Back to School Special . . . from Firefox!

This just in from the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wire Campus newsletter:

Firefox Releases New 'Campus Edition' Web Browser

It’s the time of year to stock up on school supplies — new spiral notebooks, pens, and … a new Web browser. Last week Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox Web browser, released Firefox Campus Edition for free download.

logoA key feature of the new browser is the Zotero citation system developed by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, noted here last year. The system is designed to help students and scholars mark and manage information on the Web that they want to cite in research papers.

The campus edition browser is not all work and no play, though. It also includes a plug-in called FoxyTunes that helps manage the soundtrack to cram sessions, and StumbleUpon, a service to quickly jump among favorite blogs, online videos, and photo Web sites.—Jeffrey R. Young

Roommate with a Video-Game System?

Halo Gamers
Originally uploaded by Bilbeny

When your parents deposited you in your residence hall room (sob!), they were looking (surreptitiously or not) for the tell-tale signs of your inevitable (they fear) moral dissolution. But did they check your new roommate's gaming gear?

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a study which links a roommate's gaming gear with less study time:

According to a paper scheduled for release this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, first-year college students who happen to be assigned roommates with video-game consoles study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles.

And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students whose roommates brought video-game consoles earned grades that were 0.241 lower, on a 4-point scale, than did otherwise-equivalent students whose roommates did not have consoles.

What to do? The Chronicle reports that the researchers conclude "The important lesson of their research . . . is that colleges should encourage effort, frequently reminding their students that study time pays off."

The research article--"The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance"-- is available online for a fee from the National Bureau for Economic Research.

Attention

Attention
Originally uploaded by Felix42 contra la censura

Increasingly, students bring their computers to class and faculty take theirs to meetings. Is everyone, however, paying attention to business? Who is checking email or sneaking a look at ESPN or sending snide notes via IM? What is the correct etiquette for this situation?

According to a recent article in The New York Times, there are no clear guidelines, although Microsoft Corporation makes use of 7 Rules for Using Laptops in Meetings:

1. Make sure there's a point. Don't take laptops to meetings unless you need one for a particular task, such as a presentation.
2. Designate a laptop. Put one person in charge of computer duties, for note-taking or PowerPoint projection.
3. Be ready to explain why you've brought a laptop. It's just good manners to let the meeting organizer know what you've brought a computer along.
4. Use some discretion. Be sure to look up from your machine, use eye contact, and stay involved with the meeting. Tablet PCs are less distracting than regular laptops because they eliminate the screen barrier.
5. Turn down the bells and whistles. Be sure you mute any sort of noise or sound that may prove distracting or annoying to others.
6. When in doubt, leave them out. Sometimes, it's appropriate to ask people to leave their laptops behind.
7. Dissect your meetings. If people aren't paying attention to the content of your classes or meetings, then take a hard look at the way you organize the session. Meetings that are well planned and well run help keep participants focussed.

"I keep getting older; they stay the same age."

Beloit College has released its annual Mind-Set List which attempts to to identify a worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007: "Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989."

Here are the first 12 items on the list; you can see the entire list of 70 on the Beloit College website:

1. What Berlin wall?
2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
3. Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
5. Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
6. They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
7. They have grown up with bottled water.
8. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
11. Rap music has always been mainstream.
12. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.

This execrable sentence erupted from the molten mind of Jim Gleeson, the 2007 grand-prize winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. And he's not even an English major, but a media technician.

For 25 years, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges contestants to write the worst possible first sentence for the worst of all possible novels.

You can read the 2007 winners for all categories on the contest's web site, but we'll leave you with the winner of the Vile Pun category:

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong. (Karl Scott, Brisbane, Australia)

Read Well, Live Longer

We've long known that education levels correlate to longevity. The New York Times notes that "one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates." Education, it seems, adds to one's health literacy, which then leads to a longer life.

What's new, however, is that one particular characteristic of lower education levels may cause the problem: poor reading skills. A recent study from the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that reading level "independently predicts all-cause mortality and cardiovascular death among community-dwelling elderly persons."

As nHumanities has always known, reading is good for you!

(Illustration John Gilbert, "A Death Unexpected by the Reader," DMVI: ALS019 .)