I think the best way to make the boarding go faster would be to make the waiting room mirror the plane. Have all your seats assigned, and then when they call out the sections, you're already in order.
These changes are not of trivial importance to airlines. Saving 30 seconds on each flight adds up very quickly.
PS While I'm on the topic of things someone should do: Farecast.com or Sidestep.com should add in an environmental impact estimate to each flight, so when you're buying a flight, you can compare the environmental impact of a multi-leg flight with one that goes directly.
My wife, a research librarian, attended a conference last week where Professor Groom presented on this topic.
What she found interesting were a couple of points:
The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.
The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.
Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.
She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.
She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.
She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.
Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.
Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.
Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.
Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?
So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia today:)
Just because someone has switched doesn't change my essential argument that there are tradeoffs. I'm very familiar with the guy who switched, and what he says the benefits are.
The demos I've seen of RoR are very impressive, but I think web frameworks take a long long time to mature. You'll be able to do lots of fun things with RoR, and in a couple of years it may be a great platform, but compare it to a more mature platform, and you'll see there are tradeoffs.
See What is OpenACS for an example of a web framework that's been around for about a decade, has had millions of dollars spent on its development, and can do almost anything you want. The downside to something like OpenACS is it is more complicated and there is definitely more cruft.
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These changes are not of trivial importance to airlines. Saving 30 seconds on each flight adds up very quickly.
PS While I'm on the topic of things someone should do: Farecast.com or Sidestep.com should add in an environmental impact estimate to each flight, so when you're buying a flight, you can compare the environmental impact of a multi-leg flight with one that goes directly.
- The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.
- The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.
- Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.
- She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.
- She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.
- She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.
- Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.
- Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.
- Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.
- Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?
So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia todayJust because someone has switched doesn't change my essential argument that there are tradeoffs. I'm very familiar with the guy who switched, and what he says the benefits are.
See What is OpenACS for an example of a web framework that's been around for about a decade, has had millions of dollars spent on its development, and can do almost anything you want. The downside to something like OpenACS is it is more complicated and there is definitely more cruft.