BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Not her firs public lie, in fact she's been publicly lying about herself since she met Trump, with his help.
Apparently she's repeatedly claimed to have a degree she never had....she actually left college before completing (nearly failing) her freshman year and never returned....but her biography both online and in her introduction at the convention claimed.....
"began modeling at age 16, but she only began working full-time after obtaining a degree. She graduated “in design and architecture at University in Slovenia"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/melania-trump-college-claims_us_578dd95ce4b0c53d5cfac0dc

What a pair of enormous frauds. The Republicans have one hell of a ticket. This is what you get when your entire party gets their "information" from Faux news.

I won a Palm III as 1st place prize for a Quake tournament my freshman year of college. The final match was so close and frantic. (top 3 scores were 33,31,29) Quake II was already out at the time, and going back to Q1 deathmatch was much faster pace.
I brought my headphones and a 3M Precise Mousing Surface with me, both which gave an advantage. Ah Glory Days.

The bit about pop culture portraying New Yorkers as criminals, with the "stigma" leading some to intentionally lose their accents, that was pretty lame for an otherwise intelligent video. It gets presented as a researched fact when it sounds more like a ridiculous theory.

From my experience, current generations weaned on those movies shown in the clip would be more inclined to adopt that accent as just another affectation, tattoo, piercing, meme, avatar, email signature, sampling, bumper sticker.

And the bit about the accent losing favor after WWII, "as Americans were focused on their own identity, rather than maintaining ties to England". Sounds like something a college freshman would write at the last minute to fill out a 1000 word essay.

I started college the year after. Lost a good deal of my freshman year to Quake. Oh boy, I miss those days. Only one fps that people played, and it was amazing.

Peter: You were my first best friend. We met in third grade and were unbreakable until freshman year when our lives went in different ways. We played Atari for days. We hiked the woods and made up adventures. We made abet on who would kiss a girl first. You won. You are such a deep part of who I am. I will miss you.

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

Call me old school but the material is always so weak in most of these socio-ethnic commentary videos, for lack of a better term. They get an HD camera and some troupe and it all looks slick but rarely does anyone have a talent for writing something better than a college freshman could have produced. It usually ends up being a premise in search of a writer.

Anyone remember TI graphing calculators, which at the time I was using them (90s) I think ran on 8088 processors?

Quite a bit MORE expensive than this. MUCH less powerful, even factoring in Moore's law. AND, they were in no way intended to be an open, hackable design like this is. And even with all those limitations, they became one of the primary "introduction to hardware and software hacking" devices of my generation.

When I was a 16-year-old HS Freshman, I had a TI-81 that I hooked up to a PC with a serial port and "hacked" zShell onto. I learned a bit of assembly code and put on lots of little programs like games etc. onto my calculator. I even got an image display program where you could load up bitmap images that were converted to a specific size and color depth (4-8 grays if I remember right). I got busted in my Geometry class that year looking at a blurry grayscale picture of a topless Pamela Anderson. On my calculator. If that doesn't put me in the running for biggest nerd ever, I don't know what would.

Anyway, I can only see this "Chip" thing (I agree that I'm not too big on the name) as a very cool idea. Sometimes, something as simple as a hackable platform or a blurry 4-bit picture of some boobs can be enough to push someone towards a lifelong interest in IT and other technology. Raspberry Pi and the others are great too, but the price of this one gives it a real leg up in the universal accessibility department!

I was in one of the areas that does ACT instead of SAT. I took the test when I was a freshman and got a 29 (out of 36, quite a high score), and never took it again -- I think due to a mixture of apathy and fear that my score would go down, although that wouldn't matter because you always submit your highest score.

I went to a local state university even though a 29 on the ACT is high enough to get some attention from prestigious universities. Personally, I was NOT impressed with the state of post-secondary education in the US. I'm "glad" that I went and got my degree, but only because it is expected and pretty much a requirement for getting most jobs.

I did learn some stuff, about 25% of which I feel was actually relevant to my field of study (Computer Science). If I was interested in paying the university for actual knowledge obtained as opposed to paying them for a piece of paper that opens doors to jobs, I could have packed all the relevant classes into 1-1.5 years and gotten the same amount of knowledge out at a small fraction of the cost (less than 1/4). University education felt extremely inefficient and arbitrary to me.

I don't think I'd have been any more impressed with an ivy league university education. Pay a LOT more, deal with the same inefficiencies, and end up with roughly the same amount of actual knowledge gained -- but an admittedly more (arbitrarily) valuable piece of paper to wave at job recruiters.


The situation is only getting worse for the Gen Y's and Millenials behind me. Higher expectations / requirements for college degrees in jobs that have no business requiring them, much higher tuition even at state universities, etc. I don't have any solution or advice other than suggesting that people take as many credits as possible from cheapo junior / community colleges and then transfer those to the cheapest in-state university they can.

So basically, I guess that I think that the SAT (or ACT) is actually less broken than the entire post-secondary education system at large in the US. A mere symptom of a much more severe underlying problem.

title is misleading. The message is clearly about porn addiction. It's a very real and serious thing.

And yes, BYU-Idaho has strict standards. Everyone who registers knows about it and agrees to it before they attend. No-one forces those standards on you. If you don't like it there's plenty of other choices. Where you go to college is completely up to you.

I dropped off my niece for freshman semester and they sent her away at the photo-id desk because she was wearing flip-flops. She went back to her room, changed shoes, and got her photo-id.

Congratulations! Your comment on Georgia Tech - Freshman Convocation - Epic Welcome Speech has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

Nothing works, except replacing your old lady with a nice new 18 year old college freshman.

This video really speaks to me. I'm just finishing up my computer science degree, and as part of it, I end up doing a lot of tutoring and actual teaching the classes for those who are just starting out (I want to teach it when I get out).

I always tell the freshmen, computer science is not about any particular language, or coding, its really about problem solving. Its the ability to take a large or complex problem, break it down into smaller tasks, then solve those small tasks. We just happen to do it using a computer. Those I notice that succeed and do well seem to really get this.

Of course I also always tell the freshman to indent when they see a curly brace...but that never happens.....

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Wow, that's... wow.

So, we take freshman initiation bullshit rituals and put them on TV now?

Fuck me, could not get through that, such a horrendous waste of air time.