/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4828896]

>a week before class starts
>professor mass emails the entire class that he changed the required textbook to a completely different book
>It's a 2012 edition, only new
>I end up never opening it throughout the semester.

That professor thread?

[Anonymous No.4828918]

>required textbook

Tell me, when the higher education rams its greedy cock balls deep into your arse, do you even feel it anymore or have you gone completely numb?

The textbook industry in particular is a fucking scam. Authors get paid per page so the inflate content with vapid bullshit, and then they smear it around ever year to release a new edition with no truly new content.

[Anonymous No.4828923]

>professor infected us with his enthusiasm
>gave lectures of great clarity and insight
>matched h/w well to our abilities and the material
>set us a tough but totally doable (with preparation) final

fucking cunt

[mtp !EKFQOBEsKo No.4828927]

amurica?

[Anonymous No.4828930]

>Not going to a proper university where the professors write up their own notes specific to their respective courses and hand out a copy for every student

[Anonymous No.4828938]

>>4828896
>>4828918
If only the government would stop intervening in this market, we might see a less exploitative and more sensible business model evolve. Fucking socialists trying to drag us all down to the bottom. We need to get the government out of this gig entirely and let the free markets sort it out.

[Anonymous No.4828965]

>professor uses a non-encrypted protected website instead of blackboard
>download solutions to all homework problems that he assigns from semester to semester
>the semester that i take the class he changes the required textbook to the newest edition
>fuck

i'm not going to lie, i'm really lazy and solutions are invaluable to me. this is particularly true for books like the one we are using which is just walls of text and barely no solved problems, and most of the solved problems only exist to introduce more equations.

[Anonymous No.4828972]

>>4828938
I really can't tell if you're trolling or just deluded.

Even if the former, someone else might take your comment seriously. To any who do, look at the higher education systems of other nations. Many of the state-sponsored ones are of equal quality and more accessible to the average person.

Free market politics fail because people are too greedy and will always exploit their position. It never results in a Pareto equilibrium that benefits the average person. The only way to achieve that is to impose penalties through legislation for certain undesirable behaviors. It's not an ideal solution but people aren't ideal.

[Anonymous No.4828982]

>>4828930
this

The course text is there for you to explore and develop on your own

[Anonymous No.4829020]

>>4828972
>Many of the state-sponsored ones are of equal quality and more accessible to the average person.
I was referring to the government sponsored academic textbook racket, not the American university system. Which, I might add, is the best in the fucking world.

[Anonymous No.4829040]

> laptop stolen
> get butthurt
> yell at auditorium
> make empty threats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55--XbQFgWo

I took Dr. Rine's gen bio class, got an A. his test was hard as hell. go bears.

[Anonymous No.4829044]

>3% attendance
>jimmies remain eternally unrustled

[Anonymous No.4829068]

>>4829040
You are messing with the biggest most powerful men on the planet right now. All sectors of government are working nonstop on this stolen laptop case.

[Anonymous No.4829069]

>>4829020
Not him, but I still don't think the free market is going to help textbook prices much. The problem is that the list of people able to actually write and publish a textbook on a given scientific or mathematical subject is already pretty small, and the number willing to actually do it is smaller.
Publishers charge exorbitant fees because they know we can (sort of) afford it here in North America, and there just isn't much competition for a job that's not viewed as being much fun. If the prices are really getting you down, E-Bay is your friend. International texts go for 1/4 to 1/5 the price of American versions

[Anonymous No.4829077]

>>4829040
did he get his laptop back? what happened? do you know anything? any inside rumors?

[Anonymous No.4829094]

>>4829077
Last I heard the FBI, NSA, CIA, and interpol raided his apartment with no less than 7 SWAT teams (Rumor has it that i was 9 or so, but 7 is confirmed).
They recovered the laptop, but quantum analysis revealed that he did make 3 copies of the sensitive data (One was sent the the Mafia, one to china, the third is still MIA).
He was transported to a top secret facility in Alaska and detained for a time, and I believe he was likely put under the influence of HAARP mind control to retrieve the location of the final copy, but I never heard back from my source on if it was successful or not.
What I do know for sure, however, was that he was used as a live target for FBI's experimental drone mounted anti-personal railgun at the end of the ordeal.

[Anonymous No.4829124]

>>4829094
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/15_laptop.shtml

BERKELEY – A stolen laptop computer that contained sensitive information on more than 98,000 University of California, Berkeley, graduate students and others was traced to South Carolina and has been recovered by campus police, UC Berkeley officials announced today (Wednesday, Sept 14).

UC police note that while a lab analysis could not determine whether the sensitive campus data was ever accessed, nothing in their investigation points to identity theft nor individuals involved in identity theft. It appears, they said, that the intent was simply to steal and sell a laptop computer.

According to police, an individual sold the stolen laptop around April 14 to a San Francisco man who posted it for sale on an Internet auction site about a week later. An unsuspecting South Carolina resident purchased the laptop off the Internet on April 22, police said.

[Anonymous No.4829132]

The San Francisco man has been arrested and charged by the Alameda County District Attorney's Office with possession of stolen property, and the case against him is pending, police said. The man told police that he did not know the name of the woman who sold him the laptop, but he provided a description of her that matched that of a woman seen leaving the campus's Graduate Division offices on March 11 with the laptop, according to campus police.

The laptop was stolen from the inner offices of the Graduate Division when it was momentarily unoccupied around lunch time. Because the computer contained dozens of files with the names and Social Security numbers of current and former graduate students as well as others, UC Berkeley officials sent e-mails and letters to all the individuals who might be affected if that information were accessed. From the day of the theft on, campus police continued following leads and investigating the case.

Through various leads, police learned in June that the computer was in South Carolina. Working with local police there, UC police officers retrieved the computer and sent it on June 23 to a lab to be examined to determine whether the sensitive campus data had been accessed.

[Anonymous No.4829135]

The computer was sent to the Silicon Valley Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, which is operated by various law enforcement agencies and funded by the FBI. The lab performs detailed computer forensics for federal and local law enforcement agencies. Its test results, completed Aug. 5, show that the original Graduate Division hard drive and all its files had been erased and written over with a new operating system installation, leaving only residual data and making it virtually impossible to determine whether the campus's password-protected files were ever accessed, according to the lab and campus technology administrators.

The South Carolina man who purchased the laptop online told police that he installed a new operating system on the computer. Campus technology administrators state that it is not uncommon for an individual to install a new operating system when purchasing a used computer.

The San Francisco man who was arrested told police it is his practice to install a new operating system or erase and wipe clean old data from a computer before posting it for sale online, police said.

Since the time the laptop theft occurred, campus police have learned of no pattern of identity theft or credit card fraud involving those individuals with names and Social Security numbers on the Graduate Division computer.

[Anonymous No.4829137]

>>4829132
>>4829124
>>4829135

I personally like my theory better.

[Anonymous No.4829149]

>>4828930
You know universities lose accreditation for that yeah?

I have a friend who's a professor and here is how it goes:

Publisher creates a 'new' version of a textbook, pressure is put on the school to adopt that textbook, university does not comply and they lose accreditation so the university pressures the professor to adopt the textbook, professor gets a 'free' copy of the textbook, professor does not comply and the university loses accreditation so the university compels the professor by saying things like 'you need to adopt this textbook or you'll be finding a new job', professor compels the students to purchase the new textbook.

Rinse and repeat.

[Anonymous No.4829167]

>>4829149
what do you mean by losing accreditation? and how can a textbook author do this? there are tons of different authors on the same subject, and i suppose the professor or head of department has the freedom to change the bibliography?

[Anonymous No.4829209]

>>4829167
A bit different from what he said, but a couple of states made laws that any school had to use a text for 5 years before they could replace it.

[Anonymous No.4829219]

Most of my profs for higher level math courses just tell you to download the textbook online or use course notes.

[Anonymous No.4831261]

>>4828930
WHERE!?! Tell me where!

[Anonymous No.4831277]

>professor scans the textbook and uploads it to the class website for everyone to use
>some of the pages were scanned upside-down

[Anonymous No.4831293]

>Go to class first day
>2 professors
>ohboygoodwewillhaveactualinstruction.tiff
>2nd week
>"I need to go to a conference, the other professor will take over for a while"
>Okay.jpg
>Going to the office hours
>other professor is not there
>he posts the next day he is "sick"
>no one teaches class for the next 2 weeks
FUUCK
In all honesty he did have some fatal disease though. Bronchitis or something.

[Anonymous No.4831309]

>required textbook

The fuck? any course I have that requires a textbook to be read uses one that the university library has copies of. And they point out that the old edition is usually still good.