Rare Recordings of Indigenous Language Saved By Today's Tech

This week, on International Indigenous Peoples Day, UC Berkley announced that efforts were underway to use new non-invasive scanning procedures to archive and preserve recordings of indigenous California languages.



UC Berkeley said in an announcement:

Berkeley researchers are using optical scan technology to transfer recordings from thousands of decaying wax cylinders, preserving audio of 78 indigenous California languages, most of which were recorded more than a century ago. Many of the recordings contain the only audio in the world of several of the languages, and others hold unknown stories and songs.
The collection will be made available to indigenous communities, as well as to scholars and the public.

The video above link has interviews with the linguistics and physics researchers, an archive specialist, and a descendant of a tribe that has no surviving "old-timer" speakers to teach the language.

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Listen Up: Black Nerd Power

Black Nerd Power is a weekly podcast hosted by Markus Seaberry, Malaika Salaam and Richard Douglas Jones. They discuss the worlds of comics, pop culture, current events, sci fi & fantasy from a black nerd point of view. They are all incisive, witty and laugh out loud hilarious. They were voted Memphis' best podcast last year. Just give an episode a listen and you'll hear why-- the rapport is breezy and chill while also being friendly even when there's some verbal sparring going on. Nerds have never sounded this cool, but Black Nerd Power makes it effortless.

You can listen along via the OAM Network's Black Nerd Power page, or via iOS on iTunes.

Listen Up: Headshots

Hosted by Josué Cardona and Kelli Dunlap, Headshots is one of the most fascinating video game podcasts I've listened to in a while. Dunlap & Cardona are both mental health professionals and avid, passionate gamers. It's from that perspective that they approach their podcast on the psychology of video games, technology, geeky stuff and pop culture.

You can listen to the podcast at the Headshots website, via iOS on iTunes or via Google Play.

Listen Up is an ongoing series devoted to shining a spotlight on podcasts by diverse creators. You can check out all the podcasts previously featured here. If you have a podcast you'd like to recommend, post it in the comments or email me at shawnstruck at gmail dot com.

Why Are There No Black Family Emojis?

First created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, emojis have come a long way. From little unicode-based pictures and ideograms used by a savvy few to what looks to be a thoroughly forgettable animated movie and novelty pillows shaped like cartoon poop, emoji are used millions of times a day. Once broad-based support was added for emojis in 2015, the use of emojis have almost become a language in and of themselves.

Since there are a lot people emojis, there has been a lot of controversy over representation and what is seen as the default. For example, "Family" emojis at first didn't depict same-sex couples, and after outcry and discussion, these options were added to the Unicode standard. It makes sense, after all. If there's a way to show a person, you'd like that person to look like you, right?

So why aren't there options to make black family emojis? Jeremy Burge, writing for emojipedia says:

[O]ther emojis all have a choice of skin tones. Why not the families? The answer is that black family emojis are already possible. Unicode supports the sequences required to make emoji families with any combination of people or skin tones.
In 2016, Microsoft used these ZWJ sequences to create white families, black families, and all kinds of variations in between in an update to Windows 10.

When Unicode 8.0 was rolled out in 2015, in addition to adding in stuff like a taco emoji🌮 , the standards group also added in a way to give the human emojis human skin tones in the following ranges: 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿.

However, there is currently no way to apply these to the family emoji-- either as a whole or for individual family members. Instead, the family emojis are displayed according to one standard- that the skin tones be rendered in pure yellow. Superficially it might make sense-- after all the smiley face is the same yellow. However, that sort of falls apart after even some cursory consideration, because whiteness is usually taken as the default, even with the "cartoonish" yellow. Look no further than the Simpsons! And as emojipedia pointed out on twitter:

Desire for black family emojis may illustrate that default-yellow is not being perceived as neutral or “non-human” https://t.co/x1aT0ZcXN9 pic.twitter.com/2gAr40PLyt

— Emojipedia 📙 (@Emojipedia) April 7, 2017

Over 35 percent of Americans identify as a race other than white and while they can text a single emoji that closely resembles their skin color, they can't use it for couple or family.I don't know about you but "it's so hard" isn't an acceptable answer for not including black families, and it seems more like an excuse that reeks of 💩.

[VIDEO] Holy Crap! Atari 2600 Emulator Runs In Minecraft

Description: Screenshot of aerial view of  a grass field in Minecraft
with grooves carved out to spell "Holy Crap!!!"

We interrupt your whatever you are doing to bring you this amazing video from user SethBling showing all of the work that went into getting the popular sandbox-construction Minecraft to run an Atari 2600 emulator INSIDE the game using nothing but the existing tools and blocks available in Minecraft itself. Seriously, like, he has a memory cache built out of blocks of dirt and stone.

Anyhow, the video below shows the emulator in action as well as goes into the fascinating technical explanations of how he worked to pull it off. It also doubles as a clear technical explanation of how early cartridge based systems and consoles worked.

Tech Sector's Diversity Problem: White People Still Aren't Listening

Description: A bar graph shows a demographic breakdown of employees at tech companies. Apple is 80% men, Microsoft and Google are 83% men,  Facebook is 84% men and Twitter is 90% men. Continuing the demographic breakdown, Apple employees are 54% white, 21 percent are Asian, 6 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are black and 165 are other.

The above graph from a Mother Jones article about diversity in the technology industry in general and the Rev. Jesse Jackson's outreach work in Silicon Valley in particular last year showed that for all the publicized diversity initiatives, tech has a LONG way to go before achieving any sort of equality or parity. So, a little over a year later, what's changed?

Not much.

Twitter has historically been the worst of the high-profile tech companies, with an employee workforce that's 90% male, and majority white, with Black employees making up just 1 percent of the workforce.  Janet Van Huysse, who was the Vice President of Diversity for Twitter spoke in 2014 about working to improve diversity. In 2015,  with Twitter no further along aside from very vague plans to increase hiring “marginalized groups” in their US offices, Van Huysse resigned after Twitter's numbers didn't even budge after 2 diversity initiatives and the traditional university graduate application rush.

Van Huysse-- a white woman-- was replaced by Jeffrey Simonoff as Vice President of Diversity. Simonoff is a middle-aged white dude.

Whoops.

It gets worse.

Leslie Miley wrote about his departure from Twitter due in no small part to the racism that went on behind closed doors even as the company benefitted from use by citizens and activists in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement . An excerpt :

Twitter’s issues with growth and engagement and the issues with internal diversity are somewhat related. The over-reliance on a limited number of schools and workplaces for talent has caused a type of group think to dominate. Any change would be approved by people who all think alike. There was very little diversity in thought and almost no diversity in action. To quote Mark S. Luckie “Without a variety of voices contributing ideas, the workplace becomes a homogenized environment where potential brilliance may never be achieved. Diversity should rightly be seen as a benefit to growth, not an obstruction to avoid.” For some at Twitter, diversity is an obstruction to avoid.

 Once Miley left, Twitter management was left without any directors or vice presidents of color in any of the product management or engineering divisions.

While Twitter may have the most egregious examples, as evidenced by the graph at this article's beginning, it's not the only big-name tech company to have a serious diversity problem. Instead of listening to people of color, though, many tech companies have been hiring teams like "Paradigm"-- a company that “uses social science to increase diversity”... run by three white women and a white man. After some bad PR, they hired one woman of color as a partner, and two women of color as consultants.

This glaring blind spot extends to some of the largest tech events, too-- even in places where ou'd least expect. The annual "Grace Hopper Celebration Of Women In Tech" didn't have any black women speaking or conducting talks. In fact, it was ZERO women of color and a few dozen white men spoke at least year's event! In fact, as this storify link points out:

500 speakers were req'd to buy tickets to conf they're speaking at for a conference heavily targeting students, & of 12,000 people who belong to a demographic that's systematically underpaid.
There are >900 confs for professionals in coding. I know of ~3 that charge speakers for tickets. GHX is one. Pay gap makes that esp uncool. Black women are paid 64% of white men. Hispanic&Latina women are paid 54% of white men. Charging to speak ENSURES under-representation.

...which is what prompted last year's NOTGHC counter-conference, organized by disaffected women engineers of color. Yeah, that's right, the whiny baby attitude of "oh, if you want diverse things, go make your own" has extended to engineering conferences, and once again when people of color DO make their own thing, they get the backlash of everything from being "not organized enough" to "being too exclusive"! GHC still charges speakers to pay, by the way.

Fellow white people, if you think that this lack of diversity only matters in boardrooms and doesn't affect people's real lives, think again. Last year at Dragon*Con, which is a sprawling nerd convention that lasts for days and temporarily takes over most of city downtown, automatic soap dispensers wouldn't detect black peoples' hands. The CEO of the soap dispenser's parent company had to admit that they never really thought to adjust the infrared sensors beyond a certain range. And if you just found out about this now, from me, a white dude? That's part of the problem!

The effects on health runs deeper than un-soaped hands. Erica Joy wrote about the effects tech culture's isolation and alienation of her as a black women impacted her health:

“The stress and isolation I mentioned have really taken their toll on me. Long term stress is known to cause health issues. Not long after I started working in New York, I developed heart problems (PVC’s). About 3 years ago I started to get acne, something I’ve never had in my life. I always thought it was hormonal but now recognize that it happens when I’m stressed. The isolation and resultant loneliness have exacerbated the stress, leaving me in constant fight or flight mode… I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.” 

She's right, of course. Cameron Glover said it best:

Without consequences and more nuanced understanding of different perspectives and cultures, we’re left with a tech culture something akin to a leech: the best parts of marginalized workers are taken, and we are left feeling like victims and stripped of our power.

Group Helps Black Girls Code & Grow Right Now

Technology companies in the heart of Silicon Valley are the movers and shakers of the US technical industry. Where there have been rumblings over the past few years trying to spearhead efforts to get companies to diversify the workforce, most tech companies have been pretty tight-lipped about real data. What data they have released shows that less than 13 percent of computer engineers in the Valley are female and even less are women of color. We don't know how many there are for sure because, again, companies aren't giving out hard numbers.

National Public Radio recently released a story about the non-profit group "Black Girls CODE", and some of the activities they do to help foster a passion for technology and a love of learning:

Black Girls CODE's Summer of Code included project-based camps in the Bay Area as well as Washington, New York City and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. The group says camps offer a place where "girls of color can learn computer science and coding principles in the company of other girls like themselves and with mentorship from women they can see themselves becoming." About half of the girls participating received a scholarship to attend.

You can listen to the audio report and read more about Black Girls CODE and other non-profit groups here.

Writer Reveals The Truth About Zoe Quinn & Women In Tech

It's been a hell of a week for a few prominent women in video games. Just two days ago, Anita Sarkeesian got explicit, credible threats to her family, address and loved ones that she actually had to call police and move herself and her family out of their home for a night.

I've written pretty extensively about the campaign of harassment that's surrounded Zoe Quinn in two posts: "Not Okay: Hateful Man-Babies Target Zoe Quinn. Again." and "If You Call This Justice, I Don't Want Your Support". Since publishing those two posts, I've gotten comments, tweets and emails (the majority of which are unsigned) saying I was spreading a campaign of lies, that it was incumbent upon me to tell "the truth" about Quinn.

Yesterday, Elizabeth Sampat wrote a post called "The Truth About Zoe Quinn". Here's what she had to say:

The truth about Zoe Quinn is that no one in the world deserves the shit that she has gotten. The truth is that these witch hunts over journalistic ethics and transparency and whatever bullshit dog whistle that 4chan and its ilk are using for their issues with a woman’s sexual agency are driving women out of the industry.
...The truth is sometimes I have survivor’s guilt, and sometimes I have panic attacks about being the only one left fighting, and sometimes despite all of my tough words and the fact I literally cannot imagine doing anything else with my life, the truth is that I can’t stop thinking about maybe leaving the industry. I don’t want to; the thought is like an involuntary tic, tugging at my consciousness. Maybe it’s a survival instinct. I keep using the word “survive” but I can’t help but wonder: is this surviving? What parts of me are surviving? Can any woman escape this whole? 

...The truth is, a lot of the women who are being driven away have never met or interacted with Anita or Zoe. A lot of the women in our industry exist in a constant state of fear.  

Women who make games and would never dream of connecting their face or real name with a Twitter account, just in case.  

Women who would never go indie. Women who are terrified of starting a crowdfunding campaign but who can’t get their dreams funded any other way, and so their dreams just die.  

Are you okay with this?  

Is this the industry that you want?

It certainly isn't one I want. However, a lot of men don't realize they're complicit in creating this atmosphere, either by inaction of playing devils advocate. In the comments section almost every games news site I've seen there will be comments that start out with the obvious “What happened was horrible! I can't believe people would stoop so low" and then follow up with a huge "BUUUUUUUT look, her videos are so controversial and maybe if she hadn't been nicer or less emotional or were virtuos or didn't game people a reason to mad it would happen blippety bloo it's just my opinion blorpety blah not all men and not all gamers blah blah devilsadvocatecakes." It's maddening.

Tech's Gender Gap Is Real, Pervasive, Worse Than Men Realize

For all the idealism behind the idea that technology knows no borders, that data and the market-place of ideas offer equal access to meritous ideas, free from gender bias or that women have achieved parity with men in the technology field, the actual lived experience of scores of women in the tech industry, from app development to tech investments is rife with stories that tell otherwise. Last week, Wired published an eye-opening and unflinching look at the gender gap between men and women in the tech industry entitled "This Is What Tech’s Ugly Gender Problem Really Looks Like". An excerpt:

Shortly after Kathryn Tucker started RedRover, an app that showcases local events for kids, she pitched the idea to an angel investor at a New York tech event. But it didn’t go over well. When she finished her pitch, the investor said he didn’t invest in women. When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said. Tucker didn’t need to hear any more. “I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ walked out, and never spoke to him again,” she recalled earlier this year, as part of a panel discussion on “fundraising while female” at the annual Internet Week conference in New York. 

It was one of many stories shared during a panel that painted the tech world as a place that—for all its efforts to push into the future with apps and gadgets and online services—is still very much stuck in the past when it comes to attitudes involving gender...  

But there’s another truth to remember: For every story you hear about investors behaving badly, there are far worse stories that many women wouldn’t dare to tell. “The most common thing I hear from other women is: ‘Oh the stories I’ll tell once I’m far enough along that I don’t have to worry about being shamed,’” says Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of the job search and career advice site The Muse. For women who have experienced this bias—and there are many—the simple act of talking about it is taboo... And yet, it’s only through these stories that we can begin to understand that the statistics aren’t the result of some fluke or mass oversight, but a very real problem that needs to be solved.

The entire article is worth a thorough read, and hopefully serves as a decent wake-up call. A word of advice, though: Don't read the comments on the article. They're particularly loathsome.