firehose

GitHub has just apologized for not being transparent enough about its internal investigation into claims of sexism and harassment by former employee Julie Ann Horvath.

GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath offered new details about what happened before, after, and during the investigation — although the full story is still withheld, he says, due to confidentiality promises to employees. "We failed to admit and own up to our mistakes, and for that I'm sorry," he wrote. "GitHub has a reputation for being transparent and taking responsibility for our actions, but last week we did neither. There's no excuse. We can do a lot better."

Last week, the company announced that an inquiry by a third-party investigator had produced no evidence of a hostile work environment or anything illegal, but enough "mistakes and errors of judgment" that co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned. The company declined to elaborate on what Preston-Werner was guilty of, and left it ambiguous as to whether he was asked to leave.

There was backlash against both sides

In response, Horvath started naming names and publishing emails between herself and other GitHub employees related to the incidents. She also said "there was no investigation." There was backlash against both sides, with vitriol directed against Horvath and GitHub criticized for its response.

Wanstrath now reveals that the investigation was done by Rhoma Young, a consultant with 30 years of experience who has sided as often with employees as she has for companies, he wrote.

Rhoma identified the employees she wanted to talk to based on an initial list we provided, the evidence she gathered, employees who asked to speak with her, people Julie asked her to speak with, and anyone else she determined was relevant, including Julie herself. Ultimately she conducted over 50 interviews during a four week period. Along with the interviews, Rhoma gathered and reviewed evidence consisting of emails, texts, transcripts, and code from the dozens of current and former GitHubbers she spoke with. She then took everything she learned and summarized her findings for GitHub's Board of Directors.

Wanstrath also reveals that Preston-Werner was in fact pushed out after the investigation found that he "acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office."

There were also complaints about his wife asking GitHub employees to help with her startup and "inappropriate handling of employee concerns regarding those solicitations."

Young found that Horvath's other allegations, about being harassed by an engineer and working in a hostile environment for women, were unfounded. "Women at GitHub reported feeling supported, mentored, and protected at work, and felt they are treated equitably and are provided opportunities," Wanstrath wrote.

The second, more frank version of the story makes a more compelling case for GitHub, where female employees who spoke to The Verge reported that they had never felt discrimination at the company.

Horvath is still unconvinced.

Horvath now works for software development shop &yet. GitHub has hired Kelli Dragovich, who previously worked at Barnes and Noble's Nook division and Yahoo, as vice president of human resources, and promises more positive changes will be announced in May.

I smell biased experimental results.

Alexander H. Tuttle

To a certain extent, science is a process that's focused on getting rid of possible sources of bias. It's not enough to just change a single factor and see how it affects the result; you have to eliminate or control for all the other things that might produce similar effects.

That's not as easy as it might seem, and a team of researchers from Montreal have identified a big source of bias that could be skewing a whole lot of research: male researchers. Apparently, the mere presence of a male, or even the presence of some of his clothes, is enough to set off a stress response in mice. The stress alters behavior, changes hormone levels, and even reduces the mice's ability to feel pain.

The work started with a classic "huh, that's funny" moment. Someone in a lab that studies pain perception noted that "Our laboratory personnel have reported anecdotally that pain behavior appears to be blunted while experimenters are present." At some point, they decided to see if this was biasing their results. The researchers gave some mice a painful injection, left them alone for a bit, and then sent a researcher back in the room for a few minutes. The mice's pain was then assessed using "the mouse grimace scale" (yes, that's a formal measure of pain).

An officer posing next to cruiser equipped with the Starchase pursuit management system.

Starchase

What if there was a way for law enforcement to track suspects fleeing crime scenes in cars without the danger of a high speed pursuit that could put suspects, officers, and civilians at risk? One company claims to have just the solution. Is it legal?

Over the past few years, companies like Starchase have begun developing technologies like its “GPS bullet” pursuit management system, which the company describes as a “real-time tagging and tracking tool to reduce dangerous high-speed pursuits.”

The Starchase system can be mounted to the front-grill of police cruisers, and it fires stick-on “GPS bullets” or tracking devices at the suspect's vehicle through a compressed-air launcher. “The dispatcher then views the location and movements of the tagged vehicle in near real-time on a digital roadmap via a secure Internet connection,” thus rendering a dangerous high speed car-chase unnecessary. The system is being tested by a number of police departments around the US.

The release of a major superhero movie is pretty much always accompanied by a fast food tie-in. Even the relatively complex, morally challenging Dark Knight had that pizza with triple pepperoni from Dominos, so it’s pretty obvious that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is going to be going all out. And they have, with a promotional tie-in with McDonald’s that includes Happy Meal toys. The thing is, the ASM2 Happy Meal toys come in two distinct forms: Cars, masks and action figures for the boys, and bracelets, purses and journals for the girls. You know, for their feelings.

You’re f**kin’ up, McD’s.

McDonald’s and their penchant for gendered toys is nothing new — it’s pretty rare that they don’t have two sets of Happy Meal toys going at any given time — but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the formula applied to the same franchise. Seeing the sharp contrast between the “boys” Spider-Man Toys and the “girls” set, based on the same property, brings the weirdness of the whole thing out.

There is, however, an argument in favor of the toys, one that I first heard with regards to the LEGO Friends set, a hot pink “girly” version of everyone’s favorite (pretty much gender-neutral) building blocks. It went like this: While the sets were clearly marketed as being “For Girls,” with an emphasis on cute puppies, hair salons, and friendship, the actual sets weren’t really targeting the kids. They were targeting the parents, encouraging them to pick something up for girls that would be a sort of gateway toy, for parents who wouldn’t have otherwise bought little girls sets that were based on Star Wars, superheroes or fire trucks. It’s an interesting argument, and it’s certainly true that toy commercials have conditioned kids to separate the stuff they like into the old blue-is-for-boys, pink-is-for-girls categories without even knowing it, and that girls as a market have been pretty traditionally underserved by superheroes. If the goal here is to give little girls a way to express their love of Spider-Man in a way that their stodgy parents won’t frown on, then that’s something we can get behind.

That said, there’s a pretty big problem that you can see just from looking at the toys that goes beyond just the stereotypes at play. Boys get cars and girls get fashion, yes, but while girls get Spider-Man themed purses, bracelets and stickers, boys get the Spider-Man mask. The subtle — or maybe not so subtle, considering how much this comes up in this industry — is that girls can like superheroes, but boys can be superheroes.

It’s worth noting that the TV commercial for the ASM 2 Happy Meals features a boy and girl boy both equally web-swinging and stealing each other’s food (which is weird, Happy Meals are like four bucks, you can just get two), but the toys don’t really reinforce that. Instead, they drop kids into those same limiting stereotypes that show up everywhere.

But hey, at least this is an isolated incident, right? It’s not like there’s going to be an equally weird divide with next month’s toys, focusing specifically on categorizing something that appeals to boys and girls equally as being “for boys” while girls get some kind of bizarre stereotype toy, right?

You’re f**kin’ up, McD’s.

Emma Stone Challenges Andrew Garfield For Sexist Remark

If you are serious about wanting to learn how to code, don't attend Portland Code School.My initial impression from the school space is that they don't care about their students. They have a rented space in NW Portland with no windows. The noise from the other rented offices echo into the classroom all day long and the cooling/heating system is so loud that instruction cannot be given during the noise. They have a cooler full of beverages the students can drink that probably comes out of their ridiculously priced tuition ($3500) and they have mimosa brunches every Friday where they pay for your first drink - also probably comes out of your tuition. They have terrible teachers who don't know how to teach at all. There are MANY students whom I've talked to that have had to leave a class because the instruction received was so poor only to be talked into switching into another class (so the school doesn't loose $$$) and having a terrible experience in the next class. On their website they state that 100% of students from their summer cohort got jobs after their programs and 80% from their winter cohort, but why don't they give stats for the total average since the school has been open? Because their drop-out rates are so high! They are bound to blame it on the students capabilities, but in reality they have no evaluation process for their teachers other than doing informal "check-in's". Considering the cost of a 4 month program is equivalent to a full term of classes at a graduate university level, the quality of the programs should be top notch, but they are not! There are other options out there. Epicodus has much better reviews and success rates. All Portland Code School does is have you watch Treehouse videos and use Codecademy which you can do on your own! Please, don't make the same mistake I and so many other students have made. This is an honest review and I am hoping I can help someone out there make a better decision.

        UPDATE: More Waffle Shop here and here.

Hackers targeting hospitals could spoil blood supplies, access medical records, and change defibrillator settings so they deliver random shocks, according to a new study detailed by Wired. The study, overseen by Scott Erven, information security head at Essentia Health, showed that medical equipment in a large chain of US health facilities was vulnerable to cyberattacks. Wired describes how poor network security, inefficient firewalls, and the use of default passwords meant Erven and his team were able to restart, reboot, or crash a range of devices during their two year study, and explains how the medical industry is only now starting to respond to these problems.

By Rich Stanton on April 28th, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

Rich Stanton has been playing player-driven space MMO Eve Online – read parts one and two here. In this third and final part, Rich joins a corporation and goes to war.

In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma an idealistic young Italian called Fabrice del Dongo runs off to join Napoleon’s army, and ends up at the Battle of Waterloo. He gets bonked on the head, sees soldiers running around, shoots a retreating opponent, and gets stabbed in the leg by one of his own side. The whole thing’s a mess, Fabrice has no idea what’s going on, and he returns to Parma broke and dejected, wondering if he really was at Waterloo. By the end of the novel he’s an old man, and spoken of with reverence as one of Napoleon’s key captains.

Reader – when Brave liberated the HED-GP system, I was one of their key captains.

I’ve recently joined the corporation Brave Newbies (more on whom later) in an effort to get slightly less worse at PvP. On the glorious day of our Lord Hilmar the 22nd April 2014, I was mooching around in one of the home stations looking for something to do. Lo and behold, in the fleet finder tab, the ‘HED-GP Standing Defence Fleet’ jumped out at me.

I didn’t know my HED-GP from my tail, but I figured there had to be some action there, so I joined up, jumped on mumble, and began slowly making my way over to the system – 16 jumps, so ten to fifteen minutes’ flying time. I used it to read up.

It seems that HED-GP is a nullsec pocket of space that Brave has ambitions on. But all the experienced players hate Brave, so they camp up certain areas with their big ships and elite fits for what they see as easy kills – and I’m one of them. Brave’s basic strategy when faced with situations like this seems quite simple: numbers.

As soon as I’m two or three jumps away, things get tense. Not only is comms rather a confusing mess, with our fleet split over what seems to be three systems, but the gates leading into HED-GP have been bubbled – preventing you from warping straight to them – and in some cases camped. I manage to make it through and jump to HED-GP, where I immediately align to a Brave POS, which is basically a meeting-point for fleets, and warp.

I land on top of three enemy ships. My fleet’s in this system, but none of them are here. I’m instantly scrambled, and five to ten seconds later the Kestrel I’d spent the last two hours fitting is an attractive explosion. I switch to my pod overview instantly, hold the ‘S’ key and spam click on space to try and insta-warp out – but too slow. They catch my pod, and I’m unceremoniously blown up.

My clone awakens sixteen jumps away. I’m still in fleet comms. I’m a bit pissed off at my own stupidity for warping to a POS rather than fleet, but the more I listen the more I feel for our inexperienced FC. Every single pilot in this fleet is ‘new’ to the game, but the FC is the only position that really matters – if he makes a mistake, all of our ships explode. I start the long journey back.

As I get closer the FC has handed over to another player who’s doing just as bad a job at herding cats, and it sounds like a real clusterfuck. But it’s not until I make it into HED-GP that I realise why. I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at. A somewhat-occupied system has now become another type of system: my overview is jammed with reds (bad), yellows (bad), and a few scattered blues and purples (good).

Some of these ship types I’ve never even seen before; but they see me. My warpdrive is disrupted almost instantly, and I make an heroic dash towards the bluey-purple blob. In one of EVE’s little miracles I escape for an instant and arrive among comrades – half of whom, a few seconds later, warp off. Not knowing what else to do I follow and, as we jump from place to place around the system, it’s clear we’re being chased.

One jump turns into two, into three, into four. Our FC has changed again. No-one knows what’s going on. As yet another jump starts I’m scrammed. This time there is no escape – four, five reds with more incoming by the minute, with myself and a few other stricken pilots left behind. I’m dead and podded in an instant. I don’t even know what killed me in the end.

Having lost around 15 million ISK worth of ship, I decide that’ll do for this evening. I’m utterly confused as to what just happened. It’s only the next day, browsing the EVE subreddit, that I happen across this post on TheMittani.com, from the superbly-named Angry Moustache, called ‘HED-GP Falls (Again).’

As the title suggests this is not one of those landmark EVE moments: this was no B-R, no Asakai, no Waterloo. And even though the system is now controlled by the Brave Collective, there were many other allies who helped. But it was a battle with consequences big enough to be noted by key players in the game, not just random ships pew-pewing each other. Even though that’s what it felt like.

When I read that post I felt like Fabrice del Dongo. Was I really there? I logged into the client to double-check the killmails, and I was. I’d been one of the grunts in the frontline, clueless and green, watching things zip around me and boom in the distance without ever realising what it meant. I died twice and killed nothing. But I was there.

The strange thing is that I instantly felt a part of Brave. Sure I was already a member, but this was a feeling I can only compare to being at a football match with your fellow fans; a camaraderie firm in the knowledge of a shared purpose. My personal loss had become a win.

(Never one to miss an opportunity I popped into corp chat and asked if I could be reimbursed for the ships I’d lost at HED-GP. One of the Corp higher-ups immediately did so, with grace. Stand aside for the war hero, lads.)

And here lies the reason that EVE threatens to consume me. This is an experience that is truly player-driven, inasmuch as any multiplayer videogame is player driven. Sure CCP control how the ships and mechanics work, and there’s CONCORD (the space police) in HighSec to give players some level of safety, but beyond that the story of this game – what actually happens – is being written every day.

The Battle of BR5RB made headlines because it’s a great story, and of course it’s the kind of thing that pulls in players like me – we want to be a part of something like that. But what’s important to understand is that BR5RB was exceptional because it was so big, and not because of the nature of what happened. The battle I was involved in came about because hundreds of people across the globe, on that day at that time, decided it was going to go down. And so it did. And so things change.

This is the fabric of EVE – from the micro to the macro scale it is a world that changes depending on what the players decide to do. There is no space conductor waving his baton, and the closest thing to it would be those individuals like the Mittani – who, as prominent and powerful as he is now, could be gone tomorrow. He’s only human, after all, and humans make mistakes.

No other game is like this. I said in the first of these diary entries that what blew me away in EVE was the vision, and what’s so astounding is the courage behind letting players dictate the game’s goals. It is unique.

And even if you won’t be flying a Titan in a battle like BR5RB a few weeks after starting, you can be a Fabrice del Dongo like me – on the fringes of something great, and making a difference simply by virtue of being there. You don’t have to join the same corporation I did, but take a little of their spirit and you’ll be fine. Come on in, and be a brave newbie.

Rich Stanton is off to EVE Fanfest – stay tuned for his reports back from the frontline.

Gigabyte's AMD Brix (top) is, if anything, even smaller than Intel's latest NUC (bottom).

Andrew Cunningham

When AMD sent us the Brix Gaming for review, it wasn't alone in its box. We were also sent another, smaller Brix with an AMD processor, and it's the antithesis of its big loud cousin. It's basically the AMD take on the NUC: a small, quiet, unobtrusive little box that still tries to deliver the features and performance of a full-size entry-level desktop.

We originally planned to review both in one shot, but there was so much to say about the Brix Gaming that the GB-BXA8-5545 (say that three times fast) got edged out. Rather than bury it, we've decided to give it its own evaluation. It's the only AMD-powered desktop in the same size category as the NUC that doesn't use a wimpy netbook-class processor. And as much as Intel's integrated GPUs have improved in recent years, the name "AMD" still means something when it comes to graphics performance.

Surprise, it's a tiny cuboid!

Like most other mini PCs, the Brix is a tiny box with a small external power supply.

Andrew Cunningham

The other Brix boxes we've reviewed have been larger and more powerful machines, but the smaller Intel and AMD-based Brixes are a lot more like the original Intel NUC. This one's a short, square little device that's actually a little shorter than the NUC. It's an understated all-black system with matte metal sides and a glossy plastic top, and while it has an external power brick it doesn't add much to the total size of the package. With the adapters, it's roughly the size you'd get with standard PC laptops and Ultrabooks, since the Brix uses low-voltage mobile parts rather than full-fledged desktop chips.