Zardoz?

I work for an IT shop in a university and am one of the people who respond to complaints about speech in any campus system. While our university has what some may see as a draconian policy, we have never actually enforced the policy since it was written in 1994.

The reason many campuses have these kind of policies is not de-facto censorship, but instead de-facto legal ass-covering. We also have policies that you can't ride bikes on campus, even though we offer bike racks everywhere; or say you can't use campus computers for illegal file sharing even though unless you're sucking up a crazy amount of bandwidth, we won't really do anything about it. These policies are purely legal risk management and in most campuses solely exist so if a student says something bad, we can't be sued about it.

I'm a web developer for a small state university, and part of the team that responds to live chat questions from our students. We use Olark, which provides an API to let us know what page they are on, header data like user agent, what their unique user ID is for easy lookup, and we can even look at the page they are on and circle things. This saves a ton of time and our users always feel better about the experience than on a phone call. So while I can see where live chat doesn't work in certain situations, if you have it integrated well into your web app, it can be a win-win.

Exactly, this has also happened before - the California State University system is suffering from a huge project implementing PeopleSoft - it's still not done after 14 years, but no one wants to talk about leaving PeopleSoft because of the tremendous amount of sunk cost.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-03-12/bay-area/17480072_1_csu-peoplesoft-significant-investment

University IT departments providing email and calendaring services is like the facilities employees being required to build all the chairs for classrooms.

I've used a Swopper chair (swopper.com) for over four years, and found that I have never experienced a sore back or poor posture. The design basically simulates sitting on a yoga ball without the related problems of falling off. It is highly configurable, can swoop around at up to 10 degrees in all directions, and I often find myself bouncing up and down in it a little throughout the day.

I've worked in Higher Ed and for school districts for over 12 years and both my parents are teachers, so I hope I know a little about technology in the classroom. Unfortunately, grant funding and "high-impact program" funding usually flows towards programs and institutions that can be easily quantifiable. This is a function of funders wanting to see within a year or so what they "got for their money." Saying you used the money to give each student in the classroom a laptop? Easy. Claiming that funding went towards professional development or hiring teachers competitively to develop a curriculum that will illustrate it's success in four to twelve years? Less sexy.

Unfortunately, it's often the less sexy things which get results.

The finance tickers and other things like weather in Google are called "One Boxes," which are ways to trigger off custom results based on regular expressions. We use them in my work as Google Search Appliance customers, and they work in very much the same way on a search appliance. If someone puts in a ticker with a comma, for example, it might make the One Box disappear because the rules governing it don't allow for that. I don't think that should be considered a bias in the case of specific queries which can be construed as possibly being served more effectively with a ticker interface or something else that can provide results without having to click a link.

Another reason One Boxes are more effective for things like stock tickers is that this is temporal data, which might not well be served by results which are biased by other methods (like post date, number of links to the page, and so on.)