Fall 2009 Transfer Events

One of the things you should be thinking about NOW as a PCCC student is transfer. You don't want to wait until the last moment. The Center for Student Success brings in representatives from four-year colleges and universities, and has other events designed to help you with transfer. As Paterson is our main campus, most of the events will be held there.

Here is the email I just received about this. For our IT majors graduating this semester, I would highly recommend the NJIT Immediate Decision Days. You sit with a representative and get an answer on the spot about whether you are accepted or not. You need to make an appointment beforehand, however.

Transfer Advising Groups
Would you like to know more about the transfer process? Attend a Transfer Advising Group session! The Transfer Advising Groups are held in the Center for Student Success, A-230. No need to sign up in advance. For more information, call Liz Harrison, Student Development and Transfer Specialist at 973-684-5664.

Monday, October 5, 12:00pm
Tuesday, October 13, 5:00pm
Wednesday, October 21, 12:00pm
Thursday, October 29, 5:00pm
Just have a quick question about your transfer application? Stop by the Center for Student Success on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:30pm, or Thursdays from 10:30-11:30am, ask to see the Transfer Specialist. If appropriate, you may be asked to schedule an appointment to discuss more detailed questions.

University Transfer Admission Information Sessions
Get the facts directly from the source. These sessions are led by admissions representatives who are experts on the transfer admission requirements for their institutions. Everyone is welcome and advance sign-up is not necessary.

Caldwell College
September 22, 11:00am-2:00pm, Broadway Lobby
November 2, 11:00am-2:00pm, Broadway Lobby

College of Saint Elizabeth
September 29, 4:00-7:00pm, Broadway Lobby
October 20, 4:00-7:00pm, Broadway Lobby

New Jersey Institute of Technology
November 3, 11:00am-3:00pm, Broadway Lobby

Historically Black Colleges and Universities College Fair!
November 17, 2009
8:30am-12:30pm
PCCC Gymnasium
Paterson Campus

Gather admission and scholarship information from over 40 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Many colleges will be waiving their admission application fees if you apply at the fair. This is a very special opportunity to learn more about these prestigious institutions. See Liz Harrison, Transfer Specialist in the Center for Student Success, if you have questions about the fair.


Transfer Admission Immediate Decision Programs
For students with 40 or more completed college level credits, Spring 2010 admission only. Students with scheduled appointments will meet with a university admissions representative, have their application reviewed, and receive an admission decision on the spot. The programs are held in the Center for Student Success at the main campus in Paterson.

University Interview Date Time
Montclair State University November 4, 2009 11:00am-2:00pm and 4:00-6:00pm

NJIT November 9, 2009 11:00am-2:00pm
November 19, 2009 3:00-6:00pm

NJCU October 14, 2009 11:00am-1:00pm
November 18, 2009 11:00am-1:00pm

Rutgers-Newark November 10, 2009 12:00-6:00pm

William Paterson University November 2, 2009 2:00-6:15pm

Test Taking Strategies

I am in the process of grading some tests and I was struck by how many people are having problems not only with the material (this always happens), but also how many are just not answering questions.

Here are some things that I can offer as suggestions:

• Read the instructions! For example, if I am giving short answer type questions, I always include the words "using complete sentences" in the instructions. Many professors will take off points if they ask for sentences and get fragments. Likewise, for true/false questions, I always ask for people to write out "true" or "false". This way I don't get a letter that is a combination of a T and an F.

• Answer the questions as asked. When a question asks "Discuss xxxxxxx", what the professor is looking for is NOT a list. For example, if I asked "Discuss three sandwiches", I wouldn't expect the answer would be "peanut butter and jelly, ham and cheese, eggplant". If I simply wanted three answers, I would likely say something like "List three sandwiches" or "Name three sandwiches". When a professor asks a student to "discuss" or "describe", they are looking for more information.When a professor asks "compare and contrast X and Y", this is going to require two separate parts to your answer. First should be a comparison of X and Y (how they are similar) and second should be contrasting of X and Y (how they are different). If I asked you to compare and contrast baseball and football, the correct answer would not be a definition of baseball, followed by a definition of football. Instead, a correct answer would include a comparison (for example, baseball and football are both team sports, both are played in stadiums, etc), followed by contrasting (while baseball has nine players on the field at a time from one team, football has eleven, baseball uses a circular ball that is struck with a bat while football uses an oblong ball that is thrown and kicked).
  
  
• Be on time and ready to go! If you get there on time, you will get your choice of seat and have the chance to relax before the test starts. I remember I was 45 minutes late for a final once, and I was overly stressed for that reason. I personally also schedule tests to have a set time frame, for example, one hour. If a student shows up 30 minutes late, they now have only 30 minutes to complete the test. Also, take care of any bathroom-type business before the test starts. Many professors do not allow bathroom breaks during tests, because there is potential for cheating.
  

Going to head back to do some more grading, but I wanted to put this information out there.

PCCC's CWE and you

PCCC has a requirement that, before you graduate, you successfully pass the College Writing Exam, or CWE (formerly GWE). I am about to mention this in my classes, so I wanted to type up what I am going to say here to share.

First of all, you don't need to wait until your last semester. As a matter of fact, it is advisable that you do not. Why? If you do not pass the CWE, you don't graduate. You will notice it is listed as a requirement on your degree audit.

Secondly, they give you two hours. Many students assume that two hours is there in case they need it, but the expectation is that you are using that time not only to write, but also to plan and revise your work! There is no harm in taking 15 minutes to outline, then writing, and then re-reading it and editing, and since you can take it on the computer, you can cut and paste bits and pieces, delete, etc.

The school has set up some free CWE preparation workshops that are free, and you can find information on them here:
CWE Workshops

Shut down telemarketers!

I recently wrote about the telemarketing laws that have changed. However, I realized I never mentioned the National Do Not Call registry.

A number of years back, a law was passed requiring most telemarketers to not call people if they asked not to be called. The problem is that I as a telemarketer could get your phone number and distribute your phone number to 100 other telemarketing companies. Even if you told my company to remove it, the other people still have your phone number.

The government stepped in and set up a free service - the National Do Not Call registry. You put your phone number in the system, and most telemarketers are required to not call you. If they do, you can report them and they face heavy fines. Most telemarketers will be required to stop calling you 31 days from your registration date, so if you put it in the system today, you should be safe by the end of next month at worst.

Of course, there are exceptions. First of all, any company that you have a business relationship with is exempt (though you can still ask them to remove you if they call). So, your phone company, cable company, etc. can do so. In addition, if you order from a Web site and give them your phone number, you may also be opening yourself to legal telemarketing calls.

Other exceptions include charities, political organizations (of course, because guess who passed the law - politicians!), and surveys that don't include any sales pitch.

The Federal Communications Commission does seem to pursue complaints. I was able to find a list with a hundred citations of companies that have been complained about and been fined as a result. The biggest so far was a Florida based company named Dynasty Mortgage, which got a warning and apparently kept calling people, leading to two sets of fines totaling around $1.5 million dollars.

No harm in signing up, because once again, it's free!

donotcall.gov

Skype and eBay divorce

In what I can only describe is "it's about time", eBay decided that Skype didn't fit in their business plan and sold it off. Skype is an online phone system, basically allowing people to make free calls to other people on Skype through their Internet connection. It can also be used to call from your PC to a telephone, at lower rates than most standard phone services have. For example, it's 10.3 cents a minute to the Dominican Republic, and 10.6 cents per minute to India. Compare this to Verizon charging 17 cents a minute to DR and 33 cents a minute to India. What's kind of nice is that the other person won't even know you are using a computer to call them. Nice idea!

The question I had when eBay bought it a few years back was "what are they going to do with it? How does this fit in eBay's business model?". I suppose the answer has been found.

The sale (which does allow eBay to keep a share of Skype) allows eBay to focus on what they know (online auctions). I always wonder if it is better to focus on one thing and do that really well, or to spread your business out. In this case, there was very little integration between the two applications, so it was an odd fit from the start. Meg Whitman, a former CEO of eBay, was approving of the purchase, but now that she is gone, the company found itself free to rid itself of an asset that was not helping the bottom line.

Part of me wonders if eBay is being smart, since pending legal issues have led experts to question whether Skype will need to be shut down eventually. The question is this - Skype doesn't sell advertising, and though it has 405 million users, how do you turn that in to real revenue? I don't know how many people use it for anything aside from free calling, so I couldn't tell you.

Web Link:

• Link to sale story

NFL bans use of Twitter on Game Days

The NFL has become the first league to really take a stand on social networking. News has broken today that the NFL is banning players from Twittering (and Facebooking, etc) for communications purposes on game days. This ban starts 90 minutes before the first game, and ends after the post-game interviews. This idea makes sense. This way, you avoid people getting upset and saying something they later regret. The league will likely back this up with fines or something like that.

It's rather amusing to me that we literally JUST talked about Twitter and sports two days ago in my Internet/E-Commerce Technologies class, and our discussion already is somewhat out of date.

Link to Article

Telemarketing Laws Changing Tomorrow

Tomorrow (9/1/09) marks the change in telemarketing laws, again. Starting tomorrow, most for-profit companies that you don't have a relationship with will not be allowed to call you using pre-recorded messages. I personally don't receive a lot of calls, mainly because I registered myself for the national "Do Not Call" registry.

I was going to link here to a blog post I wrote on the national "Do Not Call" registry (donotcall.gov), but in searching for it, it appears that I never got around to writing about that. Coming soon!

In some of my classes, we talk about how the laws are behind the technology, and this is one of those examples. Phones get invented, people decide to start using them to market things, people invent technology to automate marketing of things, laws come in to place 20 years later restricting this practice.

Better late than never, though, and this should cut down on some of the more annoying calls you get at home.

Link to Story

In Local News...

One thing that is great about the Internet is the availability of information. For example, it was near impossible twenty years ago to follow local news outside of your area. Now, if you want to see what is going on locally in any area, you can find resources.

For example, as of today, Paterson is mulling an adult curfew and the Paterson schools have a new round of educational reform. How do I know this? Paterson is large enough that it warrants a Web site devoted to local Paterson news.

I am especially impressed with the business model. You'll notice that the people running the site have done an excellent job with ad placement and ad relevancy. Since this is a site devoted to a very specific group, local printing companies, realtors, lawyers, and insurance agents can be confident that they are getting their money's worth. It's also nice to see local opinions on national matters, because there are only so many times you can read the same national opinions on issues.

Web Link:
patersononline.net

Video Games and the Scientific Method

I think sometimes students wonder why they have to take science courses as part of any major. Part of the reason is to teach the scientific method. No matter whether you are taking biology, chemistry, physics, or some of the other sciences, you should be learning to form hypotheses and conduct experiments to see your ideas hold true ("the scientific method").

What amazes me is that this skill doesn't seem to stick. Politicians and other people toss out ideas that just don't hold up when investigated. For example, video games are for kids (wrong: statistics show that the average age of gamers is 35). Another example, video gamers are men (true, but not as extreme as portrayed: 40% of gamers are women). If you go with the false belief that teenage boys are the only people playing video games, you can draw many poor conclusions. For example, IF most people playing video games were male teenagers, you can draw conclusions about the content that should be available on these systems.

I ran across the article linked below and it just made me think how sometimes it's easier to go with anecdotal knowledge rather than do any research. For example "every time I go in to Game Stop, it's filled with teenagers". Well, this may be true, but this is not the only place that people buy video games. Evidence can be disputed with research. Research may indicate that adults buy their video games online rather than in stores like Game Stop, for the convenience or price or whatever. However, you could draw an incorrect conclusion just by walking in to a few stores and making a generalization.

Anyway, this article is a little bit biased for gamers, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Link to article

Textbook tax credit

This just came across the email at school and I thought it was worth sharing. Here is the email we received from our bookstore manager:

Recently, the Obama administration launched economic stimulus package includes a new Textbook Tax Credit for which many PCCC students are eligible. This new government program will now reimburse students for up to 100% of the cost of required textbooks and other course materials. For example, if your student has out-of-pocket course material expenses or tuition and fees during 2009 or 2010 and no other financial grant aid covers those expenses, they would be able to claim the expenses as a credit. For each student the credit is limited to $2,500.

In the past, the Hope and Lifetime Learning credits did not cover textbooks. This exclusion disadvantaged many students for which textbooks are a high proportion of their total costs of higher education. This stimulus bill creates the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which will credit 100% of a student’s first $2000 in tuition, fees, and course materials, and 25% of the next $2000. The credit is also 40% refundable, so even if a student doesn’t owe taxes, he or she can effectively get a 40% rebate from the federal government for all tuition, fees and course materials.

At the bookstore, we are very excited about this new government program and want to ensure that our students are aware of this new opportunity. We are spreading the word here in the Bookstore, but it would make a huge difference if you could help us raise awareness by mentioning this tax credit in class to ensure that all students hear about it.

http://www.textbookaid.org/

Registry Cleaning

In my CIS 101 class, there is usually some sort of discussion of how programs get installed. Many times, whether in class or after class, I get a question that goes along these lines:

"Can I just copy the folder where Microsoft Office is to another computer?"

Now, back in the Microsoft DOS days, that would typically work, but Windows made it a little more complicated. There are a few things that are done during the installation process that you don't see. For example, some files are put in other folders on the hard drive, typically a subfolder under your Windows folder. In addition, some "services" are installed, and some information is written to a location called "the registry". So, with all that in mind, the operating system was designed to include an installation process, in part to make software piracy more difficult. Not all programs take advantage of this, but many do.

The problem with this is that when stuff is written to the registry, it doesn't always get cleaned out well when programs are uninstalled, etc. This leads to your registry being slower, as it is filled with junk that slows down your machine. A lot of people wonder why they can just reinstall the Windows operating system and see substantial improvements in speed. Part of the reason is the registry.

However, there are ways to fix this, and there is one program that does this for free, Eusing Free Registry Cleaner. This program will go through and clean up the mess left behind by sloppy uninstall programs. Definitely worth a download and a run. This is something I typically run every few months or so, and it always finds a bunch of errors it can fix. This is a program that I would recommend, especially with it being free and all.  The one concern I have is the limited support for Vista and Windows 7.

Link to Download

Fat Fingers

Late last year, I got a PS3 for myself, and I was looking to pick up a few games for it. One game I wanted was Guitar Hero, and I wasn't finding very good prices. I went to eBay, and same thing, there weren't a ton of great prices. I decided to try a site that I've used called fat fingers.

When an eBay seller lists an item for sale, they specify the keywords that go in the listing title, etc. People make mistakes, and if they make typographical errors, the end result is sometimes that they just don't get people to see their item. If no one sees it, no one buys it.

Anyway, fat fingers is a free site that will find auctions that are spelled wrong. For example, I was able to find an auction for "Gutar Hero" when I searched, and it was an auction starting at $5. I bid $5, and no one else bid on the item (because they didn't find it due to the spelling error), and I got a brand new copy of Guitar Hero for $5 plus shipping. When I bought this, this was an excellent price for it.

Note that this works well especially with eBay auctions. If it is a "fixed price" auction, you probably aren't getting a deal, but if it is an auction, you have a great chance of putting in a low bid and winning something.

I am still shocked that eBay hasn't found some way to fix this, because when their sellers lose money, they also lose money on commission.

Anyway, here's the site:
www.fatfingers.com

Physics for Free!

As an undergraduate in Computer Science, I was required to take a two semester lab science sequence. In addition, I was required to take Calculus I, Calculus II, and Linear Algebra from the math area. With proper manipulation of my free electives, I was able to take a few extra courses and end up with both math and physics minors. Where an ex-girlfriend of mine was taking classes like "Rock and Rap as Cultural Phenomena" (no kidding), I was taking four-credit lab sciences like Electricity and Magnetism and higher level math classes like Linear Algebra to complete requirements. I finished my degree with 130 credits - two more than the minimum - with those two minors.

Physics, in particular, always used to fascinate me. It was always complicated, but very interesting to solve problems using the theories provided. It's an incredibly interesting subject, but it does involve a lot of higher level math, and that usually seems to be a deterrent for people. I think people would get more out of that type of science than, say, Meteorology, but that's just me. Not that there is anything wrong with Meteorology, but I think Physics really was a class that taught me how to think and apply math and science to real world problems, and I am glad I ended up going that route.

If you ever did want to learn a little about it, a professor of Physics has actually taken the time to write a free textbook, and has made it available on the Web. You can find it at the address below:
http://www.physicsforfree.com/

Fall schedule updates

I had a minor change to my Fall 2009 schedule. I will be teaching a regular CIS 101 course CIS 101 M09 instead of the CIS 101 learning community course. If you have friends in CIS 101 M09 you can feel free to warn them to get out now.

Original Post with my Fall schedule

My experience with the legal system

I believe I mentioned that I was on jury duty for the county I live in a few weeks ago. It was certainly an interesting experience. I ended up getting selected for a trial and serving on a jury for a criminal case. The case involved a defendant who had been pulled over and found with drugs in his car. While the arrest was happening, an officer sustained an injury.

(For the record, the judge did say that we can discuss these things, for anyone wondering. I am going to avoid specifics and stick with my impressions of the whole experience)

First of all, it amazed me that it took two full days to pick a jury. The first two days I served were not anything to do with the trial; instead, I was waiting in a jury box watching people get selected and then struck by the attorneys. What amazed me was that they interviewed each prospective juror individually. The problem I have with the situation is that so much of this could be improved with technology. You had 75 people come in a room Tuesday with me, and most of them ended up dismissed because of the ways they answered the juror questionnaire. In order to be dismissed, they first had to go and sit with the judge and lawyers for a few minutes. I immediately thought of little touch screen devices, asking the same questions they were asking people on paper, and based on people's responses, automatically filtering people out if necessary. There are certain reasons that people can be dismissed, and that I won't talk about, but if those reasons showed up during the survey, why did the person need to wait the entire day sitting on the benches waiting? People literally waited 6 hours to walk up to the judge, give him their juror survey, and be sent out of the room immediately. Some of the questions saw the judge ask a follow up question. The mobile devices I am imagining could be programmed to do the same - if someone says "yes" to this question, ask this follow up yes/no question.

I'm going to make up a silly example here, just so I am not specific about the questions on the actual survey. Let's pretend the case has something to do with cats, and they are going to bring in 10 cats. Your jury questionnaire would probably ask each juror if they are allergic to cats, because you then would not be able to be around so many cats. If we had this device, anyone who was allergic to cats would be able to be dismissed back in to the jury pool and either put on another case or send home (because you CAN be called as a prospective juror for multiple trials in the same day). Heck, the survey could even be done before you go in to any courtroom, and anyone allergic to cats could be routed to another trial that does not involve cats.

Now, why not do this survey from home, which did cross my mind? You can not yet assume everyone has access to the technology and the ability to use it, and you also don't want to worry about people's forms being stolen and used by a stranger, so an in-person verification at the courthouse may be necessary.

One the jury was selected, the judge asked for our cell phone and home phone numbers, in case there was an emergency. We reported to a jury room for 9 am and proceeded to wait each of the three days the trial was going on. It would be very labor intensive to expect someone to call all 14 of us (12 jurors, two alternates), but why not use an alert system? Much like PCCC's Emergency Alert System - the "Panther Alert" - the courts could have said "the judge is busy, be here for 10:30 am instead of 9 am today". That would have allowed me and the other jurors a little time to run a few errands.

At the end of the trial, if you want to see the transcripts (for example, let's say we wanted to see exactly what one witness said, word for word). In order to do so, they print things out and you have to look through pages and pages to find it. Why not put this on a very simple device that would let you view the document and use "Find"? You save paper waste, you also save on having to pay to shred these documents, and you make your jury more efficient. You don't need a cutting edge laptop to do this - you could do this on a very basic machine that needs only the operating system and Adobe Acrobat on it.

It was an interesting experience, but the only thing that really bothered me was the fact that so much of my time was wasted just sitting there. Technology can alleviate these issues and I am sure it will in the future.