One of the differences between university lectures in Belgium and in the United States of America is that, in the US, most of the students are carefully “listening” to the lecture while having their laptop on and connected to the internet. I didn’t departed from this custom 🙂

Yesterday, I was trying to download a Linux DVD (that’s what university networks are for, isn’t it?) and observed an interesting pattern in the network speed during the lecture. If I assume that the total bandwidth available remains constant, the one available to me was drastically reduced as the lecture was going on.

Now, if you think that the y-axis isn’t about the remaining network bandwidth but about the level of attention in students, you might not be far from the truth 😉 Attention drops rather quickly during the theoretical lecture and people were very busy during the practicals. Note that the remaining bandwidth was also very small during Mundial matches …