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TOP LEFT: University of Virginia sophomores Marisa Readdy (left) and Rolph Recto (right) participate at the hackathon at Michigan Stadium Friday. BOTTOM LEFT: Illinois Institute of Technology senior Abed Arnaout and junior Tameem Imamdad (second and third from left) plan with teammates at the Hackathon at Michigan Stadium Friday. RIGHT: Engineering junior Michael Christen looks out over the field at Michigan Stadium Friday.
At Big House, innovations abound MHacks moves to Michigan Stadium for largest student hackathon in U.S. By AMRUTHA SIVAKUMAR Daily Staff Reporter
It wasn’t game day, but the Big House was bustling. The MHacks hackathon, a
competitive weekend of non-stop programming, is a collaboration of Michigan Hackers and MPowered, an entrepreneurship group, where “hackers” from universities worldwide filled the stadium — a location chosen after the 2012 hackathon outgrew Palmer Commons. At MHacks, students collaborated to churn out innovations between Friday night and Sunday morning. The rules are simple: The hackers are be given exactly 36
hours to create an application programming interface — which specifies how some software components should interact with each other — and present it at an expo for the chance to win a series of prizes. With nearly three times the number of participants as the 2012 hackathon, the 2013 event surpassed world records for hackathon attendance, as 1,700 tickets for the event sold out in less than 24 hours. The previous
record was set early September at PennApps, the annual hackathon hosted at the University of Pennsylvania that boasted a record 1,000 attendees. Though much of the participants’ time was spent developing apps, they were provided with ample food and drink, and were even able to watch the University’s football game against the University of Connecticut on the stadium screens. As it neared closer to 11 p.m.
Saturday, a class of student participants turned to sleep and social media after failing to effectively debug failed applications. Others, however, inched closer to finishing and implementing lastminute functionalities — Binghamton University senior David Lui included. “You are competing against the others here, but I don’t think of it that way until the end,” Lui said. “Right now it’s more of a social collaborative event.”
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Wallenberg fellow works to sustain Earth, human rights With $25K grant, student studying how conservation affects Kenyans By MICHAEL SUGERMAN For the Daily
Even after University alum Zachary Petroni explains in native Kiswahili that he is a student researcher, locals from the small Kenyan town of Gede question his intentions. To them, Petroni is like any other mzungu, or white person, passing through — there as a tourist rather than as a student. Petroni said withstanding this reaction has been his biggest adjustment – other than the “tropical heat” and “de-industrialization” of his diet – while working as a Wallenberg fellow on the northern edge of Kenya’s Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve, where he has been researching “the relationship between conservation governance and human
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rights” for a month. Over the summer of 2013, he worked as a research assistant for the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Petroni, formerly a student in the Ford School of Public Policy, is the inaugural winner of the fellowship, which grants $25,000 to a graduating senior each year to pursue an independent learnings or exploration project anywhere in the world. He wrote in an e-mail interview that his overall objective is “interrogating the linkages between how conservation spaces are constructed and governed … and the consequences of this decision-making on the socio-economic, cultural and political well-being of people living in close proximity to such efforts.” Each school on campus can select up to two nominees, whose applications are then forwarded to the Wallenberg Fellowship Selection Committee. The committee comprises representatives from various University units and colleges. See WALLENBERG, Page 5A
Lui created an application that would determine a user’s inherent biases through a personalized series of questions. He said being able to participate in a hackathon hosted in the Big House was a perk. At the expo following the hackathon, application developers had the opportunity to compete for a total of $23,000 in cash prizes. While the overall best applicaSee BIG HOUSE, Page 5A
City council reconsiders crosswalk regulations Council members concerned about ambiguous law By WILL GREENBERG Daily Staff Reporter PAUL SHERMAN/Daily
Students transform a parking space on State Street into a temporary park Friday for International PARK(ing) Day.
Rolling out the green carpet to spark urban-space debate Students make mini-park out of parking spaces By MICHAEL SUGERMAN For the Daily
From a rolled-out strip of bright green AstroTurf spanning a couple of parking spaces on South State and East Liberty streets, Rackham and Public Health student Arielle Fleisher invited a passerby into her makeshift “park.”
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On Friday, Fleisher and Rackham student Jenny Cooper created a “parklet” as a part of PARK(ing) Day 2013, an annual program that creates temporary green spaces in an attempt to spark discussion about how to use urban space. The duo received permission from the Downtown Development Authority and the South State Street Corridor Authority to use the spaces for free, setting up at 11 a.m. Local businesses even contributed to the parklet’s
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creation: Downtown Home and Garden donated furniture and potted plants, the Produce Station donated one park bench and the Lunch Room provided lunch for the group. Other expenses were covered by a $315 grant from the Student Sustainability Initiative, a University program. “We’re not just passively sitting here today, but we’re also making a statement,” Fleisher said. “We want to ask the question, ‘How do we value urban space, and what if See URBAN, Page 5A
Vol. CXXIII, No. 136 ©2013 The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com
In light of the death of a student early August at a Plymouth Road crosswalk, Ann Arbor’s current crosswalk ordinance has raised questions among the public and City Council as many legislators are working to revise or repeal the ordinance. When the current law was passed in 2012, it was considered an improvement over the previous ordinance, which required drivers to stop for pedestrians “approaching” the crosswalk. Some considered the wording too ambiguous to follow or enforce. Today, Ann Arbor has an ordinance that is distinct from the Michigan Uniform Traffic Code. A memorandum to councilmembers from Nick Hutchinson, manager of the city’s Project Management Unit, illustrated the differences in the wording of the two laws. The MUTC See CROSSWALK, Page 5A
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