The Dead Grandmother Effect

Earlier this year some would-be students followed the guidance of hackers who discovered a way to review their admittance decision to some 100+ colleges. Seems that many of the top schools, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT had outsourced their admissions web-apps to a third party who had a bug in their software; Run the appropriate script, and you could view if you had been accepted or denied (assuming they had made a decision about your file) before the formal announcement date.

Plenty of over-eager students took the bait and checked their admittance decisions through the back door. Now Stanford, Harvard, and MIT's B-Schools have all dumped these candidates from their applicant rosters. In this day and age of ethical violations and Sarbanes-Oxley, you think these applicants would know better. I don't even think this stunt shows technological prowess, rather instead just shows that they can follow directions on how to run web commands.

It really is a sad state of affairs when you have presumably top candidates for top schools utilizing unethical behavior to try to get an upper hand. When I was teaching, I occasionally had students hand me papers that were photocopies of their friend's homework submissions, with their name penciled in the corner. Do they really think I am that retarded or ambivalent? Why would I reward such behavior by allowing that to pass my desk unfettered? In those cases I would let them test my boundaries once by writing them a scathing message about how next time they would get a zero, and I usually knocked their grade down a notch or two. The next time, which only came up once or twice, it was referred to proper academic channels. Behavior like that is intolerable in students and criminal in business, so for their sake I treated it as such.

God that makes me sound like such a bastard who operates only by the book. I don't mind giving second chances and bending the rules now and then, but don't lie to me repeatedly. I get a laugh at students who tell me (true story) they lost their hearing and need to leave class, yet hear my dismissal of them perfectly fine, or the whole dead grandmother effect, but please, don't kill off your entire family for the benefit of a better grade in my class. After the first relative, I (and your family) don't have the patience for it.

How to Get Free Spam Blocking

I've discovered how to get free spam blocking for email. It requires that you have some IT acumen, like knowing how to access your mail server, and a gmail account:

1. Setup the email account you want to be spam free to forward all mail to your gmail account (Need a gmail account? Ask me for one). Gmail will sort out the spam with its built-in filters.



2. From now on, check your email though gmail. If you want to download it to your desktop, use the POP3 services built into gmail.

With POP3 properly re-configured on your desktop, the transition to gmail will be transparent: instead of your email client (Outlook, Eudora, etc) checking your current spam-ridden host, it will check gmail for spam-free email. Yippee!

Dr. Laura Renteria

Late last week Laura defended her dissertation, so she is now a Ph.D.! I'm really proud of her, she worked very hard to get to this point and is a definite inspiration.

As for what she is going to do with her degree, when we return to Chicago she'll work at UIC seeing both Spanish and English-speaking patients in the neuropsychology clinic there. UIC is next to a very large Mexican community (Pilsen), so she'll be able to help a traditionally underserved population.

Goooo Laura! :)

The Dead Grandmother Effect

Earlier this year some would-be students followed the guidance of hackers who discovered a way to review their admittance decision to some 100+ colleges. Seems that many of the top schools, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT had outsourced their admissions web-apps to a third party who had a bug in their software; Run the appropriate script, and you could view if you had been accepted or denied (assuming they had made a decision about your file) before the formal announcement date.

Plenty of over-eager students took the bait and checked their admittance decisions through the back door. Now Stanford, Harvard, and MIT's B-Schools have all dumped these candidates from their applicant rosters. In this day and age of ethical violations and Sarbanes-Oxley, you think these applicants would know better. I don't even think this stunt shows technological prowess, rather instead just shows that they can follow directions on how to run web commands.

It really is a sad state of affairs when you have presumably top candidates for top schools utilizing unethical behavior to try to get an upper hand. When I was teaching, I occasionally had students hand me papers that were photocopies of their friend's homework submissions, with their name penciled in the corner. Do they really think I am that retarded or ambivalent? Why would I reward such behavior by allowing that to pass my desk unfettered? In those cases I would let them test my boundaries once by writing them a scathing message about how next time they would get a zero, and I usually knocked their grade down a notch or two. The next time, which only came up once or twice, it was referred to proper academic channels. Behavior like that is intolerable in students and criminal in business, so for their sake I treated it as such.

God that makes me sound like such a bastard who operates only by the book. I don't mind giving second chances and bending the rules now and then, but don't lie to me repeatedly. I get a laugh at students who tell me (true story) they lost their hearing and need to leave class, yet hear my dismissal of them perfectly fine, or the whole dead grandmother effect, but please, don't kill off your entire family for the benefit of a better grade in my class. After the first relative, I (and your family) don't have the patience for it.

How to Get Free Spam Blocking

I've discovered how to get free spam blocking for email. It requires that you have some IT acumen, like knowing how to access your mail server, and a gmail account:

1. Setup the email account you want to be spam free to forward all mail to your gmail account (Need a gmail account? Ask me for one). Gmail will sort out the spam with its built-in filters.



2. From now on, check your email though gmail. If you want to download it to your desktop, use the POP3 services built into gmail.

With POP3 properly re-configured on your desktop, the transition to gmail will be transparent: instead of your email client (Outlook, Eudora, etc) checking your current spam-ridden host, it will check gmail for spam-free email. Yippee!

Dr. Laura Renteria

Late last week Laura defended her dissertation, so she is now a Ph.D.! I'm really proud of her, she worked very hard to get to this point and is a definite inspiration.

As for what she is going to do with her degree, when we return to Chicago she'll work at UIC seeing both Spanish and English-speaking patients in the neuropsychology clinic there. UIC is next to a very large Mexican community (Pilsen), so she'll be able to help a traditionally underserved population.

Goooo Laura! :)