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We're Jammin', Hope You Like Jammin' Too
theodp writes "Slate ponders whether a climate where anything can be photographed or surreptitiously recorded means the once-esoteric world of cell-phone jamming will become mainstream. Sites now offer portable cell-phone jammers that can provide you with the same kind of security bubbles used to thwart industrial spies, hostage-takers and bomb detonators. While actively jamming a cell-phone signal is illegal in the US, a distributor reports most of his sales go to US customers, including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures."
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.
God, root, what is the difference?
They still use blackboards? Here in NL, Canada they are considers a health hazord and have been replaced by white boards in all the schools and collages.
This is in Ottawa, Canada, at Carleton University. Yup, still using blackboards, installed last year in the brand-new Azrieli Theater.
I don't think the fumes from some of the cleaners and markers are much better for you than chauk dust.I would think so. It's probably some idiot with an arts degree who read in The National Enquirer that chalk dust might cause coughing, so without considering the whole system implications (ie. whiteboard chemicals), petitioned the school for the health effects. Universities are more apt to be "politically correct" and "environmentally correct" than rational, so they probably caved.
Personally, I would have sat the complainant down in my office, where there would be a chalk board, a white board, and a video projector.
I would invite the complainant to sniff the chalk dust, then the whiteboard markers and cleaners, then lick the lead solder on one of the video projector's PC boards. Before the Pb2+ ions could reach the complainant's intercranial fluids, I would then ask the complainant which one he or she now felt was more environmentally friendly and less apt to cause health problems.
If the complainant continued to prefer that blackboards were removed, then I would have the complainant removed from the campus for "lacking the basic common sense and reasoning abilities which we must expect of university students". At the very least, I would provide the complainant with a DeVilbiss respirator with dust cartridges, and one of those old Radio Shack toy firefighters helmets with the revolving light, both of which said complainant was going to wear as a condition of his or her presence on campus. (After all, we have to simultaneously protect this student from accidentally banging his or her cranium on things, and alert faculty and fellow students that this individual is delicate.)
Hopefully they will all be replaced by LCD projectors and the instructors will make all the notes aviable on the lan.No. For many parts of the lecture, yes, this would be a good thing. But there are lots of cases where the chalkboard is useful - in particular, answering a student's question by working out the problem on the board. The actual act of writing notes on the blackboard also forces the instructor to interact with the material. In my university experience, many PhDs really shouldn't have been teaching at all (a gifted researcher, for example, isn't necessarily an even reasonable teacher), and the best instructors were those who didn't have the "Doctor" title. Actually interacting with the material at a blackboard might be helping a PhD who hasn't solved a differential equation in 20 years remember how to do it so he can properly answer a question. I think the potential for embarrassment would also make them spend time reviewing the material before presenting it to the class.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.