Links for 2011-02-11

"More than than 70 percent of students surveyed "believe that it is important to have access to high speed Internet in order to succeed at community college," the report states. "In fact, students tend to believe that high speed Internet access is more important for success than having access to advisors or relationships with professors."

In other words, today's community college student considers an Internet hookup more important than any human on campus."

"With his 1993 breakthrough Red Rock West, director John Dahl showed a great facility for noir atmosphere and plotting; had he shot it in black and white, and curbed some of the R-rated sex and violence, it could have been mistaken for the real vintage. And though his later Rounders, another NCC entry, wasn't a neo-noir per se, Dahl treated the underground-poker scene with a seedy romanticism that helps explain why poker aficionados find that film so alluring. But Dahl's best film, 1994's The Last Seduction, is more than just an attempt to reheat old genre tropes or mine the past for moody atmospherics, though those elements are certainly at play. The question that drives Dahl's alluring, darkly hilarious film is this: What does the modern femme fatale look like? She has to depart from the classic model, but how she departs from it and how she gets around in Hicksville, U.S.A. is another question."