CoderDojo: Free Computer Classes for Children | beanmimo

What is CoderDojo?

A free and non-profit club that gives children a taste of working with computer languages and develop the growing skills of children who already have taken their first steps in an organic environment; something that our education system has yet to address.

Origins

It?s Co-founder, Corkonian, James Whelton (Entrepreneur & a Social Media Connoisseur) began coding in his bedroom when he was 9 where he created some basic websites. He shot to fame at 17 when (out of boredom) he hacked into the iPod nano, put his findings up on the web and the story sprouted legs, wings, and jet propulsion, within hours he was on the subject of some of the world?s most prestigious tech blogs.

James is the sort of person who seems somewhat anti-establishment but is already reshaping what establishment means in the world of programming.

Last year James (still only 18) teamed up with Bill Liao, the Australian Social Networking pioneer, ?author, speaker,?and?philanthropist and together they came of with the concept of CoderDojo.

Like James, Bill is a self taught Computer Programmer.

Importance of?CoderDojo

Bill Liao explains why CoderDojo is so important; if you ask somebody how the computers work, beyond surfing the net, Word, Excel or Powerpoint etc. a surprising amount of people do not have the first notion.

Since last year these coding classes for children which deal with HTML, CSS, Java and a host of other languages that create websites and online games have literally gone viral with the count now at 130 around the ever decreasing globe.

The first CoderDojo conference was held at Limerick Institute of Technology on Saturday 13^th October 2012.

The atmosphere of the classes was reflected the conference, the only rule of CoderDojo is ?One Rule, Be Cool?. James, Bill and a host of other Dojo Mentors, facilitators and children explained how these CoderDojos worked.

The Dojos encourage children to work together on projects as they find the synergy more effective. If a child is stuck on a particular piece of code they are encouraged firstly to google the answer, secondly to ask one of their fellow club ?members before, thirdly, approaching a Mentor.

Where many children started off on their bedrooms, like James, CoderDojos have made computer programming a social event. Within the year many of the club members have become mentors themselves. In fact earlier on this year a group of kid mentors visited Leinster House and gave a CoderDojo class to irish Politicians.

Adults can also take part in the clubs but they must be accompanied by a child.

To find out more or even better starting a CoderDojo in your area please click here.

Oh and one last thing thank you to Bill Liao for introducing me to Bubble Tea.

James Whelton

Bill Liao

Limerick Institute of Technology

Source: http://beanmimo.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/coderdojo-free-computer-classes-for-children/

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UK austerity protests challenge government cuts

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

A man holds up a banner reading 'Austerity - That's Enough' as a march to protest the government's austerity measures prepares to set off from the Embankment in London on Friday.

By NBC News staff and wires reports

Updated at 8:25 a.m ET: LONDON - Thousands of anti-austerity protesters marched in London on Saturday to protest against public spending cuts enacted by a government fighting off accusations that it is run by an upper-class elite that ignores the plight of recession-hit voters.?

The march comes at a time when Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative-led coalition is reeling from the resignation on Friday of a senior minister accused of calling police "plebs," a class-laden insult for working people.?

---

Conservatives faced a barrage of negative headlines on Saturday over the departure of Andrew Mitchell, the "Chief Whip" or party enforcer, four weeks after he swore at police guarding the gates to Cameron's Downing Street office.?

Class wars: 'Gate-gate' scandal swamps UK PM David Cameron

A second row involving George Osborne, the finance minister -- who sat in a first class train carriage with a standard class ticket before paying for an upgrade -- played into the hands of critics who say the Conservatives are privileged and out-of-touch.?

"Who Do They Think They Are?" asked the Daily Mail newspaper in a front page headline, while the Financial Times said the bad news over Mitchell and Osborne capped a "dismal week for the Tories", the center-right party that is trailing in the polls.?

Nurses, cleaners, librarians and ambulance drivers are among tens of thousands marching past the Houses of Parliament to a rally in Hyde Park in one of the biggest anti-austerity protests this year. Marches will also take place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Glasgow, Scotland.?

General strike?
Under grey autumnal skies, police closed roads around parliament in Westminster before the start of the march at 1100 GMT (6 a.m. ET).?

Trade union leaders are seeking to pile more pressure on Cameron at the event where they will tell protesters that the government's economic plan has failed, prolonging Britain's second recession since the financial crisis.?

Greek strike turns violent: 'Enough is enough'

The head of the head of the RMT transport workers union was set to say that Sunday's march was a step towards a nationwide strike, Sky News reported.

"The marches are a building block towards the objective of coordinated action and a general strike. ?That is why RMT says, march today, strike tomorrow,"?Bob Crow was planning to say, Sky News reported without citing a source.

Reuters reported that Brendan Barber, head of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group which represents 54 unions, planned to sat the following:

"Austerity isn't working. It is hammering the poorest and the most vulnerable ...?Ministers told us that if we only accept the pain, recovery would come. Instead we have been mired in a double-dip recession."?

Coalition under pressure
The coalition government has responded to calls from unions and the opposition Labour Party to do more to boost growth by relaxing planning laws and boosting lending to businesses.?

A downsized parade as Spain's celebrates national day amidst austerity cuts

But its latest attempt to ease the pressure on squeezed households backfired this week when Cameron said the government would legislate to force energy companies to give customers their lowest tariff. The surprise announcement appeared to take his own ministers by surprise and sowed confusion over what he meant and whether it would actually happen.?

However, Sajid Javid, a Conservative Treasury minister, said the government was right to focus on cutting borrowing and that data last week indicating a fall in unemployment and inflation showed that its economic policies were on track.?

"There is a still a lot to do," he told Sky News. "I don't pretend for a second that we are out of the woods, but this government is facing up to the problem, it is not sticking its head in the sand like (Labour opposition leader) Ed Miliband."?

Asked about the perception that the Conservatives are out of touch, he said: "I think that what matters is what is actually happening out there in the real world."?

Spain, Portugal hit with anti-austerity protests

Opponents of the unions say the government should stick to its plan to eliminate a budget deficit that stood at 8 percent of gross domestic product last year, the biggest of any major European country.?

"The government must not listen to militant union leaders," said Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which describes itself as an independent free-market thinktank. "The cuts we have seen are tiny and further concessions to these protesters would be wholly unaffordable."?

Reuters contributed to this report.

More world stories from NBC News:

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Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/20/14575474-nurses-cleaners-librarians-uk-austerity-marchers-challenge-government-cuts?lite

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Fossil Scars Capture Dinosaur Head-Butts

The way dome-skulled dinosaurs bashed heads may help tease apart juveniles from adults or one species from another

By Matt Kaplan

Pachycephalosaur wyomingens Image: Flickr/red_tzar

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazine

Raleigh, North Carolina?With domed heads and thick, bony skull protuberances, pachycephalosaurids are well known by seven-year-olds and paleontologists alike. The dinosaurs are thought to have used their thick domes to headbutt each other, perhaps as part of courtship behavior. But whereas children recreating these vicious displays simply ram plastic models of the animals together in a straight line, a study now suggests that pachycephalosaurs may have bashed one another in a number of different ways.

The work, presented this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, started with just one pachycephalosaur fossil. ?We were looking at a dome and noticed these lesions that looked like they were from injuries,? explains Joseph Peterson, a paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh. He wondered whether the fossilized injury was one of a kind ? or whether such lesions were common. To find out, Peterson and his colleague Collin Dischler started examining more domes.

Together, they were able to look at 102 domes from fossil collections around the world. Of these, 23 had lesions. Fascinated by the presence of so many injuries, Peterson and Dischler produced a three-dimensional computer model of a pachycephalosaur skull and mapped injuries onto it.

They noted that the shape of the dome differed from fossil to fossil, and that the placement of the injuries depended on the shape of the skull. Skulls with low domes tended to have injuries at the front, whereas skulls with higher domes had lesions evenly distributed between the front and back.

Living proof
The finding hinted that the pachycephalosaurs with differently shaped skulls were bumping heads in different ways. To find out what those ways were, the researchers considered the butting of sheep, goats and bison.

?The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,? says Peterson.

The team found that bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) charge each other head on; that mountain goats (Oreamos americanus) bump one another in the flanks; and that bison (Bison bison) wrestle with their horns. On the basis of these examples, Peterson and Dischler speculate that the high-domed pachycephalosaurs with parietal injuries were side-bumping like mountain goats, and that the frontal injuries are indicative of bison-like wrestling.

?It could be that we are seeing two different species bashing in different ways, but it could also be a single dinosaur species where juveniles and adults exhibit different bashing behaviors,? says Andrew Farke, a paleontologist at the Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, California.

Bone to pick
Some paleontologists disagree that pachycephalosaurs rammed one another at all, and there is much skepticism over whether the lesions really are ?butt prints?.

?It is an intriguing study but after examining one of these ?injuries? I found it hard to rule out the possibility that this might have simply been the skull being chipped after death,? says Bruce Rothschild, a palaeo-osteopathologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Farke is confident that the debate will soon be resolved. ?A look at skull bone microstructure should determine if the lesion sites actually suffered trauma,? he says.

Whatever the outcome, seven-year-olds will undoubtedly keep on bashing.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on October 19, 2012.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=293a47dd622872afff4dd3040e858165

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Gardener?s Supply | Shop garden hose accessories and tools to make watering the garden easier. Water conservation and drought prevention items that also ?

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Source: http://realestatemarketingblog.com/colorful-garden-hoses-for-los-angeles-california-homes/

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Pregnant NYC woman found slain day before wedding

NEW YORK (AP) ? A woman who was eight months pregnant was found stabbed to death Saturday in her apartment, the day before her wedding, police said.

Vindalee Smith, 38, was found on the floor of her apartment in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn with a gaping wound in her neck. It wasn't clear how long she'd been dead before the body was discovered by her landlord. Her unborn child did not survive.

There was no sign of forced entry, and no weapon was recovered, police said. Investigators are looking for a possible suspect. They interviewed her friends and family, and spoke to her fiance.

"I can't even begin to imagine who would want to do that," her friend, Sybil Samuel, told local newspapers. "It would be the devil, to kill a woman with a child in her stomach. They killed two people."

Smith had four children in their teens and 20s, friends said. A baby shower had been planned for Saturday evening, followed by a small wedding Sunday. Friends told reporters that Smith had met her fiance about a year ago.

Smith was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist and attended New Dimension Church, where she was supposed to get married. Congregation members were concerned when she didn't show up for morning service.

"She was always on time? always the first person at church," Tyler Harrigan told the Daily News of New York. "When the news came to the church, the whole church broke down. We started to bawl. All the children were crying."

A crowd of mourners gathered outside Smith's home, praying and weeping, and singing hymns. The church pastor Rev. Ferron Francis told the Daily News that Smith had once feuded with a former neighbor who threatened to kill her, but it was months ago and the trouble had stopped when she moved to the new apartment.

Calls made by The Associated Press to the church were not immediately returned.

Some friends said that Smith once worked for a home health care agency, but may have been recently unemployed.

An autopsy was scheduled for Sunday.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-10-21-Pregnant%20Woman%20Killed/id-70fe6a2296f4437db447c8ee5f1afc8e

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Video: Romneys release 2011 tax returns

>> vegas. tell us what you know regarding the romney campaign releasing within the hour his 2011 tax returns . obviously, friday, late in the evening . this all brings suspicion as to the timing.

>> reporter: tamron, mitt romney just arrived here touching down with us on the back of plane a few minutes ago, and he will be doing in las vegas what a lot of americans do, which is lay his cards on the table. we already are getting early indications of exactly what we will learn from these returns. of course, this is happening at the end of what has frankly been perhaps the worst week of mitt romney 's entire campaign season that began with the release of that secretly recorded video, which led to the remarks about 47% of americans that he referred to as victims being government depend entsdependents. what we will see in the newly filed 2011 tax return , the romneys paid $1.9 million in taxes on roughly $13.7 million in what was mostly investment income. their effective tax rate for 2011 was 14.1%. the romneys, the campaign notes donated more than $4 million to charity in the year 2011 . that's $4 million to charity, which they say amounts to about 30% of their income. you'll remember a while back the romney campaign insisted mitt romney himself insisted that he never paid less than 13% in taxes. in fact, over the entire 20-year period the campaign is telling us know as we see for ourselves that the average annual effective tax rate , what he paid as an average over 20 years was roughly 20%. they say the lowest annual federal tax rate he never paid was 13.6%. of course, tamron, as he comes here to las vegas , this is his first trip to nevada, which is viewed as a key battle ground state in seven weeks. a trip last weekend was canceled because of some problems -- excuse me. it's his first trip in seven weeks to colorado, which is taking place on monday. he

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/49122239/

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Family Home and Life: Grandparent's Say It Saturday

Fall has arrived! Though you might not know it from our temps here today! I heard it will be around 106 today! ?Around here we start to get a little giddy at the thought of cooler temperatures and look forward to getting outside more, and perhaps with a little fall gardening; or hiking in one of the local mountain preserves here. I look forward to it all, but now is the time that I start putting into action my Family Harvest Day plans. I must confess I have been slow this year about getting the ball rolling, but I have given it a little push and things are moving along. We usually make Scarecrows at our Harvest Day as a group project. You will find my tutorial how to make a?Scarecrow?from last year here at this link. Do you have fall plans? Is there a special way you celebrated the changing seasons with activities, home d?cor, or outings? How about visits to the pumpkin patch or farmers markets? Do you do something special for Halloween?

Thanks for coming by today!?I hope you enjoy linking up and/or reading all my linkers today! Stop back in a day or so to check out new linkers ok? And don?t forget to leave them some comment love so they know you were there.

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Add your link here every Saturday at Grandparent's Say It Saturday.

Please link up to three post, not to your home page, and link that back to Family Home and Life. While you are here I hope you will visit the other linkers and come back to see who links up later. We all love comments! No Etsy shops or giveaways please. This link closes on Monday night.

Be sure to visit Lisa at Grandma's Briefs to join her linky, GRAND Social, on Mondays. Thanks for linking up with me!

I have had a lot of content theft lately. If you are reading this post anywhere else but at Family Home and Life then it was used without permission! Copyright? Family Home and Life 2012 All Rights Reserved

Source: http://www.familyhomeandlife.com/2012/09/grandparents-say-it-saturday_22.html

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