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Tag: Silicon Valley

San Jose Author: Being Vietnamese in America Not So ‘Eazy’
1Jul By EditorNo Comments
Demographics, Events

San Jose Author: Being Vietnamese in America Not So ‘Eazy’

By Sharon Simonson SAN JOSÉ—For Vietnamese American author Trami Nguyen Cron, the irony weighs heavy. Vietnamese people, whether refugees or immigrants, typically have fled their homeland for the United States in pursuit of freedom for themselves and their families. But once resettled, they seek to control their children’s lives to an extraordinary degree, essentially robbing the children of the very freedom the parents often sacrificed much to gain. “Vietnamese people need to stop defining success as how much money you make or your professional title,” she says. “One of my challenges to my culture is to rethink its definition of success.” That is the primary message—but in no way the only one—she hopes to send with her first novel, “VietnamEazy,” released today by publisher Wellstone Boo...
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San Francisco Leads Nation in Employment Gains in Large Counties
21Apr By EditorNo Comments
Demographics, The Web

San Francisco Leads Nation in Employment Gains in Large Counties

Information businesses, including software publishers, and building construction are setting the job-growth pace By Sharon Simonson New economy is driving old in San Francisco, making the county the fastest growing in the country as measured by annual employment gains. Travis County, home to Austin, Texas, and another U.S. technology industry center, is the country’s second-fastest growing. Information businesses are among those adding jobs in the home county of the University of Texas, but businesses in other sectors are adding them faster. According to industry data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau on the 50 largest U.S. counties by employment, companies that specialize in Internet publishing including online software sellers and web-search portals are adding workers...
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California Has the Most Foreign-Born Residents
20Apr By EditorNo Comments
Demographics, The Web

California Has the Most Foreign-Born Residents

By Sharon Simonson A record 42.2 million foreign-born people live in the United States making up 13.2 percent of the population, according to new findings from The Pew Research Center based on U.S. Census data. With 27 percent of California's total population foreign-born — or not quite 10.5 million people — the state has more immigrants numerically than any other state and the greatest proportion of its total residents who are immigrants. One in five people (or nearly that many) living in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada also are foreign-born. West Virginia has the lowest portion of foreign-born people at 1.4 percent of the state's total 1.8 million residents, Pew reports. The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. has grown fourfold since 1960 when not quite 10 millio...
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Global Immigration to the Bay Area at 5-Year High
24Mar By EditorNo Comments
Demographics

Global Immigration to the Bay Area at 5-Year High

By Sharon Simonson International migrants are pouring into the Bay Area at the highest rate in five years, driving population growth and cultural change across the region. More than 238,000 foreign-born people and some Americans returning from abroad moved into Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Alameda counties in the last five years — more than 92,000 came to Santa Clara County alone, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population estimates released today. All five counties have seen their highest rates of international migration since 2010 in the last two years. People coming from overseas or outside the United States accounted for two-thirds of the population growth in both San Francisco and Santa Clara counties from mid-2010 to mid-2015. They represen...
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Of Notes and Modernity
11Sep By EditorNo Comments
Demographics

Of Notes and Modernity

By Sharon Simonson CAMBRIDGE, Mass., FREMONT and SAN JOSE, Calif.—Sriram Emani has no home in Cambridge, Mass., where his two-year-old company IndianRaga is based—or anywhere else for that matter. He travels so much he doesn’t need one. Emani must move fast. He is trying to ignite a global revolution. From the sparks of the most-promising Indian and Western musicians he can find, the Mumbai-born, MIT-educated entrepreneur is re-inventing Indian classical music for a mass audience. With an emphasis on education in the classic art, his digital-media startup nurtures young talent with peer-to-peer and collaborative learning. At the same time, Emani is searching for ways to distill an ancient art’s hours-long presentation into minutes of 21st-century sound, making the music relevant ...
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Census 2020 Seeks to Unravel Race from Ethnicity
16Jul By EditorNo Comments
Demographics

Census 2020 Seeks to Unravel Race from Ethnicity

By Sharon Simonson Tech companies releasing demographic data about their workforces are entering an emerging and potentially fraught conversation, though perhaps not at all about what they imagine. Since the end of May, Silicon Valley’s Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Menlo Park’s Facebook Inc. have released “diversity” counts by gender, race and ethnicity about their national and global workers. They have uniformly criticized themselves for their largely white and Asian male populations and pledged to broaden their human spectrum. But in their information releases — in particular their graphical representations of their workforces’ statistical makeup — the companies have used nomenclature that differs from that used by the federal government, conflating two histor...
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Social Conditioning and the Corporate Campus
16Jul By EditorNo Comments
Uncategorized

Social Conditioning and the Corporate Campus

By Sharon Simonson For the urbanist, the Apple Inc. campus being built in Silicon Valley is a tragedy: a 176-acre tear in the community fabric delineated with security fencing and destined to last. For the architectural historian, it is that plus a reminder: The stark separations in land use that characterize most of modern America have had — and have — purposes of people separation too. “(Apple, Google and Facebook) have created these closed enclaves where you have only badged access. It’s not exclusive in race or age or economics, or by intent to have a homogenous population, but it does create these prestigious enclaves where they control the access." Bryant Rice, business and workplace-design consultant  Despite its futuristic design and association with one of the world’s most r...
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Afghan Sisters in Silicon Valley
15May By EditorNo Comments
Uncategorized

Afghan Sisters in Silicon Valley

By Sharon Simonson SANTA CLARA, Calif.—As young children, Afghan sisters Hasina and Somaya Qaderi scampered through dusty streets once shared by soldiers under command of Alexander the Great. In their native Herat, an enormous citadel built in the early 14th century still occupies the same site as Alexander’s fort. The citadel's turreted walls rise high and stern from the central hilltop, a weighty symbol of the 2,500 years of civilized history that underlie the modern city’s expression. Herat is 7,500 miles from the suburban Santa Clara ranch home that the women now own and share with their parents. Even that enormous distance doesn’t measure the intellectual, psychological and emotional chasm that the sisters have leapt in the last 12 years, and in some ways since their births. The ...
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