If you’ve read anything online, undoubtedly there have been headlines about exploits, vulnerabilities, identities stolen and other compromises.

Are you one of the 9.3% using Internet Explorer 10 (IE10)? Hopefully, you keep your software updated, as Microsoft did squeak in a patch last Tuesday. However, if you haven’t, please stop reading this and update it and all other Microsoft patches immediately.

FireEye recently found a combination of watering-hole attack and drive-by download that utilizes the exploit in IE10.

You don’t know what a watering-hole attack is?

Let’s say the hackers find an exploit in a particular browser and they want to use that to infect the computers of people most likely to use that browser. They will find one or more websites that focus on that particular group of people. The hackers will then try to infect those websites with some drive-by download code. This means that anyone visiting those websites will be subject to the download which will infect their computer.

After the websites have been infected with the drive-by download code, hackers will blast out a series of SPAM emails that include a link to one of their infectious sites. The SPAM will be targeted to people in the targeted industry. This is called a watering-hole attack.

Just so you don’t think I’m focusing on Microsoft, these same types of attacks happen on FireFox, Chrome and yes, even on Macs.

Your best defense against these and other attacks is to keep your software updated – constantly. This doesn’t mean just your browser, but all Adobe products, your operating system and all other software programs installed on your computer.

April of 2014 will see the end of support for Windows XP and Office 2003. If you haven’t upgraded these yet, you should make plans. Without support from Microsoft, you will no longer get updates to that software. Hackers know there will be many people refusing to upgrade so not upgrading will make you the “low hanging fruit” for hackers.

In addition to keeping your software updated, please let everyone you know to use strong passwords. This cannot be emphasized enough. About 30% of the websites we clean are the result of compromised passwords. Make it at least 9 characters long and DO NOT use common, related words.

A recent informal survey we conducted shows that many passwords end with either the year, 123 or the exclamation mark (!). If this sounds familiar, please change your passwords immediately.

One other key point that we’ve been “pushing” for some time now is to schedule daily full system scans with your anti-virus software.

Here’s why.

If the anti-virus company finds a new virus “in the wild” on Monday, they will analyze it and create a rule to detect that virus. Then on Tuesday, you update your anti-virus software – either automatically or manually, this means your computer is protected from getting infected by that virus from Tuesday moving forward. However, if your computer was infected by that virus on Monday, your anti-virus program won’t remove it until you run a full system scan.

That’s why it’s critical that you run full system scans – EVERY DAY!

Let’s be careful out there, huh?

Thank you for reading.

What is a call to action?
A call to action is simply the thing you want your users to do once their on your website. If you have a brick and mortar business your first thought might be “I don’t want them on my website, I want them in my store.” But even in that case, you need something for them to do from your website. Do you want them to call you and make a reservation or appointment? Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter to get more information? Do you want them to give you their email so you can contact them later?

Why have a call to action?
A clear, specific call to action not only helps you gain customers, it helps you focus your website, and evaluate your own success. If your call to action is asking people to sign up for your newsletter, then you’ll easily be able to see how successful the call is by comparing the number of new website visitors to the number of newsletter sign ups.

How to create a call to action?
This is one of those cases where the “how” is completely dependent on the “what” and “why.” Once you know what you want people to do and why, you can create a call to action. Keep the call simple and clear, both in terms of language and visuals. Keep the options limited. The call to action is simply the first step in building your relationship with your customer, you can get in to more complicated information later.

Every year since the establishment of Computer Science in the 1960s, 30-60% of CS college majors have failed their Introduction to Computer Science course because they simply could not learn to program. Despite hours of studying and tutoring, most of these underperforming students struggle with, and many ultimately give up on, programming as a career.

What sets apart these computer programming can and can-nots?

Education researchers have been looking for the answer to that question for well over five decades. In that time, they’ve looked at dozens of possible predictors of programming aptitude, including:

• Demographic variables (gender, age, race, etc.), high school GPA, SAT scores
• How students approach problem-solving tasks
• Standard autism tests

Most of these studies have found little to no predictive power in the variables they looked at. Or worse, when they do find something that’s predictive of programming aptitude, the techniques appeared to be so complicated that other researchers are unable to replicate their results at another university. Our impression is that research in this field has slowed. At this point, there seems to be no silver bullet for predicting one’s aptitude for early programming success.

A simpler approach to predicting aptitude

We’ve been running a hands-on coding Bootcamp that jump-starts students’ careers as computer programmers specifically for web application development. We accept less than 1/3rd of applicants. As part of the screening, we have prospective students take a basic algebra test.

We also gauge student progress throughout the course and take note of individual progress using an internal normalized stack ranking. A student is given a 4.0 if they’re at the top of their class, and a 1.0 if they’re struggling to apply concepts learned in class. These stack rankings serve two purposes: first, they reveal who should be receiving 1-on-1 help and tutoring during the Bootcamp and, second, they stand as a useful measure of each student’s early programming prowess.

Now that we’ve had over 60 students through our Codeup Bootcamp program, we decided to plot the two variables — performance on the algebra test and programming aptitude — against each other. Below, each dot represents a graduate.

Shown above, our students’ performance on the algebra test predicts their future performance on programming tasks. As with all studies involving human subjects, there’s a fair amount of variance and outliers (e.g. the highly-rated student who scored only a 52% on the algebra test). But we can still confidently say that a student who scores a 75% or higher on the test will most likely be an above-average programmer, whereas a student who scores 60% or below will most likely be a below-average programmer.

It’s important to note that students graduating from our Bootcamp program are entry-level web developers; they can write a complete MVC web application using PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript from scratch, but they won’t immediately be leading the software design team for the next Twitter or Facebook.

What do these findings mean?

It’s fairly common for incoming Computer Science majors to ask the question, “Why do I have to learn all this math if I just want to learn to program?” The correlation above suggests a possible answer: The ability to understand basic mathematics is likely correlated with the ability to “think algorithmically,” which is well-known to be a foundational skill for expert programmers. Computer Science was founded in mathematics, after all.

On a more practical level, we’ve possibly found a simple method for sorting out the ninja programmers from the less capable programmers. So, if you’re a college student considering a major in Computer Science, take a look back at your algebra scores from high school to get a sense of your algebraic aptitude. And if you’re a recruiter for a growing tech company, try adding a basic algebra test to the interview process when hiring new programmers. In both cases, a 1-hour math test could save you thousands of dollars.

Methods

At the beginning of the Codeup Bootcamp program, students are given between 35 and 55 minutes (depending on the test version) to complete a basic algebra test. The test contains 25-40 questions, such as:

Adriana’s age is 1/3rd of her dad’s age. If her dad is 36 years old, how old is Adriana?

and

There are 3 consecutive integers with a sum of 69. What are they?

(No partial credit is given. The full tests are available upon request.)

To determine a student’s overall stack ranking, we have our instructors periodically rank each student according to how well they have been performing in the current programming module. Students are assigned a 4.0 if they’re at the top of their class, and a 1.0 if they’re struggling to understand and apply coding concepts. The majority of the students receive rankings of 2.0 and 3.0 such that the stack rankings for the entire class form a normal distribution. A student’s overall stack ranking is simply the average of their stack rankings over the entire Bootcamp.

The chart above shows the linear regression over the performance data of all 62 students who have graduated from Codeup Bootcamp. These 62 students come from 3 separate cohorts who took 3 distinct algebra tests. Scroll to the graphs at the bottom of this post to see that, when applied to the data from individual cohorts, all linear regressions show the same positive correlation between test score and programming aptitude with p < 0.01. This finding has therefore been replicated twice with three distinct cohorts of students.

In summary, these math tests – along with stack rankings – have been a handy diagnostic tool for us, and we’d like to share our findings with the world in an effort to both shed light on our own experience and hear plenty of feedback from others. In this new and growing industry, there is so much to learn, and we hope that this study provides food for thought and space for conversation.

Feel free to send lots of comments, questions, and suggestions our way!