Test 2

This is Molly

Long story short:

For a couple of years my family has wanted to adopt a dog. The Wife and I had a loving chocolate lab named Bailey back in the early 2000s (prior to children). Once The Boy was born, we had to give her up to another family that had the time and energy to give her the attention that she deserved. It was hard for us, but it was the right call.

The Kids, getting ready to take Molly to her forever home

Since then, we haven't had a family dog. We adopted and socialized a feral cat a few years ago - and he's been the family pet since then. BUT, cats are far less "needy" than dogs and my concern was that if we adopted a dog the kids wouldn't be mature enough to help out.

   

Enter: Molly. She's a one-year-old Border Collie-Terrier mix that was abandoned in Georgia. She's so mild-mannered and chill that I think she'll fit in with our family quite well.

So begins our Grand Experiment. Will the kids walk Molly regularly? Will they pick up her poo (without complaining)? Time will tell. What I do know is that this pup is FULL of love and affection.

More to come...

Meeting Molly at her foster home

Oh, and if you're in central Pennsylvania (or relatively close) and you're interested in adopting, we worked with PA Caring for K-9s (and on Facebook). The process was super-smooth and pleasant, and the folks (read: volunteers) are so kind and accommodating. We highly recommend their services.

Dear Santa, my friend Larry sent me a link to this Nerf blaster at SlickDeals:


Yes please. I'll be real good this year...

Yikes:

The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg admitted nearly 700 applicants in recent days, but human error is being blamed for more than 400 of those admissions offers having been sent out incorrectly. They have since been revoked.

The university issued this statement: “We were dismayed to learn about the acceptance emails that were mistakenly sent Saturday due to human error. All of us work in higher education because we care about students, and we understand the confusion and distress a mistake like this can cause. As soon as we found out about the situation, we immediately reviewed our process for communicating with prospective students and have changed our procedures to prevent this from happening again. In addition, our staff is calling each of the affected students to apologize and discuss their application status. They hope to contact all of the students by the end of this week.”

In my work, one of my responsibilities is the oversight of the release of admission decisions. At Penn State, the Undergraduate Admissions Office processes thousands of admission decisions - particularly this time of the year. We have measures in place to ensure that decisions are checked and re-checked so that erroneous admission decisions don't ever get out. But there is always a non-zero-percent-chance that mistakes in decision-making can get through our quality assurance processes. It's not uncommon for me and my colleagues to lose a few hours of sleep questioning whether or not we have dotted all of the proverbial Is and crossed of the proverbial Ts. But, from my perspective it could be much, much worse. My worst fears at Penn State would add an additional zero to USF's 400 mistaken admission decisions.

I feel for the folks at USF @ St. Petersburg, I really do. For what it's worth, they are taking the right tack. Owning the error and apologizing for it is the right thing to do - even if it will be painful for a while.

...along with everything else around here.


Wait. What just happened?

The coooooolest emote in Fornite y'all. One of the things that I really like about Fortnite is the emote. Granted they aren't all winners, but the fact that one can dance around the corpse of a fallen enemy is pretty cool.

I need to learn this dance for the next wedding that I attend...

An interesting take-down of online learning:

The report said its review of the evidence demonstrated that:

• Online education is the fastest-growing segment of higher education and its growth is overrepresented in the for-profit sector;
• Faculty and academic leaders, employers and the general public are skeptical about the quality and value of online education, which they view as inferior to face-to-face education;
• Students in online education, particularly underprepared and disadvantaged students, underperform and on average experience poor outcomes;
• Online education has failed to improve affordability, frequently costs more than in-person alternatives and does not produce a positive return on investment;
• Regular and substantive student-instructor interactivity is a key determinant of quality in online education, leading to improved student satisfaction, learning and outcomes.

The stakes are high, its co-authors conclude.

“There is a real risk that both cost-cutting efforts and well-intentioned moves to expand access to higher education could lead to greater numbers of disadvantaged students being relegated to cheap and ineffective online instruction, with detrimental results, both in terms of outcomes and student loan defaults,” they wrote.

But not everyone agrees with the report's findings:

However, several experts who read the report said it relied mostly on old data and was overly broad in its conclusions.

The paper indiscriminately trashes online education, said Fiona Hollands, associate director and senior researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“It's almost all old data, old news and not very even-handed,” she said via email, adding that the report “reads as advocacy more than research and conveniently skips out on some of the more recent and positive stories for students in online learning.”

But...

Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said the report by Protopsaltis and Baum painted online education with too broad a brush. For example, its comparisons between online programs and on-campus ones failed to acknowledge the low graduation rates and default rates of many traditional programs that enroll similarly high percentages of low-income, older students.

...and this is where I land as well.

If you're going to make assertions about the successes or failures of online programs, then you should really make comparisons to "traditional", resident instruction programs. For the most part, the report in question doesn't do that. I would agree with Schroeder that it is essentially incomplete.

The other glaring item in the report is that the phrase "for-profit" appears in the report 66 times, while the phrase "not-for-profit" appears only once. After a cursory read of the findings, the focus of the 'take-down' appears to be on the for-profit institutions. Perhaps a more detailed analysis of the not-for-profit institutions that offer fully on-line degree programs would be warranted.

I must have been under a rock for the past few months as I had no idea that this flick was coming out next month. I loved the first film, and am stoked for "the second part".

Two glaring thoughts about the (AWESOME!) trailer:

1. The cast is (once again) quite impressive! Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman (!), and Maya Rudolph, just to name a few.
2. That soundtrack! Anytime that I can hear the Beastie Boys, I'm a happy guy. The fact that they incorporated "Intergalactic" in the trailer (and hopefully in the movie!) is just fantastic.

All of that to say that I hope the second movie delivers the same quality as the first did.

An interesting article at Inside Higher Ed today about state spending on higher education. Money:

States spent 3.7 percent more supporting higher education in fiscal year 2018-19 than in the previous year. The small rise continued a five-year trend of upward support that this year totals about $91.5 billion. In the previous fiscal year, support for higher education grew just 1.6 percent, according to the Grapevine survey, an annual early survey of state indicators. And while five states reported funding decreases between FY18 and FY19, that represents a small fraction of the 18 states that reported declines the previous year.

Here in Pennsylvania, we spent 1,756,295,000 in 2018, up from 1,713,363,000 in 2017 - and 1,644,692,000 in 2014. That represents a 2.5% increase in the past year, and a 6.5% increase over the last four years. Not all states are headed in that direction:

In the five states that provided less funding -- Ohio, Alaska, Minnesota, Kentucky and South Carolina -- the drop ranged from 0.1 percent in Ohio and Alaska to 1.4 percent in Minnesota. In Kentucky, it dropped by 2.4 percent. South Carolina reported the largest one-year drop of all states at 3.7 percent.

At least we are headed in the right direction in Pennsylvania...

An interesting article at Inside Higher Ed today about state spending on higher education. Money:

States spent 3.7 percent more supporting higher education in fiscal year 2018-19 than in the previous year. The small rise continued a five-year trend of upward support that this year totals about $91.5 billion.

In the previous fiscal year, support for higher education grew just 1.6 percent, according to the Grapevine survey, an annual early survey of state indicators.

And while five states reported funding decreases between FY18 and FY19, that represents a small fraction of the 18 states that reported declines the previous year.

Here in Pennsylvania, we spent 1,756,295,000 in 2018, up from 1,713,363,000 in 2017 - and 1,644,692,000 in 2014. That represents a 2.5% increase in the past year, and a 6.5% increase over the last four years.

Not all states are headed in that direction:

In the five states that provided less funding -- Ohio, Alaska, Minnesota, Kentucky and South Carolina -- the drop ranged from 0.1 percent in Ohio and Alaska to 1.4 percent in Minnesota. In Kentucky, it dropped by 2.4 percent. South Carolina reported the largest one-year drop of all states at 3.7 percent.

At least we are headed in the right direction in Pennsylvania...