Adjunct slavery:
We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.
Some thoughts on the fall of academia:
I support the move toward “adjunct administrators.” It used to be widely understood that a college or university travels on the quality of its faculty, not its climbing walls, dining halls, or number of administrators. The University of Arkansas’ Jay Greene found that between 1993 and 2007, the number of administrators at research universities grew by 39 percent per 100 students while the number of employees directly involved in research and teaching grew by just 18 percent. More damning, spending on administration grew 50 percent faster than spending on instruction. Administrators don’t just add to the open-air prison climate on many campuses, they directly add to rising costs.
via “Nobody ever heard of an ‘adjunct administrator'”: Higher Ed SNAFU – Hit & Run : Reason.com.
“A few minutes into the flight, the Falcon’s second stage is set up to separate and continue the trek to orbit. The first stage, meanwhile, will be commanded to relight its rocket engines and slow its descent toward the Atlantic Ocean. If everything works properly, the launch vehicle will unfold a set of four landing legs, practice a landing maneuver — and then settle down into the sea gently enough to be recovered and reused.”
via SpaceX Aims to Blaze New Trail for Rocket Technology – NBC News.com.
“Putin said his move to take control of Crimea was justified by what he calls “fascists” in Kiev who overthrew pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovich last month after three months of often deadly street protests.”
The biggest fascist in Europe is Putin.
via Russian forces storm Ukraine naval HQ in Crimea – Yahoo News.
To be included as a record, the NCDC has a rather loose requirement for including stations. Their website has some problems witht he map plotter at the moment, but if I recall correctly, there a station can be included if it has a 30-year record and each year has coverage of at least 182 days. Therefore, any station that has recorded temperature data for half of each year since 1984 will be considered as setting a new record.
Such as loose definition, however, is likely very misleading to the media, politicians, and the general public. When most people hear that a new “record high temperature” has been set, they usually have a longer period of time in mind. I suspect that most people would react differently to an announcement of a “record high temperature” if they understood that the records began when Ronald Reagan was president. Of course, it is convenient for political reasons to maximize the number of “record high temperatures” because it fits the mandatory narrative about global warming or climate change.
Skeptics have been quick to point out that many of the stations in question have short records lasting only relatively short time scales, so these so-called record temperatures are relatively meaningless in the context of the longer times that most people are thinking about. Skeptics are also quick to point out when even the skewed NCDC records go the wrong way. For instance, the fact that 2013 had more daily record low temperatures than daily high records was fairly well communicated on skeptic blogs. (BTW, this trend has also continued for January and February of 2014, with more record low records than record highs.)
via ‘Record temperatures’ placed in context with station history | Watts Up With That?.
I don’t begrudge anyone the good fortune of right place/right time, take your money and run, but first drop a knee and be humbled before God reflecting soberly on the knowledge that you didn’t deserve it. I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be lying and you will believe it. You hold a fetish of value and not actual value.
via The Last Psychiatrist: Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth?.
Since the last space shuttle flight two-and-a-half years ago, our only means of getting NASA astronauts or anyone to the ISS has been on the Soyuz launch system, at an ever-rising cost, now over $70M a seat as of last August. Alternate competing U.S. means to replace it are under development in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, but Congress has been continually underfunding the effort in order to instead funnel money to the Space Launch System, a giant rocket with no funded payloads and no apparent mission other than providing job security in the states and districts of those on the congressional space committees.
via PJ Media » Time to End Our Dependence on Russian Spaceships.
“If you do become prohibited, we are going to come confiscate your firearms. But only people who have done something in their life – committed a felony, committed a violent misdemeanor, they are a fugitive from justice or they have … Read More
via The Truth About Guns http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/12/robert-farago/quote-day-going-come-confiscate-firearms-edition/
New information has been released about the two boys who were suspended from school for playing with an Airsoft gun on their on private property while waiting for the school bus. It appears a neighborhood mother called 911 to report the incident, but get this, she knew it was a toy gun and still called […]
via Guns Save Lives http://gunssavelives.net/news/mother-calls-911-on-boy-for-playing-with-airsoft-gun-which-she-knew-was-not-real-when-she-called/
HEH: Sisterhood of the traveling ass: Hillary Clinton is ‘no ways tired’ of offensive fake accent.
via Instapundit http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/172607/