Education
For and by the people
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If you watch your local news, then you have a greater chance of learning what your state legislature is doing than someone who watches a cable news channel. However, both the local station’s coverage and the local newspaper are going to deliver old news. By the time you find out, something important could have happened to move a bill along or you may have missed a public hearing.
There are easier ways to learn what is going on in the legislature than hanging out in the capitol building and attending floor sessions, and these take ...
Earth Day has its roots in Wisconsin
Wisconsin and Earth Day go back a long way together. Truth be told, without Wisconsin, Earth Day might not even exist. Dismayed by a disastrous oil spill off the coast of California in 1969, our own Senator Gaylord Nelson conceived and set in motion the gears that made Earth Day 1970 a phenomenon to be reckoned with.
Discrimination isn’t always a bad thing
When you hear the word discrimination, what comes to mind? Likely you equate the term with prejudice. But one doesn’t need to prejudge or generalize in order to discriminate.
Peace groups call for police reform
The Duluth area Northland Chapter of Grandmothers for Peace and Twin Ports Veterans for Peace Chapter 80 call for the reform of the public safety practices in our communities.
Too Lazy; Doesn’t Read (TL;DR)
Originally this phrase was Too Long Didn’t Read or TL;DR. This expression was first used on me by someone I considered a friend. After looking up the new acronym, I was insulted and a little hurt. Well, not immediately. I knew that they were busy with school and had family issues that took up a lot of their time and mental capacity. Then it occurred to me that if in fact they were too busy or too tired, why did they take the time to even be where they could see what I wrote? After all, it is not as though I wrote it out in soup in the kitchen floor. So, they must have had another reason for taking the time to write those four letters. What could those reasons be?
A call for equity and sustainable systems
Equity, the fairness with with which we treat one another, has finally become a hot topic. Sustainability, the pursuit of an environment healthy enough to ensure a livable planet for ourselves and for our children has, thankfully, become another. Together they pack a pretty explosive punch! Ignore them and we may find ourselves flat on our backs; the soul of our humanity bruised and battered by tooth and claw competition on a shriveling planet.
Around the world, including here in Wisconsin, small family farmers are being forced off their land by grocery store-scale ...
The return of the dumb terminal
Starting in the late 1960’s a little understood corner of the United States government began developing a means of connecting geographically separated research labs and universities. These remote computers allowed researchers to more quickly share data between projects and allowed research to work on projects without being required to be in the same room, or even the same state. The more complex this network became, the more obvious it became that system administrators needed to connect to and control computers without being on the remote computer’s keyboard. This is ...
Capella: four stars that appear to be one
As I mentioned in the February 1st issue article about the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, the name Capella means “female goat” or “little female goat” in Latin. Like many objects visible to us in the night sky, Capella is not just a single star. It consists of two binary pairs. A binary pair is two stars revolving around a common center, somewhat like two ice skaters holding hands while they spin.
Joint Finance Committee designates funds to in-person schools
Republican members of the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) announced that they will use $68.6 million (10%) of federal funds designated for K-12 schools to reward schools offering in-person instruction. This money will be awarded to school districts based on the number of hours of in-person instruction provided during the 2020-2021 school year. This does not affect the $617.5 million of federal funding earmarked for schools based on the Title I formula.
Some thoughts on the role journalism plays in society
Unity is more than just a good idea; it is vital. That isn’t to say that we must unite to create false equivalencies and accept fiction as though it were fact. We must restore faith in an objective truth, one of the tenets of good journalism.