Tag Archives: Entertainment Industries Council

Women and Girls at the Intersection of Innovation and Opportunity webcast May 21, 2014

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The webcast, Women and Girls at the Intersection of Innovation and Opportunity, takies place at 2 pm EDT (11 am PDT). I find the information about access to the webcast confusing in this EIC network May 21, 2014 announcement,

Live Webcast on EICnetwork.tv’s Science Engineering & Technology Channel from TV  [emphasis mine]
Worldwide Studios Near Washington D.C.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 2 PM ET

The Manufacturing Institute and EICnetwork.tv are kicking off the summer with a special webcast focusing on Women and Girls in STEM + the Arts. The webcast will be hosted on Wednesday, May 21st, live from the EICnetwork.tv studio in Chantilly, VA at 2pm ET, with a studio audience of students from the greater DC/VA area. It will be made available for later viewing immediately following the live event. [emphasis mine]

Featured panelists include Harris IT Services Director of Human Resources, Patricia Munchel; Harris IT Services Line of Business Lead & Program Manager for Health and Human Services/Clinical Research Support, Elena Byrley; Director of Communications at The Manufacturing Institute (a division of the National Association of Manufacturing), AJ Jorgenson; Brittney Exline, the youngest African-American female computer engineer in the US, and female leadership from Lockheed Martin’s space division.

This is an incredible opportunity to support excellent Internet TV program content reaching a wide audience of students, educators, policy leaders, academia, news media, mentors, entertainment writers, and executives who support initiatives in STEM + the Arts.

Perhaps the writer meant that if you don’t catch the live webcast, you can view it later?

I have found out more about EIC (Entertainment Industries Council) and its various projects, from the About page (Note: Links have been removed),

The Entertainment Industries Council, Inc. (EIC) is a non-profit organization founded in 1983 by leaders in the entertainment industry to provide information, awareness and understanding of major health and social issues among the entertainment industries and to audiences at large.

EIC represents the entertainment industry’s best examples of accurately depicting health and social issues onscreen in feature films, TV and music videos, in music and within the pages of comic books. A look at our Board of Directors and Trustees will reveal the entertainment industry’s commitment to incorporating science-based information into storylines to make them as believable–and beneficial to the viewer–as possible, and to heighten entertainment value.

EIC not only represents the best creative works that come out of Hollywood, New York and beyond; we take an active role in helping entertainment creators maximize the realistic attributes of health and social issues in their productions. EIC provides educational services and resources, including First Draft™ briefings and consultations, publications that spotlight specific health issues, Generation Next™ film school briefings and fellowships, and much, much more.

EIC also produces the PRISM Awards™, EDGE Awards™ and other recognition programs that serve to recognize and reinforce our industry’s hard work and great accomplishments in depicting health and social issues realistically, but also in an entertaining way. It is our belief that the majority of Americans–and people all over the world–are most receptive to information when it is provided in an easily digestible way. with today’s health and social issues, substance abuse and addiction, gun violence, mental illness, depression, suicide, bipolar disorder and HIV/AIDS, constantly rising cancer rates and so many more, making a difference through entertainment is a powerful tool to reach millions of people. EIC is the link between the science and the entertainment, and enables communication between scientists and the creative community, and facilitates communication from them to the public.

EIC educates, serves as a resource to, and recognizes the incredible writers, directors, producers, performers and others who are committed to making a difference through their art.

I also looked at the Board of Directors list and found a familiar sounding name, Michele Lee (from her EIC Board of Directors biography page),

A founding Board Director of the Entertainment Industries Council, Inc., this thriving star of Broadway, film and television has diversified since completing her nine year stint as Karen McKenzie on Knot”s Landing. Now an accomplished filmmaker, she was the first woman to ever write, produce, direct and star in a movie for television. A 1998 recipient of the Larry Stewart Leadership and Inspiration Award, she has long served as the “voice of EIC” – a passion which continues in her role on the PRISM Awards Honorary Committee.

Congratulations Ms. Lee on reinventing yourself.

Engineering, entertainment, IBM’s Watson, and product placement

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A new partnership between the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) was announced last week. From the Feb. 25, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

In honor of National Engineers Week, the Entertainment Industries Council, Inc. (EIC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have announced a new partnership to promote careers in science, engineering and technology. The partnership serves to enhance EIC’s ongoing Ready on the S.E.T. and … Action! program in collaboration with The Boeing Company, by providing additional expertise in science and technology to the entertainment industry creative community under the auspices of EIC’s First Draft brand.

I’m not familiar with the EIC or its ‘Ready on the S.E.T. and … Action!’ program but here’s a video featuring Pauley Perrette (from the US tv show NCIS) in one of the program’s public service announcements designed to encourage girls to enter the field of engineering,

This new program the ‘First Draft’ is a little different,

In addition to offering experts to writers, producers, directors, performers and creative executives on any and all areas of science, engineering and technology on-demand, the First Draft effort with NSF’s Science Scene program in the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs will also provide publications with depiction suggestions to creators, as well as conducting topic briefings. The first such briefing will take place in July, at the start of the television [tv] writing season. The half-day event, described as a sort-of “writer’s boot camp,” will offer up scientists and engineers in a variety of cutting-edge fields that may be useful to story development and technical guidance. Topics are expected to include such areas as nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence, bioengineering (including artificial limbs and implants), forensics (including DNA analysis and miniaturized lab techniques), as well as artificial life and genetic engineering-and exciting tie-ins to aerospace engineering, among others.

If I read this correctly, they are running a workshop prior to any writing or production work being done. In other words, they’re getting to the writers and producers before the tv episodes are written or conceptualized. That means the usual order of writers and producers getting an idea for a story, finding an expert either to vet it from a technical/scientific perspective, and going into production is reversed. Now, the story idea will spring from the science and the technology. In a sense, you could say the ‘product placement’ (science and technology) drives the story or, alternatively, you could say it’s a neat piece of social engineering.

I’ve been thinking about social engineering especially on the heels of the ‘Watson’ computer triumph on Jeopardy, the tv quiz program, after three days (Feb. 14 – 16, 2011) of competing against humans (mentioned in my Feb. 14, 2011 posting). Shortly (Feb. 24, 2011) after Watson won, IBM (Watson’s creator) announced a collaboration with the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine on a project that could bring Watson into the examining room with you.  From the article by Frank D. Roylance on physorg.com,

They have begun work on merging the speech recognition and question-answering skills of Watson – the computer that beat two humans on “Jeopardy!” last week – with the vast stores of clinical knowledge and analytical skills in the medical profession.

If it all works out, the end product could be a “Dr. Watson” in hospitals and physicians’ offices

“In the future, I see the software sitting with the physician as he is interviewing the patient, and processing information in real time, and correlating that with the patient’s medical record and other records,” said Dr. Eliot Siegel, director of the Maryland Imaging Research Technologies Lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Watson, he said, “has incredible potential to revolutionize how we interact with medical records; to be a really valuable assistant to me; to read all the literature pertinent to my practice … to always be at my side and help suggest problems, things in the medical records I need to know about; to suggest diagnoses and treatment options I may not have considered,” he said.

I found the timing interesting. First Watson demonstrates that it can think (it beat humans on a quiz that requires some semantic sophistication)  in a fairly non-threatening way (the mistakes the computer made were odd, not like humans at all and therefore funny). Then within one week or so, an announcement is made about using Watson (some day) in the doctor’s office.

IBM made much of the fact that the computer was named after the company founder, Paul Watson, and not Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson. Still, I’m sure if the company founder’s name had been Zloklikovits or another  name considered challenging for one reason or another, they wouldn’t have used the company founder’s name.

I’m pointing out that there’s a great deal of planning and money on the line and it’s a good idea to be critical (i.e. not accept unthinkingly) of our entertainment from time to time.