History Behind The Hashtag: The Historical Roots of the Black Lives Matter Movement

It began as a hashtag. Generated by the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin in July of 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged as an online response to claims of police brutality and racial discrimination. By August, 2014, the movement had transferred from the screen to the streets as demonstrators filled Ferguson, Missouri to protest the killing of Michael Brown. Subsequent reports of racial profiling and police killings only added fuel to the movement’s fire and its message quickly captured national attention. The apparent spontaneity in which the Black Lives Matter movement developed is belied, however, by the long history of racial injustice in the United States and the protest movements that have sought to respond to oppression. In an effort to understand this centuries-old story, this team examined the historical roots of the Black Lives Matter movement in the areas of politics and law, culture, organized responses, and violence. Specifically, this project sought to explore the Black Lives Matter movement within the context of the Brown v. Board court decision, the media, the women’s sit-in movement, and the 1967 Buffalo riots

Noble Knight or Menacing Pirate? Sir Francis Drake and His Controversial Reputation

To compete with Spain’s flourishing fortune in an empire stretching across the globe, nations in Europe, most notably England, turned to employing skilled naval men in legal piracy. These jealous leaders recruited skilled seaman to captain armed ships and attack enemy merchant shipping. The warm waters of the Caribbean off the coast of the New World teemed with treasure and the potential to make ordinary men into legends. This was the case of Sir Francis Drake, one of the most famous privateers to have sailed the seven seas. During the last half of the sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake plundered numerous Spanish port towns, pillaged countless ships, and became the first man to circumnavigate the globe and return alive. Described as daring, greedy, patriotic, savage, and heroic, Drake has perplexed contemporaries and historians alike as to the true nature of his character and his motives. Over the last 419 years, Drake’s historical image has continued to evolve and undergo revision. This project sought to explore the man behind the myth and to reanalyze the character and existence of a bygone figure as the progression of time can lead to historical misinterpretation. An analysis of primary sources led to the conclusion that Sir Francis Drake earned an unwarranted portrayal as a devilish pirate due to his audacious personality and the nature of his exploits as a privateer. However, his reputation as the heroic knight of English legend was limited by his self-seeking motives and vengeful behavior

A fresh look at novice programmers' performance and their teachers' expectations

This paper describes the results of an ITiCSE working group convened in 2013 to review and revisit the influential ITiCSE 2001 McCracken working group that reported [18] on novice programmers' ability to solve a specified programming problem. Like that study, the one described here asked students to implement a simple program. Unlike the original study, students' in this study were given significant scaffolding for their efforts, including a test harness. Their knowledge of programming concepts was also assessed via a standard language-neutral survey. One of the significant findings of the original working group was that students were less successful at the programming task than their teachers expected, so in this study teachers' expectations were explicitly gathered and matched with students' performance. This study found a significant correlation between students' performance in the practical task and the survey, and a significant effect on performance in the practical task attributable to the use of the test harness. The study also found a much better correlation between teachers' expectations of their students' performance than in the 2001 working group