Online International ASL Tutoring

Boles University and HardcoreASL.com are pleased to announce two new programs.

The first is our ability to now offer online and in person international American Sign Language fluency evaluations for job seekers, businesses and private individuals. Now you can get a job based on your ASL skills, or you can "opt out" of a foreign language requirement for your schooling.

Next, we now offer online private ASL tutoring via iChat and Skype and any other Mac-compatible client. Now you can learn ASL from the comfort of your home or office wherever in the world you live.

Head on over to HardcoreASL.com and click around to see all the programs we're offering on that portal.

Censorship is the Last Domain of Tyrants

There is no greater threat to freedom than censorship that pretends to be randomized or accidental.

The internet is a wonky, unstable, place filled with wires and tubes and fragile connections.

To get rid of a book, you have to burn it in the public square. To erase a file or a blog entry, you only need to touch a mouse and click.

What sort of protections do we demand in the electronic frontier to protect intentional censorship that pretends to be nonassignable and randomized?

How will those who follow us in antiquity know the history of the record when the record is so easy to edit, change, manipulate and enforce the meandering and mushy will of the fleeting people?

Minority Children in Triple Jeopardy

Health Affairs recently released a disturbing and disparaging report concerning the health and wellbeing of minority children in America:

Bethesda, MD -- Almost 17 percent of black children and 20.5 percent of Latino children in the United States live in "double jeopardy," meaning that they live in both poor families and poor neighborhoods, according to research released today in the March/April issue of the journal Health Affairs.

In contrast, only 1.4 percent of white children live in double jeopardy. According to researchers, the type of neighborhood one lives in plays a significant role in racial and ethnic health disparities. In addition, poor white children are more likely than poor black or Latino children to live in better neighborhoods.

A typical poor white child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty rate is 13.6 percent, while a typical poor black child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty level is nearly 30 percent.

A typical poor Latino child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty rate is 26 percent. Segregated, disadvantaged neighborhoods affect health in the following ways:

· By limiting economic advancement for minorities because of poor education, limited job opportunities, and a poor return on housing investment.

· By exposing minorities to violent crime, environmental hazards, poor municipal services, and a lack of grocery stores and healthy food options.

· By leading to segregated health care settings with poorer-quality health care.

How is it possible to lead a cogent and healthy life if one cannot leap from the projects and the ghetto that others create based on the color of your skin?

Lack of access to broadband technology for research papers and internet reading is the third jeopardy – and it is also a major problem in the inner city urban core.

With a lack of access to publicly available information, the mind rots, the spirit wilts and illiteracy becomes the standard of the day as self interest and community investment in the propagation of a willing society decays in the streets and rots in the gutters.

We must not only cure the bodies of these minority children in crises, we must also provide open access to healing the mind with verifiable realities of dreams coming true.

JK Rowling Wrongly Claims Harry Potter

JK Rowling -- author of the Harry Potter books -- is trying to quash competition and publication of analysis in the form of an encyclopedia dedicated to divining meaning in the series.

Rowling feels Potter belongs to her and not the world. She is wrong.

We argue the Potter phenomenon has become more than its pages in the hand and greater than its volumes in print.

Potter is now part of the cultural meme of the world and Rowling should encourage more books and articles, not less, to help provide even more enlightenment to the literacy and the learning of her series fans. Her duty is to encourage conversation, not stamp it out with legal action.

When Rowling cries in court and tries to kill the publication of analytical Potter books instead of championing the work in the marketplace, she not only wounds her brand, but she lessens her greatness as an author in the mistaken and selfish effort to control the minutiae of a culture of believing she invented, but beautifully, no longer owns.

RelationShaping Bends Technology

We are pleased to announce David W. Boles' RelationShaping is now online!

This new blog deals with the way our human form is conditioned by technology and our new logo describes that relationship in raw text:

RelationShaping's slogan is -- "The Spear of Technology Piercing the Body In Situ ->(" -- and that means, to us, that as we evolve as a species, we are always re-structured and conformed and conflated by the environment around us.

How do we deal with that shaping?

Do we rebel?

Do we actively join in the process?

Are we even aware of the changes in our body that technology demands of us?

Read RelationShaping.com and find out!

Offline with Google Docs

Google announced this week we can now use their "Google Gears" feature to work on Google Docs offline.

This is a big step because it means you no longer have to be connected to the internet to interact with Google. You can now be offline and still be Google and that is a momentous happening that few seem to understand.

Google, by going offline, livens up your entire life instead of just your virtual one. You can use Google as you wish and on your own terms. You don't have to look for an internet connection. You don't need to worry about losing data in a disconnection.

You just write in Google Docs in offline mode and then later, when you go online, Google Docs will reconcile your documents between your computer and its servers and you're good to keep going!

Google Docs Offline sets the mark for Google books you own at home, Google cellphones you hold in your hand, and Google pillows that float you off to rest in that beautiful Google dreamland.

New Jersey Sours on JuicyCampus

As a proud resident of the State of New Jersey, we are thrilled to see state action being taken against a vicious gossip website called JuicyCampus:

TRENTON, N.J. - New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students.

Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive. One thread, for example, on the "most overrated Princeton student" quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

JuicyCampus may be violating the state's Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn't allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule — and no way for users to report or dispute the material, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said Tuesday.

New Jersey is standing up for the good people who shun anonymity on the web.

We love it New Jersey doesn't believe in allowing unenforced and unmitigated chaos and hate to the internet.

When sites like JuicyCampus are allowed to thrive without social repercussion, or the force of human law coming down on them like a corrective cudgel, we are all made worse in their shadow -- because instead of enlightening the world with strength and insight, JuicyCampus tumbles us all down the wishing well and into the drink for drowning.