As part of National Engineers Week, MEDB’s Women in Technology Program is hosting a day of engineering activities, with the goal of introducing girls in grades 7 – 8 to the exciting field of engineering.
When: Feb. 22, 2018, 9am – 1pm
Where: Various locations
MEDB Women In Technology (WIT) is excited to announce that registration to our 9th annual Hawaii STEM Conference is now LIVE! Educators may register for one or both days of teacher professional development being held April 10th and 11th at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.
Over 1,000 students, teachers, industry professionals and community leaders will again convene in O’ahu to participate in two days of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professional development & hands-on sessions, STEM competitions, and/or career awareness opportunities.
Educators are encouraged to register today to engage in hands-on STEM learning, to explore the latest tools, technologies and educational resources, and to discover students’ positive impact throughout the state as they showcase their service-learning STEMworks™ projects.
WHAT: The Hawaii STEM Conference Teacher Professional Development
WHEN: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 & Wednesday, April 11, 2018 (April 10th attendees are invited to the STEMworks™ Spotlight showcasing the Service-Learning Achievements of STEMworks™ students across the state. Student peers, educators, industry professionals and local dignitaries will learn about the impact Hawai’i students create in our islands.)
WHERE: Hawaii Convention Center, Honolulu, O’ahu
WHY: Engage in Interactive Activities Promoting STEM K-12 Education. Explore the STEMworks™ Interactive Exhibitor Playground to Engage in Mini-Sessions featuring the latestSTEM Educational Tools, Technologies, & Resources
FEE: $100 Registration Fee per Day (Does not include Parking or Lunch) Note: Educators may register for One or Both days (Agenda is still being finalized but teachers may register now to reserve a spot).
Register now at http://bit.ly/2DurWos
VIDEO: Hawaii STEM Conference Promotional Video: https://vimeo.com/237993927
For more information, please contact Denissa Andrade at denissa@medb.org or 8808-270-6805.
Maui Economic Development Board, Inc.
Intent to Apply – RFP D18-084
January 24, 2018
This notice is to inform you that Maui Economic Development Board is applying for the 21st Century Community Learning Center (21CCLC) grant. If approved, the 21CCLC program will help students and their families – particularly students who attend schools in need of improvement – with academic enrichment opportunities and support services to help meet state and local standards in core content areas.
Our proposed academic activities will include STEM classes that utilize the Engineering Design Process. Our personal enrichment activities include but limited to: digital media, drone design, coding, VEX Robotics, computer-aided design, and agriculture. We will also offer opportunities for family engagement nights to families of students served.
If you have suggestions about this project, please contact Isla Young at isla@medb.org, (808)-250-2888.
By Christine L. Nittrouera,1, Michelle R. Hebla, Leslie Ashburn-Nardob, Rachel C. E. Trump-Steelea, David M. Lanea,c, and Virginia Valiand. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a report of three studies.
Recently, research has focused on identifying gender gatekeepers—people or practices that may (unintentionally) engage in, create, or maintain gender disparities. In the current research, we examine gender differences in academic colloquium speakers. Colloquium talks lead to enhancement of a researcher’s reputation, networks, research collaborations, and sometimes result in job offers.
Results from our three studies indicate that women are underrepresented relative to men as colloquium speakers across six disciplines. To examine the role of self-selection, we find that women neither decline talk invitations at greater rates nor question the importance of talks more than men do. Finally, we show that the presence of women as colloquium chairs (and potentially committee members) increases the likelihood of having female colloquium speakers.
Abstract
Colloquium talks at prestigious universities both create and reflect academic researchers’ reputations. Gender disparities in colloquium talks can arise through a variety of mechanisms. The current study examines gender differences in colloquium speakers at 50 prestigious US colleges and universities in 2013–2014. Using archival data, we analyzed 3,652 talks in six academic disciplines. Men were more likely than women to be colloquium speakers even after controlling for the gender and rank of the available speakers. Eliminating alternative explanations (e.g., women declining invitations more often than men), our follow-up data revealed that female and male faculty at top universities reported no differences in the extent to which they (i) valued and (ii) turned down speaking engagements. Additional data revealed that the presence of women as colloquium chairs (and potentially on colloquium committees) increased the likelihood of women appearing as colloquium speakers. Our data suggest that those who invite and schedule speakers serve as gender gatekeepers with the power to create or reduce gender differences in academic reputations.
The article is online at:
By Christine L. Nittrouera,1, Michelle R. Hebla, Leslie Ashburn-Nardob, Rachel C. E. Trump-Steelea, David M. Lanea,c, and Virginia Valiand. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a report of three studies.
Recently, research has focused on identifying gender gatekeepers—people or practices that may (unintentionally) engage in, create, or maintain gender disparities. In the current research, we examine gender differences in academic colloquium speakers. Colloquium talks lead to enhancement of a researcher’s reputation, networks, research collaborations, and sometimes result in job offers.
Results from our three studies indicate that women are underrepresented relative to men as colloquium speakers across six disciplines. To examine the role of self-selection, we find that women neither decline talk invitations at greater rates nor question the importance of talks more than men do. Finally, we show that the presence of women as colloquium chairs (and potentially committee members) increases the likelihood of having female colloquium speakers.
Abstract
Colloquium talks at prestigious universities both create and reflect academic researchers’ reputations. Gender disparities in colloquium talks can arise through a variety of mechanisms. The current study examines gender differences in colloquium speakers at 50 prestigious US colleges and universities in 2013–2014. Using archival data, we analyzed 3,652 talks in six academic disciplines. Men were more likely than women to be colloquium speakers even after controlling for the gender and rank of the available speakers. Eliminating alternative explanations (e.g., women declining invitations more often than men), our follow-up data revealed that female and male faculty at top universities reported no differences in the extent to which they (i) valued and (ii) turned down speaking engagements. Additional data revealed that the presence of women as colloquium chairs (and potentially on colloquium committees) increased the likelihood of women appearing as colloquium speakers. Our data suggest that those who invite and schedule speakers serve as gender gatekeepers with the power to create or reduce gender differences in academic reputations.
The article is online at:
By Erin Carson. Source: CNET.
Think men’s brains are better suited for tech jobs? Think again.
A report from the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution measured men’s and women’s digital scores, and found that women had stronger skills than men do.
The Brookings report, called “Digitalization and the American Workforce,” looked at “information about the knowledge, skills, tools and technology; education and training; work context; and work activities required” for high tech jobs, and it gave women a digital score of 48 versus 45 for men.
But despite that higher aptitude, the report says, more men than women are filling the highest-level digital jobs in “computer, engineering and management fields, as well as lower-digital occupations such as transportation, construction, natural resources, and building and grounds occupations.”
It’s a familiar issue given tech’s annual parade of diversity reports that show women’s share of the employment pie falling below 30 percent in technical roles and thinning out even further in management and leadership positions.
“While digitalization holds out significant opportunities for less-educated or historically marginalized workers or groups to move up the employment ladder, too few of them appear to be making that progress,” the report said.
By Beverly Cooper. Source: SIGNAL, afcea.org.
Female STEM field leaders offer education, career advice.
Self study, find a mentor, be confident with your knowledge, network and don’t be intimidated. These were some of the recommendations for women offered by female leaders on the Education and Future Technologies Panel at Technet Asia-Pacific. The panel was moderated by Linda Newton, AFCEA Hawaii Educational Foundation.
You have to stay current, or you become stale, said Cindy Moran, president and managing partner, Pikes Way LLC, who acknowledged that the reason she became an executive was because she was tired of being told what to do and not having input. “It wasn’t about power,” she added.
Many critical jobs today don’t require four-year degrees but still require mathematics and technology skills, she reported. College is a great foundation, but so is vocational training. A four-year degree isn’t needed to be a great web designer or technical support person. “We will see more people realizing this as we move forward,” she noted.
People need to understand what careers are out there and make sure youth get involved and learn about these options at an early age, agreed Jodi Ito, information security officer, University of Hawaii. There are many alternatives to how you get into a profession, she added.
Miyi Chung, chief, Capability Delivery Division, Defense Information Systems Agency Pacific (DISA PAC), described a different way of defining STEM, other than the traditional science, technology, engineering and mathematics definition:
S: Seek out competent STEM candidates before kindergarten. Two-year-olds are holding onto smartphones, but do they understand security and how the device came to be. What they have in front of them took engineers, programmers and mathematicians to develop.
T: Teach. Students need to know the value of contributing to national security and the livelihood of next generations. We need to instill in young people that what you do today is not all about financial gain. It is contributing to the national security and country.
E: Engaging and encouraging throughout the educational process. Encourage young ones to get involved in STEM programs and internships.
M: Mentorship is important. Many people bring different perspectives. Collaborate and learn. Be led and driven to job satisfaction.
The panelists all had additional advice for young women entering the STEM fields.
Follow your dreams and passion, and if you don’t make the right choice in school, it is never too late to change. There are intern programs, on-the-job training and ways to retool if you are not happy in your job, advised Moran.
Never be afraid to make mistakes, added Ito. Life is always a learning opportunity. Have the strength and courage and confidence to admit when you are wrong, to learn from it and to move on. Be persistent. A lot of times it just takes a lot of effort and energy and not being afraid to fail, she suggested.
Col. Claire Cuccio, USA, emphasized self study and advised young people to be the smartest person in the room. It is easier to project confidence when you know what you are talking about. Col. Cuccio is the chief of staff, 311th Signal Command.
Never settle for less, Chung said. There is always something better. Strive high. “Do not let testosterone intimidate you either,” she said. Keep your head high, keep confidence, do not be intimidated by gender.
Celebrate STEM – Dec. 6, 2017
Queen Kaahumanu Center
Center Court
Kahului, Maui, Hawaii
Questions contact: Melinda White at melinda@medb.org
By Steve Lohr Source: NY Times
The national priority in education can be summed up in a four-letter acronym: STEM. And that’s understandable. A country’s proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is vital in generating economic growth, advancing scientific innovation and creating good jobs.
The STEM campaign has been underway for years, championed by policymakers across the ideological spectrum, embraced in schools everywhere and by organizations ranging from the YWCA to the Boy Scouts. By now, the term — first popularized and promoted by the National Science Foundation — is used as a descriptive identifier. “She’s a STEM,” usually meant as a compliment, suggests someone who has a leg up in the college admissions sweepstakes.
Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists.
What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the greatest number of high-paying STEM jobs are in the “T” (specifically, computing).
Earlier this year, Glassdoor, a jobs listing website, ranked the median base salary of workers in their first five years of employment by undergraduate major. Computer science topped the list ($70,000), followed by electrical engineering ($68,438). Biochemistry ($46,406) and biotechnology ($48,442) were among the lowest paying majors in the study, which also confirmed that women are generally underrepresented in STEM majors.
“There is a huge divide between the computing technology roles and the traditional sciences,” said Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist.
At LinkedIn, researchers identified the skills most in demand. The top 10 last year were all computer skills, including expertise in cloud computing, data mining and statistical analysis, and writing smartphone applications.
In a recent analysis, Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, focused on the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment forecasts in STEM categories. In the decade ending in 2024, 73 percent of STEM job growth will be in computer occupations, but only 3 percent will be in the physical sciences and 3 percent in the life sciences.
A working grasp of the principles of science and math should be essential knowledge for all Americans, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, an expert on science education and policy. But he believes that STEM advocates, often executives and lobbyists for technology companies, do a disservice when they raise the alarm that America is facing a worrying shortfall of STEM workers, based on shortages in a relative handful of fast-growing fields like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and computer security.
“When it gets generalized to all of STEM, it’s misleading,” said Mr. Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “We’re misleading a lot of young people.”
Unemployment rates for STEM majors may be low, but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey. Computer science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are employed in their field.
If physicists and biologists want to enjoy the boom times in the digital economy, a few specialist start-ups will train them and find them jobs as data scientists and artificial intelligence programmers.
Insight Data Science Fellows Program, which has offices in New York, Boston, Seattle and Palo Alto, Calif., began its first training program five years ago and now has 900 alumni working at companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Amazon and Microsoft. Jake Klamka, a physicist who founded the program, kept hearing from Silicon Valley executives that they had considered hiring traditional scientists, but converting them to technologists seemed time-consuming and risky. So Mr. Klamka decided he would start a company to provide scientists a smoother pathway into the tech industry.
Carlos Faham made that passage. He had an impressive academic career, with a string of grant awards and fellowships. His Ph.D. from Brown University was in dark-matter physics. After Brown, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dr. Faham loved the research, but after nearly two years he was feeling the strain of that life. By then, he had spent 12 years in college, graduate school and postgraduate research. His next step would be to compete for a handful of tenure-track teaching openings across the country. For the pricey Bay Area, he wasn’t making enough. A postdoc researcher typically makes $40,000 to $60,000 a year.
Dr. Faham had done serious programming for his physics research. He applied to tech companies, figuring they would be eager to hire someone with his intellectual firepower. He couldn’t get an in-person interview. He was told his background was too academic. He fumbled a couple of phone screening interviews because the statistical and machine-learning problems were unfamiliar to him.
“It was like hitting a wall running at full speed, really humbling,” he recalled.
Dr. Faham joined the seven-week Insight Data Science Fellows program in 2015. There was no formal course work. Other than a few tutorials by industry people, the time was spent creating a product — his was software for recognizing and tracking faces in video — and training for interviews. That involved solving a programming problem on a white board and explaining his thinking. “Interviewing is a muscle and you have to exercise it again and again,” he said. After the program, he received six job offers. He accepted the offer from LinkedIn. (Insight is free for participants; hiring companies pay an undisclosed fee.)
Today, Dr. Faham, 33, is a senior data scientist, working on a team that uses machine learning and statistical models to detect illicit activity on the social network, including fake job listings, ad fraud, spam and bot attacks.
The range of data-intensive detective work, he said, is “extremely rich” and “it moves so much faster than my previous world.” He makes a “pretty good six-figure salary,” about five times what he did as a postdoctoral researcher.
About 90 percent of those who enter the Insight program have landed jobs as data analysts, the company says, with a dropout rate of about 3 percent.
Anasuya Das made a similar career move, but not one as far from her academic training. After the program, Dr. Das, whose Ph.D. is in neuroscience, joined the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where she is now a senior data scientist. She works on a team that creates software tools for the center’s doctors, nurses and researchers. One current project is a program to recommend the most promising clinical trials for individual cancer patients, based on their medical histories, age, gender and genetics.
Data science is distinctly different from neuroscience, Dr. Das said, but some of the tools she employs, like a machine-learning technique called artificial neural networks, do take their inspiration from the brain. Her experience points to the larger trend that digital technologies like data science and artificial intelligence are increasingly being used in nearly every discipline. So technology and the other STEM fields merge.
That is the thinking behind a new division of data sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, that started in July. The division is a response to student demand and advancing technology. Berkeley’s “Foundations of Data Science” course attracted 1,200 students from more than 50 majors in the last academic year.
The choice of the term “division” rather than “institute,” explained David Culler, the interim dean for data sciences, underlines its approach. “We want this to be something foundational across the university, innovating with other disciplines, not differentiating from them,” he said. “This is the academic world mirroring what is happening in the larger economy.”
Raspberry Pi & Arduino Educator Workshop
For Hawaii Educators
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Moanalua High School
Room: Library
Honolulu, HI 96818
Register online at
https://coding2017.eventbrite.com
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