The authors and producers of visions are from the UMR communications department, which promotes Missouri’s premier technological university by producing marketing materials -- various publications, news releases, websites, videos, development efforts and whatnot. Hey, we don’t just sit around blogging all day. Anyway, we’d like to take a minute to talk about ourselves -- the vast majority of posts here will be about real techie science stuff and big shot researchers, we promise.

Representatives from our shop recently attended a regional conference for the advancement of higher education in St. Louis, where, among other things, we learned that drinking beer may be good for you. Really. In addition to a bunch of free beers for our health and general well-being, we also got a lot of awards at the conference for our marketing efforts in the past year. UMR video productions manager Tom Shipley -- of “One Toke over the Line" fame -- even took home a grand gold award, which is way better than a gold award, for his “Paradise Found" DVD about student research in biological sciences.

Maybe the most important thing we brought home from the conference was confirmation that modern PR shouldn’t be too phoney, that message control is a myth, that the spirit of Holden Caulfield is alive and well, and that blogs are all the rage.