Comments on: Administered Uncertainty http://www.roughtheory.org/content/administered-uncertainty/ theory in the rough Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:54:32 +1000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: L Magee http://www.roughtheory.org/content/administered-uncertainty/comment-page-1/#comment-62576 L Magee Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:30:50 +0000 http://www.roughtheory.org/?p=830#comment-62576 Belated coda to this dilemma: the exciting "code" was the inclusion of a question in the survey asking students for their student number. Notwithstanding they had entered this to access the system in the first place. To turn from Heisenberg to Godel: we now have both a consistent and complete set of student/session registrations. Some complex transformations were also required to reconfigure these relationships however: the download format presents the student and session times in an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization" rel="nofollow">admirably normalised</a> (if practically unhelpful) state. As a side note, current theory on the business model of the company behind the "university online environment" is that the image buttons it uses to submit (and confirm, and re-confirm) actions are surreptitiously tied to Google Ads - adding immeasurably to the company's shareholder value with every "click-through", at some modest expense to the system's usability. Belated coda to this dilemma: the exciting “code” was the inclusion of a question in the survey asking students for their student number. Notwithstanding they had entered this to access the system in the first place. To turn from Heisenberg to Godel: we now have both a consistent and complete set of student/session registrations. Some complex transformations were also required to reconfigure these relationships however: the download format presents the student and session times in an admirably normalised (if practically unhelpful) state.

As a side note, current theory on the business model of the company behind the “university online environment” is that the image buttons it uses to submit (and confirm, and re-confirm) actions are surreptitiously tied to Google Ads – adding immeasurably to the company’s shareholder value with every “click-through”, at some modest expense to the system’s usability.

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