It’s a good weekend to be a hispanista in Lexington. Granted we’ve had a great fall; from the Lexington Latino Festival to the many activities surrounding the Arts and Sciences Passport ¡Viva México! program, those of us who love the Spanish language and Hispanic culture have been busy. Still, this Friday and Saturday are special. 

This weekend we celebrate Día de los muertos, or Day of the Dead, a well-known holiday that has become increasingly popular in the US. On November 1^st and 2^nd, families throughout Latin America (but especially in Mexico) build altars and visit cemeteries to remember loved ones who have passed away. The holiday is joyous, despite the macabre theme. Día de los muertos is a time to laugh with death, to accept the fact that we’re all headed that way eventually, and to give those we have lost a place at our table for the night. Here are some suggestions for how you can celebrate this weekend, just follow the hyperlinks to more information about and directions to the events. ¡Qué vivan los muertos!

Preparations

Post by: Tara Bray

As a high school student, the thought of college always seemed overwhelming. I was scared to leave my home, my friends, and everything that was familiar to me in my life. I didn’t know if I would make the transition to college smoothly, if I would succeed, or crash and burn. Little did I know at the time, by applying for the A&S Wired Residential community I was taking a step that would help me succeed during my first year at UK. Being in Wired provided me with the first step in making friends and creating a familiar environment, which are two crucial aspects in succeeding during your freshman year. Not only has Wired offered me opportunities for leadership development, such as becoming a peer mentor in the program, but it has also allowed me to form bonds with both faculty and my peers that might not have happened.

As a Wired student, you have the opportunity to take your writing class, which is a university requirement, in a section with other Wired students, which was one of my smallest courses. My writing professor was Dr. Beth Connors-Manke, who became a mentor to me and a person who I look up to, not only as an authority figure, but also as a friend. This class also led me to meet other Wired students who I still hang out with.

While going through Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" I noticed in Act 3, Scene2  this little speech from Robin Goodfellow:

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,

For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,

And yonder shine's Aurora's harbinger,

At whose approach, ghosts wand'ring here and there

Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all,

That in crossways and floods have burial.

The play is supposed to be set in ancient Athens, but, of course, it's not. It's interesting that Shakespeare has knowledge of the practice of burying suicides in crossroads. Crossroads as liminal areas, places betwixt and between, places of filth and dirt, have a long, long history.

Images courtesy of Martin Liebermann: 

www.martin-liebermann.de".

The revelations this past weekend concerning the extent of the NSA's abilities have been disturbing to say the least (ProPublica, The Guardian, NY Times). On top of its ability to record massive amounts of internet traffic for its own review, new reports indicate the government has, for at least the past decade, paid companies covertly for privileged "backdoor access" into their systems and encryption standards. In practice, this means secure communications with banks, email, and other websites are all likely easily readable by the NSA, and many or all commercial encryption products do not protect against government eyes. While this possibility has been known for some time and asserted by many conspiracy theorists, these reports present credible evidence that the NSA actually engages in this behavior.

Over the past two decades, information technology has revolutionized our world and our work, as small, fast, cheap and interconnected digital devices make previously unimagined innovations possible.

As every summer starts approaching I always wonder to myself, should I take an online class? The answer to that this summer is YES! In fact I will be taking two summer courses, both of which will be online.  This year A&S has made it really easy to see all the courses that are being offered over the summer and they have even color coded them to help make your search easier.  You can filter the courses by sessions, a selected list of courses such as A&S humanities or you can just browse the entire catalogue to find something that you might be interested in taking.  This year A&S has made it really easy to find all the courses being offered and I would encourage you to check it out and take a class (or two)!

Over the break, I had taken an online winter intercession Course (STA 210), this course was designed to be a semester long course but was jam-packed into 9 days.  Since I am still on USP I needed this class to fulfill my requirements and graduate but it was not one that I wanted to spend an entire semester doing.

While I was thinking I was doing the smart thing by cramming it all into just over a week long course, it was difficult to do.  First because I was out of town for the first week of the class and it was difficult to stay motivated to complete all the assignments every day but second because there was so much information being thrown at you at once it was easy to rush through the assignments to get them done.  This was my approach to the class and while I felt great that I had completed all my assignments and did well in the course, at the end I felt as though I had not learned much from the course.

I have been taking ITIQ Web Publishing (A&S 100-205) which uses Canvas a system that is similar to Blackboard but in my opinion it functions much better.  One of the first things that I noticed about Canvas was that the login page took you straight to your course, where BB (Blackboard) takes you to another landing page where you have to select your course from a list.  Another thing that Canvas does better than BB was the way that you can switch between courses, there is a drop down at the top of the page that you just select a different course.  This is much better than having to go back to the BB landing page, wait for it to load and then select another course from the list. 

Canvas is much faster and everything on a page loads very quickly.  There are two sections on the BB landing page that I don’t know what they are about because they never load, which doesn’t matter because all I want are my courses anyways.