Posts from — March 2009

Already on my second year of college and I’ve noticed that for some classes, its required That you do your homework online instead of on paper. This has been really irritating and has made college work even harder for me. Here are some reasons why colleges should not put homework online:

• Downtime is possible
  Even though many companies do make sure that their servers are in top notch, there is always a possibility that these servers could go down, wasting valuable time for the student. Some of these assignments are locked after a certain amount of time, therefore decreasing the amount of time each student has to do their work.
• Data can be lost
  Again, this probably very rare, but is completely possible. Computers aren’t the most reliable of things. Some do crash and some do burn as well. If your data is lost, your shit out of luck. This is probably a better excuse because it’s likely that everyone else in the class lost their work as well.
• Unintentional errors can be made
  Out of all of the online assignments that I’ve had, you have to input the information the exact way the software wants you to. For example, I have to do all of my accounting homework online and the answer to a question, lets say, is .0235% and the online homework manager want you to round the number to 2.3%, if you put in 2.35% the homework manager will count it wrong even though you decided to add more detail. Some homework managers will automatically send you back to the beginning if you get three answers wrong, which makes a regular thirty minute assignment take a frusterating three hours to do. If you get the answer wrong on an old fashioned, hand written assignment, you can turn it in and usually the instructor can write exactly how to get the answer.

Concluding, I am a geek, don’t get me wrong, but not everything is ready for the internet. Not everything should be computerized. Sometimes doing the work the old-fashioned is better because the instructor usually has no choice but to grade it and note why your getting a particular problem wrong. With these digitalized assignments, instructors don’t even have to look at the work. As a matter of fact, they can ask the database to give them a grade based on your homework.

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

Stream Provided By UStream, NASA, And Spacevidcast. Thanks!

Launch Date: NET March 12,2009 21:20pm EDT

Landing Date: NET March 26,2009 (14 Days)

Crew
Lee Archambault – Commander
Dominic “Tony” Antonelli – Pilot
Joseph “Joe” Acaba – Mission Specialist 1/ Educator Astronaut
Stephen Swanson – Mission Specialist 2
Richard “Ricky” Arnold – Mission Specialist 3/ Educator Astronaut
John Phillips – Mission Specialist 4
Koichi Wakata – ISS Flight Engineer – JAXA (Switching with Sandra Magnus)

Crew Swap
During this mission, Koichi Wakata will switch places with Sandra Magnus. Magnus will then become part of the STS-119 crew and Wakata will then become flight engineer 2 with Expedition 18.

Mission

• Install Starboard 6 (S6) solar arrays, which will be the last of the four solar arrays to be installed.

Experiments

“Shuttle Exhaust Ion Turbulence Experiments (SEITE) will use space based sensors to detect the ionospheric turbulence inferred from the radar observations from a previous Space Shuttle Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) burn experiment using ground-based radar.”

Click here for more info.

Photo: NASA