woah, what happened here? I could not see why 4 ppl down voted him. Now it says removed by mod, but the modlog only shows that the user was banned.

I’m confused because I thought banning a user did not automatically censor all their messages. I thought only a forced account deletion caused all messages to be removed.

Not sure what you mean by graph, but w/the EWS page you linked it seems they make it possible to control which apps can connect by looking at the user-agent string.

For davmail, apparently it means .davmail.properties would need to have davmail.userAgent=OWS (where OWS is whatever the server expects). But if the admins are diligent, they could make it difficult by choosing a random string for that, which would then require sniffing packets leaving an approved client. And if the approved client is a web app, it’s possible that the user-agent string is added on the server side.

Are you saying the MS Outlook mail client is viable? If so, then I would expect Thunderbird and maildav to simply work because those tools both directly speak Microsoft’s exchange protocol. I would be interested in knowing if Thunderbird and maildav are blocked because it would require the mail server to do something a bit proactively evil, as opposed to merely pushing a proprietary protocol and looking the other way.

I should mention that I assumed from context that EWS was a web-only workflow, but after a quick look that seems to be how people describe the exchange protocol.

I hate, for example, that my college only enables the use of Outlook through EWS as an email client, and Office 365 web as a web client.

I never knew the nannying could go that far as to force students & staff into a web browser for email. Usually in MS Exchange situations, Thunderbird is a drop-in replacement and there’s also davmail if you want to use your linux client of choice. But these are only options if the exchange server is reachable.

And I can’t have an email client on a Linux computer to read and write those emails? I hate it. But I also don’t want to be one of those who reply from a personal email to professional stuff.

I recall a long time ago Yahoo introduced a change to make their mail servers exclusively reachable to paying subscribers. Those with gratis plans were forced to use their web UI (presumably to feed advertising revenue). One rebellious developer scraped the website and integrated an IMAP or POP3 server, so the gratis users could use that bridge to return to using their mail clients of choice. It seems bizarre that a university would impose the shitty web on email users. But the same scraping trick could be a way around it. I see there already exists some projects along the same lines for EWS.

OTOH, EWS will be dropped this year.

W.r.t using a different ESP, you could send email to your recipients without touching the university system. Neomutt will let you enter the FROM: address freehand. From there, you just need an ESP that’s flexible about that, or you can run your own server just for sending. For inbound, then you are still chained to the garbage toolchain unless you take the scraping route or harvest EML files from EWS.

but why can’t there be another network where labs can host their own databases, file servers, compute servers, and can connect their own PCs?

In the 90s, my university had general services for all students and all disciplines, but then the engineering department had their own servers including email. I can’t imagine a university that would nanny their engineering dept and block them from practicing the trade they are studying. It would be embarrassingly anti-academic.

Speaking of anti-academic – I must say the mere use of MS mail servers is anti-academic because MS blocks all inbound mail from residential IPs. It means the university is actually blocking students from running their own mail server at home and then using it to email other students. It’s effectively a proactive assault on students and profs who want to tinker.

The bullets were all w.r.t. a Danish university. I know some US universities have some of the same issues – certainly the 1st bullet.

Indeed I was aware that my experiences would differ from others when I wrote that. I got a couple degrees in the 90s (US), got another degree purely online around 2005, then recently went to a Danish university. The comparison spans countries and ~25 years.

How is it the fault of a University that the majority of the public uses social media? Yes, my institution uses social media, though I don’t think they use facebook anymore… Besides Lemmy, I have zero social media, and yet I am aware of all events going on campus. Everything is notified via university email, not just social media.

The problem is not the mere use of social media. The problem is exclusion. Facebook and all the other I mention are exclusive platforms. You must agree to the terms of a giant monopolistic US corporation. If you don’t supply a mobile phone number to that corp, you are excluded. You cannot even read content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn without an acct. (Side note: Facebook is also purposely designed to be destructively addictive - and yes a school that promotes FB deserves blame for that)

I have no problem with inclusive, non-controversial social media that does not require selling one’s soul to the devil.

And yes, the blame is squarely on the university who opts for Facebook and Twitter. The university becomes exclusive when it puts its own resources and content inside of an access-restricted technofeudal walled-garden. Students will use the shit platforms if they want and that’s orthoganol to the university. But when the university itself uses Facebook, that crosses a line. It excludes people and drags others into shit.

In fact, when it’s a public university it crosses a human rights line. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 22-2:

“Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

If the university /duplicates/ every single Facebook and Twitter msg in a public space, which also has a feedback mechanism for those outside of FB and Twitter, that’s fair enough. But then you have to ask, how is the cost of maintaining redundant Facebook and Twitter accounts cost effective given the funding limits? Using something like Mastodon and Lemmy is inclusive. They could perhaps have a bot that copies Mastodon posts to Twitter, perhaps with a disclosure that Twitter replies won’t be read. That would enable all to participate without excessive cost.

(update)

ChatGPT and AI is a giant problem right now in academia. Nothing I do seems to convince students that using AI to do their homework harms their education. If someone knows a solution to this, I’m all ears. I’m tired of people blaming me, or the university, for things we’re trying to find solutions to.

I would first say it’s not your problem (details here).

Schools and profs indeed get blamed for the fact that grades cannot be accurate as cheaters get far ahead of the game. But schools can (and should) point the finger back to the employers. It’s incompetent employers who use school grades to appraise new hires.

Their appraisal is their job. It’s not the school’s responsibility to produce grades that employers can use for their profit-driven purposes. This problem will sort itself out. Employers will eventually be forced to accept this fact.

Note that my mention of chatbots in the OP of this thread herein is entirely unrelated. I was just expressing discontent with the universities not being on the ball about deploying their own AI research tools.

Indeed, the failure belongs to the adults, not the kids. As Rutger Bregman said in the linked article:

“Now remember, this is not human nature, it’s human culture. The kids are merely holding up a mirror and what they reflect back is what we’ve been teaching them. Currently, around 40% of Harvard graduates end up in that Bermuda triangle of BS jobs…”

The kids have been pushed into this lousy mindset and direction to a large extent. But I would attribute as much to culture as force of the underfunding situation. It’s not entirely force but the culture we have created.

There is money to get into school, and then there is money to be earned after graduation. The research Bregman seems to refer to the latter because developing a long-term philosophy about life is not something with the same here-and-now urgency as money to get into school.

You’re probably right w/a lot of that. I’m not real in tune with the funding. But indeed lack of funding has consequences. In the very least we can examine whether the funding they get is being wisely spent. For example:

grading is easily solved

There are reasonable solutions to this, as mentioned in the article:

“Professors said they resorted to oral interrogations, handwritten notebooks and class participation for grading purposes. Some require students to submit transparency statements describing their work process. Others have reportedly injected random words like “broccoli” and “Dua Lipa” into assignments to confuse learning models – exposing students who did not even read the prompts before pasting them into AI.”

The grading is quite solvable. Even for essay writing. You can put them in a room with disconnected PCs. Make the room a Faraday cage, if needed. Submitting papers that were supposedly “written” at home is a convenience of the past – something that must be dispensed with, at least as far as grading goes.

Grading can be scrapped as well, anyway. Why grade? The only good reason for a school to grade someone is so the student knows for themselves how they are doing. An A, B, C, etc is not great. Students should get granular feedback on every answer they gave. The student knows themself whether or not they cheated.

Grades that are used for external purposes like showing your GPA to a prospective employer – that’s a misuse of grading. Employers are increasingly fools to trust grades as an indicator of fitness for the job. Employers should do their own appraisal. That’s their job, not the school’s job. Some profs have been very outspoken about this long before AI hit hard. Now their stance has just become even more important.

So grading is not a problem for the school. Appraisal is the employer’s problem.

Grants and scholarships need to get creative

The only real problem for grading is where it’s used in a competition for grants and scholarships. The competition can no longer be based on essay submissions from the outside. It has to be done in a controlled environment where applicants appear in person and do something oral or write on a spontaneous topic under observation.

I often feel mosquitos when I am awake. But certainly I wake up with new bites I was unaware of. That’s rare though. The ceiling fan is probably creates a physics problem for them. In the summer I keep a floor fan blowing on me all night long. The mosquitos have no hope of doing a cross-wind landing under such strong winds. I suppose a ceiling fan’s downward airflow might not be a problem for mosquitos.

But spring and fall are tricky because the fan can make me uncomfortably chilly, which I try to counteract by piling on more covers than I would normally need.

I was actually wondering if shaving my whole body would make it easier to feel bedbugs walking on me. Now you’ve caused me to question that idea.

As I read that I wondered if there is a psychological component to that. If you are always numb from opiates, perhaps the brain adapts by becoming more sensitive. Then when off the drugs, the brain’s adjustment would perhaps still be having effect, thus creating extra sensitivity.

So I wonder if it would be interesting to take acetominiphen throughout the day and have it wear off before going to sleep. Maybe this is far fetched.

Indeed I don’t have high expectations that something exists. My 1st thought was perhaps this is something that should have some R&D on it. Particularly for ticks (as early detection is critical for Lym disease). But then I figured I should first find out if something already exists… hence the post.

Regarding inflammation, I was thinking about how part of the bedbug’s evil cocktail is not just an anesthetic, but also a chemical to vasodialate to get blood vessels opened up more. I wasn’t sure if Ibuprofin would have interplay with that… but you’re probably right… the anti-inflamatory would not likely counteract an anti-anesthetic.

Reminds me of a fun trick I heard about w/mosquitos. If a mosquito lands on your arm, you can pinch off your own blood supply to the arm which causes the mosquito to react by going deeper and sucking harder. Then you release your blood and let it rush, at which point the mosquito’s pipeline gets flooded and the mosquito explodes with a “pop”. Never tried it myself.

Sounds like marking, which I think only happens if the cat is in competition with another animal for territory.

I recall seeing videos of cats that are quite sneaky, performing ninja-gymnastics to operate doors. They wait until no humans are around and go and do something the owner doesn’t like. In some cases owners took care to ensure a cat could not access whatever area was banned only to discover after installing surveillance videos that the cat can pull off some amazing feats when no one is around – and close the door to conceal their mischief.

A small amount of intelligence goes a long way. If you have the intelligence of a plant, you’ll have a hard time getting compassion. If I end up as a vegetable with no brain activity or chance of recovery, pull my life support plug please.

The BBC article titled “Cow astonishes scientists” said “However, despite about 10,000 years of humans living alongside cattle, this is the first time scientists have documented a cow using a tool.”

It’s evidence that supports vegan causes. A tool for the vegan activist’s toolbox. In particular, environmental vegans benefit when the highest climate footprint animal (cows) are shown to have intelligence. Intelligence is a factor in assessing animal welfare and suffering. That is why it is posted in c/vegan.

(edit) note as well that when dealing with vegan-hostile meat eaters, this is the kind of story that you can present without attaching politics to it. Just show them and say “isn’t it cool that this cow figured out how to scratch her back”, and leave it there. There’s nothing controversial about that. It just drops it into their mind that there is some intelligence they did not know about. Let them realise for themselves what it implies.

OTA = over the air

I’m not sure it’s solid info that other cows used sticks. It was quickly mentioned… I think he said something like “i think other cows have used twigs”… or something that I vaguely thought sounded uncertain. Unfortunately I cannot hit rewind on my radio tuner. And I don’t have a good enough connection to grab online streams.

I heard it OTA, but this is probably it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go

It was mentioned in a BBC coverage of this that other cows have been seen using tree branches to do the same.