Hmm, should have paid that money directly to US News & World Report. Not sure how tear-gassing sophomores affects the ranking but I'm guessing low six figures can get you spot #3 on the liberal arts list.
UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
#2 is an unhealthy conflict of interest that saddens me. I remember buying $100 textbooks that were quickly out of date and too heavy to lug around. Anyone in a senior position like this should have the interests of students and their education at heart and be doing everything they can to provide students with accurate and affordable learning materials. In fact, I don't see why their creation shouldn't be subsidised…
I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible. The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon." PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is requ…
I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping.
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
But she was a true benefactor for all these wonderful images, https://www.google.com/search?q=uc+davis+pepper+spray+meme&b... Isn't active "cleaning up" of the internet by a government entity a violation of those people's free speech?
No. The cleaning up, though reprehensible, is not violating their free speech, because there's no prior restraint and no legal penalties. However, the Chancellor will hopefully have a significant amount of explaining to do as to why she is spending so much of the public's money on this whitewashing.
If someone uses public money to erase your words isn't that cenorship?
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#74"UC Davis spent thousands...". Shades of Dr Evil.
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. They probably executed the original contract well enough, but you can't game Google to prevent future news stories from appearing. That's the nature of the game. These companies just flood the internet with innocuous data about the client in a way that's carefully aimed at pushing "bad stuff" down in the rankings. This works for a number of reasons, but a major one is that search engines prefer recency. Search…
Right, but it's also kind of a special case in that your "future stupid stuff" must include the hiring of the very service that's going to clean up your previous stupid stuff -- so long as the public regards such hiring as stupid. I guess this is one case where it's especially true that "if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself" :-p
Yes, this is why this kind of thing probably only really works for individuals. There's too much public interest in a university or a large corporation, and so the act of covering your tracks is itself noteworthy.
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible. The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon." PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is requ…
I have read about those shady techniques from publishers. Universities should refuse to deal with them and those proven to take favours for making these publishers required should be penalised.
Ultimately, students make a pretty poor voting demographic (especially in Republican state legislatures in the south).
So if a college earns some kind of financial benefit from choosing a particular text "solution", then that's money the state doesn't have to fund.
If students want this to change then they need to organize politically and make it a clear demand, as they're the only stakeholders impacted by higher priced textbooks.
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible. The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon." PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is requ…
I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping. http://www.verbasoftware.com/
I always thought crowd-sourced feedback on whether a class + instructor combination required the textbook would be incredibly useful.
A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes
B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year
So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"
Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?
Thanks for the good work though!
Re: UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reference is narrowly escaping me. Help? edit in reply: Haha, no, not Green Eggs & Ham another edit: I thought the parent & grandparent posts might belong together, but apparently not. I think GP is simply using this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveYouTriedNotBe... — or perhaps this recent Dilbert strip http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-03-08
Mister Horse from Ren and Stimpy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGlN6mluGA
Mister Horse is correct!