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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said that a decade of stagnant spending has “slowed down” research on all items, including vaccinations for infectious diseases such as EBOLA. As a result, he said, the international community has been left playing catch-up on a potentially avoidable humanitarian catastrophe. Furthermore, as the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease in Dallas. Texas, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of NIH says a vaccine likely would have already been discovered were it not for budget cuts. As reported in The Huffington Post:

    “NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,'” Collins told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.” It’s not just the production of a vaccine that has been hampered by money shortfalls. Collins also said that some therapeutics to fight Ebola “were on a slower track than would’ve been ideal, or that would have happened if we had been on a stable research support trajectory.”

    “We would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference,” he said. Speaking from NIH’s headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, the typically upbeat Collins was somber when discussing efforts to control the Ebola epidemic. His days are now spent almost exclusively on the disease. But even after months of painstaking work, a breakthrough doesn’t seem on the immediate horizon.

    Money, or rather the lack of it, is a big part of the problem. NIH’s purchasing power is down 23 percent from what it was a decade ago, and its budget has remained almost static. In fiscal year 2004, the agency’s budget was $28.03 billion. In FY 2013, it was $29.31 billion — barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation. The situation is even more pronounced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subdivision of NIH, where the budget has fallen from $4.30 billion in FY 2004 to $4.25 billion in FY 2013.”

    Dr. Collins’ comments are indicative of the sad state of the federal government’s inability to work out budget comprises that are for the good of the country and its people and not for the good of a political party.

    Tony

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    Tony's Thoughts

    Teacher Education Programs Enrollment

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Between 2010 and 2012, enrollment fell in both undergraduate (nearly 11 percent) and graduate (more than 12 percent) teacher education programs in public and private nonprofit universities according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):

    “The numbers don’t match overall enrollment trends. Undergraduate fall enrollment at four-year public and private nonprofit universities increased by more than 3 percent from 2010 to 2012. And according to survey results released by the Council of Graduate Schools in September, graduate enrollment at participating public and private nonprofit universities increased by an average of 0.7 percent annually from 2008 to 2013.

    Among survey respondents, education had the greatest percentage decrease of all graduate programs from 2012 to 2013 (down 4.5 percent) and the greatest average annual percentage decline from 2008 to 2013 (down 3.4 percent)…

    Data show that the paths students take to prepare for the teaching profession are changing. For-profit institutions have gobbled up an increasingly large share of students, as have online degree programs.

    Enrollment in education programs at private, for-profit institutions has greatly increased in the past decade. From 2010 to 2012, enrollment in private, for-profit undergraduate education programs rose nearly 4 percent. Enrollment in for-profit graduate education programs decreased more than 21 percent but was still more than 50 percent higher than in 2004…

    The recession hit [also] many school districts hard, and experts who spoke to The Chronicle believe layoffs and decreased hiring may have discouraged students from pursuing teaching careers.

    “In the last few years, school districts have been cutting back on the number of teachers. There were layoffs in a number of areas, and hiring diminished, and the job market became less attractive,” said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. “One of the things we’ve seen is that career changers who were interested in switching to teaching are less likely to do it now. The field seems too uncertain, and holding on to their current jobs seems appealing…

    Mark LaCelle-Peterson, vice president for policy and programs at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, believes the numbers will rebound when the economy picks up.

    “Enrollment in teacher-education programs has always been cyclical and somewhat responsive to the economy,” he said. “In the long term, it will be responsive to the job market. Right now we’re still projecting a need for quite a number of new teachers.”

    The issues raised by these data should be of great interest and maybe concern to faculty and administrators in teacher education programs. I agree with Mark Lacelle-Peterson that enrollment in these programs is cyclical.  However, careful planning including the development of online programs especially at the graduate level should be considered.

    Tony

     

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    Dear Commons Community,

    Malala Yousafzai, a 17-year-old schoolgirl and outspoken activist, from Pakistan, and the Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi, were announced as this year’s winners […]

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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    In a major move to support research on the use of big data in medicine, the National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday awards totaling $32-million. More than two dozen […]

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    CUNYMath Blog

    Mari Watanabe-Rose (she/her) commented on the post, The Climate March Math

    Thanks for your comment, Marina! I agree that estimating numbers is such an important activity/skill to have (and it’s fun to do so!). Once you estimate, you want to know the actual number; that’s human nature. […]

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    Jessie Daniels's profile was updated
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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    Fusion, the news, pop culture, and satire TV and digital network, has just completed a poll that focuses on the views of millennial voters (age 18-34). As reported at the Fusion […]

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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    For those of us who buy online at amazon.com, you will soon be able to go into a physical store if you are in the vicinity of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. According to the […]

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    Kathleen Collins's profile was updated
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    LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable

    Jill Cirasella replied to the forum topic Draft message for CULIBS on Open Access Week- please provide comments

    Ah, thanks for prompting me to do this, Karen! I made an OA Week 2014 category (and applied it to your post) and set it so anything with that category will appear on this page: […]

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    Tony's Thoughts

    Dear Commons Community,

    Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, sent out the email below to her membership regarding the Philadelphia’s School Commission’s voiding of the teachers’ […]

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    CUNY Games Network

    Maura A. Smale (she/her) commented on the post, Citation Gaming

    That sounds great, Galina, so glad to hear that it went well! I think you should definitely submit a proposal for the conference, there’s a game demos section that sounds like it could be a great fit!

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    Cuny Games Network Dev

    Heads up everyone — don’t let the timer run out! The call for proposals for the CUNY Games Festival 2.0: A Conference on Game-based Learning in Higher Education, closes ONE WEEK from today! Submit your proposals […]

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    The CUNY Games Festival 2.0

    Heads up everyone — don’t let the timer run out! The call for proposals for the CUNY Games Festival 2.0: A Conference on Game-based Learning in Higher Education, closes ONE WEEK from today! Submit your proposals […]

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    Graduate Center Library Blog

    Comics @ CUNY: Exploring the Role of Comic Books in Teaching and Research
    Date: Thursday, October 9, 10-11:30 AM
    Location: CUNY Graduate Center — Room C197
    Registration link: http://goo.gl/z18Jy4

    Dykes_to_Watch_Out_For_(Bechdel_test_origin)

    Portion of “The Rule” in Dykes to Watch Out For sourced from this image on Bechdel’s Flickr. Comic and issue by Alison Bechdel, circa 1985.

    In this panel, CUNY scholars and professors will discuss how they have utilized mainstream superhero comics as well as other graphic narratives and memoirs in teaching students about writing, identities, literacies, art and language, as well as introduce their research on comic books and manga. Stop by and meet CUNY colleagues who share your interest in working with comic books.

    Presenters:

    Stafford Grégoire (Assistant Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College) earned his Baccalaureate at Hunter College (1992) and his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley (May 2004). He uses comic books, graphic novels and other visually inflected literature to teach composition.
    Maggie Galvan (PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, City University of New York) Forthcoming work includes “From Kitty to Cat: Kitty Pryde and the Phases of Feminism,” a chapter in the book, The Ages of The X-Men (McFarland, 2014) and “Thinking through Thea: Alison Bechdel’s Representations of Disability,” a chapter in the book, Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan). Ms. Galvan  will discuss how archives of comics are essential to the teaching of comics through a short discussion of The Rise of Graphic Archives course that she taught (at NYU in Spring 2014) and how the space of the archive figures in her own work on comics and visual culture.
    Jonathan W. Gray (Associate Professor of English, John Jay College) specializes in African American Literature and American Literature and culture from WWII to the present. His current book project, Illustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics, investigates how twin notions of illustration-the creative act of depiction and the political act of bringing something to the public’s attention-function in the comic books and graphic novels published since the Black Panther made his debut in 1966 in Fantastic Four #52. Dr. Gray will present on teaching the first graduate course devoted to Comics and Graphic Novels at the CUNY Graduate Center.
    Geoff Klock (Assistant Professor of English, Borough of Manhattan Community College) is author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Loves of the Poets, and the upcoming The Future of Comics, The Future of Men: Matt Fraction’s Casanova. He spoke at the Met, got a grant to study Kill Bill, and made a Hamlet video that got 38,000 views on YouTube. He is on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, and you should go find him there.

    Details: https://www.facebook.com/events/738292936241913

    Event contacts: Ann Matsuuchi (amatsuuchi@lagcc.cuny.edu) and Steven Ovadia (sovadia@lagcc.cuny.edu)

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