Elmer has now taken to lecturing some tech dork about how he should follow journalistic guidelines when posting on his blog, or something like that. I can't help but to notice how vitriolic his comments were. He sounded like he was ready to burst an artery or have the big one and drop dead.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/12/07/

Just when you thought Gus came back with something to say ...

DD thread started by Gus

Things are looking grim for Democrat Congressman Tim Bishop in NY's 1st district:

Quote:January 20, 2010

Representative Tim Bishop (NY-01) holds a very small lead against potential Republican challenger Randy Altschuler,  47% to 45% in a new SurveyUSA poll sponsored by Firedoglake.

...Looking deeper into the numbers, Altshuler’s support might be slightly stronger than the poll numbers indicate.

I was just about ready to write Gus off and, like an android in a bad sci-fi movie, he comes back from the dead. Does this mark the beginning of Gus' return to the DL fora?

DD thread

Using the guise of driving "diploma mills" out of business, socialists are trying to standardize higher education.  Why?  So they can dictate values, drive up prices and indoctrinate students.  Towards those same ends, now Dear Leader wants to grab control of the student loan industry too.  

Obama Prepares to Drive Up the Costs of Education

Quote:Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)
Monday, January 25th at 1:00PM EST

When Obama takes to the podium for the State of the Union, one of the things he is allegedly going to push is a wholesale federal take over of the student loan industry.

Already, his plans are causing a lot of students, particularly of private higher ed colleges and universities, problems with getting financing for education. Obama intends to shut out the usual third party lenders and put everything within the federal government — under a program that has been shown repeatedly to be highly inefficient and burdensome for academic institutions.

More troubling, by putting everything under the Department of Education, universities and colleges will be forced to adhere to federal rules, some of which conflict with the values of sectarian institutions that presently use the third party student loan system for their students.

The feds controlling the student loan industry means the feds get to tell academic institutions what values they can and cannot promote among the selection and disciplining of their students.

Brigham Young, etc. better watch out.

More troubling, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent out a letter recently to colleges and universities telling them to get on board the federal program right now. There’s just one problem — the Congress has not passed the program. Likewise, the Department of Education is encouraging outside groups to lobby for the legislation, a clear violation of federal law.

In other words, Duncan is trying to get schools that have expressed real apprehension over the program to get into the program now so Congress will believe the expressed concerns have been ameliorated.

The wholesale take over of education funding by the feds will, like a wholesale take over of healthcare, drive up prices through decreases in competition and, more troubling, allow the feds a backdoor into higher education learning and indoctrination.

Or so they say at Accredibase, a new UK-based service:

Quote:At a time when unaccredited educational establishments, diploma mills and unrecognised accrediting agencies are on the rise, Accredibase™ offers you an invaluable new resource.

This searchable global database brings together powerful information on bogus institutions from a variety of sources.

The aim? To help employers, educators and background screening companies secure only the best candidates with bona fide qualifications.

Quote:6. How can you be sure that the information you’re providing is accurate?

We endeavour to ensure that the information held on Accredibase™ is accurate, and we have a team of researchers constantly checking and enriching the facts. However, as each profile is also built from a variety of third-party sources, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information it holds.

Haven't seen this one mentioned anywhere.  A Michigan law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Belford High School:

Quote:On November 5, 2009, a class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court in Detroit alleging that Belford High School is an internet scam that defrauds students of their money. The lawsuit alleges that Belford High School takes students’ money by offering them a “valid” and “accredited” high school diploma, but that Belford High School is not accredited and that the “diplomas” are not valid. The lawsuit alleges that the two accrediting agencies by which Belford High School claims to be accredited – the International Accreditation Agency For Online Universities (IAAOU) and the Universal Council For Online Education Accreditation (UCOEA) – are not legitimate accrediting agencies. The lawsuit alleges that IAAOU and UCOEA are not recognized by the United States Department of Education and that they are sham organizations set up solely to make Belford High School look like a legitimate school when, in fact, the school actually has no authority to issue valid high school diplomas.
. . .
A copy of the lawsuit, which alleges claims for fraud, breach of contract, and violations of a federal lawsuit, the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (known as RICO), can be found by clicking here. In the lawsuit, students are asking the federal district court to order Belford High School, IAAOU and UCOEA, along with Education Services Provider, Inc. to pay them damages. The filing asks the Court to award treble (three times) damages for the violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and requests that the Court order the websites www.belfordhighschool.com,  and www.belforduniversity.org to be shut down. The lawsuit was filed by The Googasian Firm, P.C.

Apparently this kid's mom was a leading opponent of a proposed school bond, and this is how the little education nazis tried to pay her back.  Somebody really ought to consider suing the school district for civil rights violations.  



Teen Hunter’s Gun-Related Expulsion Overturned

Quote:Friday, January 22, 2010
  
In a case that received national attention, the Glenn County, Calif., Board of Education on January 22 overturned the expulsion of 17-year-old duck hunter Gary Tudesko, who was expelled from his central California high school after police dogs sniffed out unloaded shotguns in his truck.  The California Legal Action Project (a joint effort by NRA-ILA and the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation) provided legal assistance.

The truck was legally parked off-campus, on a public street, and the guns were in the truck because Tudesko had gone hunting that morning before school.  All those factors just show the school’s lack of common sense in enforcing its “zero tolerance” policy; according to guidelines from the California Department of Education, administrators don’t have to recommend expulsion unless a violation is committed at school or at a school activity.  Even that agency’s website notes widespread criticism of “zero tolerance” policies.

On the legal side, the school made many errors, such as confusing its authority to expel students under California’s Education Code with the district attorney’s authority to enforce the state’s “Gun Free School Zones” law.  Both the district attorney and the local police have said Tudesko would face no criminal charges.

Leading California civil rights lawyer Chuck Michel—a longtime advocate for Golden State gun owners—represented Tudesko.  For more information on the Tudesko case, go to Michel’s website at www.calgunlaws.com; for information on the NRA/CRPA Legal Action Project, go to http://www.crpa.org/.

Hope everyone is enjoying this wonderful holiday, where one of America's most notorious plagiarists is honored as a hero.

Let's all do our part, and copy, steal, borrow, transcribe, appropriate, counterfeit, crib, falsify, infringe, lift, pirate, bootleg, buccaneer, commandeer, freeboot, hijack, swashbuckle, confiscate, embezzle, expropriate, grab, pilfer, seize, take, and usurp!  

To do anything less is to disrespect the memory of the great Michael King, aka Martin Luther King (yep, he even stole his name.)

Hypocritical Holiday

Quote:King's Plagiarism Makes it Impossible to Revere Him
Guest column by Gerry Harbison HARBISON is a professor of chemistry.

"... plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - only be sure always to call it please 'research.'" "Lobachevsky," by Tom Lehrer

In 1988, the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project made a discovery that shocked it to its core.

The Project, a group of academics and students, had been entrusted by Coretta Scott King with the task of editing King's papers for publication. As they examined King's student essays and his dissertation, they gradually became aware that King was guilty of massive plagiarism - that is, he had copied the words of other authors word-for-word, without making it clear that what he was writing was not his own.

The Project spent years uncovering the full extent of King's plagiarism. In November 1990, word leaked to the press, and they had to go public. The revelations caused a minor scandal and then were promptly forgotten.

Indeed, I had never heard of them until I read a student letter to the Daily Nebraskan three weeks ago. That letter sent me in search of the truth about Martin Luther King Jr.'s student career.

Like most graduate students, King spent the first half of his doctoral work taking courses in his degree area, theology. His surviving papers from that period show that from the very beginning he was transcribing articles by eminent theologians, often word for word, and representing them as his own work.

After completing his course work, graduate students usually write a dissertation or thesis, supposedly an independent and original contribution to scholarship. King's thesis was anything but original. In fact, the sheer extent of his plagiarism is breathtaking.

Page after page contains nothing but direct, verbatim transcriptions of the work of others. In 1990, the King Project estimated that less than half of some chapters was actually written by King himself. Since then, even more of his "borrowings" have been traced.

Calculating the exact extent of his plagiarism will require a computer analysis, but having looked over Chapter III in detail, I estimate that at least three quarters of it was stolen from other authors.

King stole from the subjects of his dissertation, the theologians Tillich and Wieman. He copied the writings of other theologians - passages from philosophy textbooks. But most unforgivably of all, thousands of words in paragraph-sized chunks, were taken from the thesis of a fellow student, Jack Boozer, an ex-army chaplain who returned to Boston University after the war to get his degree.

We even know how he did it, for King was systematic in his plagiarism. He copied significant phrases, sentences or whole paragraphs from the books he was consulting onto a set of index cards. "Writing" a thesis was then a matter of arranging these cards into a meaningful order.

Sometimes he linked the stolen parts together with an occasional phrase of his own, but as often as not he left the words completely unchanged. The index cards still survive, with their damning evidence intact.

King fooled everybody: his adviser, his thesis reader and King scholars for more than 30 years. Nor did he stop after graduation; as early as the 1970s, King scholar Ira Zepp noticed that sections of King's first published book Striding Towards Freedom were taken verbatim from Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros and Paul Ramsay's Basic Christian Ethics (sheesh!).

Zepp, as so many have done since then, remained silent.

Everything I've written above can easily be verified in a couple of hours in Love Library. None of it comes from right-wing scandalmongers who might have a vested interest in damaging King's reputation.

But if King's plagiarism is so serious and so extensive, why do we so rarely hear about it? Partly it is because the American public thinks of plagiarism as an obscure issue that only an egghead professor could get steamed up about.

And to some extent they're right. King's academic dishonesty is after all mostly irrelevant to his life's work. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s did us all a great good by ending the greatest social evil of mid-20th century America - legally sanctioned segregation and racial discrimination. That movement is not in the least diminished by the ethical shortcomings of one of its leaders.

But more than that, American culture has personified the virtues of the Civil Rights movement - tolerance, nonviolence, and insistence on the integrity of the individual - in Martin Luther King Jr. That mythic King bears little resemblance to the real, the historical Martin Luther King Jr.

It would be safe and easy for UNL to play along with this comfortable myth.

But we shouldn't.

Plagiarism isn't a mere peccadillo. It is a direct threat to our academic integrity. When a student plagiarizes, he undermines academic standards by receiving a grade for ideas or expression that are not his own, and he cheats other students who have earned their grades honestly.

When a scholar plagiarizes, he defrauds other scholars of due credit for their work, and he contaminates scholarship by making it difficult or impossible to trace the evolution of ideas.

Remember how major-league baseball banned Pete Rose? Rose gambled on games, a minor transgression to most, but one that baseball felt undermined its the very integrity. In the same way, plagiarism subverts our integrity. Surely UNL can at least aspire to the same standards as organized baseball?

More than this, as scholars we have a responsibility to separate myth from truth. For example, we insist on making a distinction between creation myths and the scientific truth of evolution. Even though some of our students adhere to the biblical story of creation - and when we teach evolution we may cause offense and do violence to their beliefs - we can't fail to teach and research the truth out of a misplaced 'sensitivity.'

In the same way, we have a responsibility to confront Martin Luther King Jr. as the man he was, not the icon some of us revere.

Our chancellor insists we can diversify UNL without compromising academic standards. But if so, how can we, in the name of diversity, declare an academic holiday to honor a man whose entire career was marred by the most blatant academic dishonesty?

I personally have had one student expelled, and flunked several others, for turning in plagiarized papers. Can we really look those students in the face, insist that what they did was seriously wrong, and then in good conscience vote for a King holiday?

I don't think so.