Caravan Studios

Help youth find a meal and a safe place this summer

"More than a technology or a marketplace, the Internet is a social environment, a community space for people to interact with the expectation that principles of equity, fairness and justice will prevail. Internet governance must ensure that this online social space functions effectively for the well-being of all."

But no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. I’ve spent countless hours over the past four years logging the online activity of one particularly committed cyberstalker, just in case. And as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day.

But poverty in the United States is not just an economic or social concern. As this series will explore, the poverty that Andy and Maria, Richard and Malik, and tens of millions of "second-class citizens" nationwide, experience is also political. It is embedded in the structure of American society and maintained by an unequal distribution of political power. The statistics are straightforward enough: Half a century after civil rights, nearly 10 million voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting representation in Congress; 16 million immigrants of voting age have no formal stake in the political process; and tens of millions more law-abiding citizens are informally excluded from voting and other forms of participation. Meanwhile, the politicians on whom they rely do not rely on them: A tiny fraction of wealthy Americans lobbies the federal government while fewer than one percent provides the lion's share of campaign funds.

The digital divide was originally seen as the gap between communities with access to technology and those without. Though limited access is an issue in some areas, technology has proved to be more ubiquitous than imagined. The more pressing concern now is the divide between those who are consumers of technology and those who create it and profit from it. Blacks, Latinos and women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math jobs (see box at right). Many tech companies have been criticized for having all white-male management teams and boards of directors. "I don't see a resistance to inclusion. It's more an ignorance and people being confounded, not knowing what to do," said Cedric Brown, managing partner at the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland. Founder Mitch Kapor, a pioneer of the personal-computer industry, and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, are long-standing advocates for diversity in tech industries. For example, Brown has suggested companies expand their recruitment efforts beyond Ivy League schools to include national African American fraternities and sororities. Jay Banfield, founding executive director of Year Up San Francisco Bay Area, talks about tech industries broadening their definition of skills to include characteristics such as determination and what he calls grit, qualities prevalent among young people growing up in disadvantaged circumstances. "Young adults in our communities have the intangible skills companies are looking for that can be combined with technology skills," Banfield said. Year Up recruits 18- to 24-year-olds from poor neighborhoods, trains them in tech skills and places them in internships and jobs. Banfield said 72 graduated in the most recent class in February; four months later, 87 percent were employed, earning $40,000 a year.

SafeNight is a finalist in anti-trafficking challenge

Sadly, it was only a pilot project. but did show how a mobile device can serve to deliver just-in-time, clinically-guided medication reminders in the context of people’s lives. Or, as I like to call such things: health care (with an emphasis on care). What if this idea could be expanded beyond the clinical setting? What if we could break open the box that contains all the support that friends, family members, peer patients and caregivers beam to each other every day?

Yesterday, we got a chance to talk tech trends

And that started me digging into civic engagement vehicles, particularly via code-a-code-a-thons, data sharing, and problem solving. While there’s a lot of engagement — people interacting with the issue and sometimes even with each other — there wasn’t a lot of community built into the solution. We don’t have views that show us the scope of the problem. My representative to Congress? She votes on issues that impact the people who live on the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. What if I want to understand the impact wrought by the Biggert-Waters Act and ask her to come up with mediating solutions? Solutions that keep people in their homes. What if the people just in higher areas of Brooklyn want to do that?

But that rebuilding comes with a catch. New flood maps drawn up by FEMA, along with reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) enacted in 2012, meant that many residents, including the Lauries, must lift up their homes or face dramatically higher flood insurance rates.

How do you create a culture of innovation?

Health data is particularly vulnerable, the researcher says. Search terms for disease symptoms, online purchases of medical supplies, and even the RFID tags on drug packaging can provide websites and retailers with information about a person’s health. As Crawford and Jason Schultz, a professor at New York University Law School, wrote in their paper: “When these data sets are cross-referenced with traditional health information, as big data is designed to do, it is possible to generate a detailed picture about a person’s health, including information a person may never have disclosed to a health provider.” And a recent Cambridge University study, which Crawford alluded to during her talk, found that “highly sensitive personal attributes”— including sexual orientation, personality traits, use of addictive substances, and even parental separation—are highly predictable by analyzing what people click on to indicate they “like” on Facebook. The study analyzed the “likes” of 58,000 Facebook users. Similarly, purchasing histories, tweets, and demographic, location, and other information gathered about individual Web users, when combined with data from other sources, can result in new kinds of profiles that an employer or landlord might use to deny someone a job or an apartment.