UPHILL BATTLE
STAYING ACTIVE
PLAIN WHITE T’S
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BC’s 2014 football schedule is a backloaded challenge, A10
BC Alum Hannah Freilich has launched a new app to ecourage collaborative fitness, B10
The Scene interviews lead singer Tom Higgenson before his band’s show in Robsham on Friday, B1
www.bcheights.com
The Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College
Elections Committee seeks to avoid uncontested election
established
1919
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Vol. XCV, No. 2
2014 UGBC elections re-opened
HEIGHTS
THE
UNIVERSITY WEIGHS CAMPUS SCHOOL MOVE
BY JULIE ORENSTEIN Assoc. News Editor Facing the prospect of an uncontested election for UGBC president and vice president for 2014-15, the Elections Committee (EC) has re-opened the applicant pool for candidates and delayed the start of the election season. In an email sent to the student body on Monday, the EC announced that Sunday, Jan. 26 at 5 p.m. will be the new deadline for candidates to apply, extended from the original Jan. 16 deadline. The election season, which was previously scheduled to run from Feb. 3 to Feb. 14, will now be held from Feb. 10 to Feb. 19. The team that was initially running unopposed is made up of Nanci FioreChettiar and Chris Marchese, both A&S ’15. Fiore-Chettiar and Marchese will run for president and executive vice president, respectively. According to Rachel Fagut, co-chair of the EC and CSOM ’14, Fiore-Chettiar and Marchese encouraged the EC to extend the deadline for candidates to apply in order to avoid an uncontested election. “This re-opening of the application is in part due to the urging of the currently committed candidates and a decision made by both the EC and Student Programming Office [SPO],” Fagut said in an emailed statement. “The EC, SPO, and the current candidates feel as if it would be a disservice to the student body to have an election go uncontested without further reaching out to the BC community, so we urge any interested undergraduates to apply.” Joe Citera, graduate assistant for the EC and LGSOE ’17, confirmed in an email Tuesday that more candidates have signed up to run and said an uncontested election is unlikely at this point. The EC will not release the names of the new candidates until after the deadline to enter the race passes on Sunday. Marchese deferred comment until after the additional teams have been officially announced. The email from the EC stated that many potential candidates were hesitant to run due to the recent structuring changes within UGBC and also the changes in the campaign timeline. In recent years, the election season has run from late March through the beginning of April. Fagut emphasized that the application process and intent meetings were conducted in the same manner as past years, yet a simple lack of interest during first semester produced an underwhelming response to the initial application.
See Elections, A4
BY MARY ROSE FISSINGER Heights Editor Seven Campus School parents and the co-presidents of the Campus School Volunteers of Boston College (CSVBC) met with University officials on Thursday, Jan. 16 to voice their concerns about the potential affiliation between the Campus School and the Kennedy Day School (KDS), which would result
in a relocation of the Campus School to KDS’s facilities in the Franciscan Hospital for Children in Brighton. The seven parents, led by chairwoman of the Parent Advisory Committee Kristen Morin, BC ’86, sought to respond to the reasons the University has given for considering the merger, such as the Campus School’s dwindling enrollment and inferior facilities, as well as relate to the University officials the realities of
raising and educating a child with severe disabilities. They hoped to demonstrate that it would be both possible and beneficial to keep the Campus School at its original location in Campion Hall. “I do think it was a very good meeting,” Morin said. “They listened and asked questions.” The proposed merger of these two
See Kennedy Day School, A4
CONNOR FARLEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR
The Kennedy Day School’s facilities include a heated therapy pool with a height-adjustable floor and underwater camera that projects leg movement onto a screen.
Community gathers for MLK memorial BY DANIEL PEREA-KANE For The Heights Although many now consider Martin Luther King, Jr. a political figure, a civil rights leader, and non-violent activist, he was originally and foremost a preacher and minister—a sentiment reflected by The Office of Campus Ministry during its Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Gathering, whose central question of the night asked “Has the Dream Been Realized?” Speakers at the event included Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar Phillip McHarris, A&S ’13; peace activist Mel King; and Director of African & African diaspora studies program
Rhonda Frederick. The event began with the performance of the black national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was first performed in 1900. “This song epitomizes hope during struggle and a refusal to give up even amidst dark times,” said Minister Rashad McPhearson, director of music for the event. Director of Campus Ministry Rev. Anthony Penna delivered the invocation for the event. Before beginning his prayer, Penna described his own experience of Martin Luther King, Jr., hearing King’s voice broadcast to thousands over speakers on Commonwealth Ave. when King spoke at Marsh Chapel at Boston University.
“I have never forgotten his voice,” Penna said. “Sometimes, when I’m invited to speak, I hear his voice before I get up to speak, thinking, ‘If I could come a quarter of coming towards touching the hearts and minds of people as he could do, I think I’d be alright.’” Cinique Weekes, A&S ’14 and president of the Black Student Forum, thanked those in attendance for coming out in support of a wonderful occasion before giving his perspective on whether the dream has been realized. “The accomplishments of this great man need to be recognized,” Weekes said. “The question has been raised, has the dream been
See MLK Memorial, A4
For The Heights
went into Corcoran Commons and put posters up. We paid all of our subjects,” Brasel said. With adequate student participation fueling the research, Gips and Brasel performed three different studies, two of which will appear in the upcoming journal article. Specific factors they studied include differentiations in using tablets versus laptops, effects of using lab-provided devices versus participants’ own, and whether results were amplified for products with touch components. “Overall, the effect is way stronger on a tablet than a laptop or anything else,” Brasel said, pointing to an enhanced degree of interaction garnered through tablets due to large, vivid pictures and direct touch capabilities. He also indicated that there was
Working On Our Future (WOOF) Supplies, LLC is a social entrepreneurship project started by Chris Olmanson, A&S ’14, his brother Alex, and his childhood friend Jack Angell, that aims to provide notebooks and other school supplies to under privileged children. The company recently received a Legacy Grant of $1,100 from Boston College as seed funding for the project to extend its reach. The mission of WOOF is to provide greater educational options to underprivileged students by donating school supplies with the profits from selling notebooks at college bookstores. By the end of the day on Monday, Jan. 13, Olmanson had sold 250 notebooks at his table outside the bookstore in McElroy Hall. “At BC, we’ve sold the most notebooks [of the three locations],” Olmanson said. “The Jesuit culture here definitely plays into this.” For every WOOF notebook the company sells, it donates a standard one-subject, 70-page notebook. The business model for the company follows the One-for-One model set out by other companies such as Toms and Warby Parker. “In reading, we found that if a socially conscious product costs more than a nonsocially conscious product, 40 percent of consumers say they would buy the socially conscious one, but only 4 percent actually do,” Olmanson said. “On the other hand, if the products are the same quality and price, 87 percent of consumers switch to
See Touchscreen, A4
See WOOF, A3
EMILY FAHEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR
On Monday, Jan. 20, speakers and student performance groups commemorated the life and works of the late civil rights activist.
School of Management professors analyze touchscreen technology’s effect on consumers Heights Editor
Carroll School of Management professors James Gips and Stevan Adam Brasel have found that the use of touchscreen interfaces makes consumers subconsciously feel as if they own products, thereby making them more likely to purchase items. Gips, Egan Professor of Information Systems, and Brasel, associate professor of marketing, successfully submitted “Tablets, Touchscreens, and Touchpads: How Varying Touch Interfaces Trigger Psychological Ownership and Endowment” into the Journal of Consumer Psychology and will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal focusing
BC senior co-founds WOOF BY DANIEL PEREA-KANE
CSOM professors publish study on online consumerism BY MUJTABA SYED
SANJAY SETRU / HEIGHTS STAFF
Chris Olmanson, A&S ’14, started a social entrepreneurship dedicated to students.
on sensory marketing. The two began thinking about the role touchscreen interfaces play in consumer behavior in late 2011, when online shopping became particularly popular on tablets and smartphones. Gips and Brasel theorized that the act of using touchscreen tablets or phones was an altogether different shopping experience than clicking through a mouse. “There’s been research that shows that simply touching an object or even imagining touching an object makes you feel like you own it,” Brasel said. “The act of touching a picture of a product on a screen is a direct visual metaphor for touching a product.”
Eventually, Gips and Brasel tied this instinctive feeling to a sensation known as the endowment effect. “The endowment effect is an older psychological phenomenon that has been studied since the 1980s, where we over value things we think we own,” Brasel continued. “Maybe the act of touching the actual pictures of products might trigger the endowment effect. But nobody had explicitly tested it.” Using this as their basis, the two performed the majority of their research during the spring and summer of 2012 on the campus of Boston College, mainly using the undergraduate population as experimental subjects. “We have a lab on the first floor of Fulton that has all of our tech. We recruited BC students through lots of different methods—we used student mailing lists, we used marketing classes, we