Robert Blackson, the new director of Temple Gallery at the Tyler School of Art, has been doing research on the history and aesthetics of quiet. He will present five months of rotating "silences" in the gallery, starting with moments of recorded silence called to commemorate 9/11. "When we have a moment of silence, we're trying to communicate with something that's beyond us — that may not be human," said Blackson. "That punctuation of a bird, or a cough, reminds that we are human.
In the second USA Today story quoting a Temple faculty member in 24 hours, Jeff Kingston of Temple University, Japan Campus, explained the skepticism facing new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda as the nation continues to rebuild from March's devastating earthquake and tsunami. Noda, Japan's sixth prime minister in five years, says he intends to seek a "grand coalition" with opposition parties. Don't bet on it, says Kingston.
It's hard to imagine new Temple football coach Steve Addazio launching the 2011 season in a more spectacular fashion. The Owls dominated the Villanova Wildcats from start to finish, earning the third annual Mayor's Cup with a 42-7 win. Attendance was announced at 32,648, the largest crowd ever for a Temple football game not involving Penn State. The Temple fans who made up the biggest and loudest part of that crowd were pleased with the result, but Temple Athletic Director Bill Bradshaw was just as proud "to be at an institution…that's determined to do it the right way."
Police in Kansas City started foot patrols as an experiment on August 1 as a way to address crime in four of the city's toughest neighborhoods. Kansas City's foot patrol is patterned after one in Philadelphia where a 2009 study led by Temple criminologist Jerry Ratcliffe found that neighborhoods with foot patrols saw violent crime drop 23 percent and drug incident detections rise 15 percent over a three-month test period.
In an age of multi-tasking, experts say the brain still needs down time. Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple's Fox School of Business, studies how the brain processes information. Her research has found that, as the flow of information increases, activity increases in the region of the brain responsible for decisions and control of emotions — but only up to a point. Flood the brain with too much information, and activity in this region suddenly drops off.
Few events in Western New York over the past 50 years have had as much of an impact on the nation as the Attica prison riot, yet much information about the infamous riot is still under the state's lock and key.
This year's flu shot is exactly the same as last year's, but experts say you should get it again anyway. Robert Bettiker, an infectious-disease specialist at Temple University Hospital, said flu viruses change often enough that long-lasting vaccines haven't been essential, although scientists want to develop vaccines that can cover more flu types. One argument for vaccinating everyone every year is that it protects the people who are most vulnerable to flu, but also least likely to have a powerful response to the vaccine.
This Saturday, Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia will hold a grand opening for a 19,000-square-foot-retail outlet in Kensington called a ReStore. The Goodwill-meets-Home Depot sells used furniture and other home improvement items at bargain prices. "Habitat for Humanity was kind enough to let us put together a program where we used a full-time MBA class to put together a business plan for their ReStore venture," said James Hutchin, of the Enterprise Management Consulting Practice at Temple's Fox School of Business.
A unique program at Temple certifies student volunteers as emergency medical technicians, who use bicycles to navigate the busy main campus. "Right now our average response time is 1 minute, 25 seconds," said Zach Reichenbach, the program's director. The EMTs provides initial medical care until a medic unit arrives.
