Customizing your wedding is standard these days, and wedding planning businesses aren't the only ones who are benefiting. There's been a boom in people applying online to be ordained to officiate friends' and families' weddings. But there's an unexpected catch: Sometimes those Universal Life Church ordinations aren't legal in the county or state where the wedding is being performed! more ›

NY1 has a good look at the differing rules for cell phone use at two very different public schools in the Bronx. One is DeWitt Clinton High School, where classes are frequently overcrowded and there are metal detectors at the entrance. The other is Bronx High School of Science, the magnet school whose has seven Nobel Prize-winning (in physics) graduates. more ›

Bronx High School of Science, one of the city's top magnet schools, is suddently in a pickle (or is that kimchee?) with Korean parents. The NY Sun reports that parents have raised more than $100,000 to start a promisd Korean language program at the school, but the school has only offered an elective since. There are lots of questions, like why did the school accept checks from parents while the Department of Education denies any knowledge of them and why did parents fundraise when donated money cannot pay for teachers. The school did give back $70,000 in donations from Jwin Electronics, but the DOE can't seem to account for thousands of dollars from other organizations, like the Korean Embassy and LG Electronics. And then there's this:

Interest in the matter has even extended to the West Coast. A professor at UCLA, Ailee Moon, is the president of the Foundation for Korean Language and Culture, which contributed $5,000 and flew to New York to review the program with the principal in February of this year. Ms Moon was concerned that only the one course was offered. more ›

Bad, elite high schools, bad! Investigators found out that Brooklyn Tech, the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant all made low-income students pay for AP exams, while the schools received NY State grant money to fund them. Some of you may remember that AP exams are expensive - $82 a pop nowadays (we think they were around $70-some circa 1993), and the NY Times explains that students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches qualify for free AP exams. But the schools would charge those students $20-52 an exam. The whistle was blown on the operation when Brooklyn Tech's AP coordinator, Margaret Blau, wanted to refund the students after receiving the state's reimbursement of $13,000. Brooklyn Tech principal Lee McCaskill told her "he did not wish to be troubled issuing 259 checks to students, and that the surplus should be kept in the Brooklyn Tech account to be used for student activities." more ›

Joel Sherman, Professional Scrabble® Player more ›

Shocking arborists everywhere, ecologist Jillian Gregg found that saplings in New York grew faster than their country cousins. According to her findings in Nature, the excess of ozone near the ground in rural areas is greater than in cities, and as ozone is harmful to flora and fauna...Newsday reveals that it's the nitric oxide in the city that erases some of the ozone. Yay, pollution has its perks. Too bad, as a Parks Department official says, that the trees in the city will live half as long. more ›