Prestigious US fraternity at Cornell University sued for $25 million

Sigma Alpha Epsilon, whose motto is 'The True Gentlemen', has received a lawsuit from the mother of George Desdunes, 19, who was found dead on a sofa at Cornell University, earlier this year.

The 155-year-old "frat", whose alumni range from William McKinley, the 25th US president, to Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, has now been banned from the Ivy League in upstate New York for five years.

Younger members of the group allegedly kidnapped Mr Desdunes during a "hazing" in February, before tying him up with duct tape and cable ties, and quizzing him about the fraternity's history.

Mr Desdunes, an aspiring doctor, is said to have been ordered to do exercises or down a shot of vodka if he got an answer wrong. Eventually he passed out from the alcohol, according to the lawsuit.

But rather than being taken to hospital, the second-year student was allegedly dumped on a sofa in the frat house library.

The 19-year-old was found by a housekeeper, who called an ambulance. He was declared dead at a nearby hospital, where it was discovered his blood-alcohol level was five times the legal driving limit.

A spokesman for SAE, which has more than 240 chapters at colleges and universities across the US, said it had strict rules against hazing and a "zero-tolerance policy" for those who do not comply.

"In addition, Sigma Alpha Epsilon sponsors an anonymous hazing hotline at 1-888-NOT-HAZE that anyone may use to report inappropriate behaviour," the spokesman said.

But the lawsuit alleges: "The kidnapping and ensuing events were part of a long-standing fraternity ritual that was authorised and encouraged by SAE chapter officers and members." It claims one member "tried to interfere with the crime scene by having the zip ties removed before police arrived".

The lawsuit also cites three other alcohol-related deaths of Sigma Alpha Epsilon members or would-be members in recent years.

The parents of one, Carson Starkey, said last month that they had settled a lawsuit against the fraternity following the death of their son at a California university in 2008.

In a statement, lawyers for Mr Desdunes's mother, Marie Lourdes André, described him as "a fine young man".

"George's death has incited Marie to join the fight against fraternities, their dangerous rituals, and their refusal to stop activities that have killed at least one student every year for the past 40 years," it said.

Miss André said: "With the death of my son, I find some comfort in knowing that this lawsuit may bring about changes in fraternities that will prevent other families from suffering as I have."

Tommy Bruce, a spokesman for Cornell, said in a statement that the university "neither condones nor tolerates hazing or the type of activities that we understand contributed to George's death."

Detailed Interior Features

So far the Burton has shown significant innovation, but also some of the money saving ideas like using self-adhering cable ties has not worked out so well. Lets get into more detail, and see what else this case has to offer.


The Sentey Burton has plenty of room to the right and just below the motherboard. However, unless you have a modular PSU, this will be filled with unused PSU wiring. There is simply not enough room on the back side of the motherboard to store all this cabling. The last expansion slot might be best for USB or e-SATA expansion brackets or similar because it will not accommodate more than 0.5 to .7” (12.7mm) from the PSU to the slot. The depth from the standoffs of the motherboard tray, (measured from the top of the standoffs) to the inside cover edge is 7” (177.8mm). This is more than adequate for the Scythe Mugen 3 installed here. There is 1 5/8” (41.28mm) space between the top of the motherboard and the case, some of that is taken up by the 2 fans at the top.


On the right side of the case there is 5/8” (15.88mm) of space between the back of the motherboard and the case cover. This a pretty decent amount of space. There is also a larger area next to the drive cage that can be used to place extra cables. There are channels located at the bottom and top of the case as shown in this photo which can also be used to run cables.

One issue that is noted is that the reversible cable ties are unable to stick strongly enough to the painted surface of the case. In this photo you can see that the top middle cable tie is missing (because it could not stick to the case). All three of the cable ties that are supposed to run down the middle of the case failed to adhere to the case either as I was working on the cabling or soon after.


The front bezel lifts away from the case pretty easily. There are no wires that prevent the bezel from lifting off. The external drive plates are snapped off, but the design incorporates a mountable screw hole, that allows the plate to be put back into place. This is actually a pretty good idea. The 5th drive slot can also handle a 3.5” drive. However, the exterior portion of the bevel is designed to remove in its entirety, so you would need to purchase a cover plate for the smaller drive, and there is no drive cage adapter internally.


The fans are remarkably quiet. They do not include any specific modeling label or identification. The wiring for these fans terminate with standard connectors to the fan controller, however, you will certainly need extensions if you decide to replace with a non-proprietary fan. The voltage to the left fan bracket measured at 11.96 vDC (fans off) which suggests that if you desire more air flow you will have to buy different fans.


Here's a close-up of the removable hard drive cage. Once assembled the drive and the sleeve simply slide in. It locks into place with a positive feel. Hot Swap SATA is missing from the case design. This is very disappointing for a case with so many great features.


The hard drive is mounted to the drive sleeve between the metal plates, by angling the drive into non-moving pins on the right side, and then pressing a lever on the outside of the sleeve which forces the pin into the screw holes of the drive. In this photo the middle pin is shown because the lever has been pressed into place. Sentey should have followed the lead with its external drive pins and kept these metal, but unfortunately, they are plastic pins. One plus, is the hard drive sleeve also includes holes for the smaller SSD form factor which are then screw mounted from the bottom of the sleeve. This design does not use rubberized grommets to reduce noise, but despite this I did not hear any HD noise. This may be related to the fact that the newer drives are less noisy.

BACHMANN TIES ROMNEY IN LATEST IOWA POLL, SUFFERS THE CONSEQUENCES ON FOX NEWS

A new Iowa poll, which shows the most recent leanings of likely Republican voters in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, has Michele Bachmann in a statistical dead heat with Mitt Romney. This morning Bachmann appeared on Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday and was asked “Are you a flake?” Was Wallace simply being a tough journalist, or is Fox News’ bias in favor of Mitt Romney showing?

Would Wallace ask Romney, "Are you a socialist?" in reference to Romneycare.

Bachmann is set to officially announce her presidential aspirations in her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa on Monday and it would seem that her new found popularity among potential voters is irking the folks at Fox News.

Everyone in the mainstream media is rooting for Mitt Romney. The Republican wonks and puppets want him to be the nominee so badly they’re drooling. Funny thing is, Obama would love to see Romney take the nomination too, because, in all honesty, Obama would slaughter Romney.

If Romney is the candidate, then conservatives and independents looking for a real change from politics as usual would once again be forced to hold their noses, and try to hold down their lunches, while voting for Romney. The result: lack of passion which means lower turnout and Obama wins in an election year when my Golden Retriever ought to be able to beat Obama.

In the tank for Romney -

Romney is constantly dubbed the “front runner,” but typically without any analysis of the fact that Romney is the front runner by frequently smaller margins despite being the only candidate in the race now with any sort of national recognition.

Romney also dips in the polls whenever potential voters see anyone, anywhere who might be a viable alternative to Romney. Bachmann now occupies that space. Previously, it was Donald Trump when he flirted with entering the race. Trump? This is how desperate votes are for anyone but Romney.

The media continues to portray Romney as the people’s choice, despite the fact that so far, Romney, Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, Pawlenty, et al, have exactly the same win record in primaries: 0.

While Romney does lead most of the time in most of the polls, the internal numbers of those polls show him to be an incredibly vulnerable candidate with a very, very shallow base of support.

Romney is well known to voters because of his 2008 presidential run. Given that he has a higher national name recognition among voters than do any of his announced opponents, it could be argued that if Romney were truly the people’s choice, he would be running away with the race. He isn’t.

And that makes Republican elites, the party faithful, very unhappy. It also seems to chap the backside of Fox News.

More and more, the Fair and Balanced network appears to be solidly in the tank for Mitt Romney. From Karl Rove to Charles Krauthammer, a parade of talking head after talking head discredits the entire field of GOP candidates, and potential candidates from Sarah Palin to Rick Perry.

The Fox News Channel put a Democratic strategist on the air this morning to assess the potential candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Basically, she said that she can’t believe we’re actually talking about the possibility of another “Texan” running. Amazing! Throw Rick Perry and the other 27 million of us who live in Texas under the bus.

Mention the name Sarah Palin and Fox News gets mighty testy, despite the fact that Palin works for Fox News. Krauthammer has attacked Palin and Karl Rove is completely dismissive of the former Governor of Alaska.

Krauthammer, in an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s “The Factor,” recently said of Palin that she is not being "properly schooled" and "not learned.” You know, she’s just one of the unclean masses, like you or me.

We all know that Fox News is no more Fair and Balanced than is the New York Times or any other news organization in the world. There is no such thing as an objective news organization. The Cypress Times is unabashedly Christian and conservative and we will not be dishonest with our readers by pretending to be something we are not. I wish other media outlets would do the same. They won’t.

Fox News has become the number one cable news channel by not being Fair and Balanced. They have reached number one by reflecting the beliefs of the people of the United States, as opposed to CNN and the wretched MSNBC which tells the American people what they ought to believe.

So, Fox needs to be careful with its ongoing campaign rally for Mitt Romney.

Mitt is not liked among genuine conservatives. Romney is a man who made his fortune destroying companies, not creating jobs.

The only NBN monopoly seems to be on ignorance

If you listen to Opposition carping about the National Broadband Network (NBN), you might imagine that we're about to see the end of competition in the telecommunications industry. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The key to understanding the NBN - a point that the Opposition tends not to emphasise, because it's in their interests for people to remain ignorant and confused - is that NBN Co is not an internet service provider (ISP). It's a wholesale provider of a customer access network (CAN).

Let's step back a bit...

Put very simply, a telecommunications network has three pieces:

    The CAN that connects everyone to the local exchange. This was traditionally copper wire, but it now includes the hybrid optical fibre and coaxial cable (HFC) networks like the ones originally laid for pay TV, or optical fibre all the way such as the NBN is laying or, in the case of wireless data and mobile phone networks, towers packed with radio gear.
    The backhaul network that runs between cities connecting the exchanges together. That's mostly optical fibre these days, though historically it's been microwave radio links and, before that, big fat multi-strand copper cables.
    The core network that ties it all together, connecting to the rest of the world, and providing administrative functions such as metering customers' usage. This sits in data centres in the major cities.

These days, that's all called the wholesale network. Building and maintaining it is essentially an engineering and systems administration job.

Separate to all of that are the retail operations - that is, dealing with end customers and taking care of sales and marketing, billing and customer support.

Historically, big telcos like Telstra and, at least in the capital cities, Optus have run all three parts of their networks and handled retail too. The next tier like iiNet and Internode have run their own core networks and arranged their own backhaul, and have installed their own equipment in Telstra's exchanges, but have used Telstra's CAN for the "last mile" to the customers' premises, paying wholesale rates. The mid-ranking and smallest telcos have no networks of their own. They just buy wholesale capacity from, say, Telstra and handle only the retail operations.

That's perhaps overly-simplified, But the point is that there are wholesale telcos who have just a handful of customers, namely the retail telcos, who in turn have thousands or millions of end customers. If those retailers provide data services they're an ISP, if they provide voice telephone services they're a phone company, and of course these days many if not most telcos are both.

The concept of the NBN is very simple, provided you ignore what happens in the most densely-populated parts of the major capital cities, and provided you remember we're taking only about fixed services, not mobile.

In most parts of Australia, the only CAN has been Telstra's copper network. The NBN will replace that with NBN Co's optical fibre CAN - at least for 93 per cent of the population, roughly any location with a population of 1,000 or more. In other words, the NBN replaces an ageing CAN that's reaching the limits of its capacity technically, with a new one that provides vastly increased capacity for the future.

What doesn't change is the fact that customers, both domestic and business, can still choose whichever retail telco offers the best deal for them. That is, there's still the same capacity for competition between telcos. The only difference is that those retail telcos are provisioning their services via NBN Co fibre rather than Telstra copper.

That competition can take the form of different pricing for a different quality of service, or different bundles of services.

There will still be some ISPs charging premium rates for premium service and support - such as high-capacity international links with a low contention ratio and a phone number staffed 24/7 by qualified systems administrators. There will still be cheap ISPs offering over-crowded international links and a call centre in the Philippines that might finally answer your call after an hour on hold, only to present you with a human who barely understands what email is.

There will still be telcos that bundle together services delivered via the NBN - let's say a 25Mbps internet connection, two voice phones and a selection of 40 pay TV channels - with additional non-NBN services like mobile phones and web and email hosting. Heck, maybe new models will emerge, where telcos include pay-by-the-month computers along with technical support.

All that's different is that the retail telcos, instead of dealing with Telstra Wholesale to get access to its copper CAN and suspecting that Telstra arranged things to preference its own retail operations, they now deal with NBN Co - which is mandated to treat all its wholesale customers equally, and to have consistent entry-level pricing between the city and the bush. Rather than Telstra's habit of keeping its plans secret, we have NBN Co's very public consultation with the rest of the industry over what it's building and how it'll work.

Sure, things aren't quite as clear-cut in inner-urban areas. There, Telstra and Optus ran HFC networks. The deal has been done, or nearly done, to close them down. They and other providers were running fibre to the premises in cherry-picked highly-profitable areas. That will essentially end, since the only way NBN Co can maintain its regional prices is to cross-subsidise the bush from the city.

Whether you agree with that policy or not is another question, of course. But that was one of the NBN's stated policy goals. Personally, I'm all for policies that help regenerate declining regional centres and reduce the population pressure on Sydney and Melbourne and their creaking transport networks. You may disagree.

But to claim that telco competition will end because of an "NBN monopoly" is as silly as claiming there's no competition in the road transport industry because everyone has to use the same monopoly public-funded roads. Different freight companies use those same roads to deliver different styles of service at different prices, and competition seems healthy enough.

Competition won't end. It'll just be different. And perhaps, on the balance of things, better for consumers. We shall see. Amongst all the details of the Telstra-NBN and Optus-NBN deals released Thursday there are bound to be things we should be concerned about. In the NBN project more broadly, there are plenty of things we should question. But the death of competition isn't one of them.

A four-pack of fashion fun at DSquared2

DSquared2 didn't so much show a runway collection in Milan on Tuesday morning as it did four mini-collections backed by a rotating stage backdrop, topped off with a hilarious leather-and-sparkly-spandex dance number performed by a four-pack of male dancers sporting stilletto heels.

The first mini-collection, set against the backdrop of a Scandinavian fishing village, offered up things like roomy cable knit sweaters, scarves, mixed-fabrication light outerwear pieces and a hybrid boat shoe/derby boot.

That was followed by a brief (in more ways than one) trip to the island of Mykonos, which consisted mainly of exceedingly snug swim trunks (some emblazoned with the name of the island across the posterior) and mesh tank tops with a few pairs of walking shorts and light jackets thrown in.


Then it was a romantic Roman holiday with a preppy American sportswear flavor (brightly colored chinos, double-breasted blazers, and red-and-white striped ties), followed by the final  mod-rock-themed set piece, with mixed fabrication leather and denim jackets, skinny black ties, tuxedo trousers with silver studding stripes and prints of tigers and stars.


Why four mini-collections? And why the quartet of wildly gyrating, voguing dancers?

It didn't really seem to matter, since the camp theatrics -- barely past the breakfast hour -- make the show one that attendees will remember for quite some time.

Fiberart exhibition makes stop at Memorial Art Gallery

Every three years, fiber artists from around the world submit their best recent work to Fiberart International, a juried exhibition organized by the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh.

This year, the Memorial Art Gallery is one of only three stops for the show, which is on view at the Gallery, 500 University Ave., through July 3.

Fiberart International 2010 brings together work rooted in ancient techniques and materials, non-traditional textiles made possible by technological advances, and art made from such unexpected materials as cable ties and X-ray film.

The 81 featured artists representing Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The works in the exhibition were chosen from 1,685 entries from 30 countries and six continents, which were reviewed by three distinguished jurors: Vibeke Riisberg, textile designer and associate professor at the Designskolen Kolding in Denmark; Mary Ruth Smith, fiber artist and professor of art at Baylor University in Waco, TX; and Rebecca A. T. Stevens, consulting curator for contemporary textiles at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Tapas Nights

Max at the Gallery Tapas Nights run from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Visit the gallery -- open until 9 p.m. -- to hear live music, and purchase wine, beer and tapas plates.

Family Day

The Gallery celebrates the Fiberart exhibit with a free family day from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Children can try hands-on art activities, have their face painted and listen to storyteller Howard Edmond (1 p.m.). Other activities include color warp, a large-scale interactive outdoor weaving project, "Flying Colors," and an interactive dance using fabrices with Elizabeth Clark Dance Ensemble (1:30 and 3 p.m.).

I’ll start by sharing that my siblings

Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there!  If you’re reading this on Monday (because who wants to spend their holiday online?), you may not have seen that Google featured one of their famous “doodles” in honor of Father’s Day, with a clean, simple design inspired by one of the lamest Father’s Day gifts ever: the necktie.

No offense if you got your husband or father a tie this year, but let’s talk about some more unique Father’s Day gifts.  Did you send your Dad skydiving?  Take him on a fishing vacation?  Clean his garage?  I thought we could make this an open thread where each of you gets to brag about how creative and awesome you are when it comes to gift-giving.  What have you gotten Dad that absolutely blew him away?  Which of your gifts tanked?

I’ll start by sharing that my siblings and I always strove to get our Dad gifts for every occasion that would impress him, and he always, always, always complained about everything we ever bought.  ”What’d you go and spend money on a thing like this for?,” he’d ask.  ”You’re only gonna ask me for gas money when you leave!”  (So. True.)

Tell me about your favorite Father’s Day memories in the comments below!