One day each year we celebrate Mother Earth! (but the rest of the year…)

First it was the tragic loss of Malaysian flight 370 that spawned a marathon of media madness and speculation.

Now, the news is filled with another disaster: a South Korean ferry with 476 people on board sunk into the ocean last week.

Around the globe people are gripped by these stories of woe. Why?

Matt Lewis ponders the primal attraction of such disasters.

When large scale tragedies happen, how do we react? What does how we react say about us?

Using the Malaysia Flight 370 story he suggests it is natural that disasters would fascinate us. What is of concern is when they are presented like a box office hit rather than a sad reality.

With weeks of airtime to fill, the media has gone on flights of fancy…entertaining wild speculation to explain the mystery of its disappearance.

And people seem to be eating it up.

Unlike Malaysian airplane saga, the media covering the ferry disaster have living actors to blame.

The captain and crew have been accused of crimes “akin to murder” in the words of South Korean President Park Geun-hye. A serious charge.

The captain apologized to the whole nation for his actions. He will still face justice, and rightfully so. But are the captain and crew really “murderers,” and how productive is it use this language when there was no malicious intent?

There are things to learn from such events: how to improve our transportation infrastructure, how to decrease the ability for human error.

However, we’d prefer our news reports to be without wild speculation and unfounded language…with the privacy of the victims’ families being a central concern.

Unfortunately, it seems sober analysis is often a casualty of disaster coverage.

Click for video

Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector. 

UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.

Click for video

Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector. 

UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.

If you're building an icon system for a site, you have some options. If you know the icons need to be raster images, then you'll likely be using CSS sprites. If the icons will be vector images (much more common these days), you have some options. Two of those options are using inline SVG and using icon fonts.

Let's compare.

Icons are Vector

There are big advantages to vector icons: resizable up and down without losing quality, extra sharp on retina displays, and small file size among them.

In a recent personal example, while converting some icons from fonts to SVG on CodePen, some of the font icons were noticeably less sharp than the ones I converted over.

CSS Control

The big win for inline SVG here is probably multi-color icons.

Positioning

Weird Failures

Semantics

Accessibility

Ease of Use

Browser Support

Winner

It all comes down to browser support. If you can go IE 9+ / Android 3+, inline SVG is better at pretty much everything than icon fonts. If you need the deeper browser support, I feel like an inline SVG fallback would be too big of a pain to be worth it (maintaining a PNG copy, inserting an additional element to display PNG version, hiding SVG element... it's weighty).

Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts [CAGEMATCH] is a post from CSS-Tricks

I try to learn something new every day. It might relate to personal finances, physical health, computer programming, or any other topic — and the learning might take place for a few minutes or from sunrise to sunset. Every time I learn something, I typically observe a corresponding increase in my quality of life. This is why I believe it’s so critical to establish learning as a lifelong skill.

Learning to Conquer Fear

Everyone has a natural fear of the unknown, which can be a huge driver of stress: Am I saving enough money? Should my car be making that noise? Am I doing this exercise correctly? Is there a better way to write this code I’m working on?

A lack of information can make the world feel like it’s closing in.

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A few years ago I had a fairly thin physique, I ate terribly, and I lived a very sedentary lifestyle. I decided I needed to take control of my health, but the idea of a signing up for a gym membership and completely changing my diet was extremely overwhelming.

When I started exercising, I didn’t even know the difference between a rep and a set. It sounds absurd to be afraid of entering a building that contains exercise equipment, but I was terrified. My total lack of knowledge made me feel like I would either embarrass myself, hurt myself, or both. It’s two years later, and I’m now in the best physical shape of my life. I’ve gained about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) in muscle mass, I eat a much better diet, and I lift weights three days a week.

The first year I wasted a lot of time and didn’t see any real results. I decided to take the “head first” approach and just start running on a treadmill at the gym. The running wasn’t all bad; it helped me get over some anxiety and get used to going to the gym consistently. Looking back, though, I should have started my journey with a few weeks of learning. As soon as I picked up a book, read some blog posts, and watched some videos about working out, I finally started to see real change.

Lifting weights at the gym for the first time was scary, but I was able to conquer my fear by learning how to do it properly. (Photo from Flickr user midiman)

Now, before I go to the gym, I’ll spend about 10 minutes reading or watching videos on the web. Just six months ago, I was doing squats and deadlifts in cushioned running shoes. I would have thought that somewhere along the way a book would have pointed out this common mistake to me.

Instead, it was during one of my 10-minute learning sessions that a video emphasized the importance of keeping your feet as close to the ground as possible by wearing the proper shoes. This simple change increased my balance and helped me break through a plateau almost immediately. It seems so obvious in hindsight. But you don’t know what you don’t know, which is why it’s so important to always continue learning.

Learning is not a Luxury

I’ve always been a huge fan of video games. I love this hobby so much that I decided to start a big multi-year side project to make a game of my own. If you’re not familiar, writing game code (I’m using C# in Unity) is very different from writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and many of the other web languages we teach on Treehouse. It’s a different programming environment with different paradigms.

I keep this small plaque hanging in my kitchen. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still have left to learn.

I also want to make my game work with VR (virtual reality) hardware like the Oculus Rift, which adds a time pressure: The clock is ticking, and I need to work quickly before the market is saturated. At first glance, it seems crazy to spend any of that time learning. Why hit the books when I can instead draw upon my previous programming experience and dive right into the work?

Wasting time at the gym made me learn an important lesson: Learning is not a luxury. Rather, learning is a necessity that should be built in from the onset of any project. Learning is work, just like other seemingly ancillary prototypical project phases, like testing and QA. If you don’t continuously spend time sharpening your skills, then eventually they will become dull, and other competition in the tech jungle will eat you for lunch.

In a previous post about coding tips, I touched on this idea briefly:

When you’re crunching between one deadline and the next, learning can feel like a luxury. A programmer who isn’t learning, however, is just treading water. Almost every time I learn something new, it helps me work faster and more efficiently.

This idea has carried over into my game development hobby. For the first two months, almost all my free time was spent learning about game development. I absorbed as much as I could about best programming practices, how to build a solid asset pipeline, how to create engaging gameplay, and more.

Just like when I go to the gym, I start my coding sessions with about 10 minutes of learning. In those little 10-minute sessions, I often pick up a new tip that saves me hours of work. I also have a month-by-month plan for my game and, midway through, I’ve planned a month where I’ll do nothing but learning again. It might seem extravagant, especially when there’s a key market window I want to hit, but I feel confident that I’ll save more time than I’ll actually spend learning.

Learn for Life

It’s simple: Learning saves time, and time is the most precious resource available. We all have a limited life to lead, so it’s important to make the best of it. If you don’t maintain your mind, it will eventually fall apart, just like your personal finances, your car, or your body. So feed your curiosity and make it a habit to learn something new every single day. You never know what you might discover.

The post Learning, Every Day appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Amanda Langley (Photo courtesy to Treehouse)

A few years before she graduated from college in 2013, Amanda Langley shifted her focus from filmmaking to computer engineering.

Langley was good at math and liked the challenge of logic and abstract thinking in her computer science class. She was just one of a handful of women in her class of more than 100 students at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. But the lack of gender diversity didn’t stop her from excelling in her courses and landing a job at Centare in Milwaukee six months before graduation. She is now a programmer for the software development company.

Langley now reaches out to high school kids at career fairs, explaining the opportunities and challenges for women in technology.

“Adding women to the room changes the dynamics on a team,” Langley says. “I tell these high school girls that they should believe in themselves and not be afraid to tell people what they’re thinking.”

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Langley is member of Girls in Tech Milwaukee and volunteers about once a month to talk with young people about her career path.

Technology jobs, historically a man’s field, are still overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women hold only about one-quarter of all information technology jobs and nearly half the women in science, engineering and technology jobs quit the field early, according to a report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Recruiting top talent is a challenge, especially when technology companies are keyed-in to the need for diversity. But Ann Bly, senior recruiter at Base2 Solutions in Bellevue, Wash., says she’s seeing more female applicants now than she was a few years ago.

“We are working on building relationships with some of our local colleges and universities,” Bly says. “I also work with some local groups that encourage second careers in programming. “

On average, Bly receives 10 percent to 20 percent female candidates for her posted positions, a figure that’s in-line with the national averages.

Despite the outreach, only about 20 percent of software developers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The good news for women in software engineering is there are plenty of jobs. Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in 2022, yet U.S. universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them.

“I believe that women graduating with degrees in computer science or engineering degrees would have many choices for positions with large and small companies in the cities of their choice,” Bly says.

Members of the Girls in Tech group in Milwaukee. (Photo courtesy to Treehouse)

Bias Still a Concern for Women

But some women in the field warn the tech world can be a battleground, and some say they often find sexism in the male-dominated industry.

A recent notable case is that of engineer Julie Ann Horvath, who claimed she was the victim of gender discrimination at the startup GitHub. In an email to TechCrunch, Horvath wrote: “I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion.” (GitHub said on April 21 it had been exonerated by an independent investigation.)

Langley, the Milwaukee programmer, admits when she was working on projects at school, “the boys would take over, and it was difficult to have her voice heard.”

Langley and other women are fighting back with their own brand of girl power. Langley is part of a LinkedIn group, Women In Software Engineering, that’s become a platform for women to share information about job openings and female-friendly companies. It has more than 3,000 members. By banding together, the women in the group say they also hope to erase the pay gap in their field. Census Bureau figures show annual earnings for women were 77 percent of what men earned in 2012.

This month, President Barack Obama signed directives aimed at bridging that gap. His executive measure makes it easier for workers of federal contractors to get information about workplace compensation, and he directed the Labor Department to write rules requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data by race and gender.

Langley, for one, remains positive. “The future holds some cool things for computer science, and this is the time for women to be part of the network,” she says.

The post Women Finding Footing in Software Development Careers appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

For decades, The United States has controlled domain names through ICANN, much to the shagrin of the international community. Now this has all changed. Here is the story.

U.S. Aims to Defuse Tension Over Control of Internet

Some Nations Push for New Supervisory Body

By Loretta Chao, Gautham Nagesh and Frances Robinson

April 21, 2014 6:10 p.m. ET

The U.S. has agreed to give up supervision of the Internet policy-making body that controls domain names, hoping to satisfy countries that want more international control over the Internet. This week, Washington will find out if its actions have eased global tensions over its cyberspying activities [NewzGuyz thinks there is more to it than this, but alright].

World representatives are arriving in Brazil for Net Mundial, a two-day meeting about Internet governance that starts Wednesday in São Paulo. The meeting comes amid fallout over spying by the U.S. National Security Agency that has renewed concerns over the U.S. government's credibility and over longtime U.S. oversight of the Internet [actually, these concerns have existed for well over a decade, even before the revelations about NSA spying].

Revelations that the NSA targeted foreign leaders, including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, have soured U.S. diplomatic relations and opened American technology and telecom companies up to increased scrutiny abroad [Though this information is not necessarily false, it is superfluous, possibly an attempt to implicate the President in what has happened]. The U.S., where the Internet started, is now under increasing pressure to share its supervisory duties.

At the top of the agenda will be negotiations for a plan on how the Internet will be overseen globally in the future. The U.S. Commerce Department said last month that it would give up its supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. The move would decrease the U.S.'s role as the caretaker of the system of handing out domain names and Web addresses.

Organizers also expect privacy, security and freedom of expression to be part of the talks.

Discussions over how the Commerce Department should be replaced will begin this week and continue over the next year, including talks in Istanbul in September.

The U.S. is pushing for a transition to supervision by a "multistakeholder" body that includes representatives from governments, the private sector and academia. This could mean creating a new supervisory body, or empowering an existing body such as the Internet Governance Forum, which includes participants from various parties around the world and convenes annually.

Russia and China, along with some other countries, have urged that the United Nations assume oversight of domain names. They say that Internet governance has been disproportionately influenced by the U.S. As its proposal for Net Mundial, China's foreign ministry submitted a copy of a letter to the U.N. secretary-general jointly signed in 2011 by China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The letter calls for deliberation on any international code of conduct for the Internet be done "within the United Nations framework."

Critics of this proposal say it could weaken protections for Internet users. "There are still some countries that find a purely governmental [organization] much more comfortable," but "is not well thought out in terms of making the system actually work," said Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and a computer scientist who is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the Internet.

The "enormous benefits" of the exchange of information on the Internet "are balanced or counter-balanced to some extent by people who use the network," he said. Not including different stakeholders runs the risk of designing a system that "ignores important protections that are needed for the users."

U.S. officials [NewzGuyz finds it curious why anonymous sources would be used here. More detail should be presented. What agency they are from, for example], for their part, are hoping the decision for the Commerce Department to step away from its contract overseeing Icann will assuage international complaints and head off the move to U.N. governance. They admit that the agency's contractual relationship with the organization has been "an irritant" in discussions concerning global Internet governance. They have been adamant that they won't accept any government or U.N. involvement in the Icann transition, or they will delay the planned transition for up to four years.

Despite ongoing strains in relations between Brazil and the U.S. resulting from the discovery of the NSA's spying and disagreements such as over data jurisdiction [Again, is this necessary? Probably not], Brazil also agrees at least in part with the U.S. position on the matter. "We are emphasizing the importance of this [multistakeholder] model. We think that a decentralized structure of Internet governance should be maintained and strengthened," said Virgílio Almeida, Brazil's IT policy secretary and chair of the Net Mundial meeting, in an interview.

Europe has wanted to make control of the Internet's architecture a more globally shared responsibility. But Neelie Kroes, the European Union Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, said earlier this year that the U.N. shouldn't be responsible for Internet oversight because more authoritarian governments could use it to restrict freedom.

The governments of China and Russia, for example, censor the Internet in their countries using Web filtering technologies and policies.

In her blog ahead of the meeting, Ms. Kroes said that in the draft conclusions for the meeting, "some of the language related to human rights [is] unnecessarily weak," and that both human rights and data privacy should be strongly protected in leaders' decisions.

For Brazil's part, however, Mr. Almeida still cautions that greater representation would be needed from emerging economies in any new governance model. Brazilian officials have expressed frustration over a number of global Internet issues, including data jurisdiction. For example, Brazilian courts cannot easily access data from U.S. Internet service providers for judicial proceedings, even if the data involves Brazilian users in Brazil [Finally, a real reason why these changes are being sought by the international community!].

Meanwhile, the country is looking to build direct cable links between countries in Latin America, and between Brics countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—to decrease routing of Internet traffic through the U.S.

"The next billion users will come from the south," Mr. Almeida said. But "if you look at Latin America, there are few countries present at discussions of Internet governance."

Write to Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com, Gautham Nagesh at gautham.nagesh@wsj.com and Frances Robinson at frances.robinson@wsj.com

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