Can you find Ukraine on a map? What else do you know about this eastern European country with 43 million people?
What Are Your Texting Dos and Don’ts?
Take a look at the most recent text you sent. Does it contain punctuation? Are words capitalized or all lowercase? Does it contain emojis? How formal is the tone?
What makes up your personal text etiquette?
Unlike writing for school or for a newspaper, casual digital communication has no official catalog of rules. This can cause confusion, according to Bloomy, a student winner of our Summer Reading Contest. “Overthinkers are hopelessly faced with a million text dilemmas, reading into two-dimensional letters and cartoon emojis,” Bloomy wrote.
In “No More Periods When Texting. Period.,” Max Harrison-Caldwell considers one of these dilemmas: whether to punctuate the end of text messages.
You’re out with a few friends after a long day at the (Zoom) office. You’ve been presenting a professional version of yourself for eight hours and are so relieved to speak freely at last, with as much slang and intonation and irony as you like. Then another friend joins your group and sits with perfect posture, contributing humorless and grammatically impeccable sentences to the conversation. Are you at ease? Or is this person kind of rubbing you the wrong way?
If you can imagine yourself in this situation, then you can understand how many young people feel when they receive a text buttoned up with a big, authoritative period.
To younger generations, using proper punctuation in a casual context like texting can give an impression of formality that borders on rudeness, as if the texter is not comfortable enough with the texting partner to relax. The message-ending period establishes a certain distance. The punctuation is polite when speaking to someone older than you or above you at work, but off-putting among friends.
Simply put, the inclusion of a formality in casual communication is unnerving.
Think of a mother using her son’s full name when issuing a stern ultimatum. Or of an upset lover speaking to a partner in a cool, professional tone, withholding intimate silliness and warmth to convey frustration. People gain and express interpersonal comfort through unpolished self-presentation, and acting (or writing) too formally comes off as cold, distant, or passive-aggressive.
It’s also worth noting that more of our casual communication is digital now than ever before, so texting etiquette carries at least as much weight as speaking tone.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
How do you text? How rigorous are you with capitalization and punctuation while texting? Do you usually send long messages or several short ones? Do you use emojis, tapbacks or abbreviations?
What message do you think your text etiquette sends to others? Why?
Do you agree with Mr. Harrison-Caldwell that concluding a text with a period can come across as “cold, distant, or passive-aggressive”? What other texting faux pas are you aware of? Are there any that really bug you?
What are other forms of communication that have different conventions from those used in texting? How, and why, do you think they differ? If you do not have a cellphone, which modes of communication do you use most?
How do other people text you? Do you notice differences between how your parents text and how you and your friends text? Do you format messages differently based on the recipients?
The author writes that standard punctuation has been reinterpreted throughout history. How have you seen your generation experiment with grammar? In your opinion, which of your generation’s innovations should become a permanent part of the way we communicate? Which should we leave behind?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public. You can find all our Student Opinion questions here.
Lesson of the Day: ‘Thousands of Haitians Allowed to Stay in U.S. as Texas Camp Clears Out’
Lesson Overview
Featured Article: “Thousands of Haitians Allowed to Stay in U.S. as Texas Camp Clears Out”
Over the past several weeks, over 9,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, have been camping out at the U.S. and Mexico border in hopes of entering the United States. Last week, after the release of images and video of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback grabbing and chasing down Haitian migrants, the U.S. began deporting Haitian individuals and families. They are returning to a country that is still reeling from a series of crises, including the assassination of its president in July, an earthquake in August and political infighting and food scarcity.
In this lesson, you will learn about the continuing journey of those trying to migrate. Then, you will engage in a discussion about immigration policy.
Warm-Up
Part I. History of Haiti
What do you know about the history of Haiti? Have you learned anything about the Haitian Revolution? The role of U.S. occupation and interventions in the country? The multiple devastating earthquakes? The recent assassination of its president?
Read this brief history of Haiti to learn more about the country. It begins:
Haiti has been thwarted by outside interests from its very foundation as a country.
For decades, European powers, and later the United States, refused to recognize it as an independent republic.
The Caribbean nation became the world’s first Black-led republic when it declared its independence from France on New Year’s Day 1804. That day, Saint-Domingue, once France’s richest colony, known as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” became Haiti.
It was a land long coveted for its riches of sugar, coffee and cotton, brought to market by enslaved people. Its declaration of independence meant that, for the first time, a brutally enslaved people had wrenched their freedom from colonial masters. But it came only after decades of bloody war.
You can also watch this six-minute video, produced by AJ+, part of the Al Jazeera Media Network, that focuses on the important role that both France and the United States have played in contributing to Haiti’s struggles. You can take notes by writing down three things you learn and two questions you still have.
What Is a Sprint?
Every app and software product is a work in progress. Once you download an app, it’s very likely that your device will periodically download updates for that app. With each update, you may not notice anything different, or perhaps you’ll note some relatively minor, incremental changes.
Most of these minor changes and feature updates result from sprints, which are planned and executed to keep software up to date without introducing too many big changes at once. Sprints are common in the world of software development, and anyone working to become a Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, or Full-Stack Developer should be familiar with them.
In this article (and in the video below), we’ll go over what sprints are, why people use them, and how they work.
What is a sprint?
Essentially, a sprint is a set amount of time that a development team has to complete a specific amount of work. Sprints are generally planned to last about two weeks, though they can be as short as one week or as long as a month.
The big advantage of the short time frame of a sprint is that developers are forced to focus on pushing out small, incremental changes rather than large, sweeping changes. As a result, far less debugging is required, and clients using the software can get a more seamless experience with the product.
A sprint can require any sort of programming expertise. You might use Swift or Kotlin for front-end development to PHP or Node.js for back-end tasks. You might also use SQL for database management or Python for machine learning projects.
Why sprint?
Given that sprints are so limited in scope, you might be wondering why developers sprint at all. Why not “marathon” instead?
It turns out that there are a few reasons why developers prefer organizing software updates into smaller-scale sprints rather than large-scope “marathon” projects. Let’s look at some of the most common.
Sprints reduce debugging time
Suppose you’re working on a project involving thousands of lines of code. You excitedly start running it, and then your program crashes. What went wrong?
When you and your development team have thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code, debugging becomes one of the most time-intensive tasks in the project. And, all that time debugging means that there’s little progress made in the actual software product.
With sprints, there’s much less time spent debugging because there’s simply less code to check. It’s a bit like playing “Where’s Waldo?” Would you rather look for Waldo in a picture the size of a postcard or the size of a movie poster?
Sprints introduce change gradually
Even the most adventurous of us have to admit that some changes take time to get used to. For example, imagine waking up to find that everything in your favorite app has changed — from menu titles to color schemes to where your favorites are located.
Chances are, you’d need some time to adjust to the new changes. You might even feel less excited to use the software — which is exactly what developers want to avoid. By gradually introducing feature changes through sprints, developers can ensure that they’re introduced in a way that doesn’t disrupt the end-user experience.
Sprint planning
Though the sprint itself might not last long, there’s a lot of careful planning behind it — what goals should be achieved, how long it should last, and when to start.
Sprint planning involves product owners working with Software Engineers and various technical teams to ensure that the sprint outcomes are relevant and achievable. Product owners go by various titles, but they’re generally responsible for managing the many projects involved in a product’s development.
So, how do people plan sprints?
First, it’s important to remember that sprints aren’t designed to address every technical issue and wish-list improvement. Instead, the product owner and technical team work together to outline what the most important issues are at the time and how they can be addressed during the sprint.
Below are a few questions that product owners and technical teams might ask when planning a sprint. Note that while product owners are typically in charge of a product’s development, many decisions come from higher up in the company.
Which technical issues are affecting people’s experience the most?
The software issues that annoy app developers aren’t always noticed by the general public. Still, software hurdles that developers can overcome with a simple workaround might be quite frustrating for other people using the product. Sprint planning involves figuring out which features and updates would have the greatest business impact.
Which potential improvements are aligned with our short-term and mid-term strategies?
Even if it seems that every other app developer is coming out with Feature X, the product owner may decide to hold off and focus efforts instead on Feature Y, which could be more relevant or useful for the app’s target audience.
Which features will be most relevant at the end of the sprint?
Starting work on a new Thanksgiving theme for your app won’t make much sense if your sprint ends around the new year. A product owner is aware of holidays, demand cycles, and other external factors, and schedules sprints so that more people find the new features and improvements useful and relevant.
Which features and issues need to be most urgently addressed?
Sometimes, there’s a technical issue that could expose the company to legal or financial trouble. Perhaps a potential security weakness was found, or maybe there are new privacy regulations to address. These features get special priority to avoid future legal problems and losing public credibility.
What are the human limitations for the sprint?
It’s one thing to plan the perfect sprint on paper, but at the end of the day, it’s a team of real people who need to carry out the sprint project.
Are there enough team members with the right programming expertise to do the sprint? Are team members already juggling other projects? If so, which tasks take priority? And, of course, is the proposed sprint deadline a reasonable one?
Staying flexible during a sprint
Even when a sprint lasts just a couple of weeks, the reality is that business needs can change quite suddenly at any time. Halfway through the sprint, you may find that the product owner wants to change some of the fundamental sprint goals or even the sprint timeline.
If this happens, the important thing is to stay positive and flexible. Companies are chasing a moving target when figuring out how to create the best software and apps in the shortest amount of time.
Who’s involved in a sprint?
Depending on the goals and timeline involved, a sprint can involve just a few developers or dozens of team members. During the planning phase, the technical team also decides what kinds of people to include in the sprint, such as Front-End Developers, Back-End Developers, or Full-Stack Developers.
Now that you know more about sprints and how they work, the next step is to keep building on your knowledge as a developer. If you’re not sure what to learn next, our Career Paths help you focus on learning the specific skills you need to succeed as a new developer.
Web Development Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy
Web Development is the practice of developing websites and web apps that live on the internet. Whether you’re interested in front-end, back-end, or going full-stack, the content in our Web Development domain will help you get there.
10 Ruby Code Challenges for Beginners
Ruby is used for a wide variety of programming tasks, and it has a lot of cool built-in commands that make what could be very complicated tasks pretty easy. It’s considered one of the easiest programming languages to learn, and it’s a favorite among programmers. But, to master any language, you’ll still need to practice practice practice!
To put your Ruby skills to the test while continuing to build your knowledge of the language, here are 10 challenges you can try. While finding the actual solutions for each challenge is up to you, we’ll explain the logic you need to use to ensure Ruby gives you the right result and provide a tip or two to help you find the right expressions to create your function.
1. Numbers greater than 5
This problem involves finding the number of integers with a value greater than 5. In Ruby speak, you could put it like this: Given an array, count how many items are greater than 5.
To solve this, you begin by outlining the logic, then translating it into code. An array is a collection of data.
For example:
Array = [17, 7, 3, 6, 10, 1]
First, you go through the entire array and ask if each number is greater than 5.
You then create a “count” variable by checking if each number has a value higher than 5. If it is, you count it, and if not, you don’t.
2. Prime number algorithm
To create an algorithm that finds prime numbers, you have to decide if the number in question can only be divided by itself and 1. To do that, you have to check if the number can be divided by itself and each number below it, down to 1.
The process in Ruby is to check whether each number is divisible by these integers, and if it is, then Ruby designates it as a prime number.
3. Calculate the sum of prime numbers
When calculating the sum of prime numbers, you first have to identify the prime numbers within an array. You then have to add all of these prime numbers together. In Ruby, you can call an expression that selects the prime numbers from an array and then use the “reduce” expression to add them together.
4. Factorial numbers
The factorial of a number is the product of all the positive integers that are less than or equal to the number in question. For example, for the number 6, the factorial would be 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 = 720.
For Ruby, the logic involves first telling Ruby the number to begin with, which is your target integer. For the example above, you’d start with 6.
You’d then tell the program to multiply that number, then each one below it, by the integer that is one less than it. To get you started, in Ruby, the line accomplishing this task could look like this:
number = number – 1
5. Check for repeated digits
You can use Ruby to analyze a number to see if it has repeated digits in it. Your objective is to use Ruby to validate whether or not the number is made up of a series of the same digit in a row.
For example, the number 555 would qualify. A number with only two out of three digits repeating, such as 554, wouldn’t qualify.
The key to solving this Ruby problem is to isolate each digit in the series and then compare them to each other. To do this, you separate the digits and put them in an array, which allows Ruby to look at them as individual units.
6. Fibonacci algorithm
A Fibonacci Sequence is created by adding two numbers to create the next number in the sequence. You then sum that number with the one preceding it to get the next number,, and so on.
For example, if you have the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, then the next number in the sequence is 55.
To do this in Ruby, you can use a “while” expression to create a starting value and then tell Ruby which integers to add together.
7. Missing number game
For this problem, you make a function that examines an array of numbers ranging between 1 and 10 that’s missing one number and have the function find the number that’s missing.
For example, the series of numbers could be [2, 1, 5, 4, 6, 9, 7, 8, 10]. This array is missing the number 3. The goal of this problem is to write code that figures out that the number 3 is missing.
Ruby has an expression called “findmissingnumber” that you can use to examine the array you’ve written. You can instruct Ruby to compare that array to one that has the missing number, and Ruby’s internal logic can pinpoint the integer that “should” be there.
8. Reversing arrays
In this problem, your objective is to reverse the order of the numbers in an array. For example, if your array was [8, 2, 9, 4], you would want your code to return [4, 9, 2, 8].
To accomplish this in Ruby, your primary tool will be the “reverse” expression, which examines an array and flips the order of the values in it. You’ll also use a “while” expression and designate the position of each number to dictate which numbers to apply the “reverse” expression to.
9. Return the following number from an integer passed
In this problem, your goal is to create a function that uses a number as an argument, then increases it by a value of one. For example, if the number in your argument is 3, you want 4 to be returned, or if your argument number is -8, you want the number returned to be -7.
In Ruby, you’ll use the “addition” expression to do this, which adds a value to the value that’s in your argument.
10. Return the sum of two numbers
This challenge calls on you to write a function that adds together two numbers within an argument. For instance, if you have an argument like this: (5, 4), you want your function to add them to get their sum.
For Ruby to do this, you’ll also use the “addition” expression, which tells Ruby to add the two values within the argument.
Code challenges are a fun and low-stress way to test your programming and problem-solving skills. Plus, you can use them to help you prepare for an upcoming technical interview. To learn more about Ruby, check out our Ruby courses below:
Ruby Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy
Ruby is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language most commonly used for Web Development. Its key designer, Yukihiro Matsumoto, said that Ruby was designed for humans, not machines, making it a favorite of many developers and tech companies. Its most popular implementation is with the powerful…
What Is Agile?
Whether you’ve been learning how to be a Front-End, Back-End, or Full-Stack Developer, you may have come across the concept of Agile software development. It’s a popular term today, though many people aren’t sure how it compares to its main counterpart, waterfall development.
If you’re curious about what Agile software development is and how developers implement Agile, then you’ll want to keep reading — or watch the video below.
Why do we create software?
People design and develop software to turn a specific idea into a reality. That idea should solve a problem that people have now or will have in the near future.
Let’s take, for example, messaging apps. You probably have at least a couple of messaging apps on your phone, and you can probably name a few more. But, suppose that you wanted to create a new messaging app.
The first question you might ask is, “How is my messaging app better than the others out there?” With so much tight competition, you need to innovate quickly if you want your software — and your software company — to succeed.
Your messaging software needs to either do something completely new or do something better or more efficiently. To achieve this, software companies adopt two main approaches to software innovation: incubation and iteration.
Incubating waterfalls
The incubation approach to software development is a bit the way it sounds. Teams of Software Developers incubate by:
- Thinking about an idea for a while
- Doing the necessary research
- Developing the software
The result of the incubation approach is a full-fledged product that works as intended from the beginning. Rather than being presented as a work-in-progress, incubation products appear on the scene ready to go. You might even say they “waterfall” into the market.
Agile iteration
The iteration approach to software development is quite different from the waterfall approach. Rather than come out with a rich, full-featured software product, iterative software development results in a relatively barebones product, known as a minimum viable product.
The goal of the iterative, or Agile, approach to software development is to come up with the simplest product that people will want to use. Once the product is released, developers continue to apply Agile methods by:
- Fixing bugs
- Making improvements
- Adding new features based on client/market demand
4 Values of Agile
The Agile approach can be used for any software project, whether you’re developing an app with Go or Swift or working on back-end development with PHP. But, while Agile involves specific software development workflows, it’s much more than that.
Agile is a holistic approach to company culture. In fact, there’s an entire Agile manifesto authored by the original developers of the Agile approach back in 2001. The Agile approach incorporates four main values.
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
While any Agile developer would agree that processes and tools are helpful during software development, individuals and teams should carefully consider which ones to use.
While the traditional approach might be to justify why an established process or tool shouldn’t be utilized, Agile developers always first ask why a process or tool should be used.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
Have you ever played a board game that takes an hour to figure out before you start having fun? Agile developers hate those kinds of games.
The same is true for software that requires you to read through a ton of documentation or instructions before you can start using it. Instead, Agile developers aim to create software that’s as intuitive and simple to use as possible.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Contracts are necessary for any business, but Agile developers see their clients as more than someone sitting across the negotiation table.
Successful Agile development means involving the customer at all stages of the development process through daily meetings, transparency, and constant feedback.
4. Responding to change over following a plan
Change happens all the time, usually when you least expect it. An Agile approach means that the software development team is alert to external changes that affect the product and willing to immediately adjust the development plan to respond to the change.
12 principles of Agile
Along with these four values, the Agile approach embraces 12 principles, which can be found in the Agile Manifesto. If English isn’t your first language, no problem — the Agile Manifesto is available in almost 70 languages.
Scrum: The most popular Agile methodology
Many methodologies implement Agile values, from just-in-time frameworks to methodologies adapted from the lean principles of manufacturing. Let’s explore the scrum methodology — one of the most popular ways to implement Agile software development.
Sprints are the backbone of scrum
Even after Agile developers release the first version of a software product, the work doesn’t stop there. Developers then gauge and prioritize which software features should come out next.
Just like the original software, Agile updates are incremental. The development cycles for these small-scale updates are called sprints, which last anywhere from a week to a month. We go more into sprints in another article.
Sprints are short-term, keeping with Agile values. If something needs to be changed in the middle of a sprint, Software Developers rethink the plan and adjust the sprint goals and time accordingly.
The daily scrum
In keeping with the collaboration and interaction values of Agile, sprint projects include daily scrums, which are brief meetings to discuss progress, feedback, changes, and next steps.
These meetings are often done with everyone standing to keep people focused on each other instead of their phones and computers.
The scrum master
As you can imagine, multiple sprints take a lot of team effort, especially when time is tight and requirements change at the last minute. That’s why there’s always a scrum master — who keeps an eye on the entire sprint team.
The scrum master isn’t always a technical expert but instead focuses on the project management side of the sprint to make sure that team members stay motivated and manage their time well.
What else should developers know?
Now that you understand what Agile is and how it’s different from waterfall development, you’ll want to make sure you’re learning the right hard skills too.
Whether you’re interested in becoming a Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, Full-Stack Developer, or something else, our Career Paths can help you figure out which skills you need to succeed in your new career.
Web Development Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy
Web Development is the practice of developing websites and web apps that live on the internet. Whether you’re interested in front-end, back-end, or going full-stack, the content in our Web Development domain will help you get there.
Word of the Day: impediment
impediment im-ˈpe-də-mənt noun
: something immaterial that interferes with or delays action or progress
_________
The word impediment has appeared in 136 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Sept. 17 in the Opinion essay “Why Has Black Enrollment Fallen at an Elite Southern University?” by Drake Pooley:
The decline in the percentage of Auburn students who are Black is representative of a broader trend among the 14 schools of the Southeastern Conference, nine of which had shrinking proportions of Black students from 2010 to 2018.
Nationally, the picture was not much better: Black enrollment went down at 20 of the top 50 public universities over the same period, and it fell at almost 60 percent of the 101 most selective public colleges and universities from 2000 to 2017. A Washington Post and Hechinger Report analysis published this year found that 15 state flagship universities had “at least a 10-point gap between the percentage of Black public high school graduates in their states in 2019 and the Black share of freshmen they enrolled that fall.”
These numbers demonstrate a missed opportunity to use one of America’s strongest engines of economic and social mobility — public higher education — to reduce racial inequities. Black and Hispanic people are less likely than white and Asian people to have college degrees, and that presents a major impediment to advancement. In Alabama, 28 percent of the Black population lives in poverty, compared to 12 percent of white people.
Daily Word Challenge
Can you correctly use the word impediment in a sentence?
Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.
Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.
If you want a better idea of how impediment can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
If you enjoy this daily challenge, try one of our monthly vocabulary challenges.
Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.
Should We Bring Back Animals From Extinction?
Have you ever seen the movie “Jurassic Park” or one of its sequels? It tells the story of an eccentric businessman who creates a theme park of cloned dinosaurs from prehistoric DNA, only to have his dreams ruined when the resurrected Tyrannosaurus rex and other ferocious predators escape and endanger the lives of the no-longer-thrilled human visitors.
Now, a team of scientists and entrepreneurs has announced the formation of a company that aims to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth thousands of years after it went extinct.
If they can pull it off, would it be a magnificent achievement? Or should we heed the warning of “Jurassic Park” and never try to bring back long-extinct animals?
In “A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth,” Carl Zimmer writes:
A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth.
The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.
“This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”
The company, which has received $15 million in initial funding, will support research in Dr. Church’s lab and carry out experiments in labs of their own in Boston and Dallas.
A former researcher in Dr. Church’s lab, Eriona Hysolli, will oversee the new company’s efforts to edit elephant DNA, adding genes for mammoth traits like dense hair and thick fat for withstanding cold. The researchers hope to produce embryos of these mammoth-like elephants in a few years, and ultimately produce entire populations of the animals.
Other researchers are deeply skeptical that Colossal will pull off such a feat. And if Colossal does manage to produce baby mammoth-like elephants, the company will face serious ethical questions. Is it humane to produce an animal whose biology we know so little about? Who gets to decide whether they can be set loose, potentially to change the ecosystems of tundras in profound ways?
The article explains some of Dr. Church’s hopes for reviving the long-extinct animal:
Beyond scientific curiosity, he argued, revived woolly mammoths could help the environment. Today, the tundra of Siberia and North America where the animals once grazed is rapidly warming and releasing carbon dioxide. “Mammoths are hypothetically a solution to this,” Dr. Church argued in his talk.
Today the tundra is dominated by moss. But when woolly mammoths were around, it was largely grassland. Some researchers have argued that woolly mammoths were ecosystem engineers, maintaining the grasslands by breaking up moss, knocking down trees and providing fertilizer with their droppings.
Russian ecologists have imported bison and other living species to a preserve in Siberia they’ve dubbed Pleistocene Park, in the hopes of turning the tundra back to grassland. Dr. Church argued that resurrected woolly mammoths would be able to do this more efficiently. The restored grassland would keep the soil from melting and eroding, he argued, and might even lock away heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
It concludes with a discussion of both the prospects and possibilities of Colossal’s ambitious plan:
Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California Santa Cruz, is skeptical about the company’s prospects. “It feels to me that a mammoth is a long way in the future,” she said. Nevertheless, she applauded the company’s launch and hopes it will deliver scientific advances that could help species that are endangered but not yet extinct.
For example, scientists may be able to use Colossal’s advances to save species under threat from diseases by endowing them with genes for resistance to a pathogen, she said. Other species might be enriched with genes to better tolerate heat and drought brought on by climate change.
“I worry that for lots of species today, the pace of climate change and the pace of habitat degradation is such that evolution isn’t going to be able to save them,” Dr. Shapiro said. “We need to intervene even more.”
Read the entire article, then tell us:
What is your reaction to the article? Are you excited by the news that resurrecting long-gone creatures may one day may be possible? Does it fill you with dread? Should Colossal’s efforts should be applauded or feared?
Should we bring back animals from extinction? Why or why not? What do you see as the possible benefits and dangers?
If you answered yes, what animals would you like to see revived? The mythical Dodo bird? The famed saber-toothed tiger? Or even a Tyrannosaurus rex?
Mr. Zimmer raises many ethical questions about the project, such as, “Is it humane to produce an animal whose biology we know so little about?” and “Who gets to decide whether they can be set loose?” How would you answer these questions? Do you think it is ethical to resurrect extinct creatures?
Dr. Church believes that reviving woolly mammoths could help the environment and lessen climate change. How persuasive do you find this argument?
What legal limits, if any, should be placed on attempts to genetically resurrect extinct animals? Should they be banned in any form? Or should scientists be permitted to freely research and experiment with the genetic engineering of extinct animals? Explain your thinking.
Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
Lesson of the Day: ‘How to Paint 50,000 Miles of Lines’
This lesson is a part of our new Accessible Activities feature, which aims to welcome a wider variety of learners to our site and to The Times in general. Learn more and tell us what you think here.
Lesson Overview
Featured Article: “How to Paint 50,000 Miles of Lines” by Ross Mantle and Heather Murphy
Have you ever stopped to wonder how our roads, streets and crosswalks are painted?
In this lesson, you will learn about the art of line painting, or pavement marking, and how it keeps all of us from bumping and smashing into each other. Then, you will document and celebrate other kinds of overlooked work that make our communities run.
Warm-Up
The roads in your town or city are probably full of painted lines that help people know where to drive and walk, like these:
Now, imagine they have all washed away. And the mayor has asked you to help repaint them.
How would you go about painting the lines on the streets? What supplies would you need? How would you make sure that the lines are straight and even? And keep in mind, you can’t take all day with one single line. There are a lot of roads to cover!
Take a few minutes to come up with a good plan. Then, turn to a partner and share your ideas. Which of your ideas do you think would work best?
Vocabulary
Here are 10 words you’ll find in this article that you may not know:
1. contractor 2. essential 3. epiphany 3. opposing 4. aspirational 5. crispness 6. technique 7. stave off 8. chaos 9. stencil 10. consistency
Which words are you familiar with? Which are new to you?
Use this list of words and their definitions on Vocabulary.com to learn what each means and to practice using the words.
Questions for Writing and Discussion
Click through the article, reading the text and viewing the photos and videos. Then answer the following questions:
1. What did you learn about how city workers paint the lines on roads and streets? What was the biggest surprise?
2. Compare your plan for painting streets from the warm-up activity with how the city workers do it: What was similar? What was different?
3. What kinds of skills and knowledge are needed to be a good line painter? Give two examples from the article.
4. What are some of the challenges and joys of painting our roads and streets with lines?
5. The article says that the people who paint lines help to “stave off chaos.” In your opinion, why is line painting important? What do you think would happen if all the lines painted on streets and roads washed away?
6. Why do you think The New York Times published this story about something most people see every day but give very little thought to? What can readers learn from it? What lessons or inspiration do you take?
7. Would you want to be a street line painter for a living? Why or why not?
Going Further
The article celebrates line painting — a skill and art that is not usually noticed or valued. There are many jobs in our world that are underappreciated. Brainstorm a list of at least five jobs that you think should be respected more.
Then, pick one job from your list and write about or discuss with a partner these questions:
What is the job? Describe it for someone who might not know anything about it.
Why do you think it isn’t appreciated enough?
Why is it important? What role does this job play in your life and in your community?
Additional Teaching and Learning
Celebrate someone’s work. Interview someone in your community whose job you think deserves more appreciation. Find out what they like most and least about their work and one thing they wish the public understood about it. Take a few photographs, and make a slide show of your best interview quotes and images.
Learn more about the unrecognized work that makes our communities thrive. Watch “The Midnight Gardeners of Mumbai,” a short film about the lives and dreams of two men whose job it is to water the gardens of India’s capital city. Answer the questions that follow. Afterward, discuss with a partner: How does this work compare with that of the line painters? What did you learn about the skills, joys and challenges of this job? What does it make you think about when considering your own future work or career?
Film Club: ‘How Life Looks Through My ‘Whale Eyes’’
[MUSIC PLAYING] I have a question for you. Is the red dot inside or outside of the white box? “OK, I do not see a red dot.” “What red dot?” “I don’t see the red dot.” “There’s no red dot.” OK, I’ll do it again. Is the red dot inside or outside of the white box? “I don’t see a box.” “There’s no white box.” “So now I see the dot, and I see no box.” Next one. “Oh, I see what you’re doing. What?” “Is this what it’s like for you? Oh, God.” That’s what I see when I take the test. “Oh.” [MUSIC PLAYING] Nature has located the eye close to the brain so that its messages may arrive there quickly. The eyes are really an extension of the brain, and the whole optic system is capable of understanding and memorizing. Are my eyes [expletive] up? “They are a little bit.” “Nothing’s wrong with your eyes. They’re just different.” “Your eyes are different from other people’s eyes. I think only you know if they’re messed up. Certainly, people from — who see you think they’re messed up.” Do my eyes make me uglier? “I wouldn’t say so.” “No. I mean, I don’t know.” “No, you have beautiful eyes, I guess. I think so. What color are they? Brown?” I’m your child. So, my name is James, and these are my eyes. Having eyes like mine, well, it feels like everyone I meet is frolicking happily on the ship they’ve dubbed the U.S.S. Normal. And then here I am, below the surface, feeling a bit isolated. But whenever I get up near the surface, where the people on the U.S.S. Normal can see me, everyone starts acting a little weird. They get nervous. They don’t know what to do, so they just avoid looking into the ocean altogether. Even my own family. What is wrong with my eyes? “I don’t exactly know, but one of them is — you have a lazy eye.” But I don’t have a lazy eye. My brother has sat across from me at the dinner table for his entire life. In that whole time, he never got up the courage to ask me what was happening with my eyes. Now, look, I get it. I used to also believe that this conversation was best avoided. I used to lie to people about the name of my condition, telling them that it was a lazy eye. Not because this was true but instead because it was something that they would have heard of. But the thing is, I don’t really think that’s productive anymore. And that’s why we need to talk. If you’re going to spend your whole life aboard this ship, then I want to tell you a little bit about how you can meaningfully interact with what else is out there in the ocean. You see, the name of my condition is strabismus. I’m an alternator with exotropia, and I have a complication called A.R.C. All of that is hard for even me to remember. So that’s why, a couple of years ago, I just started calling them whale eyes. We take our type of vision for granted, but consider the case of the whale. What was it like to give birth to a whale? “Oh, God. I did not know that you were a whale at the time.” For me to explain whale eyes to you, the first step is to understand how normal eyes work. “Normal” is a complicated phrase. My mom is technically normal. Her eyes both work together. But she’s also the proud owner of a 50-pound bag of popcorn kernels, which is exclusively for personal consumption. Well, let’s say you wanted to look at this abnormal object with your normal eyes. A normal person would see the popcorn out of both eyes. “Your brain fuses those two images into one, and you figure out 3-D.” That 3-D is how we do things like shake hands, play Ping-Pong and hand each other Post-its without missing. “So that’s considered normal? Your eyes —” Yeah, kind of a different story over here. You see, what happened is both my eyes worked perfectly individually. They can both see the popcorn with 20/20. It’s just that this collaboration stage where they got a little confused. So my brain was getting this image from the left eye and this image from the right eye. And it was like, holy cow, that is so much information and so much popcorn. My brain could only handle one of these at a time, so I started switching back and forth. You see, my eyes were never actually lazy. It was just my brain got confused. [MUSIC PLAYING] In the U.S., as soon as you’re born into the ocean of difference, people try to start fishing you out. And believe me, I tried it all. Band-Aid eye patches, pirate eye patches, staring at strings for long periods of time, 3-D glasses, reading glasses, staring at strings for even longer periods of time. The most popular form of vision correction is surgery. If you’re young enough, doctors can straighten your eyes and trick them into realizing that these two objects are actually the same thing. I had it twice, and the doctor missed both times. This is what missing looks like. The eyes might look aligned, but it wasn’t close enough to trick my brain. I was like a fish that kept getting caught, taken into a boat and then wiggling its way back into the ocean. What all these failures meant is that I was going to have to grow up with whale eyes, overboard in the sea of difference. Let me give you an example from when I was 6 years old. I’m on the baseball team — Monte Cassino, Tulsa, Okla. So the coach would pitch you two balls, and you would try to thwack them. And if you couldn’t thwack them, which I never could, then you would get a tee, and you got two tries on the tee. And, obviously — I mean, if the ball is just sitting there on a stick, everyone hits it the first time off the tee. Almost everyone hits it the first time off the tee. I got my two chances, and I missed both times. [MUSIC PLAYING] And I remember the umpire didn’t know what to do because he had clearly never seen someone strike out in tee ball. My strikeout was just one of thousands of humiliations in which others didn’t know how to react to my whale eyes. We put so much time and effort into making sure that people who are perceived as different understand what it would be like if they were normal. But we rarely ever do the opposite. Pushing those who see themselves as normal to understand what it would be like if they were different. [SPLASH] Do you know what happens when my eyes switch? “You see out the other eye? I don’t know.” That’s a good start. But everything moves. “Everything moves?” Yeah. “Really?” [MUSIC PLAYING] So everything jumps. So when you’re reading, you’ll be like, the little brown fox jumped in the big black car. It’s like car is over here now. Now, my way of perceiving the world might seem strange and frustrating to you. But if you come below the surface, you’ll see that I’ve adapted. Take, for example, the pencil test. “Isn’t there are a famous article on pencils?” You close one eye, take two pencils, hold them out in front of your face and then try to touch the tips or the erasers to each other. “I can’t do it.” “Hands up. I got it.” Wow. Faster than any of us. “I know. Do you know what I do?” What? “You just look for the shadow.” I’ve taught myself to adapt. In all honesty, I don’t have a problem with the way that I see. My only problem is with the way that I’m seen. I just want to be able to connect with people. It’s hard to tell where I’m looking. I get it. It’s not just, “Where is he looking?” It’s like, “Where is he?” I’m still here. You just are having trouble connecting to that person. You want to know why I call them whale eyes? It’s because we love looking at whales, and we’re completely unbothered by the fact that we can only look into one of their eyes at a time. That’s the kind of acceptance that I’ve always craved. But I’m not a whale. And this whole thing about the sea of difference, it’s just a metaphor. I really live in your world. It’s a world of handshakes, and pitchers and rain. I have a fear of umbrellas. I always think they’re going to hit me. It’s a world of high fives and changing lanes and really sharp knives. That’s why I buy the precut cheese. And, yes, it’s even a world where children dream of the major leagues, even after striking out in tee ball. It’s because I really live in your world that I need your help overcoming this distance between us. That means looking back into whichever eye is looking at you and meeting those inevitable gaffes with patience. More than anything, what I really hope you’ll understand is that what for you is a few seconds of discomfort, for someone else is just one in a lifetime of little moments that have made them feel like they’re hundreds of meters below the surface, even though they’re really just standing a few feet in front of you, waiting to connect. [MUSIC PLAYING]
