“We need to prepare the next
generation to submit to authority anywhere at any time! i.e. prepare
them for their lives as second class citizens.”
Student
sues Ga. school district over strip search
February 15, 2012 by Dissent
Greg Bluestein of Associated Press
reports:
A Georgia middle
school student claimed in a lawsuit Wednesday he was humiliated and
traumatized when he was brought to a vice principal’s office and
forced to strip in front of classmates who said he had marijuana.
The student, then
in the seventh-grade, said he still suffers from emotional distress
because his classmates taunted him by calling him Superman, the
underwear he was wearing when he was strip-searched. The student is
suing the Clayton County school district for unspecified punitive and
compensatory damages.
Read more on WTOP.
This is the second strip search case in
the news this week. On Monday, the North
Carolina Supreme Court heard oral arguments in another such case,
although there are significant differences. In the North Carolina
case, there was no specific suspicion of the student and all female
students had to hook their thumb under their bras to pull the bra
away from their bodies to see if pills fell out. In this case, a
student was strip-searched in front of peers. In both cases, though,
schools will argue that they are entitled to search students because
they have a duty to keep schools safe and students
have less expectation of privacy.
But is this really what we want to
teach our children – that they have to strip on the say-so of any
authority figure? I don’t think so. And I wish the courts were
more inclined to recognize that students do have a right to privacy
and that schools have gone too far.
Will this thinking ever come to
America?
EU
court: Social networks can't be forced to monitor users
The
European Court of Justice ruled today that forcing social networks to
install monitoring systems just to see if users are illegally
downloading copyrighted material creates a "complicated"
and "costly" burden on the sites for little or no upside.
It was also concerned about the privacy of user data.
(Related) This
almost certainly will come to America.
asto21 writes with this excerpt from
The Indian Express:
"As per amendments made to
operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to
provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time
details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes.
Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall
initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government.
Within three years, service providers will have to provide
information on locations of all users. The information will have
some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of
the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when
made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the
government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in
cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."
No push-back? (Monsanto caused my
crops to mutate into Franken-food!)
"Monsanto went after hundreds
of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits
revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a
result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable
to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought
out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their
profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years
as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic
farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually
during that span with a so-called 'seed police.'"
Will the “resolutions” be worded
neutrally?
suraj.sun writes with a link about a
SEC decision that telecommunications companies must give shareholders
an
annual vote on wireless net-neutrality resolutions.
"The U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission has told AT&T and other telecommunications
companies they must include a resolution supporting wireless
net-neutrality in annual shareholder votes. In a letter posted on
the SEC website, the agency asserted that net neutrality — the idea
that Internet service providers must treat traffic equally — has
become a significant policy consideration and can no longer be
excluded from shareholder ballots. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint
Nextel must now grant shareholder requests for votes this year on
resolutions that would support net neutrality. In view of the
sustained public debate over the last several years concerning net
neutrality and the Internet and the increasing recognition that the
issue raises significant policy considerations, we do not believe
that AT&T may omit the proposal from its proxy materials, the SEC
said in the Feb. 10 letter."
This is interesting...
"HP reversed
its decision to spin off its PC business, but it's still left
with the question of how to make money in a commodity business
selling standard-issue machines manufactured overseas. One idea
they're contemplating: improved customer service. If you buy an HP
'Elite' PC and have problems, you won't have to phone into a tech
support call center where an entry-level drone reads off a script and
tells you to reboot the machine; you'll have access to a specific
support tech who will work with you as long as you own the computer."
A rather laid back, but interesting
talk...
The
Future of Reading, From Avant-Garde Poetry to Sportscenter
On Tuesday, I gave a keynote
address at the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) conference on the
future of publishing.
Another e-textbook vision...
Nature
Publishing Group Officially Launches New Interactive Textbook
Last spring I wrote about Nature
Publishing Group’s plan for a $49
electronic textbook packed with interactivity and unlimited
content updates for life. The original publication date was
scheduled for September 1, 2011, but for a variety of reasons the
release was pushed back. Today marks the official
launch of “Principles of Biology”.
This book is “born digital”,
according to Vikram Savkar, SVP & Publishing Director at Nature
Publishing Group, and is the first in a line of texts that NPG plans
to release for the life and physical sciences. It’s
not an e-book or fancy PDF, but a dynamic interactive website that
can be customized by the instructor, contains built-in assessments
that students can take, and works appropriately on any device that
can access it: desktop, tablet, or phone.
Perhaps I should file this under “Tools
for Teaching when you are Hungover?”
Chill
is a free service for creating and sharing collections of your
favorite videos from YouTube, Vimeo, VEVO, and Hulu. Chill
is kind of like Pinterest for videos. Using Chill you can
add videos with your comments to categories that you create. Your
videos appear like sticky notes on a wall. Chill allows you to
follow other Chill users to discover and share new videos.
Applications
for Education
For
teachers looking for new video content to use in their classroom,
Chill could be a
place to find that content. Or if you're just looking for a better
way to organize the videos that you find online, Chill could be the
solution for you.
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