Posts tagged kids
Call It What It Is: Energy of Mass Extinction
Mar 11th
by JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
It’s time for the public to start calling 19th century barbaric fossil fuels what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction. Dirty energy companies, including nuclear power plants, have been owned by a few rich white families from the start, which is why production of energy has remained in the Dark Ages even though clean renewable energy could have lit up the world easily, cheaply and without pollution twenty years ago. Given the latest advances in green energy technology, there’s absolutely no excuse for not legislating rapid shifts to clean energy by 2020.
Instead, world leaders, primarily the US government, not only serve as “barriers” to the advancement of green energy, they’re the fossil fuel industry’s sleaziest salesmen on earth: Big Oil pays for their seats on the Hill for the sole purpose of selling Energy of Mass Extinction to world markets. Oil executives are given an open door invitation to the White House any time and day of the week.
By contrast, lawyers that represent the public’s welfare and our environment are not welcomed, or they are put on a long waiting list. In short, the oil oligarchs operate from the White House where the polluters meet and draw up their plans. Judges are also owned by the oil firms. For example, read Buzzflash editor at Truthout Mark Karlin’s recent commentary about a federal judge that blocked U.S. courts from being used to collect a $9 billion Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for turning a beautiful rainforest into a putrid toxic waste dump Thanks to a thoroughly corrupt US government, another victory for Chevron’s oil tyrants who don’t have to clean up the toxic sludge they leave behind after they’ve contaminated everything in sight for Energy of Mass Extinction.
In order to understand Obama’s plans for Energy of Mass Extinction, it’s worth reading two articles that appeared in the Rolling Stone: How the U.S. Exports Global Warming by Tim Dickinson. While Obama talks about shifting to a clean, green future, behind closed doors, he and his rich oil friends are selling tar-sands oil, black gunk refined to crude known as petroleum coke, which is denser and dirtier than burning coal—to world markets, mostly to China and Asian markets because it’s cheap fuel.
Too bad China won’t tell Obama to take his filthy tar-sands and shove it you know where, and that they’ll meet their energy demands with their advanced solar and wind technologies. But unfortunately, they’re buying it. And as long as there’s a demand, we will be doomed by these horrific decisions made by world leaders. Incidentally, “Hillary Clinton is even more supportive of the dirty-energy trade than the Obama White House.”
The second piece is Matt Taibbi’s The Vampire Squid Strikes Again. Thanks to deregulation going back to the Glass-Steagall Act under President Clinton, accelerated by Republican, Phil Gramm, banks have gone beyond financing dirty fossil fuel industries: they’re buying everything associated with the production of Energy of Mass Extinction for big profits.
When you read these two pieces together, you get a clear understanding of how oil firms, Wall St and the US government are buying and selling Energy of Mass Extinction in a blinding wheel of addiction to money while the earth is going up in flames. These people wouldn’t know a Redwood from a Palm tree. They’re completely divorced from nature. They are exactly what T.S. Eliot meant by the Hollow Men.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. hundreds of students are being arrested in front of the White House to protest against the Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline. Although these kids stepped over the line deliberately to get arrested for the sake of drawing attention to tar-sands Energy of Mass Extinction, to my mind, they were arrested to protect the oil industry.
While these kids are going to jail for trying to save a beautiful planet that is doomed from man-made pollution, the oil criminals continue to poison our drinking water, oceans, rivers, lands, and our air at mass levels of destruction. Are they getting arrested? No, they’re being wined and dined at the White House. As for the oil-owned media, as Buzzflash editor, Mark Karlin, pointed out, a huge, oil-funded PR campaign has been launched to push Obama’s approval of the northern Keystone leg from Alberta, Canada to the southern Keystone pipeline for delivery to the Gulf where it will be sold to China and Asian markets.
For example, it was disconcerting to see that HuffingtonPost Green published Warren Buffet’s cheerleading article for the Keystone pipeline. It’s one thing to post it in the business section, but to promote Buffet’s big push for the worst carbon emitting pollution on earth in the environmental section seemed terribly hypocritical at HuffPost Green. There’s one significant point that Buffet failed to mention in his article: that he plans to profit from his investment in the Keystone tar-sands pipeline. That’s how PR works: convince the public that oil (tar-sands) is good for them, when in fact, it only benefits a few billionaires like Buffet at the expense of life as we know it.
In my last Buzzflash-Truthout commentary, Who’s to Blame for Recurring Chemical & Oil Disasters, I made a reference to Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, The Sixth Extinction. Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe. In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert explains how our use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate change are creating a mass extinction of the planet. “We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach,” said Kolbert on a NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross.
That’s why it’s important for the public to call dirty energy what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction; it’s a barbaric fuel that is sucking the life and light from our Planet Earth.
Dirty Energy is the real Weapon of Mass Destruction. These ruthless monsters are not going to change their ways as long as they can profit by the billions from annihilating the earth. Therefore, we must all make an effort to stop using and buying these deadly products to the best of our abilities. That’s what’s happening in Hawaii. Residents are opting out of the grid for solar and by doing so, making it impossible for the antiquated utility company (HECO) to stay alive. Read Hawaii’s top renewable energy advocate Henry Curtis’ piece U.S. Utilities Face Impending Doom with the Rise of Cheap Solar.
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Jacqueline Marcus is a contributing guest writer for Buzzflash at Truthout.org; she’s the editor ofForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com and author of Close to the Shore by Michigan State University Press. Her E-book, Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone: Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us, is available at Kindle Books.
CU: Build your own 3-D video game
Dec 5th
you build a video game, learn to code
In just one hour, school kids, teachers and any code-curious member of the public with an Internet connection can now create their own 3-D video game using a tutorial built by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder in preparation for the global “Hour of Code” event happening the second week of December.
CU-Boulder’s game-building program allows people with zero experience coding to design their own 3-D worlds by “inflating” hand-drawn 2-D icons and then programming those objects to interact in defined ways. For example, a participant could easily create a 3-D version of the classic arcade game Frogger by inflating a frog and then writing a line of code that would tell the program to squash the frog if it collides with a truck that has also been programmed to move horizontally across the screen at a set speed.
CU-Boulder’s online game-building tool is among a variety of self-guided tutorials that have been created for the Hour of Code, an event that aims to recruit 10 million schoolchildren to spend one hour during the week of Dec. 9-15, dubbed Computer Science Education Week, learning the basics of coding. The event, spearheaded by the nonprofit code.org, is designed to spark excitement about coding among youth in order to bolster a future interest in computer science, a field that’s increasingly important to a wide range of careers as well as everyday life.
“Programming should be easy and exciting,” said CU-Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning, who led the project. “But that’s not where we are. The perception of the public is that it’s hard and boring. Our goal is to expose a much larger as well as broader audience to programming by reinventing computer science education in public schools.”
CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code tutorial—which can be found at http://hourofcode.com/ac—builds on two decades of Repenning’s research, which has pioneered drag-and-drop programming tools for kids called AgentSheets and AgentCubes. Repenning and his team also have developed Scalable Game Design, a curriculum teachers can implement to help their students use AgentSheets and AgentCubes to learn computer science through building their own video games.
Students can use the same tools and their new computational thinking skills to build science simulations—the coding needed to lay out what should happen when a truck collides with a frog is not that different from the coding needed to outline the chemical reaction that occurs when two molecules collide, for example.
The Scalable Game Design project recently received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue to expand nationally.
From the beginning, the purpose of Scalable Game Design was to give school kids a taste of coding that might be able to flip the often-held belief that computer programming was not something they wanted to learn.
Repenning and his team began to reach out to kids in the local Boulder Valley School District, offering video game-building workshops as an after-school activity. The participants loved it, but the kids who initially showed up were the usual suspects—boys. In subsequent years, the project was introduced into classes that were already being taught during the school day, exposing all kinds of kids who might not normally be inclined to try computer programming, especially girls and minority students, to code.
“We asked them after, ‘Did you enjoy the activity?’ And they said, ‘Yeah. We love it and we want to do more of it,’ ” Repenning said.
The program is now ubiquitous in Boulder-area middle schools, and beginning about five years ago, Repenning received a $1.5 million grant from NSF to expand the program to schools outside the local district, especially districts with widely varying demographics, from inner-city schools to extremely rural schools and Native American communities. To implement the expansion, CU-Boulder hosted trainings on campus each summer to prepare teachers to deliver the program.
During the first expansion, Repenning and his colleagues also discovered that the way the video-game curriculum was taught impacted the degree to which girls, who are vastly underrepresented in computer science, were interested in coding. Direct instruction appeared to turn girls off, while inquiry-based approaches got the girls as excited as the boys.
Repenning has since received two more NSF grants. The first, for $1.5 million, is being used to follow up on how pedagogy affects girls studying computer science. The second and most recent grant—$2 million awarded in August—recognizes the achievements of the initial expansion effort and is being used to further spread Scalable Game Design across the country.
After the initial expansion, the Scalable Game Design team measured the success of the program by gauging the interest students had in learning more about computer science after they finished designing a video game and by analyzing the games themselves to see if the design of the games demonstrated a grasp of coding concepts. With positive results in both categories, NSF gave the team a green light to further expand the program by offering some teacher-training programs online.
The Hour of Code tutorial built on the Scalable Game Design infrastructure now allows anyone who is interested to get a taste of video game programming. More information on the Hour of Code can be found at http://csedweek.org/. Anyone interested in participating in the Hour of Code or using CU-Boulder’s Hour of Code program in their classes can find information athttp://hourofcode.com/ac.
-CU-
Ugly Or Not, Buffs Finally Get ‘W’ vs. Wyoming
Nov 14th
Contributing editor
BOULDER – Tad Boyle likes it fast, Larry Shyatt likes it slow. The hare finally took down the tortoise Wednesday night, but it was hardly the hoops version of the Indy 500 and it was anything but picturesque.
Boyle’s Colorado Buffs, perennial losers to Shyatt’s Wyoming Cowboys, encountered nearly night-long difficulty finding offensive consistency. But the Buffs dialed up their defense in the second half, hit their free throws when needed and exited the Coors Events Center with what Boyle labeled a homely 63-58 win.
“If you guys are looking for the definition of the phrase ‘winning ugly’ I think you saw it tonight,” he said afterward. “It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t our best effort, but I was really proud of our guys for finding a way down the stretch to win the game.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Larry Shyatt, the University of Wyoming and their program. They play us tough every year and it was good to get a win against them. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t pretty but we’ll take it, we’ll learn and we’ll move on and we’ll get better. I’ve said many times you’d rather learn from a win than learn from a loss and I think our players understand that.”
The Cowboys – staunch believers in low-possession, low-scoring games – had defeated the Buffs six straight times. Payback came Wednesday night, but it didn’t come easily for CU, which trailed by 10 points in the first half and got its final seven points on free throws (7-of-12) in the game’s last 3:06. The Buffs hit 24-of-34 free throws for the game to the Cowboys’ 11-of-15.
Junior Spencer Dinwiddie made five of his eight free throw attempts during the final 3:06, finishing with a team-high 15 points. He was 10-of-13 from the free throw line, taking all of his foul shots in the second half, when the Buffs rallied from a 31-26 deficit at intermission largely on their performance on the defensive end.
“We’ve gone 0-3 against (Wyoming) since I’ve been here,” Dinwiddie said. “It was a big game for us. I know I said earlier they aren’t a rival and I stick by that. But at the same time they are a really big game. Really, anything is a big game; we’re glad we won.”
Three other Buffs starters backed up Dinwiddie with double-figure scoring efforts – Askia Booker with 14, Xavier Johnson with 13 and Josh Scott with 12. The Buffs outrebounded the Cowboys 35-24, with Scott grabbing nine boards and Dinwiddie adding seven.
With Wyoming switching defenses and forcing CU to attack a zone and get to the free throw line for the bulk of its offense, the Buffs managed only four assists in 40 minutes. It was CU’s lowest total since having just two in a 1977 game at Jacksonville in a one-point win. CU’s bench was outscored by Wyoming’s 16-3, which Boyle attributed in part to his “shortening” his bench in the second half due to most of his top reserves being freshmen.
CU shot 40 percent (18-of-45) for the game but held Wyoming to 38.1 percent (8-of-21) in the second half – and that, noted Boyle, was key.
“In the second half, the defense was the difference in the game,” he said, adding that his team gave up nine layups in the first half – two more than its goal for the game. “We gave up three layups in the second half . . . when we ran our offense and executed our offense, we shot 50 percent in the second half and those are good numbers.”
Guard Josh Adams, of Parker, Colo., led Wyoming with 15 points, followed by Larry Nance Jr. with 10. Adams said the Buffs’ ability to reach the free throw line “always makes it difficult. They have a lot of great athletes, a lot of quick kids and a lot of kids with size. They were able to get to the line more than us . . . if you get yourself to the line like that in a game you give yourself a chance to win.”
Said Shyatt: “We just didn’t come up with what we needed at the charity stripe.”
The Cowboys led 31-26 at halftime, but that was half the advantage they held 31/2 minutes earlier. A 10-0 run put them up 28-18 before the Buffs began to gather themselves. It didn’t help that CU went just over 71/2 minutes without a field goal, and that Dinwiddie was limited to 12 first-half minutes after drawing two fouls.
Wyoming’s 10-0 run featured three-pointers by Jerron Granberry and Adams and underscored a deficiency CU exhibited in its opener. UT-Martin had hit 41 percent from beyond the arc in a 91-65 loss, but the Buffs’ perimeter ‘D’ problems got Boyle’s attention.
The Cowboys ended the half shooting 50 percent from downtown (5-of-10), but hit only two of their 11 second-half attempts (18.2 percent). “We tried to get a little closer to them,” Boyle said. “I thought our three-point defense in the second half was much better.”
The Buffs needed a stellar start to the second 20 minutes and they got it, outscoring the Cowboys 8-3 and tying the score 34-34 on a pair of “XJ” free throws with 17:17 remaining. CU went inside to open the half, getting baskets from Scott and a pair of layups from Wes Gordon that preceded Johnson’s free throws.
Wyoming reclaimed a four-point lead (40-36), but CU used free throws by Dinwiddie and Booker to tie the score at 40-40 before a Booker layup put the Buffs ahead 42-40 with 12:15 to play. The Cowboys led only once the rest of the game – 47-46 on a three-pointer by Nathan Sobey with 7:55 left.
But even with CU parading to the foul line, Wyoming stayed close. The Cowboys closed to 57-56 on a jumper by Nance with 1:47 remaining. Dinwiddie answered by making four consecutive free throws, Xavier Talton hit one of two – the last gave the Buffs a four-point lead with 11.7 seconds showing – and Johnson made one of two with 3.6 seconds left to end the scoring.
Boyle said Dinwiddie “can affect the game the game in a lot of different ways. It doesn’t have to be scoring; it doesn’t have to be shooting. It can be getting to the free throw line, which he obviously does a great job of. It can be defensively and I think he’s our best perimeter defender right now.”
If the Buffs did as Boyle suggested and won ugly, Scott took consolation in this: “You can see that we make mistakes and sometimes lose concentration, but one of the blessings is that we have so much we can improve upon. We play teams that are well-coached and have returning players . . . we have to feel pretty excited by the fact we were able to beat a team like that. It just shows that we have promise for the games coming up.”
The next one is one of the earliest in recent memory: The Buffs are back at the CEC on Saturday at 10 a.m. against Jackson State.