Posted by Akhtar BadshahSenior Director, Global Community Affairs, Microsoft
Let’s say you are a recent college graduate with a computer science degree, and you are passionate about education. Would you follow your passion by choosing a job in the classroom if you knew your starting salary would be approximately half the salary of a job in the technology industry?
Kevin Wang, a Microsoft software engineer who started out his career as a high school computer science teacher, is showing technology industry employees who are passionate about education that they need not choose between the two.
Wang is familiar with statistics that show in 2011, only 1 out of 156 Advanced Placement tests taken was in computer science (just over one-half of one percent of all AP tests taken was in computer science – only 22,000 tests overall for the year).
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Posted by Anthony SalcitoVice President, Worldwide Public Sector Education, Microsoft
Yesterday, I had the privilege of combining my personal passion with my profession on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting to announce that Microsoft will bring digital access to one million students from low-income families. The video of our announcement can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/cgivideos
Microsoft is extending its global Shape the Future program to the United States. Shape the Future has already provided digital access to 10 million students around the world, and is a continuation of Bill Gates’ original vision of a PC for every desktop and home. Now, through Shape the Future, Microsoft is working with public and private partners to ensure access to technology for youth from low-income households through broadband Internet access at a reduced cost and discounted hardware, software and educational training software.
Posted by Jacqueline BeauchereDirector, Trustworthy Computing Communications, Microsoft
Just more than half of U.S. parents say they’ve used family safety software to limit or monitor their child’s Internet use, according to a new study. Parents not using such features, meanwhile, say they have their own household rules in place, or they trust their children to act appropriately when going online.
The Family Online Safety Institute, a global, non-profit organization focused on making the Internet a safer place for children and families, released its first-ever report entitled “Parents’ Views of Online Safety.” The U.S.-wide study, sponsored by Microsoft and other FOSI partners Google, Verizon and AT&T, was released Wednesday during a special presentation in Washington, D.C. focused on online parental controls.
Posted by Lili ChengGeneral Manager, FUSE Labs, Microsoft
This summer, my research team had six incredible interns, four women and two men. As they head back to college, and as I look at my own two high school aged children, I find myself wondering, what motivates young folks to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees and careers, and what can we do to make STEM and computer science more appealing to more people?
Getting the facts, according to the Aug. 2011 study on the Gender Gap of Women in STEM from the U.S. Department of Commerce, of 44 million college graduates with jobs in the US; there were only 6.7 million males and 2.5 million females with STEM degrees.
Posted by Peter NeupertCorporate Vice President, Health Solutions Group, Microsoft
Today, I had the honor of participating in a Consumer Health IT Summit at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. It was great to see health IT stakeholders coming together to help drive the industry toward a more patient-centric health system, and I applaud the leadership at HHS and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology – particularly folks like Aneesh Chopra, Todd Park and Farzad Mostashari – for drawing attention to the need for patient engagement and ‘data liberation.’
At the event, HHS announced that they are releasing a PHR Model Privacy Notice for PHR vendors – or personal health platforms like HealthVault – to use to communicate to consumers their data sharing and security policies. We intend to post our PHR Notice on HealthVault.com as soon as the HHS Web tool goes live later this week. We have been very focused on transparency and making it easy to understand how we approach privacy and security since we started working on HealthVault – because we know that transparency is required to enable trust. This notice offers another way to communicate our privacy and security practices, so we will use it and encourage our partners who build HealthVault apps to use it also.