Interesting Links for 07-03-2012
Mar. 7th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Ken Clarke defends secret courts. I, of course, think they're an awful idea.
- 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying
- Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.
Is there a reason why voting has to happen on one day? Give people a week to vote, with daily updates on the ongoing count!
- Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
- Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords. (And they can, frankly, fuck off)
- Dammit, I find myself largely in agreement with esr on Hollywood, piracy and the internet
- A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.
- How I became Amazon’s pitchman for a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant on Facebook
- On Writers Block
- I hadn't realised that Gillian Anderson stood on a box for The X-Files
- Either be offensive, or don't be offensive. Being offensive and then pretending you weren't is just dumb.
- Rather than a mansion tax we should be sorting out council tax
- Romney vs Mr Burns - can you tell which quote belongs to which one?
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 11:37 am (UTC)They have their own dorms separate from the actual students, they don't have to pay money to be there, they are special classes created for them to ensure they get passing grades even if they can barely read and write, should they have problems with these easy classes they are then given special tutors (that are usually only available to other students for roughly $150 an hour)for free and are, essentially, employees of the university used for fund raising efforts.
Meanwhile to attract them to the schools alumni (who gamble on the games and have a vested interest in seeing the best players possible come to/stay at the school) are legendary for giving them hookers, $100,000 sports cars and all sorts of other shit - that can get the university in a lot of trouble, and the universities have had a real hard problem stopping alumni from doing so, so there needs to be some checks and balances in place.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 11:57 am (UTC)Some schools have been shut out of competition for years at a time when it came out that alumni were giving gifts to the athletes (which cost the schools millions of dollars in revenue a year.)
The schools agree to be the monitors and enforcers of the NCAA's rules and if the student breaks the rules, the school gets shut out. (Which ends up being grossly unfair to the students who didn't take the bribes.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:11 pm (UTC)This all came to a head about a decade or so ago when people started noticing that a ton of talent was suddenly choosing to go to University Of Nevada Las Vegas - an educationally sub par school.
Turns out that professional gamblers (some of whom hadn't even gone to the school) were giving the students tons of gifts to entice them there so they could stack the deck in their favor by betting on the teams.
Some of the players were actually illiterate, but the gamblers were even paying people to impersonate the kids in class and take their tests for them.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:07 pm (UTC)A side effect is that there's an incredible pressure on schools to conceal it if the atheletes show up sub-par academically. Remember in Buffy, where the school principle bullies Willow into "helping" an athlete? I think it's like that, but an awful lot more so, not because the schools are stupid, but because they make lots of money from the games, so can only fund themselves by perpetuating the situation.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:49 pm (UTC)The UK is lucky that their student athletes are actually student athletes and not simply fund raising machines.
The real fault of this is the NFL. When they decided that all professional football players had to have university degrees that encouraged universities to build stadiums so they could have the players the NFL wouldn't accept yet, make money off the games and then give the football players meaningless degrees four years later.
Eventually they realized that it was a waste to simply make money off of this during football season and just expanded the practice to their other sporting programs.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 01:00 pm (UTC)He was smart enough to get away with it. But most of the alumni assholes didn't have years of experience as criminal masterminds behind them before they decided to try to bribe people.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 01:24 pm (UTC)I also find it amusing that while it is possible to be "academically ineligible" as a college athlete, former Washington Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley managed to play four seasons at Oklahoma State despite being (in his own words) "illiterate".
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 03:05 pm (UTC)Do you remember when three UNLV players were photographed sitting in the hot tub of Ritchie "The Fixer" Perry?
http://www.reviewjournal.com/images/business/perryhottub.jpg
no subject
Date: 2012-03-07 03:08 pm (UTC)