That fruit smoothie you just bought from the local juice bar may not be nearly as healthy as you'd like to believe.
Two researchers responsible for highlighting the health risks behind consuming sugary soft drinks now say that fruit smoothies may be just as bad for you as soda since they contain the same amount of sugar.
Popkin and his research partner George Bray say that since their 2004 soft drink study was released, Pepsi, Coke and other soda manufacturers have been buying fruit smoothie companies and marketing their products as healthier alternatives.
"It's a really big part of it because in every country they've been replacing soft drinks with fruit juice and smoothies as the new healthy beverage," Popkin told the Guardian. "So you will find that Coke and Pepsi have bought dozens [of fruit juice companies] around the globe."
However, Popkin says these drinks are not in fact healthier and that they on average contain the same amount of sugar as a regular soda. Further, he says that smoothies do not actually provide the same health benefits as simply eating a whole fruit or vegetable.
"So pulped up smoothies do nothing good for us, but do give us the same amount of sugar as four to six oranges or a large coke. It is deceiving," Popkin said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about half of the U.S. population consumes at least one sugary drink per day on average. Those statistics are higher for lower income individuals, minors and minorities. The CDC also says the dramatic rise in soft drink consumption over the past 30 years has played a direct role in rising obesity rates and cases of diabetes.
A recent Harvard study found that a typical 20-ounce bottle of soda contains about 15-18 teaspoons of sugar. The same study says U.S. beverage manufacturers spend about $3.2 billion dollars each year marketing these drinks to children .
In fact, the near omnipresence of sugary drinks is so prevalent that a June 2013 study from the National Institutes of Health claims that removing soda machines from schools would not have a significant impact on the number of drinks consumed by kids.
However, at least one fruit smoothie manufacturer is standing by their claims. "Smoothies are made entirely from fruit and therefore contain the same amount of sugars that you would find in an equivalent amount of whole fruit," reads a statement from fruit smoothie manufacturer Innocent, which is primarily owned by the Coca-Cola Company.
Despite his criticism of the fruit smoothie industry, Popkin has in the past praised companies like Coke for reducing the amount of sugar in the products offering lower sized portion options to the consumer.


3HO was started by Yogi Bhajan to enable all who are interested to access the technology of Kundalini Yoga and meditation.
A great resource! Offering everything from music to manuals to informative blog posts to global sadhanas.
I love Guru Rattana Kaur! Her website is so informative and there are many sequences and meditations, available on this site, for free. She is also the author of one of my all- time favorite manuals: Transitions to a Heart-Centered World.
Practice with me online at Yoga International. There are many different sequences available with more on the way. With a membership, you have access to 100's of classes with some of the top teachers in the world as well as incredible articles, wisdom, tutorials and more.
The Alzheimer's Research & Prevention Foundation has been on the leading edge of scientific research on the value of meditation for many years. Please visit them and learn first hand what they have learned and been able to demonstrate about the value of meditation in general, and the value of Kirtan Kriya specifically. Donations are always welcome to keep this research going.
I am passionate about bringing the practice to populations that otherwise would not have access to these tools. After teaching to youth at risk and experiencing the transformations possible in this population as well as the incarcerated, I co-founded Light a Path - a 501c3 founded on the knowledge that connection creates resilience. Please check us out online at www.lightapath.org and consider getting involved.


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US Lawmakers, Citing Activist's Death, Want Aid to Honduras Held
FILE - A woman places flowers on an altar set up in honor of Berta Caceres during a demonstration outside Honduras' embassy in Mexico City, June 15, 2016.
RIO DE JANEIRO —
A group of U.S. lawmakers is making a year-end push to suspend millions of dollars in military assistance to Honduras, citing mounting human rights concerns, including the slaying of high-profile land rights activist Berta Caceres.
More than 50 Democratic Party politicians have signed a letter to the U.S. State Department urging authorities to withhold more than $18 million in security aid to Honduras before Congress adjourns for the holidays and ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20.
U.S. military assistance to Honduran security forces has fueled impunity and human rights abuses in the Central American country of 8 million, lawmakers said. They said U.S. military aid should not be going to security forces who have been accused of serious human rights abuses, including targeted killings of land activists.
"We request that the U.S. government immediately suspend all police and military aid to Honduras until these mounting human rights concerns are addressed," they said in the letter dated December 8.
Honduran officials and the U.S. State Department were not immediately available for comment on the proposed suspension of aid contained in a bill known as the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which was introduced in Congress in June.
October killings
Land rights activists are still being targeted for assassination in Honduras, with two killings in October in the northeastern Aguan Valley alone, an area where more than 150 land campaigners have been killed since 2009, the letter said.
Caceres, 43, was shot dead in March at her home in La Esperanza, Honduras, 112 miles (180 kilometers) west of the capital, Tegucigalpa.
The award-winning campaigner had been leading opposition to the $50 million Agua Zarca dam project that threatened to displace hundreds of indigenous people.
Six suspects, including an employee of the hydroelectric dam company and current and former Honduran military personnel, have been arrested in connection with the killing.
U.S. lawmakers accused Honduran authorities of bungling the investigation into Caceres' killing, after court files related to the case were stolen in September.
The Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, has pledged to see justice served in the Caceres case and to tackle rights abuses in one of the world's most violent countries.
"We are working so that the promotion and protection of human rights is part of the culture of the Honduran people," Hernandez wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
US Agencies Respond to Migrant Surge from Central America
Honduran President to Seek a Second Term; Opposition Cries Foul
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Interior design, author's supervision, equipment. The area is 745 sq. m.
The Russian office of Ivoclar Vivadent was one of the first projects with working space interior for our design-studio. Now we can say that it was exemplary in many aspects. Ivoclar Vivadent is a famous Swiss brand of innovational materials and orthodontic systems for dentists and dental mechanics. The company is 95, and it has more than 100 offices globally. Their basic values are high standards and ideal and precise business-processes. Our mutual work turned to be very convenient.
The Moscow office of Ivoclar Vivadent is almost 1000 square meters in A Class business-center where we elegantly and naturally placed a prosthodontic laboratory, an auditorium for lecturing, a conference room, a back-office open space, a kitchen, a coffee-point, a reception desk along with welcome area and even provided some space for a small exhibition. There are only necessary and functional things, though due to elaborated details the office interior was not made impersonal, grey and dull, but rather unique, with its own features. White was chosen as a basic color of interior, which, on the one side, is associated with cleanness and sterility of medical departments and, on the other, may be intimidating because of its colorlessness and coldness.
This is why we decided to add some bright colors and juicy details: green broken lines of various textures are extended along the wall and furniture, continuing their flow on the floor to be reflected in the shapes of ceiling lamps. Yellow and wooden screens on the tables revive the open space, and the glass walls in the conference room and in the kitchen make the office look more open and friendly.


Today,I woke up at around 12pm.lol.sayang smsed me and I terjaga.hehe.tak pe.infact i should be waking up by that time anyway.Because my cousin and her bf nak datang.Hehe.Then,pi mandi and everything.Just after i took my bath,when i went out from my dressing room,i heard a very familiar voices.she's here.i mean,my cousin's here!I shouted 'uuuiitttttttt~~~' from upstairs.and then she replied back 'uitttt~' haha.we were always like this.lol.shouting and laughing like mad.she's my closest cousin,from kedah side of the family.
Then,I went down.sembang2 sikit and then my mum hidang the foods.wow.ada pajeri nenas.hehe.i like!!But my mum said i makan nanti.bagi my cousin and her bf makan dulu.isk~ :( tak pe lah kan.they are the guests afterall.so,before they went to eat.I took these pictures.hehe.
Then,after that i showed to them the cake shop that my mum loves.It is situated at the Plaza Putra near my house.and i drove to desa parkcity.Jalan2 je tunjuk kat derang the place.hehe.then,i picked up Zati.because actually i need to see her today.then,send ano and her bf (yunus) back at my home,i went out with Zati.
Our first stop was at the Cats Whiskers DP.hehe.zati told me Cats skarang banyak stock baru and banyak dresses yang sangat cantik!So,aku pun cam 'oh?ye ke?jom jom jom!!' haha.I think i've tried for like 6-7 dresses.siap 3G with my boyfie,tanya his opinion and everything.haha.he gives such a 'good' opinion.hahaha.thank's sayang for your opinion yang sangat ikhlas.haha. :P i bought one dress.they told me it's beautiful and yeah i think so too.hehe.
So,after cats,we went to OU.ate at BBQ chicken and then i bought the stuff to do the pie for amin.oh yeah,i'll be meeting amin tomorrow.here's the pics at BBQ Chicken.
So,basically that's what happened today. :) oh yeah,pardon the language and vocab and everything in this entry.im typing this while im having some great headache.hurm.
Kenal tak Urbanscapes? Part 2.
Kenal tak Urbanscapes? Part 1.
Celebrating Dayana's post birthday 'party'.
Thank God aku beli chocolate banyak!
I have this one thought.


I'm only giving a three star review because my frames were broken when they got here. It would have been a one star but customer service was amazing and prompt and answered my email quickly and sent out a replacement quickly as well! Fingers crossed the second pair is as good as I hoped they would be!


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Home > Jazz Musician Wynton Marsalis: Filth-Filled Rap, Hip-Hop 'More Damaging' Than Confederate Statues
Jazz Musician Wynton Marsalis: Filth-Filled Rap, Hip-Hop 'More Damaging' Than Confederate Statues
Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis.
Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis said that the racially charged and profanity-laced creations in rap and hip-hop are "more damaging" to the culture and to black Americans "than a statue of Robert E. Lee."
During a recent interview with the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, Marsalis -- the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997 -- said: "My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don't think we should have a music talking about niggers and bitches and hoes. It had no impact. I've said it. I've repeated it. I still repeat it."
"To me that's more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee," said Marsalis, who plays the trumpet and received the National Medal of Arts in 2005.
Wynton Marsalis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997. (1997)
In 2017, Marsalis supported New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu in removing a confederate statue. However, Marsalis told Capehart that as for rap and hip-hop, "I feel that that's much more of a racial issue than taking Robert E. Lee's statue down."
"There's more niggers in that [music] than there is in Robert E. Lee's statue," he said.
"It's just like the toll the minstrel show took on black folks and on white folks," he said. "Now, all this 'nigger this,' 'bitch that,' 'hoe that,' that's just a fact at this point."
Marsalis, 56, started a jazz program at the Lincoln Center in 1987, and he has hosted the educational program Marsalis on Music, which won the George Foster Peabody Award.
At the age of 22, Marsalis won Grammay Awards for both jazz and classical music, in the same year, 1983.
A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.
He was also awarded the National Humanities Medal and was named an NEA Jazz Master. Marsalis reportedly has sold over 7 million albums worldwide. He also is the author/co-author of seven books on music.
h/t Washington Post
Source URL: https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/jazz-musician-wynton-marsalis-filth-filled-rap-hip-hop-more-damaging


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Inquiry into the use of Immigration Detention
The home of the Parliamentary inquiry into the use of immigration detention in the UK, hosted by the APPG on Refugees and the APPG on Migration
About the Inquiry
Background to the inquiry
Submitted Evidence
Written Evidence
UN Committee back British Parliamentarians' call for a time limit on immigration detention
Parliamentarians have called on the Government to take action following a recommendation of a UN Committee that a time limit on the length of time an individual can be held in immigration detention should be introduced. This echoes the call made by a cross-party group of parliamentarians earlier this year, who recommended that no one should be detained in immigration detention for longer than 28 days.
The recommendation was issued by the UN Human Rights Committee, a body of 18 international experts who monitor the implementation of the international covenant on civil and political rights, which was making its first review of Britain since 2008. In their report, the Committee said it "is concerned that no fixed time limit on the duration of detention in Immigration Removal Centres has been established and that individuals may be detained for prolonged periods. "
Earlier this year, a cross-party group of Parliamentarians published a report into immigration detention, in which they concluded that the enforcement-focused culture of the Home Office means that official guidance, which states that detention should be used sparingly and for the shortest possible time, is not being followed, resulting in too many instances of unnecessary detention.
As well as calling for a 28 day time limit, they recommended that the UK government should learn from best practice abroad where alternatives to detention are used, which not only allow individuals to live in the community, but which also allow the government to maintain immigration control at a much lower cost to the state.
Three of the Parliamentarians who published the report, Conservatives David Burrowes and Richard Fuller and Labour MP Paul Blomfield, have secured a debate on the report in the House of Commons that will take place on 10 September.
Currently, the UK is the only EU country not to have an upper time limit on the length of time someone can be held in immigration detention.
Commenting on the UN recommendation, David Burrowes, Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate, said:
"It is very welcome that this UN Committee has backed our call for the Government to introduce a time limit on immigration detention. It was clear from our inquiry that the lack of a time limit has very serious mental health consequences for people who can find themselves locked up for months on end, if not years.
"While there is a need to properly control our borders, all those who enter our country should be treated with fairness and dignity. The UK Government should learn from other countries who detained far fewer people while having higher removal rates."
Paul Blomfield, Labour MP for Sheffield Central, added:
"The UK is alone among EU states in detaining people indefinitely for immigration purposes. While Home Office policy states that detention should always be for the shortest possible time, in reality this is clearly not the case.
"The current system is expensive, ineffective and unjust. I urge the Government to respond positively to the UN Committee and our inquiry report."
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged immigration detention, UN Human Rights Committee on July 30, 2015 by APPG Refugees.
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A spacious split level ensuite family room suited for a family of 5 or 5 friends. Laid out with attractive furnishings over 2 floors and set within a peaceful location. The 5 person family room has access to the outdoor area.


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TMS invests RM50 mln for bus manufacturing factory in Seremban
SEMENYIH, Nov 11 -- Bus transportation services provider Terus Maju Services Sdn Bhd (TMS) is investing about RM50 million to set up a manufacturing factory in Seremban to meet the increase in demand of buses, including electric buses (e-buses), for the ASEAN market.
Managing director K S Loo said the first phase of the factory, which will be built on a 8.5-acre site, is expected to be operational by the first quarter of 2021, with the initial production capacity of 400 buses and up to 600 units in its full phase capacity.
"We are optimistic of growing the potential of the ASEAN's market demand in the next three years. After having exported buses to Singapore and Myanmar, we are now eyeing Laos, hopefully, before the Chinese New Year next year, followed by Cambodia and Vietnam," he told reporters.
Loo said this after a handover ceremony of TMS' first eight TMS12 bus models of the TMS Chassis product line to customers and the signing of an agreement with China's Zongtong Bus Holding Co Ltd and Myanmar's LA Coach Master (Myanmar) Co Ltd here, today.
The event was witnessed by Transport Minister Anthony Loke Siew Fook.
TMS, which previously operated an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) system for various automotive companies, is now able to produce 95 per cent of its own components at its factory here, while importing the remaining parts.
On the collaboration with Zongtong Bus, Loo said the Chinese partner would bring in advancement in the transfer of engineering technology to TMS in producing e-buses.
"We will run a pilot project next year to see the success of the e-bus (project) and determine our next planning, including production of the buses," said Loo.
Zongtong Bus, which boasts a total asset of 150 billion yuan (RM1=1.69 yuan), has been selling its products to over 100 countries.
Loo said although an e-bus may cost around US$250,000 (US$1=RM4.138) per unit compared with RM480,000 for a normal bus, it is good in terms of environmental protection and has lower maintenance costs.
On the agreement with Myanmar's LA Coach Master, Loo said the company has purchased 50 left-hand drive buses of various models from TMS, which are being delivered in stages.


Our Arrow Heart Hi-Lo Ruffle Tunic Scarf outfit is perfect for Valentine's Day or any other occasion! It is a red tunic hi-lo top with a ruffle flare sleeve detail. Arrow heart patterned pants with an elastic waist for a perfect fit. Includes matching arrow heart infinity scarf. Super soft stretch cotton blend and is comfy enough for all day wear while looking cute and fashionable! Machine wash on cold and lay flat to dry.


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Nollywood Actor Ibrahim Chatta's got married to Another wife.
Nollywood actor, Ibrahim Chatta and his wife, Salamatu Lafiaji, the daughter of former Kwara State governor, Senator Shaaba Lafiaji, has crashed irretrievably. It should be recalled that Chatta and Salamotu got married in April 2013, shortly after his first marriage crashed due to allegations of wife-beating which he emphatically denied. Ibrahim had maintained that his ex-wife, Olayinka Solomon, never stayed at home, or bothered to take care of their child. This, he said, was what drove him into the arms of Salamotu in the first place. However, the short-lived union has hit the rocks. Close family sources revealed that the couple, who made their home at Ikotun area of Lagos, started having problems shortly after their marriage due to class of differences. Salamotu, who comes from a wealthy home, according to sources, was not too comfortable with the living conditions in Chatta's home, and this put a strain on the relationship until two weeks ago when she finally moved out of the house. Her mother had once visited the couple's home and she was shattered at the poor living conditions of her daughter in the Lagos suburb. Interestingly, shortly after their marriage, Chatta had come out to debunk tales that he is a 'gold digger,' maintaining that he didn't marry Salamotu because of her money. He blamed some journalists for peddling false stories about his person, stating that he may have humble beginnings but he would never sell his soul for money. READ IT HERE'' According to him, "Truthfully, Salamat is a beautiful woman and she's from a well-to-do family, but if I intended to marry for money, I wouldn't have been available when she came along. Some of my very good fans and friends can testify to the fact that I searched for well over two years for the right woman after the relationship between me and my baby mama turned sour, even on social media like Facebook. I am not a gold digger like some people wrote about me, I started life doing all sorts of menial jobs like hawking ice cream, selling meat, and even worked as a bus conductor. Those that knew me then can testify to the fact that I will never sell my conscience for money. I like to hold my head high," he declared when the going was still smooth. All efforts to get Ibrahim's comment on the development proved abortive as his phone rang repeatedly without response on Saturday. He also ignored text messages sent to him on the subject.
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You drink kombucha and attend regular spinning classes for your physical health, and you indulge in self-care practices, like massages and journaling, for your mental and emotional health, but what are you doing for your spiritual health?
For a number of people, connecting with spirituality can seem almost esoteric. You might think it means indulging in meticulous traditions or "woo woo" rituals. While neglecting your spiritual side might be easier to do than, say, eating your veggies and doing crunches, in truth, your spiritual body is your connection to the energy of your life. No matter where your beliefs might lie, your spirituality is your energetic powerhouse where your true sense of self and purpose live.
"I find that starting and ending my day with a spiritual ritual attunes me to my inner compass. My actions throughout the day and my dreams reflect a more grounded, loving me," Jona Genova, founder of Samadhi for Peace & Reiki Collective, tells Organic Authority. "Bookending your day with a spiritual practice gives it space when you can be attentive to your practice."
Which is why, in order to live in a state of harmony and balance, it's imperative to connect with your spirituality on the daily. But how do you connect with your spirituality everyday, especially when you've got a busy professional and personal life to deal with?
Here are some simple tips on how to live a more connected and spiritual life.
The first thing Genova suggests is making the commitment to waking up 10 minutes early.
"Ideally, this is before anyone else in your household is up. In time you'll appreciate the benefits so much that you'll want to wake up 15 minutes earlier and then even 20 minutes earlier," she says.
This way it's unlikely you'll be disturbed, and thus won't forgo your morning practice for a hungry child, for instance.
Next Genova suggests creating a routine to meet your basic needs, which includes your spiritual needs. This doesn't have to be complicated.
For Genova, it includes drinking a half liter of alkaline water each morning ("I prepare a jug before bed and have it on my nightstand for quick access in the morning") and then doing her PBC ("Pee, Brush my teeth, put in Contacts") before she settles on the sofa or my meditation cushion near the window to listen to the birds and connect with nature.
Think of your current morning routine. Are you constantly hitting the Snooze button before anxiously leaping out of bed, and rushing around to get everything ready before work? Or are you simply on mindless auto-pilot?
Instead, think of how you can implement simple and grounding rituals that not only help you get ahead in the morning, like PBC but, which also helps connect you to yourself and your environment. Maybe it's watching the birds outside like Genova, or maybe it's mindfully sipping your coffee in silence -- without scrolling through your phone.
Yes, meditation. It's something that we all say that we're going to do but somehow always put off. However, with so many meditation apps and timers available, including meditations that are as short as three minutes long, there's really no excuse not to include a moment of Zen in your day.
So maybe it's hitting your meditation cushion in the morning, or taking the time to get still during lunch hour. It doesn't matter when or where; it just matters that you take that time for yourself.
"I meditate by connecting with my Spiritual Benefactors through Innate Compassion Training and read something nourishing," says Genova. "This practice orients me in the world in a way that is comforting, expansive and empathic. It's literally like calibrating yourself for the day. You'll realize you're not alone in this world and your actions and reactions will reflect this knowing."
If you're curious about Genova's practice, you can join her every Wednesday evening at 5pm PT on Facebook Live for Community Meditation.
Just as important as how you start your day is how you end it. Instead of zoning out to Netflix, think of closing out your day with a reminder of your spiritual connectivity.
For Genova that means taking a moment to think of all of the moments of caring connection throughout the day; in nature, with strangers and loved ones.
"This overpowers the negative brain bias that is tracking threatening experiences. It roots us in the reality that we are safe and cared for beyond our comprehension. It relieves worry, competition, and fear," she says. "As I fall asleep, I channel the love and equanimity of my Spiritual Benefactors to shine a loving thought and feeling to my students, family, teachers, friends, strangers, animals, Mother Nature, and even those who irritate me."
Taking the time out to cultivate and practice your spirituality will help restore your soul, and helps you put your best, and most loving, step forward every day. By keeping your routine simple and personal, you'll be able to connect with your spiritual side easily and effortlessly. Before you know it, it'll be like PBC.


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The Fruits of Debate Training…
The Girl is 11, and on the Debate team. I mention this to give context for the letter she wrote us this weekend.
"Tech time," in our house, refers to phone, kindle, or computer time.
I haven't changed any of what she wrote. Enjoy!
Dear Mom and Dad,
Hello! This letter contains many reasons why I should be allowed to have 2 hours of tech time a day, no more.
This is my first reason: Multiple pediatricians say that kids should be on screens for only 2 hours a day, according to www.commonsensemedia.com. If experienced pediatricians know this for a fact, why should 2 hours a day be harmful?
My second reason. When I do not have after school activities (which is every day except for Mondays and Fridays) there is not a lot else to do. Sure, I can read, but it's not like I can do that for 5 hours straight, and sometimes there's nothing to read. Also, sports require more than 2 people, and again, doing them for 5 hours would be tedious. Besides, it's getting cold out, and it is best to stay inside.
My third reason is that after getting home from a 6-and-a-half-hour day of school, all I want to do is relax with Minecraft, Youtube, and then a good book. I don't want to be kicked off the phone in the middle of building a house or watching a video! Then I'd have to read for a much longer time than planned to pass the time, at which point it feels more like another school assignment than a fun activity.
Here is my fourth and final reason. Longer tech time would not lower my grades! You guys always make sure that I finish all my homework before going on the phone. As long as this continues to happen, there is no way that I'd miss an assignment, thus keeping my grades up.
These are the reasons I should be allowed to have 2 hours of tech time a day. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
(TG)
As a writer, I see a family resemblance. She leans on underlining like I lean on parentheses, but otherwise, it's recognizable.
Two hours a day seemed excessive, but we couldn't let a good persuasive essay go unrewarded, so we agreed to give her extra time on Fridays. "Using your words," as they said in preschool, seems like a civilized way to settle things. She did, so we felt honor-bound to reciprocate in some positive way.
Not bad for eleven, I think...
Thanks to Brookdale for such a warm welcome. I didn't realize how much I missed New Jersey until I came back to it.
Thanks to InsideHigherEd for so much support over all these years. It's wonderful to have a platform where voices from beyond the Ivies can have their say.
Thanks to the Twitterverse for helping me keep up with sources and stories I otherwise couldn't. And the people! Tressie McMillan Cottom, Paul LeBlanc, everyone at the CCRC...
Thanks to my occasional co-author, Susanna Williams, for making the trek to New Jersey on the rainiest day in recent memory. Thanks to High School Friend on Wrong Ocean for doing the same, though without the rain.
Thanks to The Girl, for bringing class, wisdom, and humor to every single day. Watching you grow up is one of my great joys in life.
Thanks to The Boy, for showing me how adolescence was supposed to be done. Even with the move, you handle it with a grace and poise far beyond anything I could do at your age. I'm in awe.
Thanks to The Wife, for holding it all together. For slowly turning a house that isn't "us" at all into one that is. For being an amazing parent. And for still getting people to ask me incredulously "how did _you_ get _her_?" I don't even mind the implied insult...
Thanks to my wise and worldly readers. You are the point of the blog, and I learn so much from you.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
How many times should a student be allowed to re-take a class she hasn't passed? In my context, that usually means either failing or withdrawing; we don't do many incompletes.
Some colleges have policies on retakes and some don't, but I don't know that I've ever seen a fleshed-out argument for any given position. I'll offer a few gestures towards one, and then ask my wise and worldly readers to help me fill it out and reach a considered answer.
First, I think it's obvious that any given number (assuming there is one) should have some sort of "exceptions" clause. Weird stuff happens. When the stuff is both documented and sufficiently extraordinary, I don't see much point in being overly strict. (Example: one semester, the professor falls ill six weeks into the class, and the college can't find a replacement in time. I don't see why a student should be punished for that.) That said, a policy of "infinite retakes" strikes me as hard to defend, given limited resources. So assuming that infinity is off the table, and there's some sort of safety valve for extraordinary cases, what would be a reasonable limit?
"One and done" strikes me as unnecessarily cruel. People make mistakes. If a withdrawal from a class means you can never take the class again, and that class is a prerequisite for other things and/or a degree requirement, then the student is basically done. Say that a student has a medical issue or family emergency during Freshman Comp. Freshman Comp is required in every degree program at the college. Bar her from retaking the class, and you've basically expelled her. Given that anybody can get sick at any time, that just seems unreasonable.
Two or three attempts both seem reasonable at first glance. Either allows for a stray awful semester without banning the student from progressing. But they both put a cap on throwing good money or effort after bad. If you haven't passed a class in three attempts, I'm thinking maybe that isn't the class for you. Getting blocked from self-registration for a fourth attempt may prompt a visit to an advisor, who might suggest other pathways. Everybody is good at something, but nobody is good at everything; disappointment can be part of the process of narrowing down the fields that work for you. If that weren't true, I would have spent much of the 90's and 00's playing major league baseball. The only thing that stopped me was a catastrophic lack of talent.
I've asked the Institutional Research offices at my last couple of colleges to run numbers on success rates for successive attempts at courses. In both cases, success rates dropped from the first attempt to the second, the second to the third, and so on. The drop was the largest from the first to the second. I haven't seen national figures on that, but I'd guess they're consistent. By the time you get to fourth or fifth attempts, it starts to look less like compassion and more like false hope, or tuition theft.
The change in Pell limits in 2012 added urgency to the issue. Prior to 2012, students had a lifetime limit of 18 semesters of Pell. (That had to cover both undergrad and grad degrees.) In 2012, the limit was shortened to 12 semesters. If a student spends four or five semesters on a single class, the odds of her finishing a degree before running out of money drop dramatically. And even if she finishes the associate's, the odds of having enough money to complete a bachelor's are vanishingly low. If a student has a semester or two of ESL and/or developmental classes, and stops out once or twice, that 12 semester limit can come up fast. I hate to base academic policy on financial aid, but I also find it irresponsible to enable behavior that would defeat the possibility of completing a degree.
So I turn to my wise and worldly readers to shed light. Is there another angle on this question that sheds useful light? Is there a better answer?
Seasonal Retail and Final Exams
The next several weeks are some of the most stressful ones of the year for lower-income students.
That's because two demands on their time are increasing simultaneously: seasonally increased hours at many retail and customer service jobs, and the late-semester ramp-up to final projects, papers, and exams.
Although I didn't fully process it at the time, I had the remarkable privilege as a student to be able to restrict my paid hours during the semester to six to eight a week of work-study. (Summers were another story.) That level of work was enough to keep me honest, but not enough really to interfere with classes. And on the rare occasions when it did, I could ask for dispensation from a shift and nearly always get it. At worst, I might have to arrange a trade. It really wasn't an issue.
For many community college students, though, this is a cruel time of year. They need the hours at work to support themselves, and they need study time. A few jobs allow students to learn while they earn -- I remember the guy at a Christmas tree lot poring over his biology textbook between customers -- but most don't. Worse, many of them require variable hours, making it difficult for students to develop the economies of effort that come from routine. When your transportation or childcare arrangements are precarious at best, routine is your friend; the constant disruptions to routine that low-wage jobs entail can do real damage.
In some ways, the choices that students face are between short-term and long-term goods. Money right now satisfies a short-term need, but too much time on the job can jeopardize the degree, which is the long-term good. Every so often I'll hear people who should know better pontificate about "delayed gratification" and "self-discipline." It grinds my gears when I hear it, because for many students, the short-term needs are painfully real. If you don't get your car repaired, you can't get to campus anyway. If you can't make rent, you have much bigger issues than a biology exam. Some students skip meals to save money; I doubt that anyone is at her academic best when hungry. Reducing the issues to personal failings of self-discipline -- which have always existed, and are not unique to people with low income -- doesn't account for just how close to the edge some students are.
Which is to say, I wish students weren't captive to short-term retail, but sometimes they are. This is when faculty and staff can make a real difference with nothing more than a stray thoughtful comment, or a show of real human concern.
In my teaching days, I would sometimes structure classes to allow students to work harder at some points so they could ease up a bit at others. The old "give four assignments and count three" method gave them a freebie to spend as they saw fit. I would explain it at the beginning of the semester, and note that it gave them options: if they blazed through the first three, they could skip the last one. Alternately, if life happened at some earlier point in the semester, they had a chance to recover without having to explain or justify themselves to me. They could maintain their dignity as they got back on track. It worked pretty well.
At this point, classes are what they are. But that crucial human connection still matters. I was repeatedly struck by how many students were struggling economically, but how few of them know that it's normal. There's a lot of shame and secrecy for many. They've imbibed the sort of secular Calvinism that says that material poverty is a sign of moral failing, so they'll engage in counterproductive struggles to keep up appearances until they just can't.
Just hearing from a trusted person that they aren't hopeless or tainted because they're struggling can help.
Personal respect isn't a substitute for a fairer political economy, of course. But in the meantime, we could do worse than to acknowledge the strain. Some students are working hours that put them in danger. Letting them know that someone cares doesn't fix the problem, but sometimes a little respect at the right moment can make it bearable. And learning that the issues aren't just personal may help people connect the dots, and start to work on the politics of it. That's my annual holiday wish...
The Shot Not Taken
This one will be short and vague, by necessity.
This week I witnessed a devastatingly effective "shot not taken," a sort of negative-space insult that worked by implied contrast. I gasped at its elegance. It's a dying art, but it's not entirely gone yet, and I'll miss it when it breathes its last.
I'm sure there's a word for it -- wise and worldly readers, help!! -- but we've all seen it. It's Mozart saying to Salieri, "only you." Or Alan King listing his favorite actors: "Sir Laurence Olivier. Sir Kenneth Branagh. And Drew Carey."
It's more impressive in relatively spontaneous contexts. It can be the silent beat, followed by a conspicuous change of subject, after a stupid comment. Or the compliment that implies its own shadow, often in the space of a pause: "he's very...decisive...." "She certainly has a...presence."
It's not exactly sarcasm; it's more surgical than that. Done well, it leaves the attacker looking clean and clever, and leaves the attacked almost nowhere to go. It's the verbal equivalent of the perfect knuckleball: off-speed and easy to get wrong, but when done right, almost beautiful in its evasive effectiveness.
The undisputed master, of course, was P. G. Wodehouse. Politically, he was somewhere between naive and offensive, but in verbal precision, nobody came close. "Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on such a pronounced richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression." "He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin." "Unseen, in the background, fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove."
Wodehousian humor demands close attention, which may be why it's fading. It requires both precision and subtlety, and it asks of its reader or listener the ability to appreciate each. It's easy to miss.
All of which is to say, I tip my cap. It was so elegant that all I can do is applaud.
Wise and worldly readers, is there a simple term for that? And do you have a favorite application?
The Prereq Temptation
("The Prereq Temptation" was a rejected John LeCarre title. A lot of people don't know that…)
In my imagined, more perfect world, there would be exactly one reason for a prerequisite to attach to a class: the students would need to know material from the prior class to be successful in the second one. For example, a student wandering into a calculus class who had never taken algebra or trig could be expected to be lost. ("Why are you doing math with letters?") In sequences of courses that build on each other, the folks who teach the later courses should have some reasonable assurance that they don't have to go all the way back to square one.
But in this world, that's not the only reason prerequisites get put on classes. For example:
Frustration with student performance. I've seen professors in all sorts of disciplines argue for English 101 as a prereq, because they're frustrated by poor student writing.
Screening out younger students -- either dual enrollment or first-semester -- without having to say so in so many words.
A vote of no confidence in local high schools.
Felt prestige. At a previous college, I once had a department admit in a program review that the addition of a prereq to its into class made no difference in student success; to its credit, it even included the numbers to prove it. But it argued for keeping the prereq anyway, as a "statement" about expectations.
Self-defense in an arms race. If every other class that fulfills a distribution requirement has an English 101 prereq, and yours doesn't, then you will get more than your share of the less prepared students, simply by default. After a while, even some folks who generally object to prereq proliferation will yield just to level the playing field.
Transfer requirements. Certain large public institutions -- not naming any names here, but they know who they are -- won't accept certain courses unless those courses carry specific prereqs. They take the presence of prereqs as a sign of rigor. Even if we could show locally that the prereqs achieved nothing except to delay students, we'd still have to keep them.
Gaming graduation numbers. If every credit-bearing course requires that a student has cleared the developmental level, and developmental courses don't add up to 12 credits, then the college can de facto exclude all developmental students from its "first-time, full-time" graduation rate. It's unethical, but it happens.
Leaving aside the more sinister and self-serving reasons, people often argue for prereqs out of a sincere, if unproven, belief that they'll set students up for success. The argument could be tested empirically, but almost never is. It should be.
Individual prereqs can make sense, but when they proliferate -- as they tend to do -- they make timely completion of a degree much harder. A student who has to wait for a prereq class to fit her schedule may add a semester or a year to her time-to-completion, just because she's following an unproven rule passed through a combination of ego and wishful thinking.
To my mind, the burden of proof should be on prereqs. In the relatively rare cases in which the relevance is obvious and well-demonstrated, keep them. But subject all of the existing ones -- not just new ones -- to actual empirical tests. If our four-year counterparts would do the same -- hint, hint -- we could drop the prereqs that are only there to appease them.
The prereq temptation is subtle and pervasive, but it does real harm. If we could get that long list of reasons down to a single one -- where it actually helps -- students would benefit tremendously.
Guided Pathways for Transfer
Last year I caught a presentation by some folks from the Maricopa County Community College District (Phoenix, AZ) on a transfer partnership they had developed with Arizona State University. With nearly every transfer student aiming at the same destination college, it was relatively easy to design curricula for the first two years. (That's not to demean the effort involved; it's just to say the target was clear.)
I was jealous. That kind of clarity wasn't possible at Holyoke, and it isn't possible at Brookdale. That's because in both places, students had many more options for destination colleges, and the destination colleges didn't agree with each other. When the destination schools disagree on what should go into the first two years, who are we supposed to imitate?
Loss of credits upon transfer is a massive barrier to degree completion, for obvious reasons. It forces students to spend time and money retaking classes they've already taken. It's also incredibly demoralizing. Students feel ripped off, either by the destination college or the sending one, and feeling like a chump doesn't often inspire greatness.
When the loss of credits in transfer occurs between public institutions -- say, a community college and a state university -- taxpayers wind up paying twice for the same courses. It's a huge issue for students, but not only for students. Everyone winds up paying for it, except maybe for the destination school.
Yet in the public discussion of transfer -- to the extent that it exists -- most of the blame for "wasted" credits is aimed at community colleges.
To some degree, any region with a healthy population of private colleges and universities will have to deal with this no matter what. Private institutions can define curricula pretty much as they see fit, within the confines of state licensing regs and accreditation criteria. But it seems like the public institutions should be more subject to public authority.
This week I was in the umpteenth meeting in which discussions of possible changes to curricula led to the inevitable "but will it transfer?," answered with the inevitable "well, yes and no." "Yes and no" is not a satisfying answer.
Put differently, four-year publics need to be required to create "guided pathways" for community college transfer. That means keeping their own curricula in relative check, and vetoing departmental efforts to go rogue and construct idiosyncratic requirements to avoid "giving away" credits (or, in what amounts to the same thing, relegating them to "free elective" status). The easiest way, I think, would be to cap at sixty the number of credits that a destination school could require of someone with an associate's degree. Let the four-year college departments fight out which sixty credits they can require; I have no dog in that fight. But allowing the people with the greatest conflict of interest nearly unfettered discretion to double-dip is not okay. It's a disservice to the students and the taxpayers.
Have any states actually tried that? I'd be interested in hearing about unintended consequences and/or workarounds. Alternately, for folks at public four-years, can you foresee unintended consequences and/or workarounds?
The Girl is preparing for her debate tournament next Saturday. She gets the topics ahead of time, but she doesn't find out which side she's supposed to argue until 15 minutes before the match. That means she has to prepare both sides of the argument, and be ready to argue either way.
One of the topics this week is whether GMO foods do more harm than good. Last night, as she did her research, she got frustrated and asked me for help. As she put it, "all of the anti-GMO stuff is really just anti-science. I can't use that!"
That's my girl.
She's content to argue either side of something that's, well. arguable. But to her, the legitimacy of science is not arguable; it's a ground rule. If she can find a science-friendly argument against GMO's, she'll happily use it; depending on which side she gets, she may need it. But she's not betraying science.
I've been thinking a lot about arguments and ground rules recently. There's no shortage of topics.
The recent set of conflicts on campuses around racial climates strike me as rooted in different understandings of ground rules. Some people believe that protests are inherently dangerous, scary, or objectionable, regardless of their content or motivation. (In my observation, that understanding is usually buttressed by a really selective reading of history.) The more serious conflicts occur between those who take unfettered speech as a ground rule, and those who take mutual respect as a ground rule. The former camp is theoretically straightforward, even if frequently inconsistent in application. (We have closed meetings on a public campus all the time, and nobody says boo about that...) The latter camp argues that procedural equality often serves to entrench other kinds of inequality, and it asks for a focus on substantive equality before getting hung up on procedure. That camp tends to be less theoretically straightforward, even as it makes sense on the ground. As a political theorist, I see lineage to both arguments. The first group is correct that arguments like Marcuse's "repressive tolerance" can quickly lead to terrible and scary places. And the second group is correct that a focus on process outside of context can lead to absurd outcomes, as in Anatole France's line that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges.
More basically, the attacks on Paris by religious fundamentalists are rooted in an even deeper conflict over ground rules. Do you base your sense of rules and ethics on the Enlightenment, or on a desire for a specific kind of caliphate? As near as I can tell, the two are mutually exclusive.
In higher education, we've seen an increasing intensity to the conflict between two sets of ground rules. One side assumes that the point of education is to perpetuate the society that exists. The other side assumes that the point of education is to empower people to remake the world. In practice, they aren't always in conflict; the former group doesn't mind technical innovation, and the latter tends to value certain ethical precepts with hundreds of years of lineage behind them. But sometimes the two camps clash. Custodians of traditions that they believe are under attack by modernity are quick to take umbrage to what they consider irreverence. Partisans of critical thinking tend to assume that a certain level of irreverence is healthy, and that too much deference is a sign of intellectual laziness. Each holds the other in mild disdain, and each is quick to take offense when the other shows that disdain.
The tricky thing about ground rules is that most of the time, people don't have carefully argued reasons for holding them. They take ground rules as given, and are often genuinely surprised when others don't see their validity. That abrupt shock can lead to fear, and even to anger. To me -- and to The Girl -- tested, empirical evidence is self-evidently a valid standard. That's the point at which our skepticism stops. To people who hold other beliefs, that may look "dogmatic." In a sense, it is. But everybody is dogmatic; they just hold different dogma.
Dogmas are clashing a lot these days. My optimism -- which may be naive -- is based on a hunch that at some level, enough of us share enough bedrock dogma that we can find ways to live and work together. We just have to allow ourselves to be shocked, and then to get over that shock and engage intelligently and respectfully. We can choose to get some distance on our own assumptions, and to self-consciously bring ethical reflection to the process of improving them. We can make the choice to change some of our assumptions. It's a challenge for an eleven year old; it's a challenge for a forty-seven year old. But it's the right thing to do. That's where my skepticism stops.
Advising, Decades Later
This weekend we hosted some friends from Massachusetts. It was a glorious time: the kids picked up right where they left off, the weather cooperated, and the parents got along great. Other than a nasty sore throat on Sunday, I couldn't have asked for it to go better.
The friends are college graduates, but not professional academics. I mention that because at one point the grownups' conversation turned to memories of college. (The kids' conversations were largely about Minecraft.) All four of us had tales to tell of favorite classes and least-favorite classes, of professors we liked and those we didn't.
I was struck, though, by how quickly the others' tales turned to advising. In each case, the tale was the same: advisors offered too little, too late, to be helpful. The student in each case wanted clear direction, but was instead presented with a long menu of options and given little to no help in navigating it. My own story was a little different: my advisor was a physics professor, whose entire advice consisted of "you should take more physics." I thanked him for his input and returned to navigating the catalog myself.
Although each of the four of us came to college from a different angle, and all four graduated, we shared a sense of disappointment in advising. In our different ways, we each had hoped for some useful information, and none of us got it. We got through without it, but decades later, we could each recall wanting more.
The common denominator to each story was remarkably consistent with what we've been hearing about best practices in advising. Everyone wanted information that was useful, rather than either comprehensive (the long list) or self-serving (take my course!). We wanted to know what we needed to take before making choices, and we probably would have benefited from return visits over time.
I've heard those things for years from folks who study student success, but it's somehow different hearing the same things from friends who wouldn't know the Lumina foundation if it bit them. They haven't been following the student success debates, and I didn't bring up the subject. Their commentary was spontaneous, specific, and unanimous.
It's easy to object to relatively directive advising as handholding, or as reductive. And it can be. But some level of clarity is actually empowering. It levels the playing field with students who have enough cultural capital that they can navigate a bureaucracy on their own. And it prevents students from taking courses they won't need, or that don't make sense for what they're trying to do. (One friend mentioned that she unknowingly signed up for the pre-med version of Intro to Biology, even though she was a journalism major. It made life much more difficult than it needed to be.) That's not at all the same thing as lowering standards. It's applying standards to the right things.
Knowing the goal, and knowing how to achieve the goal, are two different things. With limited budgets, most community colleges can't just hire their way out of the problem. Getting to a better system will take some redeployment of existing resources, some rethinking of workflows and protocols, and probably some technology. It's not the sort of thing that can be done overnight.
But it's heartening to hear, from disinterested parties, that we're getting the question right. Advising matters, and it matters the most to the students who have the least. I hope that twenty years from now, today's students will all be graduates, too.
Ask the Administrator: How to Stay Current with a 15 Credit Load?
I have been pondering the role of research in higher education and what role it plays in opportunity for students.
In graduate school, we train people in research. When hiring to teach higher ed, we (generally) expect people to have PhDs or a similar terminal degree in a discipline because then they should ostensibly be somewhat knowledgeable about not only the history of the discipline, but the current trends, and how new knowledge in that field is constructed (I realize that there are fields that are exceptions to this). And when we take them out of the field of study, that is take them away from research, do we not take them away from this endeavor? That is to say, are we not doing the students that they train a disservice to not have faculty remain current in research? Part of my joy is sharing my research (or heck, other people's research as I come across interesting papers) with my students, even my non-majors. How does this translate to a community college professor teaching 5 classes, multiple preps, not doing research, and (I assume? Perhaps I am incorrect?) largely unable to keep up with current literature? What about students who want the chance to actually try the field on (i.e., see what research in a given discipline really is)? Does it matter that early?
I feel like knowledge keeps progressing, techniques change, and I wonder how CC profs are able to keep up, because I really don't know. Sure, Socrates and the first law of thermodynamics aren't going to change, but what we have learned in the past few years has. I suppose the question could equally apply to the increasing reliance on adjuncts at other places as well as lecturers who have no research program; I understand the cost tradeoffs here (and that some people even prefer this path), but my same question applies. I am curious what your wise and worldly readers have to say about this, as well.
Please understand, my goal here is not to make judgements but simply to ask how research informs teaching and whether it factors in at the community college level (and to educate myself). I also understand that at research-intensive schools, there are plenty of faculty who do research yet don't give a rat's behind about integrating it in the classroom...or really the classroom at all. For what it's worth, I am largely in the SLAC world, and in the sciences, which both color my views.
It's a fair question. For a long time, many community colleges were wary of hiring Ph.D.'s to the faculty for fear of them either leaving quickly for another job -- it was a different time -- or growing embittered as they lost the ability to do the research by which they had intended to define their careers. The market has changed, at least in the parts of the country in which I've worked, so now it's entirely normal to hire Ph.D.'s to faculty roles, but the question of research currency remains.
Yes, teaching fifteen credits per semester will put a serious dent in most people's research productivity. That's not to say that people don't write books, but it's not the norm. That's one reason why the strategy of "I'll use a community college gig as a stepping stone to the research university job I really want" rarely works. Very few people can write enough while teaching five classes to be competitive with people who barely teach at all.
In my observation, the folks who are able to be happiest here are the ones who stop mourning what the place isn't, and instead appreciate it for what it is. Given the lack of a "publish or perish" tenure process, it's possible to read widely and based entirely on interest. You can't keep up with everything, but you can pick a few favorites and keep up with them. Your interests can shift, which some of us find liberatory. (Although my training is in political science, I've found that left to my own devices, I'm much more likely to read sociologists.)
On the upside, there's no better college teaching laboratory than a community college. This is where the scholarship of teaching and learning finds a natural home. If you take "how do I best help students understand x?" as an applied research question, you can achieve things here that your counterparts elsewhere can't. The best-received presentation I did at APSA was about teaching Intro to American Government to students who were never going to major in it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Accelerated Learning Program -- a genuine breakthrough in the teaching of entry-level writing -- occurred at the Community College of Baltimore County, as opposed to, say, the University of Maryland.
One of my prouder achievements at HCC was the development of the "sandbox," in which faculty were given one-on-one support in experimenting with various kinds of instructional technology. Brookdale has an entire Innovation Center for the same purpose. Colleges that recognize faculty as inquisitive and inventive people, and that grasp the potential of a teaching-intensive setting, can be hotspots of pedagogical innovation. That may not be the kind of research many Ph.D.'s had in mind when they started, but it's real, it's valuable, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Admittedly, I'm not entirely objective on this one, so I'll ask my wise and worldly readers to chime in. Wise and worldly readers, especially those at teaching-intensive places, how do you keep current in your fields?
A Different Vision of the Bachelor's Degree
Have you ever re-watched a movie, or re-read a book, years after the first time, only to realize that you see it entirely differently with some more life under your belt? Sometimes it wears well, revealing new layers to experienced eyes. Sometimes it just brings home how much difference experience makes, as what once seemed profound has come to seem ridiculous. Either way, though, it's humbling; judgments that seemed self-evidently correct at an early age just seem embarrassing later.
Yet that's not how we structure higher education. We build degrees that move from the broad and general at the beginning -- the theory, the survey -- to the specific at the end. That structure pretty much guarantees that initial encounters with large and sweeping theories will be shallow at best, since they lack both context and a sense of why they matter. By the time students get to specifics, they've left the big questions behind. If they return to the big questions later, it's despite, rather than because of, the way we've organized degrees. They rarely get the benefit of coming back to the big questions with the benefit of context, and that's our failure.
That's why I'm so excited about the new report by Mary Alice McCarthy, Flipping the Paradigm. It builds on the insight that many of us quietly know, but rarely use. Starting with theories and working down to practice doesn't fit how most students learn. And it creates issues with transfer of credit that don't need to exist.
Briefly -- and McCarthy's report is well worth reading in its entirety -- she calls for "flipping" the bachelor's degree. Instead of starting with broad "gen ed" classes and working towards narrower applications, we should start with applications and work upwards towards theories. Build theories on actual context, at a point when students have some sense of why they matter. Theories may be deductive, but learning is inductive. Teach for learning.
On a practical level, getting away from the model of front-loading gen eds would also allow community colleges to drop the distinction between "applied" and "transfer" degrees. Right now, a student who gets an A.A.S. (associate's of applied science) degree at a community college and later decides she wants a four-year degree often loses tremendous numbers of credits upon transfer. A student who gets an A.A. intending to transfer, and then doesn't, walks away with a credential of less market value than she probably expected. If the gen eds were backloaded, or at least more evenly distributed among the four years, it would be easier for someone with a two-year degree in an applied, employable field to go on for a bachelor's.
Some versions of that exist now. The transition from RN to BSN is largely theory, with the clinical and applied piece handled at the associate's level. Some Hospitality degrees have the applied culinary part in the first two years, devoting most of the latter two to general business courses.
I had the uncommon experience of seeing "applied bachelor's" programs develop organically when I was at DeVry. While I was there, the New Jersey campus gradually transitioned from offering only two-year degrees to offering both two- and four-year degrees. That meant building four-year degrees on top of the two-year degrees that already existed. But the two-year grads had to be employable in their own right (rights?), so the application courses were front-loaded and the gen eds back-loaded. Students would get the hands-on part of, say, telecom in the first two years, and would spend the last two working largely on soft skills through gen ed classes. The idea was to teach the entry-level skills upfront, and to apply the "finishing school" sheen later on.
DeVry had other issues, but the backloaded gen ed structure had its virtues. By the time the students got to the more theoretical classes, they had a bit more time in school under their belts, so they weren't as easily overwhelmed. The end was in sight, so they tended to stick around. And the focus on 'soft skills' was, uh -- how to say this delicately -- worth the effort.
Right now, students have to decide upfront whether they want employability or transferability, and they have to jump through unwanted classes before they get to what they actually want. We know that people don't learn that way, and the "exploration" that the first two years are supposed to allow is largely defeated by distribution requirements. The system works reasonably well for students who get it right the first time and never deviate from the plan, but that will never be everybody. Lives change, people discover callings, markets shift. Why not move to a structure that allows students to jump more quickly into what they actually want, to stop out and come back more easily if they have to, and to transfer without losing credits?
Flipping the bachelor's won't solve everything, but it's one of the smarter ideas I've seen in a while, and McCarthy gets the details right. Well done.
Tips for Faculty Job Seekers at Community Colleges
It's hardly news that the job market for prospective full-time faculty is brutal. Yet even in this climate, searches sometimes fail. In hopes of reducing frustration on both sides and making more and more successful hires, I've prepared a non-comprehensive list of tips for candidates.
The faculty search season has started. Typically, the timelines for institutions follow roughly along lines of prestige; the elites go first, then the less elite, followed by everyone else. Part of that has to do with custom, I expect, but much of it has to do with money. When you don't have to worry about getting the funding approved, or about what the state or county will do to your appropriation next year, it's easier to plan with certainty. For colleges with thinner margins and more exposure to the political winds, it's common for searches to be postponed until late in the cycle because they often don't have a usefully clear budget picture until then.
Rob Jenkins has done some good columns at the Chronicle for people seeking faculty positions at community colleges. I'll add a few things, based on what I've seen over the last decade-plus.
A community college gig may not have been what you had in mind when you went to graduate school. That's okay; life happens. But if you convey, either in person or in your materials, that you're "settling for" a cc, you'll be dead in the water. Yes, community colleges may be largely absent from most discussions of "the university" that occur in graduate programs, but they account for almost half of the undergraduates in the United States. That's a larger portion than every flagship university in the country, combined. Treating the sector as an afterthought is both offensive and really distorted.
And those of us who work here work hard, and take our work seriously. The work may look different from the work at a research university, but anybody who has taught a fifteen-credit load to students of uneven levels of academic preparation can tell you that it's not for the faint of heart. Doing this work well is worthwhile, but really hard. If it's not for you, there's no shame in that, but don't apply. These jobs are not stepping stones -- the teaching load is too high for that -- nor are they jokes.
That said, what can you do to improve your chances?
First, if you haven't had exposure to the community college world as either an adjunct or a student, pick up a class. Get a firsthand sense of the reality of the place. T.A.'ing at a R1 is simply not the same experience, and if you try to suggest that it is, you'll convey that you have no idea what you're talking about. I know that any administrator recommending adjuncting is likely to get blasted with righteous internet rage, but candidates with community college experience consistently beat candidates without. And there are valid reasons for that.
Second, tailor your materials to a teaching-intensive place. That means moving the discussion of your dissertation and/or research to the end of the letter, to the extent that it comes up at all. Lead with teaching. This should be basic, but every year I see candidates violate this one. It's a huge red flag.
Third, get some online teaching experience. As with community college experience, online experience is a valuable box to be able to check. If you're still in graduate school, and your program offers some sort of certificate in online teaching, get it. If you're already adjuncting or "visiting," pick up an online class or two. Over the last five years, on-campus enrollments have dropped at community colleges across the country, but online enrollments have grown. It's the one consistent growth area. Given that many faculty were hired well before online teaching became an expectation, new hires are often expected to be willing and able to step in. To the extent that you can address knowledgeably what's involved in teaching well online, you will improve your chances.
Fourth, get some familiarity with "outcomes assessment." I know it's not a popular topic among many faculty, but it's here to stay. To the extent that you can speak fluently in that language, you will outshine the others in the final round. I've seen it happen.
Fifth, any experience or familiarity with "universal design for learning" and innovative ways of improving accessibility for students with disabilities can only help. At both my current campus and my previous one, more than ten percent of the student body is registered with the campus disability services office, and that counts only the students who self-report. Yes, it's fine that you comply with approved requests for extra time on tests, but what have you done proactively to create a more inclusive environment? Have you changed your handouts or presentations? Have you adopted or adapted class activities to be more inclusive? I once saw a faculty candidate brush off accommodation requests as "whining" -- and there went his frontrunner status..
Sixth, remember that your teaching demo isn't a research presentation. It's not about impressing the faculty with how erudite you are. It's about showing how effectively you can engage students. Lecture at your own peril.
Seventh, do NOT come in with an attitude of entitlement. You may honestly believe that it's obvious that the job should go to you, and that any fair-minded person would have to agree. And maybe it is. But if it is, the attitude can overshadow your merits.
Finally, assume that the folks on the committee can read. That means proofreading, obviously, but it also means addressing us as professionals. I've seen multiple -- multiple! -- cover letters start with "My name is..." Don't. Just don't. We'll figure it out from the signature line and the resume. And you may not believe this one, but I swear it's true: I once got a cover letter and resume on pink paper. (No, I'm not channeling "Legally Blonde." It actually happened.) Don't do it. It's not cute or endearing. It's insulting.
It's a brutal market out there, even for folks who do everything right. At least being prepared and avoiding some self-inflicted wounds can help.
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When plants are bitten by insects, they release a chemical scream—a cocktail of compounds that travel through the air. Some deter pests directly by confusing or repelling them; others indirectly protect plants by summoning predatory ants or parasitic wasps. Still others raise the alarm in parts of the plant that aren't yet under attack, telling them to ramp up their defenses in preparation. These same alarms can spread over entire fields, warning other plants to prep their defenses. We can't perceive these signals, but to plants, they're as foreboding as wailing sirens.
But Peng-Jun Zhang and Xiao-Ping Yu from China Jiliang University have shown that one of the world's worst agricultural pests—the silverleaf whitefly—can hack this communication system. When the whiteflies bite, they somehow change a plant's airborne warnings so that they convey information about the wrong threat. Deceived, the neighboring plants invest in the wrong defenses and become more susceptible to the whiteflies. These pests, by seeding entire fields with faulty intelligence, can prime the plants ahead of them for their arrival.
This might help explain why the silverleaf whitefly is so devastatingly invasive. It causes billions of dollars' worth of damage every year and feeds from some 500 types of plants—squash, cucumber, cotton, melons, eggplant, cabbage, and more. Wherever it goes, it drains nutrients from its hosts, covers their leaves in sticky liquids that promote the growth of molds, and infects them with devastating viruses. Originating somewhere in Africa, it has spread across the entire world over the past two centuries.
In very rough terms, plants have two main defense systems: one for insects and other plant-eating animals, and another for infectious microbes. The former centers on jasmonic acid, a hormone that triggers the production of insecticidal toxins. The latter centers on salicylic acid, a different hormone that triggers the production of antimicrobials, or tough molecules that barricade a plant's cells against besieging microbes. In 2007, Sonia Zárate and Louisa Kempema from the University of California at Riverside showed that whiteflies induce the wrong defense—the antimicrobial salicylic-acid one, instead of the anti-insect jasmonic-acid one.
Now Zhang and Yu have expanded on that finding by showing that these inappropriate defenses can cascade through an entire field. The team placed pairs of tomato plants in separate glass chambers, connected by tubes that allowed air to pass between them. If the first plant was infested with caterpillars, the second ramped up its anti-insect defenses. When caterpillars attacked that second plant, they had a tougher time and grew more slowly.
But if the first tomato was infested with whiteflies, everything went topsy-turvy. The plant released a very different airborne cocktail, which compelled its neighbor to turn down its anti-insect defenses and turn up the antimicrobial pathway. If whitefly larvae ended up on that misinformed tomato, they actually grew faster than they would have on plants that had received no warnings at all.
It's not clear how the whiteflies hack the plants' messages, but the consequences are evident. By simply biting a plant, whiteflies can make surrounding plants into more suitable hosts for the next generation of whiteflies. "It's a really interesting finding," says Petra Bleeker from the University of Amsterdam. Although the whitefly larvae gain only a small edge on the neighboring plants, Bleeker says, that small effect could add up across time and space. It would be interesting to do a larger-scale experiment to see how these corrupted messages play out over an entire field or greenhouse.
"It is super interesting to step into this invisible world," says UC Riverside's Zárate. "It appears that the whitefly is ahead in the arms race … but the plant may be preparing itself and neighboring plants to do battle with the viruses that the whitefly is known to harbor." If these are the true threat, it might make sense for infested plants—and their neighbors—to steel themselves against imminent infections instead of approaching insects. "The problem for the plants is that this also benefits the whiteflies," says Ted Turlings from the University of Neuchâtel, who was involved in the new study.
Turlings suggests that it might be possible to change these responses to our advantage, perhaps by breeding or modifying plants to launch the anti-insect defenses in response to whitefly attacks.
Such a system might be years in the making, but for now, there already is an animal that does something similar. Encarsia formosa is a parasitic wasp that exclusively targets whiteflies, and as Zhang and Turlings discovered six years ago, it homes in on one of the airborne chemicals released by infested plants. The whiteflies can fool their hosts, and the neighbors of their hosts, but they can't fool the wasp.


text:
Mattress Encyclopedia
Customer Helpline Clear Aligners
smiledirectclubreview / By MattressTeacher
In June, the thin, transparent plastic trays that fit over her leading and bottom teeth was available in the mail. McKinney is overcoming the series gradually, swapping the first set for the next, and the next, as her teeth move. It'll take about 9 months in all. However after three months of wearing these trays practically every day and night, McKinney is delighted about flaunting her brand-new smile (Customer Helpline Clear Aligners).
Danny Menendez/ BuzzFeed News Inside among SmileDirectClub's New York City places. SmileDirectClub's business design appears to be working. Align Innovation– the business that makes Invisalign, SmileDirect's main rival– invested $46.7 million to become SmileDirect's exclusive provider in 2015, and this year invested another $12.8 million, to own an overall of 19% of the business.
On the other hand, lookalikes have actually launched with similar services: Orthly, introduced by two University of Pennsylvania students, now provides services to consumers in Philadelphia, and Honest Co. introduced in New York this summer. A SmileDirect customer can be matched with one of 225 affiliated dental practitioners or orthodontists in all 50 states. These dental specialists from another location evaluate client cases and after that design the aligners that SmileDirect sends out in the mail.
The company declined to call any of the physician within its network, and would not provide details about its financial relationships with them. "Basically they are collecting payments and paying us marketing costs," Fenkell said."I believe that claim is rather bogus," AAO's basic counsel Dillard said. "The consumers do not even see a dental professional.
(SmileDirectClub has a two-star score on Yelp.) And lots of professional dental practitioners are alarmed that customers never see a certified doctor prior to or during their treatment."It blew my mind," Casi Stubbs, a Florida orthodontist and member of the American Association of Orthodontists, informed BuzzFeed News. Like typical orthodontists, SmileDirect's dental practitioners base their prescriptions on computer simulations of mouth scans.
"The teeth do not move biologically like they do on the computer system," Stubbs stated. Among her clients, 60-year-old Charlene Burnham, is a SmileDirect consumer whose too-tight aligners cut her gums, exposing part of her tooth near the root. Burnham informed BuzzFeed News she spent a week attempting– and failing– to talk with a SmileDirect dental expert on the phone, then went to Stubbs for help."They were bleeding, they were cut to the root," Burnham said.
"I was horrified."A SmileDirect representative told BuzzFeed News by e-mail that company-affiliated dental practitioners "track the patient's progress throughout treatment at regular intervals."The business "helps with the interactions" of consumers and oral companies, the agent stated. "Oral providers communicate straight with clients through the customer website and by means of SMS or phone when proper or indicated."In a YouTube video that's been seen over 21,000 times because June, Baltimore orthodontist Jeffrey Miller alerted individuals far from the service, stating that no orthodontist would ever recommend aligners without very first taking the X-rays that SmileDirect avoids.
(The video was eliminated after this story released.)Grant Olson, a dental professional in Springfield, Missouri, told BuzzFeed News that the company's product marketing, which compares itself with orthodontist-fitted Invisalign, is deceiving. Unlike Invisalign trays, which orthodontists can enhance by sticking special accessories on a tooth, SmileDirect's product is restricted to very slight corrections: The aligners can fix a tilt, however can't move a tooth's orientation or position along with its root.
He explained that SmileDirect-affiliated orthodontists just authorize cases that are ideal for a remote assessment and do not need follow-up oral visits (Customer Helpline Clear Aligners). Laws for dental practitioners vary throughout states, but there are some common themes in the 36 complaints sent by the AAO: Some states consider making impressions and supplying retainers to be the role of a certified medical professional, however SmileDirectClub normally provides those services.
AAO general counsel Dillard also informed BuzzFeed News that the business's business model incentivizes dental experts associated with SmileDirect to prescribe the trays even if they aren't essential. Danny Menendez/ BuzzFeed News Although the company hasn't brought in the attention of regulators yet, consumer problems are plentiful online. TL; DR: Prepare for a rough ride.
The large bulk of customers in these groups resign themselves to handling the snags since there are merely no other choices (Customer Helpline Clear Aligners)."If you can be client, want an inexpensive plan, SDC IS the proper way to go! Having a favorable attitude and being patient goes a LONG method," Melanie Masso wrote to BuzzFeed News.
For numerous other consumers, the ride is a bust. Seattle resident Melissa Gulick informed BuzzFeed News that at the end of nearly a year of treatment, the aligners have ruined her bite: Her front teeth touch before her molars can make contact (Customer Helpline Clear Aligners). "I'm quite frustrated– food is hard to chew now and they won't fix it!"Gulick stated that after complaints to the company, SmileDirectClub consented to continue treatment free of charge.
When inquired about complaints that the trays destroyed clients' bites, a SmileDirect agent informed BuzzFeed News: "Over 95% of our customers total treatment and validate their finished new smile. It is essential to bear in mind that with any orthodontic procedure, bites will continue to shift until the treatment is completed."Another consumer, 24-year-old Drexel University student Kacie Durham, told BuzzFeed News that SmileDirectClub sent her a simulated treatment plan that made her teeth look even worse."It really made my teeth appear more uneven at the bottom," she stated.
Durham returned her trays and obtained a refund. Later on, an orthodontist not connected with the business informed her that her teeth would have to be submitted and shaped before they could be aligned. Durham felt deceived: SmileDirect had actually approved her for a treatment that would never ever have actually worked."If a potential customer is unhappy with the 3d sneak peek of his/her smile, there is no obligation to buy aligners," the SmileDirectClub representative said (Customer Helpline Clear Aligners).
Minelle Tendler, a Boca Raton orthodontist, signed up with one of the most significant Facebook groups, the 11,800-member SmileDirectClub Support, after two of her patients inquired about the product. In browsing the posts that appear in her Facebook feed, Tendler said that she's not seen anybody state they have actually had the ability to speak with a dental practitioner at the business.
"You're asking somebody who has no oral background, 'Is this going to work?'"More than once, Tendler has actually stopped short of responding to threads on the forum. She sits on her hands since the clients are not hers. "I'm looking at the photos and thinking, Oh my god, you need to get teeth taken out, do not do it."Primarily, she is worried that individuals who are charmed by SmileDirectClub's low cost aren't totally familiar with the downsides of skipping a dental check out.
A previous variation of this article misidentified him as an orthodontist. Align Technology owns 19% of SmileDirectClub. A previous version of this story specified it was 17%. Likewise, SmileDirectClub began operating in North Carolina in early October. A previous version of this story, based upon an August interview with cofounder Alex Fenkell, said that the company was not running in North Carolina.
Mail-in aligners may appear like an excellent option for a minor repair. But remember you're not the specialist on how minimal a fix your teeth require. "It's difficult to go from something that's 90% excellent to make it 100% best; in my experience, I discover that these are the harder cases," Dr.
The outcomes of using undetectable aligners can be exceptionally unforeseeable, because some people respond well to them and others won't. "It's extremely tough to monitor this on your own, because– like whatever in medicine– not everybody reacts the same," he says. The genuine difficulty comes with figuring out how to remedy your smile if you're not reacting correctly to the retainers, he states.
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The boys played well, however, and learned quite a bit in the process. The final score was Williston 55 and KO 24. Although the score seems lopsided, the Wyverns actually scored more points in the second half and gave up less, so there was great progress happening. The Wyverns were paced in scoring by Patrick Kinney with 5 points and Ben Stengel with 6.


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The Global Volcanism Program has no activity reports for Orosí.
The Global Volcanism Program has no Weekly Reports available for Orosí.
The Global Volcanism Program has no Bulletin Reports available for Orosí.
Orosí is one of a cluster of four eroded and vegetated cones in the Guanacaste Range at the NW corner of Costa Rica. Volcán Orosí itself has a conical shape as viewed from the north or west, but its flanks are heavily eroded. The complex includes Orosí, Orosilito, Volcán Pedregal, and Cacao. The highest peak of the volcanic complex is 1659-m-high Volcán Cacao, 5.5 km SE of Orosí. The summit of Cacao is cut by two large horseshoe-shaped calderas breached to the SW and east related to edifice collapse. The age of the latest activity of the complex is not known. Historical eruptions were reported from Orosí in 1844 and 1849, but even at the time of the first volcanological observations at the end of the 19th century, Orosí was overgrown with large trees, and the eruptions may actually have been from neighboring Rincón de la Vieja. The latest documented volcanic activity produced mudflows (perhaps secondary) about 3500 years ago.
Cecchi E, van Wyk de Vries B, Lavest J-M, 2005. Flank spreading and collapse of weak-cored volcanoes. Bull Volcanol, 67: 72-91.
Chiesa S, Bettoni M, Confortini F, Invernici N, Madesani R, Suardi M, 1996. Breva resena sobre la geologia de los Parques Nacionales Santa Rosa y Guanacaste. Rothschildia, 3(1): 1-5.
Chiesa S, Confortini F, Madesani R, 1998. Geologia del Area de Conservacion de Guanacaste. Rothschildia, 5(2): 1-36.
Kerle N, van Wyk de Vries B, 2001. The 1998 debris avalanche at Casita Volcano, Nicaragua; investigation of structural deformation as the cause of slope instability using remote sensing. J. Volcanol. Geotherm. Res., 105: 49-63.
The Global Volcanism Program is not aware of any Holocene eruptions from Orosí. If this volcano has had large eruptions (VEI >= 4) prior to 10,000 years ago, information might be found on the Orosí page in the LaMEVE (Large Magnitude Explosive Volcanic Eruptions) database, a part of the Volcano Global Risk Identification and Analysis Project (VOGRIPA).
There is no Deformation History data available for Orosí.
There is no Emissions History data available for Orosí.
The highest peak of the Orosí volcanic complex is Volcán Cacao, which is seen in this view from the SW. The summit of Cacao, 5.5 km SE of Orosí, was breached to the SW as a result of edifice collapse. Orosí is one of a cluster of four eroded and vegetated cones in the Guanacaste Range at the NW corner of Costa Rica. Volcán Orosí itself has a conical shape as viewed from the north or west, but its flanks are heavily eroded. The age of the latest activity of the Orosí complex is not known.
The SW side of Volcán Cacao, located at the SE end of the Orosí volcanic massif, is cut by an arcuate depression created during a massive slope failure in which the summit of the volcano was removed. The vertical light-colored stripes on the upper edifice are rockslide scars. The latest eruptive activity at the Orosí complex consisted of post-collapse lava domes and flows from Cerro Cacao.
The Orosí volcanic complex is seen here from the north, with the summit of Orosí in the clouds at the right and Volcán Cacao, the highest peak of the complex, at the left. Orosí is one of a cluster of four eroded and vegetated cones in the eastern part of Guanacaste National Park at the NW corner of Costa Rica. Volcán Orosí itself has a conical shape as viewed from the north or west, but its flanks are heavily eroded. Reported eruptions of Orosí in 1844 and 1849 may actually have been from Rincón de la Vieja volcano.
Photo by William Melson (Smithsonian Institution).
The low hill in the background is part of a massive debris-avalanche deposit formed by collapse of Volcán Cacao (also called Cerro Cacao). The avalanche swept onto the flat-lying Pacific coastal plain as far as the Central American highway, near where this photo was taken.
Large Eruptions of Orosí Information about large Quaternary eruptions (VEI >= 4) is cataloged in the Large Magnitude Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (LaMEVE) database of the Volcano Global Risk Identification and Analysis Project (VOGRIPA).


Light forces fingers into where we'd tried to cage.
Prying, ruthless, tearing away the nailed up timbers.
The timbers weren't sound, were they?
Or the nails not put in straight.
And the light floods in.
Rudely, the room's exposed with its bare store shelves and dust, like mice, lined up on every surface.
We don't need velvet now.
No point in ornamenting the tawdry.
I lie panting, dust prickles on sweat-soaked skin.
How spring can be like an autumn wind, that strips away the leaves from a nest no longer worth hiding.
Rachel McGladdery lives in rural Lancashire.
This entry was posted on August 18, 2009, 9:26 pm and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
really liked this, i read it three times! strong writing that hooks the reader and makes you want to read more, very lyrical also.


The Guam Plant Extinction Prevention Program (GPEPP) is an island-wide program dedicated to preventing the extinction of Guam's rarest plant species that have fewer than 200 individuals remaining in the wild by working with conservation partners to protect wild populations, preserve their genes off-site, and reintroduce plants to their natural habitats.
The College of Natural and Applied Sciences was created in 2003 by combining the former College of Agriculture and Life Sciences with the Mathematical Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Preprofessional programs from the former College of Arts and Sciences and the Military Science program from the former College of Business and Public Administration. The College of Natural and Applied Sciences administers courses in military science and agriculture as part of the federal land grant mandate.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services acknowledgements.


The city of bridges, Ourense is the perfect place to discover the Galician countryside and drink in the spectacular river and mountain landscapes. This province, with a long winemaking tradition and four registered denominations of origin (Ribeiro, Valdeorras, Ribeira Sacra and Monterrei), is also home to thermal waters and baths that enchant tourist and locals alike.
Despite being the only Galician province without access to the sea, water has always played a big part in the layout and history of the city thanks to the Minho River which crosses it from east to west. The five bridges that cross the river are part of the personality of Ourense, the most spectacular being a historical Roman bridge (A Ponte Vella) and the cutting-edge Ponte do Milenio, each in its own way.
Ourense is also the most famous city of thermal baths in Galicia. The thermal waters of As Burgas, Outariz and Chavasqueira are all deserving of a visit, not only for this spectacular natural phenomenon but also for the health benefits of their waters.
To begin with, it was the gold. The gold brought by the river Miño. That was the reason why the Romans gave the name of Auriense (the place of the gold) to the peaceful little township that now is the third largest city in Galicia. And this is how we want you to feel in the Eurostars Auriense, in a peaceful enclave not without its luxuries and temptations.