By David Gibbons

Photo By Bess Adler

To say that Avenues is a grand scheme with the potential for revolutionizing education as we know it would be akin to calling the Empire State a tall building.

Students at this brand-new, for-profit private school will experience language immersion in Mandarin and Spanish from age 3. During their 15 years at the school, they’ll study history and culture in a multi-year survey called the World Course; they’ll be required to concentrate in a personal area of interest—academic, artistic or athletic—through a college-major-like program called Avenues Mastery. They’ll take multiple trips abroad and benefit from local institutional partnerships as well as integration of advanced learning technologies.

There’s much more—all of it spelled out on the website, www.avenues.org, which reads like a detailed blueprint for the global school of the future—part practical handbook, part idealistic manifesto.

The brains behind Avenues is Chris Whittle, the bow-tied media mogul famous for reviving a moribund Esquire magazine in the 1980s then founding Channel One News, which offered free TV (with ads) to schools. Whittle reinvented himself as an educational entrepreneur, starting Edison Schools in 1992 along with former Yale president Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who also heads the team at Avenues. Edison may have fallen short of Whittle’s most optimistic projections, but it is acknowledged as the pioneer of the charter school movement.

For his next start-up, Whittle amassed $75 million from private equity and his own pocket, introducing Avenues in 2011 as an “idea whose time had come.” The school’s flagship location, a beautifully renovated former warehouse on 10th Avenue in Chelsea, bordering on the Highline Park, will eventually house 1,600 students, from preschool through 12th grade. A second campus will open in Beijing in 2014, a third in São Paulo in 2015 and so on, with the ultimate goal of 20 campuses worldwide within a decade.

“We are up to speed to the degree we planned it,” says Gardner Dunnan, academic dean and head of the Upper School. Dunnan, a former headmaster of the Dalton School, was instrumental in developing and implementing Whittle’s plan as well as recruiting a best-and-brightest roster that includes Co-Heads of School Ty Tingley and Skip Mattoon, who ran Exeter and Hotchkiss, respectively.

“The leadership team all came here because it’s a new school of thought,” says Dunnan. “It isn’t like going to run another school; we’ve all done that. This is something entirely different.

“We’re looking at current best practices and transferring some of that, but we’re also inventing new methods and approaches on our own. Chris Whittle is a brilliant entrepreneur, and he works harder than anyone I know. But the key is his rare capacity to entertain a really good vision, to pay strict attention to the details and yet not be a micromanager, and to really elicit all of the talents of his team.”

Word got out quickly in the pedagogical world; Avenues received more than 4,500 applications for 125 initial teaching positions. The school will also share its riches through professional development workshops. And, after a one-year test run, the World Course, along with its invaluable database, will be made available to all takers at no cost.

Indeed. The new Google Privacy Policy, taking effect on March 1^st 2012, matters. To even mention how deeply Google has permeated our lives seems silly. For a whole ton of people, Google basically is the Internet. Now, while the company has only modest (relatively) market share within many of the sub categories that make up the full scope of Google Services, just the fact that all of these exist creates a pervasive, fungal, sort of presence across e-society.

Up until now, each G Service requested that new users agree to a clearly stated Terms of Service before entering—remember all those Terms? No? Me neither, bro! Nobody reads those things. It’s just generally accepted that companies aren’t binding us into contracts for our first-borns, or any overtly Satanic requirements, in order to use their services. What they do ask of us is that we allow them to sell information about us so that they can generate income. Which is fair. I’m certainly not paying them. Now, instead of each sub-Goog having separate policies, all of them will be grouped under one big legal roof.

So what will the new Privacy Policy mean to you? Well, it’ll mean that if you ever become curious about what you’ve consented to, you’ll only have to read ‘one’ (fairly giant) wad of text. In the same sense, it means a consolidation of your Internet person. You could think of it as, like, a declaration of self, vaguely. A coming of age.

Before now, the Internet knew you in a piecemeal way. It’d be, all, “Oh, you like that? Let me show you where to get more,” and then you were, all, “Dude, I hate that. I was just curious,” and then the Internet would say it was sorry, and urge you to tell it more about yourself, and you’d be, like, ‘God! You’re smothering me!’ but then y’all were back together the next day, because, by now, you just can’t live without one another. Come March 1st, it’s going to be like all of your Ex’s just got together for drinks with your current special someone, a.k.a. Google, and…well, suffice it to say that your Sexy Air of Mystery just got a lot less Airy.

The question is, are we ready to settle down with this cyber-babe? Are we prepared to give ourselves to Google TDDWP? Does that stand for till death do we part? Yes! Yes to all of it. It does. We do. Because we just have no choice. Google has been nice enough to let us opt out of any and all of their services, and, it’s easy enough: stop using them. Otherwise you can just opt out of the data-mining part, or the web-history part, or the Relevant Interest Advertising part, and it’s all right there on the Google Dashboard that you probably didn’t know existed. Though, even if you do all of that, there are so many websites and apps grabby-handsing at your data-sandwich that, well gosh, you might as well not have packed a lunch at all.

Personally, I think Chris Davies at slashgear.com is right in saying that we don’t give a shit about our privacy. Granted, we give huge amounts of shit when our bank numbers are swiped, or we find out that Apple knows where we get while we loop around our—suddenly so visibly pathetic—daily trajectories. But is it all so bad?

What Google wants to do with our information is make a ton of money. That’s reasonable. Google is a product(s), and we are consumers, and this is how that works. The how of Google is advertising. Paradise for advertisers is for every ad seen by consumers to be, not just relevant, but necessary. That’s kind of a paradise for consumers too. If, after the new Policy takes effect, a person were to use Google for everything—really. From Calendar to Wallet to Health—Google, in turn, could conceivably make life extremely convenient for that person.

Imagine a life where you don’t forget to set your alarm because your phone knows your schedule. It tells you that your normal route to work is going to make you late and suggests the best alternative. It even highlights an alternate Starbucks because you stop there every day for a your favorite drink—which—it will order for you once you get close enough so they’ll have it waiting at the bar. Or you could imagine that Google = Cyberdyne Systems and soon we’re all going to die in a brutal robo-pocalypse.

So, what? Are we ready to wear Google’s pin, or will they play us like a fool? What do you think?

Follow @44Carib on @Twitter just because!

The city under Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken some aggressive steps toward a greener future, and the Department of City Planning recently released its latest development in transforming New York into a more sustainable place to live.

The Zone Green Text Amendment is currently circulating through the city’s community boards for comments and feedback, and while some applaud its purpose, others have expressed trepidation over the methods used to achieve the green results and whether the zoning changes will amount to irreversible and unwanted changes to the city’s streetscapes and skylines.

The purpose of the amendment, a City Planning spokesperson said, is to remove zoning impediments that would hinder green building and renovating practices. The proposal was developed in consultation with the Department of Buildings (DOB) and the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability, and the DOB will be in charge of enforcing any zoning changes and policing how they are implemented.

The main components of the proposal involve changing zoning regulations to allow for the conversion of more energy-efficient building walls, the addition of sun-shading devices on windows and glass walls, construction of solar panels and other rooftop additions like rainwater tanks or even wind power turbines and creating greenhouses on roofs. Many of the changes would primarily affect the rooftops of existing buildings.

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, said they are still reviewing the 50-page proposal and forming opinions about it but they have some concerns over the potential results of such sweeping changes.

“The idea of the exterior insulation, eight inches of exterior insulation, strikes us as potentially damaging to historic streetfronts,” Bankoff said. “When we’re talking about historic buildings, we’re not talking about landmark buildings necessarily, we’re just talking about old buildings.”

He also said that while the city should be applauded for thinking big and going green, some of the technologies it espouses may not be worth the expense and alteration to the skyline.

“Do you want to start putting a 50-foot wind tower on a 100-foot building that will only generate 6 percent of its energy?” Bankoff said.

Page Cowley, an architect and one of the co-chairs of Community Board 7’s Land Use Committee, said some board members expressed similar reservations about the proposal, which will go before the full board on Tuesday night without a resolution from the committee.

“Some people felt that changing the ways that the tops of buildings look and increasing the bulkhead, which can go as high as 40 feet, wasn’t a problem. For others, people don’t know how this is going to affect existing, nonlandmarked buildings—how this is going to change our skyline,” she said.

Preservation advocacy group Landmark West has previously commissioned skyline studies on the Upper West Side, and its director of preservation, Cristiana Peña, confirmed that they are reviewing the proposal in that light to determine how it might affect landmark-protected buildings.

Cowley said some board members expressed concern over how the changes would be managed between the DOB, City Planning and the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which all have their own definitions and goals regarding green buildings. City Planning confirmed that the DOB will still be overseeing all building additions.

“This is where it starts to impact the private residents, and the question is, how can this be done in such a way that certain types of rooftop additions maybe need to come back to the community board for review?” she said.

Community Board 8 will review the proposal at its full board meeting Wednesday, Feb. 15.