Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Missed out on that New Year’s resolution to learn a programming language — the goal that 300,000 people signed up for, including New York Mayor Bloomberg? Too busy with school to make it happen? You’ll get another, even easier shot at that goal this summer.

Codecademy, the brand-new entity behind that plan, has announced “Code Summer +” — a condensed version of its curriculum, starting this May. The announcement was part of an event with U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.

The White House CTO was in San Francisco on Tuesday to push President Obama’s Summer Jobs + plan — and to rack up some new commitments from the tech industry.

“Codecademy is accessible to everyone,” Chopra said. “I’m very bullish on encouraging these tools.”

Standing alongside Chopra and Codecademy co-founder Zach Sim was Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and head of a number of foundations that he pledged to help Summer Jobs +. The Level Playing Field Institute and the College Bound Brotherhood will place disadvantaged and minority students in top Silicon Valley firms and Universities.

Kapor recounted that his own career began with a summer job in 1966 that had provided him access to a computer for the first time. “Half the battle with young people is getting the idea that there’s a world they can aspire to,” he said. “We can do a much better job in Silicon Valley of being open to the people knocking on our doors, and overcoming our hidden biases.”

Chopra also announced that the government would create a Schema.org database of summer jobs within 60 days — similar to one that has already been created for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

What do you think? How important are summer jobs in shaping the future of employment and education? Do Chopra’s commitments go far enough, and what else could the government be doing? Let us know in the comments.

The majority of college students today use smartphones — although three-quarters don’t foot their own bills. Not surprisingly, this has changed the classroom dynamic. Some 88% text during class; 40% use their phones for last-minute test prep; and a quarter take their devices out during each class.

This infographic, created by HackCollege, delves into the intricacies of how college students in the U.S. use their mobile devices. The leading two operating systems are Android and Apple’s iOS, holding an almost equal market share of 43% and 42% respectively.

And the tidbit we pull out in honor of Halloween: 25% of college students who are smartphone owners have used their devices in mischievous ways.

How have cellphone behaviors changed since you were in school? Do you think mobile has redefined the college experience? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Created by: HackCollege

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Hyperink

Quick Pitch: An ebook publisher that develops titles based on existing demand.

Genius Idea: Bloggers, content farms and news publishers alike have long leveraged search trends to uncover the information people are looking for and profited accordingly. But can the same model be applied to book publishing?

McKinsey alum Kevin Gao, whose startup Hyperink announced its first significant ($1.2 million) round of funding this week, believes so. (And so do his investors, apparently.)

Book publishers, he says, too often choose what to publish based on what they like rather than what they know will sell. Hyperink will instead find out what people want to read, largely by sifting through short and long-range search data. The company will then find authors to write short, highly targeted books on the topics people are searching for information about.

Think How to Get Into Yale rather than How to Get Into College, or a short history on Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs around the time of his death.

Hyperink is also welcoming pitches from aspiring authors, promising design, editing and marketing services in exchange for 50% of the royalties. Gao says the company is also interested in partnering experts who are less inclined to write their own books with journalists to co-author books.

Books are generally priced in the $15 to $25 range — a bit on expensive side for ebooks, but on the low end for business books.

Gao added that all of Hyperink’s books to date have been profitable within the first year of publication.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Republicans are taking to social media in an attempt to curb the Democrats’ digital momentum. Facebook is courting the red states. And a study shows that Republicans are more cohesive and effective on social networks. That’s the news from this GOP-themed edition of our weekly series looking at stories in the intersection of digital technology and politics.

Republicans Beat Democrats on Twitter

Despite President Barack Obama’s prowess on social networks, Republicans came out ahead of Democrats when it comes to effective use of Twitter, at least in the 2010 race. That’s according to a study from the U-M School of Information and the College of Engineering. The study looked at more than 460,000 tweets — that’s three years worth of tweets from 687 candidates running for House, Senate and guberntorial seats during the 2010 midterm elections.

Republican tweets were more cohesive, covering a single basic topic. Top terms included “spending,” “bills,” “budget,” and “deficit.” Democrats sent an average of 172 fewer tweets, and they covered more diverse topics, including terms like “education,” “jobs,” “oil_spill,” “clean_energy,” “Afghanistan” and “reform.”

Tea Party Members showed more cohesion than either Democrats or Republicans. They retweeted a colleague’s message an average of 82.6 times compared with 52.3 retweets for Republicans and 40 for Democrats. Tea partiers also used hashtags an average of 753 times, while Republicans averaged 404 times and Democrats were at 196, the study said.

Facebook Courts Top Republican Candidates

The worlds most popular social network has historically leaned towards the Democrats. President Obama has 22 million fans, which is 10 times more support than the 10 declared GOP presidential candidates combined, says the Atlantic Wire. Now Facebook is working to close that huge number disparity.

“The color of the site is blue, but the color of the company is purple,” Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration and Facebook’s current vice president of U.S. public policy, told RCP. Facebook has recruited five high-profile GOP strategists to join its outreach team in recent months.

Republican’s Hold a Twitter Debate

Following on the heels of President Obama’s Twitter town hall, Republican presidential candidates will be holding a Twitter debate on July 27 sponosored by TheTeaParty.net, reported the Washington Post.

The forum will include former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R,-Pa), former Gov. Gary Johnson (R,-NM), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R,-Minn), Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R,-MIch) and Georgia businessman Herman Cain.

Images courtesy of Flickr, outtacontext, Combined Media, Truthout.org, http://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/

Epsilon, the world’s largest permission-based email marketing services company that serves TiVo users and many more, reported a breach in its security Friday, and the list of companies affected keeps on growing.

TiVo users had a rude awakening this morning, finding out the email address they’d given to TiVo as part of their account registration had been compromised.

According to Security Week, Epsilon is currently disclosing even more companies whose email marketing lists had been compromised. Noticing the problem first with grocery retailer Kroger, Epsilon continues releasing company names that were affected by the breach. Here’s the list gathered so far:

• Kroger
• TiVo
• US Bank
• JPMorgan Chase
• Capital One
• Citi
• McKinsey & Company
• Ritz-Carlton Rewards
• Marriott Rewards
• New York & Company
• Brookstone
• Walgreens (Again!)
• The College Board (added 4/3 @8:20am)
• Home Shopping Network (HSN)(added 4/3 @10:22am)

Considering that Epsilon has more than 2,500 clients sending 40 billion emails each year, this list could keep growing. Now, anyone who’s given an email address to any of the other companies listed above has involuntarily given an email address to hackers.

TiVo tried to sooth victims, saying the release of personal data “was limited to first name and/or email addresses only.” Here’s the email we received from TiVo this morning:

While TiVo attempts to minimize the implications of this security breach, email addresses are now in the hands of those who would break into the database of a huge email conglomerate. This means those addresses might be targeted with phishing schemes, spam, and other annoyances.

Now that they have a list of confirmed email addresses, those spammers and other miscreants will have much better success at targeting their victims.

Other organizations such as Citi, Marriott Rewards and Ritz-Carlton Rewards also warned their users, with lots more warnings probably on the way.

Perhaps it’s time for a new definition.

Unskilled labor is what you call someone who merely has skills that most everyone else has.

If it’s not scarce, why pay extra?

Skills matter. The unemployment rate for US workers without a college education is almost triple that for those with one. Even the college rate is still too high, though.  On the other hand, the unemployment rate for skilled neurosurgeons, talented database designers and motivated recombinant DNA biologists is essentially zero, despite the high pay in all three fields.

Unskilled now means not-specially skilled.

Foursquare has just announced that its “Foursquare for Universities” program is now available at every college and university around the world.

That means the new-to-many-campuses university badges can be unlocked by any relevant checkins at any college or university campus around the globe.

Foursquare’s collegiate checkins program began about a year ago with a partnership with Harvard. At the time, the idea behind the partnership was to help students connect with colleagues, friends and professors through the app and to help campus visitors find their way around interesting and useful on-campus locations.

Last fall, Foursquare launched Foursquare for Universities, an official program to partner with many different schools. The program, which also made way for custom badges for each school, eventually grew to include more than 100 colleges and universities.

Since the Foursquare for Universities launch, more than 25,000 university badges were unlocked, and Foursquare said it received more than 1,200 requests from non-partner schools to bring the popular app to those campuses, too.

Now, university badges will be available at any campus around the world. Also, all students are encouraged to sign up for the startup’s ambassador program, which will give participants free Foursquare gear and tools for spreading the word about the location app.

The standard university badges (pictured in order below) include Bookworm Bender (for checking into a library or study area after midnight), Smells Like School Spirit (for five checkins to a sports venue), Quad Squatter (for 10 checkins at a common area), Munchies (for checkins at five separate campus dining facilities), and College Explorer (for checkins to any 10 different campus locations).

We’ve found it: the perfect weekend activity. Here’s a website that doesn’t want you to do anything. That’s right, nothing.

This simple site, Do Nothing for Two Minutes, challenges you to do just that — nothing — and if you touch your mouse or keyboard during the countdown, you’re greeted with a “Fail” message.

We would suggest Do Nothing for 2 Minutes creator Alex Tew and developer Ben Dowling add a motion-sensing webcam to the mix, so the only way to pass this challenging test would be to remain still, barely breathing.

According to TechCrunch, Tew said,

“I had been thinking how we spend every waking minute of the day with access to an unlimited supply of information, to the point of information overload. i also read somewhere that there is evidence that our brains are being re-wired by the internet, because we get a little dopamine kick every time we check our e-mail or Twitter or Facebook and there’s a new update. So we’re all developing a bit of ADD. which is probably not great in terms of being productive.”

Who is this guy, anyway? You might remember Alex Tew from 2005, when he convinced visitors to his Million Dollar Home Page to buy pixels on a million-pixel graphic for $1 apiece. It was a huge hit, bringing in $1,037,100 to help pay for his college education.

His follow-ons haven’t been nearly as successful, including a lotto scheme called Pixelotto, PopJam, originally a social media humor site that’s now taken a turn toward becoming a ChatRoullette-style site, SockandAwe where visitors could throw a shoe at George W. Bush, and OneMillionPeople, where visitors submit their photos for free, with the goal of gathering a million “faces of a digital generation” into a 1,250-page coffee-table book of the photos. Tew hopes to sell that book for $100 per copy, as well as sell sponsorships for each page online.

For all his trouble, he was called “the most annoying man on the Internet” by the Daily Telegraph.

Perhaps to sooth his soul, Tew is focusing on a more Zen-like approach with his new do-nothing site. From the looks of it, it’s picking up some momentum, but there’s no monetization scheme involved with this one that we can see — just pure relaxation.

As you can see in the graphic above, I succeeded in doing nothing for the full two minutes. Sorry, boss. No ADD here. I’m not alone — there are already 27,000 Facebook user who like this.

Come on, high-powered, driven people. It’s the weekend; time to give yourself a time out. Go ahead, take a couple of minutes, listen to the soothing sounds of the ocean and just do nothing. It might do you some good.

How about it, readers? Did you pass the test?