#flatiron school women in coding

[cluelesscoder]

The Journey So Far: Week One

Now that I’m halfway through week two of my SE course here at Flatiron School in Austin, TX, I find myself reflecting on my first week and trying to dissect what worked best for me. Today, I feel stuck. I feel like I’ve been going down this slide with twists and turns and loop-the-loops only to suddenly hit a brick wall with this week.

Last week had a weird, ethereal feeling to it. I didn’t know what exactly to expect coming into this course--I mean, I took a tour of the campus with one of my instructors before the course started, and I’d met several of my instructors/coaches for this course, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the rest of my cohort (class) of students. What would they be like? Would they be experienced coders or a total noob like myself? Would they look down on my lack of knowledge and experience? I was an absolute wreck that first day: I redid my makeup twice, kept checking my teeth obsessively, and changed outfits four times. I wanted to make a good impression on these people. I didn’t know how many other women would be in my course. Would I be the only one? (Spoiler: I’m not; however, I’m only one of two women in our course.)

I needn’t have worried, obviously. My cohort is amazing and full of a mostly diverse group of learners--we have someone in his 50s, someone who just graduated high school, people of varying races, ethnicities, and coding experience, and, of course, a whopping two women compared to the thirteen (now twelve) men. The pressure is on, friends. While I was disappointed to see only one other woman in my cohort, I’m trying to face it more as a challenge to overcome than a sign that I don’t belong here. In fact, I could even choose to view my being one of two women in this cohort as proof that I belong here.

I do still wonder, though. Maybe I’ll keep wondering for a while. Whether I belong here or not, I’m full of determination in regard to this course. I’m going to learn all I can possibly learn from this course. I’m not going to let COVID-19 ruin my chance at soaking up everything I can from this course.

This week has been rough so far. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday, to be honest. I’ve officially gone remote alongside most of my classmates. We’re just waiting out COVID-19 and hoping that it passes quickly--not just for our education, but also for everyone being affected by COVID-19, too. Our first week of this course wasn’t meant to be so crazy and hectic, I think. Yeah, the first few days were rough, but as soon as I felt like I was really getting somewhere, our campus went remote. I don’t regret that, though. I’m enjoying spending this time learning what working remotely looks and feels like. I’ve worn pajama pants for the last two days without anyone in my cohort knowing despite the numerous zoom meetings we’re attending. I think I can really get behind this “working remotely” thing.

[karlieklosssource]

Supermodel Karlie Kloss turns coding passion into a summer coding camps for girls

It's about 7 a.m. on an early autumn day in New York City and supermodel Karlie Kloss is quickly becoming a morning person.

“I don’t know when or how this happened, I don’t think I’ve slept past the sunrise any day this week,” Kloss told ABC News’ Chief Business, Technology and Economics Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis in an interview for “Nightline.”

On this particular morning, Kloss is coming off of a 16-hour day filming Project Runway and is getting ready for an event with Adidas, one of her many brand ambassadorships.

Despite the long days and early mornings Kloss embraces it all.

“That’s kind of my life but the good thing is I really love what I do,” said Kloss.

The 40-time Vogue cover girl got her start at just 13-years-old when she was discovered at a mall in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. She was approached by two modeling scouts, Jeff and Mary Clarke, the husband and wife duo behind Mother Model Management, who also famously discovered Ashton Kutcher at The Airliner Bar in Iowa City.

In Kloss’ case, they were recruiting for a charity fashion show.

“I was just at the mall with my friend and I was wearing Birkenstocks and just living my life at 13 years old…And at that time I literally had no interest in that [modeling] or really idea of like what the fashion industry was. It just wasn't in my world.”

Kloss said she realized quickly “it really was something I really enjoyed” and it didn’t take long for her career to take off. The modeling scouts introduced her to agents and by the time she was 15-years-old she was walking in her first major runway show.

“That fall when I started my freshman year of high school I got an opportunity to walk in New York Fashion Week for Calvin Klein and I was 15 years old. Like literally had started high school two days before and it just put me on the map.”

Kloss became a breakout star in the industry, walking in 31 shows her first New York Fashion Week season. Over the course of the next few months Kloss got an apartment in New York City and was traveling around the globe with her first major fashion campaigns for Bvlgari and Dolce & Gabbana.

But while she was living the life of a glamorous and worldly model, back home in St. Louis, pre-social media, she was just an average teenager.

“I was 15 years old, I was tall and lanky, no boys were paying any attention to me. I felt totally out of place in St. Louis, just like every teenager does. And it kind of was like this secret alter ego that I got to live out and build a career. And no one really knew about it back home.”

(MORE: Karlie Kloss goes back to school)

Over the next 11 years Kloss would become one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, gracing the runways of major designers like Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, Versace and Diane von Furstenberg.

She also served as global brand ambassador for Estee Lauder and starred in several major international campaigns for brands like adidas, Versace, Dior, Carolina Herrera and Swarovski

“I was going back and forth between, like, sitting in my chemistry class, getting on a plane that night right after school going to Paris, walking Dior Couture opening the show…and then going back home and like needing to like still turn in my five paragraph essay,” said Kloss. “But it was really amazing dual world and life that I lived and still live, I guess.”

Today that “dual world” includes another passion -- coding. On the surface it’s one that might seem unexpected, as the couture-clad super beauty doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of a hoodie-wearing coder, but Kloss has had a love of math and science from the beginning.

(MORE: Karlie Kloss goes back to school)

As the daughter of an emergency room physician, she looked up to her father, fascinated by his ability to problem solve and help people using science.

“I definitely thought being a doctor would be my kind of career path. I always was really fascinated by science, by math and I loved the idea of being able to help people with a skill set,” she said.

Kloss discovered her own love of coding by taking classes at The Flatiron School in Lower Manhattan. Her instructor and dean of the school, Avi Flombaum, said that she was a natural.

“I met Karlie, I was doing a class for two of my friends and they asked if she could join...She showed up on day one, really took to it and outperformed my two friends,” Flombaum told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.

(MORE: How to get your girls involved in coding)

After that first lesson in 2014, Kloss was hooked.

“That whole week, and more and more, she started emailing me if we could spend time on the weekends coding and that sort of snowballed,” Flombaum said.

But eventually, Kloss wanted to do more than just learn herself. She wanted to figure out a way to give other women the skill that she found so valuable. With the help of Flombaum, she started a scholarship giving 21 teenage women across the U.S. the opportunity to take the Flatiron School’s two-week pre-college program coding class, the same one that Kloss took when she fell in love with coding.

“I have this audience of young women across the country around the world, and I really care about the message that I'm sending them both through my words and my actions. And I thought, you know what, I would love to offer them something more meaningful than just a picture backstage at a runway show.”

Just one year after starting her own coding journey, Kode With Klossy was born.

Today the free two-week summer coding camp has grown to 50 camps across 25 cities across the U.S. girls ages 13 to 18 can apply to attend through the company’s website and be placed in classes of 20 where they learn to code real-life apps.

It’s not abnormal for Kloss to pop into one of the camps, and she’s become a mentor for many of the young women who have been with the program since the start. “Nightline” joined her for one of those visits at a camp in New York, where level 3 campers are learning Swift, the coding language used by Apple developers.

“It’s really amazing because I feel like I really have seen them grow so much, beyond just learning code...They’ve been able to grow as humans. I think it’s such an intense moment in life being in your teen years and high school and you’re kind of figuring out so many things and I see these girls kind of come into their own power, come into their own confidence, and they realize all that could be possible in their lives, in their careers, and it’s just so fun and amazing to watch. I get goose bumps, I really do. They’re my little sisters.”

In the beginning, the young coders first learn the basics of the new language and then collaborate to design and build a new app. They were in the final stages of creating applications targeted at real world problems when “Nightline” stopped by. But it’s not just the curriculum that these young coders love, it’s the relationships they are building with other young women in technology.

Many of the coders we spoke to said that the camps provide a supportive place to grow and thrive. Valeria Torres-Olivares, 18, began learning to code in her sophomore year of high school. But she said the past two summers she has spent at Kode With Klossy have “been a rejuvenating experience having amazing girls to work with and talk about code with.”

“You don’t feel comfortable asking your peers questions because most of the time they are male and most of the time, whether they are mean to you or not, they do make you feel like you are less than them,” Torres-Olivares told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.

Many of the female coders “Nightline” met say they are outnumbered by their male counterparts at school.

“It’s just like three girls in the front row and then the rest of it is all guys. Basically feels like a guy’s club. So being here feels like a safe space,” 16-year-old camper Ivana said.

Sofia Ongele, 18, who started learning to code at the Kode With Klossy camp in 2016, added that one of her favorite things about the program is the network of women she can connect with to talk about coding. “I could just hit up my girlfriends any time that I wanted to and be like, ‘hey, help me out here.’ So that was really great.”

When creating the camps it was important to Kloss to focus on women. Today, while women make up more than half of college-educated workers, they only make up 25 percent of those in STEM fields, according to the U.S. Department of State.

“There are multiple problems too, I think, why more girls don't get excited about tech or see themselves in that industry. A -- barrier to entry of not having opportunities, not having a class to even take to learn the skills. And B -- what society tells us or the image that we see and I think we need more visibility around women in the industry and they exist.”

With over 16 million followers across her social media platforms, Kloss is helping to increase the visibility around women in technology, showing that the stereotype surrounding STEM aren’t real.

“Everybody expected me to be one thing, to be on the catwalks or in magazines...And so I definitely think a lot of people noticed when I started coming out and talking about my love of science and math and more nerdy passions,” said Kloss. “I think that me standing up and kind of identifying my nerdy passions has ignited that for so many other girls and that impact is something that really drives me to want to keep being true to who I am, and supporting other young women.”

Watch more from Karlie Kloss on "Nightline" tonight at 12:35 a.m. ET and hear more of her interview on the ABC News podcast, “No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis."

[justkarliekloss]

Karlie Kloss interview for Vogue Spain June 2018

This is my translation. Please credit the blog if you repost it anywhere.

And sorry if there are mistakes, English isn’t my first language. But, if you see a huge mistake or something that could be better said, please send me a message so I can edit it! I’m always open to learning new things 😊

Karlie Kloss (1992, Chicago) is the best example of what being a model means these days. Being beautiful and having an amazing body isn’t enough anymore; today you need to inspire people, and doing so, she is one of the best. As the leader of a new generation of tops whose voices are heard loud and clear, she has never doubted when it comes to fight against injustice. Her last cause is to fight against the lack of women working in tech. Now, because of her, its future could be lead by women.

In 2015, after studying a coding course at Flatiron School in New York, she decided to create a scholarship for girls between 13 and 18 so they could learn about a world that still today seems to be made just for men. The next year, Kode with Klossy grew up to be a free summer camp and also a scholarship to be able to attend university. Since then, this project hasn’t stopped growing, and this summer more than 1000 girls, divided over 50 camps in 25 cities in the United States, will benefit from it.

Besides that, Karlie also supports other causes, like the fight against climate change, or the different ways to improve people’s diet in her country. For the first time in history, a model seems to be ready (and more prepared) to save the world than all its politicians. Though she isn’t the only one. Fellow tops, like Doutzen Kroes, Cameron Russell, Sara Ziff and Adwoa Aboah also share her determination to make the world a better place. The fashion world can feel proud.

Respected by the industry, Karlie has always shown an untiring activism -even before it became a world wide phenomenon- that might have created some tension with her in-laws. Since 2012, Karlie is in a solid relationship with Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared, husband of Ivanka Trump and the President’s adviser. Her natural elegance has surely helped her get over any delicate situation; same way it has helped her nail her now more than usual tv appereances. One of the last ones was on Bill Nye’s tv show, “Bill Nye Saves the World”, where she travelled to Venice to report about the problems the climate change is causing the city.

Last year you travelled to Venice to show the effects of the rising of the sea level in the city. How was the experience?

I think we all should crontribute somehow on the conservation and preservation of the planet. Bill Nye gave me the opportunity to visit the Italian city and discover all the problems they have to deal with because of the sea level rising, and I am very grateful. It was a very revealing experience, because even though they don’t make it to the headlines all the time, the climate change consecuences are very real, and it is important that we start acting to try and save the world we live in.

What other causes worry you these days?

There are a lot of topics we should worry about; it has been very inspirig seeing so many people revealing things and demanding a change. From the #metoo movement to the students that are leading the conversation about the reform of the gun law and the violence in the United States. I find that admirable. We are witnessing a moment of huge changes for history. And even though there still is a lot to do, this gives me hope for the future, especially with the next generation, who is very compromised with all these problems.

Did you think about joining the #metoo movement?

I was very lucky when I started my career. My family was always with me, on every step I took. They even joined me at photoshoots and fashion shows, anywhere I went. My experience has been very positive, but I know that that hasn’t happened to other models. I think it is very important that people feel safe at work, and that it is the industry’s role to make sure of it. Even though I am sure this is just the tip of the icerberg, it is amazing that all these stories are finally seeing the light. As a society, we need to put a face to these issues so women and girls can feel respected. I hope that this movement is the begining of some very needed changes.

How do you think the models’ situation, and women’s in general, could be improved on their work eviroment?

We are witnessing an awakening in our culture. Important topics, like equal pay or women’s proteccion against abussive situations, have started to be talked about in the fashion world and many others. I hope these conversations start a change, and that everyone can feel safe and respected at work.

Karlie was discovered when she was just 13 during a charity fashion show in Saint Louis (Misouri), where she grew up and where her family still lives, and she made her debut on the runway when she was just 15 as an exclusive for Calvin Klein. The next season, just in New York, she walked 31 shows, and that was just the begining. “Back then I didn’t aspire to be a model, I thought it was a good way to save money for university. But I had amazing oportunities I feel unvelebely grateful for. Especially because, thanks to my family and close friends’ support, I was able to live that experience without disconecting from my previous life. During my first years I was still focused on the typical high school things, like doing homework or getting a date for my prom dance”. Not long after, her face was everywhere. Karlie has walked for all the big brands and names, and she has been the face of countless campaigns. Among the last ones, Versace, the perfume “Good Girl” by Carolina Herrera -they’ve always had a very close relationship- or Adidas, with whom she has been collaborating for a while trying to promote a healthier way of living. Besides that, she was just named an Estée Lauder’s ambassador, and the brand will collaborate with Kode with Klossy. But, despite being one of the biggest names in fashion and have more than 7 million followers on Instagram, Karlie has been able to stay away from controversies and anything that isn’t related to her job or her many charitable projects. The first one, born in 2012, was the one that made her one of the tops more known among her co-workers. When in backstage, she used to give away her famous Karlie’s Kookies, healthy cookies she developed in collaboration with Momofuku Milk Bar to help FEED raise money to help kids in need. Her support to those who need it the most has been constant since then.

You created Kode with Klossy as a way to help young girls in tech, a field usually made just for me. How did the idea started?

I’ve always been a very curious person, and I loved Math and Science. That’s why, in 2014, I decided to take some coding lessons. I wanted to understand how technology is changing our world. It is something that has significantly changed the fashion world in the past five years, with the boom of social media or e-commerce platforms. I wanted to know how all of that worked. I started a course at the Flatiron School in New York as a way to challenge myself, and I surprised myself when I found out how creative and easy it was to learn coding when you had the proper teachers and subjects. It just requieres solving problems and team work, two things I love; I finished the course thrilled with that I had learnt, and I wanted to share that experience with other girls. That’s how Kode with Klossy was born. A programme that encourages women to learn coding and to become the future leaders of the tech world.

Why do you think there still are work fields, like this one, that are thought to be just for men?

In 1995, only a 37% of techs were women, and today that number has gone down to a 24%. And it definitely isn’t because of women not being interested or talented enough. The problem starts with the early acces to technology and computer science. Only one of four public schools in the United States offer this options, and when it comes to the subjects, they aren’t created having girls in mind. On the other hand, there only are a few women with important jobs on the companies that belong to this field, which sends the message that opportunities are limited for women. There is a lot to do to try an close this breach.

When did you started being interested in technology?

I’ve always been very interested in Math and Science; but I think it is all because of how much I admire my dad, who is an ER doctor. He taught me to apreciate how you can use science in your daily life, in his case, to save lifes. At first I thought I would follow his steps and study Medicine, but life had other plans for me. That passion and curiosity for Science was still there tho, and it ended on me being very interested on coding.

Did you find any obstacle on this field because you are a woman?

When I decidedd to start taking coding lessons I got a lot of questions about it. And scepticism. People thought it was weird that a model wanted or needed to learn coding, but that’s the message I want to tell the world. You don’t need to be the number one in your Math class, or want to be a software ingeniere, to be interested in it. In technology, like on many other aspects of life, it is important to not let anyone stop you from getting what you want, from achieving your goals.

What do you dream to achieve with your project?

Something we talk about very often is the idea that you can’t expect to be something you can’t see. It is important that young girls not only get the technical abilities that will allow them to develop a career on the tech world, but also that they have role models to follow, to learn from, and to be inspired by. That’s why we want to create a comunity of women with interesting careers in the tech world, so they can come to our camps and share their stories with the girls. By celebrating the success of these women, we are showing the new generations what you can achieve with a bit of effort.

[sunshinekarliekloss]

Karlie Kloss, Coding's Supermodel: The Forbes Cover Story

Karlie Kloss is sitting in a glass-walled SoHo office holding court with five teenage girls. Over video chat with several more, they are brainstorming how to support scholars of Kode with Klossy once class is out. The teenagers are all graduates of Kode with Klossy summer camps, an initiative by Kloss’ education nonprofit that aims to teach girls the basics of computer programming.

In her off-duty uniform of a Planned Parenthood T-shirt, black jeans and Gucci loafers, the 6'2" supermodel listens intently. One young woman wearing a white Kode with Klossy top suggests a custom app for students to communicate through. Kloss nods and encourages more ideas. Perhaps Kode with Klossy could upload lesson videos for scholars to look back on, or start a newsletter with events and internships. Another girl in glasses says she posts tricky coding problems on Snapchat and scholars from her camp offer solutions.

As the meeting concludes, Kloss hugs the girls before rallying them to put their hands in for a cheer. “Klossy Posse!” they shout in unison.

A 36-time Vogue cover girl is an unlikely candidate to launch a charity that has taught more than 500 young women how to code. But the 25-year-old has leveraged her giant social audience–some 12.6 million followers across platforms–to grow a burgeoning nonprofit that aims to balance the scales of software engineering’s gender disparity.

“I didn’t go into this with the plan to build an education nonprofit,” says Kloss, a member of the 30 Under 30 Class of 2018, over vegan cupcakes and cookies in her Manhattan office. “I really went into all this out of my own curiosity of wanting to learn what the heck coding was, because it was building massive enterprise value for people in a short period of time.”

Her first taste came in 2014, when she signed up for a two-week boot camp at adult-education company the Flatiron School in Manhattan to learn the basics of computer programming. “I didn’t actually know who she was,” says Avi Flombaum, cofounder of the Flatiron School, who taught Kloss’ class. “She was the best student in that group and I was surprised by how enthusiastic she was.”

Kloss covered the basics of Ruby on Rails, a popular web development framework. But she quickly noticed that her classes weren’t gender equal, an imbalance that mirrored the tech workforce. “I was curious, why are there not more women in this space?” recalls Kloss. An idea for how to help took form: “I realized, here I am with this platform and reach to young women across the country and around the world,” Kloss explains. “If I could just help a handful of girls that would be really meaningful.”

In 2015, Kloss spent more than $20,000 to personally underwrite 21 scholarships for teenage girls to the Flatiron School’s two week pre-college coding class–the very class she had taken the year prior (Flatiron School matched the donation).

But she was itching to do more. Last summer, Kloss took the initiative in-house, launching her own two-week summer camp for teenage girls aged 13 to 18 in New York, Los Angeles and her hometown of St. Louis. Kloss helped pick candidates, design the curriculum and select teachers; its graduates have gone on to win hackathons and land places at Ivy League universities. In June, the program expanded to 12 cities across the U.S., with plans to grow further.

Adults are also included: Last July Kloss launched a year-long online scholarship with the Flatiron School that selected one woman every month to enroll in its full stack web development course. And whhile other nonprofits with similar missions, such as Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code, are far more established, Kloss’ reach brings her objective to millions.

To date, funding for Kode with Klossy programs has come from Kloss herself and the brands she poses for. According to a familiar source, Kloss has personally contributed into seven figures to Kode With Klossy since 2015. She has also redirected a slice of her modeling contracts with companies such as Adidas, Swarovski and Express to fund and support Kode with Klossy. Ford’s STEAM Experience—an initiative focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines as well as the arts, part of the car maker’s philanthropic arm—lent additional support to this summer’s camps.

Such initiatives are sorely needed. Half a million more jobs related to computers are expected to be added by 2024. Though 74% of high school girls are interested in STEM, women only earned 18% of all undergraduate computer science degrees in 2015. That impacts employment, especially among minorities: Women made up just over a quarter of the tech workforce last year, though African-American women comprised a mere 3% and Latina women counted for only 2%.

“There are so many young women who really could change the world with this kind of opportunity, girls who self-select out because they don’t see others in the industry that look like them,” says Kloss.

The daughter of an emergency room physician, Kloss’ favorite subjects as a child were math and science. Had she not been discovered at a charity fashion show in a mall, aged 13, she might have become a doctor or a teacher, she says. Instead, she booked her first advertisement in 2007; that same year she landed her first major runway show, walking for Calvin Klein.

Her career quickly took off, but it went into overdrive with the advent of Instagram. Thanks to social media, says Kloss, “I could be seen as well as heard.” As her followers swelled, her fees increased. She premiered on Forbes’ highest-paid models list in 2014 banking $4 million pretax; this year, her contract earnings soared to $9 million in the 12 months prior to June 2017.

“When social media arrived, models came back into the spotlight because now everyone could see what was behind the velvet rope,” says Maja Chiesi, SVP at IMG Models, the agency that represent Kloss. “The next evolution is brands wanting the full, 360-degree sense of who these women are… They want women with a voice.”

Enter Kloss, who has long presented herself as more than just a pretty face. In 2012, she started a charitable cookie line called Klossies with Manhattan dessert spot Momofuku Milk Bar; the treats donated to meals for children with each purchase. After taking the odd night class at New York University, in 2015 she enrolled (mentor and supermodel-turned-philanthropist Christy Turlington wrote her recommendation letter). With her busy schedule, she has opted for approximately one class a semester, so far notching credits in creative writing and feminism.

She is eager to expand her platform through a YouTube channel, launched in 2015, that documents her travels and baking forays. Next up: A talk show, Movie Night with Karlie, airing on the Disney-owned Freeform in December.

All of it serves to raise awareness for Kode with Klossy. As she focuses on the nonprofit, she has pared down her modeling contracts to the most lucrative partnerships. Today, says Kloss, she works with “partners that really are excited to work with me because of not just what I look like, but because of what I stand for.” It makes sense that her bookings have shifted from conventional beauty and fashion to tech; she can be seen in recent advertisements for electronics giant Samsung and website builder Wix.

For now, the aim is to grow quickly and cost-effectively. “I’ve been thinking about Kode with Klossy like a startup,” says Kloss. The nonprofit’s team is lean, with Kloss, her manager and business partner Penni Thow, five full-time employees and consultants plus help from three members of her management.

And, Kloss says, she is just getting started. “I plan on building a big business at some point, too.”

Startups, you’re on notice.

[allfullofhope]

How to Learn to Code For Free.

Learning by Thanks to the code might even be the only way to secure your children's financial future. "By 2020, U.S. universities will not be able to fill even a third of the country's 1.4 million computer science positions with qualified graduates," says a current Time article. Learning to program leads to guaranteed job offers.

The good news is that programming during a class does not require advanced study. Today, anyone with a web connection, or library access, has numerous free resources available that even young children can learn computer! Don't wait for public schools to catch up: 9 out of 10 schools don't teach IT!

8 free ways to find curved code (for you and your kids!)

1. CodeAcademy.com

Age: teens and more.

Classes in: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python, jQuery, API.

If you've never seen an HTML line before, this is usually the starting point. Code Academy has 7 basic online classes that track and explain everything in detail. Their online lessons are choppy into small steps, making you feel like you're constantly moving forward, and satisfied that you're just making progress.

The site also remembers where you left off, so it's easy to take a 10-minute lesson, have a snack, and get back to where you left off. You can also return very easily and review past lessons if you summarize any kind of update. The situation is extremely intuitive and doesn't take long to navigate, so you almost just dive straight.

I took the essential HTML/CSS class and loved it. I had never received formal programming training before this course and it was exactly what I needed. Super easy steps, yet explained, and pointers if you can't solve it. I recommend CodeAcademy to anyone interested in learning programming.

2. Rayuela for iPad

Age: 9-11

This iPad app is designed to show toddlers the basics of programming. Kids drag and drop snippets to create games, stories, animations, interactive art, and more. Here is the Hopscotch website and this is where you can download the app on iTunes. The Rayuela app is free. Unfortunately, there is no version for smartphones, perhaps because the screens are too small.

3. KhanAcademy.or

Age: over 5 years, older for programming courses

Courses in: many tutorial videos, more classes in Javascript, cryptography, theory.

Computer science is just a topic at Khan Academy, which teaches math, humanities, economics, and exam preparation, among other things. Within the computing field, it focuses on Javascript and also offers a course on cryptography and knowledge theory. The situation is not as difficult as CodeAcademy, but that is partly due to the great amount of knowledge available about the situation, all for free!

Khan Academy is also a great location for high school lycée lycée High School "> High School? High School Lyceum Lyceum High School High school"> High school students and high school students trying to find an educator or an explanation of anything they study or interest. Algebra, history, English ... all in easy-to-understand tutorial videos.

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4. Code.org

Age: 4+

Teach Programming basics, Javascript, Python, whether child or adult, knowledge of the thanks to code means job opportunities.

Funded by tech giants Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon.com, and Google, Code.org is tasked with educating children about computer processing and acquiring programming on public school schedules across the country. The situation uses drag-and-drop programming for teens in video tutorials "self-directed". An example of youth is known as Plants vs. Plants. Zombies A great advantage is that the situation is available in 34 languages

Bonus: NYTimes wrote a story about Code.org in May 2014: "The organization pays to teach high school teachers to provide more advanced curricula, and has developed a curriculum for younger students that includes primary education Combine video games with angry birds and hungry zombies."

Code.org is PC Science Education Week and Time of Code, two initiatives aimed at driving more teens to code comfortably. Sign a petition stating that you believe that each student

5. GirlsWhoCode.com

Age: high school students

Teach: Basic to intermediate programming skills during a women's camp program.Only 3% of girls chose computers as important in college. only a few ended up being software engineers. Girls Who Code is a curved change that. The situation is carrying out a 7-week camp immersion program in selected cities across the country for the second- and third-year girls. The program is free and scholarships are available for transportation.Campers study programming from 9 to 4, as well as touring to Google, Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, Gilt Groupe, Foursquare, and, therefore, News Corp. They also meet women entrepreneurs, CEOs, developers, designers, and IT specialists who act as mentors.There are also code clubs if you are not near a diving program. The clubs are slightly larger and accept grades 6-12. A group of 15 girls is required to develop a replacement club that the organization supports monthly activities related to the project.

6. Calculate through Harvard University

Age: adult or advanced teen

Teach Extensive programming in C, PHP, and JavaScript.Tune taught in computer lectures as an extension class at Harvard University. There are videos for 2 hours a week; The course lasts 13 weeks. You will listen in three different formats: Quicktime, MP3, or Flash. Led by David Malan, Ph.D.The course includes "algorithms " (design, implementation, and analysis); software development (abstraction, packaging, data structures, correction and testing); computer structure (low-level data representation and instruction processing); computer systems (programming languages, compilers, operating systems and databases) and computers within the planet (networks, websites, security, crime analysis and encryption). The course thanks the participants for their more careful thinking and, therefore, for their more effective problem-solving."Harvard's computer science course begins here.

7. Massive courses opened online

Age: adults

Lessons: There are no courses offered directly through this website, the Aggregate offers free online courses.There are many more free online computing courses (as well as for various other topics), also known as massive open online courses. (Massive because thousands of people take them. Open because they're free. I feel like you get the rest.) A site that adds all available MOOCs is MOOC-list.com.Search for courses by category, university, instructor, country, language, certificate type. Please note that MOOCs generally do not offer college credits, but you can get a certificate. Contact the entity that provides the course for more details. Read reviews of previous courses. Take a look at the required courses. Watch videos. the situation is free to use and there are tons of ads that back it up, so be careful when clicking.

8. Code with Klossy

Kode with Klossy was founded by supermodel Karlie Kloss and could also be a free two-week coding camp for women ages 13 to 18. The program uses the Flatiron School's web development curriculum and is taught through the Learn.co platform. Girls are presented with software engineering principles and learn the same programming languages behind apps like Twitter and therefore the NY Times. The camps take place in three cities this year: St. Louis, New York, and LA ...

[seanfarrisworld]

Instagram Profile Audit 10 steps anyone can take to teach themselves to code at #Home, according to the VP of Flatiron #School, CEO of #Women Who Code, and other tech experts #marketing #Socialmedia https://socialstats.info#1a76fd9c671570a4b7e5ec9d4b1c5f9e

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/supermodel-karlie-klosss-lesson-to-young-women-never-be-afraid-to-ask-questions/

Supermodel Karlie Kloss's Lesson to Young Women: Never Be Afraid to Ask Questions!

The Project Runway host built a coding school, Kode With Klossy, to inspire a generation of tech-savvy women. But her real mission, she says, is much broader.

December 24, 2019 13 min read

This story appears in the October 2019 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

­The view is stunning up here, from the 34th floor of this downtown Manhattan office building. Outside the floor-to-­ceiling windows, the day is bright and clear. But the 24 teenage girls occupying the space are over it. Their noses are buried in MacBooks, while a soundtrack of Disney hits plays in the background. There’s work to be done, after all: They’re students at a nonprofit coding camp called Kode With Klossy, and today’s assignment is to design and code an online photo gallery.

They’re so focused on the task, in fact, that they don’t notice when the camp’s creator and very famous namesake walks in.

“Hey, guys,” says supermodel, Project Runway host, and coding enthusiast Karlie Kloss, as she gives the students a friendly wave. The girls seem a bit too stunned to react.  Eyes widen as they glance around at each other, quietly nodding with shared enthusiasm. But before they can do much of anything else, the 27-year-old Kloss is checking out their work, bringing her six-foot-two-inch frame to a squat so she can be eye level with her students and their screens. For the next 90 minutes, she asks questions about their code and their plans for the future — though conversation occasionally veers off to Harry Potter and chocolate chip cookies.

If it’s all a little surreal inside this room, it can look even more so from the outside. Kode With Klossy operates in 16 cities and this year alone gave almost 1,000 young women the (free) opportunity to learn a critical skill. It has attracted a wide range of support, though also the inevitable skepticism. Supermodels, after all, aren’t supposed to code.

Related: Karlie Kloss Looks to These Female Founders for Inspiration

Kloss has heard it before. And she has a straightforward response. “There are a lot of misconceptions about being a model, and how that directly correlates to your intellect,” she says. “Yes, I’m a model, yes, I’m a woman, and, yes, I’m interested in these areas. And I think a lot of other young women are interested in these areas, too, and they deserve the opportunity to learn about them and decide for themselves if they belong or not.” 

Kloss is careful to never claim expertise in the world of computer science. She’s an enthusiast. She can code, but she considers herself a perpetual student of the craft — and a person not defined by others’ expectations. That, she hopes, is the sensibility her students will come away with. More than attaining any level of coding experience, she wants Kode With Klossy’s attendees to appreciate the power of curiosity and the willingness to ask questions. She owes her career to this instinct, she says. And she’ll continue to use it as her professional life evolves.

As Kloss makes her rounds at the camp, one young coder sings the praises of the instructors but sheepishly apologizes for asking them too many questions. “No!” Kloss says emphatically. “Do not apologize. That’s what they’re here for. You should always ask your questions.”

Image Credit: Jake Chessum

Kloss grew up in St. Louis with her mom, dad, and three sisters. At 13, she participated in a local charity fashion show and was, as they say, discovered. By 15, she was walking the runway for Calvin Klein. In the years that followed, Kloss became one of fashion’s favorite faces, gracing countless runways and magazine covers. (To date, she’s covered various editions of Vogue 40 times.) 

But by 2014, she wanted more. “I was 21, a bit of a veteran in fashion — it’s like dog years — and I just wasn’t feeling challenged,” Kloss says. “I was so in awe of what was happening in tech but a bit frustrated that I didn’t understand it. Why do certain people know how to scale businesses and ideas and problem-solving? What is it that certain people — primarily men, and primarily highly intellectual men, or at least men who are perceived to be super smart — are privy to that the rest of the world isn’t?”

To answer those questions, she signed up for a two-week coding boot camp at the Flatiron School in New York. Kloss was captivated by the experience. “The way I learned code was very real-world applicable,” she says. “Being able to understand the building blocks of [technology]? It turns the lights on. It turned the lights on for me.”

In the months that followed, she kept studying. She struck up a friendship with Flatiron School cofounder Avi Flombaum, who helped her along. And as her fluency in code continued to grow, she started to think about how many other women could benefit from the same perspective-­changing experience.

“I had an audience of young women paying attention to me on social media and in my career, and I wanted to connect them to opportunities that could really open their minds and open doors in their lives,” she says. “It’s not only a responsibility but a real privilege to be able to point someone in a direction that could be valuable to them.”

Related: In Pitching Your Business, Take Every ‘No’ As a ‘Not Now,’ Says This Founder

But how? Kloss decided to start with what she knew. The summer after she learned to code, she partnered with the Flatiron School to underwrite 21 boot camp spots for young women. She publicized the opportunity on her social media channels and was surprised by the response. Thousands of applications came in. 

This got her thinking about what it would take to reach more women. The first step, it seemed, was to build something herself — ­something she could eventually scale nationwide. “I had no idea how, or even the intention, to build a nonprofit or anything in this realm,” she says. “I had no idea what I was doing.” 

But then again, she didn’t know anything about code until she threw herself into the boot camp. “It’s just been about figuring it out as you go,” she says.

Image Credit: Jake Chessum

Kloss calls her camp “my nights, my weekends, my day job, my baby.” But at the very beginning, it was just her puzzle. She had no experience building something like this, but she did have an enviable professional network. She counts Diane Von Furstenberg and Anna Wintour as mentors, and has longstanding business relationships with brands including Adidas and Carolina Herrera. So she made some calls and got some direction.

“Like with any business, you focus on an area you understand,” she says. “And as you grow, identify who else out there is doing good work, and figure out how you can align to better accomplish your goals.”

That became her approach. She had a vision; now she needed to piece together the right operational elements. She assembled a team of what would become five full-time staffers, and at first, they simply expanded their partnership with the Flatiron School. In 2016, Kode With Klossy launched as a stand-alone nonprofit, hosting two-week camps for girls ages 13 to 18 in New York, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. In 2017, the program expanded to 11 cities. By 2019, it was in 16 locales. 

As Kloss and her tiny team have taken on more and more of the logistics and back-end operations, they’ve required additional partners. The Turing School of Software and Design now helps craft a technical curriculum. Teach for America has also signed on, tapping into its network of teachers, and, with an assist from Kode With Klossy, is teaching them to code, and then training them to teach code.

Related: Model and Entrepreneur Karlie Kloss Shares the Importance of Always Learning

Students — which the program calls “scholars” — apply for a coveted, completely free spot at one of the camps, which aims to select students who otherwise wouldn’t have easy access to these kinds of opportunities. Those accepted spend two weeks learning code, attending workshops on topics like career paths and financial literacy, and building various projects until “Demo Day,” when they pitch their completed websites or apps to their teachers, fellow students, and parents. Past projects have included an app that connects students with peer tutors and another that helps users locate public gender-neutral bathrooms.

As the guts of the program have become increasingly well-oiled, Kloss has relied on her existing network to make Kode With Klossy’s offerings as robust as possible. 

As a brand ambassador and face of Estée Lauder makeup, for example, this summer Kloss arranged for the cosmetic giant’s female engineers to speak to scholars, and created an exercise that allowed them to explore the back-end design of a new digital campaign for the corporation. The partnership provided summer internships at Estée Lauder for two Kode With Klossy alumnae. 

Kloss also aligned with Away, the travel startup, which she’s invested in. (Her growing portfolio includes the female-founded brands Lola, which makes feminine products, and SkinTe, a collagen-infused tea.) In 2018, Away launched an exclusive collection of luggage in new colors, designed in collaboration with Kode With Klossy. Sales benefited the coding organization.

Kloss herself isn’t able to visit every camp — she tried at first, but the endeavor has simply grown too big. So she appears where she can and makes sure to FaceTime in with the rest. As she does, and as she’s talked to the girls who attend, she’s come to realize that her program is providing something that she herself lacked as a child.

“I wanted to become a teacher or a doctor, because that’s what I saw: My dad’s an ER doctor, and I had amazing teachers at my public school who really helped me love learning,” she says. “But those were the only avenues forward I saw. So now, for example, we have one scholar who’s a really gifted artist, and when she tells me she wants to go into game design, I’m like: ‘Yes! That is a great application of both of your passions.’ ”

For Kloss as well as her young scholars, coding boot camps become a portal to a bigger world. For the supermodel, it was an awakening that led her to create one of her own. And now, for the students at that camp, it’s a beginning that can lead anywhere.

Image Credit: Kode with Klossy

In spring 2017, Valeria Torres-Olivares was wrapping up her junior year of high school in Princeton, N.J. She’d taken a couple of computer science classes and loved what she learned but found the experience to be isolating.

“I was one of the only girls in my classroom, and I was the only Latina in any of the computer science classes at my school,” she says. “I felt almost unqualified to ask questions, like I should be able to figure them out for myself.  That can spiral into a lot of self-doubt.” 

Related: 5 Things I’ve Learned Teaching Hundreds of People How to Code

So she decided to apply to be a Kode With Klossy scholar and encouraged her little sister Kyara, who was 13 at the time, to do the same. (“I wanted her to be exposed to code, but in a different environment,” she says.) They recorded a joint video application and were accepted. The experience changed everything. 

“I had never been in an all-female STEM environment before, and I expected some sort of weird competitive vibe to be happening,” she admits. “But it was one of the best learning environments I’d ever been in. My sister and I both fell in love with how collaborative it was. No one was afraid to ask what might be labeled as ‘dumb’ questions.” 

Torres-Olivares went all in after that. She spent the next two summers with Kode With Klossy — once more as an attendee, and then as a paid instructor’s assistant. And like Kloss, she immediately knew she wanted to share her knowledge.

With her little sister, Torres-Olivares approached her local library and offered to host and teach free coding classes for kids. That kicked off a new organization, Code Equal, which she launched in Princeton in 2017. It has since served more than 200 students and held workshops at Fordham and Rutgers universities. This year, Code Equal will launch classes in Detroit and Omaha. 

“Kode With Klossy has an amazing network of students and instructors, and we have massive group chats where people are always supporting each other,” says Torres-Olivares, who is now a sophomore at Princeton University, where she’s studying computer science with plans to create a custom major that blends the craft of code with public policy. “Because of that, we’ve been able to expand our mission.”

For Kloss, these are the stories that prove the organization’s success — not because former scholars are choosing to commit to code, but because they’re choosing to create their own path. Next, she wants to dedicate more resources to empowering that budding alumnae network and has her eye on programming for girls younger than 13 and for women older than 18. 

“In the grand scheme of things, a Kode With Klossy camp is a short two weeks,” Kloss says. “But our scholars take it and run with it. We’re at a point in this organization where we’ve only just scratched the surface, and it’s time to look at what’s working, and innovate and scale. But being able to see impact in even one person? It’s so much bigger than what I ever imagined.”

Check out more stories from our October/November issue’s list of 100 Powerful Women.

[stopkingobama]

Karlie Kloss Does More for Women Than the Government Ever Could

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130239861@N06/ CC BY-SA 2.0

Karlie Kloss, the supermodel, Instagram star, business woman, YouTube sensation, and coder, has decided to tackle the gender wage gap.

I know what you’re thinking. “The gender wage gap is a myth.” “Women and men largely get paid the same wages for the same work and level of experience.” That’s true, as Steven Horowitz points out in his recent article about the myths of the gender wage gap.

However, he also points out that the difference in average earnings exists largely because men and women choose different lines of work. There are many reasons this is true, but culture is a big one. This is what Kloss seeks to change.

Kloss’s new-found love of coding inspired first donations, then scholarships for young women, and now her nation-wide coding camps.

Kloss is a social media giant. She has 2.88 million Twitter followers, 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, and 6.5 million Instagram followers.

She got her start on the cover of SCENE magazine at just 14 years old. At the age of 16, she walked 31 runways during New York Fashion Week, including for Marc Jacobs and Carolina Herrera. Her success in the fashion world is unparalleled. But along with fashion, she wanted to pursue another passion that had always fascinated her: coding.

Kloss understood that her education was entirely in her own hands, so she enrolled in coding classes at the Flatiron School and Code.org. She discovered that she loved coding and set out to excite others as well. Her efforts started small with promotions for Code.org but escalated into full-blown scholarships for young women.

Kloss wanted to do more than just throw money at the problem. She launched “Kode with Klossy,” a summer camp teaching 13 to 18 year-old girls to code. Last year, Kloss started out with just three camps: one in New York, one in Los Angeles, and one in her hometown of St. Louis. This year she teamed up with the Ford, and together they’ve expanded to 13 camps in 10 cities across the US. Over 300 young women will be able to come and explore a subject they love.

To put it simply, Karlie Kloss is a badass. When most celebrities see a problem with a society, they will run to the government and beg Uncle Sam to throw money at the problem. Kloss is doing something government funds could never do: she’s making coding cool. Walking runways and hanging out with people like Taylor Swift (one of her best friends) doesn’t mean you can’t dive into something you love. She is helping young women discover what they’re passionate about, and that’s something we can all applaud.

Forrest Plaster

Forrest Plaster is a blogger at libertyatthemovies.com and French tutor at beardedtutor.com.

  This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130239861@N06/ CC BY-SA 2.0

[americanlibertypac]

Karlie Kloss Does More for Women Than the Government Ever Could

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130239861@N06/ CC BY-SA 2.0

Karlie Kloss, the supermodel, Instagram star, business woman, YouTube sensation, and coder, has decided to tackle the gender wage gap.

I know what you’re thinking. “The gender wage gap is a myth.” “Women and men largely get paid the same wages for the same work and level of experience.” That’s true, as Steven Horowitz points out in his recent article about the myths of the gender wage gap.

However, he also points out that the difference in average earnings exists largely because men and women choose different lines of work. There are many reasons this is true, but culture is a big one. This is what Kloss seeks to change.

Kloss’s new-found love of coding inspired first donations, then scholarships for young women, and now her nation-wide coding camps.

Kloss is a social media giant. She has 2.88 million Twitter followers, 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, and 6.5 million Instagram followers.

She got her start on the cover of SCENE magazine at just 14 years old. At the age of 16, she walked 31 runways during New York Fashion Week, including for Marc Jacobs and Carolina Herrera. Her success in the fashion world is unparalleled. But along with fashion, she wanted to pursue another passion that had always fascinated her: coding.

Kloss understood that her education was entirely in her own hands, so she enrolled in coding classes at the Flatiron School and Code.org. She discovered that she loved coding and set out to excite others as well. Her efforts started small with promotions for Code.org but escalated into full-blown scholarships for young women.

Kloss wanted to do more than just throw money at the problem. She launched “Kode with Klossy,” a summer camp teaching 13 to 18 year-old girls to code. Last year, Kloss started out with just three camps: one in New York, one in Los Angeles, and one in her hometown of St. Louis. This year she teamed up with the Ford, and together they’ve expanded to 13 camps in 10 cities across the US. Over 300 young women will be able to come and explore a subject they love.

To put it simply, Karlie Kloss is a badass. When most celebrities see a problem with a society, they will run to the government and beg Uncle Sam to throw money at the problem. Kloss is doing something government funds could never do: she’s making coding cool. Walking runways and hanging out with people like Taylor Swift (one of her best friends) doesn’t mean you can’t dive into something you love. She is helping young women discover what they’re passionate about, and that’s something we can all applaud.

Forrest Plaster

Forrest Plaster is a blogger at libertyatthemovies.com and French tutor at beardedtutor.com.

  This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130239861@N06/ CC BY-SA 2.0

[josephborrello]

Magnitude and Direction, Issue #42 | 20 Sep 2019

Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication

‍♂️ These robots learn how to dig holes by watching humans do it. (So does one dig, while 4 others watch?) ✝ Robot priests are giving new meaning to the term deus ex machina. (I hope you thought that was as witty as I did.) It's amazing how much stuff (and people) you can fit into a fire truck (or ambulance, or rescue helicopter...)

Software and Programming

➕ generated.space is a great collection of very aesthetic, generative artwork. ➡ This AI tries to make emojis more lifelike and is neither particularly good, nor necessary. It is, however, very scary. Clippy is back. Ironically, he's back on Mac, not Windows. (He's also available for websites, like here for example.) The Recomendo newsletter did a better job describing this than I did, so I'll just re-print what they've written:

"I’ve waited all my life for a tool that would create art for me. It’s here. Artbreeder is a website that breeds new visual images from existing images. Using deep learning (AI) algorithms it generates multiple photo-realistic “children” mutations of one image. You — the gardener — select one mutant you like and then breed further generations from its descendants. You can also crossbreed two different images. Very quickly, you can create infinite numbers of highly detailed album covers, logos, game characters, exotic landscapes. I find it fiendishly addictive. Wanna see the zoo of unearthly creatures I found/made? (Note: If Artbreeder is not out of beta use Ganbreeder, it’s predecessor.) — [Kevin Kelly]"

Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine

You've heard of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" but have you heard of "I Can't Believe It's Mostly Water!"? Also on the topic of water, pulling moisture out of thin air in arid, desert climates won't only be the stuff of sci-fi for much longer. The website Relativity, showing how recent observations of a star orbiting near the galactic core helps support Einstein's theory of general relativity, is a great example of the kind of science communication we need to be doing more of.

Mapping, History, and Data Science

There's a (near-infinite) world of colors out there for you to name! (I named one 'Jimmy') ⛓ Do you understand how the blockchain works? If not, maybe this data sonification/visualization will help (it probably won't but it sounds and looks really cool). The orientation of airport runways may not sound very interesting, but I was absorbed by this map almost immediately. (For example, what's with the pretty drastic East/West divide among US runways?) What were the most popular videos on Youtube a decade ago?

Events and Opportunities

We're within spitting distance of Fall and there's lots of exciting autumnal activities coming up:

Sunday, 9/22 The World Health Organization is hosting the first-ever edition of the Walk the Talk: The Health for All Challenge in the United States, being held over 4 miles in New York's beautiful Central Park. This fun run/walk will bring together people from all over the world for a celebration of health, on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly

Monday, 9/23 Derek Brand's monthly ECHO biotech gathering is back and, as always, bringing together some of the NYC area's most exciting life science startups and entrepreneurs.

Monday, 9/23 Coming off a great mid-summer meetup with the Health-Tech Connect group, the Mount Sinai Innovators Group is teaming up with them again for another event featuring some great pre-SINAInnovations topics: Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Devices. Both presenters have extensive experience in the healthcare startup space and this promises to be a can't-miss event!

Tuesday, 9/24 Join NYDesigns for a tour of their 5,000 square foot fabrication facility and learn about how you can make use of all the impressive equipment there at their upcoming open house.

Tuesday, 9/24 Join GeoNYC and Doctors Without Borders for a special map-a-thon to fill in missing geospatial data for underserved regions in order to provide international and local NGOs and individuals with the data they need to better respond to crises.

Wednesday, 9/25 The NYC JLABS crew is back for their next Innovators and Entrepreneurs mixer, which promises, as always, to be a great event to meet local life science startups and biotech enthusiasts.

Wednesday, 9/25 The RobotLab meetup's September event focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Industry 4.0 and autonomous manufacturing.

Thursday, 9/26 Join GRO-Biotech, MSIG, and the Petri biotech accelerator at Mount Sinai for an info session on opportunities to get involved in their new startup program focused on helping formation-stage innovators realize the next frontier of biology and engineering

Thursday, 9/26 It's been touched on in previous Existential Medicine events, but the next science seminar collab between New Lab and JLABS dives deep into the revolutionary, and sometimes controversial technology of CRISPR. Use code "NewLab2019" to unlock the event registration.

Saturday, 9/28 Admission is just the swipe of a metro card for the Parade of Trains at the Brighton Beach station. Vintage train cars from all periods of the subway's history will be on display, as well as taking passengers on short trips around south Brooklyn.

Monday, 9/30 The NY Hardware Startup meetup is back with their regularly scheduled programming, which, in this case, means presentations from the likes of Lime, Light Phone, and more, down at General Assembly in the Flatiron.

Tuesday, 10/1 The next stop on Ogilvy's healthcare innovation pop-up series takes them to Hudson Yards, where they're teaming up with the HITLAB and SAP.iO Foundry for an event that will focus primarily on the female and underserved health innovators who are disrupting healthcare today.

Tuesday, 10/1 NYDesigns' next Women in Tech happy hour is back at Bierocracy in Long Island City. As always, individuals who identify as female and men are welcome to attend, too!

Wednesday, 10/2 The next edition of Larger Than Life Science at New York BioLabs is back and focusing on a crucial aspect of bringing healthcare innovations to market: preparing for and conducting clinical trials.

Some other upcoming events to keep on your radar...

Monday, 10/7 Join GRO-Biotech and Insight Data Sciences for a talk and Q&A about different careers in data, the most suitable backgrounds for each of them, and how Insight Data Sciences can help you make the transition.

Saturday, 10/12 The next edition of Hot Glass Cold Beer returns to the Brooklyn Glass studios in Gowanus, featuring live glass blowing, open studios, and effectively endless amounts of beer. As always, getting a ticker in advance (versus at the door) means you'll be guaranteed to get one of their hand-made glasses (which you can subsequently drink out of for the rest of the night).

October 11-16 Innovation Week at Mount Sinai. What started as just the SINAInnovations conference is now a week's worth of activities dedicated to bringing New York's biomedical innovation communities together. Here's the full lineup:

Friday-Sunday, 10/11-13 Mount Sinai Health Hackathon. The 4th annual Mount Sinai Health Hackathon will be an exciting 48-hour transdisciplinary competition focused on creating novel technology solutions for problems in healthcare. This year’s theme is Artificial Intelligence – Expanding the Limits of Human Performance.

Tuesday, 10/15 Careers & Connections 2019. October may feel far away, but I promise you it's not and you'll want to be sure to mark your calendars for GRO-Biotech's next big event, the Careers & Connections mini-conference and networking event, held concurrently with emerging healthcare technologies conference, SINAInnovations.

Tuesday & Wednesday, 10/15-16 SINAInnovations Conference. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is hosting its eighth annual SINAInnovations conference around the theme of Artificial Intelligence. A range of talks and panels will focus on the explosive growth of AI in our society and in particular in medicine, featuring international thought leaders across the range of relevant domains.

Wednesday, 10/16 Right after Careers & Connections, GRO-Biotech is hosting a fireside chat at BioLabs with Adam Wollowick from Stryker and Jack Wu from Adlai Nortye on what a career in business development looks like and how you can start a career in bizdev.

Saturday, 10/19 New Lab's annual open house birthday celebration is back, with a theme this year of Light+Motion. As always, you can expect pretty much everyone affiliated with technology, design, science, and/or entrepreneurship to turn up for what's one of the bigger bashes of the year.

Saturday & Sunday 10/19-20 The biggest bi-annual graduate career symposium in the country is back at NYU Med showcasing all the career trajectories you can pursue post-PhD. This is one of the best opportunities for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the breadth of career paths for doctorates and an amazing place to network with the next generation of scientists. More info on the two-day conference can be found here, and the registration link is here.

Saturday, 10/26 The Future of Care conference is back at Rockefeller University featuring some of the latest breakthroughs in clinical care and the innovators helping shepherd them from bench to bedside. Apply to attend the conference by September 6th.

Tuesday, 10/29 Join Columbia Nano Labs for their annual Industry Day conference. Learn how you can use and leverage the Nano Labs facilities, hear from a panel of entrepreneurs who have done just that, and listen to faculty and technical experts discuss the way these sophisticated tools contribute to cutting-edge research. (Yes, this was rescheduled from the originally planed date of 9/5.)

Thursday, 10/31 Pitching your startup in front of investors doesn't have to be spooky. The Mid Atlantic Bio Angels 1st Pitch events offer NYC's biotech entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their innovations in front of a panel of real investors and receive critical feedback on their pitches and business plans. The 1st Pitch events are also a great place to learn about the latest innovations in the NYC biotech ecosystem and connect with some of its major players.

Friday-Sunday, 11/8-10 For 36 hours on November 8-10, HackPrinceton will bring together 600 developers and designers from across the country to create incredible software and hardware projects. They'll have swag, workshops, mentors, prizes, games, free food, and more.

Map of the Month

When we hear about the 2-3 Celsius increase in temperature that's going to set us on path to irreversible environmental changes, it often sounds like it's still a ways off. As this map from the Washington Post shows, that future is already becoming a reality in some parts of the US.

Odds & Ends

Bovine Obstruction. I can't explain this.

[madeahashofit]

Code is *NOT* Poetry

Below is Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,  When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,  When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,  When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,  How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,  Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,  In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,  Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The same poem read by one of the humans on Librivox

Read by the Character Gale on Breaking Bad

Here is the same poem displayed using javascript, via codepen:

See the Pen JgjdjP by bluthgeld (@bluthgeld) on CodePen.0

Can you see the differences among these items?

***

Earlier this week I shared a link to a Twitter thread that had been making it round my timeline:

This is insane…

Until I hard read this thread I had never clocked the concept of a “10X developer.”

On, you haven’t either? That’s probably best for the best; it’ll save you from the anxiety of believing that it’s something you should be.

A 10X engineer or developer is said to be a man – always a man – who can do 10 times the work of the average developer in the same number of hours. Whether this man/machine hybrid actually exists in the meatverse is subject to much debate in the darkest depths of Reddit and the Twitter Machine. Still, that controversy hasn’t stopped developers and coders from putting “10X” in their bios/linked in pages, and hiring managers and Vulture capitalists like the dude above from hunting that particular Unicorn.

I’ve worked with these guys before. Not just Developers/Engineers, but also sysadmin, guys who couldn’t be bothered to put on clean jorts or show up for a mid-day meeting. He’s got more important things to do, like manning the ramparts against midnight blackhats or playing WoW.

To a Carpenter, Every Problem is a Nail

Probably Your Dad…

They are insanely good at ticking off the bullet points on their job description, there is no doubt about that. However, they fail at the soft stuff: working with others, listening, considering thoughts/feelings/opinions of anyone “nontechnical.” A developer with the attributes listed in the Twitter thread may be able to make magic, but only the magic that they want to create. You won’t have a conversation with them over the watercooler. And they will not see any solution to a problem that goes beyond their own experience with the world. To a Carpenter, Every Problem is a Nail.

Like white, male developers building facial recognition technology that mistakes black women for men, narrow thinking, tunnel vision, and limited experience can bake limitations into our code.

And that would be fine if HR and hiring managers were just looking for these magical beings, these 10X Unicorns. But executives, looking to maximize their hiring dollars, absolutely look for these attributes in the Quarter Horses1 who do the actual work of making a company full of actual human beings produce software to be used by other human beings.

If you ask about work-life balance during an interview and the hiring manager gives an ironic smile, you can believe there is none. They want 10X in 100% of their people.

***

The value of a Liberal Arts education has taken a beating, since at least the first half of the Clinton administration. I have a fine arts degree. When I left high school and took the Amtrak up to Boston to learn how to tell stories, many of my peers went into engineering, hard sciences, medicine, computer science. A lot of people thought I was insane.

Here’s a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: “Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.”

As said by someone who’s never read a book…

I can remember, distinctly, listening to Tom Friedman on some morning talk show, pontificating about how the world, as flat as it was, would need American’s to be the managers of the information society. An American (man), he implied, would be best served with a background in a very specific science or a very specific technical skill (like plumbing). Art, music, books, would still exist, of course, but for downtime, weekends, vacation. In the 90s, we were all headed for 4 day workweeks.

To the leaders of the free world, philosophy, history, art were hobbies to be pursued after we provided management to the workers of the world.

Still, it looks like the recognized value of a solid, well rounded liberal arts education is resurgent:

If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities. To mention just a few CEOs: Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube, history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. Of course, we need technical experts, Hartley says, but we also need people who grasp the whys and hows of human behavior.

What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place? Hartley argues for a true “liberal arts” education—one that includes both hard sciences and “softer” subjects. A well-rounded learning experience, he says, opens people up to new opportunities and helps them develop products that respond to real human needs.

***

This blog is a self hosted WordPress blog. The WordPress motto is “Code is Poetry.” Until my time at Flatiron, I hadn’t thought someone would believe that.

Poetry, like a photograph or a painting or a novel, is an object crafted by a human being. Not unlike Ruby or Javascript. It is designed to transmit information. Not just the facts on the page, but an emotion or feeling from the writer to the reader. Yes, art does fail to achieve this more often than not, though even objectively “bad” poetry will mean something, to someone. Rearrange the words on the page, change the structure or the syntax of a sentence and even that can mean something. See the work of e.e. cummings.

Code, on the other hand, fails completely when syntax and structure is not met exactly. Remove this line from the codepen above and see what happens:

const main = document.querySelector('main')

Code is a set of specific instructions from a human to a compiler on a computer. It may be satisfying to write it well, to achieve the same programming objective with fewer lines than the time before. To be efficient. Code itself transmits no meaning or feeling to a reader; what it produces may, but the code itself does not.

Code is the book. Code is the paper, the letterpress, the type, the ink. Code is the glue and binding. Code is even the postage stamp and brown kraft padded envelope that brings a slim volume of poetry to my house.

But it’s not the poetry. Words infused with human feeling and human thoughts, absent precise grammar, syntax, or even punctuation can still bring joy to the reader, bridge understanding between two people. The same is not true with code. Broken code fails completely to impart meaning to neither a human nor a computer. Code, when successful, is meaningful for what it imparts, not what it is.

***

Anyone can write a poem. Anyone can write code.2 To believe that they are somehow equivalent constructions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of art and communication between actual people. In much of my reading, some work experience, and the links above suggest that there are those in our field that make hiring and firing decisions based on the idea that the arts and soft sciences are not important. That a coder should have no interests other than code. That coding is *the* solution, not the mechanism for delivering a solution.

If we don’t know or care about how people will use our software, we will fail. Or worse, create problems that cannot be refactored out of our code. See Facebook and disinformation or Twitter and hate. Both of these entrenched problems stem from a fundamental lack of understanding by their creators, willful or otherwise, of how humans use their products or how people share ideas. Zuckerberg and Dorsey can not see solutions to the problems they have created for our society. Not because there aren’t solutions, but rather, their owners do not have the imagination (or access to people with that imagination) to identify or implement solutions.

To stretch that metaphor to the breaking point ↩

At least, that’s the promise of the Flatiron program. ↩

First Published Here http://tiwygwymw.us/hx

by Robert Pedersen

[georgeindc-blog]

Flatiron School moves into WeWork White House

The code school is offering $5K scholarships to women accepted into its software engineering program. Classes are set to start next month.

Flatiron School announced at its launch party, held at WeWork White House this month, that it would be giving a $5,000 scholarship to every woman accepted into their first class held in the area. The code school, based out of New York City, was acquired by the co-working giant back in October.

“Flatiron is committed to breaking down barriers and making gender parity in tech a reality, and we’re excited to offer every woman accepted into our first D.C. class a $5,000 scholarship,” said Adam Enbar, CEO of Flatiron School.  “Flatiron D.C. will be our first campus outside of New York City and one of the reasons we chose Washington, D.C. is because of its diversity,” said Enbar.

Flatiron will have a dedicated space at the White House coworking location with two classrooms and a large common area, with the space under construction now.

The evening offered a panel discussion on the local tech scene from startup players Elizabeth Lindsey, Executive Director of Byte Back, Amelia Friedman, Co-Founder of Hatch and Ryan Ross, Program Director of Halcyon House.

Most of the crowd attending the launch came from local education startup 2U, which announced a deal earlier in the week to license and develop Learn.co, a platform for WeWork members. As part of this arrangement, 2U will offer $5 million in scholarships to community members to access their graduate classes and online short courses.

While there has undoubtedly been shakeups in the local code school marketplace, Flatiron School is focused on making technology education more accessible by creating a community of lifelong learners.

The first cohort of Flatiron classes begin on March 12.

[sunshinekarliekloss]

Karlie Kloss Debuts Her New Kode With Klossy Offices in New York City

The 25-year-old model and entrepreneur is encouraging young women to break into tech—and has a chic new office to do it from!

Karlie Kloss took her very first coding class three years ago. In 2014, the now-25-year-old model had a short break before fashion week and decided to attend a boot camp at New York City's Flatiron School. It was meant to serve as a challenge for Kloss—not to inspire a new career.

Fast-forward to the present day: Kode With Klossy is Kloss's burgeoning charitable organization, which hosts coding summer camps for girls, awards career scholarships to young female developers, and creates a community for the role of women in tech. Now in its second year, the program has expanded from three to 15 coding camps in 10 different cities, and, perhaps equally as exciting for any young start-up, moved into its first official office. With a former Victoria's Secret Angel model for a founder (one who has graced more than 30 Vogue covers and walked 64 fashion shows in one season, no less), Kode With Klossy was going to need a little something more than the bare white walls and standard-supply furniture most tech start-ups are forced to endure in their first offices. So Kloss reached out to Homepolish and Lulu & Georgia, which partnered the model with interior designer Tina Rich. "My goal in designing this office was to create a clean, modern space that had its own personality," explains Kloss. "Since I'll be hosting my team, business partners, friends, and family in the office, it was important for the space to feel comfortable and chic, and flow from room to room."

Despite Kloss's jam-packed work and travel schedule, she didn't just hire the designer and walk away. She spent time culling resources to nail down the look she wanted and took regular weekly meetings in the Klossy offices with Rich, highlighting particular aspects of spaces she admires, from the aesthetics of her pal Emily Weiss's Glossier office to the furniture design in the Soho House in Berlin. "They have this wooden kitchen table that actually inspired me to go for a wooden piece in our conference room," she says. "Pinterest was a great resource for me. I loved researching different modern and open offices. Many of the offices I love have these amazing and intricate light fixtures, so I knew I wanted that to be a focal point of my own space."

With this direction from Kloss, Rich rolled up her sleeves and got to work. The ultimate goal? To create a space that felt more like a home than an office. "I wanted the conference room to feel like a dining room—especially since Karlie wanted to be able to host dinner parties—and the meeting room to feel like a living space," says Rich. To accomplish this, Rich chose statement-making carpets, chandeliers, and pendant lighting from Lulu & Georgia, and added unique artwork from Uprise Art to each room. Also high on Kloss's priority list was a quality kitchen. No surprise considering Kloss's now-famous gluten-free, nut-free, and dairy-free cookies, dubbed Klossies. "As an avid baker, it is really important for me to have a functioning kitchen in both my home and office so I can cook and bake for friends, family, and special guests," she explains. According to Rich, the kitchen was the biggest transformation: "It had dark cabinets and wood countertops. We freshened it up with Semihandmade cabinet fronts, brass hardware, and a cement tile on the face of the island. Karlie spends a lot of time in the kitchen making cooking videos! I wanted to make sure we created a kitchen that she would love spending time in and one that was the perfect backdrop for her videos." To really personalize the space, Kloss introduced antiques and personal items from home. The model calls her personal office a snapshot of her life: "I always keep a pair of sneakers and an extra makeup bag with my Carolina Herrera perfume at the office so I can head to the office before or after workouts. There are photos of my family and friends on my desk, and the drawers are filled with Klossies and healthy snacks that I can enjoy throughout the day. I keep a lot of books and fan mail around the office for inspiration, and even have my Video Music Award moon man as a paperweight!" Small additions (and subtractions) went a long way toward making the space look—and feel—completely different. "Initially, I didn't think I would need a dressing room, but with my busy schedule, we ended up installing a curtain in one of the rooms so I could change for different meetings, workouts, and events," explains Kloss. Another switch: Wooden panels in the middle of the office were removed and the walls were painted white to keep the space consistent. "I was surprised how much that little change completely opened up the room," admits Kloss. "What's great about the office is that while each room stands on its own, they all balance each other to create a collaborative, functional space." (x)

[zipgrowth]

How A Podcast-Turned-Startup Is Trying to Get More Non-Traditional Students Into Tech

Some of the earliest and largest coding bootcamp programs shut their doors for good last year. And it left many people wondering if these short term tech training programs are actually worth the investment (for investors and students alike).

One person who’s remained optimistic about the shake ups in the industry is Ruben Harris. Harris is a CEO of Career Karma, which aims to help prospective students navigate the bootcamp market, and he also hosts his own podcast about breaking into the tech industry, called Breaking into Startups.

We spoke to Harris recently about how his company is trying to shift the demographics of the coding bootcamp industry and what that looks like.

Subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Or read highlights from the conversation (which have been edited and condensed for clarity).

EdSurge: Coding bootcamps are often pitched as a solution to a so-called skills gap. But many students who enroll in coding bootcamps have some sort of prior academic experience. How well are coding bootcamps doing at getting people from non-traditional backgrounds into tech?

A lot of times, [universities] are able to benefit from tuition without being held accountable for getting students into a job. But coding bootcamps have only existed since 2012, and they’ve been pushed to hold themselves accountable to getting people into jobs.

Bootcamps are really good at training [non-traditional students], but they’re not very good at job search or alumni engagement. So what we’ve done is create the software layer on top of coding bootcamps that doesn’t just match you to the program, but also gives you that support system to know what the technical bar is at these programs, what the financial resources are, where housing is, what scholarships opportunities are.

It’s also valuable to connect to other people who are in it, because bootcamps are intense. It’s very psychological. Pushing through these assessments is difficult. Then even after you’re in a job, it’s helpful to connect with other people that might have been through bootcamps that are recently employed.

Do you think that coding bootcamps could be doing a better job at recruiting non-traditional students?

Yeah, I think coding bootcamps want to address as many people as possible outside of tech who want to break in. But if you think about any institution, or if you’re starting a company, attracting users is difficult. Now, most of [the coding bootcamps] either rely on Facebook ads or Google searches, or just the reputation from influencers talking about them and hoping that students fall from the sky. Figuring out how to track users is difficult, and so, to your point, a lot of these coding bootcamps reflect the demographics of the actual tech industry. It’s people that went to college, white or Asian.

But there are some examples of like things that have a completely different demographics. Foresight Academy and Hopper Academy, the majority of their cohorts are women. But to your point, most people that are in the 99 percent aren’t aware that coding bootcamps exist, which is why we created the Breaking Into Startups podcast.

How have your thoughts about the coding bootcamp industry evolved with it, especially in the last year after high-profile closures?

It’s kind of like the airlines industry, like the Wright Brothers. They proved that you can get something off the ground and get it to fly. But like there’s no Wright Brothers airline that continues to exist today. So Dev Bootcamp, they said, “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to code in three months for X amount of dollars, and we’re going to do it fast.” And they did it.

But when you do something quickly and you’re moving fast and breaking things, those things are not going to be perfect. People start improving on the model, and some of them are going to work, some of them aren’t. Some people are going to get excited, some people are going to get bought out like how General Assembly was bought but Adecco, a staffing firm. MissionU was acquired by WeWork. Flatiron School was acquired by WeWork. Now they have capabilities and vehicles to expand quickly.

If you think about education in general, like universities, those are very well endowed. They have all these resources versus coding bootcamps which don’t even have 1 percent of the resources of the entire education system. So they’re very scrappy. And they’re doing very well. But I think that we will see more consolidation. We will see more institutions popping up. We will see more improvements on the model. I will say, we’re still at the Wright Brothers phase.

So you’re pretty optimistic about these examples of like the WeWork acquisition of MissionU?

Absolutely. When people think about the coding bootcamp market, they think about the people that are currently in bootcamps, and they think about how many bootcamps exist right now. And if you think about it from the perspective of anybody that wants to learn how to code, that’s kind of like been introduced to it, but never had the follow-up for it, that couldn’t afford college, that market is massive.

Look at the people that are in Blacks Girls Code or Women in Tech that really want to learn and want to keep going to the next level. There’s a lot of amazing people that have a fervor for wanting to learn how to code, but there’s no follow-up. There’s no collaborative effort that like helps these people that are working on solutions to the same problem, to work together and move collectively, and measurably and accountability.

Where does traditional higher-ed get into this world that you’re living and working in? I think a lot of people would say today that traditional degrees are still what most employers look to.

Traditional degrees, you do learn a lot. You learn how to start something, and how to finish something. I have a degree, my co-founders have degrees. It’s valuable for us. Whether I’m going to send my kids to college or not is a question that I ask a lot of people. For me, I don’t know, because it really depends on how the university system adapts. If the university system adapts to the future, yes, I will. But in the current way, no, I wouldn’t unless I can pay for their student loans, because student loans are toxic. I think the same thing that happened with the housing crisis is going to happen with student loans, and people are going to blame college for that.

But some colleges, like Rutgers for example, is a 250 year old brand. They’ve been around for a long time, which is why I like what Trilogy is doing, which is leveraging the bootcamp brand, and powering them to have these accelerated bootcamps that are available, not just for students, but also for people in the community as well.

There’s many millions of people here that have some college and no degree, that want to take things to the next level. I think bootcamps are a great model for them, even if they don’t want to learn how to code, because there’s like all kinds of different models, that’s always higher, the sales. I think that you’re going to see the bootcamp model applied to any skill set that is necessary in the future.

Bootcamps are such a stripped down version of the computer science education, and it often lacks theory behind coding, or any sorts of GE courses, maybe courses in ethics, which more CS programs are introducing these days. Could removing those sorts of lessons perpetuate some of the diversity issues that Career Karma is tackling?

Yeah, I think that’s a valid critique. But let me push back onto a little bit. As far as ethics is concerned, there are some programs that do teach you the soft side of tech, or the soft side of people, in general, and how to use tech to not take advantage of them, but build with them in mind and make sure that they aren’t taken advantage of.

As far as the theory is concerned, to your point, people are starting to realize that three months and six months is sometimes too short. You start seeing alternatives pop up that are longer. I think the most recent example of an interview that we’re going to drop soon is 42. So 42 was started by Xavier Niel in France. It is a free school that’s graduated thousands of people, and now, they’re in Silicon Valley.

They are also a completely free school that also has housing in San Francisco, where this is like a big issue. Completely free, no strings. All you have to do is like have the motivation and dedicated to go through. To your point, there is no teachers. But it’s pure learning.

It’s interesting that you brought up 42, because for folks coming from a really traditional academic background, it can be nightmarish to think that there are no instructors, especially for students who are coming from non-traditional education backgrounds. Why do you think that that’s a good way to throw students in, and assume that they can teach themselves?

I mean, I was there. I’m very resource-driven. I don’t like to talk about things that I can’t prove. I don’t like to promote things that I haven’t seen outcomes with. I visited [42] myself last week… Students can be in this program, and they can leave at any time.

During the hackathons [at 42], people are so good that the prize is companies actually giving them internships at the end. They’re being invited into like competitions with some of the best developers all over the world. It’s amazing.

When you’re out at events, and you meet a student who wants to break into tech, and has that non-traditional background, what’s the advice that you give people for when they’re just starting out?

If you really want to do this, I got your back 100,000 percent, you just have to commit to start and finish it, and recognize that even after you break in, that that’s just the beginning, and you’re at the bottom of a new hill. Most people that make it all the way through, it’s not ’cause they’re extremely intelligent and they were born smart, it’s just because they stuck with it all the way. So if you’re willing to commit to it, so am I.

How A Podcast-Turned-Startup Is Trying to Get More Non-Traditional Students Into Tech published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness