The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Well, the reason for their policy is pretty retarded -- unless they also eliminate microwave ovens and 2.4GHz cordless phones on campus...
You can try to raise awareness on campus about the issue, do some research to figure out how reasonable/unreasonable their position is. Try to get it in the campus and/or local papers with hard facts to back up your points. A petition couldn't hurt really, but at the same time there's a pretty good chance it won't get anything done.
Well, the real question is what do you want to happen?
If you're pissed you can't get WiFi in your dorm, that's easily solved: buy a wireless router, and set it to not broadcast the SSID. They'll never know.
If you want to change idiotic policy, I think you are completely in the right to start some sort of petition. I think you want to get as many students as possible interested in your cause - if you can go to your administration and say, "here is concrete evidence that we have a shitload of students who agree that this policy is terrible", I think that's a good thing. Talk to your student government, since that exists largely to allow the students' voices be heard with regards to the administration's policies. It might be tough to cut through all that bullshit, but you have a legitimate complaint.
If you just want us to commiserate with you and the stupidity you encounter on a daily basis, well, yeah. They're stupid.
I hate shit like this. This is terrible policy and terrible science. It's a very good thing that few people think this way, because if they did we'd still be in the dark ages.
There's likely nothing you can do about it. People who have made up their mind to be crazy are unlikely to change it regardless of the evidence or rationale that's presented.
People that support policies like this live in a hypothetical world of zero risk. Sadly, many legislators live in similar worlds. Their value systems are generally deeply skewed. Consider the question of table saws. Should we allow the manufacture and sale of table saws? We know that table saws are dangerous implements. We also know that if table saws are widespread, it is likely at least one of them will accidentally cut off a child's hand. Yes, table saws have benefits - they allow us to do carpentry orders of magnitude faster than with hand saws. But, the question remains: are all the nice wooden cabinets in the world worth a single child's hand? Some people say "absolutely not," and therefore do everything in their power to ban table saws.
The same argumentation has been applied to violent video games, aspartame, fluoridated water, homogenized milk, vaccines, you name it. Read the resolution linked in the policy.
The Precautionary Principle states when there are indications of possible adverse effects, though they remain uncertain, the risks from doing nothing may be far greater than the risks of taking action to control these exposures. The Precautionary Principle shifts the burden of proof from those suspecting a risk to those who discount it.
I find this sort of thing pathological. First, it forces advocates of any change to all-but prove a negative. Worse yet, the premise is nearly assured for any given technology.
This is important: science is a process. Doing good science is hard. It's easy to screw up a single study in subtle ways that are not at all obvious. This is why repetition and independent validation are so important. For basically any new technology, given enough studies, a few of them are going to indicate a possible adverse effect. Therefore, for any given technology, the premise of the "Precautionary Principle" is going to be satisfied: there will always be the slightest indications that the technology may be bad in some way. The principle implies that once the risks are bounded and well-known, the principle no longer applies and you can make a decision. What the principle unfortunately does not say is what the criteria are for abandoning it. That is, how much evidence is enough to show that something is sufficiently safe? Is it a preponderance of the evidence? Beyond reasonable doubt? Clear and convincing evidence? Your school has a policy for deciding when WiFi is unsafe, but I doubt your school has a policy for deciding when WiFi is safe.
Science and reason are good at creating equivalence classes. Daenris above pointed this out for the WiFi debate - we know, for example, that microwaves and other unobjectionble technologies (not to mention things like the Sun) bathe us in electromagnetic radiation of comparable intensity constantly. Equivalence classes are a good way to set policy - if you ban WiFi because of concerns of the health effects of EM radiation, you should also ban microwaves, cordless phones, cellular phones, and so on. If you're going to ban genetic engineering, you should also consider banning dog breeding. Things like that. However, people with the kind of mindset that will ban WiFi will go to extreme lengths to come up with the smallest possible differences to explain why a cordless phone and a WiFi hotspot are fundamentally different.
My point is that there will always be a tinfoil hat crowd. Some of them will attain positions of power, and some of them will be more-or-less reasonable in many other ways. I used to work with a guy that had a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. He was obviously competent enough to obtain that degree, but he was also mentally ill. He had moments of paranoia, would randomly start ranting semi-incoherently, and so on. It's really amazing to see somebody who is perfectly rational about nearly everything and so fervently irrational about a few other things.
What do you do with people like this? Personally, I just try to stay away from them and minimize the damage they can do. Then, I remind myself to be thankful that there aren't more of them. Fighting them doesn't work. Usually it just cements their delusions further, as they're now an oppressed crusader.
The problem is he will out last you. You'll eventually get your degree, move on your way, and no longer concern yourself (for the most part) with the fact that campus lacks wifi. If you're serious about this, you basically have to get a group together of students, and then make sure you're constantly recruiting new people in each year. It's one of those interesting issues with campus organizations, if you cannot keep the flow going, the administration will almost always win because you eventually leave. You may never see wifi in your time there, but you can at least start laying the groundwork to get it for everyone else.
If you want to fight a long, hard fight, this gives you a good case. It's a clear conflict of interest. I can't guarantee that anything will actually get done, but speaking idealistically you do have an angle you could use to fight the administration.
DeathPrawn on
Signature not found.
0
Moe FwackyRight Here, Right NowDrives a BuickModeratorMod Emeritus
edited May 2008
If what your friend says is true, you should expose the true reasons for the WiFi ban. It may not get WiFi onto your campus, but it will expose the president and that might get the ball rolling.
I believe the student council also tried this a few years ago, and the president refuses to reconsider his decision that Wi-Fi could give everyone cancer. Take a wireless laptop on the Memorial-Jumbo Gardens bus though. There's some sort of ultra Wi-Fi signal that I was getting 3/3 bars on with my DS this morning entirely along Memorial avenue.
Also, I doubt that LU has any sort of built in Wi-Fi just waiting to be switched on, because unless the entire networking infrastructure for it is isolated from the normal internal network, someone would have noticed all the hardwired routers are actually wireless ones for some bizarre reason.
I think people have tried petitions before, and with no avail.
As for the whole 'zomg, his buddy owns a metal company', that'd be a fine conspiracy, except that ethernet cable is not exactly a booming market, since it's not like you can run your own ethernet cabling through the dorm buildings or something, but only if you buy it from his buddy. I mean, shit, you could buy a giant spool of it at Futureshop and crimp your own cables, thus ruining his entire maniacal plot.
Hell, I've got to figure if the student senate found proof of some massive wireless conspiracy, they'd put up at least an equal fight to keeping the pool open. Say by going "Hey, if we hate wi-fi, why'd we spend a shitload on all these routers when we could've spent it on our pool?"
All in all, LU's non-wi-fi policy seems mostly mired in the usual Thunder Bay stupidity and not some Machiavellian scheme to build a giant campus wide wifi network no one gets to use.
As far as advice, definitely hit up the student union for more info, they should at least be able to confirm/deny the wireless network existing or not.
Posts
You can try to raise awareness on campus about the issue, do some research to figure out how reasonable/unreasonable their position is. Try to get it in the campus and/or local papers with hard facts to back up your points. A petition couldn't hurt really, but at the same time there's a pretty good chance it won't get anything done.
Or just hang out at the campus bar that has wifi.
If you're pissed you can't get WiFi in your dorm, that's easily solved: buy a wireless router, and set it to not broadcast the SSID. They'll never know.
If you want to change idiotic policy, I think you are completely in the right to start some sort of petition. I think you want to get as many students as possible interested in your cause - if you can go to your administration and say, "here is concrete evidence that we have a shitload of students who agree that this policy is terrible", I think that's a good thing. Talk to your student government, since that exists largely to allow the students' voices be heard with regards to the administration's policies. It might be tough to cut through all that bullshit, but you have a legitimate complaint.
If you just want us to commiserate with you and the stupidity you encounter on a daily basis, well, yeah. They're stupid.
There's likely nothing you can do about it. People who have made up their mind to be crazy are unlikely to change it regardless of the evidence or rationale that's presented.
People that support policies like this live in a hypothetical world of zero risk. Sadly, many legislators live in similar worlds. Their value systems are generally deeply skewed. Consider the question of table saws. Should we allow the manufacture and sale of table saws? We know that table saws are dangerous implements. We also know that if table saws are widespread, it is likely at least one of them will accidentally cut off a child's hand. Yes, table saws have benefits - they allow us to do carpentry orders of magnitude faster than with hand saws. But, the question remains: are all the nice wooden cabinets in the world worth a single child's hand? Some people say "absolutely not," and therefore do everything in their power to ban table saws.
The same argumentation has been applied to violent video games, aspartame, fluoridated water, homogenized milk, vaccines, you name it. Read the resolution linked in the policy.
I find this sort of thing pathological. First, it forces advocates of any change to all-but prove a negative. Worse yet, the premise is nearly assured for any given technology.
This is important: science is a process. Doing good science is hard. It's easy to screw up a single study in subtle ways that are not at all obvious. This is why repetition and independent validation are so important. For basically any new technology, given enough studies, a few of them are going to indicate a possible adverse effect. Therefore, for any given technology, the premise of the "Precautionary Principle" is going to be satisfied: there will always be the slightest indications that the technology may be bad in some way. The principle implies that once the risks are bounded and well-known, the principle no longer applies and you can make a decision. What the principle unfortunately does not say is what the criteria are for abandoning it. That is, how much evidence is enough to show that something is sufficiently safe? Is it a preponderance of the evidence? Beyond reasonable doubt? Clear and convincing evidence? Your school has a policy for deciding when WiFi is unsafe, but I doubt your school has a policy for deciding when WiFi is safe.
Science and reason are good at creating equivalence classes. Daenris above pointed this out for the WiFi debate - we know, for example, that microwaves and other unobjectionble technologies (not to mention things like the Sun) bathe us in electromagnetic radiation of comparable intensity constantly. Equivalence classes are a good way to set policy - if you ban WiFi because of concerns of the health effects of EM radiation, you should also ban microwaves, cordless phones, cellular phones, and so on. If you're going to ban genetic engineering, you should also consider banning dog breeding. Things like that. However, people with the kind of mindset that will ban WiFi will go to extreme lengths to come up with the smallest possible differences to explain why a cordless phone and a WiFi hotspot are fundamentally different.
My point is that there will always be a tinfoil hat crowd. Some of them will attain positions of power, and some of them will be more-or-less reasonable in many other ways. I used to work with a guy that had a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. He was obviously competent enough to obtain that degree, but he was also mentally ill. He had moments of paranoia, would randomly start ranting semi-incoherently, and so on. It's really amazing to see somebody who is perfectly rational about nearly everything and so fervently irrational about a few other things.
What do you do with people like this? Personally, I just try to stay away from them and minimize the damage they can do. Then, I remind myself to be thankful that there aren't more of them. Fighting them doesn't work. Usually it just cements their delusions further, as they're now an oppressed crusader.
Either that or he's batshit crazy and ignoring all the scientists. Which is utterly insane at a university.
Also, I doubt that LU has any sort of built in Wi-Fi just waiting to be switched on, because unless the entire networking infrastructure for it is isolated from the normal internal network, someone would have noticed all the hardwired routers are actually wireless ones for some bizarre reason.
I think people have tried petitions before, and with no avail.
As for the whole 'zomg, his buddy owns a metal company', that'd be a fine conspiracy, except that ethernet cable is not exactly a booming market, since it's not like you can run your own ethernet cabling through the dorm buildings or something, but only if you buy it from his buddy. I mean, shit, you could buy a giant spool of it at Futureshop and crimp your own cables, thus ruining his entire maniacal plot.
Hell, I've got to figure if the student senate found proof of some massive wireless conspiracy, they'd put up at least an equal fight to keeping the pool open. Say by going "Hey, if we hate wi-fi, why'd we spend a shitload on all these routers when we could've spent it on our pool?"
All in all, LU's non-wi-fi policy seems mostly mired in the usual Thunder Bay stupidity and not some Machiavellian scheme to build a giant campus wide wifi network no one gets to use.
As far as advice, definitely hit up the student union for more info, they should at least be able to confirm/deny the wireless network existing or not.