I’ve noted before that there are precious few women engineers in most American companies. This, despite women being in a majority on campuses, as they beat out their male counterparts in the increasingly competitive college admissions process. Indeed, women are substantially represented on the lower rungs of the career ladder in technical and engineering departments.

But the story changes as they reach their mid- to late-thirties. Over half of all women voluntarily quit their jobs. What gives?

Monday’s Financial Times has a detailed analysis by Columbia University economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett who identifies five factors forcing out female engineers:

1. Many are turned off by male behavior. A reported 63% of women in science and engineering experience sexual harassment.

2. Women feel isolated.

3. Many lack role models and no-one to mentor their career progression.

4. They prefer not to embrace risk-taking career gambles.

5. Finally, they are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to maintaining 70+ hour work weeks AND managing child and elder care.

Hewlett offers some sound advice for companies who wish to maintain their pool of qualified female engineers and scientists past their 30’s. Failure to do so, she points out, is a national issue:

“In the US alone, reducing female attrition by one-quarter would add 220,000 qualified people to the science, engineering and technology labour pool.”

Kudos to John Kinde for a couple of full reports on the National Speakers Association (NSA) Presentation and Performance Lab which took place over the weekend in Las Vegas.

His report on day one of the conference shares a tip from keynote speaker Giovanni Livera useful for both speakers and speech writers:

…a storyboarding technique using colored Post-It Notes to visually see the flow of audience-impact-moments in your speech (color-coding each type of speech segment; stories from the heart, audience participation, music, etc. Pick categories most relevant to the texture of your speech.)

His second report covers the last two days of the event. Among the dozens of ‘keepers’ John records are many of equal value to speakers and writers:

• Make your spoken word imaginative and more precise.
• When you write a speech: Write it. Speak it. Write it. Speak it.
• Your job as a storyteller is to be an observer.
• Stories are not complicated. They are simple…but difficult to create.
• Transcribe your talk and then edit to eliminate the unnecessary words.

Thanks to John, this was one time when what happened in Las Vegas did not stay in Las Vegas.

One of the highlights of the Press Conference held at Hewlett-Packard earlier this month was the premier of a video showcasing the latest innovations from HP Labs.

The video features some of the 600+ scientists and engineers from around the world who work at Labs explaining their research in nanotechnology, sustainability, predicting the behavior of crowds, context aware computing and more. But this is not just a dry ‘talking heads’ film. The video uses creative animations to make each invention come alive. The researchers show what inspires them and explain how they turn their dreams into reality.

My favorite segment is Philip Stenton’s stunning demonstration of Mediascapes. This context-aware solution transforms the quotidian into the phantasmagorical. He illustrates how the technology is “like rolling out a digital carpet on a physical landscape” as the downtown street around him morphs into a medieval castle with fire breathing dragons. Gamers, eat your hearts out! Philip then shows how the same technology can be used in the business world as he uses Mediascapes ‘X-Ray Vision’ capability to uncover wiring schematics buried behind walls and conduits beneath the city streets. Coming soon to a city maintenance department near you?

I was also fascinated by Andrew Bowell’s explanation of BookPrep digitization which takes print-on-demand to a whole new level. This makes it possible to bring back into print every book ever printed. The possibilities for people to build profitable small businesses catering to niche markets with customized reprints of books are endless. Mash-ups of recipe books (pun intended) are first out of the chute at the Foodsville community portal.

The video lasts just under seven minutes. Take the time to witness state-of-art in high tech research profiled in a state-of-the-art video. Click the play button below.

In addition to the video of Shane Robison, Foremski’s blog has a longer clip of Head of Marketing Michael Mendenhall, Labs Director Prith Banerjee and CEO Mark Hurd discussing the new blueprint for R&D in the Labs:

Silicon Valley watcher Tom Foremski (a former FT columnist) brought a video camera to last Thursday’s HP Labs launch and posted a clip of Chief Strategy Officer Shane Robison discussing HP’s strategy. Says Foremski:

This is one of the most lucid accounts of HP’s strategy that I’ve come across.

Watch the YouTube video and see what you think:

E Pluribus Unum - Out of One, Many
HP Labs Pluribus - Out of Many projectors, One super-screen

Super-bright, large-scale, and very high-resolution digital projectors are indispensable tools of modern communication. They help CEOs wow audiences of analysts. They make rock concerts intimate. They turn computer gaming into a spectator sport. And they can make digital cinema an instant reality.

They are also very expensive. Prices for high-end projectors run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which keeps these devices from being widely used.

HP Labs’ Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata had a hunch they could make a much cheaper projection system by combining the outputs of several smaller projectors to create a single, high-quality image. They work in the Multimedia Interaction and Understanding Lab in Palo Alto on a project code-named Pluribus.

Seeing Pluribus in action, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the huge, crystal-clear picture it creates. Hook a 16-foot screen up to a game of Madden NFL Football, for example, and the players are life-size - putting you front row and center at the same scale as the real thing.
Although Pluribus looks great, its true appeal lies in the cost savings it offers anyone in the business of projecting large images. How so? For example, Pluribus can combine ten off-the-shelf projectors costing $1,000 each to project an image as bright and sharp as that created by a single high-grade projector costing $100,000.

Once this technology reaches your local Best Buy it will cause the prices of what is possible with high-end home theatre to be reset to a new price-point. You’ll just have to be patient. Hear Nelson and Niranjan discuss their work in the podcast.

 

 Pluribus - Video Projection on Steroids [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Bernardo Huberman is one of only four Senior Fellows at HP Labs - the most distinguished technologists in the company. He runs the Social Computing Lab. His research focus is on the behavior of millions of people using the internet and how this can be analyzed and predicted. He is recognized around the world as an authority on how people communicate and collaborate on the Internet. His lab has recently developed Cloudprint, which lets you store documents in the cloud so you can retrieve and print them on any printer using a mobile phone.

One amusing way of illustrating his research in everyday terms is the choices people make when they place bets. Using the patters of behavior that the bookmakers need to understand to make a living, he looks at predictions we can make in corporate purchasing departments and other business settings.

To hear Bernardo’s remarks click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Bernardo Huberman - Social Computing [3:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I blogged on Chandrakant’s work measuring lifetime energy use last December. He runs the Sustainable IT Lab at HP.

In this podcast, he expands on the issues he’s researching on least use of energy, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and using Joule’s as a measurement of energy consumption.

In our discussion, Chandrakant refers to the following sketch he created to show ‘cradle-to-cradle’ energy use.

 

 Chandrakant Patel - Sustainable IT [6:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Stan Williams is one of the four Senior Fellows at HP Labs - the most distinguished technologists in the company. He runs the Information and Quantum Systems Lab and his research focus is on what is called CeNSE - the Central Nervous System for the Earth.

Stan is looking over the horizon to developments in nanotechnology - the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, where dimensions are measured in nanometers. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter - way smaller than the proverbial width of an ant’s leg. In fact, the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as that of a marble to the size of the earth. Or another way of putting it: a nanometer is the amount a man’s beard grows in the time it takes him to raise the razor to his face!

I asked Stan to describe his research interests in the terms that my Mum could understand. Click on the podcast icon below to hear what Stan says about his research. It could revolutionize human interaction with the earth as profoundly as the Internet has revolutionized personal and business interactions. Hear him describe a possible future world where trillions of nanoscale sensors and actuators are embedded in the environment, monitoring every breath we take, every move we make. And how concerns for our privacy in this world are addressed.

 

 Stan Williams - nanotechnology [6:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hewlett-Packard announced today that it has sharpened the focus of its advanced research group, HP Labs, to address the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade.

Labs was founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard 41 years ago, before Hewlett-Packard even made computers, before the Internet and certainly before anyone on the planet had sent a single email.

Today, the world is different. As the Internet becomes the dominant platform for the IT world, Labs is looking at ways to fundamentally change the way all information is accessed, shared and communicated.

The new HP Labs now consists of 23 distinct groups of researchers spread across seven worldwide locations; it is led by Prith Banerjee, who joined as director last August.

I was part of the team that help develop the announcements that Prith and the Labs researchers shared with the world this afternoon. As well as the Press Conference and speeches, there was a unique exhibit of some of the latest technology from Labs. I visited the exhibit and took the opportunity to talk with some of the researchers about their projects. I was also delighted to meet a couple of retired employees.

Check out my following six blog entries which are podcast interviews with researchers and retirees.