We’ll see.

BP Managers Said to Face U.S. Manslaughter Charges Review

By Justin Blum and Alison Fitzgerald, Bloomberg News

Mar 29, 2011 6:03 AM ET

Halliburton recommended BP use 21 centralizers that help ensure cement is evenly distributed in the well and seals it. BP had only six centralizers on Deepwater Horizon, according to internal e-mails released by investigators. BP officials decided to go ahead rather than wait for the additional 15.

They also decided to skip a test that would determine if the cement was stable, according to testimony at Coast Guard hearings. Then, on April 20, BP and Transocean managers on the rig misread the results of another test to determine whether the well’s cement seal was strong enough to hold the oil and natural gas beneath the ocean floor, according to the president’s commission.

In the end, the companies went ahead and removed the drilling mud from the well, which took 2,600 pounds of weight from atop the oil and gas reservoir. Within hours, natural gas reached the Deepwater Horizon and touched off the catastrophic explosion.

…

Authorities are examining actions by BP managers who worked both on the rig and onshore to determine whether they should be charged in connection with the workers’ deaths, according to the people. Prosecutors have been looking at charges of involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter, which carries a more serious penalty of up to 10 years.

…

Charging individuals would be significant to environmental- safety cases because it might change behavior, said Jane Barrett, a law professor at the University of Maryland.

“They typically don’t prosecute employees of large corporations,” said Barrett, who spent 20 years prosecuting environmental crimes at the federal and state levels. “You’ve got to prosecute the individuals in order to maximize, and not lose, the deterrent effect.”

(h/t Chris in Paris @ Americablog)

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by mishima
• Muse in the Morning by Robyn
• Six In The Morning by mishima
• Gha! by RiaD

Featured Essays for March 28, 2011-

• After Libya, how could we NOT bomb Syria? by Compound F
• Worst Case at Fukushima: An International Cover-Up by Jacob Freeze
• Social Security: Get On The Phone Tuesday And Wednesday And Help Fight Cuts by fake consultant
• Are These the Corporate ‘Citizens’ United{?} by jimstaro
• Plutonium AND Lethal Levels of Radiation at Fukushima by rjones2818

DocuDharma

NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament 2011

Not a good day for underdogs.

Sunday’s Results

But I am hopeful for tonight.

Gonzaga is going to have to pull off a miracle to get past Stanford, but I sure wouldn’t mind if that happened.

Notre Dame is a better bet.  A number 2 over a number 1 is not that big an upset and Notre Dame is a good team, probably the second best in The Big East.

Besides, don’t you think Pat Summit looks tired?

Current Matchups

Follow the 2011 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament on The Stars Hollow Gazette.

If you don’t like squeeky shoes you can look for alternate programming here-

• Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

If you like a more traditional bracket try this NCAA one, they also have a TV schedule.

A School in a Quandary

By RICHARD WEIZEL, The New York Times

Published: September 01, 1996

Going to Stratfield, it was thought by many, was a way to prepare one’s child for the Ivy League.

That was all before a cheating scandal at Stratfield was revealed in April by the school superintendent, Carol Harrington.

…

On both exams there were significantly higher erasure rates than at other schools, and on both tests 89 percent of erasures at Stratfield had been changed to correct answers.

“At first nobody at the school, actually no one in the school system, wanted to believe that this had happened, particularly at such a wonderful and prestigious school that has received so much positive attention in recent years,” said Ms. Harrington, who was harshly criticized at the time by Stratfield School parents for revealing the news to the media before the school year’s ending, and before they had been informed.

“There was a lot of denial and people wanted to blame the messenger, but now I think most people accept that there was tampering and want to get to the bottom of it,” said Ms. Harrington.

…

(A)fter carefully reviewing the test results, which had up to five times the number of erasures of the other schools’ exams, officials at Houghlin-Miflin, the parent company of the Iowa Test, concluded otherwise, saying their review “clearly and conclusively indicate tampering.”

And when Stratfield’s third graders were retested in March, as requested by the school board, they fell below two other town schools. On the first test, the school’s third graders scored higher than 89 percent of students nationwide on vocabulary and reading comprehension. But on the monitored retests, their scores dropped to 80 percent on vocabulary and 79 percent for reading.

The school’s 512 pupils, 22 teachers and its long-beloved but now beleaguered principal started a new school year last week amid several investigations, in addition to one already completed by the forensic expert Dr. Henry C. Lee, who most recently gained prominence for his work on the O. J. Simpson case.

Dr. Lee’s findings, which were released in early July, did not resolve the mystery. He concluded only that there was no evidence of chemical erasures and that the erasures were made by one or more persons. He also concluded that some of the tests had different patterns of pencil strokes and others had more consistent style patterns.

What was in fact happening you see is that teachers and administrators go through test sheets to ‘clean up erroneous marks that might effect proper scoring’.

And at Stratfield Elementary School in Fairfield Connecticut, one of the highest rated and most prestigious in the United States, at the behest of and under the direction of their Principal- Roger Previs, these people were changing student answers so the school would itself test higher.

Now in my Connecticut School District we called cribbing answers from a cheat sheet, well…

CHEATING!

So what do you call what Fenty, Duncan, Obama, Third Way “Democrat”, Charter School loving Michelle Rhee did?

Test Gains at Michelle Rhee’s Favorite School Possibly Fabricated

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday March 28, 2011 8:00 am

This doesn’t fully prove a case of fraud at the Noyes School: as Kevin Drum noted, perhaps students at Noyes were taught to look over their answers before completing the test. But he adds, “the pattern here sure seems to follow a pattern we’ve seen in other school districts that have reported startling test gains and later had to recant them for one reason or another.”

I think it’s important that this is part of Michelle Rhee’s legacy, while I’m not necessarily holding her responsible. She put a premium on success at DC schools, and that pressure can lead to some dastardly things. Moreover, if the Noyes School is found to have cheated on standardized tests, it invalidates a lot of the results Rhee held up as a model in how to best teach students.

And I will point out that this is exactly the excuse offered by Roger Previs and proven false by Dr. Henry Lee.

Correcting your own answers as a test strategy doesn’t result in conclusive findings by forensic handwriting analysts that erasures and new answers were made by two different people.  Has something changed since I took the SAT and you’re now allowed to pass your paper to your neighbor because you have writer’s cramp and carpal tunnel?

Monday Business Edition is an Open Thread

1 Russia aims to boost caviar exports with fish farms

by Eleonore Dermy, AFP

Sun Mar 27, 6:10 pm ET

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by mishima
• Muse in the Morning by Robyn
• Six In The Morning by mishima
• Gha! by RiaD

Featured Essays for March 27, 2011-

• The Curious Libya ‘opposition’ by Edger
• ACORN Rising Internationally by jimstaro
• The Week in Editorial Cartoons – "I Have Here in My Hand a List of…" by JekyllnHyde
• Pique the Geek 20110327: How Nuclear Reactors Work. Part the Second by Translator

DocuDharma

Only the one upset thank goodness.

Yesterday’s Results

I’m kind of hoping Virginia Commonwealth does me a favor and drops Kansas, but that would be quite an upset indeed.

Current Matchups

Follow the 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on The Stars Hollow Gazette.

If you don’t like squeeky shoes you can look for alternate programming here-

• Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

For a more traditional bracket try CBS Sports.

NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament 2011

Yesterday was a good day to be seeded.  The only underdog to advance was Gonzaga which will no doubt make mishima happy.

Saturday’s Results

Today we start off with the Lady Huskies whom I think will be unwilling to exit the Tournament before the Men do.

You see, they’re just a far superior program.

They play Georgetown and all The Big East Teams are tough, but they’ve beat them twice already this year and there’s no reason to expect any different.

Current Matchups

Follow the 2011 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament on The Stars Hollow Gazette.

If you don’t like squeeky shoes you can look for alternate programming here-

• Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

If you like a more traditional bracket try this NCAA one, they also have a TV schedule.

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by mishima
• Six In The Morning by mishima
• Gha! by RiaD

Featured Essays for March 26, 2011-

• Reactor Core May Have Breached, Serious Poisoning Extends 200 Miles by Jacob Freeze
• Provident free market leaps from closet, saves the day. by Compound F
• Are There No Prisons? by joeshwingding
• To Combat Human Rights Abuses by jimstaro
• Can you eat gold? by ek hornbeck
• Popular Culture (Music) 20110325. The Who Sings My Generation by Translator

DocuDharma

Well it’s that time of year again when the sewing machines attack.  bmaz has his first Formula One Trash Talk up which covers many of the notable points including the political one that the season opener in Bahrain was canceled due to the jackbooted repression of the Sunni elite and their Saudi Arabian mercenaries.

Here is a season preview from The Telegraph and here is another one from the same source focusing on the drivers and teams.

I like Wikipedia for pop culture (since that’s hardly ever controversial).  Their description of the Albert Park course is here.

I can’t claim to have been paying a great deal of attention to last night’s Qualifying (results below) but my take away was that not much has changed.  Vettel qualified almost half a second faster than he did last year (as one commentator quipped- “Thank goodness they made the cars slower”).  The announcers are still way over rating Scudiero Marlboro which shows no sign of having improved at all.  Nor has Team Mercedes or any of the other ‘also rans’ from last year.

It was not known at the end of the broadcast if they would waive the 107% rule so it may be that HRT-Cosworth doesn’t start at all and we proceed with a 22 car field.  My interpretation was that they could start from the pit, but I’m not in a position to enforce that.  Ecclestone and I ceased talking well before his facist friend Mosley got caught with his jackboots on but his pants down.

In March of that year the News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper, released video footage of Mosley engaged in sado-masochistic sexual acts with five sex workers in a scenario that the paper said involved Nazi role-playing, a situation made more controversial by his father’s association with the Nazis.

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