volume #78, issue 4
Personal drone sparks new laws
monday, February 22, 2016
UR
Pop culture professional provides Oscar predictions
Playoff position on the line
Your vote is your voice
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VIEW
Bay City Beauticians develop dreams
Shannon Marschall shares a laugh with Shamall Jackson before she works on Jackson’s eyebrows. Students often practice their newfound skills on fellow students at Bayshire Beauty Academy in Bay City. (Delta Collegiate/Josephine Norris)
Read about students’ experiences at Bayshire, and view our extended photo gallery online at DeltaCollegiate. com
New York Times bestseller urges humans to monitor technology
Stephan Clay boards his bus home from Delta. Clay is one of the many Delta students that rely on the Saginaw STARS bus system to get to school every day, and not having a bus system would heavily impact their ability to achieve their educational goals. (Delta Collegiate/Josephine Norris)
road to nowhere Saginaw bus route change hurts student success Greg Horner Imagine paying almost twice as much for transportation and receiving a poorer service for it. That’s what Delta students are currently dealing with after the Saginaw Transit Authority Regional Services (STARS) made changes to its routes in October and November of last year. “Some students have had to drop out because they can’t make it to school,” says Bria Smith, leader of Delta’s Black Student Union and a resident of Saginaw. “We’re paying more money now for a longer trip… It’s no longer an express.” According to Sylvester Payne, STARS general manager, the system has been dealing with financial issues for years as the service tries to deal with a declining city population along
with stagnant state and federal funding. Starting in November, STARS consolidated 11 of their routes to seven. “We’re no different than any other government operation, every year we have to review our budget,” says Payne. “It was determined that we needed to make some reductions because our expenses are exceeding the revenue that we bring in.” The Ricker Express is an additional bus route that STARS has provided since 2013. The line used to ferry students from Delta’s Saginaw campus, the Ricker Center, to the main campus and downtown for a one-time semester fee of $56. For the 2015 fall semester, STARS increased the price to $121, then on Oct. 12, changed the route to include two
DCGregHorner apartment complexes and SVSU’s main campus. Originally, a ride from Delta’s main campus to the Ricker Center took about 30 minutes. Following the changes and additional stops, that ride now lasts roughly an hour. Payne says that the Ricker Express line has to pay for itself and that the price increase was necessary. “It did almost double on them. Working with the college we were told that they could get this out of their financial aid package. But, we didn’t realize that was going to put an additional strain on them with other things that they needed to do with that package.”
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harper skrzypczak The seats of the lecture theatre were full. Audience members stood in the wings and sat on the stage’s steps, Feb. 10, during Delta College’s 17th annual winter President’s Speakers Series. Speaker Nicholas Carr, a New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, has been writing about how computers and technology change human minds for over a decade. Carr began his presentation by quoting the first sentence from Collegiate Managing Editor Matt Brown’s opinion piece “Cell Hell.” “To survive in the current social climate, one has to be connected,” Carr reads. He laments that the statement is true. But just 10 years ago, Carr says nobody would have written that sentence. “What we’ve done, I think in recent years, is really changed the way we live thanks to the technology we all use,” says Carr. Going without your phone for more than a couple hours, Carr says, can make people feel panicked. “If you look at studies, if [people] lose their phone… they do feel panicked,” states Carr. “If they’re without it for even three days, they feel they’re missing something really important. After three days they calm down and begin to realize ‘Oh, maybe that wasn’t as important as I thought.’ ” Carr believes that humans are good with technology, and that we adapt it into our lives very quickly without thinking about it. He warns, however, that the screens that we’re constantly looking into can become a “glass cage.” This idea came to him after years of writing about technology. One day, he sat down to read a book and realized he was having trouble. “My brain kept telling me ‘oh, you should go check email… oh, you should go do some Googling,’” says Carr. He believes that the technology was changing the way he thought because he seemed to be losing his ability to concentrate. “I wanted to be kind of stimulated, the way we get stimulated when we’re looking into a computer screen, all [of] the time,” says Carr. This began Carr’s research on our digital dependence and how it shapes our brains. He looked through history to find examples of earlier technologies that “had a deep influence on people’s lives, particularly their intellectual lives,” says Carr. What became clear very quickly was a small, but important, set of intellectual technologies. Carr says these are the tools that we think with.
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FOUNTAIN
TALK
What is something new that you’ve tried recently? Aleisha Jones 18, midland
I got a tattoo. It’s writing and it says ‘I am your’s and you are mine.’
Louis Thomas 27, Saginaw [In] October, I f lew for the first time on an airplane. I went to Atlanta. The f light ac t ua l ly got too overbooked so they put me in first class.
trevaris jones 21, saginaw I put up a waiver to go to the military. When you go off to bootcamp... you get a buzz cut. So, I just cut everything off. I was like ‘I wonder what I look like basically bald?’ So it was basically start(ing) from scratch. I looked like a monk. deron wilson 28, Saginaw
I started back bowling. I’m learning more about t hat.