Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: single

  • BbWorld Presentation Redux Part I – Automation

    Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). I wrote the bit about tracking…

  • A Class of Cornell University Students Take Google as Gospel

    PC World – Students Take Google as Gospel: The experiment involved 22 undergraduate students (with various majors) from Cornell University in the U.S. It found that overall, the students had an inherent trust in Google’s ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. The news media has an inherent trust in studies…

  • Graduation Rates

    Systemwide, only 48 percent of the students in Georgia’s four-year public institutions earn a degree within six years of enrollment, compared to a national average of 54 percent. Even allowing eight to 10 years, the percentage of students earning degrees climbs only slightly. In contrast, the Georgia high school graduation rate is between 56 and…

  • B for a Be

    Are online students really students? We like to think seeing is believing, but who meets a student who takes a completely online class? Apparently, seeing is also interpolating…. at Stanford, anyway. Is this a single case? How easy is it for someone to take an academic year’s worth of classes without anyone catching on to…

  • Ready to Switch?

    I was disappointed the only IE competitor mentioned was Firefox. Opera, Safari, and Netscape are well known enough that it would behoove a more balanced view to mention them as well. My only use of IE lately is replicating a user problem I can’t replicate in Firefox and the very, very infrequent case a web…

  • Current Reading List

    The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century Stone of Tears (Sword of Truth, Book 2) Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Yup, still on reading five books.

  • What About Mixed People?

    These companies use mitochondrial DNA to trace one’s genetic lineage. So, they take a sample from my mitochondria (which I got from my mom) and compare it to samples that have been taken from mitochondria samples found in their database to match it. Well, my mom’s mom has lots of English and Scottish ancestry. So…

  • Fear != Lies

    Guys… A guy like me in with security people giving me ugly looks isn’t scared because I am a terrorist or a criminal. I am terrified because I know I was singled out because of my skin color. I know no matter what I say that the people who singled me out can’t tell the…

  • A Penny for Your Thoughts, and 1.4 Cents for the Penny

    This is a great story. The slowness the U.S. Mint is reacting to change is costing them. More than just the cost of the metals go into making pennies, so we could easily be close to 2 cents to produce a single penny. However, the U. S. Mint doesn’t exactly sell the money it makes,…