The following text refers to questions .

Informatics education:
Europe cannot afford to miss the boat

Principies for an effective informatics curriculum

        The committee performed a comprehensive review of the considerabie existing material on building informatics curricula, including among many others the (UK) Royal Society report, the CSPrinciples site, the Computing at Schools Initiative, and the work of the CSTA. Two major conclusions follow from that review.

        The first is the sheer number of existing experiences demonstrating that it is indeed possible to teach informatics successfully in primary and secondary education. The second conclusion is in the form of two core principies for such curricula. Existing experiences use a wide variety of approaches; there is no standard curriculum yet, and it was not part of the Committee's mission to define such a standard informatics curriculum for the whole of Europe. The committee has found, however, that while views diverge on the details, a remarkable consensus exists among experts on the basics of what a school informatics curriculum should (and should not) include. On the basis of that existing work, the Committee has identified two principies: leverage students' creativity, emphasize quality.

Leverage student creativity

        A powerful aid for informatics teaching is the topic's potential for stimulating students; creativity. The barriers to innovation are often lower than in other disciplines; the technical equipment (computers) is ubiquitous and considerably less expensive. Opportunities exist even for a beginner: with proper guidance, a Creative student can quickly start writing a program or a Web Service, see the results right away, and make them available to numerous other people. Informatics education should draw on this phenomenon and channel the creativity into useful directions, while warning students away from nefarious directions such as destructive "hacking". The example of HFOSS (Humanitarian Free and Open Software Systems)
shows the way towards constructive societal contributions based on informatics.

        Informatics education must not just dwell on imparting information to students. It must draw attention to aspects of informatics that immediately appeal to young students, to encourage interaction, to bring abstract concepts to life through visualization and animation; a typical application of this idea is the careful use of (non- violent) games.

Foster quality

        Curious students are always going to learn some IT and in particular some programming outside of informatics education through games scripting, Web site development, or adding software components to social networks. Informatics education must emphasize quality, in particular software quality, including the need for correctness (proper functioning of software), for good user interfaces, for taking the needs of users into consideration including psychological and social concerns. The role of informatics education here is:

• To convey the distinction between mere "coding" and software development as a constructive activity based on scientific and engineering principies.
• To dispel the wrong image of programming as an activity for "nerds" and emphasize its human, user-centered aspects, a focus that helps attract students of both genders.

Breaking the teacher availability deadlock

        An obstacle to generalizing informatics education is the lack of teachers. It follows from a chicken-and-egg problem: as long as informatics is not in the curriculum, there is Iittle incentive to educate teachers in the subject; as long as there are no teachers, there is Iittle incentive to introduce the subject.

        To bring informatics education to the levei that their schools deserve, European countries will have to take both long-term and short-term initiatives:

• Universities, in particular through their informatics departments, must put in place comprehensive programs to train informatics teachers, able to teach digital literacy and informatics under the same intellectual standards as in mathematics, physics and other Sciences.

• The current chicken-and-egg situation is not an excuse for deferring the start of urgently needed efforts. Existing experiences conclusively show that it is possible to break the deadlock. For example, a recent New York Times article explains how IT companies such as Microsoft and Google, conscious of the need to improve the state of education, allow some of their most committed engineers and researchers in the US to pair up with high school teachers to teach computational thinking. In Russia, it is common for academics who graduated from the best high schools to go back to these schools, also on a volunteer basis, and help teachers introduce the concepts of modern informatics. Ali these efforts respect the principie that outsiders must always be paired with current high-school teachers.

(Excerpt of ' Report ofthe joint Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education April 2013')

Eric Schmidt says encryption will help Google crack Chinese censorship and stop the NSA

By Rich McCormick on January 24, 2014 02:08 am Email

Eric Schmidt thinks encryption is the answer to many of the internefs problems. Google's executive chairman said last November that "encrypting everything" could "end government censorship in a decade." Now Schmidt says that in that same decade, encryption could "open up countries with strict censorship laws," giving their people "a voice."

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Schmidt said that Google was attempting to strengthen its encryption so the world's governments "won't be able to penetrate it" and obtain private data. Those efforts, Schmidt said, would create particular problems for "governments like China's," which he thought responsible for "80 to 85 percent of the world's industrial espionage." The Google chairman also said he saw the eventual relaxation of Chinese censorship over time as the number of people using social media in the country continued to grow.

Schmidt suggested the debate over the NSA surveillance scandal was good for the world, but also chastised the US government, saying "because you can do this monitoring does not mean you should do this monitoring." He was also asked his reaction to comments made by Microsoft that suggested non-US customers would be able to store their data outside of the US. "I don't understand it," was his reply.

(Disponível em www.theverge.com)

How Telecommuting Works

Telecommuting, which is growing in popularity, allows employees to avoid long commuts

“Brring,” the alarm startles you out of a deep sleep. It’s 8 a.m. on Monday morning. Time to head to the office. You roll out of bed, brush your teeth and stumble your way to the kitchen to grab some coffee.

Moments later, you head to the office, still wearing your pajamas and fluffy slippers. Luckily for you, you don’t have to go far - you work at home. Telecommuting, or working at home, has grown in popularity over the last 20 years.

On an increasing basis, workers are saying “no” to long commutes and opting to work at home. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of employees working from home grew by 23 percent from 1990 to 2000.

Telecommuting workers revel in making their own schedule - allowing them to schedule work around family and personal commitments. With the ready availability of technology tools, like the Internet and home computers, companies are more willing to let employees work from home.

(Adapted from: < http://home.howstuffworks.com/ telecommuting.htm> Access on 18th January, 2014)

                                                               NASA Mission Points to Origin of “Ocean of Storms” on
                                                                                                    Earth’s Moon

Using data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), mission scientists have solved a lunar mystery almost as old as the moon itself.
Early theories suggested the craggy outline of a region of the moon’s surface known as Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, was caused by an asteroid impact. If this theory had been correct, the basin it formed would be the largest asteroid impact basin on the moon. However, mission scientists studying GRAIL data believe they have found evidence the craggy outline of this rectangular region – roughly 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) across – is
actually the result of the formation of ancient rift valleys.
“The nearside of the moon has been studied for centuries, and yet continues to offer up surprises for scientists with the right tools,” said Maria Zuber, principal investigator of NASA’s GRAIL mission, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. “We interpret the gravity anomalies discovered by GRAIL as part of the lunar magma plumbing system – the conduits that fed lava to the surface during ancient volcanic eruptions.”
The surface of the moon’s nearside is dominated by a unique area called the Procellarum region, characterized by low elevations, unique composition, and numerous ancient volcanic plains.
The rifts are buried beneath dark volcanic plains on the nearside of the moon and have been detected only in the gravity data provided by GRAIL. The lava-flooded rift valleys are unlike anything found anywhere else on the moon and may at one time have resembled rift zones on Earth, Mars and Venus. The findings are published online in the journal Nature.
Another theory arising from recent data analysis suggests this region formed as a result of churning deep in the interior of the moon that led to a high concentration of heat-producing radioactive elements in the crust and mantle of this region. Scientists studied the gradients in gravity data from GRAIL, which revealed a rectangular shape in resulting gravitational anomalies.
“The rectangular pattern of gravity anomalies was completely unexpected,” said Jeff Andrews-Hanna, a GRAIL co-investigator at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, and lead author of the paper. “Using the gradients in the gravity data to reveal the rectangular pattern of anomalies, we can now clearly and completely see structures that were only hinted at by surface observations.”
The rectangular pattern, with its angular corners and straight sides, contradicts the theory that Procellarum is an ancient impact basin, since such an impact would create a circular basin. Instead, the new research suggests processes beneath the moon’s surface dominated the evolution of this region.
Over time, the region would cool and contract, pulling away from its surroundings and creating fractures similar to the cracks that form in mud as it dries out, but on a much larger scale.
The study also noted a surprising similarity between the rectangular pattern of structures on the moon, and those surrounding the south polar region of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Both patterns appear to be related to volcanic and tectonic processes operating on their respective worlds.
“Our gravity data are opening up a new chapter of lunar history, during which the moon was a more dynamic place than suggested by the cratered landscape that is visible to the naked eye,” said Andrews-Hanna. “More work is needed to understand the cause of this newfound pattern of gravity anomalies, and the implications for the history of the moon.”
Lunched as GRAIL A and GRAIL B in September 2011, the probes, renamed Ebb and Flow, operated in a nearly circular orbit near the poles of the moon at an altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers) until their mission ended in December 2012. The distance between the twin probes changed slightly as they flew over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features, such as mountains and craters, and by masses hidden beneath the
lunar surface.
The twin spacecraft flew in a nearly circular orbit until the end of the mission on December 17, 2012, when the probes intentionally were sent into the moon’s surface. NASA later named the impact site in honor of late astronaut Sally K. Ride, who was America’s first woman in space and a member of the GRAIL mission team.
GRAIL’s prime and extended science missions generated the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body. The map will provide a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved.
The GRAIL mission was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. GRAIL was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.

Available in: http://www.nasa.gov