well how would you feel if you got something nasty because the doctor in the village was being creative with sharing needles?

the multi million dollare equipment isn't usually used to "keep healthy", it's used for getting healthy after getting something that would kill you.

you forgot the rough-looking-but-expensive tables to sip coffee on while chatting away on the macbook how you're at the makerspace.

also add to the list to buy expensive equipment that doesn't work well and that you don't understand how it works(makerbot 5th gens fit the bill quite well) and some stuff that's no good for anyone like the rotating table 3d scanners.

seriously though.. they should add a welding machine to the shop, a decent laser cutter, maybe a water jet cutter. a mill possibly. definitely a pcb router.

basically, the kind of stuff the college kids can't have in their college rooms. a simple 3d printer fits into their rooms well and if they have one then it's likely they want to actually have all the other stuff.

if the backups don't go back long enough, it doesn't matter if the backup device fetches the data or if the data is pushed to the device.

besides, all cheap backup hd's etc with a simple button, or cheap nas backup devices, do the pushing in software on the host pc...

Called by another poster on the self-powered camera story recently.

A salesman who's not telling the truth?

it sounds like it is his first time with undergrads.

A&M lists this as a 400 level course - As in, targeted at graduating seniors (and actually has that as a requirement to take it without an override). Technically still undergrad, but if those students haven't mastered the concept of "pay attention and don't screw around", they won't, and deserve to fail.


1. These students are taking more than just His class.
2. Chances are the class is required.

The BBA curriculum at A&M lists that as the only required class for 8th semester students (with three other electives) - It counts as the goddamned capstone course for the degree. Any student who has too hefty of a workload that semester aside from that one class has only themselves to blame.


3. The students are filled with other concerns then just that class. Finding a girl/boy friend, trying to keep on on what he should socially be.

Sooo Not His Problem that you have me at a loss for words on how to phrase this more strongly. When paying $22,470 per year for a piece of magical job-paper - Sit down, shut up, and pay attention, or GTFO.


4. Because he specialized in that topic for so long, there isn't any empathy on the fact that people just don't get it, the first time.

I have taken strategic management (though not at A&M). Really not much to not "get" - You learn about Michael Porter and SWOTs and Jack Welch. Even if the professor completely sucks, you just watch powerpoint slides and memorize facts for the test. If he doesn't suck, you have fluffy group case study discussions where you basically have no wrong answers. If you don't "get" it at that point in a business degree... Well, to reiterate my opening paragraph, you shouldn't pass.


You want to know what really happened here? In every class, you have a handful of waste-of-flesh whiners who will bitch about every lecture as too boring (or alternatively, that the professor actually expects them to participate instead of letting them read Facebook on their phones in the back of the room); every assignment as too hard (even the ones where the professor all but gives the answers right in class); every paper too long. This poor bastard just managed to get an entire class packed full of them.

Sure, in theory you're right. Schools aren't run by teachers anymore, the power has taken away by PHB administrator management who want to run it like a business. (Just like hospitals aren't run by doctors, etc.) I have a hard time seeing the trend reversing course, however; that's the trajectory of our political economy.

The guy's a temporary adjunct (as most college instructors are nowadays). He probably gets paid about $3000 for all the work all semester for this course. He may not even know 6 other people at the college, never mind have any way of getting them to work for him as proctors. Is all the extra work and re-design worth the $1K left in the semester? Just walking away seems at least arguably better for one's mental health.

I ran into this line in a Wikipedia article last weekend and just stared at it in amazement for a few minutes:

"Others may want a high school diploma to represent primarily a certificate of attendance, so that a student who faithfully attended school but cannot read or write will still get the social benefits of graduation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-stakes_testing

"Also, at least one of his cheating allegations was investigated and overturned by their university's administration. This sounds mostly like sour grapes."

Nitpick: The Inside Higher Ed article linked above says, "The spokesman said that one cheating allegation referenced by Horwitz has already been investigated and that a **student committee** cleared the student of cheating." So apparently any enforcement is determined by students themselves?

"A competent prof would have taken the most egregious examples and kicked them out of his class"

Generally speaking, that is simply not within a professor's power to enact. At least where I teach, instructors officially have the right to remove a disruptive student from one single class session, but not ever from the course wholesale. Even that one-session right, when I've tried to enact that (a number of years ago), was not actually enforced or recognized by security or supported by administration staff.

Likewise, there's officially a disciplinary panel process, but the school has signaled in the past that they don't want us invoking that.

...which are completely freaking worthless if they're turned off by default. 99.9% of users will never visit and study every available config option, and the other .1% will be wondering why it's not the default setting if it's so great.

Your post is like those who insist that MySQL has safe data settings for those who know how to enable them, while ignoring the fact that almost everyone uses the configuration as shipped. Unsafe by default is an insane and undefensible way to distribute software. In fact, I can't think of a good justification for ever allowing the unsafe values to be set.

Thanks for posting that.

At least where I work, the administration in the past has sent a clear signal that -- while we officially do have such a disciplinary board -- they really don't want anyone invoking those procedures. Partly this is because now students are entitled to legal representation in those proceedings, and the whole process gets overwhelmingly complicated and expensive. The current recommended policy is "get the student to privately agree to a failing mark on that test", because that doesn't trigger the legal representation.

The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels".

Perhaps it could, but those voxels/cells aren't really independent. General Relativity requires space to be differentiable (smooth) which in turn means that value of one cell limits possible values for nearby cells. Laws of physics could also be understood as rules of how values can vary across time- and lightlike paths. Put these effects together, and I suspect the result is the holographic principle.