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Queensborough Bloodbath

There’s a bloodbath going on in Bayside and the site of the letting is the campus of CUNY-Queensborough, and the dagger is called “Pathways.”  Pathways, if you haven’t heard, is the new principle of uniting, and unbinding, disparate CUNY satellite campuses into a single, unintelligible — “Borg Cooperative” — where every course and teaching philosophy all land on the same page, and a student can take a class here and have it count for full credit over there and, as a member of the CUNY community, I believe Pathways sounds great in theory, but in current practice and cudgel, Pathways is a gangplank for faculty and the end of being for any idea of a proper, well-rounded, college education on a undergraduate CUNY campus.

Pathways is, of course, all about the bottom line — enrolling more students and graduating them quicker and paying faculty less money — but the end result will be students who are not as educated as their peers and who will be irreparably intellectually maimed, all in the name of convenience and parsimony.

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The Outlook.com Review

When Microsoft announced the redesign and re-branding of Hotmail and Live.com to Outlook.com, I raced over to the virtual land grab to get the usernames I wanted for the new Outlook.com domain.  If I’d understood the process better, I likely would have just converted my pre-existing Live.com email address to an Outlook.com email address — but that process was not clear on Day One, and so I gambled on being safer than sorrier and just started all-new accounts on Outlook.com.

What I didn’t expect in the transition from Live.com — and in comparison with my Google Apps life — is just how great Outlook.com would be in function and aesthetic!  Wowser!  I like the new icons and fast interface.  The overall look and feel are refreshing and new — I can’t wait for the Calendar to be updated to the new design.

The biggest surprise was firing up Outlook.com on my iPhone and finding how fast and easy it was to use.  Pages load really fast.  Google could learn a few things about beautiful iOS design from Microsoft.  You can almost read the mail screen with your eyes closed!  The fonts are big and beautiful.

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What's in a Deaf Sign Name? Hunter and his Gun!

The last week of August caught a firestorm in the Grand Island, Nebraska Public Schools system as administrators scrambled to recover from banning a three-year-old Deaf child named Hunter Spanjer from using his sign name because his fingers “looked too much like a gun” — and any sort of suggestion of a gun, even as a sign name, is verboten.

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What Makes an Urban Campus?

Facebook, bleeding money and prestige, are forging forward with plans to build a huge, sprawling, Metropolis Campus that looks like a giant warehouse that was built on a Tilt-a-Wheel and then bumped for good measure just to be jazzy.  There’s no sense of privacy or sacred space.  It’s all one big blob of a structural maze and a spinning internal eyesore.

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The Hereditary Nature of Internet Addiction

There are days when I am riding the bus home from the train station and I see high school aged children looking at their phones, playing games and going online and I think to myself with wonder that these children have never known a day of their lives when there was not such a thing as The Internet. I have seen children sitting in groups having non-conversations in which words are exchanged but nobody is really listening, all the while updating their Twitter and Facebook accounts about the details of the exchanges that they aren’t really having. They simply can’t seem to peel their eyes away from their small computers in order to have any kind of real interaction with their friends. Now it seems that hardcore internet addiction may be entirely genetic.

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The Return of Debtors Prison

In the time of author Charles Dickens, there was a scary institution known as a debtor’s prison in which a person, if they were unable or unwilling to pay off a debt they owed, would be put into prison as a way of making up the debt. In the United States they were outlawed in the 19th century as they did not seem to help anyone and certainly did not bring the person out of debt but it seems even in 2012 the debtor’s prison is alive and well.

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Hello, Am I Still Wanted? Yes?! Great! Goodbye!

I have been publishing new authors and playwrights online for over 15 years.  I have made a lot of great friends and it is a delight when one of the authors I originally published finds great success.  Saying “Yes” is hard.  Saying “No” is easy.  I always say “Yes” to a person of great talent and promise even if they later disappoint.

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