NARRATOR: For students in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, deciding whether to get a Mac or a PC for college can be frustrating. But for freshman Brian Lichliter, the choice was simple to get a PC.

BRIAN LICHLITER: At least in my personal experience as a computer scientist, in fact I’m taking a class right now, EECS 311, where our teacher required us to use a piece of software that, while you can still use it as a Mac user, required the Mac users to load Windows onto their computer, get some software that will allow them to use Windows, and then download the software because the software literally only works on a Windows PC.

NARRATOR: Alan Wolff is the Director of Information Resources in the IT department at McCormick. He says students should get whatever computer they’re most comfortable with, thanks to increased compatibility in programs between Macs and PCs.

ALAN WOLFF: The main software we use for our curriculum is a piece of software called Matlab. And fortunately that piece of software has both Macintosh and Windows versions. So we basically tell them, “Just get the computer you’re most comfortable with,” and we’ve seen set up a license with MathWorks and they can download whichever version they want after they purchase that software. And in fact we find that most McCormick undergraduates have Macs; I think it might even be close to 80 percent.

NARRATOR: Freshman Davin Kim is part of that 80 percent and has mixed reviews about his Mac.

DAVIN KIM: I wouldn’t exactly say it’s ben fine, I mean for the most part, yes, it’s done all that it’s needed to do, but occasionally, when I need to take quizzes, the Safari or the Google Chrome, even when I tried downloading Mozilla Firefox I sometimes have difficulties seeing the questions and answer choices, but other than that it’s been doing what it needed to do.

Jasen Pinkerton, a freshman journalism student at Northwestern University, teaches you how to shoot a basketball.

My name is Jasen Pinkerton. I’m a freshman journalism student at Northwestern University. A lot of people shoot basketballs; it’s fun, basketball’s a fun sport to play, but a lot of people don’t know how to shoot a basketball or they just don’t do it very well, so I’m here today to teach you how to shoot a basketball.

First hold the ball in the hand you’re going to be shooting the ball with, so if you’re a righty it’s your right hand, and what you want to do is set your feet, make sure that you have one foot straddling the line and your of foot just slightly behind it, all pointing at the basket.

And what’s going to happen is you’re going to toe the line with your right foot and your left foot is going to be slightly behind it and what you want to make sure is you’re on balance; you want to make sure that your shoulders, your hips, everything, your feet are pointing toward the basket, centered at the line, and then you’re ready to start the next motion of shooting.

And then what you want to do is you want to just take a couple of dribbles, make sure you’re set, make sure you’re balanced, make sure you’re comfortable, and then bend your knees and shoot. When you’re shooting the ball what you want to do is you want to make sure you get good elbow flexation and you want to make sure you’re shooting with your wrist.

When you put it all together it’s just two dribbles — comfortable — bend, shoot, flex, fingertips and hopefully your guide it home.

Hillel hosted a silent walk in remembrance of the Holocaust on Holocaust Remembrance Day — Thursday, April 19. For the organizers, the walk was a way to commemorate the past, as well as recognize a need to learn for the future.

SPEAKER: AEPi, five years ago, the NYE chapter, started this walk. Today a walk that started on that one campus is now at over 100 campuses in four countries, with over 9000 undergraduates participating in this and people leading people just like you on walks across the country, across Israel, across Great Britain, across Canada; we all take this walk to remember, but what we really can’t do is we can’t forget.

SAMMIE OFFSAY: I can’t have a Holocaust Remembrance Day without it being meaningful anymore. A lot of people don’t even know this is a day marked on a calendar, but to me this is so important that, freshman year I didn’t know about the programming on campus and I got in a cab and went to the Holocaust museum because I needed it and I think in terms of just priorities, you see what your life is and what it has been for other people.

RABBI JOSH LIVINGSTONE: My name is Rabbi Josh Livingstone. I am the director of the Jewish student group MEOR Northwestern — M-E-O-R Northwestern — on campus here. I came out because I know a lot of people that are involved and I wanted to show support to them and I wanted to do whatever I could to encourage the community at large to see this as a more global issue and not just a Jewish issue, but to encourage as many people to come out as possible.

OFFSAY: I’m Sammie Offsay. I’m on the executive board of Hillel and I did much of the planning for Holocaust Remembrance Day this year. Remembering the Holocaust in general is important to me in recognizing the many individuals. I think a lot of times we clump memories and it becomes another phase in history. This is one that’s recent enough that we can try and actually remember it.

OFFSAY: We are the last generation who will get to meet Holocaust survivors. We’re the last generation who knows what it means to look into the eyes of someone whose same eyes looked at the walls of a ghetto or through the gates of Auschwitz.

LIVINGSTONE: I think it’s important for the survivors to be remembered in their time; that they can see that there’s somebody caring it on. But the true test is not now, when we can see the Holocaust survivors. The true test is going to be in 100 years, when it’s in the history book, but hopefully we’ll set in motion something that can last forever.

[GROUP PRAYER]

Ben Kemper: Storyteller

NARRATOR: Storytelling is considered by many to be a lost art, but Northwestern freshman Ben Kemper has found a way to already make a name for himself in the field. Ben has already told stories professionally and has been perfecting his talent for over a decade, all leading up to his time at Northwestern.

BEN: Well I got hooked in the second grade when a professional storyteller named Joy Steiner came to my school and the long and the short of it was I was so entranced by what she did that I just started stalking her as a little six year old from event to event to event to event to event. And she eventually took me on as her apprentice and then I started doing gigs, opening for “dare to say no to drugs week” at school and alike and I just worked my way up.

BEN: I started working my way up by retelling the stories that I heard from Joy, and then going out to the library and finding new stories, world tales mostly in 392 the folktale section. And then I started working with stories from my own personal life and these two years past I’ve been working with historical stories from around the Boise area.

BEN: I was commissioned by the Idaho Humanities Council to make an hour-long story about the big burn of 1910, the largest fire in the history of North America. And so what I did was I read all the books that are available about it, went out to the areas that were touched by the fire, made a story, came back and performed it, and all that took round about a year.

NARRATOR: Ben took a gap year to work on the Big Burn project and then decided to come to Northwestern, where one professor caught his eye and helped make his decision to come to Evanston for school.

BEN: Reeves Collins, he’s one of the heads of the theater department and is one of the premier storytelling tinkerers in the country, also the kindest and best of men, so it’s the place where storytelling is most viewed under an academic lens outside of the Deep South.

NARRATOR: Ben has already made a name for himself at Northwestern and said he hopes to make storytelling more popular in the Northwestern community.

BEN: I’ve been setting up a storytelling hour called the Chestnut Hour all the while since I’ve been here with some successes. My hope is to attract a lot of other people from across the student body, the staff, the faculty, to come and tell stories either form their own personal lives or stories their remember fro their own heritage or childhood.

When baseball season starts, the Wrigleyville area of Chicago undergoes a massive transformation. The area surrounding the ballpark becomes packed with visitors and every Cubs home game is a massive operation for those who work inside the stadium and around it.

This slideshow chronicles the transformation of Wrigley and the surrounding area from before to during to after the game.

As media usage moves into an age focused more on technology, newspapers are struggling to keep up in the race to grab readers, new and old. Not only have newspapers lost subscribers and current readers, they have also failed, in large part, to attract younger readers, particularly college students.

The Chicago Sun-Times has not been immune to these problems, but with new owners recently taking over the company, the Sun-Times hopes to earn back the market share that it has lost.

“I think we’re going to do some upgrades to our website to try to get more Internet traffic,” Tina Akouris, a Sun-Times sports reporter, said. “And I think we’re trying to get the paper to look a little big more like a tabloid and just kind of embrace our tabloid roots because that is how the Sun-Times started way back in the 1940s, we were the tabloid to counteract the (Chicago) Tribune’s broadsheet.”

That change will be welcome for Sun-Times reader Emily Fagan, who is a freshman at Northwestern University, subscribed to the Sun-Times at her home in Aurora, Ill.

“I personally like reading newsy stuff but I think a lot of other people find a lot of interest in the tabloid kind of a thing and I think if it had more of a mix then that would draw a lot more attention to it and it would be an easy place to find the best of both worlds,” she said.

Fagan has not been impressed with the Sun-Times’ attempts to grab young readers up to this point, particularly with its struggle to grab both audiences that it has — young readers who prefer the Internet and older readers who prefer the newspaper

“I think that nowadays there is so much turn-on to the Internet for younger readers because if you have a computer it’s free and because it’s easier to get access to, and I think that most people that read newspapers nowadays are older people who don’t know how to use the internet and like to,” she said. “So I think that in order to grab younger readers, I think the Sun-Times, and other newspapers, need to do something more to promote their online reading resources and to grabbing the attention of younger readers, to give them a reason to use the Sun-Times instead of something else.”

The Sun-Times has already made steps to attract niche audiences online, including launching yourseason.com, which focuses on high school sports in the city and the suburbs. The newspaper also plans to start running more analysis rather than just hard news in hopes of better capturing readers’ interests. Akouris said she hopes these changes can lead to increased readership, especially in the younger audience.

“(I) think (the tabloid change), coupled with the Internet upgrade we are going to do at some point is really going to try to get the younger set,” she said.

As traditional newsprint goes out of style, newspapers are trying to find other ways to engage their audiences, particularly the younger generation.

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