It’s a Subcompact! No, it’s a SUV!
Many people believe that Twitter was invented in 2006. However, there is growing evidence that the 140-character messaging service may have existed as early as 2000.
This was the year that groups of engineers, apparently communicating with such brevity that they were actually working completely independently from each other, designed the Pontiac Aztek. Which is quite possibly the worst-looking vehicle ever allowed to be assembled on the face of Planet Earth.
My apologies to all of the Pontiac Aztek owning readers of this blog. But seriously, what possessed you?
Sprint Has Good PR People for the Palm Pre
This from a press release announcing customer reaction to the new Palm Pre smartphone.
The anticipation of getting a device found many customers waiting in line at Sprint retail stores Saturday morning. One person in line – on his wedding day – was Theodore Travis.
On Saturday at 7 a.m., Theodore was 14th in line at an Atlanta-area Sprint store, fidgeting for his new Pre. His wedding was scheduled for 8 a.m. As much as Theodore wanted Pre, he wanted his bride, Anita, to see him at the altar at the appointed time. At 7:45, he abandoned his wait and left his line-number and credit card information with a Sprint store employee, asking that he “hold the 14th phone for me.” The Sprint store employee obliged. Minutes after the recessional, the newlyweds returned to pick up their phone, spending the first minutes of married life with a Ready Now consultant who walked the happy couple through Pre’s setup and features. The new Mrs. Travis later revealed that her reaction was “You did what?” to her husband spending the hour before their wedding waiting for a phone, but later admitted, “I guess I kind of understand now.”
People do go a little crazy over these mobile computing devices that also happen to make telephone calls. 
The Effect of President Obama’s Budget “Cuts”
It’s probably fairly clear where I stand on President Obama. I’m incredibly proud that our country elected its first African-American president. I admire him as a husband, as a father, and as a communicator.
That being said, I think many of his policies are seriously misguided — for example, his proposal to double the tax on investment at a time when we desperately need $2 to $4 trillion dollars sitting on the sidelines to come back into asset classes that are under capitalized.
And if you look at the President’s legacy so far, it is one of tremendously undisciplined spending. His $3.6 trillion budget proposal was a “have your cake and eat it too” budget. Apparently, we needed to make zero sacrifices in a time of unprecedented budget deficits.
(Of course, President Bush shares plenty of the blame for deficits. My dislike for his record on federal spending is hopefully just as well documented.)
President Obama has tried to mitigate the public relations effects of the skyrocketing federal deficit by announcing that he is cutting $100 million in federal spending. The following video illustrates just how “disciplined” that spending cut actually is.
(Feed and e-mail readers, click through to watch the video.)
I have a feeling we’ll have the “opportunity” to demonstrate what a real spending cut looks like when it comes to the $97 million Sierra College budget. And when I say opportunity, my tongue is firmly in cheek.
SC@Work: June 9, 2009 Pre-Meeting Documents
Pre-meeting documents:
- Meeting Agenda
- Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
- Warrants
This meeting can be summed up in one word: BUDGET. If you aren’t aware of the state budget crisis and the incredible effects it will have on our local governments, please read a newspaper, and then come to the meeting and add your voice to the mix.
We have a series of very tough decisions to make, if we’re going to keep Sierra College on the right track in the midst of this fiscal hurricane. Your input is crucial, so I really hope you’ll make the effort to come.
SC@Work: May 12, 2009 Board Meeting
I’m so behind on posting this…my sincere apologies! Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of additional documents generated for this meeting. A lot of work is still at the committee level, and the agenda was on the light side to give us time for an extended board planning workshop focused on our strategic planning process.
We did have the redistricting issue come up, which was the subject of a blog post earlier. I had made the decision to oppose it, because I think our district has a huge advantage by not being balkanized between different districts, but coming at problems with unified interests and accountability. For lack of another motion, I moved to table the issue, and the motion to table passed 4-3 (Leslie, Palmer, Vineyard and Klein).
Meeting documents:
- Meeting Agenda
- Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
- Warrants
- Survey Results from 2009 President’s Breakfast
- Strategic Planning: Resource Allocation Process
Here’s the Twitter feed from the meeting. You can follow this during future meetings by searching “#sierracollege” at search.twitter.com.
- 2:35 PM — Closed session starting. Tweet on the other side. #sierracollege
- 4:56 PM — Hasn’t been a good meeting to Twitter. Lots happening. Took action on student expulsion for issue of violence, I voted yes. #sierracollege
- 4:57 PM — Adopted 09-10 board goals. Redistricting proposal failed 4-3, I voted to table. #sierracollege
- 4:57 PM — Now doing planning update on NCC facilities expansion. #sierracollege
- 5:01 PM — Saying thank you to Neal Allbee, retiring as NCC Exec Dean. His replacement, Stephanie Ortiz, is great. Congrats Neal. #sierracollege
- 5:23 PM — Speeding through the agenda. I reported on our Facilities Cmte meeting. At trustee reports now. #sierracollege
- 5:25 PM — Stephanie’s replacement as Dean of BizTech is Luis Sanchez, another great guy. #sierracollege
- 5:30 PM — Saying goodbye to student trustee Zach Rutledge…a great guy. New guy is Chris Randleman, excited to meet him. #sierracollege
- 5:35 PM — Just delivered my report about the trustee’s conference and commencement. #sierracollege
- 6:24 PM — Back from a break. Getting a briefing on the new strategic planning and resource allocation process. #sierracollege
- 9:16 PM — Forgot to wrap up. Great meeting. I’m so proud of our incredible exec team. Leo, Rachel, Doug, Mandy and Ron are the best. #sierracollege
- 9:19 PM — Next time, I hope one of you will twitter a question or idea my way. Glad to share your input with the board. #sierracollege
A New Model
The community college system’s greatest asset and largest expense are our faculty. Many of the best and brightest in California impart their knowledge to two and a half million students every year.
In these economic times, community colleges are facing some difficult problems: rising costs, shrinking budgets, and tremendous pressures in the system. Yet on the other hand, our college community finds it difficult to even contemplate reducing the number of students that we’re preparing to be productive citizens.
But the bottom line is this: we’re facing a 4% to 5% cut in our budget. Under our traditional education delivery system, that would typically result in a reduction in our available classes, and a significant number of part time instructors wouldn’t have classes to teach in that next semester.
With that being said, what I can’t figure out is why the system utilizes our most valuable asset and greatest expense — our faculty — like cogs in a factory assembly line. We pay these teachers for their brainpower, and then have them stand at the front of a classroom and deliver the same lecture time after time to a classroom of 30 or so students.
One of our faculty members recently gave me a copy of the book “Disrupting Class”, and I’m still digesting it, but I was struck by the opportunity to solve many of our financial challenges by adopting technology in a game-changing way.
Here’s the idea: some of our classes are purely labs, but many of them have at least 25% of class time occupied by lecture. Imagine if we could take a sizable number of our on-ground classes and deliver 4 out of the 16 semester weeks via iTunesU video lecture (which many of our online classes have already videotaped).
With this model, our faculty could then focus more of their time on the aspects of teaching where they can deliver the most value and have the greatest impact on student success.
And if we could stagger which weeks are delivered via video lecture, every block of four classes could be delivered by our faculty using the same working hours that the previous model took to deliver three.
Some say the faculty unions will never agree to this. I’m not so sure. First, this could ensure that we could at least maintain, and potentially increase, the number of students we’re serving under the funding we have available. Second, it’s clear that implementing this new delivery method could be optional, and we could agree to split the cost savings with the participating faculty members. Everybody wins.
I know this wouldn’t be easy. We’d have to hammer out a union agreement, undergo a crash project to identify the classes where this would work, secure the appropriate video lectures (either from the online class library or by taping new sessions), and rework course schedules for students.
But if there’s any college where it could be done, it’s Sierra College. With the collaborative culture we share, and the innovative spirit that I see so much of at our board meetings, I think it’s possible that we could be a statewide model for keeping the promise of community college education alive, vibrant and thriving.
Shouldn’t we at least try?
Pretty Stupid
Warner Brothers is releasing a movie called “Orphan” in July. This is apparently a horror flick about an adopted child “going bad”, and then attacking and killing members of her new family.
This is both (a) about as extraordinarily rare as biological kids killing their parents or siblings, and (b) a common and sad stereotype of adopted kids.
As an adoptive dad, I’ve experienced this to some degree. While no one has ever directly brought up this kind of violence, a few have danced around it, asking if I was worried about whether our son might reject us or “act out” when he is older. To which I answered, “sure…but I’d have the same worry about a biological child, too.”
The problem I have with the reinforcement of this stereotype is that being “an orphan” or being adopted is not something that a child chooses for him or herself. In that way, it’s much like race itself.
Frankly, I’m not a big fan of political correctness. I’m not one to get all up in arms over something like this. And truthfully, if there was a movie about a family, and one of the minor characters was an adopted child acting out this stereotype as one part of a broader story, you probably wouldn’t hear much from me.
But this is a movie called “Orphan” where the false stereotype is central to the film itself.
This is the equivalent of releasing a movie called “Black” about how gangbangers are ruining neighborhoods…and you can replace that with any other kind of false stereotype that judges people not by their choices, but by how they were born.
The height of offense is the line in the trailer: “it must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own” (spoken by the little girl herself).
This is one of those seemingly empathetic statements made by people who often possess subtle attitudes of anti-adoption discrimination. Frankly, it’s the racial equivalent of “oh, Korean people can’t drive as well because their eyes are slanted…it’s not their fault!”
First, an adoptive child IS most definitely “your own.” There is nothing not “your own” about an adoptive child.
Second, there is nothing harder about loving an adoptive child than a biological one. That’s difficult for some people who have never experienced adoption to understand. But when you become the adoptive parent of a little boy or little girl, a magical bond is created that extends way beyond the few strands of DNA that differ between you.
So the release of this movie saddens me. Warner Brothers has already apologized for the “hard to love” comparison and is removing that line from the trailer (and ostensibly, the movie).
But I hope they rethink their approach with this film. There are plenty of ways to entertain people without reinforcing false and hurtful stereotypes on a group of people who didn’t choose to be members of said group.
And for the record, Koreans can drive just fine.
What do you think? Am I being overly sensitive about this as an adoptive dad? Am I viewing this too subjectively? Or did I hit the nail on the head?
A Report to the Community
Did you know that those who earn AA degrees will, on average, earn $9,312 more per year over their lifetimes than those who only finish high school?
The power of education is amazing. Sierra College is doing an incredible job of delivering on that promise, and we’re only getting more innovative at doing so every year.
Is Socialism the Right Word?
There’s been a debate in local politics about whether a few local bloggers, George Rebane and Russ Steele, are right to refer to President Obama’s policies as “socialist” in nature.
Jonah Goldberg addresses the issue in today’s local newspaper:
The government effectively owns General Motors and controls Chrysler, and the president is deciding what kind of cars they can make. Uncle Sam owns majority stakes in American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and controls large chunks of the banking industry. Also, President Obama wants government to take over the business of student loans. And he’s pushing for nationalized health care. Meanwhile, his Environmental Protection Agency has ruled that it reserves the right to regulate any economic activity that has a “carbon footprint.” Just last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said climate change requires that “every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory.” Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has his eye on regulating executive pay.
Of course, nationalization of industry is only one kind of socialism; another approach is to simply redistribute the nation’s income as economic planners see fit. But wait, Obama believes in that, too. That’s why he said during the campaign that he wants to “spread the wealth” and that’s why he did exactly that when he got elected. (He spread the debt, too.)
And yet, for conservatives to suggest in any way, shape or form that there’s something “socialistic” about any of this is the cause of knee-slapping hilarity for liberal pundits and bloggers everywhere.
NCC campus expansion moving ahead
The Union has an update on the progress of the second phase of the Sierra College NCC campus expansion. That’s a picture of the groundbreaking many months ago.
The second phase of Sierra College’s expansion could start by mid-July, according to the two Grass Valley contractors who are in line to lead the $13 million worth of construction at the Grass Valley campus.
In April, Tru Line Builders and Sierra Foothills Construction joined with Clark & Sullivan of Sacramento for the right to bid and negotiate the project.
Tru Line’s Tim Brady said Tuesday the consortium would have no problem meeting the college’s $13 million maximum budget. His firm is handling about $10 million in new buildings and Sierra Foothills is doing $3 million in renovations, according to that company’s owner Keoni Allen.
