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Fear of a math hat

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I work for a Journalism school, doing computer work. Our student body is largely out of high school, into college, and I would guess by and large, they’re all Bachelors of Arts majors. Which means they’ve opted to take language courses rather than math/science. Which is fine, but it tells you that these students largely aren’t math people.

For years, some of the faculty here at the school have complained about the lack of basic math skills possessed by the students, but no one really had a firm grip on those skills, or knew what to do about it. Finally, last Spring term (2011), an Electronic Media instructor decided to address this, and gave her 16 students a math test each week, with the requirement that they get all the answers right, and then would be allowed to skip all subsequent tests. Doing so was required for the class, so failure to pass any of them would result in failure to pass the class. What were these “terrible” math problems? Largely, they were percentages. One of them based on the graphic for this post. Something like: “The devil makes it through 500 of the 666 slides. What percentage of the total is that?”

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NCAA cartel? really?

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An often vocal, of nearly everything UO, posted on his site today about how the NCAA is a cabal, and works to enforce a student athlete population to work for free, and live on 1 year scholarships, etc. The story has been covered in several other locations as well, and there seems to be a very conspicuous missing piece of thought: “fairness”.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the NCAA probably WOULD work to pay the players if they thought it would be fair. Working for a university with deep athletics pockets, I imagine it would probably benefit us to be able to pay our athletes, and give them longer scholarships. But our neighbors to the north would probably be crying foul all the way to the NCAA. Think the days of Norte Dame football are done? Let them pay their athletes and see how fast they return to being a power house. By limiting what schools can give their athletes, the NCAA levels the playing field and allows public schools to really compete with the private ones.

Yes, the NCAA would limit it to a $2000 stipend, and the number of scholarships. But I would argue once this starts, we’d end up like professional sports.

It’s actually MORE amazing that the man that runs UO Matters didn’t realize that doing something like this would put even MORE pressure on the academic side of a university if the athletics departments are suddenly on the hook for paying athletes, or giving them longer scholarships, etc.

Do I think it’s right that student athletes work for “free”? No. But I do think it’s one of the only ways to make things fair, and prevent situations where a “University” becomes an “Athletics University”. Just imagine what Phoenix University, or something like them, could do with the ability to attract players with money, scholarships, etc.

Overdrive Media Console Runtime Error

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Since there is next to NO support for this software anywhere, I thought I would share the fruits of the last hour of working. Coworker brought in their PC (Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) that whenever they tried to launch Overdrive Media Console, they’d get a Runtime C++ error. Uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t work, but oddly, the software would run under another account.

Solution makes me want to kill MS, or Overdrive, or someone. Anyway, there was a temp file in /Users/UserName/AppData/Roaming/OverDrive/Media Console.

Obviously if the software isn’t running, there shouldn’t be any 0KB temp files. Deleting it fixed the problem. Guessing the software crashed at some point, and didn’t clean up after itself on the next attempted (and thereafter) launch.