The Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender gathered at the United Nations yesterday to present its findings on what they consider to be a “rising tide of online violence against women and…
Board game pieces found in settlement built on Roman military fort
Dice design has changed very little since Roman times. Researchers found a gaming piece and die during excavations of the Roman settlement. (Thomas Maurer)
The remnants of ancient water wells, pearls and hairpins are proof that a group of villagers set up a settlement on top of a military fort in ancient Roman times.
About 1,900 years ago, a group of Roman soldiers lived in a fort in what is now Gernsheim, a German town located on the Rhine River about 31 miles south of Frankfurt. Shortly after the soldiers left the fort in about A.D. 120, another group of people moved in and built a village literally on top of the settlement, researchers found.
Archaeologists have known about the site itself since the 1800s, but the new finding sheds light on its inhabitants and what they did for fun. (An ancient die and game piece were among the discoveries.) [See Photos of the Dice and Artifacts Found in the Roman Village]
“We now know that from the first to the third century, an important villagelike settlement, or ‘vicus,’ must have existed here,” dig leader Thomas Maurer, an archaeologist at the University of Frankfurt, said in a statement.
After excavating the fort last year, the researchers returned this summer to look for evidence of the Roman settlement. Their efforts paid off: They found relics of the village, part of it built on the foundations of the fort.
Excavation efforts, which began Aug. 3 and will last until early October, have already uncovered handfuls of artifacts. Researchers have found the well-preserved foundation of a stone building, fire pits, at least two wells and some cellar pits. They’ve also found ceramic shards, which they plan to date to get a better grasp of the village’s active periods.
“We’ve also found real treasures, such as rare garment clasps, several pearls, parts of a board game (dice, playing pieces) and a hairpin made from bone and crowned with a female bust,” Maurer said in the statement.
Who lived there?
Though they built their settlement over part of the fort, the villagers likely knew the soldiers, the researchers said. In fact, the villagers were likely the soldiers’ family members and tradespeople who made a business trading with the military.
“A temporary downturn probably resulted when the troops left — this is something we know from sites which have been studied more thoroughly,” Maurer said. But the little village managed to prosper after the soldiers left, as stone buildings were built in the second century A.D., during the Pax Romana, a 206-year period with relatively few conflicts in the Roman Empire.
The inhabitants likely had Gallic-Germanic origins, but a few “true” Romans — people with Roman citizenship who had moved from distant provinces — lived there as well, the researchers said. They based this idea on several tidbits of evidence, including pieces of traditional dress and coins found there. One coin is from Bithynia, in northwest Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), which may have been a souvenir from someone’s travels, they said.
The fort next door
The Roman fort once housed about 500 soldiers, who lived there between about A.D. 70 and 120, the researchers said. When the soldiers left, they dismantled the fort and filled in the ditches with dirt and everyday bric-a-brac, much to the delight of the archaeologists excavating the site.
It was “a stroke of luck,” said Hans-Markus von Kaenel, a retired professor of archaeology at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt. More than 50 papers have been published on the findings, which Von Kaenel, his colleagues and students have worked on for almost 20 years. [See Photos of the Roman Fort Discovered in Germany]
Rome made the fort and settlement to expand its infrastructure and help it take possession of large areas east of the Rhine River in about A.D. 70, the researchers said. During that time, the fort and settlement were fairly accessible by roads.
It may have even had a harbor, “and that wasn’t really expected from this particular site.” However, archaeologists have yet to confirm that during thepresent dig, Maurer said.
However, modern-day Gernsheim is a busy town, and its expansion threatens the Roman remains, the researchers said. This year, they are excavating a 717-square-yard area — about the size of two Olympic-size swimming pools.
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Board game pieces found in settlement built on Roman military fort | Fox News.
12 sites that will teach you coding for free
This post is in partnership with Entrepreneur. The article below was originally published at entrepreneur.com.
By John Rampton, Entrepreneur
There was a time when knowing how to program was for the geekiest of geeks. That’s not exactly the case today. As most entrepreneurs, freelancers and marketers will tell you, learning how to program can help you succeed. Over the past year, I’ve been learning to code. It’s helped me to become a much better entrepreneur—I can dive in when my team needs to fix a few bugs on the site.
You don’t even need to shell out a ton of money or put yourself in debt to learn how to code, either. These 12 places offer coding courses for free:
1. CodeAcademy
One of the most popular free places to learn coding is CodeAcademy. In fact, more than 24 million people have already learned how to code through this educational company’s engaging experience. At CodeAcademy, you can dive right in and take courses that teach you everything from HTML & CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby.
2. Coursera
Founded in 2012, Coursera has grown into a major for-profit educational-technology company that has offered more than 1,000 courses from 119 institutions. While you can pay for certain programs to receive a certificate, there are a number of free introductory programming courses in various specializations from universities such as the University of Washington, Stanford, the University of Toronto and Vanderbilt.
3. edX
EdX is another leading online-learning platform that is open source instead of for-profit. It was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, so you know that you’ll learn about cutting-edge technologies and theories. Today, edX includes 60 schools. You probably can’t go wrong with the free Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University.
4. Udemy
Founded in 2010, Udemy is an online learning platform that can be used as a way to improve or learn job skills. While there are courses you have to pay for, there are plenty of free programming courses, which are taught via video lessons, such as Programming for Entrepreneurs – HTML & CSS or Introduction to Python Programming.
5. aGupieWare
AGupieWare is an independent app developer that surveyed computer-science programs from some of the leading institutions in the U.S. It then created a similar curriculum based on the free courses offered by Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley and Columbia. The program was then broken into 15 courses: three introductory classes, seven core classes and five electives.
While you won’t actually receive credit, it’s a perfect introductory program for prospective computer programmers.
6. GitHub
Sometimes, you need to recall a reference book when you’re stuck on a problem. That’s GitHub. You can find more than 500 free programming books that cover more than 80 different programming languages on the popular web-based Git repository hosting service, which means that it’s frequently updated by collaborators.
7. MIT Open Courseware
If you’ve already learned the basics, and went to get into something a bit heavier—such as exploring the theory behind coding—take advantage of MIT’s free courseware site that includes classes such as Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Introduction to Programming in Java and Practical Programming in C.
8. Hack.pledge()
This is a community of developers, which include some high-profile developers such as Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. There, you can perfect your programming skills by learning from some of the leading developers in the world.
9. Code Avengers
Based out of New Zealand, Code Avengers provides fun and interactive programming courses that will teach you how to code games, apps and web sites using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Each course takes just 12 hours to complete and is available in English, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and Portuguese.
10. Khan Academy
Created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, Khan Academy is one of the original free online-learning institutions. With step-by-step video tutorials, you can learn how to program drawings, animations and games using JavaScript and ProcessingJS, or learn how to create webpages with HTML and CSS.
11. Free Food Camp
Here you’ll learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Databases, DevTools, Node.js, Angular.js and Agile by networking and joining a community of professionals and students. You’ll even work together on your coding skills so that you can build apps for free. Here’s the catch: you’re learning those skills and building helps to help solve real-world problems. Code is available to nonprofits.
12. HTML5 Rocks
This Google project launched in 2010 to counter Apple’s HTML5. The site is full of tutorials, resources and the latest HTML5 updates. It’s open source, so developers can play around with HTML5 code. Because this is more advanced than most introductory courses, you may want to gain some knowledge and experience before jumping in.
Learning code used to require access to expensive books and classes, but no longer. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur learns to code. Still wondering if you need to code? Here is a programmer guide I put together to show you every step I took to become an entrepreneur that codes!
