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Submission + - Average HS Student Given Little Chance of AP CS Success

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "AP Computer Science is taught in just 10% of our high schools," lamented The White House last December as President Obama kicked off CSEdWeek. "China teaches all of its students one year of computer science." And the U.S. Dept. of Education has made the AP CS exam its Poster Child for inequity in education (citing a viral-but-misinterpreted study). But ignored in all the hand-wringing over low AP CS enrollment is one huge barrier to the goal of AP-CS-for-all: College Board materials indicate that the average 11th grader's combined PSAT/NMSQT score of 96 in reading and math gives him/her only a 20%-30% probability of getting a score of '3' on the AP CS exam (a score '4' or '5' may be required for college credit). The College Board suggests schools tap a pool of students with a "60-100% likelihood of scoring 3 or higher", so it's probably no surprise that CS teachers are advised to turn to the College Board's AP Potential tool to identify students who are likely to succeed (sample Student Detail for an "average" kid) and send their parents recruitment letters — Georgia Tech even offers some gender-specific examples — to help fill class rosters.

Submission + - The Nightmare on Connected Home Street

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With the battle for the connected home underway, Wired's Mat Honan offered his humorous and scary Friday the 13th take on what life in the connected home of the future might be like. "I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows," Honan begins. "The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal." Having been the victim of an epic hacking, Honan can't be faulted for worrying.

Submission + - FWD.us: GOP Voters to be Targeted by "Pissed Off" Data Scientists

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We are excited to announce that FWD.us and Hackers/Founders are joining forces to host the 'DEBUG DC' Growthathon on June 21st & June 22nd," reads the blog over at FWD.us, the PAC whose Founders and Major Contributors include current and former CEOs from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn. "This is a unique opportunity to push the envelope in online advocacy for immigration reform." The blog entry explains, "The machine of government is wedged, and is in desperate need of debugging. How do we DEBUG DC? Step One: Target critical legislative districts. Step Two: Data mine these districts to find registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform. Step Three: Growth hack ways to motivate these people to effectively engage their legislators to tell them they want them to call for a vote on immigration reform. Step Four: Measure results. Step Five: Iterate." The Eventbrite invitation for the event includes a call for Data Scientists who are "pissed off about immigration and want to fix it," are "well versed in statistics and data analysis," and can "infer voter sentiment from sparse data." So, how does this jibe with the outrage expressed by the FWD.us supporters' companies over unauthorized government surveillance?

Submission + - Zuckerberg PAC Declares Hunting Season on Republican Voters

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "We are excited to announce that FWD.us and Hackers/Founders are joining forces to host the 'DEBUG DC' Growthathon on June 21st & June 22nd," reads the blog over at FWD.us [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's PAC]. "This is a unique opportunity to push the envelope in online advocacy for immigration reform." The blog entry explains, "The machine of government is wedged, and is in desperate need of debugging. How do we DEBUG DC? Step One: Target critical legislative districts. Step Two: Data mine these districts to find registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform. Step Three: Growth hack ways to motivate these people to effectively engage their legislators to tell them they want them to call for a vote on immigration reform. Step Four: Measure results. Step Five: Iterate." The Eventbrite invitation for the event includes a call for Data Scientists who are "pissed off about immigration and want to fix it," are "well versed in statistics and data analysis," and can "infer voter sentiment from sparse data." "To keep things interesting," the invite explains, "we've lined up a few really cool prizes," i.e., one hour meetings with VC Vinod Khosla, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Technology and Civic Engagement (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith are all FWD.us supporters). So, with speculation that Mark Zuckerberg was the kiss of death for [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor, who went down to defeat in spectacular fashion in Tuesday's primary, could the planned data mining of Republican voters backfire and put off politicians?

Submission + - Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional In California (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tenure laws one of the most controversial aspects of education reform, and now the tide seems to be turning against them. A California judge has handed down a ruling that such laws are unconstitutional, depriving students of an education by sometimes secure positions for bad teachers. The judge said, "Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience." The plaintiff's case was that "California’s current laws make it impossible to get rid of the system’s numerous low-performing and incompetent teachers; that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first were harmful; and that granting tenure to teachers after only two years on the job was farcical, offering far too little time for a fair assessment of their skills." This is a precedent-setting case, and there will likely be many similar cases around the country as tenure is challenged with this new ammunition.

Submission + - Sacked Google Worker Awarded $150,000 for Unfair Dismissal

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: When it comes to evaluating employee performance, perhaps Google isn't really that different from Microsoft after all. While Microsoft used stack ranking to kill employee morale, Google turned to bell curves that were "fine-tuned" by management to do their dirty HR work, according to Irish court documents. "Google, like other enlightened corporations," explains Valleywag, "makes its workers routinely rank each other and forces the scores to match a bell curve. The employees who are placed at the wrong end of the bell curve risk termination. That's stressful enough-now imagine your CEO personally meddling." The Irish Times reports former Google manager Rachel Berthold, who just won her suit against the company for unfair dismissal in 2011 and will receive around $150,000 in a court-mandated settlement, told her counsel that she was present when the ranking of a staff member was reduced electronically by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. "It came from him," she said. "I saw it with my own eyes." She said Mr Schmidt could not have known anything about the employee. So, ask not for whom the fudged bell curve tolls, Googlers, it tolls for thee!

Submission + - A 'Mavis Beacon' for Teaching Smartphone and Tablet Typing?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Where have you gone, Mavis Beacon, a nation of smartphone and tablet typists turns its lonely eyes to you (woo, woo, woo). You've seen people type fast-and-furiously on smartphones and tablets, so you know it can be done, but how exactly do these one- and two-fingered wonders (YouTube) manage to do so? Is it their reaction time? Technique? Both? Back in the day, touch-typing teachers showed kids the secrets to higher word-per-minute scores on their Smith Coronas. Later, typing tutor software got kids up-to-speed on PCs. So, with over 1 billion smartphones and 200 million or so tablets shipped in 2013, what are the best software and tutorials that teach mobile typing techniques? And what platform specific features — iOS, Android, WP8/Win8, BB — do you find make your mobile typing life a whole lot easier?

Submission + - Xanadu Is Finally Released — After 54 Years In The Making (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: “Project Xanadu,” designed by hypertext inventor Ted Nelson to let users build documents that automatically embed the sources they’re linking back to and show the visible connections between parallel webpages, was released in late April at a Chapman University event. Thing is, development on Xanadu began in 1960 — that’s 54 years ago — making it the most delayed software in history.

Submission + - Parents Mobilize Against States' Student Data Mining

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: To paraphrase Paul Simon, the government would like to know a little bit about your children for their files. But Politico reports that parents have mobilized into an unexpected political force to fight the data mining of their children, catapulting student privacy to prominence in statehouses. Having already torpedoed the $100 million Bill Gates-funded inBloom database project, which could have made it easier for schools to share confidential student records with private companies, the amateur activists are now rallying against another perceived threat: huge state databases being built to track children for more than two decades, from as early as infancy through the start of their careers. "The Education Department," writes Stephanie Simon, "lists hundreds of questions that it urges states to answer about each child in the public school system: Did she make friends easily as a toddler? Was he disciplined for fighting as a teen? Did he take geometry? Does she suffer from mental illness? Did he go to college? Did he graduate? How much does he earn?" Leonie Haimson, a NY mother who is organizing a national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says, "Every parent I’ve talked to has been horrified. We just don’t want our kids tracked from cradle to grave." For their part, ed tech entrepreneurs and school reformers are both bewildered by and anxious about the backlash — and struggling to craft a response, having assumed parents would support their vision: to mine vast quantities of data for insights into what’s working, and what’s not, for individual students and for the education system as a whole. "People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident," said Michael Horn, a co-founder an education think tank.

Submission + - The Ethics Cloud Over Ballmer's $2 Billion B-Ball Buy

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "It is hard to imagine any more heinous way of earning money than by benefiting from racism," writes Rick Cohen, who argues that Donald Sterling and the NBA owners are being unjustly enriched by Sterling's racism, which led to the $2 billion sale of the L.A. Clippers to ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a record-high sum for an NBA team. "Indeed, the only losers in the Sterling affair are the players," adds the NY Times. "What held promise as a possible D-Day in the N.B.A., a day when N.B.A. owners stood up to be counted and voted Donald Sterling out of the league, instead turned into a great day for the status quo." Forbes contributor Robert Wood speculates that if he plays his cards right, Sterling's windfall could be tax-free. And should Sterling care to ask for advice, Ballmer is somewhat of a subject matter expert on dodging state income tax on $2 billion!

Submission + - Where's The Most Unusual Place You've Written a Program From?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: He was polling the SAS crowd, but it'd be interesting to hear the answers to the programming questions posed by Michael Raithel from a broader audience: 1. What is the most unusual location you have written a program from? 2. What is the most unusual circumstance under which you have written a program? 3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from? 4. What is the most unusual application program that you wrote?

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