The University of East Anglia, home of the infamous Climatic Research Unit, has offered to photoshop images of graduate students throwing their mortar board hats into the air, and sell the faked photographs to students, in lieu of allowing students to actually throw their hats into the air.
Graduating students told to mime throwing mortar board caps in the air and then pay £8 to have them PHOTOSHOPPED in later in case anyone is ‘injured by the falling hats’
Health and safety bosses have banned a class of law students from throwing their mortar board-caps in the air at graduation in case anyone gets injured.
But all is not lost for the University of East Anglia class.
They have been told they can mime the action for a picture and a computer whiz will Photoshop the flying cap in – all for the pricey sum of £8.
In an email sent to all third and fourth year law students set to graduate on July 21, those behind the photos have requested that no caps are thrown skywards to prevent the pointed sides from hurting anyone as they fall back down to earth.
An attachment in the original email – from the company Penguin Photograph – gave instructions for how the ‘fun’ picture should go.
It requested that students: ‘…mime the throwing of their hats in the air and we will then Photoshop them in above the group before printing’.
The paragraph continued: ‘As well as being safer, this will have the added advantage that even more of the students’ faces will be seen in this photograph.’
If UEA thinks it is OK to fake student graduation photographs, what else do they think its OK to fake?
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Is there an option for adding hockey sticks instead of mortar board hats?
Maybe they were using real mortar boards. Photoshopped diplomas, anyone?
The photoshopped diplomas cost £800 !
Now there’s an idea for a Josh cartoon!
Inciting newly graduated law students to embark on an act of deception as their first act after being qualified.
Way to go UEA !
This seems to be born of the same logic as Margret Thatcher bribing staff at the UK’s GCHQ intelligence gather hub to forego their rights to union membership. Apparently, being a member of white collar union was a security risk but accepting money as coercion if fine.
You seem to be upset that these people choose the option of more money rather than joining a union.
Why?
Isn’t the purpose of the union to get more money for the workers? If they can get the money without the hassle of the union, why shouldn’t they do it?
PS: I see absolutely no correlation between photoshopping a fake mortarboard and paying people more money?
Yeah, something to be really proud of.
They are going to be lawyers, what else would you expect.
They are trying to avoid liability in case anyone is injured by a falling hat. Has that ever happened anywhere?
There is nobody more craven and cowardly (and lazy) than a university administrator.
How on earth could the university be held liable for the acts of the newly graduated students. Maybe by renting them the hats for the day they are “facilitating”.
In any case the new EU safety regulations specify all mortar boards must have little rubber balls on each corner to make them safer 😉
Attached with strings?
Yes, attached with strings so that if the rubber ball slip off the points they won’t fall to the ground and create a slipping hazard. Actually, maybe it should be 1/16″ stainless steel aircraft cable. Can’t be too safe, ya know?
Remember, they are going to be lawyers, they are brainwashed into suing everyone about anything without regard to real liability or logic.
97% of falling hat scientists agree that there is increasing evidence to support the view that increasing numbers of people may be injured by falling hats unless immediate and decisive action is taken. A UAE falling hat professor said that just because no-one had been injured by a falling hat at UAE that didn’t mean that falling hats weren’t injuring people elsewhere in the world. In fact latest models indicated that people not being injured by falling hats may actually itself be evidence for falling hat injuries globally.
Those falling “hat scientists” aren’t falling far or fast enough to suit me.
Sounds more like another money making opportunity. (I was going to use the s word, but that always seems to send my posts to moderation.)
The models show that falling hat injuries will rise dramatically because of Climate Change. 97% of the immigrants from Syria are Falling Hat refuges, fleeing a country where this barbaric act is still practiced.
Lest we forget, UEA also has its School of Creative Writing.
https://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/creative-writing
Is Peter Gleick a visiting professor?
Why would the students even listen to them. What are they going to do – take the degrees back?
Well yes they can withhold degrees. It was threatened at least twice while I was in university studying engineering. You may go to a graduation ceremony but the whole class has to be registered and sometimes actual final exams are after the “graduation” ceremony as a lot of us dispersed after finals. Now I am going back to the 60’s and 70’s and we weren’t always PC with our end of year stunts like hanging a VW off the Lions Gate Brudge or “borrowing” Vancouver’s 9 o’clock gun to raise money for charity
One of the stunts that threatened expelling engineering students and withholding degrees, if I remember it correctly, was the cutting down with chain saws during rush hour into campus all the 6×6 sign posts around pretty much the whole campus. The administration and the other students wanted everyone expelled.
It took some convincing to demonstrate that we had removed the real signs the night before and replaced them with fake wood 6×6 signs the night before so all we had really done was cut up a bunch of old 6×6’s painted to look like the real thing.
That was not the only incident that could have ruined graduation for some of us but cooler heads always prevailed once it was realized that no real damage had been done. It could never happen today as PC and sensitivities are much more finely tuned.
Heck, I even taught a human rights course for several years to graduating classes
The point however, is that most Universites have the power to rescind graduation of contraveners of their codes of conduct. Personal experience.
Man, I hear those 60’s and 70’s era Human Rights classes got into some really crazy ideas, like that you shouldn’t kill people just because they looked different then you or had different beliefs. Thank (insert secular authority here) that our modern views of human rights are based on proper social and climate justice models. So now we have the ‘right’ to pay vastly more for energy, the ‘right’ to never be confronted by an opposing belief or point of view, and (apparently most important of all) the ‘right’ to use whichever bathroom we want.
You can almost smell the liberty. >¿<
If one is free to choose your own gender, why not race and age?
How is it any different if one feels like a woman trapped in man’s body, to feel like a white person trapped in a black person’s body?
What happens to affirmative action, or school integration? Who is to say that the all white school isn’t full of people that feel black on the inside and were mistakenly born white on the outside?
What happens when 20 year old’s start showing up to collect their old age pension, claiming they are an old person trapped in a young person’s body?
Found this on Drudge this morning.
http://www.infowars.com/nyc-to-fine-businesses-that-dont-use-correct-gender-pronouns/
I remember when the liberals declared that we were crazy when we said the old Equal Rights Amendment would lead to mandatory same sex bathrooms. The liberals proclaimed quite loudly that NOBODY would ever be that crazy.
That seems back to front. They think they’ve gotten away with some major fakery, as endorsed by subsequent inquiries, so why shouldn’t they now go that route without a second thought?.
One can hope the student body gives them a resounding alternative opinion …
Oh sweet heath and safety! Protecting humans from their own stupidity making them even more stupid since 1990.
Health and Safety may soon be issuing fake birth certificates, replete with a photo of that special baby. Birth will not be permitted. It is associated with a 100% risk of death.
The UNFCCC use Health and Safety as THE ultimate tool to expunge the anthropogenic influence upon land usage and atmospheric composition.
Ah… it finally is a “Brave New World”
they have announced an inquiry into this scheduled for next week and the results show the university has done nothing wrong.
Nice, E.O.!
+97
Did they create a model for that?
How appropriate. The research is photoshopped as well.
Well maybe the University ought to just change the type of hat to, say, a good Northern cloth cap. Or even a French beret. No need for electronic pseudo-hats.
“Owww, my eyeball! I’m not supposed to get any mortar board hats in it!”
No risk is too small to fret and worry about to those whose job it is to fret and worry.
Actually, there is probably even more deception going on.
Mortar Boards and Gowns cost a huge amount of money – several hundred pounds. A few students will have bought theirs – most will have leased them for the graduation photo.
I suspect that neither the leasing organisation nor the individual students want to have expensive Mortar Boards damaged by being flung in the air and dropped edge-on onto a hard pavement. But I wonder why they don’t say this…?
I attended a UK grammar school, where wearing a mortar board to and from school was compulsory for senior level students. Not easy if you rode a bicycle. (This was before compulsory helmets.) On the other hand, “dabbers” were useful as weaponry; it’s not so much the corners, it’s the edges. Crack someone with the edge and they will certainly feel it. I recall that the only way to use one effectively as a missile was to spin it sideways, eg board parallel to the ground.
Martin, you can do this with other types of hats, too, at least according to a documentary I once watched:
http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2015/10/images/640_hats-off.jpg
“In the past, the human herd was thinned of its weaker, less-intelligent and more-inept members via falling mortar board hats; now, thanks to the unprecedented abundance of caution by academic administration here at UEA, even the imbeciles survive and go on to bumble incompetently through life being a liability to the other 97%!”
This sort of thing receives a great deal of attention and support from the Liberal Democrats and Labour, the UK’s two major left wing parties, who are obsessed with imposing pointless and petty regulations whenever they have the opportunity. I believe a lot of this type of thing happens in the west coast states of the USA.
The problem is there are a lot of sad, pointless people looking for a purpose in life.
“Health and safety bosses have banned a class of law students from throwing their mortar board-caps in the air at graduation in case anyone gets injured.”
But of course there is absolutely no possibility that NSIDC might have ‘faked’ or ‘distorted’ any of their output.
None at all. No Siree…no way. Nope.
Unlike Skeptical Science of course, who are ‘unreliable’.
The miming of throwing hats is a mockery of mime artists and their work, and thus should be banned.
After all, a mime is a precious thing to waste.
+97
On the other hand, more than once I’ve wanted to waste a mime.
>¿<
This is beyond parody.
Statistical they must adjust the number and altitude of the hats to get the desired effect, being sure there is the correct slope no appearance of a pause at the apogee.
Imagine, a culture so coddled as to be concerned with that level of risk!
Mortar board throwing is a recent affectation at the newer universities. No wonder the world is going to the dogs.
Started by US Naval Academy in 1912 apparently so apologies and Respect to them.
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
IIRC, on graduation their rank increased, so a different hat was the proper uniform, thus dumping the “out of uniform” hat was in theory required by regulations (the manner of the dumping being the joyous part) while the new hats were available at a table to the rear. Actually makes a kind of sense…
The local kids collect the midshipmen’s hats after the ceremony. In 1965, many of his classmates wrote Roger Staubach’s name in their hats so the kids thought they had found his hat. (As a new ensign, Staubach was one of the coaches for the plebe football team that I played on.) I wonder if Keenan Reynold’s classmates will do the same thing this year.
Yes. What I was thinking. There was none of that sort of behavior when I graduated (UK – Keele University). Its a very American “tradition”. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being adopted in the UK, for no good reason that I can see. Of course, one good reason not to behave like this was (in my day, maybe these days too?) that most people rented their cap and gown (they were horribly expensive to buy), and not returning them, or returning them damaged in any way resulted in you having to buy the horribly expensive (and now damaged or non-existant) item.
Those special memories of something that never really happened, good times, good times…
Hearts full of youth,
Hearts full of truth,
Six parts gin to one part vermouth.
Eight quid sounds cheap, faked or not. My graduation photos were a great deal more than that. I suspect graduation photographs are another income stream for universities.
Eight quid per person, and that’s in addition to the regular cost of the photo.
Now I’m no photoshoping expert, but I’m pretty sure that once you’ve done it to a photo you can print up as many copies as you want. So charging each customer separately seems odd. And what of the students who choose not to pay for the photoshoping? Are they stuck having to buy photos of everybody with their arm raised for no reason? It would be unfortunate if, without the added hats, they ended up with a graduation photo with everyone giving a Nazi salute.
…now I want to photoshop Cook in his uniform into the front row. <¿<
I suspect it’s 8 quid extra on top of the usual cost of the photograph.
“Health and safety bosses have banned a class of law students from …”
The Health and Safety at Work Act applies only to employers and employees.
This is in England.
Yes, as am I and the H&SaW Act.