I wouldn't. The numerous miscarriages that my grandmother had while living in a mill town, and the cancer diagnoses that followed family who worked at the mill taught me to stay upstream of mill towns.
nc bofh.jeffballard.us 666 # I am surprised this is still working given its age; the CGI version at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/ doesn't work anymore (but the page is still up)
This is a good regression to practices that were abandoned once the Haber Bosch process was discovered. Unfortunately, we've also started medicating ourselves more heavily in the intervening years. A urine reclamation system will need to remove hormonal pharmaceuticals from medicated persons' urine or else using it will wreak havoc on the local ecology [1].
My way around this that's less than $500/mo and indefinite wait times is to have an EC2 image running as a jump box. Then anything downloaded is already on AWS's network, making ECR uploads much faster.
I dunno, giving people who might not be able to afford a masters otherwise or aren’t able to move away for two years an opportunity to get half a masters degree from home seems like a pretty big deal to me.
i don't know if that's "less" or "more" than a graduate certificate. Certificates don't usually give you half the credits toward a masters program at the same university, do they?
I can see this being great "marketing" for the university too though -- once you got the "micromasters", the only way to get half your credits toward a degree is to go to the same university that gave you the micromasters (if you can get accepted, they took your money for the micromasters without promising that) -- they've kind of locked you in.
I was originally worried at how dishonest seemed to faculty and TAs who have spent years creating many textbooks' worth of content for edX. Something akin to MIT Press selling their catalog to Elsevier or Pearson wouldn't be tolerated by the faculty. But, in the press release they do mention that MIT faculty can opt-out and operate in a MIT-only instance & fork of the Open edX platform:
"MIT will continue to offer courses to learners worldwide via edX, as well as on a new platform now known as MITx Online. MIT’s Office of Digital Learning will build and operate MITx Online as a new world-facing platform, based on Open edX, that MIT is creating for MITx MOOCs.
MIT faculty may choose to continue to offer their courses through the new edX after the transaction is completed, or move them to MITx Online."
With that in mind, it seems that Open edX development will be under a new non-profit held by MIT and Harvard. I hope this new non-profit will be less at odds with itself in respect to maintaining openness while creating profitable pay2play courses.
MIT is the gold standard of education. Most of their computing classes already give you full access to all the course materials, videos, labs, readings, handouts, etc. directly from the course page. These direct resources are far better than typical edX/Coursera courses.
The same is not generally true of Harvard courses (with a few exceptions like cs50), which hide all materials behind paywalls.
A complete tangent, but its somewhat amusing that this idiom remains popular when the literal gold standard itself is no longer generally considered a figurative gold standard of anything.
I didn’t know where the term “gold standard” came from up until a couple of years ago. I thought it simply meant top standard (and there would be a silver standard, bronze standard, etc)
Orwell says something along the lines of never use outdated idioms in his Politics and the English Language. I'm withholding judgement on the extinctioness of this one until we see how the whole debt bubble plays out though :)
