81–90 of 128 posts
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Who would want to upload files via the HTML standard? Shouldn't you be using some sort of SOAP API with an ActiveX control? Or maybe the users should login to their local ActiveDirectory server and transfer the file to a shared folder via SMB/CIFS. /s
The hair on my neck was raising up until I got to the /s Well played.
Some Berkeley students developed a similar service called Ninja Courses[1]. This lets you browse through classes, order textbooks and also shows ratings. (Although all the ratings are submitted by Ninja Courses users, I believe.) It can even automatically build a schedule for you by choosing lectures and sections that don't overlap, optimizing based on user preferences. For example: do you want more morning classes,…
RIT also has a similar service [1] there's a new ui in the works for the spring, but it's interesting to see how widespread this issue is. Also I have to say RIT has done an awesome job if coordinating with the devs, they give a CVS dump of their course database periodically. [1] http://schedule.csh.rit.edu
Let's not blow this out of proportion. They scraped private data (that required a Yale login) without permission and accidentally made it available to a wider audience than intended. Yale has historically been very supportive of these things. A couple of years ago, they acquired another very slick course catalog website, Yale Bluebook, for a good chunk of money [1]. [1] http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/08/01/univer…
Academia, and the Ivy League in particular, prides itself on being rigorously open, on providing broad access to all knowledge to advance intellectualism. In this regard, academic institutions often attack governments and corporations that intend to limit its free speech, but on the rare chance that this spirit of openness works against the institution, they take a hard liner approach to censoring it. The basic reaso…
Start up idea: Glassdoor for universities. It's a worldwide problem and choosing the wrong class can harm your curriculum, you may play of fer to make sales. ... And local universities won't shut it down. Unless, of course, it's filtered by UK's pornitical filter.
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The hair on my neck was raising up until I got to the /s Well played.
Please elaborate
You know the thing that forces you to use the most dreaded program of all times...
Edit: I hope you were /s'ing
Not at all surprised. "Big campus" is another entrenched "big industry", and disruption is hard. I'm in touch with students every so often that have essentially the same ideas - "let's make it easier for students to do XYZ", where XYZ always involves campus data and/or integrating with campus system. It's damned near impossible, and the reasons are many. Some are valid, some are invalid (obviously, these are my own p…
Now the Washington Post has picked up the story, making them look petty and childish. Does whatever point they are trying to prove offset the PR damage?
How about open sourcing the tool. Release the tool as a self hosted solution, and let any one who wants to host it, host it. Or just use for their own purposes. I am not sure if that could get them in trouble, as I am not sure what crazy provisions Yale has in their student honor code. To be safe I would obfuscate my connection to the open source tool, if I were a student.
Just because someone has the ability to use their credentials to view information does not remove legal liability for the use of that data upon the institution providing the data.
The reason this got shut down was because there could easily be liability and security concerns - about which a couple of hacking students could give two shits.
If the students were, in fact, accepting other students' credentials to access the system in any custom form (pulling data for the particular user vs. harvesting no-account-specific data), and I were on the chopping block for IT security at the uni, you better believe this would be shut down fast. Every single user of that third-party system would be forced to set up a new password and reminded of their obligations for proper handling of their own security.
Now, get off my lawn!
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Looks like ratemyprofessors.com is still kicking after ten (?) years.
A professor has no pull on an external site. But they can certainly raise a stink within their university.
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Universities today have become a text book example of bureaucracy at its finest. Not to say bureaucracy in itself is good or bad, but I think John Stuart Mill was spot on in his remarks upon them: "A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy". Which I guess in the context of most universities today (at least in the united states from my experience), seem to have become hollow shells of their former selves, or…
I think universities have always been this way. It's ironic because they are places of learning and exploring. But only when the topics do not concern the running of the institution itself.
And the ever increasing stories (maybe unique to our times in how fast we can be informed and opine on such) we hear about academia whether they are about they increasing tuition prices for questionable returns (outside of the unquantifiable "great experience" [which seems like from my conversations with people, it is so great, that people don't even try to experience it again, just merely telling others that it was so seems to suffice]), toxic environments that lead to students and profs alike making blog posts and leaving for other opportunities that pop up on hn, or students or profs having to erect time old facades also littered in pamphlets to high schools across the world in response to such events (don't forget they also include how well their best sports team did with a full page layout of their stars and the newest buildings on campus), they don't seem to do themselves any more favors (which makes me have a laugh from time to time to see that MOOC's seem to be trying to live up to hollowed shell of university existence, but at a lower price point, with information that can more or less has been able to be found online for years [It's amazing to type into ddg on some obscure subject and find a mass of pdfs going into detail about such produced from some of those same universities decades ago, maybe to the point it really isn't that amazing anymore since it has been this way for years]).