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17-Year-Old Girl Wins Boston TV API Programming Contest
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."
In suing her for trademark infringement.
Choosing not to listen to someone is not censorship.
Your 1st amendment right applies to spoilers as long as my 2nd amendment right applies to spoilers.
She'll share a very similar Male/Female ratio when she attends RIT as well, at least as of 15 years ago or so...
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.
So if the car next to me blares loud music and I roll up my windows, I'm supporting censorship too?
Censorship is when I keep you from saying it. You can still say it.
I just refuse to listen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wish people would stop focusing on age and gender.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
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.
...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 focus instead on the blatantly derivative choice of the "Twivo" name for her app?
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).
It certainly wouldn't have been newsworthy if they selected a male 20s-something developer.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If people choosing to not listen to you is censorship, then be prepared for a lifetime of 1984.
Indeed, there is a wide-spread institutional bias that stereotypes women as having superior computer skills.
That's why so few men become programmers.
Is she black? How about Lesbian? Because, that would be the trifecta of affirmative action and race/gender/SO discrimination.
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 it's their own free will, and would never complain about censorship nor fight it. Quite the opposite: They usually defend it the stronger, the less they know about it or why they think that way.
So every time we refuse to listen, we must all be very wary and ask ourselves: Are this information and my action actually useful or harmful for me?
Which is not what he was saying.
He was saying that she got selected with the primary motivation that she happened to be a girl. This isn't about who is "better". The app itself didn't actually have to be superior, if they had a hidden set of criteria in judging. If they were trying to "fight bias", the fact that there was a bias against her actually works in her favor in the subjective judging when those who don't like the bias decide to overcompensate and select her because she was a girl.
That's what he was saying anyway.
There can also be self-censorship. A concept better known as ignorance... especially in schizotypic illnesses
Ufff, what has *that* to do with schizotypy?
Ezekiel 23:20
Stop spreading my password, please!
It may turn out to be just another scam because apparently the best way to get investors is being female.
good gracious, what sort of twisted pervert would be using that for their password??
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 bothered by my disgust.
If you DO choose to listen, why not get it all out of the way?
I've found the best broadcast television hack of the past decade has been not to watch it.
*shrug*
What kind of idiot has tweets enabled on the t.v.?
Fat, stupid, lazy America....
And that's what our best minds are working on: TV/social/apps. What about wasting their time on _really_ useful stuff, like getting us out of healthcare or social security doomsday?
hunter2
So it's like an app to block an app that shouldn't have been there in the first place? Someone please enlighten us, because at first glance it only seems to benefit the few that would allow tweets in their viewing, wtf kind of ADD do our forever-online misshaped generation folk up to...
I'm like that guy that agrees, 'News ticker on TV? But that's why I bought the TV, so I wouldn't have to read!'
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's not even censorship, it's time-delay for Twitter. You 'get' to read the tweets later on when you have time.
What's ironic is that you exercised self-censorship by failing to read the summary.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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 others from speaking is one (especially vile) form of censorship: shooting the bigot for speaking would indeed filter out his material. So would standing next to him on the corner and blasting an air horn to bleep out some of his words --- which might even count as protected free expression of your own. I think censorship is a more ethically complex and nuanced issue that you imply; and covers a range of behaviors which aren't all inimical to a free society (such as applying censorship to material you choose to view for yourself).
hunter2
You can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Well, Ms. Lemere, congratulations on your achievement. Like every other achievement in your life where you beat a bunch of boys, you will immediately hear that you only got where you are because you're a girl. After all, the odds are only 1-in-80 that you'll get mentioned for such a competition, and when, roughly 1.25% of the time, you do it mentioned, it will be purely on the basis of discrimination that you are a girl. Heaven forfend that you get an award 1 out of every 15 times. Then, people won't point to the fact that four out of every five of your four sisters were discouraged from competing and so only the most insanely dedicated remained, but rather to your lack of award-appropriate genitalia.
May you continue to enjoy, in every aspect of your life, such blatant and obvious discrimination in your favor.
Wouldn't that be nice for a change?
"It's not even censorship, it's time-delay for Twitter. "
17 year old girl fixes a problem only 17 year old girls have.
i'm tired of this meme. it's not funny. i thought nerds were smart and creative. guess not as they have to reuse other people's old jokes...
They have been censored.
Uhhh...
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 the duration of the beep has nothing to do with censorship.
By your argument if you had someone who was censored, you could argue that failing to stop them from speaking to the guy behind the counter at the 7-Eleven would mean that they hadn't been censored because you didn't stop all of their speech. It is a stupid argument.
No. What you are describing is discrimination.
Just because you and me don't use twitter, that doesn't mean her generation won't when they are older :)
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.
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 it makes you feel better."
I suppose it is good to encourage and show that girls do win coding contests, but I wonder if this is actually the way to encourage them to become interested in CS.
Or even if we should be trying to interest them in CS unless they start out that way.
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 generally applicable, and avoids all sorts of tricky ambiguities about what is and isn't "preventing others from speaking," especially where it's not clear they'd be able to speak in the first place (you might not assume that this bigot would, by default, get a speaking spot on the evening news).
By your argument if you had someone who was censored, you could argue that failing to stop them from speaking to the guy behind the counter at the 7-Eleven would mean that they hadn't been censored because you didn't stop all of their speech.
Yes, I would say that the intended/attempted censorship failed in the case of the words they managed to get across before being silenced. Similarly, if you shot at someone and missed (or gave them a little flesh wound), that would be *attempted* murder, not murder, and I wouldn't say the survivor of the attempt had been murdered.
I wish I could do that with the "music" the coons round here kindly choose to share with everyone at 4 a.m.
Are you being pragmatic, or are you assuming that that "they" are correct?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
she had to be ugly. I swear, if everybody in this world was pretty/handsome, no science would ever get done. No cars, no computers, nothing at all. The world would be a much happier place, tho.
I have them all. Aahhaha, aahhhahhahhhaa! Aahhh... Wait a minute... Now I cannot use them either on this discussion as I posted...
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. :)
Not sure I understand the question. I'm saying, you're in trouble because you're censoring yourself and should stop it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ignore the sexist vitriol. You've made a really cool thing.
As you can see, many adult men feel threatened by just about everything. Particularly women. They are so miserable, they feel the need to put down the notable accomplishment of a high-school student.
Be proud.
While applaud the ability to do this....Wouldn't it be easier just not to start tweeting while your watching something? I like multitasking as much as the next person but if an app like this is really needed then maybe that is why so much of whats on sucks, because people aren't really watching so they don't noticed the crap quality of the shows on.
I may well be wrong but I tend to think of censorship not as preventing someone from speaking but, rather, preventing someone from hearing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
From TFA:
Twivo, a plug-in for Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers that will be available to everyone in a few weeks, blocks tweets if it detects keywords that may reveal important details about a show users may want to watch.
After installing Twivo, users activate the plugin whenever one of their shows is going to come on. They also designate keywords, or tags, to tell Twivo which tweets to block. For example, a user could decide to block tweets that include a show's name, characters' names or even the names of the actors.
Uhu. Now what happens if someone tweets a typo (accidentally or on purpose)? Never underestimate the ingenuity of malicious people. Griefers will find a way.
p.s. "Snaep kills Dumebldoro."
Or you could just stop reading twiter while watching a show. Only a 17 year old girl would need a technical solution to her twiter addiction. When she grow older, she will realise that putting the phone down fix ALL HER PROBLEM.
Good point... if you refuse to listen, how do you you know that which you refuse to listen to is valuable?
Society use your Sciences
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.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about an app the completely eliminates all tweets, ads(especially animated one), logos, and anything else from the lower third of the screen?
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.
Maybe people should self-censor their OT rants?