The Dreamer The Believer Zip Common App

The Dreamer The Believer Zip Common Application
The Dreamer The Believer Zip Common Apparition

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This album is great, i love the beats on the album, and commons flow is just awesome.No I.D. Did an amazing job, as well did common the This album is great, i love the beats on the album, and commons flow is just awesome.No I.D. Did an amazing job, as well did common the combination of these two was a good idea now it should be a collab with. LED Illuminated Marionettes by The Dream Hunters. The Dream Hunters used our 3528 LED strips to build their custom animal contraptions. These LED strips are great to highlight the specific features of these huge marionettes because they’re small, easy to manipulate and they can be cut and reattached to fit custom sizes. Common - The Believer (feat. John Legend) (The Dreamer/The Believer 2011). The Dreamer/The Believer is the ninth studio album by American rapper Common.It was released in the UK on December 19, 2011 and in the US on December 20 through Warner Bros. Records alongside Common's newly launched Think Common Music Inc. Common's longtime friend and frequent collaborator No I.D. Handled the album's production entirely himself.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Eric Westervelt / NPR

For many high school students this year, the already stressful process of applying to college has been made far worse by major technical malfunctions with the Common Application, an online application portal used by hundreds of colleges and universities.

'It's been stressful, to be honest,' says Freya James, a senior in Atlanta applying to five schools -- all early admissions. The so-called 'Common App' has been a nightmare, the 17-year-old says.

'No one likes applying to college anyway, and this is supposed to help and it's made it worse,' she says. 'I have spent a good number of hours just sitting there refreshing the page, doing nothing terribly productive except for trying to get this thing to work. ... It's not useful, it's not doing what it's meant to do.'

The Common Application has been around for more than 30 years and has long made the application process easier for students and schools. With one common form, students are able to apply to dozens of schools at once.

But the number of schools using the form has more than doubled over the last decade. What was once used mainly by small liberal arts schools is now accepted by more than 500 institutions.

The nonprofit that runs the form, also called Common Application, had touted a major upgrade of software and applications as a way to streamline the process even more. Instead, the digital makeover has been a bust and a big mess for many students and higher education officials.

'Application Armageddon'

'There have been issues with being able to import the application itself, with receiving the supplemental materials like the transcripts or letters of recommendations, those kinds of things,' says Lisa Meyer, dean for enrollment at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.

'Those are very big things. It's very hard to read an application when you don't have a transcript to look at .... So I think the colleges have been scrambling a bit,' she says.

Other serious technical problems include payments that take days to register or registering duplicate payments. Other students complain they simply couldn't log in, while others were repeatedly logged off for inactivity after waiting hours to submit their applications.

Then there's the personal essay, a key part of the admissions process. A formatting glitch left many students' essays looking like a giant stream of consciousness blur with no spaces, paragraphs or indentations.

Many high schoolers are ranting against the Common App on Twitter. Some of the kinder comments: 'I'm freaking out, the common app isn't working;' 'The common app is kind of the worst thing ever;' and, 'The common app is broken ... so we're all just not gonna go to college, ok.'

Irena Smith, a college admissions consultant based in the San Francisco area, says the problems are adding more stress for her student clients. 'It's starting to look like application Armageddon,' she says. And an official with the National Association for College Admission Counseling says, 'There is a bit of panic in the community.'

Schools Look For Backup Plans

A growing list of colleges and universities is now rolling back early admissions deadlines or trying to reassure students that they won't be penalized for technical failures of the Common App. As Columbia University, which has extended its early admission deadline, put it on its website, 'We hope this announcement helps to relieve some of the stress and anxiety you might be feeling as the application deadline approaches.'

In a statement, Common Application says it's 'committed to resolving these issues promptly.' Scott Anderson, the company's senior director for policy, says some of the problems have been resolved, but concedes others persist.

'We did test the system. But what we couldn't test was tens of thousands of people hitting the system at the same time using multiple kinds of browsers,' Anderson says.

Many parents and school administrators, however, are frustrated and angry. 'I think this has been a debacle, and the Common App board and leadership should be ashamed,' says Valerie Weber, chair of the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Commonwealth Medical College in Pennsylvania -- and mother of a high school senior currently applying to college.

'How they have handled the mess will be a case study in business schools for years to come about how not to handle a PR catastrophe -- hunker down, ignore and refuse to answer questions,' Weber says.

A Lesson For Procrastinators?

Some in higher education are cautiously hopeful that the technical problems will be resolved by Nov. 1, the early admissions deadline for many schools, but others are getting nervous. Some schools are starting to make backup plans that include email, snail mail -- even dusting off the fax machine. 'That is certainly one of the things we are considering doing,' says Meyer of Lewis and Clark College.

Mary Beth Fry, director of college counseling at Savannah Country Day School in Georgia, cautions students and parents to take a deep breath. 'Everyone at the Common App and the colleges is doing his best, and -- as some colleges' extensions of early action or early decision deadlines will attest -- colleges are going to do what's best for everyone.'

Bay Area admissions consultant Irena Smith sees a 'teaching moment' in all this: Some teenagers prone to procrastination may now be prodded into getting their applications done -- early.

'In some ways it's nice to learn, as we do as adults, that you can't always anticipate that everything will go smoothly,' she says. 'It's nice to plan for contingencies and to get things done a little bit ahead of time.'

But when that lesson comes with potentially crippling anxiety, she adds, maybe it's not such a great way to teach it.

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3 stars (out of 4)

Common spent so much of his career proffering earnest tales of self-empowerment and moral struggle that his 2008 album, “Universal Mind Control,” came as a shock to his followers. Brimming with lackluster club-oriented tracks and high-roller clichés, it came off as a transparent attempt to crash the pop charts.

With his Hollywood and TV career in full gallop, Common appeared to be pulling away from the music that once inspired one of his greatest rhymes (his 1994 ode to hip-hop, “I Used to Love H.E.R.”). But his ninth studio album, “The Dreamer/The Believer” (Warner), gamely tries to jump-start his career by returning to his ‘90s foundation: uplifting songs about everyday folks rising above their circumstances, and the production work of No I.D. (Dion Wilson), with whom he collaborated on several of his best early albums.

Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn on the South Side, Common remains symbolic of a certain Midwestern-bred style of hip-hop, a blue-collar MC whose style has rubbed off on kindred spirits Kanye West, Rhymefest and Lupe Fiasco. Perhaps no other MC would frame an album with cameos from the poet Maya Angelou and his own worldly wise father, as Common does on “The Dreamer/The Believer.”

No I.D. is an equally important element in Common’s attempt to get back on course. His style owes to the expansiveness of ‘70s “dusties” soul, placing a premium on pleading vocals, horns, and stepping grooves that glide rather than stomp. The producer arrays gauzy female backing vocals and softly ringing keyboards over a big, steady snare beat on album-opener “The Dreamer,” while Common free-associates vague encouragement: “Maybe I’m a hopeless hip-hop romantic … thought about my daughter for a second … the world is at my fingers … at the mountaintop ya still gotta dream to the dreamers.” Angelou bats clean-up, closing the song with a poetic history lesson.

Set against the more flamboyant stylists of the last decade, Common sounds almost quaint. He’s so ‘90s, but he sounds at home there. No I.D. keeps the melody flowing, with vocalists Makeba Riddick and James Fauntleroy II taking turns singing hooks, and building gospel-tinged celebrations out of some of the unfunkiest music ever made (samples from ELO and Kenny Loggins).

Common sees God and Run-DMC amid “Blue Sky” when he thinks about his childhood, and John Legend lays a giant gospel hook atop “The Believer” that sends the rapper sifting through a “violent culture” for inspiration. He flexes his battle-rhyme muscles on “Sweet,” and trolls the clubs in search of booty on a handful of throwaway tracks with some truly atrocious puns (“aware of her chest because I stay abreast”; “what’s in front of me is this great behind”).

Between the we-shall-overcome optimism and the get-loose lustiness, Common and No I.D. combine to deliver a knockout track that defines the album. “Lovin’ I Lost” finds the MC reflecting on a relationship over a melancholy Curtis Mayfield falsetto-vocal hook and simmering, string-accented beat. Though it could be interpreted as a break-up song, it also could be heard as a desire to make amends with hip-hop, to rediscover its essence, after a few years of straying.