Millennials are just tragically misunderstood!

I just had to post one of the closing paragraphs from this article I saw on Salon today (via Fark).  It sounds like this guy has figured out the secret of life at 25 (seriously).

For all their being dismissed as entitled, millennials have to channel more and more of their resources toward succeeding in any field.

Jason Ritzke, a 25-year-old operations manager in broadcast television, says he and his wife sent out 400 job applications and received four interviews. He managed to find a job. She’s still looking. He doesn’t take many risks as a result. He says, “As difficulty scales, as it becomes more and more difficult to elevate yourself, you find yourself giving up things. You find yourself asking, ‘Can I ride this bike without a helmet? What will happen to my wife if I lose my job? Can she provide for herself? Can she get a job fast enough to do it?’ Every day I have to lean on every single one of my faculties at work to haul myself just a tiny bit higher. Then I come home and work to fight the forces of entropy on my life, to fix things, to pay bills. I do everything by the straight and narrow because the penalties for falling off the track are so steep.”

Does he wish he was out partying? Maybe a little. Does he feel less cool because he’s not doing so?

“Do I feel lame?” asks Jason. “No. I feel like Hercules.”

Most of the piece is about how Millennials are so much more giving and attentive, etc. but this part really stands out.

I humbly submit that Mr. Ritzke has figured out the meaning of life - acting responsibly.  He's probably going to make it to adulthood successfully in a few years.

Proctoring update! And the Capstone Game.

For those of you who have expressed some interest in the whole online course integrity issue at UHCL (and you know who you are) I wanted to post a little update.

As you already know, Dr. Williams, Dr. Rusth and I are proctoring this semester.  They proctored a bunch of things, and I only required ProctorU.com for the final exams.  Funny enough: when I gave students the choice of taking the exam, online, with a proctor, or coming to campus to take it on a Friday or Saturday afternoon, most students (overwhelmingly) chose to simply come to campus.

The pilot study for ProctorU in the School of Business continues over the summer and into the fall, when we have our AACSB (accreditation) visit.  The university will also be testing two or three other systems including RemoteProctorNow and one other.  All of these include some "lock down" of the browser and remote system during the exam, but I'm not sure they all involve live proctors.

We haven't moved forward on instructing students to pay for their proctoring sessions yet - I'm not sure what folks are waiting on at the university.  I figure that when local students figure out that university resources are being used to pay for online student testing they'll probably blow a gasket.  Who knows?  Seems very unfair to ask local students to pay for (directly or indirectly) the cost of online student exams.  Seems unethical, almost.

One more issue for the alums:  Some MS Finance students have started complaining that advisors are letting other students "skip" the seminar class.  I'm not sure how that happens - it's the capstone course for crying out loud.  I'll have to check into it and report back as to whether that is actually happening, and whether it's become some kind of game ("but my roommate got to do it..." etc.).  Dr. Kathleen Williamson is responsible for that kind of thing, so I'll have to ask her about it once I get some more of this grading stuff behind me.

Watch this space for updates.

The Turner Report: A warning to those who want to become teachers

The Turner Report: A warning to those who want to become teachers

No ebooks, no flying cars: the future is here, where are my ebooks?

Interesting article here from IDG Connect on why eBooks still face an uphill battle.  The short answer (in my opinion): lack of random access, simultaneous access.  Also, institutional inertia. 

Houston is Number One...in burglaries (from Jan 3rd)

Yahoo posted a story from CNBC on January 3rd that ranks major metro areas by burglaries.  Houston was tops, followed by all of the usual suspects.  It seems that this represents a trend in recent years.  I just thought it would make a good PSA, especially since this is the first I've heard of it.

Who's moving where from Business Insider

Check out the map of who's moving where from Atlas - of course that probably only really counts those folks who use moving vans to move.

The original is here.

Interesting trends.  Plus, I think Canada is getting bigger.

'Well-regulated' and intent: Words have meanings

We hear a lot of back-and-forth about whether the 2nd Amendment is talking about individual or states' rights.

Some things come to mind on this. First, wouldn't it be unusual among the Bill of Rights amendments to have one that discusses a collective right? I think most of them dealt with individual rights, didn't they?

Next: well-regulated. The term has nothing to do with a militia being a state organization - it's about whether the militia is capable of performing effectively. The use of the term isn't novel to the Bill of Rights, as this post at constitution.org points out

Here.

Maybe we should seek to figure out all of the interpretations relevant to the First Amendment next. After all, I don't think the founders could have conceived of the slop that we see on the Intarwebs these days billing itself as 'news.'

As I've said before, if politicians would just interpret the Second Amendment the way they want to interpret the First, we'd all be REQUIRED to own guns, most likely.