UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper spray references from Internet
sacbee.com
sacbee.com
1. Serving on the DeVry board without permission from the UC President, and receiving a generous paycheck. All while DeVry is under federal investigation.
2. Serving on the board of a company selling textbooks to students and receiving stock-based compensation totaling half a million.
3. Apparently now spending tens of thousands of dollars to scrub her previous mistakes from the Internet.
The only solution is to stop donating to UC Davis -- and UC in general. If the Annual Fund calls you, ask them "Has Katehi resigned yet?" That's what I do. If you really want to help students at UCD, give to ASUCD or CalPIRG or something, not to a slush fund of a Chancellor who spends student fees on her own image.
Disclaimer: UCD alumnus here.
Edit: Although five lawmakers calling for her resignation might also decrease donations to the UC: http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/art...
Or maybe you just believe in supporting higher education. Either way.
No, that money is going to athletics for bigger telescreens and not for student athletes. Ever since the Larry Vanderhoef chancellery, Davis has been spending more and more on athletics, with little to show for it.
I just wish Emil Mrak was still around as chancellor -- that guy was awesome. He managed to keep students from massive protests at UCD during the free speech movement era by shipping them in free buses to protest at UCSB, and he introduced all of the bicycle infrastructure in Davis. Instead, we have a profiteer running the campus, in cahoots with the nation's former top cop.
Upwards of $175,000, according to the Sacramento Bee article.
Isn't active "cleaning up" of the internet by a government entity a violation of those people's free speech?
Anyone in a senior position like this should have the interests of students and their education at heart and be doing everything they can to provide students with accurate and affordable learning materials. In fact, I don't see why their creation shouldn't be subsidised and so they can be freely provided in electronic format to students. The curriculum should be free of copyright.
The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon."
PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is required, and if so, whether a previous version can be used. (I know publishers are getting worse and worse about one-time-use codes and "enhanced offerings" though)
So if a college earns some kind of financial benefit from choosing a particular text "solution", then that's money the state doesn't have to fund.
If students want this to change then they need to organize politically and make it a clear demand, as they're the only stakeholders impacted by higher priced textbooks.
A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes
B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year
So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"
Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?
Thanks for the good work though!
$500,000 + generous salary
$10,000 for perception management
easy bet for me too
I didn't find that specification particularly odd, personally.
Or maybe I have you wrong, so I'll ask: why would you ask why someone mentioned a specific search engine?
Unless their attempt is to gain coverage on something - trying to hide it is going to have the opposite effect due to social media...it seems like so many people are aware of the Streisand effect except everyone in a PR position.
Particularly I'm familiar with moderating a large subreddit. It's amazing what mods can get away with, and users have no clue. Since all removals are silent. So many people shadowbanned and have no idea and just keep commenting like normal.
Culminating with a lengthy feature in the Sacramento Bee. Mission accomplished.
That's the nature of the game. These companies just flood the internet with innocuous data about the client in a way that's carefully aimed at pushing "bad stuff" down in the rankings. This works for a number of reasons, but a major one is that search engines prefer recency. Searching "Kobe Bryant" today is going to find way more articles about him scoring 60 in his final game than about him being accused of sexual assault in 2003.
If you keep making the news for doing bad things, that same tendency works against you. It's not like these firms can make Google ignore all the articles about you that haven't been written yet. Success is predicated on the idea that you'll stop doing stupid shit after whatever initial event required the service.
I guess this is one case where it's especially true that "if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself" :-p
As far as I know, punishment for the perjury has never happened. The only case I know of where legal fees were paid is Automattic vs Steiner.
At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Why would someone be writing "Great post!" on 20 of my stories at 11:30 p.m.? Then I did a little checking on the names of the posters. Turns out they all had some "incident" in their pasts. Now they or their consultants were pumping out huge amounts of bland, benign content from all sorts of accounts (news sites, Tumblr, etc.) in their real names. The net result: these new accounts and the resulting content swamped Google, becoming the top 50 or so search results. The bad stuff didn't totally vanish, but it now was relegated to much lower placement.
In terms of whether this stuff works, that's a tricky call. I think it all depends on what the nature of the client's problems are ... and how much the world can/should care about some past mistake as life plays out. Sometimes it's hard to argue with the desire for a fresh start. In other case, it's hopeless.
Of course you didn't, because that would be mean, yet oddly satisfying.
I always thought these were linkspam bots, hoping to get a little pagerank from the url they submit with their name
There are at least four rich convicted felons who have Wikipedia articles and paid editors trying to whitewash them. They haven't succeeded.
Years later, that obscure person gets caught up in an Internet-(infamous) scandal...and instead of just a bunch of self-made pages via LinkedIn, About.me, etc., that they can delete, they now have a suspiciously-seeming astroturfed Wikipedia entry with a prominent "Scandals/Controversy" subhead. And Wikipedia's pagerank being what it is...virtually no reputation-astroturf effort will overtake it.
They must know how the internet works.
What specifically were they paying for that made it worth it? Keeping references to the incident away from their Facebook page?
Who HASN'T seen that image by now?
What a misguided allocation of funds.
Its not their money and they have no shareholders. They don't care if works or not. These PR people cashing the checks are probably friends of friends of the Chancellor.
"Right before these conflicts of interest came out, the Sac Bee did a fluff piece about Katehi without any mention of the pepper spray incident. It was a female writer talking about how wonderful it was for Katehi to break the glass ceiling."
It seems there is some conflict of interest here, as the article seems to attempt to shift blame from the Chancellor to the university. Would it be unreasonable to assume there is a special relationship between her and someone at the newspaper?
edit in reply: Haha, no, not Green Eggs & Ham
another edit: I thought the parent & grandparent posts might belong together, but apparently not. I think GP is simply using this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HaveYouTriedNotBe... — or perhaps this recent Dilbert strip http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-03-08