Category: Blogs and Blog Administration
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Bacon Bits: Coal Ash, Eclipses and Online Learning
Moon as energy conservation device. During the solar eclipse Monday, local temperatures dropped five to six degrees and electric consumption reported by Bristol Virginia Utilities, which serves Bristol, Va., fell five megawatts — or about 7.6%. So reports the Bristol Herald-Courier. Dominion launches coal ash study. Dominion Energy has hired AECOM, a multinational engineering firm,…
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I’m Going Cyborg, Baby!
Part man, part machine — that’ll be me in about six or seven hours. I’ll be checking into Saint Mary’s hospital to get a new ceramic-titanium hip to replace the flawed model that my DNA bequeathed me. I’ll be out of action for a few days, and I expect my blogging productivity will be diminished for…
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A Substation in Time Saves Nine
The 2013 sniper attack on Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s Metcalf transmission substation was a wake-up call for the electric power industry. A team of riflemen knocked out the facility near San Jose, Calif., by firing upon and severely damaging 17 transformers. Thanks to redundancy in the grid, PG&E was able to prevent blackouts by…
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Living the Good Life… for a Week
This is the view this morning from our beach cottage in Emerald Isle, N.C. The weather is beautiful. I’m guessing that my blogging will be spotty this week, but I will check in sporadically.
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Note to Agitators, Bomb Throwers and Rebels
For a couple of years now, two to three dozen readers of Bacon’s Rebellion have been contributing faithfully to the upkeep of the blog through small monthly contributions. I want to thank them for their loyal support and report to them what I’ve been doing with the money. Twitter fail. In concert with a push…
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The Biggest Screw-Up in the History of Bacon’s Rebellion
A monster apology to readers as well as to everyone in Virginia’s higher ed industry. I have screwed up with the publishing system of this blog, but never before on the scale and magnitude of the disaster that befell Bacon’s Rebellion this week. I have taken down all four articles in the four-part series on…
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RIP Sugar Bacon
After suffering a severe stroke, my stepmother, Marguerite “Sugar” Bacon, died two days ago at the age of 87. She and my dad had been married 60 years, and after my dad died two months ago, she missed him terribly. I don’t believe in heaven, but if I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure she’s with him…
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Note to Readers — Another Misfire!
I’ve been working on a four-part series about Virginia higher-education policy since the enactment of the 2005 Restructuring Act. In juggling and updating different pieces in WordPress, I accidentally hit the “Publish” button for one of them. I have taken the piece offline, but email subscribers will get a copy in their in-boxes. While the…
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College Graduation Rates and SAT Scores
John Butcher, of Cranky’s Blog fame, is turning his analytical gaze from K-12 schools to higher education. In his latest post, he explores the strong correlation between a Virginia public institution’s six-year graduation rate and the average SAT scores of its student body, as seen in the table to the left and the plotted chart below…
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A New Sponsor for Higher-Ed Journalism
I am pleased to announce that Partners 4 Affordable Excellence @ EDU has begun sponsoring Bacon’s Rebellion effective January 1 this year. Under terms of the agreement, Bacon’s Rebellion will provide in-depth coverage of higher education issues in Virginia, with a particular emphasis on the cost of attendance of Virginia’s public colleges and universities. Partners 4 Affordable…
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Note to Readers
Good news! We think we have restored the Bacon’s Rebellion blog to full functionality. Things should be working more smoothly now. However, we’re still suffering after-effects of the Denial of Service attack and our efforts (far more complicated than we anticipated) to migrate the blog to a faster, more secure platform. What’s in it for…
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Bacon Takes Aim, Shoots Foot
My apologies to the Department of Environmental Quality, the Dominion Pipeline Monitoring Coalition, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and most of all readers: Late yesterday or early this morning I accidentally published a rough draft of an article about environmental regulation of natural gas pipelines in Virginia. That draft was incomplete. I still had reporting to do,…
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Back in Action… Almost
It’s been a remarkably long and arduous process to restore the Bacon’s Rebellion blog after it was knocked out by a denial-of-service attack a month ago. For two weeks, it was literally impossible to access the files, and I continued publishing the blog only by jury-rigging a new, bare-bones website. Then, in the two weeks…
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The Disintegration of Newspapers Accelerates
by James A. Bacon The disintegration of the newspaper industry is accelerating. Even as the global advertising market is expected to grow 4% this year, spending on newspaper print ads is expected to decline 8.7% in 2016, according to estimates from GroupM, an ad-buying firm, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. That would be…
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Blog Update
The old server that served Bacon’s Rebellion at Hostmonster.com is still out of condition, the victim of a “denial of service” attack. The server hosted multiple websites, so there is no evidence that Bacon’s Rebellion was the target of the attack. It has been nearly a week now but Hostmonster still has not resolved the issue.…