Illinois’ largest predator appears to be flourishing, according to researchers Ed Heske and Marty Miller in the Illinois Natural History Survey’s newsletter Reports (July/August). “As recently as the 1950s, coyotes were considered uncommon in Illinois; now there are probably over 30,000 living in the state,” they write, perhaps because competing predators like gray and red wolves no longer are.
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“A person with a disability may encounter a handicap in one environment, but not in another,” according to the Chicago Behavior Consultants, Inc., in its newsletter, the Reinforcer (Summer). “Consider our friend Joe. Joe is totally blind (a disability), but has only that one disabling condition. He works in an office tower in downtown Chicago and travels to work independently using a cane each day via the subway. One morning as the train rolls into the station, the doors open and then pandemonium erupts. A power failure has left the passengers in the subway tunnel in complete darkness. Joe, cane in hand, proceeds along his usual path to the stairs and notices that people are grabbing his arms. He successfully negotiates up the stairs with a crowd right behind him. In this scenario, Joe is disabled, but not handicapped. The sighted passengers are not disabled, but they certainly are handicapped….Their level of skill did not meet the demands of the given environment.”
“It used to be that an art museum was where one went to see a Monet. Today it is to find out who Monet was,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Issues (July). “Museums in [the 19th century] brought to visitors things they knew about but had not seen. Today they are more often asked to show visitors things they have seen but know nothing about….A few years ago, the Field Museum surveyed its visitors about the Pacific, which was to be the subject of a major–and controversial–new exhibit. Staff found that while people had heard of the Pacific somewhere, many of them didn’t know there was so much water in it or that it had so many islands. One would not think that explaining that the Pacific has a lot of water in it is the best use of an institution that is home to the West’s pre-eminent experts on Melanesian cultures, but then buying a computer to teach 4-year-olds how to add two and two isn’t very efficient either.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
