Hasta La Gadget!

In an attempt to offer transparency to United States surveillance tactics, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report today offering numbers for National Security Agency actions in 2013. The report notes thousands of orders…

Mechanical watches are beautiful, but there’s always the hassle of setting it to the correct time when you travel abroad. What price, then, would you pay to never make that sort of effort again? If you answered “about ten grand,” then you’re the…

Scientists, put away your chalk – the most important discovery of our time has come to fruition: edible cupcake wrappers. Straight from the folks at Dr. Oetker (whom we must assume is a Doctor in All Things Excellent) comes “Edible Wafer Cupcake Cases”. They do exactly what you think they do. Each Edible Wafer Case is “bake stable”, which means … Continue reading

There are some instances in life where there is no trial run – when the time arrives, one has to bite the bullet and go through it. One example would be giving birth – you can have all the theoretical knowledge, but the day baby wants to make an exit from mother’s womb, then all of that theory would not offer much comfort. Other things in life, however, can be tested before the real deal, such as answering past year exam questions to get a gist of how things might be like. Another would be testing out a smartphone or tablet to see if it suits your lifestyle or not before making a purchase decision. Samsung knows this, which is why they have just introduced a 21-day trial program.

While the thought of carrying the latest Samsung mobile devices around for three weeks without having to pay for it sounds glamorous to some, do bear in mind that Samsung also has its fair share of conditions to protect itself. You will first need to head to one out of five US locations in order to pick up your device, where credit or debit card details have to be supplied for verification and security purposes. Basically, your card will be charged first, before the full amount is refunded should you return an undamaged device.

Do you think this modus operandi will catch on in the long run? I wonder what would happen to these trial devices that have been returned, will they be sold on the cheap? [Press Release]

Samsung Trial Program For Smartphones And Tablets Launched , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

In late spring, around the same time President Obama hosted a science fair to promote middle and high schoolers’ interest in science, technology engineering and math (STEM) careers, the tech firms Google and Yahoo! released corporate reports displaying the lack of ethnic and gender diversity in their ranks. These earnest gestures of STEM advocacy and transparency poignantly illustrated the problem with STEM diversity in the United States today: We stuff as many students as possible into the proverbial STEM pipeline while failing to address the leaks and backflows within, even when many students — especially minorities — don’t emerge from the other end with STEM PhDs and jobs.

Built into this pipeline metaphor is the assumption that the pipeline lays flat and that the momentum of every individual going through is unchanged. The data tell a different story.

At the same time as the science fair and the industry diversity reports, we presented a performance analysis of the STEM pipeline over the last decade in a paper published in the journal BioScience. We showed that the pipeline inclines upward rather than lays flat, given how many students struggle and how few get through. The problem remains particularly acute among traditionally underrepresented minorities (URMs).

In 2000, when students entered the pipeline in college, whether they were URMs or not, a bit more than a third of them expressed intentions to study STEM. But URM students proved less likely to graduate as STEM majors than non-URM students. The data show that while 24.1 percent of U.S. college freshmen came from URM groups in 2000, only 18.5 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients did in 2004.

The STEM-specific attrition of URMs became most evident after college graduation, according to National Science Foundation statistics. After college in 2009, 36 percent of the URM students holding STEM bachelor’s degrees left the field instead of taking a STEM job or entering graduate study compared to 30 percent of non-URM graduates. Among those who did enter graduate school, many URM students struggled further up the pipeline. They earned only 18.3 percent of the STEM bachelor’s degrees in 2004 and only 12.1 percent of the STEM doctorates awarded in 2010.

Reinforcing the prevailing reality seen at Google and Yahoo! that the STEM workforce lacks diversity, our assessment showed that URMs composed only about 10 percent of the STEM workforce in 2010.

These results tell us that educators and policymakers need to counteract the downward forces that prevent better advancement through the pipeline rather than simply stuff the pipeline with students. In BioScience, we proposed four ideas to help. These ideas are derived from our own experiences as minorities working in academic biology research, from our careful review of the education literature, and from results of our own NIH-funded experiments promoting STEM diversity at Brown University.

Our ideas don’t call for infusion of “new money.” Instead, we believe changes should be made that address endemic factors of academic life. We need better alignment of culture and climate, partnerships between research and minority-serving universities, a critical mass of underrepresented groups in STEM programs, and more faculty (rather than just administrative) engagement in diversity. These strategies can apply in the U.S and abroad to many underrepresented groups in STEM and non-STEM fields and in the future when the make-up of underrepresented groups may change.

Universities are large institutions with many opportunities for misalignments between the culture of articulated values, such as the importance of diversity, and the climate in which things actually happen (or don’t). When these disconnects emerge with respect to diversity, they disillusion minority students. Such disconnects need to be identified and rectified. We therefore recommend annual, confidential surveys — by third-parties rather than by university administrators — to enable unbiased discovery of when an institution’s diversity values aren’t put into practice.

Those working in STEM diversity have encountered many cases of young graduate students who demonstrate great potential at their undergraduate-focused minority-serving institutions (MSIs) but who struggle at a graduate research institution. At Brown, we’ve addressed this challenge in part by forging partnerships with several MSIs to build relationships that go beyond merely recruiting students to increase diversity. We work with our partners to identify and fill curricular gaps so that students enter our graduate programs prepared. These partnerships, funded with support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, have other added benefits. They get MSI students and faculty involved in more advanced research at the undergraduate level and provide opportunities for research-institution faculty to develop “cultural competency” in working with students and faculty at MSIs.

Partnerships also allow institutions to recruit not just a bulk of broadly categorized URM students, but a critical mass of students with shared backgrounds. Critical mass is important because it ensures that students have an environment that fosters a feeling of inclusion. It also provides a support system where their shared experiences further validate their presence and contribution. This is something we all inherently rely on and universities must recognize that in order to maximize URM student persistence and retention, they need to increase the critical mass of peers. Focused recruiting can help ensure such communities.

An often underappreciated reality of academia is that the administrative lifespans of presidents and provosts are too short to be effective in instituting transformative changes in institutional diversity practices without significant faculty involvement. Directly instilling the value of STEM diversity among faculty will make diversity programs more effective. Universities should consider explicit incentives for diversity that are ‘on par’ with research and teaching in faculty merit and promotion considerations.

Challenges of culture and practice are among the most difficult to resolve. Given the financial investments made to date, it is clear that more money alone will not address the challenge of achieving STEM diversity. More is required. As surely as STEM research and education are valuable, they are even more so when we all have genuine opportunities to participate in them.

Andrew G. Campbell is Associate Professor of Medical Science in the Department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology of the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Stacy-ann Allen-Ramdial holds a PhD and Masters in Molecular Virology from Brown University.