#8BITMOOC: What good are points?

8bitmooc:

When I originally conceived this project, I was thinking about it in the context of an in-person course that would be graded by experience points. You start off at level F, and then have to get experience points to gain levels up to an A+. However, in the MOOC system, the entire course is “graded”…

lostcatbook:

10 Hours In Our Cat’s Day

ona13suggestionbox:

Description
In this session, I’ll discuss news applications and the diversity of such. I’ll talk about how I perceive news applications, and the core of the session will be a discussion among participants about what they conceptualize as news applications, the future of software in journalism, and what we (journalists and developers) should be learning from each other.

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Style points for the Raymond Carver reference.  

chartsnthings: Charting Skill and Chance in the N.F.L. Draft

chartsnthings:

Last week we published an interactive graphic about the N.F.L. draft. Our goal was to show an odd reality: even though N.F.L. teams do tend to pick the “best” players early in the draft, there’s a tremendous amount of chance involved. The best 10 eventual N.F.L. performers will not be the…

(Source: deathriders)

madeinhexels:

Learning how to make cool stuff with this awesome program.

Wonderful data journalism.  Look how southern California calls Colorado (where many residents from CA migrated to in the 90s and aughts), New England calls Florida (I live here and I don’t know what that’s about, but that might be because I don’t have my AARP card yet); and, most touchingly, how Louisiana and Alabama call Michigan.  Many African-Americans migrated from the south to Detroit in the 40’s and 50’s, paving the way for Motown City. 

jtotheizzoe:

The Connected States of America

Are our borders really the edges of our communities? The “internet guy” in me says “of course not” but that doesn’t really take into account how much of our day-to-day interaction takes place in geographical meatspace. But on the other hand, many of America’s state borders are very arbitrary delineations of latitude or since-bridged rivers, so how meaningful are they in 2013, really? 

What would our borders and communities look like if we looked at other data, like phone calls? At Krulwich Wonders…, Robert Krulwich has taken a look at a couple of alternate “neighborhoods”.

The photo above was assembled from anonymous mobile phone data by MIT’s Xiaoji Chen, and it which regions call each other the most often. Anyone who’s been to my neck of the woods in Austin knows that Texans don’t call people in Oklahoma much (or College Station, for that matter), and the NorCal/SoCal split shows that the differences there go beyond suntans and dotcoms. And people in the Plains apparently just want to call anyone they can that doesn’t live in the Plains.

“What’s it like out there? Just grass here.”

Check out the rest of Robert’s post for more phone fun, plus a little look at how (not) far our money travels (and what that says about us).

(via NPR)

GIRLS IN IT: THE FACTS from NCWIT

girldevelopit:

satzderwoche:

Think of a cookie cutter. A cookie cutter makes cookies, but it is not a cookie itself. The cookie cutter is the class, the cookies are the objects.

- Daniel Shiffman (http://www.processing.org/learning/objects/)

iomikron:

pattern_04

Every single triangle of the above grid blinks 3 times per second. If we used this grid to count world population, corresponding one blink of each triangle to a different person, it would take 39 days to finish.

Women computer science grads: The bump before the decline

women-in-science:

“So why did the relative number of women choosing computer science as a baccelaureate major rise so sharply between 1971 and 1986, only to stall and decline so steadily and steeply over the next 25 years? What accounts for the bump?”

Processing Tutorial by Daniel Shiffer

sebrittain:

Ada Lovelace, one of the many women who played an important role in the development of computers and programming.

nprfreshair:

Good Idea Jeans: The New York Times has started a Tumblr of haikus from sentences culled from articles, then given line breaks.

timeshaiku:

A haiku from the article: A Modest Proposal for More Back-Stabbing in Preschool

(Source: timeshaiku)