TuftsDaily09-12-2012

Sunny 83/59

THE TUFTS DAILY

New Ph.D program begins this weekend by

Menghan Liu

Daily Editorial Board

The university on Friday will kick off its new joint Ph.D program in cognitive science with a three-day conference in Cabot Auditorium.

The program’s inaugural conference titled “Language and Representation” will feature 16 presentations from cognitive scientists who work at Tufts, and other institutions.

“It’s a great opportunity to network and have academic discussions,” Matthias Scheutz, director of the cognitive science Ph.D program and associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, said.

Conference speakers will explain their work and point out challenges in cognitive science research that need to be addressed, a rare experience for students, according to Scheutz. Poster sessions will also give students the opportunity to present and receive feedback on their own work.

Almost 200 people are expected to attend this weekend’s conference, according to Scheutz.

Scheutz said that the conference will showcase strengths of the new cognitive science Ph.D program at Tufts, which was approved last year after he spearheaded the proposal along with other faculty members at the Center for Cognitive see COGNITIVE, page 2

TUFTSDAILY.COM

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

VOLUME LXIV, NUMBER 5

Where You Read It First Est. 1980

New university provost David Harris brings experience, fresh ideas to the Hill by

Brionna Jimerson

Daily Editorial Board

As a sociologist, dean, Obama administration advisor and the interim head of Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, new Provost and Senior Vice President David Harris has a past steeped in administrative experience that he says will inform and benefit the work ahead of him at Tufts.

Harris’ appointment, the result of extensive and prolonged efforts of a Tufts search committee, follows former Provost Jamshed Bharucha’s departure in March 2011 and the temporary appointment of interim Vice Provost Peggy Newell soon after.

It is one of several major administrative changes Tufts has made in the last few years including the arrival of University President Anthony Monaco in 2011.

The university provost is the chief academic officer at Tufts.

In this position, Harris will represent the academic side of the university in all meetings at the senior level.

The university’s deans report to the provost, as do the vice provost and associate provost.

Harris’ responsibilities include overseeing the organizational structure of the Tufts curriculum and the overall academic growth of the uni-

Kyra Sturgill / the Tufts Daily

Provost David Harris sat down with the Daily to discuss his history at Cornell and his future at Tufts. versity – areas to which he hopes to bring an interdisciplinary approach.

“I’m heavily involved in interdisciplinary [education] not because it’s the cool thing to do, but because it’s required to answer critical questions you want to answer,” he said.

Head first into a tough job Harris’ time at Tufts won’t be the first opportunity the seasoned administrator has had to answer these types of critical questions.

This fall Tufts debuted an interdisciplinary Africana Studies major and minor in

response to student demand, and Harris’ duties include overseeing the department’s development – an area in which he has some, albeit unanticipated, experience.

In 2011, Cornell appointed see PROVOST, page 2

Fall Ball runs smoothly due to crack down on ticket scalping by

Patrick McGrath

Daily Editorial Board

Clarissa Sosin / the Tufts Daily

Event organizers considered this year’s Fall Ball a success because of changes to the ticketing policy and a renovated entrance.

Inside this issue

Tufts’ annual Fall Ball took place on Friday with a few alterations from last year, including a new entrance, the availability of food at the event and heightened measures against ticket scalping.

Students entered the event directly through the front doors of the Gantcher Center this year instead of through the front doors of Cousens Gymnasium.

The entrance to the event was congested and crowded last year, something that the Office for Campus Life (OCL) hoped to improve this year, according to David McGraw, OCL’s assistant director. McGraw told the Daily last fall that from 10:30 p.m to 11:00 p.m, 1500 students joined the queue.

“If there was one thing I was hoping that we would fix for this year, it was that,” McGraw said.

This year’s larger entrance relieved congestion outside of the venue, yet event organizers

still deployed more staff members to monitor the doorways and scan IDs, according to Programming Board Co-Chair Christopher Blackett, a senior.

“We were able to have a much shorter line,” he said.

“We were able to see whether people actually had their tickets and not someone else’s tickets a lot more effectively.”

Tufts Emergency Medical Services ( TEMS) Executive Director Robert Kaufman, a senior, noted that this year marked a decrease in students who required hospitalization.

TEMS transported eight students to the hospital for alcohol-related issues: six students at the event, one student offsite during the event and one student after the event, according to Kaufman. Last year, 12 students were hospitalized.

The OCL added several restrictions this year to prevent ticket scalping and transfers between students, according to McGraw. TuftsLife advertised a message containing the see FALL BALL, page 2

Today’s sections

New freshman engineering experience implements senior mentorship.

David Byrne and St. Vincent collaborate on the successful “Love This Giant.”

see FEATURES, page 3

see ARTS, page 5

News Features Arts & Living Editorial | Letters

1 3 5 8

Op-Ed Comics Sports

9 10 Back

The Tufts Daily

2

News

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

New provost joins Tufts ready to listen to students PROVOST

continued from page 1

Harris as an interim co-director of the university’s Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC) at a particularly contentious time in the department’s history.

In July of that year, Robert Harris, Jr. had resigned as director of the program in protest of the university’s decision to incorporate the center into the College of Arts and Sciences as a new department.

The incorporation of the ASRC, which had stood independently from the other undergraduate colleges at Cornell for over 40 years, resulted in passionate and unrelenting opposition from Cornell faculty and students, many of whom said the decision was sidestepping the ASRC’s autonomy, according to numerous articles published at the time in the Cornell Daily Sun. It was a formative experience for Harris, who said he assumed the post of interim co-director out of a sense of duty to make Africana studies work at Cornell.

“Being co-director was definitely not something I was looking to do,” he said. “It was something I did because there were no options.”

From the process of finding a permanent director for the program, Harris drew impor-

tant lessons that he says he will apply R Tufts.

“The experience reinforced in me the importance of transparency,” he said.

“When we searched for a director, we had the faculty involved in drafting the position description, vetting candidates, interviewing. We were trying to make sure that Africana could achieve what it wanted to be. So here at Tufts, I want to try to figure out where Tufts wants to go.”

Research and leadership background Harris grew up in a working class suburb of Philadelphia and earned both his B.S. and Ph.D from Northwestern University.

He found his academic and social interests later than most students, after much trial and error.

“I went to Northwestern because I was going to be a journalist,” Harris said.

He transferred out of journalism into civil engineering after three weeks, briefly dropped out after two years and then returned for a new start. “[I] realized there was something called ‘social policy’ that you could major in and have a career,” Harris said. “I had no idea. I found who I wanted to be, and I’ve been doing social

policy work ever since.”

He explained that in recent years he has addressed social policy from an administrative angle within higher education.

Harris arrived at Cornell from the University of Michigan in 2003 as a full professor, having earned tenure at Michigan with research on racial classification and its role in social policy.

His research, however, soon gave way to more bureaucratic duties at Cornell.

“I was happy to move along doing this work, but I was quickly pulled into senior administrative work,” Harris said.

He held several positions within the senior administrative level at Cornell, including becoming the founding director of the university’s Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS), serving as the school’s vice provost for social sciences, deputy provost and, in 2008, provost ad interim.

In 2010, Harris left Cornell to serve as deputy assistant secretary for Human Services Policy in the Obama administration, working with the Department of Health and Human Services as an advisor on vital issues such as poverty and child support.

Slow, steady and aware wins the race Harris arrived on the Hill

in August and has since then made an effort to meet students and gather the diverse opinions he says will inform his work as provost.

Senior Barbara Florvil was impressed by Harris, whom she met during a recent Welcome Back BBQ hosted by the Africana Center.

“He seemed very in tune with what Tufts may need, which is a provost who is available to talk with students about their day-to-day thoughts,” she said.

Harris said he will spend much of his first semester on the Hill looking at Tufts from multiple perspectives, using his time at several universities as a toolkit to decipher Tufts’ unique history.

“You have to spend time upfront learning the place,” he said.

“The challenge for an outsider is figuring out if it is a conversation that you have heard before, or if it is different. It may look like I’m being quiet, but it’s much better than the alternative to come in and say ‘I’m going to tell you day one, here’s my plan for where we’re going to be in five years, we’re going to do A, B and C.’ That’s a great way to fail,” Harris said.

Through regular office hours, Harris hopes to maintain constant contact with students.

His commitment to accessibility also extends to faculty – in August, Harris led 28 faculty members on a nearly 105 milelong bike tour of Tufts’ campuses in Medford/Somerville, Boston and Grafton.

School of Dental Medicine Professor Jonathan Garlick was one of the faculty members on the bike tour.

“It was a great way to connect faculty and the campuses,” Garlick said.

“It gave me a feeling of how connected we are; it was a great way to get to know faculty and colleagues. It’s going to be a great tradition.”

Looking toward the future With years of academic, political and leadership experience, Harris remains confident that his background will color his decision-making at Tufts.

Harris recognizes that he is joining the Hill at a time of change.

“It’s clear that the university is undergoing a transition – the president and the provost were here for a decade, and then left,” he said.

“That is a significant transition in an institution. Now, Anthony [Monaco] and I are building our relationship, as we’ll be responsible for the next chapter.”

Cognitive science Ph.D to expand scope of field’s study COGNITIVE

continued from page 1

Studies.

“The program really formalizes what we’ve been doing for a long time,” Ariel Goldberg, assistant professor of psychology and faculty member in the Center for Cognitive Studies, said.

“We have a strong tradition in teaching and doing research in the cognitive sciences, but this is building up a real cognitive science graduate program.”

Students must enroll in the joint cognitive science Ph.D program through the Departments of Child Development, Computer Science or Psychology, Scheutz said.

Degree candidates will be required to take five core courses that address different aspects of cognitive science, such as computer modeling and philosophical foundations, according to Scheutz.

Students must also demonstrate that they have mastered core methodologies of the field.

The Ph.D’s emphasis on multidisciplinary training will allow students to answer questions about the mind from perspectives beyond their own academic discipline, accord-

ing to Goldberg.

Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and professor of philosophy, affirmed the importance of the new program’s multidisciplinary approach, explaining that the field of cognitive science itself has become more interdisciplinary.

“Many of us had been planning this for years,” Dennett said. “When [Scheutz] came on the scene, the process went into high gear.”

The administration was very supportive throughout the process and expressed an interest in an interdisciplinary program of the kind, according to faculty members at the Center for Cognitive Studies.

“You need the right climate, and Tufts is the perfect place for it,” Scheutz said.

“Tufts is small enough, people have an interdisciplinary orientation and they want to collaborate.”

Scheutz hopes that the Departments of Biology, Mathematics, Education and Mechanical Engineering will participate in the program in the future.

“We’re on the map,” Dennett said. “Now we have a real program of our own, which will add to the luster of Boston as a center for cognitive science.”

Kyra Sturgill / The Tufts Daily

Tufts’ new cognitive science Ph.D program launches this weekend with a conference featuring distinguished cognitive scientists.

Ticket scalping, student hospitalizations reduced at this year’s Fall Ball

FALL BALL

continued from page 1

OCL policy against exchanges and refunds, as well as the fact that scalping was illegal, he said.

“I don’t know how many people have attempted to sell them [on TuftsLife], but we don’t see as many as what there was last year,” he said. “The process of selling a ticket actually is kind of a fool’s process because if you purchase some else’s tick-

et, technically that ticket is no longer valid.”

The tickets also included student names and ID numbers that were scanned at the entrance, another new measure, according to Blackett.

“We had a few cases of students trying to give their tickets to their friends, but we would just scan the barcodes and then see that it didn’t match their IDs, so none of them made it in,” Blackett said.

McGraw said that 2,500 tickets for the event went on sale last Monday and sold out in about four-and-a-half hours, despite a minor glitch in the system that prevented students from securing tickets until approximately 20 minutes after the expected ticket sale time of 12 p.m.

The number of available tickets is based on the limited size of the venue and the fire safety code, he added.

“We are disappointed in the sense that we just don’t have a space on this campus that can hold everyone who wants to go to this event,” McGraw said.

“However, our main priority is the safety and security of the students, and so for us, we can’t oversell.”

Another new addition to Fall Ball was the inclusion of pizza for the guests, McGraw said.

“I think it just gave it more of a well-rounded feel,” McGraw

said.

Blackett hopes to see the budget for Fall Ball increase in the future, noting that Tufts’ spending on the event is lower than that for similar events at other universities.

“I know some of the students have discussed having the ability to make the event a little bit bigger, and that obviously comes with more budget,” McGraw said.

Features

3

tuftsdaily.com

School of Engineering debuts revamped first-year curriculum

by Jacob

Passy

Daily Editorial Board

When picturing a first-year engineering student’s homework, you might imagine differential equations and physics problems sets. In the School of Engineering, new electives involve building Lego robots.

Freshman Kate Shaner did not hesitate to take Simple Robotics, one of seven elective courses offered to firstyear engineering and computer science students as part of the pilot firstyear experience program in the School of Engineering.

According to Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ethan Danahy, Simple Robotics and a few of its fellow elective courses have been a part of the engineering curriculum for many years.

“This course has been around for probably ten-plus years in its halfcredit formation and has been passed around a couple of professors,” Danahy said.

This year, though, these electives received a facelift as part of the School of Engineering’s efforts to revamp the freshman year experience for undergraduate engineering and computer science students.

“My advisor highly recommended this course,” Shaner said. “Who doesn’t want to play with Legos and get a grade?”

Professor of the Practice Ron Lasser is one of the many faculty members dedicated to this ongoing project.

“The reason we’re doing all of this is that we knew that Tufts students didn’t feel that they were getting what they thought they needed,” Lasser said.

Associate Professor Soha Hassoun, who teaches Introduction to Computational Design, argued that the material of the former first-year engineering electives was the source of these complaints.

“It didn’t energize them and [increase their] excitement about engineering,” she said.

Students who had taken these courses in their original form reflected this sentiment. Senior Brittney Veeck took issue with the narrow focus that these courses gave students in past years.

“It’s very easy to have a preconceived notion of what one of the types of engineering is, but I still don’t really know what the chemical or biomedical engineers do,” she said.

Nevertheless, the importance of these courses was clear. The goal was to combat the simplicity and lack of enthusiasm surrounding the first-year experience, which resulted in the formation of a faculty committee. Led

by Dean of the School of Engineering Linda Abriola, this committee conducted research to determine ways in which the university could improve the freshman experience for incoming engineering students.

“We did both written surveys as well as informal [question-and-answer] sessions with upper level students over the past couple of years,” Lasser said. The result of this research was a readjustment of the curricula for engineering electives taken by first-year students.

According to Lasser, these newly designed courses diverge in many ways from their predecessors.

For example, they are full credit courses that meet twice per week, as opposed to the previous courses, which were offered once per week for half credit. Danahy, who has now taught Simple Robotics in both its half-credit and full-credit forms, applauded the move.

“Changing from the half credit to the full credit, the difference is that I can cover more material,” he said. “I’m allowing students to get more in-depth in the various projects they are working on.”

When it came to selecting courses

caroline geiling / the Tufts Daily

First-year engineers in the upgraded Structural Art elective course are given the opportunity to interact with and learn from seniors. to constitute the new first-year experience program this fall, Abriola collected proposals from across the various engineering departments. Many professors, including Hassoun, jumped at the opportunity to teach one of these courses.

“I thought it would be an incredibly exciting opportunity to reach out to newer students and engage them in projects and research early on,” she said.

Lasser explained that the courses selected were required to meet certain criteria.

The courses, he said, had to provide an introduction into engineering subject matter while also focusing on leadership, teamwork and project management. “[Students] want to make sure that the course is relevant so that there’s a connection from theory to solving problems in the real world, rather than just doing math,” he said.

The emphasis on real-world application was important to both professors and students.

“The output of your education isn’t to have a [number of ] degrees,” Shaner said. “The output of your education is to make something useable for the larger community.”

A team-based curriculum is another aspect that these electives all have

in common. Professor of the Practice Eric Hines teaches Structural Art – one of the many courses that engage students in group projects. Hines’ course also provides the first-year students with the chance to interact with engineers in their senior year through a mentorship program, a feature of his course even before the move to the full-credit model.

“What I notice is that the first-years are able to develop relationships with their senior mentors that are different from the relationships they develop with me,” he said.

Senior mentor John Gill, who took Structural Art as a freshman, recalled the benefits of being able to connect with his senior counterpart at the time and argued that little has changed in first-year students’ mindsets.

“The one thing that I really wanted to do was meet upperclassmen who had all of this wisdom to impart,” he said. “[The freshman] were overall really impressed with the fact that they were coming in and weren’t just sitting in on a lecture but were down in a lab with seniors.”

Danahy emphasized that the project-based nature of these courses helps students understand the extent to which their skill and knowledge levels will grow over the course of four

years at Tufts.

“Here they are in my class building these little Lego robots, but their solutions aren’t very sophisticated,” he said. “They then realize that there’s this gap between where they are and what’s actually happening in the field.”

Danahy’s hope is that these elective courses will motivate students to seek the information needed to fill that gap.

“I want these kids to see the relevance, to see why they are doing it and then have the energy to go on for the next three years of their undergraduate degree,” he said.

Despite all of the changes, the program is still a work in progress.

“We’re surveying students before and after,” he said. “If there are problems, we’re going to make modifications and upgrade the courses for next fall.”

While it may be too soon to tell whether these redesigned courses are an improvement on the past, the excitement for them is already palpable. Freshman Charles Colley said that he was excited to work with robotics hands on.

“That’s what I’m most excited about because everything else is just pen and paper,” he said. “I may [even] decide to pursue robotics further, and it may change my idea of what I want to do [in the future].”

4

The Tufts Daily

advertisement

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Pinch Your Pennies

TheY Won’T crY

renT TexTbooks From AmAzon

sAve uP To 70%

Arts & Living

5

tuftsdaily.com

Album Review

Quirky duets, horn funk make ‘Giant’ dynamic by

Matthew Welch

Daily Editorial Board

Any fan knows David Byrne has never been short of swagger, especially when he has some good col-

Love This Giant David Byrne and St. Vincent 4AD and Todo Mundo laborators and a nice horn section at his disposal. Thankfully, his latest album features both.

“Love This Giant” is the pop maestro’s most recent album, penned along with growing indie figure Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent.

The project began as a collaborative effort to write music for a charity concert three years ago, and has finally yielded one of the most interesting albums from either musician. St. Vincent and Byrne both decided to make the horn section the centerpiece of the album, bringing up the instruments’ usually supportive roles to the fore in an interesting and refreshing choice.

Fans of Byrne’s or St. Vincent’s music will know how tastefully they combine electronic and acoustic instrumentation, whether it’s minimal drum machine accents, synth bass lines or heavily processed guitar. But few artists have tried to fuse straight horn arrangements with the kind of rhythmic electronic work Byrne has made a mainstay of his recent

output. Thankfully, the combination works extremely well for most of the album.

The opening track, “Who,” blends a jazzy dialogue between a baritone sax and the rest of the section, all of which is layered over a mechanically strummed guitar and increasingly melodic vocals and delicate synth chords. It’s an unconventional approach to be sure, but the duo more than pulls it off. Byrne and Vincent trade vocal duties with separately written lyrics, giving rise to an ongoing dynamic. The interactive element is both unique and invigorating, and it puts a fire under both musicians. Throughout the album, the two dole out catchy melodies, jauntily tense arrangements and contrasting vocal interplay with bravado.

Whether it’s Fatboy Slim, Brian Eno or Ryuichi Sakamoto, Byrne has always found interesting musicians to collaborate with.

St. Vincent proves to be a choice pick, as her ethereal vocals and quirky lyrics work unexpectedly well alongside Byrne’s nerdy funk delivery. If Byrne’s vocals ever feel like they lack delicacy or St. Vincent’s breathy delivery needs a dash of grit, the other singer is quick to provide the necessary element. The give and take of the album, whether it’s lyrical, vocal or melodic, proves to be one of its best qualities.

While many may expect straight pop tunes in the vein of Byrne’s last

see GIANT, page 6

Wikimedia Commons

Byrne and St. Vincent blend grit and whimsy on their joint album.

Fall Ball better organized but with bland music by

Ryan Kollar

Contributing Writer

In contrast to the Fall Ball fiasco of 2011, Friday’s dance proved an administrative triumph. Music, however, was an unfortunate casualty of the event.

Last year, construction on the nowcompleted Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center prevented students from forming lines outside Fall Ball’s Gantcher Center entrance. Students were instead forced to enter through

a select number of doors at the front of Cousens Gymnasium. A vast bottleneck resulted when a swarm of 1500 students joined the queue in a thirtyminute span, according to Office for Campus Life (OCL) Assistant Director David McGraw. Small pockets of students began pushing people in the lines, in attempts to force others through the entrance, and several were removed from the event by the Tufts see BALL, page 6

TV Review

‘Broadway or Bust’ relies on stale reality TV tropes by

Alex Kaufman

In PBS’s highly anticipated three-part miniseries, “Broadway or Bust,” 60 high school thespians from around America Daily Editorial Board

Broadway or Bust Starring Kyra Leeds, Kaitlin Pagliaro, and Ryan Vander Wagen Airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on PBS

Clarissa sosin / the tufts Daily

Fall Ball ran smoothly, but the music left something to be desired.

come together in New York City. There, they participate in a theater boot camp.

Their time in New York City concludes with the National High School Musical Theater Awards, affectionately known as the Jimmy Awards.

Airing on Sunday nights at 8 p.m. from Sept. 9 through Sept. 23, “Broadway or Bust” shows the grueling set of challenges that contestants face on the show.

Of the 50,000 high school actors who responded to the casting call, only the top 60 make it through to the boot camp.

Once at boot camp, they are coached by Broadway professionals on all aspects of musical theater: scene acting, choreography and show tunes. Their training culminates in a performance at Broadway’s world-famous Minskoff Theater and a crowning of six finalists. The finalists sing solos to the judges in a closed room; afterward, winners are chosen.

Throughout the show, individuals are given a chance to show off their musical talents to viewers. Many are audibly and visibly nervous, which is unsurprising considering the young age of the competitors. This show shines when these superbly talented students open their

mouths and let the music do the talking.

What’s too bad about this miniseries is that the competitors are already learning the lingo – read: trite platitudes – and regurgitating it like Broadway robots with the hope of winning. Competitor after competitor reiterates versions of, “All the actors here are just so fantastic,” “All I want to do is be on Broadway” and “I’m so blessed to be here.” The competitors are indeed blessed, but the responses are tired and canned.

Most of these young thespians are simply hamming up the most screen time they will ever receive – a consequence of “American Idol” culture. These young adults won’t rest until they are the best. That is their modus operandi, and it is painfully evident.

Each actor eyes his or her competition, figuring out ways to improve, best the others and succeed. Sadly, the end goal of this game is not artistic satisfaction but vacuous commercial victory.

“Broadway or Bust” rarely delves into the contestants’ backstories, and viewers are deprived of the chance to connect deeply with them.

Of course, the show is marketing Broadway in all of its grandeur. In propagating the legend of Broadway, it reduces the contestants – who, in a better-produced show, could be fullfledged dramatic personalities – to empty and boring Broadway wannabes.

A few of the show’s actors overcame adversity to participate in this competition; however, their backstories are weakly fleshed-out at best. For example, viewers see brief glimpses of a girl who was homeless and found a life in acting and performing. There is also the story of a young man who faced discriminasee BROADWAY, page 6

The Tufts Daily

6

GrooveBoston disappoints at Friday’s Fall Ball

BALL

continued from page 5

University Police Department.

To make last year’s situation worse, the OCL had recently unveiled its online ticket distribution system, tuftstickets. com. One of the first events to make use of Tufts Tickets, Fall Ball was a victim of an inefficient barcode scanning system, McGraw told the Daily last fall. Unable to validate all tickets and confronted by a mob of eager students, last year’s event administrators chose to allow anyone to enter, provided they had a printed ticket, McGraw said.

This year admission to the dance was far more selective and organized. With last year’s Fall Ball under their belts and further experience with the barcode ticketing system, the OCL successfully limited entry to those with IDs that matched their ticket’s barcodes. This left students who had obtained tickets from disinterested friends without valid credentials to enter the dance. Event staff politely turned away students whose names were not on their official roster of registered attendees.

Despite these improvements, the experience inside Fall Ball lacked its usual excitement.

Once again, the university hired GrooveBoston, a company that markets itself as a “mobile college club.” The group generated an intricate visual atmosphere by using a variety of strobes and lasers and making full use of a mist machine. However, the music selection – arguably the most important aspect of

any dance — was not particularly appealing to the average Tufts student.

Last year’s Fall Ball saw the inclusion of pop divas, house music and just a taste of dubstep in the eclectic mix played over the course of the fourhour event. This year, however, GrooveBoston’s team presented the student body with few recognizable selections. They focused instead on obscure electronic genres and remixes with limited melodic or lyrical resemblance to their mainstream counterparts. A small technical error further dampened the mood when the lights flicked on at the start of the second DJ’s set. After all, it is one thing to boogie in the privacy of darkness; it is quite another to face your dance partner under the glare of fluorescent gym lights. GrooveBoston performed wonderfully when they helped organize last year’s Winter Bash, so their lackluster show was particularly disappointing.

Overall, Fall Ball was an unequivocal success for those involved in planning and implementing the event. While the student experience would have been augmented by a GrooveBoston tour more reminiscent of last year’s event, the sweaty, humid mess inside Gantcher last Friday evening proved that the “Visceral Tour” was, at the very least, appropriately named. Fall Ball might not be the most culturally thrilling experience, but its coordinators can always depend on a generous student turnout looking for some oncampus fun.

Arts & Living

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

‘Love This Giant’ pairs two talents beautifully

GIANT

continued from page 5

collaborative album, his and Eno’s “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” (2008), “Love This Giant” has a lot more going on. The horn arrangements lend plenty of variety to the album, ranging from classically inflected atmospherics in “Dinner for Two” to the funeral dirge intro of “Outside of Space and Time” to the intricate trumpet lines in the salsa-tinged “The One Who Broke Your Heart. Byrne’s penchant for experimenting with different kinds of ethnic music, while nowhere near as evident in some of his past solo work, sneaks its way into “Love This Giant,” much to its benefit.

That said, the album still has some weaker tracks. As anyone would expect from a collaboration between Byrne and St. Vincent, there can be some strange musical choices that won’t appeal to everybody. The burping synths and nasally vocals of “I Should Watch TV” may catch a few off-guard, but the timely entrance of quickly interlacing sax lines and trumpet flourishes soon fleshes out the track beyond its initial stiltedness.

Even the album’s weaker moments have their virtues.

Listening to St. Vincent and Byrne

Wikimedia

“Love This Giant” isn’t perfect, but it is one of the most interesting albums either Byrne or St. Vincent has produced. work their way out of their more whimsical musical choices makes the album all the more interesting, and creates just enough

demand from the listener to keep him or her from resting on the sheer catchiness of Byrne and St. Vincent’s musical tastes.

‘Broadway Bust’ too much of a bust BROADWAY

continued from page 5

tion in high school and found relief and escape in musicals – but, disappointingly, these introspective flashbacks rarely last longer than 30 seconds.

In one instance, Michael Feinstein, a famed Broadway singer, archivist and conductor of the Pasedena Pops, explains

to a young performer that he needs to honor the music the way it’s written. Doing so, he explains, will give the music the credit it’s due while making the best of the performer’s talent.

“You’re shortchanging yourself if you don’t go a step higher,” he says.

“Broadway or Bust” could have capitalized on the inter-

THE SWEDISH PROGRAM TUFTS UNIVERSITY 5.93" X 7"

actions between young and old, amateur and professional.

Instead, the show sells itself short as it employs the same overdone and worn-out trope pioneered by “American Idol.”

For now, thespians hoping for a worthwhile, televised representation of the theatrical world will unfortunately need to keep looking.

STUDY ABROAD IN ENGLISH

Yes, Stockholm Come to an Informational Meeting: September 21, 2012 Dowling Hall, Room 745A 3 PM

The Swedish Program info@swedishprogram.org

www.swedishprogram.org

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Tufts Daily

Advertisement

7

The Tufts Daily

8

THE TUFTS DAILY Rebecca K. Santiago Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Ben Kochman Falcon Reese Managing Editors Jenna Buckle Executive News Editor Shana Friedman News Editors Craig Frucht Lizz Grainger Stephanie Haven Amelie Hecht Daphne Kolios Patrick McGrath Laina Piera Corinne Segal Martha Shanahan Melissa Wang Jenny White Sharon Lam Assistant News Editors Menghan Liu Melissa Mandelbaum Audrey Michael James Pouliot Josh Weiner Hannah Fingerhut Executive Features Editor Jon Cheng Features Editors Amelia Quinn Derek Schlom Lily Sieradzki Assistant Features Editors Emily Bartlett Alexandria Chu Jacob Passy

Editorial | Op-Ed

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Editorial

Provost Harris’ past is promising for the Hill

The start of this semester marks the end of a years-long effort to bring an Africana Studies program to fruition. Now offering students the chance to major and minor in the discipline, the program represents the university’s solidified commitment to not only bringing a diversity of voices to the Hill, but also a diversity of academic offerings that validate and give background to those voices. With this in mind, the decision to bring David Harris, the new university provost and senior vice president, to Tufts is a particularly apt and welcome choice given his background in promoting diversity on college campuses.

Diversity does not happen naturally.

Traditional academic institutions are not structured to benefit marginalized groups and highlight their stories, and so it is a university’s responsibility to develop academic departments that allow students to learn about narratives

that differ from and challenge the traditional educational frameworks.

Harris’ record demonstrates a commitment to this responsibility. While the Vice Provost for Social Sciences at Cornell University, he chaired a working group that looked at key issues in diversity on college campuses and then analyzed a range of programs that addressed those issues. The group detailed why those programs were compelling initiatives for colleges to implement, and then hosted a conference at which they shared their findings in an attempt to bring similar programming to Cornell.

Harris has a unique and multifaceted take on how he approaches issues of diversity, saying that he thinks about it in four dimensions: composition, engagement, inclusivity and achievement. By bringing this “breadth-and-depth” perspective to Tufts, Harris will challenge and encourage

the university’s developing programming to grow in new directions.

As provost, Harris says that he sees it as one of his primary responsibilities to ensure that students’ learning opportunities are diverse, and that his work in interdisciplinary education is something he undertakes because “it’s required to answer critical questions you want to answer.”

Tufts has finally taken a step forward in creating a diverse learning environment with the implementation of the new Africana studies program — hopefully the first step of many. Those next steps will only be that much easier to take with David Harris’ arrival on the Hill. The melding of Tufts’ efforts to move forward and Harris’ distinctive perspectives on diversity may, with time, yield further progress in an area where it is long overdue.

Keran Chen

Melissa MacEwen Executive Arts Editor Kate Griffiths Arts Editors Alex Hanno Joe Stile Matthew Welch Alex Kaufman Assistant Arts Editors Dan O’Leary Caroline Welch Gerardo Zampaglione Jonathan Green Bhushan Deshpande David Kellogg Seth Teleky Yiota Kastritis Louie Zong Jyot Singh

Executive Op-Ed Editor Op-Ed Editors

Cartoonists Editorialists

David McIntyre Executive Sports Editor Aaron Leibowitz Sports Editors Ethan Sturm Kate Klots Zachary Kliger Alex Baudoin Jake Indursky Assistant Sports Editors Andy Wong Marcus Budline

Off the Hill | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Debunking the middle class by

Virginia Bledsoe Caroline Gelling Oliver Porter Ashley Seenauth Kyra Sturgill William Butt Lane Florsheim Meagan Maher Misako Ono Gabriela Ros Clarissa Sosin Andrew Schneer

Executive Photo Editor Photo Editors

Assistant Photo Editors

Staff Photographers

Jodi Bosin New Media Executive Editors Brionna Jimerson Justin McCallum Brett Yarnell New Media Photo Editor

PRODUCTION Alyssa Kutner

Production Director Elliot Philips Executive Layout Editor Jen Betts Layout Editors Matthew Cardarelli Gabrielle Cella Sarah Davis Shoshanna Kahne Sarah Kester Adrian Lo Danny MacDonald Reid Spagna Nina Goldman Executive Copy Editors Drew Lewis Lauren Greenberg Copy Editors Adrienne Lange Patrick McGrath Lauren Schonberger

George Brown Executive Online Editor Darcy Mann Online Editors Daniel Kotin Executive Technical Manager

BUSINESS Christine Busaba Executive Business Director Simmone Seymour Advertising Director Li Liang Receivables Manager Shang Ming Wu Sales Director

P.O. Box 53018, Medford, MA 02155 617 627 3090 FAX 617 627 3910 daily@tuftsdaily.com

Keith Yost The Tech

Game theory suggests that in the final sum of things, Democratic politics is mostly about wooing the median voter, i.e. the individual or demographic whose inclusion will bring your coalition to 50.1 percent of the vote. Thus it comes as no surprise that in America, where the median voter is a middle-class voter, election-year rhetoric tends to focus on fetishizing those of moderate income.

2012 is no exception. If you watched the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, you probably heard Joe Biden utter these lines: “Barack and I are about growing this economy from the middle out When you do it that way, everybody does well because the middle class have money in their pockets. They can go out and purchase things that make the economy grow — and not only is sort of the American way, it’s also economically the best way to grow a country.”

The cult of the middle class doesn’t just count Democrats as members. I’m sure in the weeks to come, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will wax rhapsodically about whatever semiprofessionals and middle managers they can claim familial relations with, as much as Biden deployed stories of his used-car salesman father to heap more worship on Middle America. But Biden’s convention appearance added a new and dangerous element to the middle-class mythology that deserves a thorough and immediate debunking.

Specifically, Biden put forward a twopart theory — first, that giving more money to the middle class was the best way to raise consumption, and second, that increasing consumption was the key to growing an economy.

The first part of Biden’s claim is false as a matter of record. The U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows that it is the poor, not the middle class, who save the least and consume the greatest fraction of their income. If raising consumption is the goal of economic policy, as is often the case in Keynesian stimulus, aiming transfer payments at the middle class is not the best approach.

The Tufts Daily is a nonprofit, independent newspaper, published Monday through Friday during the academic year, and distributed free to the Tufts community. EDITORIAL POLICY Editorials represent the position of The Tufts Daily. Individual editors are not necessarily responsible for, or in agreement with, the policies and editorials of The Tufts Daily. The content of letters, advertisements, signed columns, cartoons and graphics does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Tufts Daily editorial board.

And looking at the data, it isn’t even the case that targeting economic stimulus toward the middle class would perform much better than spreading it across America equally.

In the words of Paul Krugman, “There’s no obvious reason why consumer demand can’t be sustained by the spending of the upper class — $200 dinners and luxury hotels create jobs, the same way that fast food dinners and Motel 6s do.”

The second part of Biden’s claim confuses a short-term economic phenomenon, increasing consumption in a recession to combat the paradox of thrift, for a long-term formula for economic growth. Were it the case that economic growth hinged on low savings rates and large middle classes, it’s doubtful that China’s growth rate over the past two decades would have so greatly outpaced the United States’.

The generous interpretation of Biden is that he meant his comments only as a matter of short-term policy, a way to recover from shortfalls in aggregate demand and no more.

But a more realistic reading is that he believes a permanent policy of taxing the rich to give to the middle class is a viable method for increasing economic growth, merely on the basis that the middle class consumes more and saves less as a fraction of its total income.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The simple way to think of things is this: in any given year, society has a limited pool of resources available to it. These resources include everything from physical and human capital (factories, equipment, education), to natural resources (iron ore, oil, natural gas), to the man-hours of our laborers. And faced with this scarcity, society is forced to choose what fraction of its resources to put toward the production of consumer goods, and what fraction will be put toward increasing its stock of resources in the next year.

As the national savings rate increases, more of our resources are directed toward building factories, educating students and otherwise improving our capacity to produce, but at the expense of present consumption.

When the savings rate declines, the opposite happens: There is more to enjoy in the immediate present, but next year — because less savings meant fewer resources given to students, construction companies and the

like — there will be fewer college graduates, factories and so on.

If we saved all of our income, we’d have the largest possible economy, but we’d never be spending any of it on ourselves — we would build more and more factories and train more and more workers until we got to the point we were only building new factories at the rate the existing ones depreciated, only educating the next generation fast enough to replace those departing. And if we saved none of our income (which is roughly what has happened over the past decade), we would spend everything on ourselves, but not have much to spend. The ideal savings rate, the so-called “Golden Rule Savings Rate” where steady-state consumption is maximized, lies somewhere in the middle.

Some economic growth comes naturally.

As the population grows, so does our supply of labor. As technology improves, so does the rate at which we convert our available resources into goods. But much of economic growth is due to changes in savings rates, the transition from a low-savings equilibrium to a high-savings equilibrium.

Though much credit should be given to improving institutions and diffusion of technology, most of today’s economic success stories from the developing world can be explained as a simple matter of capital formation — as they devoted more and more of what they had toward the future, the future grew brighter.

There’s no reason the United States can’t enjoy this same success story. It is universally recognized that our savings rate is below the golden rule rate. And so, while in the short run we may suffer from a paradox of thrift, in the long run we suffer from a paradox of extravagance — the more we try to raise our consumption, the lower our total consumption is.

For a Democrat like Joe Biden, who wishes to increase government consumption, raise taxes on private saving and transfer wealth from those who would save to those who would continue our long spending binge, it would be convenient if voters bought his notion that these policies were a path to prosperity. For the middle class voter hoping to actually experience some prosperity, it would be better if they ignored Joe Biden.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letters must be submitted by 2 p.m. and should be handed into the Daily office or sent to letters@tuftsdaily.com.

All letters must be word processed and include the writer’s name and telephone number. There is a 450-word limit and letters must be verified.

The editors reserve the right to edit letters for clarity, space and length.

ADVERTISING POLICY All advertising copy is subject to the approval of the Editorin-Chief, Executive Board and Executive Business Director. A publication schedule and rate card are available upon request.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Tufts Daily

9

Op-Ed

Op-Ed

Polyphasic sleep cuts shut-eye hours in half

by Joshua

Liebow-Feeser

Would you like to live longer? Longer by, say, 25 percent? Since Aug. 17, my life has been 25 percent longer than normal. I’ve experienced in three-and-a-half weeks what normally one would experience in four and a half. Since Aug. 17, I’ve been sleeping four hours every day.

Not every night, but, in fact, four hours spread out in small chunks throughout the 24-hour day.

This is known as polyphasic sleep ­— as opposed to traditional monophasic sleep. It is predicated on the idea that it is possible to train -- my roommate, also on the schedule, prefers the word “extort” ­— one’s body to fall into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep much more quickly than normal. Studies have shown that, while most people tend to sleep upwards of seven hours per night, the body only gets about two hours of REM in that time.

Further, REM is thought to be the “key” to sleep — the rest is just a journey to REM. Thus, by extorting the body into falling into REM, one can achieve a full two hours of REM in a much shorter sleep span.

The “original” schedule, dubbed the “Uberman” by its creator, PureDoxy — a mononym she uses consistently in publication — consists of one 20-minute nap every four hours for a total of two hours of sleep every day. The Uberman, however, is very rigid. Oversleeping, undersleeping or sleeping at the wrong time by even a margin of a few minutes can cause temporary exhaustion, and missing a nap entirely is virtually out of the question.

It was because of these downsides that PureDoxy created the “Everyman” schedule. It involves more sleep — four hours daily — but is much more forgiving. Oversleeping, under-sleeping and moving naps are much more tolerated. In fact, missing a nap entirely may result in only mild drowsiness until the next nap.

What would you do with four hours of extra awake time per day? I’ve made a significant dent in my movie bucket list, and, once the year gets into full swing, I’ll use it to give myself more free time to work on personal projects. Perhaps the most important improvement — and credit goes to my roommate for being the first to point this out to me — is that my schedule can now consist of a full class workload, time for significantly timeconsuming hobby projects and relaxation, all the while leaving me feeling rested and awake.

Mind you, achieving this schedule does

orenzebest via flickr creative commons

not happen overnight. As I mentioned, my roommate refers to the transition process as extortion. In order to convince your body to live with polyphasic sleep, you must first convince it that it can’t live without it. This is done by jumping in cold turkey, which results in immediate and severe sleep deprivation.

Transitioning to the Everyman typically begins with two weeks of complete and total exhaustion punctuated by bouts of microsleep — literally falling asleep standing up. Additionally, negative psychological side effects set in. For me, hours were spent during these first two weeks regretting my decision to go

polyphasic and convincing myself that it would never work; brains are useful, powerful organs which can be unfortunately difficult to bend to one’s will.

Ultimately, this sleep deprivation convinces the body that if it wants to get its full two hours of REM, it had better use what sleeping time it’s being given.

And, in my case, my body begrudgingly learned this lesson.

For those interested in pursuing a polyphasic sleep schedule — and, indeed, Uberman and Everyman are not the only two that exist — feel free to contact me. Additionally, I highly recommend PureDoxy’s authoritative book on the

subject, “Ubersleep: Using Polyphasic Sleep Schedules to Cut your Sleep Time

by Half (or more!) and Do All Kinds of Interesting Things to your Life.” It’s a short — under 60 pages — and whimsical read, and can be read as a reference rather than a novel.

Please note that none of this is proven, or even studied, science. It is, however, the anecdotal experience of myself, my roommate, PureDoxy and many polyphasic adherents worldwide.

Joshua Liebow-Feeser is a sophomore majoring in computer science.

Off the Hill | Dartmouth College

by Jonathan

Pedde

The Dartmouth

Last month, the national unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent. Given that the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, the economy must have improved significantly over the last three years, right?

Actually, no. In many ways, the economy has barely improved, if at all. Put simply, the economy sucks.

Looking at the unemployment rate in isolation can be misleading. Over the last four years, many unemployed workers have grown discouraged and simply stopped looking for work. These people are no longer counted as part of the labor force or as “unemployed.”

In January 2008, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that there would be 5 to 6 million more individuals in the labor force today than is actually the case. If we calculate a “true” unemployment rate that includes these discouraged job-seekers, the unemployment rate surpassed 11 percent in fall 2009 and has remained between 11 and 12 percent ever since. Thus, contrary to what the official unemployment rate

The economy still sucks

seems to indicate, the job market has not substantially improved over the last three years.

Alternatively, consider the percentage of working-age Americans who are actually working. The employment-topopulation ratio fell from 62.7 percent when the recession started in December 2007 to 59.4 percent when the recession ended in June 2009. It is now 58.3 percent.

In other words, the economy hasn’t even been creating enough jobs to keep up with population growth, let alone enough jobs to start reducing unemployment in any meaningful way.

But unemployment is not the only harm caused by the economic malaise — the crisis has also reduced Americans’ incomes. From 1965 to 2007, the United States’ real gross domestic product grew at an average rate of 3 percent per year. After every recession since the end of World War II, GDP grew faster than the previous trend rates, as GDP converged to its previous trend. However, since the end of the most recent recession, GDP growth has averaged only 2.4 percent per year. Thus, the average Americans’

income is now about 14.5 percent lower than it would be if GDP had converged with its previous trend over the last three years.

When confronted with these facts, many people will attempt to excuse this abysmal economic performance in one of two ways. First, the recession was deeper than was initially believed in early 2009; second, the recession was due to a financial crisis.

However, neither of these facts implies that we should expect such a disappointing recovery. Over the last two centuries, the American economic record has been quite consistent — the deeper the recession, the faster the recovery.

Since GDP dropped during the recession by more than was initially estimated, we should be seeing faster than expected economic growth now, not slower. Likewise, recent economic research seems to indicate that, while recessions after financial crises have usually been deeper than average, the recoveries have also usually been quicker than average. In other words, even though the most recent recession was preceded by a financial crisis, one

could still have reasonably expected in early 2009 that a deeper-than-usual recession would then be followed by faster-than-usual economic growth during the recovery. In fact, the Great Depression and the current economic malaise are the two major exceptions to this “deeper recession, faster recovery” rule of thumb. As a result, some economists have hypothesized that sclerotic recoveries are not caused by financial crises per se, but rather by bad government policies that have been adopted in the wake of certain financial crises.

Regardless, the simple fact is that the economy sucks, and this is really bad news for students like you and me who will be looking for a job either this year or sometime over the next couple of years. If you, like me, do not wish to become a newly unemployed college graduate any time soon, then you will likely have to spend more time and effort looking for a job than would have been the case even five or six years ago.

So, don’t let an OK-looking unemployment rate fool you. Unless something changes soon, the economy will still suck by the time I graduate.

Op-ed Policy The Op-Ed section of The Tufts Daily, an open forum for campus editorial commentary, is printed Monday through Thursday. The Daily welcomes submissions from all members of the Tufts community; the opinions expressed in the Op-Ed section do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Daily itself. Opinion articles on campus, national and international issues should be 600 to 1,200 words in length. Op-Ed cartoons are also welcomed for the Campus Canvas feature. All material is subject to editorial discretion and is not guaranteed to appear in the Daily. All material should be submitted to oped@tuftsdaily.com no later than noon on the day prior to the desired day of publication; authors must submit their telephone numbers and day-of availability for editing questions. Submissions may not be published elsewhere prior to their appearance in the Daily, including but not limited to other on- and off-campus newspapers, magazines, blogs and online news websites, as well as Facebook. Republishing of the same piece in a different source is permissible as long as the Daily is credited with originally running the article.

The Tufts Daily

10

Comics

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Doonesbury

Crossword

by

Garry Trudeau

Non Sequitur

Monday’s Solution

Married to the Sea

www.marriedtothesea.com

SUDOKU Level: First time trying Michelle Obama’s workout routine

Late Night at the Daily

Monday’s Solution

Kochman: “I regret so many things... your boyfriend drank beer out of my stomach.”

Want more late-night laughs?

Follow us on Twitter at @LateNiteAtDaily

Please recycle this Daily.

by

Wiley

The Tufts Daily

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 Football

Civetti looking to build a winner, one day, one practice at a time by

Aaron Leibowitz

Daily Editorial Board

Ask Jay Civetti about the current state of the Tufts football program, and he’ll tell you that 20-plus players made the dean’s list last semester and over 60 percent had at least a 3.0 GPA. He’ll tell you about their involvement in the community, from painting a local Jumpstart preschool to “drafting” 8-year-old cancer patient Riley Roman.

And, oh yeah, his team is improving on the football field every week.

In ten days, when Civetti marches onto Zimman Field to begin his second season as Tufts’ head coach with a game against Wesleyan, he will carry with him the burden of a program that is winless since Sept. 25, 2011. And yet, for Civetti, overcoming that obstacle is just the first step.

Ultimately, the goal is not to win one game, or two, or three. The goal is to turn Tufts football into a winner – in the community and classroom as well as on the field.

“This is a full deal,” Civetti said. “To be able to get all three of those phases together takes time, and it takes the right people being in the right place. It takes a general understanding and a well-structured plan to get there.”

The ’85 Bears weren’t built overnight, and the 2012 Jumbos probably won’t go from 0-8 to 8-0. But with the right building blocks in place – dedicated players, smart coaches, a strong work ethic and first-rate facilities – victories should follow.

That’s the blueprint Civetti learned from coach Tom O’Brien at Boston College and at North Carolina State, and it’s what he believes will help Tufts football emerge from one of its darkest moments.

“I think when you look at the plan, we’re right where we should be, we’re headed in the right direction,” Civetti said. “Last year was disappointing, but it wasn’t discouraging. Guys that haven’t won a lot of games aren’t walking around with their heads down and feeling sorry for themselves.

They want to be better, and they want to make this program better.”

To do that, the players are focused on the present.

“The last three seasons – we can’t change anything about that,” senior tri-captain offensive lineman Andrew Rayner said. “What we can do is learn from it, and our first goal this season is to beat Bowdoin [in a scrimmage]

on Friday. The next goal will be to beat Wesleyan. But right now we’re taking it one game at a time, one goal at a time.”

The roster has not yet been finalized, but the team is currently carrying 26 freshmen and 20 sophomores – not to mention a new offensive coordinator, three new assistant coaches and three candidates to become the new starting quarterback. With so much to learn and so little time, the goal in the preseason has been to hammer home the basics and to ensure that as many players as possible are game-ready.

“Our goals for the preseason have been to be physically and mentally tough, to be as fundamentally sound as we can be and play smart football,” Civetti said. “I think where we will struggle is depth. At schools that have established themselves as successful programs, that depth is there. If someone goes down, you’ve got a guy behind him with enough snaps, or you’ve got someone that, skill-wise, can step in.”

A big part of the preseason process has been learning new offensive coordinator Frank Hauser’s system. At its core, Hauser’s offense will not be much different than last year’s, split fairly evenly between the pass and the run. Still, there is a learning curve.

“It’s not drastically different,” senior tri-captain wideout Dylan Haas said. “It’s just that calls are different, plays are different – from what positions are called to how the snap count works to how you call plays. Right away, everyone including all the upperclassmen are learning these things, and they’re going out on the field thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ It makes it a little bit harder to be in the mindset to fully execute your play.

“There was that period of time, but I think we definitely are coming out of that stage.”

The first true test of what the Jumbos have soaked up will come in Friday’s scrimmage at home against the Polar Bears, who trounced the Jumbos in Week 3 last year, 27-6. The game won’t count in the standings, but it will offer an opportunity for the Jumbos to prove they can go toe-to-toe with the rest of the NESCAC. “We definitely want to make a statement to the rest of the league on both sides of the ball,” Haas said. “We want to beat them physically and make sure that they don’t want to play us in a few weeks.”

11

Sports Golf

Tufts starts season with strong showing at Bowdoin Invitational The golf team competed in its first tournament of the fall season at the Bowdoin Invitational this past weekend, finishing seventh in a 10-team field.

The tournament, won by NESCAC rival Williams College, was held a few minutes west of the Bowdoin campus at Brunswick Golf Club. Sophomore co-captain Alex Zorniger, classmate John Wawer and the freshman trio Jay Wong, Brendan Koh and Nick Dorian represented Tufts at the tournament.

Williams, last year’s second placed finisher in the NESCAC, ultimately won the tournament with a total of 606 strokes However, the Tufts squad made impressive strides, especially considering the youthfulness of the quintet. Wong led the squad with a team-best 161-stroke performance in his first-ever collegiate tournament, tying him for 21st overall.

Meanwhile, Dorian, Wawer, Koh and Zorniger posted weekend scores of 163, 166, 169 and 174 respectively. In tournament play, the highest score of each day is thrown out, and excluding Zorniger’s 90 from day one and 84 from day two, the Jumbos finished with a total of 659 strokes, 53 strokes behind the eventual champion Ephs.

“We sent a young squad out this weekend, and for a bunch of these guys it was their first college tournament,” senior co-captain Mike McCarthy said. “While we were disappointed with a 341 on Saturday, being able to bounce back and have all five guys shoot lower on Sunday shows a lot of tenacity that we will be hoping to build on over the next few weekends.”

While the final result was not what the team was hoping for,

Tufts showed plenty of promise over the weekend.

The Jumbos managed to best fellow NESCAC contender Bates by six strokes, a team they finished behind in last year’s season-opening invitational. From Saturday to Sunday, the team’s score improved by 23 strokes, inching them ahead of the Bobcats.

The explanation for the Jumbos’ dramatically different performances on Saturday and Sunday may well be a simple case of nerves.

McCarthy alluded to the team’s youth, and in its opening weekend, three of the Jumbos’ five golfers were playing at the collegiate level for the first time.

“We are still in the middle of tryouts,” McCarthy said. “We played on Thursday and Friday, and those with the best scores are who played this weekend.”

A second explanation for the massive improvement in scores between Saturday and Sunday could have been the weather conditions, which improved drastically over the course of the weekend.

“I felt like I was across the pond in Ireland for the first round, with the wind blowing the ball all over the place,” Zorniger said of the conditions at the start on Saturday.

The team will most likely take eight to ten players this season, and coach Bob Sheldon will determine who plays in the weekend tournaments based on his golfers’ performances in the days leading up to tournaments.

Next weekend, the Jumbos will attend the Duke Nelson Invitational at Ralph Myhre Golf Course in Middlebury, Vt., an event which is sure to contain more stiff competition and help the coaching staff narrow down the roster as the season gets into high gear.

— by GJ Vitale

Editors' Challenge | Week 2 Guten tag, sports fans! All hail Kaiser Ben “Schnitzel” Kochman – or at least that’s what he would like us to do. To everyone’s shock and dismay, it is the man recently returned from Germany who ends the week tied atop the leaderboard after Week 1.

Accordingly, he’s taken full control and instituted a cruel “German-only” policy in the sports section, but since none of us (including him) speak German, we’re forced to use German words that have made their way into English.

Even though Andy “Kindergarten” Wong is just entering elementary school, he still managed to tie the Kaiser with an 11-5 mark last week. However, he is unable to celebrate his youthful achievements, as he has been forced to remain humble under the rule of Herr Kochman.

Next comes a quartet of sportswriters who ate their sauerkraut and strudel and ended up all finishing 10-6. Ethan “Hamburger” Sturm, Aaron “Lager” Leibowitz, Alex “Bundt Cake” Baudoin and Marcus “Frankfurter” Budline all love to eat, and with Kaiser Kochman bringing back plenty of German delicacies from his trip, there’s enough food to feed the section until Oktoberfest.

Unfortunately, like all tyrannical societies, Kochman’s Germany is hierachical, with him at the top and the unlucky pickers at the bottom. David “Volkswagen” McIntyre and Zachey “Kitsch” Kliger both came in at 9-7, showing that they’re not the best but not the worst Ben 11-5 OVERALL RECORD 11-5 LAST WEEK Green Bay Chicago at Green Bay Buffalo Kansas City at Buffalo Cincinnati Cleveland at Cincinnati Minnesota at Indianapolis Indianapolis New Orleans at Carolina New Orleans Houston Houston at Jacksonville Oakland Oakland at Miami Arizona at New England New England NY Giants Tampa Bay at NY Giants Baltimore Balitmore at Philadelphia Washington at St. Louis Washington Dallas Dallas at Seattle NY Jets NY Jets at Pittsburgh San Diego Tennessee at San Diego Detroit at San Francisco San Francisco Atlanta Denver at Atlanta

either. Both will looking to climb up the rungs of society next week and possibly overthrow the despotic reign of the Kaiser.

Rounding out the normal pickers are Jake “Poltergeist” Indursky and Kate “Nein!” Klots who are currently the peasants of society with their 8-8 first weeks. Although there’s plenty of time to rise in social standing, they’ve been temporarily exiled to the Eastern Europe of the Daily – stats and schedule.

In some respects, it might not be surprising that Kate is down in last place, as she’s the descendant of Claire “Fraulein” Kemp, who was infamous in Sports Germany for her blonde-haired bad picking ways. It was even rumored amongst the sports section that Claire resorted to randomly selecting her picks – a heinous fate that hopefully will not befall her young protege.

Finally, guest picking this week is the foreign minister from the faraway land known as the “Washington Post,” Alex “Winston Churchill” Prewitt, the elder statesman of the group. Although he’s moved on to bigger and better things, he never forgets the plight of the oppressed and has come back once again to save the sports editors from the evil fate of Kochman’s iron grip. Hopefully, his picks will provide divine inspiration to the sports staff to revolt against Ben’s regime, which shouldn’t be too hard, because he doesn’t even work for the sports section.

Aaron Andy Ethan Alex B. Marcus David Zachey Jake Kate GUEST 10-6 11-5 10-6 10-6 10-6 9-7 9-7 8-8 8-8 Alex Prewitt 10-6 11-5 10-6 10-6 10-6 9-7 9-7 8-8 8-8 Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Green Bay Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Kansas City Buffalo Kansas City Buffalo Kansas City Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Cincinnati Indianapolis Indianapolis Indianapolis Minnesota Minnesota Indianapolis Indianapolis Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota New Orleans New Orleans New Orleans New Orleans Carolina Carolina New Orleans Carolina New Orleans New Orleans Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Houston Oakland Oakland Oakland Oakland Oakland Oakland Miami Oakland Oakland Oakland New England New England New England New England New England New England New England New England New England New England NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants Tampa Bay NY Giants NY Giants NY Giants Tampa Bay NY Giants NY Giants Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Philadelphia Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington Washington St. Louis Washington Washington Dallas Dallas Seattle Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Pittsburgh NY Jets Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Pittsburgh NY Jets NY Jets San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Diego San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco San Francisco Denver Denver Atlanta Denver Atlanta Denver Denver Denver Atlanta Atlanta

Sports

12

INSIDE Golf 11 Football 11

tuftsdaily.com

Sailing

Sailing teams coast over weekend with strong results Jumbos place fifth in Harry Anderson Trophy by

Andy Wong

Daily Editorial Board

With the start of the 2012-2013 fall season officially behind them, the co-ed and women’s sailing teams have proven themselves with some satisfying results over the weekend, with the teams split up and participating in a whopping eight regattas all across New England.

The eleventh-ranked co-ed sailing team started the season focused on the Harry Anderson Trophy hosted by Yale. Although every team had their eyes set on doing well, it was the waves – reaching up to eight feet high at times – that stole the show.

“They probably sailed in the largest waves that they will see in their entire time in college,” coach Ken Legler said.

Senior skipper Natalie Salk and senior crew Amelia Quinn, who is also a Features editor for the Daily, led the team’s A-division this weekend at the Harry Anderson, contributing 53 points total and finished seventh in their division. The highlight of their weekend was a runnerup finish in their second race.

Senior skipper William Hutchings, along with junior crew Kathleen Kwasniak, gave Tufts an extra push with top-5 finishes in five of their eight races, tying Harvard with 44 points total in the B division, although a head-to-head tiebreaker bumped Tufts down to fourth in the division.

Overall, facing tight competition, Tufts managed fifth place in the 17team race with 97 points total, only three behind fourth place’s Roger

Williams University and merely five ahead of sixth-place St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The hosts came away with the victory, as Yale put on impressive performances in the rough seas, especially in the B division, and were nine points ahead of second-placed Dartmouth with 62 points total.

Meanwhile, two other co-ed teams were competing at the Penobscot Bay Open and the Philip Harmon Cup, both hosted at the Maine Maritime Academy. Unlike at the Harry Anderson, the sailing conditions were pristine, and at both events the Jumbos crushed their competition, coming in second and first place respectively.

At the Penobscot Bay Open, sophomores Alejandro RuizRamon and Sam Madden led the A-division, while junior Julie Pringle and sophomore Duncan Swain headed the B-division. Together, they totaled 112 points – 52 for the A, 60 for the B. The tally was just 8 points shy of first but enough to distance themselves from the rest of the pack. Juniors William Haeger, Paula Grasberger, David Liebenberg and sophomore James Downer led the co-ed team at the Harmon cup, placing first in five out of six of their races for first place overall in the eight-team mini-event.

“We’re really happy with how this weekend went,” Coach Legler said.

“I think we did pretty well overall. We’re pretty happy with how we did,” Liebenberg added. “We could have won and not felt like we sailed well, but we were happy with how we sailed. It was gorgeous sailing [in Maine].”

Courtesy Ken Legler

The sailing teams posted strong showings over the weekend, including a fifth-place finish at the Harry Anderson Trophy at Yale, an event that was marred by eight-foot waves.

The women’s team, meanwhile, opened their season with the Toni Deutsch ‘58 Regatta hosted at MIT this past Saturday and Sunday. Led by their A division’s senior skipper Mariel Marchand and junior crew Sara Makaretz, both of whom are normally the B-division sailors, the Jumbos jumped to fourth-place in their division with multiple high finishes across the 14-race division.

“Mariel is normally our B-skipper,

but because our A-skipper was sailing in the [Harry Anderson Trophy], she sailed A-division and did really well,” Legler said. “Mariel and Sara were both great.”

Heading the B division were the sophomore pair of Kate Levinson and Katrina Miaoulis, who finished ninth in their division but capped off their races with a second- and third-place finish in each of their last two races. Overall, the A-division

scored 70 points and the B-division 115 for a total of 185, finishing sixth overall in the 15-team event.

“Our performances bode well for next weekend,” Legler added.

Tufts returns to the water this weekend, with a pair of regattas that include the Hatch Brown Trophy co-hosted by MIT and Boston University for the co-ed team and the Ms. Hurst Bowl at Dartmouth for the women’s team.

Men’s Soccer

Tufts downs Plymouth State, improves to 2-0-0 on season Santos, Hoppenot score in 3-0 victory over Panthers by

Matt Berger

Senior Staff Writer

The mens soccer team struck early and never looked back, beating Plymouth St. 3-0 in its MEN’S SOCCER (2-0-0 Overall, 1-0-0 NESCAC) Kraft Field, Tuesday Plymouth St. Tufts

0 2

0 1

— ---

ing a penalty kick by beating his defender and getting tripped in the box. Santos stepped up to the spot and calmly beat Ohlsson once again to double Tufts’ advantage heading into halftime.

It was a dream start for Tufts, which was sloppy early on against Middlebury in their first match, generating only

two first-half shots. This time, however, Tufts was dominant from the very beginning, giving Shapiro the opportunity to play a slew of non-starters in the second half.

“The goal is to get to that two-goal cushion early and give yourself a chance to get some new players a rep and get a look

at as many guys as you can,” Shapiro said.

Tufts essentially sealed the victory in the 54th minute when sophomore forward Maxime Hoppenot found a ball at his feet in the box and beat Ohlsson to his right with a low shot. Sophomore defender Sam Williams kept the play alive with

0 3

first non-conference match of the season. With the win, Tufts is off to a perfect 2-0-0 start but will be tested this weekend in a road match against perennial NESCAC powerhouse Wesleyan.

Tufts’ first goal was created by sophomore midfielders Kyle Volpe and Gus Santos, who linked up several times for scores as freshmen last season.

Volpe, playing in the center of the midfield, found Santos, who had gotten past his defender on the left wing. After corralling the pass, Santos, the reigning NESCAC Rookie of the Year, finished the breakaway with a low shot to the right corner to beat Panthers senior goalkeeper Bjorn Ohlsson and give Tufts the lead in the 18th minute.

“We started better,” coach Josh Shapiro said. “I think the energy was a little bit higher, and I thought our urgency to get the ball moving and spread them out was better in this match.”

In the 38th minute, Santos struck again, this time after earn-

Oliver Porter / the Tufts Daily

The men’s soccer team continued its strong early season start, using two goals from sophomore forward Gus Santos to down Plymouth State 3-0.

a header at the top of the box and was credited with the assist.

At that point, Shapiro emptied his bench, bringing on a total of eight substitutes throughout the match. Five freshmen saw game action, including defender Connor Schaible and midfielder Connor Brown, both of whom made their starting debuts for the Jumbos. Schaible and Brown are part of a freshman class that lacks the star power of last year’s freshmen but, according to Shapiro, will play a vital role on this year’s team.

“This freshman class maybe doesn’t have the flash of a Gus Santos or Maxime Hoppenot,” Shapiro said. “But there’s at least four or five of them that are going to be very valuable and are going to play quite a bit.”

On Saturday, Tufts will head to Middletown, Conn. to take on Wesleyan, a team that they lost to 1-0 last season. The Cardinals, like the Jumbos, are perfect this season, having beaten Bowdoin on Saturday 1-0. According to senior co-captain Rafa RamosMeyer, a midfielder, the Jumbos will have to be at their best to top Wesleyan and maintain their perfect mark.

“I think it’s going to be a great test, possibly the greatest test of the season,” Ramos-Meyer said.

“They have a lot of good returning players, and we’re really going to find out what we’re made of.”