it would be easy enough to gather enough students and complain to dean or department. Most schools I know have anonymous teacher evaluations at the end of each semester, and if professor can't teach he will lose his job.
I think, based on my own academic experience, that your view is far more rosy than the real world. I know several cases of professors who were downright incompetent, yet held their jobs. I remember comisserating with fellow students and really having agreement but no interest in action for fear of reprisal from elsewhere in their department.
if he had chosen to do so, it's highly unlikely I'd get anything but maybe a second chance to take a different course.
I should reinforce this with the fact that my wife took courses a few years later under completely different circumstances, but where the professor was clearly not giving the students a fair shot, and it took half the class going to the Dean every other week to get the guy to change his ways even a little bit. One or two conservative students would not be able to raise a similar stink about a leftward biased professor. My wife was a 4.0, and grasped the material fine, he just had bizarre and unfair testing/project/grading practices.
If professor fails you because of your politics and you actually do know the subject well enough - you could always go to the department chair, or to the dean and prove your case.
Your points throught the rest are on point (bad me for not RTFA), but I don't agree that this one is necessarily going to get you anywhere. You're going to the class to *learn* the subject. Perhaps if the subject is something that actually has a lot of objective background that you have the expertise to look up independantly, you could learn it on your own and then put the professor in their box. Odds are slim though that you could learn more than the Professor has, and they have 1) presumption of being correct (or they wouldn't have tenure) and 2) personal relationships (with the Dean et al) on their side. I'm thinking in a Doctoral program, I might be able to be someone with the chops to put a professor down. But in a typical undergrad situation, that's hardly likely.
You say "but that is rare"--I really don't think so. Even I, with a sheltered, small-private-school degree recall a class that was supposed to be about eastern european history that spent most of its time focussing on justifying the Polish Communists. I was able to write down what the professor wanted to hear well enough to pass the course. Had I been actually interested in attending any classes at the time, I might even have passed with high marks (and note I take full responsibility for not having them). I doubt the prof would have failed me for actively disagreeing with him, but he was a person of influence, power, and respect in the department despite his obvious biases and if he had chosen to do so, it's highly unlikely I'd get anything but maybe a second chance to take a different course.
So now I'm going to argue both sides (see another comment below about "the real world"). Do you think that it's fair that my grade should depend on how much I can parrot the professor's politics, regardless of how ridiculously caricatured it has become in the academic hothouse? I don't.
Yah. Sure. Let me see....I as a college student am expected to go into classes and never confront someone who is in a position of authority trying to convince me (through whatever tactics they may care) that their point of view is correct.
Such an unreal environment wouldn't do much to prepare students for the real world, now would it? Politicians use the same kinds of strong arm arguments all the time, and having to confront them in class and figure out what to do about them seems to me a valuable object lesson in the real world.
Or are all these conservatives afraid that if their brainwashed children have to confront alternate viewpoints, they may no longer stay brainwashed?
This is not about furthering academic debate; it's about imposing political beliefs.
Funny, that's exactly what they claim to be trying to combat. I expect they think they have to fight fire with fire. Given tenure, perhaps that's true. Unless you have evidence that they're really only targettingthe left or the right, I fail to see how they're doing anything particularly egregious. And if the University really believes it's a matter of free speech, then guess what? Nothing will actually happen.
With mine, every single time the disk filled, myth spent all it's time complaining into the/var/log/messages file, which fills up root, which causes the machine to crash badly. For whatever reason, this last time, it also opted to delete the last third of the DB files for MySQL, including the settings table. That was my last straw.
I was using KnoppMyth. For some reason, the function of "don't record if the disk is full" has never been turned on, or else never worked. I sure couldn't find docs about it, and queries to knowledgeable Myth Advocates were mostly responded to with "just update to the latest CVS" which...is not what I'm looking for. After the most recent round of "I don't have enough time to watch everything I record" filled up the partition AND trashed the database, I gave up. TiVo is in my future.
No juice? What are you smoking? Apple juice is practically a staple. Of course apple juice is practically all sugar, which doesn't really nullify your point.
Nut allergies have nothing to do with bacteria. And they do have some to do with too-early introduction of nuts into children's diets, though I hardly think that's the whole explanation or we'd know it. So your theory, as applied to allergies, falls down on two parts--introduction doesn't build allergy immunity, in fact it appears to aggravate it, and bacteria aren't linked.
Now, for OTHER sorts of bacterial immunity, I'm with you. There is such a thing as too clean.
Oh, by the way, most of the antibacterial this & that doesn't get enough time to do its job on the humans it's applied to. Hand soap in particular, most of the antibacterial effect is in the sewage supply. You'd have to leave the soap on your hands for some seconds before it did anything for your hands, and I don't know anyone who does that.
They'll guarantee your income for the forseeable future
If you call $30k a year an income. I worked University Admin for the first 7 years of my career, and I'll never go back.
I got paid 50% of my market value. If not less. I lived in student type apartments just above slum levels to keep from going broke. And I moved on with about $16k in debt.
I had to do the work of 3 people myself, with no money for training, no money for conferences (except one time in 7 years).
I only learned the equipment we had the budget to buy. Suffice to say it was not cutting edge equipment, and left me a bit behind when I did decide to go into the private sector.
24x7x365 on call. Oh yeah, I did get to go out of town a couple weeks each year, but otherwise, since I was The Guy for what I managed, if it broke, I fixed it.
It's just not worth it. MAYBE if you're going to a huge state school or an incredibly wealthy/prestigious school, they'll have budget to make up for these shortcomings. But otherwise, you're condemning yourself to a backwater. I learned hella lot, but it was all school of hard knocks, and after 7 years I was seriously burnt out.
I'd say take the Fortune 10 job, make some significant money for a few years, put a lot of it away, and then you can look for a private sector job that's a bit more laid back. They exist you know, even if they don't in the Fortune 10.
If you are certain that the device you're buying is rock solid, you can maybe get away with that. Me, I buy extended coverage for any laptop of any brand, because outside of the HD and maybe the wireless card, self repair gets very sticky very fast. The AppleCare on my wife's iBook G3 has saved us a bundle, given the reliability problems the G3 iBooks have had. 4th and last repair was replacement with a G4 iBook, and that's been much better.
Why should I have to plan in advance what I'm going to listen to?
You bothered to buy the CD in the first place, right? If that's not "planning in advance" then I'm Linus Torvalds. I forget, the slashdot crowd has the attention span of a gnat. Sitting down to spend 15 minutes ripping the music they might want to listen to tomorrow is just too much work. And damn, if after a month of that kind of minimal investment you wouldn't have all those 500 CDs all ripped and ready for the rest of your feeble pathetic life.
And you plan to listen to all 500 of them the week after that? Give me a break. What do you do at home when you want to listen to a CD? You go over to the case, put the CD in the player. What do I do when I want to listen to a CD? I go over to the case, put the CD in the ripper. Not one iota of difference.
There is no way you need your entire collection instantaneously. So all these "I have better things to do with my time" people just don't seem to be using their brains about how they're likely to use that MP3 player.
I've got >1500 CDs, purchased since the mid-late 80's, and I have no need of a ripping service. Quite honestly, it seems to me ripping things as I want to listen to them is going to be quite fine, since there's no way I can listen to all or even most of the 19,000 tracks any time soon. (Yes, I keep a database, why do you ask?)
Slashdot Mirror
I have news for you. Education is ugly already.
Funny, when people try to do that to the president, they're "providing solace to the terrorists".
I think, based on my own academic experience, that your view is far more rosy than the real world. I know several cases of professors who were downright incompetent, yet held their jobs. I remember comisserating with fellow students and really having agreement but no interest in action for fear of reprisal from elsewhere in their department.
I should reinforce this with the fact that my wife took courses a few years later under completely different circumstances, but where the professor was clearly not giving the students a fair shot, and it took half the class going to the Dean every other week to get the guy to change his ways even a little bit. One or two conservative students would not be able to raise a similar stink about a leftward biased professor. My wife was a 4.0, and grasped the material fine, he just had bizarre and unfair testing/project/grading practices.
Your points throught the rest are on point (bad me for not RTFA), but I don't agree that this one is necessarily going to get you anywhere. You're going to the class to *learn* the subject. Perhaps if the subject is something that actually has a lot of objective background that you have the expertise to look up independantly, you could learn it on your own and then put the professor in their box. Odds are slim though that you could learn more than the Professor has, and they have 1) presumption of being correct (or they wouldn't have tenure) and 2) personal relationships (with the Dean et al) on their side. I'm thinking in a Doctoral program, I might be able to be someone with the chops to put a professor down. But in a typical undergrad situation, that's hardly likely.
You say "but that is rare"--I really don't think so. Even I, with a sheltered, small-private-school degree recall a class that was supposed to be about eastern european history that spent most of its time focussing on justifying the Polish Communists. I was able to write down what the professor wanted to hear well enough to pass the course. Had I been actually interested in attending any classes at the time, I might even have passed with high marks (and note I take full responsibility for not having them). I doubt the prof would have failed me for actively disagreeing with him, but he was a person of influence, power, and respect in the department despite his obvious biases and if he had chosen to do so, it's highly unlikely I'd get anything but maybe a second chance to take a different course.
So now I'm going to argue both sides (see another comment below about "the real world"). Do you think that it's fair that my grade should depend on how much I can parrot the professor's politics, regardless of how ridiculously caricatured it has become in the academic hothouse? I don't.
Yah. Sure. Let me see....I as a college student am expected to go into classes and never confront someone who is in a position of authority trying to convince me (through whatever tactics they may care) that their point of view is correct.
Such an unreal environment wouldn't do much to prepare students for the real world, now would it? Politicians use the same kinds of strong arm arguments all the time, and having to confront them in class and figure out what to do about them seems to me a valuable object lesson in the real world.
Or are all these conservatives afraid that if their brainwashed children have to confront alternate viewpoints, they may no longer stay brainwashed?
Funny, that's exactly what they claim to be trying to combat. I expect they think they have to fight fire with fire. Given tenure, perhaps that's true. Unless you have evidence that they're really only targettingthe left or the right, I fail to see how they're doing anything particularly egregious. And if the University really believes it's a matter of free speech, then guess what? Nothing will actually happen.
Oh well, if THAT's all....
I think he'll just keep feeding the Walt Disney Monster small cuban boys.
With mine, every single time the disk filled, myth spent all it's time complaining into the /var/log/messages file, which fills up root, which causes the machine to crash badly. For whatever reason, this last time, it also opted to delete the last third of the DB files for MySQL, including the settings table. That was my last straw.
I was using KnoppMyth. For some reason, the function of "don't record if the disk is full" has never been turned on, or else never worked. I sure couldn't find docs about it, and queries to knowledgeable Myth Advocates were mostly responded to with "just update to the latest CVS" which...is not what I'm looking for. After the most recent round of "I don't have enough time to watch everything I record" filled up the partition AND trashed the database, I gave up. TiVo is in my future.
No juice? What are you smoking? Apple juice is practically a staple. Of course apple juice is practically all sugar, which doesn't really nullify your point.
Now, for OTHER sorts of bacterial immunity, I'm with you. There is such a thing as too clean.
Oh, by the way, most of the antibacterial this & that doesn't get enough time to do its job on the humans it's applied to. Hand soap in particular, most of the antibacterial effect is in the sewage supply. You'd have to leave the soap on your hands for some seconds before it did anything for your hands, and I don't know anyone who does that.
No, but it was a very small University.
B-Man has added a clarification message in this list that his choice is roughly equal salary and benefits package between the two.
Fair enough. Given equal benefits and salary, the University job will always hae more slack.
If you call $30k a year an income. I worked University Admin for the first 7 years of my career, and I'll never go back.
It's just not worth it. MAYBE if you're going to a huge state school or an incredibly wealthy/prestigious school, they'll have budget to make up for these shortcomings. But otherwise, you're condemning yourself to a backwater. I learned hella lot, but it was all school of hard knocks, and after 7 years I was seriously burnt out.
I'd say take the Fortune 10 job, make some significant money for a few years, put a lot of it away, and then you can look for a private sector job that's a bit more laid back. They exist you know, even if they don't in the Fortune 10.
Print is doomed in general. Check the financials of the big newspaper corps....
Something tells me if they made such a fundamental design change, the result would no longer be "technics parts".
Not sure how they'd make studded bricks compatable with studless Technics parts....
If you are certain that the device you're buying is rock solid, you can maybe get away with that. Me, I buy extended coverage for any laptop of any brand, because outside of the HD and maybe the wireless card, self repair gets very sticky very fast. The AppleCare on my wife's iBook G3 has saved us a bundle, given the reliability problems the G3 iBooks have had. 4th and last repair was replacement with a G4 iBook, and that's been much better.
Fair enough. Why this qualifies as news for nerds still mystifies.
You bothered to buy the CD in the first place, right? If that's not "planning in advance" then I'm Linus Torvalds. I forget, the slashdot crowd has the attention span of a gnat. Sitting down to spend 15 minutes ripping the music they might want to listen to tomorrow is just too much work. And damn, if after a month of that kind of minimal investment you wouldn't have all those 500 CDs all ripped and ready for the rest of your feeble pathetic life.
There is no way you need your entire collection instantaneously. So all these "I have better things to do with my time" people just don't seem to be using their brains about how they're likely to use that MP3 player.
Because after all, some ripping service is going to categorize/tag their music the same way I do. Not.
I've got >1500 CDs, purchased since the mid-late 80's, and I have no need of a ripping service. Quite honestly, it seems to me ripping things as I want to listen to them is going to be quite fine, since there's no way I can listen to all or even most of the 19,000 tracks any time soon. (Yes, I keep a database, why do you ask?)