News from around the world in an instant. New movies for fall. Social media. The Internet alone gives us an almost unlimited supply of media options. And it gives us plenty to talk about with Andrew Gay and Precious Yamaguchi of the Communication faculty at Southern Oregon University. They join us once a month to talk about media topics--news and not--in a segment we call "Signals & Noise."

What are you doing next week? More important, how will you get to where you're doing it? This is an important question for the last two weeks of September, the period of the Oregon Drive Less Challenge . People all over the state are urged to walk, or bike, or take public transportation instead of driving. And there are incentives... prizes that can be earned through effective reductions in driving. Rogue Valley Transportation District (RVTD) and the City of Eugene are on board.

Dar Williams is one of a kind, so a little hard to categorize. Sure, she is a singer and a songwriter, and highly regarded for her pop/folk work. But she's a writer, too, with a new book out called What I Found in A Thousand Towns. It details the changes she sees in communities she has visited in years of touring.

Even if you never drive past a vineyard, it's easy to spot evidence of a growing wine industry in Oregon. Just check out the "Oregon" racks in the wine section of the grocery store. The Southern Oregon University Research Center--SOURCE--recently completed a Wine & Vineyard Census , commissioned by the Oregon Wine Board. Eva Skuratowicz and Rikki Pritzlaff are the researchers.

Vaux's swifts migrate through the west coast while on their way to Central and South America every summer. In Western Oregon , they stop to roost in old hollow snags and chimneys every evening in September. People bring lawn chairs and picnic blankets to watch the spectacle of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tiny black birds swirling around a chimney until diving in, all the while dodging preying hawks. But the trees and chimneys favored by the birds are getting harder to find these days, and

What do you remember most about college (the educational part)? Large-room lectures where a professor talked and talked and you took notes? Or smaller settings where teacher and students could really engage on subjects and issues? Either way, higher education is slow to change, despite its ever-spiraling costs. Cathy Davidson works in higher ed at the City University of New York, and she has plenty of ideas for changing the system in The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to

Trying to understand the world of legal marijuana in Oregon is enough to drive people to wine. Marijuana IS legal for personal as well as medical use (though still illegal under federal law), it can be grown, and it is regulated--sometimes heavily--by state and local authorities. We work through some of the issues with marijuana cultivation and production in a discussion with several people.

Most teens have grown up with the internet and social media. Their parents and teachers have not. Noted educator and "millenial and teen expert" Ana Homayoun has written a guide to help parents and teachers understand teens and tweens' social media lives, and to create structures and strategies to make sure that teens' virtual lives don't swallow their real lives. The book is called Social Media Wellness: Helping Teens and Tweens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World .

The smoke from wildfires has made it difficult to catch a clean breath in much of the region for weeks. Air quality spiked into the hazardous range, spurring warnings to stay indoors by the air conditioners and filters. The quality of air is not just an issue for living things; our vehicles need fresh air to work properly (the internal combustion ones, anyway). In this month's edition of "The Squeaky Wheel," Ashland Automotive boss Zach Edwards addresses the issue of engines sucking in dirty air

Washington was one of the first states to legalize marijuana for personal use. And you can bet people in Oregon counties bordering Washington crossed that border to buy pot. And then Oregon passed its own personal use law, and the cross-border traffic cooled. A study led by University of Oregon health economist Ben Hansen finds that much of the marijuana grown in Washington stays in Washington , counter to concerns that much of it is exported to the black market.