Hello colors! My intro program

Feb 24, ’13 8:08 PM

We kicked off CMS.951 with Nick Montfort last week with Ralph Westfall’s piece, “Hello World considered harmful.” The computer scientist argues that the output of “Hello World” doesn’t communicate anything significant.

Although this code runs, it communicates virtually nothing about the concept of user-created objects. Other than the initial occurrence of the key word “class,”
and that funny little dot in the print statement, it could just as well have been written 25 years ago in some procedural language.
It doesn’t instantiate any objects and use any object behaviors. Once this problem is identified, the solution is simple. The “Hello, World” needs to be rewritten to include a user-created object.

Nick eased us into computational thinking as we wrote Python and Javascript programs to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (and vice-versa), and to generate the first 25 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.

Then he set us loose to write our own equivalent of a “Hello World” program. I decided to stick with Firefox’s scratchpad to write a program that would give me the RGB values of standard colors that I put in. Here is my program:

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Playing major scales on the Commodore64

Feb 18, ’13 10:25 PM

One of my favorite requirements at MIT has been my comparative media studies workshops. It’s where we have a chance to merge theory with practice, and this semester, we’re focused on computational thinking.

Professor Nick Montfort had us start by reading 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a book penned by 10 authors on the heritage and poetic politics of a one-line program written in Basic for the Commodore 64.

He then had us try our fingers at it for our first class. We created a few hilarious patterns (a line that struck me in the book was when the authors compared “10 PRINT” across systems and described non-Commodore64 platforms as “poorly suited for the transformation of typographical symbols into graphical patterns.” (p. 55))

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Closing the first-mover advantage in digital societies

Dec 14, ’12 2:32 PM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

A few weeks ago, Rogelio and I attended an intriguingly titled talk, “What would W.E.B. Du Bois say about inequality in digital societies?” It was part of a lecture series probing inequality and exclusion in a digital economy. Rogelio has a full write-up of the event here.

The lecturer, Dr. Ernest J. Wilson III, noted that the digital divide is still very real, but its meaning has shifted. The argument for closing the digital divide always had an economic component: Computer access and basic literacy skills would enable people to build resumes and navigate professional networking sites. Now, Wilson argued, it means that those without digital skills will be left behind as the Western world moves toward a digital service economy.

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Climate change and the currencies of movements

Nov 21, ’12 6:45 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

I spent a quaint Friday evening in New York in the company of DJ Spooky, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and hundreds of other attendees of the Do The Math tour. Like an old fashioned tour (and I mean old fashioned—think traveling presidential campaigns of the 19th century), McKibben and friends were there to rouse the audience to their feet around the biggest threat facing us this century—today and in the next 50 years: climate change.

I’ve been mulling over a few of McKibben’s points, including what could be considered a movement’s currencies and actionable media literacy. These are explained in more depth at the end of the post, but before we get there, let’s set the scene:

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HurricaneHackers in Boston – Sandy hackathon projects, lessons learned

Nov 11, ’12 9:27 PM

This entry was written with Pablo Rey Mazón. It was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog and crossposted to PBS MediaShift’s IdeaLab.

A day before Hurricane Sandy touched down, netizens began to congregate via etherpads, Google Docs and IRC, assuming the name “HurricaneHackers.”

HurricaneHackers teamed up with Sandy CrisisCamps—a series of hackathons organized by CrisisCommons around the world—to host a hackathon at MIT Media Lab. About 30 participants worked together throughout the day to figure out how a remote set of volunteers could support Sandy relief with communication technologies.

Pablo and Denise were the main facilitators for the hackathon. With Pablo’s experience organizing OccupyData hackathons and Denise’s participation in hackathons, we knew that a common gathering place is powerful for imaginative and holistic thinking, and to matchmake that thinking with real world needs.

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HONK! Activist street bands, artists, educators talk inclusion

Oct 11, ’12 11:58 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

HONK! Fest is an annual gathering of activist street bands around the country. While the festival has satellites in Austin and Seattle, it got its start in Somerville, Mass. five years ago. Last weekend, some 30 bands descended on our northern neighbor, and a pedagogical symposium on Monday topped it off.

I attended the first part of the Monday symposium at Harvard’s Gutman Library (full notes here). Scholar and organizer Reebee Garofalo described the intention of the symposium as “expanding this conversation beyond music, beyond the area we know best.”

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Vojo at Park(ing) Day with Cambridge Community Television

Sep 24, ’12 8:04 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

On Friday morning, Becky, Rodrigo and I set out for Central Square, where we had a date with Cambridge Community Television for Parking Day. Parking Day is an international celebration, with do-ocrats, organizations and cities eager to reclaim parking spaces as public spaces. Your typical street-side spot becomes a mini-park, an outdoor lounge, an open-air library—I’ve seen them all. And on Friday, the lot in front of CCTV became a pop-up broadcast station. On one side was a television studio, and on the other, Vojo.

As we talked to Cantabrigians, we learned that a local co-op had moved to three spots within a one-block radius in its 40-year history. We met a citizen journalist who, through his work, discovered that while Boston and Somerville had a commitment to open data, Cambridge was still catching up.

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Community news! Summit! Live blogging!

Sep 13, ’12 12:19 PM

This entry was first published at MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

Can I tell you about my first publishing family? It’s a network of independent publishers loosely known as Block by Block: These are your hyperlocals, some are citizen journalism based or use crowdsourcing tactics of different measure, and all are civically focused. There are many different definitions for “hyperlocal,” but the similarity is that they want to get information to geographic communities that are underserved by news outlets.

In a few hours, I’ll be hopping the plane to Chicago to attend the annual summit (Sept. 13-15). I used to attend as The Rapidian‘s citizen journalism coordinator and also sat on the advisory committee. This year, I’ll be blogging on some of the topics for Block by Block. I’m planning to take down notes/live blogging on etherpad before posting a final draft on the Block by Block blog.

If you’re interested, Block by Block tends to cover the nitty gritty, especially around sustainability, and some of it aligns with Civic. If you want to follow along on the Media Lab etherpad, I’ll be covering these topics (full agenda here):
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Can digital literacy be sexy?

Aug 23, ’12 3:27 PM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

When I’m craving a solid design read, BLDG Blog is my fix. It explores the built world and the human relationship to nature and sculptures. Since I began subscribing, I have wanted to attend a Studio-X event, where author Geoff Manaugh is the director.

Studio-X had a delicious tease for the July Venue, and I respondez-ed immediately: “Although the internet travels in pulses of light and its content increasingly exists in the ‘cloud,’ [journalist Andrew] Blum has traced its very real physical footprint.” Blum published a book that explores the synaptic growth of the internet and ways to experience this virtual good through your senses. What does it smell like (A: burnt toast and ozone)? What does it look like? Where is it? His point: People need to know where their internet comes from. And he shared his prediction for the future, where we move away from major internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, TimeWarner, etc. and buy from boutique ISPs, mirroring the “buy local” trend with food. It surprised him, Blum said, that in a borough that’s home to an artisanal pencil sharpener, there isn’t a single boutique ISP in Brooklyn!

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Death by taxes and sloppy language

May 22, ’12 11:09 AM

A few weeks ago, Frugal Dad’s infographic on the six media conglomerates that control 90% of American media consumption cropped up across the Web (scroll down to view the graphic).

“Total 2010 revenue was $275.9 billion,” it told us. To put that in context, “that’s $36 billion more than Finland’s GDP, enough to buy every NFL team 12 times, and five times the government bailout of General Motors.”

Furthermore, “in 2010, they avoided $875 million in US taxes; enough to double FEMA’s budget or fund NPR for 40 years.”

Let’s take a second here. Thanks to Tow-Knight’s crash course in accounting, I’ve been better able to distinguish among financial terms, and Frugal Dad’s infographic equivocated profit with revenue. See, revenue is how much money a company is bringing in before recouping its costs and paying taxes. By no means is that $275.9 billion pure pocket money.

Then the infographic tells us that the big six evaded taxes. However, due to the way that companies could elect to do their accounting, that could partially be explained by cash flow and accounts receivables. Because companies can undertake such expensive projects, often subcontracting one another’s expertise and services, they shake over contracts that promise payment within a 30 to 180-day window. The expected payments, not yet received, are called accounts receivable. Meanwhile, this affects cash flow, which is the exact amount that a company has on hand to cover immediate expenses such as salaries.

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