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A Rat's Life Ends in a Penn Station Bloodbath

Rats have a rough life in the Big Apple. They are feared, even hated. In many subway stations there are signs warning people to be careful because rat poison has been sprayed in the area. A few months ago, I walked into a subway station and watched a rat that must have been about three quarters of a foot long just walk around as though he owned the place — with no problem. That was not the case last Friday, when people in Penn Station proved that even though we have passed the time of the gladiators, the mentality has not left us.

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NYPD Artificial Eyes and Human Perception

New York State is in budgetary trouble. New York City is in a financial crisis. 
Is protecting the citizenry one of the first fatalities of fiscal decay as the NYPD slows the addition of 800 officers and 3,000 security cameras downtown in the Wall Street area surrounding Ground Zero? 

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Cerebral Palsy: Incarceration by Cold Weather

Some stories make you shout with anger.  Some stories make you cry in pain.  Some stories make you shudder with disbelief.  The story of Edwin
Rivera — he has Cerebral Palsy and is unable to speak — makes you feel all three.

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Watching Out For You On Liberty Island

If the NYPD Harlem Panopticon wasn’t enough of an intrusion for you into your private life, don’t step foot on Liberty Island to visit the Statue of Liberty if you hope to preserve the remaining tatters of your anonymity:

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Eyes on the Street in the Early Lives of Cities

In the early lives of cities, having “eyes on the street” was the prime way neighborhood crime was policed and thwarted. The classic, semiotic, image of that early neighborhood watch was the old woman leaning out the window, delicately balancing her elbows in a feather pillow on the windowsill as she watched the activity on the street below.

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The FDNY Firefighter Spy

We’ve turned a horrible new page in the War on Terror as the FDNY — The Fire Department of the City of New York — have joined with the Department of Homeland Security to spy on residents.

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Naked Blogging as Semiotics Shall Rule the Word

We are living in the Golden Age of Text. We most effectively communicate on blogs, in email and via instant messages where The Word is King. However, in the next five years or so we will toss away our text — along with our newly enhanced ability to cogently write to persuade others — in favor of video: Semiotics Shall Rule the Word. There are active rumors that the next iPhone will have a touch screen that is a camera so you can do live video conferencing via iChat right on your phone. There is one proof-of-concept using the current iPhone that persuasively argues for video communication over text right now.

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Policing and Loving the Ordinary Enemy Civilian

I heard an interesting discussion on the radio the other day that the problem with modern policing in the urban core today is not only the matter of Pretend Police replacing real officers, but also one of the police distrusting the general public by considering everyone a danger instead of innocent, ordinary, people.

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Subscribe Via Google FeedBurner

Now that WordPress.com no longer offers RSS feeds stats analysis, you can try to work around that deficit as a Blog owner by signing up for the just-purchased-by-Google FeedBurner Service. All the keen “Pro” FeedBurner features are now FREE! RSS feed stats can be valuable in telling you who is reading your blog and through what method. FeedBurner allows you to “re-burn” your default RSS feed.

On my Boles University Blogger blog, you can tell your Blogger to use the FeedBurner RSS feed instead of the default feed. That’s a great way to unify RSS feeds under a single master. I cover in-depth how to use FeedBurner with Blogger and Google Apps in my new book, the Google Apps Administrator Guide due soon from Thomson Publishing and CoursePTR.

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A Shot Heard in Far Rockaway is Felt in Fulham

Two days ago a Haitian immigrant friend of mine — who recently landed in Far Rockaway, Queens to find a better life and to chase the American Dream — heard a fight in the street below his apartment.
He then made the fatal mistake of the curious and went to his window to see what was happening. A stray 9mm bullet shot from the street blasted through his window, ricocheted off his collarbone, and punctured his heart. He was dead before his body slumped to the floor.

Continue reading → A Shot Heard in Far Rockaway is Felt in Fulham