Life and Code

#8BITMOOC: What good are points?

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:27:29 -0400

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

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:41:40 -0400

lostcatbook:

10 Hours In Our Cat’s Day

What I Talk About When I Talk About News Applications: An Introduction

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:53:17 -0400

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.

Read More

Style points for the Raymond Carver reference.

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

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:15:13 -0400

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…

"Yes, there are such things as best practices in software development, and they have legitimate..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:10:14 -0400

“Yes, there are such things as best practices in software development, and they have legitimate value, but as a beginner you are not obligated to internalize all of them at once. Just stop worrying about it! Make something you’re proud of, then improve it little by little. Learn one thing at a time and make incremental progress.”

- Bad code is the first step towards good code — Let’s Make Things — Medium (via scriptsht)

Photo

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:28:24 -0400

madeinhexels: Learning how to make cool stuff with this awesome...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:25:16 -0400

madeinhexels:

Learning how to make cool stuff with this awesome program.

Wonderful data journalism. Look how southern California calls...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:14:41 -0400

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

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:33:37 -0400

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...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:30:38 -0400

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_04Every single triangle of the above grid...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:30:27 -0400

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

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:19 -0400

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

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:30:19 -0400

Processing Tutorial by Daniel Shiffer

sebrittain: Ada Lovelace, one of the many women who played an...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:30:40 -0400

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...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:55:06 -0400

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

Girls Who Code

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:30:22 -0400

Girls Who Code:

marvydarling:

Only .3% of female high school graduates enter college intending to major in computer science. This amazing 8 week summer program gives sophomore and junior girls the chance to get a head start and learn coding skills… For free.

newshour: Almost one million veterans are waiting for their...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:15:34 -0400

newshour:

Almost one million veterans are waiting for their benefit claims to be processed, according to an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting. One regional office in North Carolina was so overrun with claims folders that the sheer weight of their content exceeded the load-bearing capacity of the building itself.

These photos were included in a 2012 report from the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General. To see more photos and learn more about the backlog, go here.

thedailywhat: Nice App of the Day: God.js Over the past...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:06:00 -0400

thedailywhat:

Nice App of the Day: God.js

Over the past weekend, 60 artists and hackers gathered in Brooklyn for Art Hack Day, from which cameGod.js, a programming language that acts like scripture as users browse the web. Developed by Will Brand, Ramsey Nasser and Ivan Safrin, a user can enter in scripts, er, scriptures, that the program will obey. If a doctrine is violated too much, your higher power will scold you, resulting in a range of punishments including two dozen tabs full of animated GIF hellfire.

Hat tip goes to The Verge.

She ++ Documentary Trailer

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:38:37 -0400

She ++ Documentary Trailer :

polidigitalaffairs:

She++ is an organization founded by two female CS undergraduates at Stanford University which aims to increase the number of women in CS and provide mentorship for those already in the field. Next month, they are releasing a short documentary about women in tech. This trailer features Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Jocelyn Goldfein, who offers persuasive reasons why we need more women in STEM fields. If you need more reasons, check out this infographic.

Organizations with similar or related goals: Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and Girl Develop It

Happy International Women’s Day, people!

#8BITMOOC: I'm a humanist, am I?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:11:28 -0400

#8BITMOOC: I'm a humanist, am I?:

8bitmooc:

In my #duke21c class, our instructor @cathyndavidson remarked that after hearing about why I was so deeply passionate about #8bitmooc, that I was a bonafide humanist. This, of course, took me by surprise, since I just felt like I was simply addressing problems in the field of Computer Science…

This person has a super-interesting project. Check ‘em out!