the popular hip-hop lyrics Web siteRap Genius, will announce a pilot project to use hip-hop to teach science in 10 New York City public schools. The pilot is small, but its architects’ goals are not modest. Dr. Emdin, who has written a book called “Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation,”
hip-hop “cypher,” participants stand in a circle and take turns rapping, often supporting or playing off one another’s rhymes.
“All of those things that are happening in the hip-hop cypher are what should happen in an ideal classroom.”
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Students analyze rap lyrics with code in digital humanities class
Some teachers are finding a place for coding in English, music, science, math and social studies, too
by TARA GARCÍA MATHEWSON October 18, 2018
Fifteen states now require all high schools to offer computer science courses. Twenty-three states have created K-12 computer science standards. And 40 states plus the District of Columbia allow students to count computer science courses toward high school math or science graduation requirements. That’s up from 12 states in 2013, when Code.org launched, aiming to expand access to computer science in U.S. schools and increase participation among girls and underrepresented minorities in particular.
All the above games have physics in common but they’re also all in 2D. If students love these games, consider challenging them with 3D and even 4D games that put physics knowledge to the test. Valve’s Portal series is a great choice, or look into the equally mind-bending first-person games Antichamber or Quantum Conundrum, both of which go beyond the boundaries of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.
he software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.
Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.
analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013.
Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics.
Young researchers need to publish in prestigious journals to gain tenure, while older researchers need to do the same in order to keep their grants, and, in this environment, publishing in a high impact Elsevier or Springer journal is what ‘counts’. In this general context, the negative effect of various bibliometric indicators in the evaluation of individual researchers cannot be understated. The counting of papers indexed by large-scale bibliometric databases—which mainly cover journals published by commercial publishers, as we have seen in this paper—creates a strong incentive for researchers to publish in these journals, and thus reinforces the control of commercial publishers on the scientific community.
LITA listserv exchange on “Raspberry PI Counter for Library Users”
On 7/10/20, 10:05 AM, “lita-l-request@lists.ala.org on behalf of Hammer, Erich F” <lita-l-request@lists.ala.org on behalf of erich@albany.edu> wrote:
Jason,
I think that is a very interesting project. If I understand how it works (comparing reference images to live images), it should still work if a “fuzzy” or translucent filter were placed on the lens as a privacy measure, correct? You could even make the fuzzy video publicly accessible to prove to folks that privacy is protected.
If that’s the case, IMHO, it really is a commercially viable idea and it would have a market far beyond libraries. Open source code and hardware designs and sales of pre-packaged hardware and support. Time for some crowdsource funding! 🙂
My note:
In 2018, following the university president’s call for ANY possible savings, the library administrator was send a proposal requesting information regarding the license for the current library counters and proposing the save the money for the license by creating an in-house Arduino counter. The blueprints for such counter were share (as per another LITA listserv exchange). SCSU Physics professor agreement to lead the project was secured as well as the opportunity for SCSU Physics students to develop the project as part of their individual study plan. The proposal was never addressed neither by the middle nor the upper management.
THERE’S A MEME on Instagram, circulated by a group called “Born Liberal.” “Born Liberal” was a creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian propaganda wing
Conversations around the IRA’s operations traditionally have focused on Facebook and Twitter, but like any hip millennial, the IRA was actually most obsessive about Instagram.
the IRA deployed 3,841 accounts, including several personas that “regularly played hashtag games.” That approach paid off; 1.4 million people engaged with the tweets, leading to nearly 73 million engagements. Most of this work was focused on news, while on Facebook and Instagram, the Russians prioritized “deeper relationships,” according to the researchers. On Facebook, the IRA notched a total of 3.3 million page followers, who engaged with their politically divisive content 76.5 million times. Russia’s most popular pages targeted the right wing and the black community. The trolls also knew their audiences; they deployed Pepe memes at pages intended for right-leaning millennials, but kept them away from posts directed at older conservative Facebook users. Not every attempt was a hit; while 33 of the 81 IRA Facebook pages had over 1,000 followers, dozens had none at all.
The report also points out new links between the IRA’s pages and Wikileaks, which helped disseminate hacked emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta
“While many people think of memes as “cat pictures with words,” the Defense Department and DARPA have studied them for years as a powerful tool of cultural influence, capable of reinforcing or even changing values and behavior.
“over the past five years, disinformation has evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.” And yet, rather than fighting back effectively, Americans are battling each other over what to do about it.
A year after the Meme Warfare Center proposal was published, DARPA, the Pentagon agency that develops new military technology, commissioned a four-year study of memetics. The research was led by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of the Robotic Technology Institute, and an academic with a background in physics and cybernetics.
Finkelstein’s study of “Military Memetics” centered on a basic problem in the field, determining “whether memetics can be established as a science with the ability to explain and predict phenomena.” It still had to be proved, in other words, that memes were actual components of reality and not just a nifty concept with great marketing.
Evelyn Berezin, a computer scientist who designed the world’s first word processor, has died at the age of 93.
as she explained in an oral history interview, she was having trouble finding work in the physics field, so she started asking about computers — having barely even heard of them.
It wasn’t easy being a woman in the industry. In 1960, Berezin says she was offered a job at the New York Stock Exchange, as a vice president managing the computer system that handled their communications. But then the offer was retracted by the board of directors.
In 2006, Berezin was inducted into the Long Island Technology Hall of Fame, and she joined the Women In Technology Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2015, she became a fellow at the Computer History Museum.
