The undead have been making a comeback for some time now. And they may be on the verge of a hostile takeover. A forthcoming book called the “Human Survival Guide” flips the idea of zombie preparedness on its head by offering tips to the zombies themselves, along the lines of “Avoid open spaces” and “Stay out of broad daylight”.

Here’s a sample from a chapter on “Progressive Attack Strategies”:

1. Pace

Instead of trudging towards your intended victim at an excruciatingly slow pace, try running. This way, the humans cannot escape simply by walking faster. Use your hunger for human flesh as a distract0r from the pain of running on disintegrated joints.

If you’ve ever thought about how you would survive the end of days, it may seem to you as simple of an exercise as deciding what sort of canned food you’d want to stockpile or where you could barricade yourself in your house (what, no one else does this? Uh, forget I said anything.) But when or if you imagine these scenarios, what you’re really doing is examining your own values and beliefs, writes Stephen T. Asma, a philosophy professor and author of “On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears”.

Asma says that monsters are often symbols of human vulnerability, allowing the living to formulate their own strategies in response to threats.

The monster is a virtual sparring partner for our imagination. How will I avoid, assuage, or defeat my enemy? Will I have grace under pressure? Will I help others who are injured? Or will I be that guy who selfishly goes it alone and usually meets an especially painful demise?

… things don’t strike fear in our hearts unless our hearts are already seriously committed to something (e.g., life, limb, children, ideologies, whatever). Ironically then, inhuman threats are great reminders of our own humanity. And for that we can all thank our zombies.

Oh, Halloween – that magical time of year when ghouls and goblins stumble drunkenly in the streets of College Park and that quiet girl from your stat class dresses up like she’s working the night shift.

While political costumes were hot last year (Sarah Palin, anyone?), expect to see far more pop culture references in this year’s display of finery: Lady Gaga, vampires and of course, Michael Jackson, are expected to be big hits. The trend is so popular that even Katie Couric is going to dress up as one of the Gosselin kids. Wierd.

Just don’t expect to see many ‘Illegal Alien’ costumes, featuring a space alien head, orange jail jumpsuit and prominently displayed green card – they’ve been yanked from shelves across the country after protests from immigrants rights groups.

But most college women of course will forego clever costumes in favor of the get-ups veering toward the indecent and perhaps even downright obscene. Since Sexy Halloween is here to stay, what could possibly be next? Washington City Paper blogger Amanda Hess has seen the future – and it’s Super Sexy.

The recession has dampened the holiday spirit, but enthusiasts are still buying into Halloween, the second highest grossing holiday after Christmas, according to national retail data. Surprise, suprise: 18- to 24-year-olds are driving most of the big spending. Consumers are expected to spend an average of $56.31 this year on Halloween merchandise, compared to an average of $66.54 last year. Did you spend that much?

Students at the University of California, Berkeley get to celebrate Halloween all year long – or rather, study it, as part of a course called “Film Topics: Monster Movies”. The class analyzes what spooky spirits in famous horror films represent. Writing a term paper on zombies as mindless consumers? Now that’s scary!

Do you use your umd.edu e-mail account?

If you’re like most of the denizens of the Diamondback newsroom, you probably don’t. You probably prefer a speedier service — like Gmail or Yahoo. This trend is not unique to our newsroom or this university, where students increasingly prefer personal e-mail accounts to university ones.

More than 25 percent of universities that offer Ph.Ds are considering ditching student email addresses, according to a new report by Educause. This is a big change, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which reports that only 1 to 2 percent of universities were considering this four years ago.

So while there is no evidence mail.umd.edu is going the way of the DoDo, don’t be too surprised if the .edu extension for e-mails slowly becomes a thing of the past.

Are college sex columns the stuff of revolution?

Alex DiBranco of The Nation thinks so. The often-controversial (and often-terrible) pieces have been on the front lines of the battle for student press rights, he argues in a recent article.

A short history: the birth of sex columns in college newspapers wasn’t all that long ago, with the 1996 publication of “Sex on Tuesdays” at the University of California, Berkley. Little more than a decade later, sex advice graces the pages of over 200 campus papers across the country, and everyone from skittish parents to state leaders have scrambled to censor them through a variety of means: outraged letters to the editor, yanking copies from newsstands and even attempts to cut state funding for student papers (sound familiar?).

But even though they rattle conservatives, sex-and-dating columns are far from radical, counters Washington City Paper blogger Amanda Hess. In fact, what with frequent anti-feminist views (such as mentions of “Prince Charming”) and a nearly universal neglect of gay issues, some are downright oppressive, she writes.

The persistent notion that acknowledging sex is “enough” is partly responsible for the increasingly conservative bent of a faction of campus sex columns. The first-person confessional formula is one echoed in much college sex writing and attempts to serve an entire campus community with only the limited sexual experiences of one student. Too often, “sex is OK” falls short.

Nevertheless in a later post, Hess ranks Diamondback advice columnist Esti Frischling’s latest column (whose tip of the week is to “stop snitchin’”) higher than her peers at G.W. and American University, who wrote about f—ing a Marine and safe sex respectively.

Talking about change is easy. Actually enacting it is hard.

So say a group of college and university presidents, who told the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics (co-chaired by University System Chancellor Brit Kirwan), that they want to rein in the cost of athletics programs, but don’t feel powerful enough to do so. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Libby Sanders writes:

The respondents said that while major changes were needed, presidents had limited power to control the rising expenses of sports on their own campuses and at the national and conference levels.

“The real power doesn’t lie with the presidents,” one leader said in the report. “Presidents have lost their jobs over athletics. Presidents and chancellors are afraid to rock the boat with boards, benefactors, and political supporters who want to win, so they turn their focus elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is telling colleges nationwide to get ready for change – a switchover from bank-based to direct lending. Congress hasn’t approved the switch yet, but the administration is confident enough to have Secretary of Education Arne Duncan send letters to colleges and universities asking them to get ready, the New York Times‘ Tawar Lewin reports.

Quick Hits

• Under Armour, which may or may not actually own the university, had a very nice 3rd fiscal quarter.
• An Arizona State graduate student walked into his professors’ office and killed himself.
• Jurassic Laurel! An area near the campus is designated as a park because of its high concentration of dino fossils.

A Muslim student in England  was forbidden to wear a veil on the premises of her local college. The principal of Burnley College, in the Northern county of Lancanshire, claimed that the girl’s veil made it impossible for her to communicate with others.

“It is not possible to maintain this essential full communication of the face of any student is not fully visible,” Prinipal John Smith said.

This woman wears a traditional burqa like the one Bilqes was banned from wearing.

The school says it also feared the veil could lead to problems with identity fraud.

“All members of the college community should be identifiable at all times when in the college,” Smith said.

Shawana Bilqes, 18, who is pursuing a medical career, told Sky News that she was “emotionally traumatized” by the the college’s decision.

“I was willing to take it off as a compromise for identification checks, security or whatever,” Bilqes said. “But they said I couldn’t wear it anywhere on the premises.”

Bilques has now, as a result, decided to attend college somewhere else.

The issue of wearing a traditional Muslim veil or burqa, is not confined to this one college. The then-Leader of the British House of Commons Jack Straw said in 2006 that the veil was a “visible statement of separation and difference,” which sparked controversy across the United Kingdom

It has been an ongoing issue in France since the 1990s when three girls were suspended from a middle school for refusing to remove their veils. Veils and any other sort of religious symbols have been banned in French schools since 2004. The French President Nicolas Sarkozy called burkas a “sign of subservience” and advocated banning them from the country.

“In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said in June to the French parliament.

In Quebec, women were required to remove their veils in order to vote so they could be identified.

In Egypt, a girl was also ordered to remove her burqa at school, sparking a push by the minister of higher education to ban the garment from public universities.

So it wasn’t the best weekend to be a University of Maryland student. On Friday, Administrators released the first draft of a forthcoming Diversity Strategic Plan that worried many students, and one of our peers was robbed at gun point. Then, on Saturday, we lost to Duke at football — a sport where the team hasn’t notched a winning season in 15 years.

But fear not loyal Terps, this university wasn’t the only institution that’s recently been handed the short end of the stick.

Take for instance, women. They have been repeatedly discluded and under represented in President Obama’s inner-circle according to several women in the White House interviewed by the New York Times. And according to a story in the Washington Post’s style section, women aren’t given much of a better shot when it comes to lead roles in Hollywood productions.

Maryland criminals have also been short shrifted. According to a report from Slate Magazine, many judges claiming to follow statewide sentencing guidelines accidentally gave criminals more years than recommended. The researcher who first discovered this discrepancy, Emily Owens, received her Ph.D. from this university and estimates that one in ten Maryland prisoners received the wrong sentence.

An illustration depicting the woes of Maryland prisoners - Courtesy Slate Magazine

Few University System of Maryland administrators had nice things to say about a state board’s recent decision to block UMUC’s proposed higher education administration graduate program. The Maryland Higher Education Commission ruled that the major was a duplicate of a similar program at Morgan State University, thus violating civil rights precedents the U.S. Supreme Court set to integrate historically black colleges and universities.

According to a story in The Sun, System Chancellor Brit Kirwan said he was “very, very disappointed” in the ruling. UMUC President Susan Aldridge said, “this decision prevents many taxpayers in Maryland from earning an important degree from a state university.”

But neither of their comments matched the consternation former system chancellor Donald Langenberg expressed in a letter to The Sun today. Langenberg called the decision “insane!” and then went on to compare it to Soviet rule:

“In the Soviet Union citizens who accessed electronic communication from outside the country were sometimes shipped off to the Gulag in Siberia. What might happen to a Marylander who accessed UMUC’s program through a computer outside Maryland, in D.C. for example?”

There are some things in life that are always going to be on the up and up.

College tuition is one of them. The cost of tuition at the four-year publice university went up 6.5 percent last year, The New York Times reports. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent. As America’s spending power has sunk to all-time lows, Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called the increases “hugely disappointing.”

“Given the financial hardship of the country, it’s simply astonishing that colleges and universities would have this kind of increases. It tells you that higher education is still a seller’s market. The level of debt we’re asking people to undertake is unsustainable.”

And as tuition continues to soar upwards, we can count on the hype surrounding the college admissions process to continue to increase as well. One high school English teacher in Columbus, Ohio, requires his students to write 25 unique sample college essays, one each week for 25 weeks. “Practice makes better,” the teacher, Chad Hemmelgarn, says.

And finally, there’s the world’s population. That remains on an upward tilt too. But as the world population continues to increase, some scientists are worried the world won’t have enough food to feed all its mouths. The New York Times reports that the number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, meaning that nearly one and seven people don’t have the means to buy the food they need. The United Nations estimates that the global financial recession added 100 million people to the ranks of the underfed, and now scientists are racing for a solution.