Interesting Links for 20-06-2017

[andrewducker]

Chicago goes high-tech in search of answers to gun crime surge

(tags: Technology guns crime usa )

I believe Bill Cosby

(tags: assault drugs rape men )

Educators replace "MS Office training course" with proper GCSE computer course. Are astounded when numbers drop.

Seems obvious we need to educate people both how to use computers, and how to fully understand them. Plenty of space for both types of course.
(tags: computers Education school uk )

M&S says labelling avocados with lasers is more sustainable

From now on I'm going to refuse to eat any food that isn't somehow associated with lasers. I shall call this The Laser Diet. And my book will make a fortune.
(tags: lasers food )

Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands?

(tags: netherlands bicycles )

How Ancient Egypt's beloved cats helped our feline friends colonise the planet

(tags: cats Egypt history prehistory )

Cats are an extreme outlier among domestic animals

(tags: cats humans history )

Cells are very fast and crowded places

(tags: biology cell speed time )

Comments

[calimac]

Now I want to make "laser" into an acronym for vegetables.

LASER: Lemons, Avocados, Squash, and, Er, Rutabagas.

[doug]

Lemons, Avocados, Strawberries, Elderberries, Raspberries

Lychee, Ackee, Sloe, Eggfruit, Rambutan!

[doug]

Laser fruit and vegetables! Takes me back to my teenage years.

My Dad ran a big fundraising campaign in the 80s to buy a surgical laser for the local hospital. At a big party to celebrate reaching the target, he had the laser itself proudly on display, with a supply of apples to demonstrate on.

His first, enthusiastic demonstration involved whacking the power right up to maximum and gleefully blasting a surprisingly wide hole through an apple in a matter of seconds. Sensibly, he had considered some of the issues with doing this, and had carefully positioned a second apple behind the first to stop it setting fire to the table.

What he hadn't considered was how much alarm this demonstration of laser power would cause to potential and former patients who imagined it might do or have done the same to their insides. This was well before low-power lasers were ubiquitous, and the main pop-culture reference for lasers was Goldfinger slicing James Bond in half. ("No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!")

After a bit of thought, my Dad changed the demonstration. He turned the power down and took to carefully writing people's names on the skin of the apple. For some reason this was much more popular.

[calimac]

"And what's your name, ma'am?"

"Maria Smith. They call me Granny."

[njj4]

Educators replace "MS Office training course" with proper GCSE computer course. Are astounded when numbers drop.
A computer science lecturer friend of mine was contemplating this a few years ago. He'd noticed that there would be audible grumbling from some of the students every week when he set a programming assignment, and his reaction was "look, you're doing a module called 'Introduction to Programming' on a degree course called 'BSc Computer Science' in the 'Department of Computing' - what did you think was going to happen?".

His suspicion was that A-level ICT, which he deemed to be conceptually straightforward but not very interesting, was a contributing factor: students who did it thought that computer science would be more of the same, were surprised when it turned out to involve actual programming and lots of hard maths instead, and would probably have been happier and more engaged doing something like business studies; meanwhile many of the students they really wanted to attract, the ones who enjoyed programming and hard maths, had concluded that computer science would probably be a bit dull, and had gone off to do things like maths, physics or engineering instead.

So, yes, I think you're right - we need to clarify the difference between practical everyday computer skills (like email, web browsing, use of word-processing and spreadsheet software, etc) and the conceptually deeper stuff relating to programming, algorithms, architecture, etc. And that distinction could be better reflected in school computing curriculums.

I'm not sure how we go about doing that in a wider sense, but I help run a weekly Code Club at my local library, teaching programming (using Scratch, micro:bits and Python) to 10-year-old kids. I'm finding quite fun and interesting, and the kids seem to get a lot out of it too.

[haggis]

There is an interesting piece here about the differences between Users and Programmers in how they interact with computers. It's written by a Programmer who teaches programming but it's less contemptuous of Users than those articles generally are.

http://www.pgbovine.net/two-cultures-of-computing.htm

I studied computing at school to the Scottish equivalent of A Level (two years post GCSE equivalent) and I did a bit of programming in versions of BASIC as part of that but never got into any compiled languages. So I have computing knowledge beyond the MS Office Training derided in the article but I am not a programmer.

I identify FIRMLY as a User and I remain unconvinced that it is worth the investment of *my* time to learn to program to achieve flexibility when the packages I use do 95% of what I need. This appalled the programmers I know who resent the restrictions of packages and are prepared to wrestle with minimal, antique UIs to achieve the results they need.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, programming isn't for everyone, and there's no reason people should be forced into it.

Interesting article. And yeah, I get frustrated by people who want to teach programming but can't explain why. And I'm not on either side of the fence in that article, because I'm one of the people in his postscript who uses nice visual tools most of the time.

[birguslatro]

That's a wonderful article. And the programming culture described there is ripe for disruption.

I'm an amateur programmer, but I remember and was slightly involved with a professional who had set up a beginners' class for kids to learn programming. It was all CLI based, but could've had a graphic component (in the output) if he'd wanted it to have it, but he didn't. I though this was daft, (no rewards at all for the kids' efforts), but he was the professional and so I didn't press the matter. The class failed dismally.

[andrewducker]

Yeah.

Some people seem to think that you need to leap into hardcore text-editing command line unpleasantness. Which, yeah, is going to put a lot of people off.

[andrewducker]

That sounds like a really worthwhile thing to do. I'm glad that the kids love it.