If you’re looking for two hours of deleted scenes and alternate footage from the original Star Wars Trilogy and hoping that they’d be masterfully edited together documentary-style, well, here you go. Garrett Gilchrist put together all this Star Wars footage you probably never seen before in Star Wars: Deleted Magic.
China’s strained relationship with the concept of intellectual property is one of the reasons that you can buy a local copy of a Range Rover Evoque for a third of the price. That’s one of the reasons why western businesses are wary about selling thei…
Elecom is going to release new headphone series LBT-OH05 in early December.
The LBT-OH05 series is compatible with Bluetooth Class 1, which stably communicates with Bluetooth compliant devices up to 100-meters distant. It is able to pair up to a maximum of 8 devices at the same time.
There are control buttons for volume adjustment, playback, stop, skip, etc. on the headphones.
JVC Kenwood‘s new micro system NX-PB30 is 31cm wide and only 8.5cm long. It is scheduled to be released in early December.
NX-PB30 is compatible with CD, FM/AM radio, and MP3/WMA music files in USB memory. It also supports Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR (Profile A2DP/AVRCP, Codec SBC) so that you can play music in Bluetooth compliant devices wirelessly.
We have seen exoskeletons like the Honda Walker in the past that will help patients who have difficulty moving about to be able to get around without human help, and this time around, another effort from a research team headed by Assistant Professor Yu Haoyong at the National University of Singapore have come up with a robotic walker that intends to help physiotherapists out.
This robotic walker is a newly designed device, where it intends to improve the quality as well as the productivity of therapy sessions. In fact, it is said that the most important aspect of this particular machine would be its capability to allow the patient to practice walking on the ground, as opposed to doing so on a treadmill.
The kind of technology used would comprise of half a dozen different modules: namely an active body weight support unit; an omni-directional mobile platform; a pelvic and trunk motion support unit; a functional electrical stimulator; a variety of body sensors, and an easy-to-understand user interface. Body sensors will provide the relevant feedback on the patient’s gait, in order for the robot to make the necessary adjustments so that the entire gait of the patient would be a whole lot more normal. There is an electrical stimulation component that will deliver electrical current to spur leg muscles to move, and clinical studies are being planned at the National University Hospital in Singapore before the next step – commercialization, kicks in. [Press Release]
Robotic Walker Helps Patients Regain Natural Gait , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
In April 2010, a first-year female student at the University of Virginia sat in Dean Mark Hadley’s office and told him how she had been sexually assaulted a month earlier. It was the student’s first time disclosing her assault to a university official.
Hadley, an association dean, sat quietly and listened. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled to The Huffington Post that Hadley’s first question to her was, “How are you doing in your classes?”
The student says Hadley then went on to warn that because she’d missed many classes since her assault, she might land on academic probation. The student says she was not offered any information about reporting, counseling or support options available to her as a victim. (Hadley did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
That night, the student says, she attempted suicide.
The student recovered, physically and emotionally, and later got involved in advocacy work supporting survivors in the community. In 2012, she had a chance to relay her concerns about how she was not presented with options as a rape victim to Allen Groves, UVA’s dean of students.
“The most he offered me was a box of tissues,” said the student, now a graduate working full-time at a research organization, of Groves’ response. “What’s appalling to me and other survivors is the administration clearly knew what was happening.”
The University of Virginia is currently under intense scrutiny due to a recent article in Rolling Stone that contains allegations from multiple women of being gang-raped at the Charlottesville campus. Several protests have taken place over the past week. UVA’s Board of Visitors, the governing body of the institution, held an emergency meeting Tuesday afternoon to discuss the situation.
The school was already the subject of a federal complaint, filed in 2011, that in turn was folded into a larger and more serious compliance review by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The agency only opens proactive compliance reviews when it suspects there may be serious failures at the school, and indeed, just 12 of the agency’s 88 active Title IX investigations are of the kind UVA is facing.
Now, outsiders are asking why a school so heavily criticized for its alleged mishandling of rapes is often recruited to help come up with sexual assault policies for other colleges and universities.
Edward Miller, a member of the Board of Visitors, appeared to be aware of that concern. He said at the end of the special meeting Tuesday that “we were arrogant, we assumed we knew better.”
Over the weekend, 46 researchers sent a letter to the presidents of the member schools in the Association of American Universities, an elite higher education group, to express their concerns about a campus sexual violence climate survey the organization is developing. AAU is currently soliciting its members to pay up to $85,000 to distribute the survey. The researchers are concerned that of the 18 people chosen to design the survey, four hail from UVA, more than any other institution.
Allen Groves, in particular, has been a hot commodity. He was called in to review the sexual assault policies of the University of Oregon in 2013. Additionally, two months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe appointed Groves to a statewide task force to examine sexual assault policies among colleges in the Commonwealth.
Groves was chairman of the North-American Interfraternity Conference from 2012 to 2014. During that time, NIC worked with the Fraternity & Sorority Political Action Committee, or FratPAC, on proposed federal legislation dealing with hazing and sexual assault.
And in August of this year, Groves was named head of a national committee tasked with stopping fraternity members from committing rape.
Just a few months later, the Rolling Stone article appeared, alleging that multiple women had been gang-raped at the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi. The article depicted Groves as downplaying a federal investigation into the issues when he was questioned by the Board of Visitors, referring to the investigation as “a standard compliance review.” (There is video of Groves making these remarks.) Groves later said he was “shocked” by the article’s characterization, and said he was attempting to be honest in the comments referenced.
“I went back and looked at the original 2011 letter from OCR, which says it was a ‘proactive’ review,” Groves told HuffPost on Tuesday. “I had mistakenly remembered it as ‘standard.’ I don’t recall the letter saying that the review was highly unusual, and I was honestly saying what I knew at the time I spoke. I am not an expert in OCR investigations and I am not the University’s point person on this review.”
To be sure, Groves has many admirers. He is considered a champion for LGBT causes at the school. As Equality Virginia detailed in a profile earlier this year, Groves, who is gay, has had to deal with homophobic attitudes during his career in academia and while working with fraternities. When Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said in 2010 that the state university system offered no job protection based on sexual orientation, Groves responded, “Nothing anyone says will make UVA reject its core value of nondiscrimination.”
But UVA’s record on sexual violence remains the subject of much critique. In February, for example, student sexual assault survivors privately bristled when UVA hosted a national conference on rape, advertising that the event would “foster intellectual debate with the ability to reach interested audiences” while mostly excluding actual victims from speaking slots.
It’s an irony not lost on activists that UVA — like Harvard, like Columbia, like Brown — is among the American universities generally regarded as leaders in research and academics, yet has been accused of some of the most grievous mishandling of sexual assault cases in recent years.
Victims’ rights attorney Laura Dunn, founder of the nonprofit organization SurvJustice, emphasized to HuffPost that not all administrators on these campuses are bad.
“But,” she said, “there is very much a trend of administrators who are actively violating federal law on their campuses being held up as experts.”
AAU, for its part, defended the makeup of its survey design team, which includes UVA officials, in a letter last week to concerned school presidents.
“We are very confident in our survey team’s abilities, knowledge, and experience,” AAU President Hunter Rawlings wrote. “Nearly all of the AAU team members are professionals with deep and direct experience, whether academic or practical, in survey research, sexual assault, gender issues, student affairs, or other related matters.”
And now, after years of criticism, some feel that UVA may finally improve on sexual assault.
Emily Renda, a UVA graduate and rape survivor, told HuffPost she doesn’t see the community letting the issue die by semester’s end.
“I don’t think people are going to let this go until they feel like something has changed,” said Renda. “And they shouldn’t. To be honest, they shouldn’t.”
Need help? In the U.S., visit the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline operated by RAINN. For more resources, visit the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
As we celebrate the International Day for the elimination of Violence against Women, it should not be forgotten that violence can happen in different forms: psychological violence — whereas it is in the family or in the workplace — can be as dangerous as the physical one, in extreme cases leading to suicide or death, though in this case there will be hardly someone persecuted for the crime.
Workplace harassment is a particularly serious and growing phenomenon. Yet, in most countries, there is little awareness and even less so legal protection against it. There is not even a single definition of what is meant by workplace violence or harassment. Violence is a generic term that covers all kind of abuse: behavior that humiliates degrades or damages a person’s well-being, value or dignity. A variety of behaviors fit into the definition of harassment or bullying; cultural differences also contribute to different understandings as to what constitutes violence.
Workplace harassment is different from sexual harassment. Workplace harassment — also known as bullying on the workplace or as moral harassment in French-speaking countries — is sneaky, dangerous, difficult to detect and to prove. It often takes time for the victims to understand what is happening and by the time they finally do, it is often already too late. More likely, the victims will blame themselves for not being good enough. Harassment progressively erodes the victims’ sense of self-confidence and slowly isolates them from co-workers, friends and even family. Victims are often not even believed.
Exposure to harassment results in different kinds of symptoms of ill-health and stress: irritability; chronic fatigue syndrome, gastritis, anxiety, sleeping problems, vision and respiratory problems, cardiovascular problems such as tachycardia, hypertension, strokes or even heart attacks; immune-deficiency diseases, depression, eventually leading to suicide or death.
Workplace harassment can happen in any kind of workplace. In the European Union, 18 percent of the workers are exposed to work-related violence or non-sexual related harassment; the sectors most affected being health, education and public administration . In the US, 27 percent of the workers are reported to have been subject to workplace harassment .
While harassment on the workplace affects both sexes, women appear to be the most affected; men are instead the most common perpetrators. In the US, the vast majority of bullies are men (69 percent of the total) targeting more women (57 percent) than other men (43 percent). Even women rather bully fellow women (68 percent) then men . In Hungary, at least 50 percent of women are estimated to have suffered from some form of bullying, mobbing, harassment or violence at work. Women in their 40s to 50s, holding positions of responsibility, are the worst affected by harassment on the workplace. Harassment on the workplace thus seems to be the ultimate glass-ceiling.
Yet, nor in the EU or the US, are there specific standards for workplace violence, nor specific legislation.
At the European level, the legal framework relating to workplace bullying derives from a set of different legal provisions including: Article 19 of the EU Charter on Social Fundamental Rights of Workers (“Any employee must benefit, in his working environment, from satisfactory conditions in order to protect his health and safety”); Article 31 of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights (“Any worker has the right to benefit from working conditions respective of his health, security and dignity”); the EU Health and Safety Framework Directive (89/391/EEC) (employers must “ensure the safety and health of workers in every aspect related to work”); Directives 2000/43 and 2000/78 on Equality of Treatment which treat harassment as a form of discrimination when it has the “purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person and of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” and is relates to the victim’s age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief. In April 2007, EU employers and trade union representatives also signed a Framework agreement on harassment and violence at work aiming to combat the problem.
Similarly, in the US, under the General Duty Clause , Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, employers are required to provide their employees with a place of employment that “is free from recognizable hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious harm to employees.” The Civil Act of 1964 and subsequent specifications protects from discrimination on the ground of ace, colour, religion, sex or national origin, while the Violence against Women Act of 1994, initiated by Vice President Joe Biden is focused on domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. In Zimmerman v. Direct Federal Credit Union, an employee could collect $730,000 from her company for workplace “bullying” and retaliation — even though her earlier claim for gender-bias was ultimately rejected by a jury.
Just few states have specific legislation protecting from harassment in the workplace. In 1993, Sweden was the first EU country to enact legislation against moral harassment with its Ordinance on Victimization at Work. Through the 2002 Social Modernization Law, France added both civil and criminal provisions for what in French is generally know as moral harassment (harcèlement moral). Quebec and Belgium also have specific legislation against moral harassment. In some countries, jurisprudence is ahead of legislation. For instance, in Italy the offender can be brought to Court in case the victim has suffered a (certified) physical damage from being exposed to mobbing — a mostly European word indicating a concerted effort by a group harassing the victim with the goal of leading her/him to resignation.
Harassment on the workplace comes at a high price for both society and economics. Health costs, marriages breakups, reduced school performance of the children are among the most frequent social costs. Among the negative business consequences of workplace bullying are: high turnover — not only the victims but also those who witness it; lost productivity — as bullied employees often lose their motivation to perform and tend to take more sick days due to stress-related illnesses; damage to the company’s reputation; potential legal costs . In 2012, in the US companies paid $365 million to settle harassment and discrimination cases, respectively for: retaliation ($177 million), sex/gender ($139 million), disability ($103 million), race ($101 million) and age ($92 million) . OSHA-EU estimated that in the UK alone a total of 18 million days and GPB 380 million are lost annually due to bullying on the workplace.
Both in the US and the EU, it is therefore well time for a comprehensive legislation against harassment in the workplace. Wellbeing in the workplace should be a fundamental right. Should this be not motivating enough, paraphrasing President Clinton one could say: “it is [for] the economy, stupid!”
Most of my friends on Facebook are white, and that’s a problem. Before I came out, some friends and family might not have understood the bigotry and prejudice I faced, but now they post messages of love and support, and many of them changed their profile photographs to the little red equal sign in support of marriage equality. Gay people are no longer “them” but “us.” But I can’t come out as black, Latino, Asian or belonging to any other marginalized demographic in America, and therefore my Facebook feed is mostly silent when it comes to racial equality. There is still “them,” and there is still “us.”
I am a white, Christian, middle-class male in America, but I know what it is like to be part of a minority group. I know what it is like to fear discrimination when I interview for a job and worry about being asked about my marital status or personal life. I know what it is like to wonder if the neighbors will hate me before they get to know me. I know what it is like to walk down an unfamiliar city street with my husband and worry about being beaten. I know what it is like to be called the “F” word behind my back.
Most of my straight white friends have no idea.
When you don’t experience discrimination, it’s easy to forget that it exists. It’s easier to say that someone who can’t earn a decent wage or pull themselves out of poverty is lazy. It’s easier to say that the daily violence that saturates a community is brought about by their own hands. It’s easier to say that a white cop who kills a black boy did so in self-defense. It’s easier to say it’s them, not us.
When my friends make a remark about the president and his race, or when they stereotype a population, do they know I worry that they are making similar generalizations about me? Here is something I have learned while fighting for equality: It is not something that can be portioned out to one population and withheld from another. The definition of equality is that all populations and the individuals within them (not just a few) are equal. That does not exist in America today. If you are not equal, then neither am I.
So what do I do about my Facebook feed? Do I recruit more diverse friends? Do I shout at the top of my lungs? Do I alienate everyone?
Sadly, I don’t know what the answer is, but I know what it isn’t: silence. I pretended for a long time to be straight, as did so many others, because it was easier. It was “them,” not “us.” But now that I understand that I can’t be equal until everyone else is, it’s time that I came out again and again and again.
I am white. I am male. I am gay. I am black. I am female. I am transgender. I am bisexual. I am Asian. I am Latino. I am Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, Christian and Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am Mike Brown. I am all of these things and more until all of these things are us, not them.
William Dameron’s personal blog is The Authentic Life.
Amid long-running concerns that it’s too easy to become a teacher, the White House on Tuesday evening announced new draft regulations that could overhaul the way teacher preparation programs are held accountable for their graduates’ performance.
Earlier this month, a report from a Washington think tank found that education majors tend to rack up more A’s than other majors, confirming “the damaging public perception that, too often, getting an education degree is among the easier college career paths.” The proposed regulations seek to change that.
The Obama administration had announced its intention to develop new standards of accountability for teacher preparation programs in April. After months of consulting with stakeholders, the Department of Education has released the new draft regulations for public comment. The proposed rules ask states to measure teacher preparation programs using four main criteria: new teachers’ job placement and retention rates, feedback from new teachers’ employers, student learning outcomes, and specialized accreditation.
The White House is leaving it up to the individual states to design specific metrics. But under the proposed regulations, whether states deem teacher preparation programs effective will determine which programs have access to around $100 million in federal grants.
“It has long been clear that as a nation, we could do a far better job of preparing teachers for the classroom. It’s not just something that studies show — I hear it in my conversations with teachers, principals and parents,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a press release Tuesday. “New teachers want to do a great job for their kids, but often, they struggle at the beginning of their careers and have to figure out too much for themselves. Teachers deserve better, and our students do too.”
In 2012, the Obama administration took its first stab at overhauling accountability systems for teacher preparation. However, the team developing the new regulations could not find common ground, and the effort failed.
Meanwhile, teacher preparation has come under increased fire in the last few years from groups like the National Council on Teacher Quality, the think tank that reported such programs give out disproportionate numbers of A’s. Not everybody was impressed with that report. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education said that it “suffers from methodological flaws, inadequate sample sizes and scant evidence.”
Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, told HuffPost that she “[reserves] judgment about whether or not [the proposed regulations] will be ultimately effective, but there is at minimum a huge advantage in having the federal voices play a role here. … I think that this definitely speaks to the tremendous frustration that all of us in education feel about the quality of teacher preparation in the United States.”
While Deborah Koolbeck, director of government relations at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, had not yet read all the proposed regulations, she suggested to HuffPost that they were an example of federal overreach.
“There’s so much innovation that has been happening in teacher preparation over the years without these federal regulations. One of our overall concerns is, will these regulations stifle innovation?” said Koolbeck.
Teachers unions expressed doubt about whether the rules would evaluate teacher preparation programs effectively — in particular, by judging the teachers on how students perform on standardized tests.
“With these proposed regulations, the administration is moving to rate teacher preparation programs based partly on the test scores of the K-12 students of the graduates of the programs in question,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a statement. “By replicating the K-12 test-and-punish model … the administration is simply checking a box instead of thoughtfully using regulations to help craft a sustainable solution that raises the bar for the teaching profession.”
In a call with reporters, Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell said that the idea is to measure teacher effectiveness in part by looking at student learning outcomes, but that performance on standardized tests was not the only relevant outcome.
“We believe strongly [that assessing student learning outcomes] needs to be based on multiple measures,” said Mitchell. “We’re asking states to use either their state metrics or local teacher evaluation metrics. This is one of the places it should be clear — we are not basing the evaluations of teacher education programs on simply student standardized test scores.”
The fires from a night of chaos were still smoldering in Ferguson, Missouri, on Tuesday as residents, protesters and the public looked forward to what happens next.
The grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown left the 18-year-old’s family “profoundly disappointed.” But Brown’s family, Ferguson residents, police and other officials also looked forward — to a likely long process of continued protests and reverberating legal actions.
In Ferguson, residents on Tuesday focused on cleaning up from a night that involved both peaceful protests as well as smashed windows, stolen goods and burned buildings.
The protests continued Tuesday night. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) ordered additional National Guard troops into the city. County Police Chief Jon Belmar — the man directly responsible for policing in the St. Louis suburb — pronounced himself “very disappointed” with what happened Monday night. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III asked that “the governor make available and deploy all necessary resources to prevent the further destruction of property and the preservation of life in the city of Ferguson.”
A spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Public Safety said the National Guard would not provide information beyond what the governor outlined in a Nov. 17 executive order. Nixon said at the time that the guard would “support law enforcement during any period of unrest that might occur following the grand jury’s decision.”
In the longer run, as a parade of officials speaking on Monday before the grand jury announcement acknowledged, the entire St. Louis area will likely be the focus of continuing discussions about race and policing.
“St. Louis finds itself with an opportunity to show the nation the ways in which a community can be more fair and more just for everyone,” St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said at a press conference Monday. “We must seize this opportunity together.”
Nixon tried to begin that push on Nov. 19 by appointing a 16-member Ferguson Committee, charged with addressing the social and economic conditions that give rise to the protests. The commission has no powers of its own, but can make recommendations, including legislative changes. Its members span a wide range, from white establishment figures and law enforcement officials, to young, black protesters.
But not everyone is in a conciliatory mood. The grand jury’s decision further fuels the impression among many black residents of the area that authorities are taking neither their anger over the Brown case nor their despair over larger patterns of injustice in the St. Louis area seriously.
“We will continue to disrupt life, because without disruption we fear for our lives,” said Ferguson protest leaders in an open letter released minutes after the grand jury decision. “We march on with purpose. The work continues. This is not a moment but a movement. The movement lives.”
Those leaders have pledged to continue working mostly outside the system to achieve change in the St. Louis area, by building the power of grassroots groups like the Organization for Black Struggle. Some also are involved in lawsuits against the county and other police departments over the heavily militarized and aggressive response to the protests in August, charging false arrest among other official injustices.
Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich (R) announced in October that he will audit the municipal courts of 10 St. Louis-area municipalities. The segregated, fragmented metropolitan area’s courts have been criticized in the wake of Brown’s shooting for racial disparities.
WIlson’s status with the Ferguson Police Department is still under internal consideration, Mayor James Knowles III said Tuesday. Even if Wilson leaves the police force, he still may face potential legal action from both federal authorities and Brown’s family.
The U.S. Department of Justice is simultaneously investigating Wilson for potential civil rights violations and Ferguson’s police department for potential systemic issues. Experts have said charges against Wilson are unlikely. And while Ferguson could be forced to change its policing practices, the process would take time. Another possibility is that the Ferguson Police Department could be dissolved and its functions taken over by the larger county force.
Legal experts said they believe it is likely that Brown’s family will file a wrongful death lawsuit against Wilson and the City of Ferguson. But any money damages they may win would fall far short of criminal charges.
Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.
More On Ferguson From HuffPost:
Photographic Evidence Reveals | ‘First Year Law Student Could Have Done Better Job’ | 61 Arrested | Ferguson Smolders After Night Of Fires | Protest Locations | Americans Deeply Divided | Police Chief: ‘Worse Than The Worst Night We Had In August’ | What You Can Do | Darren Wilson Interview | Darren Wilson Could Still Face Consequences | Timeline | Students Protest | Photos Of Darren Wilson’s Injuries Released | Shooting Witness Admitted Racism In Journal | Peaceful Responses Show The U.S. At Its Best | Reactions To Ferguson Decision | Prosecutor Gives Bizarre Press Conference | Notable Black Figures React | Jury Witness: ‘By The Time I Saw His Hands In The Air, He Got Shot’ | Thousands Protest Nationwide |
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