Knox in the News

From The Register-Mail:
…The fundraiser was just one part of Lombard’s “Week of HOPE,” which included daily events. Monday was a day to “honor” those who’ve battled cancer; Tuesday, students “offered” their services by picking up litter; Wednesday, students gave “praise” to Lombard faculty and staff.

Thursday, the students “earned” money to benefit cancer research, marched around the block of the school, and upon their return, they took their Relay for Life donations through the front door and dropped them into a bucket.

The week culminated in a Mini-Relay, sponsored by the American Cancer Society, with help from Knox College students, during which students learned about unhealthy choices that may lead to cancer, as well as healthy choices that may prevent cancer.

By the end of Friday, the donations totaled $1,087.56, a number Assistant Principal Tiffany Springer said doubles the amount raised in last year’s inaugural event…

From The Register-Mail:
Visitors to the Carl Sandburg Birthplace, 313 E. Third St., will soon be greeted by a spiffy picket fence and fresh whitewash thanks to Galesburg High School senior Dallas Hendrickson, who has taken on the historic site as his Eagle Scout service project.

The 17-year-old’s project, which includes repairing shutters and kicked-in fence posts and scraping and painting the Carl Sandburg Birthplace and the property-surrounding fence, was approved by the Eagle Board about a month ago…
Hendrickson will graduate in the top 10 of his class, and as a Gale Scholar, he plans to attend Knox College and major in physics to one day become an aeronautical engineer.

From NPR:
Hearing gossip about people can change the way you see them — literally.

Negative gossip actually alters the way our visual system responds to a particular face, according to a study published online by the journal Science.

The findings suggest that the human brain is wired to respond to gossip, researchers say. And it adds to the evidence that gossip helped early humans get ahead…

Other scientists say that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

“I was actually pretty excited to see this paper,” says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “For years, people like me have been saying that our intense interest in gossip is not really a character flaw. It’s part of who we are. It’s almost a biological event, and it exists for good evolutionary reasons.”

Even when primitive humans lived in small groups, they needed to know things like who might be a threat and who was after a particular mate, McAndrew says. And learning those things through personal experience would have been slow and potentially dangerous, he says.

So McAndrew says one shortcut would have been gossip.

“People who had an intense interest in that — that constantly were monitoring who’s sleeping with who and who’s friends with whom and who you can trust and who you can’t — came out ahead,” he says. “People who just didn’t care about that stuff got left behind.”

And it makes sense that our brains pay special attention to negative gossip, McAndrew says.

“If somebody is a competitor or somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dirt about them,” he says. “You want negative information, because that’s the stuff you can exploit to get ahead.”

From the KCRG-TV9 News:

Midwest Conference Presidents’ Council Chair Thomas Kunkel has announced that charter member Cornell College will return to the storied league in the 2012-2013 academic year. The Rams have been participating in the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference for the past 14 years…

The Midwest Conference is currently comprised of 10 private, liberal arts, colleges and universities in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin: Beloit College, Carroll University, Grinnell College, Illinois College, Knox College, Lake Forest College, Lawrence University, Monmouth College, Ripon College and St. Norbert College.

From The Register-Mail:
The Knox College Choir will present its final concert of the year at 7 p.m. Friday.

The choir will perform works including John Taverner’s “Song for Athene,” Felix Mendelssohn’s “Hear My Prayer,” Eric Whitacre’s “Five Hebrew Love Songs,” as well as a selection of world music from Israel, Russia, Sweden and Africa.

The Knox Chamber Singers will perform works by Healey Willan, selections from Brahms’ timeless “Liebeslieder Walzer” and two folksongs from Scotland. The concert will be conducted by acting director of choirs Daniel McDavitt and accompanied by Amber Clark at the piano, with guest faculty artist violinist Louise Polay.

From The Register-Mail:

Building community by breaking bread together is what the Knox Prairie Community Kitchen and several other organizations hope to accomplish when they host the third in a series of pot-luck dinners from 5:30 to 7:30 Tuesday at the Galesburg Community Center, 150 E. Simmons St.

The event is co-sponsored by The People of Galesburg and Stone-Hayes Center for Independent Living.
“The last event in March was a huge success,” said John Hunigan, president of KPCK. “We had at least 120 people from all walks of life. Not only did we have diversity in the crowd, but food brought by our members and other attendees represented numerous cultural traditions.

“The crowd and fellowship was amazing. Knox students sat and talked with unemployed factory workers and senior citizens old enough to remember when the Community Center building housed the city’s only fire station.”

KPCK was founded by many of the same people who came together to form The Lunch Spot. In 2010 a group of concerned parents, various people in the community and Knox students realized the long District 205 winter break was going to be a financial strain on families who depended on the school lunch program. Almost 4,000 meals were served during the two weeks when school had normally been in session to more than 450 kids who registered for the program. When The Lunch Spot’s founders realized there was a continuing need for hunger assistance, KPCK was born. The group is in the early stages of studying the feasibility and sustainability of a community kitchen that will feed people regardless of their financial situation…