Covid-19 | Coronavirus August 2020

I saw that video on facebook. Anyone else notice the "poot" when his son picks him up? I liked the woman's voice saying "Bye bye" as he was carried out too. I assume that was a store clerk.

It's a crime to threaten bodily harm, isn't it? Even in Arizona. Wish more of these asshats who go around menacing people would be charged. Might be hard to find a jury, let alone impartial ones, in this era, however.

I don't feel that sorry for the sons, though. They weren't wearing masks either, in violation of Tuscon's mask ordinance. I suppose one could argue that the Dad wasn't breaking the law (which requires everyone over 5 to wear a mask in public spaces) because mentally he's a toddler.

Lyv said:

A friend is a scientist and professor at UNC and has been setting this up. What she's been able to tell us has been interesting.

UNC Charlotte to test wastewater for COVID-19

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This is actually a clever idea. Some small towns have used this approach to tell whether the virus is being shed in the community. They can detect extraordinarily dilute amounts of viral nucleic acids these days (and yes, the RNA is there, even if the viral particles are too degraded to be infectious anymore).

However, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun to be the person who gets to dip into the sewer mains exiting a bunch of college dorms.

Stytch said:

Yes, UNC Chapel Hill just called off in-person after being open for one week. One week. All the folks who were like, "Hey freshman, be smart and just do your local community college online this year instead of going away to that more expensive school," were right on the money. I'm guessing most college administrators (who, theoretically, aren't naive or stupid) are just crossing their fingers and hoping they can pull off in-person classes past the drop/add period or for a few weeks, just long enough so that folks feel invested enough to suck it up and finish out the year online, rather than sue the pants off them for this easily predicted bait-and-switch.

I've never met an angrier "customer" than a parent of a private college student whose offspring was not being appropriately coddled. Even though UNC is public, it's one of the ones considered kind of "elite" so I imagine they've got a lot of the same entitlement issues.

If it were me, I'd withdraw entirely while I could still get my money back, and take online classes at the cheapest local community college. Hell, if I had to pay for college now even in a normal year, I'd go all the way to my AA at a CC rather than pay the exorbitant cost of a full university.

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And the editors for the UNC paper, the Daily Tar Heel, didn't pull any punches when they ran an editorial about what a clusterf**k the situation is. Warning, they actually did use that word in the headline.

https://www.pressclubinstitute.org/...paper-responded-to-a-covid-cluster-on-campus/

I teach at a community college, and all our classes are online this semester, and my sections filled quickly and have full wait lists. I think many people are taking that general approach right now. If it's not safe to take in-person classes or return to campus, you might as well take your online classes somewhere affordable.

I think there is still a lot of value to going to a four year school if one can. I still remember how much I looked forward to going away to school, and I'm glad I had that experience. An education goes beyond just the classes one attends, and it makes me sad that students are missing so many social and cultural opportunities. But given how expensive 4 year schools are becoming, I don't see what choice most people have. I wish better-off people would stop being so selfish and pay it forward to fund public higher education the way people did for them when the people now in their fifties and sixties were in college (and the taxpayers footed more of the bill).

MaeZe said:

I don't believe in spanking and never spanked my own child but metaphorically speaking, those kids need a spanking.

Maybe the college closing will wake them up.


Re online courses, welcome to the new world. In my sci-fi novel a couple hundred years in the future, all college classes are online. Kids still go to school until high school.

If anyone is interested how I handled finals in this situation, just ask.

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I know how I'm handling finals teaching online, but I'd be a fool if I thought the online proctoring software is foolproof.

That may well be an accurate way of portraying the future, but it's one I find profoundly depressing, and very possibly not 200 years in the future (though I suspect the wealthy and powerful will always find ways for their own kids to receive in-person mentoring and instruction, at least when there is no pandemic). I hope your world is dystopian

I find online education is missing so much, and I love the university and college culture--the vibrancy, diversity, social contact, long, intellectual conversations, concerts, astronomy parties, open labs, and vigor of simply being in that setting. Campuses are my favorite places in the world. But that's why I chose the profession I did, so I could stay in college forever. It's definitely true that the politicians and administrators have done everything in their power to leach the joy from my profession, and from being a college student, even before online education was much of a thing, though.

Makes me sad to think people like me might soon be replaced by algorithms and canned online courses designed at big universities but mostly run via an AI. (I can hear the byline now--an online science class designed by Cal Tech Professors, but available at your local community college!!! But then community colleges won't need to be local anymore either). I HAVE to believe humans still bring something to the table that is of value to avoid the cognitive dissonance of thinking I am useless, but maybe I'm just an old luddite who simply hopes she won't be redundant until after she is able to retire

Having said this, I also think it's madness to open in-person classes right now for all but the most specialized (and small) classes that require hands-on to get anything at all out of them. It sucks, but better to take a year off, or take classes online, and to batten down the hatches for a year. If we just took this seriously for the next six months or so, we might even get to the point where we could re-open safely again. The decisions about opening and closing, and not just for schools and colleges, are clearly being made for economic reasons, and I can see the administrators shitting bricks as they try to decide if they will lose more money by going online this year (and losing all that revenue from students who take a year off, or go the a CC) versus the lawsuits they will face if students and faculty start dropping like flies. "How many deaths can we afford if we stay open?" they are asking themselves. Of course, politicians are asking themselves which choice will cost them more votes--killing people or keeping people cooped up and resentful.

I curse the system and societal values that coerces everyone to thinking like corporate shills and to calculate the worth of lives and futures in terms of dollars and cents.

MaeZe said:

[sidetrack] There's no way teaching is not going the direction of more online learning. But it's in the future. That was one of the hardest part writing sci-fi for me, figuring out what would the future be like. Imagine imagining what the year 2020 would be like in 1920. I didn't want to make the mistake of pay-phone banks.

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I've no doubt you're right, but I suspect people will discover there are things of inestimable value that will be lost if there are no face-to-face institutions of higher learning anymore (for one thing, a heck of a lot of research goes on there, and researchers need students as much as students need exposure to research, even before grad school). My dystopian nightmare is that we are heading towards an even more stratified system of higher education than we have already, with the wealthiest continuing to send their kids to "real" universities (when it's not a pandemic, anyway), but "the masses" will have to settle for online, which will deprive them of the hands-on experiences and personal connections needed to advance beyond a certain place in the world. Especially in a future where anything that is not super creative (even teaching, medicine etc) will be increasingly handled by robotics and algorithms.

It will be interesting, in the short term at least, to see whether this "experiment" with moving education online at all levels advances the push towards online or slows it. I am getting the definite impression, both from my own students and from parents of children in K-12, that the greater flexibility of online education and working from home in general is not everything people had once imagined.

One major challenge this semester is how to provide accommodations for students with a distance ed system and online test proctoring software. Another is access for students without good internet or a real computer.

For those who are interested, online proctoring software many instructors are using during this massive move to online involves a system that requires students to take their exam with a web cam and microphone enabled, and they must scan their testing area and show a photo ID at the start of the exam. Instructors input what is allowed during the exam. The program monitors head and eye movement etc. and "flags" suspicious activity. The instructor then can view the video footage to see if it was just the student's cat jumping on the keyboard, or if they were checking their text or phone or something. It also stops them from navigating away from the test window during the exam or being in windowed mode, and the exam must be taken on a computer with the chrome browser. But there's no way to prevent students who have already taken their test online from telling a friend what was on it, which is an issue for asynchronous classes where the test is available over a longer time than a single class period.

As I've said before, though, I don't see an alternative with this pandemic. I can't think of a way to safely teach classes of the sizes we have in an indoor setting (and the administrators didn't even consider suggestions made by some faculty to possibly teach at least some classes outdoors in the stadiums and athletic fields, at least when the weather was decent and to move them online when the weather wasn't decent). Those satirical articles on McSweeny's.net pretty much sum the absurdity of what these universities have been attempting to do, which is basically slap a few placebo fixes in place and ignore the problem.