I'd like to start a brainstorming conversation about how a football (or other sports) season could be held with no fans in attendance. We could watch the game on TV as we often do anyway, but I think the experience is lessened with no audience. This reminds me of the old sitcoms that used to have "canned laugher". It was fake, but better than nothing. We could do the same, or something like that. Synthetic crowd noise?
How about home audience participation? Zoom for, say, 10,000 people? If we allocate only a few hundred pixels per person, maybe that would still be a good effect. If it's a night game, you can project the image onto the seats. Or greenscreen it in. If the audio bandwidth is also too big, maybe give people a set of buttons. Instead of emoticons, fan noises like OOHHH, YAY, DARN, Groan, and of course Go Bears!
A parade block can come surprisingly close to required spacing (if you don't go all Texas aTm!), and with no one else in the stands, you could spread out, though the sound quality would seem to suffer. I think playing a wind instrument with a mask on would be a real challenge to overcome!
Went for a long ride through some trails in the woods on Saturday, then did a bunch of nothing yesterday because it was cold and rainy all day.
I also saved my neighbor from having a nuclear meltdown: his four-year old daughter found a rock and wrote her name in the side of his Land Rover. Fortunately, it didn't go through the clear coat, so I was able to use a clay bar to remove 95% of the evidence. After that and a coat of wax, you could hardly tell there was ever any damage in the first place. I'm surprised it worked so well, because it looked awful when I first saw it.
Fantasy book club, cookbook club, Dungeons and Dragons, movies (Murder on the Orient Express; Ghostbusters; The Man from UNCLE; Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas; Brittany Runs a Marathon), books (Lies, Damned Lies & History; Rosewater; Hot Lead, Cold Iron)
The recent Kenneth Branaugh remake. I need to read more Agatha Christie because I feel like I missed a lot of the Poirot references, but it was a beautiful movie to watch.
More a matter of frustration than boredom, when I realize how much is not getting done, and how much time is being lost, usually when I finish the day's major projects and have some time, but no one to do anything with.
I got to work half of Sunday because an asshole supplier whose name rhymes with Trabazon Deb Cervixes decide to be their usual assholish bullshit selves.
they've got a sales playbook that is soooooo predictable (just like Microsoft). I tell them what they are going to do, they deny and swear it will be different, then they go and do it. They're not faring well in one particular project so they did their usual end around to the C level to get them back in the mix. It makes me tired, especially on a Sunday morning
That just sucks. We’re fighting with a MSFT product team over performance although in fairness our customer could just solve it with more money, it’s not a technical problem.
I wasn’t really all that bored; but: went for a long walk with the missus yesterday, watched the Extraction movie on Netflix, and talked to my brother about getting things like power of attorney and living wills sorted out for our parents because they will not stop leaving the house. Their ill health means we should have done this some time ago anyway.
Stopped by the lady friend's house on my way home from work and had happy hour in her backyard. Saturday, we cooked out then got drunk around the fire pit. Sunday, we sat around the lake with the dog and got day drunk. No Marshawn sightings tho.
I've found myself taking the long route on most of my trips to the grocery store. I miss driving my car, so it's nice to have a bit of fun on the road when I can.
Same with me. I went around Briones Reservour, back along Reliez Valley Rd, down past Acalanes, and over to TJ. I was stuck behind this minivan that was going like 30 and braking on all the downhills. Sucked.
I'm very fond of Ticket to Ride, where people compete to build train lines across the US. There's several other versions that let you build train lines across Europe and several other countries.
Haven't played it since college but Eclipse was one of my favorites. Explore space (hexes), colonise and develop planets, upgrade your fleet and fight other players or fixed challenges for galactic supremacy. Between the detailed ship minis and the individual player board layouts, it always felt very engaging.
In the early stages of this “shelter in place” experience I thought I might try and find board games for family fun (I don’t enjoy board games and don’t play them, but I was worried about the family not interacting well). Fortunately everyone has adapted because the 17 year old (who also dislikes games) made it clear that that she wasn’t joining in. So I’m safe.
Any of you on tik tok will have seen that every thirty something posting about how they are killing time / day drinking / annoying their spouse needs to stop.
"When the global pandemic made air travel impossible, a group of Dutch high school students stranded in the Caribbean got home the old-fashioned way — sailing a 200-foot schooner across the Atlantic.
The 25 teenagers on board the Wylde Swan sailed into the port of Harlingen and were reunited with their families on Sunday, roughly five weeks after leaving the island of Saint Lucia. Many of the students had minimal sailing experience when they signed up for an educational program aboard the two-masted schooner and had anticipated spending only six weeks cruising the relatively calm waters of the Caribbean.
But in mid-March, many islands began shutting down their ports to stop the spread of the coronavirus. When the Wylde Swan arrived in Saint Lucia, getting through customs proved to be a struggle.
Plans to sail to Cuba and fly back to the Netherlands from there quickly fell apart as more countries closed their borders and grounded flights. Finally, it became clear that the only way for the 25 teenagers, 12 crew members and three teachers to get home would be embark on a journey of nearly 4,500 nautical miles across the ocean.
On top of purchasing nearly 400 pounds of vegetables, the crew of the Wylde Swan also had to stock up on warm clothes and foul-weather gear to prepare for the voyage. They made one stop in the Azores for supplies, but were not allowed to leave the boat.
Along the way, the students gradually got past their seasickness and watched dolphins swim alongside the vessel. One 17-year-old told the Omrop Fryslan Dutch radio station that it had been “an even more exciting journey than what I had signed up for.”
When I was in Hawaii for a week, over a weekend, the PM took us (3 total) on a catamaran to go snorkeling in Turtle Bay. We had condos over in Turtle Bay. We had lunch Haleiwa right before we boarded in the afternoon. Surprisingly I was fine going out. Sometimes I do feel nauseous on ferries. The sea was fairly calm. We got the life jackets and snorkels on and spent maybe an hour snorkeling. My other coworker is Goan and doesn't know how to swim, but went out there. I was impressed. He had an issue with his mask so I stopped to help him out and there was a wave and I ended up swallowing some water. After about 5 min I felt bad and went back on the catamaran and promptly lost my cheeseburger and fries over the boarding ladder. The captain gave me some ginger pills and I fell asleep the whole trip back. I skipped dinner with them that night and stopped by a store and bought some fruit and crackers.
It was a blast, except for the throwing up part. Next time I'm not eating greasy burger and fries before.
I don't do water well either. When my sister and her husband visited Alaska we did a weekend trip that included a ferry from Whittier, south of Anchorage, to Valdez. The weather was not good and everyone else was below deck but I was up top trying to keep it together.
First colleague to get diagnosed with the ‘rona, he got confirmation last week after being out for over a week before he could get anyone to give him a test. It’s almost as if having limited testing capacity is a problem.
OMG we were on a team call with the customer and our lead customer totally started asking if he’d had the ‘rona and making a big fuss when he said yes. She’s a lawyer btw.
So this tread makes sense - I wrote "why are the women so terrible at parking" (or something like that) - and it is 100% true based on decades of managing this building. If you don't pull on the way in to a spot, you either block people in, or prevent them for parking in the perpendicular spot. And the woman that made me make this comment has lived here since 2003!
It was an astonishing example of tone-deaf executive cant from someone who should really do better. The people who run the summer camps where my wife works did a better job of communication and showing concern for the community both narrowly and writ large.
He's not wrong about points and considerations he raised. The transition to full instruction on-line was a sizable undertaking at OSU, and it already had one of the most extensive Ecampus programs in place. For some of the ivy on brick operations that hadn't even started down the 21st century education road, I'm sure it's been daunting.
That said, there have already been loss of pay and loss of jobs, and if campus doesn't open in the fall, a lot of people will lose jobs, some the rest of their careers, and a LOT of students will lose their scholarships and expense stipends. The checks would bounce if they were to be written.
The issue with an out-of-date housing and instruction facility infrastructure that was problematical 50 years ago was brought starkly to light with this event (as has a multitude of other of infrastructure and system problems everywhere), and won't be cheap or easy, and therefore quick, to update, but if no one starts working on the problems, it won't get better. Just waiting isn't a reasonable option, if its even a viable one.
One of the times I visited OSU's campus in 2015/2016 I saw the following sign.
<B>#WTF</B>OSU.
What to Fix, OSU.
Huh...seriously? Is there not a committee to oversee program names??
I can't remember if it was my 2 football game Saturday (UCLA/OSU and Cal/Oregon) or the Cal/OSU basketball game. For the football game, the brother of my friend that went to UCLA is one of the asst ADs and got her and her whole family and parents tickets to the UCLA/OSU game. She knew I was in Portland that year so she asked if I wanted to go. Luckily the. OSU game was at 3 and the Cal game was around 8. So after the OSU game I hung out for an hour or so and left to go to the Cal game. I was thinking of bailing but my college roommate and his family were going to meet me at the game. I ended up getting there about 10 min late and just missed both of our TDs. Of course Oregon outscored us something like 44-0 after that. I should've just stayed in Corvallis.
I understand the logic of everything that you are saying. In the specific case of Brown, knowing the campus and the neighborhood means that I know the president is full of shit. They don’t have the available housing space for quarantine nor can they stop students from crossing paths with locals - who are conspicuously absent from the op-ed. If they’re so smart, then they should be able to come up with something better.
One problem is with a significant segment that doesn't still want to deal with reality, much less come up with something better that might no be convenient for them.
if we go online in the fall, we're looking a HUGE chunk of revenue disappearing (we would understandably charge a lot less in tuition, but also as a residential college, the college loses out on room & board from all the students as dorms sit empty)
No 2 said that he knows some people taking the fall off. Which will make their last semester the following fall interesting. Vandy has almost 100% of students live on campus. Some stay in the greek houses. A waiver needs to be approved to live off campus. I'm wondering how many extra beds they have if the ones that "redshirt" and come back to finish in their 5th year and live on campus.
OSU can only house about 1/4 of their students, and it wouldn't be that high if they were to back off on the decision they rammed through to pacify the neighborhood associations requiring most freshmen to live on campus, so the demographic is quite different. UofO I believe is similar.
On the flip side, there are still several hundred students living in campus housing, even though there are no classes on campus. Most are international students who would have a hard time going home, and an even harder time getting back. Also some from around the country with lesser, but significant travel issues. But some are local/instate, who feel its a better option than going home. Its what has kept University Housing & Dining hanging on by a thread.
-the long-term financial health of our academic institutions (I'm obviously biased here, but pretty much anywhere dependent on tuition is going to suffer greatly)
-not being able to abruptly send everyone home every time there's another outbreak
OK but how does it work when in every lecture hall you can only have a student in every third seat of every other row? And everyone needs to live in a single? And you can't have a communal dining hall? I can't believe that pencils out any better.
I don't think social distancing and in-person education can co-exist. My take on the article: it raised real concerns that should be addressed, then it proposed a horrible solution
Distance learning and on-demand learning (vs. live) will have to remain a larger component in order to alleviate the problems with crowding. But the all or nothing approach either way isn't going to work. And you are right, it isn't going to pencil out using an unrealistic model. There is no doubt some institutions won't remain viable, just as some other businesses that are recklessly under capitalized won't.
Off the top of my head, you could consider only having freshmen and seniors on campus, although that only addresses bodies in space, the social distancing element seems in lieu outside of class
Lots of classes aren't year specific though. The priority would seem to be on some research and physical-contact areas of study, the ones where proximity and hands-on are central to the curriculum. Without all the lectures to halls half the audience for is asleep, you can spread out a lot easier.
That's one concept that's being pushed society wide, with the tracking software, not just in campus communities. At least he noted the civil and technical challenges, whereas some are hand-waving those a lot more than he did.
I mostly see this with bros driving lifted trucks that are pristine because they've never gone further off road than clipping the edge of their front lawn.
I'm only talking about the parking lot in my building, it's a bit (ok maybe a lot) idiosyncratic, but the main think is you have to pull in ALL THE WAY, leaving your car like 6 inches from the wall, or you block access to other spots in the corners.
The majority of Prius hybrids that exist in the world are registered to an address within 10 minutes of the OSU campus. And they are governed to have a top speed 10% below whatever the posted speed limit is.
The scourge of Prius drivers acting as a mobile roadblock is nationwide - or so I thought until I saw someone with pro cop pro guns bumper stickers on their Prius nearly barge a 3 series BMW off the road the other week. Now I don’t know what to think
FET, kinda. Once at a store in Western Mass, he parked kinda far down the main parking lot by himself in his STI. When he came back out, someone else in an STI also parked right by him, away from everyone else.
I also do find myself parking the Miata away from others.
Cal
Stadium Experience:
I'd like to start a brainstorming conversation about how a football (or other sports) season could be held with no fans in attendance. We could watch the game on TV as we often do anyway, but I think the experience is lessened with no audience. This reminds me of the old sitcoms that used to have "canned laugher". It was fake, but better than nothing. We could do the same, or something like that. Synthetic crowd noise?
How about home audience participation? Zoom for, say, 10,000 people? If we allocate only a few hundred pixels per person, maybe that would still be a good effect. If it's a night game, you can project the image onto the seats. Or greenscreen it in. If the audio bandwidth is also too big, maybe give people a set of buttons. Instead of emoticons, fan noises like OOHHH, YAY, DARN, Groan, and of course Go Bears!
The most un-glorious end to the uniquely college game day element that is the band?
Not necessarily! Got any suggestions? Some sort of virtual marching?
A parade block can come surprisingly close to required spacing (if you don't go all Texas aTm!), and with no one else in the stands, you could spread out, though the sound quality would seem to suffer. I think playing a wind instrument with a mask on would be a real challenge to overcome!
Crazy idea: marching formations in the empty stands. While preserving distancing.
Actually this might be feasible...
Robot fans, like in Taiwan!
Go Bears
How did you relieve some boredom this weekend?
Went for a long ride through some trails in the woods on Saturday, then did a bunch of nothing yesterday because it was cold and rainy all day.
I also saved my neighbor from having a nuclear meltdown: his four-year old daughter found a rock and wrote her name in the side of his Land Rover. Fortunately, it didn't go through the clear coat, so I was able to use a clay bar to remove 95% of the evidence. After that and a coat of wax, you could hardly tell there was ever any damage in the first place. I'm surprised it worked so well, because it looked awful when I first saw it.
I hope that little girl appreciates the extent to which her next birthday and winter solstice holiday have been saved by your timely action.
I have a toddler and a baby at home. I wish I had enough free time to get bored.
Fantasy book club, cookbook club, Dungeons and Dragons, movies (Murder on the Orient Express; Ghostbusters; The Man from UNCLE; Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas; Brittany Runs a Marathon), books (Lies, Damned Lies & History; Rosewater; Hot Lead, Cold Iron)
Murder on the Orient Express? the original? That SUCKS! We watched "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" - I'll report tomorrow
The recent Kenneth Branaugh remake. I need to read more Agatha Christie because I feel like I missed a lot of the Poirot references, but it was a beautiful movie to watch.
Watched Devs - episodes 1-7. Finishing 8 before lunch.
More a matter of frustration than boredom, when I realize how much is not getting done, and how much time is being lost, usually when I finish the day's major projects and have some time, but no one to do anything with.
I got to work half of Sunday because an asshole supplier whose name rhymes with Trabazon Deb Cervixes decide to be their usual assholish bullshit selves.
[crosses AWS off the job hunt list]
they've got a sales playbook that is soooooo predictable (just like Microsoft). I tell them what they are going to do, they deny and swear it will be different, then they go and do it. They're not faring well in one particular project so they did their usual end around to the C level to get them back in the mix. It makes me tired, especially on a Sunday morning
That just sucks. We’re fighting with a MSFT product team over performance although in fairness our customer could just solve it with more money, it’s not a technical problem.
I can't remember doing anything this weekend other than my normal runs so I don't think I relieved my boredom.
My son and his wife came over for happy hour (with distance) on the roof deck; at least the weather was very nice.
I wasn’t really all that bored; but: went for a long walk with the missus yesterday, watched the Extraction movie on Netflix, and talked to my brother about getting things like power of attorney and living wills sorted out for our parents because they will not stop leaving the house. Their ill health means we should have done this some time ago anyway.
Stopped by the lady friend's house on my way home from work and had happy hour in her backyard. Saturday, we cooked out then got drunk around the fire pit. Sunday, we sat around the lake with the dog and got day drunk. No Marshawn sightings tho.
Did a shifter rebuild on the Miata, washed the cars, lightly detailed the dash and seats. Went to Trader Joes the long way around (36 mi vs 6).
I've found myself taking the long route on most of my trips to the grocery store. I miss driving my car, so it's nice to have a bit of fun on the road when I can.
Same with me. I went around Briones Reservour, back along Reliez Valley Rd, down past Acalanes, and over to TJ. I was stuck behind this minivan that was going like 30 and braking on all the downhills. Sucked.
Board (games)
Dominion has been a lot of fun.
Not a comprehensive list of my favorites:
Splendor
Azul
Terraforming Mars
Qwirkle
Codenames
Set
Forbidden Island
Blokus
Tsuro
Munchkin Booty
Quelf
Cribbage, long a family staple, has seen a real resurgence in our house.
I'm very fond of Ticket to Ride, where people compete to build train lines across the US. There's several other versions that let you build train lines across Europe and several other countries.
https://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/
[deleted and redone because platform no likey inline links.]
Plus one.
This is a good game!
Is there a story about stolen games?
https://www.californiagoldenblogs.com/2014/9/11/6134917/dbd-9-11-14-board-games-triumphant?_ga=2.266415182.192980132.1588041519-1606213202.1541918274
TLDR: I loaned some games to a friend and it was way too much trouble to get her to give them back.
Haven't played it since college but Eclipse was one of my favorites. Explore space (hexes), colonise and develop planets, upgrade your fleet and fight other players or fixed challenges for galactic supremacy. Between the detailed ship minis and the individual player board layouts, it always felt very engaging.
In the early stages of this “shelter in place” experience I thought I might try and find board games for family fun (I don’t enjoy board games and don’t play them, but I was worried about the family not interacting well). Fortunately everyone has adapted because the 17 year old (who also dislikes games) made it clear that that she wasn’t joining in. So I’m safe.
Bored
Deftones - Bored
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdYo3WlETY
Being bored is a choice. There's always something you can do to entertain yourself.
Any of you on tik tok will have seen that every thirty something posting about how they are killing time / day drinking / annoying their spouse needs to stop.
Today in the 'rona
Sick and tired of Netflix emailing me to finish shows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/covid-19-death-toll-undercounted/?arc404=true
Not really surprising, but of course this will become a political football.
"When the global pandemic made air travel impossible, a group of Dutch high school students stranded in the Caribbean got home the old-fashioned way — sailing a 200-foot schooner across the Atlantic.
The 25 teenagers on board the Wylde Swan sailed into the port of Harlingen and were reunited with their families on Sunday, roughly five weeks after leaving the island of Saint Lucia. Many of the students had minimal sailing experience when they signed up for an educational program aboard the two-masted schooner and had anticipated spending only six weeks cruising the relatively calm waters of the Caribbean.
But in mid-March, many islands began shutting down their ports to stop the spread of the coronavirus. When the Wylde Swan arrived in Saint Lucia, getting through customs proved to be a struggle.
Plans to sail to Cuba and fly back to the Netherlands from there quickly fell apart as more countries closed their borders and grounded flights. Finally, it became clear that the only way for the 25 teenagers, 12 crew members and three teachers to get home would be embark on a journey of nearly 4,500 nautical miles across the ocean.
On top of purchasing nearly 400 pounds of vegetables, the crew of the Wylde Swan also had to stock up on warm clothes and foul-weather gear to prepare for the voyage. They made one stop in the Azores for supplies, but were not allowed to leave the boat.
Along the way, the students gradually got past their seasickness and watched dolphins swim alongside the vessel. One 17-year-old told the Omrop Fryslan Dutch radio station that it had been “an even more exciting journey than what I had signed up for.”
As someone who easily gets seasick, five weeks aboard a schooner in the Atlantic sounds absolutely miserable.
When I was in Hawaii for a week, over a weekend, the PM took us (3 total) on a catamaran to go snorkeling in Turtle Bay. We had condos over in Turtle Bay. We had lunch Haleiwa right before we boarded in the afternoon. Surprisingly I was fine going out. Sometimes I do feel nauseous on ferries. The sea was fairly calm. We got the life jackets and snorkels on and spent maybe an hour snorkeling. My other coworker is Goan and doesn't know how to swim, but went out there. I was impressed. He had an issue with his mask so I stopped to help him out and there was a wave and I ended up swallowing some water. After about 5 min I felt bad and went back on the catamaran and promptly lost my cheeseburger and fries over the boarding ladder. The captain gave me some ginger pills and I fell asleep the whole trip back. I skipped dinner with them that night and stopped by a store and bought some fruit and crackers.
It was a blast, except for the throwing up part. Next time I'm not eating greasy burger and fries before.
It sounds delightful to me!
I don't do water well either. When my sister and her husband visited Alaska we did a weekend trip that included a ferry from Whittier, south of Anchorage, to Valdez. The weather was not good and everyone else was below deck but I was up top trying to keep it together.
I suspect you'd get used to it pretty quickly
Proverbial journey of a lifetime.
Indeed, something they'll never forget.
Would have loved to have done something like that as a teenager
First colleague to get diagnosed with the ‘rona, he got confirmation last week after being out for over a week before he could get anyone to give him a test. It’s almost as if having limited testing capacity is a problem.
OMG we were on a team call with the customer and our lead customer totally started asking if he’d had the ‘rona and making a big fuss when he said yes. She’s a lawyer btw.
Today in our crumbling democracy
I for one am hoping to win a Noble prize.
Pros
Carmen Electra on the Last Dance was an amazing get for the interviews.
I thought last nights episodes were better than the first one. And she looks really good for 48. I had forgotten she and Madonna dated Rodman.
And I'm not surprised Jordan didn't want Isaiah on the Dream Team.
So this tread makes sense - I wrote "why are the women so terrible at parking" (or something like that) - and it is 100% true based on decades of managing this building. If you don't pull on the way in to a spot, you either block people in, or prevent them for parking in the perpendicular spot. And the woman that made me make this comment has lived here since 2003!
There was an atrocious op-Ed in the NYT this weekend by the president of Brown. This is one of many threads about it: https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1254504556333056000?s=21
It was an astonishing example of tone-deaf executive cant from someone who should really do better. The people who run the summer camps where my wife works did a better job of communication and showing concern for the community both narrowly and writ large.
He's not wrong about points and considerations he raised. The transition to full instruction on-line was a sizable undertaking at OSU, and it already had one of the most extensive Ecampus programs in place. For some of the ivy on brick operations that hadn't even started down the 21st century education road, I'm sure it's been daunting.
That said, there have already been loss of pay and loss of jobs, and if campus doesn't open in the fall, a lot of people will lose jobs, some the rest of their careers, and a LOT of students will lose their scholarships and expense stipends. The checks would bounce if they were to be written.
The issue with an out-of-date housing and instruction facility infrastructure that was problematical 50 years ago was brought starkly to light with this event (as has a multitude of other of infrastructure and system problems everywhere), and won't be cheap or easy, and therefore quick, to update, but if no one starts working on the problems, it won't get better. Just waiting isn't a reasonable option, if its even a viable one.
FET:
One of the times I visited OSU's campus in 2015/2016 I saw the following sign.
<B>#WTF</B>OSU.
What to Fix, OSU.
Huh...seriously? Is there not a committee to oversee program names??
I can't remember if it was my 2 football game Saturday (UCLA/OSU and Cal/Oregon) or the Cal/OSU basketball game. For the football game, the brother of my friend that went to UCLA is one of the asst ADs and got her and her whole family and parents tickets to the UCLA/OSU game. She knew I was in Portland that year so she asked if I wanted to go. Luckily the. OSU game was at 3 and the Cal game was around 8. So after the OSU game I hung out for an hour or so and left to go to the Cal game. I was thinking of bailing but my college roommate and his family were going to meet me at the game. I ended up getting there about 10 min late and just missed both of our TDs. Of course Oregon outscored us something like 44-0 after that. I should've just stayed in Corvallis.
I understand the logic of everything that you are saying. In the specific case of Brown, knowing the campus and the neighborhood means that I know the president is full of shit. They don’t have the available housing space for quarantine nor can they stop students from crossing paths with locals - who are conspicuously absent from the op-ed. If they’re so smart, then they should be able to come up with something better.
One problem is with a significant segment that doesn't still want to deal with reality, much less come up with something better that might no be convenient for them.
if we go online in the fall, we're looking a HUGE chunk of revenue disappearing (we would understandably charge a lot less in tuition, but also as a residential college, the college loses out on room & board from all the students as dorms sit empty)
UofO just this afternoon announced plans to resume running on-campus classes this fall; still projects a 15% drop in enrollment.
The 2nd largest private university in the state (George Fox [D III]) also announced they plan to reopen campus for fall term.
OSU was already exploring how to do so; this will put enormous pressure on them to do it.
No 2 said that he knows some people taking the fall off. Which will make their last semester the following fall interesting. Vandy has almost 100% of students live on campus. Some stay in the greek houses. A waiver needs to be approved to live off campus. I'm wondering how many extra beds they have if the ones that "redshirt" and come back to finish in their 5th year and live on campus.
OSU can only house about 1/4 of their students, and it wouldn't be that high if they were to back off on the decision they rammed through to pacify the neighborhood associations requiring most freshmen to live on campus, so the demographic is quite different. UofO I believe is similar.
On the flip side, there are still several hundred students living in campus housing, even though there are no classes on campus. Most are international students who would have a hard time going home, and an even harder time getting back. Also some from around the country with lesser, but significant travel issues. But some are local/instate, who feel its a better option than going home. Its what has kept University Housing & Dining hanging on by a thread.
There's something to be said for:
-the long-term financial health of our academic institutions (I'm obviously biased here, but pretty much anywhere dependent on tuition is going to suffer greatly)
-not being able to abruptly send everyone home every time there's another outbreak
OK but how does it work when in every lecture hall you can only have a student in every third seat of every other row? And everyone needs to live in a single? And you can't have a communal dining hall? I can't believe that pencils out any better.
I don't think social distancing and in-person education can co-exist. My take on the article: it raised real concerns that should be addressed, then it proposed a horrible solution
Distance learning and on-demand learning (vs. live) will have to remain a larger component in order to alleviate the problems with crowding. But the all or nothing approach either way isn't going to work. And you are right, it isn't going to pencil out using an unrealistic model. There is no doubt some institutions won't remain viable, just as some other businesses that are recklessly under capitalized won't.
Off the top of my head, you could consider only having freshmen and seniors on campus, although that only addresses bodies in space, the social distancing element seems in lieu outside of class
Lots of classes aren't year specific though. The priority would seem to be on some research and physical-contact areas of study, the ones where proximity and hands-on are central to the curriculum. Without all the lectures to halls half the audience for is asleep, you can spread out a lot easier.
The op ed was basically like “isolate sick students” and hand-waved the rest of it.
That's one concept that's being pushed society wide, with the tracking software, not just in campus communities. At least he noted the civil and technical challenges, whereas some are hand-waving those a lot more than he did.
I meant the original op ed from the Brown president
Monopoly - play it with my 9-year old nephew 2 days a week since he is not in school.
I mostly see this with bros driving lifted trucks that are pristine because they've never gone further off road than clipping the edge of their front lawn.
You are joking right? It's always some small dicked male in a lower end "prestige" car who's taking up multiple spots.
I'm only talking about the parking lot in my building, it's a bit (ok maybe a lot) idiosyncratic, but the main think is you have to pull in ALL THE WAY, leaving your car like 6 inches from the wall, or you block access to other spots in the corners.
Who the hell deleted my comment?!?!?!?!
I'm the only one in this DBD with comment-deleting privileges (unless someone else is lurking), but it wasn't me.
My guess is Leland
I blame Twist. That's always been a good go-to for anything that requires blame be fixed.
AFAIK I always park appropriately.
I find Tesla S drivers to be the worst “middle aged men in cars.” The unisex “stay away” vehicle around here at the moment is the Mercedes GLS SUV.
The majority of Prius hybrids that exist in the world are registered to an address within 10 minutes of the OSU campus. And they are governed to have a top speed 10% below whatever the posted speed limit is.
The scourge of Prius drivers acting as a mobile roadblock is nationwide - or so I thought until I saw someone with pro cop pro guns bumper stickers on their Prius nearly barge a 3 series BMW off the road the other week. Now I don’t know what to think
YES, my son thinks they have no clue at all.
@but you're the one that drives a Bimmer@.
FET, kinda. Once at a store in Western Mass, he parked kinda far down the main parking lot by himself in his STI. When he came back out, someone else in an STI also parked right by him, away from everyone else.
I also do find myself parking the Miata away from others.
deleted?! damn it