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..does not mean you have any business going through my life with a fine tooth comb.

The "Nothing to Hide" argument is a fallacy that falls apart upon examination:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110524/00084614407/privacy-is-not-secrecy-debunking-if-youve-got-nothing-to-hide-argument.shtml
https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/

I am surprised you got the spreadsheet scandal via Colbert. It has been making news for quite some time. There was an NPR report, one BBC report etc. So please do not assume I am getting all my news from Colbert.

Further, very surprisingly, Stewart and Colbert seem to care for accuracy, despite being a comedy show. Being comedians they are able to laugh off their mistakes on air and apologize by making fun of themselves. But still, they do that when they make a mistake. The one I remember recently is Stewart making up a funny dickish name connected with civil rights, and it turned out to be a real name. The on air apology from him made me wonder, why isn't he called the newsman and the others jokers.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/microsoft-excel-the-ruiner-of-global-economies/

[2] http://news.silobreaker.com/does-this-spreadsheet-error-invalidate-the-case-for-austerity-5_2266755871209947215

[3] http://news.silobreaker.com/three-umass-profs-expose-flaw-in-harvard-research-that-underpinned-austerity-5_2266756154677788864

[4] http://news.yahoo.com/student-took-eminent-economists-debt-issue-won-095347790--business.html

[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190

[6] http://chronicle.com/article/UMass-Graduate-Student-Talks/138763/

That's good because preserving student's privacy is more important than preserving tax breaks for the wealthy.

Don't presume my politics, or that using in-house IT staff provides any guarantee of improved student privacy.

Quick cites: "...It would require the DOE to create a web-based point for authorized researchers to gather aggregated data as well as a âoeresearch engine,â allowing access to âoestudent levelâ data...."

"Harvard University raised concern on and off campus with the revelation that the administration searched e-mails for leaks to the media during the cheating scandal revealed last year...."

"U. of Iowa Ceases Sending Student Data to Sheriffâ(TM)s Office Over Privacy Questions"

and my favorite...a school administrator spying on his students (see interview at 4:37).

Academic journals typically have an editor or group of editors who work for little or no pay. These editors decide whether a submission should proceed to peer review, select the reviewers, and oversee the communication between the reviewers and the submitting authors. Academics do this work for free because it is considered to be part of the vocation of creating and expanding knowledge. Publishers were necessary in the past because they handled the logistics of typesetting and printing and distributing the material, but now authors are able to typeset their own papers and distribute them through the internet.

The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) exempifies this change. Much of the editorial board of the Machine Learning Journal collectively resigned to form JMLR as an open-access journal. The new journal had all of the prestige and experience that the old one used to have, with virtually none of the costs, and is doing just fine.

Bill Gates thinks that current model of higher edu needs change.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Conversation-With-Bill-Gates/132591/

Unemployment amongst recent law school graduates is the worst it's been in history, and there is no sign of that changing. I've worked in the legal industry for a long time now, and it's ugly. I wouldn't wanna be someone with a law school loan right now. http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/ etc.

UT Arlington did freeze costs. Last year tuition and fees, and dorms fees were frozen for the following year. http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/ut-arlington-proposes-tuition-freeze/29294

[Bring] a pad of paper (or smartphone) to note down comments for the question period... You can easily take 10 seconds to note down a comment for later without detracting from your listening ability at all.

Not everyone has the same mental abilities.

If I can do it... I am sure someone whoes entire job revolves around listening to lawyers and other extremely boring and esoteric people all day, can make the effort to learn that skill... [and those who claim they can't are] bullshit[ting you].

I, for instance, find that note-taking actually eliminates my ability to listen for the period I'm writing or typing. And scientists have shown that multitasking always causes mental lapses in each task being preformed. Regardless of how well the actor (you) feels that he or she is preforming.

Here is a pamphlet released by the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association titled Multitasking Causes Accidents, an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education called Divided Attention, and an article and a multitasking test from John Hopkins Medical called The High Cost of Information Overload.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/

Though everything you said might be true, the sources you provided give no indication of that.

I did not provide any "sources" - this isn't a dissertation. I provided links for reading suggestions, which is already more effort than one should spend on a site that often ranks all non-socialist political opinion as "-1 troll" and sweeps it under the carpet...

If you don't like one international university ranking (I picked one at random actually), you can pick any other such report - all of them that I've seen show USA being dominant. Like I said: "etc, etc, etc". There are so many specific examples I could focus on, that I don't know where to begin.

You can look at average wages, you can divide GDP per capita by person employed or hours worked, etc - USA still comes out on top. (And, as I've mentioned, the GDP/capita measure is biased in Europe's favor due to low fertility and higher government spending.)

I have never seen any factual report to the contrary - can you show me one? What I have seen is people with a clear socialist bias trying to redefine success with irrational new standards, like countries that give fuzziest hugs to oak trees, or countries where you don't have to work and can live off stolen loot.

The very fact that we're writing in English (and not, for example, in my native Russian) is of some testament to the cultural and technological accomplishments of the English-speaking nations, which USA leads by population.

I am not a "patriot" of the USA (many would even call me a "traitor" and a "conspiracy theorist" for my factual analysis of all its imperfections), but of Economic Freedom, which I believe to be the basis of all the other positive qualities that follow. Very few countries top USA in that regard, and they tend to be rather small and flawed in their own ways. If other economic freedom champs top USA in things like universities and R&D, it only strengthens my argument.

That source, a Wikipedia article whose own source is no longer accessible at the relevant hyperlink, says that the U.S. spent more than any other country on R+D in 2010. In percentage of GDP though, you're down around fifth or sixth. Ok, so you spend a lot on R+D. But is it effective? efficient? no answer there.

Internet 101 - if you experience "link rot", use a "timegate" like The Wayback Machine. (Just don't rely on it as a safety net - they fail to scrape some things.) The PDF in question is perfectly preserved.

It shows only a handful of USA's close partners (Israel, Japan, Sweden, Finland, SK) having a higher R&D spending as percent of GDP (PPP), and USA having almost twice the share of global R&D spending as Europe (which has a higher population).

Demonstrating the effectiveness of the said R&D is even easier - there are many benchmarks of innovation performance, competitiveness, tech corp revenue, etc. Which argument would you find convincing?

[...] patents [...]

OK, that was a bad link. Fuck patents.

[...] And you still come in behind Finland.

https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2008/07/10/custom-textbooks/ http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-585832.html http://lubbockonline.com/stories/021700/loc_021700103.shtml http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/former-college-it-director-sentenced-in-kickback-scheme/27153

what about less tech the test and more hands on work?

College is not for all and not all majors / jobs are college material.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/decision2012/2012/08/28/higher-ed-status-quo-isnt-working-republican-platform-says/?goback=.gde_2084356_member_155071793

"expanding alternatives to traditional colleges,"

“The status quo is not working” when it comes to dealing with the rising cost of college, the document says, lending support to new learning systems that compete with traditional four-year colleges.

Those alternative programs include “community colleges and technical institutions, private training schools, online universities, life-long learning, and work-based learning in the private sector.”

and it's not just costs that are that the alternative can have peopel learning more jobs skills in a Shorter time frame With less filler that comes with traditional college.

Parts of the traditional colleges system is a relic of the past and the time tables are also loaded with the summers off and other stuff that is not the best fit in today's work force.

We do need more of a trades / tech track and maybe a college / AP track.

An other part of wasted time in education is all the filler and fluff classes well round is nice to have but how many people really put full effort into filler classes?

This: http://chronicle.com/article/From-Bench-to-Bunker/132743/

Nope: http://chronicle.com/article/From-Bench-to-Bunker/132743/

Ah interesting, I hadn't seen that until now. This Chronicle of Higher Ed article has a bit more. Apparently the agreement between Coursera and several universities included a section entitled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies" that discusses some of that.

Khan Academy is a great resource, but it's far from a perfect substitute if one want to accomplish deep learning. The fact is that there is a LOT of free and very helpful tutorial learning material on the Internet. Khan has caught a lot of interest because of the sheer scale that Sal Khan accomplished on his own. I think it's a great tool, but is becoming quite overrated in terms of what we know from those who teach face-to-face, and learning science.

Here are some valid criticisms of Khan Academy. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/07/03/the-trouble-with-khan-academy/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/

In sum, Khan Academy is NOT a revolution in learning; it's a tool that many will use to help revolutionize education.

"At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That's why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century". link

'Bill Gates has certainly proven that he can make a pile of money, but does founding Microsoft make him an expert or even an authority on education?', bowl_haircut
--

The Halo Effect

badges earned online

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

we need to move to the badges system and free up CS for real CS with all the other stuff on it's own http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

"The idea of a degree is that you spend a fixed time right after high school to educate yourself"

Some stuff seems to be padded out to fit a 2 or 4 year plan when offering it NON degree / as badges system is better.

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

I feel pretty comfortable calling Leon Kass anti-science, because of the arguments he presented against stem cell research on the President's Council on Bioethics (President Bush, that is). He argued for the "logic of disgust," which was that he could oppose something just because he personally was disgusted by it. Kass also violated the scientific ethos of free and open discussion, by refusing to discuss his ideas in an open forum.

Bush also kicked 2 distinguished scientists off the Presidential Commission, just because they didn't come to the conclusions he wanted. http://chronicle.com/article/Nobel-Laureate-in-Medicine/48714/ One of them was Elizabeth Blackburn, who later won a Nobel prize in medicine for her work on telomeres. That's like firing the referee because he didn't give you the calls you wanted, or firing your doctor because you don't like his prognosis. Blackburn was pretty outspoken in denouncing the Bush administration.

Blackburn didn't simply object to the conservative opposition to stem cell research; she objected to the way they did it, by packing a scientific advisory committee and getting rid of the dissenters who disagreed with him. That's not the method of science. Why bother to have a scientific panel if you're going to hand-pick them to give you the results you wanted in the first place?

Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter did a lot of things that scientists criticized, and lots of Democrats have a tendency to compromise their principles, but GW Bush was something else. There were editorials in the usually nonpartisan Science magazine about how the Bush Administration's ignorance and defiance of science was unprecedented. It's not often that scientists criticize the people that give them funding. Read Elizabeth Blackburn's articles.

If this is the same case, and I'm pretty sure it is, that was for educational use, which already has "fair use" exemptions. This case has nothing to do with education. It is, generally speaking and depending on which side you ask, about willful infringement and economical advantage gained by copying.

Using that case as a reference is such a gross oversimplification that it is meaningless to discuss in the same context.

http://chronicle.com/article/Long-Awaited-Ruling-in/131859

This article discusses the whole PhDs on Food Stamps thing and gives some insight as to which majors are sucking financially.

Medieval History
Film Studies
Gender Studies

I think we can see a common thread here.

>>>. This will deter many from seeking a higher education level. You will therefore end up with a larger proportion of young people having lower education levels, which tend to lead to menial jobs, more unemployment, and a reliance on benefits. >>>

BUT! Right now we have a high population of 'educated' people working menial/unskilled jobs. There's a mindset that "You have to go to college to get a job", which leads to a saturation of "educated" and/or over-qualified employees.

(Provided this is accurate: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634 )

Meanwhile you have folks like me living relatively comfortable who 1) Didn't go to college 2) Worked their way up into their positions 3) Got kinda lucky. 4) Didn't take on the debt. (NOTE: Number 3 helps a lot, I'm not going to lie).

Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading.

But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html [ed.gov] and not all trading is a good fit in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan.

Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

The tech / vol / community schools do offer night, on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. The tech Feld does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.

It is an issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.

You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better overall plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.

Tech / Vocational / Community do need more respect and yes some jobs do need post high school trading. But there is Too Much Emphasis On College Education
http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/CollegeForAll/intro.html
and not all trading is a good in to a 2 year or 4 year or more College plan. Part or issues of tech schools and some class plans in community is that they try to fit a trades / tech class plan in to a BA, AA ,ECT when some kind of Badges system is a better fit.

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

tech / vol / community schools do offer night , on line , drop in and take in non-matriculated students. Tech does have a lot of needed on going learning and 2 more years of college is not a good fit.

It is a issue when you have a DIGITAL MEDIA that offers a 2 (college class load) year very hands on Film + Broadcast plan but then you have things like a TV channel wanting a 4 year degree in Communications to work in master control? For one thing a communications BA is a poor fit for a very tech / hands on job.

You also have issues in tech jobs where mainly on the College site you have the big catch all CS that can very a lot from school to school that is mostly geared to programming / high level design work. The tech / vol / community do offer more classes / a better over all plan that covers the needed skills with less of the high level stuff that does not help you on the job.

IT should be at the NON Degree / Non-Matriculated Student level as a lot of TECH / IT work does not fit in a Traditional Degree plan.

Move to a Badges system http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

Diversity doesn't work.

In any form -- ethnic, religious, racial, class, caste, even wide disparities in intelligence -- it promotes alienation, distrust, lack of unity and self-hatred among a population. It destroys that nation.

Wherever it has been tried, it has failed and left behind unstable third-world countries. Even in "white" nations like the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Russia, diversity has been nothing more than a destructive bother.

The reason we have diversity is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was designed to switch the USA from a majority-European-descended population to a majority third world population, because minorities vote against the perceived majority and thus will always vote for Democrats. Many even credit that change with getting Barack Obama elected.

I don't see the point in revisiting the black crime figures. They're there in the FBI's uniform crime reports, produced by a government that for 60 years has tried as hard as possible to be as non-racist as possible. I think the figures are accurate. They reveal that although blacks commit much more crime per capita, and Mexicans are halfway between whites and blacks on the crime per capita scale, most victims of a criminal of a certain race are also of that race (the defining statistic is white male rape of black women, which is virtually nonexistent). The race and IQ statistics are probably also good science, given that they are consistent with international estimates. There is no reason to suppose any of this is wrong, but I find it unnecessary.

Racism is what happens when diversity happens. We all want to live with people like ourselves. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that diversity destroys trust and makes paranoid communities. This does not affect liberals, who are concerned primarily with fairness by institutions to individuals. But conservatives, who value social order (per the research of Jonathan Haidt) find it disturbing.

In fact, many of the healthiest countries are almost entirely mono-racial -- Finland and Japan come to mind.

For background information, read the Race FAQ. Then check out the biological basis of race. This gives you a background in understanding race that isn't tainted by either racism or diversity, both of which are dead ends if you ask me.

Gee, so much for the 4th amendment. What next, "border" checks in Kansas or something?

No, but there are already checkpoints and regular stops in Maine and NY. More to follow, because "Customs and Border Protection also maintains that it can set up roadblocks—it prefers the term "temporary permanent checkpoints" for legal reasons—and question people on trains and buses or at transportation stations anywhere within 100 air miles of a U.S. border or seacoast. This broadly defined border zone encompasses most of the nation's major cities and the entirety of several states, including Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Delaware, New Jersey, and five of the six New England states."

co-op or internship are nice but they need to be cut off from the college mind setup and opened up to any one wanting to do them or at least make part of some kind of tech school / Community college. But not just AA, AS, BA, BS or higher level. no more a like a 6mo-1year track.

1. college CS does not fit that in to IT
2. college CS at 4 years is to long and comes with lot's of fluff and filler.
3. Tech / IT needs on going education and lot's of on the job work to learn. As well less time in class at one time. The old college system is poor at that.
4. Tech school / Community colleges are a better fit for people who are working / need to get new skills / update old ones.
5. There needs to be better ways to show off what you know other then AA, AS, BA, BS, MA, PHD.

That is where a Badges system can work a lot better.
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

They may be being polite. Good documentation is useful; bad documentation is not only useless, but often becomes a maintenance nightmare, if it documents the wrong things, or, especially, if it actively misleads those who come later. No documentation is generally preferable to bad documentation. So, your patches have to be audited, just like a patch containing code would. Which is extra work for someone who may have limited time for the project, and other priorities. Also, even if you say your patch is pure documentation, it still needs to be audited to make sure you're not trying to sneak in some code changes. A pure-documentation patch requires just as much work as a pure-code one. Maybe even more, because you don't just have to check what the code does--you've got to compare it to the code and make sure it's accurate and not actively misleading or pointless or dependent on irrelevant details of the implementation that are subject to change without notice.

Furthermore, the world is full of grammar nazis who believe the most absurd things about English (like, split infinitives are bad, or sentences shouldn't end with prepositions). America is in love with The Elements of Style, which Prof. Geoffrey Pullum of the University of Edinburgh describes as a "toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity [...] not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules." I can't tell you how many times I've received patches from people "correcting" things that weren't wrong to start with. And that's not even counting the people who don't realize that American English and British English differ.

On top of that, churn is a real, albeit fairly minor, thing. If a problem crops up, you may need to juggle dozens of patches between several branches. Adding in lots of niggling little patches that don't actually affect the code (but do affect any attempts at automatic merging) can only complicate this. But that's such a minor issue overall that I can't help but feel there's more going on.

My advice? Start small. Open source development is a social activity. Get known by making small-but-useful contributions before attempting to send in that huge patch that modifies every file in the system, and don't be a dickwad. If the people involved know you and feel they can trust your judgement, they're far more likely to accept your contributions. And if the problem is really that the project is actually run by dickwads (which happens), find another one to contribute to. It'll be better for your sanity and everyone else's. Fuck 'em if they can't take a <strike>joke</strike> patch. :)

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

don't limit it to kids only

transferring rules are so bad that states have law forcing them to take community college credits.

But over all that is a sign that the college system needs change / reworking.

I say break it up in to smaller chunks / badges that better fit the pace that newer tech comes out, non-matriculated students and part time students.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01/08/221257/do-online-educational-badges-threaten-conventional-education-models [slashdot.org]

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/ [chronicle.com]

transferring is so bad states have law forcing them to take community colleges credits.

But over all that is a sing that the collage system needs change / reworking.

I say brake it up in to smaller chunks / badges

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01/08/221257/do-online-educational-badges-threaten-conventional-education-models

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

I teach two courses right now and it is only roughly 1/2 of my work expectations. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to teach 4-5 courses per academic year. That means that tenured faculty who are not publishing and only teaching 2-3 courses are doing a part-time job. It would be hard to justify faculty salaries of 60-120k/year for only teaching 5 classes over the course of 32 weeks. People teaching 4-5 (8-10 per academic year) classes per semester hold the rank of non-tenured track assistant professor (or instructor) and are not held to any significant publishing requirements. They have little to do with this discussion as the universities are already considering them cheap labor. Courses taught during the summer time at my university pay based upon the number of credit hours taught, typically 3 hours per course. This is a basic guideline for US Universities and, if you have doubts, pick a major university and pull up the teacher contract.

As far as the only money in their pockets, if you are unfamiliar with the wages that faculty make or if you think that university faculty are underpaid, perhaps you should take a look at the chronicle's salary survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/ and take a second look at a few university faculty contracts. Tenured track assistant professors that consider 2-3 classes a semester full-time work are probably confusing what their priorities are from the perspective of the university and may be in danger of not receiving tenure based upon time-management skills.

This article is part of a series at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and as the next part of it, we're asking students to share their views on teaching via short video comments. The info: Today, professors are letting students pass virtual notes in class on Twitter. They're trying "clickers" that turn classrooms into game shows. They're videotaping their classes to let students watch lecture reruns to help cram for the test, or share the knowledge with the world on YouTube. They're monitoring how many minutes students spend reading online textbooks to see who needs help. The Chronicle is putting together a multimedia feature exploring the state of the college lecture, and how technologies point to new models. While some enthusiasts see the high-tech changes as a much-needed upgrade to an education model that is more than a thousand years old, others see dangers ahead. Is all that gear a distraction? Is academic freedom threatened when Web tools and video make public the once-sacred space of the classroom? If you're a current college student, fire up your laptop’s Web cam, or your smartphone's video camera, and let us know whether your professor's lectures are boring, inspiring, or something in between. Would you rather something more interactive happen in class, or should lectures stick around for the long haul? Please don’t name your professors, and you don't have to give your name if you prefer not to. One view often left out of the current debates about teaching is that of the student, so your input can help shape the conversation among college leaders. We’ll feature the best videos on our Web site, and I’ll show some of the clips at a talk I'm giving at this year’s SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Just post your video to YouTube or other video-sharing site and headline it LectureFail?, or send the clip directly to jeff.young@chronicle.com. We'll be taking submissions until the end of February. More details here: http://chronicle.com/article/Lecture-Fail/130085/

Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

seems to be along the lines of what Steve jobs did in college just taking the stuff he wanted to do and not all of other filler classes.

My understanding is that it was within 100 miles of the border. As far as sources I can offer these after a quick google search:

This one about searches in Tennessee

Or this from the ACLU about the constitution free zone

Or any number of incidents that have occurred. Granted the border patrol isn't the TSA but they are both part of the DHS and even have some permanent "interior checkpoints" as they call them most are on the southern border but it is mentioned that there are number in northern states within 100 miles of the Canadian border.

The comparison to anonymized data in the summary is stupid. Facebook publishing any of those messages, they're just doing analysis on them. There would be good point in this article if they actually published those messages because then anonymizing doesn't work, but it's a moot point because they aren't making anything public. Only the aggregated search amounts.

The articles I've read about this don't specifically say as to how much aggregation Facebook will provide. I'm guessing that it would be a really coarse grained distribution of Facebook users' opinions and no different than the level of granularity most other political polls provide. However, if they provide breakdowns on very fine grained age ranges, geographic regions, ethnicity, gender, political views, etc, identifying specific people may be possible. I recall a similar study done with aggregated Facebook data by Harvard researchers where third parties using the data were able to identify some of the individuals.

Overall, I think this is mostly FUD. The only thing that makes this different than traditional surveys is that Facebook users don't have a choice as to whether or not they participate, but when it comes to Facebook, user choice seems to be the exception, not the rule.

Its very much like the market for French Literature, 1% of the graduates will get $100K/yr professorship jobs, the rest.... will not have a positive outcome.

Just a couple of quick comments:

1) professorships in the humanities take a Ph.D, and Ph.D.s in the humanities have a significantly longer time-to-degree than the sciences and much much weaker funding along the way.
2) Not even 1% of the French Literature Ph.D.s will get decent professorships (let alone French literature undergrads) Those that stay in education will mainly get adjunct teaching positions indefinitely. Finding a decent faculty position in the humanities is very very difficult, significantly harder than a faculty position in the sciences or engineering, which as already exceptionally hard.
3) An assistant professor in the humanities does not make $100k. A full professor in the humanities would be lucky to make that unless they are at an elite institution. See the AAUP database for overall faculty salaries by institution, and there are many public databases of faculty salaries. See here for one at George Mason university, where the median income in this search for language department personnel was about $55k.

The true creative class is the people who are willing to put forth the hard work to study particle physics, microbiology, colloid science, differential equations, managerial accounting, and parallel algorithms. Their dedication is what makes carrying out their creative dreams possible. As the article states, they're doing well, as there's still scarcity in that market. Their competition in overseas diploma mills that teach to the test do not produce the same results.

What this article is referring to is the so-called "creative class" who thought they could start a grunge band by learning power chords, buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer, or become a psychologist because they were interested in their bad teenage relationships. They are the types who thought they'd win the lottery and become rock stars without the serious learning required to invent, build, and deploy something new.

Those people in the so-called "creative class" locked in an entitlement mentality are a dime a dozen.It may have worked in the 1990s when they and their friends were given unlimited subsidy by coddling baby boomer parents, but these days, you're on your own and actually have to know your shit. Universities today aren't full of ambitious engineers who will take full advantage of their $50K in student loans, they're full of future waitresses and customer service reps with a piece of paper.

A better article would be "Why did 17 million people go to college?" -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634

See http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Faculty-Adopts/40447 for Harvard adoption. See http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/mit-faculty-open-access-policy-faq/ for MIT adoption.

Thank you for posting this. It explains why so many of the Academic solutions to problems I'm researching are so incredibly lacking. I've seen 200+ page theses claiming to solve a problem, but after getting through them I find that the paper actually only describes how one would go about solving the problem and the author hasn't produced one shred of real code, but lots of pseudocode, to make their point.

Honestly, this is why managers avoid hiring Ph.D.s like the black plague in the software development world. I shared a cubicle with a Ph.D. who had just come out of spending the last 10 years crafting some incredibly complex formula for accurately predicting something to do with radio waves. We gave him a report to write. Six months later he gave us a white paper on how he was going to go about writing the report. Six months after that he got a job writing white papers for another software company. We gave the report to one of our average programmers, who got it done in a month.

For the amount of effort and verbosity that goes into Academic research, it sure seems like very little comes out of it. No wonder only 40% of research papers get cited in the first five years of their being published.

I'm a bit puzzled as to how this scheme is supposed to work.

They gave an interactive example.
http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/

Having professors first strictly defining the rules, entering them into software and having a computer evaluate those rules is still "professors grading the essays". It's self evident that the grading is better if it's more strictly defined.

True. If you read the example, you'll see that these "essays" are more like short-answer questions merged into a single paragraph. The program looks for a few pre-determined keywords. http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/

It might be more fun working a few dates and keywords into a paragraph than filling out short-answer questions, but the information is the same.

As to whether a computer can be more fair, if it can then you shouldn't be setting an essay. A computer can tell if you've listed a set of bullet points correctly, but it can't judge your understanding of the subject. For example, one of the titles my students could pick was 'Give five design patterns for concurrent programming and suggest when each would be appropriate'. Students got a reasonable mark if they showed me that they understood the materials I'd covered in the lecture. They got a really good mark if they showed me something I hadn't covered in the lecture and demonstrated that they understood it. How would you program a computer to make that call?

I agree. If you look at the example of computer grading in TFA, you'll see that it is in effect a set of bullet points.
http://chronicle.com/article/Can-Software-Make-the-Grade-/128505/ It's like a short-answer test with the numbers and paragraph marks deleted and run into a paragraph.

If you're going to use an essay-marking program like this, you might as well give short answer tests.

It's nice to get the date of birth and death in an essay, but today teachers are de-emphasizing facts that you can look up on Wikipedia in favor of more insight.

This is why company's work hard to control how and when information is shared with the public.

Sometimes you just can't help yourself.

From What's a Metaphor For?:

New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.

Most of the posts will probably be "yeah MBAs don't contribute anything" versus "engineers are geeks who can't communicate". In reality MBAs working for companies usually know what the company does in detail, and there are plenty of engineers who can communicate.

It's still an issue though, because the opportunity cost of learning about "business" is less learning about something else. According to this article,

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

The rise of MBAs is also tied to the rise of finance. Most people agree that the US funneled too many resources into the finance sector, which then just destroyed them. Instead of designing more complicated mortgage securities, those physicists could have been doing physics. Although "managing" doesn't necessarily have to be about finance, most business schools spent a lot of time teaching their students about CAPM and Black-Scholes. (If you don't know what these mean, good for you!)

But of course business schools are not a fixed target. Most have reacted to the financial crisis and are now, for instance, emphasizing globalization and how to work in multiple countries. Time will tell I guess if this path is any better.

Personally, I think the biggest damage is done by the outlook that most MBA programs teach. Instead of thinking that your company's goal is to build the best vacuum or whatever, you learn that the goal is to maximize shareholder value, and that gaming the system is what everyone is doing. Over the long run, countries probably don't want too many of those people in charge.

Because by depriving them of their own ability to provide those things, we become responsible for them. We can't evade that responsibility. We could of course use corporal punishment of one form or another instead, for a vast savings and possibly for better results. But that's considered barbaric, even though most people would prefer to take say, 2 lashes of a flogger per year. There's a pretty good argument that the prison system is both less effective and crueler than corporal punishment.

JFGI

It stands for "Just Fucking Google It". I.e. don't ask for questions, sources etc where the answer is readily found within a minute of searching using any of the major search engines.

Then why didn't they highlight that case? And any reason you didn't feel like posting any details about it? Or a link?

You can start with reviewing a list of checkpoints in the south:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_Interior_Checkpoints

Here are some documented cases of Border Patrol nosing around quite a bit away from the border in states bordering Canada:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30border.html
http://chronicle.com/article/Far-From-Canada-Aggressive/125880/

(How does "temporary permanent checkpoint" sound to you, by the way?)

Again, plenty more are easily found on Google. If you do not insist on being blind and deaf as a matter of expediency, these are all easily found. Start by googling "border patrol100 miles" and go from there. Searching for "border patrol" on YouTube gives plenty of relevant videos as well, documenting the abuse.

The article never said it was in San Diego. It only gave a vague reference to somewhere around San Diego. They have the same habit as you of being vague and outraged at the same time.

Once again, Google to the rescue (you really need to get a book like "Internet for Dummies" or something!). This says "mile marker 78 of eastbound I-8, 75 miles east of Yuma, AZ (55 miles north of the international border)". That specific enough for you, or you need it down to inches?

So, if I can outrun the border patrol for 2 miles, I'm home free? Sweet.

No, because if they see you running all the way from the border, they have reasonable cause to stop and search you (the 4th only guards against unreasonable search). The problem with fixed DHS checkpoints is that they can detain you even without reasonable cause. And some of those checkpoints are located on roads which do not directly connect to the border.

A further problem in practice is that the roving patrols, while technically bound by reasonable cause, use very flimsy excuses in practice - e.g. refusal to cooperate with them is seen as reasonable cause for a "legal" search (if you refuse to cooperate at that point, you're "resisting") - a creative application of recursion that cops never got away with; but DHS is special.