In some states, like Georgia and Tennessee, there are need-based scholarships funded by lotteries. So the state cuts direct support but institutes a program (lottery) that then indirectly funds institutions with tuition paid by state scholarships. It's the college-level equivalent of school vouchers. In Tennessee, this has broadened access to college. And I suspect, but can't say for sure, that often tuition increases have an eye toward getting more out of the state through these scholarships. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. At the University of Tennessee, the students break down into two large clumps, financially. You have the children of the really rich who want a five-year football party, and then you've got another large lump that are on the need-based scholarships. There's some middle ground, but it seems that's the majority of students in those two groups. So I think that often it's a combo of soak-the-rich and get-back-what-the-state-took. But I'm cynical.
I was recently in a position to look closely at the numbers of people in the different job types at a major university in the Southeast. From what I saw, the parent's statement about overhead is half-right. The money was going to vice presidents, heads, and such. There was no uptick in the sorts of jobs that get labelled "PC." There is an ongoing reduction in general staff: grounds keepers, secretaries, sometimes IT support staff. And faculty has been transforming from tenurable professors to nontenurable instructors. (At this institution, starting pay for an English professor was $44,000. Starting pay for the instructor of English was $32,000. The professor teaches, at most, 2 classes a semester, while the instructor teaches 4.) Most of the additional need for money is coming from: reduced federal and state inputs, repair of buildings, putting in IT stuff, and high-salary jobs. And the impact of each item falls off pretty rapidly, the impact of high-salary jobs, for example, is a lot less than building repair. I guess you can add too that enrollments are rising and rising and rising.
That's a pretty bogus justification for plagiarism. First, it's widely-acknowledged among scholars that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. (Bernard of Chartre said it first, and it's been repeated again and again because it's wise.) Second, students are not expected to be original. Because a) students don't know enough yet to be original, unless through dumb luck; that's why there "students." And because b) the point isn't original work, it's exercise. When a person completes a 5k training run, no one says "What an accomplishment!" ("No one" excludes your mom, your primary school teachers, and anyone else wanting to blow smoke up your skirt.) Finally, anyone who really thinks that schoolwork is just rote learning and repetition lacks the intellectual spark that will lead to creativity, either that or the spark has been doused by sloth and the callow cynicism of the young. At any rate, such a person is perhaps best suited for trade school and not university. Yet so many of the bored and disinterested show up to class, with their baseball caps on, leaning back, demanding to entertained while they sit fondling their cybernetic genitals (cellphones).
90% of the work done in school is training. Like running laps and lifting weights to be a better ball player. Plagiarism short-circuits that process. It's gaming a system that intends to make you work (ie suffer) for your own good. That's the part I think that gets left out: it's work. Yep. Work. Not fun, not playtime, just work. Keep in mind I'm not talking about busy work doled out by the lazy teachers. But writing for composition class, solving problem sets for math, lab work in chemistry, proofs in logic class. That's all good for you. If you find a way to enjoy it good for you, or maybe you have a great teacher. But work is work.
He points out nonsensical logic used to justify the existence of god. Even cursory reading of Christian theologians indicates that calling out people on nonsense is an established scholarly tradition--even among the orthodox. And often, of course, the contest is for who will be orthodox. For example, the contest between Augustine and Pelagius (Augustine won), or Luther and All Comers (title contested). And saying that deductive reasoning isn't science is a fair statement. I suspect the reason this teacher is out of line is that you can infer that he is an atheist. But that is his business. And, frankly, adults should give young people enough information to infer such things. That's how most children of backward parents learn that atheists, socialists, Jews, and homosexuals don't actually eat babies in the name of their Dark Lord Satan.
I agree. And I'm a teacher. Teaching teachers is a trying experience. That said, I know that one reason I do stupid things like what you describe is the sheer degree of overload that I'm always suffering. That makes it easy to be panicky and stupid. I'll add, too, that most universities have terrible websites and help areas that actually seem designed to make teachers freak out. At every university I've been at but one, the help and instructions available online trail the actual installed/implemented software by a few versions. Or, there are clear instructions on the page, if you can pick them out of the bad page-layout covered in marketing department mandated gimcracks and whizdiddles. At my current institution, it's a good ten seconds before crap stops flying across the home page, and moving the cursor across any page is liable to give one an epileptic seizure. Then there are the "training" session we must endure, which generally involve some sales flak using a very bad Powerpoint to pitch us some piece of crap product that would cost our students a small fortune (Turning Point technologies, I'm looking at you with your trumped-up "research" claims.).
Job security can go a long way toward eliminating this very justifiable fear. I'm a lead lecturer in an English program. (UK folks note: in American universities lecturer means someone hired off-contract with no research opportunities. A UK lecturer is more like a teaching prof. here.) Grade inflation is a big problem because the U. demands that we are rehired on a number in part based on student evaluations. Many people are afraid--and rightly so--that too many bad student evaluations will cost them their jobs.
I strongly suggest examining methods and reading some meta-studies, as well as considering the differences between the very young students addressed in Kohn's essay and college students. At a young age, research suggests that positive reinforcement is more effective in producing learning. In early adolescence negative reinforcement becomes more effective.
And, in my experience, an MA teaching program is just about utterly useless in producing anything but people who rant about grades and want to "stick it to the man." I spent a couple of semesters teaching classes in the College of Teaching building at my university. It was an eye-opener. Students were completing graduate classes with a poster as the final project. Just a poster. On something like Piaget's theories of development. With glitter and stuff. In my opinion, and I guess you should get off my lawn, that's not graduate-level work. More like elementary school. Certainly standardized tests prove competency at standardized tests. And that silly little obstacle course at the end of a motorcycle safety course proves your ability to navigate a silly little obstacle course. And both sets of skills are relevant to wider areas of practice. (PS. I bet you're getting hearing these words a lot: "holistic" and "student-centered." And if she's trotting out "outcomes-based" you might ask her to do a little research on who exactly is pushing for that.)
"echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy" -- that's not a feminist sentiment. In fact you can't get much more anti-feminist than saying this. In fact this point--along with a few others--is the basis for almost all the feminist critique of Freud and his work. If the content of your second paragraph is what you got out of college, all your teachers were idiots. OR, given the evidence of your catch-22 defensive 3rd paragraph, there is also the possibility that you aren't very bright, at least in some fields of thought.
What about increases in the speed limit and fatalities? Those are also connected. And, oddly enough, lowering speed limits lowers fuel consumption. But high speeds are a sacred cow grazing in the same pasture as hand guns and tax cuts. If I could, I would gladly buy a Seat or Skoda, one of the newer offspring of the old Golf that got such good mileage and were, when built in Europe, very reliable cars. And I'd happily drive the thing at 60 on a 55mph interstate. I'd also like to see an end to all the breaks that SUVs get by being classed as something other than they are, which is a macho minivan.
If you're posting those things, and you think that your coworkers don't know about them, I suggest you think again. My policy is to not post anything that can't stand the bright light of day. But I'm in education, and we tend to value the exchange of ideas slightly more than the business world at large. (And that "slightly" isn't meant in any ironic way. It's only slightly.)
I can think of many uses that need high speed networking. And most of them are for businesses that might be enticed into a local economy. And of course there's the stated intention of research. So part of these projects is examining what people can come up with in a community if they're given high-speed networking. Sometimes you have to think outside the basement.
Lower tuition is a great idea. But how do you manage that when, for the last thirty years, enrollments have increased and funding has dropped from state, federal, and private sources? Higher enrollment isn't the only expense, though it's a big one because it tends to mean new buildings too. Since the 80s schools have had to spend more and more on staff and infrastructure for the information technology boom. Then add to that the things that universities have done to themselves. Some examples of that: the trend toward hiring lots and lots of expensive administrators; courting students with all sorts of expensive frills like free cable in the dorms and protection money paid to the RIAA and MPAA to keep students from being Jammie Thomased. Of course, anyone who likes the parent post probably doesn't care much about the value of research (oh the irony of the 'net user being a libertarian), so we could just eliminate all that.
I'm packing for a move and had listed my HUGE 1970s-era Fisher "Studio" series speakers on craiglist, planning to keep only the two bookshelf Bose (yes, with Monster Cables) that I bought 20+ years ago as an ignorant college student. I think I'll hang onto the Fishers for now, no matter the whining from my lower back.
In much of Europe. But I take it you've never been to Vienna in the summer. It's an oven. Same with much of Spain and Italy. Yeah, it's not AS hot as the US. But the folks in Vienna I know for sure could use AC. But they don't. Heck I've even seen guys promenading in the middle of July in sweaters. Because it's cool apparently.
I don't want to jump to conclusions... But is that a troll? I'm from the South, and I see many houses with white shingles. I even nailed down quite a few of those things. It's the color of the gritty stuff, rock or whatever it is. So, no need to paint those. Just buy the right ones when the current shingles need replacing. (As a nostalgic person who suffered through many roofing jobs, I like the new plastic fake-tin roofs that come in many colors, including nice light ones.)
Be careful here Anonymous Coward. There are at least two groups from the US religious right who are pumping out stories about how Sanger was a racist who wanted forced sterilizations. I have not read EVERYTHING she wrote, but I've read a lot, and here's all I've ever seen: She was indeed a Malthusian and she believed in reducing the "unfit" by allowing the poor access to birth control. She believed that voluntary birth control would reduce the number of unfit in the population. Yes, she did, like many do-gooders of her day, support sterilization of the developmentally-disabled or emotionally disturbed who had been placed in public custody. However, it was clear that she thought this had little to do with eugenics but was to "protect" such persons from the burden of parenthood. My take on it so far is that Sanger is not as bad as she's being painted by people who currently want to attack reproductive rights, family planning, birth control, whatever you want to call it. Given the circumstances, I think she comes out with karma on the plus side. (If you want to read about the circumstances from someone else, the Autobiography of William Carlos Williams has some passages about mid-way through discussing what it was like for him working as a doctor to women and children in Hell's Kitchen. And you might check out the websites "exposing" Sanger; most of them I've seen eventually get around to "ZOMG she also approves of pre-marital sex," which reveals a strong anti-sex bias at work.)
Tell that to my friend T, who still has scars on his face and chest from the knife-slashing he got when he stopped to change a flat. I think the proper protocol today is to make a call on your phone to the police if you see a stranded motorist. Charity and love of one's fellow man is all well and good, but the human race as a whole tends toward poo-flinging and skull-smashing. Don't blame me, blame the obelisk.
I suspect coverage and staffing are linked. If you don't have the people, they'll be spread thin, won't have to time to do research, fact-check, muck around. The issue with fark is that it is an aggregator. It's cherry-picking. And you can learn something from it, but you're not going to learn about the new planning commission report in the drawer marked "Beware of Leopard," at least not until the dozer show up at your house. Since news media consolidation began in earnest in the 80s with economic deregulation, most mid-size markets now only have one major paper, certainly one daily. TV news staff has shrank and shrank and offer a few local stories scattered among filler pieces. There's simply not the people out there to do it. And there's little incentive to take risks. With competition you wanted to one-up another paper by running a dangerous story, or the left paper was after the right folks, the right after the left. Now, with no competition, there's little incentive to rock the boat. So you get stories about how ignorant/fat the poor are, how funny dem brown folks be, tragic losses of kittens or mittens, Senator Sausage's latest wiener-wag, and so on, ad nauseum.
I'm an academic, and two of the websites I use a lot just did more or less the same thing. First, our university library decided they needed a new web presence. So the catalog system got a new page with search box. 98% of the page is irrelevant, and there's this little search box in the top left. Fine, at least it's there. Then your results come up on a page with 5 tabs. Only one tab actually does anything. The links are dead on all the rest of them. So, pick the right tab, click the link that's on it, then click one more link, again picking the right one out of a couple of dead ones, and you get..... The same old page you would get on the old system, except as the first result of your search. A similar thing happened to an online journal I frequent. It became prettier, or at least it came to conform to the present style. But finding old articles is more difficult. And all articles are now shoe-horned into 1/3 of the pages. The other 2/3s are reserved for distracting sidebars with links and pictures. They're NOT ads, but they fill exactly the same position in the layout as ads; I guess they're like self-promo ads. ANYWAY: what's driving all this? It's not like the sites being replaced are those early 90s things with web-ring GIFs at the bottom of the page. They were fairly clean, readable, USEFUL sites to navigate. Now they are not. Why the heck is this happening?
You do know that governors, the executive branch, don't write the laws, right? The authors are on the bill: http://state.tn.us/sos/acts/107/pub/pc0362.pdf. And in response to the posters below: do keep in mind, we're not ALL inbred cretins here in Tennessee. At least you'd better hope not, because we're running Oak Ridge, a couple of reactors, a couple of high explosives plants, and a facility that will produce 130,000+ metric tons of aluminum this year--not to mention controlling the headwaters of the largest river system south of the Hudson and east of the Mississippi. And that's just the most inbred, eastern, hillbilly side of the state. (Yes, I'm a little butthurt. As a native Tennesseean, bitching about the inbred cretins is MY job.)
Please don't think I'm a jerk. But I want to offer a rebuttal. I teach at a university. I am frequently nominated by students for teaching awards, and I get very high marks on student evaluations. Students generally like me, and I generally like my students. That's to offer evidence for my "not a jerk" claim. Because I'm about to be very like a jerk. So, I sometimes get students who say to me some variant of "my college education [is] largely an exercise in bullshit." The vast majority of the time, those students are both ignorant and conceited--and, to be topical, anti-intellectual. When the majority of the class is prepared to discuss the material, this person will be unprepared. When others show enthusiasm, he (and it's almost always a man) looks pissed-off and disgusted with the way those "suckers" are buying into the "bullshit." He's not completely arrogant, he's willing to admit that there are some things he doesn't know. But he'll quickly let you know that those things aren't worth his time. Sometimes, and sadly, bravado seems an attempt to mask his incapacity; he can't write well, or isn't articulate, or is well-informed but only narrowly, or is simply a bit of an isolato. SO. I never approach the student as bluntly as I say all this. Instead I engage in Socratic dialog, ask him to consider others' values, other systems of value, the possibility of his own (and my) limited knowledge. Et cetera. It's refreshing for once just to say that such people are not as well-informed as they think, not as wise about their own futures as they think. AND none of this is to say that the university isn't full of bullshit. After all the first one was started in Bologna, and maybe that's the origin of "full of baloney." But generally the person saying "education is for suckers" isn't capable of spotting the real bullshit, because he's too busy polishing his own particular sacred turd. (Not that we aren't all turd-polishers. You just have to take a break from it now and then to look at the other guy's turd. It might be a nice one.)
I am a researcher. I want to add my vote for "file system." The less interaction you do with most of this material, the better off you'll be. For me, important or useful material goes into a reference manager. Those files get tagged in the reference manager. At this point in my career--only four years in--that's just under 600 articles with accompanying pages of notes. Other stuff goes into folders based on broad categories. I don't do any tagging on these because find-by-content always does the job just fine. Avoid the extra work. You're not paid to be a secretary. And most of the organizing won't pay off, will become an end in itself.
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In some states, like Georgia and Tennessee, there are need-based scholarships funded by lotteries. So the state cuts direct support but institutes a program (lottery) that then indirectly funds institutions with tuition paid by state scholarships. It's the college-level equivalent of school vouchers. In Tennessee, this has broadened access to college. And I suspect, but can't say for sure, that often tuition increases have an eye toward getting more out of the state through these scholarships. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. At the University of Tennessee, the students break down into two large clumps, financially. You have the children of the really rich who want a five-year football party, and then you've got another large lump that are on the need-based scholarships. There's some middle ground, but it seems that's the majority of students in those two groups. So I think that often it's a combo of soak-the-rich and get-back-what-the-state-took. But I'm cynical.
I was recently in a position to look closely at the numbers of people in the different job types at a major university in the Southeast. From what I saw, the parent's statement about overhead is half-right. The money was going to vice presidents, heads, and such. There was no uptick in the sorts of jobs that get labelled "PC." There is an ongoing reduction in general staff: grounds keepers, secretaries, sometimes IT support staff. And faculty has been transforming from tenurable professors to nontenurable instructors. (At this institution, starting pay for an English professor was $44,000. Starting pay for the instructor of English was $32,000. The professor teaches, at most, 2 classes a semester, while the instructor teaches 4.) Most of the additional need for money is coming from: reduced federal and state inputs, repair of buildings, putting in IT stuff, and high-salary jobs. And the impact of each item falls off pretty rapidly, the impact of high-salary jobs, for example, is a lot less than building repair. I guess you can add too that enrollments are rising and rising and rising.
Sigh: Chartres, "they're students."
That's a pretty bogus justification for plagiarism. First, it's widely-acknowledged among scholars that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. (Bernard of Chartre said it first, and it's been repeated again and again because it's wise.) Second, students are not expected to be original. Because a) students don't know enough yet to be original, unless through dumb luck; that's why there "students." And because b) the point isn't original work, it's exercise. When a person completes a 5k training run, no one says "What an accomplishment!" ("No one" excludes your mom, your primary school teachers, and anyone else wanting to blow smoke up your skirt.) Finally, anyone who really thinks that schoolwork is just rote learning and repetition lacks the intellectual spark that will lead to creativity, either that or the spark has been doused by sloth and the callow cynicism of the young. At any rate, such a person is perhaps best suited for trade school and not university. Yet so many of the bored and disinterested show up to class, with their baseball caps on, leaning back, demanding to entertained while they sit fondling their cybernetic genitals (cellphones).
90% of the work done in school is training. Like running laps and lifting weights to be a better ball player. Plagiarism short-circuits that process. It's gaming a system that intends to make you work (ie suffer) for your own good. That's the part I think that gets left out: it's work. Yep. Work. Not fun, not playtime, just work. Keep in mind I'm not talking about busy work doled out by the lazy teachers. But writing for composition class, solving problem sets for math, lab work in chemistry, proofs in logic class. That's all good for you. If you find a way to enjoy it good for you, or maybe you have a great teacher. But work is work.
He points out nonsensical logic used to justify the existence of god. Even cursory reading of Christian theologians indicates that calling out people on nonsense is an established scholarly tradition--even among the orthodox. And often, of course, the contest is for who will be orthodox. For example, the contest between Augustine and Pelagius (Augustine won), or Luther and All Comers (title contested). And saying that deductive reasoning isn't science is a fair statement. I suspect the reason this teacher is out of line is that you can infer that he is an atheist. But that is his business. And, frankly, adults should give young people enough information to infer such things. That's how most children of backward parents learn that atheists, socialists, Jews, and homosexuals don't actually eat babies in the name of their Dark Lord Satan.
I agree. And I'm a teacher. Teaching teachers is a trying experience. That said, I know that one reason I do stupid things like what you describe is the sheer degree of overload that I'm always suffering. That makes it easy to be panicky and stupid. I'll add, too, that most universities have terrible websites and help areas that actually seem designed to make teachers freak out. At every university I've been at but one, the help and instructions available online trail the actual installed/implemented software by a few versions. Or, there are clear instructions on the page, if you can pick them out of the bad page-layout covered in marketing department mandated gimcracks and whizdiddles. At my current institution, it's a good ten seconds before crap stops flying across the home page, and moving the cursor across any page is liable to give one an epileptic seizure. Then there are the "training" session we must endure, which generally involve some sales flak using a very bad Powerpoint to pitch us some piece of crap product that would cost our students a small fortune (Turning Point technologies, I'm looking at you with your trumped-up "research" claims.).
Job security can go a long way toward eliminating this very justifiable fear. I'm a lead lecturer in an English program. (UK folks note: in American universities lecturer means someone hired off-contract with no research opportunities. A UK lecturer is more like a teaching prof. here.) Grade inflation is a big problem because the U. demands that we are rehired on a number in part based on student evaluations. Many people are afraid--and rightly so--that too many bad student evaluations will cost them their jobs.
I strongly suggest examining methods and reading some meta-studies, as well as considering the differences between the very young students addressed in Kohn's essay and college students. At a young age, research suggests that positive reinforcement is more effective in producing learning. In early adolescence negative reinforcement becomes more effective.
And, in my experience, an MA teaching program is just about utterly useless in producing anything but people who rant about grades and want to "stick it to the man." I spent a couple of semesters teaching classes in the College of Teaching building at my university. It was an eye-opener. Students were completing graduate classes with a poster as the final project. Just a poster. On something like Piaget's theories of development. With glitter and stuff. In my opinion, and I guess you should get off my lawn, that's not graduate-level work. More like elementary school. Certainly standardized tests prove competency at standardized tests. And that silly little obstacle course at the end of a motorcycle safety course proves your ability to navigate a silly little obstacle course. And both sets of skills are relevant to wider areas of practice. (PS. I bet you're getting hearing these words a lot: "holistic" and "student-centered." And if she's trotting out "outcomes-based" you might ask her to do a little research on who exactly is pushing for that.)
"echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy" -- that's not a feminist sentiment. In fact you can't get much more anti-feminist than saying this. In fact this point--along with a few others--is the basis for almost all the feminist critique of Freud and his work. If the content of your second paragraph is what you got out of college, all your teachers were idiots. OR, given the evidence of your catch-22 defensive 3rd paragraph, there is also the possibility that you aren't very bright, at least in some fields of thought.
What about increases in the speed limit and fatalities? Those are also connected. And, oddly enough, lowering speed limits lowers fuel consumption. But high speeds are a sacred cow grazing in the same pasture as hand guns and tax cuts. If I could, I would gladly buy a Seat or Skoda, one of the newer offspring of the old Golf that got such good mileage and were, when built in Europe, very reliable cars. And I'd happily drive the thing at 60 on a 55mph interstate. I'd also like to see an end to all the breaks that SUVs get by being classed as something other than they are, which is a macho minivan.
If you're posting those things, and you think that your coworkers don't know about them, I suggest you think again. My policy is to not post anything that can't stand the bright light of day. But I'm in education, and we tend to value the exchange of ideas slightly more than the business world at large. (And that "slightly" isn't meant in any ironic way. It's only slightly.)
I can think of many uses that need high speed networking. And most of them are for businesses that might be enticed into a local economy. And of course there's the stated intention of research. So part of these projects is examining what people can come up with in a community if they're given high-speed networking. Sometimes you have to think outside the basement.
Lower tuition is a great idea. But how do you manage that when, for the last thirty years, enrollments have increased and funding has dropped from state, federal, and private sources? Higher enrollment isn't the only expense, though it's a big one because it tends to mean new buildings too. Since the 80s schools have had to spend more and more on staff and infrastructure for the information technology boom. Then add to that the things that universities have done to themselves. Some examples of that: the trend toward hiring lots and lots of expensive administrators; courting students with all sorts of expensive frills like free cable in the dorms and protection money paid to the RIAA and MPAA to keep students from being Jammie Thomased. Of course, anyone who likes the parent post probably doesn't care much about the value of research (oh the irony of the 'net user being a libertarian), so we could just eliminate all that.
I'm packing for a move and had listed my HUGE 1970s-era Fisher "Studio" series speakers on craiglist, planning to keep only the two bookshelf Bose (yes, with Monster Cables) that I bought 20+ years ago as an ignorant college student. I think I'll hang onto the Fishers for now, no matter the whining from my lower back.
In much of Europe. But I take it you've never been to Vienna in the summer. It's an oven. Same with much of Spain and Italy. Yeah, it's not AS hot as the US. But the folks in Vienna I know for sure could use AC. But they don't. Heck I've even seen guys promenading in the middle of July in sweaters. Because it's cool apparently.
I don't want to jump to conclusions... But is that a troll? I'm from the South, and I see many houses with white shingles. I even nailed down quite a few of those things. It's the color of the gritty stuff, rock or whatever it is. So, no need to paint those. Just buy the right ones when the current shingles need replacing. (As a nostalgic person who suffered through many roofing jobs, I like the new plastic fake-tin roofs that come in many colors, including nice light ones.)
Be careful here Anonymous Coward. There are at least two groups from the US religious right who are pumping out stories about how Sanger was a racist who wanted forced sterilizations. I have not read EVERYTHING she wrote, but I've read a lot, and here's all I've ever seen: She was indeed a Malthusian and she believed in reducing the "unfit" by allowing the poor access to birth control. She believed that voluntary birth control would reduce the number of unfit in the population. Yes, she did, like many do-gooders of her day, support sterilization of the developmentally-disabled or emotionally disturbed who had been placed in public custody. However, it was clear that she thought this had little to do with eugenics but was to "protect" such persons from the burden of parenthood. My take on it so far is that Sanger is not as bad as she's being painted by people who currently want to attack reproductive rights, family planning, birth control, whatever you want to call it. Given the circumstances, I think she comes out with karma on the plus side. (If you want to read about the circumstances from someone else, the Autobiography of William Carlos Williams has some passages about mid-way through discussing what it was like for him working as a doctor to women and children in Hell's Kitchen. And you might check out the websites "exposing" Sanger; most of them I've seen eventually get around to "ZOMG she also approves of pre-marital sex," which reveals a strong anti-sex bias at work.)
Tell that to my friend T, who still has scars on his face and chest from the knife-slashing he got when he stopped to change a flat. I think the proper protocol today is to make a call on your phone to the police if you see a stranded motorist. Charity and love of one's fellow man is all well and good, but the human race as a whole tends toward poo-flinging and skull-smashing. Don't blame me, blame the obelisk.
I suspect coverage and staffing are linked. If you don't have the people, they'll be spread thin, won't have to time to do research, fact-check, muck around. The issue with fark is that it is an aggregator. It's cherry-picking. And you can learn something from it, but you're not going to learn about the new planning commission report in the drawer marked "Beware of Leopard," at least not until the dozer show up at your house. Since news media consolidation began in earnest in the 80s with economic deregulation, most mid-size markets now only have one major paper, certainly one daily. TV news staff has shrank and shrank and offer a few local stories scattered among filler pieces. There's simply not the people out there to do it. And there's little incentive to take risks. With competition you wanted to one-up another paper by running a dangerous story, or the left paper was after the right folks, the right after the left. Now, with no competition, there's little incentive to rock the boat. So you get stories about how ignorant/fat the poor are, how funny dem brown folks be, tragic losses of kittens or mittens, Senator Sausage's latest wiener-wag, and so on, ad nauseum.
I'm an academic, and two of the websites I use a lot just did more or less the same thing. First, our university library decided they needed a new web presence. So the catalog system got a new page with search box. 98% of the page is irrelevant, and there's this little search box in the top left. Fine, at least it's there. Then your results come up on a page with 5 tabs. Only one tab actually does anything. The links are dead on all the rest of them. So, pick the right tab, click the link that's on it, then click one more link, again picking the right one out of a couple of dead ones, and you get..... The same old page you would get on the old system, except as the first result of your search. A similar thing happened to an online journal I frequent. It became prettier, or at least it came to conform to the present style. But finding old articles is more difficult. And all articles are now shoe-horned into 1/3 of the pages. The other 2/3s are reserved for distracting sidebars with links and pictures. They're NOT ads, but they fill exactly the same position in the layout as ads; I guess they're like self-promo ads. ANYWAY: what's driving all this? It's not like the sites being replaced are those early 90s things with web-ring GIFs at the bottom of the page. They were fairly clean, readable, USEFUL sites to navigate. Now they are not. Why the heck is this happening?
You do know that governors, the executive branch, don't write the laws, right? The authors are on the bill: http://state.tn.us/sos/acts/107/pub/pc0362.pdf. And in response to the posters below: do keep in mind, we're not ALL inbred cretins here in Tennessee. At least you'd better hope not, because we're running Oak Ridge, a couple of reactors, a couple of high explosives plants, and a facility that will produce 130,000+ metric tons of aluminum this year--not to mention controlling the headwaters of the largest river system south of the Hudson and east of the Mississippi. And that's just the most inbred, eastern, hillbilly side of the state. (Yes, I'm a little butthurt. As a native Tennesseean, bitching about the inbred cretins is MY job.)
Please don't think I'm a jerk. But I want to offer a rebuttal. I teach at a university. I am frequently nominated by students for teaching awards, and I get very high marks on student evaluations. Students generally like me, and I generally like my students. That's to offer evidence for my "not a jerk" claim. Because I'm about to be very like a jerk. So, I sometimes get students who say to me some variant of "my college education [is] largely an exercise in bullshit." The vast majority of the time, those students are both ignorant and conceited--and, to be topical, anti-intellectual. When the majority of the class is prepared to discuss the material, this person will be unprepared. When others show enthusiasm, he (and it's almost always a man) looks pissed-off and disgusted with the way those "suckers" are buying into the "bullshit." He's not completely arrogant, he's willing to admit that there are some things he doesn't know. But he'll quickly let you know that those things aren't worth his time. Sometimes, and sadly, bravado seems an attempt to mask his incapacity; he can't write well, or isn't articulate, or is well-informed but only narrowly, or is simply a bit of an isolato. SO. I never approach the student as bluntly as I say all this. Instead I engage in Socratic dialog, ask him to consider others' values, other systems of value, the possibility of his own (and my) limited knowledge. Et cetera. It's refreshing for once just to say that such people are not as well-informed as they think, not as wise about their own futures as they think. AND none of this is to say that the university isn't full of bullshit. After all the first one was started in Bologna, and maybe that's the origin of "full of baloney." But generally the person saying "education is for suckers" isn't capable of spotting the real bullshit, because he's too busy polishing his own particular sacred turd. (Not that we aren't all turd-polishers. You just have to take a break from it now and then to look at the other guy's turd. It might be a nice one.)
I am a researcher. I want to add my vote for "file system." The less interaction you do with most of this material, the better off you'll be. For me, important or useful material goes into a reference manager. Those files get tagged in the reference manager. At this point in my career--only four years in--that's just under 600 articles with accompanying pages of notes. Other stuff goes into folders based on broad categories. I don't do any tagging on these because find-by-content always does the job just fine. Avoid the extra work. You're not paid to be a secretary. And most of the organizing won't pay off, will become an end in itself.