Larry Bock: Bots High Robotics Documentary – STEM, Gender Gaps, And Future Engineers In High School.

Check out the awesome article on Bots High in the Huffington Post!

One reason there are few female executives in Silicon Valley is that few women become engineers. In the United States, less than twenty per cent of engineering and computer-science majors are women. Girls are said to think that software and video games and computer programming are for guys. “Growing up,” Mark Zuckerberg’s older sister Randi told me, “my brother got video games and I got dolls.” For girls, there is a stigma attached to engineering, Marissa Mayer, who is now a vice-president at Google, says. “They don’t want to become the stereotype of all-night coders, hackers with pasty skin.” Michelle Hutton, who is the president of the international Computer Science Teachers Association, says, “Computer science is seen as a very masculine thing”—just “as girls don’t want to be garbage collectors because that’s seen as a boys’ thing.”

Check out this great article on Sheryl Sanberg, Facebook’s COO, from The New Yorker on male dominated industries.

Hey Sheryl, I know a great film that highlights a way to get girls interested in engineering.

Joey Daoud’s “Bots High” is a winning documentary…The movie lets you root for Will and Elizabeth, kids of different ages with different skill sets at different schools, as they fight and build their way into the Big Tourney. But mainly it lets these teenagers be teenagers; nerdy boys a little too eager to rush to hug cute girls when the girls’ bot is bashed, girls batting their eyes and getting the boys to help with a quick fix a a failing power supply. It’s just plain entertaining what it is.

via FFF 2011 movie review: Bots High – Frankly My Dear – Orlando Sentinel.

iPads Make Hospitals Bearable

If you have an iPad or iPhone, a must have app is Instapaper. You install a bookmarklet in your browser, and when you come across a long article that you’d rather read on the go, you click your shortcut and Instapaper pulls just the text and sends it to your phone. Even cooler, you can read the text just by titling your phone. I wish more apps would embrace this interface design.

So while I was stuck in the hospital, I did a lot of reading (and TV watching). I discovered the awesome Twitter feed @longreads, that posts the best long form articles so you have great content to read on Instapaper.

Here are some of my favorites:

The Gram Junkies: In Transportation Design the Key Issue Is Not Speed, but Weight – Interesting thoughts on modern mobility. Highest rates of obesity correlate 1:1 with the proportion of journeys children take by car. We spend the same amount of time traveling today as we did 50 years ago, but we use it to travel longer distances.

The more interesting and pertinent design task is to re-think the way we use time and space and to reduce the movement of matter — whether goods or people — by changing the word “faster” to “closer.”

A Tale of Two Trains – Oslo’s 130 mph bullet train or an Indian train from Kashmir to Kerala, which country has the more advanced infrastructure?

John Sculley on Steve Jobs, The Full Interview – Former CEO of Apple very openly talks about his experiences and what he learned.

Steve Jons and the Portal to the Invisible

Like the iMac, the iBook was designed not to be an instrument of utility but an object of desire; like the iMac, it was designed to be a pleasure both to look at and to use; like the iMac, it was designed to be designed, and by introducing it a year after he introduced the iMac and two years after coming back to Apple, he made it clear that he was not going to play the same game as those whose idea of technological innovation was beholden to the number of transistors that could fit on an integrated circuit.

Instead, he redefined technological innovation altogether. Unable to compete with the PC on the terms of Moore’s Law — on the basis of increased power and decreased price — Jobs went around it, by extending its evolutionary expectations to the realm of design. Let the Windows-Intel revolution grind forward in its pursuit of predictable exponential advantage: Henceforth, Jobs would make an art of topping himself and only himself; henceforth, Jobs would make an art of arousing expectations only his products could satisfy; henceforth, Jobs would prove so successful at defining technological innovation in terms of design criteria that he succeeded at casting doubt on technology that was not, well, beautiful.

He would do this, and he would do this again and again, and he would do this forevermore in the uniform he introduced when he introduced the iBook.

How Apple Does It

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he’ll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. “Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple’s gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

Ok, so one of the Longreads posts was a collection of past Apple articles. Still so enjoyable!

It’s off news-stands now, but if you didn’t get to read the four page article on Bots High in Robot magazine, now you can! Download a scan of it below:

4-Page PDF | Page 1 JPG | Page 2 JPG | Page 3 JPG | Page 4 JPG

Here’s a clip from Colbert’s piece on Obama announcing the end of the Constellation program, the thing that was supposed to take us back to the moon. You know, that place that we managed to go to 40 years ago before iPads or cellphones or the internet.

Even more interesting is the interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who gives an awesome speech and explanation that manned space flight is the best recruiting tool to get kids interested in science. Unfortunately I can’t embed that (nor can you watch this on Hulu – thanks Viacom) so you’ll have to view it in the whole episode, which you can see here.

Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

via Op-Ed Columnist – More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs – NYTimes.com

If you ignore the political slant in this piece if it’s something that doesn’t sit well with you, the overall message is still valid.

The country needs to create excitement in youth about making things and being innovative, about having outlandish ideas and goals and trying to reach them, so the future is not just a culture of passive media ingesters.

Kids should aspire to have a robot built after them and installed in Spaceship Earth, like the Steve Jobs one I saw this past weekend.

“Everybody’s trying to teach preschoolers how to read and nobody is trying to teach them how to do math”…

In some ways the new program is standard children’s fare. The main characters are miniature superheroes — a boy, a girl and a break-dancing robot — who zoom about fixing simple crises in their city, whether a shortage of milk, a lost kite or a subway system stalled by a dropped mitten. But the show is infused in all aspects — down to character Milli’s pony tails that turn into a ruler — with concepts from an interactive math curriculum that the characters tap to solve their problems, including shape-matching, counting, simple computation and measurement.

New Nickelodeon Show to Focus on Math – NYTimes.com

No idea what an Umizoomi is in Nick’s new show “Team Umizoomi,” but it’s cool that they’re aiming to teach kids math, which they say is an area left pretty opening in children’s television, aside form Sesame Street. Plus it stars a robot.

In the past year, researchers have developed new robots to tackle a variety of tasks: helping with medical rehabilitation, aiding military maneuvers, mimicking social skills, and grasping the unknown.

via Technology Review: The Year in Robotics.

The construction and competition of combat robots is a hobby for all but a select few builders. Robots builders may be middle-aged engineers, or enthusiastic teenagers. Robot building can teach young people a great deal about technology, and some schools use the construction of combat robots in their courses.

via Everything You Wanted to Know About Fighting Robots as Sport | The Russian electronic novelties.