Special Report: The Female Factor: Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys

But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since current statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a non-profit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not a solitary grind but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets — but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

“They’re dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they’re not dreaming of creating it,” she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world and growing and paying handsomely, as other sectors shrink.

Britain’s technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the E.U. average of 21.8 percent, or the U.S. rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The future looks bleak. Girls take just 8 percent of Britain’s computer science A-levels, the high school exam that is the passport to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, girls are 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in the field, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem at least partly to technology’s image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

That brainy-guys-in-the-garage stereotype is hardly helped by companies that Ms. Parmar believes condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. “The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry” in interaction with women, she said.

If they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

“Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong,” said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Messages about gender and technology tend to start in earliest childhood, when boys are encouraged to play computer games and think about how things work, while girls get toy makeup and fashion sets, Ms. Parmar said.

Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the Colorado center, said:

“It appears on the surface that women aren’t choosing” technology, but “there are a lot of factors that are influencing that choice.” She continued: “Girls talk about how even when there’s a computer in the house, they don’t get access to it as much, because the boys are pushing them away.”

Subtle, even unconscious bias can prompt parents, teachers and guidance counselors to give the sexes different study and career advice, she said.

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Microsoft Inherits Sticky Data Collection Issues From Skype

BARCELONA — When Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion, it acquired not only the technology behind the world’s dominant Internet voice and video service, but a connection with more than 250 million active users.

But perhaps what Microsoft did not anticipate when it made the purchase was that it would inherit the delicate privacy aspects of Skype’s business, including its billions of encrypted, peer-to-peer Internet conversations.

Those conversations, and the access Microsoft grants to them, are now the focus of a lobbying campaign by 50 digital rights groups and dozens of individuals.

In a letter sent in January, the group asked Microsoft to disclose what data it collected from Skype users and whether that data was passed on — whether to potential advertisers or to law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations.

The group, a collection of Internet activists from around the world that includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and Zwiebelfreunde, a German university group, called on Microsoft to begin publishing regular transparency reports listing the requests made by government agencies for Skype client information around the world.

Amid the pressure, there are signs that Microsoft may be preparing to relent and publish what are known as transparency reports, which disclose the level of government requests for information. Google has provided the reports since 2010. Since then, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, have moved toward offering regular reports — but not Microsoft.

Besides public disclosures, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group also wanted to know the location of Skype’s headquarters — whether in Luxembourg, as it was before it was acquired by Microsoft, or at Microsoft’s base in Redmond, Washington.

The location is important, Ms. Galperin said, because if Skype’s headquarters are in the United States, Microsoft and Skype would be required to comply with requests made by U.S. intelligence services under Calea, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which gives agencies easier access to monitor data from online businesses like Skype.

Internet activists in countries with authoritarian regimes also need to know whether their Skype conversations, once considered a hack-proof way of avoiding government phone wiretaps because of the peer-to-peer nature of the exchanges, are still secure, she said.

“What we know right now is that we don’t know,” said Paul Bernal, a lawyer and professor of technology, intellectual property and media law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, one of 61 individuals who also signed the open letter to Microsoft.

“We need to know how Microsoft and Skype cooperate with law enforcement and others around the world,” Mr. Bernal said. “People living under authoritarian regimes need to know what kinds of personal risks they are taking when using Skype.”

Dominic Carr, a Microsoft spokesman in Redmond, said that Skype’s headquarters, even after the purchase, remained in Luxembourg and the company was subject to laws of Luxembourg and the European Union, not the United States.

Luxembourg, like other E.U. countries, has mutual assistance pacts and other legal mechanisms that permit companies like Microsoft to share information with foreign law enforcement agencies in continuing investigations. The purchase of Skype by Microsoft has not changed the ability of law enforcement to gain access to Skype data, Mark Gillett, a corporate vice president responsible for Skype engineering and operations, wrote in a blog post.

According to Microsoft’s published privacy policy, three types of information are generated by Skype: personally identifiable information on users; nonidentifiable information; and the actual contents of Skype-to-Skype audio and video conversations.

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Ericsson Finds a Chinese Rival Hot on Its Heels

BARCELONA — As long as there have been mobile phones, Ericsson has dominated the global market for equipment for wireless telecom networks, selling the biggest share of gear to mobile phone operators around the world. But last year something happened that even the longtime market leader, based in Stockholm, had never faced.

A competitor, Huawei of China, pulled even in overall sales.

The rivals have different business mixes — Ericsson makes 43 percent of its sales by managing wireless networks, while Huawei also sells smartphones and corporate communication grids. And excluding those side businesses, Huawei’s sold $25 billion of equipment to operators last year, 29 percent less than Ericsson, which remains the biggest seller of key components like data and voice lines and routers, according to Dell’Oro, a research firm in Redwood City, California.

But Huawei, an upstart founded in 1987 initially to resell telephone switches in rural China, has become a global peer of equal scale, matching Ericsson with $35.7 billion in total sales.

Momentum for the time being appears to be with Huawei, whose profit rose 33 percent last year, to 15.4 billion renminbi, or $2.5 billion, as sales rose 8 percent to 220.2 billion renminbi, according to preliminary, unaudited figures from the company, based in Shenzhen. In the same period, Ericsson’s profit fell 53 percent, to 5.9 billion Swedish kronor, or $919 million, as network equipment sales dropped 11 percent, to 117.3 billion kronor.

Hans Vestberg, an Ericsson employee for 25 years who has been chief executive since January 2010, led the company’s diversification into network management, an outsourcing business that has helped Ericsson offset its equipment rivalry with Huawei. During an interview, Mr. Vestberg declined to discuss Huawei directly but noted that Ericsson had hundreds of competitors, depending on the type of equipment, the type of customer and geography.

Even so, remaining the overall market leader is important, he said.

“Ericsson has been the market leader throughout its 136-year history, and my job I guess is to make sure we hold on to that for another 130,” Mr. Vestberg said.

Product innovations, like antenna-integrated radio, or AIR, an antenna for a cellphone base station that has the radio transmitter built directly into the aerial to save space, electricity and cost for network operators, will keep Ericsson on top, he said.

But the rivalry, because of the increasingly strategic value of global communication networks, also has a significant geopolitical dimension. Amid national security concerns, the U.S. market for operator equipment has been essentially closed to Huawei, which was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army.

The largest U.S. operators have not bought from Huawei, and, last October, the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence recommended that they continue to avoid purchases from Huawei and another Chinese vendor, ZTE.

The House report, which followed hearings with Chinese company executives, concluded that Huawei had not supplied the requested information on its relationship with the Chinese government and a group of 10 state-owned Chinese banks that were among Huawei’s commercial lenders. The bipartisan panel, in its public report, concluded that Huawei was an extension of the Chinese government, using public subsidies to underbid and win business.

“Based on available information, the committee finds that Huawei receives substantial support from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned banks, which is at least partially responsible for its position in the global marketplace,” according to the report.

A senior executive at an American maker of network equipment said he believed Huawei to be a de facto arm of the Chinese government, receiving preferential subsidies and support that had allowed it to undercut Ericsson and the other suppliers of equipment, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks, to build its market share.

Start-Ups Take on Special Tasks for Small Business

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

Special Report: Technology & Innovation: Robotic Gadgets Are Becoming Within Reach of Average Consumer

His creation, the Hexy, is a six-legged, crablike creature that can navigate its own environment and respond to humans with a hand wave or other programmable gesture. Mr. Schlesinger said he had been able to lower production costs by using free software and by molding a lot of the plastic parts locally in Massachusetts, not in China.

Since setting up his company, ArcBotics, in suburban Somerville, Massachusetts, Mr. Schlesinger has built a backlog of more than 1,000 orders. His goal, he said, was to become “the Ikea of robotics.”

“I think the market for consumer robotics is poised to explode,” said Mr. Schlesinger, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “We are only at the beginning.”

Since the 1960s, robots have assumed major roles in industrial manufacturing and assembly, the remote detonation of explosives, search and rescue, and academic research. But the devices have remained out of reach, in affordability and practicality, to most consumers.

That, according to Professor Andrew Ng, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in California, is about to change. One big reason, Mr. Ng said, is the mass production of smartphones and game consoles, which has driven down the size and price of robotic building blocks like accelerometers, gyroscopes and sensors.

On the edges of consumer consciousness, the first generation of devices with rudimentary artificial intelligence are beginning to appear: entertainment and educational robots like the Hexy, and a line of tireless household drones that can mow lawns, sweep floors, clean swimming pools and even enhance golf games.

“I’m seeing a huge explosion of robotic toys and believe that there will be one soon in industry,” said Mr. Ng, an associated professor of computer science at Stanford.

The most advanced robots remain exotic workhorses like NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, which cost $2.5 billion, and the LS3, a doglike robot being developed for the U.S. military that can carry a 400-pound, or 180-kilogram load more than 20 miles, or about 30 kilometers. The mechanical beast of burden, whose price is not public, is being made by a consortium led by Boston Dynamics. In Menlo Park, California, engineers at Willow Garage, a robotics firm, are selling the two-armed, 5-foot-4 inch (1.63-meter) rolling robot called the PR2 for $400,000.

A video on Willow Garage’s Web site shows the PR2 fetching beer from a refrigerator, which while an engineering and programming feat, is an expensive way to get beer.

“I think we’re still some years away from useful personal robots making pervasive appearances in our homes,” Mr. Ng said.

Right now, for the masses, there is the CaddyTrek, a robotic golf club carrier that follows a player from tee to fairway to green through tall grass, up 30-degree slopes and in snow, for as many as 27 holes on a single charge. Players wear a remote control on their belts, which acts as a homing beacon for the self-propelled cart, which trails six paces behind the player.

Golfers can also navigate the robotic cart, which is made by FTR Systems, to the next tee while they finish putting.

“Someone ran up to me last week and said that my golf cart had broken free and was rolling through the parking lot,” said Richard Nagle, the sales manager for CaddyTrek in North America and Europe. “Most people just stop and stare. They’re not used to this.”

FTR Systems does not disclose the proprietary technology it uses to power the CaddyTrek, which sells for $1,595, but Mr. Nagle said sales of the robot carriers had been strong, and the company had been rushing to meet orders in the United States and Europe.

I.H.T. Special Report: Technology & Innovation: New Player in E.U. Data Privacy Battle

This January, when Ireland assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union, Mr. Shatter, who is now Ireland’s minister of justice, equality and defense, will take on another big challenge: putting together an agreement to extend the Union’s 17-year-old data protection law to Web businesses and the digital economy.

Mr. Shatter is Ireland’s lead negotiator on the issue in the Council of Ministers, the legislative body in Brussels that acts as the European Parliament’s upper house. The Union’s 27 members are at odds over how to apply E.U. data protection laws in the digital world, and an agreement could require companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to provide the bloc’s 503.7 million consumers with far greater control over their online data than people have in the United States.

An important part of the proposal, which is now before two committees in the European Parliament, would require Web companies to ask E.U. citizens for their explicit consent before collecting online data and tracking Internet activity used to tailor marketing and advertising to individuals.

The proposal, which was drafted by Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission, has been welcomed by E.U. privacy regulators, who are battling Google over its data collection practices.

But it is opposed by many large Web businesses, as well as by the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union. Opponents view the prior consent clause as an onerous condition that threatens an Internet financial model that relies on advertising to pay for content.

That has raised concerns among E.U. lawmakers, who are afraid that overly burdensome regulation would stifle Internet commerce and job growth.

Into this predicament steps Mr. Shatter, 61. In an interview, he said that he looked forward to working on advancing the data protection proposal, which has been packaged as a “regulation,” a rarely used binding form of E.U. law that would take effect immediately upon adoption in Brussels and apply to all 27 member countries.

“There is a need to improve trust and confidence to reassure people that their personal data won’t be misused,” Mr. Shatter said. “Putting stronger data protection standards in place will make individual citizens across Europe more trustful of the technology and its use.”

Mr. Shatter said he would aim for a compromise that recognized the growing importance of the digital economy to the European Union, as well as the need for hard-and-fast legal protections for E.U. citizens, who are increasingly making their purchases and many everyday decisions via the Internet.

Without privacy constraints, those movements online can be tracked.

“I think it is possible to reconcile the legitimate and economically important activities of the advertising industry with privacy issues,” he said. “I don’t think we can commoditize individuals and simply regard them as something of business value to be sold on.”

Such strict new rules would replace a law from 1995, which was conceived as more of a legal directive that effectively limited the possibilities of wide-scale data mining for direct marketing or other commercial purposes.

Because of the existing law’s optional nature and a loophole allowing companies to collect data for “legitimate interests,” Internet companies have been able largely to evade the directive’s principle of obtaining prior consent.

Mr. Shatter has been part of a lot of groundbreaking. His law firm, Gallagher Shatter, was the first in Ireland to represent and win a civil judgment for a victim of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, which it did in the early 1990s. Mr. Shatter, who is also a trained professional mediator — a skill that could serve him well — has published several books on Irish family law, as well as the 1989 novel “Laura,” a story about a custody battle involving a fictional politician.