A new case arising out of White Oak, TX helps to illustrate not only the slippery slope of teacher-student cell phone communications, but the enormous challenges law enforcement officials face in investigating charges of digital misconduct. At the beginning of May, the news broke that an educator in the White Oaks Independent School District had…
The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority has had a tough year. The commuter service was faced with enormous challenges last winter when the region was pummelled by eleven plus feet of snow and by most accounts, the MBTA blew it. By mid-February, the agency’s schedule was in shambles and general manager Beverly Scott was forced to…
A friend who works in the public insurance field alerted me to the sad news of the suicide death of a 12-year-old girl named Alyssa Morgan, a student at Southeast Polk Junior High School in Des Moines, Iowa. On April 3, Morgan hanged herself in her family’s garage after writing a short note on yellow…
Tuesday night (5/19), The Dr. Phil Show will air an interview by Dr. Phil McGraw of Jennifer Caswell, a 29-year-old former Oklahoma teacher who is charged “with three counts of second-degree rape, two counts of enticing a child, and one count of forcible sodomy.” Earlier today, I defended Louis C.K.’s unequivocal right under the First…
A 22-year-old young woman named Robyn Lynn Ruiz filed a federal lawsuit against the Rio Hondo Independent School District in Rio Hondo, Texas on March 19, 2015. [A copy of the Complaint can be viewed at the bottom of this post.] In her Complaint, Ruiz alleges that the school district failed to protect her from…
I’m enjoying my introduction to the world of David Pogue and Robert Scoble as an invited tech journalist to the GENBAND Perspectives15 conference in Orlando, Florida. One of the perks is the chance to sit down with some interesting people and learn more about emerging technologies and communications platforms that will be part of software and apps in…
Man, that Louis C.K. is one big walking trigger warning, isn’t he?! The rough-edged comedian did his best to distract everyone from the “Mad Men” finale by closing out “Saturday Night Live’s” 40th season with a monologue that instantly became a case study of what happens when you take a perfectly valid concept a step…
Artist supply company Crayola, which recently celebrated its 130th anniversary, is struggling to get impressionable teens to stop using its colored pencils as DIY eyeliner. The trend is yet another example of the “P2P pressure” potential of YouTube. Amateur teen beauticians have posted numerous videos showing how they use cups of hot water to soften…
On Thursday, Missouri House Speaker John Diehl, 49, abruptly resigned from his leadership post and from the Missouri House of Representatives over a flirtatious series of texts that he exchanged with Katelyn Graham, a 19-year-old Missouri State Southern University student. Graham was one of four MSSU students participating in a Capitol internship program. The intern…
There were two big stories in the art world yesterday. The first was that a painting entitled Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O), which was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1955, sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for a record-breaking $179 million. Naturally, this is a story that news outlets, particularly those based in…
