cmckay

The tension in education between the study of skills (what you would call preparation for your career) and the study of values (what you refer to as creating "well rounded people") has been around since the Ancient Greeks [1]. Most institutions tend to skew one way or the other, with smaller, liberal-arts style colleges tending to be on the "values" side, and larger, research universities tending to be on the "skills" side. (This is, of course, an oversimplification).

Now, the rhetoric we've been throwing at kids to get them to go to college has been strongly on the "skills" side of things, which is perhaps why you (and others) feel that colleges aren't focusing on what they should.

As far as fundraising is concerned, it's complicated. You have to do something to keep the doors open and the lights on. Amenities (like rec centers, nice dorms, and so on) are justified by claiming that they increase recruiting yield and retention (thus stabilizing revenues) but they cost a lot. Money in the endowment means less of a dependence on tuition, which means more stability in the face of possible enrollment shortfalls.

Something like an art museum serves multiple purposes. It's an amenity, sure, and may help students (or their parents) decide that this institution is the right place for them. If there is an art or art history department, it may serve pedagogical functions. In many cases, though, donors may have given significant amounts of art to the school, and they need a way to respond to that gift. Having a museum to put it in makes everyone happy.

[1] Sorum, C. E. (2005) The Problem of Mission: A Brief Survey of the Changing Mission of the Liberal Arts In Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities (pp.26--39).

This is true for some fields, at some schools. Median salary for an associate professor (the first rank with tenure) at my institution is 63k.

A better way (in my opinion) to ask the question of whether or not your business model is sustainable/ethical/scalable is to ask the question: are you adding value? I think in this case, the answer is clearly yes. Dealing with freelancers (and especially international freelancers) can involve a lot of time and effort; you're taking care of that end of things. It's clear that your clients could go out and find and hire their own freelancers, but that involves work they would rather pay you to do.

As far as scalability is concerned, consider raising your prices. Don't think of it as rent seeking; think of it as providing a valuable service (managing a team of outsourced talent), and price accordingly.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the best tribute to sriracha of all: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sriracha

One data point: I teach at a small liberal arts college. Our endowment is roughly of the same order as our annual budget. Annual draw-down on the endowment is 4.5% or so, which means that the rest of the budget comes from tuition. If enrollment cratered (but didn't go entirely to zero) I suppose the administration could draw the shortfall from the endowment, but the board would pitch a fit, (and likely not approve that kind of move) and it's a sign that the college isn't going to be around long.

The full sticker price (Tuition, Fees, Room and Board) just passed $40k/year last year, and it's having an impact on our ability to recruit students. Since so much of our budget comes from tuition, though, a shortfall of even 30 students from predicted numbers (out of a total student population of about 1400) can cause a serious budget crunch.

Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

This is more a meta-comment about slideshare than about this presentation in particular. I really like being able to access the slides of talks I've seen, but for talks I haven't seen, there often is just enough that's missing from the slides that I don't get the full picture.

Does anybody have a solution to this?

Now, having said that, this particular slide deck suffers very little from this problem.

The problem with capping highly funded projects ("hits") is that they make up a pretty small percentage of the Kickstarter project space, but they get a ton of press. It varies by category, but in most of the categories, the projects doing better than 3x their goal are less than 5%.[0]

The real problem (alluded to by both the article author and other comments) is that project creators don't ask themselves hard questions about how their project will scale. Unfortunately, this is more of a problem in the Technology and Design categories, which tend to have a higher hit rate than others. Many project creators envision doing the work themselves, or using hard to source parts. The Open Locksport guy even planned his reward tiers so that he was operating at a loss for each pledge. That's just poor planning.

[0] http://tachycline.com/index.php/kickstarter-funding-rates/

Are people hiring freelance/part time for data science work? I'm a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, and would like to move my career in the direction of data science. Picking up a client or two for smaller/short term projects would really help, I think.

As an aside, it isn't just the postdocs who are disgruntled. I was awarded tenure last year, and while there are aspects of the job I love, there are others that push me toward making a change.

Yes, because it's clear from the context of the article that's what the author meant:

"Kickstarter intentionally makes failure a hard thought to stumble on. Its website does not show failed projects unless they’re specifically asked for and the company directs search engine crawlers away from them."

This statement is only true if one interprets the word "failed" as Kickstarter does, that is, "failed to receive funding."

and

"And what about Kickstarters that succeed? Do they deliver, or is it just the beginning of a path full of challenges?"

This statement wouldn't make sense if the author meant "successful delivery" when he said "success."

Two points that indicate that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about:

1. "Estimating the number of failed projects is difficult because of these tactics, but most independent attempts to pinpoint the figure have landed at 50% or more."

Response: Kickstarter has a statistics page [1] that gives this information. It's not hard to find. And the failure rate is much higher than 50% in most categories.

2. "Retrovirus enjoyed a steady trickle of contributions towards its modest $75,000 goal."

Response: Actually looking at the statistics [2], 75,000 is on the high end for Kickstarter projects (more specifically, it's the 98th percentile for all projects, and the 99.4th percentile for successfully funded projects across all categories; if we look just at games, the percentiles are 93rd overall, and 96.8 for projects that actually made their goal), and carries with it a low funding rate (about 20% overall, slightly less than that for projects in the Games category)

So while it may be a "modest" goal as far as the costs of game development are concerned, it isn't modest for Kickstarter.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats [2] currently unpublished data scraped from kickstarter.com; I'm nearly finished writing up my analysis though.

These isotopes have limited (and sometimes quite short) lifetimes. Bringing them closer to the patients means that they can be produced in smaller quantities on an as needed basis, and reduces the necessary infrastructure to transport them.

I see that part of the posting didn't go through. Reposted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4281053

For product design projects, kickstarter requires that you have a working prototype and a manufacturing plan. Most of the other project areas don't have that requirement.

I just launched a kickstarter ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1402474606/the-ilex-edc-... ) and it was clear there was at least some human involvement in the approval process.