Books, etc.

Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead

Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut.  New York: Anchor Books, 2007.  Located in the library at:   HQ799.7 .D73 2007 or online  via eBrary for SHU users.

By Stephanie Sorbara '15

There are many factors today that are holding people between the ages of 20 and 30 back from reaching their American Dream. To many, the American dream is not to be extremely wealthy or drive four different kinds of luxury cars, but rather to be able to start a family and not be drenched in student loan debt. The vast majority of people aged from 20 to 30 years old are struggling to build a career and a start a family and feel as though it is their fault. In Strapped: Why America’s 20-and 30- Somethings can’t get Ahead, Tamara Draut successfully outlines the struggles that people of today’s generation face as they try to build a career and future for themselves, and how it vastly differs from their parent’s generation.

The main component necessary for obtaining a future stable job that will provide benefits when it comes to starting a family and an income high enough to cover all living expenses stems from a simple college degree. Education is the key to getting ahead in life, yet it is the largest component that holds people back from creating their own future for themselves. College is extremely overpriced and not worth the results. Because college is so overpriced, many students are forced to take out an excessive amount of student loans to help pay for college. In the end they most likely receive their bachelors degree and sometimes even further their education to a masters degree. However, even with those degrees, the income they will be receiving when they finally find a job is not enough to pay off the immense amount of loans that build up from their college education. This debt builds up extremely fast and holds those college graduates back for years from getting a home of their own and starting a family. Not only that, but many students who excel greatly in high school must resort to community colleges because a four-year education is simply unaffordable. With increasing competition, one can be the brightest student out there, but be unable to further their education due to such high college tuition costs. Several bright students must resort to a two-year degree from a community college, when they clearly deserve to go to a highly ranked school. Students with a two year degree generally tend to end up with lower paying jobs and this prevents them from being able to live on their own as quickly as they had dreamed of. However, it is not their fault and is not because they are not a bright student. The aid granted to students who excel in high school is not generous enough to help them obtain a four-year degree. Basically, if a student’s parents are not in the upper class making a very large salary, a college education will not be very easy to obtain now a days.

Another aspect that holds people back from attaining their dreams of one day living comfortably in the middle class are the missing benefits that are not granted through their job. In our parent’s generation, it was common to work for a company that would pay for that person to go to graduate school while he or she worked at their company. Not having that extra debt to pay off greatly aided in that person starting a family and owning a home. Better yet, when it came time to starting a family, the people of our parent’s generation were granted benefits, such as paid maternity leave. Today, most of these benefits are extinct and cause much of our generation’s 20 and 30 year olds to delay starting a family because their jobs would be put at risk. The jobs that one can get from a bachelors and masters degree today do not provide as many benefits for one and do not offer a high enough income to pay for the current living costs. Draut clearly outlines the reasons as to why our parents had an easier start in building their futures, and this is only one of the many.

Tamara Draut explains the reasons why it is so difficult for 20 and 30 year olds to get ahead in life and achieve their dream of simply owning a home and starting a family. Draut does a great job in depicting the obstacles that young adults today are facing and proving that it is not at all their fault. Today’s current economy, job offerings and education system vastly differs from our parent’s generation. This book is extremely informative and pertains to everyone’s life in some way. It provides great information young adults need to be aware of when diving into their future.

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan D. Blum.  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009.  Located at: First Floor, New Book Display: PN 167 .B48 2009; also available online for SHU users via eBrary.

University undergraduate students and faculty live in two different cultural communities and their understandings of plagiarism and originality differ profoundly.  Blum presents plagiarism as (for faculty) rooted in Enlightenment discussions of ideas, words, expression, individual originality, and sources –summed up in the concept of “authenticity.”  But students live performative lives –surrounded by texts via chat, texting (text is now a verb), and view performative quotation and allusion very differently from adult norms of attribution.

Plagiarism involves, according to Blum, and spectrum of behaviors from outright intentional deception (purchasing a paper to be submitted as one’s own) to casual or uninformed quotation and appropriation of text.  Academic disciplines vary in their approach to quotation: when does a cliché (if the shoe fits …) become a literary allusion (the best of times, the worst of times) become unsourced appropriation and potential plagiarism?  Students are actually very sophisticated in their use of quotation and other textual reference, but their norms differ from those enforcing originality in academe.  The previous sentence is actually quoted from page 27 –academic norms require that I attribute it to Blum; but if I loosely paraphrased the same content without attribution, am I committing plagiarism?

An anthropologist, Blum bases her study on interviews carried out by four trained students; 234 people participated in 154 interviews (“a few involving more than one student” –so there’s quotation marks!) and 32 conversations resulting in more than 5,000 pages of transcripts.  She studied “Saint U” –probably a more “competitive” university than Sacred Heart University although many of Blum’s findings seem directly relevant to this context.  Her chapter “Growing Up in the College Bubble” should be required of all faculty and staff.  This is thought-provoking material about a serious concern which evades simplistic policies and processes.

--Gavin Ferriby

The Evolution of Search (Google)

This six-minute video reviews very recent history: from 1999 -- this video is produced by Google, so it has a predictable point of view.  But it gives a great overview quickly!

 

 

Hat tip to Library Link of the Day.

--Gavin Ferriby

Featured Resource: Credo Reference

 

 

 

Credo Reference --This is information you can believe in.

Don't know where to start with your paper?  Down about a project coming up?  Credo Reference is a great place to start -- current, high-quality information with links to databases and resources available to SHU students.

Credo "topic pages" are a huge help: just type in a really general word, like democracy, photosynthesis, or terrorism --and the topic page at the top of the search results gives a basic definition, some related words, and links to journal articles, books, and images.  Click on the Concept Map link in the main menu and (after a pause for Java) an interactive, "live" concept map will open up with clickable links.

No wonder Smart Research Starts Here --with CredoReference.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

The Information: A History, A Theory, a  Flood, by James Gleick.  New York: Pantheon, 2011.  Sacred Heart University Library Z665 .G547 2011. 

In 426 pages Gleick maps the development of a concept, a property, and flow: information.  Just what information is, is hard to pin down: for this reason the book is properly The Information and that definite article is important: THE information.

Gleick's story really begins with Claude Shannon's work that bridge mathematics and electrical circuits in an obscure, technical article in The Bell System Technical Journal, July and October 1948.  Shannon clarified and quantified information as signal, bits, dots and dashes and electrical pulses, bridged by an abstract theory between knowledge and entropy, chaos, and uncertainty.  Shannon hardly cared what the bits meant, what could be resolved into meaning: he was concerned with quantified pulses, signals, loss, or distortion.  The process he discovered what the world runs on now, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.  By the time the physicist John Archibald Wheeler writes in At Home In the Universe (1994), "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe." (p. 296)  It is now hard to envision the world before Claude Shannon.

Information's maze-like permutations and unexpected entanglements, however, take the reader to Norbert Wiener's MIT, Kurt Goedel's Vienna Circle, and later the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Alan Turing's amazing years at Cambridge and Bletchley Park.  From the study of Babylonian cuneiform came a realization of ancient algorithms: instructions in starkly binary clay tablets.  Cryptograph contributed habits such as check-sums and other fail-safes to prevent the loss of signal, and in 1941 Jorge Luis Borges began his story, "The Library of Babel," with the phrase, "The Universe (which others call the Library) …." --the concept of the conceptual, ideational universe entangled with the physical, particle universe was born.

Gleick's book, like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), is hard to understand and exhilarating to read all at once.  Like Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (2003), Gleick's book is both readable and at times utterly baffling.  This book requires patience, but rewards the reader with truly unexpected conclusions that are elegant, satisfying, and logically compelling.  This is the kind of book you should read while you're in college.

--Gavin Ferriby