Who is bulk.email@stfx.ca?

Stop the spam

Anyone attached to StFX in any way has probably, at one point or another, complained to someone about how awful their StFX email is. Besides the important notices and emails from friends, peers, colleagues, students, professors, and administrators, we all get flooded with completely unnecessary emails about all sorts of things. It is email without a specific audience, completely unsolicited, and sent throughout the entire school. It’s spam and it’s coming from the University itself.

Why is StFX spamming our inboxes multiple times a day about events and items that rarely, if ever, concern us? 

The amount of spam from StFX led me to turn off notifications for my inbox. My peers in the education program and some of my professors have all voiced similar complaints about the amount of emails filling our inboxes. I’m very happy for the people who have worked hard and are now entering the thesis-defense phase of their education, congratulations to them, but an email sent in bulk devalues their efforts by, essentially, spamming the university at large. Sending notice of the defense to select groups associated with the work or the program would be a much more appropriate way of raising awareness.

But is what StFX sends its users actually spam? Unlike other emails that occasionally fill my personal inbox, StFX’s emails contain no “unsubscribe button,” nowhere in the message is the opportunity for the recipient to turn off the emails. There is no way, as I discovered, to email the sender and ask them directly to stop. If you try to reply to “St. Francis Xavier University,” you realize two things very quickly. First, you’re not actually emailing StFX, you’re emailing bulk.email@stfx.ca. Second, you’ll receive an instant reply telling you that bulk.email@stfx.ca is an unattended inbox; meaning no one uses it. A lot like a spam email.

What’s one to do? I emailed StFX IT services and asked them about it. They replied that they had no idea who actually runs bulk.email@stfx.ca and that the only way to stop the emails from ending up in my inbox was to create a “Rule” that automatically redirected the emails to my junk folder, which I promptly did. Now, instead of filling up my inbox all with emails from StFX (or more accurately, bulk.email@stfx.ca) they all go right into my trash. It’s simple and relatively easy.

I also emailed communications about this. I received a reply from Cindy Mackenzie, Manager of Media Relations. Cindy told me she, too, has no idea who runs bulk.email@stfx.ca and that I should contact IT. A dead end.

So, who runs bulk.email@stfx.ca? It remains a bit of a mystery. If you or someone you know has the answer, please let us know. Send us a tip, we’ll even keep you anonymous. Thanks in advance.

For everyone else who shares my frustration at being spammed by our very own University and wants the emails to stop, it’s relatively easy. Right click the offending email in your inbox and, from the dropdown menu, select “Create Rule,” and send that sucker to your Deleted Items folder where you’ll no longer get notifications or even see the offender.

Anyone connected to the notorious spammer, bulk.email@stfx.ca, please, reconsider how bulk emails are handled. Surely, there’s a better way than sending out untargeted, mass emails daily. Make a few lists, use Excel (I’ll even help you out!) and separate emails by the programs they’re attached to. An email about the science department? Maybe don’t send it to the English students. A lecture about Medieval Theology? Just direct it to the theology students. Or better yet, maybe have a calendar on the website about up-and-coming events that people can choose to view instead of flooding their inboxes. Just a thought.

Technology in Classrooms

The kids are alright

When Silicon Valley entrepreneurs innovated, moved fast and broke things, did that include the classroom? What began as a niche introduction to schools in the form of massive, vacuum tubed contraptions, turned into a supercomputer in every pocket and connected to other computers via nearly instantaneous networks. 

While there are some teachers who praise the availability of information to their students in the classrooms, many teachers and professors have voiced their derision about the constant phone distraction and use in class.

For most people over the age of 20-something, technology in the classroom more likely meant that there was another classroom where the computers were kept; the computer lab. 

Row after row of beige boxes would line the lengths of the room and once in a while, your teacher would let your class escape to the computer room to “do work” or “research,” if you had the internet. It was a distraction, but being so new to the internet in the 90s and early 2000s, there was little else to do but work with a word processor or check out a website overloaded with rotating flash animations. Our access to information was regulated, although not by design.

With the conquest of the office desk largely complete, computer evangelists turned their sights to the next largest market; education. Computer evangelists wove a passionate tale of improved grades, engagement, and excitement in learning to teachers and school administrators alike. With digital encyclopedias students could access information as fast they wanted. Eager to be proactive, administrators and teachers ate up the evangelists’ promises and quickly filled the spare classroom with beige boxes. What began as a trickle has turned into a deluge.

The reality of our situation is that not only do we have encyclopedias worth of information, we have endless reams of information that has proven to be a major issue, not only for students, but for adults and teachers alike. The problem of information overload is real enough to have warranted major headlines in the last few years. 

Teachers who instruct their students to do research now have to contend with a huge number of websites that not only offer poor quality information but also outright lies and falsehoods on a scale greater than previously. It’s not that there are differing perspectives offered, it’s that facts are not often even agreed upon.

While technology is now ubiquitous to the classroom, that technology is not always the prepared technology belonging to the school, or it hasn’t been modified properly for use in the classroom. Too often students who use their own cellphones in class are subjected to the notifications of social media, games and apps that distract them from school work. 

Regardless of how well they focus, even trying to ignore the buzz or audio alert from a phone is not enough to avoid having your attention undermined and your train of thought derailed, as demonstrated on an episode of CBC’s Marketplace, with both teens and adults. 

It’s stunning to see how much interruption a single buzz or ring of a phone can cause someone trying to focus and do some work. There’s a strong argument to be made that students entrust their phone to their teacher until such time as they need their phone.

The iPads that are often used in classrooms lack fundamental software that makes them truly useful in a classroom setting. True, students can use Kahoot, web browsers, and productivity apps to complete classroom assignments. What’s missing is the control over an iPad that a teacher should be afforded, that they could push pertinent information to all of them at once or direct them to a passage in a text, or highlight something on screen, without taking away the interactivity or exploration benefits of iPads.

It should also be said that students at the university level are no more resistant to the effects of constant information access that elementary or high school students. How many of us have sat in a lecture, trying to take notes, but felt the familiar buzz of our phone only to pick it up and ignore the class? Or noticed the students with laptops open and, instead of a word processor, students have Youtube, or Facebook, or a game playing on screen instead of notes? 

The truth is that we’re all susceptible to distraction. Whether you’re 80 and new to computers or 18 and grew up with the iPhone, we all crave information and attention. The teens of today are not necessarily in danger of becoming addicted to their phones, indeed each generation has their toy that they replace with more pressing activities as they grew older. 

Teens today will do the same when the times comes. Truthfully, the kids are alright.

Has AI gone too far?

The dangers of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence

We’ve all seen the many movies and TV shows that show a dystopian future in which robots or supercomputers take over and enslave all of humanity. While this reality is many years in the future if ever at all, it doesn’t mean that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t an issue that needs to be tackled today.

But first, it’s important to define what AI is. AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. It can be narrow or weak AI, which is an AI system designed for a particular task. Yet it can also be strong AI, where an AI system can find a solution when presented with an unfamiliar task because it has enough human cognitive abilities to utilize the reasoning required.

Most of us already use AI and don’t even know it. Every time you’ve used Siri, Cortana, or any other voice recognition program, you’re using AI. These programs take into account your preferences so that later, your experience with them will be more personalized. The same type of AI system lies behind targeted advertising and getting directions on Google maps, among other things.

With AI starting to creep into all areas of our life, it does become a question of how much is too much. Any interaction with an AI, no matter how small, can be gathered to create huge amounts of data on users. The problem becomes then about who gets access to the data. The government can access a user's online history and data for security purposes, as well as some businesses and those with enough technical knowledge. This is a big problem for user privacy and security.

One of the other immediate fears with AI besides access to personal data concerns robots. While the technology and computer systems needed to create a powerful robot overlord aren’t quite there, they are certainly a possibility for the future. The more pressing concern however currently with robots is the rate at which robots will replace workers in factories, transportation, and other industrial sectors.

There are also concerns with the increasing use of robots and AI for military purposes. Already, drone strikes are being used in situations where it is a safer option than sending in conventional military troops. While it’s good that AI and robotics can decrease safety risks associated with military tasks, the consequences would be horrific if this technology falls into the wrong hands or becomes uncontrollable.

Beyond physical manifestations of AI, there’s also problems on the design side of AI. This is especially with the increasing popularity of machine learning, which allows AI systems to learn and improve without programming. The boundaries of this simulated sentience are being increasingly pushed. Without proper human supervision, this could create an AI with values or goals that don’t align with our own. Different goals or values could mean that down the road, there could be problems that involve life and death with technologies using AI like self-driving cars.

Also worth noting is the discussion about ethics surrounding AI. Since the data input into systems that helps them “learn” is from human sources, it reflects human experience. This means that any bias or stereotypes present in our systems and data can be replicated in AI. Those creating AI systems should be taking that into account, especially for AI being created for areas like law or medicine.

So, with all the risk and problems related to AI, should we stop using it? At this point, AI has already become entrenched in our daily lives, and probably won’t be going away anytime soon. However, the most prudent thing to do with it is to be aware of the problems that arise from using it, and what can be done to mitigate them.

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