Images from my childhood

VILLA PARK IN THE EARLY 60s

A couple of pictures of the neighborhood (Villa Park/Orange) of my childhood. My family bought oranges at the Santiago packinghouse for many years--starting in the early 60s. This pic looks c. 1961.

Nearby Wanda Rd. I just barely remember that little store.

Got these pics from the OC History Roundup blog.

Photo taken in 1957. My family didn't move to OC (from British Columbia) until two or three years later.

This is downtown Orange, 1920s—long before my time. But I did live near there c. 1990 in a house built in 1903.

This, too, is before my time: Peters Lake (near Irvine Park), 1949. Evidently, in January of that year, it snowed! (Got these next ones from the OC Public Library archive.)

OK, this one's just weird. El Toro Rd. 1970

I cropped it to maximize weirditude

Newport Pier, turn of the century

The aggregators are coming! The aggregators are coming!

Structural disintegration of the Academy

I read an article in this morning's  Washington Post by law professor Zephyr Teachout that neatly expresses an increasingly common view about the future of higher education. If this view is correct, we’re now entering a Brave New World. (A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges.)

(What is a Zephyr Teachout?, you ask. Well, according to her Huffington Post biography, Zephyr Teachout “teaches Election Law at Duke University School of Law. She is the former National Director of the Sunlight Foundation, Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean's Campaign, and Researcher at the Center for Investigative Journalism in Bosnia-Herzogovenia”.)

Excerpts:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet….

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. … Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999….

This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. … A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.

But the demand for college isn't just about the yearning to learn – it's also about the hope of getting a degree. Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition, and even before the recession, there was substantial evidence of unmet demand for cheaper college degrees. Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.

…
Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators have taken over from the newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon you'll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo – now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.

When this happens – be it in 10 years or 20 – we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.
…
So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk.

If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.

A friend found this -- 37th in healthcare: