17-Year-Old Girl Wins Boston TV API Programming Contest 117
An anonymous reader writes "Jenny Lamere, a graduating high school senior from Nashua NH, was the youngest of 80 participants (and one of only four women) in the Hill Holiday TVnext hackathon held in Boston this past April, a programming contest sponsored by TV API providers. Her submission of 'Twivo,' an app that allows TV viewers to block spoiler tweets while watching a show and recover them later, won the contest's 'Sync to Broadcast' category (one of five), and was also named the event's 'Best in Show' (overall winner). At least one tech company has expressed interest in her app (a short demo and interview with the judges starts at 3:30 in the embedded YouTube clip). Lamere plans to enter the Rochester Institute of Technology in the fall, and will pursue a career in software development."
TiVo also expressed interest (Score:1, Funny)
In suing her for trademark infringement.
Being a woman at RIT (Score:3)
She'll share a very similar Male/Female ratio when she attends RIT as well, at least as of 15 years ago or so...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
at least as of 15 years ago or so...
When, as we all know so well, the world was exactly the same as it is now.
Also, in other news, men and women are different and a gender imbalance somewhere doesn't automatically mean something is horribly wrong and must be fixed.
And here's some actual statistics - the ratio last year was 67:33, a bit closer to 50:50 than 76:4.
Re: (Score:2)
As long as nothing is unfairly barring the opportunity, I don't see that anything else matters.
94.2% of nurses are women, but I neither see any need to shift that to 46% (because women are 54% of society) nor anything in nursing preventing men who do want to be nurses from doing so.
source: http://www.minoritynurse.com/minority-nursing-statistics [minoritynurse.com]
Re:Being a woman at RIT (Score:5, Interesting)
at least as of 15 years ago or so...
When, as we all know so well, the world was exactly the same as it is now.
Also, in other news, men and women are different and a gender imbalance somewhere doesn't automatically mean something is horribly wrong and must be fixed.
And here's some actual statistics - the ratio last year was 67:33, a bit closer to 50:50 than 76:4.
The current male to female ratio at RIT Computer Science program is 68:1. RIT also has a fruitfall Arts program which brings in a lot of females. This is where you get the 67:33. I never took a computer science class with a female while there. In fact outside of a few liberal arts classes I was free from the distraction. However, every once in a while I would see one of those mythical creatures from a window on the 3rd floor of GCCIS. That always made for an exciting day...
Re: (Score:2)
During my college [apu.edu] days from 1994-1998, it was 3 (females) to 1 (males). And yet, I still didn't get a girlfriend, married, and am still a virgin today. :P
Re: (Score:2)
Also, in other news, men and women are different and a gender imbalance somewhere doesn't automatically mean something is horribly wrong and must be fixed.
I agree, but can you suggest why women would be inherently less interested in computer science than men? I know there have been some studies in apes but they seem to be mostly bunk (why would a male ape want to play with a car when he clearly has no idea what a car is?) On the other hand girls consistently perform better at school, seeming to be more academically inclined at that age.
Re: (Score:1)
Ha. I was an RIT student in the 90's too. It was a total sausage fest. I went back for a visit in 2005 because I was in the area and noticed a lot more women there. I don't know what the per-major balance was, but it was at least better overall.
Re: (Score:2)
I started at RIT in 2000 and graduated in 2006 and even by that point the ratio was a lot better. There were mixed-gender groups of freshmen walking around the dorm side, and they actually looked... happy?
Not sure it would be my first choice for college if I were a girl, but yay for her raising the value of our diplomas in any case.
Negative Attention (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish people would stop focusing on age and gender.
Re: (Score:1)
So no one will notice systematic discrimination, which allows sexism to be a deeply rooted controlling factor for real-world systems so long as it's not too blatantly stated in writing?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Negative Attention (Score:4, Insightful)
Yaknow, centuries of deeply entrenched stereotypes don't magically vanish away overnight. Lifting up counter-examples to the stereotype that women just aren't mentally cut out for logical/intellectual work is important to eradicating such views. Other young women should get the chance to see female role models praised in the media for accomplishments besides being Miss Teen America 2013. While an ultimate goal is reaching a society where it's nothing special for a woman to be a programmer, to *get there* from our present sexist world, one needs to actively push back against entrenched misogyny.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Your feminist argument is 'men and women should be equal except women should be superior'.
And how did your amazing critical reading skills reach that conclusion, which has nothing to do with what I said?
You seem to have missed a big part of my argument, which is that *situations change with time,* so *particular things that wouldn't be necessary in the ideal future case of equality might be necessary while reacting to existing inequality.*
Suppose you see a dozen people locked up in chains. You think "in an ideal world, no one would be locked up in chains --- ergo, there would be no need to free
Re: (Score:3)
You're that into fat beardly dudes? Sorry to let you down, AC, but I'm pretty sure I swing for the other team.
Yeah, I really wasn't thinking about the potential gender implications of my username (it's a lame joke based on SI prefixes that I tossed out on the spur of the moment when signing up for a Slashdot account). I am rarely mistaken for female in real life --- but it has been educational to see what sort of slimeballs a gender-ambiguous internet identity will lure out of the woodwork.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you just made their point. Your feminist argument is 'men and women should be equal except women should be superior'.
No I think you have it upside down. I read the argument as 'all people should have equal opportunities but they don't right now so to set that right we are going to have to give the minorities a bit of special attention to show others that it's possible to succeed'. I can see why it might suck for you if they go and give attention to a girls achievements instead of yours, but it's for the greater good so get over yourself.
And, frankly, most guys who started programming in their teens or earlier are thinking 'WTF' when you suggest that a 'delay messages from twitter' app is somehow an example of amazing programming that should be lauded in the media. Had a guy done this, no-one would have cared.
And here's your problem. A 17yo girl invents a product that may just appeal mainly to
Re: (Score:3)
As a male, I guess I should be proud to have achieved cunt status. If people like you vigorously hate me, I must be doing something right to piss off the scumbags in this world.
Anyway, part of not being a fucking bigot is listening to women's voices on issues of discrimination. No matter how many angry men insist to me that women have reached full equality, it's really not a convincing argument compared to the dissenting accounts I hear from *women* I know. Guess what: your exclusively male view of the worl
Re: (Score:1)
Someone Wins Boston TV API Programming Contest
"Jenny Lamere, a graduating high school senior from Nashua NH, was one of 80 participants in the Hill Holiday TVnext hackathon held in Boston this past April, a programming contest sponsored by TV API providers. Her submission of 'Twivo,' an app that allows TV viewers to block spoiler tweets while watching a show and recover them later, won the contest's 'Sync to Broadcast' category (one of five), and was also named the event's 'Best in Show' (overall winner).
Re: (Score:3)
It is a reality that women are are poorly represented in IT. In fact, if you're one of those types who believe "reverse discrimination" is an issue, you should be upholding her as an example that women can and do succeed in computing and thus need no special attention.
I'm happy because she can be a role model for her peers, both male and female.
Re: (Score:3)
It's also a reality that they're poorly represented in the plumbing and electrician trades, and that men are poorly represented in nursing, the beauty industry, and education. Why are there no complaints and attempts at artificially twiddling the ratios in those fields? It can't even be a money thing - I know plumbers and electricians who earn about the same as me.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, that's getting fixed faster than many other disparities. With families (far more often with a single mother than single father) being the fastest growing homeless demographic, followed by single women, gender parity is well on its way. Additionally, one of the largest homelessness creators --- the US military, which discards huge numbers of veterans onto the streets after they are no longer useful canon fodder --- has seen major strides towards gender equality over the last few decades.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, we need to focus on things more important than that a female won a programming contest.
Like, why was there a dev workstation in the kitchen?
Re: (Score:3)
I wish people would stop focusing on age and gender.
It's a double edged sword that one... On the one hand there's a danger of people focusing on her age and gender at the expense of her entry and tech skills, which is bad for all the obvious reasons. On the other hand this might open the eyes of other young girls who just assumed such things were out of their reach - an easy assumption to make when they look around and see a playing field dominated by males.
I watched the start of the vid... they made a bit of a big deal about it at the start and made some co
No surprises there... (Score:1, Insightful)
After all, nobody would have watched if an adult male programmer won it, would they? Not that TV producers ever fake results to court an audience, of course; such a thing would be unethical. No, just like all the other instances of similar wins, it's just proving once again that all little girls are cleverer than anybody else. Yeah.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, nobody would have watched if an adult male programmer won it...
A friend of mine whom I respect and admire as a programmer very much might have a lot to say about this. Men receive accolades for being great programmers all the time, the industry is completely dominated by men. Everytime my friend has gotten a new job (she's on her second one in S.V., she's from the east coast and a Carnigie-Mellon grad, very accomplished) she gets hit on by the men in the staff, and knowing she's a lesbian doesn't seem to phaze them. She's gotten held back on other jobs because the admi
Re: (Score:1)
No. I can call them out RIGHT NOW because what they're proposing is NOT a blind-to-gender society.
I don't support them either, and if you believe I do you mis-read me. They have lost the way. Watching a woman get dressed down because she's a woman, that's a life changing event. I see I got modded down for expressing my opinion. Right is right. 70's feminism was misguided. Equality for everyone; that's right.
Re: (Score:2)
what they're proposing is NOT a blind-to-gender society.
What many feminists are proposing is a not blind to existing gender inequalities and their sources society. Anti-feminists like to spread intentional confusion between wanting a gender-blind society and being blind to gender discrimination --- "you can't call out anyone for being misogynistic, because that proves you can still tell which victims of discrimination are female!"
Re: (Score:1)
a fellow engineer has a vagina between her legs.
Picture or it did not happen!
Re: (Score:2)
who modded this shit insightful?
It's basically dismissing all female achievement as manufactured because the achievers are female. The only thing it offers insight into is the mind of angry anoymous bigots.
I would comment... (Score:2, Interesting)
...but with all the hullabaloo around the treatment of women in computer science lately I'm not even sure what to say anymore. Did she win because she's a girl? Did she win despite being a girl? Clearly being a girl matters, or you wouldn't have mentioned that only four girls participated. Do we wish her luck with her career choice or do we warn her off because she's going to be ogled by her predominantly male colleagues if she pursues this career? Would she prefer that we not talk about her chromosomes and
Re: (Score:2)
It it notable because it is rare, and it is rare because of the astonishing gender imbalance.
This will probably cue the whining about how men and women are different, but not explain how in the very, very early days the gender imbalance did not used to exist in the same way.
Re: (Score:2)
Very good questions. If Jenny was a Jeremy would this have received the attention and accolades it did? Given how prone to bending over backwards academia is to women in tech and heaping praise on women because of their gender, my gut says probably not.
You have no proof, but.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly wouldn't have been newsworthy if they selected a male 20s-something developer.
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows. Maybe it would have. I honestly don't know where the newsworthiness comes in this case: the fact that it's a Boston TV API programming contest, or that a girl won. I'd bet the former, but in today's context the latter may have helped a bit.
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't really need justification on Slashdot, because Slashdot editorial has established stories like "nine year old indian girl sets up a web server" and "twelve year old child of extremely successful and accomplished parents excels in doing something in the same field as the parents with the parents contacts/assistances/advice/guidance" over the years.
Re: (Score:2)
I never heard of the Boston TV API programming contest until it was won by a young woman... so maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Indeed, there is a wide-spread institutional bias that stereotypes women as having superior computer skills.
That's why so few men become programmers.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Question: Would we even heard about this contest if the winner didn't happen to be a girl?
The point being that we get some random ass contest that some girl won, and we are now expected to cheer because she won it, even though those of us who are nowhere near Boston could have cared less about it.
Feels to me like we're supposed to be taking girls seriously, but we're treating them like they just won the Special Olympics. Which is to say, "good job for winning at a contest that we only care about because i
Best hack needs no API. (Score:1)
I've found the best broadcast television hack of the past decade has been not to watch it.
*shrug*
Low hanging fruit? (Score:3)
So let me get this straight: This project won an award yet set-top-box delivery UI's still suck the big one. (Here's a big hint: prevent all the channels I don't ever want to see again from being seen e.g. the 36 friggin' shopping/infomercial channels) Makes you wonder what problems the other entrants attempted to solve.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing something that scans titles to find shows that may have boobies in them, something that scans reviews to find which shows might have boobies in them, something that scans titles and reviews to find shows that may have boobies in them...
Re: (Score:2)
A favourite channels list and the ability to block certain channels (e.g. adult channels) is a fairly standard feature on set-top boxes and TVs in the UK. Perhaps the US is different.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not talking about blocking. I want to eliminate those channels from the guide completely never to be seen again. Furthermore, surfing is impractical because the refresh rates are so slow.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what I'm talking about. Once you add those channels to the blacklist they are not merely blocked, they simply don't appear in the channel list. IIRC it was a requirement of the UK digital terrestrial TV standard because they knew people would object to some of the adult channel names.
A filter? (Score:2)
So all she developed was a filter plugin? Really? Like these don't exist already?
I find it extremely hard to believe that no one has developed a plugin like this yet for removing tweets based on hashtags or keywords.
Re: (Score:2)
It took me all of 5 seconds to find this one after I submitted that comment:
http://larryfilter.com/ [larryfilter.com]
it's been around a year..
#fraud
Funny, I thought this article was about coding... (Score:1)
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Choosing not to listen to someone is not censorship.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
In a sense it is: but you are applying the censorship only to what you see/hear. I think people should be permitted to self-censor. If I want to filter my view of the world to block out ********, then I should be able to do that. If I want to write a ********-filter plugin to help other people choose to avoid wasting their time on ******** too, then that's fine. The problem is when I impose censorship on others: if I'm the manager at the local telco monopoly, I shouldn't be installing network filters to keep ******** off my customers' computers (if they want to do so themselves, fine).
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Funny)
Stop spreading my password, please!
Re: (Score:1)
good gracious, what sort of twisted pervert would be using that for their password??
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
hunter2
You can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
Re: (Score:2)
You can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
It's great how in the original IRC quote the guy is a bit confused but still goes on joking with that. :)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No it isn't. Censorship is preventing someone from speaking. Ignoring someone is not remotely close. I ignore people all of the time, but I'm not preventing them from speaking their xenophobic racist bile. It's no different from moving away from the fat sweaty pig that has questionable personal hygiene issues, or the inconsiderate smoker wafting the pollution from their nicotine fix. I don't like either, I get up and move elsewhere. They can continue stinking everyone else out without being remotely bother
Re: (Score:2)
Your simplistic definition of censorship ("not preventing others from speaking") doesn't hold up. Suppose a xenophobic bigot is speaking on a public corner. If a news reporter records him, and plays his speech on the evening news with some of the most vile racial slurs bleeped out, then they're censoring his speech --- without stopping him from speaking; in fact, giving him a bigger audience for the non-censored parts. Censorship is filtering out material according to one's own preferences. Preventing other
Re: (Score:3)
So exactly what part of bleeping out a word or phrase isn't "preventing others from speaking" that word or phrase?
I fail to see any argument where failing to censor all speech in anyway changes small selective censorship from being anything except for preventing the speech of that which was censored.
Or to put it in a more simplistic fashion...
In your given example the censorship begins exactly at the beginning of the beep. The censorship ends at the end of the beep. Anything that is outside of t
Re: (Score:3)
So exactly what part of bleeping out a word or phrase isn't "preventing others from speaking" that word or phrase?
If the reporter decided not to replay any of the bigot's speech at all on the evening news, would you say that they were censoring even more? Are they also censoring every other single person whose speech they don't replay? How do you separate "preventing others from speaking" from "not repeating what others are speaking," or "only repeating excerpts from what people are speaking, interspersed with monotonic musical interludes"? I think a concept of "censorship" in terms of "information filtering" is more g
Re: (Score:2)
I may well be wrong but I tend to think of censorship not as preventing someone from speaking but, rather, preventing someone from hearing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It's only censorship as much as somebody choosing to read not read a book until sometime later. It's just setting up certain tweets to be read later instead of right away.
Re: (Score:1)
So if the car next to me blares loud music and I roll up my windows, I'm supporting censorship too?
Not Censorship (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Discrimination perhaps in the form of filtering audio input, the technical definintion, not the sociopolitical version. After all, not everyone wants to hear the world's greatest disco hits as played by the Highland Pride All-Bagpipe Band.
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Censorship is when I keep you from saying it. You can still say it.
I just refuse to listen.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
While you are of course right, there's one interesting thought about this:
There can also be self-censorship. A concept better known as ignorance... especially in schizotypic illnesses (and in a very obvious way in multiple-personality disorders) including religiousness (where the other personality is "god/jesus/satan").
Which obviously is just as harmful and can be done in masses just as well.
Hence it is very popular with the political social engineers. People who are made to ignore things like that think i
Re: (Score:2)
There can also be self-censorship. A concept better known as ignorance... especially in schizotypic illnesses
Ufff, what has *that* to do with schizotypy?
Re: (Score:2)
There can also be self-censorship.
Self-censorship is when you refuse to say something, or hear something, because you are afraid what 'they' will think. If you are afraid of what your government, neighbors, police, etc, will think or do if you listen to something, then yeah, you're in trouble and should change.
This is a completely different scenario than ignoring someone who has the appearance of a paranoid nut cake.
Re: (Score:3)
Are you being pragmatic, or are you assuming that that "they" are correct?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure I understand the question. I'm saying, you're in trouble because you're censoring yourself and should stop it.
Unless, of course, you're right. Then you're in a different kind of trouble. (And several other kinds as well.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If people choosing to not listen to you is censorship, then be prepared for a lifetime of 1984.
Re: (Score:2)
What's ironic is that you exercised self-censorship by failing to read the summary.....
Re: (Score:3)
"It's not even censorship, it's time-delay for Twitter. "
17 year old girl fixes a problem only 17 year old girls have.
Re: (Score:1)
Just because you and me don't use twitter, that doesn't mean her generation won't when they are older :)