“Today’s America has seen decades of the intentional conservative-led starving and squeezing of public education … and also the devastation of newspapers, journalism, and a vast misinformation campaign. All this adds up to preventing many who are educable from becoming educated. Thomas Paine, and those I’m using him to represent, would recognize this as a sabotage of their system.”
“[T]he developers are testing it on Annie, Zach Adams' wife. After a failed attempt with an earlier version, the latest tutorial took Annie far enough to where she could ‘tunnel under a bog and drown her fortress.’ Presumably, that is good.”
“There are some who take organic chemistry to get into a Ph.D. program or prepare for a career in chemistry, but they’re relatively rare. Most of the students are pre-med, and for a lot of them, organic chemistry is a dream-shattering experience.”
It seems to me like the professor at the center of this story was done a grave disservice by NYU, set up to fail (though surely not intentionally on anybody’s part) and then abandoned.
“[M]ost of my callers realised that they can’t contribute to a field without meeting today’s quality standard. … One of them might even publish a paper soon. Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey.”
“The next issue we tackled was setting up a custom video stream to play the rickroll in real-time. We needed to broadcast multicast traffic, but only the AvediaStream encoders or the AvediaServers could do this because of ACL restrictions.”
“Yes, it would be good if Harvard et al. let in a lot more poor kids. But if we really want to boost opportunity for the mass of working-class Americans, we should be worrying more about expanding access to places like UC Riverside, SUNY Stony Brook, Cal State Fresno, and so on.”
“[T]he standards-and-accountability movement … is an elaborate sorting device, intended to separate wheat from chaff. The fact that students of color, students from low-income families, and students whose first language isn’t English are disproportionately defined as chaff makes the whole enterprise even more insidious.”