Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook Messenger is testing a new feature that will make the app entirely more useable for some individuals: the ability to request adding a contact with another Messenger user rather than having to add that individual as a ‘friend.’ The new feature is aptly called ‘Add Contact,’ and would exist between Facebook friendship and messaging someone sans any formal affiliation … Continue reading

Why don’t you get a response to every email you write? It’s possible your recipient is busy. Maybe it didn’t reach them. Or maybe, just maybe, you didn’t write a quality email in the first place.

Microsoft already allows Xbox owners to stream their games to PC and now Sony is following suit. The company today announced that its PlayStation Now cloud-based game streaming service is headed to PC. This means that PC gamers can get their hands on some of the best titles for PlayStation 4 like Uncharted. The service will go live in select markets soon, enabling gamers to play PlayStation games on their PCs.

The PlayStation Now game streaming service was initially launched for PlayStation 4 to enable owners of the new console to play PS3 games. A subscription costs $19.99 per month and provides streaming access to hundreds of titles. There are more than 400 titles currently available on PlayStation Now, including the likes of God of War, Resident Evil, and Uncharted.

To have a solid game streaming experience, Sony recommends that your PC should be running Windows 7 or up, it should have a 3.5GHz Intel Core i3 or 3.8GHz AMD A10 or faster processor with more than 2GB of RAM. A sound card is also recommended. A minimum of 5Mbps internet connection is required to use PlayStation Now on any device.

Sony has said that PlayStation Now for PC will go live in Europe in the very near future and that it will be available in North America “shortly thereafter.”

PlayStation Now Game Streaming Coming To PC , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Stanford University unveiled on Monday a new policy banning hard liquor at registered undergraduate student parties, limiting the size of liquor bottles that students of age can have on campus, and restricting grad students from taking shots at on-campus parties. 

Many news outlets have covered the announcement as an unheard-of decision and a tone-deaf response to the issue of campus rape, but Stanford appears to be following the lead of several other universities.

In January 2015, Dartmouth College unveiled a policy banning hard liquor on campus as part of a plan to address binge-drinking, hazing and sexual assault. A month later, Purdue University’s fraternities banned hard liquor on chapter properties or at member events. Fraternities at the University of Kansas and University of Missouri followed suit later that spring. 

And none of these schools were original when they came up with hard liquor bans: Colby College in Maine adopted one in 2010. There are similar policies in place at many of Colby’s peer institutions ― Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Swarthmore, Williams and Colgate University.

“Late-night hospital transports, violence and sexual assault are often associated with hard alcohol consumption,” said Kevin Kruger, president of NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. “In response to these public health issues, some colleges are trying to reduce access to hard alcohol through the ban.”

Stanford is the largest school, aside from the University of Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis, to enact such a ban on spirits. 

The only unique element of Stanford’s new policy is that the school has requirements about what size liquor containers are permitted on campus.

Hard liquor is banned at any parties on the Palo Alto, California, campus where undergraduate students are present, but beer and wine is allowed. Liquor is allowed at events where only graduate students are present, as long as people aren’t taking shots. Alcohol on campus must be kept in its original container, which can’t be larger than 750 milliliters.

The university decided to regulate alcohol container sizes because it believes finding stores near campus that sell pints or half-pints of liquor will be difficult, the school explained in a campuswide message announcing these new regulations. 

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Many outlets have connected these new rules to the case of Brock Turner, a former Stanford student who earlier this year was found guilty of sexual assault. Wire services like The Associated Press and McClatchy noted the policy change “comes after” Turner’s conviction and sentencing. The Daily Mail said it was explicitly because of the Turner case.

However, the message announcing the regulations did not reference Turner. It also did not mention sexual violence. 

The potential connection between on-campus sexual assault and the new policy may be a statement that Stanford President John L. Hennessy issued in March, after Turner was convicted but before he was sentenced. In it, Hennessy said alcohol, particularly hard liquor, leads to “sexual assault and relationship violence.”

The following month, students voted for a resolution that opposed a hard liquor ban on campus. Stanford apparently didn’t listen to the student vote.

The rationale behind these liquor bans often goes back to a 2001 study from Harvard University researchers, which showed schools with alcohol bans were more likely to have a lower percentage of heavy, binge-drinkers. Alcohol bans, however, did not totally eliminate binge-drinking from a campus. 

“Some are concerned that this drives students off-campus and perhaps into cars to the local college bars and thus makes it more dangerous and more difficult to control and manage when it goes off-campus,” Kruger said.

Another study from Harvard in 2004, from the same lead researcher, concluded that rape was more common at colleges with higher rates of binge-drinking, and that alcohol was involved in a majority of sexual assaults taking place on these campuses. That study advised colleges to “give increased attention to educating male students that one of the first questions they must ask themselves before initiating sex with a woman is whether she is capable of giving consent.” 

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Tyler Kingkade is a national reporter who covers sexual violence and is based in New York. You can reach him at tyler.kingkade@huffingtonpost.com, or find him on Twitter: @tylerkingkade. 

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I remember three things about my first computer science class in college. First, improbably, the professor was named Ramm, as in “random access memory.” Second, the class was about processors, and I only had a vague idea what a processor was. Third, it was the last computer science class for most of my female classmates, who quickly decided they’d rather major in something else.

I never would have guessed that my time as a computer science student would turn out to be pretty much the high water mark for women in the field. The percentage of computer science majors who are women has gone down from 37 percent in 1984 to just 18 percent today. In other words, on average my daughters are half as likely to major in computer science as I was 30 years ago.

My daughters are half as likely to major in computer science as I was 30 years ago.

But the young women in this video are defying these odds — they’re pursuing careers in computer science and dismantling stereotypes about the field. I love hearing them talk about the sense of empowerment and joy that coding brings them. Kimberly got a standing ovation from her high school English classmates when she demonstrated a book review app she made. Kayla is preserving and sharing the rich history of her community with an app that customizes multimedia walking tours. Courtney helped design the landing legs on a rocket when she interned at SpaceX!

The gross underrepresentation of women in computer science is not just a problem for the girls who are left out. It’s a problem for all of us, because we’re not benefitting from the creativity girls have to offer. There’s a mountain of research showing that diversity makes for better companies and better products — that we’re more innovative when we work in teams with different kinds of people — yet the gender diversity in tech has been getting worse for decades.

One reason why is that somewhere along the way, society decided that computers are for boys. Or, as Aishwarya says, “guys in hoodies.” And this toxic stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, virtually guaranteeing that computer science is indeed a male-dominated field.

First, since girls aren’t supposed to be into computers, they aren’t exposed to computer science when they’re young, and even if they are, they often aren’t encouraged to pursue their interests in the field. That helps explain why only 22 percent of the high school students who take the AP computer science exam today are girls. Kayla didn’t know she wanted to be a computer scientist until she’d already started a totally different career, in library science. It was only when she started training staff to use the library’s software that she realized she might be interested in making software herself, so she went back to college for a second time to be a computer scientist. Kimberly had never heard of computer science until she saw it was one of the classes she could take at her local community college.

The gross underrepresentation of women in computer science is… a problem for all of us.

The idea that computers are for boys doesn’t just keep girls out of the field, though. It also drives women out. A host of implicit biases affect the way tech companies recruit, train, and promote–and make it easier for men to get ahead.

Luckily, there are great organizations like the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), whose mission is to increase the number of girls and women in tech. NCWIT and groups like it aim to make it easier for girls to discover that they love computers–and make it easier for women who love computer science to make a career in it. Eventually, as more and more girls choose this path, it won’t seem like computer science is just for boys.

Aishwarya, Courtney, Kayla, and Kimberly all talk about the excitement of using code to turn an idea into a piece of software that can change the world, of creating something important from nothing. Let me tell you, it is a terrific feeling. Kayla says it makes her feel like “superwoman.” I hope everyone gets the opportunity to feel that way.

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