Fast Company

[Commentary] Google does it. So does Intel. But a significant number of major tech companies--including Apple, Twitter, and IBM--still haven't published information about how many women or minorities they hire. A new project from feminist coders aims to put pressure on them until they do.

The Open Diversity Data project, launched this past June by the feminist hacker space Double Union, keeps tabs on companies that do and don’t make their workforce demographics available to the public. Anyone can submit a request for ODD to add a company to the list. Once a company’s listed on the site, viewers can click to tweet thanks at the organization for being transparent, remind it to update its information, or ask that it publish employment diversity data for the first time.

Diversity data is much more difficult to come by than you might think. Organizations collect it regardless of external requests; those with more than 100 employees are required to report that information (in something called an EEO-1 form) to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission every year. But those reports stay guarded in filing systems far away from the public eye. If companies don’t make diversity data open, curious souls have to go through the arduous process of filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Labor.

The aim of ODD is two-fold: Double Union hopes that ODD will not only put pressure on companies to become more transparent, but also encourage legislators to free up EEOC reports to the public.

Can the key to getting more American women into tech jobs be in the hands of mayors across the country? It’s an interesting proposition that Anita Garimella Andrews, vice president of client analytics services at RJMetrics recently uncovered when digging into the data surrounding the persistently low percentage of female tech workers.

It turns out that in cities with a concentration of technology companies that also have female mayors, there’s more equality among tech workers. Case in point: Las Vegas, the city leads the country with women making up the majority (over 64%) of its tech workforce. Its mayor is Carolyn Goodman, who’s held the position since 2011, and incidentally has a daughter who graduated from Stanford and worked in IT.

The US average is only 29% according to the RJMetrics survey of the top 50 cities in tech as determined through Meetup data. That’s a bit higher than the 26% of women in computer or mathematical occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for 2013. Other cities with female mayors didn’t have the scale tip so dramatically toward women employed in tech, but were still higher than the national average. Among them: Oakland 46.8%, Houston 34.25%, Palo Alto 30.19%, Baltimore 29.65%.

[Commentary] Google had just announced a new initiative called Material Design that promised to unify all Google products (and even third-party Android apps) under a common UX tongue. Google seemed to be morphing into something, but what?

With Material Design, Google has become a second reality inside touch-screen devices -- complete with its own rules of logic and physics -- and if Google has its way, it will eventually break free of touch screens to quite literally reshape the world around us. It's a series of services that have become our digital infrastructure.

And in the very near future, Google will exist, not as something you need to understand as "Chrome" or "Android," but as a conduit of information that's on just the right screen at just the right time.

[Wilson started Philanthroper.com]

For a long time, Facebook operated under an incisive motto: "Move fast and break things." Acting on this mantra has a tendency to upset Facebook's change-averse user base -- and sometimes, Facebook doesn't even have to break anything.

Recently, New Scientist revealed that Facebook's data team manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for one week in January 2012. Using an algorithm, Facebook and researchers at Cornell University either removed all positive posts or all negative posts from a user's news feed.

The joint study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Internet was not pleased. Even though the sample size was relatively small, Slate, for example, called the research "unethical."

Comments on Metafilter filled a spectrum ranging from "meh" to furious: "I don't remember volunteering to participate in this. If I had tried this in graduate school, the institutional review board would have crapped bricks."

According to ESPN, there were 1.7 million concurrent streams of the US-Germany World Cup match on its WatchESPN service. That crushes the previous high of 750,000 concurrent streams set by the last match between Mexico and Brazil.

Most people think of "accessibility" as those little-used options on their computer for disabled users. But not only does accessible design make a piece of technology useful to all, but it also increases the product’s user base and also makes it easier to use for people across age brackets and cultural boundaries.

“This is something that’s very relevant, and it’s not a luxury anymore,” explained Faith Haeussler, county coordinator of Philadelphia Link, a collaborative that helps the disability community become more independent. “There’s a shortage of caregivers, I think technology has to come in and take over some of the responsibility. I really believe that technology is going to help keep people with disabilities in their homes.”

Instead of the traditional model of telling people with disabilities what they need, individuals with disabilities were seen as knowledge experts, sitting side-by-side with hackers and developing design decisions at the conception of each project.

“As a quadriplegic, I know that I could not do the work that I do without technology,” said German Parodi, a grassroots disability activist and student. “Collaborating from the bottom up, we’re respecting each other and trying to build a future collectively.”

[Commentary] It’s a little more than a year since Google launched Blink, a custom engine used by Chrome to turn HTML and CSS code into what you see on your screen.

Before that, Chrome was powered by a tweaked version of WebKit, the Apple-led open source engine used by Safari.

But developers and browser makers alike say cross-browser development is actually less painful than it’s ever been, thanks to efforts by browser providers to keep the tools as functionally compatible and compliant with published standards as possible.

“I think that browser compatibility is actually way ahead of what it used to be," says Rey Bango. "If you look at the most modern versions of browsers, things are coming off really nicely." Far from creating silos or havoc, this move by Google shows how "competition" in the technology sector can be a much more nuanced concept than usually thought.

On the web, businesses, distribution networks, and services operate across so many layers of abstraction that practically no game is zero sum. A competitive marketplace keeps individual browser makers from rolling out major features that aren’t supported by their rivals, since developers won’t make much use of a feature that only works in one browser.

Inside a San Francisco office building, Google is trying its latest experiment: original sports journalism. When the 2014 World Cup began, Google unveiled a World Cup Trends Newsroom to turn search data surrounding soccer games into infographics.

For the duration of the World Cup, a team of data scientists, designers, editors, and translators will publish shareable original content in multiple languages to the microsite. The project is a bold attempt to turn Google's search results into shareable material -- and inject Google-branded content into the Facebook and Twitter ecosystems.

Inside a large open-plan floor office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, the 20-person staff works with an internal Google Trends dashboard to create World Cup-themed content on tight deadlines.

“Prior to each match, we look at sentiment in each country and sentiment about their competitor,” Danielle Bowers, the lead World Cup data analyst at Google Trends, said. “We then look at searches for players, and searches in general in each country. Then during a match, we use real-time tools after things like refs making a controversial call. After the matches end, we then pull summaries of the most interesting statistics.”

When you walk around the offices of Twitter’s engineering department, located on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters, you will see signs counting down the days until the World Cup.

More than 3.2 billion people watched at least a minute of the World Cup live in 2010. For Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, YouTube, and a host of regional social media sites from Brazil to Russia, the World Cup means engineers frantically working overtime to prevent outages and site overloads.

If you’re a college student in Buenos Aires or Chennai, you may have come across an unorthodox way of making extra money. Using your Android phone, an American corporation will pay you to stop by the supermarket on the way home; snap a picture of how much bread or tomatoes costs that day; and submit the price of those commodities into an elaborate data system.

California-based Premise, as they're called, uses this information as fodder for an unusual business model: getting inflation and commodity price data before governments do, sourced from regular people on the street. Using thousands of college students and other part-time workers, Premise gathers raw item prices from retailers and street markets worldwide.

The information Premise’s workers collect is used to help develop live inflation indexes and food security data for clients including hedge funds and government agencies.

According to Premise, the company is currently collecting economic data in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, Japan, and Australia. Premise is currently offering their indexes to corporations and financial service providers, to government agencies, and to marketing organizations. Of these, David Soloff, Premise’s CEO, feels government agencies have the biggest potential for licensing Premise’s indexes.