“Information management has a long history. In Assyria around three millennia ago clay tablets had small clay labels attached to them to make them easier to tell apart when they were filed in baskets or on shelves. The idea survived into the 20th century in the shape of the little catalogue cards librarians used to note down a book’s title, author, subject and so on before the records were moved onto computers. The actual books constituted the data, the catalogue cards the metadata. Other examples include package labels to the 5 billion bar codes that are scanned throughout the world every day.” — A special report on managing information: Needle in a haystack | The Economist (via interestingsnippets)
Like many online services, Rate My Professors, the engrossing professor-ranking site, seems at first to be a companion to offline life. Real-life students take real-life classes and hand down judgments of real-life professors in a virtual forum. The site invites reviewers — whose identities as students are never given or verified — to give numerical rankings, from 1 to 5, in four categories: easiness, helpfulness, clarity and the reviewers’ interest in the subject matter before they took the class. You can also assign professors chili-pepper icons if you think they’re good-looking. Even the losers have a place. Professors can rebut bad reviews and upload protest videos under the feeble rubric “Professors Strike Back.”
Many students pore over these ratings when choosing courses and colleges. But the vulnerable professors themselves may be even more obsessed. They’re rattled by, but also beholden to, what Mark Edmundson, my senior-thesis adviser at the University of Virginia, once called the “attitude of calm-consumer expertise” in contemporary students, who regularly rate everything from purchases to people.
» via The New York Times
Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards -
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Father’s commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
» via The New York Times
Privacy concerns derail Netflix contest -
Netflix, the Web’s top movie-renting service, announced Friday that it has canceled plans to hold a second contest that awards a prize to whoever could come up with the most accurate system of predicting user film choices based on their viewing histories.
» via CNET news
In stock nearby? Look for the blue dots. -
Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We’re happy to announce that as of today, if you’re searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it’s available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent “In stock nearby” link, and you’ll be taken to the seller’s page where you’ll see whether the item is “In Stock” or has “Limited Availability” near you. You’ll also see how far away the stores are from you — as long as you’ve enabled My Location or manually specified your location.
» via Official Google Mobile Blog
On the Spot with Kim Jong-il - The Big Picture
Kim Jong-il visits Jagang Provincial Library.
» via The Big Picture
SuperPower: Visualising the internet
From the BBC
The data used to generate the interactive treemap visualisation was collected by the Nielsen company and covers the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. The figures represent unique users for the month of January 2010.
The categories - such as retail, social networks, search/portal - were defined by the BBC. Because some websites have more than one use, they could fall within more than one category (e.g. Yahoo). However, the treemap only classifies them once.
The maps were produced using the Prefuse Flare software, developed by the University of California Berkeley.
Forty Questions: Grading Article In Teachers College Record
Average GPA over the time period 1930-2006 as a function of school type. Grey dots represent individual data points. Colored squared represent the mean GPA for each school type over time. Suslow (1976) shown for comparison.
The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement. Students’ entrance test scores have not increased (College Board, 2007), students are increasingly disengaged from their studies (Saenz et al., 2007), and the literacy of graduates has declined (Kutner et al., 2006). A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers. Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before.
Private and public schools graded similarly until the 1950s when grading practices for these schools began to bifurcate. The reasons for this bifurcation are not fully understood, but it was during this time that quantitative measures of undergraduates took hold in graduate school and professional school admissions. It appears that sometime in the 1950s to 1960s, the major purpose of grading at colleges and universities changed from an internal measure and motivator of student performance to a measure principally used for external evaluation of graduates. As a Yale dean noted about Yale’s abandonment of their traditional qualitative assessments in favor of the common four point grading system, “We wanted to force graduate schools to look at the student, not at a grade point average. But to a large extent, our effort has been frustrated” (Polan, 1970).
Could GPS create a world without signs? -
In the summer of 2008, a satellite navigation specialist named Colin Beatty fired up a 27-slide Power Point presentation titled “Could personal navigation systems herald the demise of much fixed signage?” Perhaps out of deference to his audience—Beatty was presenting to the Sign Design Society, Britain’s leading association for environmental graphic design—the tone was somewhat measured. (Note Beatty’s use of could and much.) But Beatty, who founded his satnav consultancy CBil 23 years ago, had bad news for the sign world: He believes the advent of geolocational technology will eventually kill the sign.
» via Slate
“If you read books on great companies, they usually leave out a dirty little secret. It doesn’t make for good public relations — like talking about how you “empower people” or how your “greatest assets” are your people. Both of these well-worn clichés are true. What is also true is that it’s hard to build a great company with the wrong people. When you have the right people, business is much easier.” — The Secret to Having Happy Employees
0-day exploits for IE flaw another reason to switch to IE8 -
Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday a new flaw affecting version 6 and 7 of its Internet Explorer web browser that could allow remote code execution. The security advisory noted that targeted attacks using the flaw were already in the wild.
This information was confirmed by McAfee, reporting that exploitation of the flaw was originating from the domain topix21century dot com over both HTTP and HTTPS. The drive-by attacks install a backdoor which connects to a command-and-control server.
» via ars technica
What was a year ago an emerging idea about how to reduce college costs and better serve students has begun to take hold at colleges across the United States, as more institutions introduce three-year bachelor’s degrees.
On Wednesday, Stanley Ikenberry, interim president of the University of Illinois, said that the university had begun studying whether it would make sense to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees and would release a report in six months. In just the past month, Arcadia University, Holy Family University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and, in partnership, Georgia Perimeter College and Georgia Southwestern State University have all introduced formal three-year programs that will begin this fall.
» via Inside Higher Ed
MyEdu Will Be Your Curriculum Guide And Virtual College Advisor Rolled Into One -
Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic information and create a roadmap tailored to their career goals.
To date, over 2 million students at 750 universities have used MyEdu to earn their degree. MyEdu’s suite of online products try to streamline the entire process of a college student’s lifecycle, from selecting a college through to earning a degree. The suite includes detailed course descriptions, grade distributions, official course evaluations, and student reviews to pick the right classes; and schedule Planner to build the best schedule that fits a student’s time constraints and goals.
» via TechCrunch
Chatroulette Map: Not So Anonymous Anymore
Whenever people mention the random webcam site, Chatroulette, it inevitably leads to talk of how there are certain less-than-desirable webcam chat partners on the service. Some would wager that the guise of anonymity on Chatroulette helps these users feel a bit safer when baring it all. They aren’t as anonymous as they think.
» via Laughing Squid