Syria has blocked facebook, fearing an infiltration of Israelis.
Human rights groups have regularly criticized Syrian authorities for blocking opposition sites …
Now if blocking facebook isn’t a violation of human rights, what is?
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MIT now releases 90 percent of its coursework material online. Will this be the beginning of the end for college campuses? Though MIT won’t offer degrees online, it seems only a matter of time until other elite institutions decide to.
I applaud MIT for putting the material online. It’s a great service to anyone who needs to learn linear algebra immediately, and by anyone I mean probably one person ever. However, getting an online education is nowhere near as valuable as a real college experience. Sure you learn the material, but think back to the classes you took just two or three years ago. How much of that material do you still remember? I barely even remember the titles of the classes I took freshmen year.
The classroom of the future?
Today in the Daily Pennsylvanian, Maureen Rush compared the recent crime spree at Penn to a bad George Clooney movie.
Three students arrested, two shootings, and two flashings. It sounds like the makings of a Penn version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Hopefully in the next week there’s four embezzling scams and five bikes stolen, so we can keep this thing going. But Rush sees the recent crime spree differently.
The crimes are “the perfect storm,” said Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush.
Engineering junior Ryan Goldstein is expected to be indicted today for his role in a world-wide computer hacking ring. Goldstein allegedly helped some New Zealand nerd named AKILL access Penn computers to use “as a staging ground for a 50,000-computer attack against several online chat networks.”
From what I can make out of the article, Goldstein was in a chat group called TAUNET, but there was some sort of fight and he got kicked out. Then he was like “oh no you didn’t”, and waving his finger joined another chat group to ask for revenge. There he found AKILL, the ringleader of a bot group called “The A Team.” AKILL then pitied the fool Goldstein and helped him launch an attack on TAUNET and other targets.
Possible accomplice?
CollegeHumor recently released their power rankings. The index lists which schools are best “for having the maximum amount of fun while putting forth the least amount of effort.”
Not only did Penn not make the list, we were beaten by both Penn State (#1) and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I barely knew Indiana was a state, let alone that they had their own University of Pennsylvania. (Is it Indiana University of Pennsylvania or The Indiana University of Pennsylvania? - either way it makes no sense and I don’t care.)
Schools were ranked on things like percentage female, bar closing time, and percentage Greek. Penn would do very well in these areas and dominate categories such as closest Taco Bell, freshmen retention rate, and stadium size (so what if it never has people in it?).
The biggest problems Penn has are average SAT scores, concert quality, and number of male vocal groups. We can’t help it that we’re smart, and SPEC has been improving their concert selection. The only way we can climb up this ranking is to ditch the Male Vocal Groups. We have at least six by my count, giving us twice as many as the “lowest scorer” in the Top 50.
Kudos to IvyGate for finding this clip of The Spin’s favorite Penn alum. John Fitzgerald Page is back with a message! Heed his warning!
“If this could happen to an Ivy League grad, and someone, you know, who has an IQ like mine this could happen to anybody.”
You too could suffer the incredible backlash of having people removing you from their friends page!
On another note, I can’t figure out his stance on whether or not the emails were his own personal, private, personal, business or not. He really needs to clarify that more.
Apparently, those kids offering free Red Bull and other products outside Huntsmen aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart. I’m sure this isn’t earth shattering news (though I wonder if it might be more effective to peddle Red Bull outside of DRL — just a thought). I found these two quotes in the article pretty interesting though.
Red Bull is one of a handful of companies that hires students to promote their products at college campuses, and, at Penn, students represent companies ranging from Apple to American Airlines to Playboy.
As a rep for Apple, College senior John Kneeland, a former DP blogger, sets up a booth at Computer Connection to promote Apple products.
Or, as he describes the job: “sit around, look good, use a Mac.”
So if the Mac guy sits around, looking good, using the product, what do you think the Playboy rep does?
The hunger strike at Columbia has gone on for a week now. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the jist of it is that five Columbia students decided not to eat until the following demands are met:
• a more systematic response to hate crimes from Public Safety
• a more collaborative expansion effort from the administration
• a revision of the Core that encourages critical engagement with issues of racism and colonialism
• more resources and support for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), and the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA).
Proving once again that they can’t make a point without being assholes, the College Republicans set up a table of donuts across from the strikers. Their president Chris Kulawik does have a point though, when he says, “A hunger strike is not a legitimate form of debate. It shelves debate.”
During the freshmen elections, I criticized what I thought were impractical and frivolous campaign platforms. I might have been wrong about “Mark Peter Pan”. It looks like he’s really trying to push his thicker toilet paper objective through the UA agenda.
UA Housing is also working with the HCS to bring in-house tutoring services to College Houses as well as thicker brands of toilet paper.
My apologies to Mark Peter Pan for thinking he couldn’t get it done, and apologies to the UA for implying that they don’t matter. Now hopefully he can focus on the other issues in his platform — like moving DRL closer to the Quad …
Penn just started it’s newest campaign to help engineering students pick up chicks. SEAS launched the Advancing Women in Engineering program in order to get more women involved in engineering.
The question is — why? If women have decided that spending their life in a cubicle with Dilbert cartoons taped to the walls isn’t for them, let it be.
I don’t understand why a lack of women in engineering is perceived as such a problem. It’s not that they aren’t interested in sciences. More than half of all medical school applicants are women. Perhaps women just don’t want a career where they have to worry about outsourcing to the point that they go insane and take a bat to the fax machine.
If SEAS is worried about anyone becoming engineers, it should be its students. The number one employer of SEAS graduates is Goldman Sachs, and tied for number two is McKinsey & Co.
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