Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Opening Keynotes

Our first speaker, Tiffani Ashley Bell, is pleading with engineers to do socially responsible things with their skills.

Are we enabling people who want to build concentration camps?   She managed to use those words ("concentration camps").  Brave.

Tiffani at The Human Utility has developed a website to help people stay connected to the Detroit water system.

People with compassion have a way to pay water bills for people who've been cut off or are at risk of having this happen.  The "system" is merciless.  If you don't pay your bill, you're cut off, regardless of circumstances.  You're no longer a customer.  Non-customers might as well be undocumented non-citizens, which is turning into a death sentence for so many.

The UN declaration of human rights no longer applies.  Actually I see the US never ratified this convention.  Nor Rights of the Child:
Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. Only the United States and Somalia, which has no functioning national government, have failed to ratify the treaty.
Then the fire alarm came on.  We had to evacuate.  I met the Python tutorial guy, William, who let me play with Python Circuit, once we got back.

IBM had a good story about their competition to develop tools for responding to natural disasters.  Your team should use IBM resources such as the Watson API.  There's a monetary reward for the winners.  Not unlike the old BFI challenge.

I got my Learning GraphQL book. The graph theory in the beginning, which I perused over donuts, does not link the concept of graphs to polyhedron. Dang. I think that's an important link between nodes.  Graphs connect around in all circumferential directions -- a lot of them do.