January 2015

Intentionally or not, the data and algorithms that propel the country's largest tech companies can easily wind up marginalizing vulnerable Americans, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said.

She added that to head off those risks, workplaces should have more women and minorities helping to shape the underlying technology. "Any company that seeks to be at the cutting edge and innovative, you need to make use of the full talent pool that's available to you," said Chairwoman Ramirez, who added that she's pleased to see technology companies disclose the makeup of their office demographics. "The more diverse a group of people you have looking at these issues, the more it can help guard against" unconscious bias.

US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith said that Hollywood is forgetting to include women scientists in its major blockbusters.

She said there were plenty of women who helped the United Kingdom crack the Enigma code and beat the Nazis, but they weren’t represented in the Oscar-nominated “The Imitation Game.” “Jobs” -- the biopic about the Apple founder starring Ashton Kutcher -- left many of the female developers who helped start the computing company off the screen, she added. “If you look at the Rolling Stone’s photographs about who made the Macintosh with Steve, seven men and five women appear in all those photos,” Smith, a former Google executive, said. “But in the scene of the movie from Hollywood, accidentally no women were cast in that scene.”

According to the California state Department of Education, four schools will benefit from part of $27 million awarded to 227 California campuses to help enhance their broadband infrastructure.

El Nido and Plainsburg elementary schools, Romero Elementary School in Santa Nella and Lake Don Pedro Elementary School in Mariposa County are getting Broadband Infrastructure Improvement Grants from the state. They are intended to help isolated schools administer the new Smarter Balance state achievement tests. Rae Ann Jimenez, El Nido superintendent-principal, called the state grant a huge step in the right direction for her district 15 miles south of Merced (CA). “Our students deserve to be connected to the outside world,” Jimenez said. “We will get better connectivity to the outside through fiber optics and internal hardware connections so eventually we can move to one-to-one computer learning. It’s expensive to advance. We are taking it one step at a time."

According to a survey conducted in late 2014, Americans are spending an average of two hours per day playing games on mobile devices, up from an hour and 20 minutes in 2012. The research firm attributed the growth to rising tablet sales and technological improvements, calling those devices “central to the mobile gaming story.”

Mobile gamers are more likely to make purchases on tablets than on smartphones or iPod touches, the survey found. The most active mobile gamers, measured against usage of other types of apps on mobile devices, were children age 2 to 12, who played an average of five games per day. However, that group was overshadowed in spending on games by adults age 25 to 44.