You keep repeating this, but... your IEEE paper does not "discredit" OAM or show that it's a "scam." Orbital Angular Momentum is a legitimate physical property of systems, both material (i.e. spinning tops, atoms, subatomic particles) and electromagnetic (light and radio waves). The IEEE paper is showing that doing so simply offers no major advantage over standard MIMO schemes. In fact, from the abstract of your paper:
We demonstrate that, for certain array configurations in free space, traditional MIMO theory leads to eigen-modes identical to the OAM states. From this we conclude that communicating over the sub-channels given by OAM states is a subset of the solutions offered by MIMO, and therefore does not offer any additional gains in capacity.
In other words, OAM is a perfectly legitimate technique for encoding data. It just happens to be a subset of what's already capable with MIMO. It's also worth noting that your paper discusses radio waves, and the OAM demonstration discussed in the submission is in the optical. There may be limitations that prevent certain MIMO techniques from being applicable to optical transmission, especially in guided-wave situations (i.e. optical fiber). In fact, the research group I worked with during my Ph.D. was looking at encoding extra information on single photons using OAM to increase the data capacity of quantum communication networks, a situation where MIMO is almost certainly not applicable.
It's worth noting that Alan Willner is no nutjob. He's worked at Bell Labs, has a chaired professorship at USC, is a fellow of IEEE, OSA and SPIE, and is an editor-in-chief for several reputable academic journals (JLT, Optics Letters, JSTQE). I had the pleasure of working with him on an unrelated project 5 or 6 years ago, and there's no reason to believe that he's trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There's certainly no professional reason for him to do so, his CV speaks for itself:
http://csi.usc.edu/faculty/willner.html
Lucky Imaging relies on the fact that every so often, a really high-quality image makes it through the atmosphere almost unperturbed (based on the Kolmogorov model of turbulence). While I don't know whether the same model can be applied to cosmic gas clouds, there may be another model that could accurately model the phase distortions those clouds impress upon a wavefront.
To achieve this one must take many very short-exposure (compared to the time-scale of atmospheric turbulence, or gas-cloud turbulence in the case we're considering) images of the source. However, distant (or dim) objects often require reasonably long exposure times in order to collect a large enough amount of light to be able to see the image. The problem with this technique may simply be that the exposure time necessary for the Lucky Image algorithm to work is too short to actually collect enough light to create a good image in the first place.
From this paper, which is linked to in the Wikipedia article:
The frame selection algorithm, implemented (currently) as a post-processing step, is summarised below: 1. A Point Spread Function (PSF) guide star is selected as a reference to the turbulence induced blurring of each frame. 2. The guide star image in each frame is sinc-resampled by a factor of 4 to give a sub-pixel estimate of the position of the brightest speckle. 3. A quality factor (currently the fraction of light concentrated in the brightest pixel of the PSF) is calculated for each frame. 4. A fraction of the frames are then selected according to their quality factors. The fraction is chosen to optimise the tradeoff between the resolution and the target signal-to-noise ratio required. 5. The selected frames are shifted-and-added to align their brightest speckle positions.
(bolding mine)
So it looks like each frame is shifted as a whole rather than each individual pixel. Which makes sense from the description of the process, since the theory is that the images you're picking in the Lucky Imaging technique are high-quality images with a random offset due to the atmosphere.
Not necessarily. The turnaround time between submission and publication of a paper in Nature can be on the order of several months. I haven't read the Scientific American article the GP is referring to, but it's entirely possible that they were reporting on the same experiment. It's common to give talks at professional conferences after the paper has been submitted and accepted, but before it's actually been published. Scientific American may have based their article on the proceedings from such a conference.
Keep in mind that when she said "straight man," she probably meant "straight man whom I don't know on the internet." When you consider that a lot of straight men subconsciously connect "lesbian" with "hot girl-on-girl action and maybe she'll invite me to join them," it's hard to blame her for that attitude.
She would probably have no problem living with a straight man if it were a friend of hers, or someone she's known and trusted for a while. But when dealing with the internet, you rarely go wrong assuming the lowest common denominator.
By the same token, I'd have no problem sharing a house with another straight man, especially if it were a friend or relative. But I'd be a lot more uncomfortable if it was someone I didn't know well and might make a habit of hitting on my wife.
So, if a teacher were found to be, say, molesting children, what actions (other than the obvious call to the police) can be taken to remove a student teacher from the classroom?
(I assume that by "if a teacher" you mean "if a student teacher", because otherwise your comment doesn't make sense to me.)
I didn't say that the district cannot remove a student teacher from the classroom. I said they cannot fire a non-employee.
If a student teacher is so disruptive that learning cannot take place, a school district is well within their right to refuse them access to the premises, and give them a poor or failing evaluation. Of course if a student teacher is breaking the law, the police most certainly will become involved. In this case, the school could have failed the student teacher halfway through the semester and refused them access, which perhaps is what you meant in the first place. But using the term "fire" implies that the student teacher is actively employed by the district, which is demonstrably false.
Then I am at a loss why this would be a requirement. I had requirements for my degrees. If a required class weren't passed, then I'd not have received my degree. If the student teaching is unrelated to the conferring of a certificate, then it is a worthless requirement. They are required to do it, but not required to pass it. That's not the way it works here, nor the way it works in TX, where I'm from. I understand I displayed some confusion on the matter, mainly because I am familiar with teacher requirements elsewhere, and they do not match the procedures followed here.
Whoa, you're reading too much into what I said (or meant, anyway). My point is this:
The supervising teacher evaluates the student teacher. This evaluation may be in the form of a letter grade, or a pass/fail, or any other form the university might want to use. That evaluation goes to the student teacher's professor at the university, who takes that into account when he or she issues a final course grade for the practicum component of the class.
Note that in the above scenario, the supervising teacher does not issue the final course grade! In fact, the supervising teacher can't since they aren't an employee of the university. Now, in most cases, if the supervising teacher fails the student, the professor will too, and they'll have to re-take the class or switch majors or whatever. However, there are always exceptions to the rule.
For example, what happens if you get a student teaching assignment with a supervisor who's awful to begin with, or doesn't get along with you. As a result, the supervisor grades you poorly even though you put forth an excellent effort. Maybe you've been coming to your professor regularly to discuss how unhappy you are with your assignment and how poor your supervisor is. Maybe they check with other teachers at the school that you may have worked with, and find out that all of those teachers give you a glowing recommendation. Maybe it's the first (and probably last) time that they've ever given a student to this particular supervisor, and only now realize that he's terrible, and thus don't value the supervisor's evaluation of you very highly. In this scenario, you may almost fail the student teaching requirement, but still receive your degree and your certification, because ultimately the university is the entity that decides whether you receive it, not the school district. And that's exactly how it should be.
Of course, I doubt that's true for this particular case. It sounds from the articles like she's just not a very good candidate for becoming a teacher. But without access to all the first-hand information, it's not really possible to make that call definitively. If it becomes clear during the court case that the teacher is a bonehead who got her panties in a bunch over a stupid myspace picture, then I hope she cleans Millersville out and the court awards her the degree and certification she earned.
Great, so instead of firing an incompetent teacher for being an incompetent teacher, she is allowed to teach. The district that continued to "employ" the student teacher thought she shouldn't be a teacher. Her supervisor thought she shouldn't be a teacher. However, they took no action to fail her, fire her, or do anything of the sort.
A student teacher isn't employed by the district, and can't be fired. She is of course being evaluated however. And the supervisor did in fact take action on that front, which was the only avenue available to her.
From the BBSNews article:
"Ms. Snyder's lawsuit admits that the school district's mid-semester evaluatin of her student teaching identified many areas where Ms. Snyder required 'significant remediation.' Indeed, her evaluation reflected serious performance problems..."
From the Lancaster Online article:
Girvin also issued a final student/teacher evaluation of Snyder and granted "superior" or "competent" ratings in all areas except "professionalism." He gave Snyder and "unsatisfactory" rating, according to the lawsuit.
It should probably be noted here that I think the Lancaster Online quote is slightly incorrect -- Girvin is a professor at Millersville, while Deann Buffington is the supervising teacher at Conestoga. While it isn't uncommon for the professor to issue an evaluation of a student-teacher, usually most of the in-class performance evaluation is done by the supervising teacher. It's not clear from this excerpt whether Girvin simply signed off on Buffington's assessment, or added thoughts of his own.
There are rumours they pressured her school to take some action, and her school denied her the teaching certificate based off a picture and some hearsay from the people that should have taken the action.
These rumors were denied by the school district in the BBSNews link. Of course that doesn't make them true or false, merely unconfirmed.
She should sue and win. The people that should have taken the action did not. The school district should have fired her while she was a student teacher and given her unsatidfactory marks.
The school district cannot fire a student teacher, as they are not employed by the district. They did give her unsatisfactory marks in "professionalism" according to the articles, which is the area in which they found her sub-par.
Instead of doing the right thing, they didn't want the conflict on their hands and passed it off to her college to take action. When you establish rules then don't follow them yourself, expect to be sued. Whether she should or shouldn't be a teacher, the school district should have blocked her when they had the chance or let it go, and her college shouldn't take a request from a school district regarding disciplinary action (especially when the district immediately claims it never happened).
I think you're jumping to conclusions here. It is not within the school district's power to grant or refuse to grant the student a degree or a teaching certificate -- that is up to the college's education department to decide. The school district has no way to "block her" from getting a degree, though giving her exceptionally bad marks on her evaluation may persuade the college to do this. The school district (or more accurately, the supervising teacher) did the only thing they could do: give the student bad marks and (probably) write a poor recommendation on her evaluation.
To be fair, professionalism is important as an educator. There's a distinct difference between being well-mannered and being chum-my with students. Learning the difference is one of the toughest parts of an education curriculum, primarily because the student teachers aren't that much older than the students they're teaching. The natural urge to be "buddy-buddy" with the students in order to seem cool is something that you need to suppress as much as possible. In general, you earn a lot more respect from students by being professional and fair than you do by being their friend.
Not that there aren't teachers with the Cartman Complex [(c) 2007 theckhd if nobody else has taken it yet!] who would go as far as to abuse their powers for petty, stupid reasons. I've seen a lot of those too. It's just not clear that this is necessarily one of them.
That was a lawsuit allegation. Any sources besides the disgruntled student?
I was just responding to the parent, who asked for sources. An alternative point of view is given in a BBSNews article that contains parts of a press release by Conestoga Valley School District, which was linked several posts down. In it, Conestoga explicitly denies that they threatened not to use Millersville student teachers in the future. There's also Millersville's response, which is less than forthcoming.
She wasn't denied her teaching certificate due to this photograph.
I never meant to imply that she was. It certainly sounds like she had established a pattern well before the image was discovered. Especially if you believe the content in the BBSNews article.
Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished, according to the lawsuit.
From Lancaster Online, a local news outlet. In addition, the article talks about her being "unprofessional" during her student teaching, though whether that was determined before or after the picture was discovered isn't entirely clear:
Girvin also issued a final student/teacher evaluation of Snyder and granted "superior" or "competent" ratings in all areas except "professionalism." He gave Snyder and "unsatisfactory" rating, according to the lawsuit.
Buffington also accused Snyder of "incompetence" and "claimed she should have been removed from her student-teaching position months ago."
Having grown up in the area (several of my friends went to Millersville; at my high school it was often thought of as the 13th grade because so many students from our district went there), this doesn't really surprise me. The stories I've heard from friends who got their degrees at Millersville generally indicated that the school was a pain to deal with on administrative issues, particularly in some departments. I guess the Ed. department is one of them.
Except that "commercial activity" implies trading virtual content for real-world money. The article (hell, even the summary) goes out of its way to point out that as long as a transaction involving real-world money isn't involved, no tax would be assessed.
For these reasons and others, I argue that players of games like WoW should be taxed if and when they cash out--that is, on real market trades. That approach would allow those playing for entertainment not be taxed on their game play (beyond the tax they already paid on the money spent on the game), while catching most profit-seeking activity.
It doesn't make sense to tax someone who plays the game without selling in-game items for "real money," and the author doesn't suggest it. However, once you start selling gold on e-bay or through one of the well-known resellers, that money now counts as income, and you ought to be reporting it on your income taxes to begin with.
The whole issue of "taxing virtual money" or "paying with virtual money" is an invalid argument. This is no different than any other person who makes a profit off of one of their hobbies, and the tax system already has the means to handle it.
Wow, I read most of the testimony when it was posted on/., but I must have missed that part. How did that come about? Did the judge decide that based on his testimony he wasn't an expert at all, or that his methods were so shoddy that his testimony was irrelevant?
I would imagine that discrediting expert witnesses is a common tactic in the courtroom, but how common is it for that tactic to succeed, at least to the level that testimony becomes inadmissible?
Also, does this invalidate his testimony only for that trial, or is this something that can be brought up in future cases to invalidate his testimony there as well? Or is that something that each individual judge has to decide on a case-by-case basis?
This isn't limited to mobile phone access. They actually market this as a feasible alternative to DSL and cable. If you go to their product site, you'll find that they advertise that the speeds are comparable to DSL, and they offer a PC card so that you can connect without using your phone. And while they offer the plan cheaper with a 2-year phone contract ($59.99), you'll notice that you can purchase this service for a little more without any voice plan at all ($79.99).
So on the one hand, they're advertising this as an easy and convenient alternative to DSL, while at the same time rewriting the terms of service to make it abundantly clear that it's not intended to compete with DSL. If you're going to be actually using the bandwidth you're paying for ($79.99 is about twice as expensive as a regular DSL line in my area), they want you to get a real DSL setup that can actually handle the advertised bandwidth.
It's more complicated than that. They outline the specifics in their license agreement form, which you must sign before they'll publish your paper. Here's the section pertaining to the rights you give AAAS:
1. In consideration of publication in SCIENCE of the work currently titled _________________(the "Work") and authored by ___________ ("Author"), the sole and exclusive, irrevocable right is hereby granted to AAAS to publish, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, store, translate, create derivative works from and otherwise use the Work in any form, manner, format, or medium, whether now known or hereafter developed, throughout the world and in any language, for the entire duration of any such right and any renewal or extension thereof and to permit/sublicense others to do any or all of the foregoing as well.
As you see, you not only give them permission to publish, but also to distribute and create derivative works, for as long as the copyright is valid.
The rest of the agreement goes on to outline the rights retained by the author, which includes reprinting it for using in a thesis, giving oral presentations at conferences, and the like. One notable exception is that you can distribute copies of the work, but only for non-commercial purposes. Another is that you can't publish the final version (as it appears in the magazine) on your own website, though you can publish the accepted version as long as you include a link to the paper on their site.
Speaking from experience, I didn't read this that thoroughly when I had to sign it, but I ended up looking more carefully at it later when I wanted to put the paper on my website. Since I couldn't put the paper itself on my website, I ended up simply including a link to the abstract and noted under it that anyone interested in a copy could e-mail me and I'd send them one, since that's one of the rights I retained.
As you stated, this is pretty standard protocol for peer-reviewed journals. However, I think you're wrong when you say:
Did they ask for my permission? Nope.
Most established journals make all authors sign a copyright agreement that gives the journal publication rights. For example, here is what Science says about copyright:
Does Science require copyright transfer? No. Authors retain copyright of their work, but must grant an exclusive publication license to Science and AAAS for their paper to be accepted for publication. Further details on this license are available here.
To even get your paper published, you probably had to sign a similar agreement, otherwise they will refuse to publish your paper. I know that I've had to sign one for each of my papers so far. So, yes, you probably did give them permission to charge people to view your paper.
Note that you still retain the copyright on your paper, and the code you released under the GPL is still protected by the GPL. But they have a permanent license to publish that document, and charge for it, without owing you a cent.
Yup. Just what a patent system overburdened with patent applications of dubious quality needs -- an express lane.
Re:how about polarization
on
Smart Sunglasses
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you drive with horizontally polarized sunglasses, you cut the glare from the road, but still get glare from the windshield. If you switch to vertical, you cut the glare from the windshield, but not the glare from the road. I don't want to see any reflected light.
You have your polarizations backwards. Light that reflects off of the road surface will be primarily horizontally polarized; thus you would need vertically polarized sunglasses to reduce the glare.
But which looks worse for the RIAA: 1) RIAA backs off after receiving a 'stern letter' emphasizing how little of a case they have and making clear the defendant's intent to respond with counter-litigation if pressed, or 2) RIAA continues with the lawsuit despite said 'stern letter', gets beaten soundly in court, and the defendant's counter-litigation is highly successful and awards attorney fees, etc.
In the first situation, the bully retains a stronger grip on his power than he would in the second. Not only would losing the case run the risk of setting a precedent for future cases (or at the least, be an example of a successful tactic for future defendants), it could also confirm that putting up a fight is more viable economically (because you could get attorney fees covered). Knowing that if you win, you may not be stuck with a several thousand dollar attorney bill could make the difference between fighting and settling for less than an attorney would cost.
If they back off after receiving the 'stern letter', re-assessing their case, and deciding that they have a significant chance of losing, the defendant probably can't even get reimbursed for the amount spent on the lawyer to write the letter.
So overall, yeah, it weakens the bully's power to drop the case after a stern letter, but not as much as actually losing the case would. Any half-intelligent bully would see that and take the lesser of two evils.
Of course this leaves out the possibility of the RIAA winning, but lets assume for the moment that there's only a snowball's chance in hell of that occurring due to the details of the case.
I think Jack Thompson was representing the families of the victims in their civil suit against Take-Two Interactive, not the defendant in his criminal case. From the wikipedia article:
Jack Thompson was representing families in the suit as an out-of-state attorney on pro hac vice status.
For no reason than to slant the story? Really? Funny, when I read the summary, I noticed:
defendant John Paladuk was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright infringement
Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year
sole income is Social Security Disability
The mention of the stroke does indeed have a purpose beyond emotional appeal. The medical bills from the stroke, combined with the fact that his base income is already small if he's on Social Security Disability, give the distinct impression that he might have financial difficulty mounting a strong defense in a case such as this.
The whole point is that the RIAA is suing someone, who based on the evidence available is most likely innocent, just because he probably doesn't have the money to defend himself successfully. They probably hope he'll cave in and settle because it'll cost less than the extended legal battle he might face.
I think NewYorkCountryLawyer included the medical information because it has a direct bearing on the interpretation of the RIAA's actions in this case. If all you saw was an appeal to pity, then maybe you need to re-read the summary again.
But if through regulation, you can mandate that the wires must be made available to anyone for a reasonable cost (which is effectively what the EC is saying), and still let companies shoulder some of the financial burden of building the network, the government saves the taxpayers a great deal of money while achieving the same end result.
I agree that it would be nice if the gov't fronted some cash to help make fiber available everywhere, but it gets expensive fast. Until Joe Taxpayer becomes convinced that internet access is as necessary to daily life as are, say, roads, it's unlikely that the majority of taxpayers will be interested in funding such an effort.
Not to mention that the idea of a government-maintained internet makes me shudder, not just for privacy reasons, but for efficiency concerns as well. Take a look at any state DOT (in the US) for an example.
By keeping industry involved though, the government lets the industry shoulder some of the cost, thus increasing the rate at which the network is deployed/improved. It also helps keep the amount of bureaucracy limited.
As long as there is still profit to be had, it will be worth it to the companies to invest in the infrastructure. Having a limited amount of regulation imposed by the government seems like the most cost-effective way (for the government, anyway) to encourage that. Too much regulation, and the industry sees no potential for profits, and the telco stops putting money into improving the network (leading to the scenario you described). Too little, and each telco ends up having to lay its own, wasting resources and money in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, OAM is a perfectly legitimate technique for encoding data. It just happens to be a subset of what's already capable with MIMO. It's also worth noting that your paper discusses radio waves, and the OAM demonstration discussed in the submission is in the optical. There may be limitations that prevent certain MIMO techniques from being applicable to optical transmission, especially in guided-wave situations (i.e. optical fiber). In fact, the research group I worked with during my Ph.D. was looking at encoding extra information on single photons using OAM to increase the data capacity of quantum communication networks, a situation where MIMO is almost certainly not applicable.
It's worth noting that Alan Willner is no nutjob. He's worked at Bell Labs, has a chaired professorship at USC, is a fellow of IEEE, OSA and SPIE, and is an editor-in-chief for several reputable academic journals (JLT, Optics Letters, JSTQE). I had the pleasure of working with him on an unrelated project 5 or 6 years ago, and there's no reason to believe that he's trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There's certainly no professional reason for him to do so, his CV speaks for itself: http://csi.usc.edu/faculty/willner.html
I think your suspicions are probably correct.
Lucky Imaging relies on the fact that every so often, a really high-quality image makes it through the atmosphere almost unperturbed (based on the Kolmogorov model of turbulence). While I don't know whether the same model can be applied to cosmic gas clouds, there may be another model that could accurately model the phase distortions those clouds impress upon a wavefront.
To achieve this one must take many very short-exposure (compared to the time-scale of atmospheric turbulence, or gas-cloud turbulence in the case we're considering) images of the source. However, distant (or dim) objects often require reasonably long exposure times in order to collect a large enough amount of light to be able to see the image. The problem with this technique may simply be that the exposure time necessary for the Lucky Image algorithm to work is too short to actually collect enough light to create a good image in the first place.
So it looks like each frame is shifted as a whole rather than each individual pixel. Which makes sense from the description of the process, since the theory is that the images you're picking in the Lucky Imaging technique are high-quality images with a random offset due to the atmosphere.
Not necessarily. The turnaround time between submission and publication of a paper in Nature can be on the order of several months. I haven't read the Scientific American article the GP is referring to, but it's entirely possible that they were reporting on the same experiment. It's common to give talks at professional conferences after the paper has been submitted and accepted, but before it's actually been published. Scientific American may have based their article on the proceedings from such a conference.
Keep in mind that when she said "straight man," she probably meant "straight man whom I don't know on the internet." When you consider that a lot of straight men subconsciously connect "lesbian" with "hot girl-on-girl action and maybe she'll invite me to join them," it's hard to blame her for that attitude.
She would probably have no problem living with a straight man if it were a friend of hers, or someone she's known and trusted for a while. But when dealing with the internet, you rarely go wrong assuming the lowest common denominator.
By the same token, I'd have no problem sharing a house with another straight man, especially if it were a friend or relative. But I'd be a lot more uncomfortable if it was someone I didn't know well and might make a habit of hitting on my wife.
I didn't say that the district cannot remove a student teacher from the classroom. I said they cannot fire a non-employee.
If a student teacher is so disruptive that learning cannot take place, a school district is well within their right to refuse them access to the premises, and give them a poor or failing evaluation. Of course if a student teacher is breaking the law, the police most certainly will become involved. In this case, the school could have failed the student teacher halfway through the semester and refused them access, which perhaps is what you meant in the first place. But using the term "fire" implies that the student teacher is actively employed by the district, which is demonstrably false.
Whoa, you're reading too much into what I said (or meant, anyway). My point is this:
The supervising teacher evaluates the student teacher. This evaluation may be in the form of a letter grade, or a pass/fail, or any other form the university might want to use. That evaluation goes to the student teacher's professor at the university, who takes that into account when he or she issues a final course grade for the practicum component of the class.
Note that in the above scenario, the supervising teacher does not issue the final course grade! In fact, the supervising teacher can't since they aren't an employee of the university. Now, in most cases, if the supervising teacher fails the student, the professor will too, and they'll have to re-take the class or switch majors or whatever. However, there are always exceptions to the rule.
For example, what happens if you get a student teaching assignment with a supervisor who's awful to begin with, or doesn't get along with you. As a result, the supervisor grades you poorly even though you put forth an excellent effort. Maybe you've been coming to your professor regularly to discuss how unhappy you are with your assignment and how poor your supervisor is. Maybe they check with other teachers at the school that you may have worked with, and find out that all of those teachers give you a glowing recommendation. Maybe it's the first (and probably last) time that they've ever given a student to this particular supervisor, and only now realize that he's terrible, and thus don't value the supervisor's evaluation of you very highly. In this scenario, you may almost fail the student teaching requirement, but still receive your degree and your certification, because ultimately the university is the entity that decides whether you receive it, not the school district. And that's exactly how it should be.
Of course, I doubt that's true for this particular case. It sounds from the articles like she's just not a very good candidate for becoming a teacher. But without access to all the first-hand information, it's not really possible to make that call definitively. If it becomes clear during the court case that the teacher is a bonehead who got her panties in a bunch over a stupid myspace picture, then I hope she cleans Millersville out and the court awards her the degree and certification she earned.
From the BBSNews article:
From the Lancaster Online article:
It should probably be noted here that I think the Lancaster Online quote is slightly incorrect -- Girvin is a professor at Millersville, while Deann Buffington is the supervising teacher at Conestoga. While it isn't uncommon for the professor to issue an evaluation of a student-teacher, usually most of the in-class performance evaluation is done by the supervising teacher. It's not clear from this excerpt whether Girvin simply signed off on Buffington's assessment, or added thoughts of his own.
These rumors were denied by the school district in the BBSNews link. Of course that doesn't make them true or false, merely unconfirmed. The school district cannot fire a student teacher, as they are not employed by the district. They did give her unsatisfactory marks in "professionalism" according to the articles, which is the area in which they found her sub-par. I think you're jumping to conclusions here. It is not within the school district's power to grant or refuse to grant the student a degree or a teaching certificate -- that is up to the college's education department to decide. The school district has no way to "block her" from getting a degree, though giving her exceptionally bad marks on her evaluation may persuade the college to do this. The school district (or more accurately, the supervising teacher) did the only thing they could do: give the student bad marks and (probably) write a poor recommendation on her evaluation.
To be fair, professionalism is important as an educator. There's a distinct difference between being well-mannered and being chum-my with students. Learning the difference is one of the toughest parts of an education curriculum, primarily because the student teachers aren't that much older than the students they're teaching. The natural urge to be "buddy-buddy" with the students in order to seem cool is something that you need to suppress as much as possible. In general, you earn a lot more respect from students by being professional and fair than you do by being their friend.
Not that there aren't teachers with the Cartman Complex [(c) 2007 theckhd if nobody else has taken it yet!] who would go as far as to abuse their powers for petty, stupid reasons. I've seen a lot of those too. It's just not clear that this is necessarily one of them.
I never meant to imply that she was. It certainly sounds like she had established a pattern well before the image was discovered. Especially if you believe the content in the BBSNews article.
From Lancaster Online, a local news outlet. In addition, the article talks about her being "unprofessional" during her student teaching, though whether that was determined before or after the picture was discovered isn't entirely clear:
Having grown up in the area (several of my friends went to Millersville; at my high school it was often thought of as the 13th grade because so many students from our district went there), this doesn't really surprise me. The stories I've heard from friends who got their degrees at Millersville generally indicated that the school was a pain to deal with on administrative issues, particularly in some departments. I guess the Ed. department is one of them.
Except that "commercial activity" implies trading virtual content for real-world money. The article (hell, even the summary) goes out of its way to point out that as long as a transaction involving real-world money isn't involved, no tax would be assessed.
It doesn't make sense to tax someone who plays the game without selling in-game items for "real money," and the author doesn't suggest it. However, once you start selling gold on e-bay or through one of the well-known resellers, that money now counts as income, and you ought to be reporting it on your income taxes to begin with.
The whole issue of "taxing virtual money" or "paying with virtual money" is an invalid argument. This is no different than any other person who makes a profit off of one of their hobbies, and the tax system already has the means to handle it.
Wow, I read most of the testimony when it was posted on
I would imagine that discrediting expert witnesses is a common tactic in the courtroom, but how common is it for that tactic to succeed, at least to the level that testimony becomes inadmissible?
Also, does this invalidate his testimony only for that trial, or is this something that can be brought up in future cases to invalidate his testimony there as well? Or is that something that each individual judge has to decide on a case-by-case basis?
This isn't limited to mobile phone access. They actually market this as a feasible alternative to DSL and cable. If you go to their product site, you'll find that they advertise that the speeds are comparable to DSL, and they offer a PC card so that you can connect without using your phone. And while they offer the plan cheaper with a 2-year phone contract ($59.99), you'll notice that you can purchase this service for a little more without any voice plan at all ($79.99).
So on the one hand, they're advertising this as an easy and convenient alternative to DSL, while at the same time rewriting the terms of service to make it abundantly clear that it's not intended to compete with DSL. If you're going to be actually using the bandwidth you're paying for ($79.99 is about twice as expensive as a regular DSL line in my area), they want you to get a real DSL setup that can actually handle the advertised bandwidth.
As you see, you not only give them permission to publish, but also to distribute and create derivative works, for as long as the copyright is valid.
The rest of the agreement goes on to outline the rights retained by the author, which includes reprinting it for using in a thesis, giving oral presentations at conferences, and the like. One notable exception is that you can distribute copies of the work, but only for non-commercial purposes. Another is that you can't publish the final version (as it appears in the magazine) on your own website, though you can publish the accepted version as long as you include a link to the paper on their site.
Speaking from experience, I didn't read this that thoroughly when I had to sign it, but I ended up looking more carefully at it later when I wanted to put the paper on my website. Since I couldn't put the paper itself on my website, I ended up simply including a link to the abstract and noted under it that anyone interested in a copy could e-mail me and I'd send them one, since that's one of the rights I retained.
Most established journals make all authors sign a copyright agreement that gives the journal publication rights. For example, here is what Science says about copyright:
To even get your paper published, you probably had to sign a similar agreement, otherwise they will refuse to publish your paper. I know that I've had to sign one for each of my papers so far. So, yes, you probably did give them permission to charge people to view your paper.
Note that you still retain the copyright on your paper, and the code you released under the GPL is still protected by the GPL. But they have a permanent license to publish that document, and charge for it, without owing you a cent.
Yup. Just what a patent system overburdened with patent applications of dubious quality needs -- an express lane.
You have your polarizations backwards. Light that reflects off of the road surface will be primarily horizontally polarized; thus you would need vertically polarized sunglasses to reduce the glare.
But which looks worse for the RIAA:
1) RIAA backs off after receiving a 'stern letter' emphasizing how little of a case they have and making clear the defendant's intent to respond with counter-litigation if pressed, or
2) RIAA continues with the lawsuit despite said 'stern letter', gets beaten soundly in court, and the defendant's counter-litigation is highly successful and awards attorney fees, etc.
In the first situation, the bully retains a stronger grip on his power than he would in the second. Not only would losing the case run the risk of setting a precedent for future cases (or at the least, be an example of a successful tactic for future defendants), it could also confirm that putting up a fight is more viable economically (because you could get attorney fees covered). Knowing that if you win, you may not be stuck with a several thousand dollar attorney bill could make the difference between fighting and settling for less than an attorney would cost.
If they back off after receiving the 'stern letter', re-assessing their case, and deciding that they have a significant chance of losing, the defendant probably can't even get reimbursed for the amount spent on the lawyer to write the letter.
So overall, yeah, it weakens the bully's power to drop the case after a stern letter, but not as much as actually losing the case would. Any half-intelligent bully would see that and take the lesser of two evils.
Of course this leaves out the possibility of the RIAA winning, but lets assume for the moment that there's only a snowball's chance in hell of that occurring due to the details of the case.
This group already exists. But remember, representation isn't free. Do your part and chip in.
The mention of the stroke does indeed have a purpose beyond emotional appeal. The medical bills from the stroke, combined with the fact that his base income is already small if he's on Social Security Disability, give the distinct impression that he might have financial difficulty mounting a strong defense in a case such as this.
The whole point is that the RIAA is suing someone, who based on the evidence available is most likely innocent, just because he probably doesn't have the money to defend himself successfully. They probably hope he'll cave in and settle because it'll cost less than the extended legal battle he might face.
I think NewYorkCountryLawyer included the medical information because it has a direct bearing on the interpretation of the RIAA's actions in this case. If all you saw was an appeal to pity, then maybe you need to re-read the summary again.
But if through regulation, you can mandate that the wires must be made available to anyone for a reasonable cost (which is effectively what the EC is saying), and still let companies shoulder some of the financial burden of building the network, the government saves the taxpayers a great deal of money while achieving the same end result.
I agree that it would be nice if the gov't fronted some cash to help make fiber available everywhere, but it gets expensive fast. Until Joe Taxpayer becomes convinced that internet access is as necessary to daily life as are, say, roads, it's unlikely that the majority of taxpayers will be interested in funding such an effort.
Not to mention that the idea of a government-maintained internet makes me shudder, not just for privacy reasons, but for efficiency concerns as well. Take a look at any state DOT (in the US) for an example.
By keeping industry involved though, the government lets the industry shoulder some of the cost, thus increasing the rate at which the network is deployed/improved. It also helps keep the amount of bureaucracy limited.
As long as there is still profit to be had, it will be worth it to the companies to invest in the infrastructure. Having a limited amount of regulation imposed by the government seems like the most cost-effective way (for the government, anyway) to encourage that. Too much regulation, and the industry sees no potential for profits, and the telco stops putting money into improving the network (leading to the scenario you described). Too little, and each telco ends up having to lay its own, wasting resources and money in the process.
Absolutely nothing, provided I have the capital to launch satellites and provide content.