TommieMedia

Sept. 21 was World Alzheimer’s Day, as well as Respect for the Aged Day in Japan. This is meaningful to me because my grandmother has been slowly deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease for much of my life. She is currently in the moderate-advanced dementia stage, meaning she is completely dependent on the caregivers at her nursing home.

Plaques and tangles cling to much of her brain like barnacles, and the gradual, irreversible withering of higher brain function has choked out any real sense of awareness, reasoning, personality, memory or recognition.

Early Tuesday morning at Johns Hopkins University, an undergraduate student heard noises coming from behind his off-campus residence, and noticed the door to his garage was open. The student then grabbed his samurai sword, and investigated.

Discovering an intruder in his garage, the would-be ninja threatened to call 911. According to police, the suspect then lunged at him, and the sword-wielding student sliced the suspect’s left hand, almost severing it. The intruder was mortally wounded with an upper-body cut, and was dead when police arrived.

President Obama rallied citizens for national health care reform Sept. 12 at the Target Center in Minneapolis. Using Rochester’s Mayo Clinic as a model, Obama called for accessible, effective health care at a sustainable cost, as Congress discusses the most ambitious health care legislation since 1994. It’s difficult to write a thrilling speech about reforming …

Continue reading “Making sense of the health care reform”

The first day of class was a time for professors to set the tone and share their expectations for the semester. While reading their syllabi, many students may have also noticed the pandemic prevention advice regarding the H1N1 virus expected to circulate this fall. In addition to providing annual flu tips like using hand sanitizer …

Continue reading “About time St. Thomas had a sick student policy”

TommieMedia’s View Another class of freshmen begins their St. Thomas adventure, thrust onto an unfamiliar campus surrounded by strangers. Fortunately, today’s first-year collegians have a remedy for their pangs of loneliness: social networking Web sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. EDUCAUSE, a higher education and technology non-profit, studied student online social networking usage at 44 …

Continue reading “Social networks boost students’ online egos”