Women are excellent coders, according to GitHub research

A survey back in 2013 found that only 11.2 percent of software developers were female. Working then on the premise that males would be prejudiced against female coders work, a group of students has now studied the acceptance rate of GitHub pull-requests by gender.

A pull-request is when volunteers submit work to a project and it receives some scrutiny by the project team, they often accept the work or reject it with some advice. What the study team has discovered is that 78 percent of work submitted by women was accepted, which compared favorably to only 74 percent for men.

“Women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top 10, to various degrees”, the researchers find.

The team then looked at submissions where the coder was clearly identifiable as a female, and to their dismay discovered that in this case females performed worse than their male colleagues did, suggesting a gender bias.

However, not all female coders related to those results. Jenny Bryan, a professor of statistics and her profile makes clear that she is a woman: “The men I interact with in the R community on GitHub know me and, if my gender has any effect at all, I feel they go out of their way to support my efforts to learn and make more contributions”.

Lorna Jane Mitchell, a software developer whose work is almost entirely based on GitHub, said, “that it was impossible to tell whether a pull request was ignored out of bias, or just because a project owner was busy or knew another developer personally”.

Elizabeth Eastaugh, a director of technology at Expedia comments: “The GitHub analysis is not only indicative of gender bias in web development, but a sign that the lack of all diversity is still a huge problem in the tech world. Looking at the approval rates at the quality of code for women compared to men when the developer’s gender is concealed is quite demoralizing. But it is crucial that these results don’t dissuade minorities from revealing their identities in the future. In fact, it should spur them on to do the opposite”.

“It’s important that people realize that minority groups do exist in the tech industry, and it’s also crucial that these minorities do not feel isolated in their respective fields. The technology industry needs more C-level role models who dispel the notion that great success is the preserve of well-educated white men”, adds Eastaugh.

“The findings should by no means justify the decision to hide your gender, because identifying yourself as female in a primarily male-dominated industry is extremely important. And the issue of inclusion and diversity shouldn’t just end with gender — it should incorporate race, sexuality and disability as well”, concludes Eastaugh.

Apple iPhone 7 concept renders show phone without headphone jack

Every rumour and leak till date suggests that Apple may drop the 3.5mm headphone jack, and these renders show the same.

Apple iPhone 7 is more than six months away from launch, but rumours and leaks about the phone have been flowing in steadily. Earlier today, concept renders of the phone suggested a build minus the 3.5mm audio jack. It should not come as a surprise, since it has been widely rumoured that Apple will be replacing the headphone jack with the Lightning port that it already uses. This means that the Lightning port will work as a charging port and audio input/output. We expect Apple to launch the iPhone 7 in September 2016.

These concept images come from Arthur Reis, and do not represent the actual product. These images merely showcase what the upcoming iPhone might look like. The iPhone 7 will have a new SoC, likely to be termed the A10. A recent report suggests that TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing company) will be making these SoCs for Apple. Previously, both Samsung and TSMC were responsible for the SoCs that go into Apple devices.

Rumours also suggest that the iPhone 7 is likely to get a 3GB RAM upgrade. With the iPhone 6s, Apple finally stepped up from having 1GB of RAM, and the upcoming iPhone 7 is expected to get an upgrade over the 2GB of RAM on the iPhone 6s. As for the display, the most prominent rumour is Apple being granted a new patent for ‘flexible electronic devices’. This has led to suggestions that the upcoming iPhone 7 may have a curved edge display.

Apart from that, a different report suggested that Apple might be looking to make the iPhone 7 waterproof and remove the antennae lines as well. However, the biggest change to the exterior might still be the removal of a 3.5mm headphone jack. If it does turn out that way, many Apple-only accessories that work via the 3.5mm headphone jack will become obsolete.

Hardik Singh  hardik.singh@9dot9.in

Light at the top, this odd looking creature lives under the heavy medication of video games.

Google’s X lab chief sees Internet reaching billions
February 16, 2016 by Glenn Chapman
Project Loon confirmed that one of their balloon stayed up in the stratosphere for 187 days, circling the world more than a doze
Project Loon confirmed that one of their balloon stayed up in the stratosphere for 187 days, circling the world more than a dozen times
The “captain of moonshots” at Google parent company Alphabet sees widespread, world-changing wireless Internet on the horizon.

Astro Teller, head of the boundary-pushing X research team, shared his vsion of the future during a talk at the TED Conference here late Monday.
Teller shared insights into the X team’s balloon-powered high-speed Internet service known as “Project Loon,” which aims to get billions more people online by reaching remote or rural regions that are not yet connected.
“There is a lot of different technology out there, rolling them out will be complicated,” Teller said.
“But, somewhere between five and ten years, it will change the world in ways we can not possibly imagine.”
Project Loon began its first tests in Sri Lanka on Monday ahead of a planned joint venture with the government there, the country’s top IT official told AFP.
It promises to extend coverage and cheaper rates for data services.
Service providers will be able to access higher speeds and improve the quality of their existing service once the balloon project is up and running.
Once in the stratosphere, the balloons will be twice as high as commercial airliners and barely visible to the naked eye.
Astro Teller heads Alphabet’s boundary-pushing X research team
Astro Teller heads Alphabet’s boundary-pushing X research team
Teller told the TED audience that he expected Project Loon balloons to be tested over Indonesia this year.
Craziest idea to date
The project, he quipped, might be the craziest to date at the X lab, which was once part of Google but became a separate unit with a restructuring that created parent company Alphabet.
The name of the project was intended to remind the team how bizarre it initially seemed.
As with all their projects, members of the X team first tackled the toughest technical challenges facing Loon with an eye toward quickly scuttling the mission if the goal was not realistic, according to Teller.
“We had round silvery balloons; giant pillow-shaped balloons, balloons the size of a blue whale,” Teller said.
Project Loon balloons will fly twice as high as commercial airliners and will be barely visible to the naked eye
Visitors stand next to a high altitude WiFi internet hub, a Google Project Loon balloon, on display at the Airforce Museum in Christchurch on June 16, 2013. Google revealed top-secret plans on June 15 to send balloons to the edge of space …more
“We busted a lot of balloons.”
Each potentially terminal technology challenge for Loon has been surmounted well enough to continue the project.
The current design is a balloon within a balloon, one containing helium to keep it aloft and the other with air that can be released or added to alter the weight and, as a result, move up or down to ride the wind.
Kudos for failure
The balloons can navigate fairly well, and send Internet signals to each other in order to increase their reach into remote areas.
As a Loon balloon floats out of an area, it hands the connection off to another floating into that same area.
The current design of Project Loon is a balloon within a balloon: one containing helium to keep it aloft and the other with air
The current design of Project Loon is a balloon within a balloon: one containing helium to keep it aloft and the other with air that can be released or added to move up or down
And, Teller said, the bandwidth is good enough to stream free online TED talks for which the conference is renowned.
Last year, one of the balloon stayed up for 187 days, he said, circling the world more than a dozen times.
“Our balloons today do everything we need,” Teller said. “So we are going to keep going.”
Teller said his team refers to their base as “The Moonshot Factory” because their goal is to blend audacious ideas with the realities of getting them to market.
People on the X team get kudos, bonuses and even promotions for finding fatal flaws that kill projects and thereby let resources shift to more promising dreams.
“We use the word ‘moonshot’ to remind us to keep our vision big, and the word ‘factory’ to remind ourselves that we need concrete plans to make them real,” Teller said.
“We spend most of our time trying to break things and prove we are wrong.”
X lab’s work on an automated system for vertical farming was killed last year when the team couldn’t get it to grow staple crops such as grains or rice.
An ultra-light air-ship for hauling cargo was abandoned after the team realized the costs to build the first prototype would be astronomical.
“We can’t spend $200 million to get the first data point about whether we are on the right track,” Teller said. “So we killed it.”
The lab’s self-driving car was a natural moonshot, and is humming along, according to Teller.

Reports: Apple Pay rolls out in China on Feb. 18

Caitlin McGarry | @Caitlin_McGarry

Today we’ve an excellent project from our forums to share with you: JonathonDuerig, known as duerig on the forums, posts about the standalone book scannerhe has built, controlled by a Raspberry Pi 2 and using the Raspberry Pi TouchDisplay as an interface. It’s a large and fairly imposing object, based on TheArchivist DIY book scanner and using Tenrec Builders‘ open source book-scanningsoftware, Pi Scan.

Books rest on a V-shaped cradle that the scanner’s operator lifts up towards asimilarly shaped 3mm glass platen by pulling down on a handlebar, thus pressingflat the pages, which are evenly lit from above. The Raspberry Pi controls twoCanon PowerShot ELPH 160 cameras, each angled perfectly to capture one of thevisible pages of the book. The Pi allows the user to set the zoom level for eachcamera, automatically sets and locks focus, and captures the images, saving themto an external SD card. The scanner’s touchscreen interface is made with Kivy, aPython GUI development system for touchscreen devices.

Looking at this build and the projects it draws on, I was pretty astonished bysomething that regularly bowls me over when I’m looking at open source projects,and by which I hope I never stop feeling awed. The level of duerig and others’commitment to the overall open book scanning project and its quality and integrityis remarkable. We are proud that Raspberry Pi is a useful tool to communities likeyours and projects like this.

Duck or rabbit? What this optical illusion says about you

It was created more than 100 years ago, but this image of a duck and a rabbit is sparking a huge response on social media.

Depending on what you see and how quickly you register the two images is said to be an indication of how creative you are.

The drawing first appeared in a German magazine in 1892 and was first used by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, who used the sketch to make the point that perception is not only what you see but is also telling of brain activity.

Jastrow’s research and other subsequent studies were based on how fast a person can make out two animals and how quickly participants could change their perception between the duck and the rabbit.

Research participants who found it easy to flip between rabbit and duck, came up with an average of almost five novel uses for an everyday item. But those who couldn’t switch between the animals at all came up with less than two novel uses.

The results suggest the ease and pace at which you can move between the two visuals indicates how creative you are. Highly creative people display a talent for finding new uses for existing objects or are able to make connections between previously unconnected concepts or material things.

Research has also noted different animals will appear more prominent depending on the time of year. So with Easter approaching, it is suggested you’ll be more inclined to see the rabbit first.

– nzherald.co.nz

How-To: Stream the 58th Annual Grammy Awards on your Mac, Apple TV, or iOS device for free

The 58th Annual Grammys are broadcasting tonight and thanks to CBS All Access, nearly anyone canwatch it for free without a cable subscription or TV set. The show starts at 8PM ET, with a pre-telecastred carpet show at 7PM ET. Viewers can catch the show on CBS’s site, or by using the iOS or Apple TVapp. Here’s how to do it for free:

New subscribers to CBS’s All Access can get a free week trial inpreparation for tonight’s show using their current Apple IDs. WhileCBS’ CEO has declined that there have been recent talks with Appleabout a streaming TV service, the current state of CBS’ All Access isas close as a user can get today.

This is CBS’ second major broadcast event they will be streaming,after this year’s Super Bowl 50. Having traditionally cable-orientedlive events accessible through streaming has helped to bridge thegap many cord-cutters felt in previous years. By making these liveevents viewable on so many platforms, not only is CBS increasingtheir viewership reach, but they are providing data to the oft-missedNielsen ratings that so many networks rely on.

To get ready for the show tonight, be sure to download the CBS app onto your Apple TV or iOS device. Ifound that the quickest way to create a CBS All Access account was right from the ‘Settings’ screenwithin the app. From here, a user can select ‘Sign In/ Purchase/ Restore’ and then select ‘Start YourOne Week Free Trial’. The app will use your currently registered Apple ID to start the free trial, which itwill then automatically charge $5.99 at the end of the week. Users are also able to link current CBSaccounts to the new subscription so that they may use it access the live show online with theircomputers.

Remember, if you’re not happy with the overall CBS subscription, the cancellation process is very similarto canceling Apple Music.

Also Be sure to keep an eye out on the @CBSThisMorning’s Twitter account as Apple Music takes overit for the Grammys.

Will you be streaming the Grammys tonight using the Apple TV, iOS device, or your computer? How doyou think this benefits or takes away from a traditional cable subscription in terms of experience orvalue? Does CBS streaming the Super Bowl 50 and 58th Annual Grammys signify a better or worsefuture for cord cutters? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

The CBS iOS and Apple TV apps are available for free in the App Store, and CBS’s All Access streamingis available for $5.99/month. The monthly price includes over 7,500 CBS episodes on demand, and theability to watch CBS live in select markets. New users to the platform are able to get a one week freetrial, perfect for tonight’s Grammys.