 um this is the newest MacBook Pro and it normally doesn't do anything but every once while it just goes crazy and it's going crazy right now. It says it's Chrome. Chrome is 178 percent. It's always Chrome. It's the Beyonce Effect of Chrome. I make your browser so crazy right now. That's a song Allison. I made a song joke. I took a picture of the 48th box of Thin Mints I bought and I wrote oops I did it again. Ah see. Huh? There you go. I put little musical notes in it. Ah like a person who likes music. Four years of high school band, second chair flute. And you just don't that's so funny. That's so funny. I played every note as long as they said to play it. I played the pitch they said to play it. Played as loud as they said to play it but they said that wasn't music. Who knew? You were at second chair? Yeah and then I went on to piccolo because it could be first chair. Isn't that sad? So I mean technically I played quite well. I still have my flutes. I played trumpet. Trumpet windsock. No I just I played trumpet in in high school and drums. Actually I played trumpet in elementary school. I dropped it in junior high because I wanted to do just percussion. Yeah. So I was just drums from junior high on. Girls like the drummers. Well they like the brass though too. That was not my experience with the drummer. My brother played flute and he was quite popular because he was with all the girls. Yeah but was he popular because of the flute or because he was himself? Yeah. Because of the flute. I can tell you like very few ban geeks got any attention that way. No one said like oh watch me pull out my trombone. And have the women swoon. My daughter was never allowed to have boys in her room and one day I come home and she's got a boy in her room. She's like in early high school and afterwards I said I said what are you doing? She goes oh mom he's in band. Then I was like oh all right. I didn't think that counted. Is that what she was trying to say? And I had to. I only was allowed not to have boys you should worry about in my room. Wow how insulting for the poor kid. It was true though. That's so funny. And I took her point. I didn't get mad or I said yeah you got me there. So yeah I think we're going to have a good show. We're going to have a good conversation. You've read over your headlines. I have notes. I've read the questions. Probably look at the feeds one more time. Mexico's Congress is cooking up dozens. Okay fine that's not a tech story. I don't know why that's in there. Pennsylvania just sued IBM over an allegedly botched $100 million project. Good luck Pennsylvania. You'll need it. Godspeed Pennsylvania. Look how little this is. Isn't it cute? That's the D-Link Omna. The first home kit compatible surveillance camera for inside your house. Yeah look a little it's two inches across me. It's bigger than the drop cam though or the nest cam. How big is the drop cam? Nest cam is only two inches. It's like half my fist. Oh a little ball. Okay. It's got a stand. It's only two inches across them. It's got LEDs so it'll or IR LEDs so it'll light up the rim at night and you can see 16 feet. It's probably the same electronics. It's just that it's got a cylinder form fact instead of the skinny stand. It's probably otherwise it's probably the same. Maybe it's got anti-warping technology. Anti-warping so you can't go you can't go beyond the speed of light. Exactly. No Star Trek. Well that's no good. I guess if you're just using it for home that's not a problem. You see I wrote something in the slack like a whole new thing to Justin. Yes I did. Froderick. That's the proper German pronunciation. Right but then he said Frederick the second time so that's why I figured it was. I was you know fairing it up. I do Giff and Giff the same way. Just alternate. Yeah. All right you get ready. Might as well get going. Why don't we just do it. Things are working. Let's do it. Here we go. The Daily Tech News Show is brought to you by its listeners, not outside organizations. To find out how you can contribute go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, March 10th, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt. Joining me this Friday. I'm very happy to have Allison Sheridan on the show. Welcome back Allison. Well hey how you doing Tom? Where's Len? I thought I was going to get to be on with Len. Len was going to be on and then Len turned into what he calls doober which is dad uber. He has to drive his kids around all day so he is sorry he couldn't make it. He might have a college visit for one of his kids next week so maybe a couple weeks but Len will be back. Do not worry. Okay. He sends his best. All right. All right good. I was worried about him. I know. I was sad that he wasn't going to be here today too because I feel like we have some good illustrative opportunities for him but you could still go to lemperaltostore.com and look at all the fine work that he's done over the years for DTNS. Before we get to the top stories, a few breaking things. Gear VR users outside the US at first. It'll come to US later. We'll be able to share live gameplay on Facebook live starting now and Oculus added voice search to the Gear VR and the Rift. None of this changing Allison's opinion about me. I don't even have to say it anymore. Twitch announced it will relaunch the Curse app as the Twitch desktop app on March 16th adding more social features things like friends, whispers and starting in the spring you'll be able to download and store video games. Curse historically known for add-ons. It'll still be able to do that but it's been able to do a whole lot more like screen sharing and stuff like that and so now it's being incorporated into the twitchiverse and Waymo has formally asked a judge to block Uber from operating its autonomous vehicles as part of a lawsuit claiming Anthony Levendowski took and now the filing specifies 9.7 gigabytes of proprietary files from Google to his startup auto which was then acquired by Uber and if they could prove that Uber knew Levendowski had these inappropriately attained files if they can prove that the files were inappropriate that he had them and that Uber knew them Uber could be in big trouble here. Yeah but they could be stopped either way right even if they didn't know. If they didn't know then it's more about Levendowski and they wouldn't be able to use his research but they wouldn't be in trouble as Uber if they're like hey we didn't know he had this stuff we thought he created. But they might not be able to use it and they might slow him down. Yeah well they'd have to license it exactly. Yeah well let's get into the rest of the top stories. Google's making CAPTCHA disappear. CAPTCHA is that process for distinguishing bots from humans used to be a type in a couple of letters then it became identifying a picture and then lately Google's recapture just says I'm not a robot and you click it and if you click it in a way that seems human that's it. They don't ask you for anything more. Google says they have a new system that uses a combination of machine learning and advanced risk analysis that means you don't even have to click I'm not a robot. They'll just be able to tell the implication is your normal interaction with the web page typing in things clicking on buttons will be examined to determine if you act like a person rather than a bot. Google doesn't want to go into details though because they don't want people to circumvent it. That sounds awesome I mean I still like the I'm not a robot that's for sure compared to every single other site. I mean I even went across just recently saw CAPTCHA that had no audio component say really come on. Yeah well and I'm not a robot is not as good at accessibility right. You have to have the audio component for certain users. This might be able to obviate that and say like as long as we're seeing okay this looks like an accessibility user and it's acting like a human accessibility user that could be helpful too. I don't know if that would be nice. If it can do that yeah whether because you aren't moving a mouse around for example. Right but if it's detecting patterns that gives it more latitude to go okay we don't see a mouse but that could mean this kind of human user right. Right fork code. At least that's my hope. All right see if you can follow this one Oculus CTO John Carmack is suing former employer Zenimax for failure to pay all it owes to the acquisition of Carmack's ID software in 2009. In the suit Carmack says Zenimax is claiming violations of Carmack's employment agreement as the reason for withholding more than twenty two and a half million dollars. In a lawsuit against Oculus Zenimax previously did not bring charges of breach of contract and Oculus was not found guilty of stealing trade secrets. So that's Carmack's assessment is hey these guys had a chance to nail me for what they say is the reason for not paying me and they didn't. So I'm suing them now yeah yeah that's a that's a mess. Yeah basically saying I mean this is a little bit of a tit for tat right Zenimax sued Oculus because of Carmack in part and went after Palmer Lucky in particular but now Carmack is saying all right you started this you've owed me twenty two and a half million dollars for a few years now and I've been pretty quiet about it I'm not gonna be quiet anymore. That's well they haven't owed the money since 2009 have they. Well they acquired it software in 2009 they've given him the stock but he they still owe him the rest so yeah well it's been a while that's an interest on that one yeah definitely. Speaking of interest the world's largest fintech hub maybe you didn't know this I didn't tilt today is Lattice 80 in Singapore they take advantage of Singapore's unique position as a city-state to do a lot of good financial stuff that organization Lattice 80 has signed an agreement with the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to open a second Lattice 80 site in the coastal city of Vizag chief minister of the state there in India is trying to turn Vizag into a tech hub and the Indian state has been saying you know since a lot of Indians are being prevented from taking jobs in the United States we're hoping they'll come back here and work in this tech hub. A couple of interesting things in there first of all I didn't even get past fintech before I had to go look it up that means a financial financial technology it's not about fish correct no I had to go look that one up when we were in India we found that we learned that they were actually losing tech jobs to cheaper countries for things like the the regular you know the support calls so they're having to mutate already in this short length of time they're having to mutate into the higher up the food chain into the higher tech stuff so this could really end up working to the advantage of of India right yeah absolutely I mean India is making that transition to to better jobs higher quality jobs and and several states are trying to be the place in fact there's an interesting backstory the tech in Asia goes into that I was not aware of either but apparently the state of Andhra Pradesh was once part of a larger state recently that include Hyderabad and the chief minister was the chief minister of that entire state and was trying to turn Hyderabad into cybarid bad somehow and now because he's now the chief minister of the smaller state of Andhra Pradesh he's turning his attention to Vizag but this this is there's a lot of competition to have a lot of different Silicon Valley like locations and financial tech is huge financial tech is growing and if you can get a little love out of it you you're possibly going to jump start your industry lattice 80 is huge it is like I said the world's largest hub in Singapore for financial tech so yeah that's pretty cool stuff yeah so we all love it when big rich people get into bets about stuff right but this is actually one that could really start changing the world on Twitter Elon Musk promised Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon Brooks that Tesla would get a 100 mil I'm sorry megawatt battery storage farm installed and working in South Australia 100 days from contract signature or it would be free like Musk said Tesla would charge $250 per kilowatt hour Cannon Brooks said he needed seven days to sort out politics and funding South Australia suffered from blackouts during a heat wave in part due to the closing of coal fired plants across the country this is the best story ever Tom I love this story yeah Mike Cannon Brooks is Australian if you didn't know and Atlassian is his company there and he's talking about the problems in South Australia and what can be done and Musk just jumps in and was like all right I'll get you 100 megawatts at least right that's my bare minimum he's hoping he could do more within 100 days or it's free like you know 30 minutes is is a little fast for for solar panels but this is crazy and it's there's a lot of movement to get Malcolm Turnbull the prime minister there to restart more coal plants to fill in the gap because those are there already right but this is an attempt by someone to say you know what I'd like is is more clean energy to work yeah why turn that on I like the way it happened because Elon just basically blustered on Twitter and Mike Cannon Brooks said so are you serious you can put your money where your mouth is and then he made the bet and you just know he's going to do it right he's not going to fail at that and he's got this is like when he when he was stuck in traffic and decided to start a company that would bore a hole to lax right like this guy Elon Musk I think sets challenges for himself because he knows that's what'll motivate him to get things done like if he publicly states it then he feels like he has to do it you know I worked with the woman I actually heard a woman who was that she would shoot for the moon and I would look at her going there's no way you can possibly do that but you know what she would hit really high mountains because of that and I'd be going oh geez that hill looks too high I probably can't do it you know so he just makes this stuff up but he has done a 90 megawatt battery storage farm so he's he's got some experience doing it yeah but I just love that the whole thing played out on Twitter as a bet between rich people Apple sent representatives to lobby against a proposed Nebraska bill on Thursday that would grant people the right to access company service manuals diagnostic equipment replacement parts a lot of times right now you may not realize this but manuals are restricted they're only given to certified repair shops and intellectual property laws are asserted to prevent people from getting copies of those manuals supporters of the right to repair bill think that companies unfairly restrict access to this information and they claim the fees charged to become a certified repair shop are too high while opponents of the right to repair bill said it would undermine intellectual property expose trade secrets threaten the safety and security of your consumer devices because hackers will all just moved to Nebraska and start pounding away on devices there uh Samsung John Deere because tractors right to repair is just as big of an issue as iPhones here comp tia the consumer technology association the information technology industry all opposed the bill and uh sounds like the chair of the judiciary committee in Nebraska doesn't think the bill is going to be considered this year so if they haven't gotten it killed they've certainly got to kick down the road hmm i do still wonder about the intellectual property part you know i i i completely agree with with the bill on one side but then intellectual property you know why do i have to give away my design if i if i invented it you know that hmm it's it's it's an interesting situation right like on the one hand a lot of this is just companies wanting to protect their revenue stream because they make a lot of money after off of controlling the repair uh john deere is a big example of that they they put intellectual property rights on the engine so that if you open the engine and try to repair it yourself they say you're violating copyright it's just that circumventing drm right and so that's to me over the line but i think you have a point allison which is if your service manuals are sufficiently technical they may reveal certain proprietary information uh but is that is that copyright or is that patent yeah that's a really good point that would be a trade secret like that would be patent not copyright the copyright is you don't have the right to reproduce this manual because it's our copyright not that you don't have the right to know the information and use the information that would be a pack but inside of that maybe you would reveal details to allow someone to reverse engineer a patent i don't know i no matter what you should be allowed to replace the screen on the phone yeah and then there's the whole trade secrets trade secrets things is a different matter as well which is to say like this is the information that tells you exactly how it works on the other hand that's i mean really you don't need the car industry but in massachusetts finally agreed to rules that allow them to share manuals repair manuals uh they were trying to assert copyright and that was just because they wanted to protect the the revenue so while i think you bring up a good point i also think there is an easy way to say this level of manual detail it has trade secrets and that can only go to people who sign an nda and are certified but this level is not and that is rightly available for people to use to repair their devices because because the other because the problem is sure if we live in los angeles we've got plenty of apple stores and certified repair options around us if we live out in southern illinois uh you may have to drive a hundred miles to find one and we're all of ireland yeah right or all of ireland no exactly and and if you have to pay five thousand dollars become a certified repairman and you only know you're going to get a few clients every so often and it's a sideline business you're not going to do it yeah absolutely well it's time to pour a little bit more out for radio shack us retailer radio shack is filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy for the the second time in more than two years it will close 200 stores and convert several hundred of the remaining 1300 to sprint stores sales at retail locations will be final now with no returns accepted gift cards must be spent by april 7th radio shack is owned by general wireless which which bought the stores after the last bankruptcy in 2015 yeah remember sprint got some of the stores too so that's not the ones we're talking about we're talking about the ones that stayed radio shack and if you're not from the us this may be lost on you a little bit but this this was the store uh if you were a geek growing up uh this place sold transistors and resistors and and and all kinds of you know the tandy computers the trs80 and so there's a lot of nostalgia around this but the problem is all the stuff that you can get at these stores can be bought online and in a lot of locations can be got just as cheaper and with a wider selection at stores like best buy or fries yeah the other day or a couple of months ago I needed to make a a headless mac mini think that it had a head on it in order to do some software update and I needed a resistor to hack across two of the pins on the connector and I had a break into my buddy runs house to go get one because he had them don't admit to any crimes on this show I'm sure well he scared me to death he scared me to death though he has a uh a tesla and it was parked in the garage and he honked the horn while I was in his garage remote honking uh and it's a good burglar detector did deterrence there right yeah I mean I what would a small store if you're not familiar with radio shack it's a boutique store right it's it's the it's drugstore size uh what what is the role of that in technology is there even a role should maybe this should be the repair shop change yeah yeah there you go I'm starting to wonder what anybody's role is I mean I go to CVS for stuff I went to buy shampoo they don't have my shampoo anymore they've replaced it all with their own brand I couldn't find chapstick the kind that I wanted because they have their own brand and I'm starting to think you know it's because I'm shopping it at amazon for everything else well yeah I mean that's that's changing inventory practices for sure I I go to store I go to the grocery store I'm one of those old-fashioned people that actually goes to the grocery store rather than having my groceries delivered by amazon fresh uh but I like to go and look at the produce I just can't let other people pick my produce that's just me it's a weird thing that I have you know some of the best avocados I ever had was we're from grocery.com and they went out it's better at it than me but I have the hubris of thinking that I will do better uh but but other than that the only reason I go to stores is because I need it now and even things like amazon prime now are starting to make it like well it's actually easier to order it and get it in an hour from them than to get in the car and drive there yep yep yep absolutely hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in around five minutes uh you should know about daily tech headlines you can subscribe to it at dailytechheadlines.com get it as a podcast you can get it on your amazon echo in the u.s as a skill we're hoping it's coming to other countries soon and you can get it on the anchor app at anchor.fm and in fact with that one you can even flip through them if you're like ah it's not a story I'm as interested in we also can take calls on the app and respond to them I respond to do a couple on the anchor fm app today so check it out dailytechheadlines.com and that's a look at our top stories all right so uh this week was International Women's Day and of course uh last week was the the news about Susan Fowler's allegations about the culture at uber and whether or not you believe the allegations are true or not certainly they reflect a lot of people's experience and Allison you looked at that and you said yeah I this all sounds familiar to me yeah it sounded sadly familiar to me I found the the article from Susan I don't normally read that much long form but I read every word that she wrote about what it was like being an engineer inside uber and it just rang so true to me and it wasn't even as much the the pure sexual harassment parts of it that wasn't really what bothered me it was things like the stupid leather jackets you know where all the men got the leather jackets and then they told the women while there's too few of you and it's not worth it to us it's just something like that it's like yeah why do you think there are so few of us that sounds like a really dumb move by hr but you're you're saying that sounds like something that happened to you well it's just it just little things like that happen uh happened all the time as I was so I was an engineer a practicing engineer for the first 11 years of my career and I was in a giant company huge company and I was in a 2000 person business in the south part of El Segundo and I worked in there in an engineering organization about 270 people and over time I started noticing that the women were disappearing and I wasn't getting promoted and I wasn't getting raises the other people were getting and I finally I left to go to the northern campus which was another 2000 person organization and the culture was completely different I went from you know nudie posters on the wall facing open doorways to women in charge of the businesses and the engineering organizations women leaders other women at my level and it was uh to me that I thought maybe okay that was the 1980s you know that was when that was adorable and accepted but to read Susan Fowler's thing in 2017 was just like oh come on are we still there really well yeah no what kind of engineer were you just just out of curiosity mechanical mechanical engineer so this is not just the tech scene this is not just developers this is something that has been pervasive in lots of technology uh and yes you might think oh well that was the 80s uh but this this uber story shows that it hasn't gone away but I think it's it's good to note that you did find a company where you could be employed and not have to be in that kind of culture and I would argue that those kind of companies are probably going to end up doing better over time I don't know that that happened in your case but if you aren't making the culture hostile to a certain percentage of of qualified people you're going to get better people overall right yeah and and by the way both of these were the same company I'm talking to an 80 000 person company so two arms of this of the same overall corporate structure in the same in the same city they were a mile apart and the culture was completely different um and so you know Steve and I were talking about a little today and he was saying well you were just in a pocket of that and I said how do you know that the good one wasn't the pocket you know we don't really know we only have two sample sets there but I looked into some of the percentages one of the things people would always say to me is well Ellison you know you can't expect there to be a lot of women because not a lot of women go into technology and when I graduated from college that was from the engineering school at UC Irvine it was 20 percent of women engineers and I just checked the of the statistics online it's 24 percent now and I remember when I quit that organization I told them that I was leaving and I was the last woman to leave which was interesting to me I looked around and there were there was nobody left there were no women out of 270 engineers by the time I left so I'm just the slowest one and uh when I left the guy said uh said well you know there's not that many women in engineering and I said well if it was 20 percent when I graduated let's say three out of four of those were not mechanical so let's say it's five percent women let's just say that what's five percent of 270 is it bigger than zero yeah right well I'm bad at the arithmetic but come on okay why is this a problem if if women weren't interested in doing technical jobs then it wouldn't be a problem but you are an example of the fact and I don't think you're a you're unique that women are interested in technical jobs and anecdotes about Susan Fowler are backed up by other women saying yeah I wanted to work in this place and I found it uncomfortable on the other hand you know workplaces can overdo it in being like you know too careful and never you know holiday party sort of stuff is where a lot of people start to get tired of like oh wait a minute now we can't even have a holiday party etc etc so where is the balance where you say let's let's do something to make it attractive for anybody who wants to be technical to come work somewhere without turning it too far the other way I would I would say the the biggest thing that I learned from from my company is is and I'll say the name of the company now because this is giving them a good plug it was it was Raytheon I was on the diversity council and I got to know a lot about what we were doing in terms of diversity in the company and what they told us just made so much sense to me they said we don't do diversity right because it's the right thing to do because it's nice to people because it's fair that's not why we do this because we will make better products if we have more diverse opinions if you've got the quiet people and the loud people and the and the and the you know energetic people the people who can communicate the people who only communicate through writing and they're from all races genders creeds colors you know every flavor there is of people we are going to have better products and once I heard that that's when I was like the champion of diversity because I hate the quota stuff I hate looking at that you know and saying oh well we got to make sure we have 28% of this you know that doesn't really get you there what gets you there is realizing that if you have all these opinions and and female opinions can help make better products even if they are bombs you know you're going to make better products if you have everybody's kind of opinions and so that became a more optimistic view of the whole thing to me when I started thinking along those lines but I got to tell you you can tell I'm I'm a real wilting lily you know wallflower yeah I never speak up for myself but you know what I didn't Tom I really believed when I wasn't getting promoted I I really believe all I just must not be good enough I'm not I must not I guess I'm not that good and then looking around going wait where'd all the rest of the women go and I was like well wait a minute maybe it's not me well you were telling me that that one time you were passed over for promotion because they said that the other person was gaining a master's degree but you had a master's degree I already yeah yeah the guy said well you know Tom got this promotion because because I complained I didn't sit back the wilting lily I whipped up and said hey why didn't I get that job he said well Tom's working on his master's degree I said got my master's in engineering from UCLA two years ago I mean it wasn't even a bad degree it was a good degree you know and it was stuff like that where he didn't even check he didn't even consider it so it is very odd what advice would you give to someone who's young and entering the workforce uh do do they need to act like men do they need to just put up with it what what kind of advice do you give that's um and and that is the the pinpoint of the problem is that if we have to act like men then you're not going to get the diverse opinions right um if you're in an organization that you feel isn't listening to you when you act like you when you act in your nature natural state then find a different place to work find a different organization or try to work to change it but I'm the kind of person who's going to get up and stand up and raise my hand and yell and badger until I get what I want but a lot of women are a lot of men are and so you can't say be like Allison because and I did eventually get there but I mean my friends were like really took you that long to leave you know our mutual friend Diane could not believe it took me so long to quit so I I would say if it feels wrong figure out a way to change it or leave A or B don't don't put up with it and the the other hard part about being a woman and probably any minority group minority population group is that if you don't have peers to go hey are you getting treated like this that and I think that's when Susan Fowler started realizing that it wasn't her she was looking around going all these other women are having the same experience but if you don't have enough peers then you don't even think to do that so that's kind of a catch-22 right you don't know that you're have that it's not you what do you do though if people say you know what this is just too hard and I'm going to leave technology when the thing is we need multiple perspectives from people in technology that so that's a hard one leaving technology I don't even understand how you could because it's in your DNA or it's not in my opinion I have been watching what different organizations have been doing it was Harvey Mudd I think I heard about on your show and I went off and read the materials where one of the things the the head of the computer science department did was she separated the boys and the girls so the women taking the beginning computer programming class were with other women and they did far better when they weren't in a class with men what I didn't understand the article is eventually she started merging them back together and she doesn't do it that way anymore but she got it up to 50 percent graduation rates men and women and and then you start going okay what is it we do is women looking at men going oh are we supposed to act stupid around them or do they yell out their answers first and we don't yell you know what is it that happens there well there's an there's an interesting cultural thing that happens it's self-perpetuates when I was growing up the women were always better at math that was just that was just the way it was in elementary school and and into high school when I got to college I started to run into people say well you know women aren't as very very good at math and I I was stunned because in my little pocket of southern Illinois in Greenville High School women had already always been better at math and that was just the way it was and it was this weird thing that I found out later was very unusual it was not typical but I always wondered what was it that caused that to be perpetuated as the myth that you know and it was a myth that women were better at math but it was a myth that had perpetuated itself because it got rolling somehow and and it caused guys to just not want to try at math which is the opposite of what was happening everywhere else in the country and it I part of it I think is just telling people like hey you you can be good at pretty much anything you want uh just just if you like it and you apply yourself to it you can do it it doesn't matter what you are yeah yeah I I bet there probably aren't rules I am just kidding when I say we're so better at math but we really are but the um I think about in context of what you were saying the movie Hidden Figures and I was just reading a book about uh women computers who worked for JPL they were the mathematicians at the time of of the early rockets and and uh working on the moon launch and that sort of thing and so here were the women were doing all the math so why would we ever think women aren't good at math why how did that even get started we got to find out who started that rumor well or just stop it like it's not true it's not it's not true that that women or men are better at math some people are good at math and some people aren't and there's not a lot of inherent difference in that especially because yes there are sex linked differences and oftentimes men tend to think in a different way than women some of some of them is a more ordered way of thinking versus a more creative way of thinking I don't want to get into that whole morass because you can get into a lot of wrong stereotypes right but the differences in the way that women and men think don't make them better or worse at math they may have them both different approaches to math is right but if they're both there and they're both working on the math and one of them sees big picture one of them sees details you put those two people together you're going to get a better product I mean it just makes sense to do that well and it let's leave a gender out of it when you have people with different perspectives on things you learn more because they show things that you were blind to because you just didn't see them before yeah that's one of the best presidents I worked for was in front of a big crowd and he said I refused to surround myself with yes men because if we do the best answer I'm going to get is mine and I think we can do better than that yeah you really got that having diverse opinions was the way you got the best products top CEOs often say what they want is to be the dumbest person in the room they want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than them so they can take all of those ideas and pick a direction and if you only limit yourself to a certain kind of person whatever that is you're not going to have the smartest people in the room around you absolutely absolutely so do we have time to look at some of the questions yeah sure we we've got questions from like Mike Kepper for instance wanted to know if things changed over the 35 years for better or the worse and did you have mentors whether male or female yeah I did have I had a great male mentor that is and here's a great sexism story he would kid around when we were on on at vendor sites and he would ask me to go get him coffee just so that people would think I wasn't technical just as a joke so I would you know hit him and stuff yeah it was funny actually maybe that story didn't come off right but at the time it's not an awful but yeah you know I would think that there was progress but then one of my favorite things that ever happened we were in a giant convention center kind of room it was probably three or four hundred people in the room and Microsoft was giving a speech on some new product they were working on and I was setting up towards the front and the guy kept using acronyms and every time I didn't know an acronym I raised my hand I said would you please explain what that acronym is and the third time they did it he said to the whole audience oh I'm sorry I really should ask first how technical is it or how many people in the room are technical I was the highest technical person in the room at the time at the highest technical level and I just raised my hand and all my all my peers were just cracking up because they knew I was going to eat this guy alive after the presentation but I didn't eat him alive I went up to him afterwards and I said so what did you learn today did he learn anything uh yeah yeah I think so and I and I didn't hurt him which I consider Travis aka mechagobbler I wanted to know if you had a moment that felt like you crossed the peak of most resistance and gained reasonable acceptance and if so what was it or was it just a daily uphill climb definitely when I changed from the one organization to the other was I mean it was a 90 degree shift I mean all of a sudden it mattered what I had to say I was somebody who knew stuff and they wanted me to to participate and contribute so the biggest thing for me was actually moving in the company and that made a difference but then then it was more of a gradual slope where I would still run into the idiots you know the people who just like would assume that I wasn't who I was uh I was we had a vendor in one time where it was only a half a dozen of us in the room and I was kind of pushing back on this guy and the guy kept ignoring me and not answering me and talking to a man who worked for me and I'll never forget he just started to slide his chair away from me because he knew when I blew he didn't want any of it to get on him well and this brings up a good point I I I am tempted to say well I've had I've faced those same prejudices before somebody didn't like how I looked how I talked my attitude where I was from and and treated me with disrespect now if you're a man especially a white man imagine that being true on top of other things that you have no control of yeah you know the prejudice the prejudices aren't absent from it from people it everybody experiences prejudices against them but some people have prejudices on top of prejudices because they happen to be black or or a woman uh or or from an area the country that is considered dumb uh there's all kinds of that stuff so it can get complicated and and it can it can build on itself and so that's why it's worse for some people than others it's not that it's absent forever and and I'm glad you brought that up Tom because I am 100 guilty of the same prejudice I'm talking about I remember looking at the window of my office we had kind of a quad area and I saw a young good looking short blonde woman walking and an older balding white guy with a big gut in a suit and I assumed he was a manager and she was the secretary yeah I heard it in my head and I was like oh and if I'm doing it too though we're doomed we're doomed if I do it the key the key to me is not to feel bad about the fact that you thought that but to try to correct your your assumptions at least like a scientific endeavor when you know that you've got an assumption that is going to be incorrect that you've got some kind of inherent blinder spot you try to work against that so that you don't let that pollute your results yeah absolutely and denying that it exists isn't going to help finally big Jim asks what is the most fundamental thing we can do to get more girls he says into STEM areas so I think he's talking about you know elementary school junior high school science technical engineering and math I don't know what the the most fundamental thing is but I do know of a school that's doing it right in the Downey school district and I'm kind of blank on the name of which school it was but they they have in their in their junior high they have a robotics program they're well funded by a benefactor actually but they've got this robotics program and I've gone and watched the kids working and what the guy does is they've got an assignment they've got to build these robots they've got a program um they've got a they've got to do a whole bunch of different stuff in document everything and he lets each pair of kids do whatever feels the most natural to them for it so there were a couple of guys who sat down and they were just they just built and they didn't do any programming another kid sat down and once he got it built to a certain level he was all over the programming and then there were a couple of girls over here and they were researching the way other people had solved the same problem and basically he was letting them all go to their strengths they still had to do the minimum but they were all in completely different paths that they were taking to get there and I think that was that was part of this you know recognizing diversity that they had different paths and different ways of doing it not every school has a wealthy benefactor to build a robotics lab for you though so I don't know if that's a scalable solution but the attitude is scalable I think well thanks to everybody who submitted questions everybody who participates in our sub reddit you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com a couple of messages before out of here pick of the day this is from me the EFF just updated their guideline to border privacy it's called digital privacy at the US border protecting the data on your devices and in the cloud if you're someone who's traveling whether you're from the US or not you might want to review this to understand what your risks are what you can do to protect your data and what you shouldn't do we've talked a lot about hidden volumes and and and hit and things like that if you lie and the EFF makes this clear if you lie at a border you significantly raise the possibility of legal ramifications being severe the EFF nobody recommends lying and having a hidden volume can be considered lying so there are better ways to protect your data and if you want to go into it you should check it out EFF.org look for the digital privacy at the US border or we'll have a link in the show notes you can send your picks to us folks feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks finally Drew wrote in and was listening to our discussion about using chat bots to fill out complicated forms like immigration paperwork and traffic tickets he wrote it occurred to me you're basically describing TurboTax TurboTax isn't exactly a chat bot but it's very close it asks you for information in a conversational way and helps you fill out very complicated forms do you have any w2 forms to add please enter the number did you sell any stock in 2016 did you buy or sell a home in 2016 with the exception of the actual chat window TurboTax has been doing this for a long time I just used a bot to update my certificate on my chat server oh yeah nice yeah the bot just did the certificate within the chat interface that's kind of cool yeah yeah yeah in fact I think TurboTax could benefit from bots I wouldn't be surprised if they're investigating this because the questions you get right now are very mechanical it knows what to ask and what to do with your answer but if you throw something new at it it doesn't have a lot of forking trees the difference between that and a chat bot is a chat bot can react to information because it's got a little machine learning behind it and it might be able to say oh and in a bunch of cases when people asked answer this way they might also have this other deduction so I'm going to ask about that I'd be cool if TurboTax became an actual chat bot thank you Drew for that email and thank you Allison Sheridan obviously podfeet.com to find all your good work because beyond being an engineer for decades you also are a podcaster for decades literally decades now we're into a second decade right so tell folks about what's going on with you well the latest thing I just got to work with is really fun is the first home kit compatible security camera it's from D-Link it's called the Omna and I just did a review of it pretty in-depth this is a wicked cool device if you've been waiting for home kit this is probably something you really want to go look at there's lots of other security cameras but this is the first home kit one and the other thing I want to plug if I can steal two plugs is we joke around a lot that I don't listen to music and I get teased a lot by it but it turns out there is a syndrome called or I don't know if it's a syndrome but there's a thing called specific musical anhedonia and the Atlantic just did an article Divya and I'm blanking on her last name but Divya is her first name she just wrote an article and she quotes me in the first two paragraphs so it's it's kind of fun no it was great the article is by Divya Abbott and Allison said you should you should link to this Atlantic article because it's about me in the first two paragraphs and I was thinking oh it's going to talk about this condition which is like Allison no the first word the first two words of the article are Allison Sheridan couldn't care less about music like it's literally about you that's so cool I asked my friends if they're going to stop teasing me about it now and they all said no no it's just going to make them teach you more uh hey as I mentioned Len Peralta couldn't be here today but go check out his weekly dTNS inspired drawings at LenPeraltaStore.com you can get digital versions print versions all kinds of cool stuff in there uh thanks to everybody who supports the show if you get a little value from the show all we ask is you give a little back for that value you get thanks to Chris Larson Dana Levine and Martin Stein is that firestorm out there supporting the show maybe be like I think it might be Dane Levine uh no it's Dana oh it is a typo in in the in the uh doc there patreon.com slash dTNS thanks to everybody who supports the show our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m eastern at alpha geek radio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back on Monday with Veronica Belmont talk to you then show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com all righty now we're sorry about that oh no that it was a perfectly logical deduction on your part I just noticed my own typo that's all I figured if it was wrong you'd want to know it didn't occur to me if it was right you might not want to but I thought one more thing I wish I'd said about the the stem thing was I I've realized when you see a little girl and you know you want to say something nice to them what do you say aren't you pretty yeah so I've started saying are you really smart and I think sometimes and and so I've decided to do it to boys too but you know are you strong and are you pretty is what we usually say how about are you smart yeah no I think that's great in both things I've never ever said to little kids what cute or strong yeah I just like hey out of my way I it's funny because I've always associated those phrases with grandparents like that's what you know older folks I've always said I'm not gonna be old so I've always afraid it's like oh you know that's your nice kid no no no old all people say look how big you are look how big you've gotten that's what they say my parents say about me when they see me look how big you've got a different way I think Roger wait what you're looking for I look at children and I say win my respect it's like okay stare like is your mommy or daddy we usually if you say that it's it's no actually when I see Ellie I just say hey Ellie what's up like why why comment you don't have to comment on them at all just be like engaged yeah you know my father used to always say and I've tried using this is he would say what do you think I just wait to see what they said because off because if I go if I see a person in on the street that's not a child I don't say are you pretty I don't say aren't you smart I say hi how are you usually it's the opposite it's like man are you stupid why did you cross against the red light titles that one better than I thought by the way Tom that went well I think oh good good yeah I thought it went well too I thought we covered some some interesting areas but it's so much of it is cultural I mean like you were referring to and it's like I think all of it is it's well it's it's cultural that's reinforced by the way the the institution is built around that culture and so it's just it's a word feedback I think feedback loop where it just reinforces one thing top of the list is fintech be like Alice in this top all right followed up with fintech exclamation mark equals fish fintech does not equal fish uh do ber a tech woman's word google releases our capture capre versus patent repair secrets radio shacked no returns accepted I didn't hurt him I know that was good too I'm kind of torn I like a tech woman's word I like I didn't hurt him because it's hilarious and I like fintech does not equal fish yeah shoot the nerdom takes fish fintech does not equal fish yeah it's not the main topic but it's so good no but that's okay it's it is a bigger oh it's not a tech woman's word it's a tech woman's world according to nth mic oh I guess it's a typo oh oh oh that's good world well it's a world I like I like it better with wool fintech does not equal fish I think we're going with it if that's cool I would like to go with fintech yeah I got it and I can lie I like that better too as normally uh women like fintech you know this may be video tom I could tell when you were coughing that I should keep going oh yeah that's helpful huh Bart and I you know Bart's still teaching me uh javascript and we I finally came up with a solution to one of the problems I had was that he didn't realize when I was really struggling with something he was trying to explain to me and it's only an audio podcast so I said why don't we just do video so you can see when I'm slamming my head on the table yeah Veronica and I do that for sword and laser on her suggestion she's like well let's let's we're doing audio but let's let's have it up so we can see each other's expression and it helps tremendously yeah because she'll react she'll be like you look you look like you don't like what I just said right and it'll cause a funny like side side conversation to yeah and Roger your bed looks very nice for the last few months thank you I've removed a couple of sheets so it's just faster to make I learned that from a friend of mine to get that kind of a bed cover just so you just go I'm just gonna do vey is it embarrassing to admit that we don't use sheets oh you don't really I use sheets just because it's uh I bought it with the set we have the fitted sheet over the mattress the duvet all the time and you gotta stuff it in that sounds like a pain no I use a sheet because keeps the duvet clean but it's also because when you buy a set of sheets it comes with that sheet yeah I don't want to just leave I want to use it I paid money for it not just a tarp no it's not even a tarp it's linen so it soaks you can sell it but people want a set right it's like having two different someone out there that just wants sheets find a need and fill it Roger well I could think of one group that would love sheets but I don't think it's the group I would associate best selling stuff I ever sold on a at a garage sale was always the sheets those were snapped up immediately hey so where did you ever find the questions I kept going in and looking to see if there were questions in Slack and I never found them oh Mike asked one in the questions channel which makes a certain logical sense uh and the other one bosses yeah in bosses I only have general headlines in random I don't have the questions oh yeah you have to go in and add all for the love of Pete aha you just want everything spoon fed to you well that's because we don't know about it yeah how do I know it's so I thought like at pod feet might be in some of them see how see how on channels there's a plus sign yeah but that creates a new channel if you hit plus no if you had plus it shows you you can either create a new channel or add a channel that has already been created that you're not a member of yet okay I hit the plus and it says create channel I can give it a name of purpose and send it bites and cancel so it's not okay I'm on mobile if if you click on on on the desktop but you click the name channels that it's a 16 and if you hover over it it says browse all channels wait which plus are you talking about there's on mobile you just hit plus on desktop you you have to click on the the word channels to browse all the channels oh because there's a plus next to the channel that does not do that you have well this is an issue like on on mobile it works differently than it does on well there you go yeah someone obviously was too interested in eating the ramen noodles instead of making sure the ui's were unified honestly slack has one of the best ui's on the internet don't think that's terrible this is how much of it no I mean Roger I'm on your side you have it you expect you've decided slack should work away it's a certain way and you're not letting them on board you if you if you actually follow them when you join it's so they like tell you everything right from the beginning so today as I told you I got a notification on my watch it said Tom said Tom said we should be having this conversation in slack and I thought oh man he's right I should go look at that so I grabbed my iPad and I looked at the notifications there and there's no notification of it even though I have notifications turned on for slack so I said okay well let me go into slack and I thought okay well we've been talking in the dTNS bosses slack so go in there and I poked everything I could find I could find I could not find what you had written so I switched over to the other one and then I found what you had written so it took me like you have the dTNS bosses did you have both slacks installed in all places well in at least the two places the place I looked they were so why didn't you get the notification on one and not I don't know and I checked to make sure that notifications were turned on on my iPad they were which I had laboriously done on every single freaking they were turned on for both teams oh my god you don't have to do notifications separately by team yeah you want that because you might want no I actually want that because I want notifications from some slacks that I'm working like dTNS that I'm working with but I don't want notifications from slacks that are so general interest that I don't want to be notified of every single thing so on every device on every if you set it if you set the notification on one device I think it carries over to the others I don't think so since it came to my watch which must have come from my phone but it didn't come to my iPad that can't be true unless what it says is the notification was seen on the watch so we've delivered it we don't have to send it anyway that's a great UI that's iOS no I get it on everything only messages and highlighted words so uh fintech is not fish correct yes fintech is not fish that's it software I've ever seen my life I know that the so where'd the other questions come in are the other secret channels there was one one on email okay wouldn't have seen okay that was the one from mecca gobbler there was one from big jim in general that came in like late and then there was one from mike in questions uh I don't see it in dtsboss's general I see pick up some good questions for pod feature mile then something from hobbit toilet can tell jay maybe big gems didn't come from general I don't I could be remembering that wrong I'm trying to publish the show and answer your questions at the same time so I'm not very good are you whispering yeah I'm grumbling oh you're right it's not in general did he do it in questions as well I guess he did yeah he did his in questions too so they were both in questions wait I went to questions I would only previewed questions it didn't actually keep it for me did you really join channel you saw it say that there now you joined I see you really you're just gonna write black in the channel now they're gonna think you thought their questions were black that's bad UI okay can let's see if I can edit it let's add a reaction there I'll put a smiley face on it we're racing against time here nine minutes till database actually I don't even know if they start the thing right at two o'clock they probably don't but I just want to be safe got a buddy who uh had an article picked up by John Gruber that he wrote on medium by the way about how awesome the UI is on Slack so I fight with him all the time about it I think it's great I get it it doesn't confuse me I even watched a one-hour video by Don McAllister on how to use it just doesn't there are some things that that are not great I will admit and the divergence between desktop and mobile I don't like that you said you just stick to one so you don't have to no I use it I use it on both let me put it on my android phone and see how much different it is but I will maintain that when you set it up it starts by really spoon feeding you everything I don't know if I did I really have ignored that now that I could explain some of your frustration not all of it but some all right we're published well thanks everybody for watching I hope you had a good Friday we certainly did and we will talk to you on Monday with Veronica Belmont bye everybody