Takes somewhere between 48 hours and a week to generate the first invite codes, though. (Those are the two closest moments at which I checked before and after I had invites available)
Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's what happened to me a few years ago:
I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage departmental and eventually school reputation.
Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best professor for this class" rankings to naive students.
Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for higher ed in the future.
Coming off a three-year stint working for a University, I would have to agree that the old ways have to die before change can come about. University bureaucracies are built on the idea of long-standing tradition (even tenure promotes the idea of no change), so when change comes, the administration fights it. Especially, if that change involves opening data up that could somehow in their minds potentially embarrass them.
If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of professors, how can they actually shut you down? I know there are lots of "Professor Review" sites out there, so is it just the grades aspect? I don't remember signing anything at my college that says I can't give out grade info, but I may be mistaken.
> If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of professors, how can they actually shut you down?
"I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for."
The provost has some authority over the deans and schools. Since the application is "owned" by his employer....
Yes, maybe he could continue it "on the side" but he may want to stay employed and if he got the grade information from the school, they can probably shut that down
Yeah, University employees are contractually held to a non-compete agreement which would prolly break down here when brought to general counsel.
The grade distribution information is not considered restricted under any FERPA or other policy, but it is considered 'sensitive' and requires an external party to jump through quite a few legal hoops to access.
Edit: I serve at the behest of the Provost. So that was basically the boss/boss saying "we made a mistake, please take that down."
The idea's still there in the administration tho. It's the Faculty who need to quit being butthurt about it.
Generalizing:
Working with leading faculty is a bit like working with the 'always answers in snippits' students from highschool 40 years later in their life. Procrastinate, panics when something isn't the way they expect it, and genuinely quirky. All it takes is one noisy tenure to make a stink to a VP/P and many things get shut down.
Maybe in a decade when the damage grade inflation has done to accreditation and the value of a degree becomes apparent the faculty will allow for this type of thing to exist.
dunno about actual run-of-the-mill daily cycle but I've seen the reactor at K-State run a couple-dollar pulse. It looked about like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgNwtepP-6M
For the day to day operation it just looked like a big pool of distilled water with a ton of pipes running around in it.
The Cherenkov radiation in that video is worth a watch if you haven't seen it before. Apparently the water contains the radiation. The effect is from the electrons passing through the water faster than the speed of light could be in the water.
I've done exactly this to moderate effect with "greenstuff" modeling epoxy. I use it in my other hobbies and had it on hand. It lacks the strength to really break multiple seals from some of the loctite's used in apple products.
(related: http://www.amazon.com/Games-Workshop-Green-Stuff-Modelling/d...)
Usually a tough Allen wrench of similar size and some luck works on those oddball sized heads.
I don't mean to be snarky but how is rape/murder/theft threat different than your daily life? Someone is going to go overboard and sucker people vs randomly kidnap someone at a Wendys?
I live in a safe place. If I'm going traveling (To likely a more dangerous place), I'd be safer staying in some sort of 'official' establishment, such as a hotel. Rather than staying with random people. They could be irritating, unhinged, dangerous, murderous, thieving, perverted, etc
Random people scare me. Maybe I just assume the worst in random people. How many airbnb rooms have spycams installed in the showers? I'd bet it's more than in hotel rooms :/
It's just the same reason I wouldn't hitch-hike or go in an unlicensed taxi.
They're vetted by the hotel, there's regulation, command structure, security in the hotel, they have an incentive to not do bad things (They'd get fired), they're (hopefully) trained, etc etc
Additionally, if the hotel is a big chain, there's a certain standard of service you can pretty much be sure of across hotels.
So IMHO, people working for a company who are trained and employed to serve the public, are quite different to 'random people'.
Ever heard of Mechthild Bach? Can't find an English link right now.
Everyone's trained not to do bad things (it's called education), HR departments are not able to screen out killers, thiefs, rapists etc. In the end, people working in a hotel are a random selection, too. So whoever downvoted me, please reconsider.
I didn't say there were NO instances of trained employees abusing trust. Obviously there are edge cases everywhere.
If I'm going traveling to some strange dangerous place, a trained employee is going to be safer than a random person off the street.
I expect you were downvoted because you decided to interpret my comments as "trained employees never do anything wrong", rather than what I actually said, "trained employees are safer for you than random people".
I need breaks from what I'm working on - and this site fills that need. There's only so much I will get done in a day and this unquenched optimism & productivity that is common here is simply not something I do. I end up thinking back to something I read here months & years later, thus cementing it's leisure value above reddit, fukung and twitter.
If user satisfaction is mapped on the X-axis of real numbers, doing beyond-the-call-of-duty service for a customer with negative user satisfaction is equivalent to multiplying by -1.
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