pictures of other people (often taken without their permission)
One of the reasons I have a facebook account is so I can untag photos others say are me.
This is one of my arguments for maintaining a public presence on the internet: control over my image/likeness. When someone Googles my name, the first things they see are my professional webpage, personal webpage, and Facebook account. Anyone else with the same name is pushed to the second page of results. Anything not under my direct control is pushed to the bottom of the first page of results.
With a Facebook account and publicly available webpages, I am able to broadcast my side of the story and drown out any impostors/naysayers (if anything were to happen).
Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them...
thats only a 1% error... is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable? Sounds like the technology works pretty well, pragmatically...
Anyway, sounds mildly-moderately threatening to general privacy. Who's paying for this?
FTFA, grants from:
National Science Foundation, grant # 0713361
US Army Research Office, contract # DAAD190210389
How much?
We'll never get any better if we don't try. That's what these grants are for: improving the state of the art.
As a general rule, if the bill is bipartisan, it's a situation in which many different businesses benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Bills that are controversial usually are those where some businesses benefit while others are hurt (e.g. Obama's health care law).
New modern airliners, only they are so slow compared to what was available in the 1970s...
If I'm flying a long distance, i'd rather get there in half the time than sit for hours, even if the environment is more comfortable. Time spent travelling is time wasted.
Bring back Concorde!
Or better yet, surely technology has improved since the 1970s that we could build something *faster* than Concorde.
I would like to see this too, especially after having made several 14+ hour flights. However, is the demand really there for faster travel? I would argue that most of the demand for immediate physical presence has been fulfilled by the capabilities of the internet. I find it interesting that the internet became of age not long after the Concorde entered regular service. Email and Skype provide easy, instantaneous, and free communication with anyone, anywhere. Any immediate issues can be addressed online, making any remaining reasons for physical travel much more delay tolerant.
If nobody can understand what a teacher is saying, then how much benefit do the students get from that teacher? Those students may be better off staying home and reading a book. Plenty of college professors fall into this category, but most of them aren't hired based on their teaching ability. For those whose job descriptions include communication, a thick unintelligible accent can be a serious hindrance.
That said, if someone has a trace of an accent but he or she is completely understandable, then there shouldn't be a problem. Some of the examples given in TFA I would consider ridiculous. But, if parents are complaining that their children can't understand their teachers, a remedial course to mitigate a thick accent might be beneficial.
It doesn't matter what you want to put on your thesis, you university owns the copyrights to it.
I'd suggest you contact your Uni and put the same question to them, rather than 6 million/. Subscribers.
At my university, if your research is not funded by the school, you own the copyright to any works you produce. If you are funded, the school does claim copyright on anything you produce.
You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support.
Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.
I was too lazy to do the exact math, but you got me interested. Since yearly revenue and operating budgets are publicly available for my school (as well as tuition), I was able to figure out the exact change:
First, the 2011 operating budget for my university is 8.1% higher than in 2001, adjusted for inflation, so there hasn't been this huge "administrative bloat," at least in the last 10 years. Next, as a percentage, state funding decreased from 33.6% in the 2001 budget to 14.3% for 2011. Conversely, tuition composed 24.8% of the budget in 2001 but in 2011, this increased to 38.1%. Lastly, undergraduate tuition, including room and board, increased by 55% from 2001 to 2011, also adjusted for inflation.
It appears for my school at least that the roles of tuition and state funding have more or less flip-flopped, with tuition being relied upon more than ever today. Indeed, the increase in tuition basically accounts for the decrease in state funding.
Most state athletic programs make the institution money. Football in particular is such a moneymaker, it can subsidize other less prominent sports.
This isn't true. There are only about 12 or 13 football programs (D1, BCS) that make enough money to fund other athletic programs or put money back into their school's general fund. The majority of college sports funding comes from alumni-funded endowments with the remainder made up by athletic tuition fees.
It's not something they like doing, but when the government cuts the funding there are limited options.
Except that one of the options never seems to be cutting staff or programs that aren't essential to education. Public universities where I live seem to constantly announce new administrative offices and extraneous clubs and activities while spamming alumni about how they don't have enough money.
Obviously, but that clearly isn't the sole cause of increases in education costs which were occurring during the boom years and also at private institutions.
+1. Ten years ago, my first year in a state funded university cost about $10k. State support was at about 20% of the school's operating budget. Today, it costs around $25k with state support at about 13%. So a drop in 7 percentage points in state funding equals a tuition increase of 2.5? Not only that, but the school has also increased total enrollment as well as the proportion of out of state and international students, which pay more than if you live in state.
>Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
The public university that I attend applies for patents all the time (software patents being the ones that I know about). I've come to realize in my higher education that universities, even public ones, are just as cash hungry as corporations.
If you're willing to forgo something out of the box, look at Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). It's like rsync but does bi-directional synchronization.
Is there anyone who uses Unison to synchronize a large amount of data, say like ~50 gigs or more? I have a file server on my LAN that I use to synchronize data between multiple machines and thought Unison would be an excellent choice. Unfortunately, it takes hours to scan through all my data and look for changes, even after the first sync. I really like all of the features, especially since it has both command line and GUI interfaces, but synchronizing just takes way too long. Since then, I've been experimenting with another tool called DirSync Pro, but it's Java-based and often runs out of heap space when dealing with large amounts of data.
I have used a pair of QNAP TS-109s (older model) to do this - they can use whatever ports you want & they can be set to rsync on whatever schedule you like. According to this: http://www.qnap.com/images/products/comparison/Comparison_NAS.html the TS-112s will do everything you want, & newegg has them for $160, otherwise the TS-119P+ (can take 2.5" or 3.5" drives) is $250 or so. You need to add the drives. Their web interface is pretty nice, and mine are still going strong after 3+ years.
I've got one of these too, and it's been great. I've hacked it to run Debian Squeeze so I can mount it remotely using SSHFS -- older versions of the QNAP firmware only allowed you to SSH as root.
Well, you might think a little, but not much more than you have to actively think about the order in which you take off your parking brake or operate the clutch in a manual transmission (if you know how).
I drive a manual transmission because I enjoy it. If I didn't enjoy it, I would have bought a vehicle with an automatic transmission, of which there are plenty to chose from. With running shoes, I don't particularly enjoy dealing with laces but there aren't really any alternatives. You may enjoy learning to tie a new knot, but I would rather have shoes be something that I don't even need to think about -- just like driving a car with an automatic transmission.
So double-knot them. Your running shoes should be loose enough that you can slip them on and off without untying them (or breaking them) anyway, if you're running significant distances. Wear, run, retie once or twice to get them just right, double-knot, repeat in 400 miles. What is problem?
Tying a pair of shoes once and then stuffing my feet into them is a hack. Resorting to this method is just further evidence that laces need some serious improvement.
You could just double lace them. Besides is learning how to tie a proper square knot that difficult. I do it two times every day.
I already do this. No dice. It's when the humidity/dew point is ridiculously high that I have trouble. After about five miles in the summer, my shoes are completely waterlogged with sweat. The laces swell up and the knot comes right apart.
I don't think it's the sweat that doing it. You (like most people) tie their shoes using a granny knot instead of a reef (or square) knot, resulting in your shoes coming untied easier. Check this for a refresher. Stuff you should know, news for runners (and other people who tie their shoes).
I've seen this article before a few years back -- either I was doing it wrong or it wasn't working as advertised. Either way, there shouldn't be an "art" to ensuring that my shoes stay on. I should be able to put my shoes on with minimal hassle and forget about them.
It's high time we move on from the useless and medieval shoelace. Living in the humid US Southeast, my sweat opens shoelaces on my running shoes faster than Houdini unlacing a straitjacket. They already make cycling shoes with velcro straps and plastic fasteners that would work great in running shoes, but for some reason athletic shoes have a focus on form rather than function.
The US won't fall because someone else was smarter, it will fall because it kills itself from within. It is funny to see from the outside, you got extreme right wingers trying to determine who is the least or most extreme right winger. Mean while the roads are falling apart, education is going to hell and production has ground to a halt with everyone buying Chinese.
It's also funny to hear what the outsiders think, looking in. US history is full of polarized opinions and the resulting government indecision. The issues you speak of may be new, but the ensuing debates, turmoil, and even violence is as old as the country itself. This tearing apart you speak of is really just everything functioning as usual.
After doing that in game, I remember thinking that there was no way this would really work. I was hoping that Mythbusters would tackle it but it looks like academia beat them to it.
Not really. BART is NOT a private corporation. Those repeaters are NOT private property. It was/is financed through sales taxes levied by the local government.
I always wonder about this. Where is the line drawn between public and private? Are publicly funded universities considered government entities because they receive a fraction of their revenue from the government? What about government contractors, especially those that receive all of their income from the government? There's definitely some grey area here -- maybe there are some court cases that clear things up.
They haven't voted it in yet. It's on hold in the Senate.
Write your congresscritters (one rep, two senators). Include Senator Wyden, who placed the hold on it. Good old fashioned snail-mail. They pay more attention to that than to emails or phone calls. In your own words, tell them why it's a bad law and should not be passed. Be polite. Then tell them that you'll be paying special attention to their votes on the bill. Follow through on that - write another letter if and when they vote.
I've done this a few times, even for my state representatives but to no avail. The only thing that happens is that I get auto-added to their re-election campaign mailing lists. I've come to the conclusion that the only thing these people listen to is money.
The ability to borrow should be used only occasionally. I mean, are you living on a deficit every fucking month? How long would you last if that was so?
A considerable number of Americans do live on such a deficit. Huge credit card balances, mortgages, car payments, and college loans. Very few have enough savings on hand to survive for a few months if they lose their job. That the US government acts similarly is no surprise.
Can't most people do this already without the need for an "app"? I think almost everyone with a smart meter should have access to the data through their power utility's website. Does this do something more, like monitor per circuit or per device usage?
I saw a presentation from a prof at the University of Washington who designed a power meter that plugs into the breaker and automatically learns the power signature of each device in your home as well as determine how much power each individual device uses. He founded a startup that was supposed to sell these things for about $150 in retail stores, except he sold out to Belkin before the devices went to market. This was about a year or two ago, and I haven't heard anything about these devices since. I definitely would have bought one.
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One of the reasons I have a facebook account is so I can untag photos others say are me.
This is one of my arguments for maintaining a public presence on the internet: control over my image/likeness. When someone Googles my name, the first things they see are my professional webpage, personal webpage, and Facebook account. Anyone else with the same name is pushed to the second page of results. Anything not under my direct control is pushed to the bottom of the first page of results.
With a Facebook account and publicly available webpages, I am able to broadcast my side of the story and drown out any impostors/naysayers (if anything were to happen).
Right now I bet if you were to snap pictures of 10,000 people, you would incorrectly classify at least 100 of them... thats only a 1% error... is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable? Sounds like the technology works pretty well, pragmatically... Anyway, sounds mildly-moderately threatening to general privacy. Who's paying for this? FTFA, grants from: National Science Foundation, grant # 0713361 US Army Research Office, contract # DAAD190210389 How much?
We'll never get any better if we don't try. That's what these grants are for: improving the state of the art.
As a general rule, if the bill is bipartisan, it's a situation in which many different businesses benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Bills that are controversial usually are those where some businesses benefit while others are hurt (e.g. Obama's health care law).
If only I had mod points...
New modern airliners, only they are so slow compared to what was available in the 1970s... If I'm flying a long distance, i'd rather get there in half the time than sit for hours, even if the environment is more comfortable. Time spent travelling is time wasted.
Bring back Concorde!
Or better yet, surely technology has improved since the 1970s that we could build something *faster* than Concorde.
I would like to see this too, especially after having made several 14+ hour flights. However, is the demand really there for faster travel? I would argue that most of the demand for immediate physical presence has been fulfilled by the capabilities of the internet. I find it interesting that the internet became of age not long after the Concorde entered regular service. Email and Skype provide easy, instantaneous, and free communication with anyone, anywhere. Any immediate issues can be addressed online, making any remaining reasons for physical travel much more delay tolerant.
If nobody can understand what a teacher is saying, then how much benefit do the students get from that teacher? Those students may be better off staying home and reading a book. Plenty of college professors fall into this category, but most of them aren't hired based on their teaching ability. For those whose job descriptions include communication, a thick unintelligible accent can be a serious hindrance.
That said, if someone has a trace of an accent but he or she is completely understandable, then there shouldn't be a problem. Some of the examples given in TFA I would consider ridiculous. But, if parents are complaining that their children can't understand their teachers, a remedial course to mitigate a thick accent might be beneficial.
It doesn't matter what you want to put on your thesis, you university owns the copyrights to it.
I'd suggest you contact your Uni and put the same question to them, rather than 6 million /. Subscribers.
At my university, if your research is not funded by the school, you own the copyright to any works you produce. If you are funded, the school does claim copyright on anything you produce.
You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support. Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.
I was too lazy to do the exact math, but you got me interested. Since yearly revenue and operating budgets are publicly available for my school (as well as tuition), I was able to figure out the exact change:
First, the 2011 operating budget for my university is 8.1% higher than in 2001, adjusted for inflation, so there hasn't been this huge "administrative bloat," at least in the last 10 years. Next, as a percentage, state funding decreased from 33.6% in the 2001 budget to 14.3% for 2011. Conversely, tuition composed 24.8% of the budget in 2001 but in 2011, this increased to 38.1%. Lastly, undergraduate tuition, including room and board, increased by 55% from 2001 to 2011, also adjusted for inflation.
It appears for my school at least that the roles of tuition and state funding have more or less flip-flopped, with tuition being relied upon more than ever today. Indeed, the increase in tuition basically accounts for the decrease in state funding.
Most state athletic programs make the institution money. Football in particular is such a moneymaker, it can subsidize other less prominent sports.
This isn't true. There are only about 12 or 13 football programs (D1, BCS) that make enough money to fund other athletic programs or put money back into their school's general fund. The majority of college sports funding comes from alumni-funded endowments with the remainder made up by athletic tuition fees.
It's not something they like doing, but when the government cuts the funding there are limited options.
Except that one of the options never seems to be cutting staff or programs that aren't essential to education. Public universities where I live seem to constantly announce new administrative offices and extraneous clubs and activities while spamming alumni about how they don't have enough money.
Obviously, but that clearly isn't the sole cause of increases in education costs which were occurring during the boom years and also at private institutions.
+1. Ten years ago, my first year in a state funded university cost about $10k. State support was at about 20% of the school's operating budget. Today, it costs around $25k with state support at about 13%. So a drop in 7 percentage points in state funding equals a tuition increase of 2.5? Not only that, but the school has also increased total enrollment as well as the proportion of out of state and international students, which pay more than if you live in state.
>Given that Universities are for the most part funded by government and other public funding sources one could make the case that they should ALL operate this way. Universities are the last entity that should be locking up ideas with patents.
The public university that I attend applies for patents all the time (software patents being the ones that I know about). I've come to realize in my higher education that universities, even public ones, are just as cash hungry as corporations.
If you're willing to forgo something out of the box, look at Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). It's like rsync but does bi-directional synchronization.
Is there anyone who uses Unison to synchronize a large amount of data, say like ~50 gigs or more? I have a file server on my LAN that I use to synchronize data between multiple machines and thought Unison would be an excellent choice. Unfortunately, it takes hours to scan through all my data and look for changes, even after the first sync. I really like all of the features, especially since it has both command line and GUI interfaces, but synchronizing just takes way too long. Since then, I've been experimenting with another tool called DirSync Pro, but it's Java-based and often runs out of heap space when dealing with large amounts of data.
I have used a pair of QNAP TS-109s (older model) to do this - they can use whatever ports you want & they can be set to rsync on whatever schedule you like. According to this: http://www.qnap.com/images/products/comparison/Comparison_NAS.html the TS-112s will do everything you want, & newegg has them for $160, otherwise the TS-119P+ (can take 2.5" or 3.5" drives) is $250 or so. You need to add the drives. Their web interface is pretty nice, and mine are still going strong after 3+ years.
I've got one of these too, and it's been great. I've hacked it to run Debian Squeeze so I can mount it remotely using SSHFS -- older versions of the QNAP firmware only allowed you to SSH as root.
Well, you might think a little, but not much more than you have to actively think about the order in which you take off your parking brake or operate the clutch in a manual transmission (if you know how).
I drive a manual transmission because I enjoy it. If I didn't enjoy it, I would have bought a vehicle with an automatic transmission, of which there are plenty to chose from. With running shoes, I don't particularly enjoy dealing with laces but there aren't really any alternatives. You may enjoy learning to tie a new knot, but I would rather have shoes be something that I don't even need to think about -- just like driving a car with an automatic transmission.
So double-knot them. Your running shoes should be loose enough that you can slip them on and off without untying them (or breaking them) anyway, if you're running significant distances. Wear, run, retie once or twice to get them just right, double-knot, repeat in 400 miles. What is problem?
Tying a pair of shoes once and then stuffing my feet into them is a hack. Resorting to this method is just further evidence that laces need some serious improvement.
You could just double lace them. Besides is learning how to tie a proper square knot that difficult. I do it two times every day.
I already do this. No dice. It's when the humidity/dew point is ridiculously high that I have trouble. After about five miles in the summer, my shoes are completely waterlogged with sweat. The laces swell up and the knot comes right apart.
And everyone should know how to tie their shoes - it's pretty simple, and yet myriad people have their knots coming open all the time
If myriad people have knots coming open, that's a pretty good case that a better solution is needed that doesn't require knots.
I don't think it's the sweat that doing it. You (like most people) tie their shoes using a granny knot instead of a reef (or square) knot, resulting in your shoes coming untied easier. Check this for a refresher. Stuff you should know, news for runners (and other people who tie their shoes).
I've seen this article before a few years back -- either I was doing it wrong or it wasn't working as advertised. Either way, there shouldn't be an "art" to ensuring that my shoes stay on. I should be able to put my shoes on with minimal hassle and forget about them.
It's high time we move on from the useless and medieval shoelace. Living in the humid US Southeast, my sweat opens shoelaces on my running shoes faster than Houdini unlacing a straitjacket. They already make cycling shoes with velcro straps and plastic fasteners that would work great in running shoes, but for some reason athletic shoes have a focus on form rather than function.
The US won't fall because someone else was smarter, it will fall because it kills itself from within. It is funny to see from the outside, you got extreme right wingers trying to determine who is the least or most extreme right winger. Mean while the roads are falling apart, education is going to hell and production has ground to a halt with everyone buying Chinese.
It's also funny to hear what the outsiders think, looking in. US history is full of polarized opinions and the resulting government indecision. The issues you speak of may be new, but the ensuing debates, turmoil, and even violence is as old as the country itself. This tearing apart you speak of is really just everything functioning as usual.
They did this in Splinter Cell YEARS ago.
After doing that in game, I remember thinking that there was no way this would really work. I was hoping that Mythbusters would tackle it but it looks like academia beat them to it.
Not really. BART is NOT a private corporation. Those repeaters are NOT private property. It was/is financed through sales taxes levied by the local government.
I always wonder about this. Where is the line drawn between public and private? Are publicly funded universities considered government entities because they receive a fraction of their revenue from the government? What about government contractors, especially those that receive all of their income from the government? There's definitely some grey area here -- maybe there are some court cases that clear things up.
They haven't voted it in yet. It's on hold in the Senate. Write your congresscritters (one rep, two senators). Include Senator Wyden, who placed the hold on it. Good old fashioned snail-mail. They pay more attention to that than to emails or phone calls. In your own words, tell them why it's a bad law and should not be passed. Be polite. Then tell them that you'll be paying special attention to their votes on the bill. Follow through on that - write another letter if and when they vote.
I've done this a few times, even for my state representatives but to no avail. The only thing that happens is that I get auto-added to their re-election campaign mailing lists. I've come to the conclusion that the only thing these people listen to is money.
The ability to borrow should be used only occasionally. I mean, are you living on a deficit every fucking month? How long would you last if that was so?
A considerable number of Americans do live on such a deficit. Huge credit card balances, mortgages, car payments, and college loans. Very few have enough savings on hand to survive for a few months if they lose their job. That the US government acts similarly is no surprise.
Can't most people do this already without the need for an "app"? I think almost everyone with a smart meter should have access to the data through their power utility's website. Does this do something more, like monitor per circuit or per device usage?
I saw a presentation from a prof at the University of Washington who designed a power meter that plugs into the breaker and automatically learns the power signature of each device in your home as well as determine how much power each individual device uses. He founded a startup that was supposed to sell these things for about $150 in retail stores, except he sold out to Belkin before the devices went to market. This was about a year or two ago, and I haven't heard anything about these devices since. I definitely would have bought one.