"She would often arrive on campus early, around 7:30, for office hours. She would get settled into her office and sit down. She was a black woman in a largely empty building, and people would come by and inquire about whether she was the janitor. Then she would teach classes. Her students loved her, but their parents would call the school questioning whether she had a doctorate."
Let’s just say I had a similar reaction and attempted to decipher the simultaneous ToS update by Microsoft/Meta/PayPal as well.
I’m relieved to know that I’m not the only one befuddled by the inaccessibility of the legal terms in general…?
And kudos to Microsoft and PayPal legal team that there is at least a summary of changes page in plain language.
Coolest find of the week: high-res public domain art repository.
(Somewhat amused that "Asian Art" is >90% Japanese artworks. Are there just not enough of Korean/Chinese/Indian works in public domain...?)
After years of trial and error, I did confirm that the best way to improve coding skills is to push yourself to build/expand projects of increasing complexity...
There's only one problem: it takes a significant amount of energy and uninterrupted time to actually code well.
Unless your program for a living (or have the financial/social means to delegate other activities), it can be hard to dedicate yourself to maintain such a habit.
(Writing as I try to untangle a project I wrote months ago.)
In years of mentoring students planning their first redesign project, 8 out of 10 people would pick either the course management platform (you'll know when you see it) or something similar. It never fails.
What they don't realize is that the poor UX they have to put up with is merely symptoms of the larger institutional bureaucracy at work...
And that, is a problem bigger than any individual can tackle.
Wish you all good luck with the start of the new semester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality_of_evil
Copy-pasting here because it's well said:
"A PhD is one of those rare periods of life where you are completely on your own, navigating unknown territories without anybody telling you what you should or should not do, where your professional success depends entirely on your own ideas and decisions. The reason to try a PhD is that you are truly free to test your limits. It can be liberating, but also daunting. And definitely humbling.”
Walking around streets of the central districts in Manila, I would see countless people — children and older adults alike — indulging on smartphone games throughout the day, many of which appear to be pay-to-win freemium titles.
For a country with a daily minimum wage of $10, I wonder how much on average do low income workers spend on these games, given that the pricing scheme is likely optimized to prey on small but frequent spenders.
Insidious cycle indeed.
A design mentor once told me: "We do design reviews not only to improve the quality of our websites and apps, but also to cultivate our designers' ability."
I think the same should be said about scholarly peer review. The process shouldn't only focus on ensuring that publications meet certain standards, but that the feedback can help nurture the future generation of researchers — these are especially important learning opportunities for PhD candidates.
"I'm something of a hacker myself."
"That's cool. I like to reverse engineer old video games consoles. What do you specialize in?"
"P-hacking."
