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Yesterday I listened to this NPR Science Friday segment on the disagreement between scientists and the public on key issues. As I have been reading posts on Facebook and twitter about the measles outbreak and condemnation of people who do not vaccinate their children I asked myself, are these posts making a difference?

I started coding when I was in middle school. I taught myself through a combination of experimentation, searching the Internet, a book I received, and an intensive summer school class. Many years later I am still learning. I do not call myself a software developer or professional programmer, rather I view myself as a hacker. I am also not a professional teacher with a background and understanding of learning theory. However the failures and roadblocks you encounter over time are experience when they happen to you, but then become wisdom when shared with others and I think that we have a shortage of wisdom in this arena.

A while back I recommended CoBook for contact management and syncing on the Mac. They were acquired by FullContact and the other day they finally released an updated iOS application.. This provides a gateway to easily sync your iCloud contacts over to your Google account. I also find the UI easier to use to update contacts. The only downside is it does not yet seem to have a mode where iCloud can be the canonical place where all your contacts live, and I am hopeful they fix this soon.

Ezra Klein has some great thoughts on the future of news and what has worked at Vox.com in this video:

Nearly nine years ago two political scientists at Yale conducted an experiment to see whether publicizing the voting histories of individuals to their neighbors would increase voter turnout. This strategy took many years to catch on and started to come into vogue in 2010. Here in the land of steady habits we remained largely oblvious to what our Ivy League university had unleashed unto the rest of the world until the last election cycle. After the two parties deployed this tactic last year there was a lot of discussion about big data boogeymen and whether voting records should be public.