Tornado slams Mississippi college town

HATTIESBURG, Miss. (AP) ? Residents shaken by a tornado that mangled homes in Mississippi were waking up Monday to a day of removing trees, patching roofs and giving thanks for their survival. More than a dozen in the state were injured.

Daylight also offered emergency management officials the chance to get a better handle on the damage that stretched across several counties. Gov. Phil Bryant planned to visit hard-hit Hattiesburg, where a twister moved along one of the city's main streets and damaged buildings at the governor's alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi. Emergency officials said late Sunday that at least 10 people were injured in surrounding Forrest County and three were hurt to the west in Marion County, but they weren't aware of any deaths.

It was raining at first light Monday and people began trying to salvage what they could in one damaged neighborhood. Some people walked around fallen trees, power lines, smashed cars and other debris to carry belongings away.

Charlotte Walters, 61, and her daughter Heather Walters, 30, were moving buckets and bowls around inside their house trying to catch water pouring through holes in the roof. The women were at home along with Charlotte's husband when a relative called and said a tornado was headed their way.

"It sounded like Katrina," said Charlotte Walters, who lives in a neighborhood also hit by the 2005 hurricane that devastated the Gulf Coast.

Besides holes in the roof of her one-story wood frame house, a falling tree had damaged the side and another one collapsed on her carport, denting and breaking windows in three cars there.

"I'm blessed. At least I don't have one of those in my house," Charlotte said, pointing to a tree that had fallen onto a neighbor's house next door.

Marie Key, 68, was hoping to salvage what she could Monday morning. She was alone in her one-story brick house when the storm hit Sunday. She heard the tornado coming and dove under a kitchen table.

At least three trees hit her house, which she said was also damaged during Hurricane Katrina and another storm in 1998. The fallen trees blocked the front and back doors and a neighbor had to pull the limbs away so she could get out. She had a bruised forehead Monday and some other scratches but was otherwise uninjured.

"I'm luck, I know that," Key said fighting back tears as she spoke. "I'm kind of past the 'poor me' part of it. This is so widespread and it's happening in so many places. I'm going to be all right."

Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesman Greg Flynn said it appears a single tornado caused the damage in Forrest, Marion and Lamar counties. Hundreds of homes are damaged in Forrest County, along with a couple dozen in the other two.

Flynn said the sheer scope of the damage was slowing officials' assessment.

"The problem is, it was so strong that there's so much debris that there's a lot of areas they haven't been able to get to yet," he said.

On campus, trees were snapped in half around the heavily damaged Alumni House where part of the roof was ripped away. Windows in a nearby building were blown out, and heavy equipment worked to clear streets nearby in a heavy rain after the worst of the weather had passed.

The university released a statement saying no one was hurt but that it was under a state of emergency, and anyone away from campus should stay away until further notice.

East of campus, 47-year-old Cindy Bullock was at home with her husband and dog when she heard the tornado coming. They ran to a hallway and covered their heads. It wasn't long before the windows in the kitchen and bedroom exploded. The storm stripped all the shingles off the roof and left holes in it, while knocking over a large pine tree in the yard.

After dark, the Bullocks were trying to arrange their stuff inside so it wouldn't get wet from the dripping water.

"I just looked out the window and I heard the rumbling. It sounded like a train. We ran to the hall, and the kitchen windows and the windows in the bedroom exploded. It happened pretty fast," she said.

There were large trees blocking the road all through her neighborhood, and several of the houses were hit by falling trees. Her friend was staying with them after the friend's apartment took a direct hit from a falling tree.

Forrest County Sheriff Billy McGee says 10 or 15 people were injured by the tornado that slammed Hattiesburg and other parts of the county ? but none of the injuries was serious.

"Most of our injuries have been walking wounded," he said.

To the west, Marion County emergency director Aaron Greer said three injuries had been reported in the community of Pickwick, about seven miles south of Columbia. Two people were taken to hospitals, but the third didn't have the injury examined, he said.

Greer said one mobile home was destroyed, three other structures have major damage and several have minor damage.

On Sunday night, John and Katherine Adams were cleaning up around their one-story white house where the storm punched holes in the roof, busted windows and completely destroyed the back porch. The couple was at home with their 7- and 3-year-old daughters when the tornado passed next to their house.

All through the neighborhood, houses and vehicles were damaged by falling trees.

"We're safe, and that's all that matters," said Katherine Adams, 46.

John Adams, who's in the building supply business, said he was surprised to see broken boards that appeared to be from new construction in his yard because there are no homes being built nearby.

"We've got stuff around here; I don't even know where it came from," he said.

___

McConnaughey reported from New Orleans.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/homes-wrecked-dozen-hurt-mississippi-tornado-035836403.html

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Humans and robots work better together following cross-training

Public release date: 11-Feb-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Caroline McCall, MIT Media Relations
cmccall5@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Swapping of roles improves efficiency as well as robots' confidence and humans' trust

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Spending a day in someone else's shoes can help us to learn what makes them tick. Now the same approach is being used to develop a better understanding between humans and robots, to enable them to work together as a team.

Robots are increasingly being used in the manufacturing industry to perform tasks that bring them into closer contact with humans. But while a great deal of work is being done to ensure robots and humans can operate safely side-by-side, more effort is needed to make robots smart enough to work effectively with people, says Julie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

"People aren't robots, they don't do things the same way every single time," Shah says. "And so there is a mismatch between the way we program robots to perform tasks in exactly the same way each time and what we need them to do if they are going to work in concert with people."

Most existing research into making robots better team players is based on the concept of interactive reward, in which a human trainer gives a positive or negative response each time a robot performs a task.

However, human studies carried out by the military have shown that simply telling people they have done well or badly at a task is a very inefficient method of encouraging them to work well as a team.

So Shah and PhD student Stefanos Nikolaidis began to investigate whether techniques that have been shown to work well in training people could also be applied to mixed teams of humans and robots. One such technique, known as cross-training, sees team members swap roles with each other on given days. "This allows people to form a better idea of how their role affects their partner and how their partner's role affects them," Shah says.

In a paper to be presented at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Tokyo in March, Shah and Nikolaidis will present the results of experiments they carried out with a mixed group of humans and robots, demonstrating that cross-training is an extremely effective team-building tool.

To allow robots to take part in the cross-training experiments, the pair first had to design a new algorithm to allow the devices to learn from their role-swapping experiences. So they modified existing reinforcement-learning algorithms to allow the robots to take in not only information from positive and negative rewards, but also information gained through demonstration. In this way, by watching their human counterparts switch roles to carry out their work, the robots were able to learn how the humans wanted them to perform the same task.

Each human-robot team then carried out a simulated task in a virtual environment, with half of the teams using the conventional interactive reward approach, and half using the cross-training technique of switching roles halfway through the session. Once the teams had completed this virtual training session, they were asked to carry out the task in the real world, but this time sticking to their own designated roles.

Shah and Nikolaidis found that the period in which human and robot were working at the same time known as concurrent motion increased by 71 percent in teams that had taken part in cross-training, compared to the interactive reward teams. They also found that the amount of time the humans spent doing nothing while waiting for the robot to complete a stage of the task, for example decreased by 41 percent.

What's more, when the pair studied the robots themselves, they found that the learning algorithms recorded a much lower level of uncertainty about what their human teammate was likely to do next a measure known as the entropy level if they had been through cross-training.

Finally, when responding to a questionnaire after the experiment, human participants in cross-training were far more likely to say the robot had carried out the task according to their preferences than those in the reward-only group, and reported greater levels of trust in their robotic teammate. "This is the first evidence that human-robot teamwork is improved when a human and robot train together by switching roles, in a manner similar to effective human team training practices," Nikolaidis says.

Shah believes this improvement in team performance could be due to the greater involvement of both parties in the cross-training process. "When the person trains the robot through reward it is one-way: The person says 'good robot' or the person says 'bad robot,' and it's a very one-way passage of information," Shah says. "But when you switch roles the person is better able to adapt to the robot's capabilities and learn what it is likely to do, and so we think that it is adaptation on the person's side that results in a better team performance."

###

Written by: Helen Knight, MIT News correspondent

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 11-Feb-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Caroline McCall, MIT Media Relations
cmccall5@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Swapping of roles improves efficiency as well as robots' confidence and humans' trust

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Spending a day in someone else's shoes can help us to learn what makes them tick. Now the same approach is being used to develop a better understanding between humans and robots, to enable them to work together as a team.

Robots are increasingly being used in the manufacturing industry to perform tasks that bring them into closer contact with humans. But while a great deal of work is being done to ensure robots and humans can operate safely side-by-side, more effort is needed to make robots smart enough to work effectively with people, says Julie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

"People aren't robots, they don't do things the same way every single time," Shah says. "And so there is a mismatch between the way we program robots to perform tasks in exactly the same way each time and what we need them to do if they are going to work in concert with people."

Most existing research into making robots better team players is based on the concept of interactive reward, in which a human trainer gives a positive or negative response each time a robot performs a task.

However, human studies carried out by the military have shown that simply telling people they have done well or badly at a task is a very inefficient method of encouraging them to work well as a team.

So Shah and PhD student Stefanos Nikolaidis began to investigate whether techniques that have been shown to work well in training people could also be applied to mixed teams of humans and robots. One such technique, known as cross-training, sees team members swap roles with each other on given days. "This allows people to form a better idea of how their role affects their partner and how their partner's role affects them," Shah says.

In a paper to be presented at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Tokyo in March, Shah and Nikolaidis will present the results of experiments they carried out with a mixed group of humans and robots, demonstrating that cross-training is an extremely effective team-building tool.

To allow robots to take part in the cross-training experiments, the pair first had to design a new algorithm to allow the devices to learn from their role-swapping experiences. So they modified existing reinforcement-learning algorithms to allow the robots to take in not only information from positive and negative rewards, but also information gained through demonstration. In this way, by watching their human counterparts switch roles to carry out their work, the robots were able to learn how the humans wanted them to perform the same task.

Each human-robot team then carried out a simulated task in a virtual environment, with half of the teams using the conventional interactive reward approach, and half using the cross-training technique of switching roles halfway through the session. Once the teams had completed this virtual training session, they were asked to carry out the task in the real world, but this time sticking to their own designated roles.

Shah and Nikolaidis found that the period in which human and robot were working at the same time known as concurrent motion increased by 71 percent in teams that had taken part in cross-training, compared to the interactive reward teams. They also found that the amount of time the humans spent doing nothing while waiting for the robot to complete a stage of the task, for example decreased by 41 percent.

What's more, when the pair studied the robots themselves, they found that the learning algorithms recorded a much lower level of uncertainty about what their human teammate was likely to do next a measure known as the entropy level if they had been through cross-training.

Finally, when responding to a questionnaire after the experiment, human participants in cross-training were far more likely to say the robot had carried out the task according to their preferences than those in the reward-only group, and reported greater levels of trust in their robotic teammate. "This is the first evidence that human-robot teamwork is improved when a human and robot train together by switching roles, in a manner similar to effective human team training practices," Nikolaidis says.

Shah believes this improvement in team performance could be due to the greater involvement of both parties in the cross-training process. "When the person trains the robot through reward it is one-way: The person says 'good robot' or the person says 'bad robot,' and it's a very one-way passage of information," Shah says. "But when you switch roles the person is better able to adapt to the robot's capabilities and learn what it is likely to do, and so we think that it is adaptation on the person's side that results in a better team performance."

###

Written by: Helen Knight, MIT News correspondent

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-02/miot-ha021113.php

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WPD Bits: Surface RT expands, the return of Scroogled, and a unified Store for WP8 and Windows 8

? Has it stopped snowing yet? Phew, that?s a relief. Oh look at that, it?s already February. I think it?s about timeWPD Bitsfinally comes out of its hibernation.

Continue reading here:?

WPD Bits: Surface RT expands, the return of Scroogled, and a unified Store for WP8 and Windows 8

Source: http://www.allphonenews.com/2013/02/11/wpd-bits-surface-rt-expands-the-return-of-scroogled-and-a-unified-store-for-wp8-and-windows-8/

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Immune systems of healthy adults 'remember' germs to which they've never been exposed

Feb. 7, 2013 ? It's established dogma that the immune system develops a "memory" of a microbial pathogen, with a correspondingly enhanced readiness to combat that microbe, only upon exposure to it -- or to its components though a vaccine. But a discovery by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers casts doubt on that dogma.

In a path-breaking study published online Feb. 7 in Immunity, the investigators found that over the course of our lives, CD4 cells -- key players circulating in blood and lymph whose ability to kick-start the immune response to viral, bacterial, protozoan and fungal pathogens can spell the difference between life and death -- somehow acquire memory of microbes that have never entered our bodies.

Several implications flow from this discovery, said the study's senior author, Mark Davis, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology and director of Stanford's Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection. In the study, newborns' blood showed no signs of this enhanced memory, which could explain why young children are so much more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adults. Moreover, the findings suggest a possible reason why vaccination against a single pathogen, measles, appears to have reduced overall mortality among African children more than can be attributed to the drop in measles deaths alone. And researchers may have to rethink the relevance of experiments conducted in squeaky-clean facilities on mice that have never been exposed to a single germ in their lives.

"It may even provide an evolutionary clue about why kids eat dirt," said Davis. "The pre-existing immune memory of dangerous pathogens our immune systems have never seen before might stem from our constant exposure to ubiquitous, mostly harmless micro-organisms in soil and food and on our skin, our doorknobs, our telephones and our iPod earbuds."

CD4 cells are members of the immune club known as T cells. CD4 cells hang out in our circulatory system, on the lookout for micro-organisms that have found their way into the blood or lymph tissue.

In order to be able to recognize and then coordinate a response to a particular pathogen without inciting a Midas-touch overreaction to anything a CD4 cell bumps into (including our own tissues), our bodies have to host immensely diverse inventories of CD4 cells, each with its own narrow capacity to recognize one single pathogenic "body part" or, to be more scientific, epitope -- and, it's been believed, only that epitope. Contact with that epitope can cause a CD4 to whirr into action, replicating rapidly and performing the immunological equivalent of posting bulletins, passing out bullets and bellowing attack orders through a bullhorn to other immune cells. This hyperactivity is vital to the immune response. (It is CD4 cells that are targeted and ultimately destroyed by HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS.)

In the early 1980s, Davis, now the Burt and Marion Avery Family Professor of Immunology at Stanford, unraveled the mystery of how organisms such as ourselves, equipped with only 20,000 or so genes, can possibly generate the billions of differing epitope-targeting capabilities represented in aggregate by T cells. He found that highly reshufflable "hot spots" in a rapidly dividing T cell's DNA trigger massive mix-and-match madness among these genetic components during cell division, so each resulting T cell sports its own unique variant of a crucial surface receptor and, therefore, is geared to recognizing a different epitope.

That variation accounts for our ability to mount an immune response to all kinds of microbial invaders, whether familiar or previously unseen. But it doesn't account for the phenomenon of immune memory. CD4 cells, like other T cells, can be divided into two groups: so-called "na?ve" CD4s randomly targeting epitopes belonging to pathogens they haven't encountered yet; and CD4s that, having had an earlier run-in with one or another bug, have never forgotten it. These latter CD4 cells are exceptionally long-lived and ultra-responsive to any new encounter with the same pathogen.

"When a na?ve CD4 cell comes across its target pathogen, it takes days or even weeks before the immune system is full mobilized against that pathogen. But an activated-memory CD4 cell can cause the immune system to mount a full-blown response within hours," said William Petri, MD, PhD, chief of infectious diseases and international health at the University of Virginia.

That's why Petri, who was not involved in the study, thinks the newfound abundance in healthy adults, and total absence in newborns, of memory CD4 cells targeting microbes those individuals have never encountered before is so important. For the past 20 years, he has led a team conducting medical interventions in an urban slum in Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh. There, the average infant experiences a half-dozen diarrhea-inducing infections and as many upper-respiratory-tract infections within the first year of life, many of them within the first few months. The consequence, Petri said, is rampant malnutrition, with corresponding cognitive deficits and high mortality -- this, despite the fact that Petri's group provides free health-care and education services and visits homes twice a week.

"If I had lived in such a slum as a kid, I probably would have died of infection," Petri said.

A sophisticated technique invented by Davis in 1996 and since refined in his and others' laboratories permitted the Stanford team to identify a single CD4 cell targeting a particular epitope out of millions. Using this method, his team exposed immune-cell-rich blood drawn from 26 healthy adults, as well as from two newborns' umbilical cords, to various epitopes from different viral strains. They were able to fish out, from among hundreds of millions of CD4 cells per sample, those responsive to each viral epitope.

Nearly all of the 26 adult blood samples contained cells responsive to HIV; to HSV, the virus that causes herpes; and to cytomegalovirus, a common infectious agent that often produces no symptoms but can be dangerous to immune-compromised people. This wasn't surprising, given humans' exhaustive inventories of divergent CD4-cell affinities.

What was surprising was that, on average, about half of the virus-responsive CD4 cells in each adult sample bore unmistakable signs of being in the "memory" state: a characteristic cell-surface marker, gene activation patterns typical of memory T cells, and rapid secretion of signature biochemical signals, called cytokines, that communicate with other immune cells -- even though highly sensitive clinical tests showed that these individuals had never been exposed to any of these viruses in real life.

The newborns' blood contained similar frequencies of CD4 cells responsive to the same three viruses. However, all these cells were in the "na?ve" rather than memory state. "This could explain, at least in part, why infants are so incredibly susceptible to disease," said the study's first author, Laura Su, MD, PhD, an instructor in immunology and rheumatology.

Another surprise: About one-fifth of the adult samples boasted "cross-reactive" memory CD4 cells responsive to other harmless environmental microbes. For example, CD4 cells selected specifically for their reactivity to HIV turned out to be able to recognize a large number of common environmental microbes, including three gut-colonizing bacteria, a soil-dwelling bacterial species and a species of ocean algae. Considering that the investigators tested only a negligible fraction of all the microbes a person might encounter, it's a sure bet that this measure of CD4-cell cross-reactivity was an underestimate.

Next, the researchers recruited two adults who hadn't been vaccinated for flu in five years or longer, and then vaccinated them. In these volunteers, memory CD4s proliferated and otherwise became activated in response to exposure to certain components of the influenza virus, but also to epitopes of several different bacterial and protozoan microbes.

This cross-reactivity could explain why exposure to common bugs in the dirt and in our homes renders us less susceptible to dangerous infectious agents.

Which raises another point. "We grow and use experimental lab mice in totally artificial, ultra-clean environments," Davis said. "That's nothing like the environment that we live in. The CD4 cells from adult mice in the lab environment are almost entirely in the na?ve state. They may be more representative of newborns than of adults."

Petri described the new study as paradigm-shifting. "It was one of those rare, seminal findings that changes the way I think about the immune response," he said.

Davis' study offers hope that some of the immunity conferred by a vaccine extends beyond the specific microbe it targets, Petri said. "This adds support to the impetus to vaccinate infants in the developing world," he said. As many as 30 different pathogens can cause diarrhea, so vaccinating small children against all of them -- even if those vaccines existed -- would require so many separate injections as to be logistically hopeless. Understanding the mechanism by which cross-reactivity occurs might further allow immunologists to develop "wide-spectrum vaccines" that cover a number of infectious organisms.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center. The original article was written by Bruce Goldman.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Laura?F. Su, Brian?A. Kidd, Arnold Han, Jonathan?J. Kotzin, Mark?M. Davis. Virus-Specific CD4 Memory-Phenotype T Cells Are Abundant in Unexposed Adults. Immunity, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.immuni.2012.10.021

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/cUUdfOFGgpM/130207131602.htm

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RipDeck Featured on Exercise, Fitness, Nutrition Blog | RipDeck

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://ripdeckapp.com/2013/02/ripdeck-featured-on-exercise-fitness-nutrition-blog/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ripdeck-featured-on-exercise-fitness-nutrition-blog

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Tunisia Islamist party rejects gov't dissolution

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) ? The Islamist party dominating Tunisia's ruling coalition on Thursday rejected its own prime minister's decision to form a non-partisan technocratic government to try to appease critics, signaling that the political crisis brought on by the assassination of a prominent leftist politician is far from over.

The announcement by Ennahda throws into question efforts to resolve one of the worst crises Tunisia has faced since its revolution two years ago and makes plain that there are divisions not just between the government and the opposition, but within the ruling party itself.

The country's main labor union also declared a general strike for Friday over the assassination, a provocative move that will shut the country down and is expected to inflame tensions in a country already on edge after Chokri Belaid, a fierce government critic, was shot several times in his car just outside his home Wednesday morning by unknown assailants.

Demonstrations erupted Wednesday around the country and had to be quelled by tear gas. Though the capital, Tunis, was quiet Thursday amid cold weather and a heavy downpour, the country's Radio Mosaique reported full-scale riots in the southern mining city of Gafsa, where Belaid's Popular Front coalition of leftist parties has a great deal of support.

Tunisia had been seen as a model after its people ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and kicked off the Arab Spring, but political violence and allegations of government negligence have dimmed hopes. The new crisis has raised fears it may not be an exception to the turmoil in the region.

Ennahda was long repressed by Ben Ali, but after his overthrow in January 2011, the well-organized movement dominated subsequent elections and now rules in coalition with two secular parties. Relations between the government and the opposition had deteriorated in recent months and talks over a government reshuffle had gone nowhere until the crisis. Meanwhile, critics like Belaid had accused the government of employing thugs to attack meetings of the opposition.

Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali announced late Wednesday that he would dissolve the government and form a new one of technocrats to manage the country until elections, giving in to the longstanding opposition demand in a widely welcomed move.

On Thursday, however, the vice president of Ennahda, Abdel-Hamid Jelassi, said the party disagreed with the move, throwing the political future of the country into question once more.

Jelassi, according to Ennahda's website, said the country still needed political figures to run it and suggested returning to the long-running talks with other parties to expand the government. He added that the party was not informed of the prime minister's move before it happened.

Belaid's family and associates blame the Ennahda Party for complicity in the assassination, and other opposition figures have claimed there is a list of potential targets.

In an autopsy attended by the country's chief prosecutor Wednesday night, the coroner removed three bullets from Belaid's body as well as pieces of glass from the car window that the gunmen shot him through.

There has been no information about the identity of the killers.

Opposition parties had hailed Jebali's initiative as a courageous decision. The year-old government has often been criticized for being unable to tackle the country's problems, chief among them high unemployment and an economy battered by Europe's financial crisis and too few tourists.

"It's a recognition of the need to totally change the government which is incapable of running the country," said Taieb Baccouche, secretary general of the right-of-center Nida Tunis (Tunisia's Call) party, one of the main opposition parties. "There has to be immediate consultation between all the parties involved to avoid unilateral decisions."

_____

Associated Press writer Paul Schemm contributed to this report from Rabat, Morocco.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tunisia-islamist-party-rejects-govt-dissolution-124107142.html

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Opinion: Three common myths about Communications majors ...

You are here: Home ? Boston College Opinions
By Kara Weeks, Photo Editor, on February 5, 2013 7:29 PM

I can not-so-fondly recall a time last semester when I was talking to a fellow Boston College student who had proudly stated that he was an economics major. When he asked me what my major was and I informed him that it is communication, he snorted and had the audacity to make a comment about how I had it easy. Right to my face.

The idea that my major is easy is just one of the many stereotypes I have heard about the communication major. I recently changed my major to communications and, I have to say, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. That is why I am here to defend my major?s honor.

With that in mind, let?s start with the common myth about communication being ?easy.?

While I?ll admit that communication is not the hardest major at Boston College, the idea that it is easy is completely off the mark. It is a reading and writing intensive major and your grades depend heavily on class participation and whether or not you are actually doing the reading.

Furthermore, it requires analytical and critical thinking skills on a daily basis. I was surprised to find out that the Communication Department has an attendance policy that requires a student?s final grade to drop by one letter grade if they miss more than three classes. In general, six absences constitute a failure of the course. In other words, the communication major is not for the lazy, or those of us who are afraid to speak up in class. Your grade will be negatively affected by these traits.

On a related note, I can?t spend as much time talking about the ?easiness? stereotype as I?d like, because I have both a test and a presentation to prepare for by tomorrow. So there?s that.

I?ve also often heard it said that people choose to be communication majors because they have no idea what else to major in. False.

While this may be true for some people, I know a lot of people who are communication majors because they legitimately have strong interests in journalism, advertising, reporting or human communication as a science.

Personally, I chose communication because I have always liked writing and reading. The communication major gives me many opportunities to build on those skills, and opens up various career options in those areas.

Lastly and most ridiculously, there?s the common and very insulting stereotype that communication majors are ?dumb.? For starters, Boston College is an elite institution. We all got into this school because we are good students and smart kids in general.

Even putting that aside, I oftentimes find myself really impressed by the insightful comments my fellow communication majors make in class. Even more impressive is the knowledge of my professors who have PhDs in communication; these are very intelligent people with great insight. One of them actually does research in the medical field, studying patient-doctor relations and how they can be improved.

I bring this up, not to impress you, but to demonstrate the relevance of my field to others. Communication is a respectable field that offers a diverse range of intellectual pursuits and, on top of that and most importantly, I have loved all of my communication classes so far.

Courtesy of Kilgub/Flickr

All majors are subject to their stereotypes and the communication major is no different. However, I think stereotypes can, in some way, be chalked up to our different interests.

Just because someone prefers communication to Pre-Med doesn?t mean that they are dumb or looking for an easy ride. Regardless of how majors are stereotyped, I think the most important thing is to do what you enjoy and to major in something that mentally stimulates you.

In other words, if you?re studying something that motivates you enough to pack your bag and head to class everyday, you?re doing something right.

?

Source: http://bcgavel.com/2013/02/05/opinion-three-common-myths-about-communications-majors-debunked/

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