The Living Wage Calculator

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From MIT: The Living Wage Calculator

In many American communities, families working in low-wage jobs make insufficient income to live locally given the local cost of living. Recently, in a number of high-cost communities, community organizers and citizens have successfully argued that the prevailing wage offered by the public sector and key businesses should reflect a wage rate required to meet minimum standards of living. Therefore we have developed a living wage calculator to estimate the cost of living in your community or region. The calculator lists typical expenses, the living wage and typical wages for the selected location.

Scratch for Arduino Makes Programing the Arduino More Visual

Scratch for Arduino Makes Programing the Arduino More Visual

Windows/Mac/Linux: Programming an Arduino isn’t especially difficult, but if you’re looking for a more visual method, Scratch for Arduino (S4A) uses MIT’s Scratch as a groundwork for teaching kids (or beginners) how to program an Arduino.

S4A works just like Scratch where you drag and place actions to create programs. The idea is to provide you with a more visual language to program in so you can understand how things work better. Even if you’re experienced with Arduino programming, it’s fun to play around with. Otherwise, it’s a good place to start learning about how the Arduino works.

S4A

Immersion: A People-Centric View of your Email Life

What is Immersion?

It has been almost two decades since the beginning of the web. This means that the web is no longer just a technology of the present, but also, a record of our past.
Email, one of the original forms of social media, is even older than the web and contains a detailed description of our personal and professional history.

Immersion is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.

Just like a cubist painting, Immersion presents users with a number of different perspectives of their email data.
It provides a tool for self-reflection at a time where the zeitgeist is one of self-promotion.
It provides an artistic representation that exists only in the presence of the visitor.
It helps explore privacy by showing users data that they have already shared with others.
Finally, it presents users wanting to be more strategic with their professional interactions, with a map to plan more effectively who they connect with.

So Immersion is not about one thing. It’s about four. It’s about self-reflection, art, privacy and strategy. It’s about providing users with a number of different perspectives by leveraging on the fact that the web, and emails, are now an important part of our past.

MIT Android App Inventor Beta Releases

 

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The first beta version of MIT’s App Inventor for Android popped up on the web today at appinventor.mit.edu.

The App Inventor, first launched by Google in mid-2010 before being discontinued and open-sourced last year, allows just about anyone to dive directly into Android app development with a simple web-based interface. To get started with the public beta, all you need is a Google Account and a little creativity.

However the launch seems to have stressed the MIT servers, there are reports of responsiveness being up and down. 

Google and MIT announce open sourcing of the App Inventor code

I finally found the Google App Inventor Blog for MIT.  I am catching up to using App Inventor again in class after pausing while MIT took it over.  From the Blog:

Google and MIT are pleased to announce the initial free and open-source release from Google of the App Inventor source code at http://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-releases/.

There’s little supporting documentation yet, and we’re not accepting contributions to the code now. That will happen later, after the MIT Center of Mobile Learning opens their App Inventor server to the public. We hope to nurture a robust and active open-source project eventually, but for now we don’t want to distract the MIT developers from their efforts to complete and deploy the large-scale public server. In the meantime, we’ll update the code periodically to match what’s running at the latest MIT experimental system. We’ve also created a Google Group here for people working with the code to relate their experiences with the code, ask questions, help each other, etc.

People who create modifications from this code base are free to use the term “App Inventor” and the puzzle-piece Android logo in their work. MIT will be releasing its own versions under the name “MIT App Inventor”, which is reserved for the systems actually coming from MIT.

Enjoy the code, and Happy Inventing!