Glitch Creating the worlds first super computer
Digital Dada
is your teen safe online?
3d Printing
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contents
4 EMV Cards: Are They Really Secure? 10 Digital Dada 14 Is Your Teen SAfe Online? 18 What is the right age to introduce your kids to mobile technology 24 3D printing 28 Coding Bootcamps 36 Creating The World's First Supercomputer 41 Predicting Genes with computer software
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EMV Cards: Are they really secure? BY TOM GROENFELDT
By the end of 2015, 70 percent of U.S. credit cards and 41 percent of U.S. debit cards will have security chips — called EMV for Europay, MasterCard, Visa — according to the Aité Group. While Europe, Canada and Mexico have had chipped cards for years — usually with a chip and a PIN (personal identification number), the U.S. card issuers have studiously avoided the more secure, but more expensive, cards. To some extent American issuers
didn’t need the card-based security. Unlike Europe, the American card industry had grown up with cheap telecommunications, so merchants could check cards in real-time as they accepted a card in payment. American technology vendors also developed very sophisticated, if sometimes alarmist, tools to detect fraudulent card use. Really, should a New Jersey resident’s $30 gas purchase in Massachusetts trigger an alert just because she rarely ventured so far from home? →
As other countries went to chip and PIN cards and the U.S. continued to rely on a less secure magnetic stripe, the predictable occurred. Just as having two loud German shepherds makes it likely thieves will move to the house next door, America’s continued reliance on mag stripes has made it an attractive target for card fraud. “The fraud rate has doubled from 5 basis points to 10 basis points now,” said Julie Conroy research director in retail banking at Aité Group.
“It speaks to the fact that criminals are targeting the U.S. because we are the weakest link in the chain.” Even now most American card issuers aren’t going with chip and PIN, preferring chip and signature. Conroy said that the American card issuers have mostly gone for chip and signature which is less expensive and less complicated to issuers than chip and PIN, where the PIN has to be mailed separately and lost PIN card replacement becomes more complicated.
“The fraud rate has doubled. It speaks to the fact that criminals are targeting the U.S. because we are the weakest link in the chain.” – JULIE CONROY “Last year about half [of issuers] were leaning to chip and signature, 25 percent chip and PIN and another quarter undecided,” Conroy explained. “Now the vast majority is chip and signature, one is going chip and PIN and four are undecided.” Lost/stolen cards, which is where PIN is most valuable, make up only 13 percent of U.S. fraud, she added, while cyber-criminals have shown with incidents like Target, Neiman Marcus and other card data thefts that they can do vast damage without possessing the actual card. “Issuers are addressing the biggest point of pain with chip,” Conroy added. 6 Glitch Magazine
“I had so many issuers tell me that if you look at the business case, and the attrition risk if our user experience is more cumbersome than that of our competitors. They are going with the numbers [chip and signature] and I think that makes sense.” At the same same, time card networks have been pushing hard to get their cards accepted at unmanned kiosks, such as train stations in Europe, where PINs were required in the past That will help avoid inconvenience to American travelers who don’t have PIN cards. I still find it hard to understand why American card providers didn’t offer chip and PIN to their cardholders who traveled to Europe frequently. And when they did provide chip and
PIN cards, they didn’t show them on their Web sites or inform call center reps that such exotic devices existed. Two rather widely separated catalysts have accelerated the adoption of EMV in the U.S., according to Conroy. The 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano, stranded many Americans in Europe for weeks, forcing them to rely on cards that weren’t always widely accepted in businesses like restaurants and train stations at night where unmanned terminals required chip and PIN. Then came the Target card breach which exposed 40 million card holders. Still, said Conroy, at Charles deGaulle airport in Paris Americans can expect to find long lines at the two agents who take signature cards, while PIN cards can be used in kiosks. “Visa [which last year told me rather
vehemently that chip and signature was quite enough for the American market] has pushed PIN in other geographies. The investment is already there. If you look at the U.S. market, we have a unique set of consumers. As one issuer put it —’We are not convinced Americans can learn to do two new things at once.’ ” Sadly she did not name the source of that comment. “As you look at the competitive pressure in the U.S., it is so much more significant than in other countries. We have 14,000 banks and credit unions competing for consumers’ business. Nobody wants consumers, who have 3.4 other credit cards in their wallet, to have a bad experience with one card and then send it to the back of their wallet. “A number of issuers said they wish
Credit cards featuring EMV chips will be more secure than the cards lacking it according to recent financial and identity fraud statistics.
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C A N T H E I NT ERNE T MAKE A DIFFE RE N CE FOR AC TIVISM ?
ada BY CAMILLE CRITTENDEN
“T
he more digital the world becomes, the more appetite people have for real things.” This was said during by Alan Rusbriger of The Guardian, during a NY Times Magazine interview on March 7, 2014. He couldn’t be anywhere further from the truth.
New platforms for civic engagement are leveraging the power of the Internet to bring constituents’ opinions to the doorstep of the politicians who represent them. The field of “civic tech” includes applications from paying parking tickets or taxes online, to creative visualizations of complex budget data or 311 calls. The most powerful citizen-driven applications use social media to refute state-sponsored media, as in the Ukraine, or engage the public directly to ask their opinions and priorities. In many cases, emerging technology empowers activists and bystanders to grab the attention of policymakers and elected officials. This new type of activism is reminiscent of the Dada movement. For those lacking art history knowledge, Dadaism (or simply: Dada) is a post-World War I cultural and political movement in visual art. The movement was, among other things, a
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protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. Nothing made sense, nor was it supposed to. But what exactly separates the original Dada from modern activism? It’s pretty obvious that the distinction here is technology. Still, a physical human presence is often required for social progress. While technology is a powerful tool that certainly helps activists of today’s world get their messages across, the fact is that changes will not occur without humans gathering offline to m ake it happen. Research in “human-computer interaction” (HCI)
focuses on user interfaces or device design -- the relationship between the device and its user. Thinking about HCI in the broader context of civic engagement leads to considerations of how new media applications relate to social change. Even while technology and social media offer ever-expanding opportunities for expressing opinions, creating alliances, and exposing corruption, democracy and social progress often still require physical presence and commitment. The integration of social media with action “in real life” parallels similar trends in engineering and computer science, where the “Internet of things” or development of “cyberphysical systems” has attracted increasing attention from academics and investment by government and industry. Sensors and software are being rapidly
Wanting To Make A Difference: Speeches often must be matched by physical commitment to achieve real change.
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integrated in manufacturing and aerospace industries, building automation and energy infrastructure, technology for “smart cities,” as well as healthcare and consumer applications. How might these technologies be applied to improve not only commercial and industrial sectors but also to civic life and democratic engagement? A new platform, created in a partnership between the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative and the Office of Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, highlights the urgency of connecting online sentiment analysis with offline action. The California Report Card allows participants to grade the state’s performance on six topics before suggesting new topics that should be priorities on the political agenda. One of the top issues that emerged since the platform launched in early February is disaster preparedness. Whether natural disasters like earthquakes and forest fires, infrastructure failures like gas pipeline explosions, or threats of human violence, many communities in California feel the state’s capacity for preparation, protection and response should be improved.
"T h e m o r e d i g i ta l t h e wo r ld b ec o m es, t h e m o r e a p p et i t e p eo p le h av e fo r r ea l t h i n g s." – ALAN RUSBRIGER
Of course, many technological innovations are underway to address these issues, from seismological early warning systems to sensor networks in gas pipelines. But citizen input can increase political will to accelerate real-world change. Alternatively, opportunities are also growing for the vibrancy of offline activity and lived experience to be reflected online. Data visualization tools applied to public data sets are also putting information in the hands of activists, journalists and citizens to illustrate their concerns in new ways. Even as we celebrate and recognize the advantages of online tools for organizing and promoting civic dialogue, we must find ways to recognize the unique advantages of cyber and physical systems, and bring them closer together for promoting democratic values.
Peace, Love, and Happiness: a symbol of peace in the western world that originated during the 1960s.
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IS YOUR TEEN SAFE ONLINE? BY PEGGY MCKIBBIN & ABBI PERETS
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f you are the parent of a teen, then you know that your child can be pretty private aout how they sprend their time online. Teens are exposed to a lot of dangerous content that we, as parents, cannot always monitor and control. Such content can include the promotion of drug use and drug abuse among other risky behaviors. However, there are things you can do to feel confident in your ability to keep your kids safe online, while still embracing and encouraging your child to embrace the good things the Interent has to offer. So, what can you do as a parent? Great question. Here are some steps you can take to stay in the know about your teen’s online habits: • Be aware of where your teen is spending thier time online. Get to know where your teen is most active on social media, what they are talking about online and how much time they spend on the Internet. This doesn’t mean that you have to approve every postyour teen publishes. And you don’t have to sit with yourr teen as she or he use the Internet. Just check-in every once in a while to see what sites your teen is visiting and how much time he or she is spending online.
• Join your teeno online. Even though it might be a difficult conversation to have, start a dialogue with your teen about risky teen behaviors, like medicine abuse. Use this opportunity to visit websites like WhatIsDXM.com, drugfree.org and, of course, StopMedicineAbuse.org with your teen. Together, look through video and images that explain the dangers of medicine abuse. This way, teens are exposed to graphic, credible information. Then, talk with your teen about the risks of drugs from their parents are 50% less likely to use drug. And, if your teen has quwstions that you cannot answer, check out this page with parent recources or speak with a parent specialist by calling 1-855-DRUGFREE. • Applaud good online behavior. When teens use the Internet properly, let them know! Validation from you will help your teen stay on track and continue to behave safely online.
• Be honest and set expectations. Tell your teen that you’re checking in on them online. Once he or she is aware that you are keeping tabs for safety reasons, your teen might be less likely to visit dangerous sites, or post risky content online. Additionally this gives you an opportunity to be open and transparent about what you consider safe - and dangerous - Internet usage.
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SIX WAYS TO KEEP TEENAGERS SAFE ONLINE 1. Have “the technology talk”
It’s best to understand from the start that no matter what measures you take, computer-savvy tens may be able to figure out ways to bypass the bulit-in contols on the family computer or you may eventually forget to log out of the administrator account. No app or setting can keep your teens safe online, which means you need to start talking to your kids, about your concerns.
“NO ONE APP OR SETTING CAN KEEP YOUR TEEN SAFE ONLINE, WHICH MEANS YOU NEED TO START TALKING TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT YOUR CONCERNS.”
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2. Use parental settings wisely Once you set up the rules, let them be the boss, instead of you. For instance, Macs and iOS devices allow you to set usage restrictions. On a Mac, you can set Parent Controls preferences to control your kids’ access to the computer and the Internet-and to specify times that they can and can’t use the computer. iPads and iPhones have fewer parental control options, but some of them can be useful. On an iOS device, launch Settings, choose General, and Restrictions button. Then choose and enter a four-digit passcode-something your kids won’t guess.
3. Friend your kids on social networks Give your kids examples of real people whose reputations have been damaged by something posted online. For example, in 2012, Indiana high school student Austin Carroll was expelled for a Parsons, a teenager from Canada, killed herself after facing months of online harassment and bullying; two men (who were minors at the time of the crime) have now been charged with making and distributing child pornography.
4. Be the holder of the passwords Remind your kids that they’ve walved any expectation of privacy, and make sure you know thepasswords for their email, Facebook, and other social media accounts, and anything else they use.
5. Don’t let your teens sleep with their phones or computers. A lot of nasty stuff in the teenage world happens at night. Alone in their rooms, kids can text horribly hurtful insults, goad others
into posting inappropriate pictures of themselves, and engage in conversations strangers. Don’t let your kids be part of it.
6. Be a good role model Frequently gather with your kids in the family room and request that phones and other devices be put away for a set amount of time. The key to this that Mom and Dad also have to follow the rules, because kids will always do as you do, not as you say. Try establishing a daily device-free time of just 10 or 15 minutes at the breakfast or dinner table, and see if you feel it have a positive impact on your family.
“MOM AND DAD ALSO HAVE TO FOLLOW THE RULES, BECAUSE KIDS WILL ALWAYS DO AS YOU DO, NOT AS YOU SAY.”
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?
What Is The Right Age To Introduce Your
KIDS To Mobile
Technology? BY REUVEN COBEN
A
s a technologist, I want to expose my kids to technology early. Maybe it;s in the vain hope that my kids take after me, or maybe it;s because from an early age I spent countless hours to my home computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer my parents bought me (at the age of 8, circa 1986), then later my fascination with online tech. But as a father I worry what exposing my 3 and 4 year Old’s to various forms of technoloy too soon actually be doing more harm than good. So I recently set out to try to get an answer. This is what I discovered. According to Steiner-Adair, “much of child evelopment at this age is driven by children’s desire to connect with each other and the exciting world beyond; to fit in, stand out, look older, smarter, cooler. If the computer has become the new playground for our children, then we must ask why they are playing, who they are meeting there, and what they are learning. It is certainly a fast crowd online than ever graced a neighborhood playground. For all the good they can find there, other influences, from screen games and commercial pop-ups to YouTube, social media, and online erotica, introduce them to images and information they are not developmentally equipped to understand.
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M
y boys love to play with their iPad, My oldest who is 4 spends an average of 45 minutes each day playing a variety of games. Some like Endless Alphabet are educational while others like Fruit Ninja, are not so much. Like many in the preschool age bracket, Angry Birds has become this generation’s version of Mickey Mouse of Scooby Doo.
A
recent excerpt from the book “The Big Disconnect” posted on Salon.com by Dr. Catherine Steiner Adair, an internationall recognized clinical psychologist, takes a much blunt stance on the topic of kids and technology. The aptly titled post “Tech is killing childhood” suggests that “time spent on gadgets coould be hampering kids’ ability to connect to each other and the real world.”
“There are many games and interactive activites on mobile devices that are not necessarily about school subjects but still useful for children and beyond purely entertainment, “Jaynes says. “Games and activities that engage children in thinking skills like memory games, puzzles, spatial reasoning activities; nuturing skills such as digital pets, making music are also great.” I suppose the answer is a fairly simple one. Like everything in life, access to technology is best done with a healthy serving of moderation.
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The MakerBot Replicator 2
taking printing to a new level.
Ruby on Rails
www.rubyonrails.org
pri
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3d inting By Roff Smith
3
Rocket engine parts, chocolate figurines, functional replica pistols, a Dutch canal house, designer sunglasses, a zippy two-seater car, a rowboat, a prototype bionic ear, pizzas—hardly a week goes by without a startling tour de force in the rapidly evolving technology of three-dimensional printing. What sounds like something out of Star Trek—the starship’s replicator could synthesize anything—is increasingly becoming a reality. Indeed, NASA is testing a 3-D printer on the International Space Station to see if it might provide a way to fabricate meals, tools, and replacement parts on long missions. Back on Earth, long-term business plans are being reimagined. Airbus envisions that by 2050 entire planes could be built of 3-D printed parts. GE is already using printers to make fuel-nozzle tips for jet engines. And interest isn’t limited just to corporate giants. “We all know that 3-D printing is going to play a big role in the future,” says Hedwig Heinsman, one of the partners in the Dutch architectural firm DUS, which is printing a house on the banks of Amsterdam’s Buiksloter Canal.
Over three years a 20-foot-tall printer, the KamerMaker (Room Maker) will create walls, cornices, and rooms, trying out materials, designs, and concepts. “I can see a time coming where you will be able to choose and download house plans like you were buying something on iTunes, customize them with a few clicks on the keyboard to get just exactly what you want, then have a printer brought onto your site and fabricate the house,” adds Heinsman. Additive manufacturing—as 3-D printing is also called— has been around for about 30 years. It’s the quick pace of advances that has created the recent buzz and inspired some grandiose predictions. But there is a huge and possibly unbridgeable gap between what can be made on highly sophisticated commercial 3-D printers and what you can make on a home printer. A 3-D printer works in much the same way as a desktop printer does. Instead of using ink, though, it “prints” in plastic, wax, resin, wood, concrete, gold, titanium, carbon fiber, chocolate—and even living tissue. The jets of a 3-D printer deposit materials layer by layer, as liquids, pastes, or powder. Some simply harden, while others are fused using heat or light. Glitch Magazine 25
The high cost of tooling up a factory has long been a barrier to developing niche products. But now anyone with an idea and money could go into small-scale manufacturing, using computer-aided design software to create a three-dimensional drawing of an object and letting a commercial 3-D printing firm do the rest. Since a product’s specifications can be “retooled” at a keyboard, the technology is perfect for limited production runs, prototypes, or one-time creations—like the onethird-scale model of a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 that producers of the James Bond film Skyfall had printed, then blew up in a climactic scene. And because a 3-D printer builds an object a bit at a time, placing material only where it needs to be, it can make geometrically complex objects that can’t be made by injecting material into molds—often at a considerable savings in weight with no loss in strength. It can also produce intricately shaped objects in a single piece, such as GE’s titanium fuel-nozzle tips, which otherwise would be made of at least 20 pieces. This same precision is making it possible to fabricate things never before made. A team of Harvard University researchers has printed living tissue interlaced with blood vessels—a crucial step toward one day transplanting human organs printed from a patient’s own cells. “That’s the ultimate goal of 3-D bio-printing,” says Jennifer Lewis, who led the research. “We are many years away from achieving this goal.” Additive manufacturing is much slower than traditional manufacturing, but that could change, says Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University long involved with 3-D printing. “Printer speed, resolution, and the range of materials that can be printed are all being developed right now, along with printers that are capable of printing with multiple materials and creating objects with working parts and active circuitry,” Lipson says. He and his team printed a replica of Samuel Morse’s telegraph. With a nod to history, they tested it by tapping out the message an awed Morse sent in 1844: “What hath God wrought?” God may have wrought the principles, but people are pressing the buttons. In May 2013 a political activist named Cody Wilson grabbed headlines when he announced the test-firing of the world’s first 3-D printed handgun, the Liberator, a single-shot .38-caliber pistol made with $60 worth of plastic. The news initially unnerved law-enforcement officials, who foresaw disposable, untraceable guns printed like term papers. But making a reliable gun is not simple—or cheap. When a California firm, Solid Concepts, printed a limited edition of a hundred Browning Model 1911 .45-caliber pistols, it did so with a printer and facilities that cost the better part of a million dollars.
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“It’s simply a lot easier for crooks to get hold of a gun the old-fashioned way—buying them or stealing them—than to fuss over a 3-D printer for a couple of days, only to end up with a warped plastic blob or, even worse, something that blows up in their hands,” says Jonathan Rowley, design director of Digits2Widgets, a London 3-D printing firm that made the parts of a nonworking version of Wilson’s gun for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Few people will be crushed by not being able to print a Saturday night special, but many may be disappointed with the misshapen trinkets that are the typical fare. “People read about the fabulous things that are being made with 3-D printing technology, and they are led to believe that they will be able to make these things themselves at home and that what they turn out will be of a really high standard of workmanship,” Rowley says. “It won’t be.” While consumer printers may one day allow us to make whatever we like, Rowley envisions a different grassroots revolution, one where people can test ideas that once would never have made it off the back of an envelope.
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CODING BOOT CAMPS M
arlon Frausto is in pursuit of the new American dream. Just a few weeks ago, he left his job, in Hispanic marketing for the legal industry, and moved to San Francisco. Every day he wakes at 5:30 a.m., commutes 45 minutes by train, and studies until 9 or 10 at night. He’s spending down his savings and says he’s getting help from “my loving family.” At age 26, Frausto has gone back to school. Sort of. He’s enrolled in a brand-new kind of trade school: the immersive Web-development program, also known as a “coder boot camp.” These programs promise, for several thousand dollars, to take people like Frausto and, in a manner of weeks, turn them into job-ready Web developers.
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Job Descriptions Several computing-related fields overlap with web development, all with different education and experience requirements. The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers these broad definitions: Virtually unknown just four years ago, today at least 50 of these programs have sprung up around the country and overseas. Collectively, the sector has taken in an estimated $73 million in tuition since 2011. And the top programs say they are placing the vast majority of their graduates into jobs earning just under six figures in a rapidly expanding field — filling a need for practical, hands-on skills that traditional college programs, in many cases, don’t. “The main portion [that attracted me] was the empowerment — being able to create something in terms of technology,” says Frausto, a slight man in a baseball cap with a mustache waxed straight out to sharp points. “That, and obtaining a trade.” Coder boot camps are poised to get much, much bigger. This past summer, Kaplan, one of the largest education companies, acquired Dev Bootcamp, where Frausto is enrolled. These programs constitute nothing less than a new business model for for-profit vocational education. But their creators believe their greatest innovation may actually be in the realm of learning itself. 30 Glitch Magazine
“Just because someone has a four-year computer science degree doesn’t mean they’re going to be great coders in the business world,”
“This was a chance to think about education in a very different way, and the way I think education should be,” says Anne Spalding, the director of Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco. Spalding left a tenured position as a computer science professor at Colorado Mesa University to take this job just under two years ago. Her new “campus” is a well-worn floor of offices in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco’s central business district. There’s a space for daily yoga sessions for the 75-odd students, as required by the California vibe police. (Life coaches are also available, as are weekly sessions on social and emotional skills like empathy and giving and receiving feedback). There are rows of Macs everywhere, and there’s a kitchen where students keep bins of groceries — they’re usually working straight through breakfast, lunch and dinner. Spalding originally came to the city on sabbatical. She wound up helping with the very first cohort of Dev Bootcamp. “The primary difference [from a university] is the intensity of the program,” she says. That and the changed role of teachers,
from being the “sole source of knowledge,” she explains, “to creating a guided learning environment where knowledge comes from everyone and is shared by everyone.”
“Practice and theory are one and the same here,” Frausto says. “I just thought it was a very integrated approach to education that isn’t available anywhere else.”
At Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco, students spend most of the day in Coder boot camps arose as an the “lab,” pairing with one another elegant solution to a problem of on coding challenges. supply and demand. Claudine Gossett/Dev Bootcamp
Frausto is in the third three-week module of the program. On the day that I visit, he is paired with Murat Gocmen, 35, originally from Turkey. The two of them are tasked with building a “clone” of a website called Stack Overflow — a question-and-answer site where users can submit answers and vote them up or down.
This is one of the fastest-growing areas of the job market, and average salaries are high: from $62,500 for a Web developer to $93,350 for a software developer, and even higher in competitive cities like San Francisco. Outside the traditional tech fields, a basic familiarity with code is helpful in design, journalism, education, marketing, business, finance, scientific research and many other fields.
The two students put a yellow Post-it note atop their monitor, signaling that they’re stuck. A teacher, another student or a paid alumni mentor may come around to assist.
At the same time, in just the past five years, the nature of coding itself has changed. Programming languages like JavaScript and Ruby, essential for websites and Web browser-based applications,
Uniting ‘Practice And Theory’
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are evolving to be increasingly powerful, even for novices. When you compare today’s toolkits, frameworks and scripts to the earlier days of programming, it’s like the difference between hand-carving a set of wooden blocks to build a model house, and snapping together some Legos. It’s that technological progress that makes it plausible, just barely, for these programs to advertise that, in just 10 to 19 weeks: “We are teaching them enough to be able to get a job and get paid to keep learning,” in Spalding’s words.
Students have two quick lectures or Q&A sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, that focus on teaching them how to teach themselves. I heard one lecturer explain to brand-new students how to debug a program by Googling for help. Each lecture is followed by a coding challenge. Usually this is completed through a method called “pair programming,” a common industry practice where two programmers share duplicate screens, correcting each others’ mistakes as they go. In the final weeks, students propose and build a project. Then they spend a “career week” working on their portfolios and interviewing skills.
Patrick Sarnacke has hired many Dev Bootcamp Students learning to code at General Assembly in and other “boot camp” graduates at New York City. ThoughtWorks. It’s a global software “These programs tend to claim that 9 out of 10 of their graduates get consultancy headquartered in Courtesy of General Assembly Chicago, and Sarnacke is head of the hired, with starting salaries between On the other hand, Sarnacke says, associate consultant program. $75,000 and $110,000. It’s difficult to “The boot camps cut right to the independently verify these numbers.” chase.” While graduates generally “Just because someone has a four-year computer science have some weaknesses in the degree doesn’t mean they’re area of computer-science theory, going to be great coders in the business world,” “They have experience. They know the engineering he says. “A lot of traditional programs aren’t practices and the software methodologies that we teaching the skills people need.” use.” At Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco, group lectures focus on teaching students to teach themselves. Claudine Gossett/Dev Bootcamp So, how do these programs work? I spent an afternoon at the San Francisco site to find out.
Selling Access There are as many different ways to learn coding today as there are people who want to study it: free online tutorials like Codecademy; paid online communities like Treehouse; nonprofit, in-person mentoring groups like Black Girls Code; and of Glitch Magazine 33
course traditional and online university programs. The coder boot camp is a hybrid of all of these that sprang up almost by accident. In the beginning of 2011, entrepreneur Shereef Bishay was teaching one of his best friends how to code. He thought it would be more fun in a group, so he posted on an online community called HackerNews that he was thinking of holding a 10-week intensive training to share what he knew about programming. In the first week, he had over 200 applications, and Dev Bootcamp was off and running in San Francisco. They’ve since expanded to Chicago and New York. At about the same time, General Assembly, a co-working space in downtown Manhattan founded in 2010, began adding evening classes and workshops in design, technology and entrepreneurship. In response to requests, it introduced its own full-time 34 Glitch Magazine
immersive Web development program, which now has locations in Sydney, Melbourne and Hong Kong. These programs tend to claim that 9 out of 10 of their graduates get hired, with starting salaries between $75,000 and $110,000. It’s difficult to independently verify these numbers. In exchange, Dev Bootcamp charges $12,200. General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive is $11,500. And don’t go looking for a Pell Grant or even a student loan. Coder boot camps are not accredited by any federal or state education agency, and they’re not interested in doing so. They will vouch that you’ve successfully completed the program, but that’s it. “We’re not selling a degree. We’re selling an experience, a job and access to our community,” says Jake Schwartz, co-founder of General Assembly. (General Assembly has begun work on a
set of alternative credentials that it hopes will be recognized by industry partners like GE.) Regulatory Questions In January, a division of the California Office of Consumer Affairs that regulates trade schools warned General Assembly and several other boot camps that they could face fines of up to $50,000 and a shutdown if they didn’t come into compliance with the regulations that govern such schools. But Schwartz says the state was asking for little more than basic measures, like an enrollment agreement that clearly discloses all terms of the program. “At the end of the day their goal is not regulating what we teach; it’s consumer protection, which we are very much in favor of.” Somewhat paradoxically, Schwartz argues that this lack of regulation is part of what keeps his business honest, and sets it apart from the bulk of the for-profit education industry. “The problem with for-profits has been that they evolved to become machines for gobs of Title IV funding,” he says, referring to the category that covers federal highereducation aid. Indeed, for-profit technical schools get as much as 90 percent of their money from these sources. In response to increased regulatory pressure and bad
publicity, enrollment across the sector has fallen sharply in recent years. By contrast, at a coder boot camp, students are paying out of pocket, which should in theory make them more attentive to the question of return on investment. “Our students are taking on a significant risk here,” says Spalding. “They’re looking to change their lives.” Boot camps demand a full-time, if short, commitment, and offer few scholarships (Dev Bootcamp has a $500 discount for veterans, minorities and women). That makes them more elite than, say, a community college or typical online program. Participants tend to have resources, and at least some college and work experience. They are not much more diverse than the predominantly white, male tech workforce in general. The application process for Dev Bootcamp is similar to a job application, and people complete a nine-week, parttime introduction online before they come to campus. And, Dev Bootcamp says, about 95 percent
Article: Alexandra Ossola - Images: Universal Images Group
Creating the World’s Fastest Supercomput-
Y
esterday, President Obama signed an executive order to establish the National Strategic Computing Initiative, intended to advance American research efforts that require high-capacity computing (HCC). The main thrust of the program, according to a blog post from the
White House, would be to create the world’s fastest supercomputer, which would be 20 times faster than today’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2. The machine would be called an exascale computer--capable of making a billion billion—or one exaflop—calculations per second.
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“China's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer ... but not for long.�
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HCC has already enabled scientists to run simulations
takes a few minutes to sift through the thousands of
and experiments faster than ever, computing outcomes
mutations in a patient’s genome to highlight those that
based on millions of data points. So far it has created
might cause cancer. And the quantity of data researchers
elaborate models in the fields of anthropology, weather
will need these computers to process will only increase
prediction, neuroscience and biology. Supercomputers
from now on.
have simulated nuclear weapons tests and when the next earthquake might strike. Recently, this computational power has been useful in diagnosing and managing diseases in precision medicine initiatives, in which the computers use an astronomical amount of genetic data to diagnose current and future diseases. While the HCC systems that are currently in use work well with the data researchers have, they’ll soon find
Obama has established the National Strategic Computing Initiative to increase both the computing power and storage capacity necessary for research projects like the Precision Medicine Initiative. Though the challenges that engineers face in building such a machine “are not trivial,” researchers told the BBC that they hope to meet the plan’s deadline and construct the exascale computer by 2025.
these computers limiting. There are only a few of them, and they can only handle so much data. Even Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-winning cognitive computing system,
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Predicting Genes with Computer Software
Genetics researchers are really excited about CRISPR/Cas9, an enzyme that has made it easier than ever for scientists to target a particular strand of DNA, snip part of it out, and replace it. And though its use in humans is still in its infancy, many experts predict that engineering the human genome is inevitable. Tests on human genes are expensive and controversial, and no one is quite sure whether gene changes will have their desired effect. Now the Canadian startup Deep Genomics claims it has developed a computer program that can play out the possible effects of genetic manipulation based on computers’ deep learning.
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www
"The genome-editing enzyme known as CAS9 at work on a strand of DNA."
Understanding how genes work is complicated
Genomics founder Brendan Frey told Motherboard.
because they exist in a dialogue with other genes,
“That’s a very difficult thing to do computationally;
turning each other off or on and generating differ-
most of the approaches are experimental.”
ent molecules for the body to use. Researchers have been trying to understand these relationships to better treat medical conditions from cancer to schizophrenia, but the web seems to be too complicated for us to understand. That’s where deep learning comes in—using a huge dataset of people’s genetic information with its various mutations, Deep Genomics’ software can learn how cells read their genetic code and what molecules they make as a result. This information would be just as useful for precision medicine treatments as for genetic editing: “We can use our system to determine the efficacy of therapies, whether it’s a drug, or a CRISPR/Cas-9 gene editing system, whatever it is, our technology allows us to predict the effects of those modifications,” Deep
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Deep Genomics, which just launched this week, isn’t
ments and the use of CRISPR becomes less controversial,
the only company using big data in the commercial
genetic software, whether the Deep Genomics algorithm
genetics realm--23andMe is also developing predictive
or others, will doubtless become important in precision
software. Deep Genomics’ program only looks at mu-
medicine and beyond.
tations that affect the process of splicing, in which new genes are inserted into DNA, which is not the only form of mutation.
As Brendan Frey’s company is on a come up, genes are still being moved to computers for more research. Sifting though the tangled genetic web of precision medicine,
So far, as the Motherboard story notes, it doesn’t look like the work conducted by Deep Genomics’ founders
DNA is starting a new way of seeing things and it’s by your computer.
before its launch is any better than its competitors’. But as scientists are able to better decipher genes for treat-
Article: Alexandra Ossola - Images: Hiroshi Nishimasu
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