-
"Earlier this week the Pulitzer Prize Board initiated another milestone when it announced that it would expand the prestigious prize to online-only news organizations for all 14 of its journalism categories.
"Though it has accepted online content for various categories for years, prior to this announcement, entrants were required to have a print newspaper publication in order to be considered. This news means that more organizations will be able to compete for the award, but the ambiguity of the announcement leaves some wondering which online-only publications will be eligible. For instance, under these new guidelines would Marshall and TPM be able to submit their work?"
-
Clay Shirky's take: "Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness"
They wrote: "To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."
-
Do you have what it takes to be a geek? "This test predicts ability to program with very high accuracy before the subjects have ever seen a program or a programming language. … All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can, and those who cannot, each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists. We have a test which picks out the population that can program, before the course begins. We can pick apart the double hump. You probably don't believe this, but you will after you hear the talk. We don't know exactly how/why it works, but we have some good theories."
