The comments thread on this article about Whole Foods’ transporting some turkey breasts in a crowded, dirty, elevator next to some guy’s ass and trash cans is quite possibly the funniest and somehow simultaneously snarkey and happy stream of collective consciousness on a website. With 20,000 views of this article, the Gothamist has it going on apparently?
How The Meat Is “Prepared” At Whole Foods
What’s the best website we’re not reading?
October 19, 2010 By
WordCamp this weekend
October 15, 2010 By
I have acquired 2 free passes for Baruch students from StudioPress, please email baruchfreepress/gmail/com if you are interested; first come first serve.
The schedule of the weekend’s workshops is available at 2010.nyc.wordcamp.org
Day of Tolerance October 14
October 14, 2010 By
This email has a correction published with it here.
I wish things were different. I wish USG sent out an email notifying students about the intent to support and observe the day. I wish the man sending the email out, Carl Aylman, didn’t make a crass and sexually harassing comment about a gay hookup “ring” when I brought multiple reports of academic dishonesty to him. It totally sucks to attend a college that you realize has no moral leadership, but it’s too late to transfer somewhere else.
Direct Deposits this week will be THURSDAY! [Financial Aid]
August 11, 2010 By
If you were expecting a financial aid direct deposit this week, it will be coming on Thursday, August 12, instead of the usual Wednesday day. You heard it here first.
Did you know that you can usually see the direct deposit in esims on the Monday before it deposits? This week it didn’t show until Tuesday, but I didn’t notice the Thursday date. Oops.
Textbook Affordability Provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act
August 7, 2010 By
An article in today’s New York Times, How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks mentions new federal laws about the sale of textbooks that started July 1. The two important rules I noted were that publishers must sell items individually if they also sell items in bundles, and students have to be provided the ISBN numbers of the books that would be used in the courses for which they were registering. Well, in recently trying to find a computer science course, I saw that the bookstore was charging $86 for a copy of a technology book that was seven years old. I’ve overpaid for textbooks at our bookstore like all of you, but I’ve never seen such an obvious scamming of students in the way that Follett was charging for a used, out of date technology book. I sent this letter to our new President, Mitchel Wallerstein, this afternoon:
Dear President Wallerstein,
In trying to look up textbooks for the classes that are supposed to start in three short weeks, I found that the bookstore still did not have the texts available on their website for the fall semester.
Interestingly, in today’s New York Times, there is an article that mentions a new Federal Law that says I should have the ISBNs of the textbooks available to me for all the classes I can register for, effective July 1, 2010.
You can imagine how frustrated I am to be unable to find Baruch in compliance with this new Federal Law.
Interestingly, for one course I was considering taking, I looked up the book that the previous section used. It was a computer science course related to database applications and the textbook was for Microsoft Access 2003. The “textbook”, now seven years old, is selling at our bookstore for $86. I say “textbook” because a book related to a piece of software that is two versions and seven years old does not qualify as a textbook for a course in an American college in 2010 about technology. The only reason there are 56 copies available on Amazon.com in the price range of 1 penny and $20 is because nobody has any interest in buying the book and the other 50,000 people who have copies to sell have just thrown the book away! It obviously needs to be said that the school has no business taking the money of unwitting young people for such “education”, and it makes a mockery of the school for granting three credits in the study of such antiquated technology. What in the world is going on at Baruch College?
Please investigate and clear up these issues as quickly as possible.
Robert Reale, [repeatedly embarrassed] Senior
Fellow Baruch students, I hope there is an answer for us soon. Please feel free to comment on this post and/or email the Baruch College President at mitchel.wallerstein@baruch.cuny.edu.
The Crises of Capitalism, by a Sociologist
July 1, 2010 By
This is just the greatest animation put to a very well said short lecture by David Harvey of the CUNY Graduate Center:
We need to talk about the oil spill… (xpost)
June 10, 2010 By
That was clear from class today.
A friend of mine just brought up the oil spill to me again on the phone, and he was too young to remember the Iranian hostage crisis. We are living through a terrible moment in history right now, and this isn’t a moment where you “remember where you were when…” like one day you will tell someone younger than you where you were the day Barack Obama was elected President. That was a great day. Your grandparents remember where they were when they found out that John F. Kennedy had been killed. That was a horrible day.
Every single day during the Iranian hostage crisis, I came home from school hoping upon hope that my mom would tell me the hostages were freed. I remember getting the newspaper and hoping that there would be something happy there to find out about these poor people. The newspaper was Newsday, and it was an “evening” paper – so there was never going to be anything new in that paper that I didn’t already know. This went on for 1 year and almost 100 more days… it was torture to be an American citizen in 1980 because some Iranian college students made fools of us and we had a President who wouldn’t stand up for us. OK it wasn’t really torture, but it was deeply and thoroughly humiliating. I do not use these words lightly. I feel this same sense of humiliation again when I see these corporate executives on TV each morning, and I hear reported the effing jerk CEO of BP say he’d like his life back. Really? Like “Seth and Amy? Really?” really?
What we are living through now is an enduring and sustained horribleness. The world is being polluted – no, destroyed, before our eyes, while we watch – and we are powerless to stop it right this instant. By “we” I mean you, me, the President, scientists: by we, I mean all the people of the planet Earth. And men who make more money in a month than we will make in a lifetime sit on morning TV and act like snotty children who you want to just smack upside the head. If you’re lucky enough to be crazy busy, you can avoid the news. If you’re not, you try to figure out how to expel the sadness from your body because it’s so sad but it’s hard to cry for an oil soaked pelican. We couldn’t see those hostages all that time, but is the sadness different or is it my soul that is so hardened by a country so stupid as to elect the leaders that they do?
So we’re living through this event. People, animals, economies, systems of all types are going to be screwed over by this event. It won’t just end and we look back and see houses built a year later. We’re not going to grow a bunch new fish on the Today show and ship them in a big truck to New Orleans (they built house frames in Rockefeller Center and shipped them to La.) Whether or not you believe in a higher power, how did they ever think they were going to just rebuild biology? How did they think they allow the possibility of this happening and how do they think they can ever, ever possibly make amends to all of the Earth’s creatures for what they have done?
My friend Chris is a video guru of sorts and he made this video because he felt he needed to do something.
(This was also posted on a class blog, not for credit.)
Is this the end of Facebook? These Diaspora guys asked for $10,000, got $200,000
May 29, 2010 By
click on the image to go to their funding page
Inspired by a talk given by Columbia law professor Eben Moglen gave on internet privacy in February, four guys from NYU decided to build a social networking system that would be, “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.” It’s called Diaspora*.
From what I can discern from their website, they started a kickstarter funding project on April 24, and asked for $10,000. It took them twelve days to reach that goal. It’s now 2 days from the closing date of the funding effort and they have raised $191,963.
I’m excited and want to be on board. I doubt it is a coincidence that Facebook rolled out a revamped privacy mechanism this past week.
If you are interested in being part of the effort to bring Diaspora to the Baruch community, please send me an email at rob-at-ibaruch.org. We will do our best to arrange for students that need hosting services to receive it at no charge from ibaruch.org.
I feel lucky to have stumbled upon this! I completely missed the New York Times article about Diaspora earlier this month. I am stoked to see what the possibilities are!
This comic from xkcd.com really does sum up the whole privacy thing, too:
