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Thanks to Jon Miller for letting Andy and I sit in in on KXNO a couple times this week. We had a blast, and Andy nearly wet his pants when Chris called in from Vegas as Marty.
You scooped Snyder back to K-State alright. You and Marty Tirrell’s dentist.
i dont care about k-st or martys dentist but i’ll listen if hassle does it. that was so firkin funny i laugh now when ever i hear marty.
To all who have just joined the Chris Hassel ban wagon- Welcome Abooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooard!This guy is so funny he takes the Hassel out of Hasselhoff.
Is there a way to hear this impession of Marty by Chris if we weren’t fortunate enough to hear it live? On the web site maybe? I am always in the mood to laugh my arse off!
You could also scroll down the sports page at whotv.com and it’s right there in the videos.
I agree with Shawn Terrell…enough with the Cubs picture(do we not endure enough each year)…let’s find a picture of some Cyclone fans and laugh at that for awhile!
Uli Seit for The New York Times Tough luck. Students in Jackson Heights, Queens, had to go to school on Wednesday.
If childhood affords few experiences more pleasurable than that of waking up to a snow day, it holds fewer disappointments more crushing than having a snow day snatched from your giddy grasp.
Perhaps, children, you’re wondering if you were somehow partly to blame. Maybe you got overconfident when the mayor declared a weather emergency before the first flakes had even fallen Tuesday evening, urging drivers off the roads.
Maybe you considered the snow day such a sure thing you neglected to perform the pajamas-on-backwards-leave-a-spoon-under-the-pillow-and-flush–ice-cubes-down-the-toilet ritual.
Whatever the reason, a city full of public schoolchildren awoke to a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance: 9 inches of winter wonderland out the window, and the caffeinated voice on the news radio ordering them to class.
The kids were upset. And the main target of their wrath was that two-faced mayor.
“I got mad at Mayor Bloomberg because he lets his kids walk like this on ice and snow,” said Kaitlyn Velazquez, a fourth grader on her way to Public School 166 in Long Island City, Queens.
Chris Hondros/Getty Images Children trudged to school on Wednesday after hoping for a day off because of the snowstorm.
To be sure, a lot of students did stay home, whether in protest or because of transit problems (of which there were few). Only 46 percent of schoolchildren showed up for school, about half the number who came to school last Wednesday, when the weather was fine. But those that did were fuming in their chairs.
On Twitter, where the older children go, the language was saltier than a coddled sidewalk, but the sentiment was the same as 9-year-old Kaitlyn’s.
“I know all those kids that had to go school today wish that bloomberg fell on that snow,” read the printable portion of a Twitter post by kathy890.
But listen up kids, it was for your own good. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said so.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times Marcia Jackson, a fourth-grade teacher at Public School 36 in Morningside Heights, playing with her students on Wednesday.
“Our kids are better off in school,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday, noting that parents who can’t find day care on snow days often have to miss work. His schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, had reached the same conclusion. “The last thing we’re going to do is close schools and put 1.1 million children wandering around with nothing to do,” she said.
And just because they canceled school twice last year doesn’t mean that it’s routinely done. Sit down now for a brief history lesson. During a 31-year stretch from 1978, when your dad was in knee pants, to 2009, the New York City public schools racked up a whopping total of five snow days. In 31 years!
Uli Seit for The New York Times Children making their way to P.S. 69 in Jackson Heights, Queens. More than half of public-school students missed school.
Maybe kids were tougher back in Dad’s day, is that it? Don’t you want to be tougher than those private-school kids, many, if not most, of whom got the day off? Of course you do.
More mature children accepted the mayor’s decision as an opportunity for personal growth.
Even some students who gave in to anger benefited from the experience: it got them to care, for the day at least, about politics and politicians. In a moment, a generation found its voice and its issue. There were calls for Mr. Bloomberg’s defeat from the office he has held for some of his younger constituents’ entire conscious lives. Indeed, his face is so ubiqutous as The Mayor that many children seem to assume that he will still be running for office when they reach voting age. Should that happen to be true, he seems to have lost a few votes on Wednesday, the Snow Day That Almost Was.
“Bloomberg. U ain’t gonna get any vote from me,” ikavin wrote on Twitter.
Tim Stelloh and Rebecca White contributed reporting.
Uli Seit for The New York Times Children had to trudge through nine inches of snow (uphill both ways) to get to school.
The decision was the right one. Essentially, Mike left it up to the parents to decide.
Those parents who are soooo overprotective that they fear their darlings will shatter into ice crystals if they go out on a snowy day were welcome to keep their precious, wimpy spawn at home. No doubt these delicate children spent their days locked inside under the close watch of their illegal-alien maids and nannies, lest (gasp) a snowball might have flown their way.
In the meantime, normal, working parents assured their children that when they, the parents, were kids, they walked through snow this high, (with their hands held against their chests, which of course was often over the heads of their little ones), and nonetheless survived. Traipsing through the snow to get to school thus became a right of passage — a chance to excel at conquering an obstacle their parents had also fought long ago; and thus going to school became a chance to grow up, even if just a little bit.
So their children tromped and sloshed through the snow and slush, possibly learning a few new curse words along the way, but also learning that it takes more than a little white fluffy stuff to keep a good man, woman, boy or girl from meeting his or her responsibility. A small lesson, perhaps, but one that nonetheless served as a good starting point for learning about the nobility of struggling along, even through adversity, to reach a worthy goal.
The children who stayed home, on the other hand, learned that when life deals you a hand that’s less than ideal, you quit.
We went to school… and did absolutely nothing. Half our teachers were absent.
I will send you lots more snow. Be ready!!! Here it comes!
so on those limited snow days we’ve had over the last 30 years or so, what’s the student attendance like? what’s the staff attendance like? any school bus accidents? other snow related injuries? why does the private or parochial school next door to my kid’s public school think it’s a good idea to cancel classes?
The figure of 3 snow days in 31 years is amazing, but it points to the benefit of public transit. Where I grew up in the car-crazy burbs, I think we had 2 or more snow days every single year for my entire school career.
This was just the mayor and his hand puppet, Ms. Black, trying to give the impression that the city had everything under control during the latest storm. Sending children to school in nine inches of snow is idiocy. That’s why my kids didn’t go.
I teach at a middle school in the south bronx, and lemme tell ya, today was a waste of a school day! Half the teachers didn’t make appearances because of their difficult commute from other burroughs, and I’m pretty sure that there were a lot less than 46% of students in attendance. Maybe 30%? In any case, once past the difficult commute part, I had an exceptionally relaxing day- almost as good as a snow day. There weren’t enough students present to hold classes, so we let them play in the gym and watch movies all day. I spent my day painting a picture.
Still would’ve preferred to be making a snowman, though.
The school system was correct in ordering the kids to show up to school: a lot of kids depend on subsidized lunches. And declaring a snow day would have meant a day without lunch for them. I couldn’t care less about the winter wonderland.
I can vividly remember going to school on days where there was a lot of snow but they didn’t cancel. As this article points out, half the kids would never show. So we would spend the day goofing off along with the teachers who were also annoyed to be in attendance.
The lesson learned should be that if there’s a lot of snow, call it a day. You’re not doing anyone a favor by not canceling.
Kids, take it from one who had to shovel instead of sleigh in both snow storms, this one did not compare to the last one that everyone unfairly got sore at the Mayor and Sanitation over. The Eskimos have 100 words for snow. We have 100 terms of abuse for our public officials concerning nature.
If you haven’t had to shovel it yourself you should resist the temptation to criticize. Shoveling snow provides an insight that conveys to your back and legs the difference between clearing away the white stuff and having it blown right back in your face and over your sidewalk.
My school district has some record for snow days while you poor public school kids there in New York City just have to learn to suffer through as you do without and that will teach you for having voted for Bloomberg!
absolutely ridiculous. first, consider that the announcement was made at 5 in the morning. with the little sleep that high school students get anyway, the mayor is forcing us to wake up early to listen to the fact that we have to go to school? announce it earlier. i understand that the mayor and chancellor want to assess the situation in the morning, but the inconvenience for the students makes it worthless. 46% showed up? many people didn’t even know that there was school today – probably cause the announcement was made before anyone was awake.
the fact that snow days were announced rarely in the past means absolutely nothing. how does that contribute to the debate of whether or not this specific snow day should have happened? our parents were deprived of snow days – why should we also be deprived? mr. newman clearly has no idea of how a high school student’s mind works. if he thinks we want to be “tougher than private school kids” rather than get sleep, he should read some teenage sleep studies.
apparently, “mature kids” saw the day as an “opportunity for personal growth.” I’m guessing these are the same “mature kids” who feel tougher than private schoolers because they went to school. my version of “personal growth” is getting in the recommended amount of sleep, and settling down with a good book – a lot more “growth” at home than at school.
i don’t know what the chancellor is thinking when she says over a million kids would be wandering the streets. if it’s snowing too much, kids would obviously stay inside and sleep in. even if they don’t, will the kids be “wandering around” or playing in the snow?
the only sensible issue this blog brings up is the fact that working parents would have to take off work or find a last minute sitter. First, how about calling an optional snow day? we did it for the swine flu “epidemic.” Second, 46% of kids came to school today. if 54% of parents can let their kids stay home, then have the snow day! Third, since high school students typically have a longer and more dangerous commute, have a HS only snow day.
going to school today felt like bloomberg and the, now very unpopular, chancellor toyed with all of us.
This is great. Well done. Growing up in Brookly, I can truly relate to the children. A few inches of snow in NYC can sometimes feel like the blizzard this season. And they just never, never let you stay home and enjoy sledding, making snowmen, or having a fun snowball fight! Instead you stand on street corners waiting for the city buses to bring you back and forth to school, and have to climb mountains at corners to cross the street. I lived in CT for a few years, and my gosh, they closed the schools if the weather advisory on Monday called for snow on Thursday!
Here’s a spin from the cold country: back in 1961 the forecasters saw a blizzard coming to the Minneapolis area and schools were ordered not to open. No snow! I went out and saw two or three lonely and small flakes fall. Unfortunately, when you get older, memories are deleted and I’ve never been able to find anyone my age who can remember getting a snow day… with no snow!
It really was a waste of a day. I am a teacher and we had less than 40% of students in attendance! We also had more than 20 teachers out because they could not make the trek. Classes were combined, teachers had students that were not their own. Many classes spent periods in the auditorium just hanging out. No instruction was taking place at all! Ridiculous how Bloomberg and Black talk about the “8 days” of lost instruction. Well, today should be added to that list because that’s the truth.
The School Superintendant lives way out on LI. Mom, the School Board President, lives on the hilliest stretch of the school district . . . Mom has the perogative/directive to cancel school in a snow emergency. Guess how many times that happened???
Missing school was NOT an option in Mom’s mind, but Mom was cool . . . while we were out shoveling the driveway well before dawn (so Dad could get to work) if our steep hillside road was plowed, then, of course, no SNOW DAY. If we could get out, then everyone could get out.
But the worst??? Running into your teacher (also on a SNOW DAY) in the grocery later that day when Mom had to make an emergency run to get milk and supplies. SOOooo embarrassing!!
Your caption for the above photograph is pure gold. I’m sorry NY schoolchildren didn’t get their anticipated day off (I remember well the immense pleasure brought by a school closing announcement), and I hope all made it to school safely. That being said, thanks to NYT for offering something a bit more lighthearted (well, okay, I laughed reading that Hitler dog article, too. Why, why is the dog wearing glasses?!).
I always liked school… What is not to like??
I hate you, Bloomberg! You made my class fail our math test, since we were all counting on a snow day.
My son attended New York City public schools from first grade through high school, graduating in 2007 — and I don’t remember him ever getting a snow day. Sad, because as this post notes, nothing is sweeter to a school kid than that snow-covered get-out-of-jail card.
I know from this from growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, attending parochial schools. We got snow days regularly, and they were always cause for celebration.
My kids were also mad at Bloomberg. I don’t like him, either, but not because of lack of snow days. For my son, however, that is reason enough to get rid of him.
I go to a specialized high school in the Bronx, however like many kids who go to that same school, I live in Queens. It took me two hours to get to school, with my jeans half wet, and my socks fully drenched. As i am sure what happened in many in many schools, today was an absolute waste of time, money, and a useful opportunity to catch up on sleep and study time. Half the students were not here, half the teachers did not show up either. So thank you King Bloomberg for allowing your political agenda, to come before the safety of NYC students, some of whom like myself have to travel for hours to get to school. I also thank you for caring for our education so much, you know the one with a failing public school system, that one day will make all the difference in our lives.
P.S. there is a difference you know with walking down several blocks with 9 inches of snow and a clear park avenue townhouse.
Ill health cost him a sure shot medal in his pet event single skulls but the backing of his teammates was key to a much-improved performance in the quadruples where he won a gold medal, said ace rower Dattu Baban Bhokanal.
KOLKATA: Ill health cost him a sure shot medal in his pet event single skulls but the backing of his teammates was key to a much-improved performance in the quadruples where he won a gold medal, said ace rower Dattu Baban Bhokanal.
Bhokanal was in second position for the most part of the single sculls race but would freeze around the 1200m mark before finishing sixth as his boat capsized.
Recalling his plight, Bhokanal said he contracted cold while on flight to Indonesia.
"I thought it was a minor thing but it got aggravated after landing there because of the climate change from Pune. On the race day, I rowed with 104-plus fever and the boat also toppled to add to the misery. Water got into my ears and nose and I lost out on a definite gold medal," Bhoknal said during a felicitation at the Calcutta Rowing Club on Saturday.
But the entire team stood by him as he returned to make amends in the team event to win India's only second gold at the Asian Games rowing, the first being Bajrang Lal Thakkar's in Guangzhou 2010.
"I was really depressed to have returned with empty-handed from my favourite event. But my teammates stood by me and told me 'don't worry we can still win the team event'," he recalled.
He took complete rest for the quadruple event scheduled days later and that his team mates - experienced Sawarn Singh, Om Prakash and youngster Sukhmeet Singh - were fully fit and that made up for his weak health due to a heavy dose of antibiotics.
The quadruple sculls squad also changed their tactics after the dismal show by being steady only to step on the gas in the last 500m as they move did pay off as won the race by close to three seconds.
Their success was however dampened after India's foreign coach Nicolae Gioga from Romania was fired hours after India bagged gold.
There were tussle between the Romanian coach and the Indian rowers and it came to the fore during the Games with the latter openly criticising the rowers while his methods were not liked by his wards.
"I do not want to comment on that. I took advice from our Indian coach as well and foreign coach too. I have delivered under both of them so I would not like to blame anyone," Bhokanal said.
India coach Ismail Baig however said they never got along well with the 66-year-old Romanian, who had coached many Olympic teams.
"He has a brilliant track record. But it just did not click with us. He never listened to the players and went about his ways," Baig said.
Also felicitated were Dushyant Chauhan, who defended his third place in lightweight single sculls, and the men's lightweight double sculls duo of Bhagwan Singh and Rohit Kumar.
India's heptathalon gold medallist Swapna Barman, gold medal winning bridge duo of Shibnath De Sarkar and Pranab Bardhan were also present.
Uber’s SVP of engineering, Amit Singhal has been shown the door by the company’s CEO Travis Kalanick, Recode reports. Reportedly, Singhal failed to disclose a sexual harassment allegation made against him at Google.
Singhal worked as the vice president of search at Google for 15 years before resigning in February 2016. The report says that a female employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint against Singhal which an internal investigation found “credible.” He allegedly denied the claims.
Although Uber conducts background checks on new hires, Uber learned of the complaint against Singhal from a Recode reporter. Though Google had planned to fire Singhal, it allowed him to leave quietly because the woman who filed the complaint did not want to go public.
Clearly, the news is a direct fall-out of the Susan Fowler case that has brought much disrepute for Uber in recent days.
Though Google has declined to comment about the nature of Singhal’s departure from the company, in an email to Bloomberg, Singhal wrote, “harassment is unacceptable in any setting” and that he wants “everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior. In my 20-year career, I’ve never been accused of anything like this before, and the decision to leave Google was my own.”.
Cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology are being touted as the next-big-thing after the creation of the internet. One area where these technologies are likely to have a major impact is the financial sector. The blockchain, as a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), has the potential to transform well-established financial institutions and bring lower costs, faster execution of transactions, improved transparency, auditability of operations, and other benefits. Cryptocurrencies hold the promise of a new native digital asset class without a central authority.
So what do these technological developments mean for the various players in the sector and end users? “Blockchains have the potential to displace any business activity built on transactions occurring on traditional corporate databases, which is what underlies nearly every financial service function. Any financial operation that has low transparency and limited traceability is vulnerable to disruption by blockchain applications. DLT is therefore both a great opportunity and also a disruptive threat,” according to Bruce Weber, dean of Lerner College and business administration professor, and Andrew Novocin, professor of electrical and computer engineering, both at the University of Delaware.
Earlier this year, Weber, Novocin, and graduate student Jonathan Wood conducted a literature review on cryptocurrencies and DLT for the SWIFT Institute. Based on this review, the SWIFT institute recently issued a grant to conduct new research on DLT and cryptocurrencies in the financial sector. Weber and Novocin noted that just as disruptors like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Uber built software platforms and thriving businesses thanks to the connectivity provided by internet standards, next-generation startups will build new services and businesses with blockchains. “Many pundits expect blockchain, as a distributed technology, to become the foundation for new services and applications that have completely different rules from those running on hierarchical and controlled databases. Cryptocurrencies are an early example but many others will follow,” they added.
Regarding cryptocurrencies, Hosanagar pointed out that most of the value today is tied to speculative buying rather than actual use cases. But having a currency without a central authority offers “certain unique kinds of protections especially in countries with troubled central banks.” For example, Venezuela’s currency is rapidly losing value. For people who stored their savings in crypto, there was greater protection against such rapid currency devaluations. “Of course, cryptocurrencies have their own instabilities, but they aren’t tied to actions by central banks and that’s particularly relevant in countries and economies where citizens don’t trust their governments and central banks,” he said.
Hosanagar expects the first wave of applications to be rolled out in “private” blockchains where a central authority such as a financial institution and its partners are the only ones with the permission to participate (as opposed to public, permissionless blockchains where participants are anonymous and there is no central authority). Applications in the private blockchains, he said, will be more secure and will offer some of the benefits of decentralized ledgers but will not be radically different from the way things work at present. However, over time, he expects smart contracts (self-executing contracts when requirements are met) to be offered on public blockchain networks like Ethereum. “When securities are traded, intermediaries provide trust, and they charge commissions. Blockchains can help provide such trust in a low-cost manner. But trade of securities is governed by securities laws. Smart contracts offer a way to ensure compliance with the laws. They have great potential because of their ability to reduce costs while being compliant,” says Hosanagar.
Blockchain will reduce the massive duplication of information that creates delays, conflicts and confusion in many aspects of financial services, Werbach added. For example, when a syndicate of lenders participates in a loan, having one shared ledger means they don’t all need to keep track of it independently. International payments and corporate stock records are other examples where there are huge inefficiencies due to duplicate record-keeping and intermediaries. “End users won’t see the changes in the deep plumbing of financial services, but it will allow new service providers to emerge and new products to be offered,” said Werbach.
Governance is the biggest challenge in decentralized organizations, said Weber and Novocin. Members participating in a blockchain-supported financial function may have misaligned incentives, and can end up in gridlock, or with a chaotic outcome. They cite the example of the ‘DAO Hack,’ which was the first prominent smart contract project on the Ethereum network to suffer a large loss of funds. The Ethereum community voted to conduct a hard fork (a radical change to the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid or vice-versa) — reversing the transactions after the hack and essentially refunding the DAO investors. This was in effect a breach of Ethereum’s immutability and it left a sizeable minority of the community bitterly dissatisfied. This group viewed the Ethereum community as forsaking its commitment to immutable, permanent records. They refused to acknowledge the hard fork, and maintained the original Ethereum blockchain, now known as Ethereum Classic (whereas the forked version supported by the Ethereum Foundation is simply Ethereum).
Werbach listed a variety of risks and vulnerabilities related to cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin has shown that the fundamental security of its proof-of-work system is sound, but it has major limitations such as limited scalability, massive energy usage and concentration of mining pools. There has been massive theft of cryptocurrencies from the centralized intermediaries that most people use to hold it, and massive fraud by promoters of initial coin offerings and other schemes. Manipulation is widespread on lightly-regulated cryptocurrency exchanges.
For example, roughly half of Bitcoin transactions are with Tether, a “stablecoin” that claims to be backed by U.S. dollars but has never been audited and is involved in highly suspicious behavior. Money laundering and other criminal activity is a serious problem if transactions do not require some check of real-world identities. “There are major efforts to address all of these risks and vulnerabilities. Some are technical, some are business opportunities, and some are regulatory questions. There must be recognition among cryptocurrency proponents that maturation of the industry will require cooperation in many cases with incumbents and regulators,” added Werbach.
Hosanagar cautions that while decentralization offers significant value — and a significant number of miners/validators must verify the transaction for it to be validated — it is still susceptible to collusion. If one or a few companies running lots of miners/validators in a small network collude, they can affect the sanctity of the network. The big risk with cryptocurrencies, he added, is that most activity as of today is ultimately tied to speculation. It’s important for cryptocurrencies to discover a “killer app soon so there is some underlying value created beyond speculation of its future value,” Hosanagar concludes.
Given all these challenges, what is the current mindset in the financial sector towards adopting these new technologies? And, importantly, should one push for wide acceptance and deployment, or is there need for them to stabilize first?
This article is part of an editorial collaboration between Knowledge@Wharton and the SWIFT Institute.

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