I am not sure custom curricula are a good idea. Education is more about how it's learnt and less about what is learnt.
Beware of technology's cognitive biases too, see how TV is transforming education into entertainment. Computers have their own biases, just see the difference between today's teenagers and teenagers from 15 years ago.
One thing that can be both a quality and a problem, is that The Wire is very demanding. A lot of what happens is implicit or not directly seen on camera. Also, episodes are not as self-contained as, for instance Mad Men, where you can watch one stand-alone, without needing too much background on who's who, and what happened before.
Yes, but instead of manipulating them separately, they apply one same filter to all the film, even frames with now face in it. Which means some frames have no contrast in them (screenshot Wolfman #2), others make irrelevant objects stand out (Hot Tub #2). Great article.
Digital literacy (how to use technology/computers) maybe, programming literacy I am more sceptical.
The use of computers and basic tools is more vital than programming for the average person. Most employers require it, soon it will be necessary to buy basic services (plane ticket, concert ticket).
The Martian Chronicles is SF, maybe not Hard SF, but SF.
That's where the limit between SF and fantastic is blury, but in that regard Dick is sometimes more fantasy, or not so science (consider Time Out of Joint for instance, probable inspiration for the Truman Show).
What i found most insightful is the "monotous death" he says SF is at risk of settling into. All the brilliant SF's reputation is overshadowed by the pulp works with tasteless covers, and people tend to think of SF as children's books, not serious (if you compare it to "classic" litterature). We need more works like Bradbury's, that are in themselves brilliant litterature (look at the prose in Fahrenheit 451!) as well as SF.
Another battle won for copyright lobbies. This bill as no upside for British society, neither for consumers nor for companies.
>libraries and universities could not be exempted
That sentence made me tick, reminiscence of autodafés.
The first solution costs you the memory of a pointer, though it does not modify data like the 2 others. If one wants some sort of referential transparency, one kind of solution can pose more problems than the other, depending if scope is lexical or dynamic.
>Articulating why a design is good is substantially harder than coming up with a good design.
Yes, and slower. Trust is good, though in a professional environment one will be expected to motivate their choices with a rational argument... unless they want to play the card of the artistic licence, tough one when someone is trying to sustain a business.
This article covers mostly how _performant_ (as in fast/resource savvy) parallel programming is hard. Though robust parallel programming can be tricky too, and the way you "[Avoid] race conditions" will have an impact on performance. So the trade-off evocated in the article between speed, maintenance, memory could also take into account robustness.