JHU Seal

Ok, so some students at Johns Hopkins University are upset that a new movie The Social Network, is being filmed on their campus. Their beef is that Johns Hopkins is standing in for Harvard in the movie, which is based on the true story of Mark Zuckerberg, who is credited with being the creator of Facebook while he was a student there.  My first though was that they must have chosen Johns Hopkins because it is in Maryland and therefore at least a few degrees warmer than it is up here is in Massachusetts.

But it wasn’t climate of even budget that took the films’s producers to Hopkins.  It seems that Johns Hopkins was something of a second choice for the movie producers because it wasn’t possible to film on location at Harvard. The Baltimore Sun’s article on the controversy is funny, albeit quite sarcastic.

The movie, like some Hopkins students, couldn’t get into Harvard, which has a longstanding policy against commercial filming on campus. So the production has opened some old college-admissions wounds.

“The general consensus is, a lot of kids are not pleased,” said Lorre Atlan, 20, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering. “It’s obvious they [the filmmakers] could get Hopkins and not get Harvard.

Apparently students all over campus are wearing Johns Hopkins t-shirts and hoodies, hoping one of them will get into a shot and be missed in editing so they show up in the film.

continue reading "Is Your College Just an Understudy for Harvard?"

NITLE

This is the NITLE Professional Development News that went out today. It focuses on my programs for the coming two weeks. They are going to be be keeping me busy. But they are interesting programs, so they should be fun.

Dear Colleagues,
As campuses continue to respond to the challenges of globalization as well as on-going economic restraints, I wanted to take a moment to call your attention to three upcoming NITLE programs relevant to both situations.

Using media elements with an international perspective to introduce complex issues such as research ethics can offer a new dimension to the lab-based science class, stimulating and enriching discussion. Faculty members in the natural and social sciences who want to integrate an international perspective into lab-based curricula in this way are encouraged to sign up for “Science and International Perspectives.”
continue reading "NITLE Programs This Week and Next"

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic-speaking world, as well as across Asia, Africa and the rest of the world,” said ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom just before the vote, according to an Associated Press story.
–via ICANN Approves Use Of Non-Latin Alphabets In Web Domain Names, Channel Web

I thought that was a good quote. I’ve been following this story for a while. I was also interested to learn that Chinese and Arabic domain names are in the highest demand. These are also the two languages that I have been noticed have seen a great deal of increased demand in undergraduate education. This isn’t the result of any systematic study, mind you. It is purely an observation. Governments or their designees can begin submitting requests for specific domain names in non-Latin scripts on Nov. 16.