The timing of rain and snowfall throughout the year has a great impact on the types of plants that grow in a given area. The next time you travel between Rawlins and Laramie, notice the types of plants you're seeing. Towards Laramie, there's a lot more grass and a lot less sagebrush. Farther west, sagebrush is plentiful. Sagebrush is abundant in western Wyoming where a larger portion of the year's total precipitation falls in the winter as snow. Water accumulates in the snowpack and when it melts it can reach greater depths in the soil. The deep tap roots of sagebrush are well suited to reaching this deep water. This helps sagebrush grow during the hot, dry summers. Much of eastern Wyoming receives more dependable spring and summer precipitation than western Wyoming. This rainfall pattern is well suited to the shallower rooted grasses and forbs and that's part of the reason that grasslands with little or no sagebrush are more common in eastern Wyoming. As you travel our great state, remember that when the rain and the snow falls, determines the mix of plants that exist. From the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, I'm Paul Myman.


Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host. Today our guest is Suzanne Matthews. She is an assistant professor of computer science at West Point. Welcome Suzanne. Thank you very much. So what's most exciting is that this is your 10th Grace Hopper Conference. Yes it is. You've been a decade of Grace Hoppers. So tell me about how the conference has changed over the years and what your impressions are of it this year. So this year looks like a really, really great conference. So when I first went to Grace Hopper, I actually started out as a scholarship recipient back at the 2007 Grace Hopper. That was in Orlando. And I was super isolated and I was kind of shy and I wasn't sure what I was gonna make of this but I had heard of this conference and it just completely changed my life. And how many people were there back in 2007? About 3,000. Okay, okay. I think we had about 3,000 people. Respectable?  Where I went to undergrad, it was only 24% female at the institution itself. So coming to a conference and seeing 3,000 women who were as passionate about computing as I was was just absolutely a life changer because I wasn't alone and that's one of the great things about this conference. And now here today, it's 15,000 people. Yes, it's 15,000. We've really grown and it's just great to see all these new people who are interested and passionate about computing. We certainly have a workforce shortage in the United States. So I mean, this is really boating well for our country as a whole. And you said you began coming here as a scholarship recipient and now you're the co-chair of the scholarship committee. So what does that do? What is a Grace Hopper scholar? So a Grace Hopper scholar is really a special distinction, I would say because what a scholar gets is a free ride to Grace Hopper. Your registration is paid, your hotel is paid. Basically, you get reimbursed for expenses so travel is paid for and so it really is for many of the young students who come once in a lifetime opportunity to really get this experience. And more so now than it was back then because the conference has gotten so big it's kind of hard to get registrations. So for many people, this is one of their few opportunities.  Right, so recruiters for sure but also to learn about different kinds of technologies and when you're a minority in this field, having the first look at something new, that is a conversation starter. That is an opportunity for you to get interested about things and potentially find an area of research. So the panel, you're speaking at a panel here and it is about cultivating more women in computer science academia. The numbers are depressing and bleak. Women comprise 20% of the faculty in computer science. Why is that? What accounts for this discrepancy? So computer science is a strange field because in the 1980s, I think we had about 35 to 40% women who were graduating as computer scientists and I think it was with the release of the personal microprocessor that in the personal computer that really computing started to shift to be a male dominated profession and I think we've never quite recovered from that and since men have always been at a higher representation in the faculty, it's been harder for young women to make inroads, especially when they find themselves as the only woman in their department and they constantly question if they actually belong there when none of their colleagues look like them. So back in the 1980s, as you said, with the dawn of having these personal home computers and it became a thing that the boys did because it was playing video games and a lot of the video games were shoot out bang bang not as interesting to young girls and so that really had a big effect in the 1980s in terms of women who went into it and thinkings. So now you are a female academic in computer science and as you've said, there are obstacles, there are barriers. How do you think about your career, manage your career in terms of making sure that you stay? So I've been very fortunate and it's partially because of this conference because I have mentors. Even if there aren't that many female colleagues even though I do have a few, I have so many others at different institutions. So if I run into a problem, I can call them up. I know that I am not alone and that was one of the big things that Grace Hopper in this conference taught me and because of that, it's not that bad. So talk about your research in terms of what you do at West Point, where your interest lies. So West Point is a four-year undergraduate co-educational institution. All of our students are also active duty military and so given that, we are not a very research-focused institution. However, one of my big goals as a faculty member is to introduce students to research so they have opportunities to go to graduate school and further their own interests. And the way I've done that at West Point is to really introduce them to parallel computing. Parallel computing, what is it? So parallel computing basically describes the programming of languages and of algorithms that can operate on modern architecture that have either multiple cores or large distributed networked systems. Okay, that is, break it down for me, Suzanne. Okay, so really when we talk about parallel execution, we're just talking about things executing simultaneously and it could execute simultaneously on the multiple compute cores of a computer. So it's just doing more things than one thing on your computer. It is doing more things than one thing. Okay, okay, okay. So you are introducing students to parallel computing and doing research in that area. And so then what is the upshot? Are your students going on and doing that? So I have had several students who've won national scholarships. Two, actually no, three now. Three of my students are MIT Lincoln Labs military fellows and their graduate students at Northeastern University. I have another student who won the National Science Fellowship Graduate Research Fellowship. She also won the CRA Undergraduate Research Award Outstanding Researcher Award. She won the National Physical Science Consortium Award. She's won a lot of awards. And so she's also a Churchill scholar and she's attending Cambridge University in that capacity. About your students. Yes. Are they interested in computer science in the sense that we don't think of the military as this bastion of computer science and yet it relies on technology. I mean, we are fighting technological wars today. It is, I mean. And so of course there's a lot of technology and where are your students thinking about? What is on their minds? So I mean, my students' interests are very, very diverse. I think the hot new thing right now is cybersecurity. As we produce more data, as we have a greater diversity in the kinds of computing devices, security is more and more coming to the forefront. And so we have a cyber branch, several of my students hope to join the cyber branch upon graduation. But of course, the military's history with computing goes much further back. So prior to the cyber branch, we've had a lot of students who go into military intelligence or the signal core, where they are protecting networks and actually working on projects that rely on computation to solve problems that are of interest to the military. And are your students, are there things like affinity groups at West Point in the sense of our students, particularly the women, maybe the women of color too, who are interested in computer science? Are they able to sort of get together and come to a conference like this or? Yes, actually. So one of my first things that I did when I was a faculty member is that I started EECS sisters, which is our ACMW chapter at West Point. Okay. And all of the women in our department are part of that, which is really great. Eight of my students are at the conference this year. I brought eight last year and I think 10 the year before. So every year we've managed to bring a number of our computing students to the conference. And how do you advise them? Because as you said, they are active military personnel. They could get called up, but they also are hopefully planning for careers beyond the military too. So how do you advise them in the sense of making sure that they are learning the right things to be competitive professionals in the job market? So to be competitive in the job market, I would argue that the same skills are necessary in order to make a good contribution to the problems that the military are interested in. So that's the focus I take. And I am not the only civilian faculty and I'm also not a military faculty member. So the military faculty will advise them more on the military aspects of things. And so I just want them to be strong computer scientists and hope that they know that they can always come and talk to me about whatever. And so just being a friendly face and always being willing to talk to them about, well, maybe you should put your resume together this way. You know, maybe you should apply for this opportunity. Let me help write letters of recommendation for you to graduate school. Those are ways in which I could actually help them. Suzanne, what is next for you? Are you working on any interesting research projects? Are you planning on writing books? Or what is up next for you? Well, hopefully tenure is up next. So I'm going up for promotion in a couple of years. So that's what I'm working toward mainly. But I am doing some interesting work with single board computers, which are these little clusters of raspberry pies or parallelas or other small devices that we're trying to explore if they can be used for certain computationally. Raspberry pies. Yes, yes. So I mean, that's one area of research I'm exploring right now. I also do a lot of work with CS in parallel, which is an NSF funded organization that tries to- National Science Foundation, yes. To try and inject more parallelism at the undergraduate level. So we have workshops over the summer that faculty could come to. We also run workshops at other conferences. So that's been a lot of fun. If you could advise the Grace Hopper committee for next year's Grace Hopper 2017, which will be your 11th Grace Hopper, what is the one thing you want to see next year? The one thing I want to see next year. Oh boy, that's hard because there's so much to see and do at this conference. I think I would like to see more tracks. Tracks, okay. So like we have three main areas. We have a data science. We have security. We have, I think an HCI track, but more diversity in the kinds of disciplinary things featured as tracks. Any one in particular. This is your chance, Suzanne. Grace Hopper is listening. Parallel computing, maybe? Parallel computing, okay, okay. So yes. Great, well Suzanne, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you very much for joining us. This has been Rebecca Knight here at the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas for theCUBE. We will, we're wrapping up today. So we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.


What do you say we get started? I was like, okay, cool. Hey, I'm Tony, via Chorek. I'm here to talk today about practical ways to advocate for diversity at work. I've been A-B testing the title of this talk, so sometimes I call it straight white men should advocate for diversity at work. Like any good A-B test, I only had very few sample size, so it's been accepted in both ways. But I think diversity is something that we should all care about, not just people of color and women. It's very important for our businesses. So I'll talk today about why I think that. So here's my husband and I, my husband's in the front row right here, at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Does anybody recognize the guy with the arrow pointing to him? Yes, I heard Tantorum. That's Pennsylvania Senator Rick Tantorum, who is particularly vitriolic and hateful in his speech, before Trump was Trump, he was Trump. And we do what you do at an airport, which is you grab your Starbucks or your coffee, and you wander in a haze at the airport.  And he was giving a radio interview on the phone. So I don't know to who. But he was being really hateful that day, saying things about gay families with an earshot of my husband and I, and our nephews, saying how we're destroying America, that women's place is in the home.  And I'm just getting angrier and angrier. I'm getting angry just talking about it, thinking about it right now. And I wait for him to finish, and he gets off the phone and I say, how dare you? Like I walk up to him, he's right behind me. How dare you talk about me and my family that way? We're not destroying America, we're not hurting you. I'm an American just like you are. Why are you talking about us this way? He gives me a very political answer. He says, thanks for your vote and gives me a thumbs up, which only makes me more and more mad. He starts walking away, and I notice the people around us have gotten up and are moving away from us. They're afraid of what's gonna happen. They're not gonna be able to get on their flight. They're scared of what we might do. So I, in a moment of anger, I remind him of the meme, the internet meme that made his name so very, very famous. Don't look it up right now. And I like to think that that got him. I don't know, we'll see. But I like telling the story because this is the kind of America that I live in. A lot of people live in, right? I live in Boston, Massachusetts right now, a very progressive city in a very, very liberal state. We had marriage equality way before. A lot of other states did. And we're constantly on the forefront of social issues. But I travel and I meet people like Santorum in an airport randomly. I turn on the television and I hear Trump talking some about families, about people that I care about in certain ways, it's awful. So how much more awful do you think it would be to have this in your day life and then go to work and hear the same kinds of jokes? Maybe not quite in such a hateful way, but they constantly dig at you day after day, right? That's the experience a lot of people of color and women have at work and during culture. And I want to change that. So this is my attempt at doing that. A little bit about me, I went to undergraduate school at WPI in Worcester, Massachusetts. And then went to graduate school at Tufts, all right. So I got my graduate degree from Tufts University in engineering management. I interned at NASA in high school. My first job out of college was at the Free Software Foundation, where I was the personal assistant for Richard Stallman. So after they has come talk to me, I have lots of great stories about that. And then I really got my education in engineering from Zipcar, where I was for four and a half years. How many people here have driven in a Zipcar or knows what it is? Okay, good, you've used my software, that's great. I was there while we were growing. I was one of the first eight engineers, a small team there, and then we grew to 50 engineers. We acquired two companies, we went IPO, and then we ourselves were acquired by Avis all in that time that I was there and I learned a lot about engineering at Zipcar. Currently I work at a company called Locallytics. We build software that's in all of your phones right now. It's an SDK that companies can install to see what users in aggregate are doing in their apps to build better apps, build better features. We work with companies from the New York Times to HBO, SoundCloud, and our software is installed in over two and a half billion with a B devices around the world, processing terabyte to data a day coming into our systems. And we work across Ruby, Scala, JavaScript, and a few other languages. And I manage a team of 11 engineers who are across all those languages there, and I hire a lot for our company. And I found that the single biggest challenge of building a company, especially in Boston, is hiring the best people. And everyone says this, right, but what's that word best? That's the word I wanna concentrate on. And for me, best means hiring a diverse workforce. People from different educational backgrounds, people of different genders, people of different colors, races, ethnicities. And I think that way, here's a demonstration of why I think that way. Kate Hedelston has this fantastic series of blogs where she talks about this, that the productivity of your team is a product of how well they work together and the sum of the individual talent of the team. I think all too often engineering groups focus just on the sum of the talent part of that. They talk about 10 X engineers and that's why they talk about it that way. But I like talking, as other people do, about 10 X teams. And this is why, right? The better the team works together, the more productivity I'm gonna get out of everyone. And for me, a diverse team is a team that works better together and there's research that backs this up. Here's some research from the Scientific American that teams, diverse teams prepare better, anticipate alternative viewpoints, and they know that reaching consensus is gonna take work to achieve. That to me is the process of developing a product of engineers getting together to build software that helps people and helps companies build better apps. That's the essence of why diversity for me is important. But I mentioned I manage 11 engineers, right? And that means every week I have a 30 minute one-on-one with each one of them. Where I give them on the right, I try to give them, and here's one, he's right in the front row too, so tell me if I don't do this for you. But I give you clear, frequent, and tough feedback. That's how you grow as an engineer, but the way that you're gonna best receive that is if you also believe that I care about you as a person. I'm not just telling you that tough feedback because you're replaceable and if you don't achieve that, I can replace the cognitive machine, right? I mean, that's a lot of engineering departments operate that way or people feel like they do. So I celebrate everyone on my team as a whole and diverse person. Does that make sense to people? I wanna lead you through five ways that I've found are practical ways you can advocate at work for diversity. Measure, fund, raise, call out, and recruit. And I'll preface this by saying I'm not an expert in this. I wanted to share my experiences because that's how I think we all learn better that way. I work for a company who's one of our major products is analytics. We tell people what you do in their apps, and so I'm used to using data to make the problem clear. You can see at the top, the gray bars at the top is the US population distribution. This is from a few years ago. And how the major tech companies in America are lined up with those gender and ethnic distributions. So you can see the gender distribution, and we know that it's not a secret, right? That the gender distribution in all of our companies is out of whack. As are the representation of Latino and black employees, especially. And companies these days from Google, Yahoo, Pinterest, Etsy, right, they released their gender and ethnicity breakdowns. So I said, oh, this is great. I wanna do this at Localytics. But our company's 250 people, now we're near the size where we have an HR department who knows how to conduct a survey. How do I conduct a survey with some really sensitive questions in it, right? Where are some techniques? I couldn't really find a lot of information. So I pieced together a survey for our company and I open sourced it so people can run these kinds of surveys at their own companies. Our first decision was how do we ask people what ethnicity and race you are? It's a very complex question. A lot of people identify as many of these or several of these. And it's also a very personal question. So we settled on a government form called the EEO-1, very official sounding, right? But any company of a certain size has to fill this form out of their employee makeup. And we thought that using the same categorizations for ethnicity and race would give us at least a benchmark that we could use. We also wanted to be cognizant that people identify as in gender in different ways, right? So we wanted to not have it be a binary choice and have it be a right in field but people identify however they wanted. On the back end, when we got the data in an anonymized fashion, this did mean we had to massage the data a little bit, right? And because people would put an M when they meant mail. So we had to assume and guess what they meant. But it turned out not to be a big deal. And because we're only 250 people, and we wanted to release the data in an anonymous fashion, we didn't want to have it be super identifiable. We didn't want people to look at it and say, oh, I guess that that's that person answering that question. And so when it came to GLBT affiliation, we chose just do identify with any of these terms or not. Because we thought if we dove down into it, it would be too identifying. I really wish that this next slide that I showed you was a result of how we're doing awesome, right? How the gender breakdown of localitics is world-class, matches the US population. Same thing for ethnicity. And unfortunately, that's not the case. We look just like this slide from Google. We suffer, we struggle with the same problems a lot of companies do, except we're trying to do something about it and that's really what this talks about. But I feel like at a tech conference I should show, okay, here's the result we got, right? We're spectacular for this reason. We also, we fund local groups at localitics in an effort to raise awareness for it. I'm used to getting in my inbox every week, Ruby Weekly, DB Weekly. Anybody subscribed to these weekly tech email newsletters? Yeah. There wasn't one for diversity that I found. There's Model View Culture, which is a fantastic publication. I think they're actually print and online. But what I started was diversityhackers.com. This is every Tuesday morning, you sign up, you go to diversityhackers.com. I will send you a curated list of five articles from that week. That week's news in diversity. Practical tips that you can use in your company, how other companies are pushing this problem. We recently were sponsored by Buffer, the social media app. They wrote about us on their blog. And so it's been growing every week. And I encourage all of you to sign up for it and give me some feedback of what kind of articles you wanna hear about. So we also support local women's groups in Boston. This one is called She Geeks Out. You can see on the bottom right there we made little shot glasses for everyone to take home. We bought dinner for this group. It's about 150 women. This is the offices, our old offices in Boston. They showed up and we had a speaker present. On the left, that's Sarah Rakowitz. She was the senior product manager at Localytics. She talked about techniques to build a product and how we build it at Localytics. And on the right, that's Diane Hesson. She's the CEO of the Startup Institute. She talked about founding your own company as a woman, especially in Boston, techniques and trips she's found. You know, it was a feel-good event. Everyone had a great time. We had some fantastic barbecue. Although now I'm in Kansas City, I can't really compare, I guess. But more than just a feel-good event, I put my recruiter hat on and I'd say that was 150 women who came into our offices, saw what it was like to work at Localytics. And we got several warm leads of people reaching out to us afterwards saying, how can I come work for your company? And that to me is, if I'm not doing that every week, I'm not doing my job as a manager really, encouraging people to come work for our company. Another thing I tried was starting my own monthly meetup in Boston. There weren't any groups for gay engineers, LGBT engineers to meet up, so I started one called Code Pride. Again, if I don't hear this from people about Localytics, that I was interested in Localytics before, but I'm way more excited now that you host Code Pride, that's part of my job as an engineering manager is to want people to want to work for us. So another practical way that you can advocate for diversity is by letting other people know that it's important to you. So I started at Localytics about a year and a half ago and the second week on the job, I didn't know anybody, they bust us all two hours away from Boston to a casino for an offsite, a company offsite for three days. Very, very nervous. And the whole thing started off with a three hour event where the CEO laid out the vision for the company for the next three years and then we had an open question and answer period. So you can imagine all 250 people in a room, people are sort of lobbing softballs at the CEO, that's what you do in a big company organization like that. And then I let a few people ask some questions and then I ask the CEO, what are you doing to increase diversity among the management at Localytics and among the company as a whole? And I don't think he was expecting that kind of question. He's a person of color himself, he's of Indian descent. So he said, obviously I care personally about this issue and it's important for our company to hire a diverse workforce. But then he did something very unexpected. He turned the microphone back on me and said, Tony, what are you gonna do about it? And I paused and I stammered my way through an answer and I said, you know what, that's, Raj, thanks for giving me that opportunity. He did what all good leaders do, which is he didn't have an answer but he wanted me to take leadership position at Localytics to show them how diversity could be different here at the company. It was nerve-wracking, I gotta tell you, and it probably would be for a lot of people in this room to stand up and say like, this is important to me, especially in front of the whole company. But the best leaders, the companies you wanna work for, the companies that accept that and want to help you change the culture. But it's also important to talk about this because the perception among engineers is not equal to the reality that a lot of women and people of color face. This is research from Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's Foundation. 72% of men responded that they think women have the same opportunities as men in the workplace. And this doesn't sound right, right? Because women on the whole in the United States make less than men. What I was surprising to me that 16% of people said they have more opportunities than men. We hear this daily from engineers not just leaving your company, but leaving the industry as a whole. There's a problem here and there's a perception gap. So it's important that you talk about this to your fellow engineers and to your management, that this is a problem. An easy way that you could raise awareness for diversity at work is something like your conference room names. We recently moved to a brand new beautiful office in downtown Boston that was built out specifically for our company. So we had to rename all the conference rooms. What an easy opportunity for us to name them after women and LGBT engineers who made a fantastic contribution to the industry. These are names familiar to a lot of us here, Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, Alan Turing. But think about other departments who also book these conference rooms who don't know who these people are. Every time they book a conference in Grace Hopper, it's an opportunity to talk about why she's important to our industry and to engineering in general. You can even include it in the description of the room name. I mean, it's not hard to sort of subtly reinforce that people of all stripes and colors and backgrounds are accepted here at Localytics. So another thing that happens at work is people tell jokes or they say things that make people feel uncomfortable. And so I can talk through some techniques I use to call that out when they hear that happen at work. Growing up, I thought mayonnaise came with tuna fish in the jar. I'm the oldest of six kids. We grew up in a small house in Baltimore City. Tuna fish sandwiches were a popular snack of ours.  And I thought, why do I have to make this when the mayonnaise jar comes to the tuna fish inside the jar already? And of course it doesn't, right? But that's because the laziness of my brothers and sisters and I, that every time we would double dip and add more mayonnaise, we would leave tuna fish behind in the jar, okay? What a great metaphor for our engineering cultures, that things that seem like that's, oh, they've always been that way but that's how it has to be, right? It's actually a result of people not expanding their world view or being lazy about certain things, right? When I was making the slide, you can't find a stock photo of tuna fish in a mayonnaise jar so I had a little photo shoot. And I bought a jar of mayonnaise and I bought some tuna fish and my husband had this disgusted look on his face as I was doing it. It's kind of gross, right? And I said, good, we should all be so disgusted at the current state of our engineering cultures when it comes to diversity. How many people are familiar with this tool, this SBI tool? Anybody heard this before? One person, two people, three of them. It's a technique when talking about sensitive subjects or subjects that people can get really offended at or defensive with, giving them feedback in a way that still makes you heard. So there's this thing that happened at work where we have a pull-up bar, like you can do pull-ups on it which is a very macho thing in the first place. Probably doesn't have any room in our company anymore but a couple of people from a different department came over and it was right next to my desk and they start doing pull-ups and then they, based on where their bodies were positioned they made a joke that I took as offensive towards gay people. And I'm out at work, it's not a secret so I know that they know better than the state of those kinds of things at work but it could be hard to speak up and say that that was not an okay joke to say.  Do you mind not saying those kinds of jokes at work? So that's two sentences and when I did that first sentence was talk about a specific situation.  And that has a way of diffusing the situation so I didn't call them homophobic, it's not defensive, they can't really argue with the facts, especially they can't really argue with how it made me feel and I provided them what I wanted them to do which was stop telling those kinds of jokes at work. This tool, I encourage you to read more about it if you're interested, it's from the center for creative leadership, they have a little booklet on it that you can practice and it's a great tool for giving general purpose feedback that might be hard to give. And finally, recruiting and retaining the best employees. This was from a few months ago, the front page, top article of the Boston Globe, shortage of tech workers worries mass companies. How many of you have trouble hiring people? Yeah, right, there's a lot of jobs, a lot of qualified people out there, there's a culture of switching jobs often so you wanna attract and retain the best talent and I mentioned earlier how some women aren't just leaving your company sometimes when they hear these jokes or they feel that they're not really welcome, they're leaving the entire industry and that's a shame. I wanna do everything I can to attract the best talent to come work at localitics. You know, and I hear sometimes people talk about, Tony, we obviously want more women, we want more people of color to work here but we don't wanna lower the bar. How many people have heard that before? This notion that there's a bar that you don't wanna lower for other people. Etsy, actually there's this fantastic metaphor that they have for this where they say people are like potatoes. We all have areas of us that are more well rounded than other areas, maybe some technologies where we have a divot like the eye of the potato. We have this shape about us, right? It's not about a line, we're not throwing that potato over a bar, we're hiring the entire potato, the entire person. And so I would much rather take a candidate, offer them a position, a candidate who maybe didn't do as well on our coding test or as well in our whiteboard test but has a proven track record of leading teams through quick iteration and being a visionary leader on their team. That person to me is much more valuable than a so-called rock star or superstar who is used to only working by themselves. A funny thing happens when you start talking about diversity at work, you get emails like this. Two months ago from a female coworker of mine, below is the perfect example of patronization in the workplace. This is from a male coworker of hers who had given her a to-do list about a job that she had been doing for many, many months. Somebody who felt like she wasn't doing according to him what she should be. And she said this, how patronizing is that to get a to-do list of what you should do every day? And so this was an opportunity, we talked in person about this too, this was an opportunity for me to go teach her about the SBI tool and say, well, here's my technique. Whenever I get an email like this, here's how I approach it and here's maybe, here's a tool set, some things you can do and try with this person. But it's difficult, I get people a few times a month send me emails like this or pull me aside and say, this just happened, what can I do about it? And sometimes all people want is a sympathetic ear, somebody to listen to and talk to about it. Do you have a question? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. There's about 10 minutes at the end for questions. If I can just finish, is that okay? And then we can talk about that, sounds good. And finally, you can work with your HR departments to provide inclusive healthcare, trans-inclusive healthcare, generous OBGYN and paternity and maternity leave. And by the way, these things aren't just for the people that they directly affect, right? It's not just for women who are currently having a baby. It's also a signal to people that it's okay to have a work-life balance here at Localytics or my company, right? It's okay to want to have a family, we want you here, and we're signaling that by giving you as much time as you need after you have a kid, right, to bond with them. So we've talked about five ways today, measure, fund, raise, call out and recruit to advocate for diversity. And I wanna leave you with a few thoughts that a lot of people think about diversity efforts like this, like it's a binary thing. Either I'm fantastic at it, I'm on, or I'm not good at it, so I shouldn't even try. I'm off, right? We're engineers, this is a way a lot of us think, myself included, sometimes about things that if I can't be the best at it, I'm not gonna try. But I wanna encourage you to use some of the tactics we talked today to think more about your diversity journey like this. But over time, you'll have low points and you'll have high points. Maybe a low point is you didn't call out speech that was derogatory, or you said a joke yourself. You slipped up and you said something you probably shouldn't have. The next day, maybe you talk through it with your team and you apologize, or the next time you hear that speech or that behavior in a meeting, you call it out. But over time, you're getting better at it, right? I love Nidagrass Tyson. He has this quote, I love being wrong because that means in that instant I learned something new that day. And I have this in my head every time I try to talk about diversity at work. What we've really talked about today is an agile or iterative approach to being an ally for diversity. Okay, back to the airplane real quick. I did get on the flight, I was not kicked off, thank goodness. And in that great equalizer of American society, both Senator Santorum and I and my husband were all three seated in a coach together. Luckily not in the same row or near each other. But we land in Omaha, Nebraska, legally unmarried. We left Boston married, legally unmarried in Omaha, Nebraska. And it's something that's on our mind. If you or I went to the hospital, would we have as many rights as we do in Boston? No, we wouldn't. And you can't make this up. That very same weekend was the weekend that the Supreme Court handed down the ruling that legalized our marriage in Omaha. We left Omaha that weekend married again. It was a great feeling, right? A full citizen.  Things can change. We can change our cultures. All it takes is people like you and me to try. Thank you. So the question was in this case, the to-do list coming off as patronizing, how did I work with the individual in this scenario? Both individuals? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like everything in life, this is a super complicated example because the person in question was senior to me even. And I don't look at this like I need to go solve it. It's not my, sorry, that it's not, I don't look at this like it's my problem to solve necessarily, because that's also a way of patronizing, like, oh, you can't solve it yourself. I'm the man, I'll step in and solve it for you. I'm sensitive to that. I don't want to have that come across that way. So this particular employee and I had a conversation about that SBI tool and practiced it with her. You know, it's one of those things that you can help somebody practice on you as an ally, somebody who won't judge them for wanting to feel this way. And honestly, I think it helped her to hear from somebody, you know, I'm a manager at work. I deal with some of these issues sometimes. It helped to hear from her that her feelings were valid. And yes, I do think that this was a case where that he had some, he could have worked on how he communicated to her. My approach for her was not to do a reply email, to go talk to the person face to face because a lot's lost in that translation. So the question was, make sure I heard you correctly. The question was, have I kept measurement on which one of these techniques works best? Was that the whole question? Okay, I haven't. But one of the ways we've started to measure this is we use a recruiting tool called Greenhouse. It keeps track of resumes coming in and it helps us facilitate our hiring process. It was a point of pride of mine when I didn't have to say anything when people assumed that we would keep track of the number of women candidates and people of color that we talked to and asked the candidates to self-identify. It could be tricky. You don't want to get into this game of guessing. But even that was a, when somebody interviews with you and you say, hey, we have this optional thing where you can self-identify, it's important to us because we want to make sure, because diversity is important to our company. It's a way to open the conversation about diversity being important. That make sense? I will be out in the hallway. Please come talk to me. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you, everyone.


Over the next two weeks, the Gradeship Inc. 1,000 Smiles Dental Program will be operating in Cicero, Canary's and the Bodily Correctional Facility. Gradeship Inc. 1,000 Smiles is operated by the U.S.-based non-profit Gradeship Inc. and provides access to free first-class dental care and education. Founded by Joseph Wright, also known as Papajo, the Gradeship Inc. 1,000 Smiles Dental Program has been a staple across the Caribbean since 2003, operating in the islands of Jamaica, St. Lucia and Grenada. This week, the 1,000 Smiles Dental Program is running concurrent clinics at the Cicero Combined School and the Bodily Correctional Facility. The 1,000 Smiles Dental Clinic wraps up in the community of Canaries from July 30th to August 4th at the Canary's Primary School. So we have, in week one, we have 33 volunteers who have come in through Papa Joseph Wright's Initiation and Leadership. They've come in from across the U.S., essentially, and they've given their time and service to the project. They've come, they've worked for one week, they will leave. In week two, another set of volunteers will arrive and do the same thing. What they have in common is the location, the venue for bed nights and accommodation, which is Sanders Grand and Sanders House Yen. So this is the contribution of the results to the project that they provide. People, young people, older ones as well, have decided to give back to their communities or to our communities through their vocations, and so they've come, the call has been made and they've come. We have male and female people from all ages, from young adulthood into more mature people who have agreed to give the service and they really enjoy the experience. Now for them, the climate is one of the bigger deterrents because it's really hot and you can feel the heat in your hair as well. So they really are suffering, but they're doing the work with good hearts and that's what it's really about. And it comes back really to just a random act of kindness that I like to talk about because you do something for somebody and it comes back to you. Nicole Smith is a project coordinator and has been affiliated with Great Shape 1000 Smiles for the past 18 years. She describes the work being undertaken by the charitable organization as heartwarming. I've done all the projects that they offer because you know they have the literacy, they have teacher-teachers, they have the eye care as well, so it's a big project and it's just, for the years, it's just so great to see the work that they have done meeting so many great people and seeing the service. You see someone coming in with a tool that needs to be filled and seeing that person coming out smiling and the changes on those faces to just see someone get a denture that has never had a denture before. And when you look at that face and you see the tears, the tears of joy, it gives me the sense of wanting to do more as a fellow Caribbean person as well. Ms Smith also describes the magnitude of the logistical preparation ahead of the delegations visit. It's a lot of, you know, coming together as a team to get this work done, to get the equipment going, to get the toothbrush, the toothpaste, the flask and all of the works being getting the chair set up, you know, the sweating and all of that, but it's awesome at the end of the day to see that we can do it together, to know that it's all the Caribbean coming together. It's awesome. Dental hygienist with the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Mrs Sheryl Shansea, says the ministry is pleased to be associated with the initiative which has been bringing a much-needed service to the doves of St. Lucian's. It helps us because the department that we have, it is a small complement of staff and we will never be able to accomplish every task there is in dentistry. And so when they come here and their sisters doing procedures like fillings, cleanings, surgical extraction and simple extractions as well, it helps us in a tremendous way. And by extension I should say it helps our country, St. Lucia, and all we can say is that we endorse it, we want them to come again year after year to help us out. The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs has assured that the delegation has met the requisite requirements for operating on the island. From the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Julia Tepita reporting.


Hello, I welcome you all once again to my channel Explore Education. I am Dr. Ashmi Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, Assistant Nagar's University of Allahabad. It is my email ID and today I am going to discuss a very genuine, important and relevant topic under psychological testing that is characteristics of a good psychological test. This lecture will be in bilingual mode and it must be useful for you. So let's see what is a psychological test? All the students do psychological testing. Psychological testing is a relatively young branch of one of the youngest of the scientists. Psychological testing is a standardized measure of a person's behavior that is used to measure the individual differences that exist among people. A psychological test is a standardized measure. Psychological test is an objective and standardized measure of an individual's mental and behavioral characteristic. A psychological test is a standardized measure of an individual's mental and behavioral characteristic. A psychological test is a systematic procedure. A psychological test is a systematic procedure. A psychological test is a systematic procedure of observing a person's behavior or performing describing it with the aid of a numerical scale or a category system. This means that we can give data on a person's behavior, performance, and numerical scale. Psychological tests are written, visual or verbal evaluations administered to assess the cognitive and emotional functioning of children and adults. Psychological tests are written, visual or verbal evaluations are written to assess the emotional and emotional functioning of the person, the children, and the children. If we want to define it, then a standardized psychological test procedure measures either quantitatively or qualitatively. One or more aspects of a trait through a sample of verbal or non-verbal behavior. That is, verbal or non-verbal behavior or a trait through a psychological test. Anastasi and Arbina have defined this in their childhood. It is an objective and standardized measure of a sample of a person's behavior. As simple as that. The definition above is that a person's behavior, behaviour, and human behavior is a very important way of doing it. In 1998, it was said that a psychological test is a standardized procedure for sampling behavior and describing the same in scores or categories. Then, the need for psychological tests. Why does it need to be done? We need to identify the weakness and strength of children and students. We need to identify the weakness and strength of children and students. Support individualized lesson plan. If you want to make an individualized lesson plan according to the child's nature, then it needs to be placed in a place. It needs to be placed in a place where it needs to be placed. We need to see the progress of the child's student. Identify the disabilities. If there is any disability, then helping the administrative and academic works and vocational ability. We can prescribe it for vocation. We will also do divorce. Now, we will come to the main topic. If we say that it is a good human behavior test, then the test will be a good human behavior test. When it will be objective, then it will be a list, it will be reliable, it will be suspicious, it will be valid, it will be valid, it will be non-scientific, it should be standardized. It should be humanistic, and it should be practical and private. A good psychological test must have objectivity, reliability, validity, non-standardization and practicality. Let's see what is objectivity. The degree to which the test results are obtained is the same by scoring different scores without the influence of their biases or beliefs. Non-scoring is known as objectivity. Objectivity means that more scores are more individual. If they are administering the same test, then they get the same result. It means that their bias or their belief is not affecting the scoring system. Most standardized tests of aptitude and achievement are high in objectivity. The tests of many clubs and aptitudes are high in objectivity. If we look at the dictionary, what is objectivity? It is the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association. It is a tendency. The tendency to base judgments and interpretations on external data rather than on subject impactors such as personal feelings, beliefs and experiences. The tendency to base judgments and interpretations on external data, the data we are getting, is based on our judgment and interpretation, not on subject factors. What we think, what we believe, what our beliefs are, what our beliefs are. It doesn't matter. What is objectivity? A quality of a research study such that it's hypothesis, choices of variables, study measurements, techniques of control and observations are as free from bias as possible. Whatever we are doing in it, if there is no bias in it, then it is just an assumption. And the test should be free from subjective judgment regard. The last one is the APA dictionary definition. It should be different. The test should be free from subjective judgment. It means that your judgment will not come, There will not be judgment of subject, what the passive is regarding what is theffentlich regarding his or her caution with the expert on knowledge, behavior , or potentially measure and evaluate there will be no subjectivity in it. How is that? will be subjectivity. And a good psychological test should be objective. Then reliability. If you see the reliability, It includes it's video and you can read it in detail It shows reliability, the objective evaluation of psychological tests involves primarily the determination of the reliability and reliability of the destined specified situations. As used in psychometrics, the term reliability always means consistency. Consistency is the consistency of scores. Consistency of scores is the consistency of what? Consistency of scores obtained by the same persons. Consistency of scores obtained by the same persons when re-tested with the identical test, when the same test is tested again, and when the same test is tested in the same equivalent form, or under other variable examining conditions, or in different tests, the same or consistent score of the same persons is obtained, so that test is reliable. This concept of reliability underlies the computation of the error of measurement of a single score, thereby we can predict the range of fluctuation likely to occur in a single individual score as a result of irrelevant chance factors. They are saying that if the consistency is not coming in the score, it means that there is a measurement error. And that error can be through chance factor, or through irrelevant factor. By chance, if you have a problem, or if you are sick, then you are not well, if you are not feeling well, then you can face a problem in the score. The concept of test reliability has been used to cover several aspects of score consistency. The concept of reliability in that score consistency has been covered by many factors. In its broadest sense, test reliability indicates the extent to which individual differences in test scores are attributable to chance errors. They are saying that if the test is reliable, then your score will be consistent. But if there are differences in the score, then it will be because of chance error. That is, the wrong by chance. To put it in more technical terms, measures of test reliability make it possible to estimate what proportion of the total variance of test scores is error variance. They are saying that if we talk in more technical terms, then what does test reliability mean? That we can estimate it. We can tell them how much part of the total variance of the test score is error variance. That is, the error is because of chance factor, and that error will not be consistent with the score. So, what is the matter of death? There should be consistency in this score. And if it is consistent, then your test is reliable. And if your test is reliable, then that is the main feature of a scientific experiment. In the very titty, undoubtedly the most important question to be asked about any psychological test concerns is very difficult. The importance of any scientific experiment is very important. The degree to which the test actually measures what it purports to measure. That degree, that limit, that extent of the test, that experiment is not being done for which it has been made. Very titty provides a direct check on how well the test fulfills its function. The determination of very titty usually requires independent or external criteria of whatever the test is designed to measure. The validity of a test concerns for the test measures and how well it does so. Moreover, the validity of a test cannot be reported in general terms. We always tell that no test can be said to have high or low validity in the abstract. Abstract means that it is high or low. It will always be against a criteria. Its validity must be determined with reference to the particular use for which the test is being considered. Then, for determining test validity, the standards for educational and psychological tests, these procedures are classified in the three principle categories, content, criteria, validity and construct validity. You can see the old video of validity. You will be able to see that there are three categories that are classified in the content, validity, criteria, validity and construct validity. Criteria validity becomes predictive and concurrent, construct validity becomes your determinant and conformity. So, you can see the old video there. And norms. You can see my old video or previous video where I have discussed the norms in detail. The norms are grade norms and age norms. What are the norms? Test norms describe the characteristics or behaviors that are typical or common within a specific population. We say that age is not according to the norm. The norm is not according to the norm. It is not typical, it is not common. It is deviated. In other words, test norms compare a person's answers to the answer of other test takers in the same group. What does the norm mean? It is comparing. It is not comparing. It is the answers of the same group that the test takers have answered. Test norms consist of data that the relative standing of an individual who has taken the test. That is, the test we have done, we are participants and we are the subject to give the test. So, the rest of the students, the test takers, the rest of the individuals who have performed it, what is their relative position in the norm? By itself, the subject is not a raw score. That is, our raw score is 100 out of 100 of which we have achieved 75. Until we find out that how many students have done more than 100, 75, they have reduced it to 75. If the maximum students have performed better than 75, that means we have performed very well. But our score is higher than many people, so we have performed very well. But our performance will not depend on our performance. In fact, the rest of the test takers are performing this very well. Okay. Almost always, a test score must be interpreted as indicating the subject's position relative to others. In some group, some group should be the same. Norms provide a basis for comparing the individual in the group. Okay. Our comparing base provides norms, values called centiles or percentiles. We say the result is percentiles. How many percentiles do you have? That is, we have scored well from so many people. Serve as the basis for one widely applicable system of norms. From a distribution of the groups, the raw scores, the percentage of subjects falling below any given raw score can be found. If we have 75 percentiles, that means we have performed better than 74 percentiles and 25 percentiles have performed better than us. Any raw score can then be interpreted relative to the performance of the reference or normative group. Then standardization. As you can see, you do not get this term in characteristics, but standardization is necessary. It is important to remember that the initial definition of psychological test was described as a standardized measure. Whenever you read the definition of psychological test, you will realize that it is a standardized measure. That means you can handle it in a practical way, in an administrative way, in an administrative way, in a scoring way. What does this mean? Standardization means uniformity of procedure. That is, one thing will be done. For this, you have to administer it and score it. It is not like we are administering in some other way, or in some other way, so that is not a standardized measure. Otherwise, it will be considered as a practical procedure. Another important standardization of a test is the establishment of norms. We have talked about that we should establish the norms of our test only then it will be a practical procedure. Psychological tests have no pre-determined standards of passing or failing. Like criteria reference. There are two types of tests. You can listen to this in the old video. Criteria reference and norm reference. Criteria reference and criteria reference are already passed. If you pass 10 to 100, if you pass 32, then it is a fail. But in norm reference, we can top 10 to 100 and fail 80 to 100. Why? Because the comparison of our group is performed in a way that this age group has a typical characteristic. As its name implies, a norm is in normal or average performance. Thus the administration scoring and interpretation of scores are objective in so far as they are independent of the subjective judgment of the individual examiner. And last but not the least, practicality. The test is very good and reliable. It is very good and valid. The norms are also set in a standardized way. But if it is practically very difficult to administer it, then it is of no use. It means that the test is easy to design, easy to administer, easy to see. No matter how well it is reliable at least, it has to be practical to make and to take. This means it must be economical to deliver. If it is very expensive, then it is useless. The layout should be easy to follow and understand. It should be easily followed and understood. It must stay within appropriate time constraints. It is difficult. It takes at least 2-3-4 hours if it is going on. Who will do it? Who will be the subject? Who will be able to do it? There is not much time. Everyone keeps quiet. It must be relatively easy to administer. It should be easy to administer. It is very typical. It is correct evaluation procedure is specific and time efficient. Okay. So this question is very much asked what are the characteristics of a good psychological test? Or do you give feedback when someone is testing creativity or creativity then they will ask you if you have a good experience. In general you should know reliability, validity, norms, practicability, objectivity, and standardization. If you are a psychology or a student then I have completed this a very important, basic and easy to understand topic. Characteristics of a good psychological test. Okay. So


The best thing about my job is you're only limited by your imagination. My name is Sheena Graham. I am a nudgy woman from Western Australia. When I was in high school, I planned to finish year 12. That was seen as a big step because not many of my family had finished year 12. So I was like, well, that's not going to stop me. But I became a single parent and I had to wait until my son was older and started school before I could go to university. But I heard about the Institute of Curious Education at Dickon University. So they fly Indigenous students in from right around Australia and the Torres Strait to study block releases. And they give you intensive support while you study at home. I did my degree and I thought I'd apply for seven graduate opportunities here in Canberra because I thought Canberra's where politics happens. And my degree in political science was really interesting to me so I wanted to do it day by day. When I was in AusAid, I got to experience all this knowledge and experience from the overseas aid program in communities in the Pacific where they were going through issues that my family was experiencing back in WA. So I got to see firsthand of how other communities grappled with similar challenges and how government used its policies and programs to help enable. The value of having Indigenous Australians working on the aid program helps bring that lived experience. We're in foreign policy. Can Australia push the global agenda in a way where we have our own strengths? And it was pretty clear that economic development is one of our greatest stories to tell because domestically the Department of Commerce and Cabinet was really energising and building the Indigenous business sector in Australia recognising that by enabling communities not just to set their own development but to help them to use their business to fund their development and be independent of government. That was working quite well and was working well in the aid program so it made sense to me that when the delegation went to the UN expert mechanism on the rights of Indigenous peoples in Geneva was to go and convince other states that it was worth investigating what can the UN do to help enable Indigenous peoples to set their own economic development priorities. So with the foreign policy it was really just me and a friend sitting down with a whiteboard mapping out where can Australia add value to global policy. In Canberra helping people realise that Australia, yes we have our challenges but that shouldn't stop us from taking our strengths overseas and sharing our lessons with other countries and other governments.


Appalachian Wireless is Appalachian Advantage. Unlimited text, talk, and two gigs of data for as low as $45 a month. Or if you like, get five lines on eight gigs of data for just $145 a month. See store for details. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless and East Kentucky Network Company. The murder trial for 22-year-old Anthony Raheem Ariaga continued today in Mingo County Circuit Court. Ariaga is accused of killing former coal company executive Bennett Hatfield. Hatfield was allegedly shot in the back while cleaning his wife's grave at Mountain View Memory Gardens in Mayer Memorial Day weekend last year. The day consisted of gathering information and logistics from officials working the case and those who had a part in the investigation. Today, the prosecution brought forth several witnesses. Before lunch, the jury heard testimony from Ben Hatfield's twin brother, Dennis Hatfield, who allegedly located Hatfield's body along the riverbank. Hatfield stated that Ben had what he called a cemetery kit and cleaned his wife's and in-laws' graves at least once a month. During the cross-examination, the defense asked if Ben Hatfield had any current or past enemies due to his line of work. Dennis claims he had no knowledge of any. The jury heard from the Mingo County medical examiner and a medical examiner expert who was also the lead examiner in the case. After lunch, the courtroom heard testimony from Ronnie Spurlock and Bradley Preston Acres, who allegedly drove Ariaga from Mayer to the town of Wayne after the murder took place. Spurlock lives next door to Mountain View Memory Gardens. He said he and Acres were outside when they saw a man enter his property from the river wearing only boxers. Spurlock told the jury Ariaga stated he had fallen in the river and needed to use a phone. He allegedly let him use the house phone and gave him a pair of shorts. Both men claim that Ariaga was dry and didn't look like he had been in the river. They also said Ariaga offered them $40 to take him to the ride aid in Wayne County. The two stated Ariaga acted as if he was quote on drugs saying he was very anxious and his eyes were racing back and forth. Kelsey Runyon and her dad Keith Pauley also took the stand. Runyon stated she was the ex-girlfriend of Ricky Peterson and friends with Ariaga and his alleged co-conspirator, 20-year-old Brandon Lefitz Patrick. Peterson was also charged with obstruction, accessory after the fact, and false information to law enforcement pertaining to the case. Runyon and Pauley live next door to the ride aid. They say he acted strange and told them quote, I had to do it. I had to cap him. Both claimed he meant he had to shoot someone. Spurlock, Acres, Runyon, and Pauley each identified Ariaga in the courtroom as the man in the white shirt. Jury also heard from West Virginia State Trooper Contos. The trial will continue throughout the week. In Williamson, Shelby Porter, EKB News.