Who is paying for this “service”?

I find it hard to believe any institution is shelling out money for these authoritarian proctoring services.

When University of Florida sophomore Cheyenne Keating felt a rush of nausea a few weeks ago during her at-home statistics exam, she looked into her webcam and asked the stranger on the other side: Is it okay to throw up at my desk?

He said yes. So halfway through the two-hour test, during which her every movement was scrutinized for cheating and no bathroom breaks were permitted, she vomited into a wicker basket, dabbed the mess with a blanket and got right back to work. The stranger saw everything. When the test was finished, he said she was free to log off. Only then could she clean herself up.

“Online proctor” services like these have already policed millions of American college exams, tapping into students’ cameras, microphones and computer screens when they take their tests at home. Now these companies are enjoying a rush of new business as the coronavirus pandemic closes thousands of American schools, and executives are racing to capture new clients during what some are calling a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This is contrary to any good teaching practice. When your paranoia is so great that you no longer trust your students to learn, then you can’t teach effectively. What is wrong with the University of Florida, or anyone else who coughs up money to have strangers sit and stare at their students?

If my university required this kind of nonsense, I’d tell them to fuck off, no way am I subjecting students to this kind of humiliation. Fortunately, I think most of my colleagues would express the same sentiment.

Maybe I’ll banhammer someone live on video!

I usually avoid the YouTube comments (always good advice), but I noticed that my video on “The Fallacy of Biological Sex” has accumulated over 50 comments — I know, that’s pathetic, but I am a baby YouTuber — so I was going to dive in and clean up and maybe even answer some. Then I thought…I could make a spectacle of it! That’s the YouTube spirit!

So this afternoon, as a break from grading, I thought I’d browse them live at 3pm Central time, right here.

This may be a terrible mistake, but I figure I needed more practice configuring live streams, so let’s go for it.

Physicists!

It’s become a joke that physicists think they understand all ‘lesser’ fields of science than the people with actual training. Now we lesser beings have a beautiful example to point at and laugh.

An Australian astrophysicist, stuck at home by the pandemic, decided to try and build a device to help with the coronavirus — a gadget that would signal when your hands moved close to your face. I have to admit that that does sound like something a physicist would be capable of doing, but everything went wrong. He somehow thought putting magnets in his nose would be helpful.

Reardon said he placed two magnets inside his nostrils, and two on the outside. When he removed the magnets from the outside of his nose, the two inside stuck together. Unfortunately, the researcher then attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them.

“At this point, my partner who works at a hospital was laughing at me,” he said. “I was trying to pull them out but there is a ridge at the bottom of my nose you can’t get past.

“After struggling for 20 minutes, I decided to Google the problem and found an article about an 11-year-old boy who had the same problem. The solution in that was more magnets. To put on the outside to offset the pull from the ones inside.

“As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets.”

Before attending the hospital, Reardon attempted to use pliers to pull them out, but they became magnetised by the magnets inside his nose.

“Every time I brought the pliers close to my nose, my entire nose would shift towards the pliers and then the pliers would stick to the magnet,” he said. “It was a little bit painful at this point.

It’s terribly unfortunate that he ran out of magnets. If only he’d had a few more this story could have gone on even longer!

I may have made a small mistake

In my struggle to get my classes back on track as quickly as possible after spring break, I wanted to get everyone thinking and focused again, so…

  • In my intro class, I assigned a set of homework problems, due on 30 March.
  • In my intro class, I gave a take-home exam on Friday, due on 30 March.
  • In my genetics class, I assigned a set of homework problems, due on 30 March.
  • In my genetics class, I gave a take-home exam on Friday, due on 30 March.

They were supposed to send them to me by email.

Today, you may notice, is 30 March.

I opened my inbox this morning, and recoiled in horror. So many of my students were industrious and on the ball and possibly bored out of their minds, so they got everything done early. There are others who are still working on them, so I expect even more to trickle in during the course of the day.

The next exams are staggered a bit, at least, but I should have done that this time. The shock of the sudden isolation event just put everything in sync.