Thursday, April 30, 2015

Why Coding Is Your Child's Key to Unlocking the Future

The Wall Street Journal (04/26/15) Christopher Mims

An increasing number of educators and activists are pushing to make programming a part of all children's basic education. Most argue programming should be viewed as a foundational element of a modern education, the same as math or reading. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Mitchel Resnick, who is leading the effort to develop the child-friendly Scratch programming language, says in addition to granting them an important and marketable skill, coding helps children learn to think about processes in the world. Hadi Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, says computer science helps promote analytical skills, problem solving, and creativity. Many activists point to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projection that there will be 1 million unfilled programming jobs by 2020 as evidence of the growing market for such skills. Partovi thinks this could be a significant underestimate. However, programming is still not taught in the vast majority of U.S. schools, so many are looking to find ways of teaching children to code outside of the classroom. Some, such as Bryson Payne, author of "Teach Your Kids to Code," are seeking to teach children to code as early as possible. Many say the most effective way of teaching children how to code is to have them design games or to treat coding as simply another form of play.
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One Way to Reduce Email Stress: Re-Invent the Mailing List

MIT News (04/27/15) Adam Conner-Simons








Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a prototype system called Murmur they hope will improve the experience of using email mailing lists by incorporating popular social media features such as upvoting, following, and blocking. CSAIL Ph.D. student Amy Zhang presented a paper on Murmur at last week's ACM CHI conference in Seoul, Korea. Zhang says it is surprising that email mailing lists have retained their popularity and have changed so little since their inception decades ago. The basic thrust of Murmur is to enable users to customize the ways they interact with mailing lists. One of the new system's features is the ability to post messages to specific mailing list members and not others, which Zhang says could help encourage people who want to contribute but worry about "spamming" people. Recipients will be able to give these messages the equivalent of a Facebook "Like," such that it automatically spreads to more list recipients. Users also will be able to customize how much content they receive, for example by "following" certain users or specifying how many emails with certain tags they wish to receive in a given day or week.
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Five new open source project management tools for 2015 | Opensource.com

http://opensource.com/business/15/1/top-project-management-tools-2015

Why to choose RADIUS over LDAP | Opensource.com

http://opensource.com/business/15/4/benefits-using-radius-over-ldap

The best reason why RADIUS should be favored over LDAP: an LDAP server considers itself to be the final authority for authorization and authentication; a RADIUS server will split authentication and authorization. Authentication is who you are. Authorization is what you are allowed to do. Splitting them is important because increasingly you need two-factor authentication. You don't have to split them, though. Supporting RADIUS also gets you LDAP.

How To Install LAMP Stack On Ubuntu 15.04

http://www.unixmen.com/how-to-install-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu-15-04/

Pascal Fares
http://www.cofares.net