Dear Colleague, Student, Stakeholder, Parent, Teacher, or Friend:
The purpose of this email is to invite you to become part of a research experiment to demonstrate how social networking can help increase middle school, high school and college, especially minority and female students, in computer science, science, technology, engineering, and math (CS-STEM) majors and careers. On March 1, 2010 proposals are due to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for innovative new ideas to encourage students to major in CS-STEM and pursue careers as engineers and scientists. This competition will be extremely challenging DARPA is committing up to $7.5 million to three groups, over a 39-month period; and there are many good CS-STEM programs. My strategy is to
replicate MIT's Red Balloon Challenge team which recently won a similar DARPA competition. They in less than 1 week received more than
5,000 emails and ideas by providing incentives for participation even from those who didn't join their team. We have a little more time, until March 1st to pull this off and want to make it worth everybody's time to help come up with the best ideas; or help find some of the top talent to help come up with really good ideas. See the How it works section of our wiki.
Our team includes a nonprofit that has run an online international CS-STEM competition, that has served more than 2,000 students and was recently award a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media Learning grant; a Chicago-based network of 200 tutor and mentoring programs, that are mostly located in economically disadvantaged communities; and my organization, a for profit consulting business that
provides research-based strategy, grants writing and development, and technical assistance to community-based and faith-based organizations interested in education, economic development and jobs creation.
Prior to starting this business, I was the research coordinator for a 12-university collaborative that helps to build research and policy advocacy capacity in economically-disadvantaged communities.
Based on my review of the literature regarding what interventions have successfully increased minority and female students in CS-STEM majors and careers; conversations with many of you who are the leading experts, in the field; and my own experiences of how the digital revolution is increasing opportunities for collaborations, skills development, fund-raising and new relationships, across time and space I invite you to take a look at my teams proposed response. Our wiki for this project is http://sites.google.com/site/darpara1003/ or you can email me directly at brianlbanks@gmail.com
In, his bestselling book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-First Century, Thomas L. Friedman interviewed Marc Andreessen who invented Mosaic, the first really effective, easy to use browser; and founded Netscape which was sold for $10 billion. Andresen said, "And today the most profound thing to me is the fact that a fourteen-year old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want. That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs, and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop." Below is a story about a 17 year old in Moscow who has created one of the most popular new applications on the Internet. Working together I think we can help one of the students, in your program, or some student like you, if you are a student-- do the same thing. Imagine the support for your program if one of your students gets a similar article written about him, in the New York Times. Please take a minute to look at our wiki and comment there or back to me directly.
Thanks,
Brian
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-founder-17-introduces-himself/
FEBRUARY 13, 2010, 1:05 PM
Chatroulette’s Creator, 17, Introduces Himself
By BRAD STONE
Andrey Ternovskiy Andrey Ternovskiy says he created Chatroulette for himself and his friends.
This week my colleagues Jenna Wortham, Nick Bilton and I have been utterly fascinated with, and sometimes repulsed by, a suddenly popular new Web site called Chatroulette.
The site, which gets about 20,000 users on a typical night, generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user. The results are occasionally serendipitous, putting you face to face with an interesting person from another corner of the planet. More often though, the site is reminiscent of those old anything-goes AOL chat rooms, only with video. Let’s put it this way: Parents, keep your children far, far away. The site was well described in an article recently and, oddly enough, was featured on “Good Morning America” on Saturday.
The lingering mystery, though, was who was behind the site. The question was answered on Saturday when Andrey Ternovskiy responded to the questions we sent to an e-mail address on Chatroulette. Mr. Ternovskiy said he was a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.
“I was not sure whether I should tell the world who I am mainly because of the fact that I am under age. Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself,” Mr. Ternovskiy wrote.
I asked Mr. Ternovskiy about the origin of the idea for ChatRoulette, how he manages the technical challenges of running the site, whether he viewed it as a business, and about the way some people were using Chatroulette in, as he put it, “some not very nice ways.” Here are his e-mailed responses, slightly edited and condensed:
I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people.
It wasn’t so easy to create it for me, but I have been coding since 11 (thanks to my father who introduced me to the Internet early – most of my knowledge comes from it).
I didn’t advertise my site or post it anywhere, but somehow, people started to talk to each other about the site. And the word started to spread. That’s how the simultaneous user count grew from 10 to 50, then from 50 to 100 and so on. Each time the user count grew, I had to rewrite my code completely, because my software and hardware couldn’t handle it all. I never thought that handling the heavy user load would be the most difficult part of my project.
As the user base grew, bandwidth and hosting bills started to show bigger sums. I am glad that my relatives helped me with it by ‘investing’ some money in my idea.
It wasn’t very much money, so I couldn’t just buy new servers just like that, I had to optimize my code as much as possible instead. I must say that lots of people have helped and still are helping me when I have questions about coding. I am very thankful to them. I still code everything myself, though. I’d love to share work with someone else, but I am not in the USA, and most of the interested people are located far away from me, because I live in Moscow. So I still have to do all the things myself. But I am not worried.
I enjoy what I do. It is like a game for me. I discover new things and solve interesting problems.
Right now Chatroulette uses seven high-end servers all located in Frankfurt, Germany. Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second. I use various technologies to minimize bandwidth consumption. But a lot of bandwidth is still consumed. Bandwidth bills show sums which shock me as a teenager, but I am not very worried.
I am glad that people show attention to my project, and there were interesting offers I’ve received that probably might help my project to survive and improve.
Advertising on Chatroulette is kept to a minimum, because there are a lot of sites full of advertisements, which distract you from what you want to do on those sites. I also love minimalism. That’s why I have put only four links on the bottom as advertisements. And what is interesting, is that these advertisements almost cover all expenses, just those four links on the bottom!
I think it’s wonderful that I do not have to put a lot of advertisements on my site to keep it running. I am not sure why it is so. Maybe because Google AdSense (the thing I use to show the advertisements) shows links to various video chats. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I actually think it is a good thing, because only people not interested or tired of using my site click those links, to explore other services.
I am aware that Chatroulette is popular in USA. It is interesting, but I have never been to the USA myself. Yet most of my site users come from it. I would love to visit the United States.
I actually think that it would be best to found Chatroulette as a U.S.-based company. But this is just an idea.
I have always wanted Chatroulette to be an international thing. That’s why I chose Germany for hosting, because it is in the middle between Russia and U.S.A. It is also at the center of various backbone European networks. I think this is a good place for hosting a project which connects people around the world with each other.
However, I am planning to get other servers in other countries soon. With it I will add more interesting and “weird” (in a good sense) features which will make my site even more entertaining.
What is currently stopping me from adding other features which have been suggested by many and have been in my mind is that I am not even sure what Chatroulette is now.
Everyone finds his own way of using the site. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service.
I think it’s cool that such a simple concept can be useful for so many people. Although some people are using the site in not very nice ways – I am really against it. Others do really unbelievable things I could never think of. They make up songs about strangers and sing to them, draw them, listen to music, broadcast them their own music. Two groups of teenagers can party together. That’s just great in my opinion. I am glad that I made this project and it is a pleasure for me to work on it.
· NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018
Brian Banks
BAC Partners
email:brianlbanks@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/blbanks BAC Partners (BACP) is a consultancy that provides research-based strategy, grants writing and development, and technical assistance to community-based and faith-based organizations interested in education, economic development and jobs creation. BACP helps these organizations develop collaborative partnerships with universities, government, business and philanthropic organizations.
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