Last night, CUNY”s Board adopted a broad ban on tobacco for all the university campuses, making CUNY the largest tobacco-free public university system in the United States. The policy prohibits the use, marketing and promotion of tobacco on all grounds and facilities, including the areas outside campus buildings, and bars tobacco use during all events, including athletics. Read more about it in Inside Higher Ed.
January 25, 2011
CUNY Board Bans Smoking — Even Outdoors
January 24, 2011
Swapping Floors
In response to popular demand, Cohen Library is changing floor designations. Starting with the spring semester, Floor 1 (the lower floor of Cohen Library) will be come a QUIET STUDY floor and Floor 3 will become a GROUP STUDY floor. Signs noting this change will be posted.
January 20, 2011
IOP Maintenance
On Saturday, January 22, the IOPscience service will be unavailable for approximately 8.5 hours, between 3:30 am and Noon.
This is due to essential maintenance work being carried out in order to increase site performance. All services will be restored to normal operation by Noon.
January 5, 2011
Really Relevant Searching
For those of you who think that Google has become a jungle–a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers that usually links the user to sites set up to make someone money, you may want to try another search engine, Blekko. Blekko was founded in 2007 by a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers.
According to Vivek Wadhwa in a January 1st TechCrunch post, “in addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges. So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites.”
January 3, 2011
Unbiased Student Loan Advice
When Governor Andrew Cuomo was New York State Attorney General, he conducted an investigation of the student loan industry that uncovered kickbacks and deceptive marketing tactics. Some $13 million in student loan settlement payments produced by that investigation will be used to finance a national student loan center, to help borrowers and their parents navigate the complexities of the college lending process. Read the full New York Times article.