Code Talkers

(noun)

Term that usually refers to the 400 American Indian Marines who during World War II served in the United States Marine Corps and whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages. The term is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers recruited during World War II by the Marines to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater. These codes were never broken.

Examples of Code Talkers in the following topics:

  • American Indians and the War Effort

    • In February 1942, a white civilian named Philip Johnston came up with the idea of using the Navajo language as military code.
    • Until its declassification in 1968, the code that these Navajo developed remains the only oral military code to never have been broken by an enemy.
    • In 2001, the 28 members of the Navajo Code Breakers were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, mostly posthumously.
    • While the term code talkers is strongly associated with the bilingual Navajo speakers, code talking was pioneered by Cherokee and Choctaw Indians during World War I.
    • Other American Indian code talkers were deployed by the United States Army during World War II, including Lakota, Meskwaki, and Comanche soldiers.

  • Meeting In Person (Conferences, Hackfests, Code-a-Thons, Code Sprints, Retreats)

  • The Napoleonic Code

  • Codes of Conduct

    • Organizations adopt codes of conduct to guide employees' actions and decisions.
    • There are three types of ethical codes: codes of business ethics, codes of conduct for employees, and codes of professional practice.
    • A code of business ethics often focuses on social issues.
    • A code of practice is adopted to regulate a particular profession.
    • Similarly, behavior in organizational settings may be guided by organizational codes of conduct.

  • Slave Codes

    • Slave codes in the Northern colonies were less harsh than slave codes in the Southern colonies, but contained many similar provisions.
    • The slave codes of the tobacco colonies (Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia) were modeled on the Virginia code established in 1667.
    • South Carolina established its slave code in 1712, with the following provisions:
    • Compared to some southern codes, the District of Columbia was relatively moderate.
    • The district’s official printed slave code was issued only a month beforehand.

  • Hammurabi's Code

    • The Code of Hammurabi was a collection of 282 laws, written in c. 1754 BCE in Babylon.
    • The Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest deciphered writings of length in the world, and features a code of law from ancient Babylon in Mesopotamia.
    • Other forms of codes of law had been in existence in the region around this time, including the Code of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur (c. 2050 BCE), the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BCE) and the codex of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1870 BCE).
    • Nevertheless, the Code was studied, copied and used as a model for legal reasoning for at least 1500 years after.
    • This basalt stele has the Code of Hammurabi inscribed in cuneiform script in the Akkadian language.

  • Introduction to Contributor Agreements

    • There are three ways to handle copyright ownership for free code and documentation that were contributed to by many people.
    • Note that even under centralized copyright ownership, the code (I'll use "code" to refer to both code and documentation, from now on. ) remains free, because open source licenses do not give the copyright holder the right to retroactively proprietize all copies of the code.
    • So even if the project, as a legal entity, were to suddenly turn around and started distributing all the code under a restrictive license, that wouldn't cause a problem for the public community.
    • The other developers would simply start a fork based on the latest free copy of the code, and continue as if nothing had happened.

  • Boundless and Bookstores

    • If you want your bookstore to carry Boundless materials, you can put in a request for a certain number of access codes.
    • Access codes are one-time use passes to a Boundless course.
    • If a student buys an access code ($29.99), they can use it to enter their Boundless course, and receive the same benefits (lifetime access, e-reader, study tools, assignments) as anyone who paid for Boundless with a credit card.
    • We will invoice your institution periodically based on the number of access codes used, rather than the number initially purchased.

  • Describing Qualitative Data

    • Coding is the actual transformation of qualitative data into themes.
    • When coding is complete, the analyst prepares reports via a mix of: summarizing the prevalence of codes, discussing similarities and differences in related codes across distinct original sources/contexts, or comparing the relationship between one or more codes.
    • In these cases, codes are often applied as a layer on top of the data.
    • Analysts respond to this criticism by thoroughly expositing their definitions of codes and linking those codes soundly to the underlying data, therein bringing back some of the richness that might be absent from a mere list of codes.
    • Alternatives to coding include recursive abstraction and mechanical techniques.

  • The "Do Anything" Licenses

    • If you're comfortable with your project's code potentially being used in proprietary programs, then use an MIT/X-style license.
    • It is the simplest of several minimal licenses that do little more than assert nominal copyright (without actually restricting copying) and specify that the code comes with no warranty.