CNN asks "When did Facebook become so uncool?" - Duh....The day it was created

I've said it here numerous times....FACEBOOK is not cool, never has been. It was created by a guy who wanted to extract revenge on other Harvard types that wouldn't allow him to be one of the "cool kids". This is NOT the kind of thing you want to be involved with.

Now, Facebook is becoming " Big Brother " and people are finally waking up to the real insidious nature of what Zuckerberg created and profited from...People admire him - I see nothing but a geeky kid who created his own world and got many "sheep-ple" to follow him.

Not me. Not now, not ever. Do yourself a favor and kill your Facebook account.
Really, you'll thank me later.

CNN ? - They are as clueless as the other sheep-ple who gave Zuckerberg $$$ for getting people to follow his unethical website which is now being seen for what it really is....worthless. To think that people feel this sham is worth $$$ is unbelievable to me and proves what P.T. Barnum knew 100 years ago:

" There's a sucker born every minute"


When did Facebook become so uncool? By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.

Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.

When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.

Pundits weren't kind to Facebook, either. David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like "Big Friend," a gentler variation on George Orwell's all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook -- twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.

This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it's the Nickelback to Instagram's Bon Iver.

Facebook and Instagram's images couldn't be more different, so it's tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: "Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?" A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.

"It's official, Facebook is becoming uncool," CBS declared.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook's image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook's current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.

First: Money. Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn't monetized its product. It didn't support advertisements and apparently didn't sell its users' data.

Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal's recent feature "Selling You on Facebook," which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.

Second: Size. As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet -- the search engine that didn't have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was "Don't Be Evil." As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google "built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect."

That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company -- and to question its motives.

Gizmodo: "In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services -- Gmail, Search, YouTube and more -- and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for."

People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It's the kind of company journalists love to use the word "scrappy" to describe.

Third: Trust. As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they're pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.

According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport's site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.

"You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don't trust Facebook -- despite Mark Zuckerberg's promises -- with their networks and memories," Garber writes. "You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure."

Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.

In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: "We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand."

Finally: The cool factor. Maybe it's less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn't as cool as it used to be -- partly because it's so popular and also because it's not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster -- all of Facebook's predecessors -- didn't survive (or didn't continue to grow) for this long.

Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility -- you cold post photos easily from your phone -- and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.

"Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its 'cool', rapidly," wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.

Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate -- a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)

It's not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that's independent from Facebook and that people won't have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.

"Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy," Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. "They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. ..."

There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg's network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It's seen as the big, bland company that the app's users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.

Paranoid & Pathetic - Looks like the White House went after Fox News in 2009 after all

A local blogger from the hometown accused me once of "regurgitating FOX News" simply because I have a low opinion of the President. I have rarely, if ever, highlighted a FOX News story here. I like to write about issues, provide some newstype as the basis of what the discussion is about and leave the analysis of my POV to you the reader.

Some of us are old enough to remember the infamous NIXON Administration and the " Enemies List" that President Nixon had in a paranoid delusion that he could control the opinion of others by excluding his "enemies" from access to the White House (which in reality belongs to the PEOPLE).

Well flash forward to 2009, and the juveniles in the Obama Administration were accused of doing the same thing with FOX News, a charge which they dismissed as baseless......Seems as the TRUTH (something the White House has no clue about) was that YES, THEY DID make a concerted effort to exclude FOX News from the access given to others who were Obama's Cheerleaders.

I'm sorry, but when you start having to utilize NIXONIAN style tactics to defend your actions, you've pretty much shown that whatever you were doing is wrong....and then to LIE about it only further repeats the mistakes.....Paranoid & Pathetic - Very telling behavior from the worst President we have seen since NIXON.....

TIME TO GO BARRY....back to Chicago where you belong.


Looks like the White House went after Fox News in 2009 after all
By Joe Pompeo -Media Reporter
Yahoo News The Cutline – 16 JULY 2011

As the U.K. phone-hacking scandal continues to engulf News Corp's British segment, one of the company's top-performing assets in the U.S. is enjoying a bit of unrelated vindication.

Rewind to October 2009: Fox News Channel and the White House were at war. In one particularly heated incident, Fox claimed the Obama administration had tried to oust the "fair & balanced" network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, when the other four news nets in the TV coverage pool had been offered access. In the end, Fox was included, and a Treasury Department spokesman snarled: "There was no plot to exclude Fox News, and they had the same interview that their competitors did. Much ado about absolutely nothing."

Emails that surfaced last week, however, through a public records request by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, suggest otherwise.

"We'd prefer if you skip Fox please," a White House broadcast media staffer advised a Treasury Department public affairs secretary ahead of the interview. In other emails during the same time frame, deputy White House communications director Jennifer Psaki called Fox News anchor Bret Baier "a lunatic" and boasted that "I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby--just cause." In yet another email, another White House press officer wrote: "We've demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews …"

Proof of an anti-Fox agenda in the Oval Office? Judicial Watch thinks so.

"These documents show there is a pervasive anti-Fox bias in the Obama White House," said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton in a statement. "The juvenile Mafioso-talk in these emails has no place in any White House. For the Obama administration to purposely exclude a major news organization from access to information has troubling First Amendment implications."

But current White House press secretary Jay Carney pushed back on the revelation during a briefing Thursday.

"It is well known that at the time there was a dispute between Fox News and its coverage and the White House and its feelings about the coverage," he said, according to CBS News. "I mean, that was then, and we obviously deal with Fox News regularly. ... We regularly engage with every network and every news organization here, including Fox, and give interviews to Fox, and respect the reporters at Fox who are reporters and do their job."

Taking Teachers off the " Sainthood " pedestal and holding them accountable for their work, just like any other professional.

Name the most powerful union in the state of Massachusetts ? The Teamsters ? NOPE....The Public Employees Unions ? Nope.... The Teachers ? YOU GOT IT.

In Massachusetts there is no more powerful Union than the Teachers. While I understand the value of education, the manner in which Teachers have been elevated to " Sainthood " and to be above review by taxpayers defies logic. We pay more per pupil for education in the State of Massachusetts and in return, we get "Meh" for results.

Governor Deval " Spend it all" Patrick and his pal the " Empty Suit ' in the White House want to throw more money at an issue that we have already inundated with cash to no real gain.

The main reason is that the Teachers Unions and the Administrators placed themselves above reproach. They have told us that being a teacher is a thankless task, they have to do soooo much with soooo little, all the while, in reality, we've been giving teachers, administrators and school systems more money than ever. Don't get me wrong, there are GOOD teachers but there are some really god-awful ones and there are more of the latter than the former.

Like any other system, without checks and balances, how can we tell what we are getting back from our educators?? Do Teachers work hard ? YES, they do. But so do many others, with just as much importance to society and without 2 weeks off at Christmas, a Winter break, a Spring break and 10 weeks off for the Summer. And let's not forget " Teacher conference days " that happen 10 times a year.

The problem is that we allowed the UNIONS to build up this idea of the " Teacher as Saint" and no one has been monitoring the work they do. When grades plummeted, we heard a litany of reason like bad parents, too much TV, etc. They used distraction to pull attention that for the last 20 years, we have not had the best educators assisting our children, and without regular reviews, they have been without proper guidance. Any worker who isn't reviewed by a boss on a regular basis will have lower performance. Teachers are no different.

At the same time, we've added a lot more " Administrators " to the public sector in school systems and they don't contribute anything but more drag to a slow moving system. You need more classroom strength and less fat-arses sitting in offices waiting for retirement.

In the BOSTON GLOBE today was this tripe:

"As state education leaders prepare to vote tomorrow on a sweeping overhaul of the way administrators and teachers are evaluated, local school officials say one key area remains a concern: finding time for overburdened principals to actually do the evaluations."

Well any manager in any other workplace will tell you that they have very little time to spend on evaluating staff BUT that is part of being a BOSS....to cry about it just because you now HAVE to do it in school systems is pretty shallow. Get over yourself School Administators, as all of us in management have been dealing with this same issue for YEARS.

So in the end, we wasted taxpayers money, placed Teachers on a pedestal (whether they were good, bad or indifferent) and allowed the Greedy Union types to game the system. All to the detriment of our country and the education of future generations.

Well as much as the recession has brought misery to far too many, it has also fiscally forced the hands of our school systems to start evaluating those who teach our children. I hope they use a better evaluation than the system they created to teach children with as if the system to evaluate is as bad as the rest of the administrative schlock they have used, we'll get more " Meh " out of an already faulty system of educating our Children.

Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired
By SAM DILLON - NY TIMES
Published: June 27, 2011

WASHINGTON — Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.

Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.

The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.

Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching.

But some educators say it is better at sorting and firing teachers than at helping struggling ones; they note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent in Ward 8, the poorest.

“Teachers have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” if they work with low-income children, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union. “Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”

Jason Kamras, the architect of the system, said “it’s too early to answer” whether Impact makes it easier for teachers in well-off neighborhoods to do well, but pointed out that Washington’s compensation system offers bigger bonuses ($25,000 versus $12,500) and salary enhancements in high-poverty schools.

“We take very seriously the distribution of high-quality teachers across the system,” he said.

The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city’s 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so-called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington.

For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.

These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve.

Impact costs the city $7 million a year, including pay for 41 master educators, who earn about $90,000 a year and conduct about 170 observations each. The program also asks more of principals. Carolyne Albert-Garvey, the principal of Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill, has 22 teachers — she must conduct 66 observations, about one every three school days.

“I’ve really gotten to know my staff, and I’m giving teachers more specific feedback,” Ms. Albert-Garvey said. “It’s empowered me to have the difficult conversations, and that gives everyone the opportunity to improve.”

Several teachers, however, said they considered their ratings unfair.

A veteran teacher who said he did not want to criticize the school system openly, said that a month after he inherited a chaotic world history class from a long-term substitute, the visiting evaluator cut him no slack for taking on the assignment and penalized him because a student was texting during the lesson.

Another teacher who expects to lose her job next month because of low ratings said at a public hearing that evaluators picked apart her seventh-grade geography lessons, making criticisms she considered trivial. During the most recent observation, her evaluator subtracted points because she had failed to notice a girl eating during class, the teacher said.

“I’m 25 years in the system, and before, I always got outstanding ratings,” she said. “How can you go overnight from outstanding to minimally effective?”

A report issued by the Aspen Institute in March said one of Impact’s accomplishments was to align teacher performance with student performance, noting that previously 95 percent of Washington’s teachers were highly rated but fewer than half of its students were demonstrating proficiency on tests. Still, the report quoted teachers who complained of cold-eyed evaluators more interested in identifying losers than in developing winners.

“After my first conversation with my master educator, I felt it was going to be worthwhile — she offered me some good resources,” the report quoted one teacher. “My second master educator was kind of a robot, not generous in offering assistance, a much tougher grader.”

This month, Mary Gloster, who taught science in three states before she was recruited to Impact in 2009, was at Ballou High, one of the city’s lowest-performing schools, to share the results of some classroom visits.

She met with Mahmood Dorosti, a physics teacher who won a $5,000 award this spring. “Don’t even think about it — you’re highly effective,” she told him.

Next was Ms. Strzelecki, 23, who came to Ballou through Teach for America. The two sat at adjoining desks, with Ms. Strzelecki looking a bit like a doe in the headlights.

But Ms. Gloster, who had watched her teach a ninth-grade biology lesson the week before, offered compliments, along with suggestions about how Ms. Strzelecki might provide differentiated teaching for advanced and struggling students.

“You did a really good job, kiddo,” the evaluator ruled, grading her as effective, the equivalent of a B (the same rating she got on previous observations).

“What I liked about Mary was that I felt she was on my side,” Ms. Strzelecki said later. “Some teachers feel the master educators are out to get them.”

That is a common perception, said Mark Simon, an education analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, which receives teachers’ union financing. Ms. Rhee developed the system, he noted, during tough contract negotiations and did not consult with the teachers’ union in its design.

“That was a missed opportunity,” Mr. Simon said, “and it’s created a lot of resentment.”