firehose

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Check out Make’s write-up of the new BBC Edtech program Micro:bit, which launched last week.

Earlier today the BBC announced the final design of its Micro:bit. Intended to allow children to get creative with technology, the Micro:bit is one of the cornerstones of the BBC’s “Make it Digital” campaign, the corporation’s most ambitious educational initiative for 35 years.

A lot of us cut our teeth on BASIC programming back in the late 70’s and early 80’s — we owned a Tandy TRS-80, an Apple II, or a BBC Micro — and spent hours in front of glowing phosphor screens hacking away, writing our own version of Space Invaders. The BBC Micro was a familiar sight in British schools, and it has left a lasting legacy which still looms over how computing is taught here in the UK.

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Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!

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From Crawick Multiverse via inhabitat:

The Crawick Muiltiverse is a hidden gem nested in a bowl of rolling hills in the heart of Dumfries and Galloway (Upper Nithsdale).

This major land restoration project, on the Duke of Buccleuch’s Queensberry Estate has transformed a former open cast coal mine into a spectacular artland and public amenity.

The ecology of the site, and the materials found within it, inspired its design which is based around space, astronomy and cosmology.

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Where Are The Jobs? via WaPo “Nearly every job in America, mapped in incredible detail” –

These differences form economic identities that shape each city as much as their culture and geography do. And they’re starkly — and beautifully — visible in a new visualization, made by Harvard Ph.D. student Robert Manduca, that maps nearly every job in America, one dot per job. His project, which draws on Census data reported by employers, is modeled off Dustin Cable’s well-known racial dot map that mapped every person in the country.

The result, in metropolitan Washington, looks like this, with manufacturing and trade jobs shown in red; professional services jobs in blue; healthcare, education and government in green; and retail, hospitality and service-sector jobs in yellow.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Tertis

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Soo…remember how Ellen Pao got a lot of crap for standing up against gender discrimination in the workplace? Then, remember how she got a lot of crap for firing popular Reddit employee, Victoria Taylor? Well, according to former Reddit CEO, Yishan Wong, Pao may not have had anything to do with handing down that decision, and may have undeservedly taken the fall.

As reported by The Daily Dot, Reddit co-founder and Board chairman, Alexis Ohanian, made this statement on Reddit over the weekend:

Ellen is a class act. I have gotten to know Ellen well as we’ve worked closely together over the past eight months and I’m impressed by her hard work and integrity as she’s strived to do what’s right for both reddit the company and reddit the community. I have admired her fearlessness and calm throughout our time together and look forward to following her impact on Silicon Valley and beyond. It was my decision to change how we work with AMAs and the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson. Today was another step. I’m really excited to be working with Steve again and appreciate what Ellen did during her time here.

So wait, you’re saying that the decisions re: how you work with AMAs, including, but not limited to Taylor’s dismissal, was your decision? That’s weird, because from the looks of the entire internet, it seemed like everyone was blaming Pao for it – on the heels of chastising her for daring to fight gender discrimination, no less. Pao herself even apologized, albeit vaguely (and now we may know why). Where was this statement back when Taylor was first fired? But, you know, it’s totally cool that you get to work with your pal again in the meantime, so I guess we should all just forget about it and move on?

I’m not the only one asking these questions. Former Reddit CEO, Wong, who left the company last year, had this to say about Ohanian’s statement:

I’m glad redditors have started to piece together all of this. Here’s the only thing you’re missing:

It travels upstream, except when it comes from the CEO’s boss.

Alexis wasn’t some employee reporting to Pao, he was the Executive Chairman of the Board, i.e. Pao’s boss. He had different ideas for AMAs, he didn’t like Victoria’s role, and decided to fire her. Pao wasn’t able to do anything about it. In this case it shouldn’t have traveled upstream to her, it came from above her.

Then when the hate-train started up against Pao, Alexis should have been out front and center saying very clearly “Ellen Pao did not make this decision, I did.” Instead, he just sat back and let her take the heat. That’s a stunning lack of leadership and an incredibly shitty thing to do.

I actually asked that he be on the board when I joined; I used to respect Alexis Ohanian. After this, not quite so much.

There was a bit more back-and-forth between them, where Ohanian reminded Wong that even though he was Chairman of the Board, he still reported to Pao. Wong then wrote:

I can lighten up a bit…given that in-one-capacity you weren’t her boss, but I am still extremely disappointed in you.

It wasn’t “we didn’t handle it well” – Ellen actually handled things very well, and with quite a bit of grace given the prejudices arrayed against her and the situation she was put in – you didn’t handle it well. There was tremendous amounts of unnecessary damage done as a result, and we are only able to say that things might turn out ok because Huffman agreed to return and take up the mantle.

This entire situation seems extremely unfortunate. All the more unfortunate, considering that these tensions within Reddit seem to go back a long way – long before Pao even arrived on the scene. Now, it just looks like the organization lost two talented women for no real good reason, and that a female CEO of color who fought gender discrimination and tried to improve people’s experience on Reddit by shutting down abusive hate subreddits like /FatPeopleHate has been replaced by an old-school white guy returning to appease Reddit’s overwhelmingly white, male user base.

So much for the Internet being for everyone.

(via The Daily Dot, Image via Christopher Michel on Flickr)

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Everyone’s fretting about a terrifying article on the terrifying Cascadia Subduction Zone, which will almost certainly deliver the deadliest earthquake in US history. That earthquake would almost certainly be made less deadly with an early warning system that’s ready to be implemented—if only the US would decide to make it a priority.

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A SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. employee posed for years as an animal-rights activist, joining protests against the company over its use of captive killer whales, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

pleatedjeans:

via

Congratulations on your new cat.

AL-SHATI, GAZA STRIP—Saying he hardly recognized some of the makeshift buildings and piles of rubble he played in as a child, Gaza native Ramzy Abu-Dhubah told reporters Tuesday he was struck by how much the refugee camp he grew up in has changed over the years.

As he walked through his “old stomping grounds” in Al-Shati, a 0.3-square-mile camp currently home to 87,000 displaced Palestinians, the 36-year-old remarked how the whole area seemed more bustling and crowded to him now than it did when he was a boy.

“So many of the spots where I used to hang out are gone, and they’ve all been replaced by new homes—I guess this place has really been growing,” Abu-Dhubah said as he pointed out a demolished concrete structure filled with improvised mud-brick shelters that had not been there when he left Gaza in 1999. “This used to ...

Nike fined over $74,000 for putting a French jersey on a statue of Winston Churchill http://t.co/HFFnJGy80j pic.twitter.com/7cm081j7VN

— Complex UK (@complex_uk) July 14, 2015

Nike found itself in hot water in France for a publicity stunt from four years ago. The sportswear company teamed with events company Ubi Bene to dress a statue of Winston Churchill in a Tony Parker jersey back in 2011. The statue's sculptor was not amused.

Jean Cardot filed a lawsuit against Nike and Ubi Bene saying his work was "defiled" by the jersey being put on the statue without his permission. The courts agreed this week, fining Nike and Ubi Bene a total of 48,000 Euro in damages (approximately $74,000).

h/t Washington Post

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Dante's Inferno, Academic Edition" - originally published 7/13/2015 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

wikihow-illustrations:

“a lizard bit me? w/e”

hamhamclubhouse:

jurassiraptor:

Jurassic Park 1993 VHS oversized pillow

its like an anime girl pillow but its for me

casadelanime:

andknuckles:

shaq’s “aaaa (thats me yellin)” tweet is objectively the best tweet

hammerlock:

agendr:

reblog this post with a picture of the weirdest dog

Rep. John Lewis returns to Comic-Con in "official outfit" from Selma march and shows the world what a real superhero looks like.

The lawsuit stems from a 13-minute video that appeared online in 2009, featuring a wig-wearing 50 Cent as a narrator dubbed Pimpin' Curly. He makes explicit remarks about the images and taunts rap rival Rick Ross, who isn't in the video but had previously had a daughter with Leviston. At the time the video surfaced, Ross and 50 Cent were trading barbs via video, lyrics and interviews.

Jackson got the tape from the man in it, Leviston's boyfriend at the time. The rapper said that he didn't actually post the video but that Leviston's then-boyfriend said she wouldn't mind if he did.
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Cancer survivors, who are often left infertile by the disease or treatment, may face unexpected hurdles if they later turn to adoption to start a family, a study suggests.

Researchers who contacted adoption agencies found that while all prospective parents were asked to provide a medical history, cancer survivors might also be required to submit letters from physicians or show they were disease free for at least five years.
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catio summer

	Courtney shared this story from The Babe Brigade:
	Why Disney Bought Marvel, btw: Disney knows how to sell to girls; they wanted IP to sell to boys (hence cutting the girl characters out of Marvel merch lines -- those girls could be buying princesses, is the logic)

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prokopetz:

silkktheshocka:

texasuberalles:

freyjapup:

Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled

Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.

This is so fucked up.

To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)

This week, Oregon passed a new law that allows women to buy hormonal contraceptives from a pharmacy without a doctor’s prescription. After the law goes into effect in 2016, women in Oregon will be able to get birth control pills without having to first visit a doctor for permission.

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Aloe, please.

Coach, we here at SB Nation are concerned. You live in Florida now. The Sunshine State! Land of endless beaches and sun-drenched days. You need to take care of yourself out there, otherwise, well, this could happen:

I don't know how he's able to move his mouth to speak without screaming in agony, and heaven knows how the rest of his body looks. Honestly, just seeing him like this makes my own skin hurt. I'm glad you had some eye protection, but perhaps it's time to invest in a hat, umbrella, and maybe some SPF 10,000.

HT: @s_geist7/@isojoejr