geekosystem

IBM's Watson supercomputer is a pretty smart machine, already capable of trouncing our finest humans in trivia contests. There's always room for improvement, though, and in a move certain to leave Peter Thiel like, SOOOOO pissed, the team developing Watson is sending the computer to college, where it will bone up on coursework in English and math. Pretty soon, not only will Watson be better at trivia than you, it will also be able to trounce you in beer pong, meaning it's officially time for us to just pack it in as a species, folks. The machines have already won.

Fly larvae -- fine, maggots -- that are raised on food spiked with alcohol grow up into flies who can't learn normally without the aid of a little booze juice, marking yet another way in which maggots are pretty much just like college students. A study demonstrating the difficulties maggots experienced while trying to process new information without the aid of a morning beer to take the edge off things appears this week in the journal Current Biology, which reminds us that keg stands are not always recreational choices -- sometimes they are educational tools.

Attention college students: Do you like playing video games? More specifically, do you like a game called The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? If so, then I suggest you hightail it on down to Rice University in Houston, Texas, the only school that I know of with a course devoted entirely to the epic open-world RPG. For one semester only, English majors can sign up for Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim, a course that studies the psychology of gamers and the influence of Scandinavian culture in western fantasy stories.

The textbooks for college courses can cost a pretty penny, especially if the publishers keep putting out a new edition year after year. Even if students manage to find someone to purchase their used copies, it's still a losing proposition for the average student. That all might change soon in California. Governor Jerry Brown has signed legislation that will eventually provide free, open-source digital textbooks for 50 of the state's most popular courses.

One would think that the study of art might require some, well, art to study. The people calling the shots at OCAD University would disagree, however. The textbook this year for one of the university's art courses, titled "Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800," costs a whopping $180 and -- in all seriousness -- includes no art whatsoever. The kicker? It's required for every student taking the class.

In what surely ranks highly on the list of Scandals Discovered Because of Grammatical Errors, Harvard's most recent academic witch hunt was kicked off in part because one professor noticed an unusual typo in the same place in two exams. The discovery, made by assistant professor Matthew Platt, initially placed 13 final exams under suspicion this past spring. When Harvard publicly announced the inquiry at the end of August, the number of undergraduates being investigated had increased to about 125.

Are you an over-educated college graduate unable to find a job? Then why not spend your time between filling out job applications by taking some free online college courses to keep you well ensconced in your ivory tower! While Stanford may have turned lots of heads with their free, graded online courses, there are quite literally hundreds of other courses available online for free. At least 400 of them, according to Open Culture. They cover everything from History to Computer Science to English to Biology, and everything in between. But 400 is an awful lot to read through, so we've broken down a much shorter list for your reading pleasure.

According to the results of a study that followed thousands of students throughout their college careers, the higher-education system (in the United States at least) is effectively broken. The results show that many students are leaving college with degrees, but little to no improvement in critical thinking or complex reasoning skills. New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study, reports that after following 2,322 typically-aged college students from 2005-2009, he found that a whopping 45% showed no improvement in higher-reasoning and critical thinking skills after two years. Moreover, 36% percent managed to go four with no improvement. The study also found that while more selective schools had high overall success with these things, all 24 universities involved had small groups of (presumably self-motivated) kids who were learning a lot among a majority who were just getting by.

According to a recent survey by Rutgers University's Heldrich Center for Workforce Development [pdf], the above are recent college graduates' seven biggest regrets looking back on their college years as they consider their current employment situation. While most graduates say they are ultimately happy with their decision to have gone to college, a full 74% regret not doing something differently. The tops: Wishing they had been more careful about selecting a major or choosing a different major, or getting more part-time work or internship experience. (via Andrew Sullivan. h/t Hannah Waters)

If you're a college senior currently applying to college and you "like" this post on Facebook, be warned: There's a decent chance that the admissions departments at schools where you're applying are keeping tabs. (Hopefully, they will note your excellent taste in blogs.) A recent Kaplan survey found that admissions departments at 80% of top colleges "visited potential students’ online profiles during their recruiting process." Allison Otis, who runs a blog about her experience interviewing applicants to Harvard, speculates on the real impact that indiscreet social media profiles can have on kids' admission chances:

I doubt that hordes of students frequently lose scholarships or have an admission reneg'd for something that they innocently put up on Facebook. BUT what actually happens is much worse. Indiscreet social media postings can make your interviewer (or the admissions officer) prejudiced against you without realizing it. And that's scary and worrisome because a large chunk of admissions decisions are really close calls. They are based on "fit" and "feel" - it's not just what you've shown you can do, but the potential people think you have.

The obvious takeaway here, which applies to people of all ages: Keep personal Facebook pages pages private. Seriously. (via AllFacebook)

This is an actual thing happening at an actual college. Ohio State University is teaching sparkly tween paranormal romance Twilight as part of an honors literature course. Taken from the actual course's syllabus, which can be downloaded here:

While we read and discuss some important, influential narratives about the supernatural – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight as well a few minor works – we will also explore how these texts, like much other fiction, try to create particular reading experiences, as they push us to consider the nature and importance of literary imagination and the way fiction’s seductiveness is tied to other potentially dangerous attractions.

For good measure, here's how a fairly esteemed college feels about Twilight.

(epicponyz via The Daily What)

The vast information-gathering capabilities of Facebook can be highly creepy when one's own data is singled out. Nevertheless, when applied to big chunks of the population, it can reveal fascinating patterns that probably couldn't have been ferreted out before without laborious and expensive surveys. Case in point: This graph of breakups over the course of the year, as culled from over 10,000 status updates. In a pattern apparently very much influenced by the college calendar, Spring Break and the period two weeks before Christmas witness huge spikes in breakup frequency; people also like to begin the summer by being single, and Monday is the most common day of the week for breakup announcements. (Matthias Mikkelsen via @antderosa | David McCandless)

We don't write about every image macro trend to come along -- there are far too many, really -- but we're really big fans of Freshman Ferret, a fellow we've been seeing a lot lately on the Tumblrs and such as the back to school season kicks in. Whereas a character like the more familiar Socially Awkward Penguin is marked by mere social ineptitude, Freshman Ferret's is of a more specific and more painful variety: The awkwardness of being a freshman. The subtler and more painful varieties of Freshman Ferret aren't merely about things like walking into the wrong class, staying for 10 minutes and not knowing it's the wrong class, and then staying to the end because you don't want to walk out (although those are good too): The most spot-on Freshman Ferrets do things like failing to follow up with a cool and interesting person they met early on in the schoolyear because they couldn't remember that person's name. Remember, first-year students, everyone is a Freshman Ferret sometimes, and knowing that fact will help you transcend your own Freshman Ferretdom. Below, 15 of our favorites:

Hot on the heels of news that the amount of student loan debt in America is now higher than the amount of credit card debt, comes oddly named website (or game?) Ultrinsic, which allows college students to gamble on their own performance. From Fast Company:

The idea came from one of the site's founders, Jeremy Gelbart, who, as a student, made a wager with his friend Steven Wolf, now CEO of Ultrinsic. If Jeremy got an A, Steven would give him $100. If he didn't, Jeremy had to hand over $20 to Steven.

We must admit, the image of a couple of college age kids having that conversation does not inspire confidence in any business plan based thereupon.

Trees can breathe a sigh of relief.  The iPad moved one step closer to making paper unnecessary this week by finding a place inside the backpacks of every student at Seton Hill University, a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania.  The school announced yesterday that it would begin distributing the hot item to every single full-time student this coming fall.  Heck, all the incoming freshmen even get free 13"  MacBooks!