Poet Ponders the Digital

Math Mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 5, 2014 Deadline January 2015 Issue In 2013, California began phasing out the algebra requirement for eighth grade students. Math and science requirements have been reduced in Texas and several other states that followed California’s lead. This is the wrong path, especially for Central Valley schools that have extreme achievement gaps among socioeconomic groups. In 2013, some social advocates argued that the algebra and science graduation requirements disproportionately penalized poor and minority students. Instead of reducing our standards for middle and high school completion, our schools should have developed better math and science education in our elementary schools. I fear the choices made a year ago will lead to more economic isolation for the Central Valley and similar regions. Cutting math requirements might make graduation easier, but it also limits the future opportunities for our youn...

I have Feedly, Newsify, and NetNewsWire on my various computing devices. Only a couple of years ago, I used RSS readers daily to check headlines on Slashdot, RealClear, MacWorld, and many other websites. Maybe it is me, but I felt there were great stories every few hours — and RSS made keeping up with the news easy and convenient. This week, MacOSXHints went into "archive" mode. Slashdot traffic has fallen dramatically. News sites favor Facebook and Twitter over RSS. Even some apps for news sites don't work well. Tom's Hardware for iOS wasn't updating for nearly a month. Only last week did updates start appearing on my phone and tablet again. Newsreaders and dedicated news apps are collecting virtual dust. The most disappointing failure might be Apple's Newsstand app for iOS, another stale and nearly useless slot for magazines and newspapers. Apple, which effectively killed RSS along with Google, just doesn't seem to value virtual periodicals. ...

NXT Robot (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November  3, 2014 Deadline December 2014 Issue Robots for Home: Not Yet the Jetsons Rosie the robot maintained the Jetson household more than 50 years ago. To the disappoint of many of us who still enjoy the classic 1960s cartoon, Rosie remains science fiction. The only robots in our houses are round bumper cars that vacuum floors. The iRobot Roomba offers no witty banter and no sighs of exasperation. Growing up, I expected Twiki, the android that followed Buck Rogers about for no apparent reason, to become a reality. After all, Twiki didn’t do anything except carry a much smarter talking computer about his neck. Sadly, Rogers was stuck in the twenty-fifth century. All the good androids and robots seem to be way off in the future or in other galaxies. Although we have no Rosie, robots are on the rise. They build our cars, deliver medications, defuse bombs, explore planets and even perform surgeries. M...

IBM PC XT with green monochrome phosphor screen and 10MB full height 5,25" hard disk drive (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 6, 2014 Deadline November 2014 Issue Thankful for Computing Technology Computing technology touches every minute of our lives, and it has made life better for most of us. Though I am thankful for computers in general, some inventions have changed my life in dramatic ways. I am celebrating this Thanksgiving by listing the technologies for which I am most thankful. Home Computers The early Apple, Atari and Commodore computers I used in school and at home during the early 1980s ushered in the personal computer revolution. Costing a fraction of business computers, these devices empowered the young people who would launch the dot-com revolution. We learned to code in machine language, BASIC and Pascal on computers with memory measured in kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes. When IBM decided, somewhat half-hearted...

In the last two weeks, several of my students have mentioned that employers expected them to know macro programming for Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel, and Access. I've written many times that students should aim for at least intermediate knowledge of Word, including the concept of macros if not coding skills. However, the inclusion of Excel and Access was a little surprising. Maybe it shouldn't be, since what made Lotus 1-2-3 the "killer application" for PCs was its macro abilities. WordPerfect also had exceptional macros back in the DOS days, helping it become dominant for many years. Note: I'm not sure I'd call the VBA code in Access "macro" coding, but it is Visual Basic and often the code used in workplaces exists in snippets. I won't post my gripes with most of what I've seen done in Access, but I have a long list of bad habits I've seen in workplaces. Still, employers use it for small projects and it isn...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 2, 2014 Deadline October 2014 Issue Font Wrangling: Take Control of Your Typefaces Too many typefaces are cluttering up printed pages, online spaces and computer drives. Hundreds, or even thousands, of fonts on our computing devices prove too tempting for some people. It’s time to wrangle your fonts and refine your designs. A high school teacher rejected the first term paper I typed into a computer. Notice that I didn’t write the paper on the computer; I entered text I had written on paper. I sought to avoid the hassles of using correction fluid with my typewriter by switching to the computer and its dot-matrix printer. Despite using the “letter quality” mode of my Epson printer, the built-in font looked odd. The teacher complained that the lowercase g, p and q were squished and lines of ink smudges were unacceptable. Unless you could afford a daisy-wheel printer with its typewriter mechanism, a personal computer was an ...

If you decide that learning computer programming offers students much needed critical thinking (and job) skills, then the next question is which language(s) should be taught to which students. Computer programming changes, so any opinion I offer will be bad advice in a few years. What I offer below are my views at this moment, and they reflect my biases as a programmer. Suggestion One: C It's not flashy, it's not trendy, and it isn't the first choice of most programming courses. Yet, C is the language of operating systems, programmable controllers, and a lot of portable logic. When you learn C, it's easy to transport those skills to almost any modern language. C compilers are free, there are many integrated development environments (IDEs), and lots of resources are available for learning. You can code C in any text editor, too, and compile from a command line. For OS X and Windows, I suggest using the tools from Apple and Microsoft to learn C, C++, and either...

English: Flowchart example of calculating factorial N ( N! ). (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley Aug 4, 2014 Deadline September 2014 Issue Think, Code, Solve: Programming as Career Skill “Until I had to code it, I didn’t understand how many perspectives there are.” This spring, a group of my statistics students attempted to model the return on investment for various degrees at several colleges. To develop their model, they had to ask themselves what is “value” and how would they measure “return” for those students not seeking financial wealth. Developing their computational model, they learned more about what college provides society. Creating variables and functions, collecting data and creating output, the task of creating a computer program opened up new ways of considering the question these students sought to answer. Was a degree from one college better than the same degree from another school? Was one degree better than another? If you want...

This is why I haven't been blogging a lot this summer. I've been working on several new plays…  A NEW DEATH A World Premiere By C.S. Wyatt Directed By Kaitlin Kerr Assistant Directed By Sarah McPartland Presented by Throughline Theatre Company   July 18 - July 26 The Grey Box Theatre 3595 Butler St, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15201 TICKETS: http://www.throughlinetheatre.org/tickets-and-pricing/   Featuring: Andy Coleman  Chelsea Faber Hazel Carr Leroy Eric Leslie  Tonya Lynn  Sarah McPartland Jared King Rombold  John Henry Steelman

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 1, 2014 Deadline August 2014 Issue Recycling Risks: Remove Your Digital Self Electronics, including our digital gadgets and computers, should be recycled. I encourage everyone to reuse or recycle devices, as long as they recycle wisely. Green and blue recycling bins stand at the entrances of many major retailers. Cheerful signs encourage shoppers to deposit phones, tablets, and “other electronic devices.” The grocery store in our neighborhood has an electronics recycling station next to the coin counting machine. If you can get a few dollars in return for doing the right thing, all the better. In the middle of a shopping mall, a kiosk declares, “Instant cash for your phone!” The machine doesn’t actually offer cash. Recyclers receive a mall gift card, which encourages immediate redemption. One or twice a year, the major office supply chains announce computer and printer recycling programs. My wife and I traded-in old inkjet and laser print...