I used to work right on Old Street roundabout in the BT building on the NW corner, back in the late 90s. This was about the time that some of the old buildings nearby were just being converted into loft apartments. I guess the writing was on the wall even then, although the area was a backwater languishing in geographical obscurity. The pubs were unbelievably seedy dives (or worse). There was one bright spot, though, which was the street market in Whitecross Street. I don't think that exists any more. Oh well, that's what passes for progress, I suppose.
Interesting and challenging article about most current online education offerings. It would be interesting to see if the problems of maintaining engagement in a MOOC were at least partly due to students realizing that some or all of the requirements for authentic understanding were not being met.
As I understand it, there is a different MOOC philosophy that has not gained much support (probably because it's much harder to scale) - the connectionist approach. Perhaps that would support some of the requirements.
(PS: interesting that many of the comments here try to rise to the ice-cube challenge...)
Even if NTP had been working properly, you would not have clocks synchronised at the level of individual ticks - only to the level of time intervals. If two updates happened at roughly the same time, and fell into the same time interval, there would be no way to tell which one happened before the other. A paper by Cilia et al on timing of composite events in distributed event-based systems using NTP deals with this issue.
It doesn't sound like they care much for their workers. if someone's upset about something that happens within the company, aren't there better ways to resolve it than to just fire them?
There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in this article between the 'hire people who will grow into your culture' and the 'fire anyone who falls out of line with your culture' points being made.
typed in three choices of group name: one a dictionary word, another a university module code, the last a random selection of about 20+ letters. All three choices returned the same error message - that this group may already exist.