By Cynthia Herbert :: 1:06 PM
A 12-year-old Queens, NY, girl hung herself last week, after repeatedly being the target of in-school bullying and cyber bullying.
Gabrielle Molina, a seventh-grader at Queens’ Jean Nuzzi Intermediate School 109, was found in the bedroom she shared with her 15-year-old sister Georgia. Her body was discovered by Georgia and her grandparents.
Over the past several months,Ă‚Â Gabrielle had been the target of taunts from her fellow classmates, including slurs such as “slut” and “whore.” New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Thursday thatĂ‚Â Gabrielle left a suicide note that referenced being bullied.
Earlier this year,Ă‚Â Gabrielle had been in an altercation at school that was videotaped by another student and uploaded to YouTube.
“There was information in the suicide note concerning cyber bullying,” Kelly confirmed. As part of the investigation, two computers were removed from the Molina household. Investigators will search through the computers’ hard drives looking for evidence of the cyber bullying.
The school that Gabrielle attended has a poor record for handling student bullying issues. According to a NYC school progress report from 2012, 80% of students surveyed said there was bullying at the school.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:56 AM
When high school senior Patrick Brown started a hashtag on Twitter earlier this week to discuss issues surrounding his school district’s budget, the last thing he expected was to suffer disciplinary action for his efforts.
Brown attends Cicero-North Syracuse High School in New York state’s North Syracuse Central School District. On Wednesday, he coined the hashtag #shitCNSshouldcut after the district’s budget failed to pass muster with voters. In New York State, individual school budgets are put to a vote every year in May. If a district’s budget is not adopted by voters, the superintendent and board of education must make changes and resubmit the budget for another vote.
He started the hashtag to encourage discussion among district residents and students about where the district should cut funding in order to create a new budget that would be approved by voters. The next day, he was removed from class, and suspended for using his cell phone in class. Brown claims the suspension is directly related to his creation of the hashtag on Twitter.
North Syracuse Central School District’s superintendent, Kim Dyce Faucette alleges that Brown was causing a “social media riot that disrupted the learning environment,” according to Syracuse newspaper the Post-Standard.
“We have a student code of conduct and there are clear expectations for all students in our district,” Faucette told the paper. “It’s our expectations that our students will abide by our policy and procedures, and if they don’t there are clear consequences.”
Students had been voicing their concerns on Twitter about which athletic and extra-curricular programs might be cut, and though Brown admits starting the hashtag as a bit of a joke, it eventually evolved into an online discussion that involved students, teachers, and community members.
Initially, school officials claimed that Brown had been harassing teachers via Twitter. After Brown was able to prove that his Tweets were not harassing in nature, the charges against him were changed to the use of cell phones during class time.
“It makes me uncomfortable that I can get in trouble for expressing my opinion,”Brown told the Post-Standard.
Other students at Cicero-North Syracuse High School have now taken to Twitter with the hashtag #FreePatBrown to show their support for Brown, and their displeasure with the administration for their decision to suspend him.
Officials at the school district did not respond to request for comments, citing that they do not comment on the disciplinary actions taken against their students for privacy reasons.
By Paul Thomson :: 12:58 AM
Search company Google is exploring entry into the wireless networking business, launching an initiative to introduce both wireless technology and affordable computing to emerging markets in Africa and Southeast Asia.
According to published reports in the Wall Street Journal, Google will focus on rural areas and suburbs outside major cities, where traditional wired connections are not possible. Google will also use the technology it develops for countryside use to improve connectivity in city centers.
The plan makes use of portions of the wireless spectrum that are usually reserved for television broadcasts. Google’s expected solution makes use of a network of high-altitude balloons that help propagate wireless signals across hundreds of square miles of rural areas.
Google plans to engage local wireless and telecommunications companies in its rollout efforts, though no formal partnerships or participating companies have yet been named.
The effort abroad mirrors Google’s plan to create a robust Internet access infrastructure in the U.S. with its Google Fiber rollout. Fiber already is available in Kansas City, and will be coming soon to Provo, Utah, and Austin, Texas.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:27 PM
A rumor currently circulating on Instagram and Twitter claims that the photo sharing service will be deleting user accounts at random over the next several days.
There are several different strains of the rumor making the rounds. Nearly all are shared as Instagram images (see above for example), and encourage users to repost the image, and tag it with a particular hashtag.
Right now, the most common hashtags accompanying this rumor include #dontdeletemyaccount, #dontdeletemyig, and #dontdeletemyinstagram. Over 275,000 images have been shared with those hashtags so far.
Instagram has not made any public announcement about account deletion on its official Twitter account. The Facebook-owned service has also not yet addressed the many user inquiries abut the rumor.
Despite Instagram’s silence on the issue, it is likely just a rumor, and user accounts are probably not in jeopardy of being deleted – whether or not they share a post on the subject.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 3:31 PM
Electric automaker Tesla Motors has announced the payoff of a 2010 U.S. Department of Energy loan.
In 2010, the company was awarded the loan, which required matching private capital obtained via public offering, as part of the U.S. government’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program. Coupled with previous payments made in 2012 and earlier this year, yesterday’s payment of nearly $452 million repays the full loan amount with interest. The payment was facilitated using a portion of the approximately $1 billion in funds Tesla raised in last week’s concurrent offerings of common stock and convertible senior notes.
“I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate,” Tesla founder Elon Musk said in a press release. “I hope we did you proud.”
While a Tesla Motors press release initially claimed that the company was the only U.S. automaker to fulfill loan obligations to the U.S. government, automaker Chrysler countered this claim today, noting that two years ago, Chrysler repaid (in full and with interest) loans issued to it by both the U.S. and Canadian governments. Chrysler’s loans were paid about six years ahead of schedule.