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Tornadoes have struck Moore, Oklahoma again. The fifth one in the last sixteen years. :(
 
Why does the Illuminati hate Moore, Oklahoma so much?
 
If I ever got on a plane I fear something like what happened on Germanwings would happen. I have worse luck than McBoberts. :cry:
 
A Good Professor Is an Exhausted Professor: A North Carolina education bill would be a disaster for research and pedagogy.
According to the official press release from its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Tom McInnis, Senate Bill 593—called “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System”—would “ensure that students attending UNC system schools actually have professors, rather than student assistants, teaching their classes.” Another result would be more courses taught by fewer professors.

But that shouldn’t matter, according to Jay Schalin of North Carolina’s Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, who recently explained to the Daily Tar Heel that “the university system is not a jobs program for academics.” What the bill’s supporters either fail to realize—or, more likely, realize with utter glee—is that this bill actually has nothing to do with “professor quality” and everything to do with destroying public education and research. Forcing everyone into a 4-4 minimum (so ideally an excruciating 5-5, I guess?) is a “solution” that could only be proposed by someone who either doesn’t know how research works or hates it. It’s like saying: Hey, I’ll fix this car by treating it like a microwave.

Teaching college, especially if you’re good at it, isn’t particularly hard. But it does take time—and those 75 minutes in the classroom are the least of it. There are the office hours (which most students eschew for professor as 24-hour email concierge); there’s the prep (anywhere from two to ten hours for one class meeting); and then, of course, there are the hours upon hours—upon godforsaken hours—of grading. Four (or five!) courses, even with the shortcuts afforded by a teaching assistant here and there (which most people don’t get), are a full-time job in and of themselves.

A course load that high leaves little if any time for serious research: You know, trivial stuff like professor David Margolis’ team investigating potentially lifesaving HIV drugs; professor David Neil Hayes’ work on cancer genomics; and professor Bruce Cairns’ leadership of one of the only burn centers in North Carolina. These folks may also be spectacular pedagogues, but they were not hired to teach. And honestly I don’t care how good of a teacher someone is if he saves the life of my burned child—and neither, I am betting, do you. (These all happen to be professors of medicine, but SB 593 makes no provisions about professional or graduate schools. Its text quite clearly says “all professors.” I learned attention to detail and reading comprehension in college, from professors who had a reasonable course load.)

At any rate, if you think SB 593 is about “improving” instructional quality at all, you are either a cynic or a sucker. As UNC law professor Michael Gerhardt put it to me, this bill is “politically driven, and not pedagogically driven. The political forces have aligned against the public university system, as well as the public schools more generally”; the right’s goal is to “redesign it, weaken it, narrow it, redirect it. Some would be quite happy to close it all down.”

Whether or not the stated goal is to “close it all down,” that will definitely be the result. The professors forced into a 4-4 will simply pick up their research—and the labs where that research gets done, and those labs’ workforces, much of them nonacademics, Mr. Schalin—and move them somewhere that will fund them. With the inevitable cratering of UNC–Chapel Hill and NC State, the Research Triangle will become the Research Dot, and the 50,000 individuals North Carolina currently employs in Research Triangle Park—a massive conglomerate of nonacademic research labs located where it is precisely because of its proximity to Duke, UNC, and NC State—will have their livelihoods put in danger. It’s easy to sneer that the university isn’t a “jobs program” until you have to answer for your state’s brain drain.
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Serious question: is any of this legislation driven by a backlash from the academic scandal, or is linking a bill designed to have professors show up to teach more classes and a scandal driven by no-show classes a case of 2 + 2 not necessarily equaling 4?
 
It's for the entire UNC system, not just Chapel Hill. It's the conservative legislators putting their stamp on how they think a university system should work because they feel persecuted the way universities are currently run. Seems it's just backlash against 100 years of Democratic control and done totally for spite.
 
aiw said:
Lawrence Phillips is under suspicion for killing his cellmate. Nice work, ck.
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He got put in jail for trying to run people over with his vehicle so I'm not even surprised at this development. If you had given me one guess of a Nebraska player murdering someone, he'd have been my first guess. Second would be Thunder Collins though he's already in jail for murdering someone if I recall correctly.
 
Best and worst U.S. counties to grow up in (future income correlation):
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015 ... pares.html

Guess I'll move to Uintah County, Utah or Catahoula Parish, Louisiana when I have kids.

I look at the terrible income correlation for Washtenaw County, Michigan, where Continuum once spent some years of his life, and I have to wonder if he really molested/traumatized so many children during his stint there that it significantly affected the results for Washtenaw. Perhaps he also spent some time in Durham County and devastated the children the Durham as well.
 
http://news.yahoo.com/holiday-socialist-fairyland-north-korea-woos-tourists-055426432.html


trap.png
 
The banning of the subreddit /r/fatpeoplehate has created a huge shitstorm on Reddit. All this did was make people who would otherwise not hate fat people develop hatred toward fat people due to freedom of speech concerns. There are a lot of incredibly terrible subreddits, much worse than /r/fatpeoplehate.
 
Thain said:
Sharks are eating people on the coast of NC.

http://www.wect.com/story/29316814/12-year-old-16-year-old-stable-after-shark-bites-in-oak-island

In defense of the sharks, it's not really smart to go swimming at 5pm when the sharks are feeding, by the pier where the sharks are feeding after people have been fishing all day causing fish blood to infuse the water which brings in lots and lots of sharks. That being said, I am extremely glad there were no fatalities.
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Which piers? I couldn't quite place the beach locations.
 
This Rachel Dolezal story gets funnier and funnier by the hour. Today it was revealed she sued Howard University in like 2002 for discriminating against her because she's white. She lost.
 
CK86 said:
This Rachel Dolezal story gets funnier and funnier by the hour. Today it was revealed she sued Howard University in like 2002 for discriminating against her because she's white. She lost.
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I went to an NAACP meeting once. Apparently yellow is the wrong color.
 
dkst0426 said:
Thain said:
Sharks are eating people on the coast of NC.

http://www.wect.com/story/29316814/12-year-old-16-year-old-stable-after-shark-bites-in-oak-island

In defense of the sharks, it's not really smart to go swimming at 5pm when the sharks are feeding, by the pier where the sharks are feeding after people have been fishing all day causing fish blood to infuse the water which brings in lots and lots of sharks. That being said, I am extremely glad there were no fatalities.
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Which piers? I couldn't quite place the beach locations.
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Not sure which pier. There have been 2 in Oak Island and 1 in Ocean Isle within the last week.
 
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