Pew: "The Strength of Internet Ties"

Pew has released a new study called "The Strength of Internet Ties," authored by Jeffrey Boase, John B. Horrigan, Barry Wellman and Lee Rainie. From the summary of findings:

Our evidence calls into question fears that social relationships — and community — are fading away in America. Instead of disappearing, people’s communities are transforming: The traditional human orientation to neighborhood- and village-based groups is moving towards communities that are oriented around geographically dispersed social networks. People communicate and maneuver in these networks rather than being bound up in one solidary community. Yet people’s networks continue to have substantial numbers of relatives and neighbors — the traditional bases of community — as well as friends and workmates.

The report is available as a PDF at the page linked above.

IM sports recruiting

The intramural sports page is here -- take a look and let us know what you might be interested in via the comments section. We've done basketball and floor hockey before and had a lot of fun, and there's also been some talk about softball this semester. Each of those (and some others) is available in men's, women's and co-ed leagues. Sign-ups for some sports begin this week, so hopefully we can come to concensus pretty quickly.

[TUE afternoon edit: Looks like strong support for basketball (deadline next week) with weaker support for floor hockey (deadline tomorrow), so if you want floor hockey make the case this afternoon! I think we have three or four interested people, but we need five to put a team on the floor. Otherwise, we can do a decent size basketball team.]

[TUE late night edit: Not enough people for floor hockey, it looks like. Sign-up for basketball is next week, so if you want to do that please examine the schedules for the NAT and SERF leagues and we'll see what works best for the group. I haven't tallied it up, but given all the responses we might have enough interest for two teams.]