#overseeing public schools. education laws. and stuff like that

[sallertiafabrica]

Teachers kwami but it’s @arcadeology’s French Fae Court (+ her Zodiac Races designs cuz I LOVE those guys)

Bonus: Cross-Dimensional Grudges

[leagueofgardens]

The Origins of Assault Lily

In 2005, Obanazawa Kenei (the original creator of Assault Lily, which officially launched much later in 2013) posted a description of a setting that he called "Private!¹ Yurigaoka Girls' Academy" on his blog. Later, he put up an expanded write-up on the website of a model dealing partnership he was a member of. This is an English translation of the expanded write-up.

In translating it, I tried to be as literal as possible while also conveying the rather casual tone that most of the original writing has.

I translated this because I think it's genuinely interesting to see how some of these ideas continued into Assault Lily, while others were changed or discarded. I have assumed that Obanazawa doesn't mind people reading this because it's still online and he has mentioned it in interviews about Assault Lily, but if he ever indicates that he no longer wants it to be public, I'll delete this post.

¹ Private as in "Yurigaoka is a private school", not as in "Obanazawa didn't want anyone to see this."

Yurigaoka Girls' Academy — Setting

In the 23rd century, because of various changes in the planet's environment, living things have also rapidly mutated and evolved.

Some of them have turned into monsters that prey upon humans.

Developed countries have invented new weapons to oppose these monsters, and it's the responsibility of all of humanity to use these weapons. This is so that every single person has the means to defend themselves.

Teenagers are the best at learning how to become warriors, and to train them in advanced fighting techniques, the high school curriculum now includes combat as a subject of study.

Japan is no exception to the state the world is in, and the Ministry of Education oversees the new curriculum. It's been 30 years since that happened. The story begins in 2230, when the belief that humanity can't survive without fighting has spread throughout society.

Yurigaoka Private Girls' Academy… a missionary school for girls that moved to Ikuta² after the new education requirements were implemented.

It's an elite high school that's recognized for teaching its students everything from advanced tactics and strategy to one-on-one fighting, training in the use of the latest weapons, and more. Atop a low hill stands its beautiful cathedral, and its gate rises towards the heavens. A garden in which the chosen maidens gather… that's what Yurigaoka Girls' Academy is.

The setting of Private! Yurigaoka Girls' Academy

Well, it's the year 2200, and all sorts of creatures on the planet have evolved, in a bad way.

So you see, humanity isn't at the top of the food chain any longer. Uh-oh, lizards got all big, so there's dragons and stuff now. Other wacky creatures (you know, monsters! The real gross kinds! Ones with tentacles and stuff!) are spreading all over the place. That means that by the time people are high schoolers, they've gotta be stronger than anyone believed possible! They'll already be drilling like soldiers! Because that's how strong humanity is, y'know? Everyone on the planet is a warrior, that's what this is like! But there hasn't been a world war or some kind of disaster that destroyed the Earth, so civilization is still moving right along. There was a lot of inequality in the world once, but when the monsters showed up, they wiped all that away. So things aren't like that any longer. Anyway! Civilization's progressing in all sorts of ways. Humans aren't Night Heads³ anymore, for the most part. Almost everyone can use over half of their brainpower now. And among those hidden powers, people have plenty of abilities that are a lot like magic and superpowers. So now, with these powers they've gotten that completely ignore the laws of nature, humanity is fumbling for a way to try and remove themselves from the food chain once again. Even in this world, Yurigaoka Girls' Academy is amazing. Guns of all sorts, swords, hand-to-hand fighting—their graduates have all found a way of fighting to call their own, and are throwing themselves into the battle to protect humanity.

Yurigaoka's Unique Educational Systems

1: The Schutzengel System

This is a system where an older student becomes the Schutzengel (meaning guardian angel) to one of her juniors. It's a system dating from the time when Yurigaoka was a Christian school. Well, this part is just like it is in "Someone-sama is Watching"⁴, hee hee. This is a parody, after all, so please excuse the silliness. Anyway, the three school years are known as Erzengels (archangels, 3rd-year students), Schutzengels (guardian angels, 2nd-year students), and stray sheep⁵ (1st-year students), with students from each year taking care of the younger ones. This is a big deal for the party system, which I'll talk about later, and other things too.

2: The party system

At Yurigaoka Private Girls' Academy, there's a system where three people will join up into a party. Of course, the girls in a party together have a super-strong bond! Students can form whatever parties they like, as long as at least one member is a senior. Fighting monsters isn't so easy that three inexperienced girls from the same school year could get together and do it, after all.

3: Sororities⁶

Sororities are a bit like social clubs, but it's not like everyone has to join one. They're like any other club or after-school activity. There are a whole bunch of sororities at Yurigaoka, but five of them are officially recognized by the school, and these five all have their own requirements to join. Being a strong fighter or a good student, that sort of thing. Sororities are an opposing force to the Student Council, which has immense power, and the fact is that it's their presence that allows the school to operate in a democratic manner. The leaders of sororities are called "Masters", and each of them has inherited one of the several special deposited⁷ weapons that are called Gears.

Yurigaoka's Curriculum

Year One

Yurigaoka uses a credit system, and the first year is used to determine the aptitude of new students. Basic fighting skills, handling and practical use of their main weapons, simulation games, mock battles and so forth are all used to choose the best warriors among them. The available electives are equipment training (with missile launchers, bombs, communication gear and so forth.) The most important thing is for students to find a fighting style they're good at. They're also trained to fight in the parties they'll be in later. Normally, during this year, every student will find a Schutzengel who she'll call "Onee-sama." Second-year students also believe that to become a proper student, they need to choose a stray sheep to guide, so they'll be looking for a younger girl who they like during this time. But those who enter into an oath with one another also usually join the same party, so it's not solely about liking or disliking each other personally.

Year Two

It's well known that Yurigaoka is strict with allowing only those who have earned it to graduate, and advancing to the next school year is equally challenging. To progress to their second year, students must have mastered the Deposition⁷ Synchro-System. The Deposition Synchro-System, which allows someone to instantly materialize various weapons, serves as proof that one is a senior Yurigaoka student. (This is a rip-off of Gavan.)⁸ The students will continue advancing the skills they learned during their first year, as they begin fighting real battles as parties. Second-year students also study, as a required subject, the Deck Battle System that uses Sealed Card Decks. By collecting cards, each of which has a special technique with unusually potent offensive ability sealed within it, they'll get highly effective attacks they can use while fighting monsters, although there's a limit to the number of times they can be used. (This is a rip-off of Kamen Rider Ryuki and Blade.)⁸ Notably, the reason that the 13 special weapons used to protect the school are considered special is that because they can take cards that are unusually powerful and effective. These 13 special weapons, called "Gears", belong to the leaders of the student council and the masters of the sororities, and are passed down to others through various means.

Year Three

All the third-year students of Yurigaoka, with their amazing powers, hold the future of Japan in their hands. They've gotten even more accurate and proficient with the Deposition Synchro-System they learned in year one, and the Deck Battle System they learned in year two. They can now elevate party battles to new heights. Third-year students don't need to use wild strategies. They can just charge right in and overwhelm the enemy. That's the true mark of a third-year. As many important positions in the school as possible are held by third-years, like the three student council presidents (the Yellow Lily, White Lily, and Red Lily, hee hee.)⁴ If you hear a girl say without hesitation that she'll take on a thousand enemies, you know she's a senior Yuri girl.

Later On

Graduates from Yurigaoka Private Girls' Academy can proceed straight to Yurigaoka Girls' College. The college's clubs also attract strong fighters who aren't students there.

Weapons and That Sort of Thing

It's not part of the curriculum, but Yuri girls are expected to take many credits' worth of electives during their three years at the school. Depending on their decisions and how motivated they are, they can earn a lot of credits doing this. The electives include weapons training and live combat courses. Oh, and also, the weapons should be the futuristic sort, but the near future. The reason is that I don't know a thing about weapons, hee hee! The only gun I know about is the P-90 from Gunslinger Girl! The only thing I know about warships is some are called Aegis warships! That's why! So keep in mind this is fantasy, in a lot of senses of the word! Someone lend me their brain here! Weapons! I know nothing about them!

The Location

Well, Yurigaoka Girls' Academy is near Ikuta Station on the Odakyu Odawara Line (but this story takes place in 2200, remember? Don't try to find it!) Not Mukogaoka Yuen! Ikuta! The school's on a small hill, where there used to be an experimental facility⁹ used by the old Japanese Army. Yeah, that place! You think the neighbors know about it? By the way, the only trains on the Odakyu line nowadays are those "Romancecar" express trains¹⁰. What's with that?

Gears

These are the 13 special weapons. Not only are their fundamental abilities an order of magnitude better, they have special card readers which can read advanced decks called High Rankers' Decks. They're the latest weapons used to protect the school, and can only be used by people whom they themselves deem worthy. It's impossible for anyone else to use them. Those who can use the Gears also become able to use High Rankers' Decks. The case holding the decks has a thin LCD display that can be used like a touch-sensitive PDA. By entering the right password, you can use super special techniques! The passwords are things like 555, 333 and 000. (This is a rip-off too.)⁸

Yurigaoka Girls' Academy Character Illustrations

I've chosen not to repost Obanazawa's illustrations here because I don't like reposting illustrations that belong to people and not corporations. But you can see them on the original website.

These are characters that I, Obanazawa Kenei, drew.

My scanner is broken, so I took and uploaded these with my mobile phone's camera!

It's crazy, I know! But even if they weren't photos they wouldn't be great!

1: Ruri and Miki¹¹

On the left is the model for this kit. She's a new student who just entered Yurigaoka by passing the high school entrance exam. Yurigaoka has a junior high school, high school and university, so it's pretty tough to enter midway through. But fortunately! Ruri has a gentle, yet sometimes strict onee-sama to guide her! (Yeah, yeah…) On the right is her onee-sama, Miki, a second-year at Yurigaoka. Miki is one of the student council presidents. She's a remarkable person who will soon be one of the pillars supporting Yurigaoka! Oh, and she's rich enough that it'll blow your mind!

Text on the first image My scanner's busted as usual, so I took this on my phone. On the left is the main character, Ruri. I imagine her voice as Saito Chiwa's! On the right is the girl who becomes her onee-sama, Miki. I imagine her voice as Hitomi Nabatame's! My drawings don't have a pattern to them, huh? I can't tell them apart myself!

2: The Commander of the Tricolor Lilies! Shigure Hisae

Yurigaoka's student council has three presidents, and one of them is her, Shigure Hisae. She's a straight-laced person who seems like she's similar to a samurai, but she's one of the most capable student council presidents of all time. She's especially skilled with swords and uses the Gear "Mistilteinn."

So, this girl, before I get too into things, I want to say she's based on Signum¹²! It's fine, isn't it? I just can't say "Laevateinn!" Oh, and watch out for the tentacles, hee hee!

Footnotes

² Ikuta is a train station in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture on the Odakyu Odawara line. It's two stops before Yurigaoka (the station called that, not the Garden, which in current canon isn't even in Kawasaki.) ³ "Night Head" refers to the 70% of their brain that most humans (supposedly) don't use. Those who can use more of their brain have psychic powers. The term comes from a 1992 Japanese television series of the same name. ⁴ This is a reference to Maria-sama ga Miteru. ⁵ Obanazawa wrote this as "stray sheep" in English, otherwise I'd have translated it as "lost lambs." ⁶ I haven't talked about them on this blog before, but this concept survives in Assault Lily as the "Labyrinth Sorority", a clandestine society that acts as a check on the power of Yurigaoka's student council. They operate an unofficial legion, LG Ginnungagap, whose members are registered with the school as freelance Lilies and sortie together. ⁷ Deposition (in Japanese, 蒸着, jouchaku) is a reference to the tokusatsu show Space Sheriff Gavan, where the titular sheriff yells "Deposition!" to have his spaceship encase him in Granium particles that form into his combat suit. In physics, deposition is when a solid surface is coated by individual molecules of another substance (metal plating is one type of deposition.) ⁸ Just to be clear: Obanazawa actually wrote these things here himself. They're not some kind of editorial by me, the translator (the only things I added were these footnotes and the sentences all in italic.) ⁹ This seems to be referring to the Noborito Research Institute, which is now a museum. ¹⁰ I think this is Obanazawa complaining about the real world, not anything related to the setting… Can't be sure though. ¹¹ Ruri's name is almost definitely Ruri, but I'm less sure about Miki. It's not as likely, but the kanji in her name could be pronounced Mitsuki or Miyuki instead. It's impossible to tell from what's written here. ¹² From Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's.

[deniigi]

Hi Dr. Matt, I too am a college youth coming to you for advice, well actually more like concept. What does GPA actually mean, in terms of my ability to get jobs/go to grad school/etc. I grew up in a very "4.0" or bust household and while I've broken free (god that first B was freeing) I have less than 0 ability to actually add context to these numbers. Help?

Hi, anon!

So let’s start from the top and be real broad for you and other folks who might be in different circumstances:

GPA = Grade Point Average. Each institution may calculate this differently. I occasionally have to do them by hand, but why the fuck would you do that is the better question here.

GPA is usually a number between 0.00 and 4.00. Students who fall below a certain GPA at college/univ level (for many institutions in the USA, 2.0 is that number, which is a C average) go on something called Academic Probation

The reason Academic Probation is a problem is because if you are on Academic Probation for multiple semesters, you may be ‘Disqualified,’ I.e. Kicked out of your college/univ.

So in this sense, GPA functions as a way of demonstrating to the University and the people giving you Financial Aid that you are making satisfactory progress on your degree, and you are ‘worthy’ of continuing to receive subsidized education.

While that’s a shitty way of conceiving of humans and education, that’s the system we live in, and that’s essentially why it’s really important for people to be aware of their GPA.

It’s not that that number defines you or your intrinsic worth as a human, rather its that that number gives you access to other things.

Now, on that note, let’s talk about GPA in terms of social value, economic value, and social and academic mobility. It’s going to be a long conversation, so I’m putting it under the cut.

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Depending on your field of career and study, average GPAs are going to vary.

Engineers, for example, go through such difficult classes that they have notoriously low GPAs. Like anything from a 2.0 to a 3.0 is solid and anything higher than like a 3.3 is considered by many in Engineering fields to be really good.

Many STEM fields are like this. Chemistry, Kinesiology, Physics, Math, Engineering, Biology, Bio-Chem, etc.

In many Social Science and Humanities fields, GPAs are less important than research and analytical abilities, writing strength, communication abilities, teamwork stuff -- transferable, “soft” skills essentially.

That being said, when you are trying to move up, academically or economically, GPA may become a factor that you start to think about--especially when you are applying to a type of specialized or graduate school (certification programs, nursing programs, teaching certificate, Masters degrees, PhDs, etc).

Many programs have GPA limits on their programs in order to thin out their application pools. Nursing programs may have a 3.0 minimum. Masters programs may ask you to have only gotten X number of Bs or Cs.

I want to emphasize here, however: GPA minimums depend on the program itself.

Prestige is one of the main driving factors behind demanding a certain GPA. Places with prestigious programs and jobs have the notoriety that brings them loads of applicants, which in turn gives them the ability to raise standards.

The top 10 schools in the US are going to be able to demand a 3.5 GPA or higher for admission.

The top firms in a city can say that you need X amount of experience in X area to be hired onto their team.

-----------------

When it comes to applying to graduate school stuff (law school, Masters programs, PhD programs), I would focus less on whether or not you have a freakishly high GPA and more on your extracurriculars, your publications, research opportunities, writing abilities, analytical skills, and the hard skills necessary for your chosen field (I.e. Knowing MatLab or Python or GIS).

The reason for that is that you don’t really choose a graduate school so much as you choose a supervisor at a graduate school.

So if you can connect with a potential supervisor and are able to demonstrate to them that you A) are an asset to their program and B) have the skills necessary to do the work, then they are often the ones who decide whether or not you get admitted.

Supervisors can often smooth over lumps and bumps when it comes to admission of graduate students because THEY will be the ones overseeing your work before the Univ/program is.

Example: When I applied to one of my schools, the potential supervisor I was working with coached me in how to structure my research statement. They also advocated for me in admissions, and I did, in fact, get into that school (even if I chose not to go). For my other choice, I worked with a different supervisor who helped me get funding to help me secure admission as well.

So in this way, it is far more important for you to impress a supervisor than to have the best GPA of all applicants.

--------------

Now for the rest of y’all who aren’t thinking about grad school or a certification program, you may be asking, “Will my GPA affect my ability to get a job in the future?”

And first off, I want to sort of break down the notion that your degree = your career. Only something like 30% of people end up working in the field they get their degree in, so that tells you already that GPA and choice of Major kind of doesn’t matter in terms of being able to make money.

But more to the point:

Generally speaking, most (like, 95% or something) jobs do NOT require you to list your GPA on your resume or any other application materials.

Some positions may ask you to demonstrate proficiency in a given area or hard skill. Some positions may ask you to provide proof that you completed your degree. But usually, this proof is given to a company AFTER you have applied and accepted an offer for the position.

Example: after I accepted my job, I was asked to submit proof of my Masters degree, because my offer was contingent on me having the credentials I said that I did.

Now, if you are fresh out of school and don’t have much experience, but you’ve got a bangin’ GPA, that may be something that you consider listing on your resume to demonstrate to employers that you are a smart cookie, simply lacking experience.

If you are a new graduate in a STEM field specifically, and you have a bangin’ GPA and are looking for work in STEM, then you may also list that on your resume.

But I want to emphasize that you don’t have to. It is your choice. And in this scenario, you would only do that if you were applying to a highly specific position where that mattered and if you felt that it would help you.

If you’re applying to anything that is not an internship or a STEM entry job (like a new engineer, a new lab assistant, etc) there is no reason for you to put your GPA on your resume. That should not affect your chances for a position.

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That’s probably plenty of food for thought for now. But anon, you can breathe. I got your other message and you are doing fantastically. Try to understand that the number isn’t as important as your competence and understanding in the material you are learning.

For right now, focus on building the skills. When it comes down to it, people would rather have a doctor who understands what to do to save their life than a doc who got a 4.0 in undergrad.

[bbq-hawks-wings]

hey! I've seen a bunch of posts on how HPSC is slightly corrupted and all, could you explain if you understand this? They're (die hard villain fans) usually using this as a justification to slam the heroes for raiding the army. I'm quite confused sorry

I’d be more than happy to, friend! I have a strong feeling it’s going to be a key detail in the story moving forward so it’s good to go back in reviewing everything we know now; plus, it gives me the perfect chance to offer up my theory that ropes in Aizawa, Midnight, and Present Mic. Buckle up, though, because this gets a little long.

The HPSC tells heroes what to do.

The Hero Public Safety Commission is a pocket of the Japanese national government in this universe, sort of like how the FDA is in America.

It’s important to note that HPSC is a separate entity from the heroes. They’re the ones giving out licenses, disciplining rouge heroes, overseeing hero training, acting as liaison between heroes and law enforcement, organizing cooperative efforts with multiple heroes across different regions, and managing the general image of heroes with events like the Hero Rankings Billboard.

Heroes have to obey directives given by the HPSC and hero schools have to align with guidelines set by the HPSC, but heroes don’t usually get a say in these decisions and often only get to complain about how things are done and are stuck doing it anyway. If someone is caught heroing without a license or not in hero uniform, you can be fined and/or jailed. If a hero doesn’t keep up with paperwork or runs off and does their own thing they can also be fined and have their license suspended. If a hero goes AWOL or completely flips out they can have their license permanently taken away and be jailed.

It’s actually even more important to note that way heroes are allowed to operate and answer to the government is actually closer in line to a militia than a police force. In fact, while heroes are allowed to make arrests and use their quirks, they are more restricted in what they can and can’t do on their own than the police. If a hero wants to work with other heroes on an investigation, they have to use the private network (administrated by the HPSC) or communicate in person. In the case with the Shie Hassaikai or looking for Kurogiri and the LoV where police cooperation was necessary to carry out the investigation and bring in the gang right away there was no choice but to be transparent with the HPSC.

However, the HPSC doesn’t have to be transparent with the heroes.

They require heroes to give up all their information to keep working as heroes, but they don’t have any accountability for themselves and have notably dodged scrutiny up to this point with public backlash almost always falling on the heroes who have little to no say in how they run things.

Starting back at the beginning of the series with the USJ incident, it understandably garnered massive media attention - it should have. Dozens of unknown, random two-bit villains poured into the most secure, prestigious hero school in all of Japan undetected and resulted in the serious injury of two teachers and could have included the students as well if All Might had not been there to fight and subdue the inhuman monster - the Nomu - who had up to that point had never been seen before.

It’s not unreasonable that UA initially got the blowback from this as it could have been chalked up to complacency causing a lapse in security that the HPSC absolutely wouldn’t have been accountable for. It’s treated like a one-off event and despite investigations going nowhere on it, it’s ultimately downplayed and checked out in the background while continuing with the Sports Festival in high spirits. However, things get worse.

After passing their semester exams the Hero Course first-years head off to do practical training in the mountains with a hero team named the Wild Wild Pussycats. Remember, because this is a hero training initiative between a school and a hero team, the HPSC is likely involved at least on some administrative level in regards to granting permission and securing the patch of mountainside to use even if this detail is not acknowledged in the series. Despite efforts to only include the staff, teachers, and heroes involved word somehow still gets out - resulting in more student, hero, and teacher injuries, and most importantly the kidnapping of one of the students.

This can no longer be swept under the rug. A lot happens in the secret hideout raid revealing lots of stuff with the plot, including All-for-One’s direct involvement, but it doesn’t add anything more to our notes besides the fact UA is once again blamed and heroes are thrown under the bus instead of the organization overseeing them.

Fast forward to the Provisional License Arc. This is the first time we see the HPSC acting explicitly. It’s noted that they passed significantly more students this year than previously. Yokumiru Mera, the tired proctor, is overworked. The HPSC has a reason to urgently pump more students into the “working force” now than it had before, though at the moment it’s written off as a result of All Might’s retirement.

During the Shie Hassaikai arc the only suspect detail we get is the fact that the raid on compound is inexplicably compromised, and somehow the yakuza knew the heroes and police were coming. We’ll come back to this and to the leaks in UA again later.

Skipping the remedial courses and school festival arc, we get to the Pro Hero Arc. Big lights, pomp and circumstance, and a massive powerful Nomu attack that nearly kills the freshly crowned #1 Hero. From this point forward, what we get of the HSPC is mainly through Hawks and his experience with him. After the fight, we get a flashback of the President of the HSPC herself telling him to ignore civilian casualties in his mission to infiltrate the LoV, that he has to do it solo, and that he can’t tell anyone. Briefly in the next chapter he says that despite his objections he can’t actually tell them no.

Hold up!

Did a government agency just tell a hero to secretly get in with the villains no matter what, and when he objects and asks whether he’s just supposed to ignore collateral damage in the process is told, “You can and you will”?! (That’s a verbatim quote from chapter 192.) I thought this agency was supposed to hep people and keep them safe!

We get smatterings of interactions between Hawks and the HPSC, and though we don’t get anything from there side we’re getting that every questionable or deplorable thing Hawks does or needs to get on the LoV’s good side is acknowledged and endorsed by the HPSC. “I’m in contact with the shady guy who loosed that monster in the middle of the city with no warning. He wants me to kill the other top hero who just recovered and to join the definitely-dangerous doomsday cult, and maybe THEN he’ll let me in on what’s going on.” Ok, sure. Nothing morally questionable about any of that...

Jump to chapter 267. Up to this point, this note about Hawks’ past has been hinted at, but is here finally confirmed with a chilling detail. Kids who enter hero work may get special coaching by their families when they’re young, but the threshold for entering formal government-regulated training isn’t until 14/15 years of age in the last few years of their education. Chapter 267 shows a little Keigo Takami no older than about 8, at best, being told by the HPSC that he doesn’t get to call himself by his own name anymore. From now on, he’s going to be a hero, and only a hero, and it’s going to long and hard. Back in 192, two mysterious figures promise the same boy, shown at the same age, that his family will be taken care of.

Whatever circumstances led Keigo’s family to end up in the situation they did, they accepted an offer from a government agency, the HPSC specifically - you can see their headquarters in the flashback - to take away their very young son, take away his identity (and implicitly his family), and groom him to be government tool for the rest of his life - a commitment he had no true say in and that he could not understand at the time.

And it gets worse.

Endeavor works with the HPSC regularly as all heroes have to, but his relationship with them and what they’ll let him get away with gets put into greater question the longer we look at it. He turned to eugenics to create a hero he couldn’t be and surpass All Might for the sole purpose of satisfying his own ego. He bought a girl from her family and forced her to have his kids, then subjected those kids to cruel training - passing over each one until he got to one he felt he could work with -, beat his wife as well, and some kind of action he was involved in lead to the death of his oldest son. While the domestic abuse could be hidden, the death of his child cannot. What’s more, shortly after (very shortly if timelines add up), his youngest son received a permanent burn scar on the heat-resistant side of his face and his wife was locked away in a mental institution for a decade.

And the HPSC never bats an eye. They could take away his license. They could call the police. They could have exposed him to the public or at least ordered an investigation. But they didn’t. On some level they knew, and they did nothing.

But it might be even worse.

I skipped over this detail chronologically, but it’s the linchpin for just how corrupt the HPSC might be if all this lines up. Looking at the Endeavor Agency Arc, we get a seemingly random confrontation with a guy called Starservant (chapter 243) who prattles off a prophecy about the Dark Lord returning and his Dark Stars conspiring against humanity which will bring the world to ruin. He calls out Endeavor specifically as the shining light that beckons the darkness, but this sounds an awful lot like the deranged wailing of some crazy old man, right?

Let’s jump over an entire series now to the spin-off serial Vigilantes. This series takes place in the same universe at an earlier point in the timeline of the main story - and take an extra little note that there’s an underlying subplot about unusual drugs meant to enhance quirks (that often result in mutating the user) and that someone may be using them to clandestinely run experiments on humans from the shadows. 

In chapter 59 we get flashbacked to Eraserhead, Midnight, and Present Mic’s childhood experiences at UA, and we’re also introduced to Oboro Shirakumo - their fellow classmate and dear friend. We get a few chapters establishing their relationships and their goals and dream for the future until chapter 63 where things make a drastic turn in tone. On what should be a routine hero training exercise as third-year seniors a giant, monstrous villain shows up and attacks while the UA kids are escorting a class of preschoolers around town.

In the scuffle, though Aizawa is able to single-handedly come out victorious, in the fight and debris Shirakumo is struck in the head by falling concrete as he tries to lead the children to safety and dies on the scene. Go back to main series, chapter 254-255, the villain Kurogiri is detained but the police are having no luck questioning him. They get a sliver of a lead and call in Present Mic and Eraserhead to interrogate him, and it’s confirmed that Kurogiri was a human experiment of Doctor Ujiko - the mad scientist bio-engineer responsible for the Nomu and outspokenly faithful servant of All-for-One - created from the corpse of their dearly departed Oboro.

Here’s the kicker, though, in Japan they don’t often bury their dead. Funerals next to never include an open casket - the loved one is cremated first, their ashes placed on an funeral shrine with their picture, and the loved ones mourn there. That means Ujiko needed to get to the body before it was cremated - which requires some fast work; but that’s not even the worst of it. Jumping one last time to chapter 270, Ujiko recognizes Mic as a friend of Shirakumo and boldly admits the entire time he was after Aizawa for his quirk.

That attack more than 10 years ago was premeditated. This goes back a long ways. How did he find this information - about their quirks and their movements and where to find them? How did Ujiko get the body out of the morgue without anyone catching him? Could it be the same way his fellow servants of All-for-One were able to get into the USJ? And the Training Camp? And the Yakuza raid? All-for-One has a lot of connections for his faithful servants to move about freely in this world of heroes despite every effort being take to stop them. 

Somehow, these shining lights can never seem to outrun the dark no matter how hard they try, as if there’s a conspiracy against them. But a conspiracy of that level would have to come all the way from the top! If you wanted to get poetic about it, you could even say the stars themselves are conspiring against us. But that old man was crazy, right? If he wasn’t crazy - if he was right at all - then no matter what way you slice it:

This is bad.

[orbemnews]

Amazon Workers’ Union Drive Reaches Far Beyond Alabama Players from the National Football League were among the first to voice their support. Then came Stacey Abrams, the Democratic star who helped turn Georgia blue in the 2020 election. The actor Danny Glover traveled to Bessemer, Ala., for a news conference last week, where he invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s pro-union leanings in urging workers at Amazon’s warehouse there to organize. Tina Fey has weighed in, and so has Senator Bernie Sanders. Then on Sunday, President Biden issued a resounding declaration of solidarity with the workers now voting on whether to form a union at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, without mentioning the company by name. Posted to his official Twitter account, his video was one of the most forceful statements in support of unionizing by an American president in recent memory. “Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union,” Mr. Biden said. A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers. On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is one of the world’s dominant companies, an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history. The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at the Bessemer warehouse, which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South. The retail workers union has a long history of organizing Black workers in the poultry and food production industries, helping them gain basic benefits like paid time off and safety protections and a means to economic security. The union is portraying its efforts in Bessemer as part of that legacy. “This is an organizing campaign in the right-to-work South during the pandemic at one of the largest companies in the world,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School. “The significance of a union victory there really couldn’t be overstated.” The warehouse workers began voting by mail on Feb. 8 and the ballots are due at the end of this month. A union can form if a majority of the votes cast favor such a move. Amazon’s countercampaign, both inside the warehouse and on a national stage, has zeroed in on pure economics: that its starting wage is $15 an hour, plus benefits. That is far more than its competitors in Alabama, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. “It’s important that employees understand the facts of joining a union,” Heather Knox, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will provide education about that and the election process so they can make an informed decision. If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site and it’s important associates understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon.” The company, which went on a huge hiring spree last year as homebound customers sent its sales to a record $386 billion, recorded more than $22 billion in profit. In Alabama, some workers are growing weary of the process. One employee recently posted on Facebook: “This union stuff getting on my nerves. Let it be March 30th already!!!” The situation is getting testy, with union leaders accusing Amazon of a series of “union-busting” tactics. The company has posted signs across the warehouse, next to hand sanitizing stations and even in bathroom stalls. It sends regular texts and emails, pointing out the problems with unions. It posts photos of workers in Bessemer on the internal company app saying how much they love Amazon. At certain training sessions, company representatives have pointed out the cost of union dues. When some workers have asked pointed questions in the meetings, the Amazon representatives followed up with them at their work stations re-emphasizing the downsides of unions, employees and organizers say. The meetings stopped once the voting started, but the signs are still up, said Jennifer Bates, a pro-union worker in the warehouse. In this charged atmosphere, even routine things have become suspect. The union has raised questions about the changing of the timing of a traffic light near the warehouse where labor organizers try to talk to the workers as they are stopped in their vehicles while leaving the facility. Amazon did ask county officials in mid-December to change the light’s timing, though there is no evidence in the county records that the change was made to thwart the union. “Traffic for Amazon is backing up around shift change,” the public records stated as the reason the county altered the light. Amazon regularly navigates traffic concerns around its facilities, and wasting unpaid time in congested parking lots is a frequent gripe of Amazon workers in Facebook groups. But the retail workers’ union president, Stuart Appelbaum, questioned the timing of the request in Bessemer, coming as it did at the height of the organizing. “When the light was red we could answer questions and have a brief conversation with workers,” he said. Last week, the union questioned an offer the company made to the Alabama warehouse workers to pay them at least $1,000 if they quit by late March. Mr. Appelbaum accused the company of trying to entice employees to leave before the vote ended. “They are trying to remove the most likely union supporters from their work force by bribing them to leave and give up their vote,” he said in an interview. But “The Offer,” as it’s known among employees, was the same that Amazon made to workers at all of its warehouses around the country. It is an annual program that lets the company reduce its head count after the peak holiday shopping season without layoffs. It has been in place since at least 2014, when Jeff Bezos wrote about it in a shareholder letter. “Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit,” Mr. Bezos said at the time. “In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.” Mr. Appelbaum was not swayed. He said he believed that Amazon had chosen to make the offer across all of its warehouses when it did in order to help eliminate possible “yes” votes in Bessemer. President Biden stopped short of urging the Amazon workers to unionize, but his statement instantly raised the stakes of an already momentous campaign. “Let me be really clear,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union. But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that, either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers. Full stop.” He added, “Workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important — a vitally important choice.” And it is one, he said, that should be made without intimidation or threats. Despite the union’s suspicions, it has not filed any formal complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, Mr. Appelbaum said. Typically, unions can raise objections to a company’s tactics before an election and the labor board can step in. If a complaint were to be filed, the labor board could potentially determine that the election is invalid because of Amazon’s actions. But after working for months to build support inside and outside the Amazon warehouse, the last thing the union wants is for the labor board to intervene and rule that the election must be held again. The voting has already been taking place in Bessemer for nearly a month. Mr. Sachs, of Harvard Law School, said that despite Mr. Biden’s admonishments of companies’ interfering in elections, the current labor law does allow Amazon to hold certain mandatory meetings with workers to discuss why they shouldn’t unionize and enables the company to post anti-union messages around the workplace. “It is very helpful that the president is calling out these tactics, but what we need is a new labor law to stop companies from interfering,” he said. It is rare for such a large union election to be held by mail. Over Amazon’s objections, the labor board required a mail-in vote after determining that federal election monitors would be at risk of contracting Covid-19 if they had to travel to Bessemer to oversee in-person voting. By pushing back aggressively against the union, Amazon risks angering Democrats in Washington, many of whom are already calling for more antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies, whose businesses have grown even larger in the pandemic. Amazon has mounted a public campaign supporting legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, buying prominent ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. In his video on Sunday, President Biden specifically mentioned how unions can help “Black and brown workers” and vulnerable workers struggling during the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. Ms. Bates, 48, one of the leaders of the union drive, started working at the Bessemer warehouse in May. She said she felt insulted by some of Amazon’s anti-union efforts, particularly the company’s statements to the staff that they would be required to pay nearly $500 in union dues every year. Because Alabama is a right-to-work state, there is no such requirement that a union member pay dues. “It angers me a little bit because I feel like they know the truth and they won’t tell the truth and are taking advantage because they know employees come from a community that is looked on as Black and low income,” said Ms. Bates, who is Black. “It felt really horrible that you would stand there and mislead people intentionally. Give them the facts and let them decide.” Source link Orbem News #Alabama #Amazon #Drive #reaches #union #Workers

[junker-town]

How Hannah Gordon is leading the 49ers’ diversity efforts

Hannah Gordon, the 49ers’ Chief Administrative Officer & General Counsel, has been with the team since 2011.

SB Nation’s Q&A series that highlights some of the NFL’s most powerful women continues with Gordon, who’s been working with the 49ers since 2011.

Over the summer of 2019, SB Nation interviewed several women who currently hold or have previously held leadership positions within the NFL to find out more about them and the work they do. This Q&A series highlights the powerful women who have dared to shake up one of sport’s biggest boys clubs. First up in the series was ex-Raiders CEO Amy Trask, followed by the Dallas Cowboys’ executive VP and chief brand officer Charlotte Jones Anderson.

Hannah Gordon is currently the Chief Administrative Officer for the San Francisco 49ers. She began her work with the 49ers back in 2011, when she was hired as the team’s director of legal affairs. She then became the vice president of legal and government affairs in 2015, then general counsel from 2016-17 before getting moved to her current role. Some of her responsibilities include overseeing community and fan engagement projects — like Women of the Niners and 49ers PRIDE for LGBTQ+ fans — as well as legal and strategic communications.

Author’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

SB Nation: Your career path is pretty unique, in that you actually started your career in journalism and PR before attending Stanford Law School. Tell me a bit more about that.

Hannah Gordon: For me, [my career] really started in college at UCLA. I was really homesick and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and watching Hannah Storm host the halftime show during the Lakers’ run for the championship that year — I love smart, funny people and conversations, and I enjoyed the repartee that she was facilitating and I thought, “That seems like such a cool job, how do you do something like that someday?” And I started looking into journalism.

While I was in college I interned for the Raiders, NPR, and as a production intern at Fox Sports West. After college, I went to the NFL Players Association for the 2003 season, and then from there went into the PR world and did media relations at Cal for football, track and swimming from 2004-05.

At that point, I had gotten accepted to law school at Stanford and I wanted to get experience at an agency as well, so I did a six-month stint at Octagon, doing the PR for their football class of clients. In law school, I went back to the Raiders as a law clerk, then went back to a firm after school.

SB: You also worked as an attorney for the NFL during the 2011 lockout, which sounds super interesting!

HG: I was with the management council working on player contracts, salary caps, and CBA. It was the best possible time to be there as a young lawyer because it was the last uncapped year. And then trying to get a new agreement, the CBA expiring, getting to learn from really amazing senior attorneys in terms of outside council, and getting to track the bid ask of every CBA negotiation.

In the midst of the lockout I was called by [president of 49ers Enterprises and executive vice president of football operations] Paraag Marathe to come [to San Francisco].

SB: In your current role with the 49ers, you oversee quite a bit, including legal, public affairs and strategic communications, and community relations. Describe what all your job entails.

HG: It’s pushing forward every business initiative that we have through the function of legal. Because anything you’re doing as a business, whether it’s season ticket agreements or suite agreements or sponsorships, all of that is a relationship between two parties and in business it always involves an agreement.

The second part would be serving every 49ers fan in our larger community, whether or not they are customers. And for me that’s sort of what connects all of our other functions. So whether its our public affairs department, our foundation that educates and empowers Bay Area youth, our community relations department which hosts the themes that you probably see in games in terms of bringing out cancer survivors in October.

That part of my job is about how do we serve everybody who is a constituent of ours. They may or may not be a business partner of ours, but we still want to have a connection to them.

SB: You also oversee fan groups, like Women of the Niners (WON) and 49ers PRIDE for LGBTQ+ fans. How did inclusiveness become such an important part of your job?

HG: I was fortunate enough that fan engagement was one of the departments that I was tasked with about two and a half years ago. And as we looked at “how are we serving underserved demographics of fans?” whether that’s kids — we have a strong kids club — or women fans or LGTBQ+ fans. I wanted to make sure that we created unique experiences for all those different people and that they felt like they were a part of the 49ers family and that they know that they’re valued by us.

For one, we really just looked at it in terms of what we were doing now, how could we continue to scale that, and upgrade that, and make it something that they feel a sense of ownership in. And it really is respectful of the fact that these are some of our most avid fans.

In terms of PRIDE, that just for us felt really natural. We’re the San Francisco 49ers, we should be leaders in terms of progress within the NFL and making sure that everybody does feel included. That’s just part of our brand and our culture.

SB: What’s a typical day of work like for you?

HG: It usually starts at 6 a.m. I try to hop out bed, come into the facility, get a workout in because we actually have a gym and classes that we do for employees. So I do that at 6:30, go home, shower, come back. Then it’s meetings most of the day. I think probably all of us that’s how our lives work, and then at 5 you realize you have like 200 unread emails, so you spend two hours getting through those. And then you actually need to start getting real work done and knocking out agreements and stuff like that.

SB: What are some of the more challenging parts about your job?

HG: Anytime you have a tough season, it really does wear on everybody in different ways. Obviously, it doesn’t wear on folks on the business side the same that it does a player or coach. But you’re deeply invested, and I think that that can be challenging.

SB: As an NFL front office employee, you’re asked a lot about how it feels to be a woman in a male-dominated industry. Is that question something you’re tired of being asked or do you embrace it?

HG: I think that that’s always been a hard question for me because I always worry about being put in a box of “Oh you’re the female,” and I think there’s always a risk that once you are pigeon-holed that way you are not able to continue to grow into future, larger leadership roles. So it’s always a question that, to be honest, makes me a little uncomfortable.

But at the same time, like most experiences in life, it can be both really great and at times, fine. Oftentimes I forget in part because I’ve spent my whole career pretty much in this business, so I don’t really have any reference points for what it would be like not to be in a male-dominated industry. For me, this is just life, right?

And I think for a lot of people that’s actually the case because when you think about other industries — whether it’s finance, law, construction, or politics — once you get to that upper echelon, it’s probably male-dominated. That’s the world that we continue to live in, so I don’t know that my experience would necessarily be tremendously different from other people.

SB: There are a lot more women in the league than there was back in the day. How inspiring is it to see that?

HG: I do think one of the things that’s exciting to see over the last 20 years is I see so many other young women supporting other young women. It’s not that it didn’t exist before, but I love seeing our scout Salli Clavelle, and our coach Katie Sowers, and our trainer Laura McCabe all getting together and supporting each other.

A couple weeks ago, we took all the training interns out, and I’m seeing so many more young women in the field and they’re there to support each other. Not to be exclusionary of their male colleagues, but I think that there’s a real power in that because none of us want to be that only woman who’s in a certain room. That’s not the goal — the goal isn’t “Oh, look I made it and you didn’t.” The goal is everybody who has a voice who has something intelligent to contribute to the conversation, we want everybody at the table.

[subtletyislost]

Worldbuilding: The Scion Way

more spaced out version here

Anonymous asked: 25. What is your worldbuilding process like? 

[TL;DR for my TL;DR: Worldbuilding is tough, but my very basic model is “if I have a question, answer it. If someone might have that question, answer it. If it’s even possible to question that thing, answer it.”

TL;DR: my worldbuilding process is basically I have a dream or fantasy about a story I want to write, this gives me a glimpse into the world, then I start writing and answer questions as they come up, making notes as I go. Sometimes the answering questions leads to connecting other stories to the world that weren’t originally part of it simply because the combined worldbuilding aspects that have been accomplished for each one simply make sense together. Sometimes it means that I sit down and actually think things out because the world is huge and I’m excited but also I need to understand X,Y,andZ or I’ll end up so frustrated that I give up.] 

Alrighty anon, I said this deserved its own post, and it does. But first let me clear up one or two things. First, my worldbuilding process highly likely won’t work for other people. Second, for just because I don’t work like other people work, does not mean my process (or theirs) is inherently bad in any way, it just means that I am an individual and my experiences and mind are different from other people’s experiences and minds. With that out of the way let’s move on.

More under the cut because this is going to get long.

 The first thing I do in worldbuilding is unusual in that it doesn’t happen intentionally. I dream. Most of my worldbuilding begins with a dream. That’s why I say my method won’t work for most people. A lot of people, can’t or don’t want to, remember their dreams. With the dream, I usually get a first look at the world, and sometimes if I’m lucky the story within it that needs to be told. That gives me a big picture view, I know what kind of world it is. Then it varies depending on how much like our world that world is.

If it’s enough like our world, I just start writing and make everything up as I go along, or research it and pick and choose the things I want in the world.

If it’s different enough, I start big picturely. I think about what kind of things live in the world, how they get along, what kind of government there is, if there’s money, do they all speak the same language, ect.

Let’s go with an example, the most detailed worldbuilding I’ve ever done is for the universe that contains several stories: Light in the Dark, Sk8r Girl, The Invisibles, The Forgotten Realm of Dreams (Scion in Space), Space Cadet Luka, Is This Home Yet?, and an unnamed sequel to Sk8r Girl (tentatively I’m considering calling it “First Contact, or How to Talk to Aliens: An Autistic Scientist’s Guide to Proper Miscommunication”).

Within it I began with a few dreams, and then story ideas.

It all began when I was 12. (No really, Space Cadet Luka is a story I began when I was 12). Back then the first bits of worldbuilding I did was this: deciding that the story took place on a human colony on a planet that isn’t Earth, that there are animals that can do magic, that the colony maintains regular contact with Earth, that there’s nonhumans living in the colony too, that the people who could control the animals went on a journey and competed in some kind of competition, that they stayed in hotels for free while on their journey (because most of the time they did their journey right around age 13), that they could listen to “holiday” music from Earth on the radio whenever they wanted, and that there were cards that could help during fights between two people who could control the animals.

Some people might say that’s bad worldbuilding because little me didn’t include important things like: what they ate, the non-placeholder names of the animals or nonhumans, who ran the contests, if someone oversaw the journeys, what kind of money they use, the moral implications of the animal/controller relationship, who founded the colony, why is there a competition, what the hell are the ‘cards’ and how do they work, ect. But in little me’s defence, I was 12.

That was it for a while, I went to other stories. Then I picked up, Is This Home Yet? To be honest, I almost didn’t include it in this post because it started/currently lives it’s life as Frozen fanfiction, but it is part of the universe and I did create its entire world by scratch. It started with one simple thing: hatred directed toward some really asshole-ish politician who said those dumb things about rape like “it should be legal to force sex upon a woman because if it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways of shutting that down.” From there I build up the world as I went, there was the true beginning of actually worldbuilding the entire universe.

I decided how the garbage is taken care of (trash pickup in Elsa’s neighborhood is every Wednesday); what they eat; how the government works; what kind of laws they have about things like discrimination against the lgbt community, racial issues, children wandering around without supervision; how the healthcare system works; what kind of problems (gangs, the mafia, human trafficking, drugs, ect) the police have to deal with on a daily basis; how insurance works; among other things.

From that I was able to build the world of The Invisibles, by adding in some simple but essential details: the inclusion of multiverse travels and theories; the everyday life of some adults (as opposed to high school students); what kind of companies are the same as our world; and minor details like the timeline and history.

For a while there were missing pieces in The Invisibles/Is This Home Yet world that broke the story for me. The most important one being that there was an agency regulating multiverse travel from a different universe in the multiverse, but I didn’t know anything about them or the world they lived in.

Then I had a dream about a skateboarding competition, two autistic lesbians, and an organization dedicated to ‘finding the truth’. And Sk8r Girl was born, and the world got bigger and better. I was able to decide more important things about the world like: who runs the school system when the government couldn’t care less about making sure people are educated because there’s ‘not enough money’ for that; who builds parks and bridges and handles the general infrastructure of the cities and towns and countries; how things might be different if exploration of the ‘new world’ focused a little less on ‘this is our land now’ and a little more on cooperation; how museums work; how children are handled when it’s discovered they’ve willingly (through either their own choice, or the choice of someone who was supposed to be taking care of them) fallen through the cracks of the system; how the general public handles autism, mental illnesses, and minority religions/people; and slightly more obscure things like differences in ancient myths.

After that I was able to create Light in the Dark, because it was in the same world, just set a few years earlier and about two side characters from Sk8r Girl. This allowed me to build up how the economy works; how companies work; how arranged marriages for business deals work; how college/university is different when it’s mostly handled by an organization dedicated to knowledge instead of private companies; how someone who doesn’t work for the big organization views it.

From all of this I was able to tie together The Invisibles with Sk8r Girl by allowing the big organization to be the organization that oversees multiverse travel.

The single most packed with worldbuilding story of them all is The Forgotten Realm of Dreams, which began from a dream and was originally not part of the universe.

[side note: The Invisibles/Is This Home Yet (though always in the same universe as each other) weren’t originally part of this large universe and neither was Space Cadet Luka (which is kind of duh because Space Cadet Luka existed well before any of the rest of these did). So originally this universe consisted solely of Light in the Dark and Sk8r Girl, the first one to get added to it was The Invisibles, when I realized that the organization was what I was missing from it, that brought Is This Home Yet with it; the second thing I added was The Forgotten Realm of Dreams and Space Cadet Luka when I realized the organization being the leader in space exploration on Earth (having unified all the disparate space organizations under their one banner through the clever use of money) would make for the perfect organization to be the face of humanity in a relatively peaceful galaxy, and being full of scientists and knowledge seekers and explorers would have made for excellent colonists to start up colonies on other worlds (and then study and work hard to cooperate and live in harmony with any native beings of the planet). Space Cadet Luka was easily attached to The Forgotten Realm of Dreams because I was lacking names for the nonhumans, and having them be some of the same species as in The Forgotten Realm of Dreams adds like 5 extra levels of stuff to the world.]

For it I have to build up entire alien civilizations (including religions, histories, biologies, governments, health care, cultures, ect); answer science questions; create multiple money systems; construct multiple languages with regional variances and both ancient, middle, and modern forms; design spaceships; interweave among all of that a deep secret and mystery of the universe; design entire planets and ecosystems; create new technology; repurpose ‘old’ technology; then I have to take everything I’ve created and put it through the lens of a nonhuman character or several; and be able to answer literally any question a fan would think to ask me about any of it.

Worldbuilding is tough, but my very basic model is “if I have a question, answer it. If someone might have that question, answer it. If it’s even possible to question that thing, answer it.”

I don’t know if any of this helps you at all, but it should give a weird look into my brain that is unedited and possibly doesn’t make any sense.

[the-magic-of-those-good-old-days]

I am dumbstruck by the coverage I am viewing of the education secretary confirmation hearing. And I'm not talking the pandering facebook group crap, I'm talking actual CSPAN clips here. I honestly don't care if you support or oppose the democratic senators who questioned her- what I care about is Betsy DeVos' lack of basic knowledge and experience required of her position.

1. She has no education certifications or degree and has never held a position in the education field (I am literally having "Bobby Newport" flashbacks at this point) 2. Does not seem to have an understanding of the debate of growth v. proficiency (This is freshman level stuff, people.) 3. No understanding of the federal law IDEA (protecting the rights of students with disabilities) and supports voucher programs that make students with disabilities sign away their rights 4. noncommittal in upholding established department policies such as in reporting sexual assault on college campuses, gainful employment regulations, or accountability standards across federally funded schools 5. It's one thing to serve as chairperson for foundations that support school choice, vouchers, and privatizing education but then to take on the role of overseeing the entire department of education after calling public education a "dead end" and "closed market" seems over-dramatic and ignorant to me. It's because of people like her and the push for school choice that this funding is sucked from the districts that need it the MOST and trusting in the free market seems irresponsible and inconsistent when it comes to educating our nation's children. Also, I know it's petty to consider this a strike against her but since she is also in charge of higher education, it's worth noting she has never had to take out gov. loans for herself or children's education.

*This list is just a few of the questionable things I've come across- not even taking into account my own opinions on the education system. But if we want to talk "school choice" let's find someone who has not just a "passion" for it but actually has reasonable and logical solutions and understands the depth of complexity this issue. Sometimes its not enough to advocate for choices that make the parents (who can afford it) "happy", we need to think about the big picture implications this may have on our society.

[zipgrowth]

Chief Privacy Officers: The Unicorns of K-12 Education

Last month, the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published a report arguing schools and districts should go the way of other industries and hire a Chief Privacy Officer to oversee their organization’s privacy policies and practices.

Page by page, the report explains what a CPO is, why the role is necessary and even provides a two-page sample job description districts can use to begin the hiring process for a CPO.

The intent here is good, says Linnette Attai, a K-12 privacy expert and founder of the global compliance consulting firm PlayWell, LLC. Schools and districts collect, manage and analyze more data now than ever before. That data can be used to improve K-12 decision-making, tailor instruction to each student and flag when one student needs extra attention or assistance. But because data can also be misused, abused, exposed and manipulated, it must be protected. Thus, the need for a Chief Privacy Officer—someone who can establish and enforce privacy policies, train staff on privacy procedures and ensure that all data is collected and shared safely.

But the reality is that Chief Privacy Officers in K-12 education are about as common as unicorns. EdSurge contacted education nonprofits, a technology association and a handful of privacy experts, and none could identify a single K-12 CPO. In fact, it is still extremely rare for districts to hire even one full-time employee dedicated to privacy—leadership or otherwise—says Attai, who frequently advises K-12 districts on privacy issues.

“It should be a leadership position, but it’s not,” she tells EdSurge. “We’re a really long way off from it ever being there, and we may never be there.”

The reason comes down to funding, Attai says. K-12 districts have to establish their priorities, and while privacy continues to move up that list, a CPO isn’t likely to make the cut.

Still, she emphasizes that the absence of a CPO in K-12 is not synonymous with a shoddy privacy program: “It’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t have to be detrimental to student privacy protections.”

Instead of going the more aspirational route outlined by the CDT, Attai argues that districts start by giving privacy personnel—or the closest they have to it—the ears and attention of school leadership. If they’re not going to have a seat at the table, they at least need to communicate with those who do.

In at least two public school districts—both large systems that serve close to or more than 100,000 students—that’s how it works. Denver Public Schools in Colorado and Baltimore County Public Schools in Maryland have each hired a senior-level official who is responsible for the organization’s privacy policies and data governance.

Denver’s Student Data Privacy Officer

Two years ago, Denver Public Schools created a new role, the Student Data Privacy Officer, after the Colorado legislature passed a law to promote student data privacy and transparency.

Bryan Westerman, then a client tech analyst for the district, became the first person to fill the position. At a high level, his job is to ensure that DPS—the largest district in the state, with 90,000 students—complies not only with federal privacy laws (FERPA, COPPA, CIPA) but with the new state one as well.

Colorado was one of the first states, along with California and Connecticut, to pass a sweeping student privacy law, Westerman says. The law focuses on three main areas: data use and data use restrictions for third parties; data destruction, which is required at the end of a contract term or vendor relationship; and transparency, so the public can know which vendors each district does business with.

In his role, Westerman works closely with the district’s legal team to make sure their policies are in compliance with the law. He also spends a lot of time on contract reviews, he says.

When the state legislature passed its privacy bill in summer 2016, a group of district technology leaders in the state convened to get a game plan. “We said, ‘OK, this new law is going to be big and change a lot about how we do business. Let’s come up with a contract template for this but one that still allows us to do our own thing,’” Westerman recalls. “There was a lot of consensus and collaboration with that.”

The education leaders created the “Data Protection Addendum,” a document that each district requires its vendors to sign. A sample addendum—in this case, it was used with the company Amplify—can be viewed here. As part of its commitment to public transparency, DPS publishes each data protection addendum and vendor privacy policy online.

Westerman is a “team of one” at DPS, he says, which makes him the only person in the state in his role or one like it, although district IT staff are sometimes drafted. “There are other people who do this work, but it’s not an official designation. They’re told, ‘Hey, this is part of your job now.’ Those folks need the simplest, easiest ways to manage this stuff. In Denver, we are fortunate enough to get to take a hard look.”

In his position, Westerman reports to the chief information officer’s (CIO) chief of staff, which is comparable to a deputy CIO.

Baltimore County’s Director of Innovation and Digital Safety

Over 1,000 miles away, in Baltimore County, Md., Jim Corns is helping steward the data of nearly 115,000 students.

Corns was named the new CIO of Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) in November 2018, but prior to that, he served as the district’s director of innovation and digital safety. It’s the closest thing BCPS has to a privacy official, Corns says.

The position was created in 2016, and Corns was the first to occupy it (it’s currently vacant, due to his promotion, but the district plans to fill it).

Unlike Denver, BCPS didn’t create the role in response to a new state law, nor was there a major data breach that precipitated it. The community was beginning to express concerns about privacy as schools adopted more and more technology, Corns says, and parents wanted to feel confident their students’ data was being handled appropriately.

“It was a proactive move [by the district] to say, ‘Look, this is where the future is headed, and this is how we’re getting in front of it,’” he explains.

In his first full year as director of innovation and digital safety, Corns says he devoted much of his time to data privacy—e.g., calls with the legal team about bringing on new vendors, establishing policies and procedures for vendor relationships, including what data to share and when to destroy it.

As part of that work, Corns’ team built out a data governance manual that laid out how the district would move data in and out of its system, as well as who would own it and how data would be suppressed to protect student privacy. They also developed a data-sharing agreement.

“Baltimore County takes a different tack in how we interact with our vendors,” Corns explains. “We don’t allow edits to our data-sharing agreement. It’s the document all of our vendors have to sign off on to do business with us. We’ve had vendors that refuse to sign it, and we don’t do business with them.”

When Corns was in the director role, he attended bi-monthly meetings with leadership to discuss updates and changes that had been made to the district’s data privacy and data governance policies, and he frequently met with the district’s “chiefs” to discuss privacy issues, he says. “It’s definitely a best practice to have somebody work to ensure privacy at that level.”

Attai agrees, reiterating that if privacy personnel in a district aren't a part of the leadership team, they must at least be heard by it.

“Leadership has to be heavily invested in understanding the complexities of managing student data privacy. It has to support and drive the creation of a privacy program,” Attai says. “It doesn’t work without leadership investment. This is not something that can be bootstrapped from the bottom up.”

Chief Privacy Officers: The Unicorns of K-12 Education published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[libraribear]

Librarians!

While I was having my bear-spine adjusted on the chiropractor’s table the other day, the guy made conversation with me, asking me what I did (though he knew I was a librarian) and what it meant when I said I was an Academic Librarian. He also wanted to know if there was a special degree or certification or what. So, here goes! This is all in my experience, anyway.

Librarian - This term is a bit of misnomer in today’s age. Really, librarians would better be described as “Information Specialists”. It’s just that back in the day the vast vast vast majority of information you could access was recorded in books, which mostly lived in libraries... you get the idea. While it’s true most librarians work in some kind of library - the idea that we just arrange, organize, select, suggest, etc. books is a huge misperception. Instead, we are connectors, curators, and managers of information. We may not be the experts on a particular subject or a particular field, but we are the experts on finding you what resources and tools are out there on a particular subject or a particular field. 

Where do we learn how to do this? Though much is learned through experience, most of us go to library school! The terminal degrees for librarians is generally assumed to be the M.L.S., or Master’s in Library Science. Sometimes this is referred to as an M.L.I.S. (Master’s in Library and Information Science). 

As if this wasn’t confusing though, there are many well-qualified, cool people with only a bachelor’s degree in Library Science, or people that just work in a library and help people find stuff, that might consider themselves librarians or call themselves librarians. However, for MOST library positions I’ve seen, you need a minimum of an M.L.S. or an M.L.I.S.

There are lots of different kinds of librarians within the subset of libraries. I’m going to hit on some general ones. Keep in mind that “Information Specialist” would work just as well in front of most of these, though of course there are levels.

Public Librarian - A Public Librarian usually runs or is a significant contributor to a public library. In addition to managing the library collection, they often provide reference services to public patrons, put on programs for community members or groups within the community (for example, there are teen/young adult librarians that put on rad programs for teens and young adults). I’ve got tons of stories of public librarians helping homeless people, or poor people, or just computer illiterate people help these populations use the library computers to post their resumes, apply for jobs, etc. and that’s just one example of their awesomeness. Public Librarians rock, and in many cases they are woefully underpaid for the incredibly awesome work they do for their communities. Be nice to them. Maybe vote to support libraries when it comes up politically. I can almost guarantee you that the library contributes more to the economy and the well-being of its community than it takes out.

Academic Librarian - This is what I do! I work at a university and help faculty, students, community members, etc. with their research while also contributing to/managing aspects of my university’s library(s). I also select most of the materials for a variety of different subject areas to keep the collection current and in tune with the academic and research needs of some of the academic departments on campus. Usually the bare minimum degrees and experience required to do what I do is an M.L.S. or M.L.I.S. and some other graduate work in higher education. This is sometimes related to whichever academic departments and subjects you might specialize in, and sometimes not. Having TWO Master’s degrees (one in Library Science, and one in another subject) is a big plus. Some Academic Librarians might have three. Others might have their M.L.S. and a Ph.D. Much smaller libraries may be able to employ librarians with just M.L.S.’s, or M.L.I.S.’s, but in my experience many times those with only one degree wind up being Library Technicians - which also serve a VITALLY important role in almost all libraries - but may not have some of the responsibilities of a full-fledged Academic Librarian. Other than that there’s a wide, wide range of librarians employed by most universities. Depending on the size of the university, a librarian might just have one subject specialty or population they serve, or they might have several. They might have one specific task (Say, Collection Management or Cataloging, or overseeing Interlibrary Loan) that they do, or they might have several. In today’s day and age a lot of this expands into the digital world too. For example, you’ve got data librarians that might manage all the datasets and research that a university pumps out.

Law Librarian - Often employed by a Law Library or sometimes a law firm, they do legal research and also navigate the loads and loads of confusing legal journals, citations, etc. They are also among the most qualified librarians I see, as many times the IDEAL Law Librarian candidate will have an M.L.S. or M.L.I.S. AND a J.D. Early in my career I was fortunate enough to work for a large law firm as a research assistant (my first job out of library school) and the many Law Librarians I contacted were wizards at helping me figure out confusing legal citations and information. They were also incredible lifesavers when my firm needed a legal resource for a case IN LIKE AN HOUR and their law library had it. Many times a Law Librarian might be employed as a research for a firm. They might not work in a Law Library but they might be really good at doing research for reports and things.

These are just three really basic kinds of librarians, but there are lots more. So the next time you’re having trouble figuring out if something is fake news, or where to read about a law, or if you’re in college and have a question about ANY paper or project or subject, try visiting your library. We tend to LOVE eccentric questions. 

[antigentilism]

Ben Sasse's Bogus Business Career

Interesting fact about Sasse: despite claims to be a “turnaround guy,” he has notr worked in business or business consulting since a 1-year stint that ended at age 23. Claiming that he is a "turnaround guy" is like a paralegal who worked for a law firm 20 years ago claiming to be a “lawyer guy.” It’s simply categorically false. Sasse was a perpetual grad student who spent 8 years in grad school and graduated when he was 32. He then spent another few years as a professor before becoming a university administrator. In other words, he has spent nearly all of his adult life in universities. Sasse has claimed to Omaha.com that he was “working full time” during those years as a “turnaround guy” but that is laughably untrue. He has claimed that he was flying around the country consulting for corportions and that he has worked on “26 turnarounds in 21 years” which is again laughably untrue. He recently claimed on the Kristol interview show that he has served as “interim president of x, y, and z” over the years, which is a bit like me saying that my Canadian girlfriend’s name is “Put Name Here.” It’s a lie, but it’s also a very bad lie – Sasse can’t even come up with a name for his fictitious business exploits so the best he can do is “x y and z.” Here are some quotes from Sasse and some facts: Here he is in the NYT: “My average duration in a job is more like six months, because I’ve done crisis and turnaround stuff for two decades. I’ve been in a lot of companies and not-for-profits and institutions that were really on fire; in a lot of ways, the Senate is the least urgent, least serious institution I’ve ever worked in.” Sasse to Kristol: “I got there, having been a turnaround guy – I’d been a college president but I’d also done a lot of corporate strategy and not for profit strategy and interim president of x, y, and z when things were on fire – the Senate was a 6-year term, and so it provided a luxury.” Sasse talking to Coca-Cola: “I knew pretty early on that I wanted to help organizations – both corporations and nonprofits – tackle big challenges. And that’s most of what I’ve done for the past 21 years. I’ve worked on about 26 strategy projects that have helped organizations find synergies and address challenges in mergers, during periods of rapid growth, or in crises.” Sasse to a Omaha.com: “Over the years, he tackled projects for airlines, utilities, telecom companies and manufacturers. He describes his consultant role as solving the problems that “companies face when they’re either growing really fast or in danger of going bankrupt.” “I helped the leadership of Northwest Airlines figure out how to turn their planes around faster at the gate because we were getting our lunch eaten by Southwest,” Sasse said. “I just am really drawn to strategy problems and to big crises.” Omaha.com also asked him about his academic career: “Five college degrees? “I guess,” he said, quickly adding that he continued to work full time during much of his postgraduate education.” Truth: Sasse worked *1 year* as a strategy consultant, when he was 23. It was not his career. He did not work in strategy consulting when he was working on his 400 page opus on Madeline Murray O'Hair, instead he was a volunteer wrestling coach for Yale wrestling. Again: he never worked in business consulting again after quitting his jr associate role at BCG at age 23. His career pre-Senate was spent almost entirely in academia, collecting three masters degrees and a Phd. He also spent some time in government, most of that time overseeing the Bush torture agenda. Not turnarounds, not business consulting. Sasse is not just lying, from what I can gather from his public statements, he is outright *delusional*.

[zipgrowth]

Old Ways Meet New Tech (and New Students) at Meeting of Library and Academic Leaders

With edtech, specialized isn’t always better. Technology designed for educators is pushed “as if our ones and zeroes are special,” keynote speaker Clay Shirky told top librarians, publishers and administrators at the Ithaka Next Wave 2017 conference, held in New York City on Wednesday. “When you look at the way students actually work, they mostly work with tools that are general-purpose,” Shirky said.

Those easy-to-hand, widely adopted tools cited by Shirky include the ubiquitous Google Docs, as well as more-unexpected ones like the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius). Originally set up to house lyrics, it’s been repurposed by students as a place to share and annotate texts like the Mayflower Compact.

Next Wave 2017 was the latest in an annual, invitation-only meeting series run by Ithaka, the nonprofit group behind JSTOR, ArtStor, the PORTICO digital archiving and preservation service, and Ithaka S&R, which conducts research on higher ed and technology. This year’s theme was “Innovating and Adapting to Address Today's Higher Education Challenges,” and leaders from different walks of academic life took turns throughout the day addressing it, beginning with Shirky’s keynote.

You might expect an internet visionary who’s also a professor and an administrator overseeing tech-based education to plump for the latest edtech. But Shirky, vice provost for educational technologies at New York University, argued that having the latest digital tools isn’t what counts most in today’s higher-ed environment. The focus, he said, should be on the changing narratives around the technology: how the internet isn’t just enabling new approaches in the classroom, it’s altering the bigger public discussion about how to provide (or pursue) a college education. “Online is changing the story people are willing to tell themselves about college,” he said.

Shirky invoked Napster, the music file-sharing system brought down by legal action on the part of the music industry. Napster failed���but it opened possibilities that led to the multitude of sharing services we use now. “These kinds of tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technically boring,” Shirky said. “It’s the moment that people take them for granted—the moment they tell themselves a different story about how life could be.”

On a panel called “At the Leading Edge: Transformation and Innovation,” a trio of higher-ed leaders shared stories of how their institutions changed, not always by choice. Meredith Woo, the recently-installed president of Sweet Briar College, described radical changes implemented in response to the school’s near-closure. Those changes included doing away with the general-education program and replacing it with a core set of courses focused on women and leadership; focusing on three “centers of excellence,” including engineering education; and cutting tuition dramatically. “We decided to signal to the American public that a compelling, small liberal-arts education is a financially viable option,” Woo said.

“What we’ve done is not nuclear science,” she added. “These were things that had to immediately be done to define who we are.”

Changing Attitudes

During that panel—and throughout the day—online education emerged as a dominant theme. Michael H. Koby, associate dean of international and graduate programs at Washington University Law School, said that at first he was “100-percent against” the online Master of Legal Studies program he was put in charge of—but changed his mind once he realized that it made the school stronger by “bringing in groups of students we otherwise wouldn’t have.”

The university chose 2U as its tech partner to help create and run the online program. Koby said that made it possible to think creatively about the program—how to do mock trials and adapt the Socratic-dialogue approach to the online-learning environment, for instance—and to make sure the online experience lines up with the law school’s overall approach to teaching.

One secret to the partnership’s success: clear boundaries between the for-profit company and the nonprofit educational institution. “We’re completely in charge of admissions. We’re completely in charge of the curriculum,” Koby said. “They’re in charge of the technology.”

For Gordon Jones, founding dean of the College of Innovation & Design at Boise State University, affordability and technology stand out as dominant trends now, with online options expanding what the college (and the larger university) can offer for the tuition it charges. The pressure students feel to sign up for pre-professional majors has driven “significant outmigration from our humanities and liberal-arts majors,” Jones said. To satisfy the hunger for more business training, the school teamed up with Harvard Business School to offer Boise State students a 9-hour credit block in which they earn HBS’s business-writing certificate online. It doesn’t cost extra, and the option might make it easier for undergraduates to think more flexibly about the majors they choose.

In a crowd-pleasing aside, Jones mentioned that he decided to house the innovation-and-design college within Boise State’s library, and suggested that libraries often function as safe neutral spaces in which to experiment. “You are leaders of what’s basically Switzerland on campus,” he told the audience.

The second half of the day focused on what universities are learning about student success, and on new workflows and frameworks for research and publishing.

Several publishers talked about how some university presses are experimenting with how to do things differently in an era of tight finances but a wealth of non-traditional forms of scholarship. That includes digital-humanities projects that work best as interactive, multimedia products and that can’t be reduced to flat text. Alan Harvey of Stanford University Press explained the thinking behind the press’s Digital Scholarship publishing program, which put out its first product—Nicholas Bauch’s Enchanting the Desert—in 2016, with three more to follow this spring, including Samuel Liebhaber’s When Melodies Gather, centered on the oral poetic tradition of the Mahra on the southern Arabian Peninsula. “The only way to engage with this is digitally,” Harvey said.

Reinvention in the networked era requires changing definitions as well as adopting new technologies. Darcy Cullen, associate director of acquisitions at the University of British Columbia Press, used a joint project with the University of Washington Press to talk about how publishers need to expand their thinking about authorship and audience. The two presses are building a platform for indigenous-studies scholarship that’s “audience-tailored,” Cullen said. “Readers can choose the format that best suits their needs.”

The project is part of a move toward culturally-sensitive design that can be adapted to scholarly norms while also respecting indigenous communities’ traditions and expectations. Cullen mentioned the Reciprocal Research Network, which enables research on First Nations items from the Northwest Coast; 27 institutions participate, and indigenous community members can correct and interpret material in the network, she said.

Monetization v. Information Flow

Technology changes rapidly. Mindsets often shift more slowly.

Certain themes have been cropping up for years now at almost any gathering of academic librarians and administrators: the need to appeal to faculty self-interest in order to get things done, for instance, and the complaint that scholarly publishers are price gougers. Arnold Hirshon, associate provost and university librarian at Case Western Reserve University, talked about how many publishers in the United States focus on monetizing content, while the rest of the world is more interested in what he called “the information flow.”

Not everybody was predisposed to agree. One attendee, Rick Anderson, associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah’s library, said later that he was “a little bit distressed at how much reductionist rhetoric we’re still hearing about ‘publishers who only care about money and are just trying to preserve their 30-percent profit margins.’” Anderson said, “I don’t believe for a second that the people saying this stuff are really unaware that 75 percent of publishers are nonprofits,” many of them dedicated to supporting their fields rather than making a killing off them.

Although it focused on big shifts and challenges, the conference also brought to light smaller but revealing details about shifts in how higher-ed practices have changed. Hirshon, for instance, talked about how one small behavioral problem has big reputational consequences. Many faculty members don’t take the time to learn how to cite the university in their work so that it turns up in international rankings of scholarship. He’s seen hundreds of variants of his institution’s name, he said—but only the correct version gets counted.

Another theme that emerged during the day: Librarians as well as faculty are being called on to rethink old habits. “The priorities of 25 years ago are not the priorities of today,” Hirshon said. Judy Ruttenberg, program director for strategic initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries, said that librarians accustomed to “a high-touch kind of work”—one-on-one reference services, for instance—must get comfortable with providing library services in new ways. “It’s hugely destabilizing for people to work in that way, but it’s urgent,” she said.

In his keynote, Shirky pointed out what’s probably the biggest disruptive factor of all in the internet era: the rise of what he called the “post-traditional student.” American higher education has been been too focused on the 4-year college model, with an emphasis on a certain kind of student for whom that model works.

“Colleges are run by people who did well in college,” Shirky said. “We are the number-one nation in enrolling people in college. We’re not even in the top-10 for completion. We don’t have an enrollment problem, we have a completion problem.”

That’s because the traditional model doesn’t work for students who aren’t untethered teens but adults with jobs, families, and other commitments, he said. A flexible online model works better for them—and their numbers are growing. “Online program after online program is filling with students who are perfectly capable of doing the work,” but who can’t leave their commitments behind for a residential college experience, Shirky said. “These are not characteristics most of our institutions are well set up to deal with.”

Old Ways Meet New Tech (and New Students) at Meeting of Library and Academic Leaders published first on http://ift.tt/2x05DG9