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Submission + - If the Programmer Won't Go To Mountain Valley, Should MV Go To the Programmer?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US," Matt Mullenweg advises in How Paul Graham Is Wrong (a rejoinder to Graham's Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In), "and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like." Microsoft and Google — which hawk the very tools to facilitate remote work that Mullenweg cites — have shuttered remote offices filled with top talent even as they cry the talent sky is falling. So, is "being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located," as Mullenweg puts it, a big part of tech's 'talent shortage' problem?

Comment Why We Have a Lawless Gotcha Capitalism Economy (Score 5, Interesting) 121

Here's Why We Have a Lawless Gotcha Capitalism Economy: "Gotcha Capitalism rewards bad behavior. It turns the normal reward function of capitalism on its head. Instead of good companies with good products and creative innovation rising to the top, we have companies that refine their gotcha mechanisms rising to the top. They create just enough surprise to walk the thin line of the law...or slip over it, but not enough to do something that might actually have a material impact on the bottom line. If you like my line of thinking, I've written an entire book about this - you can buy it here. But for now, know this: Until bad behavior starts resulting in material impact, companies won't stop. And we'll remain stuck in the sucker economy."

Submission + - Would Twitter Make President Obama 'Follow' the Tea Party if the Price is Right?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Giving others the impression that individuals support something that they actually don't could get you fined and placed under house arrest. But if you're Twitter, it could boost your bottom line. Gigaom's Carmel DeAmicis reports that brands pay Twitter to falsely appear in your following list, an advertising technique brought to light by William Shatner after he saw that 'MasterCard' appeared in his following list despite the fact that he didn’t follow it. "By making it look like someone follows an account that they don’t," writes DeAmicis, "it sends a false signal that said user cares about that brand. Although the brands are marked as 'promoted,' it’s not necessarily clear that the user in question doesn’t actually follow the brand. There’s ethical considerations to be had. Hypothetical examples: What if you’re vegan and don’t want people to think you’re following Burger King? Or you’re the CEO of Visa and don’t want people thinking you’re following MasterCard? Or you’re a pro-life activist and don’t want people thinking you’re following Planned Parenthood?" Or, if you're @BarackObama and don't want people to think you're following @TPPatriots!

Submission + - The Billionaires' Space Club

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Silicon sultans are the new robber barons, writes The Economist, adding that "they have been diversifying into businesses that have little to do with computers, while egotistically proclaiming that they alone can solve mankind’s problems, from ageing to space travel." But over at Slate, NYU journalism prof Charles Seife is less-than impressed with The Billionaires' Space Club. "It's an old trick," begins Seife. "Multimillionaires regularly try to spin acts of crass ego gratification as selfless philanthropy, no matter how obviously self-serving. They jump out of balloons at the edge of the atmosphere, take submarines to the bottom of the ocean, or shoot endangered animals on safari, all in the name of science and exploration. The more recent trend is billionaires making fleets of rocket ships for private space exploration. What makes this one different is that the public actually seems to buy the farce." Seife goes on to argue that "neither [Elon] Musk's nor [Richard] Branson's goals really seem to break new ground, despite all the talk of exploration."

Submission + - President George H.W. Bush Was the First 'Coding President'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We have a coding President!" declared U.S. CTO Megan Smith as President Obama completed a short computer coding exercise with middle-school students at the White House earlier this month. Perhaps "We have another coding President!" might have been more accurate. Decades earlier, President George H.W. Bush participated in a very similar computer programming demonstration at the Saturn School of the Future in St. Paul, MN. Dr. Tom King, the founder and Director of Saturn School, said in e-mail that Bush 41 was "the first of American Presidents to see and try K12 coding," and shared a couple of photos from the 1991 event in which students show President Bush how LEGO-LOGO worked and how to enter computer code. "What George H.W. Bush did here," recalled King, "would have been similar to what Clinton or Obama did years later: Enter codes to solve a problem, such as moving a graphic around a computer screen. It's not trivial to do, but it's not 'rocket science' either. Obama used a modern computer or iPad screen, and typed in code, or 'chunks' of code, to make things move about the screen. To say any of them had learned to code is a stretch, but they did learn some basics of what coding is all about."

Submission + - President George H.W. Bush Tried K12 Coding in 1991

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Much ado was made when President Obama joined middle-school students for a computer coding exercise earlier this month. "The fact that the president is taking time out of his busy schedule to do a line of code shows how important he thinks it is for the future of education," blogged Wonder Workshop, maker of the Dot & Dash robots that sat next to the president as he learned to code. Before we get too carried away though, it's worth remembering that President George H.W. Bush participated in a very similar computer programming demonstration more than two decades ago at the way-ahead-of-its-time Saturn School of the Future in St. Paul, MN. Dr. Tom King, the founder and Director of Saturn School, said in e-mail that Bush 41 was "the first of American Presidents to see and try K12 coding," and provided a couple of photos from the 1991 event in which students show President Bush how LEGO-LOGO worked and how to enter computer code. "What George H.W. Bush did here," King added, "would have been similar to what Clinton or Obama did years later: Enter codes to solve a problem, such as moving a graphic around a computer screen. It's not trivial to do, but it's not 'rocket science' either. Obama used a modern computer or iPad screen, and typed in code, or 'chunks' of code, to make things move about the screen. To say any of them had learned to code is a stretch, but they did learn some basics of what coding is all about." More on the Saturn School of Tomorrow (R.I.P 1989-2003) and the need for change in K12 here and here.

Comment Re:Congrats to the school, and mostly to the kids (Score 1) 355

In the press release, the National Parks Foundation and Google left no doubt that this was intended to be a for-girls-only event The Google for Education blog also drove home this point: "Earlier this year, we introduced a program called Made with Code to inspire millions of girls to try coding, and help them understand the creative things they can do with computer science. Starting today on madewithcode.com, girls can use the introductory programming language Blockly to animate the lights of the state and territory trees that will decorate President's Park, one of America's 401 national parks and home to the White House, through the holiday season." BTW, Google did require kids to declare their gender on other sites (Khan Academy, Codecademy) so that public school teachers would only receive $1,000+ in funding rewards for encouraging girls to code. A current Google-Codecademy promo takes things further, asking kids to declare their gender and race, apparently to exclude all boys from a $100 per-student reward ("gift codes will be distributed only to girls"}, and white/Asian boys from a $1,000 per-10-students bonus ("Why is the bonus funding specifically geared for girls and students of color?").

Comment Re:The second link is absolute crap! (Score 1) 355

Try this one: St. Augustine Students Join Google's Made With Code Initiative and Light Up Holiday Trees With Code: Although Googleâ(TM)s Made with Code is a movement launched in June 2014 to inspire millions of girls to learn to code, and to help them see coding as a means to pursue their dream careers, âoewe decided to open it up to all our students, both boys and girls so that they could be a part of such an historic event, and have it be the kickoff to our Hour of Code week,â commented Debra Knox, Technology Teacher at St. Augustine.

Submission + - School Defied Google and US Government, Let Boys Program White House Xmas Trees

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: This holiday season, Google and the National Parks partnered to let girls program the White House Christmas tree lights. While the initiative earned kudos in Fast Company's 9 Giant Leaps For Women In Science and Technology In 2014, it also prompted an act of civil disobedience of sorts from St. Augustine of Canterbury School, which decided Google and the U.S. government wouldn't determine which of their kids would be allowed to participate in the coding event. "We decided to open it up to all our students, both boys and girls so that they could be a part of such an historic event, and have it be the kickoff to our Hour of Code week," explained Debra Knox, a technology teacher at St. Augustine.

Comment White House Hosts Next Generation' Young and Rich (Score 1) 65

by theodp (#48681987) Attached to: White House Touts Obama's 1-Liner as 2014 Tech Highlight

#10? White House Hosts Next Generation' Young and Rich: "The daylong conference was organized by Thomas Kalil, a deputy director for technology and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the help of Nexus, a youth organization based in Washington that seeks to "catalyze" the next generation of billionaire philanthropists and other stakeholders.."

Submission + - White House: President Obama Writing a Line of Code #1 SciTech Highlight of 2014

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: That President Obama became the first President to write a line of code (as a top Microsoft lobbyist looked on) is #1 on the White House's Top 9 science and technology highlights from 2014. To kick off this year's Hour of Code, the President 'learned to code' by moving a Disney Princess Elsa character 100 pixels on a screen, first by dragging-and-dropping Blockly puzzle pieces and then by coding 1 line of JavaScript. Interestingly, Bill Clinton might have been The First President To Write Code had Microsoft seen fit to use its patented, circa-1995 Graphical Programming System and Method for Enabling a Person to Learn Text-Based Programming — which describes how kids as young as 8-12 years of age can be taught to program by progressing from creating a program using graphical objects to doing so using text-based programming — to teach President Clinton to code some 20 years ago!

Submission + - The World of YouTube Bubble Sort Algorithm Dancing

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In addition to The Ghost of Steve Jobs, The Codecracker, a remix of 'The Nutcracker' performed by Silicon Valley's all-girl Castilleja School during Computer Science Education Week earlier this month featured a Bubble Sort Dance. Bubble Sort dancing, it turns out, is more popular than one might imagine. Search YouTube, for example, and you'll find students from the University of Rochester to Osmania University dancing to sort algorithms. Are you a fan of Hungarian folk-dancing? Well there's a very professionally-done Bubble Sort Dance for you! Indeed, well-meaning CS teachers are pushing kids to Bubble Sort Dance to hits like Beauty and a Beat, Roar, Gentleman, Heartbeat, Under the Sea, as well as other music. So, will Bubble Sort dancing to Justin Bieber and Katy Perry tunes make kids better computational thinkers?

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