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The academic world tends to be quite different from the heavily money-driven world of most people. Academic prestige and reputation are prized far more than money, and so people will put out vast efforts to write a book that brings them virtually no money, but does bring them prestige, at least in their own imagination."
Underlying this apparently is a need for social approval, some get it by peer group recognition, and others by having money and often by flaunting their wealth through their possessions.
At the top end of speakers I remain unconvinced of the superiority of their sound in many cases, but they don't half look good.
The academic world tends to be quite different from the heavily money-driven world of most people. Academic prestige and reputation are prized far more than money, and so people will put out vast efforts to write a book that brings them virtually no money, but does bring them prestige, at least in their own imagination."
Underlying this apparently is a need for social approval, some get it by peer group recognition, and others by having money and often by flaunting their wealth through their possessions.
At the top end of speakers I remain unconvinced of the superiority of their sound in many cases, but they don't half look good.
At my university we are very lucky and have the option (which everyone uses) to rent our textbooks, which works out great since the last thing I want is a bunch of gen-ed textbooks kicking around.
For the few classes that I actually want to have a textbook around for reference in the future, I can buy "retired" (old editions no longer in use) books for a few bucks at the rental place.
As to the anxiety; I think that we can all agree that reading the news these days is anxiety-provoking. For those students who engage in social media (I am not one of those), it is completely unavoidable.
For the few classes that I actually want to have a textbook around for reference in the future, I can buy "retired" (old editions no longer in use) books for a few bucks at the rental place.
As to the anxiety; I think that we can all agree that reading the news these days is anxiety-provoking. For those students who engage in social media (I am not one of those), it is completely unavoidable.
Agree. Millennial and Gen-Z are much nicer to each other than we ever were. We could be pretty horrible to each other, although from what I saw our parents were worse.
I suppose we are all a little different online. I've met a few denizens of this forum who were quite unlike their forum personas. And the again, some of you are exactly the same. 
The 20-somethings I know are basically pretty PC, but they almost all roll their eyes at a lot of the SJW stuff. In person, they are much like their parents (us).
The 20-somethings I know are basically pretty PC, but they almost all roll their eyes at a lot of the SJW stuff. In person, they are much like their parents (us).
Indeed, the youngest amongst us are not the sole cohort guilty of surfing the leading edge of virtue signalling. To say any more might breach the boundaries of this forums rules of conduct - there’d be more than a few only words valid only in cage-match Scrabble.
Actually, some do pass the Scrabble dictionary test, but not safe for most work environments these days.
Actually, some do pass the Scrabble dictionary test, but not safe for most work environments these days.
Some real-world alpha-male posturing and B.S. doesn't work as well to intimidate others online, compared to real life.
In the early days of online interactions, there were some research studies that reported that people who were very retiring and or otherwise overlooked in real life, were more likely to contribute their own ideas and be listened to during online interaction (typing, back then, not video conferencing.)
Just recently my wife was telling me about some programming classes taught at her elementary school by a (male) visiting computer science teacher. He conspicuously avoided one-on-one interactions with the two 7th grade girls in the (mixed grades) group, despite their raised hands and appeals for help, obviously uncomfortable with the fact that they are old enough, pretty enough, and physically developed enough, to appear to be women to a shy young man on the autistic spectrum, as most computer science teachers tend to be. He was fine dealing with the younger kids, and all the boys; only the 7th grade girls got left out, through no fault of their own.
Had that class been taught online, chances are those two girls would not have been overlooked to that degree.
Of course there are also people at the other end of the spectrum, who use online anonymity to insult and threaten and bully others, which they would never have the gonads to do in real life.
-Gnobuddy
I suppose we are all a little different online. I've met a few denizens of this forum who were quite unlike their forum personas. And the again, some of you are exactly the same.
The 20-somethings I know are basically pretty PC, but they almost all roll their eyes at a lot of the SJW stuff. In person, they are much like their parents (us).
Unfortunately, many young people have figured out that they can get away with saying just about anything online without repercussions. Or at least, they haven't felt the repercussions yet. Online, it's pretty easy to get away with telling someone they should kill themselves. When you say that to someone's face, you tend to look like an awful person.
Most people on this forum are civilized enough to avoid that kind of behavior in the first place. Social media is another story. DiyAudio has a great moderation team who makes sure that things stay civilized. This, unfortunately, is not the norm. I'm not sure what the process for becoming a mod on this forum is, however it seems that a lot of care is taken to make sure that we don't end up turning problem members into moderators- something that seems to be depressingly common elsewhere.
That is a really interesting perspective and food for thought. Not something that would ever have occurred to me. Thanks for posting.
Thanks for that very positive comment!Thanks for posting.
People used to say "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good." I think online classes are a good example - there are plenty of ways in which they're worse than real face-to-face classes, such as extremely high drop-out and failure rates, as well as high rates of cheating.
But there are also a few ways in which online classes are better, and one of them is that people don't suffer as much from stereotyping or get neglected as much if they happen to be unusual in some way.
-Gnobuddy
The cheating is a problem everywhere. Professors who give (and grade!) HW problems out of the textbook are rewarding students who cheat. Almost any textbook is on Chegg these days, and a large percentage of students pay the $15/month and just copy the solutions. They get a 100% in the HW category.
I refuse to use Chegg or other answer keys, and usually those who do end up being rewarded with exam grades to match their practice level. It's fine if you're only using them to check your work, but invariably it becomes more than just "checking".
Plenty of people also use the internet to do class projects for them. They'll download all the SolidWorks models and turn them in as their own. Ditto for schematics in EE courses. Unfortunately, a lot of them don't get caught. I don't think I could live with myself if I did that kind of thing.
Edit: One of the professors I know will go through the online answer keys and pick out problems that the answer key did incorrectly to assign.
Same here, and I only wish more people were brought up with a strong enough sense of internal ethics to feel the same way.
There is such a strange disconnect in placing all the value on the course grade, and not on the actual knowledge that it's supposed to represent. It's as though these people were happy to buy fake Ferraris, made of cleverly painted paper-mache, hollow, with no engine or mechanicals inside, and park them on the driveway to impress the neighbours.
There is a peculiar form of cheating involving rich kids, usually rich latchkey kids with no parental supervision (often the parents are abroad.) The rich kid simply hires someone else - an excellent student, often some years senior - to impersonate them for an entire semester. In the full-blown, and most expensive version of this fraud, the fake student attends lectures, does labs, takes all the exams for an entire semester, while the rich kid gets the grades and college transcript.
Apparently there are always plenty of rich latchkey kids in cities like Los Angeles or Vancouver, and also plenty of dirt-poor grad students or fourth-year Bachelor's students with sufficiently porous consciences to do this kind of thing, even in face-to-face coursework.
But online courses make this form of cheating almost trivially easy in most cases, despite various attempts to find technological solutions. Simply get someone else to take your exams. I wouldn't be too surprised if a service like TaskRabbit already existed for this.
I don't have any data, but I don't think the willingness to cheat is anything new, nothing to do with younger generations or older generations. I think it has been part of our species for as long as homo sapiens have existed. In general we are not a very ethical species (just look at the glee with which people began to steal music online as soon as Napster and its ilk arrived). Thankfully there are always honest individuals, even though we are a dishonest species en masse .
-Gnobuddy
When I completed my degree in 2015, and during the 4 years of study, all course work is checked for plagiarism and outright cheating.
Every character of text is checked electronically against online information, and existing works/papers. The student is awarded an originality score. Beyond a very low plagiarism score, the student is failed. All references must be cited, Harvard styles and these are all checked by the software against the work submitted.
It's the group project exercises that are prone to collaboration, when individual perspective and interpretation of the lab/group task is what is tested. Beyond that plagiarism is very well moderated, in my experience.
It's fine thinking in you own mind, to yourself, that students arent as clever as they were back you or day, and the useless millennial generation are all cheats, but in reality and here, in the UK, in my experience of completing a degree in the last decade, the opposite is true, rates of plagiarism are the lowest they have been for a long time, any impression that it is otherwise, is probably due to the fact, MOSTLY cheats are now caught - where 20 years ago or more, and they got away with plagiarism/cheating
Every character of text is checked electronically against online information, and existing works/papers. The student is awarded an originality score. Beyond a very low plagiarism score, the student is failed. All references must be cited, Harvard styles and these are all checked by the software against the work submitted.
It's the group project exercises that are prone to collaboration, when individual perspective and interpretation of the lab/group task is what is tested. Beyond that plagiarism is very well moderated, in my experience.
It's fine thinking in you own mind, to yourself, that students arent as clever as they were back you or day, and the useless millennial generation are all cheats, but in reality and here, in the UK, in my experience of completing a degree in the last decade, the opposite is true, rates of plagiarism are the lowest they have been for a long time, any impression that it is otherwise, is probably due to the fact, MOSTLY cheats are now caught - where 20 years ago or more, and they got away with plagiarism/cheating
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I have watched Gever Tulley on TED talks and read about his camps and svhool. Also bought his book - 50 Dangeros Things Your Child Should Try (or something like that) - to my graddaughter.
Tulley’s idea is that we have taken the kids out of the djungle, but not the djungle out of our kids. Many people liv in urban areas and a sort of fear or even paranoia is spreading. We are over-protecting our children, so when they meet a challenge, they don’t understand the consequencies if going lall in”.
So to give the kids a fair chance of surviving and promoting their curiosity is to let them do dangerous things like making a fire, carving things out of wood with a knife or go by public transport (by themselves). The adults must show how things must be done and also explain that bad things happen and how to stop a bleeding or fix bruises from falling down a tree.
Kids that have gotten the opportunity to try things out, have learned how to cope with ”dangerous” situations also are smarter and more seldom do crazy things.
Here’s Tulleys talks about 5 dangerous things to do and his tinkering school:
Gever Tulley | Speaker | TED
Tulley’s idea is that we have taken the kids out of the djungle, but not the djungle out of our kids. Many people liv in urban areas and a sort of fear or even paranoia is spreading. We are over-protecting our children, so when they meet a challenge, they don’t understand the consequencies if going lall in”.
So to give the kids a fair chance of surviving and promoting their curiosity is to let them do dangerous things like making a fire, carving things out of wood with a knife or go by public transport (by themselves). The adults must show how things must be done and also explain that bad things happen and how to stop a bleeding or fix bruises from falling down a tree.
Kids that have gotten the opportunity to try things out, have learned how to cope with ”dangerous” situations also are smarter and more seldom do crazy things.
Here’s Tulleys talks about 5 dangerous things to do and his tinkering school:
Gever Tulley | Speaker | TED
I hadn't heard of Tulley, but I think he's absolutely right.
I just recently downloaded Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and R.M. Ballantyne's "The Coral Island" from Gutenberg.org . (If you haven't heard of the Gutenberg Project, check it out - volunteers type up books that are old enough to be out of copyright, and make them available, free of charge, to anybody in the world with an Internet connection. It's entirely legal, as the books are out of copyright, either because they're over a 100 years old, or because, in some cases, copyrights expired decades ago and were never renewed.)
"Huckleberry Finn" was published in 1884, and "The Coral Island" at about the same time, in 1857. Both books are about boys - and the range of abilities those boys were routinely expected to have is eye-opening.
In both stories, the boys routinely do things like canoeing, finding firewood and building fires, camping outdoors with no adults to guide or protect them, swimming across rivers or lagoons, cutting down trees, building rafts and using them, fishing, cleaning and cooking the fish over fires they built themselves, et cetera, et cetera. Using tools like axes, saws, needles and thread and knives is entirely routine.
Due to the overt sexism of those times, these stories include nothing about the corresponding abilities of girls in the 1850s, but I'm sure girls of the era had many skills that have also vanished among that age-group today, ranging from darning and mending and knitting and sewing on buttons, to cooking and looking after the younger children. I'm sure the girls were also quite familiar with common tools (scissors, knives, axes for chopping firewood) as well.
Not so long ago the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides (aka Girl Scouts in some countries) continued to provide young people with access to some of these skills. Both those organisations have been withering on the vine for decades now, though.
We really have robbed our children of so much of what makes childhood enjoyable and fulfilling. Yet another trip to the mall to buy yet another quite unnecessary set of clothes is a poor substitute for learning self-reliance while enjoying the beauty of nature
-Gnobuddy
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When I was 10 I started making printed circuit boards with acid. I would buy a big bottle of it from Radio Shack no questions asked. I learned the hard way what happens if you get some of the acid on your clothes. Nobody seemed to think this was unusual or alarming.
I'm pretty sure that's verboten today. Gotta take a class and get a license first. It's too dangerous for amateurs.
I have never bought this acid on the internet. I still have one big bottle of Radio Shack etching acid left. Is it a big deal to buy and ship?
I'm pretty sure that's verboten today. Gotta take a class and get a license first. It's too dangerous for amateurs.
I have never bought this acid on the internet. I still have one big bottle of Radio Shack etching acid left. Is it a big deal to buy and ship?
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