The Pittsburgh Pirates' success on the field this season will mean higher ticket prices next year. "They've got to do it now," said Michael Jackson, director of graduate programs in sport and recreation management at Temple's School of Tourism and Hospitality Management. "Adrenaline is flowing. People are so excited about the team. The backlash will not be really strong because of the psychological factor of competition. As long as they're hot, you have to capitalize on it — but you cannot bust the bank."
The deal on raising the debt limit means the country has enough money to pay its bills. But it could mean that some college students will need more to pay theirs. "Most of the professional students — law and medical — and a lot of our graduate students were able to get subsidized loans for a portion of the amount they were borrowing," said John Morris, director of Student Financial Services at Temple. This will change next year when the interest on federal student loans will begin to accrue while students are still in school instead of after graduation, he said.
Temple football coach Steve Addazio sat down with the Inquirer's Keith Pompey to talk about the upcoming season in a webisode of "Owls Insider" on philly.com. On the offensive side, Addazio predicted which players have the chance to become household names on a par with Bernard Pierce. "Deon Miller and Rod Streater…are two big wide receivers…who I think are going to have a great year. We can flat throw the ball and they are big, tall targets out there. We're going to have a balanced offense," he said.
Another six weeks of excavation has helped archeologists find more clues about the pre-Civil War freed slave village of Timbuctoo in New Jersey's Burlington County. On Tuesday, Temple graduate student Chris Barton and anthropology professor David Orr shared their results with local officials. Although 15,000 artifacts have been recovered, others may never be found. "We have found evidence of robbing of some of the bricks that made up the houses," Barton said.
What's the best flash mob deterrent? Rapid police response, wrote Jerry Ratcliffe, chair of Temple's Criminal Justice Department and former London policeman, in an op-ed piece published in the Inquirer. "What could work is changing young criminals' perception that the benefits of mob violence outweigh the risks," he wrote. In addition to a rapid response, he explained, there must be visible, uniformed police patrols at likely flash-mob sites. A study published by Ratcliffe this week showed that foot patrols in crime hot spots reduced violence by 23 percent.
In his "Small Matters" column for the Inquirer, Temple economist Bill Dunkelberg, a nationally-recognized expert on small business, says he doesn't think the government has done enough to solve our long term debt problem. "The deal was done over the first two days of August, so at the end of the month, we'll see how consumers and businesses view the solution: a path to an improved economy, or something else," he wrote.
