How do the latest technologies affect our communities? How can we use science to benefit society and how do we keep it from harming us?

KBOO's The Digital Divide is a public affairs radio show that attempts to answer these questions and ask a few of our own through interviews, recordings, and commentary. The show touches upon such issues as open source, privacy, transparency, intellectual property, free speech, accessibility, hacking, net neutrality, file sharing, piracy, social networking, pollution, bioethics and more.

This month, the Digital Divide looks at the environment and what technology is doing to help or harm it.

We speak with a pioneering nonprofit that is battling the growing amount of eWaste, and talk to a justice organization on just how green many of the next generation energy technologies really are.

Contact [email protected] if you'd like to get involved.

The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN), Software Association of Oregon (SAO) , Oregon Business Association (OBA) and the Portland Business Alliance are presenting the 2010 Gubernatorial Candidate Forums. Tech America will be a supporting organization for the forums

Oregon’s economy is facing great challenges. The state is struggling with serious budgetary shortfalls and that is exacerbated by an unemployment rate that is hovering above 10 percent. With the recent passage of measures 66 & 67 many Oregonians question what the impact will be for Oregon businesses. Policies that support and encourage business growth and economic development are a top-of-mind priority for many Oregonians. These candidate forums are intended to provide an opportunity for members of the business community to ask the candidates from each party what they would do to help support business and economic growth in Oregon.

The Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate forum will take place on Wednesday, April 7 at Portland General Electric’s auditorium located at 121 SW Salmon St, 2WTC in Portland. It will feature Democratic candidates Bill Bradbury (www.bradburyfororegon.com) and John Kitzhaber, (www.johnkitzhaber.com).

The Republican Gubernatorial Candidate forum will take place on Tuesday, April 27 at the Multnomah Athletic Club 1849 SW Salmon St. in Portland. It will feature Republican candidates Allen Alley (www.allenalley.com) and Chris Dudley (www.chrisdudley.com).

Tickets are required for onsite attendees and individual live stream access. Registration is recommended for satellite venues.

The gubernatorial candidate forum will be held prior to the primaries and will be moderated by Laural Porter of KGW News (twitter.com/lauralkgw). Check-in begins at 4:00PM. The program will begin at 4:30 PM and will run to 6:00 PM. Tickets are $20 for members of presenting or supporting organizations and $40 for non-members. We encourage attendees to pre-register online using the link below.

The forums will be streamed live over the web. Individual web stream tickets can be purchased for $10 in advance, but business community members outside of the Portland area may attend a satellite event in their local area at no charge.

For more information about the forums, or to register for either of these events, please go to:

Democratic Candidates Forum: www.sao.org/event/dgp

Republican Candidates Forum: www.sao.org/event/rgp

Follow the discussions on twitter: #pdxGDP & #pdxRGP.

The PDC interview came up with 3 critical areas that impact software professionals: 1) Education 2) Political Engagement 3) Taxes & Fees

The goal of the meeting will be to break into small groups, read some of the written ideas from the online interview and brainstorm ways for the PDC to address these issues.

Each of the 3 groups will share with the larger group with the goal of reaching consensus around a few ideas for the PDC to pursue.

We'll then go out to the larger community with a second online interview to make sure that we're giving the PDC advice that reflects the entire region.

On June 7th, check out Portland’s First Thursday scene and stop by DemocracyLab’s summer soiree, hosted by our friends at PREM Group. Come meet our board and staff members and learn more about our new online community engagement tool. For a small donation at the door ($5 suggested), you can enjoy food, libations and music to your heart’s content.

Click here to RSVP.

Hope to see you there!

Do you believe in open source democracy?

Do you want to help improve collaboration tools for building online engagement apps?

Then come to DemocracyLab's hack-a-thon at New Relic, this Tuesday, July 23 starting at 5 p.m.

Whether you're attending OSCON or just attending tandem events like ours, we hope to see you there!

More election data mining and data visualizing. We're almost finished with our Behind the Curtain beta... and it's getting exciting!

spatial data, data viz, non-tech politicos, data science, designers--- we love you!

Check out hackoregon.org to find out more about the BTC project.

Special Thanks to Squishy Media for sponsoring our coding comfort and hacking vices.

Speaker: Winston Saunders

Abstract: Word vectors, derived by deep learning algorithms applied to billions of words of text, provide powerful semantic models of language. Code in R, demonstrating [queen] + [man] - [woman] ~ [King] to about 90% accuracy will be reviewed. Building first on exploratory "bag of words" analysis of Presidential debate texts, we'll explore, using pre-computed GloVe vectors (Pennington et al http://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/), relationships like [sanders] + [trump] - [clinton] ~ [cruz] and how candidate positions align to rhetorical sentiment like [government] + [people] - [tax]. This analysis is work in progress. We'll also test empirical limits (aka failed experiments). Active feedback is both sought and welcome.

Details:

Doors open ~6 pm, talk starts at 6:30 pm

Doors are open at bottom, take elevator to 3rd floor, door should be open for suite 320

We'll visit a local watering hole afterwards.