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Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

nytimes.com

171–180 of 238 posts

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#171
This is one of the thousands of tiny abuses enabled by everyone carrying around a corporate surveillance device in their pocket.

Apple/Google could end this tomorrow by implementing permission systems that allowed users to change the data received by apps. A workable user friendly interface might be "location pinning", where you could check a box to store your current location and keep reporting that location until you said otherwise. And if app developers insisted on fighting back and inferring whether data wasn't noisy enough, the OS could easily step up its game by adding in synthesized drift, even across multiple users.

The problem is that smartphone OS developers are trying to serve two masters - their users, but also the surveillance-minded app developers. They're pretending it's possible to remain neutral in the face of a huge power disparity, but what they're actually doing is forcing the user to remain open to inspection by hostile code. Even LineageOS stonewalled the patches to support microG instead of simply accepting them into the state of the art and moving on!

If we as users want to be in control of our own devices (and for our society to not turn into a totalitarian shithole, we really do!), then we need to accept the worthiness of lying. No matter who it was written by, the code on a user's device should be working for the interests of the user. App developers already have a place to run the code that represents them - on their own servers.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#175
post #6

Sounds like students opt-in to this to get rewards later. It's not a penalty, it's more like you don't get a free lottery ticket.

It's still a bit orwellian to manipulate students into installing a tracking app like that. Couldn't they just have the students who want to opt in swipe or tap their student IDs as they enter and again as they leave?

It’s hard swipe 17,000 students twice during a game, we use beacons to do it automatically in the background.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#176
When I was a student, I was required to buy a little clicker that I used to answer mini quiz questions at lectures. Professors used that to track attendance. Yet there were no breathless NYT pieces about how Professors were tracking student locations...

Is it only "Orwellian" when GPS is involved?

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is extremely misinformed. there are phisical education and phisical therapy degrees, team sport is essential to character development in children and sport in general done early and constantly is useful to combat a wealth of health related issues including obesity. sport in school is not an USA anomaly, in Italy the school curriculum basically includes for all obligatory cycles as much hours of physical activity…

Do you have any evidence to back your assertion that team sport is necessary for childhood character development? How about your implied premise that team sport does a better job of improving physical health than individual sport or non-competive physical activity?

it's self evident if you ever been trough schooling, but since you want to play the evidence game let's start from a systemic study about team sport, socialization and psychological health

https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1479-5868-...

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then he should go to the NFL and hang with the big guys. Is he personally bringing in the millions and the athletes nothing?

>Is he personally bringing in the millions and the athletes nothing? I agree with the first half of your sentence and not the second. But I would argue that Saban is easily 10x more important to Alabama's success than any single athlete on the team. I think Bama's QB carousel backs up that claim. > Then he should go to the NFL and hang with the big guys. Financially that might be the best move for him, however I don'…

> But I would argue that Saban is easily 10x more important to Alabama's success than any single athlete on the team.

Maybe they should pay him 10x more than they pay the students then. What's that work out to? If the students are being compensated with free tuition, 10x that is probably a few hundred thousand dollars, right?

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#179

It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy (but there is no shortage of other non-academic activities that many students share, such as baseball...) And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game ea…

> And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game early, it's perhaps not an activity that students enjoy after all. This is completely misunderstanding what's happening. They're leaving early because the game is already decided . When the score is 62-10 in the 4th quarter, you're no longer watching a competition.

If the game is meant to entertain the students, and the students are no longer entertained by that particular instance of the game, then why is it so important to the school that students remain inside the stadium?

It really seems to me that the school has somehow made these student/spectators a product in some way. Perhaps it looks better to network television if the stadium stays packed the entire game?

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#180
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I think the reason is that Western Europe is historically much more urbanized than most of America.

The way this whole thing started was between very urban Ivies in the USA: > The first organized college sports club was formed in 1843 when Yale University created a boat club.[4] Harvard University then followed in their footsteps, creating a similar boat club a year later. These boat clubs participated in rowing races called Regattas.[5] The creation of these organizations set the stage for the first intercollegiat…

I don’t disagree the sport started in the ivies, but not where it became massively commercialized. Right now the Northeastern football programs are not very competitive, with the exception of Notre Dame. I can’t do this analysis right now, but I’d bet that there is a strong correlation between college football revenue and distance from professional teams, adjusting for the date at which the professional teams were founded.
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