The former phone maker is taking its software expertise to the world of self-driving cars.

The 1980's nostalgia and sci-fi show Stranger Things returns for season three with a new setting: The Starcourt Mall. WIRED's Emily Dreyfuss talks with architecture professor Ellen Dunham-Jones about mall culture and the fate of dead malls. Hint, zombies.

Finney, Martha I

Gately, Karen, author

Australia. Parliament. Joint Select Committee on oversight of the implementation of redress related recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, author, issuing body

McGonigal, Jane, author

Hayden Library - GV1469.34.P79 M33 2016

Victims’ advocates caution institutions against plans to “restore” fallen leaders.

Update (May 1): Cedarville University president Thomas White has been placed on administration leave by the school’s board of trustees. A week after Anthony Moore was fired by White over “additional information related to [his] past,” the board announced it will commission an independent investigation of Moore and an audit of his hiring.

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Another case of a leader with an abusive past moving from one evangelical institution to another has intensified scrutiny on Christian hiring practices and responses to abuse.

In ministry contexts, the desire to keep fallen leaders out of positions where they might again abuse their authority is sometimes met with another perspective—a hope that a redemptive and forgiving God would allow people to be restored to leadership. Both victims’ advocates and community members worry that administrators weighing those considerations at Cedarville University made the wrong call.

In 2017, Cedarville welcomed Anthony Moore six months after he was fired from the lead pastor position of The Village Church’s Fort Worth campus. President Thomas White wrote that he offered to shepherd Moore through a five-year plan of restoration at the conservative Baptist school while he taught theology, helped coach basketball, and served as a special advisor on diversity.

CT spoke with four current and former Cedarville professors who said they knew Moore had made a “mistake” related to same-sex attraction and technology, based on White’s introduction and Moore’s own telling. Some assumed pornography or an online relationship. They had no idea that he had reportedly filmed a subordinate at his previous church in the shower. The revelation, detailed by multiple ...

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How Bethany Jenkins's daily devotionals kickstart common-good Christianity in NYC.

Watch the video to see Salman's answer to that question!

The merger with Capital First will drive home three years of growth at one go to IDFC Bank: Rajiv Lall

Quick! Think of the word “developer” or “coder” — what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe a whiteish male in his twenties living in a busy metropolis, wearing a nerdy t-shirt and hoodie? Someone a bit like Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe a younger Bill Gates or Sergey Brin? Any of the dudes from the HBO series Silicon Valley, perhaps? Certainly no one like me.

By tech standards, I’m old. I’m also female and a mother. I live in a midwestern town you’ve never heard of and will never visit — a town where the cows vastly outnumber the people. My hair color is (almost) natural and is no longer part of the ROYGBIV collection, so I have no perceived conference street cred. I own about a thousand geeky T-shirts, but never actually wear them in public, opting for more “girly” attire (or so was pointed out by a male colleague). On the surface, I look more suited to taking notes at a PTA meeting than writing code. I’m a bit of an outsider. A tech misfit.

So when my 11-year-old daughter finished her recent coding camp and excitedly declared, “Now I’m a real developer, Mom, just like you!” there was the usual parent pride, but also a small piece of me that cringed. Because, as much as I support the STEM fields, and want the next generation of girls to be coding wizard-unicorn-ninjas, I really don’t want my own daughter to be a developer. The rationale behind this bold (and maybe controversial) statement comes from a place of protection. The tech world we live in today is far from perfect. I’ve endured my share of misogyny, self-doubt, and sexual harassment. Why wouldn’t I want to protect her from all of that?

The (diversity) elephant in the (computer) room

You’ve heard this story before: there is not enough diversity in tech. This puzzling trend seems to continue year after year, even though numerous studies show that by including more people from underrepresented communities, a company can increase its innovation, employee retention, and bottom line. Even with the recent push and supposed support for diversity and inclusivity from many Fortune 500 companies, women and female-identifying people still only hold 20% of all top tech jobs.

The data from FY 2018 shows that the number of women in technical roles at three of the top tech giants was 24% for Adobe, 26% for Google, and 22% for Facebook. While these numbers show that there is still not enough representation for women, these numbers do reflect a slight increase from the previous year (FY 2017: Adobe 22%, Google 25%, Facebook 15%). But even with this upward trend of hiring women in tech roles, the marginal growth rate has not caught up with the real world. The tech workforce is seriously out of touch with reality if, in 2019, a demographic (women) that represents more than half the global population is still considered a minority.

Sometimes this lack of diversity at the top level is blamed on a “pipeline” issue. The logic being: “If there are not enough girls who learn to code, then there will not be enough women who can code.” However, programs aimed at teaching girls how to code have skyrocketed in the past few years. Girls now make up about half of the enrollment in high-school coding classes and are scoring almost identically to their male classmates on standardized math and science tests, yet, young women make up only 18% of all Computer Science degrees. I have to wonder if this steep drop in interest has more to do with lack of representation in the tech sphere, than with girls and young women simply not being “smart enough” or “not interested” in working with code? At the very least, the lack of representation certainly doesn’t help.

Of course, the diversity picture becomes even more abysmal when you consider other underrepresented groups such as people of color, people from the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. And while I really don’t like glossing over these deeper diversity issues in tech, because they are abundant and are much more grotesque failings than the male/female ratio, I also don’t feel qualified to speak about these issues. I encourage you to look to and value the voices of others who can speak with higher authority on these deeper diversity issues, such as Ire Aderinokun, Taelur Alexis, Imani Barbarin, Angie Jones, Fatima Khalid, Tatiana Mac, Charlie Owen, Cherry Rae, and so many others. And for those readers who are new to the topic of diversity in tech, watch Tatiana Mac’s recent conference talk How Privilege Defines Performance — it’s well worth the 35 minutes of your life.

The four stages in the digital accessibility journey

However you look at it, the numbers don’t lie. There are some pretty significant diversity issues in tech. So how do we fix this issue before the next wave of young developers join the tech workforce? Simple: teach developers to write accessible code.

This may seem like a joke to some and stretch to others, but hear me out. When we talk about accessible code, what we are really talking about at its core is inclusiveness. The actual process of writing accessible code involves rules and standards, tests and tools; but inclusive development is more abstract than that. It’s a shift in thinking. And when we rethink our approach to development, we go beyond just the base level of simple code functionality. We instead think, how is this code consumed? How can we make it even more intelligible and easier for people to use? Inclusive development means making something valuable, not just accessible, to as many people as we can.

That line of thinking is a bit abstract, so let’s go through an example. Let’s say you are tasked with updating the color contrast between the text on a webpage or app and the background. What happens at each stage in the accessibility journey?

Stage 1: Awareness — You are brand new to digital accessibility and are still trying to understand what it is and how you can implement changes in your daily workflow. You may be aware that there is a set of digital accessibility guidelines that other developers follow, but you are a bit hazy on what it all means in a practical sense.

Stage 2: Knowledge — You know a bit more about digital accessibility and feel comfortable using a few testing tools, so you run an automated accessibility test on your website and it flags a possible issue with the color contrast. Based on your awareness of the guidelines, you know the color contrast ratio between the text and the background needs to be a certain number and that you need a tool to test this.

Stage 3: Practice — Feeling more confident in your knowledge of digital accessibility rules and best practices, you use a tool to measure the color contrast ratio between the text and the background. Then based on the output of the tool, you modify the hex code to meet the color contrast ratio guidelines and retest to confirm you have met the accessibility requirements for this issue.

Stage 4: Understanding — You understand that the accessibility guidelines and tools are created with people in mind, and that code is secondary to all of that. One is the means, and the other is the end. In the color contrast example, you understand that people with low-vision or colorblindness need these color contrast changes in order to actually see the words on your web page.

This is a bit of an oversimplification of the process. But I hope you get the gist — that there are different stages of digital accessibility knowledge and understanding. True beginners may not be to even stage one, but I am finding that group rarer and rarer these days. The word about digital accessibility seems to be out! Which is great; but that’s only the first hurdle. What I’m seeing now is that a lot of people stop at Stage 2: Knowledge or Stage 3: Practice — where you are aware of the digital accessibility guidelines, have some testing tools in your back pocket, and know how to fix some of the issues reported, but haven’t quite connected the dots to the humans they impact.

From the standpoint of getting daily stuff done, stages two and three are okay stopping points. But what happens when the things you need to do are too complex for a quick fix, or you have no buy-in from your peers or management? I feel that once we get to Stage 4: Understanding, and really get why these kinds of changes are needed, people will be more motivated to make those changes regardless of the challenges involved. When you arrive at stage four, you have gone beyond knowing the basic rules, testing, and coding. You recognize that digital accessibility is not just a “nice to have” but a “must have” and it becomes about quality of life for real people. This is digital inclusion. This is something you can’t unsee, you can’t unlearn, and you can’t ignore.

Making digital accessibility a priority — not a requirement

In my role as an accessibility trainer, I like to kick-off each session with the question: “What are you hoping to learn today about digital accessibility?” I ask this question to establish a rapport with the audience and to understand where everyone is in their accessibility journey, but I am also evaluating the level of company and individual buy-in too. There is nothing worse than showing up to teach a group that does not care to be taught. If I hear the words “I am only here because I have to be” — I know it will be an uphill battle to get them anywhere close to Stage 4: Understanding, so I mentally regroup and aim for another stage.

In my experience, when companies and their leaders say “Digital accessibility is a requirement,” nine times out of ten there is a motivating factor behind this sweeping declaration (for example, impending litigation, or at least the fear of it). When changes are framed as mandatory and packaged as directives from on high with little additional context, people can be resistant and will find excuses to fight or challenge the declaration, and any change can become an uphill battle. Calling something “mandatory” only speaks to Stage 1: Awareness.

By swapping out one word from the original declaration and saying “Digital accessibility is a priority,” companies and their leaders have reframed the conversation with their employees. When changes are framed as “working towards a solution” and discussed openly and collaboratively, people feel like they are part of the process and are more open to embracing change. In the long run, embracing change becomes part of a company’s culture and leads to innovation (and, yes, inclusion) on all levels. Calling something a priority speaks to Stage 4: Understanding.

Some of the excuses I often hear from clients for not prioritizing accessibility is that it is too difficult, too costly, and/or too time consuming — but is that really the case? In the same accessibility training, I lead an exercise where we look at a website with an accessibility testing tool and review any issues that came up. With the group’s help we plot out the “impact to user” versus the “remediation effort” on the part of the team. From group to group, while the plots are slightly different, one commonality is that close to 80% of the errors plotted fall into the quadrant of “simple to fix” for the team, but they also fall under “high impact” to the user. Based on this empirical data, I won’t buy the argument from clients who say that accessibility is too difficult and costly and time consuming anymore. It comes down to whether it’s a priority — for each individual and for the company as a whole.

What will your coding legacy be?

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. So by that same logic, a programmer hitting keys at random on a computer for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce a website that is accessible. But where is the thought process? Where is the human element? While all the things we’ve already talked about — awareness, education, and prioritization of accessibility are important steps in making the digital world more inclusive to all — without intent, we are just going to keep randomly tapping away at our computers, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The intent behind the code has to be part of the process, otherwise accessibility is just another task that has no meaning.

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we’ve come to a point in our society where we want our work lives to have meaning. And that we don’t want to just hear about the positive change that is happening, but want to be part of the change. Digital accessibility is a place where this can happen! Not only does understanding and writing purpose-driven code help people with disabilities in the short-run, I believe strongly that is key to solving the overarching diversity issue in tech in the long-run. Developers who reach Stage 4: Understanding, and who prioritize accessible code because they understand it’s fundamentally about people, will also be the ones who help create and cultivate an inclusive environment where people from more diverse backgrounds are also prioritized and accepted in the tech world.

Because when you strip away all the styles, all the mark-up, all the cool features from a website or app — what’s left? People. And honestly, the more I learn about digital accessibility, the more I realize it’s not about the code at all. Digital accessibility is rooted in the user; and, while I (and countless others) can certainly teach you how to write accessible code, and build you tools, patterns, and libraries to use, I realize we can’t teach you to care. That is a choice you have to make yourself. So think for a moment — what are you leaving the next generation of developers with all that inaccessible code you haven’t given much thought to? Is it the coding legacy you really want to leave? I challenge you to do better for my daughter, her peers, and for the countless others who are not fully represented in the tech community today.

Rotch Library - G70.212.G489 2018

Hayden Library - G155.M6 T39 2018

Online Resource

Hayden Library - BF378.F7 H93 2019

With restrictions on travelling and no sporting activity allowed, the 34-year-old Haryana boxer is spending time with his family in Delhi.

In this sample chapter from Learn Adobe Dreamweaver CC for Web Authoring: Adobe Certified Associate Exam Preparation, 2nd Edition, explore how the client-to-design process works for creating page prototypes that meet customer requirements. You will learn how to use images to further define the look and feel of a design, how to insert and position images, and the tools that Dreamweaver provides to help you get those jobs done.

In this sample chapter from Engineering Design and Graphics with SolidWorks 2019, author James Bethune gets you started on SolidWorks. This chapter will show you how to start a New drawing and introduce the Line, Circle, and Edit tools. The Smart Dimension tool will be used to define and edit lines and circles. Line colors and relationships will also be introduced.

Schendler, Auden

This week we chat about why it’s hard to get a taxi to nowhere, why bones came onto the scene some 550 million years ago, and how targeting bacteria’s predilection for iron might make better vaccines, with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. Plus, Science’s Alexa Billow talks with news writer Elizabeth Pennisi about the way hybrids muck up the concept of species and turn the evolutionary tree into a tangled web.   Listen to previous podcasts   [Image:  Raul González Alegría; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, three papers came out describing new approaches to folding DNA into large complex shapes—20 times bigger than previous DNA sculptures. Staff Writer Bob Service talks with Sarah Crespi about building microscopic teddy bears, doughnuts, and more from genetic material, and using these techniques to push forward fields from materials science to drug delivery. Sarah also interviews Philip Cook of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, about his Policy Forum on gun regulation research. It’s long been hard to collect data on gun violence in the United States, and Cook talks about how some researchers are getting funding and hard data. He also discusses some strong early results on open-carry laws and links between gun control and intimate partner homicide. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: : K. WAGENBAUER ET AL., NATURE, VOL. 551, 2017; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

As part of a special issue on chemicals for tomorrow’s Earth, we’ve got two green chemistry stories. First, host Sarah Crespi talks with contributing correspondent Warren Cornwell about how a company came up with a replacement for the popular can lining material bisphenol A and then recruited knowledgeable critics to test its safety. Sarah is also joined by Beate Escher of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the University of Tübingen to discuss ways to trace complex mixtures of humanmade chemicals in the environment. They talk about how new technologies can help detect these mixtures, understand their toxicity, and eventually connect their effects on the environment, wildlife, and people. Read more in the special issue on chemicals for tomorrow’s Earth. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF)

Statistical highlights on the fifth and final day of the opening Test match between India and Sri Lanka, in Kolkata, on Monday.

Dewey Library - HV8738.S835 2019

02:21 - Tyler McGinnis Introduction

• Twitter
• GitHub
• Blog
• DevMountain Programming Bootcamp
  • @DevMtn
• Firebase Experts Program

03:23 - Getting Started at DevMountain

• Hack Reactor
• Needle

04:38 - DevMountain Conception

• Cahlan Sharp

05:37 - How Do I Learn How to Code?

• Struggle. Fail. Tears.
• [Confreaks] Tyler McGinnis: What I’ve Learned about Learning from Teaching People to Code

08:03 - Resources => Consume ALL THE Information

• Katya Eames
  • [YouTube] Katya Eames: How to Teach Angular to your Kids
• A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript: The new approach that uses technology to cut your effort in half by Mark Myers

11:16 - Two Camps: Art (Creators) and Technicians <= Does DevMountain Cater to One or the Other?

13:08 - Repetition as a Way to Learn

• The Hard Way Series (Zed Shaw)
  • Follow @lzsthw for book related news, advice, and politeness

15:23 - Letting People Struggle vs Helping Them    

17:14 - Training/Finding Instructors / Teaching Teachers to be Better Teachers

21:08 - Why Is JavaScript a Good Language to Learn?

• JSX

24:11 - DevMountain Mentors

26:30 - Student Success Stories

28:56 - Bootcamp Learning Environments

• React Week
  • @reactweek
  • Ryan Florence

34:11 - Oldest and Youngest Students (Success Stories Cont’d)

37:18 - Bootcamp Alumni (Employment Rates and Statistics)

Picks

Costco Kirkland Brand Peanut Butter Cups (Dave)
[Confreaks] Tyler McGinnis: What I’ve Learned about Learning from Teaching People to Code (Dave)
[YouTube] Katya Eames: How to Teach Angular to your Kids (Dave)
[YouTube] Misko Hevery and Rado Kirov: ng-conf 2015 Keynote 2 (Dave)
Mandy’s Fiancé (AJ)
[YouTube] Katya Eames: How to Teach Angular to your Kids (Joe)
ng-conf Kids (Joe)
Salt (Joe)
[YouTube] Dave Smith: Angular + React = Speed (Tyler)
[YouTube] Igor Minor: (Super)Power Management (Tyler)
React.js Newsletter (Tyler)
Dave Smith’s addendum to his talk (Joe)

Taking a “mobile first” approach to web development poses some challenges if you need to provide a “desktop” experience for legacy versions of IE. Using a CSS pre-processor like Sass can help.

As of Sass 3.2, there is another way of catering for IE, described by Jake Archibald.

One aspect of a “mobile first” approach to development is that your styles are usually gradually built up from a simple base. Each new “layer” of CSS adds presentational adjustments and complexity, via CSS3 Media Queries, to react to and make use of additional viewport space. However, IE 6/7/8 do not support CSS3 Media Queries. If you want to serve IE 6/7/8 something more than just the base CSS, then you need a solution that exposes the “enhancing” CSS to those browsers.

Popular existing options

An existing option is the use of a CSS3 Media Query polyfill, such as Respond.js. However, there are some drawbacks to this approach (see the project README), such as the introduction of a JavaScript dependency and the XHRing of your style sheets, which may introduce performance or cross-domain security issues. Furthermore, adding support for CSS3 Media Queries is probably not necessary for these legacy browsers. The main concern is exposing the “enhancing” CSS.

Another method, which Jeremy Keith has described in his post on Windows mobile media queries, is to use separate CSS files: one basic global file, and an “enhancing” file that is referenced twice in the <head> of the document. The “enhancing” file is referenced once using a media attribute containing a CSS3 Media Query value. This prevents it being downloaded by browsers (such as IE 6/7/8) which do not support CSS3 Media Queries. The same file is then referenced again, this time wrapped in an IE conditional comment (without the use of a CSS3 Media Query value) to hide it from modern browsers. However, this approach becomes somewhat cumbersome, and introduces multiple HTTP requests, if you have multiple breakpoints in your responsive design.

Getting Sass to help

Sass 3.1 provides some features that help make this second approach more flexible. The general advantages of the Sass-based approach I’ve used are:

1. You have full control over how your style sheets are broken up and reassembled.
2. It removes the performance concerns of having to reference several separate style sheets for each breakpoint in the responsive design, simply to cater for IE 6/7/8.
3. You can easily repeat large chunks of CSS in separate compiled files without introducing maintenance problems.

The basic idea is to produce two versions of your compiled CSS from the same core code. One version of your CSS includes CSS3 @media queries and is downloaded by modern browsers. The other version is only downloaded by IE 6/7/8 in a desktop environment and contains no CSS3 @media queries.

To do this, you take advantage of the fact that Sass can import and compile separate .scss/.sass files into a single CSS file. This allows you to keep the CSS rules used at any breakpoint completely separate from the @media query that you might want it to be a part of.

This is not a CSS3 Media Query polyfill, so one assumption is that IE 6/7/8 users will predominantly be using mid-size screens and should receive styles appropriate to that environment. Therefore, in the example below, I am making a subjective judgement by including all the breakpoint styles up to a width of 960px but withholding those for any breakpoints beyond that.

The ie.scss file imports numerous other files, each containing a layer of CSS that builds upon the previous each layer of CSS. No CSS3 @media queries are contained within the files or the ie.scss file. It then compiles to a single CSS file that is designed to be served only to IE 6/7/8.

// ie.scss

@import "base";
@import "320-up";
@import "480-up";
@import "780-up";
@import "960-up";

The style.scss file imports the code for each breakpoint involved in the design (including any beyond the limit imposed for legacy versions of IE) but nests them within the relevant CSS3 @media query. The compiled version of this file is served to all browsers apart from IE 6/7/8 and IEMobile.

// style.scss

@import "base";
@media (min-width:320px) {
    @import "320-up"; }
@media (min-width:480px) {
    @import "480-up"; }
@media (min-width:780px) {
    @import "780-up"; }
@media (min-width:960px) {
    @import "960-up"; }
@media (min-width:1100px) {
    @import "1100-up"; }

The resulting CSS files can then be referenced in the HTML. It is important to hide the ie.css file from any IE-based mobile browsers. This ensures that they do not download the CSS meant for desktop versions of IE.

<!--[if (gt IE 8) | (IEMobile)]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css">
<!--<![endif]-->

<!--[if (lt IE 9) & (!IEMobile)]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie.css">
<![endif]-->

This Sass-enabled approach works just as well if you need to serve a basic style sheet for mobiles without CSS3 Media Query support, and prevent those devices from downloading the CSS used to adapt the layout to wider viewports. For example, you can avoid importing base.scss into the ie.scss and style.scss files. It can then be referenced separately in the HTML.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/base.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css" media="(min-width:320px)">

<!--[if (lt IE 9) & (!IEMobile)]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie.css">
<![endif]-->

You’ll notice that I didn’t wrap the style.css reference in a conditional comment to hide it from legacy versions of IE. It’s not necessary this time because the value of the media attribute is not understood by legacy versions of IE, and the style sheet will not be downloaded.

In different circumstances, different combinations of style sheets and media attribute values will be more appropriate.

Summary

Even if you want to don’t want to use any of the Sass or SCSS syntax, the pre-processor itself can help you to write your CSS in a “mobile first” manner (with multiple breakpoints), provide a “desktop” experience for IE 6/7/8, and avoid some of the performance or maintenance concerns that are sometimes present when juggling the two requirements.

I’m relatively new to using Sass, so there may be even better ways to achieve the same result or even to prevent the inclusion of IE-specific CSS unless the file is being compiled into a style sheet that only IE will download.

Finney, Martha I

It’s probably one part coronavirus, one part new-fancy-video setup, and one part “hey this is good for CodePen too,” but I’ve been doing more videos lately. It’s nice to be back in the swing of that for a minute. There’s something fun about coming back to an old familiar workflow.

Where do the videos get published? I’m a publish-on-your-own site kinda guy, as I’m sure you know, so there is a whole Videos section of this site where every … Read article “I’m getting back to making videos”

The post I’m getting back to making videos appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Problem-solving is an essential part of software development. Sometimes we get stuck on a particularly baffling problem, and this can feel frustrating and discouraging. The following are some strategies for getting yourself "unstuck."

Without policy changes, the gap between actual greenhouse gas emission reductions and those needed to hit climate targets will continue to widen

Chemical makers, cleaning product firms, and cosmetics makers are all scrambling to meet new limits on the impurity

Old songs, retro fashion, 1980s pop culture, childhood icons and sharing space with Kundan Shah on paper, the theme of Sukanya Verma's super-filmi week was consistently nostalgic.

Prepping for the Baahubali juggernaut, remembering a toddler Vinod Khanna and making Deepika Padukone dance to Jennifer Lopez's tunes, Sukanya Verma's super filmi week was pretty eventful.

Smith, Burleigh, 1979- author