Louisiana ranks No. 1 on the list of “Top 10 States Most at Risk Of Disaster,” according to Kiplinger.com.

“The Pelican State has the unfortunate distinction of being the most disaster-prone state in the nation, largely because of Hurricane Katrina, which was the costliest disaster in U.S. history,” the Kiplinger website says.

Kiplinger advises Louisiana residents to adequately prepare for the upcoming 2011 hurricane season, which begins in June.

Forecasters at Colorado State University released the predictions for the upcoming hurricane season in December.

The 2011 Colorado State forecast includes 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of which are predicted to be major storms.

Hurricanes are considered major if they fall between Categories 3 through 5, according to the Colorado State report.

The report predicts 48 percent of storms will make landfall on the Gulf Coast between the Florida panhandle and Brownsville, Texas, an area that also includes Louisiana.

The Colorado State forecasters make their predictions based on a system of teleconnections, which refers to the idea that weather in one part of the world affects the weather in another, Barry Keim, professor of geography and anthropology, told The Daily Reveille in January.

Keim said the main factor of whether a hurricane season will be active has to do with El Niño and La Niña in the Eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

El Niño occurs when sea temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are warmer than normal, which in turn causes cooler than normal Atlantic temperatures and therefore a lighter hurricane season, according to Keim.

La Niña is the exact opposite — when cooler temperatures in the Pacific cause warmer temperatures in the Atlantic and therefore a more intense hurricane season, Keim said.

“We’re in a La Niña year right now,” Keim said. “Unless we swing into a strong El Niño, we can expect an above-average season.”

Keim said some of the worst hurricanes Louisiana has seen have been during “very quiet years.”

People in Louisiana need to be on guard at all times because there have been bad storms in quiet years, Keim said.

“Hurricane season serves as a great reminder to re-evaluate your preparedness plans and update your emergency toolkits,” said Col. Joseph Booth, LSU Stephenson Disaster Management Institute executive director.

The institute strongly encourages people to prepare families and businesses for upcoming hurricanes.

“It’s time for preparedness to go viral,” Booth said. “We encourage the entire LSU community to not only prepare themselves but to help prepare their friends and families. We actually have to put preparedness into action to make a difference.”

Notre Dame can put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable seasons in NCAA tournament history when it faces Texas A&M tonight in the championship game.

Both teams are coming off back-to-back victories over No. 1 seeds after pulling off upsets in the national semifinals Sunday. Notre Dame (31-7) earned a 72-63 win over two-time defending champion Connecticut, while Texas A&M (32-5) ousted Stanford in a 63-62 thriller.

“In some ways we’re mirror images of each other because we’ve got great guard play and pretty good defense,” Irish coach Muffet McGraw said. “And they’ve got an outstanding player in [senior forward] Danielle Adams.”

Adams scored 16 points and grabbed six rebounds in 32 energetic minutes for the Aggies in the win over Stanford.

“[Playing Texas A&M] is something I haven’t actually spent a lot of time thinking about, and when I was watching them through the tournament, I thought, boy, they’d be a really tough team to play,” McGraw said.

While Notre Dame will participate in its second championship game in program history, Texas A&M has never reached the title game before.

“It feels great,” junior guard Sydney Carter said. “I’m just ready to play again. We’re going to the final game, and we just have to push through and do it again.”

The story of the semifinal match for the Irish was the play of sophomore point guard and emotional leader Skylar Diggins, who has quickly emerged as one of the nation’s most talented players. She scored 28 points on 10-of-14 shooting to knock off Connecticut, who lost Sunday for only the second time in 115 games.

“[Diggins] played like [an All-American] tonight,” McGraw said after her point guard’s performance to defeat the Huskies. “She did it all. She ran the team. She scored. She made good passes, good decisions.”

10 years ago, the Irish defeated Connecticut in the national semifinals, also in upset fashion. Led by Notre Dame Ring of Honor inductee Ruth Riley, the squad defeated Purdue two nights after beating the Huskies to earn the program’s first national championship.

“Every team in America wants to be where we are right now and we’re going to take advantage of that,” freshman forward Natalie Achonwa said.

The Irish and Aggies will battle tonight at 8:30 p.m. at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for the national title.

Hroniss Grasu needed a breather.

Practice had just ended on Monday, and the redshirt freshman center was gassed. Competing for a starting role at arguably the most important position on the offensive line is exhausting, and Grasu has quickly picked up on how difficult the Oregon offense is to master.

“It’s different when you’re in the film room and you see it on film, and you get a call out, you can adjust to the play,” Grasu said. “But when you’re out there like on the tempo that we play at, it’s totally different to get the calls out. It’s a different tempo when you’re going live at practice.”

Grasu is just one of many newcomers battling for time on offensive line coach Steve Greatwood’s unit. In the wake of departed seniors such as center Jordan Holmes, guard C.E. Kaiser and tackle Bo Thran, there are plenty of spots to be earned. It is Greatwood’s job to shuffle the new pieces to best fit the needs of Oregon’s high-octane offense.

Though it is very early in the process, Greatwood is happy with what he has seen in spring practices.

“Right now, I’m fairly pleased,” Greatwood said. “I mean, with the tempo, we’re not making it easy on them … there’s been some glitches but for the most part I think they’re handling it well.”

At the center position, the competition for playing time takes place between Grasu and sophomore Karrington Armstrong. Greatwood has also given sophomore Mana Greig some chances, but the decision will ultimately fall between Grasu and Armstrong.

“We’ve gotta continue to work and get more consistent at that position,” Greatwood said. “But I like the competition that’s developing there, as I do across the board … both those kids are competing their tails off right now inside at center.”

Of course, as Greatwood alluded to, there are other holes to fill. He hopes senior Darrion Weems will be able to avoid injury and become a stalwart at the left tackle position, and junior Nick Cody has caught his eye as a potential guard or tackle.

“I really like the way Nick Cody is competing right now at both guard and tackle,” Greatwood said. “(Sophomore) Everett Benyard has looked as good as he’s ever looked since he’s been here. So we’re slowly developing some depth, and now it’s just again a matter of getting the consistency.”

To do that, he will rely on the leadership of upperclassmen like Weems, senior Mark Asper and junior Carson York. As is often the case, this season’s offensive line will be a healthy blend of fresh talent and seasoned veterans. For Asper, the key will be establishing cohesiveness across the board.

“To really get clicking as a unit, communication has to be back and forth down the whole line,” Asper said. “And a couple times today we were just a half a second late getting a full line adjustment call off, and we were late, and the play got busted.”

It will take time, and Greatwood knows this. For him, practices during the spring should be so difficult that by the time the season rolls around, the players are over-prepared.

“We want to make it tougher in practice than it’s going to be in a game,” Greatwood said. “And I think we do that for them. I want the games to be slow for them.”

Asper agreed but made sure to point out that nothing can simulate live game experience.

“You gotta get in and get in the fire,” Asper said. “Because nothing’s like the real deal. We try to simulate noise and crowd and excitement here, but I think it’s even different once you get in a game.”

Live game experience may be a long way off for Grasu, but he is slowly gaining confidence as spring practices wear on.

“I feel pretty confident,” he said. “But it’s still early. It’s still spring ball, we gotta work every single day.”

As someone who writes for the Arts section, I rarely get the opportunity to be openly militant about particular issues. Today, I am up in arms over an arts issue.

Rutgers University drew attention this week for paying “Jersey Shore” star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi $32,000 to speak at the university last Thursday. You don’t need to be Suze Orman to realize this was a bad deal, but it gets worse. The school is paying Nobel-laureate writer Toni Morrison $30,000 to speak at its spring commencement in May.

I could tell you that this is a crying shame, but that’s the obvious argument. So, I’m going to explain to you why this is our fault.

One of the most basic principles in any economics class is that of supply and demand. Supply really isn’t in play here, but the point is that when demand is high, you can set prices high.

Demand for Snooki is high because the youth of our nation is obsessed with her asinine show. Demand for Morrison is low, although she’s won a Nobel Prize for literature.

If talent were a precious metal, Snooki would be worth about 78 cents at your local Gold 2 Cash location. She is (debatably) talented at tanning and laundry. I’m not even going to joke about the gym part. She’s like Ivan Rodriguez, except with more emphasis on the “Pudge.” If Snooki is gold, Morrison is rhodium; it’s worth a lot more, but you wouldn’t know because you’ve never heard of it.

When I reference the youth that makes Snooki so popular, I mean you guys. Now, I’ve only seen one full episode of “Jersey Shore,” but I can’t hole myself up in an ivory tower. I watch a lot of TV that is chemically proven to kill brain cells (for example, Syfy’s “Danger Mouse vs. The Lab Rats”). As I can attest after watching “The Room” for the first time this weekend, watching overtly stupid things is massively entertaining. But if we’re going to demonstrate outrage over something like Rutgers’ absurd display of celebrity proclivity, we have to do it actively.

What’s your excuse for having not read “Beloved”? Too much text? Too little time?

I understand that many intelligent people don’t get the opportunity to attend college, but arguably you are among the top quarter of the population in terms of qualifications to read “high-level” literature. Let me tell you: It’s much more strenuous than reading “Harry Potter.” But it’s much less strenuous than reading “The Sound and The Fury.”

Authors, playwrights and artists routinely feel the heel of a society that finds their work too inconvenient to appreciate. Yes, an hour-long episode is easier to digest than a 600-page novel. But even if I never read Morrison again, I will still hang on to how amazing her prose was.

It’s easy to say that paying Morrison less than Snooki is wrong. It’s tougher to demonstrate that we mean it. Don’t watch MTV this week. Go out and buy a respected book. It doesn’t have to be Morrison. It doesn’t even have to be literature. Saying something is wrong is meaningless. Acting on it sends a message.

Terry Jones, if you’ve gotten bored instigating violence in the Middle East, can I recommend “A Shore Thing” for your next book burning?

In a room bound by silence, the voice of one woman in NYU’s philosophy building reached a stunned audience with the help of an interpreter.

“My name is Aleya. I come from Bangladesh,” said Aleya Akter, a sewing machine operator in a Bangladeshi factory. “I’ve been working for Wal-Mart since 1994. When I started I used to get $7 per month for 208-hour work and now I get about $80 a month for 26 days a month. I was working 14 hours in a row and sometimes up to 3 a.m. shifts.”

As part of a larger campaign to keep Wal-Mart from building a store in Brooklyn, Oxfam @ NYU invited the “Sweatshop, Warehouse, Wal-Mart: A Worker Truth Tour” speaker series to give students a closer look at the experiences of Wal-Mart employees.

“Here in New York City, we do not need a Wal-Mart to offer poorly paid jobs and replace small business,” Oxfam America @ NYU treasurer Marlie Wilson said. “We need to send a strong message to the company that it’s big enough already and should discontinue its invasions into new communities.”

Wilson said Oxfam hosted the worker tour to inform students of what she called “Wal-Mart’s exploitative policies.”

The four speakers at the event, all past or present Wal-Mart employees, spoke about their experiences working for the company that Oxfam is advocating to push out of New York City.

“They want to get rid of all the full-time associates and the reason for that is all the part-time workers, you get no benefits,” said Cyndi Murray, who has been a Wal-Mart associate for 11 years. “You get no health care. They put nothing to the table.”

Kalpona Akter, who was fired from her job at Wal-Mart in Bangladesh and blacklisted for organizing at the sweatshop factory where she worked, spoke about how she joined with other former garment workers to create the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity. But her efforts have brought against her 10 charges for allegedly vandalizing streets during demonstrations. If convicted, she could face life imprisonment or even the death penalty in her home country.

Despite the speaker’s allegations about Wal-Mart’s labor practices abroad, Steven Restivo, director of community affairs at Wal-Mart, said Wal-Mart offers city employees wages that are “equal to or better than many other national retailers operating now in New York City.”

“We foster an environment of open communications with our associates and our ‘open door policy’ encourages any associate to take their concerns directly to members of management, up to and including the CEO,” he said.

The tour travels to cities where Wal-Mart is looking to expand. Murray speaks for the Wal-Mart Worker Truth Tour at risk of losing her job, but she says there is no other way to achieve change.

“I don’t choose to walk away because I feel that somewhere we need to make a change and if it doesn’t start with me, where will it start?”

The Charlie Sheen craze has officially begun to wear off.

There was a period during the catastrophic events of Japan that one didn’t often hear about the daily doings and sayings of Charlie Sheen but recently another turn of events has caused him to return to the spotlight. His opening night of “My Violent Torpedo of Truth: Defeat is Not an Option” tour has proven that he is no longer “winning” and his only option is defeat.

Although it may seem insane that sane people would pay to listen to Sheen’s mind blowingly idiotic rants, an audience of reportedly around 5,000 people sat down to listen to him Saturday, April 2 in Detroit. According to The Hollywood Reporter, and practically every other media news outlet, the beginning of his 20-city tour completely and utterly bombed.

The show was deemed, “egomania gone wrong” with “the overwritten, faux-Biblical preaching of self-anointed Messiah, who views himself as the most truthful person in the universe.”

Instead of the promised night of “pure magic, a night of winning” the audience got mostly a presentation through videos, such as Sheen’s 20/20 interview, a video of Snoop Dogg and fellow rapper Simon Rex performing, and a tribute to Sheen’s father Martin Sheen.

Sheen has proven himself to be not a stand-up comedian but someone who is obsessed with his arrogant and erratic ways and believes everyone else should be too.

Eventually Sheen was booed off the stage by a chant of “Refund! Refund!” after he had both insulted their city as a place of crack cocaine addicts and only answering questions from the audience if he thought them interesting enough.

Is this the end of the craze of Sheen-ism? Let’s hope.

Not everyone who goes hungry lives below the poverty level.

There is an intermediate level above the poverty line known as food insecurity, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Food insecurity is the USDA’s term for a lack of access to enough nutritionally valuable food for all members of a household.

Feeding America, a domestic hunger relief charity, created an interactive map of the country titled Map the Meal Gap. It evaluates the food insecurity rate, average cost of a meal and the additional amount of money required to meet food needs for 2009 at the national, state and county level at www.feedingamerica.org.

According to the USDA, food insecure households are not insecure all the time, as a typical household in poverty is. Such households generally experience the need to make trade-offs between paying housing or medical bills and purchasing nutritionally adequate foods.

People who are food insecure may live up to 185 percent above the poverty line, but a family of four at 185 percent would only be making $40,793 in yearly income, according to the site.

The map’s results were determined through various forms of data collection and statistical calculations.

To calculate the food insecurity rates, the relationship between food insecurity and indicators of food insecurity, such as poverty level, unemployment and median income, were defined at the state level and county level.

Feeding America then used these rates to reach estimates for the map.

To combat these levels of food insecurity, several local food banks and kitchens provide services to people in the area below the poverty line, as well as those in the food insecurity range who need assistance.

The Hoosier Hills Food Bank distributes food to more than 20,000 individuals each month in its service area of Monroe, Martin, Owen, Orange, Brown and Lawrence counties.

It has several food donation programs established within the organization that distribute food to not only individuals, but also smaller food banks and soup kitchens.

Have your parents ever nagged you about being a social media addict who wastes hours of time on websites like Facebook and Twitter? I hear it all the time: They say that maintaining online social “friendships” is superficial and pointless. Now, even experts argue that social media sites contribute to our narcissism.

Social psychologists and journalists like New York Times columnist David Brooks argue that the way our generation uses social media sites reveals a level of self-promotion not found among previous generations.

They say Generation Y has turned into Generation Me. Apparently our egoism is just a click away.

One argument is that Facebook can serve as an easy outlet for the self-loving among us to flaunt our personal lives to the public. It’s true that Facebook is always looking for innovative ways to cater to the individuality of its users. The new page layout, for example, lets you show off your languages, brag about where you’ve worked and list profound quotes that just scream “me.”

Perhaps you obsessively check Facebook throughout the day.

You probably jump on your phone every time you receive a text message, hoping it’s a Facebook notification. Your fingers quiver with excitement as the suspense mounts. You wonder who of your 500 “friends” could be responsible for that bright red box on the top left corner of the screen. You click it.

Yes! Your friendship request was accepted, making your total number of friends 501 — many more than the number of Facebook friends most of your peers have.

Another telltale sign of online narcissism is when you pull your phone out of your bag during class Monday morning, squirming to post an update about how amazing your weekend was. You planned that status the night before, spending hours agonizing over the exact phrasing before finally impressing your online groupies with your witty words.

Success! You received five “likes” in five minutes, moving your status from the bottom of the “Top News” feed to somewhere in the middle. Just provoke a few more “likes” and next time you really will be top news.

Does this sound like you? It might be an exaggeration, but you can’t say you’ve never been guilty of using Facebook for an ego boost. Whether it’s checking your page multiple times, posting mundane statuses about insignificant daily developments or comparing your profile to other friend’s pages, using Facebook is one of the quickest ways to inflate your head. After all, we’re social animals, and we do crave some attention — that’s human nature.

It’s why Facebook has been successful. The site feeds into our guilty pleasures and provides an outlet for our naturally egotistical, adrenaline-rush-loving selves. Social media makes us feel like celebrities.

But is this narcissism? It depends on how you use it. Obviously there is an element of self-centrism on Facebook and Twitter. We want to know what our friends are up to, and we want others to know about us. That’s the point.

The trick with social media sites is to know how to use them wisely and when to stop sharing information before you become too self-involved. Take yours truly for example: I inhabit the social media scene with my Facebook page, a Twitter account and two blogs. But I use these sites primarily to communicate with my friends.

On Twitter I follow several news sources and bloggers to keep up-to-date on all the news, which I wouldn’t be able to do as efficiently otherwise.

There are also the professional networking opportunities. A few journalism professors have suggested their students use social media to get connected and promote their work online. A professor recommended I use LinkedIn to post my résumé and connect with employers. These days, it seems like every reporter has Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to shamelessly self-promote their work. The question for me is: When does networking and branding become plain showing off?

According to new studies, social media users can exploit networking tools to promote themselves in a productive way — sometimes.

According to a recent national San Diego State University study, out of more than 1,000 college students, 92 percent of respondents said they use MySpace or Facebook regularly, and 84 percent go online several times per day. A whopping two-thirds agreed their generation is more self-promoting, narcissistic and attention-seeking than previous generations. Fifty-seven percent said they attribute this narcissism to the use of social networking sites.

According to SDSU’s website, a professor who collaborated on the study had this to say about the findings:

“Students are right about the influence of social networking sites — research has shown that narcissistic people thrive on sites like Facebook, where self-centered people have more friends and post more attractive pictures of themselves.”

And here’s the kicker: Almost 40 percent of those polled think being narcissistic online is “helpful for succeeding in a competitive world.”

Perhaps Generation Y is more confident, and we’re definitely more connected to technology than previous generations. Certainly, social media sites can serve as a self-promoting outlet for the attention seekers among us.

But overall, we do a good job of keeping our online egos in check. The key is to network and socialize online with moderation, without forgetting to take advantage of the vast networking opportunities.

Drug cartels may find themselves in even more trouble than normal if new legislation in Congress passes.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, introduced a bill Wednesday that, if passed, will designate six top Mexican cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

If the cartels are indeed labeled terrorist organizations, the US State Department would be able to charge drug and gun traffickers with supporting terrorism. According to McCaul spokesman Mike Rosen, this is the first time any member of Congress has tried to designate what the cartels are doing as acts of terrorism.

The legislation is targeting the Arellano Feliz, Beltran Leyva, La Familia Michoacana, Los Zetas and Sinaloa and Gulf cartels — the most violent and successful cartels in Mexico. The war on drugs has already claimed nearly 35,000 lives since 2006.

The proposal is more than just a new title — the distinction would allow prosecutors to tack on 15 years to any conviction of providing aid or supplies to cartels. It would also level a federal death sentence against any cartel action that results in death.

McCaul recognizes that cartel actions are not religiously motivated, but said in the Chronicle that the organizations are routinely found “using similar tactics to gain political and economic influence,” as well as utilizing “kidnappings, political assassinations, attacks on civilian and military targets, taking over cities and even putting up checkpoints in order to control territory and institutions.”

Frankly, any label that can be used to stop the cartel’s criminal operations is fine. Label them terrorists, mafiosos, drug traffickers — the end result is the same.

To put the cartel’s 35,000 death count into perspective, that’s more than 7 times the casualties the US has sustained in the Iraq war — and the cartels have racked it up in half the amount of time America has spent overseas.

McCaul seems to have the right idea. If a label is what’s needed to crack down on the violence south of the border, then a label is what Congress should provide.

Looking for a great film to watch this weekend? Forget “Rango,” “The Adjustment Bureau” and “The Lincoln Lawyer,” because “Red Riding Hood” is what you want to see. Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, the groundbreaking, original take on the classic children’s story has all the mind-bending of “Inception” and “Shutter Island,” as well as all the romance of “Titanic.”

But aside from Leo, what’s the real reason you should spend 10 bucks and 100 minutes of your weekend on this horror/romance treasure? It was directed by Catherine Hardwicke. If you are not familiar with Hardwicke, she directed the greatest film of our generation: “Twilight.” For all you fans out there, watching “Red Riding Hood” will be like watching the same exact movie, only this time there’s a werewolf.

The film stars Amanda Seyfried as Valerie (the now teenage, not “little,” Red Riding Hood), a girl caught in the middle of a love triangle involving an arranged marriage and a woodcutter. From this point on, the story has nothing to do with the folk tale, which is great, because teenage melodrama is definitely more interesting.

As Valerie tries to run away with her true love Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) the town is alarmed that the evil werewolf has struck again. To thicken the plot, the dead young woman is none other than Valerie’s sister.

The villagers panic and send for Lord Solomon (Gary Oldman), the best werewolf hunter in the land. He shows up, and being the great medieval detective that he is, concludes that the werewolf becomes wolf at night, and is a human by day. What makes Lord Solomon such a dynamic character? Not only does he have silver fingernails to kill the werewolves, he travels with a metal elephant!

After his hunt comes up blank, Solomon, being the wild character that he is, decides to torture the village idiot to get some answers. The ending will leave you guessing, because it truly comes out of nowhere.

VERDICT: “Red Riding Hood” is the best film ever. 7 out of 5 stars.