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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."
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...
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.
...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
Indeed, there is a wide-spread institutional bias that stereotypes women as having superior computer skills.
That's why so few men become programmers.
After all, nobody would have watched if an adult male programmer won it...
A friend of mine whom I respect and admire as a programmer very much might have a lot to say about this. Men receive accolades for being great programmers all the time, the industry is completely dominated by men. Everytime my friend has gotten a new job (she's on her second one in S.V., she's from the east coast and a Carnigie-Mellon grad, very accomplished) she gets hit on by the men in the staff, and knowing she's a lesbian doesn't seem to phaze them. She's gotten held back on other jobs because the admin and IT staff were chauvinistic, gotten practically raped by cabbies, and treated like shit professionally becuase she's attractive. Its absurd and it needs to stop. When we have a truly blind-to-gender society you can call out the feminists. Until then you're full of shit. I can't have respect of my male friends when their bias shows simply becuase a fellow engineer has a vagina between her legs. Its ridiculous.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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?
Stop spreading my password, please!
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.
hunter2
"It's not even censorship, it's time-delay for Twitter. "
17 year old girl fixes a problem only 17 year old girls have.
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.
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.
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.
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."