February 16, 2012 Of course we all know that the crumbling Education System in America is but a microcosm, (if you choose to regard education in such a manner), of the general state of daily life for the 99%. The latest mind-numbing statistics on poverty, “One out of every two Americans are currently living either […]
The Blame Game: It’s your fault! No, it’s your fault!
February 9, 2012 I am frustrated! I have just been through the twilight zone and emerged confused and perplexed; confused as to why someone else’s failure to provide necessary information, in this case payment for service is somehow my fault, and perplexed as to why an individual would even go through the effort of blaming […]
Academic Documents: The Psychology of Fraud
February 2, 2012 In less than a week, two senior analysts in my company detected irregularities on documents we had received for evaluation and both were able to determine that the documents had been falsified. Though the due diligence exercised by our team of analysts in their scrupulous review and handling of these applications is […]
Music and Art: Tools for Survival
January 26, 2012 Classical pianist Alexis Weissenberg recently died. He was considered one of the great virtuosos of the last century. He was a child prodigy in Bulgaria when he and his mother were taken prisoner by German soldiers in 1941. Weissenberg had a small accordion and could play excellent renditions of Schubert piano works […]
1, 2, 3: Delivering information to students around the world
January 20, 2012 Billy Wilder used film as a vehicle for raising social awareness in the hilariously acerbic comedy, “One, Two, Three” which took place in Post-War Berlin. Art imitates life full tilt here as the Germans erected the Berlin Wall during filming. Wilder was a bit daring for this time period of extreme social […]
My Place of Birth
January 12, 2012 I had no idea the Pandora’s box I’d be opening as I set off ten years ago to work on a book, loosely based on my Persian paternal grandparents. Half way through my second re-write of the manuscript, I found myself so moved by the 2009 Green Revolution that was blossoming in […]
The Music of Language
January 5, 2012 by Jackie Parker I had been asked to teach a writing workshop for a group of women and their teenage daughters who lived within blocks of each other in Alhambra California, a city of 80,000 eight miles from downtown Los Angeles. Alhambra is the birthplace of the painter Norman Rockwell whose scenes […]
George Whitman, Shakespeare & Co., and what I learned from living in Paris
December 29, 2011 George Whitman died recently at the ripe old age of 98. He took over the famous Left Bank bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., after the original owner, Sylvia Beach, left it at the onset of World War II. She ran it as a publishing company that famously published James Joyce’s revolutionary novel […]
Season’s Greetings from ACEI
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Down the Rabbit Hole
December 15, 2011 “Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.” –Lewis Carroll Education has taken a nasty fall. In fact, if we do not […]