Teachers Diana Carter and Dona McKenzie are fed up with their students wearing clown trousers – y’know, pants that sag to their bums – so they came up with this: "Pull Up Your Pants Day."
Following in the footsteps of President Obama, who last year told MTV that "brothers should pull up their pants," the school is encouraging kids to hide the underwear and hike up their trousers.
The day was devised by two teachers, Diana Carter and Dona McKenzie, who had become frustrated with the low-hanging look in the school’s hallways. The two even managed to get a Pompano Beach Wal-Mart to donate belts for teachers to hand out to offenders.
"The young men need to be educated based upon where it originated from, which it came from our prisons," McKenzie said. "They need to be aware of how they’re looking when they’re out and walking around, how people perceive them."
(Photo: Eleventh Earl of Mar [Flickr])
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In the ongoing saga of the economic crisis, AIG has been squarely portrayed as the villains. Everybody piled on the bandwagon of villifying the greed and brazenness of their multi-million dollar bonuses (yes, including this blog).
But is that the full and true story? Here’s a letter published in the Opinion section of The New York Times – it’s a resignation letter, actually, sent by Jake DeSantis, an executive VP of the AIG’s much maligned Financial Products unit, explaining why he quit:
I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.
I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.
(Photo: jdiggans [Flickr])
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Substitute science teacher Alex Dolan took covert footage of students in London and Leeds to document and uncover deficiencies in the local school system.
And what did she get for her trouble? Why, she was found guilty of professional misconduct, of course! Didn’t she ever heard of the adage "no good deeds go unpunished?"
Alex Dolan recorded the footage covertly at four schools in London and Leeds in 2005, exposing apparent attempts by the school to dupe Ofsted inspectors.
A General Teaching Council panel found her guilty of taking advantage of pupils, breaching their trust – and that of colleagues – and abusing her position.
Dolan was praised at a hearing of the panel last week for showing integrity, and acting as a whistleblower to expose conditions in the schools in which she had taught.
But in its judgment, the panel said it did not accept that the public interest issues raised by the film Undercover Teacher justified the use of covert filming.
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It’s long been known that if you want someone to do something (especially if that "something" is contrary to what they’re likely to do in the first place), give them an "expert" advice. But why is that?
Emory University Neuroscientist Greg Berns and colleagues have found the answer: a brain-scanning study of people making financial choices found that when given the so-called expert advice, the decision-making parts of their brains often shut down.
In the study, Berns’ team hooked 24 college students to brain scanners as they contemplated swapping a guaranteed payment for a chance at a higher lottery payout. Sometimes the students made the decision on their own. At other times they received written advice from Charles Noussair, an Emory University economist who advises the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Though the recommendations were delivered under his imprimatur, Noussair himself wouldn’t necessarily follow it. The advice was extremely conservative, often urging students to accept tiny guaranteed payouts rather than playing a lottery with great odds and a high payout. But students tended to follow his advice regardless of the situation, especially when it was bad.
When thinking for themselves, students showed activity in their anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — brain regions associated with making decisions and calculating probabilities. When given advice from Noussair, activity in those regions flat lined.
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Look like a genius using these secrets for navigating everyday life
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Household chores may never feel effortless, but appliances that make our day-to-day lives easier have definitely come a long way over the decades. Take a fun look back at vintage ads that tout then-innovative inventions, such as the gas range, electric broom, portable television and more!
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When the clerk came in to ask about the Lunar Orbiter tapes, she didn’t hesitate.
“Do not destroy those tapes,” Evans commanded.
She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. “I could not morally get rid of this stuff,” said Evans, 71, in an interview at her Sun Valley home.
She had no idea what she was letting herself in for. The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.
The mountain of tapes was just part of Evans’ new burden.
There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.
The L.A. Times has the story of how Evans fought bureaucracy and outmoded technology for 30 years to preserve the 1966 pictures. Link -via Metafilter
Also see a post with photographs that follow the story of the recovery. Link
(image credit: NASA)
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The favorite perfume of powerful Egyptian "she king" Hatshepsut may be resurrected from residue found in a 3,500-year-old perfume bottle.
X-ray photographs of the 4.7-inch-tall (12-centimeter-tall) bottle, from the permanent collection of Bonn University’s Egyptian Museum, reveals remnants of the ancient oil. Scientists plan to identify the substance and, possibly within a year, re-create the perfume.
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More than 99 percent of all species that have lived on Earth are now extinct. Sometimes extinctions actually accelerate the evolution of life on Earth. As some forms of life weaken and die off, they create opportunity for other species to grow and flourish. Take a look at these creatures and imagine what life would be like if they had survived!
Shown is the 11-foot-long armor-plated shark-eating Dunkleosteus. Link
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