Long September, Rest in Peace

Clay Shirky has a nice retrospective on usenet at his blog "Many-to-Many" When usenet was the world... This flurry of blog postings on the fate of usenet is due to AOL unplugging its news servers. Shirky eulogizes the "long September" this way:

The moment AOL started offering newsgroup access, it created the ‘long September’, where the flood of clueless newbies became more or less permanent, in contrast with previous years where every September saw an influx of freshman at colleges with usenet access, who were then flamed to high heaven acculturated, and the whole thing settled back down by October.

Long live virtual communities, but this particular one is largely dead. I remember using it in 1993-1994 at school, but I think spam killed it around 1997 or so.

Here is my oldest usenet posting as cached by google, circa 1995. I guess I wasn't posting before that, or maybe the messages are gone. I don't remember.

Princeton caps number of A's

My Way News has an article about Princeton capping the number of A's that can be awarded. This is part of a new effort to curb grade inflation.

Previously, there was no official limit to the number of A's handed out, and nearly half the grades in an average Princeton class have been A-pluses, A's or A-minuses. Now, each department can give A's to no more than 35 percent of its students each semester.

Seems to me that 35% is pretty close to "nearly half', so I'm not sure what this really accomplishes.

viral marketing

Some of my classes have studied (albeit briefly) viral marketing. Here's a snopes review of a new allged Volkswagen ad making the roudns as possible viral marketing gone wrong. UPDATE: here's a web site devoted to cataloging viral marketing.

Bill Gates in Teen Beat magazine, 1984

In the 80's the "teen computer whiz archetype" was very popular in popular culture. Here is a photo shoot in whichBill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Magazine, 1984. Note also the Mac on the table behind him in the top photo. Update: snopes debunks the "Teen Beat" aspect of the story. Darn!

Recovery dorms on campuses

CNN.com - 'Recovery dorms' offer student support

The residence -- with sparse landscaping and bare-bones furniture -- looks like a fraternity house, only cleaner and lacking a beer keg on the back porch. It's the university's experiment to help students with drinking and drug abuse problems cope with the high-pressure environment of university.

is the market always right

Those of you who read my blog(s) carefully know that I generally value the market as an acceptable arbiter of what is good and worthy (albeit with an occasional reservation). Here is an article that asks whether the market may be wrong in some respects because it pays professional atheletes more than academics, even though most people would agree that teachers and researchers and scholars provide more benefit to society.

If you're still reading this post, you'll know that one of my favorite books on this subject is Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology. When is the market wrong (if ever)? If we accept that the market can occasionally need regulation (which some people wouldn't agree with, by the way), can we define when those times are? When there is a monopoly? When baseball players make more than scholars?

Forget Crossfire, forget left and right. This is the stuff of good debates.

Winter Term blog posted!

The winter term blog (GST 364: Imagining Technology) has been posted. Enjoy!

Joel on Software - Advice for Computer Science College Students

Joel on Software - Advice for Computer Science College Students: Go read it!

# Learn how to write before graduating.
# Learn C before graduating.
# Learn microeconomics before graduating.
# Don't blow off non-CS classes just because they're boring.
# Take programming-intensive courses.
# Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.
# No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

an excellent article and well worth a read.