About a week ago , I wrote about the events leading up to the dilemma faced by Western Carolina University faculty and administration with being offered a $2 million grant from a Koch Brothers foundation. What I did not mention is the recent domination of the North Carolina university system by Republican minded-administrators such as
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What does a public university do when a donation to it comes with strings? This is the situation Western Carolina University finds itself in today as a $2 million donation is being given to it by a Charles Koch Foundation to establish a Center for the Study of Free Enterprise under BB&T bank sponsored department
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Bernie Sanders is attracting a lot of support, it isn’t unusual to see newsworthy items about him concerning the size of the crowds he is drawing and the number of donors he has attracted. For someone who is a self-proclaimed Socialist, (more properly he is a Social Democrat in the Scandinavian style), that is unheard of for U.S.
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There is an increasing amount of conversation about the development of artificial intelligence, with a great many smart people coming out to warn of what this could lead to. Most scenarios concern things along the lines of if AI believes humans compete with it for energy it may decide it is better off eliminating humans,
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I ran across this explanation of Probability as seen by different professions at Sam Wang’s Princeton Consortium and tracked it down to Ben Orin’s Math with Bad Drawings blog. A little about Ben and his blog as told by himself: “This blog is about the things I like. It’s also about the things I can’t
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So due to a software vulnerability the Sanders campaign was able to access, and attempted to download, Clinton campaign data relating to voter databases. As a result, the DNC, which hosts these databases, denied the Sanders campaign access to its own files as punishment. This caused a popular backlash amongst Sander’s supporters and resulted in
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The division and breakdown of peoples is a fascinating subject. If we consider our daily lives we spend countless hours dealing with people with whom we may have widely differing opinions on how things should work. Many of these people, neighbors, co-workers, vendors, we are probably friendly with. If something happened where one of these
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Conservatives like to tout the natural power of the U.S. economy, how it is due to our free markets that we have an economy so large, and one capable doing so well while others falter. Yet does this really hold water? What is the driving force behind the U.S. economy? Interestingly enough it isn’t how our
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It is ironic that the U.S. can spend so much time and energy training soldiers and police in nations like Iraq and Afghanistan when we seem to be becoming aware of shortcomings in our own police forces. Quite obviously there is a need here to address problems in policing methods, as we seem to veer
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Eating Meat has come under fire lately from both a health and sustainability standpoint. Given the way meat is raised in the West, and the sheer amount of it which is eaten these criticisms are certainly warranted. But there is a logic to eating meat, and it is important that we are aware of it.
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