They're letting you down by allowing a professor to fail an entire class, especially since the grades are based on something that doesn't really reflect your understanding of the subject.
Let me get this straight -- you think your grade should only reflect your understanding of the assignment? So an "A" means "understood the assignment outstandingly" or something?
I agree with the general attitude you express that this was a hard (and perhaps impossible) assignment, but your grades should reflect your performance on the assignment, not just whether you were smart enough to understand it.
I've always had a problem with this sort of behavior in college profs -- it gets away from what I consider to be the basic nature of higher education. As a student, I'm the consumer. I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information at the end of the class
Well there's your problem right there. If you think the "basic nature of higher education" is about treating the student as a consumer in the service industry, you really don't belong in higher education.
If you must look at it strictly as a commercial transaction -- and you're certainly entitled to; after all, it is your money -- then I suggest you leave the professor out of it. You're not "paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information" -- in fact, you're not paying the professor at all. The professor is paid by the university and his or her contract says nothing about rating your "absorption" of information like a scientist testing the nitrogen content of soil. You're paying the university to provide the bureaucratic and physical infrastructure for something like "education" to take place. This includes the creation of departments, etc., and of course the hiring of professors.
I'm not suggesting you should just take whatever professors you get without whining about the lousy ones, but I don't think it's legitimate at all to characterize the educational process as a kind of commercial transaction and to make the student's relationship with a teacher the kind of relationship that say a customer in a restaurant has with a waitress or waiter. Students like you remind me of cranky customers in restaurants who call the manager over and try to get the waitress fired because they didn't like her attitude. It's even more sad when the student's complaint about the teacher is that they are doing their job of challenging you a little too well -- that their classes are too difficult or their assignments require too much thinking.
Your complaint about teachers who don't show up to class is another point entirely -- a professor's contract with the university certainly does stipulate that they will attend their classes - though not perhaps in so many words - and it is certainly legitimate for a student to worry that they are wasting their money if their classes don't even meet. Again though I would make the same case on educational grounds rather than commercial grounds. If you can't tell by now, I really hate this metaphor of the university as some kind of service industry enterprise.
Anyway, I doubt this professor will fail the whole class, and it sounds to me like an almost impossible assignment, but I don't know anything about finding security holes in anything, so I wouldn't presume to make a judgement about that.
True... but we wouldn't be in that situation if universities were still buying hardcopies of things. I don't mind the shift to electronic forms of publication (though I don't want it to completely replace print), but it doesn't make sense to make the shift if you're not actually gaining capabilities. I think the university libraries have talked themselves into buying the worst of both worlds -- more expensive access to crippled forms of publication. Of course, I would not want us to go backwards here and not get the electronic pubs, but it's frustrating to know what the capabilities of technology are and see it intentionally crippled.
When my thesis advisor (who wrote two chapters for the Handbook of Research Methods in Industrial Psychology) publishes, he typically sends stuff first to the Journal of Occupational Behavior, not DarkSarin's Online Journal of Amateur Psychology or Commoderesloat's Journal of Human Weirdness.
Actually, your advisor just sent us a review essay for the Journal of Human Weirdness...;)
There isn't a good, quick, easy solution to this, and anyone who says that there is needs to have their head checked. Sorry.
I didn't say there was an easy solution. The only thing that would make it easy is eliminating the element of greed. This is human social and intellectual progress we're talking about, no matter what field you're in, and it is short-sighted to put access to that progress in the hands of institutions who only answer to the bottom line. I understand they have to make a living, and I understand that a certain level of greed is integral to human nature, but it is incumbent upon those who are led by things other than greed -- e.g. professional organizations and editorial boards -- to take a more active role in making sure the work is more easily disseminated.
I just joined the publication staff of a journal in my field (not Human Weirdness) and when the idea of making the journal accessible online came up in a meeting, everyone was in favor of it. Yet the only online version that had been available up till that point was a crippled JSTOR version -- gifs of scans of bad photocopies of the paper journal. The desire to see it made more available was there but up until this point nobody had pressured the publishing company to make a real pdf available. I'm not sure how the publishing company will respond when we press them on this point (and the goal of the journal is now to be available in html too) but I do know how they will respond if nobody presses the issue....
The prestige of a journal is related to the difficulty of getting an article past peer review, not to the fact of the journal being available online or in paper. So there is no "trick" at all other than for the prestigious journals that already exist to start making content available online or in other electronic form.
As for fulltext articles, try JSTOR if you want to see how to do it wrong. Page by page in gif format, and some huge pdfs with all pictures and no ability to process text. Useless!! Yes you can print it out but then I'd just as soon get the hardcopy in the first place.
One where you can plug in a mini plug rather than rely on a crappy mic from belkin? Then you could record from a real mic, or from a keyboard, or from a mixing board, anywhere you go. Now that would be something really useful. A dictaphone is nice, but when you have all that hard drive space it is a shame not to be able to use it as a real recording device.
The reason there are so few copies is because they are so expensive.
Chicken and Egg.
No; the reason there are so few copies is there are so few people who want to read specialized journals. And the small audience only accounts for a small part of what many academic journals charge.
No; the problem is not overhead costs or small audiences. The problem is that the owners of much of that kind of content are greedy bastards. There is no reason for the outrageous price of some journals. Some scientific journal subscriptions are in the tens of thousands; even many liberal arts journals are far from cheap. And if you want to copy an article for your students to buy at kinkos, expect them to pay 35 cents a page or more for the copyrights alone.
And many of them are worse than the RIAA in terms of access to content electronically. Journal articles are included in databases sold to some universities You can read articles in some databases but only by loading a.gif of every page one at a time. No copy and paste, no text access at all. So much technology going into preventing the thing from being copied that the online version is actually less useful than the dead tree version rotting on the shelf.
I think this is a great move by Google and Harvard, and I like the idea behind google scholar, but I expect this kind of work to be resisted by many of journals and professional organizations, to the extent that they have in a say in it. This will be a huge boon in terms of the availability of public domain resources, but unfortunately outdated perspectives on intellectual property are likely to hold back real progress for something really useful to scholars in a systematic way. At least until those perspectives change significantly.
It sounds like he's saying Windows had it long before MacOS X.
Perhaps, but not before MacOS 9, or actually 7.5.3 if I remember correctly (which I'm sure I don't....) In any case, videoconferencing was possible using C-U-C-Me or whatever on old versions of MacOS prior to OS X.
The LA Times is no more "biased" than any other paper like it (NYT, Chicago Trib, etc.). Its problem is not bias; its problem is that it's just not a very good paper as far as real news is concerned.
Your examples of bias don't wash. There were negative stories about Arnold during the recall because the story of the democratic process being hijacked by an action movie star who refused to even discuss his political positions publicly was big news! The groping scandal was stupid, but the stories were true and credible, and the LA Times would have been foolish to ignore them. If you want to look at bias during the recall campaign, look at the free ride Arnold got in the electronic media, some of whom even ran the movie "Total Recall" in the leadup to the election.
The problem with LA Times is not that it's too liberal; it's that it's just not a great paper, and there's no way it could compete with NYT or the Washington Post in New York or Washington. Why would you bother with the LA Times with such better papers available locally? The LA Times consistently hires good writers and is a good place to look for stories about entertainment, food, culture, etc., but news reporting - and especially investigative journalism - is just not its forte, and never has been, not even when it was locally owned. (In fact, the purchase of the paper by the Chicago Tribune's owners actually improved the quality of its reporting. But not by enough to make a difference).
As others have pointed out, your comments about bias are just stupid, and your link to the Tibet site is nonsensical. The Abu Ghraib story was huge and important news. Stories about Saddam Hussein's torture were perhaps newsworthy when they broke, during the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were covered by all the papers mentioned during that time (including front-page coverage). But obviously stories that involve Americans are considered more newsworthy by American papers.
This is a big problem and it would be substantially mitigated with such a simple solution.
Following along the same line of reasoning, why not have the RSS reader send one request, and then changes are pushed to the reader after that? The reader can cache the change so if the user hits reload they get the most recent cache rather than hitting the server again.
Borrowing ideas is not "stealing." For christ's sake, the whole point of making your ideas public is so that they will be "borrowed" in this way, so that they will influence other people who will hopefully use those ideas to form new ones. I doubt Steve Albini complained a bit about Courtney "borrowing" his idea here, and it isn't his idea anyway; it's his description of the reality that is the music industry -- and it's a reality that is confirmed by just about everyone who participates in it. Courtney, as fucked up as she is, did not pretend this was her original idea, and who cares? The point is she made public from within the industry an important point of view. That Steve Albini had the same thoughts 10 years earlier is beside the point. If I suggest that a free press is important, are you going to give me shit about "borrowing" Thomas Jefferson's ideas?
OK, can you please "whip up a little shell script" that will automate the process of physically moving the next slide to the scanner, taking the old one off, and putting it away?
While you're at it, please show me how to use the "find" command to find my car keys....
Slashdot Mirror
that - or something similar - is quite possibly the actual goal of the assignment.
This is false.
We sleep with our students because they're just so damn sexy in their cute little spring wardrobes.
(I'm joking, I'm joking; stop slapping me with that trout already!)
Let me get this straight -- you think your grade should only reflect your understanding of the assignment? So an "A" means "understood the assignment outstandingly" or something?
I agree with the general attitude you express that this was a hard (and perhaps impossible) assignment, but your grades should reflect your performance on the assignment, not just whether you were smart enough to understand it.
I've always had a problem with this sort of behavior in college profs -- it gets away from what I consider to be the basic nature of higher education. As a student, I'm the consumer. I'm paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information at the end of the class
Well there's your problem right there. If you think the "basic nature of higher education" is about treating the student as a consumer in the service industry, you really don't belong in higher education.
If you must look at it strictly as a commercial transaction -- and you're certainly entitled to; after all, it is your money -- then I suggest you leave the professor out of it. You're not "paying the professor to teach me what he/she knows and then to rate how well I've absorbed that information" -- in fact, you're not paying the professor at all. The professor is paid by the university and his or her contract says nothing about rating your "absorption" of information like a scientist testing the nitrogen content of soil. You're paying the university to provide the bureaucratic and physical infrastructure for something like "education" to take place. This includes the creation of departments, etc., and of course the hiring of professors.
I'm not suggesting you should just take whatever professors you get without whining about the lousy ones, but I don't think it's legitimate at all to characterize the educational process as a kind of commercial transaction and to make the student's relationship with a teacher the kind of relationship that say a customer in a restaurant has with a waitress or waiter. Students like you remind me of cranky customers in restaurants who call the manager over and try to get the waitress fired because they didn't like her attitude. It's even more sad when the student's complaint about the teacher is that they are doing their job of challenging you a little too well -- that their classes are too difficult or their assignments require too much thinking.
Your complaint about teachers who don't show up to class is another point entirely -- a professor's contract with the university certainly does stipulate that they will attend their classes - though not perhaps in so many words - and it is certainly legitimate for a student to worry that they are wasting their money if their classes don't even meet. Again though I would make the same case on educational grounds rather than commercial grounds. If you can't tell by now, I really hate this metaphor of the university as some kind of service industry enterprise.
Anyway, I doubt this professor will fail the whole class, and it sounds to me like an almost impossible assignment, but I don't know anything about finding security holes in anything, so I wouldn't presume to make a judgement about that.
True ... but we wouldn't be in that situation if universities were still buying hardcopies of things. I don't mind the shift to electronic forms of publication (though I don't want it to completely replace print), but it doesn't make sense to make the shift if you're not actually gaining capabilities. I think the university libraries have talked themselves into buying the worst of both worlds -- more expensive access to crippled forms of publication. Of course, I would not want us to go backwards here and not get the electronic pubs, but it's frustrating to know what the capabilities of technology are and see it intentionally crippled.
Four letters.
So don't. Somehow, I think the rest of us will get by.
Actually, your advisor just sent us a review essay for the Journal of Human Weirdness... ;)
There isn't a good, quick, easy solution to this, and anyone who says that there is needs to have their head checked. Sorry.
I didn't say there was an easy solution. The only thing that would make it easy is eliminating the element of greed. This is human social and intellectual progress we're talking about, no matter what field you're in, and it is short-sighted to put access to that progress in the hands of institutions who only answer to the bottom line. I understand they have to make a living, and I understand that a certain level of greed is integral to human nature, but it is incumbent upon those who are led by things other than greed -- e.g. professional organizations and editorial boards -- to take a more active role in making sure the work is more easily disseminated.
I just joined the publication staff of a journal in my field (not Human Weirdness) and when the idea of making the journal accessible online came up in a meeting, everyone was in favor of it. Yet the only online version that had been available up till that point was a crippled JSTOR version -- gifs of scans of bad photocopies of the paper journal. The desire to see it made more available was there but up until this point nobody had pressured the publishing company to make a real pdf available. I'm not sure how the publishing company will respond when we press them on this point (and the goal of the journal is now to be available in html too) but I do know how they will respond if nobody presses the issue....
As for fulltext articles, try JSTOR if you want to see how to do it wrong. Page by page in gif format, and some huge pdfs with all pictures and no ability to process text. Useless!! Yes you can print it out but then I'd just as soon get the hardcopy in the first place.
One where you can plug in a mini plug rather than rely on a crappy mic from belkin? Then you could record from a real mic, or from a keyboard, or from a mixing board, anywhere you go. Now that would be something really useful. A dictaphone is nice, but when you have all that hard drive space it is a shame not to be able to use it as a real recording device.
He means just books and such. It's not fair counting umbrellas.
How many Libraries of Congress is it?
No; the reason there are so few copies is there are so few people who want to read specialized journals. And the small audience only accounts for a small part of what many academic journals charge.
No; the problem is not overhead costs or small audiences. The problem is that the owners of much of that kind of content are greedy bastards. There is no reason for the outrageous price of some journals. Some scientific journal subscriptions are in the tens of thousands; even many liberal arts journals are far from cheap. And if you want to copy an article for your students to buy at kinkos, expect them to pay 35 cents a page or more for the copyrights alone.
And many of them are worse than the RIAA in terms of access to content electronically. Journal articles are included in databases sold to some universities You can read articles in some databases but only by loading a .gif of every page one at a time. No copy and paste, no text access at all. So much technology going into preventing the thing from being copied that the online version is actually less useful than the dead tree version rotting on the shelf.
I think this is a great move by Google and Harvard, and I like the idea behind google scholar, but I expect this kind of work to be resisted by many of journals and professional organizations, to the extent that they have in a say in it. This will be a huge boon in terms of the availability of public domain resources, but unfortunately outdated perspectives on intellectual property are likely to hold back real progress for something really useful to scholars in a systematic way. At least until those perspectives change significantly.
Perhaps, but not before MacOS 9, or actually 7.5.3 if I remember correctly (which I'm sure I don't....) In any case, videoconferencing was possible using C-U-C-Me or whatever on old versions of MacOS prior to OS X.
when to expect the OS X version.
Better hope it doesn't start raining while you're down there....
Your examples of bias don't wash. There were negative stories about Arnold during the recall because the story of the democratic process being hijacked by an action movie star who refused to even discuss his political positions publicly was big news! The groping scandal was stupid, but the stories were true and credible, and the LA Times would have been foolish to ignore them. If you want to look at bias during the recall campaign, look at the free ride Arnold got in the electronic media, some of whom even ran the movie "Total Recall" in the leadup to the election.
As others have pointed out, your comments about bias are just stupid, and your link to the Tibet site is nonsensical. The Abu Ghraib story was huge and important news. Stories about Saddam Hussein's torture were perhaps newsworthy when they broke, during the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were covered by all the papers mentioned during that time (including front-page coverage). But obviously stories that involve Americans are considered more newsworthy by American papers.
It's really good; taste a little like bald eagle.
As they say, of course it does. It all depends on how you define toaster.
Following along the same line of reasoning, why not have the RSS reader send one request, and then changes are pushed to the reader after that? The reader can cache the change so if the user hits reload they get the most recent cache rather than hitting the server again.
Isn't that your explorer over there parked on top of that pile of dead baby seals?
For twenty gigs of storage? And people said my iPod was expensive.
Borrowing ideas is not "stealing." For christ's sake, the whole point of making your ideas public is so that they will be "borrowed" in this way, so that they will influence other people who will hopefully use those ideas to form new ones. I doubt Steve Albini complained a bit about Courtney "borrowing" his idea here, and it isn't his idea anyway; it's his description of the reality that is the music industry -- and it's a reality that is confirmed by just about everyone who participates in it. Courtney, as fucked up as she is, did not pretend this was her original idea, and who cares? The point is she made public from within the industry an important point of view. That Steve Albini had the same thoughts 10 years earlier is beside the point. If I suggest that a free press is important, are you going to give me shit about "borrowing" Thomas Jefferson's ideas?
While you're at it, please show me how to use the "find" command to find my car keys....
But you are old, right?