Thursday, September 06, 2007
"You Little Jerk" John McCain Answers Age Question At Forum
Never one to back down from a question, Senator John McCain took this one on with at first a good start, but ended with an unfortunate reference to the questioner as "You little jerk" -- thus cementing that person's place in history.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
2007 Kick-off Party invades NYC Chelsea Hotspot
The NFL Draft Bible and Fieldposition have teamed up to bring you the first NFL season Kick-off Party ever to have it's own Podcast. Recording live from "Flight 151" in the Heart of Chelsea this Thursday night, the Party will feature Football Trivia, $2 Coors light's, and hopefully Lots of Good football fun. Hosted By NFL Draft Bible's CEO Ric Serritella and it's SR. VP, and field scout, as well as Fieldposition.com and SBS Football Personality Dr. Bill Chachkes, the Party and Podcast start at 7 Pm eastern, and is located at 151 8th av bt 17th and 18th streets(Yes Zennie, only a few blocks from Murry's Bagels!!)
Public School Racial Segregation Increasing - Must Change This
This is not the direction America should go in. We must go back to desegregation as a policy and stick with it. It's the best combatant to racism, which is a mental illness.
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a Supreme Court decision in June, according to report published on Wednesday.
The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who now make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, said the report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California in Los Angeles.
Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college and fail to graduate more than half their students.
In its June ruling the Supreme Court forbade most existing voluntary local efforts to integrate schools in a decision favored by the Bush administration despite warnings from academics that it would compound educational inequality.
"It is about as dramatic a reversal in the stance of the federal courts as one could imagine," said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and a co-author of the report.
"The federal courts are clearly pushing us backward segregation with the encouragement of the Justice Department of President George W. Bush," he said in an interview.
The United States risks becoming a nation in which a new majority of non-white young people will attend "separate and inferior" schools, the report said.
"Resegregation ... is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated -- the South," it said.
The trend damages the prospects for non-white students and will likely have a negative effect on the U.S. economy, according to the report by one of the leading U.S. research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality.
Part of the reason for the resegregation is the rapidly expanding number of black and Latino children and a corresponding fall in the number of white children, it said.
Contrary to popular belief, the surge in the number of minority children in public schools was not mainly caused by a flight of white students into private schools.
Instead, it said, the post-"baby boom" generation of white Americans are having smaller family sizes.
"During the desegregation period there was a major decline in the education gap between blacks and whites and an increase in college entry by blacks .... That gap has stopped closing," Orfield said.
TRIPLE SEGREGATION FOR LATINOS
The record of successive administration reforms such as the Goals 2000 project of former President Bill Clinton and Bush's "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 "justifies deep skepticism," the report said.
Those changes focused pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal to children in schools that were fully integrated.
School desegregation is a sensitive issue in the United States because of resistance to it from white leaders in the decade after a 1954 Supreme Court decision saying segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
One of the chief complaints of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was that black-only public schools were inevitably starved of resources by local government with the result that black children received inferior education.
Latinos are the fastest growing minority in U.S. schools and for them segregation is often more profound than it was when the phenomenon was first measured 40 years ago, according to the report, "Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the need for new Integration Strategies."
"Too often Latino students face triple segregation by race, class and language," it said.
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Public schools in the United States are becoming more racially segregated and the trend is likely to accelerate because of a Supreme Court decision in June, according to report published on Wednesday.
The rise in segregation threatens the quality of education received by non-white students, who now make up 43 percent of the total U.S. student body, said the report by the Civil Rights Project of the University of California in Los Angeles.
Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college and fail to graduate more than half their students.
In its June ruling the Supreme Court forbade most existing voluntary local efforts to integrate schools in a decision favored by the Bush administration despite warnings from academics that it would compound educational inequality.
"It is about as dramatic a reversal in the stance of the federal courts as one could imagine," said Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and a co-author of the report.
"The federal courts are clearly pushing us backward segregation with the encouragement of the Justice Department of President George W. Bush," he said in an interview.
The United States risks becoming a nation in which a new majority of non-white young people will attend "separate and inferior" schools, the report said.
"Resegregation ... is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated -- the South," it said.
The trend damages the prospects for non-white students and will likely have a negative effect on the U.S. economy, according to the report by one of the leading U.S. research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality.
Part of the reason for the resegregation is the rapidly expanding number of black and Latino children and a corresponding fall in the number of white children, it said.
Contrary to popular belief, the surge in the number of minority children in public schools was not mainly caused by a flight of white students into private schools.
Instead, it said, the post-"baby boom" generation of white Americans are having smaller family sizes.
"During the desegregation period there was a major decline in the education gap between blacks and whites and an increase in college entry by blacks .... That gap has stopped closing," Orfield said.
TRIPLE SEGREGATION FOR LATINOS
The record of successive administration reforms such as the Goals 2000 project of former President Bill Clinton and Bush's "No Child Left Behind" in 2001 "justifies deep skepticism," the report said.
Those changes focused pressure and resources on making the achievement of minority children in segregated schools equal to children in schools that were fully integrated.
School desegregation is a sensitive issue in the United States because of resistance to it from white leaders in the decade after a 1954 Supreme Court decision saying segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
One of the chief complaints of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was that black-only public schools were inevitably starved of resources by local government with the result that black children received inferior education.
Latinos are the fastest growing minority in U.S. schools and for them segregation is often more profound than it was when the phenomenon was first measured 40 years ago, according to the report, "Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the need for new Integration Strategies."
"Too often Latino students face triple segregation by race, class and language," it said.
YouTube Metrics and The 2008 Presidential Race
I’m writing this blog post to answer a question posed by Micha Sifry over at TechPresident and also to clear some glaring errors in what was an otherwise interesting article.
Sifry write that she’s “thinking out loud about YouTube metrics, but doesn’t include all of the metrics. Sifry wants to know if there’s a relationship between the number of YouTube subscribers and viewership. The answer is it’s more complicated than that. But before I explain why, I need to clean up these problems in Sifry’s article.
Take a look at this. This article was written on August 16th 2007. This is August 29, 2007. Sifry states that “John Edwards' (You Tube) numbers are somewhat higher than the other leading Democratic candidates because his campaign is using YouTube as the player for videos on his own site, while Obama uses Brightcove and Clinton uses an in-house tool.”
Really?
I wonder which numbers Sifry was looking at?
I created a table that compares the YouTube statistical numbers for the Democratic Candidates with those of the Internet’s top Republican Challenger Ron Paul. Now keep in mind I’m pulling these numbers straight from the channel pages of each candidate’s YouTube page.
Let’s look at the results.
The leader in this area by a massive margin is Senator Obama, who has 11 million channel views. As you can see, the closes follower isn’t that close at all.
Now from this, we should expect Barack Obama’s video views to be so far ahead of everyone else’s that there’s no comparison. Indeed, a look at my own channel statistics, which you can’t see, but I can from my account, shows my overall video views to be ahead of my channel views.
But when I use TubeMogul, the best evaluator and recorder of online video traffic ever constructed, we get results that imply fewer video views than the 11 million subscribers. But here’s the problem – and I think it’s one that Sifry had – but did not see – in looking at YouTube Metrics using TubeMogul. TubeMogul only captures a date range going back six months; Senator Obama’s YouTube channel was established almost one year ago. So while we can’t see Senator Obama’s account to learn how many video views he has, I can safely say that the video views do outpace the channel views.
One major reason for this is something not properly recorded by YouTube – it’s called the embed code. It allows you to install someone’s video on your blog or website. The trouble us, YouTube only records links, not embeds, in video stats.
So an Obama video can be set and then played and replayed and there would be no record of the embed, but high video view stats, higher even than channel views.
On top of all that, Obama has more videos posted on YouTube than many candidates. Ron Paul, the overall view leader, has just 44 videos on his channel. Considering Paul’s popularity, he’s not got enough videos out there to take advantage of it. His view numbers should be far higher than they are, and they would be with 100 more videos.
Finally, it’s very important for candidates to take YouTube even more seriously than they do. It commands 60 percent of the video distribution market share, and the next closest competitor MySpace Videos only has 16 percent of the market, and then Google Video (which really doesn’t count here) has 8 percent. Plus, there are about 70 YouTube-type companies, which makes challenging YouTube’s market share almost impossible (here that NBC!?)
The lesson here is three-fold – first the relationship between YouTube subscribers is more complicated than it seems, second, TubeMogul can only capture part of the picture, not the whole, and third that people do see the candidate message on YouTube, and given the shift in YouTube’s demographics to an older audience and for no other reason than the mainstreaming of YouTube, an audience more likely to vote in the 2008 Presidential Race.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
What Black Men Think - A Great Video
This wonderful video was passed to me via a link by a YouTube contributor. You simply must watch it. I'm very happy that we as a group are finally coming together to take control of our image and debunk myths. Click here for more information on "What Black Men Think."
Patriots' Rodney Harrison to be suspended 4 games, reportedly for HGH
By JIMMY GOLEN, AP Sports Writer
September 1, 2007
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) -- Rodney Harrison, the frequently fined strong safety who solidified the New England Patriots' defense through back-to-back Super Bowl victories, will miss the first four games of the NFL season for violating the league's substance abuse policy.
"Tomorrow, the commissioner will announce I have been suspended," a somber Harrison said in a hastily announced conference call with reporters on Friday night after ESPN.com reported that he had admitted obtaining human growth hormone.
Harrison did not take questions or confirm the banned substance involved.
"I want to make it clear that not once did I ever use steroids," he said. "I did admit to the commissioner that I did, in fact, use a banned substance."
The league issued a statement late Friday night confirming that Harrison is suspended without pay for four games, effective immediately. He is eligible to return to the active roster on Tuesday, Oct. 2, following the previous night's game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the league said.
The NFL, meanwhile, confired that Wade Wilson, currently the Cowboys' quarterback coach, also admitted to NFL officials that he received illegal drugs.The NFL announced his suspension on Saturday.
According to the New York Daily News, Wilson admitted receiving HGH while working for the Chicago Bears from 2004-06. The league said that Harrison, Wilson and Richard Ryzde, a former doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers, were involved in an internet drug operation being investigated by the Albany (N.Y.) District Attorney's office.
Ryzde was fired by the Steelers. League spokesman Greg Aiello said Saturday that those three were the people affiliated with the NFL involved with the operation.
The Patriots, who lost in the AFC championship game to the Indianapolis Colts last season, are considered favorites to reach the Super Bowl after a series of strong offseason acquisitions, including Adalius Thomas and Randy Moss. Harrison apologized for becoming a distraction to his team as it prepares for the Sept. 9 opener against the New York Jets.
"I will be absent from the team for the next four weeks. That is a penalty that I have to serve. I intend to return and do my best to really help this team in any capacity I can help this team get back to winning the championship," Harrison said.
"This is something that Rodney Harrison did, and Rodney Harrison did alone. My teammates didn't do it. As they prepare for the Jets and games after that, I would ask that you give them the respect, not badger them with questions because they don't have any information."
The team had no comment, spokesman Stacey James said.
Harrison also apologized for serving as a poor role model for young football players.
"I sent the wrong message with my actions," he said. "I have not made excuses, nor will I make excuses. I made a mistake and I am very sorry for that. ... I do not condone my behavior. I am very, very embarrassed by it. I am disappointed in myself."
In a 13-year career, Harrison has earned a reputation as one of the NFL's most aggressive players, one feared by opponents for bonecrushing hits they complain are cheap or illegal. The league often agrees, fining him more than $200,000 in his career, including a one-game suspension in 2002 for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Oakland's Jerry Rice that cost him a game check of $111,764.
But as much as others hate to play against him, his teammates appreciate the way he practices, plays -- and talks -- at full speed.
On his second day of training camp after joining New England, Harrison took out elder statesman Troy Brown on a route across the middle. Brown threw the ball at him, but a month later a group of Patriots went to coach Bill Belichick and asked him to make Harrison one of the defensive captains.
"It wasn't about me making friends," Harrison said before the 2004 Super Bowl. "It was about me proving that I still had some gas in my tank and I could still play."
But it wasn't just gas in his tank.
As the hits took their toll on Harrison, he turned to banned substances to get back on the field.
"My purpose was never to gain a competitive edge," he said Friday night. "Rather, my use was solely for the purpose of accelerating the healing process of injuries I sustained while playing football.
The injuries came more frequently as Harrison, now 34, got older.
He was sidelined for eight games in 1999 with a shoulder injury. After injuring his ankle in 2002, the Chargers feared his career was in jeopardy and cut him.
Harrison quickly signed with New England and held together the defense for teams that won the 2004 and 2005 Super Bowls, sealing the second victory by intercepting Donovan McNabb with 9 seconds remaining.
But he played in just three games in 2005 before tearing his anterior cruciate ligament, medial collateral ligament and posterior cruciate ligaments. He broke his right shoulder blade last season and missed six games, then returned for two more before straining his right knee and missing the rest of the regular season and playoffs.
ESPN.com reported that Harrison's name came up in federal and New York state investigations into an Internet pharmaceutical distribution ring for steroids and other performance enhancers.
September 1, 2007
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) -- Rodney Harrison, the frequently fined strong safety who solidified the New England Patriots' defense through back-to-back Super Bowl victories, will miss the first four games of the NFL season for violating the league's substance abuse policy.
"Tomorrow, the commissioner will announce I have been suspended," a somber Harrison said in a hastily announced conference call with reporters on Friday night after ESPN.com reported that he had admitted obtaining human growth hormone.
Harrison did not take questions or confirm the banned substance involved.
"I want to make it clear that not once did I ever use steroids," he said. "I did admit to the commissioner that I did, in fact, use a banned substance."
The league issued a statement late Friday night confirming that Harrison is suspended without pay for four games, effective immediately. He is eligible to return to the active roster on Tuesday, Oct. 2, following the previous night's game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the league said.
The NFL, meanwhile, confired that Wade Wilson, currently the Cowboys' quarterback coach, also admitted to NFL officials that he received illegal drugs.The NFL announced his suspension on Saturday.
According to the New York Daily News, Wilson admitted receiving HGH while working for the Chicago Bears from 2004-06. The league said that Harrison, Wilson and Richard Ryzde, a former doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers, were involved in an internet drug operation being investigated by the Albany (N.Y.) District Attorney's office.
Ryzde was fired by the Steelers. League spokesman Greg Aiello said Saturday that those three were the people affiliated with the NFL involved with the operation.
The Patriots, who lost in the AFC championship game to the Indianapolis Colts last season, are considered favorites to reach the Super Bowl after a series of strong offseason acquisitions, including Adalius Thomas and Randy Moss. Harrison apologized for becoming a distraction to his team as it prepares for the Sept. 9 opener against the New York Jets.
"I will be absent from the team for the next four weeks. That is a penalty that I have to serve. I intend to return and do my best to really help this team in any capacity I can help this team get back to winning the championship," Harrison said.
"This is something that Rodney Harrison did, and Rodney Harrison did alone. My teammates didn't do it. As they prepare for the Jets and games after that, I would ask that you give them the respect, not badger them with questions because they don't have any information."
The team had no comment, spokesman Stacey James said.
Harrison also apologized for serving as a poor role model for young football players.
"I sent the wrong message with my actions," he said. "I have not made excuses, nor will I make excuses. I made a mistake and I am very sorry for that. ... I do not condone my behavior. I am very, very embarrassed by it. I am disappointed in myself."
In a 13-year career, Harrison has earned a reputation as one of the NFL's most aggressive players, one feared by opponents for bonecrushing hits they complain are cheap or illegal. The league often agrees, fining him more than $200,000 in his career, including a one-game suspension in 2002 for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Oakland's Jerry Rice that cost him a game check of $111,764.
But as much as others hate to play against him, his teammates appreciate the way he practices, plays -- and talks -- at full speed.
On his second day of training camp after joining New England, Harrison took out elder statesman Troy Brown on a route across the middle. Brown threw the ball at him, but a month later a group of Patriots went to coach Bill Belichick and asked him to make Harrison one of the defensive captains.
"It wasn't about me making friends," Harrison said before the 2004 Super Bowl. "It was about me proving that I still had some gas in my tank and I could still play."
But it wasn't just gas in his tank.
As the hits took their toll on Harrison, he turned to banned substances to get back on the field.
"My purpose was never to gain a competitive edge," he said Friday night. "Rather, my use was solely for the purpose of accelerating the healing process of injuries I sustained while playing football.
The injuries came more frequently as Harrison, now 34, got older.
He was sidelined for eight games in 1999 with a shoulder injury. After injuring his ankle in 2002, the Chargers feared his career was in jeopardy and cut him.
Harrison quickly signed with New England and held together the defense for teams that won the 2004 and 2005 Super Bowls, sealing the second victory by intercepting Donovan McNabb with 9 seconds remaining.
But he played in just three games in 2005 before tearing his anterior cruciate ligament, medial collateral ligament and posterior cruciate ligaments. He broke his right shoulder blade last season and missed six games, then returned for two more before straining his right knee and missing the rest of the regular season and playoffs.
ESPN.com reported that Harrison's name came up in federal and New York state investigations into an Internet pharmaceutical distribution ring for steroids and other performance enhancers.
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