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The Creativity-and-Community Edition Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Creativity And Community Come Together At Apple’s Teacher Coding Academies, by Apple

The elementary, high school and college educators who attended this summer’s academies came from different states, schools and backgrounds — but they all shared one new and very important responsibility: shepherding their students into a world where coding is a common language. The teachers are determined not only to teach their students about coding, but to show them how they can channel that knowledge to make the world a better place, starting with their communities. On that front, they’re leading by example.

Apple Subsidiary FileMaker Inc. Changes Its Name (Back) To Claris, by Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch

As FileMaker Claris CEO Brad Freitag, who recently took over this role from Dominique Goupil, told me, the reason for this move is because the company is starting to look beyond its core FileMaker product. “We’re accelerating our vision and our strategy,” he said. “We’ve described our vision for a long time as making powerful technology accessible to everyone. And with the leadership change, we are really asserting a more aggressive posture in bringing that product roadmap to life.”

To put a point on this and clarify its strategy, Claris is also using today’s announcement to launch Claris Connect, a tool for integrating various cloud services and automating workflows between them. With this, Claris also confirmed the previously reported acquisition of Stamplay, a small Italian startup that makes tools for connecting the APIs of various enterprise tools. Claris Connect is going to be the second product in Claris’ lineup, with FileMaker remaining its flagship product.

iOS 13 Privacy Feature Will Force Total Overhaul For Facebook Apps, by Anna Washenko, Ars Technica

VoIP services ostensibly stay running in the background so they can connect calls quickly, but they also lets those apps collect information about what users are doing on their devices. Restricting the programs that can simply be open at any time on its mobile hardware fits the narrative Apple is crafting about being a trusted place for customer privacy in an increasingly untrustworthy industry.

Stuff

The Beautiful And Compelling Journey Arrives On The App Store, by AppAdvice

In the anonymous adventure, you’ll travel on a life’s passage and can even connect with others while on the journey.

Develop

Learn To Code — From Toys, by Luke Winkie, Vox

For now, we don’t know how effective these toys are. There are no academic studies focusing on the impact of modern programming toys on children’s development, nor has there been wide-ranging research on why this market is ballooning or why parents are flocking to STEM aisles in the first place. That’s the one thing Ken Seiter, executive vice president of the Toy Association, makes clear when I reached him over the phone — the trend is simply too new for us to have valuable data points.

Notes

Songs For Screens: Grammy Winner Latroit On Scoring Apple’s FaceID Campaign, by Andrew Hampp, Variety

White was in Barcelona for recording sessions in early July when he received a link to the spot from his manager. “I was screaming in this apartment I was renting, just running around. That was the triumph. I haven’t been congratulated for something this much since I won that Grammy last year. It felt like I had won a major award, and it’s interesting that it comes across that way to anybody who hears about this achievement. It is a life event.”

Apple Stands In The Global Antitrust Crosshairs, by Mark Scott, Politico

Apple – not Facebook or Google – is rapidly emerging as the test case for how officials in Brussels, Washington and beyond clamp down on Big Tech’s digital empires spanning vast swathes of the world, according to government officials, tech rivals and lawyers representing consumers in class-action lawsuits against the iPhone maker.

Other Silicon Valley heavy-hitters are also under a renewed spotlight for allegedly unfairly promoting their services over those of rivals. But with European regulatory complaints and U.S lawsuits piling up against Apple, it’s the tech giant that now finds itself at the center of a regulatory — and increasingly political — storm over possible antitrust abuses.

Why Mathematicians Hate That Viral Math Equation, by Kenneth Chang, New York Times

For mathematicians, equations like this one — something that looks like what you learned in school, but which has been twisted with intentionally ambiguous notation — reinforce the trope that the core of math consists of memorized recipes of calculation.

“It implies that the point of mathematics to trip up other people with stupid rules,” Dr. Wilkinson said.

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During weekdays, breakfast is probably the most peaceful meal for me. Alone with my audiobooks, drinking coffee. And, most importantly, I haven't open up my email inbox.

Lunchtime, unfortuantely, has a very high chance of having conversations veering into work-related topcis. While, at dinner, I'm still trying to forget what happened during the day.

:-)

~

Thanks for reading.