Combat controllers from the 21st Special Tactics Squadron work with Chilean military personnel as they fast-rope from a CV-22 Osprey during the Emerald Warrior exercises near Hurlburt Field in Florida. While the fast-rope, repelling warfare exercise is fascinating, the begging question is where do the glowing rings come from?
The Princess Tower is 1,358 feet tall and currently the world’s tallest residential building and the second tallest building in Dubai. It is huge. So obviously when the building opened up their roof to base jump off of, 558 awesomely crazy daredevils joined up and pulled off all sort of crazy jumps. It’s like fear doesn’t exist.
Maybe Tim Cook lost his address? Of all the public figures sporting shiny new Apple Watches this week, the leader of the free world is not one of them. Our president is a Fitbit guy. Fitbit Surge, to be exact.
Those of us around the Great Lakes were hit with a bitter cold winter this year, but it has turned out to have a beautiful effect on Lake Michigan in particular. The lake’s water has turned oddly clear in the transitioning period between having an icy shell and being muddied up with algae blooms and sediment, and with that clarity … Continue reading
This weekend sports dominates the TV landscape, with the big fight on pay-per-view, the Kentucky Derby and the NFL Draft. Meanwhile, The Last Man on Earth is readying its season finale, along with PlayStation Network’s Powers. After a long developmen…
Coverage of the unrest in Baltimore has once again proved that the media still believes “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Following the funeral of Freddie Gray — the 25-year-old black man who died of a spinal chord injury suffered while in police custody this month — riots have broken out and sparked a larger conversation about police behavior and community relations.
But cable news has been flooded with graphic and disturbing images of burning cars, torched buildings and violent clashes between police and protesters. Newspaper front pages show only the destruction. Twitter is dominated by extreme photos and news anchors are playing the blame game rather than focusing on solutions.
Images of the peaceful protests or community members coming together are scarce. Like much of the coverage in Ferguson, the media has resorted to repeating only the negative while doing very little to move the story forward.
Fox News on Monday night played videos on loop of the damage and rage:
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Laura Ingraham tweeted this controversial comment:
No fathers, no male role models, no discipline, no jobs, no values = no sense of right & wrong. #Family #Character
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) April 28, 2015
Megyn Kelly reported on a possible shooting … in Brooklyn, New York:
During Fox News’ coverage of the protests Monday night, host Megyn Kelly reported on a Brooklyn shooting before having any valuable information or confirmation — or a real connection to the scene in Baltimore.
She told viewers that Fox News has been “keeping [its] eyes open for any related incidents. As we saw back during Ferguson, violence did break out in several other cities besides.” Mediaite called it the “worst moment” of Fox’s Baltimore coverage. Kelly risked misreporting a shooting simply to try to make a connection between Baltimore and Ferguson.
Watch below:
Others on Fox blamed the Obama administration for the situation in Baltimore:
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and contributor Keith Ablow blamed President Barack Obama and his administration for the riots and growing tension.
Ablow said the unrest was driven by disrespect of the nation’s laws, and a “tacit acceptance” of violent protests by people who may be frustrated.
“But the bottom line, Lou, is that if you want to change things, you work within the system, that is the way it has always been,” Albow said. “If you want to tear down the system, you might be taking your cues, by the way, from a president who has given the appearance that there is every justification for any level of anger at our country because we’re such despicable people.”
Images of chaos in Baltimore continuously displayed:
MSNBC spent much of Tuesday only highlighting the worst of the data — the exact numbers of fires and arrests — as well as playing video of the looting on repeat. Their coverage was burning building after manhandling after car fire after rock throwing — drowning the viewer.
Watch below:
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CNN sensationalized its coverage with dramatic interviews and once again choosing to continually play mostly negative images. Slate’s Justin Peters called the network’s reporting “shallow, sensationalistic, reductive and statist.”
Watch below:
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And CNN’s Twitter feeds gave more insight into the focus of their coverage:
Powerful photos from the #BaltimoreRiots http://t.co/vzzZVOjSqP pic.twitter.com/9kknLVq3TL
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 28, 2015
Similar images dominated newspapers’ front pages:
But there was more going on.
Alongside the arrests and chaos were people of all ages coming together to protect and restore their community.
A number of news outlets are highlighting these efforts, but we could all be doing more.
Images cable news won’t focus on: Baltimore residents restoring their city together http://t.co/sjLBisnqm5 pic.twitter.com/Z8sKvLxyya
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 28, 2015
Peaceful protesters gather in Baltimore ahead of curfew http://t.co/oPwWevZF2y pic.twitter.com/wwWUoBAN9v
— RT America (@RT_America) April 28, 2015
Neighbor helping neighbor. Police and protesters standing peacefully side by side. #Baltimore‘s untold story: http://t.co/JtZnVtpwfT
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 28, 2015
One video that shows the peaceful side of the #BaltimoreRiots: http://t.co/JUsMZuOA5z via @ACFromDaBranch pic.twitter.com/h2aWnuF9Gf
— Esquire Magazine (@esquire) April 28, 2015
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HONOLULU (AP) — A ranger did what was necessary when he used a stun gun on a man flying a drone over a lake of lava, the National Park Service said.
Crowds have been flocking to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to watch a steadily rising lava lake at the summit of Kilauea volcano.
There were several hundred people at an outlook area at about 10 p.m. on Sunday when a ranger asked Travis Sanders three times to bring the drone down, park spokeswoman Jessica Ferracane told The Associated Press Tuesday. The ranger told Sanders flying an unmanned aircraft in a national park is prohibited.
Sanders eventually brought down the drone. “The ranger identified himself and approached the individual, who refused to identify himself,” Ferracane said.
Because Sanders fled and was near the edge of the caldera rim — where there’s a 500-foot drop — the ranger deployed a Taser, Ferracane said.
Sanders, 35, of Pahoa, Hawaii, was arrested and cited with interfering with agency functions and operating an aircraft on undesignated land. He was taken to a Hawaii County police cellblock where he spent the night and was released in the morning on $500 bond, Ferracane said.
He has a July 22 court date.
Sanders brought his family to the park to record the lava with his drone and didn’t realize the man yelling at him to bring it down was a ranger, he told Hawaii News Now. “He sounded very angry, confrontational — like he wanted to fight — and I didn’t really want to stick around for it so I just told him, `I don’t have ID and I’m leaving,” he told the Honolulu news station.
Randy Horne was setting up his camera and tripod at the overlook when he heard a commotion. He heard someone yell stop and when he turned around, he saw the ranger pull out a stun gun. He saw the weapon’s “sparkly, glowing blue” wires attached to a man on the ground.
“I really didn’t see there was any severe threat going on,” Horne, of Honokaa, Hawaii, told the AP. “In my opinion, I thought it was a severe overreaction.”
Horne watched as Sanders was handcuffed, checked by paramedics and then put into a police car.
The park service is investigating, Ferracane said. “He was described as being very unpredictable, belligerent,” she said of Sanders. “The ranger felt he needed to be stopped for the safety of himself and others.”
—
Information from: KGMB-TV, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/
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Imagine being a nine-year-old child. Picture yourself studying for a test, walking into class, feeling confident you prepared the best you could. How would you feel if after finishing the test you only understood half the questions? Would your confidence be shaken?
Over on-third of students failed Utah’s state required standardized assessment last year. Florida purchased questions for its standardized test (commonly called the “FSA”) from this seemingly flawed Utah test and many expect Florida will see similar results. Earlier this month, Florida legislators, recognizing the potential issues with the test, signed a bill promising not to hold back third graders who fail the FSA this year. However, elementary students had already walked away from testing a week earlier feeling inadequate and confused. High stakes testing sets a child up to fail.
Even when a school employs hardworking teachers and has the support of parents and local business partners, some schools serve students that live in homes that fall below the poverty line. Research tells us that the number one indicator of how a child will perform on a standardized test is whether or not that child lives in poverty. Our flawed standardized testing model sets even the most talented teacher up to fail.
For a moment, walk in the shoes of a school administrator.
You want to guide your teachers and provide a solid curriculum for the students enrolled in your district. However, states are purchasing required tests from large for-profit corporations. You are caught between trying to provide quality education to your students and maintaining the financial backing from the state to do so. Unfortunately, these goals are often mutually exclusive. High stakes testing sets up even the most altruistic school administrator up to fail.
Now take the perspective of a parent.
You childproof your home. You vaccinate your child. You put your child in a car seat and you teach her the golden rule. After providing your child a foundation, you send her off to public school, dropping her off at the schoolhouse gates confident that the school system will be your key partner in her education. As the school’s partner, you plan to stay involved every step of the way.
But you soon find out that corporations, not teachers, created the tests your child will take.
You learn that the innovation and creativity you worked so diligently to harness during her first few years of life could be jeopardized by the “high-stakes” testing culture saturating her public school classroom.
Perhaps worst of all, your child takes her first standardized test and comes home reporting that she was required to sign a piece of paper promising not to talk to you about the test or the testing procedure itself.
High stakes testing sets parents up for failure, too.
This is the current climate of public education in our country. Students, teachers, and administrators know the system isn’t working. It’s not too late to fix it. Children desperately want to learn and succeed. Talented teachers are ready to provide comprehensive, engaging, and exciting lessons to their students. School administrators are eager to motivate and inspire their districts to use innovative and creative approaches in the classroom. Parents want to partner with their local public schools.
Teachers and administrators can’t fix the system alone. But parents and community members can help. “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.” Louis L’Amour
Get involved. Write to your state and national legislatures. Let’s change course and set students, teachers, administrators, and parents up for success.
This views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
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At the end of a short interview with Fox News reporter Leland Vittert on the streets of West Baltimore Monday night, Nick Mosby, a member of the Baltimore City Council, decided he’d had enough.
“At this point, this is not productive,” Mosby said, walking away from Vittert. “All you want to do is talk about…” He trailed off, and gestured at a nearby liquor store that had been looted.
(This part of the exchange was cut from the video Fox News posted online, but it was captured by documentary filmmaker Ricky Kelly, who posted it to Facebook. As of this writing, the two versions of the video, edited and unedited, have together been viewed more than 5 million times.)
Violence broke out in Baltimore on Monday after the funeral for Freddie Gray, 25, a black man whose spine was severed while in police custody earlier this month and who died on April 19. Mosby, who represents a part of Baltimore where much of the rioting took place Monday night, was in his district “trying to bring calm,” he said, when Vittert approached him.
“When you watch this go on, does it break your heart to see this happen?” Vittert asked, pointing to protesters off-screen.
“Definitely,” Mosby replied, before shifting the conversation toward the larger social forces at work. “What it is, is young folks in this community with decades’ [worth] of anger and frustration for a system that has failed them.”
“This is bigger than Freddie Gray,” he continued. “This is about the social economics of poor urban America. These young guys are frustrated, they’re upset and unfortunately they’re displaying it in a very destructive manner. When folks are undereducated, unfortunately they don’t have the same intellectual voice to express it the way other people do, and that’s what we see through the violence today.”
Vittert then tried to shift the conversation back to the evening’s outbreak of crime.
“We just watched this liquor store being looted, and there’s a bunch of folks running in and out,” Vittert said, observing that there were police officers down the block allowing the looting to occur. “Is that right?”
“Is it right for people to loot?” Mosby responded. “No. I think you just missed everything I tried to articulate to you.”
“Everything that’s happening out here is wrong,” he continued. “The violence is wrong. That’s never acceptable… There’s a symptom of something that’s going on here, and what I’m trying to articulate to you is that when you look at communities like this in urban America, it’s lack of education. Lack of commercial development. Lack of opportunities. It’s the socioeconomics of it. It has nothing to do with West Baltimore or this particular corner in Baltimore. This could erupt anywhere in socially-economically deprived America.”
“We’ve certainly seen this in other cities,” Vittert said. “Ferguson comes to mind — ”
“We also see it at rallies like at Kentucky, when Kentucky lost that basketball game,” Mosby interrupted, referring to the University of Kentucky’s loss in the March Madness tournament earlier this month. “We see crowds that loot and flip over cars and stuff.”
“But unfortunately, [despite] all the 95 percent of the positive rallying that’s been happening here in Baltimore, the national media is going to focus on this, and that’s the problem,” Mosby went on.
The conversation continued, and when Vittert again asked why the police had backed away from the looters, Mosby interrupted again.
“We asked them to back off,” said Mosby. “The ministers’ community came together. We talked to the police. We told them we would kind of be able to talk to the young guys out here and we asked them to back up, and they did it. It worked out.”
“But the liquor store’s still being looted,” Vittert said.
“That’s passed,” Mosby said, and then ended the interview.
“Unfortunately the interviewer was more focused on some looting that had occurred across the street, as opposed to really talking about the issues,” Mosby told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.
“You can’t focus on the movement without focusing on systemic issues that affect urban enclaves across America,” he added. “It’s something you really need to address. Great American cities like Baltimore are only as good as their weaker communities.”
The vast majority of protesters in Baltimore, Mosby said, are peaceful, and they’re doing their best to put their city back together. The media should focus on that, he said.
“The immediate need is de-escalating the situation and bringing calm to our communities, going after the violators,” Mosby said. “But then we need to really fight for justice. People want answers about Freddie Gray. They’re not going to listen to anything else until we get answers.”
“We’re gonna have to heal,” he added.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
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Working with recruiters is an integral part of most people’s job search strategy, yet there seems to be a consistently negative perception about recruiters: aggressive, untrustworthy, and only interested in placement fees. So can they be trusted to negotiate the best salary package on your behalf?
As an ex-recruiter, I can assure you this perception is generally untrue. The basic fact is that recruiters charge the hiring company a fee based on an agreed percentage of the successful candidates’ annual salary. They are then personally paid commission or bonus based on this fee.
So by default, they are driven by personal financial gain, if they 1) fill the job, and 2) get the highest possible salary (for maximum commission).
However, there are other factors a candidate should be aware of, as these will have an effect on the outcome of the recruiter attaining “best salary package”:
Candidates do not pay recruiters or recruitment agencies for their service, they are hired/paid by the hiring company, therefore the recruiters’ aim is to source and place the “best” candidate for the job. As you don’t pay the recruiter you have limited influence on being considered “best” for the job, so the better the recruiter knows you (skills, experience and professional reputation), the more likely they are to recommend you. Top tip: meet your recruiter.
Knowing the market and your competition as a candidate is key when negotiating your salary. You may be the only candidate (which gives you more negotiating power) or you might be one of many. Your recruiter is an expert in your market, so they will be advising the hiring company about what they need to pay to get the best candidate for the job, according to market dynamics at the time of hiring. Top tip: know the market.
You specify your salary expectation so being clear on your salary “walk away point” is critical. The clearer you are on what you want and why, and being confident in your value, is important when working with recruiters. Top tip: know your value.
The hiring company will have a budget or salary range to work within, which may or may not be negotiable, depending on external market dynamics (such as volume of suitable candidates available), and internal salary restrictions (aligning newcomers with current employee salaries). So at times, there is limited flexibility in what a company can offer if your salary expectation is outside of the salary range, and there is little recruiters can do about this. Only you can decide if it is the right opportunity for you with all factors considered. Top tip: know the salary range and level of the role prior to applying.
The hiring company may be using multiple recruitment agencies, so even your recruiter may be in the dark about other candidates in consideration, therefore their advice is limited to what they know. Top tip: know the recruitment process.
You may be first choice, but this does not mean the ONLY choice, for the recruiter or hiring company. Top tip: don’t be arrogant.
Your professional reputation. Being well networked, well respected and a high performer will stand you in good stead when upwardly negotiating your salary. Top tip: develop a positive professional reputation.
So in summary, yes, you can trust the recruiter to get you the best possible salary, however you play a huge part in this process.
My advice: Don’t delay responding to requests for information, interview quickly and be flexible in your availability to interview, be clear on your salary requirements and notice period, don’t withhold information (for example you have a one month holiday two months after the start date), and tell the recruiter if you have other roles in the pipeline.
If you are slow to respond or inflexible when interviewing then a recruiter will question your interest in the role. If you draw out a recruitment process because you have multiple roles on or are waiting to play one offer against the other, then this time delay is allowing other potential candidates to get involved, and you could end up with nothing.
It is far easier to work with candidates who are honest and straightforward and you are more likely to get the salary you want under these circumstances.
If you’d like to discuss holistic coaching to help you change careers, get unstuck in your job or to find balance as a working mother, please drop me an email to Rebecca (at) theedithub (dot) com and as soon as a coaching space becomes available you will be notified.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.