A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China; Business Insider, March 25, 2024

Matthew Loh , Business Insider; A UPenn Student Started a YouTube Channel. Her Face Was Stolen in China

Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; Trib Live, November 12, 2019

Patrick Varine, Trib Live; Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

"Rory Cooper, who was recognized earlier this year by the office with a trading card created to honor U.S. inventors, holds more than two dozen patents related to mobility-improvement research. Cooper is the director at Pitt’s Human Energy Research Laboratories, a U.S. Army veteran and also serves as director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America Research Foundation...

Cooper was recognized in the patent office’s SUCCESS report, an update on progress achieved through the 2018 Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success (SUCCESS) Act. The act aims to promote patent applications by women, minorities, veterans, the disabled and other underrepresented classes.

“Without diversity of thought, potentially life changing work for wheel chair users and others with disabilities might not be possible,” Cooper said. “We have a world-class team at our labs that is committed to helping people with disabilities and older adults live full lives and contribute to society as much as they can and they like.”"

Can Higher Education Make Silicon Valley More Ethical?; Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2018

Nell Gluckman, Chronicle of Higher Education; Can Higher Education Make Silicon Valley More Ethical?

"Jim Malazita, an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, hopes to infuse ethics lessons into core computer-science courses."...

"Q. You mentioned you’ve been getting some pushback.

A. I’ve had to do a lot of social work with computer-science faculty. The faculty were like, This sounds cool, but will they still be able to move on in computer science? We’re using different, messier data sets. Will they still understand the formal aspects of computing?

Q. What do you tell faculty members to convince them that this is a good use of your students’ time?

A. I use a couple of strategies that sometimes work, sometimes don’t. It’s surprisingly important to talk about my own technical expertise. I only moved into social science and humanities as a Ph.D. student. As an undergraduate, my degree was in digital media design. So you can trust me with this content.

It’s helpful to also cast it in terms of helping women and underrepresented-minority retention in computer science. These questions have an impact on all students, but especially women and underrepresented minorities who are used to having their voices marginalized. The faculty want those numbers up."

Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer; Salon, August 5, 2017

Mark Peters, Salon; Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer

"The commercial success is an especially delicious rebuke to anyone who thinks diversity is killing Marvel. The issue of gender in comics is timelier than ever thanks to a depressing recent incident on Twitter, which should be the name of the Norse realm of the trolls. A group of female Marvel editors were recently blasted with online harassment just for posting a picture of them drinking milkshakes. This picture, no different from thousands posted online every day, somehow drew angry trolls out their holes, issuing rape threats and complaining about how women and SJWs are ruining comics. This burst of ugliness provoked the #makeminemilkshake hashtag, which catalyzed an outpouring of support.

You don’t have to be Heimdall the all-seeing to notice that female Thor is more important than ever in a world where women are treated like garbage, by garbage people, just for daring to work in the comics industry. So let the Odinson keep playing with his ax and keep that hammer right where it is, Marvel."

The big problem for Uber now: Attracting talent; Washington Post, June 14, 2017

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Todd C. Frankel, Washington Post; The big problem for Uber now: Attracting talent


[Kip Currier: Uber's ongoing travails provide an illustrative case study for the critical importance of organizational culture and core values. For an upstart start-up company betting the corporate house on developing paradigm-shifting self-driving technology, there's an ironic sense that the leadership and Board were asleep at the steering wheel (or revved up on too many Red Bulls!) for a very long time. Whether Uber can now shift out of "off-roading" bro-culture mode, institute tangible "cultural guardrails", and make lasting transformational change is anyone's guess.]


"Last year, software engineer Elizabeth Ford got what many young engineers in Silicon Valley once considered the dream job pitch: Would she be interested in working at Uber?

Ford was blunt with the Uber recruiter, telling her the company was immoral and asking not to be contacted again. “As an engineer in the Bay Area, I feel we’ve pretty much turned on Uber,” Ford, 27, who works at restaurant start-up Eatsa, said.

On Tuesday, Uber said it would be taking 47 wide-reaching steps to address a recent string of controversies about its anything-goes, cutthroat corporate culture, including allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior — accusations that have made Ford and many other tech workers, particularly women, skeptical of joining the company.

Ford said Tuesday’s actions did not change her views.

“The company still has so much toxicity,” Ford said by e-mail Tuesday evening. “They would need to change everything about their culture and how they operate to make me want to work there."

Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa); Harvard Business Review, 8/8/16

Even Apfelbaum, Harvard Business Review; Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa) :

"When it comes to issues of race, gender, and diversity in organizations, researchers have revealed the problems in ever more detail. We have found a lot less to say about what does work — what organizations can do to create the conditions in which stigmatized groups can reach their potential and succeed. That’s why my collaborators — Nicole Stephens at the Kellogg School of Management and Ray Reagans at MIT Sloan — and I decided to study what organizations can do to increase traditionally stigmatized groups’ performance and persistence, and curb the disproportionately high rates at which they leave jobs.

One tool at any organization’s disposal is the way its leaders choose to talk (or not to talk) about diversity and differences — what we refer to as their diversity approach. Diversity approaches are important because they provide employees with a framework for thinking about group differences in the workplace and how they should respond to them. We first studied the public diversity statements of 151 big law firms in the U.S. to understand the relationship between how organizations talk about diversity and the rates of attrition of associate-level women and racial minority attorneys at these firms. We assumed that how firms talked about diversity in their statements was a rough proxy for their firm’s approach to diversity more generally.

Two findings were particularly intriguing."

How to Crack Down on Social Media Threats; New York Times, 8/3/16

Room for Debate, New York Times; How to Crack Down on Social Media Threats:

"Last week, a prominent feminist writer abandoned social media after a rape and death threat was directed at her 5-year-old daughter. Online violent threats are not uncommon, especially for women and minorities, but when they are reported, police are often not responsive.

How can law enforcement crack down on threats of violence made on social media?"

South Korea Is Contending With A 'Gamergate' Of Its Own — Over A T-Shirt; All Tech Considered, NPR, 7/29/16

Mark H. Kim, All Tech Considered, NPR; South Korea Is Contending With A 'Gamergate' Of Its Own — Over A T-Shirt:

"An online controversy over a South Korean voice actress's tweeted image of a T-shirt has escalated into what is now being called East Asia's version of Gamergate — a reference to the vitriolic controversy that pitted gamers, largely men, against women in tech."

Pope Francis Says Church Should Apologize For Discriminating Against Gays, Ask For Forgiveness; Reuters via Huffington Post, 6/26/16

Reuters via Huffington Post; Pope Francis Says Church Should Apologize For Discriminating Against Gays, Ask For Forgiveness:

"Pope Francis said on Sunday that Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should seek forgiveness from homosexuals for the way they had treated them.

Speaking to reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome from Armenia, he also said the Church should ask forgiveness for the way it has treated women, for turning a blind eye to child labor and for “blessing so many weapons” in the past."

How to Explain Mansplaining; New York Times, 4/20/16

Julia Baird, New York Times; How to Explain Mansplaining:

"The manologue takes many forms, but is characterized by the proffering of words not asked for, of views not solicited and of arguments unsought. It is underwritten by the doubtful assumption that the audience will naturally be interested, and that this interest will not flag. And that when it comes to speeches or commentary, longer is better.

The prevalence of the manologue is deeply rooted in the fact that men take, and are allocated, more time to talk in almost every professional setting. Women self-censor, edit, apologize for speaking. Men expound.

Of course, some women can be equally long-winded, but it is far less common...

It is also clear that the more powerful men become, the more they speak. This would seem a natural correlation, but the same is not true for women. The reason for this, according to a Yale study, is that women worry about “negative consequences” — that is, a backlash — if they are more voluble. Troublingly, the study found that their fears were well founded, as both male and female listeners were quick to think these women were talking too much, too aggressively. In other words, men are rewarded for speaking, while women are punished."