- PhD thesis delight | Turning mirrors
"In the beginning vast public funding created heavenly lab-space on earth. Now the labs were formless and empty and the spirited physicists were contemplating over their future experiments. And they said let there be light and they built a grating stabilised external cavity diode laser. And they said let there be an optical table to separate the floor from the ceiling. And it was bought. And they browsed through catalogues from Thorlabs, MiniCircuits, and Farnell and populated the optical table and the racks above it and the entire floor-space below it. And they said let us invite some graduate students who are like us and let them screw, turn, solder, align, and calibrate all the equipment on the optical table, the racks above it and the entire floor-space below it. They saw all that they had made and it was very good; so they tried to optimise it to make it even better and at the end nothing worked as it should."
- Views: Why We Inflate Grades – Inside Higher Ed
Scroll down a bit for the Dean Dad’s comment with a crazy idea for solving the grade inflation problem.
- News: The Children They Never Had – Inside Higher Ed
"[Elaine Howard] Ecklund of Rice said in an interview that it was important to note that the regret over not having more children is not an issue just for women, but for many men as well. "We can do a disservice to the issue if we focus on this only as a women’s issue," she said, even if these challenges fall disproportionately on women. Further, she said that while the scientists who are the most senior in these departments, generally men, advanced in part through the help of wives without outside careers, the men entering the academy today are more likely to be married to people with career ambitions themselves."
- The Evitable Future of the Digital | Easily Distracted
"There’s an interesting paradox embedded in Heffernan’s essay that applies to educators, though. She runs through a long list of careers and activities that rely upon skills in digital media or with information and communications technology that already exist, and uses them as a signpost for the unknown careers of the future that will require students trained in today’s cultural and knowledge-producing environments.
The paradox is that somehow we got to this point without our education system having that orientation. That’s a lot of content, work and invention without the training that Heffernan suggests we’ll need for tomorrow’s world. So the trick for educators is not arguing about what we’ll need to operate at all, but about what kinds of improvement and range a “new culture of learning” could achieve, or what kinds of still-unseen practices we might engender."
- Cheaper Than Paper: A Firsthand Examination of the Google+ Profile Reporting Process
"My goal was to determine […]:
1)How hard is it to get an account with a legitimate name suspended if that’s what you want to do?
2)What actually happens when an account is reported? What evidence needs to be provided?
3)What safeguards are in place to insure that the reporting system isn’t abused?
In order to find these things out, I decided to take the following steps documenting the process throughout:
1)Create a bogus account with the same first and last name as my own account. This is hardly unusual. I am the original Gary Walker on Google+, but I am not (as a quick people search will indicate) the only Gary Walker on Google+.
2)Fill out a simple profile for the account with no actual PII. Simple enough. Accounts require some fields to be filled out, but they don’t have to have anything useful or realistic in them.
3)Have the account reported, initially as a "Fake Profile" and then if no action resulted, for "Impersonation."
4)Attempt to have the account re-instated." - The Most Brilliantly Pointless Street Flyers | Happy Place
"You now have no excuse for wasting all your time on the Internet when it’s perfectly clear you could be wasting paper out in the real world."
- Internet Access CAPTCHAs
"Site administrators use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated scripts from performing certain functions, such as creating an account, sending email to a distribution list, or participating in a discussion thread.
That’s fine, as far as it goes. But, frankly, I’d also like to see certain people on the Internet prevented from doing certain things. You know, like: logging onto the Internet.
And so, a modest proposal: Internet Access Captchas, built right into browsers, designed to greatly reduce the overabundance of youtube commenters, Facebookers, and Twittererers.
Here is my prototype:"