Sanghvi, who didn’t use a computer regularly until college, went on to launch such features as News Feed, which defines the user experience for many people on Facebook. Her rise at the company from when she was one of the first 10 engineers hired illustrates the potential and possibilities for a bright young engineer in the tech field. Given her vantage point and success, her impressions and suggestions stemming from her experiences carry a certain weight.

Sanghvi is from Pune, India, and studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where she got used to working in a nearly all male environment.

Sanghvi said she was used to being the odd woman out — she was one of five female students out of 150 in a course in the Electrical Computer Engineering department — and at Facebook, she again found herself on a team with only a handful of female engineers.  

Though she looks back fondly on her time at Facebook and describes it as “one of the best companies to be working at right now,” she said her male co-workers enjoyed a certain camaraderie that she could not match or fully penetrate.

“It was difficult to break into the boys’ club,” Sanghvi said. “I wish that females had a similar culture or support network.”  

Sanghvi said the male engineers on her team created a “brogramming page,” presumably only for the Facebook “bros” who were programming. She recalls having to change her working style to adapt to the “aggressive” environment, a shift she said affected how she was perceived.  

“Engineers are either aggressive or passive aggressive. You need to just dive straight into it, and sometimes there are social repercussions because of it,” Sanghvi explained. “The impression that people had of me was that I was really harsh, hard-edged, brusque and to the point. All of that happened because I am a woman, and I was acting in that kind of environment.”

She had more to share on the topic of mentors and role models, advice for women to be proactive, and praise for the tech industry’s culture of rewarding ability. Read the full profile at Huffpost.

Related: The next Mark Zuckerberg, Happy Engineer’s Day in honor of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya

(Image: Flickr photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexf96/)

Vivek Kundra, the first-ever federal chief information officer, is planning to leave the White House in August, according to sources.

Kundra, who has held the position for two-and-a-half years, is leaving the administration for Harvard, the sources said, although it’s unclear if he’ll be teaching or taking a more research-oriented post.

As CIO in the Office of Management and Budget, Kundra was responsible for overseeing $80 billion in federal information technology projects. In that role, he spearheaded a number of initiatives to try to make the government’s complex technology systems more efficient and less costly.

Kundra is one of three White House officials tapped to revamp the government’s use of technology. President Barack Obama also appointed Aneesh Chopra as the federal chief technology officer and Jeffrey Zients as the chief performance officer. All three positions were brand new roles in the White House.

I’m a little behind in the curve when it comes to these sorts of things, but technically I think Kundra would be an “information architect.” I imagine the architects to be the officer corps of the systems administrators, who are the grunts.

According to Google Trends there hasn’t been any news out of this guy for a while….which is usually a good thing if you’re a systems administrator! It’s kind of like being an offensive line guy in football, if people are noticing you it’s probably not a good thing (e.g., there’s been a major security breach and you have to take the fall for it). I’m personally skeptical of the “cloud computing” initiative Kundra spearheaded, for national security reasons. I wouldn’t ever put anything sensitive in Dropbox, and I don’t care how good the feds think they are, hackers will worm their way into their “lockbox” in the cloud at some point. But Vivek Kundra doesn’t have to worry about it, some other command-line jockey will take the fall for it….

Well yesterday, Bangladesh totally copycatted Pakistan.

Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country’s leaders were uploaded, say reports. Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed.

A spokesman for the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) told AFP Facebook had “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s majority Muslim population” by carrying “offensive images” of Mohammed. [BBC]

I just think it’s kind of silly that that they are “officially” citing the cartoons TEN days after the actual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” That site isn’t even up anymore. If that was really the issue, the halal-ness of the interwebs in Bangladesh, wouldn’t they have banned Facebook at the same time Pakistan did – on May 19th the day before the ‘sanctioned’ date of May 20th?

I think the real issue is that the current Bangladesh government was insulted by cartoons made about THEM. And they are using the anti-Muslim sentiment as a scapegoat. > “Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition,” said the [Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC)] commission’s acting chair, Hasan Mahmud Delwar.

On Saturday, one man was arrested by the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in Dhaka and charged with uploading the images. “Facebook will be re-opened once we erase the pages that contain the obnoxious images,” said Mr Delwar. [BBC]

What I was able to gather was that as soon as RAB arrested the youth for uploading onto Facebook images about the current Prime Minister and opposition leader, they made the recommendation to block Facebook temporarily. All of this screams not simply censorship, but of a lack of real democratic values. I.e. don’t talk smack (or draw cartoons) about your political leaders, or we will take away your right to social media. Yay for democracy, the South Asian way.

The Bangladesh government’s action is pretty transparent – and the youth of Bangladesh are rebelling back.

Hundreds of Dhaka University students took to the campus streets on Sunday to protest the government temporarily shutting down the popular social networking website Facebook. They called the decision a contradiction to the government’s ‘Digital Bangladesh’ vision and “interference with the right of expression”.

More than 400 million people worldwide use this social networking of which Bangladesh accounts for just over 875,000 users, mostly youth.And it is these young people who are finding the decision a contradiction with the government’s ‘Digital Bangladesh’ vision– a slogan featuring high on the ruling Awami League campaign pledges– saying that blocking the site will bring no benefit. [bdnew24]

And of course, a protest wouldn’t be a real protest w/out the following:

A Facebook group named Withdraw the ban on Facebook in Bangladesh has been created. [Global Voices]

Of course.

All joking aside, Global Voices article has a really in-depth analysis quoting some noted Bangladeshi bloggers, if you want to read up more on this issue. Pakistan’s Facebook ban is scheduled to be lifted tomorrow and it seems that the facebook page in question was taken off of the Facebook site. I guess we’ll see what happens tomorrow for Pakistani interweb users. As for Bangladesh, the site was blocked “temporarily” so we’ll see just how temporary that is.

Google India had launched a ‘Doodle 4 Google – My India’ contest in August. The Doodle is the logo design you see on the Google homepage. The theme of this competition was ‘My India’. On November 12, Google India announced at Taj Ambassador Hotel that tech hub Gurgaon based 4th standard school kid Puru Pratap has won the competition…a laptop computer for himself, a t-shirt with his doodle and Rs. 1 lakh (approx 2100 US dollars) for his school.

But his counterparts in USA and UK won substantially more. According to Google their US winner “will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Google New York Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. We’ll also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.”

So let’s see: Indian winner = laptop + T-shirt + $2100 (for his school) + $0 (for himself)
US winner = laptop + T-shirt + trip to NY + $25,000 (for his school) + $15,000 (for himself)

Let me see…let me do the math…I dunno, maybe you need a special algorithm or something to make these two things equal? Because to my eyes, it looks like the Indian kid is getting royally screwed. It looks like the same contest, run by the same company, is rewarding a far lesser prize to the winner from one country than to the winner from another country.

The writer of the quoted piece goes on to point of various other prizes that are awarded equally to winners from all countries. She concludes:

Are we children of a lesser Google? Or is the Indian market less important? Perhaps Bing has the answer.

Dammit. I like Chrome.

A little over a year ago, my social networking life was all but nonexistent. Like everyone else my age, I had a Facebook page left over from college. Other than the occasional stalk-in, er login, however, I rarely used my account. But overnight (it seems) everyone and their aunty joined Facebook. Before I knew it, I had second cousins from Pakistan who I’d never met trying to friend me and my mother calling me every morning to discuss my status. (“You were sick and you didn’t call me?”) Now Facebook is the first site I visit each morning. And after Facebook comes Twitter. (My name is ____________ and yes I do have an Interwebz addiction.) And now, I’m afraid I may just join Foursquare, a new social media site which has my friends abuzz. What is Foursquare you ask? Ever sat by yourself in a coffee shop? Wished a friend was close by and wanted to hang out? Didn’t feel like texting everyone in your phonebook? If you’d logged in to Foursquare, which was co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai this past March, you would’ve known immediately who was around.

Before you start crying “stalker,” read this article from the New York Times.

…for many urbanites in their 20s and 30s, two other questions are just as important: Where are you, and can I come join you? For them, a fast-growing social networking service called Foursquare is becoming the tool of choice. A combination of friend-finder, city guide and competitive bar game, Foursquare lets users “check in” with a cellphone at a bar, restaurant or art gallery. That alerts their friends to their current location so they can drop by and say hello.

Other companies… are also offering services aimed at helping friends find each other on the go. But Foursquare has attracted more attention than the others, in part because it incorporates elements of gaming and social competition.

The system awards points and virtual badges to players depending on how often they go out and which places they visit. Users who frequent a particular place enough times are crowned “mayor” of that particular location.

[Link.]

Whaddya guys think? Next Facebook? Or is just another fad? Are you a Foursquare user? Should I add yet another task to my list of web addictions?

Alrighty, full disclosure, my interest in Foursquare was piqued after a friend Tweeted this picture.

Hmmmm. Methinks it’s time to get that “I heart geeks” T-shirt back from the dry cleaners and get some badges.

Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice. That’s why I’m happy to announce a new feature for Gmail that lets you type email in Indian languages. If you’re in India, this feature is enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent. [link]

Oh, if only there were some way for me to type Malayalam words the way they sound in English to me…and have GMail (or anything else, for that matter) automatically convert them to the correct Malayalam-in-English spelling equivalent.

For example, sometimes while I’m writing, blogging, tweeting or commenting on your Facebook crap, I feel the compulsive need to refer to the side dish I loved most as a small child: a fried, potato-y concoction which I’d spell “oorelkarunga merehkwerty or in a similarly butchered fashion.

Do you know how that shiz is actually spelled?

urulakizhangu mezhukkupuratti

Yeah (Thanks for the correction, sumithar!).

Unfortunately, when I’m trying to pronounce some of these words internally, so that I can sound them out slowly in order to spell them awkwardly, I hear them the way I did when I was four, which is neither helpful nor accurate. Just try and use a search engine to look for a correct spelling when Malayalam spellings are so wacky, and by wacky, I mean REALLY DIFFICULT.

For example, if you have Hindi selected, “namaste” will transliterate to “नमस्ते.” We currently support five Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, and businesses and schools using Google Apps should see this in the coming weeks. [link]

My father always said it’s not lady-like to gloat, but after seeing four Dravidian languages on a list of five total, I’m gloatin’. Blame my traumatic college days, when almost everyone was of North Indian descent, and the only brown languages I heard were Punjabi or Hindi– even from the handful of other Southie kids! All that aside, this feature sounds pretty cool to me. Like GMail wasn’t already great enough…

A couple of weeks back, Sree asked SAJA Forum readers to help him see if there were any Desis affected by the Madoff swindle: http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/02/crime-any-desis-on-the-madoff-client-list.html

As a techie, needing to have humans manually crowdsource the filtering of Desi names out of a long list seemed inefficient.

That’s why I built DesiFilter, a new web tool to help community journalists and obsessive Desi-angle stalkers:

http://www.desifilter.com (click on “Example 1″, etc. for sample datasets)

It’s pretty simple — just feed it some text, and it’ll go through a list of about 26,000 common South Asian names and highlight possible matches.

South Asian names are super-multicultural. I tried to remove most common Anglo names (otherwise any list of American names would be all false positives), but there’s still substantial overlap with Iranian, Arab, Turkish, and Portuguese names. It may miss Anna John and catch Osama Bin Laden — but it’s still infinitely easier than looking for potentially Desi names by hand.

My goal is for the tool to be part of any obsessive Desi-angle stalker’s toolkit. I’m interested in what you or Sepia readers find with it. I’d love feedback. Thanks.

You want feedback? Boy, you ’bout to get you some feedback, let me tell YOU. I love how it’s an accepted practice to be an “obsessive, Desi-angle stalker”. It’s just so matter-of-fact. And warm and fuzzy– we at SM are not the only ones! Admit it, you totally do it, too. When movie credits roll, and you see a Best Boy named Neel/Jay/Anil Patel/Sen/Singh, you feel a little twinge of recognition…or indigestion. Who told you to get a Large popcorn AND nachos?

Anyway, is this the first time I’ve reprinted an ENTIRE, somewhat lengthy missive to the tip line, verbatim? Why, I think it is. I just don’t have the heart to remove anything. Especially any sentence which allows me to escape freely (muahahaha) while catching Bin Laden. FINALLY! Someone needed to do it and the U.S. sucks at it. Jai Hind! No, wait…Jai Ho! Actually, more like Jai HIM—-> Anirvan.

Of course, if you’re a bibliophile, you already knew him; he’s behind the very respected BookFinder.com

…the best resource (online or off) for finding used, rare, and out of print books. The Library of Congress recommends it; both Newsweek and Money magazines called it one of the two best book sites online (the other, in both cases, being Amazon.com). [link]

And no, Anirvan didn’t pay me to splort all over your screen with my giddiness over his geekery. I splorted for free! Wait, that sounds awful. My point is, we get dozens, if not hundreds of tips. We rarely have the resources to cover each one. Most of you are aware of this.

I’m sure Anirvan sent in his DesiFilter message, shrugged, and thought “maybe”. He certainly couldn’t have expected that I’d put down my outrageously late dinner of lemon rice and paavaka mezhukkupuratti, pause the DVR and postpone packing for my trip tomorrow, just to publish an effusive endorsement of his efforts. He deserves it, though. It’s not every day that reading a tip makes me go –> . Better living through technology, y’all. I’m ’bout it bout ‘it. Let the stalking begin! Wait, that doesn’t sound right, either…

Hell, yes!

FundRace gives you the technology to do what politicians and journalists have been doing for years: find out where the money’s coming from, see who it’s going to, and solve the mystery of why that crazy ex-roommate of yours is now the Ambassador to Turks and Caicos.

Using public records filed with the FEC of all contributions greater than $200, FundRace calculates the who, where, and how much of hard/soft cash going to political parties/candidates/PACs. I’m all agog at the technological marvels that produce such transparency.

Nosing around a bit, I came up with:

Jhumpa Lahiri, Writer, gave $250 to the DNC
Kalpen Modi, Actor, gave $1,395 to Barack Obama
Atul Gawande, Surgeon, gave $250 to John Kerry
Aziz Ansari, Producer/Actor, gave $1,150 to Barack Obama
Vikram Pandit, (current CEO at Citigroup, then COO at Morgan Stanley), gave $2,000 to George W. Bush

$330,376 was given by people who identified their last name as “Gupta”
$42,850 from 28 people to Republicans
$287,526 from 96 people to Democrats

Rather amusingly, $4,945 was given by people who identified their last name as “Jindal”
$0 to Republicans
$4,945 from 5 people to Democrats

In my entirely unscientific survey, all the desi names generated more Democratic donors than Republican. Interesting since I thought the balance, based on political punditry and SM commenters, would tilt towards the GOP. Also found loads of PAC contributors, especially to energy/engineering/science based PACs like the General Atomics Political Action Committee. Time to see how that moron in your lab got all that grant money!

You can find relatives, neighbours, friends, co-workers, celebrities…anyone who donated more than $200, really. The map pinpoints addresses with rather startling accuracy. You can also search by occupation:

$86,577 was given by people who identified their occupation as “Mathematician”
$13,740 from 18 people to Republicans
$72,837 from 98 people to Democrats

I searched for donations from Astronauts, but, sadly, got no results. Oh, Abhi…

So, of course, my curiosity piqued when I recently read about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent book deal with the University of California Press.

Per Publisher’s Weekly:

THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING: How one company is transforming culture, commerce and community – and why we should worry, showing how Google is taking on governments, organizations and entire industries – and the implications of Google knowing more about us than we know about it.

(The book began as an open book experiment sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, where Vaidhyanathan is a fellow, and was subsequently picked up for publication.)

Vaidhyanathan is a rising cultural historian and media scholar whose two previous books Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System have met with wide praise.

He is approaching the book as both a fan and as a critic, he says at his website: “I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.”In a talk titled “The Googlization of Everything” that he gave last week at Penn State, Vaidhyanathan used the example of a google search result of the word “Siva” (the #1 result is the Smashing Pumpkins 1991 music video for “Siva,” not the Hindu god of the same name) to raise the question of just how universal Google actually is.

From an article in Penn State’s campus paper The Collegian Online:

“The Smashing Pumpkins were a once relevant band from Chicago,” Siva Vaidhyanathan said. “There are a billion Hindus … You would think that would be the most important thing. This gives us some indication that the Google universe does not map to the rest of the world.” …

[If you run the search yourself, a list of his books comes up first under Google Books, then the Smashing Pumpkins, then a wikipedia write-up on “Shiva” (the more common spelling for the Hindu god of destruction), then his website. Hmmm….]

From the same article:

“Google actually has a pretty profound and perhaps disturbing role in what we consider to be valuable, true and important … “Millions, perhaps billions, of people use Google everyday. We are not Google’s consumers; we are Google’s products. The advertisers are the consumers,” Vaidhyanathan said, [criticizing Google’s collection of detailed records and user information.] … “Google knows everything about many of us and a lot about almost all of us. Google knows your interests, your passions, maybe your fetishes.” Vaidhyanathan pointed to Google’s official mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” “It’s a stunning mission statement for any company,” he said. “But it’s the universality we have to question. How universal is Google? We know it doesn’t work exactly the same way in China.”

Vaidhyanathan’s starting point is that Google is a part of our lives and that we talk about it as though it were Divine — think of the good versus evil paradigm that has been set up in the google universe — but that it is something we need to take a closer look at, especially when it comes to consumer surveillance and copyright.

From another interesting article at the U. Va. website: “Discussing the role of the consumer, Siva notes another Google illusion – that of the free service. We pay for Google with our data – our searching habits, our surfing habits – and this fuels Google’s cash cow, personalized advertising.” [link]

The book will be out sometime next year, and in the meantime, we’ll all keep using our various google apps and accounts more than ever … won’t we?

Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract. Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data. While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely.

The first flummoxed Facebooker quoted by la grey lady is brown!

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

I understand that Facebook is ostensibly attempting to keep the reactivation process zimble, should one change one’s mind about one’s participation in this timesuck, but one might still find this policy douchey. (Now who has U2 stuck in their head? Just me? Meh. You kids and your tatti taste in music.)

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers. Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

I love Facebook for its clean interface, glorious lack of blinking ads* and its illusions of privacy, but I am making the shame-shame gesture towards them for such selfish, self-damaging policies. You know the one. It’s the same one your Aunt made at you, when she caught you happily adjusting yourself too often. Or maybe that was just my little-cousin-who-is-not-related-but-with-only-three-other-desi-families-here-kinda-is.

If MySpaz and my quondam stomping grounds Friendster (2003-2007) let you delete your profile, that gives them one very significant advantage over Facebook. Who cares if you can play Scrabulous if you don’t have the right to walk away from the site? I have friends who are on the fence about joining Facebook and this article has pushed them right off– to the “no, thank you” side. Well-played.

“Most sites, even online dating sites, will give you an option to wipe your slate clean,” Mr. Das said.

Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were also on the site. “I work in a small office,” he said. “The last thing I want is people going on there and checking out my private life.”

“I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to manage saw my stuff,” he added.

At first glance, it would seem to be in Facebook’s interest to flip us a collective bird, but is it? How much bad press and how many MoveOn.org protests do they want?

“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network that has certified Facebook.

Mr. Burlison’s complaint spurred the Information Commissioner’s Office, a privacy watchdog organization, to investigate Facebook’s data-protection practices, the BBC reported last month. In response, Facebook issued a statement saying that its policy was in “full compliance with U.K. data protection law.”

If you want help with walking away from things in your own past, walking away from, walking away from things that just won’t last, there is actually a Facebook group devoted to helping you do exactly that; join “How to permanently delete your facebook account” and you/one will discover 4,763 members who feel the same way you do. . . .

*I hate ads. Much to my elation, this site does not have ads. I want one ad-free oasis in my wirtual life. No eye-bleed-inducing blinking, no weird animation, no pop-under-over-throughs, no offers for NetFlix or 1,728 ugly emoticons. No. Just mutiny, and nothing but some mutiny, k thx bai.