Number 4. Intellicheck dot com. The Rise in Ghost Students: How Fraudsters Use Fake Identities.
This article — really more of an advertisement — is several weeks old now, but a heartwarming story of enterprising young people launching careers is always worthy news.
In this case, the enterprising young people are those who are, or at least who claim to be, of college age. Through the magic of technology and old-fashioned can-do ingenuity, a whole generation of fake students is flooding America’s colleges and universities.
Virtually every institution of higher education — not to be confused with higher learning — offers online enrollment. While government issued identification is required, in many cases there is no face-to-face interview between living people sitting in the same room.
If you have been paying attention, you know that in the last year billions and billions of personal data records have been appropriated by hackers and made available for sale — sometimes nearly free — if only you know where to look. There are digital storehouses of personally identifiable information, including social security numbers, home addresses, cellphone numbers, email addresses, birthdates, mothers’ maiden names… you get the idea.
For those who are both clever and unprincipled — and we seem to have plenty of each — enrolling in college classes with someone else’s name is probably very easy. As is applying for financial aid, taking the money, and then disappearing.
The California Chancellor’s Office — whoever that is — estimates that fully 20% of the 2 million community college students in that state are fraudulent enrollees. They siphoned off some $5 billion last year from the state’s education budget.
(If you have your calculator handy, that comes to $12,500 per ghost student. That used to be real money. These days, I can see that a prospective ghost swindler would think, “Yeah, that would be fine, but how much effort will it involve? Will it interrupt my TikTok scrolling?”)
This article is by Intellicheck, which is a commercial outfit promoting the use of their digital identity verification system. They claim it works, that many colleges and universities are signing up for their product, and that it saves money.
I have no doubt it does all those things, because Intellicheck hasn’t been hacked yet. Or at least, it hasn’t made the news. Meanwhile, I will continue to peruse the headlines of the latest hacker outrage involving stolen credentials. Maybe their name will come up.
In the ghost students’ defense, it could be they are onto a creative, winning strategy, balancing long-term gains against short-term goals. Maybe they have concluded that one more graduate with a degree in 19th-Century Sub-Continent Juju Art Criticism does not have nearly the earnings potential of a hacker with a government-funded laptop, a stolen driver’s license, a dot EDU email address and a free university VPN connection.
Number 3. USA Today. Florida's new python hunting queen makes history.
The first-ever female winner of the Florida Python Challenge beat out 900 competitors to take home the $10,000 cash prize. Taylor Stanberry, 29 years old, managed to snag 5 dozen pythons in the Florida Everglades.
At 4’11”, this is one petite lady with whom I would not care to tangle.
Admittedly, summertime is hatching time for baby pythons, and many of those Ms. Stanberry took were babies. But baby pythons grow into adult pythons. No one knows how many of the Burmese invaders live in the swamp, but estimates put the slithering population around a quarter million and growing rapidly
With less than 300 caught during the 10-day competition this year, it would seem we have a ways to go.
Taylor has been catching and killing pythons for 10 years, which means she started that unusual hobby just out of high school. Today she is employed by the State Of as a contract python hunter.
Taylor is also an attractive blonde; in her press photo she is seen holding aloft a live python. Though it is hard to tell where the snake ends, and her full-arm tat begins, she does have a winning smile.
Surely there is a book deal in there somewhere. If any of you happen to know her, pass my name along. She could probably use a good ghost writer.
Number 2. Popular Mechanics. A Diver Stumbled Upon the Treasure of a Lifetime.
Speaking of turning your passion into cash, one lucky fellow exploring a sandy seabed off the coast of Sardinia found the treasure of a lifetime. We don’t know his name — probably holding out for the best TV news interview — but he came across a trove of perhaps 30,000 coins lying in plain sight.
He and other divers immediately — and I mean IMMEDIATELY — notified authorities of the find. (At least, that is what they told reporters, and I probably would have, too.) They were soon joined by a small navy of professional police and fire fighter frogmen.
The coins are of bronze and copper, which dates them to the late Roman era around 300-400 AD. We know that because by that time the Republic was sliding down into cultural, civil and economic ruin, their currency devalued, and they were reduced to calling bronze and copper precious metals.
Which they are not, and never have been, because they are not scarce enough to possess intrinsic value. But they can be DECLARED by the government to BE of value, and as long as everyone pretends, it’ll be okay. Sort of like paper currency.
But I fear that I digress. Where was I? I think I lost my place.
Nevertheless… There is considerable historical hype over this find, in part because there is apparently no historical record that old of a shipwreck near the mid-Mediterranean island of Sardinia. I suppose that is not surprising, coming as it did long before the advent of the 24-hour news cycle. The speculation is that such a shipwreck exists beneath the sand, as that is about the only phenomenon that would explain the quantity of coins offshore.
Now I wonder how many bronze and copper examples will show up on eBay, after being laundered through various Italian and Greek pawn shops.
Number 1. IFL Science dot com. Rare Phenomenon In The Sea Of Galilee.
Jesus spent much of his early ministry near Capernaum, a small city along the northwest coastline of the Sea of Galilee, aka Kinneret or Gennesaret. It was here that he called some of his first disciples: Peter, James and John.
After a sermon to the gathered people, Jesus urged Peter to push his boat off from shore and let down the nets for a catch. After a brief protest, Peter did so, and the resulting catch was so huge that it broke the nets and nearly swamped the boat.
In the gospel text, this event prompted the fishermen to forsake careers and follow the one they now saw as their Messiah.
It was an obvious miracle.
Not so fast, says a team of ocean scientists published in Water Resources Research in November last year.
Lake Gennesaret, they point out, is a warm-monomictic lake, which means it is stratified into layers of water at different temperatures. The upper layer, the epilimnion, is warmer, while the lower hypolimnion is colder. Separating them is the metalimnion layer. (Yes, this will all be on the test.)
These layers are known as thermoclines, which immediately brings to mind Tom Clancy’s American submarines hiding from Russian sonar “below the layer.”
The warmer upper epilimnion is rich in oxygen, while the lower hypolimnion is oxygen starved. I am not at all sure why this is, but I am already so far out over my skis that I will take this part for granted.
Unpredictably, from time to time there is an upswelling of the hypolimnion, probably caused by wind-driven wave action in the relatively small lake. Cold water is driven to the surface and changes places with the warm layer. The cold water from the depths is anoxic, “devoid of dissolved oxygen.” Because of the direction of prevailing winds, the transfer is most prominent in the littoral regions at the northwest corner of the lake.
Which is exactly where Jesus met up with his boys.
Such upswelling events have been documented in this century at Gennesaret, on Lake Erie, off North Carolina, and in Canada.
Ergo, the so-called miraculous catch was a simple matter of hydrodynamics, for which phenomenon the fish paid the ultimate price, suddenly floating belly-up by the thousands in the cold, anoxic surface water.
A skeptical Christian reader (intellectual skepticism is actually a hallmark of Christian maturity) might observe the researchers’ conclusions and point out that nowhere in the gospel account (Luke 5.1-11) did Peter say, “Wait a minute! These fish are all dead! You’re a fraud!”
Moses, it should be noted, was fairly direct in Deuteronomy 14:21: “Do not eat anything you find already dead.”
The Biblical account was immortalized, if such was needed, by Raphael (not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) who depicted the event in his famous painting.
As a footnote truly unworthy of comment, note that in Raphael’s fishing boat there is one man praying, one man making noise, and three men actually working the fish.
And thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, August 29, 2025. Go out to a restaurant this weekend and enjoy a nice halibut steak. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it will be served to you dead. It might be a little useful to find out exactly HOW LONG it has been dead. On the other hand, you may not want to know the answer.
Have a good weekend!
