Travel is big business, and so are travel guidebooks. In the International Herald Tribune, Eric Pfanner reports that the major guidebook publishers are experimenting with online versions of their guides. ( “Travel Guidebooks Expand Online Presence” )

A professor of communication at Purdue University has created a 3-D virtual reality experience of Rome in the fifth century A.D. A video about the project may be seen at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here’s a link to Purdue associate professor Sorin Matei’s project, Visible Past.

Graphic novels are popular in Italy, with large audiences of adults as well as children. Daisy Benson has created a short introduction (in Italian) to the work of some women graphic novelists and cartoonists in Italy.

Daisy has included examples of the work of several Italian fumettiste, with links and a bibliography.

Is Italy in a funk? Some Italians think so. In a story this week in the International Herald Tribune, Ian Fisher writes that

All the world loves Italy because it is old but still glamorous. Because it eats and drinks well but is rarely fat or drunk. Because it is the place in hyper-regulated Europe where people still debate with perfect intelligence what, really, the red in a stoplight might mean.

But these days, for all the outside adoration and all its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or malaise, and it implies a collective funk – economic, political and social – summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, report themselves the least happy people in Western Europe.

A video linked to the story tells of an Italian comedian, Beppe Grillo, who has become a new force for expressing political discontent in Italy, and whose blog, www.beppegrillo.it is reported to be among the top ten blogs in the world.

Tourism has long been a primary contributor to the Italian economy, and some observers are speculating that with Italian industry suffering from foreign competition and Italian politics stuck in gridlock and corruption, tourism may become the last economic resource for the nation. Fisher writes that “Many worry, meantime, that Italy may share the same fate as the Republic of Venice, based in the most beautiful of cities, but whose domination of trade with the east died with no culminating event. Now [Italy] is essentially an exquisite corpse, trampled over by millions of tourists. If Italy does not shuck off its comforts for change, many argue, a similar fate awaits Italy: blocked by past greatness, with aged tourists the questionable source of life, the Florida of Europe.”

Here is a story from the Penn State Newswire today:

Alumni couple creates study abroad endowment in the liberal arts

Penn State alumni Ray and Marlene Bolze have committed $500,000 to support study abroad scholarships for students in the College of the Liberal Arts. The Ray S. and Marlene Marks Bolze Study Abroad Endowment will give first preference to students who show academic promise and have financial need. “We feel strongly that, to have a complete education, it is necessary to get out of our own country and see how other people deal with everyday life and its challenges,” said Marlene Bolze. “It really broadens you and gives you so much to think about.”

Read the full story on Live: http://live.psu.edu/story/27301?nw=4

In today’s New York Times, there is a fascinating story about a plant scientist at the University of Perugia who is working to collect samples of the fruit and vegetable seeds of traditional backyard gardeners in the region.

According to the story, the genetic variety of plant species is rapidly being lost as modern agricultural practices replace the small farmers and backyard gardeners, who have often preserved special varieties for generations. As the children of those gardeners move to the city, the old species are lost.

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Here is a scene from the fruit and vegetable market at Campo de’ Fiori, Rome —

Happy Thanksgiving.

There is an interesting article in today’s New York Times about an American woman who returned to her family’s original home in Calitri, Italy, where she met her Italian family for the first time, and where she has now bought a house and found love. She bought a small house in the town — the house where her grandmother was born.

All of us have half remembered or entirely forgotten relatives in various countries around the world, or in America, towns, farms, homes that not long ago were at the center of our families’ lives and are now lost to us. Some of our Rome students next summer will be finding relatives in Italy for the first time, and perhaps creating life-long connections.

At the Penn State Faculty Senate meeting of October 23, 2007, the Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems presented a report on backing up electronic data. The committee worked on this report for a couple of years, designing it in the hope that it would prompt individual students, staff, and faculty to arrange for backup of their electronic data.

The full report is available in the Faculty Senate minutes for October 23, 2007.

The key issues:

* Develop a system that you use regularly for backup of your data.

* Don’t rely on CD or DVD storage for backup — these are not reliable in the long term.

* Consider whether you might use one or two external hard drives, one of which can be kept at another site for added safety. Portable external hard drives of 160GB, 250GB, 500GB, and even 1TB are small, efficient, reliable, and increasingly affordable.

* Develop a plan to migrate aging data to new media formats.

* Consider backing your data up to an online server. Your university may provide this service for you. There are also some commercial sites that provide the service.

There is an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune on the world’s most livable cities. Rome is not in the top ten. Nor is State College. The article comes with several interesting slide shows and videos, plus links to more detailed articles on urban design.