Panels from the 2014 ideas festival in new york. Well start with the discussion on technology and social media. Then well hear from a nasa scientist, working on mars exploration. Later cancer biologist, andrew z hestle looks at cancer research. And thin well look at virtual currency. This weekend on the cspan networks, friday night at 10 00 eastern on cspan, a conversation with retired Justice John Paul stevens, the founder and former chair of microsoft bill gates on the Ebola Outbreak in west africa. And the director of the museum of african art, and friday night on cspan 2, authors talk about war and the constitution. Saturday night at 10 00 on become tvs afterwards, author heather cox richardson, and live at noon, on book tvs, Legal Affairs and editor in charge at reuters and Supreme Court biographer. Friday at 8 00, on American History the on cspan 3, historians and authors talk about world war i, 1 one years 4r5er9. And former fbi director on catching the 100th anniversary of the panama canal. Find our Television Schedule at cspan. Org and let us know what you think about the programs youre watching, call us at inng 2026263400. Email us at comments cspan. Org. Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. Know a conversation on technology and social media, and well hear from an executive from lincoln and the founders of change. Org and the magazine mental cross, the atlantic and the Aspen Institute cohosted this hourlong event. Please welcome to the stage megan garver, Christina Lewisid halperin and nicholas missoula. Hi. Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Today its my honor to welcome this great group of people. I want to get right to the conversation. So im going to do a lightning introduction of all of them. To my right is Christina Lewis halperin. Next to her, the senior technical manager at aol, who he both manages product and team management. Howard has also been coding since he was 14 years old. And last but not least, nicholas who ask a sophomore at the early Technologies High School in brooklyn, and he has been on the robotics team. I would love to start with christina, can tell you us a little bit about program code and also in particular why you wanted to focus on young men. Sir, all star code is we attract, prepare and place young men of color by teaching them Computer Science and coding in onestay workshops as well as an intensive 10day program. We feel this is the recipe for success in job growth in this country and it reveals extremely undiverse. It features 3 of our workers are black and latino and fewer than 1 of startups have an africanamerican on the starting team. We give them extra skills and intensive Career Training so we can place them in our career pipeline. We will give them other guidance in choosing their path in an advisory role. The reason were focused on boys, this program is so successful, theres already two National Programs working with girls in the states. I spoke with the directors of those two organizations and they felt that minority boys need programs like this too and theres no need to duplicate their efforts. We have been open two months and are piloting our first Summer Program this year in new york city. We just selected our first class. Nice. How many people . 20 students and we got over 130 applications. Wow, thats amazing, thats lets talk about some of the particulars of the program. Nicholas, can you tell us a little bit about your experience, did you have a favorite of the four you have attended . I have only been to one so far, and from it, i received a whole bunch of education when i went, they showed me how they took a problem and used coding to solve it in a way that was unknown to me when i went, they stay stated the problem to a whole group of people and they decided how they would use they would use this certain apis to solve the problem and it was just cool, i have never seen anything like it. Thats really awesome. Application program interface. What we can offer these students is exposure to the Tech Industry, even students like nicholas, who already gnknew he wanted to go into tech and is studying it at his school and is on the robotics team, have so little access to Fall Technology professionals, has never visited a Technology Company in new york. In fact the First Company that we brought you to was spotify and nicholas said i thought spotify was just overseas in europe. He didnt know that they have their u. S. Headquarters is5m he in the city. And thats where we can really make a difference. Because if you cant see it, if you cant see how and understand how what you learn in school can be used in the real world, and that path, we feel that you cant dream it and you cant follow that path. So thats what we expose our students to. Awesome. Lets talk about this idea that you do hiring. Et cetera, at aol. Care and feeding. Care and feeding, yes. Lets just, i guess, dig into this idea of sort of net working, and what net working itself, i know thats a dirty word and maybe rightfully so in some perspectives, but it can be also beneficial . Absolutely, a lot of what attracted me to the program was net working these kids with professionals. I found that i benefitted a lot from mentors in my own social and professional network. So i thought it was intriguing to be able to offer that to these up and coming technologists. Mentoring is so restrictive, its mostly about being available. And thats one of the things i enjoy, let me bring you to the different teams, let me explain some of the things that give you quizzical looks, its interesting because youre not quite clear about what you know and you can convey until youre asked about it. Thats awesome. Whats been your favorite moment of mentorship so far . I have found when teams have that internal spark, its limitless what can be created, so when you see that spark in the kids, you know theyre on a particular path and theres very little that they cant accomplish at that point. Nicholas, i know this might change like tomorrow or in a year, but at this point, what do you want to do later on . At this point, i would like to do a little web design and i would like to start learning a little bit more about photography. Oh, awesome, cool, cool, and integrated within technology . Yes. Thats great, awesome. One of these ideas that i would love to get your perspective on, this idea of sort of culture fit, its a term we use a lot in hiring in the Silicon Valley and tech in general. It can be a good thing because people want to hire people who can work well with the team and who can integrate and work well and that kind of stuff but at the same time it can be sort of an excuse to hire people that look likes you and act like you. So what sort of, a, is the ideal hiring approach that you guys would like to see and b, what do you think of this particular idea of culture fit . My idea was originally as a professional journalist, i reported for the wall street journa journal, i was very familiar with different businesses, but i was not familiar with the Tech Industry until i went to a convention a couple of years ago. It was a different world with a different set of expectations from the corporate world that i need. So culture fit is indicative of that. And i saw at the same time that there were very few minorities. And i could see that things like culture fit, an emphasis on technology, an emphasis on being a self taught learner, is something that black and latino students werent familiar with and needed exposure to. Things like culture fit are a fact of life in the Tech Industry and what were doing is supporting our students in educating them so that when they do pioneer into this and we fully expect our students to be able to do that, they wont feel so different when they arrive. Yeah. So we have to prepare them for can i talk a bit about the inge picture ration for all star code . Yes. Well, my father, regional lewis was a pioneer on wall street, he was born in 1942 and in 1942, in segregated baltimore and went to all black schools all his life until he went to an early prep program that was run by harvard law schoer÷c and tha program opened the world to him and gave him the education and credentials to springboard him on to wall street, where he went to the law firm and ended up being extremely successful as a finan financeir, which was a typical White Boys Club in the 70s and 80s. Because of that, i have firsthand experiencing on seeing how early Access Programs can have a huge affect on the lives of interested in talented students if theyre exposed to a stage where they can really take advantage of it. Thats why i feel confident that with this program, our students can innovate and pioneer into thats wonderful. My father unfortunately passed away 21 years ago. This is a wonderful tribute to him, i think. Wonderful, well, this idea of sort of education in general, you know, it had come up a lot. And what would you guys like to see about sort of the Education System as it currently stands, what should we sort of change if there could be something changed about the way that we sort of approach teaching skills versus teaching approaches. . Everything in our teachers and in our mentors is project based, in terms of our learning, our students are taught are exposed to video game design, to wearables to of course web development, mobile apps and a focus on a final project. And our students demo what they have learned and actually put together a product instead of working oneonone where a teacher assigns the students work and they do it, they work informally in teams, so that they always understand that they have to collaborate, workingrd formally put something together and i think that and many people feel that schools have to do more of that with their students in terms of lab work and other things that help students give them the skills, the holistic set of skills. What was your final product . Final productx ,z in all sta code . Yes. Before we started working on the robots, we worked on they gave us three problems and i believe i chose yes, i chose the problem that theres a rundown park in the neighborhood and what are you going to do to get your community to come and fix the part . And what my team and i did was we photo shopped a bunch of posters and we said we were going to put it all over the neighborhood and get the word spread. Awesome. I was going to talk about tom from the first workshop. Spotify, we had to build a place where people could lempb about music and learn about the knew music that is coming up. And so i coded a website and it was basically a prototype of what it would look like, and it was a whole bunch of articles where you could talk to the or pianists and learn what theyre trying to make. That is amazing. That site is live right now . I have it, but it isnt up on a domain. I hope it gets up soon because i could totally use that site. Thank you for sharing your time, this has been wonderful, thank you. Thank you. Please welcome to the stage deep nashar. ,z3 thank you. Wow, thats loud. Its great to see everyone here÷ you know, i was a little worried getting on the stage because for those of you who were here at 9 00 a. M. , you saw the then you had theebn fountain water g. Has anyone done moderation, any of your friends phone it . There was one in california this past weekend, and i saw some pictures, its pretty gruesome. The thing that people pay 100 each, not only slide through mud, but at the end, you have to go through a wall of live wires. You actually get jolted with electrical shocks. Some people will go to any extremes. So i found that i had to notch it up a bit. I will talk about not economic empowerment, but bare hands and feet rock climbing with 50pound knapsacks on their back. Thats my next multimilliondollar business idea. No, im just kidding. I do climb for fun. But thats not what im going to talk about today, im going to talk about economic e0 nempowe. Im going to bring you back a few years and talk about a communication device that is quite expensive. Youre awake in line for a long time to get one and it was only available in one color. Can anyone guess what that is . I heard someone say the iphone, you had to wait in line for months. There are friends of mine who waited in line for about 48 hours or so in palo alto. Im talking about the big black board. Anyone remember this. Its going to be an exhibit at the museum. This phone was a very important device, when i was growing up in india, it was one of those phones that made that sound, and it goes by, the rotary dial. It was a very important device. The reason was it cost 10,000 rupees to get, it was in the 80s. Thats about six months salary for an average person in india at that time. We had to wait in line sometimes for five to ten years to get one. And it was only available in the color black. This phone was so important that most of the time it would be under lock and key, it would be in available. It was a very expensive, hard to get, important device. 800s mumbai where i grew up, looked like this, lots of tenement housing, i grew up in a place like this. Me and my parents and we shared an outside toilets with a bunch of other tennants that shared the same floor. You got Running Water for 30 minutes every evening between 9 00 and 9 30, we would fill it up in a bucket so we could use that water for the next 24 hours. In other words we had a very happy existence, in the 80s, thats what middle class used to be like. Most of us also aspire to go do something different. And as i was growing up, in the early 80s i was in high school. And i was a science major, and one year that i really wanted to do for the science fair was to create electricity out of Geo Thermal Energy. And my concept was the following. Theres a lot of extra energy that comes out of the earth. A lot of eruptions, geysers, i wonder if you can harness this energy and use steam turbines and convert that into electricity. And the way i wanted to demonstrate that is to have a little light bulb glow. My partner and i spent six months making this work. We spent months of research at the library, there was no internet then. At practice sessions, all this was working. And finally the big day arrived, the judges came by, were presenting our project to them. And then that exact moment happened, about showcasing the demo. I knew that i was going to become an engineer. Because i had that moment that every great engineer has, at least once if not multiple times in their life. Their demo fails at the big moment. The light bulb did not light up. And i was crushed. Thankfully, the judges saw the power of what we could do, they were excited by our enthusiasm and we placed second. And not only did we place second, we showed up in the National Newspaper the next day. I was famous. Loved it. I never got over the fact that the first place winner was some kid who copied a Popular Mechanics thing about creating a robot from bicycle chains. Im like, really, people . Im just kidding. I was on cloud nine, if i only had one regret, it was that i did not parlay this fame into a hot date. Because i went to an all boys school, couldnt really do anything like that. The person who was behind a lot of this work was really my middle school and High School Science teacher, lets call her mrs. J. Mrs. J. Not just taught us the principles of science inquiry, but she also was a disciplinary, she was the person who brought you back on track. She would make you think about the problems you were facing. She would try and connect the theory that we learned in the classroom to what we were trying to do in our projects. To teach us why on paper the Geo Thermal Energy project, which always worked flawlessly, but in reality is implications and the uq not always what the books tell you and it didnt quite work. She went a couple of steps further. Our school was crowded, we didnt have space or time sometimes to work on the projects we were doing. She literally opened up here home and we would work on the project on evenings and weekends and holidays in her living room. She enabled us to go beyond where we were. Once i had a bunch of questions that she couldnt answer and she said, why dont you go call someone . Heres the person, heres the number, go talk to her. You can imagine, im 12, 13 years old. I barely use the phone, i didnt have one at home. There were only two such phones in our entire school. One was on the principals desk and the other one was in a drawer with the school clerk under lock and key. So i go up, i go to the school office, i ask the school clerk, mr. Dyers, i said i need to make this call, he reluctantly hands me the phone, i make the call, a short call, i get my answer. And something changed for me. For this scrawny little as i walked out, i felt an inch suddenly i found a connection with the world that was beyond the 1 kilometer radius between my home and my school. Its almost like mrs. J, the mentor in my life had shown me the art of the possible. Beyond the confines of where i lived, and where i studied. And she did this not just for me, but for hundreds of other folks like us. And we have gone on a lot of us to become doctors and lawyers and in some small way tried to make the world a better place. She gave us the key that opened the lock. I have been thinking about this quite a bit recently because even as the world is becoming increasingly connected, and nowadays, this is a cybercafe in my old neighborhood, i can walk in there, you know, kids like me, 30 years ago and walk in there and instantaneously be connected to all sorts of information, all sorts of people around the world. You still have a fundamental disconnect. And the disconnect is what Andy Mccaffrey who is going to speak this afternoon, i highly recommend listening to him. He talked about the second half of the chess board. What we are teaching our young people these days is about how to sol technical problems, the challenge is, the computers are already soling these technical problems, what we need to teach them is also how to construct these problems together. And that is something