Who invented cell technology

Tune in to our annual Snapdragon Tech Summit on Nov. Recruitment startups aim to help tech companies access a more diverse candidate pool and help students access opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.

The recruitment tool companies are all in on helping Gen Z find jobs, and making the process more fair than it was for their parents.

She's a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school's independent newspaper. She's based in D. Jordan Brammer, a senior at New York University, said he used to apply to finance jobs through a mishmash of networks, like LinkedIn and Google.

But after being ghosted by one too many employers, he realized he needed a better recruitment tool. He eventually stumbled across HIVE Diversity, a network connecting students and companies who might not have found each other otherwise.

Professional networking sites have been around for a while. LinkedIn, the dominant career development site, launched in But startups like HIVE have popped up relatively recently targeting young job seekers and claiming to tackle the access problem. In , after finding themselves shut out of Silicon Valley jobs, three students at Michigan Technical University launched Handshake to create a more-equal playing field for students looking for job opportunities.

Even TikTok wants to help young people find jobs — the platform launched TikTok video resumes in July. The companies are all in on helping Generation Z find jobs, and making the process more fair than it was for their parents. Those are things that are within your control. Hiring is a painful, belabored process both for the people desperate for jobs and for the places that want to hire them.

Big tech companies constantly look for ways to optimize their recruitment strategies. As Facebook's engineering hiring crisis , Google's brutal recruitment process and a fake resume that garnered top tech interviews show, the system is often broken. And for young people breaking into the job market, there's the age-old issue of access. It often feels to them like they're sending your resume into the void. And if a candidate didn't attend a top school or doesn't have a "white-sounding" name , or if the candidate doesn't look or sound like other people who work at the company, recruiters may be biased against hiring the person.

The pandemic hastened the shift to primarily virtual recruitment, and to a greater reliance on these tools. Gone are the days of crowded in-person career fairs, or flying out candidates for stressful interview processes. Instead, companies and students turned to networks like Handshake, often aided by universities.

For young people, it may be changing for the better. Rembrand Koning, a Harvard Business School professor in the strategy unit, studies the rise of outbound recruitment in companies' hiring strategies. He became interested in the topic after realizing that most of the famous hiring bias studies looked at people sending their resumes to companies.

We're increasingly seeing people getting poached," Koning said. The percentage increases when it comes to Silicon Valley workers, high-skilled workers and workers with LinkedIn profiles. The study looks at currently employed people, but Koning is working on another paper about how this change affects people entering the workforce.

How do recruiters evaluate young people with little work experience? As student recruitment networks grow in popularity, Koning said his biggest concern is ensuring that people are equally represented on the platforms.

The makers of these tools want to host as many students from as many backgrounds as possible on their platforms; it's essential to their business pitch, and it's something they think about constantly. The goal is to help companies access a diverse candidate pool and help students access opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise. Without a strong user base, neither of those things can happen. Digital recruitment networks can broaden choices on both the student and company sides of hiring.

The search is easier when everyone is in the same digital space and can search by category for the jobs and candidates relevant to them.

Ariel Lopez, CEO of hiring platform Knac, said he believes strongly in the democratization of the recruitment process. But we also care about the people that are in your pipelines. They're more than just a resume. They're humans. Lopez began her career helping brands and startups with recruitment.

She went on to found Knac, which helps companies manage and give feedback to candidates in their application pipeline. She wants to eliminate the "black hole" of resumes and ensure companies aren't ignoring qualified and passionate people. Often even major tech companies have incompetent applicant management strategies, with candidates "swimming in spreadsheets," Lopez said. Arsh Noor Amin, an engineering graduate student at Bucknell University, appreciates the consolidation of opportunities on platforms like Handshake.

He can easily message recruiters and find software jobs that work for him as a student from Pakistan. The consolidation helps employers, too. Renee Davis, director of recruiting at Duolingo, started using Handshake to find employees in March The game-changing aspect was being able to access such a large student network all at once. Sometimes the tools are lacking in features, however.

Andrea Robinson, a junior at UCLA who's looking for marketing jobs, said Handshake is useful for finding companies, but she'll still apply directly through the company itself.

This disparity can make it confusing for students to navigate. Handshake released a report in October looking at how Gen Z navigates the digital job market. The main takeaways were that a majority of students, particularly women, feel that they don't need to meet in-person to make meaningful professional connections.

The report also found that a majority, particularly students of color, feel that it's easier to break into careers compared to their parents' generation. Digital communication is often thought to be isolating, but for some, it's freeing. HIVE, too, is focused on helping its candidates build deeper connections. Each student on the platform uploads comprehensive resumes, encouraged by HIVE to include as much information about identity and lived experience as they feel comfortable.

The platform wants students to share their qualifications and interests beyond professional bullet points. There's a slight barrier to entry with HIVE in that the platform puts its student users through various training sessions to make their applications more attractive to employers.

The quick apply button is the fastest way to nowhere. It feels great to fire off applications, but it feels worse not to hear from anybody. As everyone discusses the "Great Resignation" and companies struggle to recruit the talent they want, some of the power has shifted to workers.

A lot of the conversation centers around offering currently employed workers better benefits and pay, but it should be normalized for those entering the workforce as well. Messy recruitment processes can really turn qualified people off. It's advantageous for any company to really be thinking, 'How do we rewire what we're doing here?

For recruitment tools, putting power in young people's hands is what it's all about. A new report argues there's more tech companies can do to stop child sexual abuse material from spreading online without sacrificing privacy. In many cases, company safeguards are failing to keep pace with the evolving threat of child sexual abuse material.

Aisha Counts aishacounts is a reporting fellow at Protocol, based out of Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she studied business and philosophy. She can be reached at acounts protocol. Online child sex abuse material has grown exponentially during the pandemic, and tech's best defenses are no match against it, according to a new report on the threat facing countries around the world.

The report, published last month, was developed by the WeProtect Global Alliance, an NGO that represents nearly governments as well as dozens of companies including giants like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft in their efforts to stop the spread of child sexual exploitation. The report, which also includes a survey of 32 member-companies, found that not only is the sheer volume of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, increasing, but it's growing more complex and capitalizing on tech's blind spots.

That's while troubling trends like online grooming and livestreaming child sexual abuse for pay have grown. At the same time, companies and law enforcement officials are grappling with a rapid increase in "self-generated" content from kids, who may be sending images of themselves consensually to peers only to have those images circulated without their consent later on. The report finds that while tech companies have come a long way toward addressing this problem over the last decade, in many cases their safeguards are failing to keep pace with the evolving threat.

This sustained growth is outstripping our global capacity to respond," the report reads. Children spent more time online than ever and offenders had reduced opportunities to commit offline abuses, which increased online demand for imagery. Increases in reporting doesn't necessarily equate to an increase in volume, the report's authors caution, but they point to other recent trends that have also exacerbated the problem.

WeProtect's report included research that analyzed conversations in offender forums on the dark web and found that offenders use these forums to exchange best practices. More than two-thirds of the discussions were about technical tools for messaging, exchanging funds or storing content in the cloud. The report also emphasizes the challenges in policing this content on a global scale.

The internet makes it easy for offenders to exploit vulnerabilities in whichever country has the weakest technical and regulatory defenses, because it's just as easy to access a site hosted in the US as it is in Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world.

In developing countries, the dramatic uptick in online adoption has outpaced those countries' ability to protect against these kinds of abuses, Drennan said. This is further complicated by the inherently global nature of CSAM. It's that kind of international dimension," said Drennan.

To truly collect evidence or prosecute offenders that are overseas requires careful coordination with international entities like Interpol and Europol, or bilateral collaboration with other countries. The report also points to an increase in "self-generated" sexual material over the last year. That includes imagery and videos that young people capture themselves, either because they were coerced, or because they voluntarily shared it with someone their own age, who then shared it more broadly without their consent.

And that's a real challenge for policymakers to try [to] address. In addition to outlining the scope of the problem, the report also takes stock of what the tech industry has done so far to address it. And yet, far fewer companies actually contribute new material to existing hash databases. Sean Litton, the executive director of the Technology Coalition, said tech companies have a responsibility to share "hard lessons learned, to share technology, to share best practices, to share insights.

That needs to change, the report argues. The report also suggests tech companies use techniques such as deterrence messaging, age-estimation tools and digital literacy training.

These interventions can include showing users a message when they attempt to make searches for CSAM or using AI to scan a user's face and check their age. Some regions, including Australia , are also pursuing an approach known as "safety by design," creating toolkits that tech companies can use to ensure their platforms are considering safety from their inception.

The authors of the report advocate for more regulation to protect against online harms to children, as well as new approaches to encryption that would protect users' privacy without making CSAM virtually invisible. But many of the techniques for detecting CSAM come with serious privacy concerns and have raised objections from some of WeProtect's own member-companies. Privacy experts, like the ACLU's Daniel Kahn Gillmor, worry that features like Apple's proposed child safety features — which WeProtect publicly supports, but which the company has put on hold — can open gateways to infringements on privacy and security.

Another proposed feature would scan iMessages on devices of children under 13 and alert their parents if they send or receive sexually explicit imagery. Another concern is miscategorization. In a world where tech platforms use metadata to detect adults who may be grooming young people, what would that mean for, say, a teacher who's regularly in contact with students, Gillmor asked.

There's also the risk of mass surveillance in the name of protection, he argued. Gillmor is careful to frame the conversation as surveillance versus security rather than privacy versus child safety, because he doesn't see the latter as mutually exclusive. Tech companies have a long way to go in making sure prevention and detection methods are up to speed and that their platforms provide protections without sacrificing security.

But there's no neat and easy solution to such a complicated, multidimensional threat. Drennan likens it to counterterrorism: "You put the big concrete blocks in front of the stadium — you make it hard," he said.

While some perpetrators may slip through, "you immediately lose all of those lower-threat actors, and you can focus law enforcement resources on the really dangerous and high-priority threats. Singapore is expected to become a global DeFi center, thanks in part to China's crypto crackdown. Shen Lu is a reporter with Protocol China. She can be reached at shenlu protocol.

Singapore is emerging as a global crypto stronghold as droves of Chinese blockchain investors, startups and crypto exchanges scramble to fly the coop following an intense regulatory crackdown at home. In late September, China's powerful regulators delivered the heaviest blow to the country's once-sprawling crypto industry by criminalizing all crypto-related activities, from mining to transactions.

Industry players have been winding down their operations in China and are on a quest for safe havens. Many of the exiled and soon-to-be-exiled crypto exchanges, wallet apps, crypto market data publications, decentralized mining services and investors are eyeing Singapore. The Southeast Asian island city-state takes a more progressive approach toward crypto compared to China's heavy-handed stance.

And Chinese crypto players' intentions to relocate to Singapore meshes with the city-state's ambition to cement itself as a global decentralized finance hub. The Singaporean government is also actively recruiting Chinese crypto players.

In late August, the Singapore nonprofit Business China — of which Singapore's former prime minister is a founding patron — hosted a closed-door conference aimed at improving the city-state's digital economy.

Chinese crypto heavyweights, including Binance founder Zhao Chengpeng, imToken founder He Bin, and Bitmain and Matrixport founder Wu Jihan were among the attendees, per screenshots of the conference agenda that Protocol reviewed.

Notably, Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke at the event, as did a few senior Singaporean government officials. Yan, one of the conference attendees, told Protocol that crypto entrepreneurs and investors in attendance rubbed elbows with dignitaries and their families while discussing the opportunities for Singapore's blockchain industry.

But all Singaporean state-owned enterprises and investors came to hear us speak, and former government officials wined and dined with us … It's a very Chinese way of business-dealing. You just get it right away. Beyond the implicit hospitality, Yan recalled some senior officials and business VIPs explicitly asking the attending Chinese crypto entrepreneurs: "Are you ready to fly the coop? The Southeast Asian city-state of fewer than 6 million inhabitants punches far above its weight; it is the fourth-largest financial center in the world.

And its business environment, which emphasizes networks of favor-exchanging and mutually beneficial relationships developed outside formal settings, is similar enough to China's to allow its entrepreneurs to fit in seamlessly. Hong Kong, another Asian financial hub, could have been an alternative destination for Chinese decentralized finance businesses. But the special administrative region of China has fallen out of favor with Chinese-speaking investors, Yan said, as civil unrest and the lack of confidence in the government runs deeper.

Publicly, the Singaporean government has been sending welcoming signals to crypto players big and small in China — not to mention globally. Singapore's friendlier stance on crypto has attracted major Chinese crypto exchanges. I did not imagine that more people in the world would eventually have access to cell phones than flush toilets.

Cell phones are a classic example. And that is even more true now than it was then. When we prepared the budget for cell phone development, Jim Caile, my marketing manager, showed me a forecast for sales of portable cell phones. We agreed that the first phones would go to market by the mid- to late s. The predicted quantities of product shipments, however, struck me as totally unacceptable. I knew what it would cost for the engineering and other talents needed to develop a manufacturable cell phone.

I had done it enough times, and underestimated those costs enough times, to be pretty confident in my estimates. And I also knew that we would never get our leaders to buy into a plan that would sell too few cell phones to recover that investment.

On the other hand, the naysayers, especially the financial managers, would laugh us out of the room if we were as optimistic as we wanted to be. I looked at the forecast again. The portable was too expensive, and there were not enough cell sites to support reliable portable communications.

By , portable performance and size became more practical, and sales grew rapidly. By it was difficult to buy a car phone; the handheld had taken over. By the s, the collapse of wired telephone subscribers had started.

Yet none of us at Motorola envisioned features like cameras on phones. Throughout the s, Motorola had been a leader in transistors and incorporated them into consumer electronics. This included the DynaTAC, so we had some notion that, to improve performance, cell phones would include more and more transistors. The personal computer was still in development at the time, and the internet was just being conceived.

In the s, television audiences all over the world were familiar with the notion of a hand-held two-way communication device, as seen in the hands of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock in the Star Trek series that began in the late s. Two-way radiophones had been helping police and military personnel to stay in contact in fast-changing situations since before the Second World War. In the s, researchers at Bell Labs in the USA began to experiment with the concept of a cellular phone network.

The idea was to cover the country with a network of hexagonal cells, each of which would contain a base station. These base stations would send and receive messages from mobile phones over radio frequencies. Any two adjacent cells would operate at different frequencies, so there was no danger of interference. The stations would connect the radio signals with the main telecommunications network, and the phones would seamlessly switch frequencies as they moved between one cell and another.

Meanwhile, Martin Cooper, an engineer at the Motorola company in the US, was developing something that came close to the Star Trek communicator that had fascinated him since he first saw it on TV. What we believed was that the telephone number should be a person rather than a location. Martin Cooper , inventor and entrepreneur. Motorola launched the DynaTAC in It weighed over a kilogram and was affectionately known as The Brick, but it quickly became a must-have accessory for wealthy financiers and entrepreneurs.

The movie Wall Street cemented its status as an icon of wealth and greed when it showed ruthless financier Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, walking along a beach talking into his DynaTAC. The US approach offered contracts to two companies in every city, which resulted in a confusing mish-mash of incompatible networks. The British government took a different approach. Too far apart and they would leave holes in the coverage; too close together and the signals would interfere with each other.

The first base stations, large and heavy pieces of kit, were installed in