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itwbennett writes
"Researchers at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy have found that happier programmers (or, more specifically, computer science students at the university) were significantly more likely to score higher on a problem solving assessment. The researchers first measured the emotional states of study participants using a measure devised by psychologists called the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience Affect Balance (SPANE-B) score. They then tested participants' creativity (ability to write creative photo captions) and problem-solving ability (playing the Tower of London game). The results: happiness didn't affect creativity, but did improve problem-solving ability."
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rjmarvin writes
"We've all seen the code displayed in hacking scenes from movies and TV, but now a new industry is growing around custom-building realistic software and dummy code. Twisted Media, a Chicago-based design team, started doing fake computer graphics back in 2007 for the TNT show Leverage, and is now working on three prime-time shows on top of films like Gravity and the upcoming Divergent. They design and create realistic interfaces and codebases for futuristic software. British computer scientist John Graham-Cumming has drawn attention to entertainment background code by explaining what the displayed code actually does on his blog, but now that the public is more aware, studios are paying for fake code that's actually convincing."
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itwbennett writes
"The MOOC (massive open online course) failure rate is notoriously high — only 1% of people who take the beginning computer science programming class, CS50, that Harvard offers over the EdX online platform complete it. A new effort in St. Louis called LaunchCode is changing that — and solving the city's programmer shortage. For the past several weeks, about 300 hardy souls have been gathering in a downtown St. Louis library to listen to the CS50 lectures and work together on the various programming problem sets. But the support offered by the all-volunteer run LaunchCode doesn't end with meet space. They're also doing an end-around on the traditional coder hiring process by pairing the students who complete the course with experienced programmers in one of more than a 100 tech companies who are looking for talent."
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sfcrazy writes
"Google's Chromium team is working on an alternative of Gtk+ for the browser, called Aura. Elliot Glaysher, a Google developer explains, 'We aim to launch the Aura graphics stack on Linux in M35. Aura is a cross-platform graphics system, and the Aura frontend will replace the current GTK+ frontend.' The Free Software community is debating: is Google trying to do Canonical? Couldn't Google just switch to Qt, which is becoming an industry standard?"
