111–120 of 124 posts
I don't think it's appropriate for a professor to use this feature. Am I in the minority?
Maybe it’s because I studied in Austria where universities generally provide very little handholding to students but I don’t understand the point of compulsory attendance in university lectures. If students think they can pass exams without attending the lectures then they should be able to do that. I certainly did that once or twice when I realized I needed some more credits before the end of the term. It’s a differ…
- Some students are "sponsored" by scholarships or organizations that request attendance data. - I want to know the attendance record for a student who is asking for an extension, or extra-credit work, or some other informal accommodation. - I like to draw fancy graphs correlating attendance and final grades.
But other than that, I don't care if students are in class or not. They're adults. Learning is their responsibility.
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This is a great answer. But I would add that while a technical solution is welcomed, an organizational one could help too: why are multiple people in the same meeting joining from nearby desks instead of a conference room?
There's a downside to the conference room angle; the camera is far away, and the image of the room occupies the same amount of space on my monitor as the seven other heads in the call who are calling in remotely. So unless I know the voice of everyone in the conference room, I have no idea who's speaking at any given point unless they're also gesticulating wildly.
I held onto Symbian longer than I should have, but am surprised this practice hadn't crossed my path before now. IMHO it's insidious. It's one thing for a Google Street View car to war scan my WiFi router, but another for my own phone to secretly rat me out. Not that I use Location myself, but I can't stop other members of the household. I assume this is yet another practice that Android forks like GrapheneOS disable…
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They wanted to keep accurate global positioning as a US military exclusive capability. It's definitely useful for guided munitions, & alternative satellite positioning systems didn't exist or were less mature at the time, so US GPS was the only system one could realistically use for that. A missile able to hit a target within a 3 meter radius is vastly more effective than one that can only hit within 100m, for instan…
Which is idiotic, because nowadays it is trivial to build your own GPS received compared to the complexity of building a reliable ICBM.
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Honest question - what's your use case for needing GPS indoors? I generally know where I am when I'm indoors :)
You're in a large building you're unfamiliar with. Particularly one with an unusual layout, like a mall or hospital.
Then we can be wherever we want, super precisely!
One time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...
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The logic is, nobody cares if you waste your own tuition money by not attending class, but people do care if you waste somebody else's tuition money.
You didn't answer my question at all. I understand whose money is involved, that had nothing to do with my point.
Now imagine you're a big donor. You donate enough money for, say, 10 scholarships. None of them attend class. None of them get degrees. Are you likely to donate again?
Now the question: can you spoof your location? Say you are an admin on your system (for instance you run a Linux distro), can you make your OS return the same list of SSID/BSSIDs as your friend who is in the classroom (or as you recorded the day before) to pretend you are there? Would be a fun experiment, and a nice follow-up post :-).