Finals are approaching. The pressure is on for students like us.

We’re overwhelmed with work and responsibilities and we’re beginning to think that an A is no longer possible (though our story here suggests A’s are getting easier to come by…).

Still we’re in desperate need of some help to Ace that final ...

Where do we turn?

Well, for more than 1/3 of college students, the answer is prescription stimulants.

What are prescription stimulants? Adderral, Ritalin, any drug prescribed by doctors to treat ADHD or narcolepsy.

These drugs increase alertness and concentration and decrease fatigue. Its no wonder that they are abused for power-study sessions and all-nighters. 

However, many students fail to realize that:

1. They are DEA Schedule II substances, meaning they are highly addictive and dangerous. Chemically, they differ very little from methamphetamine and cocaine.
2. 74% of users obtain the drug from a friend with a prescription.
3.  Penalties for illegal sale include: imprisonment for up to 20 years and fines up to $25,000. 
4.  Abuse of these drugs causes increased anxiety, lack of sleep, and susceptibility to depression. 

These “study drugs” can be compared to steroids used by athletes. They may produce great results in the short-term but are by no means sustainable. 

In a society that is fixated on maximum achievement and productivity, how are students expected to keep up?  

Medical Director Brian Quigley puts it best:

“By avoiding these drugs you’re going to be the winner in the long run. If all you care about in life is getting a certain grade on a test and doing it at any cost, you might temporarily win, but over the long haul it’s not going to benefit you.”

‘Tis the season of final exams…

And the season of those ever-anticipated final grades.

With students’ rising anxieties over their GPAs, a welcome gift has appeared in this year’s Christmas stockings: grade inflation.

Now we here at USDemocrazy are students, and we too enjoy getting the gift of good grades.

But should we be happy if our top grades are being awarded for substandard work?

Recently, a Harvard professor spoke out against his institution’s tendency to hand out As. Harvard College, one of two schools within Harvard University, hands out more As than any other grade. At Yale, 62% of their grades in the spring of 2012 were A’s.

Some may argue that Harvard and Yale, being Ivy League schools, are blessed with an abundance of over achieving students? But there is a disturbing trend here…

From 1991 to 2007, American colleges and universities, public and private alike, saw average GPAs jump from 2.93 to 3.11.

Some Ivy Leagues have adopted new grading systems to respond to the rising inflation. Princeton, for example, instructs professors not to award more than 35% of their students with As.

As you study for finals and anxiously await the fate of your final grades, you can guarantee this Harvard grade calculator will be a nice self-esteem boost.

Students argue that they need high grades to remain competitive for graduate schools. But is this worth it when students have to put in less work for a high grade? What do you think?

The new geolocation function in HTML5 adds the functionality to the browser necessary to detect the user’s location, generate co-ordinates, and return them as values back to the user.

Not only will it work across desktops, but across mobile and tablet devices too — which opens up huge possibilities for web developers looking to create location-based online apps!

In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to fetch the latitude and longitude co-ordinates using nothing more than a few lines of HTML and JavaScript. You’ll then learn how to take those co-ordinates and feed them into the Google Maps API to reverse-geocode those values and produce a live in-browser map of your current location, complete with a place marker.

Once you’ve finished the tutorial, I recommend checking out the full Google Maps API documentation to learn about some of the more extensive and exciting features it’s capable of.

Have you used a location service for a project? How reliable do you think geolocation is? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, location image via Shutterstock.

Appareo Font Family – Vintage, Weathered Typeface – only $12!

Today W3C launched a new Data Activity to lead the Web to a new level of data interoperability. The Activity includes two new groups:

• CSV on the Web Working Group, whose mission is to provide technologies whereby data dependent applications on the Web can provide higher interoperability when working with datasets using the CSV (Comma-Separated Values) or similar formats.
• Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group, whose mission is (1) to develop the open data ecosystem, facilitating better communication between developers and publishers; (2) to provide guidance to publishers that will improve consistency in the way data is managed, thus promoting the re-use of data; (3) to foster trust in the data among developers, whatever technology they choose to use, increasing the potential for genuine innovation.

The Data Activity subsumes and expands upon the work done in the Semantic Web and eGovernment Activities. W3C will continue to complete and enhance the Semantic Web in the light of growing real-world experience and demands.

Learn more about the Data Activity.

UMBC has been named one of The Baltimore Sun 100 Top Workplaces in the Baltimore region. UMBC ranked no. 11 among large employers in the Top Workplaces list, published on Dec. 8 in a special section in the Sunday Sun and online.

The Baltimore area winners included on the list were selected from employee surveys measuring qualities such as company leadership, career opportunities, workplace flexibility, compensation and benefits.

UMBC was recognized by its employees as an organization with strong leadership, vision and direction and one that operates by strong values and ethics. Some comments shared by faculty and staff include:

“I am provided a great deal of flexibility and respected for my efforts.”

“I get the opportunity to grow professionally and I work with great people. ”

“I use my experience and skills to the fullest and feel a sense of accomplishment in my work.”

“Strong sense of community; high motivation to help students/faculty succeed.”

“The people, the projects, and the possibilities.”

During the summer, UMBC was nominated to participate in The Baltimore Sun Top Workplaces program, which identifies and compares top places to work in the Baltimore Metropolitan area, based solely on the opinions of employees. In late August and early September, UMBC faculty and staff responded to a confidential independent survey conducted by research company WorkplaceDynamics, LLC.

For more information about the Top Workplaces lists and WorkplaceDynamics, please visit topworkplaces.com.

Bitcoin is underpinned by unbreakable codes but the secret keys that protect personal fortunes are easily lost or stolen and impossible to regenerate once gone.

A man showed up at a trash heap in Wales last month with an unusual request: he needed help finding a hard drive he had thrown out weeks earlier that held the cryptographic key to 7,500 bitcoins, currently worth over $6 million.

Bitcoin is underpinned by unbreakable codes, but the secret keys that protect personal fortunes are easily lost or stolen.

A man showed up at a trash heap in Wales last month with an unusual request: he needed help finding a hard drive he had thrown out weeks earlier that held the cryptographic key to 7,500 bitcoins, currently worth over $6 million.

W3C is pleased to announce new leadership for the following activities:

• Wendy Seltzer will be the Technology and Society Domain Lead, focused on Privacy, Security, and potential work around Social Web and Digital Marketing. Wendy will also continue her legal and policy work.
• Ralph Swick will be the Information and Knowledge Domain Lead, focused on data, semantic web technologies, digital publishing, and XML. Ralph will also continue as W3C’s Chief Operating Officer.

Read about W3C’s Activities, and Management Team.