City College of San Francisco is helping students without a science background gain laboratory experience to work in the biotech industry, one of the Bay Area’s most promising employment sectors. The idea is to meet the demand in the industry for lab technicians who don’t necessarily have four-year degrees in science. While some big companies have been hesitant to take on two-year college graduates from the Bridge to Biotech program, smaller companies are more willing to take a risk on them. How much education do you need to get a laboratory job? “Science always seemed to me like something for the intellectual elite,” said Kiel Copeland, whose internship led to a job at a San Francisco startup developing drugs to fight HIV and other viruses. “I never saw myself as that.”
Category: Technology
Posted inCommunity, Economy & Business, Land use, Technology
Small loans having big impact on local businesses
Financial crisis leading to an increased demand on microlenders for start-up capital
In the community acupuncture room at Bu Tong Clinic, patients wait in silence away from the bustle of traffic and hawkers on Mission Street. The clinic owner, Julie Baumhofer, has seen her clientele grow as word about her low-fee acupuncture treatment continues to spread.
The clinic wouldn’t have happened without a microlender.
“If they didn’t do what they do, I wouldn’t be here now,” she says. “You don’t have to be born rich and know the right people, and you can be a business owner.”
Posted inCommunity, Media, Technology
Internet Access as the Next Civil Rights Battle?
Advocates argue for ‘open Internet,’ some fear minority redlining
The ongoing, often arcane, battle over whether telecommunications companies may slow certain online services and charge fees to speed up others has morphed into a civil rights controversy.
Many of the country’s leading civil rights organizations are siding with the phone and cable companies in their bid to prevent federal regulations over their broadband, or high-speed, Internet services. At stake: whether to preserve “network neutrality” — the longstanding principle that all consumers can access whatever websites or applications they want on the Internet, at the same speed and without limitations imposed by Internet service providers.
Posted inLabor, Technology
‘Socially responsible outsourcing’ takes tech jobs to developing world
A local nonprofit group is making a name for itself in the tech world by providing U.S.-based companies with low-priced online labor in developing countries. While thousands of for-profit companies have been offshoring tech jobs for years, San Francisco-based Samasource says it wants to turn online work into a tool to alleviate poverty.
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Media, Technology
Cheap phone calls hang in the balance in tug-of-war between FCC, cable giants
Voice-over-Internet calling is steadily growing in popularity, replacing costly long distance phone services with free or cheap options that are affordable for many low-income and immigrant communities. Bay Area residents could see cheap calls become a thing of the past depending on the outcome of a battle being waged in the halls of Washington D.C. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski wants to reclassify broadband from an information service to a telecommunications carrier with the goal of gaining some authority to regulate providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, which the companies fiercely oppose.
Read more…
Posted inCity Hall, Economy & Business, Education, Health, Labor, Neighborhoods, News, Technology
Heart, neuroscience buildings to boost UCSF economic impact
The University of California, San Francisco, is slated to begin several large new projects at the Mission Bay medical center, including buildings dedicated to cardiovascular and neuroscience research. UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who shared a new report on the impact the university has had on the city, said the university is the second biggest employer in the city.
Posted inMedia, Technology
Bay Area News Project editor promises media renaissance
Jonathan Weber, the new editor for the Bay Area News Project, reveals project details to an audience of more than 100 journalists at the World Affairs
Council in San Francisco. Weber said — unlike most media outlets — that he’s hiring. He presented a contrarian point of view on modern media, saying that technology heralds the rebirth, of journalism, not its death.