I agree 100% on the age figures. Of course, my comment was a diplomatic response to the GGP post who argued "by college age the students are NOT adults and CANNOT make their own decision", which is off-calibrated by about a full decade.

I might argue that a student texting is pretty low-impact on other students in the room; say, equivalent to doodling on notebook paper. Compared to the possibility of disruption by striking up social conversations, perhaps texting is actually an improvement.

Do your classes have mandatory/scored attendance? I don't, and so that opens the pipe to truly-disinclined students to simply not be there at all, and fail on the tests like they were going to anyway. I've found in the last year that I've had much higher levels of discussion, and very enjoyable interactions, even in my remedial classes with the half of the students that are actually motivated to come to class and get engaged with the subject (irrespective of having cell phones accessible).

Good anecdote, thank you for that.

You need to come visit Earth in the 21st Century sometime. At least among the college students I teach:

- College is the time to practice, exercise, and test out being an adult. Yes it's fundamentally a safer and lower-impact space than elsewhere. If there are some failures along they way then they can recover and be used as learning experiences.

- Students are not having educations paid for by mommy and daddy; mommy and daddy are probably dirt poor or not in the picture. Student's education are being paid for by financial aid from the state (I think 80%) at my school and egregious loans.

- Phones are part of their lives even if they're not physically on the at all times. Most of my students have jobs, children, other family members they take care of, and expect to be available in case of an issue or emergency. Yes, this makes it much harder for them.

Frankly I say this as an lecturer who fought bitterly against having any phones out in the classroom for several years (points off, attendance penalties, etc.) Within the last year I finally surrendered on the issue because it was simply unwinnable and caused escalations up to and including physical threats against myself. Having relaxed that requirement, I've found that counter-intuitively it seems like less of a problem; students do seem to keep them available in a mature fashion, and actually fewer of them are challenging the rule by fiddling continuously with them. So that's just anecdotal, but it's been my pleasantly surprising experience in all my classes this year.

Smart people don't get defensive and make up silly stories. They use mistakes as learning opportunities to educate themselves better.

A half-dozen, no; 30 people, yes. The probability of getting all-KKK members is microscopically small, and is accounted for in the confidence level of the estimate. You simply don't know what you're talking about, and are making a classic perennial mistake of the uninformed, is all.

What, pray tell, does stop-and-frisk "do to make NYC work", if anything? It practically never finds weapons or drugs. It's not even targeted at the cohort most likely to use drugs. It's just raw gamesmanship by the NYPD (look at our mighty stop numbers), against the usual part of the population who takes it on the chin because their poor, uneducated, and don't have the power to fight back (legally or politically). You might as well claim that slavery was a requirement "to make the South work".

Totally disagree, as a resident of NYC for about 10 years now. What was it, 2 weeks back, I put my folks (senior citizens from Maine) on the subway to go home by themselves for the first time (early meeting for me at work that day) -- and reported being offered help up stairs multiple times, by both black and white people. Frankly, I'm more prone to trusting strangers here than back in Maine where I grew up.

If anything I would say the converse: NYC policing is only able to be as corrupt as it is in such a large and diverse city. When the managers break the law and say, "you're required to write 20 tickets and one arrest every month", they can pick on the black neighborhoods to dish out abuse, because they know they're poor and powerless. The war on drugs is effectively indistinguishable from simple race-based sabotage.

Have you ever lived in NYC, or are you just responding via TV show knowledge?

"Where they interview 0.00125% of the population"

This is the dumbest goddamn thing you can say about statistics.

From what I've read in the past, it's mostly about being able to scam your way through the HR hiring process at some joint. In most organizations it's a long, hard slog to fire anyone after that point, no matter how clueless.

For what it's worth, I was in a large community college Math/CS department meeting last week where it was proposed to form committee to investigate whether we should switch from C to Java in the future.

Let me just pile on here and say this is also what I do through a Time Warner household account. When I first set it up nearly a decade ago, I thought I saw an article that just flat-out said this was the polite/ expected/ required thing to do in the first place (and email basically didn't work for me until I did so). When I first read your post, I was a little puzzled, because I assumed that you were already set up that way.

One state doing the wrong thing + free travel = nation-wide epidemic. That seems pretty obvious. If the chance for one state to get it wrong is just 2%, then the chance of a nationwide epidemic is 1-(1-0.02)^50 = 64%.

And as usual, the thinker who came up with the parent post couldn't get their nonsense argument even grammatically correct ("Ebola can be transmitted by airborne infection...")

Depends on the state. There's a dozen that require both sides to consent. The rest require only one side of the conversation to know about, and consent to, recording.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United_States

Here's article by Scott Aaronson that argued precisely the opposite last month. Here are some high points:

- "Standardized tests were invented as a radical democratizing tool, as a way to give kids from poor and immigrant families the chance to attend colleges that had previously only been open to the children of the elite. They succeeded at that goal—too well for some people’s comfort."
- "We now know that the Ivies’ current emphasis on sports, “character,” “well-roundedness,” and geographic diversity in undergraduate admissions was *consciously designed* (read that again) in the 1920s, by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as a tactic to limit the enrollment of Jews. "
- "I’d say the truth is this: spots at the top universities are so coveted, and so much rarer than the demand, that no matter what you use as your admissions criterion, that thing will instantly get fetishized... So, given that reality, why not at least make the fetishized criterion one that’s uniform, explicit, predictively valid, relatively hard to game, and relevant to universities’ core intellectual mission?"
- "I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, *getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.*"

Then at the bottom there are links to two anecdotes like this: Teenager is a math prodigy, has already professionally published papers in math, is strongly lobbied for by math faculty to get them in their program... and is refused at multiple schools by the undergraduate admissions officers (because they are "insufficiently well-rounded"). Has to go abroad in order to get undergraduate degree. Acceptable or not?

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003