Friday, October 10, 2008

The Brown Daily Herald F riday, O ctober 10, 2008

Volume CXLIII, No. 89

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

Media notices Brown less than Ivy peers Ranking favors large research schools

By Charlene Kim Contributing Writer

Brown receives less media attention than most of its Ivy peers, according to a new ranking compiled by the Global Language Monitor, a Web site that tracks trends in the English language.

Brown finished 30th overall — and seventh in the Ivy League — in the ranking, which analyzed how often 100 top colleges and universities appeared in global print and electronic media and on the Internet.

Dartmouth trails Brown in overall mentions, but both are far behind the next Ivy, Penn, which GLM rated 11th.

Harvard, the most-mentioned Ivy, led all schools in mentions.

Brown’s relatively low placement among its Ivy peers on the ranking could be attributed to its smaller graduate school and lower research profile. Schools that are considered high-profile research institutions tend to fare best in the ranking, GLM founder Paul Payack said.

Payack said the ranking was unique in that it “provided another way to look at colleges without the inherent biases and prejudices of other rankings.”

The ranking, according to Payack, continued on page 4

Justin Coleman / Herald

George Edwards, left, and Tara Ross, both authors of books on the Electoral College, debated the merits of the system last night.

Experts cast votes on Electoral College at Janus lecture

By Sydney Ember Contributing Writer

Eight years after Al Gore lost the presidential election despite winning the popular vote, two experts faced off on issues regarding the Electoral College in presidential elections.

A crowd of mostly students packed into MacMillan Hall last night to hear the speakers debate the current election process in a Janus Forum lecture called “Thinking Outside the Ballot Box:

Is the Electoral College Good for America?” Tara Ross, author of “Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College,” and George Edwards, political science professor at Texas A&M University and author of “Why the Electoral College is Bad for America,” sparred over issues including the power of electoral minorities under the current system, the importance of federalism and the existence of swing states.

“I think that pure democracy is not a good thing ... and the found-

SPOTLIGHT

Students Google competitively for cash

By Chaz Firestone Features Editor

Andrew Bergmanson ’11 draws stares from his competitors as he pushes open the double glass doors and enters the silent room.

They might feel threatened by the shamrock-green streak in his otherwise black hair — an “intimidating good luck charm” he got over the weekend — but most just seem amused by his lateness.

“I was making tea,” he says, thermos in hand. “I can’t come here without my tea.”

Knuckles crack around the room as he takes his place among the 40 or so competitors. All share a common goal with Bergmanson — to search and destroy.

Search the Internet, that is, and destroy the competition; Bergmanson is a competitor in the Digital Literacy Contest — “a high speed battle of the minds to find information online.”

Using the computer as a “cognitive prosthetic,” says contest developer and Purdue University graduate Daniel Poynter, competitors scour the Web to answer obscure questions chosen by Poynter for the cunning strategies required to solve them.

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CAMPUS NEWS

“If Napoleon Dynamite were here,” Poynter says, “he’d say something like, ‘Chicks dig Internet skills.’”

Competitive research As the seconds left before the start of the contest tick away on a projected virtual countdown, Poynter surveys the John D. Rockefeller Library battlefield. Competitors of varying ages and concentrations have turned out for the $200 prize awarded to the winner.

“Who thinks they’re going to finish in the top 10 percent?” he says.

Bergmanson and a small handful of others raise their hands. He has practiced questions and trained with databases in the days leading up to the Wednesday competition, and he already knows all the rules: 30 questions in 30 minutes, organized by subject and varying in difficulty and point value.

“I’m pretty confident,” he says.

“As long as I have my tea I’ll be fine.”

As the contest begins, the sound of fingers tapping on keyboards fills the room, but Bergmanson stares blankly at the first question, which asks him to “calculate the percentage of U.S.

not that buds Brown Undergraduate Dramatic Society re-imagines “The History Boys”

www.browndailyherald.com

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CAMPUS NEWS

energy consumption in both 2003 and 2007 which was made possible by fossil fuels” for the maximum five points.

He skips to the second question, a one-pointer that asks for the name of the youth organization founded by Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65. Bergmanson makes creative use of a political resource Web site to answer correctly: “Academy Children’s Science Center.” It’s a solid start for the political science concentrator.

But beside Bergmanson is Music Librarian Ned Quist, who is playing to his strengths and has skipped to a question about an article in a Swedish academic journal.

He uses his intimate knowledge of the library’s databases to answer quickly and confidently.

The second-floor computer cluster bursts with silent activity as the competitors lock onto their screens, their hands flitting across their keyboards.

“We’ve never seen this room so quiet,” says Head of Reference and Research Services Ron Fark.

“And this used to be the Absolute Quiet Room.”

continued on page 4

kid-friendly Brown researchers get a $12 million grant to track 1,000 local childrens’ health

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OPINIONS

ing generation agreed with me,” Ross said. She urged the audience members to consider the logic behind the Electoral College regardless of their party affiliation.

“The fundamental aspects of human nature remain unchanged,” she said. “You still need a government that protects you from that.”

Ross went on to say that the Electoral College requires presidential candidates to seek the support of a diverse group of people who would not necessarily matter

under a direct election process.

She added that under a more direct process for presidential elections, candidates could “camp out” in areas with larger populations and ignore rural, less-populated areas.

The current system also decreases the impact of “extremist” third parties, she said.

Edwards argued that the Electoral College should be abolished.

“At the heart of democracy is the continued on page 4

Federal gov’t includes U. in recruiting program

By Gaurie Tilak Senior Staff Writer

If you’re ner vous about finding a job in the struggling economy, fear not — roughly one third of all federal employees are currently eligible for retirement, and the government is looking to replace those retirees with college graduates.

Brown is one of five schools to have received “Call to Ser ve” grants this year from the Partnership for Public Ser vice — a nonprofit organization geared towards helping connect potential recruits with government agencies. The grant provides $3,000 of funding as well as personalized consulting to help the Brown community embrace federal ser vice. The money, received in Januar y, must be used in advancing the par tnership’s goals within 18 months.

The federal gover nment is tr ying to fill positions in sectors deemed “mission critical” — those areas where agencies would be unable to carr y out their designated functions without additional manpower, said Tim McManus, vice president for education and

pumpkin eaters Jake Heimark ‘10: Let’s stop sweeping cheating under the rug

195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

12 SPORTS

outreach at the PPS. Eighty percent of the projected new “mission-critical” hires are projected to be in five broad occupational categories: security, protection and enforcement; medical and public health; accounting and business; engineering and sciences; and program management and analysis, he said.

Along with the monetar y assistance from the grant, the PPS is providing personalized consulting to all of the grant schools — which are California State University at Sacramento, Washington University in St. Louis, Western Michigan University and the State University of New York at Albany, in addition to Brown — to help them tailor their campaigns specifically towards their student bodies.

The goal of the “Government at Work” project, as it is called at Brown, is three-fold: to educate the community about available opportunities in government service, to train faculty at Brown so that they can help students navigate the application process and to build relationships with more federal continued on page 4

athlete of the week Rhett Bernstein ‘09 is the Ivy League Player of the Week — and ours, too

News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com

T oday Page 2

Friday, October 10, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

We a t h e r TODAY

Vagina Dentata | Soojean Kim TOMORROW

sunny 68 / 46

sunny 70 / 48

Menu Sharpe Refectory

Verney-Woolley Dining Hall

Lunch — Creamy Cappellini with Broccoli, Couscous Croquette, Clam Bisque, BLT Sandwich

Lunch — Chicken Fingers, Vegan Nuggets, S’mores Bars, Enchilada Bar

Dinner — Vegetable Stuffed Peppers, Vegan Vegetable Couscous, Salmon Provencal, Pumpkin Pie

Dinner — Salmon Quiche, Grilled Chicken, Cheese Ravioli with Sauce, Pumpkin Pie

Brown Meets RISD | Miguel Llorente

Sudoku Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

Epimetheos | Samuel Holzman

Enigma Twist | Dustin Foley

© Puzzles

by Pappocom RELEASE DATE– Friday, October 10, 2008

Los Angeles Times Puzzle C r o sDaily s woCrossword rd Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

ACROSS 1 Vitality 5 Hit hard against 9 Past, for one 14 Ancient Greek contest 15 Wife, in legalese 16 Tale with a memorable horse 17 Harbor groups of strikers?

20 Black or Red 21 Real ending 22 Contradict 23 Bouquets for the diva?

27 You might ask a waiter to give you one 28 Dick 29 “Big Girl in the Middle” co-author Gabrielle 31 Drug used in old CIA mind-control experiments 34 Ballpark rallying cry based on a 1950s hit 36 Long time 37 Trailer for an old movie festival?

42 Org. for 47-Across 43 Grate 44 Fairy tale mattress lump 45 Marilyn’s birth name 47 42-Across members 49 Nasty “Pearls Before Swine” character 52 Leaders in a race?

56 Incandescent bulb gas 57 Something to lend or bend 58 Initialed, perhaps 60 Hypochondriacs?

64 To have, in Tours 65 Recipients of some TV his 66 El __ 67 Some swing seats 68 Fluctuate wildly 69 Classes DOWN 1 Shoots, sci-fi style 2 Tepid assent

3 Add to the staff?

4 Horned grazer 5 Prize money 6 Release, as from an obligation 7 California’s __ Altos 8 Subaru models 9 Star part, often 10 “Airplane!” heroine 11 Like many a college sophomore 12 Got ready for a lap dog 13 Parenting VIPs 18 Greedy sort 19 French possessive 24 Scopes Trial org.

25 Sydney suburb 26 Uncle Scrooge, for one 30 Viennese center?

32 Subjects of a parental caution 33 Opus __: “The Da Vinci Code” sect 35 Pup squeak 37 Mouse alternative?

38 “__ the opinion ...”

39 Holden Caulfield, e.g.

40 Longtime nemesis 41 Make 46 “Tuesdays With __”: 1997 best-seller 48 Like some R-rated movie scenes 50 Like Berg’s opera “Wozzeck”

51 Disapproving sounds 53 Pitcher Glavine 54 Joe’s “Midnight Cowboy” pal 55 Actress Meyers 59 Brit. mil. awards 60 Gobble 61 Square in old Rome?

62 Shih-__: mixed breed 63 Cycle opening

Alien Weather Forecast | Stephen Lichenstein and Adam Wagner

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Fizzle Pop | Patricia Chou

xwordeditor@aol.com

10/10/08

T he B rown D aily H erald Editorial Phone: 401.351.3372 Business Phone: 401.351.3260

University community since 1891. It is published Monday through Friday during the aca-

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once in July by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. POSTMASTER please send corrections to

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10/10/08

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A rts & C ulture Friday, October 10, 2008

E ditors ’ picks Today: “Political Art and Its Paradoxes: A Symposium,” presented by the Cogut Center for the Humanities in conjunction with the exhibition “Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons.” Featuring Profs. Svetlana Boym (Harvard), Devin Fore (Princeton and the American Academy in Berlin), and Christina Kiaer (Northwestern). From 3-6:30 p.m. in Pembroke Hall, Room 301. “Views and Re-Views” is on display until Oct. 19.

Now to Oct. 11: “Pixilerated: Concert Performances I & II,” presented by Pixilerations [v.5].

In the University of Rhode Island Shepard Building, 80 Washington Street, at 10 p.m.

Oct. 11: WBRU presents TV On the Radio at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel at 7 p.m. With The Dirtbombs. Tickets are $20-30.

Now to Nov. 2nd: Perishable Theatre’s 14th International Women’s Playwriting Festival presents “Lazarus Disposed,”

by Desi Moreno-Penson; “Lizzy Izzy,” by Holly Jensen; and “Biography of a Constellation,”

by Lila Rose Kaplan ’02. “Lizzy Izzy” runs Oct. 9-12. “Biography” runs Oct. 16-19. Marathon performances of all three plays take place Oct. 23-26 and Oct. 30-Nov. 2. Performances are Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m.

Thursday-Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. Student tickets are available for $15. Perishable Theatre is located at 95 Empire Street.

Oct. 15: The Orion String Quartet performs works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Lowell Liebermann. In Alumnae Hall at 8 p.m.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Oct. 17: The Brown University Wind Symphony, directed by Matthew McGarrell and assistant conductor Aaron Jones ’09, performs works by Bartok, Holst, Whitacre and others. In Salomon Center at 8 p.m.

Oct. 17-19: Brown and RISD host Interrupt 2008, a festival of digital media writing and performance. Events include performances, lectures and roundtables featuring artists, curators and theorists. See interrupt2008.net for more details.

Oct. 17-19: The Brown University Orchestra performs Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” under the baton of Paul Phillips. On Friday, the concert begins at 10 p.m. in Sayles Hall and will be followed by a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” On Saturday and Sunday, the orchestra presents the complete concert program.

Carol Wincenc is the soloist in the RI premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Flute Concerto. Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Sayles.

Oct. 17-20: Sharpen your pencils and brush up on English Romantic poetry and the Mandelbrot set. Production Workshop presents Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” directed by Doug Eacho ’11.

Now to Oct. 26: “The Dreams of Antigone,” by Curt Columbus, at Trinity Repertory Company; directed by Brian McEleny. Performances are Tuesday-Sunday at 7:30 p.m, with selected Saturday and Sunday matinees. Student tickets are available for $15.

New theater group pulls bait and switch

By Caroline Sedano Senior Staff Writer

Audiences at Production Workshop on Wednesday night were expecting to see critically acclaimed English playwright Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys,” which won the Tony for Best Play in 2006. The play began as they had anticipated — with English accents, schoolboy uniforms and an eccentric, tweed-clad professor. But after two scenes of these antics, it abruptly turned into something else and never looked back.

As cliche as it might sound, the best way to describe the Brown Undergraduate Dramatic Society’s debut performance is with the Monty Python quote: “And now for something completely different.”

This per formance may have been disappointing for viewers expecting a serious or substantive theatrical experience, but otherwise it was thoroughly enjoyable for its comic absurdity.

BUDS—no connection to Brown University Dining Ser vices—was created by high school classmates Sam Alper ’11, Justin Kuritzkes ’12, Drew Foster ’12 and Max Grey ’12 over the summer because, as Alper explained, “we have like-minded views of the certain kinds of theater that we want put on.”

By “like-minded views,” Alper meant “bringing in shows that are making a splash in the general theater world but aren’t necessarily getting the same attention at a university level.”

“Brown has a ver y vibrant theater scene,” he added, “and we want Brown to check the heartbeat of the world on these issues.”

Alper told The Herald before opening night that he thought this production would surprise audiences. He said he hoped that “Brown is ready for the craziness we are going to unleash on them. And that everybody comes away having had a good time with the show.”

The show began with two wellacted scenes from the actual “The Histor y Boys,” one of which was entirely in French. Then, an actress planted in the audience jumped on stage, loudly clapping and praising the brilliance of the show so far.

After requesting a picture with the cast, she proceeded to take over as a new director.

The actors left their British schoolboy characters behind to briefly just be themselves, and what followed was a series of independent and increasingly ridiculous vignettes. Two college guys discovered their wardrobe was in fact a por tal to Narnia. Spoken word poet Phil Kaye ’10 recited a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem while wearing a costume in the shape of the “shocker” gesture.

Rafael Cebrian ’11 performed a dance to a song about balls. There was a stand-up comedy routine.

There were robots. A dance party to Gnarls Barkley’s song “Crazy.”

And a lot of Parmesan cheese.

If it sounds weird and a little confusing, well, it was. With no signal as to what would come next,

“The Histor y Boys” was a fastpaced, hour-long show of hilarious surprises, both clever and juvenile, that left the audience wondering “what is going on?”

Perhaps one of the strangest scenes featured Alper and Kaye in an ambiguously homoerotic scene in which they stood on the stage, without speaking, and undressed. In complete silence, each revealed that he was wearing a bra beneath his shirt. After taking off each other’s bras, the now-shirtless guys walked away from each other to the beat of slow techno music while casting longing glances over their shoulders. Then the scene ended.

Most of the play went on like this. The ensemble cast had the audience laughing at the ludicrous scenes they concocted. The actors’ ease and camaraderie worked well in both the opening schoolboy scenes and the sketch comedy scenes.

The comfort the actors seemed to have with each other on and of f the stage helped guide the audience through the bewildering production and, according to Alper, led to a ver y collaborative process of directing and creating the show.

“Four of us split the directorial role, which doesn’t always work, but because of the ensemble nature of the show and our comfort with each other, (it) seemed to work really well for this particular situcontinued on page 4

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Friday, October 10, 2008

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‘History Boys’ entertains Brown 30th in media attention ranking and confuses audience continued from page 1

continued from page 3 ation,” he said.

But besides a good laugh, the purpose or meaning of the BUDS performance remains foggy.

In the show’s penultimate scene, planted audience members announced that they had “bombs” under their seats. Confetti flew, lights flashed and pounding music amped up the confusion as cast and audience members flailed about on the stage and in the aisles.

It ended abruptly as one audience member stood, frozen in a spotlight and said with a hear twrenching sigh, “I thought I was going to see ‘The Histor y Boys.’

And now I’m going to die.”

BUDS plans to put on one more production this semester: Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County.” But in light of the group’s “interpretation” of “The Histor y Boys,” audiences should perhaps not hope to see ver y much of Letts’ actual work.

Feds looking to fill spots to be left open by retirees continued from page 1 agencies in which students are interested, said Jennifer Slatter yBownds, adjunct lecturer and manager of career and employment development at the Taubman Center, who also wrote the grant proposal.

The project is being jointly run by the Taubman Center and the Career Development Center. The Taubman Center plans to bring speakers to campus who could educate students about the shortage of employees, Slattery-Bownds said, while the CDC works with students to help them find and apply to jobs.

“Because of the economic crisis, there are so many more people trying to figure out what their plan B is — and this is a good fit for most of them,” Slattery-Bownds said.

The Government at Work project started with a day-and-a-half training session in August run by the Partnership for Public Service, McManus said. He said the training is geared at career ser vices staff and other faculty who provide counseling to students, so they can help students navigate the application process for federal jobs.

“We don’t want a school to wait for a student to come to them; we want the school to reach out to students,” McManus said.

Since funding is limited, Slatter y-Bownds said she has been taking advantage of the resources available to her from the Taubman Center and from other depar tments. “If a department is having a speaker, we’ll try to advertise it,” she said.

For example, she said, Alicia Robinson-Morgan ’94, a staf fer from the Depar tment of Com-

merce, came to campus to speak about trade policy. While at Brown, she also held informational interviews about the department with students, Slattery-Bownds said.

The grant is part of a larger national initiative by the PPS called “Making the Difference,” a program designed to find cost-effective and sustainable ways to promote public ser vice on campus, according to the partnership’s Web site. The PPS has developed the Call to Ser ve network of more than 600 colleges and universities that have made a commitment to promote federal service on their campuses.

Next year, the partnership plans to offer up to five additional grants to a new cohort of schools from the Call to Serve network, McManus said. The hope is that Brown and the other current grant institutions will be able to provide coaching for the new group of schools to help them set up an infrastructure for promoting public service.

“We’re using this cohort of five schools to seed new ideas for the rest of the network,” McManus said. He said the goal over time is to find the most effective strategies for getting students interested in public service and implement them across the nation.

Director of Career Development Kimberly Delgizzo wrote in an email to The Herald that only two new federal employers were able to attend the Career Fairs this fall — the Social Security Administration and Volpe Transportation.

Delgizzo wrote in her e-mail that while student attendance at programs has been high and that the initiative has received positive feedback, it is too early to determine what the long-term effects of the project will be.

proved that ultimately, “academic quality trumped everything else” — schools with top academic reputations prevailed over major athletic powers, for example.

Payack said he believes GLM’s ranking is an effective indicator of overall quality because of the importance of an institution’s brand, he said, and the ranking is one way of measuring that.

But Director of University Com-

munications Mark Nickel said he had questions about the ranking’s validity as a measure of overall quality.

One factor Nickel suggested could skew such a ranking was the size of a school’s alumni pool. If a university were to have a larger alumni network, every time an alum were to marry, get hired or die, the university’s name would be mentioned.

Eric Hoover, who covers schools’ marketing strategies for the Chronicle of Higher Education, said that although studies have shown that

rankings like those of GLM or the better-known U.S. News & World Report generally do not heavily sway prospective students. Still, Hoover says, the new rankings are relevant.

“It is at least one measure of wealth, success and prestige,” Hoover said. “Even on campuses where presidents do not put too much stock into rankings themselves, it is something they must think about” because alums and top students pay attention to them.

Databases may not be needed in contest continued from page 1 ‘Bicycle for the mind’ A competitive research environment is often a turnoff to students in academic fields, but Poynter has found a niche in making competitive research a sport. The 21-year-old is president of Global NetworkedIntelligence Contests, a young company he started with three current Purdue students.

For him, the contest is not just a test of ability, but a new way of looking at the relationship between computers and the mind.

“Steve Jobs explains it better than I do,” he says, pulling up a YouTube video of the Apple Inc. founder. Jobs recalls a study he read about in Scientific American that looked at efficiency of locomotion across different species and found that the condor vastly outperformed the human being.

“It was not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation,” Jobs says. “But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle … a human on a bicycle blew the condor away.”

To Poynter, as to Jobs, the computer is a “bicycle for the mind.”

GNIC’s mission is to create a “Tour de France of Internet-enabled minds.”

Brown is the fourth school to purchase Poynter’s contest, which Fark says doubles as an advertisement for the library and its extensive — and expensive — resources.

“It’s all an awareness thing,” Fark says, adding that the funds for the competition came from the library’s outreach budget. “It used to be said that the library is the heart of the institution, but the

Web has taken things in all different directions.”

Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources David Stern adds that more skills will be developed in the future, with the goal of fostering “mature information fluency.”

“One of the selling points to universities is that they spend millions of dollars on databases but nobody uses them,” Poynter says.

“A third of the questions require participants to use databases.”

But for Poynter, the contest is more of a consciousness-enhancer than a consciousness-raiser. His degree in philosophy influences his explanation of the contest’s objectives and a phrase in his company’s name, “networked-intelligence.”

“I don’t remember my dad’s phone number, but when I need it I flip open my phone and look for it,” he says. “It’s not unreasonable to consider it an extension of my memory, my nervous system.”

The Internet, then, is the ultimate “cognitive prosthetic.” And in the information age, “the ability to wield it should be right up there with IQ tests and the SAT,” he says.

A (data)base-less strategy In the Rock, Bergmanson and his prosthesis aren’t getting along.

More than halfway through the allotted 30 minutes, he is staring at a dense spreadsheet of information on nuclear energy use by state. He’s spent almost 10 minutes entering calculations into Google.

Quist, the librarian, isn’t faring too well either. He has a frustrated look on his face as he scans another database and scribbles some information down on a notepad beside him. His pencil slips out of his hand onto the ground and he pounds his

fist on the table — precious seconds have been lost.

Other competitors seem to be using their time more efficiently.

A student behind Bergmanson watches YouTube in one window while he searches the database ProQuest in another.

By the time the contest draws to a close, Bergmanson and Quist look flustered.

“I think my only chance is if everybody else completely screwed up,” Bergmanson says.

“I probably got four points,” Quist adds.

The victors are Michael Fruta ’09 and Catherine McCarthy ’11, who edge out Herald Business Staffer Ben Xiong ’11 to tie for first and split the prize money. Their scores of 33 points are the most ever scored in the contest, Poynter says, placing them ahead of their peers at the University of Florida, Indiana University and Purdue.

But for all the effort put into the contest to focus on database usage, the winning strategy appears to have been no strategy at all.

“I don’t know how to use the databases,” says McCarthy, a neuroscience concentrator. “I just used Google.”

Fruta and McCarthy both say they did not prepare for the contest and cherry picked the easy questions first, earning quick points before trying the more difficult ones.

“I thought I might have (had) the wrong strategy,” Fruta says.

So how did he win? Fruta, a gender and sexuality studies concentrator, smiles and credits “the free time and independence I had from my concentration.”

“Oh, and I ate at the Ratty before this,” he says. “I don’t usually do that.”

Janus Forum debates Electoral College continued from page 1 view that all voters are equal and that minorities should not rule,” he said.

Edwards said several aspects of the Electoral College contribute to violating both principles. The most important violation, he said, was that the current system awards votes on a “winner-take-all” basis, giving all votes to the plurality winner, not the majority winner.

He added that the potential disparity between the winners of the national vote and the electoral vote is one of the most “egregious violations of democratic principles.”

Instead, Edwards said he advocated a direct election process.

“I suggest we hold an election ... and select the candidate who receives the most votes,” he said. This system would encourage more party competition and

increase participation in elections because people would feel their vote mattered more than under the current system, he said.

But Ross, who said the current system fosters moderation and compromise, said she still supports the Electoral College, though she acknowledged that it departs from the concept of direct democracy.

“It doesn’t bother me that it isn’t one person, one vote across the entire nation,” Ross said.

“Stability and certainty result from our current system,” she said, because electoral votes magnify the margin of victor y.

“On Election Day, you do have that feeling — we know who our president is.” The 2000 election, she said, was “a rarity.”

She added that the current system makes it more difficult to affect the election through fraud.

Ross said changing the current

system would be difficult because it is a fundamental part of our constitution.

“Our government system is like the solar system. If you change the gravitational pull of the sun,” she said, alluding to a quotation by President Kennedy, “it will set off a whole domino effect. In the same way, you cannot take the Electoral College out of our system.”

After the lecture, some students still said they were unsure about the Electoral College system.

“I heard different arguments than I was expecting,” said Reuben Henriques ’12, though he added he wasn’t sure the lecture had changed his previous stance on the issue.

“I think it was interesting to have two perspectives,” said Inaki Arbeloa ’12, “but I don’t think either of them were that convincing.”

C ampus n ews Friday, October 10, 2008

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Gov’t adds $12 mil. to large U. health grant

By Shannon O’Brien Contributing Writer

Chris Bennett / Herald File Photo

A new study shows free drug samples from doctors may not be a good idea.

U. researchers: Beware of drug samples Free samples of medications given out by pharmaceutical companies to physicians may actually harm children, a recent Brown study found.

The study, published Oct. 4 in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, analyzed the results of the 2004 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which asked 10,295 respondents under the age of 18 about receiving free drug samples.

The study found that free samples could pose a significant health risk for children. Of the 15 most-distributed medications, four had been black box listed, meaning the Food and Drug Administration considers them unsafe, and two others were labeled as Schedule II controlled medications, indicating they pose a high risk for dependence and abuse.

“It really just promotes the inequity in the system,” Leleiko said of drug companies providing free samples to children.

The study also found that children from poorer or uninsured backgrounds were no more likely to receive free samples than their more affluent or insured counterparts.

“It’s an access issue,” said Neal Leleiko, a senior author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at Alpert Medical School. “The free samples do not equalize or make better the access to medicine to those who are under-insured,” he said, pointing out that in general, only those who had access to medical care to begin with are able to get free samples of medicines.

Leleiko also said while the practice seems safe and a “perk of the system,” in reality it costs the health care system and individuals a great deal because it often causes people to overlook cheaper alternatives.

Though he described doctors as “well-meaning,” he said free samples can affect doctors’ prescribing habits, raising potential concerns .

Free drug samples are one of the most important marketing tools for drug companies. But, Leleiko said, “It doesn’t serve patients, and that’s what we’re concerned about.”

“Personally, I would like to see the whole system of pharmaceutical representatives giving free samples to physicians abandoned,” he said, adding that he would be pleased to see it happen either voluntarily or through regulation.

— Jyotsna Mullur

U. joins climate risk network The committee that advises the University on corporate responsibility recently succeeded in getting Brown to join an investors’ group that focuses on climate change, itschair said this week.

In the last academic year, Brown became the first university to join that investor network, said Professor of Economics Louis Putterman, Committee Chair of the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility and Investment Policies.

The Investor Network on Climate Risk is a group of institutional investors that promotes the understanding of global warming as it relates to economics. The student, faculty and alumni-led advisory committee succeeded in convincing President Ruth Simmons’ office to pay the network’s membership fee, Putterman said.

The advisory group, which has maintained a low profile since its 2006 recommendation to the Corporation to divest its endowment from companies operating in Sudan, also spent some of its time last year updating the list of specific businesses to which that divestment applied, according to Putterman.

The committee will convene for its first meeting of the year on Oct. 20, at which time its annual report for last year will be made available.

This year, the committee will consider “the possibility of recommending that Brown be a signer of a statement on climate risk,” Putterman said.

The statement, set forth by the investor network the University recently joined, outlines investors’ role in “a global agreement that will drive the financial flows necessary to address climate change.”

The committee does not have a specific agenda for this year because the current membership has yet to meet and because its purpose is to be “responsive to external events and requests,” Putterman said.

— Ben Schreckinger

Brown has been selected from a pool of applicants to receive a fiveyear, $12 million grant that will nearly double its research contribution to the National Children’s Study, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development announced last week.

The National Children’s Study is a countrywide examination of childhood health aimed at the prevention of several key health concerns, including diabetes, obesity, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, birth defects and injuries.

The University, along with its lead par tner, Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, applied successfully last year for an NCS grant and received $14 million to conduct research in Providence County.

With this additional $12 million, the University can expand data col-

lection into nearby Bristol County, Mass.

“This grant allows the University ... to partake in a national, cuttingedge research initiative,” Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Edward Wing wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “When we engage on this level, we attract the best faculty and students to Brown.”

Researchers for each county will enroll 1,000 pregnant women and track the health of the newborns until age 21, focusing on how environmental influences that surround children, such as water, soil and air, affect their well-being. They also will gather biological information from the parents. Data collection is slated to begin in 2010 for Providence County and 2011 for Bristol County.

“Right now it’s ver y much ... getting to know the counties so that we can be informed,” said Maureen Phipps, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and

a lead researcher on the project.

“We have been getting to know the communities ... and looking at each neighborhood and their characteristics.”

Once collection begins, Brown faculty and students will be able to access the data and help in its analysis.

“We want (the project) also to be seen as a chance for students to learn from participating in this type of groundbreaking study,” Phipps said.

“What we see as the six most important childhood health conditions ... cost America $640 billion each year, so it’s terrific that the government wants to tr y something ver y large and ambitious ... to reduce the burden on families and the nation as a whole,” said Professor of Community Health Stephen Buka, a lead researcher on the project and director of the Center for Population Health and Clinical Epidemiology.

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Friday, October 10, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

U.S. may pull N. Korea from Iceland economy frozen by credit crunch state-sponsored terror list

By Glenn Kessler Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration appears poised to provisionally remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, perhaps as soon as Saturday, sources close to the administration said.

The move would keep alive a faltering effort to eliminate Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs.

President Bush had promised to delist North Korea last June but never took action after U.S.-North Korean talks on a plan to verify North Korea’s claims on its nuclear programs broke down.

Thursday, heightening the tension, North Korea barred international inspectors from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which has been monitoring the site.

North Korea “also stated that it has stopped its (nuclear) disablement work” and “is preparing to restart the facilities at Yongbyon,” the IAEA’s statement said. But a diplomat in Vienna said the inspectors have not been ordered to leave North Korea, only to halt their monitoring.

The move came as the Bush administration has been engaged in deep debate over whether to adjust its inspection plan to accommodate North Korea’s concerns and when to announce North Korea’s removal from the terror list. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the North Korean announcement “a regrettable step but one that is reversible.”

Assistant Secretar y of State Christopher Hill visited Pyongyang last week, and U.S. officials said he brought a proposal to have North Korea submit an approved verification plan to China, the host of the six-nation disarmament talks, before the United States announced North Korea’s delisting. But the verification plan would not be officially unveiled until after the U.S. announcement, allowing Pyongyang to say it had not taken the first step.

“This is an action-for-action process,” McCormack told reporters Thursday. “As North Korea meets its obligations, we are fully prepared to meet our obligations.”

Some sources said they had been told the delisting would take place as soon as Saturday. But McCormack said in an e-mail, “I can assure you that a decision has not been made.”

U.S. officials have been noticeably quiet about what, if any, North Korean proposals Hill brought back to Washington after three days of talks. McCormack and his deputy, Robert Wood, have refused to answer questions all week about the results of Hill’s trip, while the normally loquacious Hill has not responded to e-mails and phone calls.

Hill briefed Rice at length about his trip and then Rice briefed President Bush, officials said. But the information has been very tightly held to only a handful of top officials.

Conservative critics of the administration’s rapprochement with North Korea are poised to pounce on any suggestion that the administration has scaled back its demands. A Japanese news report Thursday — and sources who have been briefed on the discussions — said the United States might be prepared accept a partial verification plan that focused first on North Korea’s plutonium program at Yongbyon, leaving to later questions about its alleged uranium enrichment program or its proliferation activities.

Advocates of this approach say that it would prevent North Korea from acquiring more plutonium and would keep the focus on the most dangerous part of its arsenal. But former U.N. ambassador John Bolton said such an approach would be “pathetic” because “Yongbyon has been pored over for years.”

In July, the United States made broad demands on North Korea, requesting “full access to all materials” at sites that might have had a nuclear purpose in the past. It sought “full access to any site, facility or location” deemed relevant to the nuclear program, including military facilities, according to the four-page verification document. Investigators would be able to take photographs and make videos, remain on site as long as necessary, make repeated visits and collect and remove samples.

North Korea a few weeks later submitted a counterproposal, agreeing to a number of U.S. demands but objecting to two key elements — visits to nuclear facilities that would remain active and the taking of environmental samples. In August, the United States submitted a counterproposal that was somewhat more vague than the first plan but retained key elements. But then North Korean leader Kim Jong Il suffered an apparent stroke, and the talks lapsed until Hill traveled to North Korea last week.

By Keith Richburg Washington Post

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — The bad news just keeps coming for Icelanders, who in the last week have seen the international financial empire that they built on this remote North Atlantic island start to crumble, piece by piece.

On Thursday came the worst shock so far: The government seized the country’s largest bank, completing the emergency takeover of virtually the entire financial system.

Iceland might be called the first national casualty of the global financial tumult. Its currency, the krona, is in free fall. Foreign exchange markets are effectively closed — for Icelanders who need to travel abroad, dollars or euros are nowhere to be found. The stock market has shut down until next week. The government has been placed in the role of international beggar, asking Nordic neighbors, the Russians and perhaps the International Monetary Fund for emergency loans.

For an estimated 100,000 Icelanders — a third of the population — who owned shares in the nation’s three major banks, savingshave been wiped out in a single, tumultuous week by uncontrollable events thousands of miles away.

“What can we do? This is not a simple matter — this is a national tragedy,” said Vilhjalmur Bjarnason, a professor of business at the University of Iceland. He owned stock in all three banks. “I was planning to use this money for my daughters, who are handicapped,” Bjarnason said. “... The fundamental question is, how can this happen in a civilized society?”

In the past decade, banking’s rapid expansion helped transform this country founded by 9th-century Vikings into a kind of Switzerland of the North Atlantic. Families in Britain, Norway and the Netherlands sent their savings here. Living standards rose and Reykjavik became a costly playground for Europe’s wealthy.

“The wealth trickled back to many places,” said Bjarni Brynjolfsson, editor of the online magazine Iceland Review. “To the arts, to musicians who played at the parties, to the caterers, to the restaurants, to the whole of society. ... Everything seemed fine.”

The banking wealth also bought companies around Europe, including the Hamleys toy-shop chain in London, a British soccer team,

property in the Netherlands. Until the spectacular collapse this week, the three banks’ assets were more than 10 times the economy of this longtime fishing outpost of 310,000 people.

Economists and business leaders here say that the institutions had been fundamentally strong — well financed, lots of liquidity and a history of never defaulting on loans. But in the past year, emerging economic troubles overseas started to pressure them and the country’s currency. Last week, when the smallest of the three, Glitnir, went for a routine refinancing from a German bank, it confronted the world’s frozen credit markets: sorry, no loan. The system began to unravel.

The government announced last week that it was in effect nationalizing Glitnir — Prime Minister Geir Haarde prefers the phrase “take over.” The move got people asking questions about the exposure of the country’s two other major banks.

On Monday, Iceland’s currency dropped rapidly, and the government gave itself broad new emergency powers to intervene in all the banks’ affairs and replace their boards. The second-largest bank, Landsbanki, fell to government control the next day.

Just when it seemed the worst was over, Icelanders awakened Thursday to the news that the largest bank, Kaupthing, had also been seized.

Haarde, in a news conference later in the day, said the government was forced to take the bank over after authorities in London, concerned about protecting the money of hundreds of thousands of British depositors, froze the bank’s assets in Britain, effectively rendering it bankrupt.

“We think this is very unfortunate,” said Haarde, barely able to hide his anger at Britain’s moves.

“We were hoping that Kaupthing would be able to survive this crisis.”

The foreign depositors had been attracted by interest rates higher than what they could get at home. But it was only this week that many discovered that the Icelandic government guaranteed only the deposits of customers here in Iceland. That led British officials to threaten to sue, and also to invoke a 2001 anti-terrorism law to freeze the banks’ British assets.

Icelanders are now talking about falling back on the old industries — fishing, aluminum smelting, and nature tourism at its spectacular

volcanos and hot springs.

Haarde did not play down the impact on his citizens in the meantime.

“This is going to be a very painful process for many people here,” he said Thursday. “Many people will lose their jobs. ... Many shareholders — probably all of them — will be losing money, some losing substantial amounts.”

“It’s going to take years to rebuild the economy up to the standards we have today,” said Frosti Olafsson, an economist with the Iceland Chamber of Commerce. “ ... The whole economy is basically on hold now.”

One of those unlucky investors, Bjarnason, the business professor, said: “I knew something was going to happen. I didn’t know how serious.” He also heads an association of small shareholders. Concerning his investments, he said, “I was not cautious enough, even though I am an economist.”

For many Icelanders, the hit is compounded by the collapse of the currency. Because of Iceland’s high interest rates, banks here sometimes encouraged people to take out loans in low-interest foreign currency to buy their cars or their houses. Now with the krona losing 50 percent of its value over the last weeks, people find themselves owing twice what they borrowed.

Ulfar Steinthorsson, who runs a Toyota import showroom here, said about 15 percent of new-car purchases have been made with foreign loans. Olafsson, of the Chamber of Commerce, said about 7 percent of mortgages might be denominated in foreign currency.

During the Cold War, Iceland, a NATO ally, hosted a large U.S. military base and was known mostly as a European backwater, subsisting largely on its fishing industry and periodically hosting prominent foreigners such as chess masters and President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two leaders held a summit here in 1986.

When the Cold War ended, the U.S. base closed. After their industry was privatized and deregulated in the late 1990s, Iceland’s banks moved to expand beyond their tiny home market. They launched a major overseas expansion into Europe.

The result was that Iceland turned into one of the region’s wealthiest nations. It ranked first on a 2007 United Nations index of “most developed” countries — becoming the “Nordic Tiger.”

NSA snooped on shared conversations of Americans abroad, linguists say

By Joby Warrick Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee is looking into allegations that a U.S. spy agency improperly eavesdropped on the phone calls of hundreds of Americans overseas, including aid workers and U.S. militar y personnel talking to their spouses at home.

The allegations, by two former military intercept officers assigned to the National Security Agency,

Have a good long weekend.

include claims that U.S. spies routinely listened in intimate conversations and sometimes shared the recordings with each other.

At least some of the snooping was done under relaxed eavesdropping rules approved by the Bush administration to facilitate spying on terrorists.

Intelligence committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., Thursday termed the accusations “extremely disturbing” and said his staff had begun gathering information and may consider holding hearings. “Any time there is an allegation regarding abuse of the privacy and civil liberties of Americans it is a ver y serious matter,” he said.

The alleged intercepts were described by two linguists who said they witnessed the activity while assigned to the NSA’s giant

eavesdropping station known as Black Hall, in Fort Gordon, Ga. Adrienne Kinne, 31, a former Army reser vist, worked as an intercept operator at the site from 2001 to 2003, while Navy linguist David Murphee Faulk, 39, held a similar position from 2003 to 2007. Both provided accounts to investigative journalist James Bamford for his book “The Shadow Factor y,” due for release next week, and also in inter views with ABC News.

Both said the NSA’s intercept program was intended to pick up intelligence about terrorists and their plans — which sometimes happened. But the operators also would frequently tap into phone calls by Americans living abroad — usually satellite phone calls made from the Middle East, or routine calls made by U.S. militar y personnel from phones in Baghdad’s

Green Zone, they said inter views broadcast Thursday.

Faulk said some of his fellow operators, after stumbling upon a titillating conversation, couldn’t wait to let their friends in on it.

“There’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk — pull it up, it’s really funny,” Faulk told ABC, recalling conversations between operators.

While declining to give specifics, an NSA spokesman said some of the allegations were currently under investigation, while others had been “found to be unsubstantiated.”

“We operate in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations and with the highest standards of integrity and lawful action,” said chief spokesman Patrick Bumgardner.

He added that any evidence of misconduct would bring a “swift and

certain” response.

A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the reports noted that two internal investigations, by the inspectors general of the NSA and the Army, were unable to substantiate the allegations by Kinne. The of ficial spoke on the condition that he not be identified, citing the secret nature of the intercept program.

The of ficial noted that the NSA is legally allowed to monitor communications of government employees in war zones, and he acknowledged that agency spies assigned to intercept foreign communication will sometimes “encounter information to, from or about” U.S. citizens. But the agency’s policies bar it from retaining or sharing any intercepted conversations between Americans that do “not constitute foreign intelligence,” he said.

W orld & n ation Friday, October 10, 2008

Campaigns spar over character

By Michael Finnegan and Peter Nicholas Los Angeles Times

DAYTON, Ohio — The campaign for president pivoted sharply to character and temperament Thursday as Democrat Barack Obama accused his Republican counterpart of “erratic behavior” and John McCain offered his most public — if still elliptical — criticism of Obama’s acquaintance with a onetime domestic bomber.

With the free-falling stock market as a backdrop, Obama sought to use McCain’s newest economic proposal — a mortgage bailout plan he announced in Tuesday’s presidential debate — to suggest in his sharpest language yet that McCain is unfit to be president.

He criticized a change the Arizona senator made to the mortgage plan that would give a break to lenders that made bad loans.

“So banks wouldn’t take a loss, but taxpayers would take a loss,” Obama explained, characterizing the switch as “just the latest in a series of shifting positions ... this is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing out of Senator McCain.”

Each candidate has tried to characterize the other as the riskier choice for voters, and McCain’s effort Thursday to portray Obama as iffy presidential timber took a page from the 1960s. Campaigning with running mate Sarah Palin at a townhall-style event in Waukesha, Wis., McCain was asked by an attendee about Obama and “the people that he has hung with.”

Without mentioning the name of former Weather Underground member William Ayers, McCain alluded to him as “an old washed-up terrorist” and said that “we need to know the full extent of the relationship because of whether Senator Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not.”

McCain also launched an Internet ad linking Obama and Ayers. The two live near each other in Chicago, and in the mid-1990s Ayers, now an education professor, introduced Obama at a political event at his home. The Illinois senator was 8 years old when Ayers and his colleagues planted bombs to protest the Vietnam War, and it is not clear when Obama learned of Ayers’ past behavior. The two are not close, and Obama has criticized the bombings as “detestable.”

The moves by Obama and McCain in Middle America suggested the outlines of the campaign with 26 days to go before Election Day: Obama, riding a surge in national and bellwether-state polls, was campaigning in southwestern Ohio. He was using the economy as a cudgel against McCain.

McCain, for his part, was campaigning as the underdog in Wisconsin, where he was trying to stoke concerns about Obama’s background and relative lack of national experience to peel away voters.

More bluntly than he has in the past, McCain conceded Thursday what political analysts have suggested for weeks: that his campaign is in trouble, and time for a shift in fortunes is diminishing.

“In case you missed it, this is about continued on page 9

Page 7

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Dow Jones suffers largest one-day loss in decades

By Martin Zimmerman and Maura Reynolds Los Angeles Times

The fear gripping the stock market escalated Thursday as panicky investors pushed the Dow Jones industrial average to its biggest one-day loss in more than two decades and worries grew that efforts to ease the global credit crisis won’t work.

The Dow plunged 678.91 points, or 7.3 percent, to close at 8,579.19, its lowest level since May 2003.

The blue-chip index is now down 39 percent from its all-time high set one year ago Thursday -- with half of that decline coming the last seven trading days alone.

The cascade of anxious selling indicated that many investors who held on through most of the recent wave of declines were now throwing in the towel, some analysts said.

“People are scared,” said Conrad Gann of TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, Calif., which tracks mutual fund investments.

“They are tired of losing money week after week in the stock market.”

For former Newport Beach, Calif., surfer Donald Wise, the stock plunge reminded him of wiping out at the legendary Wedge on the Balboa Peninsula in his youth. “You are three feet down and you can see the sky and the sun, but you can’t seem to get there,” he said.

A similar fear is spooking the stock market, said Wise, now a hotel industry consultant. “We just came out of a time that was so incredibly heady and then suddenly the pendulum swung far in the other direction,” he said. “And nobody knows how far it’s going to go.”

Governments around the world are desperately trying to stem the credit crisis that is engulfing stock markets and threatening economic damage. Steps taken include a $700 billion plan passed by Congress last week to buy up bad mortgages and a coordinated interest-rate cut this week that proved only a momentary salve for investors’ fears.

But analysts said there were few signs Thursday that the credit markets were loosening. Interest rates on loans between banks continued to rise, signaling that the arteries of global finance remained clogged.

Uncertainty could be the rule on Wall Street again Friday, especially for investors watching for signs of an economic slowdown. General Electric, a bellwether for both the industrial and financial sectors of the economy, is due to report its third-quarter earnings.

In Asia early Friday, markets opened sharply lower, with stocks sinking as much as 11 percent in Tokyo and 8 percent in Hong Kong.

Late Thursday, the White House announced that President Bush would address the nation Friday morning from the Rose Garden in an effort to reassure the markets.

“He will assure the American people that they should be confident that economic officials are aggressively taking every action to stabilize our financial system,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Earlier, administration officials said that if conditions in the credit markets did not improve, the government might offer to buy preferred stock in banks that need more capital.

Perino described the proposal as “capital injections that would actu-

ally be investing in banks but not taking them over.” She said the idea was one of a range of options available to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Any purchases of bank stock or troubled mortgage debt are not expected for a few weeks, officials said, adding that the Treasury Department “is moving quickly to use new tools to improve liquidity, which is the root cause of this problem.”

In recent days, the stock market has rallied early only to drop off a cliff in the last hour or so of trading. Analysts said that pattern could reflect selling of stocks by mutual funds, hedge funds and brokerage firms at the behest of clients.

Those investors, in turn, could be dumping shares out of fear of further losses or because of a need for cash triggered by the credit crunch or the shrinking value of their portfolios.

“Right now, you can take economic fundamentals ... and throw them out the window,” said Joe Battipaglia at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. “This is mass liquidation at the point of a gun.”

TrimTabs said investors pulled a record $52.1 billion from U.S. stock and bond mutual funds in the last week. That followed a $72.3 billion outflow in September, the most in a single month. Much of the money has gone into bank accounts, Gann of TrimTabs said.

“People are going into the safest things they can find,” he said. “They’re avoiding risk in all forms.”

Thursday’s sell-off certainly had the earmarks of a stampede from a burning theater. All of the Dow’s 30 stocks were down, as were the shares of all but 12 of the 500 companies in the benchmark Standard

& Poor’s 500 index, which sank 7.6 percent. Falling stocks outnumbered rising ones by 12-1 on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the last year, including Thursday, $8.3 trillion in U.S. stock market value has evaporated, according to Wilshire Associates. The Dow’s yearlong slide is now steeper than its 38 percent drop during the dotcom bust of 2000-02.

No stock symbolized the market’s dire state Thursday more than General Motors Corp. Shares of the country’s largest automaker, long a mainstay of the economy, plummeted 31 percent to $4.76 -- their lowest level since the Korean War. Beset by falling auto sales and tightening credit, GM has seen its stock plunge 87 percent in the last year.

Even hopeful signs were washed away in Thursday’s flood of selling.

Oil futures, extending their recent slide, fell $2.36 to $86.59 a barrel, their lowest level in almost a year.

Not too long ago, that would have cheered investors. Instead, they just trashed energy stocks, which were the second-biggest losers in the S&P 500 after financial stocks.

Indiscriminate selling can signal what analysts call capitulation, a wave of desperation selling that indicates the market is near a bottom.

“So many signs say we are getting to that ultimate capitulation,” said David G. Dietze, chief investment strategist at Point View Financial Services in Summit, N.J. “But I thought that on Monday, too.”

— Times staff writers Marc Lifsher, Roger Vincent, Ken Bensinger and Tiffany Hsu contributed to this report

U.S. to focus on training Afghan state, tribal forces

By Julian Barnes Los Angeles T imes

WASHINGTON — Confronting the prospect of failure after seven years in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is crafting a new strategy that probably will expand the power and reach of tribal militias while relying less on the increasingly troubled central government.

Under the new approach, U.S. forces would scale back combat operations to focus more on training both of government forces and tribal militias. The plan is controversial because it could extend the influence of warlords while undermining the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

At the same time, the new strategy could set up a hair-trigger rivalr y between national security units and the improved tribal forces, proponents concede.

The U.S. military’s willingness to consider such risks reflects the growing worr y about worsening conditions in Afghanistan. Until recently, the militar y would not have considered a move to bolster tribal militias but, with relatively few troops available, military leaders believe only a new approach to the war can stanch the spreading violence.

“There has been ver y, ver y tough fighting this year and it will be tougher next year unless we adjust,” Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday.

Supporters contend the dangers are offset by the prospect that well-trained tribal forces could help improve local security, undercut the insurgency and strengthen ties between rural areas and the central government.

“My bottom line is that this is clearly something we should do,” said a senior military officer, who was one of several to describe strategy reviews on condition of anonymity because it is still underway.

By focusing on tribal militias and local security, the new approach resembles the U.S. campaign in Iraq, where former Sunni insurgents were paid to shift their allegiance. But American officers stress they are not planning to export the troop surge used in Iraq, a topic of debate and commentary during the intensifying presidential campaign in America, to Afghanistan, where there are fewer U.S. troops and differing fault lines among ethnic groups.

The new approach also reflects increasing frustration among U.S. and allied commanders over Afghanistan’s central government, which they believe has been proved too weak to exer t any meaningful influence outside the capital, especially in the country’s mountainous reaches.

Although Karzai several years ago declared that the era of warlordism was over and offered several warlords influential posts in the central government, warlords

remain extremely powerful forces in the country. Many enjoy great influence in their home provinces, with some fielding private militias or gaining wealth from the opium trade.

Any broad effort to train tribal militias probably would have U.S. military forces working with Taliban sympathizers. But U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss the Afghanistan war with NATO defense ministers, said Thursday the U.S. would be open to reconciling with the Taliban.

“There has to be ultimately, and I’ll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this,” Gates said.

“That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us.”

The new Afghan strategy is being crafted as new intelligence assessments conclude that Afghanistan is spiraling downward in part because of the government’s shortcomings and widespread corruption. Those findings, contained in an upcoming U.S. National Intelligence Assessment, pose new concerns for American forces in Afghanistan, which have reported two successive years of record casualties in 2007 and 2008.

The impending strategy shift is emerging from reviews set in motion earlier this year and nearing completion. The Pentagon and White House both are conducting such reviews, and U.S. Central Command, the military headquar-

ters in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East, is crafting its own recommendations.

Results of the White House review, under Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, are weeks away, according to an administration official.

The militar y reviews, one ordered by Mullen and the other

by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the incoming head of Central Command, might be more significant because they could guide options presented to the next administration.

There are more than 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, far fewer than the 140,000 in Iraq.

Military officials hope to send as many as 15,000 new troops in 2009, but some members of the joint chiefs have insisted that no additional forces should be sent until a new strategy is in place.

A particularly acute need is for new military trainers both for regular Afghan forces and for the militias, as part of the U.S. push to improve local security.

The new Pentagon plan would expand the number of militar y trainers in Afghanistan by giving combat troops added responsibilities. Currently, most units are assigned either to a combat or training role. Mullen has advocated a hybrid role that would give most units responsibility for both combat operations and training Afghan forces.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Bernstein ’09: M. soccer needs to find its passion continued from page 12 preseason fitter than I’ve been in my four years, and I’ve started to see the benefits of it. The support from my family, my friends, my coaches and my teammates has had a tremendous effect on the way I’ve performed this year.

What are the expectations of the team after last weekend? Is the Ivy Championship a real possibility this year?

We expect ourselves to keep improving and building on the next game, one game at a time. The Ivy League Championship is our main objective at the moment. But, I believe this team has the ambition and drive to go somewhere else no one’s

been before. We’ve taken a few unsteady steps along the way, but it’s only made us a stronger group of players.

What does the team need to do to keep winning games?

It comes down to how much we really want it. We have the talent, we have the players, we don’t possess the passion. That’s what it takes, on teams I’ve played on, to get to a whole new level. It’ll come. Just wait.

Bernstein and the rest of the Brown squad are heading to Princeton, N.J., this Saturday to take on their Ivy rival, the Princeton Tigers.

The Bears will look to prove their passion as they seek their second straight Ivy League win.

Pres. campaigns get negative continued from page 7 the seventh or eighth time that pundits have said ‘McCain’s campaign is in trouble,’” the senator said at an event in Mosinee, Wis., in a reference to his Lazarus-like resurgence to win his party’s nomination. “We fooled them then, and we’ll fool them again.”

Policy matters took a back seat to character issues Thursday, but the campaigns did bicker over McCain’s mortgage plan. The plan would spend as much as $300 billion to buy up troubled mortgages to stabilize the housing market. As initially announced Tuesday, the plan would have made lenders responsible for “the loss that they’ve already suffered.” By Wednesday morning, the McCain campaign said that line was a mistake.

Obama pounced on the change Thursday as evidence that McCain favored banks over homeowners. “We have to act to fix our broken economy

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and restore the credit markets, but taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped create this crisis,” Obama said in Dayton.

For Obama, the back-and-forth over policy was less important than pressing the notion that McCain had moved unpredictably on an economic issue. He has been drumming the same theme for weeks.

“We need a steady hand in the White House. We need a president you can trust in times of crisis,” Obama told a crowd in Cincinnati.

He said McCain was “lurching all over the place” on the economy.

McCain, for his part, has used the Ayers issue sporadically in recent days, raising it in interviews but declining to do so in rallies or when on the same stage with Obama in Tuesday’s debate. In making the connection more directly Thursday, McCain misstated the facts.

Well-traveled Frenchman wins lit Nobel

By Achrene Sicakyuz and Sebastian Rotella Los Angeles Times

PARIS — Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a globe-trotting French author of books exploring indigenous and nomadic cultures in Latin America, Africa and Asia, on Thursday won the Nobel prize for literature.

Le Clezio, 68, has written about 50 books and has won critical acclaim and a devoted following in France. But his profile remains relatively low, and he is largely unknown in the United States.

In announcing the prize Thursday, the Nobel academy in Stockholm, Sweden, called Le Clezio an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner were among leaders celebrating the award. Kouchner, himself an inveterate traveler as a former head of Doctors Without Borders, praised Le Clezio’s interests that include the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and the deserts of Morocco.

“From Albuquerque to Seoul, from New York to Panama, from London to Lagos, Jean-Marie Le Clezio lives, travels, crosses and loves a great number of countries, of peoples, of civilizations, of cultures,” Kouchner said.

Le Clezio discussed the honor in an improvised news conference in the offices of Gallimard, his publisher. Living up to the sobriquet of the “nomad writer,” he had just

returned from a trip to the Korean peninsula. He thanked the academy and said he wanted to send a public message: Keep reading novels.

“It is a very good means for questioning the world today, without having answers that are too schematic,” he said. “The novelist is not a philosopher, he is not a technician of the language; he is someone who writes, who asks himself questions.

If there is a message to send, it is that we must ask ourselves questions.”

The selection marked another year in which the academy declined to pick better-known writers who have yet to be honored, such as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and American author Philip Roth.

The last U.S. author to win a Nobel was Toni Morrison in 1993.

Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, said of Le Clezio, “I’ve never heard of him. Nobody I know has ever heard of him.”

But Augenbraum cautions against making a snap judgment just because Le Clezio isn’t better known.

“You can look at the award from two different points of view,” he said.

“One aspect is that it’s good because it helps create a whole new readership. But it also continues the political nature of the award.”

Le Clezio spends most of his time in Albuquerque, N.M., with his wife and two daughters but also maintains homes in France.

He makes few public appearances, preferring to travel to remote places and pursue his fascination with the environment. Le Monde newspaper

described him Thursday as a tall, blond man with the “photogenic allure of an elegant cowboy.”

Le Clezio was born in Nice, France, on April 13, 1940, and spent part of his childhood in Africa. His father was British and his mother French. His literary influences include Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad and their themes of restless voyagers and solitary adventurers, according to Le Monde.

He served in the French military in overseas posts in Thailand and Mexico.

During the early 1970s he traveled in Latin America, spending months with indigenous communities in Panama that had a profound effect on him.

“This experience changed all of my life, my ideas about the world of art, my way of being with others, of walking, of eating, of sleeping, of loving and even my dreams,” he once said.

One his major works is “Desert,” a 1980 novel about a Tuareg woman from the Sahara desert. In a different vein, he wrote “Diego and Frida,” a biography of the politically committed Mexican artists and tormented lovers Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, published in 1993.

His most recent novel is “The Tune of Hunger,” a portrait of a young Frenchwoman coming of age as World War II looms. A review in Le Monde this year described it as a moving, expertly drawn portrait.

— Sicakyuz reported from Paris and Rotella from Madrid, Spain.

Staff writer David L. Ulin in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

E ditorial & L etters Page 10

Friday, October 10, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

S t a ff E d i t o r i a l

Diamonds and coal A diamond to the students in Esperanza International for successfully getting an environmental protection article added to Ecuador’s constitution. Impressive — SDS can’t even save the RIPTA routes.

Coal to the Brown Bookstore for choosing Blue State Coffee to run its revamped store. We’re only OK with this openly political choice if you keep things balanced — say, by outsourcing the clothing to Red State Sweatshops.

A gorgeous, perfect, really huge diamond to the groundbreaking study that found an over whelming majority of Brown students prefer Barack Obama to John McCain. Genius! And so unexpected. You deserve a freaking Nobel. (Then again, we’re the ones who wrote about it.)

A diamond to the people behind the Trees 2020 initiative, which aims to plant 40,000 trees in Providence in the next 12 years. Just keep them at least 100 feet away from the sculpture on the Front Green, please.

And cubic zirconium to Doug Still, Providence’s city forester, for finding that as lush as the city seems, only 23 percent of its area is covered by trees. We appreciate your efforts to make the city more lush, but we’ve always thought of Providence as a steady drinker.

Wait a minute, Providence has an official city forester? A diamond to that!

Coal to this fiscal year’s drop in state tax revenue, which, is forcing citizens and governments alike to “tighten their belts,” according to a spokesperson for Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65. If only Dunkin’ Donuts weren’t so darn cheap and delicious, we could tighten our belts even more.

A diamond to Rufus Griscom ’91 for achieving the Brown trifecta: making a living writing about sex, pissing off your alumni parents and feeling that, somehow, classes in Modern Culture and Media helped you get by in the real world.

Coal to the sur vey finding Brown to be second-to-last among the Ivies in the number of times it’s mentioned in the media. Your methodology is questionable at best — and, fortunately for us, easily subverted: BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN.

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P ete fallon

Letters Cups threat overstated To the Editor: Last week’s article on cups in the dining hall (“Budget slows replacement of possibly unhealthy cups” Oct. 3) was excessively alarmist about the health concerns relating to Bisphenol A (BPA) from dining hall cups. The possible health concerns regarding BPA are centered on the growth and development of formula fed infants who consume 100% of their nutrition from baby bottles containing BPA. The chemical primarily leaches from bottles and other polycarbonate plastic containers when they are heated. Baby bottles are generally heated each time the baby is fed, in addition to high temperature washing and sterilizing. Infants are also an order of magnitude smaller than Brown students, resulting in higher average plasma concentration of BPA. Numerous laboratory studies have been conducted looking for associations between BPA and developmental problems, and the lowest dose at which effects were observed in laboratory animals is 33,333 times the highest estimated dose that American adults are exposed to. It is also more than 3,500 times higher

than the highest estimated dose that infants are exposed to. Studies in humans have not been able to demonstrate any adverse effects from BPA. Given that BPA is found in many common plastic food containers, the lining of most food cans, the lining of most bottle or jar lids, and some water pipes, I think the decision by Brown Dining Services to replace dining hall cups with non-BPA alternatives as they break rather than throw out all plastic tableware immediately is more than adequate to protect Brown students from any negligible, theoretical, possible threat posed by our cups of coffee milk and Gatorade. Based on current research, there is no reason to waste our tuition money on all new cups or fill our landfills prematurely.

If we are really concerned about the health effects of our food, we would do well to avoid items that have proven negative health ramifications at both physiologic and extreme doses (think Magic Bars, or French Fries).

Brenna Sullivan ’07 MD’11 Oct. 8

Play by the rules, DTau To the Editor: As a former Greek Council Chair, I applaud the Council for its leadership in taking action against Delta Tau for failing to register a social event with the Student Activities Office (SAO).

In my experience in the Greek system, I had to register a dozen parties. The process is simple - a few forms submitted at the SAO so that the university is aware of an event and can plan accordingly. The SAO provides valuable feedback to organizations as they are planning events and usually visits parties to make sure they are running safely & smoothly. This process keeps campus groups in check and protects student attendees.

DTau failed to follow these very simple rules. The house protests their punishment, trying to tug on our heartstrings by noting that the event benefited a charity that urgently needed funds. Why couldn’t the charity have waited one week so that the house could get the proper registration? The supplies already purchased for the party could be used a week later. If the money was so urgently

needed, how about donating the money and throwing a party to recoup the funds? After all, the house was planning a Class F party the next weekend, in which guests would pay a cover charge and purchase beverages.

The nature of the event is irrelevant. DTau is making excuses in an attempt to throw an unregistered party and get away with it.

DTau should consider itself lucky to have dealt with the Greek Council. It wasn’t long ago that greek houses who broke the rules went straight to administrators who were not Greek-friendly. The Greek system fortunately has strong leadership within the Council and support in the Office of Student Life through people like Senior Associate Dean for Residential Life Richard Bova.

DTau, take responsibility for your actions. After years of being off campus, one would think you’d want to play by the rules.

Meghan Gill ‘06 Greek Council Chair, 2005-2006 Oct. 9

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O pinions Friday, October 10, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Page 11

Rewriting Columbus

BY ADRIENNE LANGLOIS Opinions Columnist On Oct. 12, 1492, a sailor aboard a small caravel somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean kept watch in the early hours of the morning.

As the sun rose, he sighted land, calling to his crewmates excitedly.

In a ten-week journey full of doubts and threats of mutiny, it was a moment of hope for the captain of the fleet, Christopher Columbus, who had begun the journey in an attempt to find a faster route to the West Indies.

But the sailors’ encounter with what they would come to consider a strange, new land would also become the beginning of one of the most controversial interactions in American histor y.

Today, in the United States, Columbus Day is celebrated on the second Monday of October. For most of us at Brown, Columbus Day provides a much-needed three-day weekend that takes the place of the longer fall break many of our friends at other schools receive.

For some Italian-Americans, Columbus Day is a time to celebrate their heritage through the accomplishments of the famed Italian explorer. For American citizens with American Indian heritage, the celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the New World represents the American government’s continued complicity in cruelty against indigenous minorities.

These var ying interpretations of Columbus’s historical significance make him one of the most famous and infamous figures of all time.

One need not look at an elementar y

school histor y book to understand that in many ways Columbus has come to represent Europe’s first interaction with the New World. The phrase “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is perhaps the most wellknown “fact” in American histor y.

In front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., a formidable statue of Columbus stands, with a lofty inscription applauding his “high faith” and “indomitable courage that gave man a new world.” From the inscription alone, it’s clear that the hero worship has

exhibiting this behavior today would receive a marble statue in our nation’s capitol, reducing Columbus to a caricature of an evil conqueror representative of all indignities against American Indians is just as unproductive as representing him as a hero.

It’s not unwise to view Columbus alongside other early explorers, but it becomes problematic when the details of each encounter are lost in the process of criticizing these now infamous figures.

Indigenous people were mistreated in

Indigenous people were mistreated in ways that extend beyond conventional stereotypes of land theft and smallpox blankets, and solely focusing on Columbus diminishes the true scope of these atrocities. gotten a little out of hand.

Columbus’ journals reveal a man racked by insecurity who was obsessed with reaching Asia and obtaining gold. He falsified longitudinal readings to calm his uneasy crew, fabricated sightings of tree branches and birds, and, after encountering native peoples, tricked them aboard his ship with trinkets and forced them to collect gold under punishment of death. In short, he was deceitful and opportunistic, thinking of little beyond his ultimate goals.

While it’s hopefully unlikely that someone

ways that extend beyond conventional stereotypes of land theft and smallpox blankets, and solely focusing on Columbus diminishes the true scope of these atrocities.

Additionally, attempts to downplay the importance of European perspectives in this particular historical narrative ultimately do more harm than good. Telling histor y from the viewpoint of the oppressed is important, especially since a lack of source material and the government’s neocolonial motivations have silenced these voices for centuries. But any historian worth his or

her weight in primar y sources knows that a well-researched analysis of any historical phenomenon requires accounts from all points of view.

Eliminating the perspective of the oppressors neglects an equally important part of the stor y of the conquest of indigenous peoples. The motivations of explorers like Columbus were not solely the product of latent racism in 15th and 16th century Europe.

Those who write off the unfortunate actions of Europeans against natives of the New World as the product of pure racist tendencies ignore the other equally problematic motivations for continued injustice against minority groups in the present day.

While Columbus may not deserve the laudatory depictions he has received in history books for centuries, crimes against American Indians and other minorities extend far beyond the scope of one man’s arrival in the Caribbean. This upcoming Monday should provide us with an opportunity to think critically and consider our countr y’s unfortunate legacy of oppression.

If anything, there’s much to be learned from this explorer’s missteps. Columbus was so blinded by his desire to reach Asia that it took him months to admit he had happened upon a completely different territor y.

To let our understanding of this man be obscured by either praise or disgust is ultimately just as hurtful to the participants in this narrative as Columbus’ actions themselves.

Adrienne Langlois ’10 hopes to further focus her study of colonialism and genocide by creating an independent concentration in Depressing Studies.

Cheating Brown

BY JAKE HEIMARK Opinions Columnist Last month, Stanford held the SOS: Stressed Out Students conference to address two worrying and linked phenomena on college campuses. First, an increasing number of students have sought mental health services for stress related to academic achievement. Second and more disconcerting, administrators have noticed an increase in cheating. As Brown students, we may think we are insulated from cheating by the Open Curriculum — but we are not.

There is a cheating epidemic nationwide and it extends to Brown. We are at the point where it is impossible to avoid cheaters on campus. The practice is more widespread than has ever been acknowledged, and we are all to blame for ignoring it.

We have all seen, or at least know someone who has seen the type of capital “C” Cheating that results in a Dean’s hearing. Properly motivated students are incredibly creative.

There was the boy who laminated a 3x5 note card and carefully taped it to the inside of a fresh Grande Starbucks coffee cup. The girl who slid a list of chemical reactions into the clear plastic front slip of a binder she placed below her feet. The guy who paid a professor in England to write his final Shakespeare paper.

And the engineers who wired their cell phones’ GSM chips to a TI-89 so they could send text messages during an exam.

Yet we already have honor codes, computer algorithms and internet-scouring devices in place to discourage these sorts of nefarious activities. These students are the recognizable cheaters we condemn to public ridicule as a

warning to would-be Cheaters across the land.

Often, they are asked to take a temporary leave from the University, and on some occasions a permanent one. But this is not the central problem at Brown.

The cheating that happens every day is a more subtle beast. It is the last five questions of a Math 9 assignment copied from a classmate. Or the lab results “borrowed” from a friend because a dirty test tube skewed your results. The discussion of a paper that may

ing, and we rarely think twice about it. If we aren’t actively engaging in it, we look away when our roommate does.

It would be wrong to complain. Why risk your roommate’s future at Harvard Med for a lousy Chem 33 assignment when a third of the class is probably doing the same thing? He’s not hurting anybody. You aren’t in the class, you don’t know what the policy is. Maybe they are allowed to fax the answers to each other.

So we operate on a strict Don’t Ask, Don’t

The dirty truth is that many of us are cheating, and we rarely think twice about it.

have marginally overstepped the collaboration policy.

Often, if you confront students, they will say this sort of activity is “not really cheating.”

They really could have done the work themselves if they had the time, they swear. The Phi Psi party just left them a little bit more tired than they expected. Or their roommate lost his wallet and they had to spend the afternoon looking for it.

The dirty truth is that many of us are cheat-

Tattle policy.

Unfortunately, the distinction between cheating and Cheating is one we are willing to make to justify actions we know are wrong.

Some would say it is human nature. We cheat on our diets and our spouses, and as long as we try to learn from our mistakes, and catch the Cheaters, we are doing well enough.

But while individual instances of cheating may not be the moral equivalent of kicking puppies, they contribute to a culture of rule-

breaking, excuse-making and reasoning that spills over into other aspects of our lives.

Plagiarists do not wake up on a Tuesday and begin copy-pasting chapters of a book into their theses. They begin with a word here, a sentence there, eventually lifting entire paragraphs until they are caught. Or not, as is often the case.

By ignoring small acts of cheating, we encourage the Ken Lays to keep skimming off the top and the Martha Stewarts to trade on insider information. It is probably too late to remagnetize the moral compass of Lehman Executive Richard Fuld Jr., who blamed everyone he could but himself and happily walked out of the building with more than $500 million in compensation.

But maybe we can try to make sure the next ones do not come from Brown.

We can fight cheating like we should fight fake IDs, by legalizing and embracing the activity— in this case embracing many different types of academic collaboration. We could remove incentives to cheat by changing the way we grade assignments. Or we could make ourselves miserable by providing rewards for snitching on our classmates.

Then there is the current policy: we can just keep ignoring it. As long as we do not talk about cheating, Brown professors and the University administration can continue to claim plausible deniability, and students can continue to slightly cross the line. But maybe if we address this dishonesty head-on right now, we won’t have Brown alums screwing over honest people ten years down the line.

Jake Heimark ‘10 “borrowed” this column from his roommate.

S ports W eekend Page 12

Friday, October 10, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Kickin’ it W. soccer struggles for tie against Bryant Wednesday with Rhett Bernstein ’09

By Jason Wade Spor ts Staff Writer

By Nicole Stock Sports Staff Writer

Rhett Bernstein ’09 was named Ivy League Player of the Week, as well as the Top Drawer Soccer Player of the Week and College Soccer News National Player of the Week for the week ending Sept. 28. Soccer

ATHLETE OF THE WEEK America named him to the Men’s Team of the Week for his three gamewinning goals against URI, BC and UNC-Greensboro. The following week he scored yet another gamewinning goal against Columbia to lift the Bears to their first Ivy win of the season. Bernstein’s knack for finishing strong has made him The Herald’s athlete of the week.

Herald: When did you start playing soccer and why did you start playing?

Bernstein: I started playing soccer when I was about 5 years old. I’d say the biggest reason why I began playing was because of my father.

He is a very passionate soccer player and supporter and I’d admired his love for the game.

What made you choose Brown to play soccer?

I chose Brown based on its reputation for both academics and soccer.

But, I really wanted to play for the Brown soccer team because I was extremely impressed on my recruiting visit with the camaraderie between the players. I have never been part of a team with such a great group of guys. It’s a really unique feeling.

The women’s soccer team played a thrilling game against Bryant on Wednesday night, to the surprise of Brown and Bryant fans alike.

With Brown coming into 3 Brown the game with 3 Bryant a 4-4-2 record compared to Bryant’s 2-7-2, fans may have expected the game to be an easy Brown win, but the game concluded in an anticlimactic 3-3 draw.

The Bears held control of possession during the beginning of the game, but Bryant seemed to control the game’s tempo. Brown, who defeated No. 11 Penn State and tied No. 1 UCLA earlier this season, did not appear to put as much effort into beating Bryant.

“This was our weakest performance of the season,” said Head Coach Phil Pincince. “We did not bring our A-game.”

Brown was put into a hole early when Bryant scored just 18 minutes into the game on a shot from 25 yards out. The visitors controlled the play following the goal and kicked a loose ball into the Bears’ net for a 2-0 lead at the 26:27 mark.

Bruno’s offense was revitalized, however, when Marybeth Lesbirel ’12 entered the game late in the first half. In the 38th minute of the game, tri-captain Lindsay Cunningham ’09 sent a pass up the left wing to Lesbirel, who then used her speed and footwork to maneuver around the Bulldogs

slower defender and sent a perfectly placed shot off the far post and into the goal.

“Mar ybeth does a great job of elevating our play,” Pincince said.

Fewer than three minutes later, at 41:16, Sarah Hebert-Seropian ’12 tied the game at 2-2 with a header into the net directly off a corner kick taken by Gloria Chun ’12. The Bears went into halftime with the score tied.

After returning for the second half, it did not take long for Bryant to re-take the lead. Just 46 seconds into the half, Brown committed an own goal. A cross by Bryant was sent into the box and was misread by the Brown defense. The ball hit the leg of a Brown defender and reached the back of the net before goalkeeper, tri-captain Brenna Hogue ’10, could get back to the other side.

“A bunch of people half went for it,” Charlotte Rizzi ’11 said. “We didn’t listen to our goalie.”

Despite this blunder, the Bears’ offense was kicking on all cylinders in the second half. They racked up a 13-5 advantage in shots and a 4-0 advantage on corner kicks. The team’s offense paid off in the 81st minute of regulation when Brown scored its third goal, when Silvia Stone ’11 sent a short throw-in to tri-captain Jamie Mize ’09 who gave it right back to Stone. Stone then sent in a cross through the box and Cunningham knocked a header off the far post and into the net.

Cunnigham’s goal tied the score at 3-3, forcing overtime.

Despite controlling play in over-

Justin Coleman / Herald

Lindsay Cunningham ’09 had the assist on a goal by Marybeth Lesbirel ’12 late in the first half. time, Brown was unable to come away with a win. The team had multiple corner kicks and legitimate scoring attempts by Lesbirel and Chun but shots by both were either deflected or wide of the goal.

The second overtime also came to a scoreless end, resulting in a 3-3 draw.

“It was a sub par performance

M. soccer shuts out Bryant, but celebration can wait

Who is your favorite European soccer team?

I love watching European soccer, especially the European Champions League. My favorite team, without question, is Manchester United.

Do you have any superstitions?

No, not really. Although, I used to wear a wristband every match. I try not to bother about superstitions now. I think they are just one more thing to worry about in preparation for a game.

How do you manage to keep scoring these game-winning goals?

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been in the right place at the right time. But, I would still give a lot of credit to the guys who assist the goals. Their quality services and flip-throws have been the reason I’ve been scoring.

As a defensive player, how important is it that you are getting involved in the offense?

It’s not my job to score goals.

It’s my job to prevent them. Any defender will tell you that. I don’t care how many goals I score, none of them count unless we win!

What would you attribute to your success so far this season?

I worked hard in the offseason on building my strengths and improving my weaknesses. I came into continued on page 9

on all counts,” Pincince said. “The one bright side is that we came back from 2-0.”

“We were a ver y lucky team tonight,” Pincince concluded.

The Bears travel to Princeton on Saturday where they will tr y to get on the scoreboard early and put an end to the Tiger’s five-game winning streak.

Justin Coleman / Herald

Rhett Bernstein ‘09, The Herald’s Athlete of the Week, helped Bruno take down Bryant, 1-0.

By Katie Wood Assistant Spor ts Editor

The men’s soccer team (7-2-1) defeated Bryant (1-12-1) 1-0 Tuesday night at Stevenson Field. Although the Bears were on the board early with a quick goal by T.J. Thompson ’10 in the first 10 minutes of play, they were unable to add to their early lead.

“Any time you can get the first

goal early in the game, you should be able to build off it,” said Head Coach Mike Noonan. “We didn’t use that as a platform to play well.

Unfortunately, you have those games sometimes.”

Noonan said the team performed “below expectations,” a feeling shared by the majority of the team.

“The longer the game went on (had we not scored early), it would

have given Bryant a window of opportunity,” Thompson said. “We tried to expand on the lead; unfortunately we didn’t capitalize on the early goal.”

The Bears came out attacking with 10 shots in the first half. In the opening minutes, Thompson shot the ball past the Bulldog goalie on a pass from Sean Rosa ’12 who had just entered the game. The goal was the first of the year for Thomp-

son. The Bears’ early momentum did not carry on into the rest of the game, as the Bears failed to score in the remaining 80 minutes of play.

Darren Howerton ’09 recorded a season-high five shots, one on goal, and Thompson tallied the second-most shots with four.

Though the Bears out-shot the Bulldogs 19-12, the numbers did not reflect the Bears’ struggle to find the net.

“We played poorly all the way around,” Noonan said. “They weren’t real quality shots either.”

Goalkeeper Paul Grandstrand ’11 received the win on the night with two saves evening out his record in the net (2-2-0).

The Bears were frustrated with their overall performance and inability to execute their game plan, according to Thompson, who, althoughglad to have scored his first goal of the season, was not pleased with the result of the game.

“It was good to get my first goal of the year early on,” Thompson said. “It gave me confidence for the rest of the game. We had opportunities to score but didn’t capitalize. We’ll have to take that performance, put it behind us and come out with a new attitude for Princeton this weekend.”

Princeton may be tougher than their record would reveal, as they pulled off an impressive tie with Dartmouth, one of the top contenders in conference, in the first Ivy League game of the season.

The Bears will travel to Princeton (2-7-1) on Saturday and are looking to improve on their 1-0 league record.