Are there any courses on the unintended consequences of the overuse of government regulation?
Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
51–60 of 155 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#52As a former UC Berkeley student, I just want to add that besides the public lecture videos, there are also many private, unlisted course videos on YouTube from the last couple years (after it became an issue). The Archive Team has missed these videos as they're only accessible via UC Berkeley's student portal if you're a student in the class. The Archive Team and current/former students need to work together here to…
It was mentioned on reddit as well that there are videos on iTunes that are not on YouTube and that the iTunes videos will be removed as well.
He mentioned private videos on YouTube, not the iTunes.
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#53I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here. If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they cou…
I'm not involved in the previous discussion at all, but given my limited knowledge of the facts, I'd propose a solution like: "Berkeley should keep these videos up, and work to add subtitles and accessibility features to them in a reasonable timeframe, consistent with funding and personnel availability."
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#54I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here. If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they cou…
I think this would be a good project for crowdsourcing, because as you point out, it's something many people do care a lot about, so it ought to be possible to recruit some enthusiastic volunteers.
For all the talk about these types of issues, it seems to be very rare for tech conference videos to be captioned (presumably due to cost).
You can see here, something like 800 out of 18,000 videos from tech conferences are captioned:
https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type...
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#55The proximate cause of this removal is Gallaudet University [1] [2].
What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest? I don't want to excoriate them without knowing the whole story, it could have been just someone's doh! moment turned into a really bad outcome.
I know there are closed-captioning format standards. Perhaps someone can create a site that runs closed captioning underneath YouTube videos, with the closed captioning supplied by volunteers (kind of like how closed captioning was done by anime fans)? Hook it up to a GitHub backend so closed caption data can be refined by anyone, with appropriate sidebar discussions. Hook it up to Google Translate to generate Braille and foreign translations of the hand-curated closed captioning, and let users refine the auto-generated translations. Then prevail upon the DOJ and Gallaudet University to give this time to develop instead of hammering on UC Berkeley, and let Creative Commons-licensed closed captioning fill in the content everywhere for all access-challenged students, for all content? Google might be interested to use this as a corpus for Deepmind.
Gallaudet University could have pioneered a solution and become the world leader in automated accessible content generation working in partnership with Google Deepmind, for example. That would have brought in way, way more funding through licensing than this short-sighted approach they are taking now. If Gallaudet University established a CS focus upon this, it would draw in top global talent for a variety of specialties. HAL-like accurate automated lip-reading coming out of this, with even more accuracy when using mic arrays? Yes, please; you get something like that even 90% accurate and you just gave a mindgasm to every meeting-organizer in the world who wants meeting notes taken. And as much as you all hate meetings, if you had a near-irrefutable better-than-stenographer CYA from meeting notes just once, I guarantee you would love that mechanism, increased meetings frequency or no.
This is a darkening of the Net and education in general, and it should not stand. Unless the reporting on this development is simply not including their side of the story, that Gallaudet University is not front and center of this issue trying to get ahead of the outcome by seeking win-win solutions should be making them a pariah on the Net and in the education world. Gallaudet University pursuing a perfect-is-enemy-of-good tactic likely has not considered that they just pulled free education for hundreds of millions of young minds in the developing nations who cannot afford anything close to a world-class education, but have family and friends willing to translate for them. That's unnecessary.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...
[2] http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-regu...
UPDATE: I glanced at the YouTube API, and it seems the IFrame Player API supports returning playback status and elapsed seconds [3], so closed captions running underneath an iframe'd video and dynamically responding to the state of the video appears feasible. Only a 5-minute glance, though, so I might have missed other bits for analyzing for feasibility.
[3] https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#P...
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#56I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here. If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they cou…
I think the crux of the matter, and opinion of the majority of people in those threads, was that the decision against Berkeley was decidedly unjustified.
To me, so long as the university provides resources to its disable students, which I assume they do given they're not involved in an even bigger lawsuit, what they provide to the public is community service. Denying billions of people across the world access to quality information because of the needs of maybe a million deaf in the US is ridiculous and a loss for the world.
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#57None. If you are interested in some subject then you would have taken. And if you got interested in future there must be some course.
So don't waste your hard disk space.
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#58I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here. If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they cou…
I'm not involved in the previous discussion at all, but given my limited knowledge of the facts, I'd propose a solution like: "Berkeley should keep these videos up, and work to add subtitles and accessibility features to them in a reasonable timeframe, consistent with funding and personnel availability."
>I'm not involved in the previous discussion at all, but given my limited knowledge of the facts, I'd propose a solution like: "Berkeley should keep these videos up, and work to add subtitles and accessibility features to them in a reasonable timeframe, consistent with funding and personnel availability."
The issue is that this is not an option. Any institution that gets federal money is required to comply with ADA rules. They either need to make it more accessible or take it down.
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#59Dunno if CS 161, Computer Security, is available but it's a great course. Wagner or Weaver both have their points. CS 70 should make the list but the lecture notes are enough. Strongly prefer Kubi for OS or pretty much anything.
I've been looking for CS 161 but it doesn't look like it's available unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
#60I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here. If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they cou…
I think the crux of the matter, and opinion of the majority of people in those threads, was that the decision against Berkeley was decidedly unjustified. To me, so long as the university provides resources to its disable students, which I assume they do given they're not involved in an even bigger lawsuit, what they provide to the public is community service. Denying billions of people across the world access to qual…
>Denying billions of people across the world access to quality information because of the needs of maybe a million deaf in the US is ridiculous and a loss for the world.
While I don't take sides on the issue, I will point out that this line of reasoning can be used to justify anything against any minority.
The whole point of having this law is to negate this argument. It is (almost by definition) counterproductive to invoke this. The law is saying a particular minority has a right, and as with most/all rights, it is irrelevant how inconvenient it is.
We could keep going back and forth about this, but this is essentially the utilitarianism vs individualism debate. It hasn't been settled for centuries.