I looked at this list, and I think I've discovered the problem.
Knowledge is evil.
Say no to education!
Let's get back to the Garden!
1.4: Just want to make it clear that this is not an endorsement of any military action against Iraq or Iran.
1. Make America Great Again!
Not all those hundred bad things are ed-tech as such, of course, but in my now five years of ed-tech job I've seen most of them go by, been paid to work directly on several of them (not the death of Aaron Swartz), and sat through vendor presentations on many more. So what are the common threads?
- Since higher education has so much collective purchasing power, adding "for education" to any old snake oil is a great way to hoover up some cash. This matches up nicely with the drift of university administration toward a corporate management style which demands data and metrics, and fails to see that if you take those data-driven methodologies outside specific domains where they work well (Google ad clickthroughs, say, or Amazon orders), what you end up with is terabytes of junk data, and that plus $4.50 plus a few thousand a month to offset your AWS costs will buy you a latte.
- Universities tend not to understand that buying something from a vendor platform doesn't let you off the hook for further work; you still have to hire Nibelungen like yours truly to hammer out all the integrations in subterranean darkness, which task frequently ends up being such a pain in the ass that you would have been better off building the whole thing from scratch.
- Broadly, in the face of continued state disinvestment in higher education it's natural to hearken to the ed-tech promise of scalability and efficiency, since what you're theoretically doing is supplanting older workflows involving expensive humans. The technology is superficially shiny enough that it feels like an advance rather than a retreat, and you can ignore that what's actually happening is a continued scaling back of the educational mission.
(aside: It's not that technology has no place in higher education; it's not that my job is completely pointless.)
Started reading it at 100. Didn't recognize it, probably because I'm not in ed-tech. 99 and 98 seemed vaguely familiar but pointlessly generic. The next 10 were either one or the other. So instead I skipped to the bottom. #1 - agreed, sounds horrible. 2 and 3 seem to be each summaries of a huge category of entries on the list. Isn't that cheating? 4 is hype for massively open online courses (MOOCs) - sounds plausible. 5 is Gamergate. Sounds fair. 6 is "everyone should learn to code", and the author makes a good argument there. 7 is ClassDojo, and hey, this is familiar to me. We get frequent updates from Atossa's teacher. Just cute pictures or announcements about upcoming events so far, maybe we'll get to the insidious stuff later. It's a tiny bit annoying how frequent those updates are, but isn't literally everything like that these days?
When I first saw this, was gratified that my company wasn't listed (and the big evil company that briefly owned us, only mentioned in passing). But many of these trends are familiar.
- Since higher education has so much collective purchasing power, adding "for education" to any old snake oil is a great way to hoover up some cash.
Yes, even more so if you consider education as a whole. It has the same combination of lots of money, being at the edge of what we understand well, and a general desire to improve over the status quo that allows bullshit to flourish. Not too different from tech in general in that sense.
Having been at colleges and universities in one capacity or another my entire adult life, I've seen lots of nonsense, but I think MOOC mania takes the prize for most spectacular outburst of pure hype.
It's been downhill since they made me switch from Windows XP.
I am, for the first time since 1989, not affiliated with any university.
I've probably says that here before, but then I got a contact with one shortly after.
I like it that Peter Thiel himself gets his own entry and I would suggest that he have one on every Top 100 Worst list of any kind.
Although it's true that there's an endless variety of dumb things you could do with clickers in a classroom, I have seen them put to impressively good use and here in the UK I should think they'd be helpful during lectures simply as a proof of life, since IME I could set myself on fire and do a pole dance without getting so much as a nod of acknowledgement from the students here.
And I'd still love to ban laptops in lectures although I've conceded that battle.
Not exactly ed tech, and I don't know how specific it is to my university, but I've noticed that all the big custom software platforms used for adminny kinds of things -- ordering, grant budgeting, lab animal inventory, even the CMS for public-facing web pages -- like, scarcely work at all when they're up, and are frequently offline. I assume it costs a shit-ton of money to commission custom software for a big institution and yet I often feel like a lot of these tasks could be more reliably done for free with shared go/ogle sheets and so forth. I don't get it.
You can't monetize not getting it. That's the problem.
This is funny and related and so help me god I have seriously gotten the "must use IE" admonition from one of the above-mentioned useless custom platforms within the last year.
15: Fuck Microsoft! I'm sticking with Netscape.
I've been annoyed at the whole "hour of code" thing, which ends up being "here, use this drag and drop tool to write instructions for the Disney Princess to get through the maze," and then stops there. There is no follow of up with "this is what HTML does" or "here is how to write a basic script in Python."
I have websites that I have to use Internet Explorer for, because they require Microsoft Silverlight.
We are basically dividing websites now into "only Internet Explorer" and "can be any browser except Internet Explorer".
This doesn't include Microsoft Edge which is the work equivalent of Windows Media Player, every couple of days generating a "Oh God I didn't mean to open this! It set this as the default for some file format! How do I change the default back!" and then being ignored.
Still worth a laugh and a reminder about how wrong he is about everything, but education expert and Mustache of Understanding regularly used to inform us that MOOCs were in the process of massively transforming education. Much like television was going to back when he and I were children.
I have websites that I have to use Internet Explorer for, because they require Microsoft Silverlight.
Ha, I have had this experience too, but only with one site. It's so weird that they didn't make Edge backward-compatible with this Silverlight stuff since they clearly intended it to replace IE.
Since higher education has so much collective purchasing power, adding "for education" to any old snake oil is a great way to hoover up some cash
Also, think of the children. Everyone finds it necessary to at least pretend they care about education. There's a big pool of cash, the people who control it seem to think it's a badge of honour to be hopeless, and people think you're a saint for accepting it!
since what you're theoretically doing is supplanting older workflows involving expensive humans
"Workflows". Do you mean "mangling Word documents really slowly, all the while bitterly complaining and trying to break something so you can beg a passing teaching assistant/student/spouse to do the job, before getting back to teaching, research, and scheming to keep the same administrative responsibility you barely manage to discharge with bad grace and ill humour because otherwise some other department might get it?" YES OF COURSE YOU DO IT'S A UNIVERSITY.
About half the list is good but the rest is just generally shouting at clouds, in the Grandpa Simpson sense.
I am sad to learn that Ned is trapped in 2010, never able to escape.
Everyone finds it necessary to at least pretend they care about education.
If my son is any guide, seniors in high school don't necessarily even pretend.
Honestly, 2010 sounds really great. How can I go back?
If you do manage to go back, maybe you can stop Obama from wearing a tan suit so this whole bloody timeline would be derailed.
I think I fucked something up. Real quick, is it giraffes or unicorns that are real?
28: Depends. Are you a machine learning algorithm?
I'm not sure how I would know if I were.
31. Can you tell two African-Americans apart? If not, you are an ML algorithm.
Are they going to be identical twins?
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Snipers in helicopters took to the skies as part of a bid to curb "extremely large" herds of camels in South Australia. An ongoing drought has driven the animals closer to towns, threatening the water supplies of locals.|>
34: A perennial theme of drought management is to "look to Australia" and we get regularly told to do what Australia does and I have heard more talks about Australian management and I am generally not impressed nor think their lessons transferrable so I have to admit I feel a little spiteful glee when I hear stories about fucked-up Australian water management. I knew it all along! (only for being right, not because they're suffering)
Maybe if they got the camels to eat the prickly pears they's come out ahead?
(They're shooting 10,000 camels, btw.)
Anyway, we've all been backed into a corner and had to shoot 10,000 camels at one point.
10,000 camels, 30-50 feral hogs, tomato, tomahto.
Also, everyone wish me luck? I just interviewed for a (small, unimpressive) promotion.
42: Good luck, LB! Are you going to be taking Harry and Meghan's place?
42. Good luck. Any motion is impressive, smiley face !
Good luck. We're all rooting for you.
You can say what you want about neoliberalism, but when Rahm was mayor of Chicago, I didn't read about people getting attacked by coyote in Chicago.
Tom Waits and Solomon Burke: Diamond in Your Mind
I knew what that was without looking
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Speaking of tech, I have to get a new phone (after 5 years) and my tech advisor is no longer available. My God they've gotten expensive. And too big for my pockets?
Anyone have suggestions? Android. Verizon. Need a good camera, and a battery that can go all day in subzero.
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I have a Pixel that is a bit older (2xl) and I am not happy at all with the battery in the cold. I'm probably going to go back to Samsung, but I have not direct experience there.
I've been happy with Moto x4. Basic Android, long battery life, large but not ridiculously so - longest dimension 14.8cm.
You could get a Huawei if you want to make sure somebody in China always knows what you are doing.
My current phone is more or less held together by a pro-Uyghur sticker.
My OnePlus 7 really blows the doors off of ever crappy phone I ever owned. Its fast, has a strong camera, and goes days without a recharge.
So many phones, so few small phones! A neglected market. (Especially women.)
Palm seems to have a low-powered contender at 9.6cm; most of the rest are no less than 14cm.
The Moto G7 is *very* reasonably priced Android Phone. Like between $130 & $180 pending the variety. There's multiple varieties of the G7 power [slightly more expensive at around $180] with longer battery life, G7 plus, and just G7 regular (I think). According to the internet, where everything is true, it's supposedly one of the best budget phones. It does not remotely feel like a budget phone to me at all. Though as mentioned above, it's going along with the trend of huge screens.
56. The Samsung Galaxy 10e (Android) is "normal sized" (5 1/2" x 2 5/8") and has a long-lasting battery. I got mine through Verizon. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't ruinously expensive like some fruit-based phones.
I mean, it's one bananaphone. How much could it cost?
People born in 2000 won't get why anybody would try to answer a banana.
Yeah, the Moto G7 looks like the current descendant of the X4.
OT but holy crap this looks bad for Boeing.
In one April 2017 exchange, an employee wrote: "This aeroplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys."... In one message from March 2018, an employee, apparently unhappy after a meeting, wrote they were not sure "if I will be returning in April given this -- am not lying to the FAA. Will leave that to people who have no integrity." "I'm sorry, that is not acceptable," another employee responded. "Your integrity is priority 4."
https://www.ft.com/content/7785de46-3350-11ea-9703-eea0cae3f0de
"your integrity is priority 4" is a line I really did not think anyone could possibly use in real life. It's straight out of the bullying scenes in Succession.
Don't know about Verizon or if you can even get them in the states but OnePlus seems to make the best affordable android phones at the moment. Huawei are cheap because of the boycott and all but the one I lust after, with the 5x optical zoom, is still expensive. I just got my sister a recycled-as-new ONePlus 3 and she is delighted with it. I would have got one myself if I were not feeling broke. My rule is to buy the flagship of two years ago, preferably just after a new model has been introduced. Perfectly happy with my pizel 2, especially the camera, but the oneplus did have a nicer, larger screen.
Is there a US equivalent to envirofone?
Just read the bit about batteries in the cold. I think there is probably a correlation between battery size and usefulness; the trouble with that is that battery size is directly related to screen size now that everything is so thin.
The other point arising from that FT Boeing story is that the relevant authority already has access to the emails. It's going to take some really stonking bribes to get out of that hole.
Or an outbreak of, for lack of a better phrase, great-power competition.
Who gets what? I thumbsuck Airbus gets the civil bits, BAE the military, Lockheed the space.
, BAE the military,
Can't see the US government allowing that.
IIRC the UK was included in the JSF project a the same level as the US itself ("Tier 1 partner", IIRC). And stand to be corrected, but the alternative to a European buyer would be a Lockheed monopoly. Or a bailed-out zomboeing.
77: I'm not sure that the EU would allow Airbus to take BCA because it essentially reduces the passenger jet industry to one OEM for anything bigger than a big regional jet (Bombardier and Embraer). It'll be a while before the Chinese produce a proper widebody, and no one flies an Ilyushin unless they have to for political reasons and/or don't mind the hearing loss.
The only other big defence manufacturers in the US are Lockheed and Northrop Grumman. I can see NG being allowed to buy Boeing Defense - most of that used to be McDonnell - and thus preserving two decent fighter builders - NG hasn't built a fighter since Grumman back in the Seventies. Given that BAE was allowed to buy General Dynamics' land systems branch back in the 1990s, it's not impossible it might be allowed into Boeing Defense, I suppose.
Maybe we should just go back to using trains.
For passenger travel and defense (fortified trains). Not for space.
I'm not sure that the EU would allow Airbus to take BCA because it essentially reduces the passenger jet industry to one OEM for anything bigger than a big regional jet (Bombardier and Embraer)
Pretty sure the EU would be fine with a monopoly as long as it was a Pan-European one.
Regardless, a bailout seems way more likely to me than a forced breakup, though with Trump's idiosyncratic approach to antitrust, who knows.
Trudeau has a goatee! Still looks like a teenager.
Zamphir is the only pan-European I know.
Who apparently spells his name incorrectly.
The real treasure is the millions of records you sell in Europe along the way.
Fine. Bombardier gets civil.
Bombardier is Canadian. It's already terribly civil.
Zamphir is the only pan-European I know.
Le Creuset?
The Canadian I know best swears like a trooper. He's Quebecois though.
Most of the troopers I know are actually terribly well spoken.
I'm sure I've complained about this before, but it's never been so topical:
The Heebie U internal website has the charming feature where it constantly warns you not to use the "back" button on your browser, or you'll be kicked out of the system and have to log back in. THAT'S RIGHT. No back button for you.
This makes me lose my fucking mind.
Canadian perspective on Bombardier: the company is a disaster. No way they would ever be able to develop and manufacture a wide-body jet within an order of magnitude of the promised budget or timeline. The very idea is laughable.
(I may be biased because they made light rail vehicles for my city, which were delivered 2 years late so that for 2 whole years we had a complete light rail track system through the city, complete with re-prioritized traffic signals, but no trains to run on it.)
That's too bad. I liked flying on the little CRJs.
95: let me go try. I'll report back.
The airline I was taking that used them went broke. Once there were only like four passengers on a flight (Columbus to Raleigh).
"The document is no longer available".
They provide a pathway of links at the top of the page, so you can navigate backwards from there, but you have to remember to do so.
NYC has announced that a bunch of its new trains, made by Bombardier, will be taken out or service 737MAX-style because the doors can open too easily when the train is moving.
The great country of Canada is not immune to corporate incompetence and corruption!
Right, but you can get a good glass of wine in Toronto for like less than $10. Try that in other big North American cities.
I would try myself, but I really don't go places often.
72: oh, I think it's sympathetic sarcasm. Never say never, but evil middle managers are usually more roundabout in written communication.
Sarcasm is always a first priority.
105. Embraer E-Jets are already a better passenger experience than 737s, but they've never tried to make anything in the 747-8/A380 class and it would be a hell of a gamble to bet on them doing so and then waiting god knows how long to see if they did it right.
So it looks like Airbus gets civil.
Well, in this scenario they would be acquiring BCA which has plenty of experience in making wide body jets...
72: It reminds me of a manager at a place I worked years ago who, not long before rethinking her life and career and quitting and putting much of her savings into a long trip to Bali which she left for shortly after her last day at that job, said during a meeting about people spending too much time on accuracy over volume doing data entry work: "If you can't aim for mediocrity, we can't use you."
Also, I read that whole list of 100 in the OP and the sheer amount of private money put into failed initiatives, either as for-profit investments or non-profit donations, is truly staggering. I wonder if anyone's added up those figures (not just from the post but in general) and compared them with public spending.
"If you can't aim for mediocrity, we can't use you."
But you can respect a commitment to sucking.