This Week in College News
Friday, June 19, 2009 by Kelly Sutton Facebook Gets Vanity URLs (via Facebook Blog)
At 12:01 am EST on June 13, Facebook opened the floodgates for it's "vanity URLs." Vanity URLs allow users to get their own specific address in relation to the Facebook domain name. I snagged facebook.com/kellysutton pretty quickly. Facebook reports that over 200,000 people grabbed their vanity URLs within the first 3 minutes. While not earth-shattering, I see this as a move on some of the other professional networks like LinkedIn and Xing.
University of Illinois Under Investigation for Questionable Acceptances (via NY Times)
I didn't know that Illinois was considered a pretty corrupt state until my dad pointed it out one day. Apparently such corruption dips its hands into university admissions as well. U of IChampaign-Urbana will undergo an investigation for some questionable admissions practices. Sorry dad, your alma mater is now "shady."
Will WolframAlpha Make Calc I and II Obsolete? (via the Chronicle)
With the recent release of WolframAlpha, calculus teachers and professors around the world have seen mysterious performance increases among their students. The culprit? The new answer engine WolframAlpha. Because WA (that's what the cool kids call it) can solve complex calculus in the blink of its robosentient eye, many students have started using it with mixed results from professors. Will Calculus II no longer be cool? Besides, we all know everything after calc II is just made up.
Reader Comments (2)
WolframAlpha was a very interesting post, and a great link at that.
To extend the concept here, people cannot forget that doing mathematics and calculus by hand is meant to completely change the way we think and help us think through not only mathematics but ideas and problems constructively and logically. This goes for liberal education requirements in schools: they are there to teach you how to think.
I've already snagged my Facebook name too!