I know we're all sick of MGMT's "Kids" but this electronic version is pretty wild. The Mentalists, a four-woman band from London, created a cover of the song using their iPhones and iPods.
Watch the cover:
[Gizmodo by way of an anonymous Wesleying tipster]
As you probably know, Google will soon become Wesleyan's webmail provider (the switch is happening January 19th). Since I've heard a fair number of questions floated whenever it comes up in discussion and had a few questions about the switch myself, I asked some questions and got answers from Karen Warren, one the ITS employees in charge of the switch. I'm going to summarize those answers here and try to offer some additional general explanation in a question and answer format.
What's going to change?
If you route your Wesleyan e-mail through Gmail already very little will change for you, except that Gmail access will be more seamless than before since you'll no longer have to have your e-mail automatically forwarded or fetched with POP3. If you don't use Gmail already the main difference for you will be that you'll be using Gmail as a webmail interface rather than the current SquirrelMail.
Another major change is that e-mail will be hosted externally from Wesleyan rather than locally on servers owned and maintained by ITS. An advantage of this is the greatly increased storage space: each student will get the same amount of storage as a standard free Gmail account, which at the moment is more than 7GB, as opposed to the 100MB we've had up until now. One additional consequence of this is that any downtime will probably be Google's fault rather than ITS's. Unless Gmail starts going down a whole lot more often than it does now this will probably be a change for the better.
[edit by Sam]: E-mail addresses will remain the same.
Can I opt out of the switch?
Yes. If you for some reason want to opt out of the switchover, you must do so by 5pm, January 14th. There's a link—'Gmail Opt Out'—to do so in your portfolio. If you choose to opt out, you may opt back in at any time. However, you may not go back to using Wesleyan-hosted e-mail once the switch has been made.
What will the EULA/Privacy Policy look like?
Google's general education contract is here. However, Wesleyan has been negotiating with Google to make some changes to the agreement, and those are not yet finalized, and so are not available online. I have been told that they will be made available when possible.
You will not have to accept any additional EULA when you first sign in to your Google Apps webmail. Additionally, all of Wesleyan's policies will continue to apply.
Will there be ads?
For current students, no. For alumni, read on...
Will there be any change in account functionality post-graduation?
Service will remain essentially the same. Google reserves the right to add advertising to alumni accounts, but does not currently do so.
Please feel free to leave any questions you have in the comments. I'll answer them myself if I can or get them answered if I can't.
[EDIT] ITS has a blog with details about the switch to Google Apps, including instructions on opting out and instructional videos for moving your contacts, keeping the mail currently in your account, transferring any folders you've set up in webmail, and setting up mail clients.
[/EDIT by Justin, 2009-01-11 2:35 PM]
Holly Wood '08, co-founder of Wesleying, sent us two interesting bits of news about tech-related stuff. The first is an article about memorization in schools. According to Canadian Don Tapscott,
... for today's youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries...Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is...It's an interesting approach, considering that most of us never retain the minute facts anyway.
...Tapscott dismissed the idea that his approach is anti-learning, instead arguing that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever "in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed"...
The Middletown Eye recently reported that students at Middletown's Macdonough Elementary School will soon be using XO laptops in their after-school activities—yes, the XO laptop that grew out of the One Laptop Per Child project.
Now, the school is looking for computer science students who want to help the third, fourth, and fifth graders with the new laptops. Cathy Lechowitz, Director of Community Service and Volunteerism, writes:
Volunteer to help the XO One Laptop Per Child education project by learning and mastering computer programming skills while helping to teach Middletown’s North End Macdonough Elementary School third- through fifth-grade students to do so, as well. This project is to bring creative uses of technology to the low-income North End neighborhood, where the lack of income and resources stifles access to technology. Service learning at its best!Contact Izzi Greenberg at 860 346-4845 if you are interested.
Wesleyan is done with its contract with ComCast to provide Cable TV to students and isn't renewing it, mostly because most of you now watch computers instead of TV. There will still be cable in lounges, but if you want it in your room next year you get it yourself. From campus-wide email:
Before proceeding with another 5 year commitment, we wanted to gather information regarding the number of TVs that students bring to campus as well as informally poll them on their TV viewing habits. We determined that less than 25% of the students bring a TV and that many prefer to watch their TV shows on computer... based on this data, we have decided to no longer offer Comcast Cable TV to Wesleyan students after May 31. After this date, any student who wishes to have Cable TV service will directly contract with a Cable TV provider to customize the channel lineup and pay for it directly.
...If you have any questions regarding this, please contact Fran Koerting at fkoerting@wesleyan.edu or G. Ravishanker at ravishan@wesleyan.edu
Having recently procured an Iphone, i was soon frustrated by repeatedly having to log into Cisco before I could get on the internet. Other users suggested turning off wifi entirely and just using the slower Edge network.
I've found a better solution. Turns out if you keep the Logon Information page open in a window, you can simply hit the refresh button on the address bar and it will automatically resend the information without you having to type it in.
It's really nice when your last name is something long, like, say, Schlesinger.
Apparently this works for all Macs. My next-door neighbor keeps the page always open on a tab on her firefox, and just refreshes it whenever she needs to.
EDIT (by Matt): Alternatively, you can send an email to helpdesk with the MAC address of your iPhone or iPod touch, and they will push it through clean access, so that you don't have to deal with cisco ever again, at least not on your iPhone/iTouch. The mac address will look something like 12:34:56:78:9A:BC, and you can find it under Settings-->General-->About--> Wi-Fi Address. It basically makes it work like it was designed to, so that you don't have to open safari before, say, weather, and so that you can have it automatically check your mail.
Before you get too excited, though, be aware that this policy only applies to iPhones, and possibly other mobile devices.
EDIT: Do not email Help Desk with the MAC addresses of your iPhone/iPod Touch. You must physically bring your iPhone/iPod Touch into the Help Desk in order for us to register it. We need proof that the MAC address belongs to a device that we are allowed to exempt from Cisco Clean Access, so we must physically see the device and its MAC address. (Justin)
Facebook has been down all night. Is it a Wesleyan problem? A network problem? A Facebook problem? Anyone have information on this?
Edit: 9am, still down.
Edit Edit: It's back! And apparently it wasn't a just a Wesleyan thing, but a Connecticut thing and even a Mississippi thing.
Toxic children's toys, dangerous seafood, defective tires, poisonous medicine, incredible amounts of pollution, thousands of shady executions. They've killed your pets. They've got some weird hybrid of Communism and capitalism and a government rife with corruption. They're propping up unstable governments in Africa in exchange for their natural resources. And now they're tracking everything about you. Or, rather, everything about the Chinese in Shenzhen:
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips [...] will be issued to most citizens.Woohoo, civil rights! Personal freedom! Personal privacy! Communism!
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
EDIT, by Brian: Ok guys; I've been had. Where are the hidden cameras? As a result, it appears the series of pictures which follows this text is misleading. Justin D responds:
> Your recent post on Wesleying is more than a bit misleading. I am not
> yet officially employed by Apple (and technically, won't be for the
> foreseeable future) and, as such, I am receiving no compensation of
> any kind for spreading the news about the most revolutionary mobile
> device ever created (mm, mm, good: iPhone). I'd like it if you would
> clearly state, as an addendum to your post, that there is no conflict
> of interest in this situation�and do so as soon as possible.
Definitely. Sounds like there is no conflict of interest in this situation, I was wrong, and that was weak.
Mr. T, your verdict?
True that, Mr. T. This article was written without enough info, not enough fact checking, and once, in the late 1980s, this article smoked but did not inhale. Brian's current credibility: down the shitter. Justin's current cred: top notch.
Just for Brian's criminal record: a series of images that will probably be deleted soon (note to self: save sweet dramatic word enlargement graphic)
As Wesleying's resident Apple evangelist, I just wanted to issue a reminder: start your drooling. iPhone launches at 6 PM on June 29. Get ready to stand in line for days outside your local Apple/AT&T store.
Missed a few webcasts this year?
Mostly sports. Some Weseminars. Roth and Lehrer's speeches, the Spirits concert. You can also watch the senior IMS workers graduate.
More goodies if you go up a directory.
One of our friendly UNIX sysadmins (aka the guy who fixes webmail when it breaks) posted a super-detailed spam-fightin' action guide on WesConfess. Here it is slightly abridged and formatted:
So as some of you may have noticed, there's now a button in Wesleyan's "webmail" that allows you to report a given email message as spam or not spam. Since reporting as spam fires off the email to me so that I can evaluate 1) if it's legitimately spam, and 2) if so, why it bypassed our filters, I've noticed my mailbox has recently been flooded by reports of spam. This is great, cause this is exactly what I want. Bizarrely enough, I don't actually get spam in my Wesleyan account (in contrast to my other accounts) so it's been immensely frustrating to deal with complaints because no one has given me any data. But now I have it.
In any case, there's a few hints I can give based on my evaluation of reported spam for dealing with spam. The technology behind the filters work; where we've really failed is making it easy to use and educating people on how to use it. Again, working on this, but I have to rely on other people to help me out - I'm horrible at writing "serious" documentation and identifying what is user friendly.
- The most important - turn on your filters. I don't know fully why it is the policy to make filtering opt-in, but unless you have specifically configured your spam filters (you can do this through Webmail->Options or some link in e-portfolio) nothing gets filtered for spam. Similarly, if you forward your mail off to someplace else, nothing gets filtered for spam.
- Nearly as important - do not whitelist from @wesleyan.edu. Or yourself @wesleyan.edu. Anyone in the world can claim they are from Wesleyan and trust me, spammers do. This counts for over half of the spam that get reported me because the whitelist will let a mail through no matter how spammy it looks. As a point of comparison, I routinely get reported mails that, if they had not been whitelisted, would have received a spam score of 30, well over most people's threshold. We don't actually filter internal Wesleyan communications at all as a matter of policy. Email wasn't really designed with verification of sender in mind (though there are things in place, but they're tricky for reasons that have nothing to do with technology).
In any case, a "whitelist" in this context is a list of addresses that are absolutely allowed. Namely, an address that is whitelisted means you have expressed a desire that this address, under all circumstances, is definitely allowed. In the context of Wesleyan's system, you do this through your spamassassin prefences or by clicking "Allow Sender" when you're viewing a message in webmail and the end result is that the mail will not be flagged as spam.
It can be quite useful in some circumstances, but as I noted above, lots of spammers fake the domain they're sending to so whitelisting all of Wesleyan addresses means all the spam gets through. And since we actually don't pass internal mail through the filters anyway, it's not necessary anyway. Spoofing email is trivial, anyone can pretend to be oh, I dunno, dbennett@wesleyan.edu with little effort. I wouldn't recommend doing it though.
Conversely, a blacklist is a list of addresses that are not allowed under any circumstances. It too can be configured through your spamassassin preferences or "Block Sender" when viewing a message in this case. Generally speaking trying to use blacklists to block all possible spammers is a futile gesture, but it can be helpful for something like an Amazon list you just want to get rid of. Unfortunately, you can't blacklist Wesleyan addresses (policy again) via this system, but anything else is fair game.
Of course, this brings up the point that sometimes internal Wesleyan communications are very much spam and that maybe you do want to blacklist certain Wesleyan addresses. I'm hoping to come up with a solution for this, but it is currently lacking.- It's actually more important to learn messages as not spam then spam. Very high scoring spam messages are automatically learned by the system as spam, and very low scoring spam messages are automatically learned as ham... but unfortunately, it's very very hard to get a legitimate low-scoring spam message. It's simply easier to automatically detect a mail as spam-- ham (legitimate mail) not so much. And since the learning technology will only start taking affect after you've learned 200 spams and 200 hams.. well, unless you've learned enough non-spam, it's never going to help. I know it's a pain, but it will help. Reporting something as non-spam, btw, does NOT get sent to me in any fashion.
- Not every piece of bulk mail is necessarily spam. Some things will never be detected as spam by the filters because they aren't spam by the current definition. Things like various newsletters from Amazon, Buy.com, whatever (which you unwittingly opted in to) will probably never get flagged-- by learning them you might be able to push them past the barrier, but because they are "legitimate", the filters give them a pretty low score. You're better off unsubscribing from them or blacklisting them straight out then trying to get the score down. What determines their legitimacy? Basically if they are 1) big enough, 2) opt-in, 3) have a clear way to get off their list they get a stamp of approval from the makers of the software.
- Lyris lists - depending on how the email is delivered to lyris, messages from lyris lists aren't correctly scanned. We're working on closing the hole, of course, but lyris is not the most cooperative product in the world for some of these things and the work around/recommendation I suggested has some other issues.
It's a little late for this now, but Notemesh looks like a promising student resource:
There are plenty of notes services out there; NoteMesh is a different way of thinking about your notes. Collaborate with your classmates to create a unified set of notes for your class. It's like Wikipedia for your notes.Great for those of you who just sit in the back row typing on your laptops (EVERYONE in Sensation & Perception: I'm looking at you!). The site's slogan is "collaborate to graduate," and I think it has great potential-- Especially for lectures.
