ATC Class: Gourmet Food Trucks Racing To Serve You Lunch

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129357300

Aspiring chefs usually have to prove their chops in the backs of kitchens. Now, some have found a fast track to culinary stardom. They're starting up food trucks.

If you stretch your arms out, you can just about touch the walls of Skillet. The mobile kitchen is crammed into a shiny, 1962 silver Airstream trailer. It heats up like an oven as three chefs scramble during the lunch rush in Seattle.

It looks like an episode of Iron Chef in a sardine can. Not exactly where you picture a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. Yet this is exactly what Josh Henderson had in mind when he conceived Skillet.

A Different Kind Of Fine Dining

"I was tired of working at restaurants," he says. "I kind of wanted to do something that was a little bit more my style, which was a little chaotic. And I enjoy being outside. Some days we're next to a mountain, and other days we're in the urban downtown, you know, homeless people asking us for free food."

Good thing for Henderson, foodies are willing to shell out $11 for one of his burgers.

He starts with grass-fed beef and slathers it with buttery French cheese. His fresh linguini is topped with reggiano, asparagus and pine nuts.

"With cooking, there's so many different ways — you can cook on a boat, you can cook in an Airstream trailer, you can cook in a Michelin-starred restaurant," he says. "It really doesn't matter, as long as what goes in that box is something we can be proud of."

Henderson isn't the only chef making mouthwatering cuisine in a trailer. Cooks in New York, Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles have led the way in mobile gastronomy. Now gourmet vendors are rolling out from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. And they're serving everything from appetizers to desserts.

When customers walk up to the peach-and-brown Parfait ice cream truck, Chef Adria Shimada gives them a sample and a spiel.

A Bakery On Wheels

"Have you guys had my ice cream before? You haven't?" she tells them. "I make everything from scratch. I'm 100-percent organic."

She says that otherwise, they might expect her mint to be green and candy-cane flavored.

"I infuse my ice cream custard with fresh spearmint leaves," she explains. "And then at the end, when I churn it, I drizzle in a warm chocolate stream into the cold custard, and it breaks up into these little, flaky, light chocolate chips."

The trained pastry chef says she holds her ice cream to the same standards as a high-end French bakery. She just couldn't afford the bakery part.

"The primary concern for me was the quality of the product I'm making," she says. "Having a mobile truck has really allowed me to keep that quality very high."

She says now that Parfait has built up a following in Seattle, she could go the more conventional brick-and-mortar route. Other food cart chefs have recently gone down that road. But the trucks themselves aren't leaving town anytime soon. Chefs say it's a great way to put the word on the street.


Vocabulary

Chops Scramble Fast-track Chaotic  Mouth-watering Gastronomy Spiel  Brick and mortar

1.       Inducing salivation 2.       A quicker than usual path to success 3.       An often repeated speech/story/other verbal communication 4.      Lacking the appearance of order 5.       The study of edible things or stomachs 6.       A real building based store 7.       Skills that require practice to maintain 8.       To attempt to do quickly or in a rushed manner

Discussion

1. Do you prefer brick and mortar, or on-line shopping? Why?
2. What kind of food would you buy from a cart/truck, and what kind would you not buy?
3. What is the strangest food you've seen sold from a cart?
4. Do you think cooking food in a movable trailer is sanitary?
5. What are some of the advantages/disadvantages of selling from a trailer/cart?

Gourmet Food Trucks Racing To Serve You Lunch : NPR

Gourmet Food Trucks Racing To Serve You Lunch : NPR

I'm thinking of changing this to do some activities instead. So don't sweat this article too much.

Slang For the Week

What up!/Up top! - This means "I said something witty, don't you think? Perhaps we should high-five in the up top position.*"

*(as opposed to what is called a low five)

You can see prime examples of usage of this expression by Barney Stinson in the sitcom, How I Met Your Mother.

Monkey Business: Fairness Isn't Just A Human Trait : NPR

Monkey Business: Fairness Isn't Just A Human Trait : NPR

Showing your humanity usually refers to an act of kindness or charity. Treating someone humanely means treating him fairly and with dignity. But are these traits really unique to humans?

Psychologist Sarah Brosnan wants to find out. She argues that traits like fairness and curiosity are essential for any social animals to survive and live together. To show that, Brosnan works with capuchin monkeys at the Language Research Center, a part of Georgia State University.

The capuchins here are "living in a normal social environment,” she says. "So they spend the vast majority of their day out here running around playing together, and we just separate them out for the testing.”

The monkeys climb over branches in the cage, swing from the top of the cage, wrestle with each other. When it's time for testing, the animals go indoors.

On this day Audrey Parrish is testing two capuchins, Liam and Logan. The test tries to get at the concept of fairness in capuchins. It isn't too tricky: Audrey hands Liam a granite token, and he hands it back to get a food reward. Audrey alternates between Liam and Logan.

Equal Pay For Equal Work

Now here's the twist. Sometimes each monkey gets the same reward, sometimes not. And there are two different kinds of rewards: a scrumptious, extremely desirable grape, or a ho-hum piece of only somewhat desirable cucumber. Think ice cream cone versus celery stick.

Logan was perfectly happy to exchange the token for a cucumber when his pal Liam was getting a cucumber too. "The question is now how is Logan going to respond to that cucumber when Liam is getting a grape?" says Brosnan.

What she finds is that more often than not, a capuchin offered the less desirable reward after his partner gets the good one refuses to hand back the token.

"What we're really testing is how do you respond when you're the one that gets the lower salary, not how do you respond when you hear there's a discrepancy between salaries in the environment," says Brosnan. "So they don't necessarily have to have an ideal of fairness or an idea of the way the world should work. All they have to care about is they got less than someone else."

Brosnan sees this work as evolutionary proof that animals have some of the same complex social rules that humans do.

Curious By Nature


Clive Wynne isn't so sure. Wynne, an animal psychologist at the University of Florida, says you don't have to invoke ideas like fairness or inequity to explain the capuchins' behavior.

There's an older concept, a more basic concept of frustration that humans share with many other species: "The tendency to act up if something they were expecting to receive is not given to them," says Wynne. "So if a child is in the habit of receiving a piece of chocolate for completing their homework, and they don't get their piece of chocolate, they may throw a tantrum. And that kind of frustrative behavior is seen in any number of different species."

Brosnan says whether or not you accept terms like fairness or inequity to explain what the capuchins did in the fairness test, she insists you can see unmistakable echoes of human behaviors in her capuchins.

Take curiosity. Brosnan points to what the capuchins did the first time they saw me and my recording gear — they all came over to have a look. "They're curious about you," she says. "They haven't seen you; they haven't seen a mic before. So they want to see what it is. Is it going to do anything to them like give them food, or is it going to be a threat?"


"You're not acquiring food; you're not mating; you're not defending yourself from a predator," says Brosnan. But saying play is purely social is not to suggest it isn't important — it helps juveniles learn the limits of acceptable behavior in their groups.You can also see beginnings of another important human social activity in capuchins: the desire to play — to do things that have no immediate payoff.

Brosnan doesn't believe play is a behavior inherited from monkeys in a genetic sense "but instead is a behavior that all sorts of intelligent, socially living species that live in complex social groups — and need to know their ways around [the groups] — have evolved."

What humans and their big brains bring to the table is an ability to do more with these socially learned behaviors, to be curious about more things in our environment, and to extend concepts like fairness and inequity to make more complex societies.

"That probably explains why we're building city states, and other species are still in groups of 200," she says.

In other words, we had the human edge.

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect : NPR

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect : NPR


When David Eagleman was 8 years old, he went exploring. He found a house under construction — prime territory for an adventurous kid — and he climbed on the roof to check out the view. But what looked like the edge of the roof was just tar paper, and — you can feel it coming — when David stepped on it, he fell.

Whoosh … Thud.

David was fine. But between whoosh and the thud, something odd happened. As David remembers it, he noticed every detail of his surroundings: the edge of the roof moving past him, the red bricks below moving toward him. He even did a little literary analysis: "I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland, how this must be what it was like for her, when she fell down the rabbit hole."

All of that happened in just 0.86 seconds. David knows that now because he has calculated how long it takes to fall 12 feet. David Eagleman is now Dr. Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and one of his specialties is exploring how our brains perceive and understand time.

Several years ago, motivated in part by his childhood plunge, David started studying the way our sense of time distorts in crisis situations. He has gathered a huge number of stories from people who have survived falls, car crashes, bike accidents, etc. Everyone, he says, seems to say the same thing: "It felt like the world was moving in slow motion."

But what is really going on? David started to think that maybe, in a crisis, the brain goes into a sort of turbo mode, processing everything at higher-than-normal-speed. If the brain were to speed up, he thought, the world would appear to slow down. This would work just like a slow-motion movie; in a slow-mo shot of a hummingbird, for example, you can see each individual wing movement in what would otherwise be just a blur.

Taking The Plunge

So David decided to craft an experiment to study this "slow-motion effect" in action. But to do that, he had to make people fear for their lives — without actually putting them in danger. His first attempt involved a field trip to Six Flags AstroWorld, an amusement park in Houston, Texas. He used his students as his subjects. "We went on all of the scariest roller coasters, and we brought all of our equipment and our stopwatches, and had a great time," David says. "But it turns out nothing there was scary enough to induce this fear for your life that appears to be required for the slow-motion effect."

But, after a little searching, David discovered something called SCAD diving. (SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device.) It's like bungee jumping without the bungee. Imagine being dangled by a cable about 150 feet off the ground, facing up to the sky. Then, with a little metallic click, the cable is released and you plummet backward through the air, landing in a net (hopefully) about 3 seconds later.

SCAD diving was just what David needed — it was definitely terrifying. But he also needed a way to judge whether his subjects' brains really did go into turbo mode. So, he outfitted everybody with a small electronic device, called a perceptual chronometer, which is basically a clunky wristwatch. It flashes numbers just a little too fast to see. Under normal conditions — standing around on the ground, say — the numbers are just a blur. But David figured, if his subjects' brains were in turbo mode, they would be able to read the numbers.

The Time Blur

The falling experience was, just as David had hoped, enough to freak out all of his subjects. "We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10," he reports, "and everyone said 10." And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall. The numbers on the perceptual chronometer? They remained an unreadable blur.

"Turns out, when you're falling you don't actually see in slow motion. It's not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work," David says. "It's something more interesting than that."

According to David, it's all about memory, not turbo perception. "Normally, our memories are like sieves," he says. "We're not writing down most of what's passing through our system." Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it's writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.

Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain's way of making sense of all this extra information. "When you read that back out," David says, "the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time." But really, in a crisis situation, you're getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.

Vocabulary

·        Prime ·        Literary analysis ·        Perceive ·        Plunge ·        Induce ·        Chronometer ·        Sieves ·        Stimuli  ·        Swerves ·        Accumulate

1.     to move violently in one direction 2.     to cause something 3.     a time measuring device 4.     ideal 5.     a device with many holes or a screen in the bottom 6.     thinking deeply about books 7.     to gain more and more of something 8.     to gain information through the senses 9.     to fall or dive 10. things that cause a reaction

Discussion

1. What is the interviewee trying to find out about how we'll perceive time?

2. What did they find out?

3. What do you think might be useful about a 'turbo mode' in a dangerous situation?

4. Have you ever experienced this kind of change in time perception?

5. What is the most dangerous thing you've ever done, and survived?

Monsanto Caused an Estimated 150,000 Farmer Suicides

Monsanto Caused an Estimated 150,000 Farmer Suicides



A tangible consequence of India's shift to a neo-liberal economic model has been the flood of suicides among farmers. The vast majority of the world's second most populated country still farms for a living, but are caught between deep debt and the erratic nature of seasonal change. Lured by the promise of greater production, farmers are pressured into mortgaging their farms to purchase genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer from American companies like Monsanto. Since GM seeds are patented by Monsanto, their repeated use each year requires constant licensing fees that keep farmers impoverished. One bad yield due to drought or other reasons, plunges farmers so deep into debt that they resort to suicide. One study estimates that 150,000 farmers have killed themselves in the past ten years.

A new feature film written and directed by Anusha Rizwi and produced by Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan, called Peepli Live, tackles head on this grim topic. The story is set in an Indian village named Peepli where one young debt-burdened farmer named Natha is talked into taking his own life after he learns that his family will be financially compensated through a government program created to alleviate the loss of farmers taking their own lives. What unfolds is a dark comedy of errors when a media circus descends on the tiny village, followed by corrupt politicians wanting to make use of the planned tragedy. Khan's credits as an actor and producer include Lagaan, the 2001 Oscar-nominated film about Indian resistance to the British occupation. His latest film 3 Idiots released last year became the highest grossing film in Indian film history.

Text of Sonali Kolhatkar's interview follows (with video and more information about Khan's film at the bottom of the article):

* * * * * *

Sonali Kolhatkar: The film Peepli Live tackles a number of issues in rural India which aren't always portrayed in Bollywood films. How important was it for you to make such a film about an issue that's not very well known especially outside India?

Aamir Khan: I feel that Peepli Live is not really a film about farmer suicides [but] that farmer suicides are a backdrop because the film doesn't really go into the issues that farmers are facing or why this epidemic really has been spreading for so many years now. It's a film that's more about the growing divide between urban and rural India and how as a society we are concentrating all of our energies, our resources, our wealth towards cities and are ignoring our villages and the rural parts of India which is where the bulk of our population lives. As a result our villages are not life-sustaining in a healthy manner. And that in turn results in a lot of migration from villages to cities. So in villages we don't have schools often, medical facilities, even basic stuff like water and electricity. I think this is what the issue in the film really is.

On a certain level it's also a film about survival. While it's a satire about civil society today and takes a humorous view of the administration, the political scenario, the media, or civil society in general, it's also on a certain level a story about survival. Each one of us: politician, journalist, civil servant, or a district magistrate, or even Budhia (a character in Peepli Live), who's a farmer, a villager - each one of us in our own environment, in our own situation, is doing what he or she thinks needs to be done in order to survive.

This Just In -- Dry Weddings Make People Angry - Lemondrop.com

This Just In -- Dry Weddings Make People Angry - Lemondrop.com

A chocolate fountain, a vintage photo booth, a congo band, a master cigar roller and an open bar ... Sounds like the most incredible wedding reception ever, right?

As a lucky guest at this, the unforgettable shindig of a friend, I can confirm that it was. But after the festivities were over and the headache subsided, I wondered if it would have been as much fun (or just plain dorky) without booze.

According to a recent CNN poll, 38 percent of wedding guests don't mind if the bar isn't fully stocked, but they do expect there at least be gratis beer and wine. Most are pissed by the prospect of a cash bar (5 percent won't even show up if they have to pay for their own libations). Brides and grooms trying to trim your guest list -- take note!

Yeah, it seems like a jerky thing to ask people to bring gifts and pay to toast you -- especially since a lot of us are also paying for a dress or transportation to and from the event. As a friend who is planning a wedding told me, "A cash bar is tempting because the alcohol is such a major line item in the wedding budget. But etiquette-wise, it's my party, so I should foot the bill."

"I always advise couples against cash bars," says wedding planner Aisha Gayle, owner of Con Gusto Events in New York City. "I'd rather see a limited bar -- a signature cocktail, plus wine and beer -- over a fully stocked cash bar. That said, rule number one remains 'Be true to thy budget.'"

Well, if things continue on as they are -- the U.S. treasury secretary recently warned that jobless rates may soar again -- the cash bar could become a real trend that guest may have to get used to.

No worries if you're inviting us to your wedding; we'll settle for one free glass of champagne. That's all we need to get our Electric Slide on and poppin' without feeling self-conscious. Besides, isn't a wedding supposed to be about celebrating the happy couple, not the happy hour?

은/ㄴ 편이다 - More or less

For those of you who have have been taking the regular curriculum and maybe don't quite get the expression 'more or less', here's how it might work in Korean. She is more or less creepy, 그여자가  칭그러원 편이에요. You might also express this in English more literally as "She's  a bit on the creepy side." or "She's on the creepy side." There you go folks. Try it out yourself in my class!

Is an Insect Diet the Cure for Climate Change?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/01/insects-food-emissions

Saving the planet one plateful at a time does not mean cutting back on meat, according to new research: the trick may be to switch our diet toinsects and other creepy-crawlies.

The raising of livestock such as cows, pigs and sheep occupies two-thirds of the world's farmland and generates 20% of all the greenhouse gases driving global warming. As a result, the United Nations and senior figures want to reduce the amount of meat we eat and the search is on for alternatives.

A policy paper on the eating of insects is being formally considered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO held a meeting on the theme in Thailand in 2008 and there are plans for a world congress in 2013.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the author of the UN paper, says eating insects has advantages.

"There is a meat crisis," he said. "The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth."

Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the FAO, he can't be dismissed as a crank. "Most of the world already eats insects," he points out. "It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don't know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable."

The advantages of this diet include insects' high levels of protein, vitamin and mineral content. Van Huis's latest research, conducted with colleague Dennis Oonincx, shows that farming insects produces far less greenhouse gas than livestock. Breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times less methane than livestock. The insects also produce 300 times less nitrous oxide, also a warming gas, and much less ammonia, a pollutant produced by pig and poultry farming.

Being cold-blooded, insects convert plant matter into protein extremely efficiently, Van Huis says. In addition, he argues, the health risks are lower. He acknowledges that in the west eating insects is a hard sell: "It is very important how you prepare them, you have to do it very nicely, to overcome the yuk factor."

More than 1,000 insects are known to be eaten by choice around the world, in 80% of nations. They are most popular in the tropics, where they grow to large sizes and are easy to harvest.

The FAO's field officer Patrick Durst, based in Bangkok, Thailand, ran the 2008 conference.

Durst helped set up an insect farming project FAO project in Laos which began in April. This involves transferring the skills of the 15,000 household locust farmers in Thailand across the border. "There were some proponents of a bigger dairy industry in Laos to improve a calcium deficiency," says Durst, whose favourite is fried wasp - "very crispy and a nice light snack". "But this is crazy when most Asians are lactose intolerant." Locusts and crickets are calcium-rich and 90% of people in Laos have eaten insects at some point, he says. Durst says the FAO's priority will be to boost the eating of insects where this is already accepted but has been in decline due to western cultural influence.

He also thinks such a boost can provide livelihoods and protect forests where many wild insects are collected. "I can see a step-by-step process to wider implementation."

First, insects could be used to feed farmed animals such as chicken and fish which eat them naturally. Then, they could be used as ingredients.

Van Huis adds: "We're looking at ways of grinding the meat into some sort of patty, which would be more recognisable to western palates."

One of the few suppliers of insects for human consumption in the UK is Paul Cook, whose business Osgrow is based in Bristol. However, no matter how they are marketed or presented, Cook is not convinced they will ever become more than a novelty. "They are in the fun element ... But I can't see it ever catching on in the UK in a big way."

Mind - A Snapshot of a Generation May Come Out Blurry - NYTimes.com

Mind - A Snapshot of a Generation May Come Out Blurry - NYTimes.com

ATC: A Snapshot of a Generation May Come Out Blurry

Trying to pin down the character of a generation is a controversial and, some say, presumptuous exercise. Who’s to say whether 50 million Americans should be called the Me Generation, or the Greatest? Who’s to decide exactly when Gen X ends and Gen Y begins?

Never let it be said that psychological researchers duck a challenge. In recent years some have sketched a portrait of the current crop of twenty- and thirty-somethings that is low on greatness and high on traits like entitlement and narcissism. The Millennials, also known as Generation Y, may be a little callous, too: At a psychology conference in May, researchers presented data suggesting that college students today had significantly less “empathetic concern” than students of the 1980s.

Social scientists have been surveying young people for decades, looking for trends in thinking and behavior that might be attributable to shifts in the broader culture. Tracking behaviors and attitudes is relatively straightforward. Compared with previous generations, for instance, the Millennials are more tolerant of people of other races and different sexual orientations, research suggests. They appear to be more likely than previous generations to do volunteer work. Hundreds of thousands of them have signed on to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But assessing their motives, their traits — their collective personality — is a far more slippery territory. Thus the debate over the Generation Y character, and whether generations even have distinct characters.

It revolves around a recent finding that, on personality questionnaires, people born after 1970 are more likely than previous generations to see themselves as “an important person,” to say they’re confident and rate their self-esteem higher. “The research converges on this: that individualism is increasing, that it’s more acceptable in the culture to focus on oneself, and not to worry so much about social rules,” said Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, who in a 2006 book, “Generation Me,” described the trend and its possible upside (more opportunities for those who have lacked confidence) and downside (increased levels of anxiety, depression).

But a recent issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science aired a backlash against this argument, in which psychologists bickered over methodology and offered alternative interpretations of survey data.

In one report, two psychologists analyzed a large survey of high school seniors that spanned decades and concluded that there was “little evidence of meaningful change” in questions related to self-esteem, individualism, or life satisfaction. “I think as a profession we need to be careful that we don’t stereotype or label a vast number of people unless the evidence is very strong,” said M. Brent Donnellan, of Michigan State University, who co-authored the paper with Kali H. Trzesniewski, of the University of Western Ontario.

In another critique, researchers at the University of Illinois reported data suggesting that narcissism peaks in young adulthood, “not because of cultural changes but because of age-related developmental trends.”

Dr. Twenge and others have shot back, point by point, and the standoff is not likely to be resolved soon. For one thing, personality tests are themselves suspect. “We should keep in mind that personality tests are themselves cultural documents, idiosyncratic products of particular individuals that say more about their creators than about the people who take them,” said Annie Murphy Paul, author of “The Cult of Personality Testing” (Free Press, 2004)…

Vocabulary: Match the word with the correct definition

Pin down Presumptuous Entitlement Narcissism Slippery territory Backlash Spanned Standoff Idiosyncratic

1.         a kind of characteristic, habit, mannerism, or the like, that is peculiar to an individual 2.         a dangerous area where it is difficult to maintain any one opinion 3.         to define clearly 4.         the feeling of deserving something 5.         a strong or violent reaction, as to some social or political change 6.         unwarrantedly or impertinently bold; forward 7.         to be extended over or across 8.         inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. 9.         a situation where neither party takes action or gains an advantage

Discussion/Comprehension

1.        What is the author saying about the character of different generations?

2.        What kind of science is used to determine these kinds of characters?

3.        According to the article has any definitive answer been reached? Why or why not?

4.        Why do you think people believe in generational character?

5.        What do you think about generations having a specific character?

6.        Do you feel the so called ‘generation gap’ sometimes? If so when and where? If not why not?

ATC Class: Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com

Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age - NYTimes.com

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.


At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying fromWikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed onHBO last night.”

Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily.”

A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.

She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.

Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.

War Games Lure Recruits For The Real Thing : NPR

War Games Lure Recruits For The Real Thing : NPR

A controversial Army Experience Center in a northeast Philadelphia shopping mall will soon close its doors after a two-year pilot program. With regard to its military outreach efforts, the multimillion-dollar facility has declared "mission accomplished," but opponents question the Army's version of reality.

At the center, teenage boys sit in a row of Army-green recliners facing flat-screen monitors. They square off in video war games like the popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Once visitors register and prove they're 13 years or older, they're given free access to the facility's array of war-themed games.

Army Experience Center spokesman Capt. John Kirchgessner says the center has proved more effective than traditional recruiting methods. Using technology to create a relationship with the public "is a much better way to share our Army story than to simply smile and dial and ask someone if they thought about joining lately," he says.

The facility also houses three simulators: Apache and Blackhawk helicopters plus an armored combat Humvee. John Gallato, 18, and three of his 15-year-old friends sit atop the Army vehicle eagerly waiting for their mission to begin. With a lifelike machine gun in hand, Gallato says experiences like this will help prepare him for the future.

"I'm going to be killing people," he says. "I'm actually joining the Marines and will be doing this in real life."



When they get the green light, the four teens begin maneuvering through virtual war zones and shooting at targets while dodging bullets themselves.

These simulated war experiences have met with strong opposition. Combat veteran Staff Sgt. Jesse Hamilton says the Army has sanitized the horrors of combat.

"The heat, people screaming, blood, flies, horrible smells, smoke in your eyes stinging, sand — the list goes on and on — and they've taken all of that out," he says. "What they've effectively left is what they consider to be the 'fun' part."



Kathy Leary, of the BuxMont Coalition for Peace Action, says war is not a game. "We've heard kids come out of the Army Experience Center saying, 'They're really showing me what war is really like' — and obviously that's not what war is really like. There's no reset button in war."



Kirchgessner denies the center portrays war as a game and says recruits are well aware of the dangers of combat.



"If you were to ask any one of them, 'Do you feel as though the Army is going to be like playing with a controller or game?' they're going to smile and say, 'Absolutely not,' " Kirchgessner says. It's crazy to even think that."

Five nearby recruiting offices were closed when the Philadelphia center opened in 2008. Since then, an estimated 240 recruits have enlisted at the Army Experience Center. While overall recruitment rates in the area have stayed the same, Kirchgessner says the facility reached that number with half the staff.

This fall, two new Army Opportunity Centers will open in the Philadelphia region, downscaled versions of the Experience Center.

Pilot
Question
Square off
Recruiting
Manoeuvring
Dodging
Effectively
Portrays
Downscaled

Comprehension/Discussion

1. What is the purpose of the army experience centre?
2. How does the centre mimic a real field experience for visitors?
3. What are some of the things that are left out that are real aspects of working for the army?
4. What do you think about this kind of recruiting?
5. Do think draft recruiting or voluntary recruiting is better, and why?
6. Do you think there is a just cause for war or not? Why?