Employers in California will have more discretion in whether to pay their interns, under revised guidelines from the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, The New York Times reported Friday. While the federal criteria requires that, in order for an intern to be unpaid, the intern must be given training and not replace a regular employer, California's labor department has released a looser set of criteria, according to The Times. Under the new state guidance, interns can occasionally perform tasks done by regular employees as long as the intern's work "does not unreasonably replace or impede the education objective for the intern and effectively displace regular workers," David Balter, acting chief counsel for the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement in California, told The Times.
The North Dakota State Board of Higher Education ruled on Thursday to retire the Fighting Sioux nickname and logo of the University of North Dakota athletic teams, the Grand Forks Herald reported. The board voted in May 2009 to retire the nickname and logo unless the University could obtain a 30-year commitment of approval from the two Sioux tribes. While voters in the Spirit Lake tribe approved the measure, officials of the Standing Rock tribe refused to hold a referendum, according to the Herald. Logo supporters recently brought an injunction against the board's retiring of the nickname until the referendum occurs at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The district court ruled against the injunction, and the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court on Thursday morning, the Herald reported.
Some professors are outsourcing their students' writing assignments to online assessors through a service called "Virtual-TA," The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The goal of the service is to lighten the workload of professors and teaching assistants, and enable the professors to focus more on in-class teaching and research. The company claims to do a better job than many TAs because it employs a group of professionally=trained online assessors who do not have their own coursework to juggle. EduMetry, the company behind Virtual=TA, is based in a Virginia suburb, and the assessors are concentrated in India, Singapore and Malaysia, according to The Chronicle. Critics say the lack of personal relationship between the assessors and the students could prevent the assessors from fully understanding students' ideas, but many professors who have used the service said the lack of relationship has not been an issue, according to The Chronicle.
