The November 20th football game between Illinois and Northwestern next year will most likely be played in Chicago at Wrigley Field.

“It would be great national exposure and a neat thing for both sides,” said Zook, who visited Chicago on Tuesday. “Wrigley Field transcends the whole country.”

Northwestern officials, buoyed by the success of the NHL’s Winter Classic, have been trying for more than a year to make a Wrigley Field game a reality.

On Jan. 17, NU athletic director Jim Phillips said: “Within the next month or so, we’ll decide if it’s something that can work. There are a lot of moving parts.”

Bottom line, officials involved are confident the game will become a reality. But at least two hurdles remain: revenue sharing (between the Big Ten and the Cubs) and the fact if Northwestern moves a 2010 game to Wrigley, it will have just five at Ryan Field.

Phillips will meet Wednesday with Cubs President Crane Kenney in an effort to get the game closer to fruition. For a 2010 game, Northwestern probably needs to nail down details by the end of March.

Check out the graphic with the potential field orientation, and the full article from the Chicago Tribune.

The City of Champaign has released emergency rules that will govern Unofficial St. Patrick’s Day, planned for March 5 on the Illinois campus.

Bars in the campus area must raise their minimum entry age from 19 to 21 during Unofficial, and they must also have a doorman aged 21 or older checking identification at the entrance. … The mayor’s office will not issue any keg permits for private parties, making it illegal to possess more than one keg per residence. … Last year, Champaign police issued 351 citations on Unofficial, and spent more than $13,000 on police overtime, Champaign police Lt. Brad Yohnka said Friday.

News-Gazette: Emergency rules announced for “Unofficial” in Champaign

No matter what you do on Unofficial, be responsible and be safe.

Apparently college students had it right all along – naps improve all-day learning abilities.

This study suggests that if you’re trying to cram in facts you need to recall later, a same-day nap before your last-minute cram might be more helpful than powering through your day with nervous energy.

Naps Can Seriously Improve All-Day Learning Abilities

(Image via Flickr)

Do you often go to Illinois.edu to do a people search? If so, you can save time and clicks by downloading NetID Lookup – a free Firefox add-on (created by your friends at The Quad).

This add-on simply creates a new item in your right-click menu so that when you highlight a netID or name, you right-click the highlighted netID, and it automatically opens the search result from the Illinois.edu People Search in a new tab. This works great in Gmail when you want to figure out a name based on an email address.

Download NetID Lookup securely from the Mozilla Add-ons page

Fighting Illini Fans:

Saturday was a great day for Illini Nation!

Thank you so much for the amazing atmosphere you created at the Assembly Hall. You started the day by creating one of the loudest and most energized scenes in the history of ESPN College GameDay. Digger Phelps and Rece Davis both singled out the Orange Krush for creating an electric environment for the national television audience. Our students, band, cheerleaders and Illinettes deserve special recognition for making Illinois look outstanding during the broadcast. I can’t thank you enough.

We followed it up with an incredible packed house in the big win over Michigan State. That was the loudest I remember hearing the Assembly Hall in years. There is no doubt that the home court advantage played a huge role in our win.

We have three very important home games remaining on our schedule in Ohio State, Minnesota and Wisconsin. I hope you can continue to make The Hall the best home court advantage in the Big Ten as we head down the stretch.

Go Illini!

Bruce Weber

Congratulations to the Fighting Illini Men’s Basketball team on their recent win against Michigan State!

We decided to whip out this classic for your enjoyment:

“Edit all you want, you’re still runnin’!”

We’ve all realized over the years that talking causes distracted driving, but research from UIUC has proven that driving actually distracts one from talking. According to the research, driving impairs your ability to comprehend and use language.

“The previous findings made no sense to those of us who have studied language,”said Gary Dell, a psycholinguist in the department of psychology at Illinois and corresponding author on the study. “You might think that talking is an easy thing to do and that comprehending language is easy. But it’s not. Speech production and speech comprehension are attention-demanding activities, and so they ought to compete with other tasks that require your attention – like driving.”

The study reflects the tradeoffs that occur when people try to communicate while performing other tasks, Dell said. “The relative balance of attention to any two tasks is going to vary,” he said. “And perhaps we don’t understand one another as well as we should because of this. With modern technology, we’re talking more and more while we are doing other things, but we may be understanding one another less and less.”

Driven to distraction: New study shows driving hinders talking – UI News Bureau

Researchers at the Beckman Institute have proven that success in playing a video game is dependent upon the size of a specific brain structure.

The study adds to the evidence that specific parts of the striatum, a collection of distinctive tissues tucked deep inside the cerebral cortex, profoundly influence a person’s ability to refine his or her motor skills, learn new procedures, develop useful strategies and adapt to a quickly changing environment.

Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh was lead author on the study. Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and Arthur Kramer, a professor of psychology at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, were co-principal investigators on the study. Walter Boot, of Florida State University, also contributed to the research, which was conducted at Illinois.

“This study tells us a lot about how the brain works when it is trying to learn a complex task,” Erickson said. “We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate.” Such information might be useful in education, where longer training periods may be required for some students, or in treating disability or dementia, where information about the brain regions affected by injury or disease could lead to a better understanding of the skills that might also need attention, he said.

Video gamers: Size of brain structures predicts success – UI News Bureau

Unofficial is a holiday at the University of Illinois that students celebrate 1-2 weeks before St. Patrick’s Day. Created because St. Patrick’s Day often falls during Spring Break, it is a celebration that closely resembles St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in other cities: green clothing, green beer, and greetings of “top of the morning to ye’.”

The date of Unofficial 2010 will be March 5, 2010.

Recently, Unofficial celebrations have taken on a negative connotation. As Urban Dictionary puts it, “The day is marked by bars opening at 8 in the morning, kegs on front lawns, students from nearly all surrounding schools flooding the campus to celebrate by drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. It has been said that more drinking occurs on Unofficial at U of I than occurs at many other school’s entire years.”

Every year the issue becomes a hot-button issue on the Illinois campus around mid-February as the holiday approaches.

Parent Programs Office: Unofficial
The Quad: Irish Illini
Unofficial: U of I Wiki

Be sure to check back here for more information regarding Unofficial. Have some Unofficial news? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy Musebrarian (Creative Commons License).

Interim Chancellor Robert Easter recently sent out an email to all students, faculty, and staff about the financial situation of the University of Illinois. In it, he points out that we have received only seven percent of our annual appropriation from the State. C’mon Illinois – get your act together!

Dear Students:

As we approach the spring semester I write to inform you of the current
financial situation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As is the case with all public universities in the state we currently face
a cash crisis. In the current fiscal year that commenced on July 1, 2009,
we have only received 7 percent of our annual appropriation from the
state. As I write this letter the state of Illinois owes the University
more than $436 million of its appropriation. That number increases every
month.

As a response, we have instituted a number of measures on campus to ensure
that we have the necessary resources to get through the semester with an
eye to confronting a similar fiscal shortfall in the next fiscal year. Our
faculty and administrative staff will begin mandatory furloughs in
February. (A furlough is a leave of absence without pay.) We have also
been cutting costs at all levels of the university and we are looking at
ways we can consolidate services to garner even more savings. Finally, we
continue to draw on cash reserves, but these are finite and we can no
longer continue to go down this path.

Please understand that we are doing everything we can to protect our
students – our number one priority – from the impact of these cost-cutting
measures. We believe that each fiscal decision we make must not compromise
the education of this state’s greatest assets, its daughters and sons.

Please share this letter with your parents and family members. Great
public universities such as ours must be preserved and supported to ensure
that Illinois and the nation stay competitive in a global economy.

Thank you for your support,

Robert A. Easter
Chancellor and Provost (Interim)