Thursday, April 14, 2011
Countdowns
limit possibilities
in the present
Nicola Fish
Countdowns — we have them for holidays, vacations and even for summer. Every
day I walk through the residence hall and
there is at least one whiteboard tracking
the days until some event, whether it is the
opening day of a baseball game, a birthday or
the weekend. It seems like everyone is waiting for something.
Summer obviously is weighing heavily
on people’s minds. The rise in temperature
directly correlates with the rise in procrastination. Living in Kirksville, it feels like we
finally are coming out of hibernation and the
mound of homework we were buried under.
Everyone is looking forward to the summer and the main topic of conversation is
‘What you are going to do with the time
off?’ Issues up for debate range from where
you’re going to work, what you’re going to
do and even where you’re going to live. Plus,
the summer signals the end of classes — no
more essays, no more required readings
and no more late nights in Pickler Memorial
Library. We constantly talk about how long
we have until summer and complain the
wait is too long. Everyone is in a hurry for
this semester to be finished. Why are we at
college if we are just playing a waiting game
for it to end?
There have been times when I wanted to
rush my life along, and skip through schooling to real life. We have this tendency to assume life can only become better. Obviously
this is optimistic and hopefully true. But it
means we don’t appreciate what we have
right now. If we’re constantly thinking there
must be something better, then we are undervaluing what we have right now. People
always are telling us that college is supposed
to be the best time of our lives, yet we don’t
give the impression we’re listening.
What it all comes down to is the simple
fact that time never stops. We do not have a
chance to pause, and we have to constantly
keep moving forward. Counting down the
days allows us to plan ahead and might make
us feel like we have some element of control
in our lives. It gives the future an exaggerated sense of importance and leads us to
neglect the time we spend waiting. When
we count down toward something, we stop
living in the present and instead become
impatient for the future and ignore the negatives that might come with it.
We appear to have forgotten what the
end of school means. For seniors it means
moving to a new place or back in with their
parents. It is a chance for a fresh start and
a new adventure, but it also is a time to say
goodbye to people you have spent the past
four years in constant contact with. For the
rest of us, the end of the school year means
returning home, back to our parent’s rules.
The simplicity of seeing your friends every
day has ended, and you are relegated to
Skyping or an occasional meet up.
Looking forward to the future is inevitable, but it shouldn’t receive the amount of
attention it does. By placing so much emphasis on the future, we are neglecting what is
happening right now. We need to live in the
moment.
Nicola Fish is a freshman
undeclared major
from Consett, England
opinions
5
Danny Jaschek
New technology endangers
personal privacies
Molly Skyles
I feel sorry for stalkers.
It used to be a challenge to be a good
stalker. You had to follow people around
without them noticing, figure out their
names, root through their trashcans and
interrogate their neighbors to get the dirt.
Today, technology has robbed them of the
thrill of the hunt.
Google is working on a facial recognition mobile application that will allow you
to take a picture of someone with your
phone and instantly be provided with
access to his or her personal information,
according to cnn.com March 31. Welcome
to the age of simplified stalking.
You see a cute guy in a bar. Snap a
picture when he isn’t looking, and boom,
you know his name, phone number, address and any other information that’s
floating around the Web. Google has taken
the work out of stalking and given people
another excuse to creep.
Now, I’m not the most privacy-cautious
person. I’m not dumb enough to put my
phone number and address on Facebook
for the world to see, but I usually am not
scared of having some hacker or creep
breach my right to privacy. I don’t carry
mace and I don’t password protect all my
technological devices. However, this new
app scares me.
Apparently this technology has been
around for some time, but it had not been
utilized due to privacy concerns and for
good reasons. Similar technology exists in product recognition — you take a
picture of an object and it will provide a
detailed description. This could be handy
when grocery shopping or bargain hunting. However, people are different than
products. There can be real consequences
if your personal information is in the
wrong hands. Whereas, if I find out Dawn
dish soap is more expensive at Walgreens,
only the Walgreens corporation will suffer
financial loss.
With most technology, there is some
positive use, but with this, I don’t see any
benefits. When you meet someone you can
use this app to instantly get their number instead of waiting to get a business
card, according to the CNN article. Come
on. How difficult is it to carry a 3.5”x2”
piece of cardstock until you can program
a number into your phone? Just take the
three minutes to shake someone’s hand,
introduce yourself and exchange cards.
Google claims that to be identified by
the new software, you have to check a
box agreeing to give them access to your
profile information. Now I don’t know
about you, but I check boxes all the time
without reading the information just to
continue to the next page. It’s easy to
forget about privacy when online. We fail
to realize that by sending our address to
someone via Facebook wall post, it is out
there for the world to see. Even if you
delete it, your address is drifting around
cyber space somewhere. This new app
will find it and any other available information, trace it back to your name and
put it in the hands of anyone who takes
your picture. This is an important, new
technological advancement?
We are a paranoid country. There was
H1N1 and the swine flu, which threatened
to kill the entire human race, and before
that, every piece of mail you received likely was to contain traces of anthrax. Some
of our fears are completely ludicrous, but
this one is legitimate. Google is making it
easier to be stalked or have your identity
stolen. So much of our personal information is floating through the web and now
it can be in the hands of anyone you pass
on the street.
Thanks for your hard work in keeping up with the times, Google, but take a
break. I’d rather make my stalkers work a
little harder.
Molly Skyles is a junior
communication major
from St. Louis, Mo.
around the Quad
How do you protect your privacy online?
“I don’t put a lot of
information, like phone
numbers, online, and I
keep high privacy settings
on Facebook.”
Lindsey Stadler
junior
“I only use my personal
computer for bank
accounts and things that
are password protected.”
Allyssa Dummerth
sophomore
“I only add people I
actually know as friends on
Facebook, and I look out for
people who may be scams
and not really exist.”
Rachel Marler
freshman
“I change my passwords
frequently and look up
website information before
I join anything to make sure
it’s protected.”
Tyler Jackson
sophomore
Work load shouldn’t stop students from enjoying outdoors
Zach Vicars
Last Sunday I found myself in the hills of
the Missouri wilderness, eating lunch with
my best friend and dog, under the shade
of a hidden tree in a secluded spot. The
weather was perfect — no, sublime — a
balmy 80 degrees with a whipping breeze.
All around us the rugged landscape seemed
to be shrugging off the last burden of
winter — the warm bluegrass was shooting up through the brush, the redbuds were
blooming and the turkeys were scampering
through the woods.
Everything seemed so alive. Everything
was right with the world.
Then I had this terrible realization. “I
am a college student, and it’s mid-April,” I
thought to myself. Immediately, reality set
in. I felt the immense weight of my past-due
assignments, finals looming just beyond the
horizon and my upcoming presentation on
bovine bloat. If you don’t know what that is,
you probably don’t want to.
My brief moment of nirvana ended, and
I quickly hopped up, wrapped up the picnic
blanket and started for home, knowing my
studies would be waiting for me.
During the drive back, it occurred to me
that the collegiate system is messed up.
Somehow, we’ve devised a system in which
there is an inverse relationship between
nice weather and free time. Maybe that
sounds a little too much like a chemistry
formula, but think of it like this. When the
weather sucks — in Kirksville that would be
from early January to late March — most of
us have relatively relaxed schedules. There
are no term papers, finals or year-end projects due. Besides the occasional midterm,
it’s business as usual. Yet, we’re stuck inside
because it’s 10 below zero with the windchill and there might not be snow on the
ground. No nice weather, a lot of free time.
On the other side of that treacherous
coin, you have times like now — April and
May — when the weather is gorgeous, but
we can’t enjoy it because of the immense
pressure of school work.
All of us at one point have felt the
unmistakable tension between studying
in the library and sunbathing on the Quad.
The situation might seem desperate, but
there are measures we can take to alleviate
the suffering.
One solution would be to lobby University President Troy Paino to restructure our
entire spring semester. I’m not sure how it
would be possible to avoid the end of the
year mayhem of finals, but come up with a
creative enough plan and he might be willing to implement it.
Another solution to this problem is to
plan ahead. That concept is mind-blowing
for most college students. I’m not sure if
there is an antonym for procrastinate, but
you certainly could make one up. Be like the
squirrel who, during the summer, puts away
nuts for the winter. This time you’ll be storing away hours of studying in the winter
that you can turn into hours of leisure in
the spring.
What are the chances we’re going to see
rapid reform in the structure of academic
life? What are the chances that any of us
will actually plan ahead next semester?
Both are extremely unlikely. So the last and
most viable option is just to live with the
tension and adapt. Get your lunch at the
SUB instead of eating in the stuffy dining
halls. If you live off campus and meals are
not an option, walk to class one day and
take time to enjoy the changes that are occurring around you. Charge your laptop and
write that paper underneath an oak tree,
rather than a fluorescent bulb. We can’t
abandon our studies, but we can’t abandon
the natural world, either. Fortunately for us,
research seems to suggest that setting time
aside to enjoy being outdoors might be a
secret to dealing with academic stress.
Going outside and walking greatly
improves mental health –– more so than
indoor exercise, according to a study by the
Journal of Environmental Psychology. For
those of us who feel like we’re on the brink
of academic collapse, mental health certainly can be in short supply. The study went on
to demonstrate that length of time outside
doesn’t make a significant difference. Even
20 minutes of outdoor activity per day can
increase one’s health and happiness.
If the weight of school’s stress is enormous right now, take a walk. It can be short,
but just stretch your legs and enjoy the
fresh air. Even if you can’t find hours out of
your day to get outside, find ways to enjoy
this spring weather that only comes once
a year. And who knows, a little time in the
‘aire libre’ might help your studies.
Zach Vicars is a junior
philosophy/ religion
and linguistics major
from St. Charles, Mo.