It’s that time of year again! The hecrenews’s centennial cyberbullying roundup survey has just finished, and the results are most surprising. The most interesting finding by the Hecrenews SAR (Science and Research) division was that cyberbullying as a whole has had a massive increase from the last century. So sad, don’t you think? I think so. I think that this is not a very good result. Cyberbullying is not cool, no thank you, so we really do need to do something about this massive spike in recent times.

Now, all article length-padding aside, here’s the methodology of the survey (I was about to publish this article without this section, then Chief of Science and Research (SAR) Sheeple Dunnell came knocking at my door to tell me to hold up. I guess it’s important for people looking for faulty conclusions or something? Anyways, the study hand-selected a specific group of HBA members known to frequent a local non veg eatery between the hours of 8 to 9 pm, so you know that the results are representative of pretty much anyone, anywhere.

Participants (willing or not) were forcibly interrogated asked about their past history with Cyberbullies. Some of the questions subjects of the study were asked to answer were: “Were you cyberbullied today?”, “How much time do you spend thinking about cyberbullies”, and “On a scale from 10-10, how attractive is the person interviewing you right now?” This survey has been going on for the past couple of weeks ago. The data for the 99 years, 11 months, and 6 days that SAR didn’t interview people for was fabricated extrapolated based on the given, definitely legitimate trends.

The collection of smarty-pants affectionately called SAR was so kind as to provide me with a graph of their findings. On the y-axis we have the Level of Cyberbullying, measured customarily by the unit of CBs (Computer-Baddies). And on the x-axis, is the number of years since 1920 (the date that we would have held our last cyberbullying survey, if we’d existed then). Unfortunately, the guys at SAR seem to have adopted us writers’ trend of procrastination and laziness, so neither axis is labelled. You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess:

After collecting the data came its analysis. The good people at Science and Research put the survey data through their time-tested model to check for a correlation. This model, obtained after minutesmonths and minutesmonths of speculation and careful researchand typing random funny-sounding numbers, tested to see if the amount of cyberbullying had gone down over time (as shown by the negative sign on x1). The correlation for this model (r^2 value for those enlightened ones) was an astounding approximate -0.01. If you solve for r by taking the square root of both sides, r would be either plus or minus 0.1 i. Taking the square root of a negative number means that the result is imaginary– I learned that nifty detail from my time in the Math Corps. Since the correlation was imaginary for cyberbullying decreasing over time, this must mean that cyberbullying had increased, reasoned the geeky ones. Sounds like spotless logic to me!

Whatever could have caused this massive spike in cyberbullying?? Experts disagree, but one major opinion is that cyberbullying rates skyrocketed because of the invention of the computer and virtual things in general. Still, we may never have a definitive answer to this question. In other words: “Eh, who knows?”

So, what to do now? Well, there’s two ways we can go about fixing this problem. We can either fix the problem ourselves by ELIMINATING all cyberbullies, or we can raise awareness about the issue so that they slowly disappear by choosing to act different. Personally, I think the first method has a lot of merit but Wopps once told me that doing those kind of things puts a lot of stress on the one-man legal department of the Hecrenews, and I wouldn’t want to do that.

How can we prevent cyberbullying? Well, here’s an excellent article that will tell you how to bounce back, if you feel bullied or demotivated in any way. Quite a piece of work, if I do say so myself. Yup, definitely check that stuff out. Very good things in there.

Well, that’s all done. See you next century! I’ll leave you with the all-too-true words of my paternal granddaddy: “rat