proud citizen of The Future

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

theopjones:

collapsedsquid:

Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.

Goddamn it Peter Thiel

It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.

But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced”  operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students. 

Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests. 

When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?

My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.

(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)

(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)

—

I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…

One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.

A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.

The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in University Land #proud citizen of The Future

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Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

Pictured (an incomplete list): over a decade of diary entries, several years of dream journal, a few years of chat logs, copies of the comments I’ve left on blog posts (sadly incomplete, but far better than nothing), email archives for all three and a half of the email addresses I care about, tens of millions of words of fiction, a few hundred songs, a complete set of the Red Panda Adventures (including books and video comics), Wi-Fi maps for several cities I am relatively likely to find myself in, buggier and less-thorough Wi-Fi maps for the entirety of Canada and the United States, regular maps for every province/state I’m likely to visit in the normal course of events (Ontario, New York, Massachusetts), complete copies (including images) of several Tumblrs (including but not limited to mine), and the full text (but not images) of Wiktionary and Wikipedia.

Tags:

#I take great comfort in carrying my Useful Thing collection around with me all the time #and I have applied this same mindset to information #(the text portion of this post has been lying around in my drafts for so long that I’ve actually gotten a new smartphone since then) #((picture is of the new phone; taken using the old phone’s camera)) #(it’s still true it’s just that the portable version of my personal archive has a different physical embodiment now) #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(currently three; I plan to sell the old one soon to recoup most of what I spent on the new one) #proud citizen of The Future #oh look an original post #in a couple of days I’ll do the next backup and this post itself will become part of my archive #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

God, the Internet is amazing.

I was thinking fondly of a song from a childhood video game, but I could not recall how the song went or the exact name of the game. And I thought “Maybe I can fix that.”

Armed only with the information “there was this M&M-themed game on CD-ROM, and the song was the background music for level 5″, it took me all of a couple of minutes to track this down. (If you would like to skip to the best part, that is at 1:03. I tried linking to that timestamp, but it looks like you can’t do that with video posts.)

Bonus: apparently the game disc’s ISO is available from the Internet Archive.

(I wonder if Windows 7 is backwards-compatible with Windows 95 games, or if I would have to take stronger measures?)

Tags:

#games #my childhood #music #oh look an original post #food mention #proud citizen of The Future

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

(Note: I do not do pranks. In any case, I encourage you to check this thing out for yourself.)

Today I learned that you can download the entirety of Wiktionary onto your smartphone. Speaking as someone without a cellular data connection who likes her apps to be as self-sufficient as possible, this is so cool.

(The downloadable Wiktionary is about a month out of date at the moment, but Wiktionary-as-it-was-one-month-ago is a lot better than nothing, and quite a bit better than an offline dictionary that only defines English and can’t be stored on the SD card.)

If I had a larger SD card, I could even get Wikipedia! (Or rather, Wikipedia as it was ~3 months ago, but still.) (~18 GB for an imageless version, 50-something GB for the full copy.) So, while I currently still don’t get to have Wikipedia at my beck and call at all times, the problem is now merely “too little storage space”, which is much easier to fix than “how the fuck do you even download Wikipedia”.

I haven’t played around with it that much yet, but initial tests are promising. (I tried using my local copy of Wiktionary just now to double-check my usage of “self-sufficient”, and it worked fine.)

(A while ago I was reading the Eclipse Phase RPG sourcebooks, and at one point they mention a device characters can get that stores a local copy of space-Wikipedia, automatically updating itself whenever you have space-Internet access and providing you with Wikipedia-as-of-the-last-time-you-had-Internet when you don’t have Internet access. And I was like “Damn, *I* want one of those”. Turns out, you can pretty much have one of those.)

Tags:

#I mean there’s a lot of tech in Eclipse Phase that’s like ”damn I want one of those” #but that one stuck out because it seemed like it might actually be feasible at our current tech level #and indeed it is #give or take a live-update mechanism #(which might very well be the hard part) #oh look an original post #proud citizen of The Future #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #the more you know #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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tinierpurplefishes:

justice-turtle:

So @brin-bellway mentioned that being born into liberal feminism is apparently “vanishingly rare, to the point that I’ve seen people who will actually base an argument they’re making on the assumption that everyone comes from somewhere else. (“Nobody’s born spouting feminist doctrine! Give people a chance to learn!” Dude, I *was* born spouting feminist doctrine *that is now two decades out of date*.)”

Thing is, being a convert (so to speak) from hyperconservatism is also vanishingly rare – I know of one other person besides me who switched, and the most common argument I see against tone policing is “Nobody ever changed a hyperconservative’s mind by talking to them.” Which, I mean, tone policing is in fact wrong, but that argument is invalid, because I’m sitting right here not being hyperconservative anymore. ^_^

So what we were wondering is: where the fuck did all the rest of y’all come from? O_O Is there some large pool of mildly apolitical families out there that we just don’t hear about? (And in today’s polarized political climate, how’d you manage that? ;P)

Well, I more or less was born into liberal feminism, as were a number of my friends. But, that said, I think that, pre-9/11, there was a much larger pool of mildly apolitical families in the US. The polarization had been building since before I was born, but it felt like it really hit an inflection point around that time.

I suspect there are also a bunch of people from families that are liberal, but not explicitly feminist. That kind of think that they’re post-feminist, that the fight’s all done and everything is equal now. I rather suspect most of those folks think the same about race as well. Kids from those families might well end up getting shook up a bit when they start having to deal with the world outside their bubble.

But that’s the problem I’m having, that even when people acknowledge the existence of their own fucking culture they use derogatory words like “bubble” to describe it and act like it shouldn’t exist. Isn’t that what feminists want, isn’t that the point? A world where every child grows up that way, and they never have to learn better because there is no better to learn. Every child that does grow up that way is a step in the right direction, a little piece of the utopian future made manifest.

Even assuming the war is eventually won, it will not be won all at once, could never have been won all at once. You want your culture to win out over the other cultures, your mores to be the mores, and the way that happens is with little pockets where your culture has won, little “bubbles”, that expand until they encompass everything. Try to destroy your own strongholds at every opportunity and you’ll never get anywhere.

Tags:

#in which Brin has strong feelings about subcultural validity #again #reply via reblog #a movement does not survive on converts alone #discouraging the existence of non-convert feminists is a *bad* move #I am tempted to tag this #proud citizen of The Future #though that is not the usual meaning of that tag #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

New Horizons Spacecraft Displays Pluto’s Big Heart

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-spacecraft-displays-pluto-s-big-heart-0 }}

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New Horizons Displays Pluto's Big Heart}}

airbuilder7:

Happy Valentine’s Day from Pluto! <3

It’s Pluto’s first one since we visited! :D

Tags:

#found one! #the ultimate in Valentine space pareidolia #proud citizen of The Future #and no Valentine’s Day in The Future is complete without a picture of Pluto #Happy Valentine’s Day from an aromantic asexual #Pluto #space #pareidolia