As a prof, this is what I do. Files with the outline of the class and topic are available a few days beforehand and most students bring them to class as a print-out or just saved on their computers.
Some colleagues are aghast that I'm "encouraging students not to come to class" by circulating notes ahead of time. Balderdash! I let the students know that there's "value added" in the classroom session, quite literally. Neither the textbook (one of the best on the subject but with its own idiosyncrasies) nor the notes will give anyone the full picture. Nor would coming to class having not done the readings!
As long as students aren't annoying others around them in the crowded classroom by playing games or movie files with distracting animation effects, I don't really mind if they're "off topic" for a bit -- everyone is at some point, whether armed with clay and stylus, pen and paper or laptop and keyboard.
The update has been pushing this software for days -- my twelve-year old called me to the family PC last week to ask about the update install. If I hadn't trained her well, she would have assumed it was okay since she knows we have Apple's Quicktime installed (and the update cleverly bundles Quicktime with iTunes, which I don't want on any computer, especially one with a nearly-full HD).
I hadn't looked into the iPhone configuration part though, like the blogger mentioned, I was irked since there's never been anything like an iPhone in this house. Knowing now what was involved, I'm glad we dodged that bullet!
This whole experience goes to show that corporations can all fall into traps of not thinking or knowing what one part's doing and not really caring until someone makes enough noise to get their attention. I don't trust Apple anymore than I trust Microsoft. Nor should anyone blindly trust these corporations: they don't have your best interests at heart!
How many of the books that they're pulping are actually available out there with no additional cost? Not that many. This school will either be putting out a lot of money to license content in the digital format(s) that it previously owned in print or their students will learn the joy of researching from "snippet" view in Google Books.
Project Gutenberg and various free sources are good enough for accessing some pre-copyright books but, honestly, even as a researcher who specializes in 16th century books, it's hardly a drop in the bucket. Most of those 16th century books aren't freely available online but scanned as part of a wonderful but pricey subscription service (Early English Books Online). Not to mention that a lot of the freely-available Victorian editions are error-ridden or almost illegible.
And what of scholarship since the 1920s? Sure, there's the California Open Source Textbook Project and other similar endeavours. Haven't really gotten them all robustly off the ground and it doesn't help students who're looking for current scholarship on topic A when all we have are textbook-level summaries of B and C.
I know a lot of students like the idea of reading books online but very few of them are truly happy with what's out there so far. If there's no money for OCR conversion, you have a lot of scans in PDF or image format, sometimes dauntingly grainy. Even Google Books at its best has a hard time identifying the index properly in open-access books so have fun trying to look up your subjects in these multi-volume early twentieth century reference works which is what you have on hand. Or just give up and say that Wikipedia will be the default resource for everyone's research (but don't be surprised when your students complain that not all of their university professors agree with this approach!).
What's wrong with having a bit more of a learning commons feeling and some more carrels while still keeping most of the books? Do a shelf-read (your librarians do know what that practice is, I hope!), and cull out those "Personal Computing and You" volumes from 1998 (unless you're running a historical archive of the computing community). But, for the love of Pete!, don't get rid of all the books. The students won't be thanking you as they realize you still expect them to read and research but you're hamstringing them at the same time.
Note: I have one of my four Windows boxes running Vista at present.
I bought a new machine this spring and accepted Vista. The 64-bit version with updates works very well and I'm happy that I am running Vista as it now exists. A bit irked that I couldn't find a Vista driver for my old office HP printer (no problem -- I gave that printer to the kid who inherited the old XP machine and got a new one for myself which I'd been meaning to do for a while) but nothing horrid. Still, there wasn't a single compelling feature in Vista that would have made me install it on my previous PC.
Microsoft badly bumbled the release of Vista, bringing it out buggy and without much driver support. I remember when Vista rolled out on "Vista-ready" systems that were anything but! I remember the failure of many mission-critical software packages to run on the new OS. Microsoft has blown the "instant update your OS" goodwill that it enjoyed in the old Windows 95 day. I still see Apple users rush out to update their OS versions quickly but not so much with Microsoft users. And I can't blame them because I clung to XP for a good long while and my workplace, like many, remains an XP environment.
Sure, Windows users might appreciate some elements of the Vista OS but what we'll appreciate more in our memories of Vista was not having to upgrade right away when the OS made its debut.
Some colleges and universities are preferentially offering more admission spots to male candidates than otherwise they would. Why? In order to redress the gender imbalance that's seeing fewer men than women enroll. (See this article from 2007 in US News & World Report.)
As an academic and someone who advocates wide access to all sorts of education, I want to see everyone have a chance to study for what they want to and can manage, men and women.
And someone who took stats to a graduate level and read TFA will respond with this quotation from TFA:
Mertz and Hyde looked for evidence of this imbalance - more boys than girls at the extremes of math ability - in international data, too. Again, they found that in some countries as many girls as boys score above the 99th percentile, and in others more girls than boys are extreme math dunces or math geniuses. In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
Furthermore, in T(Actual)FA about which TFA reports, I read the following:
Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. (Hyde and Mertz, PNAS June 2, 2009 vol. 106 no. 22, 8803)
In other words, statistical measurement shows that what you're seeing in the performance differences between men and women in mathematics are not innate differences but culturally-mediated differences. Same goes for the ability in language, verbal expression or other acquired skills, I would argue. Women aren't innately better communicators or writers. We're just kind of herded that way, as a group. Young women are, from very early on, acculturated to those skill sets seen as appropriately feminine. Young men are supported to learn and behave in ways that are considered appropriately manly. This socialization begins very early and extends quite a ways into the life-cycle.
The article doesn't talk about the Kindle's other technological back doors at all, so colour me disappointed.
Still, as a parent of an autistic child, I know how valuable the TTS function can be in our computer programs. As an author, I'm saddened that Amazon's rolled over on this for the publishers' and Author's Guild panic. TTS is not the same as an audiobook performance, nor does it have that possibility any time soon.
I used that quote as the title of my farewell email when I was let go from a dotcom in 2001. Sadly, most of the people there were too culturally unenlightened to recognize the reference.
I do something like that, teaching history: making a corollary list available for students who're stuck with an older edition of what pages I'd assigned in previous iterations of the course.
It's not perfect. Some chapters are entirely missing from new editions as new interpretative themes replace old ones: others get chopped up and reorganized. History does change over time (maybe not as much as the publishers would like, but still!)
History doesn't use problem sets, but illustrative primary sources or interpretative essays change from one edition to another. It's not fun for the student who's using the 4th edition to realize that none of the tutorial readings for this week from the 6th edition are in her copy.
Finally, what and how I teach changes. Last year I taught the second half of Western Civ for the first time in years and decided to put much more emphasis on the rise and influence of Social Darwinism and eugenics. I couldn't tell you what pages in the older editions corresponded to this theme since I wasn't pulling it out in such a detailed fashion.
Good comment! Many of those fandom encyclopedias were licensed (such as the Star Wars stuff, all carefully controlled by Lucasfilm) or are dealing with work that's no longer in copyright though study guides are a whole different kettle of fish from encyclopedias. (Note of interest -- while Frank Herbert apparently approved of The Dune Encyclopedia's publication, he never endorsed it and the ongoing Dune novels have now parted ways with the universe as represented in McNelly's reference work.
A study guide such as those produced through Cliff Notes includes summaries of plot and characterization but adds to it other material dealing with the critical reception of the work and major analytic themes. The latter part would lend more weight toward considering those works as having sufficient original or transformative content. From what I've seen at the Justia site for the trial, it seems as if there's less that 3% of what could be considered original content in the proposed lexicon.
Well, Anne Rice is the epitome of suckiness. Which is what makes the whole "commentary by other authors" such meet fodder for fandom_wank.
Really, the precedent of the Castle Rock case seems like it'll be what nails RDR's case to the cross. They're not adding original content or commentary, but simply marshalling a lot of quotes and a little organization of biographical and other entries. To suggest it's a transformative work of some sort is a stretch.
As an academic who's written critical works on contemporary media, I'm all for fair use and the freedom for fans or opponents to employ some material in their own work. But that isn't what this proposed Lexicon is, in truth.
This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case: copying fragments of the work.
More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).
The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)
As any first-year college student can tell you, an encyclopedia is not meant to be an authoritative source, nor can it be used a primary source in a properly-written research paper.
You obviously haven't met my first year students many of whom, even after being directly instructed to not use anonymous websites, general-interest encyclopedias and the like, will still preferentially cite from Wikipedia. There's a tendency to uncritically receive information presented on the internet, particularly when presented in a fairly straightforward fashion (as it is in most Wikipedia articles). It's familiar, it's ranked high in search engine results for most research terms and it's tempting.
Teaching students why Wikipedia is not suitable for university-level research is difficult because they're using it a lot in the K-12 system. As the parent of a grade-schooler, I'm taken aback by teachers' blithe referral to Wikipedia as the recommended resource for most research assignments. I've been as disturbed with the earlier tendency to only using Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta.
As a professor, I'm inundated with unrequested "examination copies" of textbooks (oftentimes irrelevant for the subfields I teach). Nowadays these same annoying shipments come with specially printed covers outlining all the restrictions on what I can do with the books I didn't request and don't want.
Preferentially, I'll do the rep's work for them and give the book to a professor who might actually find it useful. If there are no takers, I'll dump the books near the grad students' office and offer them first dibs. And, generally speaking, I won't adopt other books from those publishers because I know they're racking up huge bills with these unnecessary promotions and special printings that end up being reflected in the insane costs of textbooks (particularly those for introductory level courses).
Two of my four current computers are Dell (they'd all four be except for I have one current and one retired work computer that I was required to buy from IBM) and what I loved from Dell was the ability to customize. I never see a standard configuration with the video card and RAM that I need (yet I don't want to spend a premium on Alienware with that funky desktop grill which has the added ability to give my two kids nightmares).
I can understand the economizing aspects, but I really think that Dell's going down the wrong road, abandoning what made it stand out from competitors and, instead, trying to beat HP and others by adopting their selling strategies.
The university for which I worked promised an "advanced" email workshop. Thinking that I might learn something halfway interesting or useful about the filing system or filtering or whatever, I signed up. After all, I act as my department's tech rep and have to keep up on things in order to counsel my colleagues!
So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.
I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.
Comcast/= all cable internet service
Verizon/= all fibre optic service
Until you can understand that a one-off comparison of apples and oranges (the technical promise of Verizon's very small roll-out versus the customer service dissatisfaction with a major broadband offering out of Comcast) doesn't equate to a rigorous comparison of the two technologies OR the overall future of the two companies in their broadband offerings?
You've been had by your own computer -- sounds like you've got mp3s set up to default play via iTunes, there. Uninstall iTunes from your computer and set up something else as your default mp3 player. There are lots of choices (like JetAudio or Winamp or whatever's your choice).
I bought the album as part of my monthly eMusic subscription, downloaded it as I always do using the eMusic downloader and played both the preview and the files without a problem. Never a whiff of that annoying iTunes software on my computer!
My heart goes out to this young man and his family for the crazy response of the local police and school board. It's particularly maddening as studies have shown that zero tolerance and suspension-happy school administrators aren't making our schools safer. For instance:
Defenders of the [zero tolerance]
policies point to the larger threat posed by serious violence in our nation's schools, suggesting that civil rights violations may be an unfortunate but necessary compromise to ensure the safety of school environments.
Unfortunately, however, this latter argument is made somewhat moot by the almost complete lack
of documentation linking zero tolerance with improved school safety. Despite more than ten years
of implementation, there have been only a handful of studies evaluating the outcomes of security measures. Of these, only school uniform research appears to have enough support to be considered even promising in contributing to perceptions of safer school environments. The most extensive studies (Heaviside et al., 1998; Mayer & Leone, 1999) suggest a negative relationship between school security measures and school safety.
From "Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice" by Russel Skiba, Indiana Educational Policy Center, August 2000 PDF report link
It is well established that most women in the US do not make decisions based on logic
Oh, really? The same can be said of most men. They just like to claim that their decisions were logical and brand a female's decisions as irrational. The rest of your comment reads rather like the comments of a 19th century misogynist who is sure that women are something other than human.
The original article is simply suggesting a new spin on recruitment. Instead of admitting people to the program based heavily on their previous programming experience, recruit students (male and female) with the scholarly ability and interest in doing something with the CS education. Since many high schools don't offer a full range of CS courses, this also would probably level the playing field for many prospects.
It would be interesting to look at the numbers and see exactly how much previous programming experience is a predictor of success in CS. I know that in many university-level disciplines, previous experience breeds a cocky attitude amongst students who feel they don't have to do the freshman-level work and are outraged when they fail for not taking the quizzes or completing the projects. I wouldn't say that previous programming experience was a hindrance, but by putting a heavy emphasis on this in admissions, the program people might have been overlooking more compelling factors for success.
My work has a system where any emails in the inbox more than six months old are automatically deleted. So if you really want to keep something, you archive it promptly to ensure it doesn't disappear. Or, judging from the behaviour of some colleagues, you mourn the loss in dramatic terms, stamping up and down the hallways, muttering imprecations against the IT department.
I don't think she implied she was doing all the household work, just that she was keeping up with it. I, too, am the primary breadwinner in our household but we both work outside the home as well as doing chores in our free time (add in two kids and two dogs for more responsibility and fun). It's neither fair nor fun to drop all of the household chores upon one partner, whatever their income!
As others have said, this much training is usually picked up by the company. I wonder if your employers don't understand how much of a leap this is: after all, isn't this all just Microsoft which you know already? (I know, I know -- put yourself in a tech-unsavvy mindset, however.) If you point up how much training is usually required to admin this and list out some of the alternatives (they pay for the support from Microsoft; they get you to get the training; they pay for another system), they'll hopefully come around. Either that, or you know it's time to send out those resumes!
Bear McCreary put together a great soundtrack for season one that will be released to stores in June. You can listen to samples on his site or on the record company promo page.
Slashdot Mirror
As a prof, this is what I do. Files with the outline of the class and topic are available a few days beforehand and most students bring them to class as a print-out or just saved on their computers.
Some colleagues are aghast that I'm "encouraging students not to come to class" by circulating notes ahead of time. Balderdash! I let the students know that there's "value added" in the classroom session, quite literally. Neither the textbook (one of the best on the subject but with its own idiosyncrasies) nor the notes will give anyone the full picture. Nor would coming to class having not done the readings!
As long as students aren't annoying others around them in the crowded classroom by playing games or movie files with distracting animation effects, I don't really mind if they're "off topic" for a bit -- everyone is at some point, whether armed with clay and stylus, pen and paper or laptop and keyboard.
The update has been pushing this software for days -- my twelve-year old called me to the family PC last week to ask about the update install. If I hadn't trained her well, she would have assumed it was okay since she knows we have Apple's Quicktime installed (and the update cleverly bundles Quicktime with iTunes, which I don't want on any computer, especially one with a nearly-full HD).
I hadn't looked into the iPhone configuration part though, like the blogger mentioned, I was irked since there's never been anything like an iPhone in this house. Knowing now what was involved, I'm glad we dodged that bullet!
This whole experience goes to show that corporations can all fall into traps of not thinking or knowing what one part's doing and not really caring until someone makes enough noise to get their attention. I don't trust Apple anymore than I trust Microsoft. Nor should anyone blindly trust these corporations: they don't have your best interests at heart!
How many of the books that they're pulping are actually available out there with no additional cost? Not that many. This school will either be putting out a lot of money to license content in the digital format(s) that it previously owned in print or their students will learn the joy of researching from "snippet" view in Google Books.
Project Gutenberg and various free sources are good enough for accessing some pre-copyright books but, honestly, even as a researcher who specializes in 16th century books, it's hardly a drop in the bucket. Most of those 16th century books aren't freely available online but scanned as part of a wonderful but pricey subscription service (Early English Books Online). Not to mention that a lot of the freely-available Victorian editions are error-ridden or almost illegible.
And what of scholarship since the 1920s? Sure, there's the California Open Source Textbook Project and other similar endeavours. Haven't really gotten them all robustly off the ground and it doesn't help students who're looking for current scholarship on topic A when all we have are textbook-level summaries of B and C.
I know a lot of students like the idea of reading books online but very few of them are truly happy with what's out there so far. If there's no money for OCR conversion, you have a lot of scans in PDF or image format, sometimes dauntingly grainy. Even Google Books at its best has a hard time identifying the index properly in open-access books so have fun trying to look up your subjects in these multi-volume early twentieth century reference works which is what you have on hand. Or just give up and say that Wikipedia will be the default resource for everyone's research (but don't be surprised when your students complain that not all of their university professors agree with this approach!).
What's wrong with having a bit more of a learning commons feeling and some more carrels while still keeping most of the books? Do a shelf-read (your librarians do know what that practice is, I hope!), and cull out those "Personal Computing and You" volumes from 1998 (unless you're running a historical archive of the computing community). But, for the love of Pete!, don't get rid of all the books. The students won't be thanking you as they realize you still expect them to read and research but you're hamstringing them at the same time.
Note: I have one of my four Windows boxes running Vista at present.
I bought a new machine this spring and accepted Vista. The 64-bit version with updates works very well and I'm happy that I am running Vista as it now exists. A bit irked that I couldn't find a Vista driver for my old office HP printer (no problem -- I gave that printer to the kid who inherited the old XP machine and got a new one for myself which I'd been meaning to do for a while) but nothing horrid. Still, there wasn't a single compelling feature in Vista that would have made me install it on my previous PC.
Microsoft badly bumbled the release of Vista, bringing it out buggy and without much driver support. I remember when Vista rolled out on "Vista-ready" systems that were anything but! I remember the failure of many mission-critical software packages to run on the new OS. Microsoft has blown the "instant update your OS" goodwill that it enjoyed in the old Windows 95 day. I still see Apple users rush out to update their OS versions quickly but not so much with Microsoft users. And I can't blame them because I clung to XP for a good long while and my workplace, like many, remains an XP environment.
Sure, Windows users might appreciate some elements of the Vista OS but what we'll appreciate more in our memories of Vista was not having to upgrade right away when the OS made its debut.
Some colleges and universities are preferentially offering more admission spots to male candidates than otherwise they would. Why? In order to redress the gender imbalance that's seeing fewer men than women enroll. (See this article from 2007 in US News & World Report.)
Last month also saw the 2nd Conference on College Men which also dealt with some of these concerns.
As an academic and someone who advocates wide access to all sorts of education, I want to see everyone have a chance to study for what they want to and can manage, men and women.
And someone who took stats to a graduate level and read TFA will respond with this quotation from TFA:
Mertz and Hyde looked for evidence of this imbalance - more boys than girls at the extremes of math ability - in international data, too. Again, they found that in some countries as many girls as boys score above the 99th percentile, and in others more girls than boys are extreme math dunces or math geniuses. In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
Furthermore, in T(Actual)FA about which TFA reports, I read the following:
Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. (Hyde and Mertz, PNAS June 2, 2009 vol. 106 no. 22, 8803)
In other words, statistical measurement shows that what you're seeing in the performance differences between men and women in mathematics are not innate differences but culturally-mediated differences. Same goes for the ability in language, verbal expression or other acquired skills, I would argue. Women aren't innately better communicators or writers. We're just kind of herded that way, as a group. Young women are, from very early on, acculturated to those skill sets seen as appropriately feminine. Young men are supported to learn and behave in ways that are considered appropriately manly. This socialization begins very early and extends quite a ways into the life-cycle.
The article doesn't talk about the Kindle's other technological back doors at all, so colour me disappointed.
Still, as a parent of an autistic child, I know how valuable the TTS function can be in our computer programs. As an author, I'm saddened that Amazon's rolled over on this for the publishers' and Author's Guild panic. TTS is not the same as an audiobook performance, nor does it have that possibility any time soon.
I used that quote as the title of my farewell email when I was let go from a dotcom in 2001. Sadly, most of the people there were too culturally unenlightened to recognize the reference.
I do something like that, teaching history: making a corollary list available for students who're stuck with an older edition of what pages I'd assigned in previous iterations of the course.
It's not perfect. Some chapters are entirely missing from new editions as new interpretative themes replace old ones: others get chopped up and reorganized. History does change over time (maybe not as much as the publishers would like, but still!)
History doesn't use problem sets, but illustrative primary sources or interpretative essays change from one edition to another. It's not fun for the student who's using the 4th edition to realize that none of the tutorial readings for this week from the 6th edition are in her copy.
Finally, what and how I teach changes. Last year I taught the second half of Western Civ for the first time in years and decided to put much more emphasis on the rise and influence of Social Darwinism and eugenics. I couldn't tell you what pages in the older editions corresponded to this theme since I wasn't pulling it out in such a detailed fashion.
Good comment! Many of those fandom encyclopedias were licensed (such as the Star Wars stuff, all carefully controlled by Lucasfilm) or are dealing with work that's no longer in copyright though study guides are a whole different kettle of fish from encyclopedias. (Note of interest -- while Frank Herbert apparently approved of The Dune Encyclopedia's publication, he never endorsed it and the ongoing Dune novels have now parted ways with the universe as represented in McNelly's reference work.
A study guide such as those produced through Cliff Notes includes summaries of plot and characterization but adds to it other material dealing with the critical reception of the work and major analytic themes. The latter part would lend more weight toward considering those works as having sufficient original or transformative content. From what I've seen at the Justia site for the trial, it seems as if there's less that 3% of what could be considered original content in the proposed lexicon.
Well, Anne Rice is the epitome of suckiness. Which is what makes the whole "commentary by other authors" such meet fodder for fandom_wank.
Really, the precedent of the Castle Rock case seems like it'll be what nails RDR's case to the cross. They're not adding original content or commentary, but simply marshalling a lot of quotes and a little organization of biographical and other entries. To suggest it's a transformative work of some sort is a stretch.
As an academic who's written critical works on contemporary media, I'm all for fair use and the freedom for fans or opponents to employ some material in their own work. But that isn't what this proposed Lexicon is, in truth.
This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case: copying fragments of the work.
More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).
The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)
As any first-year college student can tell you, an encyclopedia is not meant to be an authoritative source, nor can it be used a primary source in a properly-written research paper.
You obviously haven't met my first year students many of whom, even after being directly instructed to not use anonymous websites, general-interest encyclopedias and the like, will still preferentially cite from Wikipedia. There's a tendency to uncritically receive information presented on the internet, particularly when presented in a fairly straightforward fashion (as it is in most Wikipedia articles). It's familiar, it's ranked high in search engine results for most research terms and it's tempting.
Teaching students why Wikipedia is not suitable for university-level research is difficult because they're using it a lot in the K-12 system. As the parent of a grade-schooler, I'm taken aback by teachers' blithe referral to Wikipedia as the recommended resource for most research assignments. I've been as disturbed with the earlier tendency to only using Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta.
As a professor, I'm inundated with unrequested "examination copies" of textbooks (oftentimes irrelevant for the subfields I teach). Nowadays these same annoying shipments come with specially printed covers outlining all the restrictions on what I can do with the books I didn't request and don't want.
Preferentially, I'll do the rep's work for them and give the book to a professor who might actually find it useful. If there are no takers, I'll dump the books near the grad students' office and offer them first dibs. And, generally speaking, I won't adopt other books from those publishers because I know they're racking up huge bills with these unnecessary promotions and special printings that end up being reflected in the insane costs of textbooks (particularly those for introductory level courses).
Two of my four current computers are Dell (they'd all four be except for I have one current and one retired work computer that I was required to buy from IBM) and what I loved from Dell was the ability to customize. I never see a standard configuration with the video card and RAM that I need (yet I don't want to spend a premium on Alienware with that funky desktop grill which has the added ability to give my two kids nightmares).
I can understand the economizing aspects, but I really think that Dell's going down the wrong road, abandoning what made it stand out from competitors and, instead, trying to beat HP and others by adopting their selling strategies.
The university for which I worked promised an "advanced" email workshop. Thinking that I might learn something halfway interesting or useful about the filing system or filtering or whatever, I signed up. After all, I act as my department's tech rep and have to keep up on things in order to counsel my colleagues!
So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.
I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.
Comcast /= all cable internet service /= all fibre optic service
Verizon
Until you can understand that a one-off comparison of apples and oranges (the technical promise of Verizon's very small roll-out versus the customer service dissatisfaction with a major broadband offering out of Comcast) doesn't equate to a rigorous comparison of the two technologies OR the overall future of the two companies in their broadband offerings?
*yawn*
They're working on a new version of the manager that runs Linux: http://developer.emusic.com/ and I know that there's also a Python eMusic, Dromanova, that's getting rave reviews and can be downloaded here: http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/?p=97
You've been had by your own computer -- sounds like you've got mp3s set up to default play via iTunes, there. Uninstall iTunes from your computer and set up something else as your default mp3 player. There are lots of choices (like JetAudio or Winamp or whatever's your choice).
I bought the album as part of my monthly eMusic subscription, downloaded it as I always do using the eMusic downloader and played both the preview and the files without a problem. Never a whiff of that annoying iTunes software on my computer!
My heart goes out to this young man and his family for the crazy response of the local police and school board. It's particularly maddening as studies have shown that zero tolerance and suspension-happy school administrators aren't making our schools safer. For instance:
Defenders of the [zero tolerance] policies point to the larger threat posed by serious violence in our nation's schools, suggesting that civil rights violations may be an unfortunate but necessary compromise to ensure the safety of school environments.
Unfortunately, however, this latter argument is made somewhat moot by the almost complete lack of documentation linking zero tolerance with improved school safety. Despite more than ten years of implementation, there have been only a handful of studies evaluating the outcomes of security measures. Of these, only school uniform research appears to have enough support to be considered even promising in contributing to perceptions of safer school environments. The most extensive studies (Heaviside et al., 1998; Mayer & Leone, 1999) suggest a negative relationship between school security measures and school safety.
From "Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice" by Russel Skiba, Indiana Educational Policy Center, August 2000 PDF report link
It is well established that most women in the US do not make decisions based on logic
Oh, really? The same can be said of most men. They just like to claim that their decisions were logical and brand a female's decisions as irrational. The rest of your comment reads rather like the comments of a 19th century misogynist who is sure that women are something other than human.
The original article is simply suggesting a new spin on recruitment. Instead of admitting people to the program based heavily on their previous programming experience, recruit students (male and female) with the scholarly ability and interest in doing something with the CS education. Since many high schools don't offer a full range of CS courses, this also would probably level the playing field for many prospects.
It would be interesting to look at the numbers and see exactly how much previous programming experience is a predictor of success in CS. I know that in many university-level disciplines, previous experience breeds a cocky attitude amongst students who feel they don't have to do the freshman-level work and are outraged when they fail for not taking the quizzes or completing the projects. I wouldn't say that previous programming experience was a hindrance, but by putting a heavy emphasis on this in admissions, the program people might have been overlooking more compelling factors for success.
My work has a system where any emails in the inbox more than six months old are automatically deleted. So if you really want to keep something, you archive it promptly to ensure it doesn't disappear. Or, judging from the behaviour of some colleagues, you mourn the loss in dramatic terms, stamping up and down the hallways, muttering imprecations against the IT department.
I don't think she implied she was doing all the household work, just that she was keeping up with it. I, too, am the primary breadwinner in our household but we both work outside the home as well as doing chores in our free time (add in two kids and two dogs for more responsibility and fun). It's neither fair nor fun to drop all of the household chores upon one partner, whatever their income!
As others have said, this much training is usually picked up by the company. I wonder if your employers don't understand how much of a leap this is: after all, isn't this all just Microsoft which you know already? (I know, I know -- put yourself in a tech-unsavvy mindset, however.) If you point up how much training is usually required to admin this and list out some of the alternatives (they pay for the support from Microsoft; they get you to get the training; they pay for another system), they'll hopefully come around. Either that, or you know it's time to send out those resumes!
Bear McCreary put together a great soundtrack for season one that will be released to stores in June. You can listen to samples on his site or on the record company promo page.
If you're talking about the character portrayed by Edward James Olmos. That's Commander Adama.
Captain Adama's his Viper pilot son, aka Apollo. Check out the character list over at Scifi.