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The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

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Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

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Quantcast Proprietary Pixel Query for WordPress.com

This morning, I posted a support query in the deep and authentic WordPress.com Support Forum concerning previous discussions of the “Quantcast Pixel” that is loaded for each WordPress.com blog.  It seems that if you visit the Quantcast site, anyone can get information on your WordPress.com blog just by entering your blog name at the end of the Quantcast URL.  Here’s the text of my support inquiry — I have added the screenshots for this article:

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Lying in Wait and the Unwanted Exposition of Repressed Rage

I spend a lot of my waking hours — when I am not here staring at a computer screen writing to you — walking the urban streets of New York and New Jersey.  I interact with all sorts of personalities and lifestyles.  I am seeing a new trend that concerns me as a pseudo-amateur watcher of human behavior:  The free exposition of lying in wait repressed rage.

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Why Do You Wear Pajamas in Public?

In the USA, I’ve seen people wear sweatpants in public, and hospital scrubs worn as street clothes have been de rigueur for a decade now, but I don’t understand the continued rise of wearing pajamas — and slippers! — in public as your actual clothing.

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The Revenge Bloggers

You’ve read their blogs.  You’ve felt their heat.  You know their terroristic hatred.  I’m talking about — The Revenge Bloggers — and I’m hoping today we can try to deaden their cold, and narrow, icepick impact in the public square by asking them to retire their poison fingers.

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Clinton as a Dubya Handi Wipe

We are all quite familiar with Dubya’s memorable moments in office as he flipped us off on camera — but there is a new firestorm afoot under the former president’s thumb — and it all has to do with how he used his new best friend Bill Clinton as a human Handi Wipe. 

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Cuffed for Money: Privacy and the Public Record

You can buy the new “Cuffed” magazine for a dollar to ogle the faces of the recently arrested.  There are some who believe “Cuffed” is an inappropriate invasion of privacy while others argue the mug shots are part of the public record and any right to privacy was lost upon arrest.

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Death of the Public Schools

Are we at the end of our tether with public schooling as private schools, religious schools and school vouchers try to replace our traditional education system?

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GIS in Public Health

This article represents a quick presentation of what is possible with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software.  We were pleased to provide some GIS content for Glencoe/McGraw-Hill publishing for three textbooks in 2008: World Geography and Cultures, Glencoe World History and The American Vision — all with a combined expected worldwide sales of 750,000 copies.

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