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The following reports are taken from
The Calhoun Chronicle archives:
County road supervisor Ira Hardman has a crew of R.F.C. labor at
work on a concrete bridge across Frozen Run, where it empties into Left Hand. It
will be a great convenience to the public, the ford there being a bad one. The
structure is being built on plans provided by the state road commission and will
be modern in every respect.
Except for the maintenance of primary roads, little work is
being done by the state road commission in the county. Rights-of-way are being
secured for several favored projects on which work will be commenced when funds
are available.
Saturday Evening Post, the largest magazine of
its kind in the U.S., has announced that it will
begin accepting alcoholic beverage advertising.
A number of large magazines do not accept liquor advertising.
This is a policy that is somewhat peculiar to the U.S., for in most other
countries, there are few prohibitions against this kind of advertising. It is
partly a holdover from the period of prohibition, when alcoholic beverages could
not be sold legally, and there could be no such advertising.
There is little doubt that a respectable segment of the American
reading public approves of the policy for such magazines as
Readers Digest,
TV Guide,
National Geographic,
American Homes,
Good Housekeeping and others that do
not yet accept alcoholic beverage advertising.
Action by Saturday Evening Post will be a significant turn in the policy of
restraint among major magazines along this line.
You can hardly open a magazine these days without seeing at
least a half dozen advertisements for home computer systems. The idea, as
expressed by the manufacturers of these electronic whizzbang handy-dandy
solutions to all problems, seems to be that if you don’t rush out right now and
spend anywhere from less than a hundred to a few thousand dollars, you are
hopelessly old-fashioned. Worse, your children will suffer intellectually and
socially; you and your relatives will be left behind in the mad dash to success
and there is just no calculating the injurious effects the lack of a home
computer will inflict on your children’s children.
Computers are upon us as a circumstance of the high-tech world
we have entered and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are fascinating to
watch and fascinating to use. When applied to the solution of specific problems,
such as complicated computations, they can spit out answers in moments that used
to take hours, or even weeks.
The other evening, there was a commercial on television for a
computer wherein two tow-headed lads were struggling with a simple problem in
addition. The announcer’s voice informed us that the computer was helping these
kids get a powerful assist in education.
This was a simple problem in arithmetic. Are they trying to tell
us that now we need high-tech instrumentation that costs several hundred dollars
to solve the same simple problems?
Perhaps we’re being oversold on computers. Computers are swell,
mind-boggling devices, but most people can get along without them very well. So
can our kids. So can their teachers. We don’t need to discard the old
tried-and-true methods.
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