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Learning to code is becoming the key skill for anyone who wants to launch a tech startup, or even just get a job working at a hot tech company. That may seem intimidating, but programming is not some monumental skill that only specially gifted people can learn. Really, it it isn't all that different from learning to speak another language. If you can pick up the rudiments of Spanish or French in a couple of weeks, how hard could it be to get started with Ruby On Rails? The Developer Bootcamp is designed to help anyone get started coding - and they might even get a job at a startup or tech heavyweight out of it as well.

"Dropbox is holding a promotion for students in which you can gain 3GB of extra Dropbox space for two years, plus more depending on how many people in your school sign up. To sign up for Dropbox's "Great Space Race," all you need to do is head to the link below and type in a valid .EDU email address (which you probably have even if you aren't a student anymore). After you confirm it, you should see 3 extra GB of space in your account. If you get others at your school to sign up too, you'll get even more space, going all the way up to 25GB. So sign up, tell your friends, and invite them if you haven't already for bigger bonuses!"

Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.

 Ever since Rosie the Robot took care of "The Jetsons" in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease. Enlarge This Image   Jodi Hilton for The New York Times, left; Hanna-Barbera With Ava, left, iRobot is trying to do Rosey the Robot of "The Jetsons" one better. Ava will have an iPad or Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. Rosie, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. "Then, 50 years passed."

Hey Great Lakes THATCampers! We're just under a month away from what promises to be a very exciting unconference. We've got a full day of workshops on Friday (be sure to email us at glthatcamp2012 [at] gmail [dot] com with your workshop choices if you haven't done so already!), topped off with a meet-and-greet hosted at London's own UnLab on the Friday evening. Saturday will be a day of sessions, and it is truly a day that is up to you, the CAMPERS, to make your own. In order to get you started, we've put together a list of a few of the session ideas you have suggested in your applications. Now that you are all registered as contributors, you are able to post about what you'd like to see happen on the 21st and 22nd. The more talk there is about the sessions prior to Great Lakes THATCamp, the faster we can get going on the Saturday morning, so please join in and help us out!

As I said in my recent review, I generally had a blast making my way through Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita. Despite some annoyances with the system's touch-screen and tilt-based controls, I had a good time working through the shooting and climbing sections and being rewarded with some well-acted witty banter in the cut scenes. But despite my overall enjoyment, there was still one point in the game where I was so frustrated I was ready to turn it off and never return. And while this frustration was probably at least as much my fault as the game's, I still think it would have been nice, and much less frustrating, if the game had offered just a little help getting me past that point.

Not long ago, Cory told you about how the Canadian government has been muzzling scientists-refusing to let them speak freely with the press and, thus, controlling what research the public gets to know about. Not surprisingly, it's research on topics that are politically inconvenient to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government-climate change, for instance-that end up getting frozen.

I went to the GLUE conference to get in over my head. That was my entire goal. I wanted to learn about the technology that helps to stitch together the various parts of the Internet, but I also wanted to spend some time getting to know the people who made that technology do what it does. Over the course of 2 days I met people who made me feel dumb, saw thousands of lines of code and left with a new appreciation for how technology works.

If you miss those great 1990s movies in which cyberspace runs amok, you'll get a kick out of this video of a real-life system for monitoring cyber-attacks. The new DAEDALUS (Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security) cyber-alert system has been in the making for several years, but now the developer has posted a cute video, to show you what it looks like.If you miss those great 1990s movies in which cyberspace runs amok, you'll get a kick out of this video of a real-life system for monitoring cyber-attacks. The new DAEDALUS (Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security) cyber-alert system has been in the making for several years, but now the developer has posted a cute video, to show you what it looks like.

Note-I am going to try this for our blog. If you've ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you've written), you've been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now. Yet the reality is that when it comes to connectivity, we're barely scratching the surface in terms of where we'll be in the future. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/02/21/the-connected-human-how-the-world-is-about-to-get-even-smaller/#ixzz1nATDjr5q

"Would you like to send a confidential note to a friend that self-destructs after it has been read so that no one else (including your friend) can ever see that secret note again? Maybe it has a password that shouldn't be stored anywhere. Or you are worried that the private note can get leaked online. "

"The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the £10 million ($16 million) that the UK government, via the Technology Strategy Board, has already committed over the next five years for the project."

It's easy to get lost in CAVE2. The next-generation virtual reality platform is one of the most advanced visualization environments on Earth. It combines 320 degrees of panoramic, floor-to-ceiling LCD displays with an optical tracking interface that gives rise to a "hybrid reality system" capable of rendering remarkably immersive 3D environments - whether you wish to explore the labyrinthine vasculature of the human brain, or soar swiftly over the vast canyons of Mars.

"The boundless wisdom and humor of Terry Pratchett get immortalized in a series of motivational posters that you only wish were hanging in your office right now. They don't seem to be the kind of thing Buzzfeed normally posts, but that's where I found them. No source or attribution, natch :|"

Archaeologists may not need to get their hands so dirty any more, thanks to the kind of digital technology being pioneered at Southampton University. Its 'µ-VIS Centre for Computed Tomography' possesses the largest, high energy scanner of its kind in Europe: a 'micro-CT' machine manufactured by Nikon. Capable of resolutions better than 0.1mm - the diameter of a human hair - it allows archaeologists to carefully examine material while still encased in soil. Using visualisation software, archaeologists can then analyse their finds in 3D. This keeps the material in its original form, and postpones any commitment to the painstaking process of excavation by hand.

Heated political rhetoric is everywhere. It sets us apart from one another and erodes what's left of civil discourse. It grinds the worthy concept of "logic" into dust. Not any more. Not when we fight back with an open source game I'm calling Logic Shrink. I'm not selling a thing. You don't need an app, a console, even a board. It's entirely your game. Play a solitary version. Play it during a get-together with your extended family. Play it with kids, especially teens. Bring it to the classroom, community center, or secret Super PAC meeting. It will entertain. Afterwards, when the lively score-keeping has ended there will be something new in the room. It may be unfamiliar at first. It's a state of being that requires no name calling, no slippery slope. It's logical thinking.

"As we get more data, we can fit more model. But at some point we become so overwhelmed by data that, for computational reasons, we can barely do anything at all. Thus, the curve above could be thought of as the product of two curves: a steadily increasing curve showing the statistical ability to fit more complex models with more data, and a steadily decreasing curve showing the computational feasibility of doing so."

SANTA BARBARA-"Maybe we're just too dumb," Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. Since his lecture, I've been learning about a theory that seems to confirm Gross's worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I've been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

Allison sez, "Michael Geist provides some commentary on yesterday's announcement by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and Access Copyright. His conclusion: 'For those that sign the model license, the new AUCC - Access Copyright deal is simply more of the same: AUCC and its institutions pass along copyright costs to students, Access Copyright gets millions in revenues despite ongoing questions about its repertoire (with thousands used to lobby against education copyright reforms and most of the money going to foreign collectives and publishers, not authors), and the potential for digitally-oriented changes within Canadian higher education heading back to the back burner.'"