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That chair is worth how much?

Jacob — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:06:53 +0000

June 2: An office chair was taken from the Faculty Office Building. The chair is valued at $900

The real shocker here is that BYU is paying $900 for office chairs. That does sound like theft.

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BYU’s supercomputer is too slow

Jacob — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:54:32 +0000

Twice a year a list of the top 500 supercomputers is released. BYU’s supercomputer, named Marylou4, was once ranked as high as 45 on the list. As of last June, Marylou4 fell in rank to 274.

The most recent listing doesn’t even include a BYU supercomputer. Marylou4 is too slow to make the list.

So there you have it: BYU no longer has a top-500 supercomputer.

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Reasons why it stinks to be an engineering student at BYU

Jacob — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:52:07 +0000

A WIRED.com post (also posted to Slashdot.org) gave 5 reasons why it stinks to be an engineering student. I’ve decided to list each reason and give a letter grade to BYU on how they appeared to do while I was in the program. If you want to rant about your education, here is your chance. Higher grades indicate a better student experience.

5. Textbooks Quality: B-. I’ve had some great textbooks which the professors used well and still are used by me today. I also had some classes where I was provided only with an electronic copy of a manuscript that the professor was putting together.

4. Encouraging Professors: C+. The WIRED post presented the problem as, “A professor that would rather be tending to his research will walz up to a blackboard or overhead projector and scribble out equations for an hour.” About half of my professors seemed to do this to some degree, and several of which had severe problems with this. There were a few professors who seemed burdened to be having to teach an undergraduate class, they would rather be working on research, and you would never see them attempt to interact with students outside of the three lecture hours a week. However, there were some professors who made every effort to get to know their students by name and do whatever it took to help them succeed.

3. Quality Counseling: B+. I found that there were many great counselors who were very skilled, approachable, and available. I only gave a B+ grade because in my experiences, I found that these counselors did better with course work academic counseling and were not so pro-active at personalized career counseling. I also didn’t give an A grade because those seem to impossible to earn at BYU.

2. Reasonable grades: C-. Engineering classes are just plain harder than classes in other majors. I always found it amusing when taking a class from a different department (not math) and was able to put in less work for a better grade when compared with an engineering class. Anti-grade-inflation tactics are well employed in engineering classes, where students compete harder for lower grades than students in other disciplines.

1. Interesting assignments: C. The complaint being, “Every assignment feels the same.” Homework assignments were often many page, green engineering paper, math problems. Varied labs and coding assignments made things interesting sometimes, but it seemed like the hard work-out problems from the text book were never-ending and downright miserable compared to the homework I saw my non-engineering friends do.

Bonus reason, girls: D. I’ve been in classes where there were no girls at all, and I’ve been in classes where the only girl was my sister. On average, there might be one girl to twenty guys. Without even touching on the limits this puts on dating, having fewer girls around just adds less excitement and variety.

Overall GPA: 2.17. If these grades get any lower, engineering classes would have to be put on academic warning status. These grades aren’t to say that engineering is bad, or to discourage people from entering an engineering field. Its just illustrating that engineering is hard. BYU’s use of student teaching assistants could especially be a source of many problems, especially as these TAs create an inappropriate buffer between the students from the professors.

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Working at BYU while schooling at BYU

Jacob — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:35:08 +0000

Today at work, my boss told me about some new student employment policy changes coming into effect for Winter Semester 2008. I haven’t been able to verify these, but student employees at BYU should inquire if they think these changes will effect them.

Starting Winter Semester 2008, there is a change in the number of credit hours of classes a BYU student employee can take. Undergraduate, non-international students, may take between 6 and 15 credit hours and work for BYU. Students who work outside of this range of credit hours need special permission. This is a change because previously there wasn’t an upper limit on the number of credits a student employee could take.

I’m told that the reason for the change is that students taking more than 15 credit hours are less likely to perform well at their job, nor are they likely to succeed at their education.

The credit-hour ranges are different for graduate students and international students. Again, don’t take my word for this, but ask your supervisor if you plan on taking more than 15 credit hours and working next semester.

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BYU continues to block YouTube

Jacob — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:30:08 +0000

Brigham Young University’s Internet filters continue to block the popular video sharing website, YouTube. BYU blocks the site completely “because it allows inappropriate sexual media throughout its URLs,” according to an article in the student newspaper. I appreciate that BYU wants to block inappropriate content, but YouTube contains so many videos that it is unreasonable to block all of YouTube content because there might be a few bad videos. Likewise you could argue, that BYU should block the whole Internet because there are a few bad sites.

By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

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BYU’s new website theme fosters identity theft

Jacob — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:05:12 +0000

On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and feel for its various websites including the BYU homepage, Route Y, and department and college sites. The administrators for BYU’s webpages have nicknamed this new look and feel Collage. The Collage theme sports new colors and new methods for user interaction, but will increase a hacker’s ability to steal student’s identities.

An essential component to Collage is a login form on the top of every page. Students can type their username and password into the form to be shown a custom set of Internet links. Webpage administrators expect that students will frequently enter their password to gain access to their preferred links. Students will then be trained to frequently type their password on top of any page with the Collage theme.

Within a matter of minutes, anyone with a technical background can set up a page using the Collage theme. They can make it look like a genuine and legitimate BYU site. In particular, hacker’s can create a fake site that looks like a BYU site, but it really just a technique to trick student users. Many student users could be tricked into giving their username and password to a fake site created by a hacker. The hacker could then gain access to the student’s personal information, email, and financial accounts. Once the hacker has access to the student’s information,

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BYU basketball leaves student fans out in the cold

Jacob — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 02:54:39 +0000

While BYU athletic administrators are out celebrating a men’s basketball win over Air Force in front of a sold-out crowd, hundreds of students are wishing they could have been a part of it all. BYU athletic’s postgame notes record that the game had the 23rd largest sell-out crowd in basketball history. But what did BYU do to sell the Marriott Center out? They spent the week selling tickets at a dollar a piece to anyone who wanted them. Then, when large student crowds showed up to view the game, they had to turn hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them away because there were no seats left.

Anyone who has been around BYU men’s basketball knows the dedication of the student section. Long before the game begins, it is common to see the student section packed with fans eager to be the loudest in the house. Many student fans spend $40 or more on student-access-cards which allow them access to BYU sporting events. At today’s game, these card holders showed up expecting to be granted access as usual to the game, but many were disappointed when they were turned away at the doors. Those turned away were angry that they were not able to attend an event that they had already purchased access to. Access and seat availability is controlled by ticketing policy which determines how many tickets should be sold at various prices. The ticketing policy for today’s basketball event failed because it did not give access to those students who had purchased it.

I strongly recommend that the ticketing policy for future events be examined carefully to be fair to students and other fans. Some policy changes that could be considered are:

Increase the size of the student section,
Improve communications about seat availability,
Limit the number of tickets sold at promotional discounts.

Additionally, I recommend that the athletic administrators issue an apology for today’s ticketing failures and make efforts to improve future accommodations to dedicated student fans.

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Should we even bother to fix it?

Jacob — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:45:21 +0000

I recently read this in the latest Police Beat:

Sept. 15: A student driving a BYU box truck on the south side of the Eyring Science Center attempted to drive between two building and ran the truck into the awning connecting the buildings. When the student hit the awning he was thrown into the steering wheel of the truck and reported chest pain. The student was checked by BYU EMT’s and released. The damage is estimated at $10,000 to the awning and $6,000 to the truck. It was the student’s first day driving the truck.

The thing is, this isn’t the first time the awning has been damage by a trunk trying to drive under it. It was damaged about a year ago, and finally fixed up about last April. I haven’t seen the new damage–it seems quite a bit more extensive–but I think it is at least a little funny that this isn’t the first time it has happened.

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Welcoming students back to campus

Jacob — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 11:02:19 +0000

I was looking over BYU Newsnet campus headlines today when I saw this one. The headline was: Opening Socials Welcome Students Back to Campus while the tag line was: To begin the year with a grand entrance, the four on-campus housing areas are holding their opening socials for residents.

The words that seemed a little odd to me are welcome back, and on-campus housing. This just seems a little odd to me because typically a large majority of those who live in on-campus housing are freshman, which means we wouldn’t be welcoming them back. Now granted, there are some students who are returning to campus who live in on-campus housing (many of whom live in Wyview which I argue isn’t really on-campus), but I’m just saying that the headline of the article could have been written to better fit the demographics.

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Wyview is not on-campus housing

Jacob — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:51:09 +0000

I’m tired of BYU advertising Wyview Park as on-campus housing. Just because it is owned and operated by BYU doesn’t mean that it is on-campus. I used Google Earth to find some distances from Wyview and a few off-campus housing complexes to various campus locations. All distances are linear, and not the actual distance a student may travel while walking to the location.

To the library entrance:

Wyview: 0.88 miles
Glenwood: 0.62 miles
University Villa: 0.67 miles
Centennial: 0.89 miles

To the Marriott Center:

Wyview: 0.65 miles
Glenwood: 0.52 miles
University Villa: 0.87 miles
Centennial: 1.19 miles

To the Joseph Smith Building:

Wyview: 1.02 miles
Glenwood: 0.69 miles
University Villa: 0.49 miles
Centennial: 0.78 miles

When looking at these number, it is hard to imagine that Wyview is considered “on-campus” while the other complexes are considered “off-campus.”

These numbers were easy to find with Google Earth’s distance measuring tool. Google Earth is part of Google Pack, a free collection of essential software. You can download Google Pack by clicking here.

Update March 1, 2008: For those who are not familiar with BYU campus, you can take a look at the campus map to see where some of the buildings are. Wyview is northwest of campus, on the far side of the stadium. Glenwood is west of the northern part campus, about 3/10th of a mile northwest of Heleman halls, a housing complex that more properly can call itself, “On-campus.” University Villa just a few blocks west from the tennis courts on the southwest side of campus. Centennial is located near a few other large complexes southeast of campus.

Update January 23, 2009: I’ve also added this map to help show where a few major on-campus and off-campus complexes are located with respect to the main part of campus where students take classes (the blue shaded region). Wyview is the brown shaded region along the top of the map.

View Larger Map

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