ordersofmag

When all those creative, skilled IT people found they could make double the money moving out of higher ed into start-ups and industry at the same time that the administrations realized that crazy IT stuff was actually mission-critical and that they needed to use what cash they had to double-down on reliable rather than creative the die was cast.

It's a wrapper around a bunch of API's. If that makes you nervous then wait until you hear about how the rest of the modern web is strung together. It's been working reliably for me for a decade.

That's not how it works. The copyright holder (the photographer your case) has exclusive rights to produce works that are 'derivative' of the original. So your Dad would likely be in violation of copyright law without permission of the photographer. Now one could argue your Dad's painting was fair use on the grounds that it was 'transformative'. But given case law as I understand it (IANAL), that would be unlikely to hold up on court. That said practically it seems unlikely the photographer would sue given the likely market for your wedding photo...

I'm guessing they lived lives of incredible luxury with no worries about money in any sense other than recreationally. Just like the year before and the year after.

Good teaching largely consists of setting the learner up in situations where they can practice effectively. To pick just one example many people are taught to improve the quality of their writing. This largely consists of giving guidance on what writing to attempt and (more importantly) guidance how to reflect on the quality of the writing you've just done so you can improve.

We generally combine what we learn from interviews/usability testing with what we can learn from analytics. Analytics often highlights use patterns that are of a 'we can definitely see that users are doing 'x' but we don't understand why' genre. Then we can craft testing/interviews that help us understand the why. So that's analytics helping us target our interviews/user testing. It also works the other way. User testing indicates users will more often get to where they need to be with design a versus design b. But user testing is always contrived: users are in an "I'm being tested mode" not a "I'm actually using the internet for my own purposes" mode. So it's hard to be sure they'll act the same way in vivo. With analytics you can look for users making the specific move your testing indicated they would. If they do great. But if not you know your user testing missed something or was otherwise off base.

Of course analytics from 13 years ago doesn't help us optimize page load times. But it is extremely useful to notice that content that has gotten deep use steadily for a decade suddenly doesn't. Then you know to take a closer look at the specific content. Perhaps you see that the external resource that it depended on went offline and so you can fix it. Or perhaps you realize that you need to reprioritize navigation features on the site so that folks can better find the stuff they are digging for which should no longer include that resource. We have users that engage over decades and content use patterns that play out over years (not months). And understanding those things informs changes we make to our site that make it better for users. Perhaps this is outside your world of experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. And we also gather data to help optimize page load times.....

We've got 13 years worth of data stored in mysql (5 million visitor/year). It's a pain to query there so we keep a copy in clickhouse as well (which is a joy to query).

I'm a website 'publisher' for a non-profit that has zero advertising on our site. Our entire purpose for collecting analytics is to make the site work better for our users. Really. Folks like us may not be in the majority but it's worth keeping in mind that "analytics = ad revenue optimization" is over-generalizing.

Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.

from back in 2008 "the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a trade group, found that there were at least 170 static electricity fires at gas stations from 1992 to 2006. Considering that the American Petroleum Institute estimates that there are 11 billion refuelings in the United States a year, the problem probably isn’t a big one." from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/automobiles/27STATIC.html

I'll note that in the state I live (MN) it's technically illegal to get back in your car while pumping (you have to be " in close attendance to the dispenser nozzle").

Wages paid by grants in general have to match whatever the institutions 'standard' pay scales are. So it's the institutions deciding pay rates. At least in the U.S..

While this may be novel in residential buildings in the U.S. there are a number of college campuses that have been going this route (providing a large number of buildings with heating/cooling/hot water via a centralized system that leverages heat pumps and the earth's thermal mass) for awhile. See for example: https://energynews.us/2022/02/07/colleges-see-untapped-poten...

Yes, there's lots of folks doing this and currently it looks like combining results from an LLM based index and a standard text retrieval indexes (e.g. using BM25) may beat either alone. Note that you can add and search LLM derived vectors from within Elasticsearch: look up 'dense vector search' in the docs. Check out the Haystack conference next week for lots of discussion of current practices: https://haystackconf.com/2023/

Except if you look at university budgets you’ll see that most of that overhead ends up paying for…that’s right. People.

A big chunk of that 15,000 are professionals engaged in research activities (mostly funded by grants and other external funds) e.g. the 1600 folks involved in running the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and activities like fundraising and finances. They mostly are NOT folks 'administering' the faculty in any way. So the comparison with your kid's school is not meaningful. Not to say there are perhaps more administrators than might be ideal. But these numbers aren't helpful in understanding whether that's true.

Also, it's worth noting that Stanford is in fact free for folks under the median household income in the U.S. (roughly speaking) which seems pretty 'affordable'. Of course the economics of one of these large-endowment, research intensive institutions is pretty much unrelated to their teaching function. But that just highlights the weakness of using gross, whole-institution numbers of people/dollars for any sort of comparison. Big universities serve lots of ends (not just teaching undergrads) and so the teasing apart the economic picture (and whether it's efficient at meeting it's many goals) is complicated.

I'm a runner who's fairly familiar with the difference in sensation between activating the soleus and activating the gastrocnemius (thanks PT). I'm also a drummer and I'm pretty sure most of my pedal-work while drumming is gastrocnemius-centric.

Looks like it was bought by a museum that intends to digitize and make it public https://www.bronte.org.uk/whats-on/news/248/bronte-parsonage...

Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.

The 'Broader Impacts' section the proposal is a required element for all National Science Foundation proposals (like this one). It need not be about diversity but you need to articulate how your proposed work has "potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." So certainly it's forced. In the same way demonstrating the Intellectual Merit of your work is also forced (that being the other criteria against which the proposal is going to be judged).

Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. And 53% is actually pretty low compared to many institutions. Source: I've been 100% grant funded the last 20 years of my career and have been involved in writing 100's of federal research grants.

Mmmmm, a Model A. I miss those days. No electronics whatsoever. Just that mechanical odometer ticking over ever so slowly.

The original paper indicates the starting sample was 3500. On a quick read I didn't quite follow how things were narrowed from there (it's complicated) but it was not just 191 random folks off the street.

Web Developer | SERC Carleton College | Northfield, MN | Onsite Full-Time | https://serc.carleton.edu/serc/news/221337.html We're a grant-funded office that aspires to improve science education nationally. We've been doing this for 17 years and run a busy website (5+ million visitors/year) that educators across the country use to share expertise around topics like climate change. We're looking for an experienced web developer(JS/PHP/Mysql) who appreciates being part of team that values actual work/life balance and making the world a better place. Being onsite with some regularity is important but some remote work is possible and flexible scheduling (including less than full time work) is open for discussion.

I have a site that includes lots of older content. I checked the first page that came to mind (published in 2005) and it still shows up on the first page of Google results for the obvious search terms. So it certainly isn't as clear-cut as 'everything older than 10 years is not in the index'. update checked another circa 2003. It's also on the first page of search results for a search on its title.