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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2011 • VOLUME 122, ISSUE 30 • CHICAGOMAROON.COM
DISCOURSE
STUDENT LIFE
Dorm room café brews artisan coffee
Protesters share Tahrir Square experiences By Jingwen Hu News Staff
Second-year Patrick Ip discusses the finer points of syphon coffee brewing with a customer at Café 4B, a coffee bar that he operates from his Stony Island dorm room. DARREN LEOW/MAROON
By Amy Myers Associate News Editor Something strong is brewing in a fourth-floor Stony Island suite. Ip, a second-year, runs Café 4B out of his dorm each Saturday. His café is one of only two in Chicago to offer cutting-edge syphon brewed coffee.
With a halogen-heater and specially made glass containers, Ip’s syphon coffee machine looks more like lab equipment than a dorm room kitchen accessory (and is worth about as much—the equipment costs hundreds of dollars). The Japanese-inspired system, also called vacuum brew coffee, relies on heat from water vapor and vacuum
CRIME
pressure to brew coffee by the cup. The result is “one of the freshest, purest ways to drink coffee,” according to Ip. Intelligentsia’s downtown location is the only other store in Chicago to brew syphoned coffee, which was recently called a “20,000 dollar cup of coffee” by
CAFÈ continued on page 3
Four exchange students from Cairo shared firsthand accounts of the revolution Thursday at the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OM SA) in an effort to connect Egyptians on campus. Th e e v e n t , o r g a n i z e d b y the Office of International Affairs, brought students from Cairo University and American University in Cairo together with University faculty and students to discuss the 18-day protest that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak. The students arrived late January and early February and will be studying at U of C during Spring Quarter. Noha Syam, an exchange student from Cairo University, attended the protests for one day but still shared her experiences watching the protests unfold in Tahrir Square. She said that as protests continued for days and the Internet was shut down, the unity of the protesters made her realize a potential for revolution she had initially dismissed. “I saw how people were very wise.
Even those who are not well–educated, they were aware of what they were doing,” Syam said. “I liked how they were sharing ideas. They were sharing food. They were sharing water. They were sharing everything.” She added that she was impressed that the protesters, who came from all social classes and education levels, banded together to protect public buildings like the Egyptian Museum amidst the chaos while there was no government presence. However, the National Democratic Party Office was looted during this time. Mohamed Salem, also an exchange student from Cairo University, shared a much darker perspective on the same events. Salem was part of the protests almost every day since January 28 and experienced police brutality firsthand. “They b eat us very heavily. They drove us back to the side streets. They actually followed us to the side streets and they gassed us with no less than 80 canisters of tear gas,” Salem said. But the fear ended as the police left. “I think the thing that people were most afraid of was not get-
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CAMPUS LIFE
Another daytime robbery Rocket launch hits tree, misses 1,000 foot target prompts security alert By Adam Janofsky MAROON Staff
By Sam Levine News Staff A university student walking south on Ellis Avenue between East 61st and 62nd Streets was robbed at gunpoint last Monday. The attack triggered the first campus-wide security alert of the quarter. The robbery follows in a series of attacks that have taken place
during the daytime this month. According to the University of Chicago Police Department (UC P D), there have been four instances of robbery, attempted robbery, or assault before 6 p.m. this month. “To see a robbery at that time of day is not common,” UC P D spokesman Bob Mason said regarding last Monday’s attack.
clean air, meeting with congressional offices to lobby. Students for a Just and Stable Future (S J S F), a subset of the R S O Green Campus Initiative (GCI) that was founded this fall, is hoping to send 25 students to the conference. “You go from being interested to feeling like you’re part of a really big movement,” S J S F director and firstyear Caitlin Grey said. Traditionally, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, and other local col-
Yellow caution tape surrounded the center of the main quad Friday as five hundred students prepared for lift-off. A seven-and-a-half foot homemade rocket stood on the circle of the quad, teetering over with the unexpected gusts of wind. During the final countdown, the crowd watched as the rocket shot into the air, blew in the wind, and careened into a nearby tree. Th e l a u n ch w a s t h e c l i m a x of a month-long project by the Engineering Society, a student organization that started this fall. Although it went off with some hitches, it was the RSO’s first large campus event, and several future projects are in the planning stages. According to students who helped build the rocket, it had the potential to reach a maximum altitude of 1,000 feet. The weather, paired with technical issues, bogged the launch. “The wind disrupted the angle and we had our electrical control mess up–only one cluster engine of three set off,” Engineering Society board member and first-year Alex Kolchinski said. “500 feet plus was the expected altitude. We definitely got 10 to 20
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SUSTAINABILITY
GCI looks toward climate conference By Rebecca Guterman News Staff U of C environmentalists are shifting into high gear to raise enough funds to send student representatives for the first time to Power Shift, a national conference on climate activism and lobbying held by Congress in April. Every two years, thous ands of top climate activists, policymakers, and students—mostly college-aged—spend four days in Washington, D.C., at workshops focusing on campus activism and
The Engineering Society and the Student Organization for Aeuronautics and Robotics (SOAR) launched a 7 foot 6 rocket in the middle of the main quads Friday afternoon. MATT BOGEN/MAROON