Tag: college

  1. Organics, AI, and what people want to believe.

    25 May 2023

    You pretty much have to have been living inside a farday cage with a stack of dead trees for company to have not heard anything about large language models taking the tech world by storm. Without going into too much detail (because that's not what this essay is about) you take some clever statistical math, a metric fuckton of GPUs, and several petabytes of text scraped from most of the Web, mix thoroughly with a couple of million USD from investors and some Python, and bake it all in a large network of virtual machines running in someone's network (usually …

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  2. Obligatory college thinkpiece.

    25 August 2020

    It seems that every blogger, at one point or other, has to write a thinkpiece about whether or not college is relevant or worthwhile in the 21st century.  I seem to have some spare time on my hands, and I haven't bothered t write one yet, so I figured that I might as well.  I've been out of college for about seventeen years as I write this, so I haven't completely forgotten everything about the experience.  Unfortunately, because I can only speak to my experience in education, this text will be unavoidably skewed in the direction of my perspective.

    The …

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  3. Shooter kills six students, self at Northern Illinois University.

    15 February 2008

    For crying out loud... yesterday afternoon around 1500 CST6CDT, a former sociology grad student of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois dramatically stepped from behind one of the curtains in an ocean sciences lecture hall and opened fire with a shotgun. The gunman is thought to have loosed something like twenty rounds of ammunition, killing six students and wounding another fifteen before turning a weapon upon himself. Students ran for their lives or took cover wherever they could, even behind a transparency projector if it happened to be nearby. Shortly after the carnage began the school went into lockdown - Nexxus6 …

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  4. High school freshmen pick their college majors; students, parents puzzled.

    16 August 2007

    High school freshmen in Englewood, New Jersey will begin a puzzling new programme this fall, which will require them to pick their majors in college their freshman year, an act that will then dictate their primary classes and electives for the next four years. The programme was begun as an experimental effort to prop up falling test scores and help the students focus upon their eventual goals (aside from getting the hell out of high school, which is everyone's imperative at that age). Not all of the parents are convinced that it's a good idea, and that it smacks too …

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  5. Lives lost are lives lost, regardless of the side.

    27 April 2007

    I've been covering the Virginia Tech massacre from last week off and on for a while - just the highlights because things are at the point where just about everyone is saying more or less the same thing, just with slightly different words. Something jumped out at me last night before I went to bed, though: Controversy has been stirred up at VT because student Katelynn Johnson placed a thirty-third stone in the memorial, for shooter Seung-Hui Cho. All hell broke loose as a result, and understandably so, but Johnson was undeterred; in a letter to the school newspaper, she stated …

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  6. The Virginia Tech massacre - aftermath.

    17 April 2007

    More information's come to light with regard to the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus yesterday. They think that they've figured out who the shooter was, a twenty-three year old English major named Cho Seung-Hui. He was reportedly a loner, and they're having a difficult time finding any information on him as a result. They're going through his schoolwork at this time (he was an English major, after all, so they've got stuff from composition classes and the like to analyze); they found a number of rants and missives about various sorts of people in his dorm room written during …

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  7. EDIT: Thirty-three confirmed dead at Virginia Tech.

    16 April 2007

    Just an hour or two ago, an unidentified gunman opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing twenty and wounding more. The gunman was also shot and killed, but it hasn't been announced yet if it was at his own hand or not. The shootings started at Norris Hall, which is the engineering building of the college. The campus is in lockdown at this time, and is expected to remain so well into tomorrow. Other shootings were reported near one of the dorms.

    As it turns out, security forces locked down the campus for a time so the shooter …

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