'This is the end': Australian teens mourn loss of social media as ban begins; Reuters, December 10, 2025

 Christine Chen, Reuters ; 'This is the end': Australian teens mourn loss of social media as ban begins

"Australian teenagers have taken to social media for the last time to farewell their followers and mourn the loss of the platforms that shaped much of their lives before a world-first ban took effect on Wednesday.

In the hours leading up to the ban's midnight start (1300 GMT on Tuesday), a flurry of goodbye messages came from teenagers - as well as adults - on platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Reddit.

Australia has ordered 10 major platforms including TikTok, Alphabet's YouTube and Meta's nstagram and Facebook to block around one million users under the age of 16 or face massive fines.

Some 200,000 accounts have already been deactivated on TikTok alone, the government said, with "hundreds of thousands" to be blocked in the coming days.

Young Australians, who have grown up using social media, faced the prospect of losing access to their favourite apps with a mix of sadness, humour and disbelief."

'Disastrous' lack of diversity in AI industry perpetuates bias, study finds; The Guardian, April 16, 2019

Kari Paul, The Guardian;

'Disastrous' lack of diversity in AI industry perpetuates bias, study finds

"Lack of diversity in the artificial intelligence field has reached “a moment of reckoning”, according to new findings published by a New York University research center. A “diversity disaster” has contributed to flawed systems that perpetuate gender and racial biases found the survey, published by the AI Now Institute, of more than 150 studies and reports.

The AI field, which is overwhelmingly white and male, is at risk of replicating or perpetuating historical biases and power imbalances, the report said. Examples cited include image recognition services making offensive classifications of minorities, chatbots adopting hate speech, and Amazon technology failing to recognize users with darker skin colors. The biases of systems built by the AI industry can be largely attributed to the lack of diversity within the field itself, the report said...

The report released on Tuesday cautioned against addressing diversity in the tech industry by fixing the “pipeline” problem, or the makeup of who is hired, alone. Men currently make up 71% of the applicant pool for AI jobs in the US, according to the 2018 AI Index, an independent report on the industry released annually. The AI institute suggested additional measures, including publishing compensation levels for workers publicly, sharing harassment and discrimination transparency reports, and changing hiring practices to increase the number of underrepresented groups at all levels."

What Are “Ethics in Design”?; Slate, August 13, 2018

Victoria, Sgarro, Slate; What Are “Ethics in Design”?

"Examples of product design that fail on the ethics front are all too easy to find—like news feeds promoting fake news, ride-hailing companies psychologically exploiting workers, and virtual home assistants perpetuating negative gender stereotypes. It’s not that product designers don’t care about the ethical ramifications of their work—far from it. It’s that, too often, they assume that such considerations fall outside of their job description

Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design and author of the influential essay “A Designer’s Code of Ethics,” says that this ignorance has become an issue with the rapid change in scope of design over the past decade. “Designers have been running fast and free with no ethical guidelines,” he told me. “And that was fine when we were designing posters and sites for movies. But now design is interpersonal relationships on social media, health care, financial data traveling everywhere, the difference between verified journalism and fake news. And this is dangerous.” 

Increasingly, though, the industry is taking ethics seriously. Every year at SXSW, John Maeda, the global head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, presents the “Design in Tech Report,” which serves as a kind of State of the Union on design in technology. This year, Maeda focused on inclusion as the future of design. Maeda defines inclusive design as designing products for a broader audience—whether that’s people with disabilities, people living outside of the U.S., people of color, or older people. On his list of “the top 10 most critical issues and challenges currently facing design,” “ethics in design” came in third, behind “design not having a ‘seat at the table’ ” (No. 1), and “diversity in design and tech” (No. 2)."

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."

Uber board member resigns after making a joke about women at a company meeting on sexism; Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2017

Tracy Lien, Los Angeles Times; Uber board member resigns after making a joke about women at a company meeting on sexism

"Biillionaire businessman David Bonderman resigned from Uber’s board of directors Tuesday evening after making a joke about women at a companywide meeting aimed at addressing the harassment of women and unprofessional conduct at the company...

Bonderman’s remarks came earlier in the day when Uber held a staff meeting to discuss recommendations from a months-long investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, discrimination and employee misconduct."

Uber Needs To Do Better When It Comes To Diversity; Huffington Post, March 28, 2017

Ryan Grenoble, Huffington Post; 

Uber Needs To Do Better When It Comes To Diversity

"After years of keeping its diversity data hidden away, Uber released its first diversity report Tuesday, under the direction of its new Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey.

The report revealed that Uber employees are mostly white and mostly male, especially at the more senior levels of the company. A full 78 percent of Uber’s workers at the director level or above are men, and 76.7 percent of the company leadership is white.

Tuesday’s disclosure is part of a concerted PR effort to right the ship at the company after a series of scandals. Uber has faced allegations of rampant sexual harassment from former employees; a high-profile lawsuit that contends Uber stole trade secrets from a Google-founded competitor; numerous high-profile departures; and a video showing CEO Travis Kalanick telling off a driver.

“​This report is a first step in showing that diversity and inclusion is a priority at Uber,” Kalanick said in a statement. “I know that we have been too slow in publishing our numbers — and that the best way to demonstrate our commitment to change is through transparency.”"

Pittsburgh’s Youth-Driven Food Boom; New York Times, 3/16/16

Jeff Gordinier, New York Times; Pittsburgh’s Youth-Driven Food Boom:

"If there are scholars who hope to study how a vibrant food culture can help radically transform an American city, the time to do that is right now, in real time, in the place that gave us Heinz ketchup.

In December, Zagat named Pittsburgh the No. 1 food city in America. Vogue just went live with a piece that proclaimed, “Pittsburgh is not just a happening place to visit — increasingly, people, especially New Yorkers, are toying with the idea of moving here.”...

For decades, Pittsburgh was hardly seen as a beacon of innovative cuisine or a magnet for the young. It was the once-glorious metropolis that young people fled from after the shuttering of the steel mills in the early 1980s led to a mass exodus and a stark decline.

“We had to reinvent ourselves,” said Bill Peduto, Pittsburgh’s mayor.

And they have. Over the last decade or so, the city has been the beneficiary of several overlapping booms. Cheap rent and a voracious appetite for culture have attracted artists. Cheap rent and Carnegie Mellon University have attracted companies like Google, Facebook and Uber, seeking to tap local tech talent. And cheap rent alone has inspired chefs to pursue deeply personal projects that might have a hard time surviving in the Darwinian real estate microclimates of New York and San Francisco.

No one can pinpoint whether it was the artists or techies or chefs who got the revitalization rolling. But there’s no denying that restaurants play a starring role in the story Pittsburgh now tells about itself."

Starving for Wisdom; New York Times, 4/16/15

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; Starving for Wisdom:

"So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well...

Third, wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence.

Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction. Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

Literature also builds bridges of understanding. Toni Morrison has helped all America understand African-American life. Jhumpa Lahiri illuminated immigrant contradictions. Khaled Hosseini opened windows on Afghanistan.

In short, it makes eminent sense to study coding and statistics today, but also history and literature.

John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1780: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”"

These 6 tech giants still haven't released their diversity data; Forbes, 1/27/15

Michal Lev-Ram, Forbes; These 6 tech giants still haven't released their diversity data:

"Below are six tech giants — IBM IBM -1.49% , Oracle OCLCF 4.06% , EMC EMC -2.30% , Broadcom BRCM -1.72% , SanDisk SNDK -1.39% and Qualcomm QCM — that have yet to release their data. A spokesperson for Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle says the company has no plans to do so. A few other tech companies Fortune spoke to were more thoughtful in their responses, asserting that while they have yet to disclose their diversity numbers, they are engaged in active, internal conversations to determine when and how they should go about doing so.

Even among those technology firms that have released diversity data, some companies are more transparent than others. For example, not all tech firms have published the entire contents of their annual EEO-1 reports, a government form requiring many employers to provide a count of their employees by job category, ethnicity, race and gender.

And, of course, there is the issue of what happens after a company releases such data—after all, transparency alone isn’t enough to move the needle on diversity and inclusion."

Microsoft Releases More Diversity Stats, and They Aren’t Pretty; Wired.com, 1/5/15

Davey Alba, Wired.com; Microsoft Releases More Diversity Stats, and They Aren’t Pretty:

"Microsoft has quietly released more information about the diversity of its employees, and these new stats are in line with most every other big player in tech: Women and people of color are highly underrepresented at the software giant.

Late last year, Microsoft revealed some of its diversity statistics and even launched a dedicated diversity and inclusion website. But some activists urged the company to release its federal Equal Opportunity form, or EEO-1, which contains more information about the company’s internal diversity numbers. Just after the New Year, the company did indeed make the form public...

The new statistics released by Microsoft are disappointing at best. The company’s report to the federal government says that 76 percent of its overall workforce is male, while only 24 percent is female. 61 percent are white. 29 percent are Asian. 5 percent are Hispanic/Latino. And only 3 percent are black."

Apple’s Tim Cook Says That He Is ‘Proud to Be Gay’; New York Times, 10/30/14

Brian X. Chen and Vindu Goel, New York Times; Apple’s Tim Cook Says That He Is ‘Proud to Be Gay’ :

"The Valley has also been ahead of the curve in extending employee benefits to same-sex partners and spouses. But tech companies, particularly start-ups founded and staffed largely by young white men, have struggled to deal with a fraternitylike workplace atmosphere inhospitable to women and gay people. Silicon Valley has few prominent executives who are openly gay.

“Thank you Tim for showing what it means to be a real, courageous and authentic leader,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on his social network as he shared Mr. Cook’s essay with his followers.

Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, a maker of media player software in Seattle, said in an interview that Mr. Cook’s step was “hugely positive.”

“Life is about role models,” said Mr. Glaser, who has worked in the tech industry for three decades. “If you’re a 14-year old kid and you find the C.E.O. of one of the most iconic companies in the world happens to be gay, you’ll think, ‘There’s no limit on what I can do.'"”