Getting strange for the holidays. According to a recent UIC press release, nutrition instructor Janet Regan Klich urges holiday shoppers to use the supermarket as a gym. Park at the far end of the lot, she suggests. Choose items from top and bottom shelves only. And “pick up two 46-ounce cans of juice and do arm curls and lifts while walking around the store.”
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Management-directed fund drives are “unfair to employees,” writes Donald McNeeley, president of Chicago Tube & Iron, in the newsletter of DePaul University’s Institute for Business & Professional Ethics. “This places undue pressure on employees, some of whom may not be in a position to afford [to contribute]. Further, perhaps some of those who can afford such would, in a more neutral environment, select a different charity which is more personal to them.”
“Life after death has gotten more difficult over geologic time,” says University of Chicago paleontologist Susan Kidwell, who’s quoted in a recent university press release. She specializes in taphonomy, the study of what happens to an organism after it dies, as it decomposes and becomes fossilized. “There has been tremendous evolution on the supply side of the equation–the organisms that produce potential fossils–but also among agents of destruction, those organisms that destroy bones and shells….Half a billion years ago, post-mortem processes were less severe but shells were also less durable, with the result that the mixing of multiple generations [in the same layer of rock] is less of a problem.”
“Math programs for kids don’t teach math. They test,” report Lorraine and Jordan Breslow in Chicago Computer Currents (October). “Ideally, we would like our children to learn early in life that math, like reading or art, can be fun and creative. But for now, the Wall Street wizards who make Barbie believe that ‘math is hard’ would have us believe that through the miracle of multimedia, math is easy. It isn’t.”
