A high school computer science teacher claims there’s an “unacknowledged failure” of America’s computer science (CS) classes at the high school and junior high school level. “Visit classrooms and you’ll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor…

“Look underneath the celebratory and self-congratulatory remarks, however, and you’ll find that, although contemporary secondary education is quite good at generating initial student interest, it has had much less success at sustaining that engagement beyond a few weeks or months, and has frankly been ineffectual in terms of (a) measurable learning for the majority of students; (b) boosting the number of students who take a second CS course, either in high school or college; and (c) adequately preparing students for CS college study.”

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In ” A New Pedagogy to Address the Unacknowledged Failure of American Secondary CS Education ,” high school computer science teacher Scott Portnoff argues that a big part of the problem is the survey nature of today’s most popular high school CS course offerings — Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) — both of whose foundational premise is that programming is just one of many CS topics. “Up until a decade ago,” Portnoff explains, “introductory high school computer science classes were synonymous with programming instruction, period. No longer.”

This new status quo in secondary CS education, Portnoff argues, resulted from baseless speculation that programming was what made Java-based AP CS A inaccessible, opposed to, say, an uninspiring or pedagogically ineffective version of that particular curriculum, or a poorly prepared instructor. It’s quite a departure from the 2011 CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, which made the case for the centrality of programming in CS education (“Pedagogically, computer programming has the same relation to studying computer science as playing an instrument does to studying music or painting does to studying art. In each case, even a small amount of hands-on experience adds immensely to life-long appreciation and understanding”).
This teacher believes that programming languages are acquired rather than learned, just like any other human language — and concludes the solution is multi-year courses focused on one programming language until proficiency is fully acquired.

For this reason, for the last seven years he’s also been making his students memorize small programs, and then type them out perfectly, arguing that “the brain subconsciously constructs an internal mental representation of the syntax rules implicitly by induction from the patterns in the data.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Should High Schools Teach Computer Science?

“Masks are stupid and so are the people wearing them,” posted one San Diego woman on Facebook (who is also an anti-vaxxer). “She has also shared previous posts expressing her refusal to wear masks, and her belief that those who wear them are ‘not thinking clearly,'” reports the Washington Post.
Here’s what happened next…

Amber Lynn Gilles walked into a Starbucks in San Diego without a mask and was declined service, according to a Facebook post on her page. She took a photograph of the barista who didn’t serve her… Her post backfired.

It quickly collected more than 100,000 reactions and comments, as well as nearly 50,000 shares. Many Facebook users defended the barista, Lenin Gutierrez, and some called Gilles a “Karen” — a name coined to describe an entitled white woman making inappropriate remarks. One Facebook user wrote: “There’s no reason to publicly shame a kid who’s trying to work his shift like any other day….” That’s when Matt Cowan, a man who doesn’t know Gutierrez but stumbled upon the post, decided to start a virtual tip jar for the barista on GoFundMe. Cowan called the donation page “Tips for Lenin Standing Up To A San Diego Karen…”

“Everybody is rallying around somebody for doing what they’re supposed to do and trying to protect everyone else,” Cowan said in an interview with KGTV. “It just goes to show you there are a lot of good people out there and that outweighs the bad….”

By Saturday the original Facebook post criticizing the Starbucks barista had brought him over $70,000 in donations through the GoFundMe campaign.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports, “In an interview with KNSD-TV Channel 7 in San Diego, Gilles said she’s received ‘thousands’ of death threats since the post went live.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Starbucks Worker Insisting Customers Wear Masks Rewarded With K On GoFundMe

Android Police spotted a new “Verified Calls” feature Google appears to be rolling out that tells users why a business is calling before they answer the call:

Unlike call screening, which can be initiated by the user on any incoming call, Verified Calls only come from businesses that have gone through Google’s approval process. When a call that meets the criteria is placed from an approved business, the user will see the business name and logo, as well as the reason for the call.

Verified Calls require the business to send call information to a secure Google server. That server then pushes the info to the Google phone app on your device
When the actual call is placed, the app checks the caller’s info against that stored data in order to verify the call is indeed coming from the business. If everything’s legit, the Phone app displays the call as being Verified, and presents the helpful info provided by the business. A few minutes after receiving the call, the information is deleted from Google’s server. Verified Calls will be turned on by default, but there should be a setting to opt-out in the Phone app. Although, it doesn’t seem to be showing up yet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Google’s Phone App May Soon Tell You Why Businesses Are Calling

Long-time Slashdot reader hankwang writes: The New York Times has an article on how the transmission of Covid-19 by seemingly healthy individuals was discovered in Germany on January 27, but the report was discredited because of a quibble over whether it was really asymptomatic or rather presymptomatic or oligosymptomatic transmission. Oligosymptomatic means that the symptoms are so mild that they are not recognized as symptoms… It took until March before asymptomatic transmission was publicly acknowledged as playing a significant role.

From the article. (Alternate source here):
Dr. Rothe, an infectious disease specialist at Munich University Hospital, and her colleagues were among the first to warn the world [on January 30]. But even as evidence accumulated from other scientists, leading health officials expressed unwavering confidence that symptomless spreading was not important. In the days and weeks to come, politicians, public health officials and rival academics disparaged or ignored the Munich team. Some actively worked to undermine the warnings at a crucial moment, as the disease was spreading unnoticed…
It is now widely accepted that seemingly healthy people can spread the virus, though uncertainty remains over how much they have contributed to the pandemic. Though estimates vary, models using data from Hong Kong, Singapore and China suggest that 30 to 60 percent of spreading occurs when people have no symptoms… The Chinese health authorities had explicitly cautioned that patients were contagious before showing symptoms. A Japanese bus driver was infected while transporting seemingly healthy tourists from Wuhan. And by the middle of February, 355 people aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship had tested positive. About a third of the infected passengers and staff had no symptoms…
[P]ublic health officials saw danger in promoting the risk of silent spreaders. If quarantining sick people and tracing their contacts could not reliably contain the disease, governments might abandon those efforts altogether… Plus, preventing silent spreading required aggressive, widespread testing that was then impossible for most countries. “It’s not like we had some easy alternative,” said Dr. Libman, the Canadian doctor. “The message was basically: ‘If this is true, we’re in trouble.'” European health officials say they were reluctant to acknowledge silent spreading because the evidence was trickling in and the consequences of a false alarm would have been severe…
As the research coalesced in March, European health officials were convinced. “OK, this is really a big issue,” Dr. Agoritsa Baka, a senior European Union doctor, recalled thinking. “It plays a big role in the transmission…” Since then, the C.D.C., governments around the world and, finally, the World Health Organization have recommended that people wear masks in public.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Did the World Miss Covid-19’s Silent Spread?

British stock trader Navinder Sarao was accused of helping cause a $1 trillion stock market crash in 2010.
But the rest of his story is now being told in a new book titled Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History. “I think that he was a gamer and, for him, markets were honestly the ultimate form of game,” author Liam Vaughan tells the New York Post:
Sarao was more concerned with the rise of high-frequency trading, a method of buying and selling that used powerful computers and algorithms to execute trades in fractions of seconds. The speed allowed (mostly) large, monied firms to beat others to a trade, thereby securing a better price. Sarao bristled at the unfairness. He began engaging in what is known as “spoofing.” He hired software developers to write programs that would allow him to place millions of dollars worth of orders, then — after other traders had reacted to his potential trade — abruptly cancel his order. The deception allowed Sarao to nudge the market higher or lower and reap the benefits.

His trading habits eventually drew scrutiny from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, earning him cautionary letters. Sarao, however, phoned the authorities and told them to “kiss my ass.” Then on May 6, 2010, Sarao logged on from his bedroom and began furiously trading, attempting to capitalize on the volatility still roiling the markets after the 2008 crisis. In the final two hours before he logged off at 7:40 p.m. London time, the trader had bought and sold 62,077 e-mini contracts — with a combined value of $3.4 billion. A minute later, markets tumbled with a “velocity and intensity it never had before,” Vaughan writes…

Sarao was later arrested and extradited to the United States, only the second person ever charged with spoofing. It’s unclear how much his actions contributed to America’s so-called “flash crash.” The US government contends that he was partially responsible, while some financial experts disagree, seeing him as a Robin Hood whose actions only hurt wealthy companies.
But whatever happened to Sarao? The Post writes that he cooperated with authorities, and the answer ultimately came quietly in January, reports CNBC:
Despite facing as much as eight years in prison, Federal Judge Virginia Kendall sentenced Sarao — who suffers from severe Asperger’s — to just one year of supervised release. Court documents submitted by Sarao’s legal team described him as a “singularly sunny, childlike, guileless, trusting person,” who lived off social security payments and played hour after hour of video games in his childhood bedroom.

Sarao, who spent four months in the U.K.’s Wandsworth Prison before his extradition to the United States, has forfeited about $7.6 million in gains made from trading. U.S. authorities claimed Sarao made more than $70 million between 2009 and 2014 from his bedroom — much of it legal. However, it has been reported that he has lost almost all of his money after investing in fraudulent scams.
“I think justice was done,” the new book’s author tells the Post, “because the message was out there that someone shouldn’t be thinking about doing what Nav was doing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Whatever Happened to the ‘Flash Crash’ Trader?