Man of the Year — my vote

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Maya Angelou

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The thing I most appreciate about celebrated writer, Maya Angelou , is her bravery.   She spoke and wrote what was on her mind, never mincing words.   In today’s world of empty praise and false positive affirmation, this poet is a fresh ocean breeze in the heat of summer.   I love her poetry and I teach it often along with her memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings .   Her work connects back to the Harlem Renaissance writers and other African-American artists.   The title of her memoir comes from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906).   However, she is not an artist addressing a particular race; she is a poet for the ages and for all people, a true American treasure. The Washington Post published a piece yesterday by Valerie Strauss that made clear Angelou’s ability to speak the truth.   She was exuberant about the election of President Obama, and he in turn awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.   However, she often spo...
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No Strangers To Tragedy

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Courtesy CBS News Two recent stories continue to haunt me, as I’m sure they haunt the rest of the nation. At a Pennsylvania high school , young Alex Hribal, age 16, greeted his fellow students one morning last week by stabbing 21 of them with a set of kitchen knives.   He also attacked a school security officer.   Four of his victims remain in critical condition. Tomorrow, the school will reopen so parents and students can do a walk-through.   The school plant has been cleaned and sanitized of the blood and gore, but the fear, I’m afraid, will be much harder to clean away.   Classes begin on Wednesday, but it is safe to say no one in the community will be the same again. Hribal did not stand out as a troubled teen before the rampage.   Mental illness does not necessarily broadcast its presence to the world before bullets fly or steel flashes, bloodstained and corroded, in a school hallway.   There are sleepers out there, psychologists warn us.   Some...
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ES proposal: Shared memory and atomics

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The ECMAScript proposal “ Shared memory and atomics ” by Lars T. Hansen has reached stage 4 this week and will be part of ECMAScript 2017. It introduces a new constructor SharedArrayBuffer and a namespace object Atomics with helper functions. This blog post explains the details. Parallelism vs. concurrency Before we begin, let’s clarify two terms that are similar, yet distinct: “parallelism” and “concurrency”. Many definitions for them exist; I’m using them as follows: Parallelism (parallel vs. serial): execute multiple tasks simultaneously Concurrency (concurrent vs. sequential): execute several tasks during overlapping periods of time (and not one after another). Both are closely related, but not the same: Parallelism without concurrency: single instruction, multiple data (SIMD). Multiple computations happen in parallel, but only a single task (instruction) is executed at any given moment. Concurrency without parallelism: multitasking via time-sharing on a single-core CPU. However,...
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