TheChronicle of Higher Educationreports that Stacy Snyder, a 27-year-old student at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, was denied her education degree (and the accompanying teaching certificate) after student-teacher advisors and university officials discovered an “unprofessional” picture of the degree candidate on her MySpace page. The picture, which portrays Snyder drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup and wearing a pirate hat at a 2005 Halloween party, is accompanied by the caption “Drunken Pirate.” Despite the fact that (a) Snyder was of legal drinking age at the time of the picture; (b) the picture was posted on an outside, non-university website; and (c) the drinking captured in the picture happened in a private, non-university setting, Millersville officials decided that the picture alone was enough to cost Snyder her degree and teaching certificate, despite the fact that Snyder was on the dean’s list and received positive evaluations for her final student/teacher evaluation in every area except for “professionalism.” The school instead awarded Snyder a degree in English.
In response, Snyder has sued, requesting relief in the form of her education degree and $75,000 dollars in compensatory damages.
The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal’s coverage of the incident sheds yet more light on the disturbing denial. According to her lawsuit, Snyder’s student-teacher advisors at Conestoga Valley High School (where Snyder was fulfilling her student-teaching requirements) were the first to discover the photo, and confronted Snyder about it, accusing her of “incompetence” and telling her that “she should have been removed from her student-teaching position months ago.” In turn, the dean of Millersville’s School of Education, Jane S. Bray, had a meeting with Snyder, accusing her of “promoting underage drinking” and stripping Snyder of her education degree. Instead of pursuing a career in teaching, Snyder, a mother of two, now works as a nanny.
Barring any as-of-yet unknown revelations about her student-teaching conduct and her coursework, the conduct of Snyder’s student-teacher advisors and the Millersville administrators is outrageous. Snyder should be awarded her degree immediately. Online glimpses of her private life, insofar as they did not portray any illegal activity whatsoever, should in no way bar her from receiving her duly-earned degree. Since when are teachers required to forego any semblance of an adult social life? Since when did a student’s normal, non-criminal private life outside of the classroom become suitable grounds for evaluation, and even the denial of a degree?
I just finished watching 80′s vampire movie, The Lost Boys. A few notes:
it’s much shorter than I remember — only about 1 hour 30.
it’s much shallower than I remember, I think it’s the cool title song that made me think more of it. Listening to the commentary, the shallowness is somewhat deliberate — it’s supposed to be a teen movie, remade from an original script for a kid’s movie
the movie looks great, very modern in technique but the clothes and music is totally — epitomely, if that’s word — the 80′s. The commentary said that Corey Feldman’s clothes was supposed to be “mall fashion-victim”, but that provides no excuses for the head vampire Edward Hermann who looks like he wanted to be on a Duran Duran album cover.
first movie with The Two Cories
Keifer Sutherland looks great; they say he has the least words of any of the major stars in the movie, but every word counts
I have to say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has totally set my expectations for vampire movies — “hey, they’re not following the rules”. For example, inviting a vampire into your hour renders you powerless; but they don’t need an invitation.
I had never seen this movie and quite enjoyed it (despites to follow). Given its place in pop culture, I was expecting Jar Jar Binks meets Cadyshack II
The despites:
Sophia Coppola can’t act. Too bad.
George Lucas makes exactly the same mistake as Coppola in Star Wars I-III: they confuse the MacGuffin with the story
The Andy Garcia (Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son) plotline is poorly integrated, to say the least. At the beginning of the movie he doesn’t even rate an invitation to big event; at the end he’s the Godfather despite the fact he really doesn’t really accomplish much
Tom Hagen is missed.
What’s the point of the Godfather trilogy: is it just that Michael has to pay for his character flaws of being disproportionate and losing sight that it’s supposed to be for the family, not for honor? That Michael’s sins put him outside of forgiveness? Just asking…
Despite the critical tone above, if you haven’t seen it, take the time.
From the “if you don’t believe something, you’ll believe anything files”, the “Gore Challenge” (via Greenie Watch):
As a believer:
that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by one year from today
Note by selecting the “household” as the target, the energy profligate lifestyles — first class seating, private planes, entourage, limos, SUVs, powertoys, cottages, etc. — of the privileged are exempt from examination; whereas almost 100% of Joe Everyman’s life is up for grabs.
When multiculturalism came into vogue a generation ago, it was powered by the conceit that group hatred is primarily a Western pathology — an outgrowth of our warmongering, colonialist past. That’s why from the 1980s onward, multicultural agitprop in schools, workplaces and government agencies has invariably focused not on assimilating immigrants and stripping them of their old-world prejudices, but on eliminating any vestige of white bigotry.
The reason multiculturalism now seems like such a fraud is that experience has taught us that old-school racism has nothing on the sort of hatreds brought into this country by the immigrants themselves: hatred toward homosexuals, toward heretics, toward “loose” women and, most importantly, toward each other.
An interesting article, but probably wrong. The value to the NGP to corral immigrants into voter blocks is too high; “multiculturalism” is the happy rhetoric put around this practice.
Noami Wolf gives her 10 easy steps to a Fascist America, currently being implemented by the Bush Junta. This is even too stupid for Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder. One could pointlessly “fisk” the article, but let me argue from a meta point of view: if America was actually becoming fascist, Wolf and her pals would either shut up and cower or, more likely, enthusiastically join up, start sig-heiling and kicking the shit out of people who looked at them sidewise, just like large numbers of “socialists” and “communists” did once they saw which way the wind was blowing in Nazi Germany. And to further belabor the point, if you turned on the TV and saw a mob of masked thugs kicking the shit out of someone, would you take a bet that they’re right-wing Bush partisans?
In its war on tobacco, WHO has attempted Orwellian moves of almost absurd incompetence. In 1998, for instance, the group was supposed to release an enormous 10-year study on second-hand smoke’s links with lung cancer, the largest ever done in Europe. A small mention of it was printed in a WHO report before the whole study was available. The British Sunday Telegraph tried to get a copy of the study, since the brief reference intriguingly implied that it could not find a statistically significant link between second-hand smoke exposure and lung cancer. The Telegraph implied that WHO was trying to bury the report since its results went against their official anti-tobacco stance.
WHO and other anti-tobacco groups were outraged. One group, Action on Smoking and Health, filed an official complaint with Britain’s Press Complaints Commission over the supposedly erroneous reporting. (The commission found in the Telegraph’s favor.) WHO responded to reports that its study did not find a statistically significant link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer in a press release headlined, “Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You” — strange, strained language from a supposedly scientific organization.
Underneath that colorful headline, the press release states, in italics, that “passive smoking causes lung cancer in non-smokers.” Then, in the very next paragraph, it clarifies, “The study found that there was an estimated 16% increased risk of lung cancer among non-smoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17%. However, due to small sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant.” In other words, the Telegraph report was exactly correct: The study had found no statistically significant link between second-hand smoke and cancer.
As for the “suppressed” part, WHO insisted that the paper was merely being peer-reviewed, not hidden. Yet three years later, you’ll still find no mention of the report on WHO’s list of “Comprehensive Reports on Passive Smoking by Authoritative Scientific Bodies.”
Having recently watched Star Wars III, including the incredibly boring special features about how they did everything (green screen + cash + Australians), this video “interviewing” George Lucas and pals about how they would do Lord of the Rings is priceless:
Interestingly enough, the most interesting part … hell, maybe the only interesting part … of Star Wars I-III, the fight on the volcano planet, had a lot of consulting with Steven Speilberg.
Who does [New York Time's public editor Byron] Calame think he’s fooling? Imagine the following scenario: three African-American college students are charged with a crime for which almost no evidence exists. One has an air-tight, public, unimpeachable alibi. Their accuser is a white woman with a criminal record and major psychological problems. They are prosecuted by a race-baiting district attorney who violates myriad procedures while seizing upon the case amidst an election campaign in a racially divided county.
Does anyone believe that the Times would have covered the story outlined above with articles that bent over backwards to give the district attorney the benefit of the doubt, played down questions about his motivations, and regularly concluded with “shout-outs” regarding the accuser’s willingness to hang tough—coupled with sports columnists who compared the accused students to gangsters and drug dealers?
How will they differentiate between the loners and the dangerous crazies. Poorly, ignorantly and stupidly it looks like. Because there’s a hell of a lot more of the first, and sorry they don’t fit in the way you like but they are entitled to a life outside of popularity.
Sheryl Crow wants toilet paper rationing (via London Fog). You can’t make this stuff up. What is it, that the little gears in celebrity big thinkers keep spinning and spinning churning out non-solutions to problems no one is having.
The side of Net Neutrality I like is the one about not discriminating among destinations. If I place a VoIP call, my ISP should not be able to prevent my using Vonage (or to permit it only if I pay more) just because it has its own VoIP product. Such discrimination allows a carrier to take advantage of its near-monopoly situation in order to boost its other non-monopoly business, and should be prohibited. A non-Internet example: I subscribe to cable TV, and when the cable company, which also has media interests, bought a sports channel from another media company it decided to make it a “basic cable” offering that every cable customer would have to pay for, including people like me who never watch it. The cable company had never forced on its subscribers a longer established and much more popular sports channel that it did not own; this action was taken only when it benefitted the cable company’s media division. This is the kind of discrimination I would like to see prevented. If a carrier offers value-added services like VoIP, that’s fine with me, but it should not be permitted to discriminate between its own services and those of others.
The side of Net Neutrality that I’m not so keen on is the one relating to “traffic shaping”. Here the ISP gives lower priority to certain types of packets in order to keep the rest of the packets moving smartly. In particular, it gives lower priority to BitTorrent packets. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer system for distributing large files, and is very good at that: GNU/Linux distributions have been spread this way, for instance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of audio and video distributed illegally, such as movies recorded by a video camera smuggled into a movie theatre. Movie files are huge, and BitTorrent traffic now constitutes a large percentage of all Internet traffic. Net Neutrality advocates say that this traffic should get equal priority. I don’t agree. If my ISP uses traffic shaping to slow down BitTorrent, that’s just fine with me. Yes, that unfortunately slows down “legitimate” torrents as well, but I’d rather pay that price than have the entire Internet slow to a crawl.
For the record, I don’t think ISP should be able to discriminate between packets from different sources (without losing common carrier privileges) and should be able to traffic shape. The first means they cannot deliver a “superior” product, say video, by downgrading competitors. The second says the little geek next door can’t ruin everyone else’s Internet experience on the Internet by spending all day downloading movies.
If then (for example), Rogers wants to offer a “video downloading” package with all the bandwidth our hypothetical neighbor needs, they cannot make it a “Roger’s Video Only” deal.
Perhaps the best sign is the shifting media narrative. A few weeks back, yours truly and a couple of other skeptics were dismissed by The Toronto Star’s David Olive as “Black retainers”. But, as Chris Selley noted the other day, it’s not just Steyn and Peter Worthington “calling this thing for the defence any more”. Fleet Street seems to be so stunned by the prospect of a Black acquittal that they’ve more or less abandoned all coverage of the trial. But, across the water in Dublin, The Irish Independent’s Ruth Dudley Edwards says: “I can’t be the only one beginning to wonder if there’s anything more to this case than spite and envy.”
Marlon Brando is amazing (and I’m only 15 minutes in); I’m really going to have to make an effort to watch some of his early material to see what that’s all about — my memories are mainly of the corpulent joke Brando, but there’s a lot more going on there
Robert De Niro is amazing too; I’m glad I watch these movies in the reverse order. He did a fantastic job of capturing Brando’s character. Sadly, another actor who has lapsed into parody
contract to Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. McGregor got the motions, but never the character.
My wife Joanne’s Italian and it’s funny to note that they had a “fixer” character too in their life. When they moved to Canada, only one lady could speak English and she took charge of all things dealing with “the English”. As necessary, she would be the mother, the sister, or whatever was needed for the circumstance (such as going to the doctor). [I'll update this with her name when Joanne gets home]
Everything you know about Italians from the top-tier mob movies is true, except for the mob part. Really (or at least they’re not admitting to the mob part, though I do step lightly). The first time I saw The Sopranos, it was “hey look, they have our bedspread … and our bedroom … and our kitchen cupboards…”
(update) the soundtrack is totally over the top. Is this a time-ism thing, or did it suck also when the movie came out? Rick McGinnis would know…
I really only have one major issue with the social content sites out there right now. The content sucks.
The problem is social content sites (digg, reddit, etc.) are a great blender mixing everyone’s choices into a smooth consistent blend. With a relatively homogeneous group, this doesn’t matter so much but as more and more people pile into the system, the worse the results become (i.e. it becomes so popular, no one goes there anymore).
What does this mean? Well, the obvious thing is that the market’s still open for solutions. Partitioning users by taste into different sites (as suggested in the starting link) is an inadequate solution (IMHO); but what if you could data mine a facebook-like site. That would be killer.
I got in on this, taking a one way flight from Montreal to Toronto in July to return from The Police concert (I’ll take the train down with friends):
It’s a good time to book airfare in Canada, with rival airlines Air Canada and WestJet offering competing promotions in a bid to win over consumers.
Air Canada on Tuesday dropped its prices on select routes to $11 one-way to match bargain prices offered by rival airline WestJet, said Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for Montreal-based Air Canada.
On Tuesday only, an $11 ticket could be bought for flights between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal
FIRE’s Torch reports: 
Here’s what I have queued up for watching this week: 
I just finished watching 80′s vampire movie, 
Here are a few thoughts on 