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The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week heard oral argument in two cases involving whether the police, after arresting someone, can search his or her cell phone without a search warrant. Although the police have been allowed to do a limited search of a person after they've been arrested, this exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement was never intended to cover the massive amounts of sensitive information on a cell phone. But as the oral arguments made clear, the government is relying on dangerous misconceptions about cell phone technology in an attempt to justify a significant privacy intrusion.
The Issues Before the Supreme Court
After the police arrest someone, they're allowed to search the arrestee's person and the items within their immediate control without a search warrant for two reasons: first to make sure the person is not hiding a weapon that can harm officers, and second, to ensure that any evidence that could be lost or destroyed is secured. Under the search incident to arrest exception, the police do not need to make any showing that there were actual threats to officer safety or evidence destruction. That is, if the item they want to search is on the person (meaning in their pockets or purse) or within reaching distance at the time of arrest, the police get to search, period.
At issue before the Supreme Court is how this doctrine applies to the modern cell phone. Both cases involve a police search of a cell phone after they had arrested someone for a crime unconnected with the phone. In Riley v. California, the California appeals court found a warrantless search of a smartphone appropriate under the exception, ruling that the nature of the item to be searched —and ultimately the amount of information carried on a cell phone—was irrelevant to deciding whether the exception applied. But in United States v. Wurie, the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals found the breadth of information stored on a cell phone did matter and the exception didn't apply to a search of a simple flip phone. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1973 that police could search a pack of cigarettes found in an arrestee's jacket pocket and so to some extent, the issue in front of the Court now was whether a cellphone was similar enough to a pack of cigarettes that the police could search it too.
Together with the Center for Democracy and Technology, we filed amicus briefs in both Riley and Wurie, arguing that the amount of information stored on a modern cell phone is so great, that it was nothing like a pack of cigarettes and should be off limits to police without a search warrant. In other words, the technology matters for the constitutional issue before the court.
Mischaracterizing the Technological Reality
At the argument on Tuesday, it was clear that the governments of both California and the United States agreed that technology mattered for the constitutional issue too, but in a vastly different way. First, California's Solicitor General argued that when you carry a cell phone, you assume the risk that your data could be searched at any time:
But what we are saying is that people do make choices, and those choices have consequences. And the consequence of carrying things on your person has always been that if you are arrested, the police will be able to examine that to see if it is evidence of crime.
In a country where people can be arrested for not wearing a seat belt and attempts to count the number of federal criminal laws (let alone state criminal laws) have failed because there are too many to count, everyone's phone is fair game under this premise. But taking advantage of technological advancements shouldn't require a person to sacrifice constitutional privacy protection, especially when a cell phone carries far more information than any person could even physically carry on them in non-digital form.
More problematic than California's bogus assumption of risk theory was the federal government playing fast and loose with the role encryption plays in the modern world. While encryption is a universally good thing— a way to safeguard information and keep it private—the government views it as a threat.
Well, I think that there is clearly the technology available and growing technology to wipe phones remotely. But the other critical problem that comes back to Justice Ginsburg's point about getting a warrant is encryption technology is increasingly being deployed in cell phones. That is something that clearly is on the rise. And when a phone is turned off or the lock kicks in and the phone encrypts, it can be almost impossible to get into it.
This argument makes no technical or legal sense.
First, the government assumes that a specific phone actually has a lock and that it is actually deployed. But a Consumer Reports survey from last week found that only 36 percent of cell phone users have a four-digit PIN setup on their phone and that 34 percent of smartphone owners took no security measures at all. In those instances where the phone has a PIN, the government assumes a scenario where officers get the phone in the brief time frame before the phone locks. But a phone could be sitting idle in a person's pocket or next to them in a car, meaning officers wouldn't be able to bypass the PIN screen anyway.
Second, the government conflates the issue of if they can search with how they can search. If the search incident to arrest exception applies, the police are legally permitted to search the phone. But the exception does not create a right to an effective search. If the police encounter a phone they cannot access because it is locked (and they don't know the PIN) or the contents are encrypted, then the exception is simply irrelevant as to what the police can do next. They can ask the arrestee if he agrees to allow the police to search (and he can and should say no if he wants) or try to brute force their way into the phone. And as we've successfully argued elsewhere, they cannot compel the arrestee to decrypt or unlock the phone. But the incident to arrest exception has no bearing on these issues at all.
Related to this is the government's paranoia regarding the ability of a phone to be remotely deleted, a concern it consistently raised as a reason to allow police to search immediately after arrest. This paranoia is self-made. There is little empirical evidence to show that the majority of smartphones are capable of being remotely wiped. If not even a majority of Americans have a four-digit PIN on their phone, it's doubtful most people understand how to remotely wipe a phone. And it has unsurprisingly been law enforcement itself pushing to have cell phones designed with "kill switches" built in, ostensibly as a means to deter phone theft, that creates the very justification the government needs to bypass the warrant requirement. If the government were truly concerned about maintaining the integrity of a cell phone, it would make more sense for them to secure the phone instead of searching it in the field. There are plenty of ways to prevent remote wiping, whether by placing the phone in a Faraday bags, removing the battery or SIM card or powering the phone off, eliminating the justification for searching without judicial oversight.
Ultimately, this all matters because the government is using these mischaracterizations to argue for a general rule that will be applied to all phones in all arrests. If the Court accepts this argument, then police can search any phone, regardless of whether it has a PIN or encryption or no security at all. That will be the vast majority of phones the police encounter. The Court should base its ruling, which will impact millions of Americans' cell phone privacy, on facts, not hyperbole.
During oral argument, the Court seemed to demonstrate greater awareness of the digital reality than the government. Justice Kagan remarked "people carry their entire lives on cell phones. That's not a marginal case. That's the world we live in." In a different setting, she noted that the justices might not be "the most technologically sophisticated people." Fortunately, it doesn't take technological sophistication to figure out that the only way to protect privacy in the modern world is to prohibit the police from intruding into a cell phone without a warrant.


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Saturday, August 18, 2012
How we killed higher ed in 5 easy steps
A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, "In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, 'History is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe.' I think he got it right. Nothing is more important to the future of the United States and the world than the breadth and effectiveness of education, especially of higher education. I say especially higher education, but not because pre- school, elementary, and secondary education are less important. Success at every level of education obviously depends on what has gone before. But for better or worse, the quality of postsecondary education and research affects the quality and effectiveness of education at every level."
In the last few years, conversations have been growing like gathering storm clouds about the ways in which our universities are failing. There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan debt. Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty. There are now movements to control tuition, to forgive student debt, to create more powerful "assessment" tools, to offer "free" university materials online, to combat adjunct faculty exploitation. But each of these movements focuses on a narrow aspect of a much wider problem, and no amount of "fix" for these aspects individually will address the real reason that universities in America are dying.
To explain my perspective here, I need to go back in time. Let's go back to post World War II, 1950s when the GI bill, and the affordability – and sometimes free access – to universities created an upsurge of college students across the country. This surge continued through the '60s, when universities were the very heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times. It was during this time, too, when colleges had a thriving professoriate, and when students were given access to a variety of subject areas, and the possibility of broad learning. The Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late fifties into the sixties — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn't like the outcome of the 60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.
I suspect that, given the opportunity, those groups would have liked nothing more than to shut down the universities. Destroy them outright. But a country claiming to have democratic values can't just shut down its universities. That would reveal something about that country which would not support the image they are determined to portray – that of a country of freedom, justice, opportunity for all. So, how do you kill the universities of the country without showing your hand? As a child growing up during the Cold War, I was taught that the communist countries in the first half of the 20th Century put their scholars, intellectuals and artists into prison camps, called "re-education camps". What I've come to realize as an adult is that American corporatism despises those same individuals as much as we were told communism did. But instead of doing anything so obvious as throwing them into prison, here those same people are thrown into dire poverty. The outcome is the same. Desperate poverty controls and ultimately breaks people as effectively as prison…..and some research says that it works even MORE powerfully.
So: here is the recipe for killing universities, and you tell ME if what I'm describing isn't exactly what is at the root of all the problems of our country's system of higher education. (Because what I'm saying has more recently been applied to K-12 public education as well.)
First, you defund public higher education.
Anna Victoria, writing in Pluck Magazine, discusses this issue in a review of Christopher Newfield's book, Unmaking the Public University: "In 1971, Lewis Powell (before assuming his post as a Supreme Court Justice) authored a memo, now known as the Powell Memorandum, and sent it to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The title of the memo was "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," and in it he called on corporate America to take an increased role in shaping politics, law, and education in the United States." How would they do that? One, by increased lobbying and pressure on legislators to change their priorities. "Funding for public universities comes from, as the term suggests, the state and federal government. Yet starting in the early 1980s, shifting state priorities forced public universities to increasingly rely on other sources of revenue. For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011." That's a loss of more than 1/3 of its public funding. But why this shift in priorities? U.C. Berkeley English professor, Christopher Newfield, in his new book Unmaking the Public University posits that conservative elites have worked to de-fund higher education explicitly because of its function in creating a more empowered, democratic, and multiracial middle class. His theory is one that blames explicit cultural concern, not financial woes, for the current decreases in funding. He cites the fact that California public universities were forced to reject 300,000 applicants because of lack of funding. Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for de-funding of public education is racial, pro-corporate, and anti-protest in nature.
Again, from Victoria: "(The) ultimate objective, as outlined in the (Lewis Powell) memo, was to purge respectable institutions such as the media, arts, sciences, as well as college campus themselves of left-wing thoughts. At the time, college campuses were seen as "springboards for dissent," as Newfield terms it, and were therefore viewed as publicly funded sources of opposition to the interests of the establishment. While it is impossible to know the extent to which this memo influenced the conservative political strategy over the coming decades, it is extraordinary to see how far the principles outlined in his memo have been adopted."
Under the guise of many "conflicts", such as budget struggles, or quotas, de-funding was consistently the result. This funding argument also was used to re-shape the kind of course offerings and curriculum focus found on campuses. Victoria writes, "Attacks on humanities curriculums, political correctness, and affirmative action shifted the conversation on public universities to the right, creating a climate of skepticism around state funded schools. State budget debates became platforms for conservatives to argue why certain disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, minority studies, language, and gender studies should be de-funded…" on one hand, through the argument that they were not offering students the "practical" skills needed for the job market — which was a powerful way to increase emphasis on what now is seen as vocational focus rather than actual higher education, and to de-value those very courses that trained and expanded the mind, developed a more complete human being, a more actively intelligent person and involved citizen. Another argument used to attack the humanities was "…their so-called promotion of anti-establishment sentiment. Gradually, these arguments translated into real- and often deep- cuts into the budgets of state university systems," especially in those most undesirable areas that the establishment found to run counter to their ability to control the population's thoughts and behavior. The idea of "manufactured consent" should be talked about here – because if you remove the classes and the disciplines that are the strongest in their ability to develop higher level intellectual rigor, the result is a more easily manipulated citizenry, less capable of deep interrogation and investigation of the establishment "message".
Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.
There was recently an article talking about the long-term mental and physical destruction caused when people are faced with poverty and "job insecurity" — precarious employment, or "under-employment". The article says that, in just the few short years since our 2008 economic collapse, the medical problems of this group have increased exponentially. This has been the horrible state of insecurity that America's college professors have experienced now for thirty years. It can destroy you — breaking down your physical and emotional health. As an example: the average yearly starting salary of a university professor at Temple University in 1975 was just under $10,000 a year, with full benefits – health, retirement, and educational benefits (their family's could attend college for free.) And guess what? Average pay for Temple's faculty is STILL about the same — because adjuncts now make up the majority of faculty, and earn between $8,000 to $14,000 a year (depending on how many courses they are assigned each semester – there is NO guarantee of continued employment) — but unlike the full-time professors of 1975, these adjunct jobs come with NO benefits, no health care, no retirement, no educational benefits, no offices. How many other professions report salaries that have remained at 1975 levels?
This is how you break the evil, wicked, leftist academic class in America — you turn them into low-wage members of the precariat – that growing number of American workers whose employment is consistently precarious. All around the country, our undergraduates are being taught by faculty living at or near the poverty line, who have little to no say in the way classes are being taught, the number of students in a class, or how curriculum is being designed. They often have no offices in which to meet their students, no professional staff support, no professional development support. One million of our college professors are struggling to continue offering the best they can in the face of this wasteland of deteriorated professional support, while living the very worst kind of economic insecurity. Unlike those communist countries, which sometimes executed their intellectuals, here we are being killed off by lack of healthcare, by stress-related illness like heart-attacks or strokes. While we're at it, let's add suicide to that list of killers — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past.
Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university.
This new class takes control of much of the university's functioning, including funding allocation, curriculum design, course offerings. If you are old enough to remember when medicine was forever changed by the appearance of the 'HMO' model of managed medicine, you will have an idea of what has happened to academia. If you are not old enough – let me tell you that Once Upon a Time, doctors ran hospitals, doctors made decisions on what treatment their patients needed. In the 1970s, during the infamous Nixon Administration, HMOs were an idea sold to the American public, said to help reign in medical costs. But once Nixon secured passage of the HMO Act in 1973, the organizations went quickly from operating on a non-profit organization model, focused on high quality health care for controlled costs, to being for-profit organizations, with lots of corporate money funding them – and suddenly the idea of high-quality health care was sacrificed in favor of profits – which meant taking in higher and higher premiums and offering less and less service, more denied claims, more limitations placed on doctors, who became a "managed profession". You see the state of healthcare in this country, and how disastrous it is. Well, during this same time, there was a similar kind of development — something akin to the HMO — let's call it an "EMO", Educational Management Organization, began to take hold in American academia. From the 1970s until today, as the number of full-time faculty jobs continued to shrink, the number of full-time administrative jobs began to explode. As faculty was deprofessionalized and casualized, reduced to teaching as migrant contract workers, administrative jobs now offered good, solid salaries, benefits, offices, prestige and power. In 2012, administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country. And just as disastrous as the HMO was to the practice of medicine in America, so is the EMO model disastrous to the practice of academia in America, and to the quality of our students' education. Benjamin Ginsburg writes about this in great detail in his book The Fall of the Faculty.
I'd like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts – which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but to hire adjuncts, as a "cost saving measure" in an increasingly defunded university. What they don't say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power. The money wasn't saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore away from the students' education itself — and into these administrative and executive salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of "consultants", PR and marketing firms, law firms. We have to add here, too, that president salaries went from being, in the 1970s, around $25K to 30K, to being in the hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of dollars – salary, delayed compensation, discretionary funds, free homes, or generous housing allowances, cars and drivers, memberships to expensive country clubs.
Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money
To further control and dominate how the university is 'used" -a flood of corporate money results in changing the value and mission of the university from a place where an educated citizenry is seen as a social good, where intellect and reasoning is developed and heightened for the value of the individual and for society, to a place of vocational training, focused on profit. Corporate culture hijacked the narrative – university was no longer attended for the development of your mind. It was where you went so you could get a "good job". Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history.
Anna Victoria writes, on Corporate Culture: "Many universities have relied on private sector methods of revenue generation such as the formation of private corporations, patents, increased marketing strategies, corporate partnerships, campus rentals, and for-profit e-learning enterprises. To cut costs, public universities have employed non-state employee service contractors and have streamlined their financial operations."
So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research. Corporations donate to departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research. Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one example, corporations who don't like "climate change" warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research. This is especially dangerous when pharmaceutical companies take control of university labs to test efficacy or safety and then push approval through the governmental agencies. Another example is in economics departments — and movies like "The Inside Job" have done a great job of showing how Wall Street has bought off high-profile economists from Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or MIT, to talk about the state of the stock market and the country's financial stability. Papers were being presented and published that were blatantly false, by well-respected economists who were on the payroll of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch.
Academia should not be the whore of corporatism, but that's what it has become. Academia once celebrated itself as an independent institution. Academia is a culture, one that offers a long-standing worldview which values on-going, rigorous intellectual, emotional, psychological, creative development of the individual citizen. It respects and values the contributions of the scholar, the intellectual, to society. It treasures the promise of each student, and strives to offer the fullest possible support to the development of that promise. It does this not only for the good of the scholar and the student, but for the social good. Like medicine, academia existed for the social good. Neither should be a purely for-profit endeavor. And yet, in both the case of the HMO and the EMO, we have been taken over by an alien for-profit culture, our sovereignty over our own profession, our own institutions, stripped from us.
A corporate model, where profit depends on 1) maintaining a low-wage work force and 2) charging continually higher pricers for their "services" is what now controls our colleges . Faculty is being squeezed from one end and our students are being squeezed from the other.
Step Five – Destroy the Students
While claiming to offer them hope of a better life, our corporatized universities are ruining the lives of our students. This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to withstand "tests" and "exams", to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed "common syllabi" courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.
The Second Prong: You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt free. Younger people may not know that for much of the 20th Century many universities in the U.S. were free – including the CA state system – you could establish residency in six months and go to Berkeley for free, or at very low cost. When I was an undergraduate student in the mid to late 1970s, tuition at Temple University was around $700 a year. Today, tuition is nearly $15,000 a year. Tuitions have increased, using CA as an example again, over 2000% since the 1970s. 2000%! This is the most directly dangerous situation for our students: pulling them into crippling debt that will follow them to the grave.
Another dangerous aspect of what is happening can be found in the shady partnership that has formed between the lending institutions and the Financial Aid Departments of universities. This is an unholy alliance. I have had students in my classes who work for Financial Aid. They tell me that they are trained to say NOT "This is what you need to borrow," but to say "This is what you can get," and to always entice the student with the highest possible number. There have been plenty of kick-back scandals between colleges and lenders — and I'm sure there is plenty undiscovered shady business going on. So, tuition costs are out of control because of administrative, executive and coach salaries, and the loan numbers keep growing, risking a life of indebtedness for most of our students. Further, there is absolutely no incentive on the part of this corporatized university to care.
The propaganda machine here has been powerful. Students, through the belief of their parents, their K-12 teachers, their high school counselors, are convinced by constant repetition that they HAVE to go to college to have a promising, middle class life, they are convinced that this tuition debt is "worth it" — and learn too late that it will indenture them. Let's be clear: this is not the fault of the parents, or K-12 teachers or counselors. This is an intentional message that has been repeated year in and year out that aims to convince us all about the essential quality of a college education.
So, there you have it.
Within one generation, in five easy steps, not only have the scholars and intellectuals of the country been silenced and nearly wiped out, but the entire institution has been hijacked, and recreated as a machine through which future generations will ALL be impoverished, indebted and silenced. Now, low wage migrant professors teach repetitive courses they did not design to students who travel through on a kind of conveyor belt, only to be spit out, indebted and desperate into a jobless economy. The only people immediately benefitting inside this system are the administrative class – whores to the corporatized colonizers, earning money in this system in order to oversee this travesty. But the most important thing to keep in mind is this: The real winners, the only people truly benefitting from the big-picture meltdown of the American university are those people who, in the 1960s, saw those vibrant college campuses as a threat to their established power. They are the same people now working feverishly to dismantle other social structures, everything from Medicare and Social Security to the Post Office.
Looking at this wreckage of American academia, we have to acknowledge: They have won.
BUT these are victors who will never declare victory — because the carefully-maintained capitalist illusion of the "university education" still benefits them. Never, ever, admit that the university is dead. No, no. Quite the opposite. Instead, continue to insist that the university is the ONLY way to gain a successful, middle class life. Say that the university is mandatory for happiness in adulthood. All the while, maintain this low-wage precariate class of edu-migrants, continually mis-educate and indebt in the students to ensure their docility, pimp the institution out to corporate interests. It's a win-win for those right wingers – they've crippled those in the country who would push back against them, and have so carefully and cleverly hijacked the educational institutions that they can now be turned into part of the neoliberal/neocon machinery, further benefitting the right-wing agenda.
So now what?
This ruination has taken about a generation. Will we be able to undo this damage? Can we force refunding of our public educational system? Can we professionalize faculty, drive out the administrative glut and corporate hijackers? Can we provide free or low-cost tuition and high-quality education to our students in a way that does NOT focus only on job training, but on high-level personal and intellectual development? I believe we can. But only if we understand this as a big picture issue, and refuse to allow those in government, or those corporate-owned media mouthpieces to divide and conquer us further. This ruinous rampage is part of the much larger attack on progressive values, on the institutions of social good. The battle isn't only to reclaim the professoriate, to wipe out student debt, to raise educational outcomes — although each of those goals deserve to be fought for. But we will win a Pyrrhic victory at best unless we understand the nature of the larger war, and fight back in a much, much bigger way to reclaim the country's values for the betterment of our citizens.
I am eager to hear from those of you who have been involved in this battle, or are about to enter it. We have a big job ahead of us, and are facing a very powerful foe in a kind of David and Goliath battle. I'm open to hearing ideas about how to build a much, much better slingshot.
13 comments:
- AnonymousAugust 23, 2012 at 10:13 AM
No students passed my poor high school unless they could read,write and fill out a questionaire that had math on it. Liberal arts,philosophy,etc are for teachers not doers.
The basics need to be taught first not propoganda. The downfall of education is the fault of the politically correct crowd,who thinks everyone is entitled to a college education. Not so. Some need to be trained to be in a vocation or a trade.
You and your espousal of liberal viewpoint and
the unintelligable ballyhoo you teach are the problem.
Teaching a child their multiplication tables and phonics does not require the worship at the tree of bull shitery. Did you read the article? It made no assertion that every child should go to college and just talked about the obstacles to success that are going on there.
I also personally believe we are short changing many kids by not offering them a skills, trades or arts education. I don't think every kid is going to college nor should but we still have to prepare them to be productive citizens.
By the way here in Florida, conservatives have been in charge of everything education related for going on 14 years, it's ignorant to blame things on liberals.- AnonymousAugust 23, 2012 at 12:55 PM
You sir are incorrect. The Ted Kennedy no child left behind has been the education tool from george Busch first term. You educators want to lay it on republicans when Kennedy wrote this .
ReplyDelete So poor George Bush and the republican controlled congress did nothing, they were just dupes? Just for once I would like one of you guys to join the rest of us in the real world.
I think NCLB is terrible and Race to the top too, it just goes to show there are idiots on both sides, you however are blinded by your irrational hates and fears and nobody with an R next to their name ever did anything wrong.- AnonymousAugust 25, 2012 at 1:25 PM
If you remember,Jim jeffords switched parties and voted democrat.
I would not be interested in joining the "rest of us"I work for a living. - AnonymousAugust 26, 2012 at 7:06 AM
They did not control both houses when the bill was passed for no child left behind.From 02-06 they did control both houses.
I remember Bush saying he had a friend that had written a bill for students he liked.
Then he went on to sayhe is a liberal by the name of Ted Kennedy.
You do understand that a bill passed and signed must be changed
by the congress.Do you think after lauding the drunk driver,the republicans were going to change the bill.
What did your buddy Obama do when he contolled by a large majority both houses.
Here again most of you so called educators are only interested in unions.That is why you have quit teaching cursive writing and americanism vs. communism.You are mostly a bunch of folks that were taught by a bunch of folks,that have no experience in the world of commerce. So let me get this right, Bush was in the white house, the republicans controlled the house, and Kennedy was in the house and were 49-51 in the senate and NCLB is solely the democrats fault. Furthermore I have written many times about how Obama has been bad for education and sometimes the unions are self serving and I have done so because I have perspective.
You on the other hand are delusional friend, to you the republicans have never done anything wrong and the dems never anything right and friend if you are against teachers unions you are against public education. Inform yourself instead of just being spoon fed talking points.- AnonymousAugust 27, 2012 at 10:57 AM
Every one is delusional that does not agree with a democrate.
That is understood,just like no blacks can be racist,just whites.
I am spoon fed nothing.I have witnessed the degradation of the public school system since the 70's.
Yes the nclb is totally the democrats fault. Busch trying to play the can't we just get along card let the drunk write the bill.He was duped just like his dad with the read my lips.George should have learned what he was dealing with from his dad.
The public is getting wise to democrats and their wild eyed accusations.They are also getting wise to the products turned out by unionized teachers.You know the real problem of the education system,but you cannot say anything not politically correct.
All my children went to private school,where God and patrionism are not dirty words,nor offensive to weirdo's.By the way you know what they call homeschooled and private schooled kids? Smarter - AnonymousAugust 28, 2012 at 7:15 AM
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Dimitris Paritsa is a family run hotel with a cozy and friendly atmosphere. The hotel is located in Kos town, only 150 metres from the sandy beach and 300 metres from the harbour and the city centre. Near the hotel, guests can find a variety of restaurants, bars, shops and cafés.
Within the hotel, guests may make use of the breakfast room, relax with a book in the lounge area or have a a refreshing drink at the hotel's bar. Dimitris Parista Hotel has on offer 44 well maintained rooms. They are very stylishly decorated with the beat of modern amenities. A short walk would lead you to the sea beach. It just takes about 5 – 10 minutes to walk up to the sandy and shingled beach.
Fill in your address into the address field below the map and the shortest route will be calculated.


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Posted by emily on February 15, 2012 · 2 Comments
From New Year's Eve 2009, some thoughts on ice, fear, solitude and disaster.
Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged with death, demons, dirt roads, disaster, fear, freezing, from the vault, ghosts, ice, Lake Celeste, monsters, New York, plumbing, time
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For venting attic spaces, high roof lines, storage sheds, garages and cupolas. You choose from Western Red Cedar, Cypress, Pine or PVC. Only clear, kiln dried lumber is used, with water proof glue, exterior fasteners and aluminum bug screen.
GVT1836 - 18" x 36" Tombstone Gable Vent
- Rough Opening: 18" x 36"
Louver Box size: 17-1/2" x 35-1/2"
Louver Box depth: 3" including screen and molding
Over-all including SE trim: 21-1/2" x 39-1/2"
Over-all including BM trim: 20" x 38"
SE=Standard Square Edge Trim is 3/4" x 2-3/4" no detail
BM=Brick Molding Trim is 1-1/4" x 2" with a 180 pattern
Approx. net free air flow: 142.02in.


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Wairuna, Girringun National Park
Wairuna, in Girringun National Park, has a varied landscape of open forest and woodland on its western margin through to tall wet forest on the elevated range to the east. It features the headwaters of the Burdekin River, fed from high rainfall on the rugged ranges above Cardwell. Over times, the river carved out a wide plain, which now features abundant waterholes and lagoons that are seasonally full of water attracting a rich diversity of water birds.
The traditional owners of the area are the Warrungnu Aboriginal people. The area also has a rich history of early European settlement by the Atkinson family including their work on Brahman cattle breeding and grazing.
Camp overnight in one of three separate and partially shady sites beside the Burdekin River. Wairuna camping area is closed throughout the wet season from 1 December to 31 March inclusive.
There are no formal walking tracks at Wairuna but you can walk alongside the Burdekin River. Look for freshwater crocodiles and turtles basking in the sun, and see how many species of fish you can identify.
Many animals are most active around dawn and dusk and nocturnal mammals may be seen at night by spotlight.
Does not cater for people with access needs.


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Here you can find answers to questions about how the board works. Use the links or search box below to find your way around.
There are more Forums and options that are not visible. You need 50 points to gain access to all of RWO's features.
Select this option if you would like your search to look in the text of FAQ items as well as their titles.
Select an option here to specify how you would like your search query to be treated. 'Any words' will return the most numerous but possibly least relevant results, while 'Complete phrase' will return only results that contain exactly what you are searching for.


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Belvedere Dessert Knife (150g massive silverplated)
Delivery time: 2-4 days
Belvedere Collection
Robbe & Berking has combined classic beauty with contemporary aesthetics in Belvedere. Design and handcrafted perfection lend Belvedere a radiance and sense of celebration that will take your breath away. A cutlery collection created with the ambition of being the best of its kind.
Design: Robert Berking
Belvedere Collection
Belvedere Bar-Collection
Hand meets Craft
Robbe & Berking silver manufacturer was founded in 1874 and still remains a family-run business today. The perfection and quality of our products remain unrivalled anywhere in the world, industrial mass production is not an option here. The shapes and decorative details are created by our silversmiths' own hands. The world's finest hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants and numerous royal families all rely on the high-quality and unique design of Robbe & Berking silver.


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Our Product
Welcome to Doo Rag Nation the #1 online shop in the U.S.A for its head apparel. We don't compete on price. We compete on quality. So if you are looking for quality-made products, you've come to the right store. There are so many variations on how doo rags are referred to, pronounced, and written. Throughout this article, you'll see variations of spellings. You may have heard our doo rags referred to as doo-rags, dewrags, do-rags, doo-rags, durags, du rags, do rags, or dew rags. Whatever name you are familiar with is OK.
You know how when you sweat a lot, sweat pours all over your face and gets in your eyes. Other times, your long hair gets in the way when you do something. In the hot sunshine, direct sunlight could also be a problem. We get it, and we understand your frustration. That's why we've created our products with you in mind. We have sweatbands to absorb your sweat. Our doo rags fit medium size to large heads. Ties at the back for a more snug fit. The majority of our doo rags are 100% cotton. Form-fitting design and stylish look. Quality-made and comfortable fit. When you use our product, you'll look great and feel better.
We have nearly 300 dew rags in our stock inventory. So if you're looking for a specific design, there is a good chance we have them in stock. The easier way to search is to type in a "keyword" in the top right-hand seach bar i.e. NFL. We consistently update our product inventory. Our durags selections of doo-rags include sports durags, silk do rags, velour du rags, mesh doo rags, military durags, medical do rags, patriotic dorags, biker doo-rags, and safety doo rags for people who need to be seen.
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If you are a sports enthusiast and lover of the game of sports, try these. We might have your selection of sports du-rag in stock. If not, we have the ability to create and produce. Our selection span across college and NFL. Check some of our other sport doo rag selections and click here. To be sure, click at the top of the menu and enter a search term. For example, enter "Florida State University" and results certainly should prove success. Don't wait, certainly get yours today.
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Our skull cap, beanie cap, doo-rag cap, or whatever you might call them, we have them in stock for men and women. Our doo-rags are popular among our biker crowd. If you wish to go directly and view them click here to see them. Our skull caps are quality-made, fitted with a sweat band, comfortable, stylish, and priced right. That is the reasons our Biker Babes and Biker Boyz love them. In particular, Harley and Indian motorcycle riders wear them a lot, for certain. For one thing for sure, doo-rag skull caps fits nicely under the helmet. With this in mind they help resolve our customer's biggest complaint—sweat. Some of the most popular do-rags for our biker babes and boys are the skull & roses, red hot chilli pepper, and flames. The patriotic dewrags are certainly among the favorites for freedom-of-the-road riders. In any event, get yours before the next bike festival.
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Some things you just can't put a price on—like your safety. Whether from us or some other reputable online or local store, be seen and heard. One way to do that is through our high fluorescent color dew rags. There are thousands of workers struck, injured, or killed on the roadways by vehicle motorist each day. Danger abounds everywhere. We realize all risks can not be eliminated, but we believe one less risk increase your odds. Our mesh do rags with fluorescent yellow and orange offer high visibility. We called them our safety doo-rags. How much worth is it for you to increase your safety? A valued customer of ours Mindy from Hannibal, Missouri purchased 10 dew rags for her hubby who works our highways. Do you think investing into your safety is worth it? Of course it is! Experience our Mesh do rags for yourself. These dew rags are popular with construction and labor workers because they work mostly in the sun. Our construction du-rags are a great way to absorb sweat and retard the sun rays. Hot weather is always in some parts of the country, right. Try and experience today. You won't be disappointed.
Military Service Members and Veterans
Doo Rag Nation is a Veteran-owned company. We would be remised if we forgot about our active duty service members and Veterans. Thank you for your services. Click here to view our selection of military du rags hear. Our military do rags we have for all branches of services: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen. They really look good, all of them. Army leads the way, in our opinion, but you decide. We love and support them all.
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Of course 2020 and 2021 have been a tough year for those affected by the covid-19. Those are were struck by the virus and those who care for them. We owe our all of our medical personnel and great big hug, and a big thank you for going above and beyond what is required. Our medical personnel worked so brilliantly fighting COVID-19. Again, thank you. Our gratitude and heartfelt thanks extends to you and your love ones. In particularly, we pay homage by offering our medical do-rags to highlight your profession. View our category of medical durags hear.
The for the outdoors men and women
Hunting is an American pastime for hunters and is a was to get away, relieve stress, and listen to the great outdoors. Do you love hunting? Are you a fisherman? A lover of guns? Do you love camping and the outdoors, archery, survival games? If you answered YES to any of these questions, you might like our hunting do-rags for the outdoorsmen and woman. Click our hunting and durags for the outdoors here. Similarly, you might also like these types of du rags.
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Got a favorite do rag in mind. Click here and email us with your design specifications or call us and indicate the time frame you need them by. Please note that custom orders may take a bit longer. Custom-made doo rags here.
We have a limited stock of accessories. Embroidered patches, color gear ties, and large gator necks just to name a few. See the accessory page here.
Mailing List
Be the first to know! Sign up for our mailing list for new doo rags added to inventory, du rags on sale, and dew rag giveaways. Sign up here SIGN ME UP! We won't hound you. Know of a family or friend that might like our products, share with them. Our business operates in part by word of mouth. So please do share our website . Thank you.
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We are looking for models to help exhibit our products— our doo rags through our market and modeling program. This is a great opportunity to earn some extra cash by simply working hours that you are free. If you are the person who wishes to increase her or his exposure, this is a way to enhance your modeling career and gain exposure. We are looking for diversity from all backgrounds, shades, and shapes. We want diversity but we are selective. We're looking for ordinary people with an extra ordinary mindset. We're looking for people who are ambitious. Those who have a positive attitude or wish to better themselves. We are not looking for everyone, only those that fit these descriptors. If you would like to learn more information about this opportunity, click here Learn More!
Did You Know This? 10 Uses of Dew rags
- Protect your noggin from UV rays
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- 100% cotton
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Port Authority® Challenger™ Vest. J355
The versatile Challenger Vest has spandex-trimmed armholes and hem for long-wearing durability. |
- Teklon® nylon shell
- Heavyweight fleece lining for extra warmth
- Double-needle stitching throughout
- Slash zippered pockets, interior zippered pocket
- Port Pocket for easy embroidery access
- Binding at armholes and hem
- Due to a Tyvek inner lining, a silk screen or heat transfer treatment is not recommended for Goldenrod/True Black.


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Stations are all stations in all MPECs, which observed this object. Object is the short name and an asteriks appears for objects, which have been announced in the MPECs as NEO. A discovery by this station is named as Discovery. Obs all are all observations in all MPECs for this object. Obs J16 are all observations in all MPECs for this station. Obs percent is the percentage of stations observation to all observations.
J16 has discovered 0 objects. It has made 1065 of all 282719 observations (0 %) at 167 objects in all MPECs with involved station J16. There are 168 of all 5084 observations (3 %) at 44 objects in all discovery MPECs with involved station J16.


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Originally posted April 2007, in the Calladus Blog.
I have a long post today that was spurred by the article that Abstinence Only education doesn't work. How odd - religious conservatives keep saying that it DOES work - so I wanted to find out why they would say such a thing. I decided to see if my favorite religious fundamentalist lobbying organization could shed some light.
Tony Perkins, President of James Dobson's Christian lobbying organization "Family Research Council", is a big advocate of Abstinence Only education programs for teens and pre-teens in public schools. On 23 March '07 he wrote on FRC.com:
… stacks of peer-reviewed research are showing the direct impact of abstinence education, including a peer-reviewed study on America's largest and oldest abstinence program, Best Friends."Stacks of peer-reviewed research" validate Abstinence Only education according to Mr. Perkins. This is the opposite of what is reported in March 8th's edition of CitizenLink.com, a news publication of James Dobson's "Focus on the Family". This edition of CitizenLink quotes Linda Klepacki, R.N., M.P.H., who is an analyst for sexual health at Focus on the Family Action:
In Adolescent and Family Health, Dr. Robert Lerner's analysis of urban D.C. participants found that, "Despite the fact that [these students come from schools that]... are located in Wards that have higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, girls who attended the program are substantially less likely to...have sex than a comparable sample... The relative odds of 120 to 1 of a [high school] Diamond Girl abstaining from sex is a result so strong that it is unheard of in practically any empirical research."
What they are saying is that, in order to be medically and scientifically accurate, you must be verified and supported in your research by peer review," she said. "Abstinence education cannot get into peer-review journals because the journals are controlled by far-left liberal organizations that do not allow us to publish. That automatically eliminates abstinence-only education, from their standpoint.How odd. Is it just me, or does it seem like Dobson's left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? Are there really stacks of peer-review proof that Abstinence Only education really works, or are all the evil secular progressives using their Black Helicopters to prevent the overwhelming evidence from being reviewed in Lancet or Science?
And what about the peer-review journal, Adolescent and Family Health? I decided to do a little research on the AFH journal. It would seem to me that a good way to make sure that a peer-reviewed journal is unbiased is to check on who runs it, who supports it, and how long the journal has been in business. So I started with the AFH ethics policy which states that:
A conflict of interest may arise when an individual, organization, or other entity has the opportunity to benefit either by monetary gain, employment, or policy position, from an article published through the Journal.There is no mention of conflicts of interest due to religious idealism. This journal doesn't seem to care that research may be accepted or rejected due to purely religious preconceptions.
The Editor in Chief of the AFH journal is Doctor Alma L. Golden. In order to hold this position Dr. Golden should have no political bias or scientific preconceptions so that she may evaluate all research with an open mind. Unfortunately Dr. Golden has a history of bias and preconception. Dr. Golden developed a taste for politics as an advocate for children's health insurance in Texas. She then became a founder of the abstinence advocacy group, S.A.G.E. Advice. As the medical director and presenter of S.A.G.E. Advice, Dr. Golden not only advocated Abstinence Only, but also discouraged teaching the use of condoms. (Powerpoint link to S.A.G.E. presentation by Dr. Golden.)
S.A.G.E. Advice incorporated in 2001 as a non-profit group and started receiving large grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is suspiciously odd that in October 2002, Dr. Golden was appointed to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs (DASPA). According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
Dr. Golden [will oversee] the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) within [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] Office of Public Health and Science. OPA advises the Secretary and Assistant Secretary for Health on a wide range of reproductive health topics, including adolescent pregnancy, family planning and other population issues. OPA also provides policy and administrative direction for the Title X Family Planning Program and the Title XX Adolescent Family Life Program.Is this a conflict of interest? Louise Witt, in an article in the April 14th edition of Salon points out the conflict of allowing an Abstinence Only advocate to oversee the OPA:
The Office of Population Affairs oversees Title X, which provides federal funds for family planning and reproductive health services, and Title XX, which funds research and projects on teens' sexual issues. In Bush's 2003 fiscal budget, the administration requested a 33 percent increase, or a total of $135 million, for the office's community-based abstinence-until-marriage programs. As one lobbyist for a women's health group put it: "It's the fox guarding the chicken coop."Well, the person who runs the journal of Adolescent and Family Health certainly seems biased to me. How about the people who support it? According to their website, AFH is a journal for the Institute for Youth Development (IYD), which was founded by Shepherd Smith and his wife Anita. Mr. Smith testified before the House of Representatives in March of 2003 in order to advocate Faith-Based Abstinence Only education and to discourage the promotion of condoms.
According to the IYD overview:
Since its inception, the Institute for Youth Development has been dedicated to ensuring the best possible future for America's youth through the promotion of a risk avoidance message regarding five unhealthy risk behaviors: drugs, alcohol, sex, violence and tobacco."Risk avoidance" seems to be another way of saying "abstinence" to me. And the IYD agrees on its FAQ page:
IYD supports a comprehensive approach to sexual abstinence. In fact, we believe that the abstinence approach should apply to all risk behaviors associated with the use of alcohol, drugs, tobacco and violence.The IYD FAQ page even has a blurb on the effectiveness of Abstinence education:
IYD believes that abstinence is indeed an effective approach to addressing adolescent sexuality. This message is being embraced by teens throughout the nation as evidenced by the 2001 Centers for Disease Control Youth Surveillance Survey. This survey indicated that 54% of teens have not had sex as compared to 45% in 1990. So, the survey indicates that teens are choosing to abstain from sexual activity. This year, the CDC reported that birth rates for unmarried teenagers continued to decline. Teens that choose abstinence are totally protected from the consequences that can dramatically alter their lives and their futures.This blurb is very misleading. The IYD is quoting from the CDC's "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" a survey of trends in America. The survey they quote from is the "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance" survey. By comparing two of these surveys the IYD notices that sexual activity among adolescents declined, which resulted in fewer births. There is no indication of why there was a reduction of sexual activity – but Abstinence Only advocates are quick to take credit for it, and the IYD quotes it as an "effective approach." This seems circular to me.
The people who run the journal, Adolescent and Family Health seem biased to me, as does the organization that supports it. So how long has the journal been in business? The journal's welcome letter is dated January 2nd, 2001 and is published twice a year. After 2003 publishing of the journal becomes erratic. The last dated issue was in 2005. There is one undated issue after that. You can see the issues here, but you'll need a free registration to read their abstracts.
So what about the "Stacks of peer-reviewed research" that Tony Perkins writes about? Well, there seems to be only one. In Volume 3, Number 4 of the AFH journal, a submission by Dr. Robert Lerner is titled, "Can Abstinence Work? An Analysis of the Best Friends Program." The full text of this particular article can be read under a free registration, even thought the other articles must be read under a paid subscription. How odd - this feels like a magician's force to me.
I'm not a statistician, nor am I a psychologist or medical doctor. I am somewhat familiar with peer-reviewed articles and basic laboratory procedures. So perhaps I'm being arrogant when I say that this submission reeks of poor science. Perhaps someone could check me on this.
A good way to judge that the results are sound is to examine the methodology, here is what I've found. The Best Friends program for girls was founded in 1987 and runs in over a hundred schools across the USA. Instead of analyzing the program in all of these schools, Dr. Lerner restricts his analysis to those in Washington DC only. Dr. Lerner doesn't randomly pick test subjects and control subjects, instead he picks schools that have more or less comprehensive data. The Best Friends program requires students to fill out data sheets at the beginning of the program and the end of the year. Dr. Lerner compares this data to the state's Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS) for the District of Columbia; this seems to be his control group's data. Dr. Lerner never indicates how many students are in his study at any point. The Best Friends program data is self-reported by the students, there is no discussion about adjusting that data for reporting bias, and there was never even the thought of an attempt to gather original, neutral data for the purpose of analysis.
At this point, I can see that Dr. Lerner's data is nothing more than the purest shit, absolutely useless for science. But Dr. Lerner goes off on several pages of text and tables, performing statistical masturbation. With this sort of scholarship, it is no wonder that Dr. Lerner's article didn't make it into a more mainstream publication like Lancet or Science. This article would have rightly been rejected out of hand as substandard by any of my laboratory professors.
And this is it. This is the often cited but never discussed peer-reviewed killer study that shows that Abstinence Only education works, that Abstinence Only is the only way to educate adolescents. This is nothing more than junk science in a biased journal supported by religious flunkies with a religious and political agenda.
The amount of dishonesty here should be astonishing, if it were not so common among religious conservatives.


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By a stupid mistake, I thought I was holding a 7D and attempted to put the EF-S 17-55 mm f/2.8 IS USM on the camera. But it was the 1DX I had in my hand. The EF-S lens doesn't fit, of course, but the problem was that the rubber ring at the rear of the lens, that ring which prevents mounting on an EF lenses only body, it opened the latch for the focusing screen. The screen frame opened, the screen fell out and got scratched.
Not that it's very expensive to get a new one, but quite unnecessary. So don't mess with EF-S lenses near your 1DX!


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Is Influencer Marketing Dead? What Will Replace It?
There's been a lot of talk about social media influence and its role in the new consumer decision journey. Big brands are not only buying into the concept of leveraging people with influence, but are spending serious money. From Polaroid actually hiring Lady Gaga to a study showing that the majority of marketers are allocating budget to influencer marketing, it's clear that companies are keen on figuring out how to leverage "influencers."
But what many brand marketers don't realize is that influence doesn't matter unless the influencer is willing to endorse your brand and its products. Jay-Z won't promote your phone charger unless you pay him (a lot) and bloggers are starting to demand the same.
Moreover, brands don't trust social scoring tools anymore, as they only measure potential influence.
So what's a brand to do?
Not All Influence is Equal
First, recognize that influencers don't necessarily affect consumer decisions, even if they are willing to endorse your brand. A person may have the highest Klout score, the strongest blog community or 200,000 followers on Twitter, but why does that make him an authority on your product? The lifeguard at your local pool might have a whistle and big loudspeaker, but he still can't convince ten-year old kids to walk rather than run along the edge of the pool. Influencers might create awareness of a problem and solution, but not all awareness leads to new actions.
Second, while influence plays a role, the influence of a "celebrity blogger" might not be the best type of influence. Friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors are simply more trustworthy. They are members of our tribe, and therefore they are the preferred sources of brand knowledge. We trust them to steer us right. They endorse a brand because they actually believe in the brand and its products, unlike the arch-influencer who is mainly in it for financial gain. Who do you think is going to stop more ten year old kids from running alongside a pool--the lifeguard or elder siblings and parents who recognize the danger and want their siblings or children to be safe because they love them?
Don't discount influencers completely--just acknowledge that they are one or two small trail blazes along the path to a purchase. The rest of the blazes are word-of-mouth endorsements that social media experts now call advocate marketing.
Advocate Endorsements Are the Goal
So influence is not necessarily dead--it's simply migrating from the big shots to people we actually trust and identify with. Some people call it influence marketing, others call it word of mouth, and I call it advocate marketing.
Endorsements can come from multiple types of advocates: customers, employees and bloggers. Brands first need to shape programs that focus on harnessing the affinity that all these groups have for their products.
Advocates are effective because they are friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances, not paid celebrity influencers. According to Nielsen's Global Trust in Advertising report, 92 percent of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Further, Nielsen has found that 77% of consumers are more likely to try a product when it is recommended by a friend or family member. No one wants to be paid to share a product they would share anyway--it feels insincere, and it destroys the credibility of the recommendation. Instead, a good advocate marketing program can reward advocates with deals, exclusive events and opportunities to test or preview new products.
Still, advocates can be difficult to motivate, scale and measure.
If brands could overcome these cons, would they be more likely to leverage advocates?
Technology Puts Advocates Front and Center
With the proliferation of social media and advent of cloud computing technology, there's opportunity to scale massively. As Social Media Today reports, 2.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook and 400 million Tweets are sent out every day. There is plenty of raw volume to build advocate networks.
These networks scale advocate marketing from a 1-to-1 to 1-to-hundreds or thousands conversation. Whereas influencer marketing ran top-to-bottom, "blogger celebrity," to others, the advocate conversation is peer-to-peer. It's natural.
Further in the past, you could never really tell if advocate marketing was working for your brand. Today, integrations to social networks, tracking and cloud technology make it easy to measure success. Technology, however, only facilitates the conversation--brands still must start the conversation and keep it going.
Align Brand and Advocate Goals to Motivate Thousands of Advocates
There's a myriad of great research on why people share, from the wonky Ernest Dichter, which Harvard Business Review reminded us of recently, to the practical steps that companies like Marketo provide and prove everyday. Regardless of your audience, there are easy ways to figure out what will motivate them to share, but they all seem to come down to a few key principles:
Make the advocate look smart. No one wants to be ridiculed or mocked for sharing. No one wants to receive unintelligent marketing jabber. Make advocate sharing about the advocates--your brand is secondary.
Give them something funny or entertaining to share. We don't thank friends for forwarding bad content. We get annoyed with brands that pepper social media waves with standard marketing jabber. Make your advocates eager to share your content because of the inherent value of the content.
Give them something that helps their friends. Brands win by helping advocates and advocates win by helping their network. Only plugging your brand is not being helpful. What can your brand share that will make your advocates' friends feel appreciative?
Give them a way to express themselves. Do not control advocate expression with an iron fist. You can suggest messaging and content, but ultimately the choice should be up to your advocates. Let them figure out the best way to reach an audience.
Listen to your advocates. If your advocates push back against your messaging, listen carefully because you have an opportunity to learn. Remember, these are people who already appreciate your brand. So if they're not happy with your content, who in the world will be?
If advocate marketing works, platforms to scale it exist and the measurement technology to prove the business benefits are available, do potentially influential celebrities and bloggers still matter? Yes and no. Their influence is not dead, but perhaps it's best saved for something other than endorsements. Let celebrities go back to being professional entertainers or athletes. Let bloggers go back to writing well. And let the people we trust help us figure out what brands we want.
This article was written byDave Hawley, Sr. Marketing Director of SocialChorus.


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Spotlight on Literature
These downloadable audio files are designed for use with Spotlight on Literature. Each level in the series provides one downloadable ZIP file containing four audio files in mp3 format. To download each file click on the level title. The chapters are listed below for your reference.
Chapter 1: The Story-Teller Chapter 2: All Summer in a Day Chapter 3: The Gift of the Magi Chapter 4: The Lady, or the Tiger? |
Chapter 1: From the Letters of Vincent van Gogh Chapter 2: Poems Chapter 3: Excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream Chapter 4: Excerpt from When I Was Puerto Rican |
Chapter 1: Searching for Summer Chapter 2: One Thousand Dollars Chapter 3: The Seven Ages of Man; Life; O Me! O Life! Chapter 4: On Women's Right to Vote |
Chapter 1: Around the World in Eighty Days: Chapter XX Chapter 2: A Sound of Thunder Chapter 3: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus Chapter 4: Crime and Punishment |
Chapter 1: Myths Chapter 2: Aladdin and the Magic Lamp Chapter 3: Departure by Night Chapter 4: The Adopted Son |
Chapter 1: Four Poems Chapter 2: Excerpt from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Chapter 3: Eleven Sons Chapter 4: Gate No. 12 |


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Just like you we are passionate about timber. We love its warmth, its beauty, its strength, its versatility. Our mission is to help you make the most of this sustainable and adaptable construction material with tried, tested and trusted wood protection products and services that will give you and your customers real world performance.
For over 80 years we have been pioneering and developing customer and market focused preservative protection technologies for timber. Offering innovative products, application systems and support services that work for you. Innovation still drives us today and makes us who we are. Proactive, helpful and trustworthy partners for you and your customers.
We are ready to listen and talk.
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Contact: email@example.com


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COP 21 or the 2015 Paris Climate Conference that is scheduled to take place in Paris on November 30, 2015, will be unlike other UN climate summits or climate conferences in the past. COP 21 has a scarily grandiose objective: in their own words "to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate … for the first time in over 20 years of UN negotiations." If they achieve their aim, we would be faced with the horrifying prospect that the mythology of AGW (anthropogenic global warming or manmade global warming) would become entrenched in law, thus solidifying it as fact in the minds of many. It would be a giant step towards Global Governance or a One World Government with a worldwide carbon tax, for so long now the wet dream of the New World Order manipulators.
COP 21: Trying to Make the AGW Fallacy Into Law
The objective sought at COP 21 has been a long time coming. Obama revealed how important this was to some factions of the NWO when he stated that his "definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we'll get in Paris," in response to the assertion put forth by the interviewer that Putin was challenging Obama's leadership. If worldwide climate change laws are just as important to the NWO as controlling Syria, it gives you some idea of what is at stake here. Some have also suggested that the upcoming COP 21 was the reason former Aussie PM Tony Abbott lost leadership of his party (Abbot was strongly opposed to the idea of AGW) and replaced with pro-AGW and Goldman Sachs man, Malcolm Turnbull.
Normally, the annual COP (Conference of Parties) meets to review the implementation of the "Rio Convention," drawn up at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It includes the UNFCCC (UN Framework on Climate Change) which entered into force in 1994 and has 195 signatory parties. This time, COP 21 will be going all out with extra gusto to create a new set of planetary laws to ensure every nation must combat climate change, with the purported aim "of keeping global warming below 2°C."
A Few Problems for COP 21: Antarctica, Greenland and the Arctic Aren't Cooperating
Unfortunately for the global governance enthusiasts, who seek universal "consensus" among all nations and parts of the Earth, there are many factions that are not cooperating – include a couple of massive areas of ice, and a continent. Very recent data reports from multiple sources (NASA and AGU/BAS [American Geophysical Union and British Antarctic Survey]) are suggesting that not only is Antarctica not succumbing to global warming, but just the reverse – it is freezing over. Here are some quotes from the studies; this first one is from the NASA study:
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers … According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
The net gain may have slowed, but that is still a gigantic amount of ice to gain. This next one is from the joint AGU/BAS study:
Since the record is 300 years long, we can see that the amount of snow that has been accumulating in this region since the 1990s is the highest we have seen in the last 300 years … Annual snow accumulation increased in the early 20th century, rising 30 percent between 1900 and 2010.
Meanwhile, around the North Pole, the same thing seems to be happening. Tony Heller of Steven Goddard reports that
Ice growth in Greenland continues at record levels this fall. The surface of Greenland has gained 200 billion tons of snow and ice in the last eight weeks. This has been accompanied by record cold weather approaching -60C" and also that "Arctic sea ice extent is at a ten year high for the date, after record growth.
Maybe the NWO controllers should have made anthropogenic global cooling their crusade, and fooled people into some other kind of tax based on plummeting temperatures … oh, wait a minute, they did (see image above)! I guess it's too late to reverse course now … although with the vague term climate change anything is possible.
Leading French Meteorologist Verdier Busts AGW in His Book, Loses Job
In what is very interesting timing for France, one of their leading meteorologists, Philippe Verdier, recently published a book Climat Investigation (Climate Investigation), where he accuses climate change scientists and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of manipulating the data. As Verdier states in this video, "My book 'Climate Investigation' was published one month ago. It got me banned from the air waves," and according to RT also said that he had put himself "in the path of COP 21, which is a bulldozer, and this is the result."
Consensus? Far From It: Look at All the Dissenters in the Run Up to COP 21
The more you look, the more you find dissenters from all over the Earth who are speaking out against the highly politicized AGW climate change movement as COP 21 approaches. Unfortunately for the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, the UN, the IPCC and all their stooges and mouthpieces, the UN has failed to achieve consensus (one of its favorite buzzwords) on climate change, and the science is settled only in one way – showing that the world is not really warming at all, and that man's contribution to climate change is insignificant. There are a plethora of dissenting individuals, scientists and organizations with massive research behind them showing that AGW is a political movement to usher in global governance:
– NIPCC: The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is an international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. They published the 2009 report Climate Change Reconsidered which they claim "is the most comprehensive critique of the IPCC's positions ever published. It lists 35 contributors and reviewers from 14 countries and presents in an appendix the names of 31,478 American scientists who have signed a petition saying 'there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate'.";
– 1000+ dissenting scientists: as of 2010, there were more than 1000 international scientists (up from 700) who came out and publicly went on the record to state that AGW is a flawed model. The list includes many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC;
– This list of scientists who oppose the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming;
– John Casey: this former White House space program advisor believes in global cooling, and that the Earth is on the brink of a major ice age;
– Christopher Monckton: this former advisor to the UK Prime Minister has done a great job exposing the fear mongering and junk science behind the global warming movement, which is really a cover for implementing cap-and-trade (favoring big corporations) and global government. He quotes how Al Gore admitting his own sensationalism: "I believe it's appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations of how dangerous it is";
– Ian Plimer: this Australian geologist humorously calls the AGW movement a "load of hot air" and has shown how the data measurements for climate change have been totally rigged. He also points out how environmentalism has replaced organized religion as a matter of personal faith;
– Russia: Many have referenced Russian President Putin's disdain for the idea of AGW, and have reported that he believes that "there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia," and that maybe global warming will mean Russians "spend less on fur coats."
COP 21: Remember How It All Started …
COP 21 is the culmination of a very long-term plan, hatched by the NWO manipulators decades ago, and revealed in the documents like the Report from Iron Mountain and the Club of Rome. It is also important to note that COP 21 and AGW are the result of a Rothschild-Rockefeller attempt to create a One World Government. George Hunt was the whistleblower who was there at the start. He overheard and captured the actual voices of the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and their top agents as the laid out their deceitful schemes, some of which you can hear in this video!
As William Jasper pointed out in The New American, the official draft text of the climate treaty to be agreed upon at COP 21 includes provisions for the establishment of an "International Tribunal of Climate Justice" (see pg. 19 of 34) – think World Court – which, alongside a world carbon tax, is yet another stepping stone to the New World Order. Make no mistake about it; there are some serious things planned at COP 21 which will affect every human being on the planet. It remains to be seen whether the people attending the conference will vote humanity further towards a One World Government based on carbon deception.


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Ferris Digital Organizing & Productivity Consulting
Configuration Connection offers real life solutions for digital overwhelm. Ferris digital organizing & productivity consulting is for anyone who wants to get organized, stress less, and use time more efficiently.
What is Digital Organizing?
Digital organizing is all about taking control of the information and "stuff" you have on your computer, phone, and other devices. Imagine it like cleaning up your physical space, but for your digital world. Receipts, images, correspondence, files, contracts – all the things that used to be paper, are now electronic. That's great, but how to do make sure you can find everything when you need it? How long do you keep things? Is technology working FOR you or against you?
Here are some things digital organization can help with:
- Finding things faster: Ever spend ages hunting for a document or photo? Digital organizing will help you create a system so you can easily find what you need.
- Saving time: By keeping your digital space organized, you won't waste time searching for things or wading through clutter.
- Reducing stress: A cluttered digital space can be mentally overwhelming. Digital organizing can help you feel more in control.
Every person and situation is unique, but there are some common ways to approach digital organizing:
- Decluttering: Getting rid of unused files, downloads, and old emails.
- Creating a filing system: Using folders and labels to categorize your information.
- Automating tasks: Setting up your devices to automatically download files, back up your data, or send reminders.
What is Productivity Consulting?
Think of a productivity consultant as your personal digital organizer for not just your stuff, but your time and energy too. Configuration Connection can help you streamline how you work, both with your physical and digital tools, to get more done in a way that feels less stressful.
Here's why you might consider a productivity consultant:
- Feeling overwhelmed: If you constantly feel behind or have too much on your plate, we can help you identify time-wasters and prioritize tasks.
- Tech troubles: Maybe you're not sure which apps or tools can help you be more efficient. Configuration Connection can recommend options and show you how to use them effectively.
- Work-life balance issues: Do you struggle to switch off after work? We can help create systems that keep your work organized and under control, freeing up time for personal life.
Just like with digital organizing, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. We'll talk to you about your goals and challenges, then suggest strategies and tools to improve your workflow. We can help with things like:
- Setting realistic goals and deadlines.
- Developing time management techniques.
- Learning to say no to unimportant tasks.
- Creating healthy habits to avoid burnout.
Who Can Benefit From Ferris Digital Organizing & Productivity Consulting?
Basically, if you deal with any kind of digital information overload, or feel like you could be working more strategically with your time, then digital organizing and productivity consulting can be a game-changer. It's all about working smarter, not harder, regardless of your role or organization size. Digital organizing and productivity consulting can benefit a wide range of people, from individuals to large corporations.
Anyone feeling overwhelmed by digital clutter, from students managing schoolwork to busy parents or caregivers juggling finances and family life.
Business Owners & Managers
Improve team collaboration with better document sharing and communication, and delegate tasks more effectively.
Small Businesses & Home Businesses
Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs can streamline workflows, find files faster, and free up time to focus on growth.
Corporations & Teams
Large organizations can benefit from standardized digital filing systems and productivity tools that boost efficiency across departments.
Ferris Digital Organizing & Productivity consulting
Invest in Your Future With Configuration Connection
Temporary fixes can be frustrating. Our focus is on helping you build long-term systems that fit your workflow. We'll create habits and strategies that keep you organized and productive, not just for today, but well into the future. Think of hiring a digital organizer and productivity consultant as an investment in your time and sanity. By setting up systems that work for you now, you'll save yourself countless hours and frustration down the road.
System Building
We don't just "clean up" your digital space once. We help you create systems for filing, prioritizing, and automating tasks that will keep them organized and productive in the long run.
Habits over Hacks
We're not just about giving you quick tricks. We'll help you develop sustainable habits and workflows that fit your specific needs and work style.
Future Proofing
Our approach considers your future goals. We'll set you up for long-term success by building systems that can adapt and grow as your needs evolve.
Investment Over Expense
Our services are an investment in yourself and your business, not just an expense. The time and stress reduction you'll gain now will pay off in increased productivity and a smoother workflow for years to come.
Organizing & Consulting Services to Fit Every Need
In-Person Services
Whether you need help wading through physical papers, receipts and files or you're drowning in a digital ocean, Configuration Connection is here to throw you a lifeline. We'll help you build processes and habits that will help you get organized and stay that way.
Maybe you've got the organization part down, but you'd like to find ways to shave time off of frequently performed tasks, automate simple tasks, or just generally find ways to be more productive. We'd love to help you streamline your workflows to unleash your productivity potential.
Presentation & Training Services
Need hands-on training for your Ferris company or business? We can do that. We offer presentations tailored to your group's specific needs, including:
- Getting Organized
- Time Management
- Guide to Productivity Apps
- Managing Email Correspondence
- Utilizing Evernote
Want to learn more?
Virtual Services
Feeling overwhelmed by digital clutter or like you're constantly spinning on a productivity hamster wheel? Virtual organizing and consulting services can help! We provide remote support to conquer your digital chaos, no matter your location. From decluttering your computer files to streamlining your workflow, our experts will guide you in creating long-term systems for a calmer, more efficient you. So ditch the geographical limitations and take control of your digital world – we're here to help you work smarter, not harder, from Ferris and beyond.
Take the First Step to Being More Organized


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Pictured above, from L to R: white, black, brown zip, cream lace-up, dark brown
This fall and winter, I decided to give a little extra love to one part of my wardrobe: my shoes! More specifically, my boots!
My goal was to create a small, varied collection that felt lively and a little playful, while also prioritizing comfort and practicality. I put a lot of care into the process, and now I'm so proud — they are like a little art collection.
Since then, I've been getting some questions on the subject: What basic pairs should I start with? How do I decide on colors? What should I buy if I can only get one pair? What's your favorite boot brand?
So today is all about boots! Building a boot collection takes time, but it shouldn't be complicated. If you're looking to rebuild your boot collection this year, here's how I would approach it, in 3 simple steps.
STEP 1 | Start with the basics — and to me, that means one black pair and one brown pair of boots that are versatile enough to wear with just about anything. Plus, a black and brown color palette is easy to integrate into most wardrobe styles.
I look for details like a lower heel (comfort first!), leather-wrapped heel (to add a touch of chic), and minimalist design (to maximize versatility).
Tip: If you're looking to get just one great pair of boots to serve as the foundation of your collection, I'd suggest going with a pair of versatile black booties, like these (pictured below). The pointy-but-not-too-pointy toe and sculptural, leather-wrapped heel dresses this boot up a bit, but at the same time, it's still a plain black boot — meaning it strikes that perfect balance between dressy and casual.
Try it: Pick one black boot and one brown boot below and you'll have your basics covered.
(See something you like? You can shop it and support my blog at the same time by using the affiliate links throughout this post.)
FIVE ($36 on sale) | SIX ($49 on sale)
STEP 2 | Next, increase the functionality of your collection with a pair of weather boots.
Admittedly, I'm no snow boot expert. I live in Texas where we're lucky to get one dusting of snow each winter. You may have different needs than me when it comes to weather boots.
But you also might be interested to know that, as a gal who only has one pair of weather boots, this pair does it all for me. Cute, comfortable, minimal, warm, and dry.
Tip: Looking for warm socks? These are my favorite merino wool socks that stay up all day and feel super soft.
Try it: Pick one weather boot below and then head on to the final step. You're almost done!
STEP 3 | Finally, round out your collection with one or two fun booties. Bright white, lace-up, and snakeskin booties are my favorite right now when it comes to making a statement.
Tip: My favorite brand of shoe right now is Vagabond Shoemakers. They look designer, but they come in around $150; plus they are a sustainable company. I have two pairs (Olivia in black and Mya in white) and am so impressed with the quality and design for the price point. This isn't a sponsored post or ad, I'm just excited to have found a good shoe company.
Try it: Pick one or two below, then your boot collection is complete!
ONE ($174) | TWO ($516) | THREE ($122 on sale)
FOUR ($55 on sale) | FIVE ($79 on sale) | SIX ($79)
• • •
And there you have it! A practical, versatile, and fun boot collection, made up of four or five boots: 1 black pair, 1 brown pair, 1 weather boot, and then 1 or 2 fun pairs. A good boot collection doesn't need to be extensive, it just needs to work for your lifestyle and needs.
Your turn! How is your current boot situation working? Are you all set, or are you planning to do some rebuilding? Cold climate dwellers, do you have any other weather boot recommendations? And fun question: what's your favorite kind of statement boot to wear? (I'll go first — white boots!)