COOK'D


As much as it pains me to admit it, the campus rag is reporting it first: the Faculty Senate has (kind of) voted no-confidence in Bud Peterson in the wake of SurveyGate. Regardless of the questions on quorum and other procedural matters, the senate has little power over what goes on above them; it's like the Student Senate voting no-confidence in the Governor of Wyoming. They sent the message they wanted to - we'll see more at this "general meeting" next week. Faculty members felt betrayed by Peterson for his willingness to enforce Jackson's whacked interpretations of Supreme Court rulings and labor laws, all of which were sparked by someone having the nerve to take a survey about Jackson's tyrannical tactics in running RPI (RPI being that vestigial part of the Board of Trustees used as a marketing gimmick to draw in potential donors). Seeing as the NC vote was predicted here weeks ago, it'd be a shame not to try and go two for two: you don't call a general meeting of the faculty to talk about the Provost. *gestures towards Troy Building*

i2 have seen the darkness

The future is not bright for those of us who don't enjoy shelling out $20 for a CD with a single song.

Tulane and Northeastern have both blocked all external traffic from i2hub; other schools may soon follow. The amount of shared material has dropped from nearly 110 TB to under 60 since the subpoenas were issued, with the majority of the dropoff being observed at schools with students who were served; Neural RPI seems to have disappeared completely (but if you have details on them, please email me). The RPI student in me fears that another round of legal action will drop i2hub usage below a critical level, whereby students will no longer view it as a viable source and continue sharing. In the meantime, it may recover, as some schools refuse to comply with the RIAA and the cases get tied up in the appeals courts (though I'm not holding my breath on the Grokster case already before the Supreme Court). However, with the school year winding down, I don't expect sharing to break 70 TB until September when the new freshmen, less burdened by caution, start picking up the slack.

At this time it may be a good idea to start reminding people that there's more to RPI than the internet, like sunlight--and both of the girls.

Excuse the language - it's the lack of thought that counts

At a senate meeting earlier this week, student senators proposed sending the following letter to the RIAA in response to the subpeonas issued for RPI students.

Dear RIAA,

Go fuck yourselves. Go fuck yourselves hard.

Love,

RPI

All mention of the letter was subsequently struck from the record, obviously out of fear of the RIAA finding out that RPI students were unhappy with them.

"Additional Scholarship Funds"

From an email from the Office of Financial Aid:

We would also like to follow-up on Dr. Jackson's announcement last month regarding the additional scholarship funds for upperclass students. Since this particular pool of funds is limited, it will be reserved for students who have experienced a significant change in their financial circumstances that constitutes an extreme financial hardship. If you believe that your family's financial situation has endured extreme financial hardship within the last year, you may submit your appeal in writing directly to the financial aid office.

For those of you just joining this tragedy, this statement comes after Dr. Jackson appeased the students who were outraged over the tuition hike with the promise of "additional scholarship funds" to offset the increase. Once again, Dr. Jackson has used the students' apathy against him. Emails like this shouldn't angry blog entries; they should spark angry mobs outside the Troy Building.

As for anyone who bothers to apply for this 'assistance,' I predict the most common hardship will be, "the President of my school has turned disregard for student welfare into an artform and raised tuition more than she had to."

FYI, from now on, anyone can comment - an account is not required.

MIT to RPI: Keep her!

Last year, there was widespread speculation that Dr. Jackson had applied to be the next President of her alma matre MIT. While there were early indications that she'd be getting the position, MIT announced in August 2004 the selection of Susan Hockfield, then-Provost of Yale University. While announcement was about Hockfield, many saw it as a scathing refutal of Jackson's application and the policies that have defined her regime at RPI, word of which has certainly made its way back to Cambridge. Of particular interest:

In making the announcement, Corporation Chairman Dana G. Mead said, “As a strong advocate of the vital role that science, technology, and the research university play in the world, and with an exceptional record of achievement in serving faculty and student interests, Dr. Hockfield is clearly the best person to lead MIT in the years ahead. She brings to MIT an outstanding record as teacher, scientist and inspirational leader with a reputation for bringing out the best in all the people with whom she works.”

[emphasis mine]

For those of you who prefer to skim this blog, that paragraph reads "she's not Dr. Jackson."

You heard it here first...

You're probably asking yourself, "why does Bernstein have a picture of the Poly hanging from a toilet paper dispenser in his blog?" The answer lies buried in this week's Polytechnic, which shall now be referred to as, "the campus rag." [Legal disclaimer: the term "campus rag" is a trademark of another student, and, as you're all by now aware, I really have no reservations about stealing uncopyrighted pictures like this one.]

On the matter of the pending armageddon between Shirley Ann Jackson and the faculty, originally reported by RPI Watch last week, the campus rag managed to dumb it down to sound like a case of office politics, with the climax being Bud Peterson showing up at the Ricketts building demanding the return of his stapler.

More to come when I have the stomach to properly examine where the children putting out the rag went wrong.

RIAA Update

This is the list of the songs that RPI students were caught uploading--and their IP addresses (hat tip: trendyblog.com). A very reliable source has given me what appear to be positive identities of two of the students, both of whom used static IPs. I am withholding them for now, pending verificiation that they've been notified.

Where the RIAA, the campuses and/or i2hub went wrong

Having just sent my obligatory "have I been subpoenaed" email to the Dean of the Students Office, I believe we should all take a moment and reflect on this RIAA nonsense. Of course, you can spew the "copyright infringment" business, which is 100% accurate, but so long as music companies continue their current marketing strategies of exorbitant costs it's foolish to expect file sharing to cease evolving and improving.

Let us consider the story of photography companies, such as Eastman Kodak. For many years, if someone wanted additional copies or enlargements of photographs, they went to a professional, to whom Kodak sold the papers and the chemicals required for completing this process. As technology improved, it became possible for people to not only edit and copy pictures on their own, but also to take them. Did Kodak executives drag every photo scanner and digital camera producer into court, telling a sad story about their declining sales? No - they embraced the new technologies. They began selling digital cameras instead of film, and thousands of Kodak kiosks now let people edit and copy pictures themselves. Adaptation proved to be much more profitable than litigation.

Look at iTunes: Apple sold over a million songs in the first week the music retail system was operating. They addressed music downloaders as a market, not a threat, and have been making handsome profits as a result.

Now, we consider the the RIAA, which claims to represent businesses, and how it has failed to follow suit and adapt; instead of working to implement technologies to deter filesharing (or lowering their prices to make it less appealing to starving college students), the RIAA is acting like an indignant candlestickmaker, cursing at the powerlines that are eroding his sales. Of course, while the candle guy has little ability to make his product less expensive or brighter burning, the RIAA has run to its lawyers rather than it's R&D people (does the RIAA have R&D people?).

Of course, as fun as it is to gripe about the RIAA, there are other people more deserving of our gratitude and/or rage.

The i2 sysytem was revolutionary in that it was "secure"; whereas phynd could be scanned by users at remote locations, i2hub offered a layer of security, in that users supposedly had to connect to an i2-subscribed campus in order to download.

Besides on the actions of the students themselves, responsibility for these subpoenas lies squarely with one of two groups: either a campus network had lax enough security policies that some permitted some goon from the RIAA to walk in, plug into their network and snoop around i2hub, or the RIAA got wind of the nifty policy of the i2hub operators allowing people to connect from offcampus for a measly $5 fee.

If the latter was true, then the stupidity of the people who created the greatest filesharing systems many of us have ever used resulted in 405 users getting nailed, at a cost to the RIAA of less than the price of one of their CDs.

Greetings from the Ministry of PolyTruth

If anyone can find a smooth way to incorporate the words "Polytechnic" and "propaganda," let me know immediately. You can find some inspiration for this effort by checking out the PolyBlogs, a product of the Office of Admissions and a smattering of sunlight-deprived IT majors. Their cause d'affaires:

PolyBlogs is a group of select Rensselaer students who have agreed to share their life and experiences as they attend RPI.

I find myself both insulted for not being offered a role in this heinous venture, and honored that my standards were assessed as being too high to participate. But then again, seeing as their goal is probably to increase future enrollment rather than eliminate it, I can understand their reasoning.

Surveys, unions and other criminal items in Jacksonville

According to emails forwarded to me by one of my three readers, it's been brought to my attention that tensions are rising between the faculty and our illustrious President Shirley Ann Jackson. The Faculty Senate minutes verify that the situation has degraded below the ambient level of distrust and outrage. All of this stems from members of the Faculty Senate committing the dastardly deed of surveying the faculty about how they feel about the tyrant in the Troy Building (three days a month). Dr. Jackson, who was in Asia at the time, ordered the Provost, G.P. "Bud" Peterson, to have the survey results destroyed and to reprimand the person(s) responsible, on the grounds that they were in violation of human resources policies because three of the questions could be interpreted to pertain to unionization. In a meeting yesterday, members of the Faculty Senate were addressed by Curtis Powell (VP for Human Resources), Chuck Carletta (RPI's attorney known as"Chuck E Cheese" to senior faculty), and an unidentified labor lawyer that the administration flew in from Philadelphia (this, after the faculty members had been told they couldn't have legal representation at this meeting). I'm still working on securing the details, but it sounds like the meeting was the closest you can come to a public flogging when PhDs are involved. A no-confidence vote by the Faculty Senate against the Provost, the man who's supposed to be "advocate of the faculty," is seen as imminent, and there's widespread speculation that Dr. Jackson might be in line for the same treatment.

Batten down the hatches, this is going to get messy.

And if you wanted the actual link to Dr. Jackson's profile, here it is.

"To Make a Difference" and other cliches the candidates have expended the quotas on

In case it's been drowned out by the calls for my head and other things I'm not prepared to part with, my only goal in all this has been to effect a change.

Looking back, I wish I could have done more. If nothing else, the student body now has access to the records of the senate, allowing them for the first time in a long time to see the degree to which it's dominated by self-absorbed, disconnected and irresponsible personalities. In a fitting finale to a year of neglecting their constituents, the senate spent its meeting tonight gorging themselves on catered food and deciding whether parking should be a perk for the GM and the PU. The student government has a long way to go before anyone takes it seriously again. Tonight's election results might mark a step in that direction; they might not.

While this worthless rant was originally formed to keep tabs on the election process, I've decided to offer the services of this bastard child of information technology and latent anger to the RPI community as a whole. There are questions that aren't being answered. There are others that aren't being asked. We can solve half of that right now.

Ask away.

Nobody's perfect, not even me

Behold, Article V, section 1 of the JBoard bylaws.

1. The Judicial Board shall have the power to hear and rule on three types of cases.
a. Disciplinary cases, originating in the Dean of Student's Office, wherein a student is charged with a violation of the Grounds for Disciplinary Action.
b. Intergovernmental and constitutional disputes, in which there is a dispute over the authority of a Student Government body, or the constitutionality of its actions with respect to the Union Constitution. This shall also include disputes over the end results of elections.
c. Civil cases in which there is a dispute among students or student groups who wish to submit the dispute to the Judicial Board.

There's no gun pointed at the JBoard to rule on election matters. My prediction should have been that certain races would be appealed, not necessarily heard, and my analysis of the PU business was worse than the Poly coverage of---everything else that goes on at RPI. Not being a member of the JBoard, and with all the wireless usage on campus messing up my ESP, I'll keep my aspirations of being a JBoard commentator on hold. My apologies.

Bernstein Endorses No Endorsement by the Polytechnic

I have decided not to endorse the Poly's lack of an endorsement for GM. Rumor has it the staff of the Poly has a bone to pick with Max Yates, and that he could come up with a plan to eliminate AIDS and communism and still their illustrious editorial board would only give him the endorsement half-heartedly. Reports of prejudice aside, the Poly editors were, without a doubt, off their medications when they wrote their abortion of an analysis for the GM race. In what appeared to be a condemnation of Yates:

He said multiple times that the important jobs would go to those best-suited for the position, and these might not necessarily be senators. Given that the student body has selected these senators to serve them and meet their needs, they should have a well-defined role in the process.

And then, later, the Poly discounts Robert Otlowski as lacking "significant experience in the Senate," about which they'd said only one paragraph (or half a crayon, if you're reading the original manuscript) earlier:

Yates has a firm grip on student government as a whole, and has a defined stance on where he feels this year's Senate has failed.

[emphasis mine]

Yates had the common sense and the courage to point out that the student government as it stands isn't working--as the editorial board obviously agreed--and yet they're sizing him up for a Hitler moustache as an enemy of democracy. While the plan Yates puts forth on his website seems to be pecking at the periphery of the problems with Student Government, it is Yates' simple acknowledgement that RPI student senators are not reincarnations of the Continental Congress that warrants consideration to vote for him. I still take issue with the lack of a stance against the tuition hike, by either candidate, but seeing Yates stand up to the worthless resume whores in the Student Senate gives me goosebumps. If only he had firing power over the Poly editors...

I should also take this time to point out that I was kidding about making endorsements when I posted the possibility last week. I, will however, be explaining what's right and wrong in the PU endorsement, once I find enough Tylenol.

Forget an endorsement, why not a reminder?

First, there was violation 2:

For sign policy violation, the Genesis Party must remove all posters from Amos Eaton within 24 hours. The Genesis Party will no longer be allowed toposter inside or on Amos Eaton for the duration of the election.

Then came violation 3, which is legally classified as theft:

For use of Union resources through the Rensselaer Student Union Club Printer through the Senate’s account to print approximately 30 printouts of campaign material between 11:21pm on 03/07/05 and 3:57am on 03/08/05 the following sanctions have been posted for the Genesis Party:
1. No Genesis Party posters may be placed in or on the Union for the duration of the election;
2. A $5 fine shall be paid to the Rensselaer Student Union;
3. 1 additional hour of GM Week service must be performed by one of the officers of the Genesis Party. This service may only be performed during Campus Cleanup.

And then violation 5, petty by comparison, but still a violation:

Max Yates and Peter Baldwin have been found in violation for lacking contact information on multiple posters throughout campus. The following sanctions have been posted for both candidates:
1. All signs in violation must be removed within 24 hours;
2. All Max Yates and Peter Baldwin signs must be removed from the DCC and CII area by 8am on Wednesday April 6, 2005.

And then violation 6:

Peter Baldwin has been found in violation of the regulations of the Commons, as they have asked no candidate to solicit signatures in the dining area. As such, the following penalties have been conferred upon the candidate:
1. Nomination petitions 20 and 27 have been invalidated;
2. An additional 36 valid nomination signatures above the 500 signatures required for the office of President of the Union must be submitted to the Rules and Elections Committee.

And then violation 7:

Peter Baldwin has been found to be in violation of the following:
1. The decision of both the Resident Dining Director of the Commons and later by the Committee on March 30, 2005 was reiterated in Violation 6: no candidate was to solicit nominations in the Commons dining area, effective March 30, 2005.
2. The following portions of the Honor Code:
· I will uphold the right of every qualified student to full and equal participation in the electoral process.
· I will not abuse the process of the Rensselaer Union Student Government Elections.

The following sanctions have been issued for Mr. Baldwin:
1. For each instance of entering the Commons dining area during which nominations were solicited by Mr. Baldwin, the value of the cost ofentrance must be added to his expense form.
2. Mr. Baldwin must obtain an additional 150 nomination signatures to appear on the ballot for President of the Union.

[emphasis mine]

And those are just the ones RNE knows about. Should I ever take the time to write them an email, I might have a few more PDF files to post. Just as a reminder, the Genesis party is not only still on the ballot, but seems to have the GPS coordinates for every RNE soft spot.

Peter Baldwin has been granted an extension until Sunday, April 3, 2005 until 2pm. This is due to the upholding of the punitive penalty from Violation 6. As he is granted an extension, an additional penalty of 64 valid signatures shall be given to Mr. Baldwin. This brings Mr. Baldwin to a total of 600 valid signatures necessary to be on the ballot for President of theUnion.

Surely, this would be much easier to comprehend if the opposition were to master the art of existing and stopped rallying around a produce commodity, but in the course of three weeks, the Genesis party has ignored poster regulations, repeatedly entered off-limit areas and stolen from the student body. What idiocy they're capable of in a full year, given who's on their ticket, is anybody's guess. We can only wonder: if Genesis candidates have been paying so little attention to the rules, what attention do they plan on paying to the students?

Are they joking about the platforms, too?

A verse from Genesis:

We support every one of our candidates’ personal welfare and professional growth.

The last time I had brain activty, that sounded a lot like "we're doing this for us, not you." It's only beaten by:

Let us water the very best of the seeds in everyone except for those who are weak or liars.

If Genesis has really rid itself of the weak and the liars, who are they going to run?

As for the Banana Party platform, I don't have enough webspace to upload everything that's wrong with it. The fruit-joke-to-issue ratio is dangerously high.

Paging Arthur Galpin...

Some Fool I Am

The link to my blog which once graced the Senate webpage has disappeared.

What kind of school is it where an anonymous blogger can't get a plug on the site of the organization he's ridiculing? Honestly.