Here's The College Major That Defines Each State

We’ve recently looked at how college majors compare with one another in terms of earnings. Here is a look at how they vary by geography.

We used data from the Minnesota Population Center’s 2012 IPUMS, an individual-level set of responses to the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey (ACS), slightly modified for statistical and privacy reasons. Among the many subjects covered on the ACS is educational attainment: Respondents are asked to give their highest level of education and, if they have a bachelor’s degree, what field they majored in.

Based on this data, we were able to find the most disproportionately popular major (among majors with at least 1,000 degree holders) in each state. These are degrees for which the rate of people holding that degree in a state is much higher than the rate of people holding that degree in the US overall, as explained in more detail below:

These are not the most common degrees held by the residents of the states, but instead degrees held at a disproportionately high rate. For example, 23,977 Floridians hold a degree in Criminology, out of 3,759,154 residents of that state who have at least a bachelor’s degree. This gives a rate of about 64 Criminology degree holders out of every 10,000 bachelor’s degree holders overall in Florida.

Meanwhile, for the United States as a whole, 98,475 people have a degree in Criminology, out of 63,954,947 degree holders overall. This gives a national rate of about 15 Criminology majors out of every 10,000 bachelor’s degree holders.

The location quotient of Criminology majors in Florida is the ratio of these two rates: 64 Ã· 15, which is a little above 4. So, there are about four times as many Criminology majors per 10,000 degree holders in Florida as there are in the nation as a whole. The map, then, shows the degree with the highest location quotient in each state.

Taking our data and finding the most commonly held degree in every state leads to a much more monotone result: In 35 states, the most common major is Business Management and Administration, which is also the most common major in the US as a whole:

SEE ALSO: Here’s How Much You Need To Earn To Be A One-Percenter In America’s Big Cities

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Here's The College Major That Defines Each State

How An Alleged Criminal Cheating Ring May Have Wrecked A 3rd-Grader's Education

A high-profile trial to prosecute 12 ex-educators in Atlanta for an alleged cheating ring began on Monday. The defendants could face up to 20 years in prison for their alleged role in artificially raising students’ test scores in an attempt to boost their own salaries. 

The beginning of the trial saw testimony from Justina Collins, a mom who claims she first noticed something was off when her third-grade daughter miraculously passed state tests after spending the entire school year struggling to keep up academically at Cascade Elementary School, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reported. According to her testimony, when Collins confronted the school’s principal about her daughter’s abrupt success, Principal Alfonso Jessie responded that some students are just really good test-takers, according to the AJC.  

Unsatisfied with that answer, Collins took her concerns to the Atlanta Public School System (APS) central district office, where then-Superintendent Beverly Hall allegedly said there was nothing she could do at the time but that if Collins had any further questions she should contact her directly. (Hall is currently receiving treatment for stage IV breast cancer and has been noticeably absent from the courtroom.)

Collins has become the spokeswoman for APS parents, albeit reluctantly, according to the AJC. Initially refusing to get involved, she was soon subpoenaed by prosecutors who are now using her testimony to highlight the real-life consequences the cheating had on APS children and parents.

Collins says, as a result of inflated test scores, her daughter Nybria became ineligible for federal funds to get the extra academic help she needed, according to the Los Angeles Times. She continued to struggle. Currently, she’s in the 11th grade but reading at an 8th grade level, according to the AJC. 

Collins’ story underscores what was a potentially unforeseen consequence of the cheating teachers’ actions: that the affected students’ academic careers would actually suffer in the long run, no matter how good the teachers had made them look on paper. 

At this point, it is clear that Nybria was probably not the only student whose academic future was potentially compromised by the scandal, as it has been alleged that the cheating was systemic and occurred at 44 of 56 Atlanta schools where administrators pressured teachers to cross ethical lines.

SEE ALSO: How The Atlanta Cheating Ring Was Uncovered

SEE ALSO: Jury Chosen In Cheating Trial of Former Atlanta Educators

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How An Alleged Criminal Cheating Ring May Have Wrecked A 3rd-Grader's Education

Cornell University Names Its First Female President

University of Southern California provost Elizabeth Garrett will be the 13th president of Cornell University, the Ivy League school announced Tuesday.

Garrett is currently the second-ranking officer at USC, and has a background as a law professor. According to Cornell’s press release, in addition to her responsibilities as president, “Garrett will be a tenured faculty member in the Law School with a joint appointment in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences.”

She will replace outgoing Cornell president David Skorton, who is leaving at the end of the academic year to head the Smithsonian Institute.

“I am honored to have been selected as the next leader of this remarkable institution,” Garrett said in a statement. “Cornell is one of the world’s truly great universities, with a stellar commitment to excellence in teaching, research, scholarship and creative activity, linked with a deep commitment to public engagement. I am excited to join the Cornell community and to work with the faculty, staff, students and alumni to chart the next chapter in its illustrious history. Andrei and I also look forward to joining the vibrant Ithaca community.”

According to her biography on USC’s website, Garrett “specializes in the legislative process, direct democracy, the federal budget process, the study of democratic institutions, statutory interpretation and tax policy. She is an expert on state, national and presidential politics.”

One of Garrett’s biggest responsibilities during her tenure will likely be ensuring the success of Cornell’s New York City technology campus, set to open on Roosevelt Island in 2017. According to Cornell’s press release, Garrett currently serves on the board of trustees of Internet2, which “aims to accelerate research, advance education, and improve the delivery of public services through innovative technologies.”

Garrett is Cornell’s first female president. She received her B.A. in history from the University of Oklahoma and her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

SEE ALSO: 19 Incredibly Impressive Students At Cornell

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Cornell University Names Its First Female President

Hear the Album Björk Recorded as an 11-Year-Old: Features Cover Art Provided By Her Mom

Iceland’s biggest export, aside from volcanic ash, is that pixyish pop singer, Björk. Or at least that’s how it seems in the American popular imagination. Björk’s first three of albums were pretty much required listening in certain circles during the ‘90s.  Since then, her stature in the indie world has only grown.

Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOv9_ksYwAg

In March of last year, Toronto collector Greg Gatenby auctioned off “some 1,700 LPs, 45s, and 10-inch discs”-worth of recorded literary history, containing readings by such canonical figures as “Auden and Atwood, Camus and Capote, Eliot, Faulkner, Kipling, Shaw and Yeats,” and the recordings featured here from Sylvia Plath. Gatenby’s entire collection went on sale for a buy-it-now price of $ 85,000 (I assume it’s sold by now), and while we might have preferred that he donated these artifacts to libraries, there may have been no need. Most of them are already, or we hope soon will be, digitized and free online. Sylvia Plath reading her poetry (now out of print) was originally released on vinyl and cassette in 1977 by prolific spoken word record label Caedmon, but of course the readings they document all took place over fifteen years earlier, some at least as early as 1959, the year before the publication of her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHVEMogmxZ0

Many of the poems here appeared in The Colossus, the only collection of poems Plath published in her lifetime. Some, like “November Graveyard”—first published in Mademoiselle in 1958—were collected late, in the Ted Hughes-edited Collected Poems in 1981, and the rest appeared in Ariel and other posthumous collections. Oddly, the title poem of her first book doesn’t appear, nor will you hear any of the poems that made Plath an infamous literary figure: no “Ariel,” no “Daddy,” no “Lady Lazarus,” though you can hear her read those poems elsewhere. Many of these poems are more lush, less visceral and personal, though no less rich with arresting and sometimes disturbing imagery. Several of these readings took place in February 1959 at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. The album’s official description tells us these are “selections from the last 6 years of her life,” and also include “readings for the BBC before she wrote her controversial novel, The Bell Jar.”

Before Caedmon collected these lesser-known poems recorded readings of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” had already been released on the compilation record The Poet Speaks in 1965. Listening to Plath read these poems may prompt you to pull out your own editions to read them for yourself, whether again or for the first time. To see a full listing of the poems Plath reads above, scroll to the bottom of this bibliography page on sylviaplath.info.

Find more great poetry readings in our audio collection — 550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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Sylvia Plath Reads “Daddy”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life

Do Communists Have Better Sex?: A Documentary on the NSFW Ideological Question

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl_r7rIcds8

If I had to point one visible difference between American cities and Toronto, where I’ve stayed this past week, I’d point out the flyers posted around advertising a “Communism Discussion Group.” Maybe this has to do with Canada’s wider openness to the political spectrum; maybe, if you look at things another way, it has to with Canada’s deeper slant to the left. But here, much more so than in most of the United States, I could imagine people openly discussing the question of whether maybe — just maybe — humanity had it any better under communism. Sure, nobody on the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain could have enjoyed the food lines, the crumbling housing, or the sheer boredom. But this hourlong documentary has a specific yet enormously relevant and often overlooked sub-question in this line of inquiry to ask: Do Communists Have Better Sex? Or: did East Germans have better sex than West Germans? The divided country offered something close to a controlled experiment for anyone looking to study the effects of communism versus those of capitalism, and here we see the sexual side of that dynamic explored through expert interviews, contemporary newsreels and educational films, and even animation.

The documentary proposes that, for all its deficiencies, the German Democratic Republic actually put forth a remarkably progressive set of policies related to such things as birth control, divorce, abortion, and sex education — a precedent to which some non-communist countries still haven’t caught up. However forward-thinking you might find all this, it did have trouble meshing with other communist policies: the state’s rule of only issuing housing to families, for instance, meant that women would get pregnant by about age twenty in any case. We must admit that, ultimately, citizens of the showcase East Germany had a better time of it than did the citizens of Soviet Socialist Republics farther east. And if the Ossies had a better Cold War between the sheets than did the Wessies, well, maybe they just did it to escape their country’s pervasive atmosphere of “unerotic dreariness.” Still, one likes to believe in the possibility of a better world. Back in Los Angeles, I recently attended Competing Utopias, a show of East German household artifacts at Richard Neutra’s idealistic VDL House — now I just wonder what must have gone on in the bedrooms.

You can find Do Communists Have Better Sex? (2006), shot by André Meier, in our collection of 200+ Free Documentaries Online.

via Network Awesome

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Do Communists Have Better Sex?: A Documentary on the NSFW Ideological Question is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Do Communists Have Better Sex?: A Documentary on the NSFW Ideological Question

Martin Scorsese’s New Documentary on The New York Review of Books Airs Tonight on HBO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FmHuio4C-s

A quick note: Tonight, HBO will air the premiere of The 50 Year Argument. That’s Martin Scorsese’s new documentary about the influential literary and academic journal, The New York Review of Books.

Writes The New York Times: “Robert Silvers has assigned thousands of pieces for The New York Review of Books, so why not a documentary film? “The 50 Year Argument” … originated along the same lines as one of the lengthy, learned articles in The Review: Mr. Silvers sought out a talented essayist, in this case Martin Scorsese, and asked him to explore a subject — the magazine’s 50-year history — that he was passionate about but not expert in.” The result is a “textured and smart but thoroughly celebratory, a paean to the magazine and the amazingly durable Mr. Silvers, now 84.”

Regrettably, the film isn’t available online. But you can watch the trailer above and then a long Q&A about the film. Recorded in Berlin earlier this year, the Q&A features Scorsese on the stage, along with David Tedeschi (his co-director), NYRB editor Robert Silvers, publisher Rea Hederman, and contributor Michael Greenberg.

We have many other heady documentaries (where else?) on our list of 200 Free Documentaries Online.

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Martin Scorsese’s New Documentary on The New York Review of Books Airs Tonight on HBO is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Martin Scorsese’s New Documentary on The New York Review of Books Airs Tonight on HBO

A Quick Refresher On The Difference Between Macau, Hong Kong, And Mainland China

As the “Occupy Central” protests in Hong Kong continue to unfold, here’s a quick refresher on the island’s relationship to mainland China.

If you’ve ever traveled from Macau to Hong Kong to mainland China, you’ll notice that your passport gets stamped every time.

That’s because Macau and Hong Kong are “Special Administrative Regions” with their own money, police force, schools, languages, and even government; for almost 20 years since rejoining China, Hong Kong has been able to elect its own leaders.

But Hong Kong and Macau are not independent countries. Hong Kong has been under Chinese rule since 1997, and protest have erupted on the island over Beijing’s decision to select candidates for an Hong Kong upcoming election.

Check out the video below for the quick explainer on the differences between Macau, Hong Kong, and China.

SEE ALSO: The Day 2 Hong Kong Protests Are Unbelievably Huge

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A Quick Refresher On The Difference Between Macau, Hong Kong, And Mainland China

Christopher Walken Reads Where The Wild Things Are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNaYlzssbc

Perhaps you saw Spike Jonze and Dave Egger’s twee, sunlit, achingly earnest adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps you found it irresistibly charming. Perhaps, however, you missed the sharp edges of Sendak’s lean adventure, its undercurrent of feral violence, its flirtations with matricide and cannibalism. Well who better to convey such frightening undertones than master of casual menace Christopher Walken? Just above, hear him read Wild Things like you’ve never heard it before. Walken’s interpolated commentary on the illustrations draws our attention to a few features we probably missed in our several hundred readings of the book, such as the possible suicide of Max’s teddy bear and a potential swarm of giant insects in his transformed bedroom. After you hear Walken’s take, Max’s harmless suppertime daydream might give you nightmares.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp_a9TLISoM

Walken has long enjoyed entertaining the kiddies with his creepy interpretations of children’s stories. Just above see him read the Three Little Pigs in 1993 on the British comedy series Saturday Zoo. Once again, he adds his own explanatory comments. He’s a little more Billy Crystal than Captain Koons this time, and if his delivery doesn’t make you LOL, his day-glo sweater and wicker throne won’t fail to. Host Jonathan Ross liked the reading so much he invited Walken to read again in 2009 on his BBC show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. This one’s for the older kids—a deadpan rendition of Lada Gaga’s “Poker Face,” below. Can’t get enough of Walken’s readings? Don’t miss Kevin Pollack’s spot-on parody of the actor Mickey Rourke once called a “strange being from another place.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSrMdsJagM4

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Christopher Walken Reads Where The Wild Things Are is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Christopher Walken Reads Where The Wild Things Are

Bill Gates Wants To Change How We Teach History In High Schools

Bill Gates wants to change how students learn history.

As a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine details, the Microsoft founder and current richest man in the world went on a mission to change history curricula in the US after he became enamored with “Big History” — a series of DVD lectures from Australian professor David Christian.

The DVD series “put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth,” writes The Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin.

In short, it’s a holistic approach to history, rather than a strictly chronological one.

A lesson on the Big Bang theory, for example, “offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe,” Sorkin writes.

Watch the first “Big History” lesson on the Big Bang below:

Since discovering the videos in 2008, Gates has personally invested $ 10 million in the Big History Project, in the hopes of eventually creating an integrated history course for high schools around the country.

The program launched in 2011 in just five high schools, Sorkin reports, but has surged in the three years since its inception. This fall, Big History is being taught in around 1,200 schools — from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor to, Sorkin notes, Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. The number of schools implementing Big History curricula is expected to continue to climb over the next two years.

One issue that Gates and Christian initially faced seems the stem from the academic outsider nature of their course.

“We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school … How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool,” Gates told Sorkin.

According to Gates, schools were not prepared to handle the hybrid course — which would likely involve them having to either retrain teachers or revise longstanding lessons.

“You’ve got to get a teacher in the history department and the science department — they have to be very serious about it, and they have to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the course schedule so kids can sign up,” Gates said.

Gates is no stranger to the world of education, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push through projects such as the Common Core Standards Initiative. The Big History Project, Gates tells Sorkin, allows for the philanthropist to move past solely funding high-level education policy changes, and actually have a tangible impact on the evolving nature of the classroom — which has seen much less of the influence of technology compared to most other aspects of life.

“I wanted to explore how you did digital things … That was a big issue for me in terms of where education was going — taking my previous skills and applying them to education,” Gates said.

Below, a slide from a lecture Christian gave this year uses Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” as a platform to show the various disciplines that Big History incorporates:

According to Christian, all of these different elements come together to tell a full story. “This captures very nicely and very simply the ambition of Big History — to connect disciplines,” Christian says in his lecture.

The “Big History” classes also seem to be resonating with current students. Sorkin visited a classroom in Brooklyn where high school students were learning about “extinction events” — “why and how various life-forms have died out,” Sorkin writes.

Here’s a “Big History” video on evolution and extinction:

As one student told Sorkin, “At first I hated it, because I was like, ‘I hate science.’ But it actually just opened my perspective that I never knew about. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, and then I grew to love the class.”

Read more about Bill Gates’ efforts to put “Big History” in America’s classrooms at The New York Times Magazine >>

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Bill Gates Wants To Change How We Teach History In High Schools

The College Majors With The Biggest Lifetime Earnings

Students who study chemical engineering as undergraduates will, on average, make the most money of any college major over their lifetimes, earning more than $ 2 million, according to a new study from The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

The report — titled “Major Decisions: What Graduates Earn Over Their Lifetimes” — tracks data from the Census Bureau to determine which college majors yield the largest financial rewards over a graduate’s lifetime. Unsurprisingly, engineering degrees topped the list, while education and arts majors were found closer to the bottom.

However, as The Washington Post notes, “these rankings exclude people with graduate degrees, which leaves out doctors, lawyers, and professors,” which explains the potentially low ranking of majors that traditionally go on to law school or medical school.

Overall though, the report reaffirms the importance and value of a college degree — according to the findings, a typical bachelor’s degree graduate will earn $ 1.19 million over their lifetime, around twice what the typical high school graduate earns.

Here’s The Hamilton Project’s chart of median lifetime earnings by college major, in millions of dollars:

Read the full report on college major lifetime earnings at The Hamilton Project >>

SEE ALSO: The Most Influential College In Every State

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The College Majors With The Biggest Lifetime Earnings

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyXnpFvBmXk

I write this from Toronto, having come to explore, record interviews in, write about, and generally try to understand this big, busy, famously diverse, and sometimes formless-seeming metropolis Canadians appreciate and resent in equal measure. Despite the difficulty of defining or even describing it, the city has nurtured impressive minds. If not Canadian yourself, you might struggle to come up with a list of notable Torontonians, but surely names like Margaret Atwood, David Cronenberg, Frank Gehry, Joni Mitchell, and Marshall McLuhan ring bells. Despite having passed in 1982, pianist-composer Glenn Gould may still rank as the city’s best-known cultural ambassador. “I’m not really cut out for city living, and given my druthers I’d probably avoid all cities and live in the country,” he said in 1979. “Toronto, however, belongs on a very short list of cities which I’ve visited and which seem to offer to me, at any rate, peace of mind — cities which, for want of a better definition, do not oppose their cityness upon you.”

He says it at the very beginning of Glenn Gould‘s Toronto, which spends the rest of its 50 minutes exploring not just the city itself but Gould’s ideas of its nature. The documentary, which originally aired as an episode of the CBC series Cities, follows him from the CN Tower which looms over Toronto to the waterfront (on what he calls “the least great of the Great Lakes”) to the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition (a sizable event with a “spirit out of a small-town fall fair”) to the then-new city hall. Along the way, his monologue touches on the peace and quiet Toronto offers him, the reflexive distaste it can inspire in others, the “cultural mosaic” to which it plays host (sometimes insistently), the way it survived the 1960s without enduring the disastrous hollowing-out American cities did, and the friendly rivalry it enjoys with Montreal. Gould’s clear, analytical manner of speech delivers a stream of pointed observations, dry jokes, and childhood memories, revealing his nuanced lifelong relationship with the city: not the simple one of a booster, nor the even simpler one of a detractor. But then, Gould never had anything simple about him — nor, as I’ve come to find out this past week, does Toronto.

You can find Glenn Gould‘s Toronto in our collection of Free Documentaries.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979)

California Approves Controversial 'Yes Means Yes' Consent Law For College Campuses

Gov. Jerry Brown announced Sunday that he has signed a bill that makes California the first in the nation to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.

State lawmakers last month approved Senate Bill 967 by Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, as states and universities across the U.S. are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations. Campus sexual assault victims and women’s advocacy groups delivered petitions to Brown’s office on Sept. 16 urging him to sign the bill.

De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain “no means no,” the definition of consent under the bill requires “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.”

“Every student deserves a learning environment that is safe and healthy,” De Leon said in a statement Sunday night. “The State of California will not allow schools to sweep rape cases under the rug. We’ve shifted the conversation regarding sexual assault to one of prevention, justice, and healing.”

The legislation says silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. Under the bill, someone who is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep cannot grant consent.

Lawmakers say consent can be nonverbal, and universities with similar policies have outlined examples as a nod of the head or moving in closer to the person.

Advocates for victims of sexual assault supported the change as one that will provide consistency across campuses and challenge the notion that victims must have resisted assault to have valid complaints.

“This is amazing,” said Savannah Badalich, a student at UCLA, where classes begin this week, and the founder of the group 7000 in Solidarity. “It’s going to educate an entire new generation of students on what consent is and what consent is not … that the absence of a no is not a yes.”

The bill requires training for faculty reviewing complaints so that victims are not asked inappropriate questions when filing complaints. The bill also requires access to counseling, health care services and other resources.

When lawmakers were considering the bill, critics said it was overreaching and sends universities into murky legal waters. Some Republicans in the Assembly questioned whether statewide legislation is an appropriate venue to define sexual consent between two people.

There was no opposition from Republicans in the state Senate.

Gordon Finley, an adviser to the National Coalition for Men, wrote an editorial asking Brown not to sign the bill. He argued that “this campus rape crusade bill” presumes the guilt of the accused.

SB 967 applies to all California postsecondary schools, public and private, that receive state money for student financial aid. The California State University and University of California systems are backing the legislation after adopting similar consent standards this year.

UC President Janet Napolitano recently announced that the system will voluntarily establish an independent advocate to support sexual assault victims on every campus. An advocacy office also is a provision of the federal Survivor Outreach and Support Campus Act proposed by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Susan Davis of San Diego, both Democrats.

SEE ALSO: How ‘Consensual’ Sex Got A Freshman Kicked Out Of College And Started A Huge Debate

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California Approves Controversial 'Yes Means Yes' Consent Law For College Campuses

The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYj–P4CgQ

We know what Mark Twain looked like, and we think we know what he sounded like. Just above see what he looked like in motion, strolling around Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut—signature white suit draped loosely around his frame, signature cigar puffing white smoke between his fingers. After Twain’s leisurely walk along the house’s façade, we see him with his daughters, Clara and Jean, seated indoors. Above you can see the original murky version, featured on our site way back in 2010. Here, a digital restoration (which we can’t embed) does wonders for the watchability of this priceless silent artifact, so vividly capturing the writer/contrarian/raconteur’s essence that you’ll find yourself reaching to turn the volume up, expecting to hear that familiar curmudgeonly drawl.

Shot by Thomas Edison in 1909, the short film is most likely the only moving image of Twain in existence. We might assume that Edison also recorded Twain’s voice, since we seem to know it so well, from portrayals of the great American humorist in pop cultural touchstones like Star Trek: The Next Generation and parodies by Alec Baldwin and Val Kilmer. Kilmer’s surprisingly funny in the role, but he doesn’t come near the pitch perfect impersonation Hal Holbrook’s been giving us for the better part of sixty years in his masterful Mark Twain Tonight. Holbrook’s vocal mannerisms have become a definitive model for actors playing Twain on stage and screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqHPN4lW6tI

Given the number of Twain vocal impersonations out there, and Edison’s interest in documenting the author, we might be surprised to learn that no original recordings of his voice exist. Twain, we find out in the short film above, experimented with audio recording technology, but abandoned his efforts. It seems that none of the wax cylinders he worked with have survived—perhaps he destroyed them himself.

As narrator Rod Rawlings—himself a Twain impersonator and aficionado—informs us, what we do have is a recording made in 1934 by actor and playwright William Gillette,  an able mimic of Twain, his patron and longtime neighbor. Like Holbrook, Gillette spent a good part of his career traveling from town to town playing Mark Twain. Above, you’ll hear Gillette address a class of students at Harvard, first in his own voice, then in the voice of the author, reading from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Gillette’s performance is likely the closest we’ll ever come to hearing the voice of the real Twain, whose major works appear in our collection of 550 Free Audio Books and 600 Free eBooks.

Related Content:

Mark Twain Plays With Electricity in Nikola Tesla’s Lab (Photo, 1894)

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

Rare Recording of Controversialist, Journalist and American Literary & Social Critic, H.L. Mencken

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison