avs733

So with some searching…

In the UK you can apply to upto five colleges.

In the US the recommendation seems to be between 5-8

Looking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice.

I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.

So correct for the reality that…

1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.

2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)

3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.

And their model is just breaking.

Having dealt with this with a couple of family members, set it a similar system for my spouse and I, and also been tech support for numerous friends doing somethign similar I'll provide a couple notes

* The biggest product market fit note to me is that this misunderstands the information access challenge. My experience has been that you are on 'step 2' of the information - organizing it and accessing it. Step 1 is getting the information out of the person, all of it, correctly, willingly. These are hard conversations and structuring them is less of a challenge than the emotional piece.

* In the zero trust/everything is multifactor age what I have really found is that access to cell phone and email are the most critical. I don't see where this prioritizes those...because I won't be able to login to anything of (say) my mom's from my laptop until I have those two things to verify identity.

* I can't quite tell whether you are pitching this at 'healthy people to set this up for the future' (a nonstarter because of annual subscription cost) or 'healthy person helping sick family member' (they have enough going on that starting using a new piece of software is an unsustainable cognitive load delta no matter the ease).

Big picture...what I recommend for friends and family is a password manager with a deadmans switch someone else (your estate personal rep) can trigger. That, plus good estate planning is basically sufficient. You should (and almost always can) have some document in there listing major accounts nad bills that is mostly up to date. This stuff doesn't have to be perfect it just needs to be good enough because no matter why you are activating it perfect is not going to be an option or even helpful.

I think this is the larger point that is easy to miss.

Thinking about this as slashing science or making it more efficient or short sighted or innovative is all a distraction.

It’s just another opportunity to give money to the friends of those in government and take money from those you don’t. Say want you want about how it used to be, but this and the new rules around “political oversight” are just corruption and grift that are either wearing a mask of ideology or efficiency based on your political stance

Worth noting this is pretty standard university PR. It is written with author involvement so it’s likely technically correct but it is aimed at getting it picked up so it often makes it sound flowery and contains multiple descriptions of generally the same thing with different analogies or simplifications that anyone writing an article from this can parrot easily.

I’m going to keep it vague beyond saying that I don’t have to worry about going bankrupt from healthcare.

Why assume that this is about finding a job?

I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.

We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.

The aesthetic very much feels like the whole earth catalog revisited…

Except the housing market, especially the rental market, is still significantly driven by small rental property owners and is a significant source of generational wealth transfer.

Starting with the assumption that all or even most investors / actors are rational is a continuing pox on both economic scholarship and societal thinking

There is a nother factor worth mentioning in the admissions piece - the proababilistic accuracy in admissions alongside massive increases in the number of applications students send out. The first admissions criteria is basically the ability to succeed at the institution academically. It used to be typically applied to a handful, maybe 10 max, universities. Now it is not uncommon to hear from students they applied to 40 or 50. In 2017, my university got 31k applications and accepted 7.4k students. In 2025 those numbers were 68k and 8.5k - the number of acceptances were up 20%, the applications were up 115%. If you assume admissions process has a 95% accuracy, that predicts a huge increase in 'false positives' dropping from 85% of students we expect to be 'correctly' prepared to 74%.

Add to that that the quality of math learning outcomes and math learning in K-12 has gone WAY down. I point this squarely at 2 factors - No child left behind and the rejection of the common core because parents no lnoger felthtey understood the math their kids were learning. (and teachers did not understand math well enough to teach it well as a conceptual matter).

Even if they are getting the grades and even getting the test scores, they increasingly undersstand very little. They are not prepared for understnading they are prepared for question answering. Even in advnaced classes I see students actively reject learning and understanding for just answering - answering is the point they have learned. Right answers are the point, the only point.

A colleague and I were recently talking about what they see their middle nad high schoolers being taught in math classes. They termed it 'calculation as a defense against analysis'

SATs might help some but they aren't the problem they are a stop gap. K-12 (and by extension college) have so heavily sought to (poorly) quantify every aspect of experience to evalute people that they have stripped any meaning from the process. The problem is nothing has useful predictive value anymore in a process that is oversaturated by a 115% increase in the number of decisions an admissions office has to make. Its a math problem more than a cultural or standards problem.

I'm with you and have said this a long time. We* are responsible for the government that acts in our name and we should bear the costs of its abuse. The Sheriff did not have the power of arrest that he abused here when we has a regular citizen. We gave him that power and we are responsible for its misuse. That is not to say the Sheriff should not be punished and our criminal laws and criminal system are woefully inadequate for a myriad of reasons at punishing abuse. There is a term for what the Sheriff did - kidnapping. That is never gonna happen, but the civil litigation and damages is rightly against Sheriff Nick Weems not Nick Weems.

* We does not mean everyon every time - it means the people from whom an official vests their power.

It seems like some better basic metrics should be made front and center with PRs in this day and age. Yes AI is the driving force behind the current crop of problems but there are other issues. Yes it’s accessible if you go look but the point is people don’t have time.

the rate of comits/PRs total

The rate of PRs to repos they don’t own

The reject rate of PRs

The number of ban

An estimated “AI” or bot score or status flag

There are a few better attempts at GitHub metrics calculators but I have not seen any that move beyond the paradigm of more vomits is default assumed good. It’s time to foreground quality not just quantity. The GitHub “4 kpis” are entirely action oriented.

At least in my state the actually high risk portion of their job…dealing with traffic collisions on the highway…is being outsourced to non police “hero units”

Tells me we can change what police are and aren’t responsible for, and it is telling which ones they want to drop and which ones they don’t.

In a sense you aren’t wrong but those analogies fail at scale. It’s like saying you could replace all hr functions with a spreadsheet.

They are large databases yes but they do a lot of small and large things that that analogy glosses over

Because faculty didn’t want to do it anymore. They want it handled by others but also they want oversight and veto power but also they don’t want to be bothered. But it better always work, and if they make a mistake the software is broken because don’t tell them it’s a user error they used to write Fortran.

As a faculty member at a large university…I have a deep respect for the impossible job of university IT departments.

We originally rolled our on LMS decades ago. When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date because faculty refused to remove their files. Finally each one was manually moved by IT for the recalcitrant old faculty.

our instance went from [insert hacker leet text] to "down for scheduled maintenance" and myself and other faculty are just having the darkest humor about this.

It is absolute chaos at my institution. This is the last day of finals and grades are due Monday morning. Most faculty are spending today, tomorrow, and through the weekend finalizing grades.

What we don't have access to includes:

* Already graded work

* Ungraded work

* overall adn assignment grades

* lists of students and student emails from the course

* messages from students that are often sent through gradescope

Just...complete implosion.

Its a blog post from the WalletWallet team about the upcoming changes that have only been reported by Bloomberg news

A gay mobile kitchen?

If we are going to say violence isn’t okay then it is important that we be clear about the boundaries of what we define as violence.

Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.

If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.

From liability!

If this were to actually happen I can only imagine financial liability is the least of their concerns?

What scares me most about this is the narrowness of thought to match this fear with this response.

I read this twice thinking it was an April fools joke I wasn’t getting.

and I imagine that if the INVERSE of this case had come up, the police suing for defamation would have been protected by qualified immunity so no lawsuit would have been possible.

The police being able to leverage civil law against citizens to control their behavior in ways that citizens cannot leverage against cannot to comment on the abuse of power is entirely unacceptable no matter what our laws and judiciary chose to allow.

If the company violates their ToS, you can take them to court (or arbitration).

This is my favorite...how exactly can I monitor compliance? No evidence of non-compliance - get tossed out of court. No court order for discovery - no ability to monitor/gather evidence compliance.

The idea that this is even a potential for mutuallity on a TOS is just farcical.

I don't think the commenter you are responding too thinks this is a good thing - they are just describing that it is. I read it as just a blunt summary of how absurd this situation is.

out of context that makes sense...but in the context of a case report how do you implement that? The patients have privacy rights and the authors/doctors have a responsibliity to protect them. That doesn't justify this but it does force a conversation about what 'every single data point' means. Does it mean the patient's real name and social security number? their complete medical chart?

Case reports are descriptive not determinative and should be treated as such by other scholars. They are 'I saw this' not 'this is generalizably true'. They can (and often are) replicated or countered but they are not per se research as you are thinking about it. Whether it is fictitious or not, other scholars should be cautious in citing them as proof/evidence in papers that fit into the 'research' mold.

not only that but they leveraged the 'compliance' mindset that comes with government institutions to do so.

This was first reported at least a week or two ago and only now are they getting aroun dto thinking about making it an actual rule (which takes time and process). The rules that aren't really rules for plausible deniability serve several purposes including normalizing compliance in advance.

I'll set aside opinions of the rule because people can really feel differently about the long and short term balance of security and soft power...but not rule rules is an approach to government I really struggle to see both sides of.

That simply says if a company offers a service the government gets to cut the line. It doesn say I have to make them a hamburger if I’m a sushi restaurant.

They are a private company they can largely sell or not sell they want. They aren’t saying they won’t build them because they are to effective they are saying they won’t build them because they aren’t safe.

As just a statement of bias…the guys at that site have a pretty clear distaste for Tesla. They are industry experts and that’s where their analysis comes from, but it’s palpable. I would call it evidence versus politically based but noting it. The difference in bias though is ther snark has citations to primary sources not just wild generic claims.