In academia, promotion, tenure, funding, and pretty much everything someone needs to keep their job is tied to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. If I self publish I won’t keep my job. If a university ran a website for publishing, they would have to reimplement the peer review process, and often there may be ~a dozen people worldwide qualified to review a particular paper so it’s not just that others from within the university could review work. If a university is implementing all that, they have basically become a publisher and likely have costs they’ll want to try and recoup and could foreseeably implement a fee to publish.

Don’t get me wrong - the journals have a predatory and exclusive model that should be dismantled. But until we fix promotion, tenure, and funding pathways in academia that have enabled the publishers to become what they are there will always be these problems – any other system that pops up will not get widely used because academics will be disincentivized from using it (as discussed in some other comments here).

Sure, it’s a subjective number that certainly does not solve all the problems with our education system. But it specifically addresses the problem highlighted in the post. On a 100-point scale under the 10-point grade bin convention, 60% of the grading scale is assigned to a failing grade; under the 7-point grade bin convention, 70% of the grading scale is reserved for failure. Thus schools/districts have created rules that teachers can’t assign less than 50 (or whatever number they decide on) to minimize the heavy weighting of failing grades. But this creates a situation where someone who did the assignment but did poorly receives the same grade as someone who didn’t even show up. Under the 4-point scale, all grades (A, B, C, D, and F) are weighted equally, which reduces the urge admin might have to set a minimum grade and minimizes the habit teachers may have to assign failing grades to students who may actually be slightly better than failing.

Viewing school as indoctrination is a societal choice - it doesn’t have to be that way. Are there other ways to learn? Absolutely. And we should value those just as much as we value a traditional school-based education. I’m all for that, and all for alternative evaluation systems that don’t involve assigning a number to everyone, but in my experience most people – and especially students – don’t want to put in the time or effort it takes to really evaluate people or themselves beyond a GPA-type number.

A good argument for the 4-point grading scale.

For me, it was buying CA glue from hobby or woodworking shops instead of those tiny packs of “superglue”. Comes in all different thicknesses and with activator usually for a lower cost per gram, and in bottles designed to last until the glue is gone.

Several posts are saying this would be a good thing. Maybe, if implemented like the meme shows, but I worry ads in LLM chatbot output have the potential to be the most insidious and persuasive form of advertising we’ve ever seen. Chatbots are – by their nature – conversational and pushed in forms that are meant to eliminate any sort of thinking on the part of the user. And more and more, people are using them as their closest, most trusted confidants. Who’s to say a (e.g.) political candidate won’t pay to control the narrative of a chatbot, and have their propaganda (“ads”) appear as a private conversation between an individual and their trusted “friend” or “partner”?

Although it may not be ideal for a large document, I have used the Coblis for individual figures that I’m worried about. I usually find small tweaks to the colors can make them much more readily differentiable in the simulator.

You don’t need to do this. If properly pruned, crape myrtles will form a canopy over the sidewalk that doesn’t interfere with pedestrians and actually provides shade; if topped like the picture, they will form an unruly mass of growth right at head height.

I agree with the other comment – looks like maybe insect damage or (fungal?) infection, but I’m really not sure. You might try looking through Sue Bottom’s Orchid Disease Guide (PDF), if you haven’t already.

I agree, looks like a mulberry. Leaves on small trees and new branches are particularly likely to be lobed in mulberry, while older branches tend to produce leaves without lobes.

Atomic Frontier on YouTube trained a machine learning model on his prior emails, assignments, etc., and had it determine his personal worst keyboard layout. He posted the code on GitHub for others to do the same.