StudentofFortune.com - Blog

Student of Fortune opened it’s doors on April 3rd, 2006. Here’s a happy (belated) birthday to everyone!

StudentofFortune.com made front-page news in today’s issue of USC’s Daily Trojan newspaper.

A brief snippet:

Website offers homework help - at a price

Users place bids to answer questions at Student of Fortune. Some say services border on cheating.

Auction websites have been known to offer everything from designer bags to alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast, but one new site’s product is of high demand to college students: homework help. . . .

The website, which functions like a cross between eBay and Yahoo! Answers, allows students to submit questions and place a “bounty” ranging from 25 cents to a few dollars for a correct answer.

Unlike some tutoring websites, the profits go directly to the person who submitted the answer, not hired tutors. . . .

USC Student Judicial Affairs officials believe Student of Fortune’s intentions are not a blatant threat to academic integrity.

“If (students’) purpose was having someone else do their work, that would be viewed as a violation,” said Raquel Torres-Retana, director of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards. “But if people are using it as a tutor, then it’s a tutor. It’s the same online as it would be getting help at your neighbors apartment.”

We’ve highlighted some of the things you might find interesting, but there’s much more. You can see the whole article on the Daily Trojan website.

StudentofFortune.com was mentioned in a Washington Post article.

It’s an interesting article - The author, Jason Johnson, argues that many of the “anti-plagerism” reminders don’t particularly hold water in the corporate world. He wrote “It was an open secret that my entire report, written “by Jason Johnson,” had been composed by others and that I had been merely an editor. Instead of a reprimand, I was rewarded with a post-briefing latte.”

I’m not entirely sure I agree with this perspective. One of the best hallmarks of a strong manager is the ability to give credit when credit is due. Just because you no longer have a professor comparing your work against TurnItIn and iThenticate does not mean that one can take work without attribution.

For this, I hope that our users will continue to use SoF as a resource and learning tool.

Here’s what the Washington Post has to say about SoF:

Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.

Enterprising young scholars can also upload their completed homework assignments, and the site will broker a sale to someone who is stumped while using the same textbook. For a fee of $1, for instance, user “brittanymarie” from “calloway country high school” can get the answer to this burning query: “During the process of transcription, DNA serves as the template for making what?” The people behind StudentofFortune, not so far removed from their school days themselves, say this isn’t cheating — it’s just a chance for students to “ask their colleagues for help on difficult problems.”

I love PayPal’s humanitarian mission / customer service model. It’s simple: take mid-tier bureaucrats from the former Soviet Union’s government, teach them a bunch of English, then stick them in a call center.

Just kidding.

I will say, though, that getting anything done with PayPal is an exercise in “gaming the system” and patience. Here’s an example of that.

Student of Fortune, Inc. is a California Corporation, for what that’s worth. The corporation is a separate legal entity with it’s own TIN - Tax Identification Number. That’s like a Social Security Number, but for businesses.

As a result, all of PayPal’s dealings aren’t technically with myself and the other people who work for Student of Fortune. Their legal relationship is with Student of Fortune, and we’re just the intermediaries. Well, this makes things unexpectedly interesting.

For instance, I am not the “account holder” for PayPal. Our CEO is. That said, I handle all of the financial matters. That includes working with PayPal to make beautiful things happen. Well, it turns out that when I call PayPal to ask questions, they want to talk to the CEO. Usually when I remind them that they’re working with a corporation and that I’m one of the officers, things seem to work our way. The last time I called in, though, I was flatly told that I could not talk to anyone in customer service. The CEO would have to call. I explained my situation and asked for an easier way. “Oh, your CEO can log into the account and give you authorization to talk to us.”

“Ok, can you hang on a second while I do that?” …. “Ok, I’m now an authorized user. Now can you talk to me?”

Here’s another one. PayPal’s micropayment system requires you to have two accounts - one for “regular” payments, and one for “micro” payments. This all seems pretty reasonable, until you come to learn one very important fact: PayPal, deep down in the cockles of it’s beautiful heart, does not want it’s users to have more than one account. A bank account may be used only once. A TIN may be used only once. Everything can only be used once. This makes it awfully hard to confirm a bank account if I can only use our bank account once.

But, dear reader, I digress. In short - we now offer PayPal micropayments. You won’t find any visible changes on the site, but it makes everything better. Just like frosting.

We’ve released some major updates this past weekend that you might enjoy:

• A new registration process that no longer requires an email address confirmation
• A new homework upload tool that automatically categorizes your homework based on optional entry of a textbook’s ISBN number
• A new upload homework introduction
• You can now begin the process of asking a question without creating an account
• Other general usability improvements and bug-fixes across the site

Wow, there’s a lot going on in Student of Fortune land these days…

First, we were featured in a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “HOMEWORK HELPER: A new Web site offers answers, for a fee, to problems in mathematics and science.” The requires a subscription to view, but was positive on the whole… other than quoting a concerned professor quipping “…our students are now, more than ever, cheating in ways that leaves our older generations in the dust.” Oh professor…

Second, we’ve released a new “Upload Your Homework” feature. What’s that? Simple. After completing a homework assignment, head over to StudentofFortune.com and click “Upload Your Homework.” Enter a little information about your assignment, set a bounty, then type in each question and your answer. We’ll post your questions and answers to our site and sell them to anyone who needs them. You’ll earn a bounty every time someone buys your answers. So basically every time do your homework and put it on Student of Fortune you’re helping your fellow students AND making money off it. Nice.

Lastly, may I send my sincere congratulations to Shaina and her owner, winners of our $150 “Show Us Your Pussy(cat)!” photo contest. Don’t worry Shaina, I’ve got a banner ad with your name all over it.

WOW! Thanks to everyone who submitted their entries to our “Show Us Your Pussy(cat)!” photo contest!

The contest entry period has come to a close. From the dozens of adorable entries, our judges have selected their 50 favorites. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. You try picking favorites!

The voting officially starts tomorrow. We’ll send out an email to the 50 finalists to let them know that their pets are well on their way to internet stardom… and the owners are on their way to $150!

We spent some time at the colo center moving from one rack to another… we ran out of room! Now we’re in a happy new home with half a rack of space (most of which is taken) and room for all of our bitching accessories. 5 little workhorses keep SOF in action. There’s a database server, QA server, and three web servers. Say “Meow!” to plague, nikki, clammy, pippin, and redryder when you get a chance. Other ancillary machines provide backup and large-file hosting (like our Flash movie files… we were running at about 15mbps for a good while).

Who’s that girl with the cat ears? Say hello to Nora, a professional actor and friend of SoF. She did 5 videos for us - General introduction, Get Paid, Get Answers, Contest, and Confirm Your Account. The videos are encoded in Flash MX 2004 with the Sorensen codec at 150kbps, using a 32kbps MP3 audio stream. We’re looking at doing some fancy-schmancy stuff with an alpha channel and Flash… Stay tuned.

Well, I never did get around to updating the CSS. After making changes on Nikki, our QA and development server, I liked the simplicity but didn’t like how boring things looked. We gained some white space but paradoxically lost legibility. C’est la vie. I’ll try other ideas once we get more time.