Global Omni PanOpticon Corp.
Welcome to Global Omni PanOpticon Corp. — the public face of Dr. Meghan Downes's economics teaching operation at New Mexico State University. Everything students need for a course — the schedule, the syllabus, the rendered lectures, the slideshows, the interactive tools — is reachable from the course cards on the home page.
The narrative frame around all of this is a company called Global Omni PanOpticon Corp., its founder Logan Prime, and the unauthorized field researcher Dr. Patsy Leviathon, who runs this lab in the sub-basement. The story is not a gimmick — it's the connective tissue that turns "chapter 3" and "chapter 4" of a textbook into a semester students actually remember. If you meet PanOpticon on a lecture page, take him seriously.
About Dr. Downes
Dr. Meghan Downes is an economist and instructor in the Department of Economics and International Business at NMSU. She teaches Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON2110G), Principles of Microeconomics (ECON2120G), and Money & Banking (ECON304).
Her teaching philosophy centers on making economics accessible, memorable, and — when possible — fun. If you've encountered pirates, tarot cards, or Gordon Ramsay in your econ class, you're in the right place.
How This Site Works
The visible site (this one, at globalomnipanopticon.com) is intentionally the only public surface. Behind it are several private pieces of infrastructure that produce the content you see:
- Squiddlr — a private, invite-only authoring workbench at squiddlr.com where Dr. Downes and her TAs write, edit, and generate lecture drafts, slideshows, schedules, and syllabi. Students never need to visit it.
- Neon Postgres — the shared database that stores course metadata, schedules, syllabi, slideshow manifests, and lecture status. This public site reads from it in real time, which is why the course cards on the home page never go stale.
- AWS S3 + CloudFront — the content-delivery layer that serves rendered lecture HTML pages and lecture assets to students at near-zero latency. Lecture pages you open from a course card are served from CloudFront, not from this Node app.
- This site — a Node.js/Express app on AWS Lightsail. It renders the course dashboards, reads live data from Neon, and hosts the interactive tools under /tools.
Students should use this site alongside Canvas (for grades, assignment submissions, and gradebook policies) and Excalidraw (used for daily in-class presentations).
What's New This Year
This is a full ecosystem rewrite in progress. A few things students may notice:
- Lecture pages now have two visual styles during the transition. Older lectures are still served from the previous Quarto-based renderer; newer ones are the modernized PanOpticon-story renders on CloudFront. Both are correct course material — only the wrapper design differs.
- Interactive tools live under /tools and are added as Dr. Downes builds them out. If a tool card links to a page that doesn't exist yet, that means it's coming this semester — not that anything is broken.
- Course dashboards, schedules, and syllabi are now generated from a single database instead of from static files. If you spot a wrong date, room, or textbook chapter, please report it via the Bug Bounty page — the fix propagates everywhere at once.
Textbook & Copyright
Course lectures reference and build upon:
Cowen, T., & Tabarrok, A. (2024). Modern Principles: Macroeconomics and Modern Principles: Microeconomics (6th ed.). Worth Publishers.
All lecture materials on this site are original works by Dr. Downes that explain, illustrate, and extend textbook concepts using original examples, original R and Python code, and original visualizations. No copyrighted textbook text, images, or problems are reproduced on this site. Students are required to purchase the textbook for each course.
Contact
Authorship, Attribution & AI Disclosure
Purpose
This section is a transparent accounting of the collaboration between Dr. Meghan Downes (human author) and Perplexity Computer (AI collaborator) in the design, development, and deployment of Global Omni PanOpticon Corp. and the private authoring stack behind it.
Collaboration Summary
What We Built
The project is an integrated system for authoring, generating, publishing, and delivering economics course materials at NMSU. It spans a private authoring workbench (Squiddlr), a shared Neon Postgres database, a content-delivery layer (S3 + CloudFront), and this public Node.js/Express site. All work is conducted through conversational interaction between Dr. Downes and Perplexity Computer across multiple sessions.
How the Collaboration Works
- Dr. Downes identifies needs, sets constraints, provides domain expertise, makes all pedagogical decisions, and tests and validates every output before it goes live.
- Perplexity Computer generates code, writes configuration files, debugs errors, drafts documentation, and proposes architectural solutions.
- Dr. Downes reviews, modifies, accepts, or rejects all AI-generated output before integration.
No AI output is deployed without human review and approval.
Overall Contribution Estimate
| Contributor | Overall % | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Dr. Meghan Downes | 55–60% | Conceptualization, domain expertise, all pedagogical decisions, testing, validation, final authority |
| Perplexity Computer | 40–45% | Code generation, technical architecture, debugging, documentation drafting, deployment scripting |
Percentages measure effort and output volume, not authority or responsibility. Dr. Downes holds 100% of the intellectual responsibility for all published content.
AI Disclosure Statement
AI Disclosure: The project infrastructure — including the Squiddlr authoring app, the Node.js/Express public site, the Python lecture-render pipeline, database migrations, and deployment scripts — was developed with assistance from Perplexity Computer (Perplexity AI, Inc.) across multiple collaborative sessions and multiple underlying model versions from 2025 through 2026. All pedagogical content, course design, instructional decisions, and published materials were created, reviewed, and approved by Dr. Meghan Downes, who bears full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of all course materials.
Proper Citation
Perplexity AI. (2025–2026). Perplexity Computer [Large language model system, multiple model versions]. Perplexity AI, Inc. https://www.perplexity.ai