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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 96 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

SUNNY CLOUDY

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CROSS CAMPUS

RESOLUTIONS SITE HOLDS USERS ACCOUNTABLE

PUBLIC EDUCATION

IRAN

W. TENNIS

Students protest Arizona law banning books on race, oppression

PROF TRACES EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS REGIME

Elis sweep weekend games en route to 4th consecutive ECAC title

PAGES 8-9 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

PAGE 3 NEWS

PAGE 5 NEWS

PAGE 14 SPORTS

City resists ICE program

Supporting the students.

In a Monday night email to the campus community, University President Richard Levin wrote that the Yale Police Department played no part in the New York Police Department’s surveillance of the Muslim Students Association, voicing his support of Yale’s Muslim students. “In the wake of these disturbing news reports, I want to assure the members of the Yale Muslim Students Association that they can count on the full support of Yale University,” Levin wrote.

BY TAPLEY STEPHENSON STAFF REPORTER While administrators have said Yale-NUS will help spread liberal arts in Asia, the focus on interdisciplinary studies will not be entirely new when the jointly run Singaporean college opens in fall 2013.

Trying to join the NYPD? The global affairs major’s Monday newsletter featured a listing inviting students to consider a career with the NYPD, which can offer a salary of over $90,000 plus overtime after five years of work. “If you are ready to experience the career of a lifetime, then the New York City Police Department is ready for you,” the notice read.

YALE-NUS

for deportation proceedings undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes and pose public safety risks.

Officials at the press conference, however, argued that Secure Communities threatens to lead to racial profiling and erode trust between the New Haven Police Department and the city’s large immigrant community, making effective policing difficult.

“Among the biggest responsibilities of New Haven city government is public safety,” said DeStefano, liken-

The National University of Singapore’s University Scholars Programme (USP), established in 2001, allows students the opportunity to spend 30 percent of their coursework in a field outside of their major — an uncommonly large proportion in Singapore, where colleges generally have a more vocational approach.

Yale administrators said they have consulted with USP professors and administrators in building the faculty and curriculum for Yale-NUS, though they said the new college will feature a more expansive liberal arts curriculum.

John Richardson, the program’s director, said the program initially struggled to draw students, partly because students worried how potential employers would view their education. University administrators have also said in the past that they will pay special attention to career services at Yale’s new college to help graduates navigate the job market with a liberal arts degree.

But Richardson said a successful and supportive alumni base

SEE ICE PAGE 4

SEE SINGAPORE PAGE 4

Moving on. Tom Williams, the

former head coach of Yale’s football team, has accepted a job coaching safeties at the University of Texas at El Paso, the website coachingsearch. com reported Sunday.

Thinking Independent. The

New Haven Independent reenabled commenting on Monday with a new policy for keeping the discussion civil. The online news outlet first cut off comments a few weeks ago, after less thoughtprovoking and more libelous comments started to dominate the Independent’s comment boards.

Two more days. Last Thursday,

Kevin Ryan ’85, the CEO of shopping website Gilt Groupe, sponsored a 24-hour challenge for the senior class gift in which he pledged to match funds if the gift could raise a certain amount. In a 24-hour period, donations rose from $26,629.93, with 78.5 percent participation, to $28,871.30, with 85.4 percent participation. Currently, 87.9 percent of the class of 2012 has donated.

One Button redesign.

OneButtonWenzel will relaunch today under the name CrunchButton. The new website will allow students to order from restaurants besides Alpha Delta Pizza, the home of the Wenzel. New options include Thai Pan Asian and The Little Salad Shop.

Reflection. Tonight PBS airs

the second half of a four-hour documentary following the life of former U.S. President Bill Clinton LAW ’73. The documentary focuses on the relationship between Clinton and his eventual wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton LAW ’73.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1966 The state’s draft chief warns students that rising need means more students could be drafted, even those who received a deferment.

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Program pioneered liberal arts

CHRISTOPHER PEAK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Jessica Vosburgh LAW ’13, a member of the Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinic, joined city and state officials at City Hall Monday at a press conference urging Gov. Dannel Malloy to resist a new federal immigration enforcement program.

FEDERAL IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT INITIATIVE TO BEGIN IN CONNECTICUT; CITY URGES DELAY, NONCOMPLIANCE

BY NICK DEFIESTA AND CHRISTOPHER PEAK STAFF REPORTER AND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER City and state officials gathered at City Hall Monday afternoon to protest Secure Communities, a federal immigration enforcement program they said would hurt community policing efforts in New Haven and damage the city’s social fabric.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr., along

with members of a Yale Law School clinic, State Rep. Juan Candelaria, members of the Board of Aldermen and other community leaders, held a press conference in which they called on U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to delay the implementation of Secure Communities in Connecticut. According to ICE, the program, scheduled to begin in Connecticut on Wednesday, is designed to prioritize

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D I S C I P L I NA RY AC T I O N

‘The most logical of philosophers’

Fighting piracy with a ‘liberal policy’

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ix years ago, the Yale College Executive Committee began hearing cases of digital copyright infringement as reported by outside organizations. Nine students, upon receiving a third warning for illegal downloading, have been brought before the committee since. All have left with just a warning. CLINTON WANG reports.

BY HOON PYO JEON AND JANE DARBY MENTON CONTRIBUTING REPORTER AND STAFF REPORTER Ruth Barcan Marcus GRD ’46, a Yale professor of philosophy and pioneer in the field of quantitative modal logic, died Sunday at her home in New Haven. She was 90.

One of Yale’s first female professors, Marcus helped carve a place for women in academia, and her groundbreaking research in the philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology put her at the forefront of her field. To her students and colleagues, Marcus was an academic visionary and an inspirational mentor.

“She had a kind of personal integrity and intellectual integrity that just shone through,” said Don Garrett GRD ’79, chair of New York University’s department of philosophy and one of Marcus’ former students. “People sometimes found her intellectually intimidating, but anyone who knew her knew that she was a very dear person with a very clear mind — the most logical of philosophers and philosophical of logicians.”

Marcus began her revolution-

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Yale professor Ruth Barcan Marcus died Sunday at the age of 90. ary work in modal logic during the late 1940s when she developed the Barcan formula, which brought a quantitative dimension to the field. Though Marcus initially came under fire for her radical ideas, she continued her research and eventually drew scholarly recognition and acceptance for her work, her colleagues said.

Born in New York City in 1921, Marcus grew up in the Bronx and went on to attend NYU, where SEE MARCUS PAGE 6

Last fall, the Yale College Executive Committee heard cases from 59 students on issues ranging from plagiarism to underage drinking. But four students faced the committee for an infringement that the University does not monitor directly: Internet piracy.

When ExComm began reviewing cases of Internet piracy in 2007-’08, three students faced the committee for downloading copyrighted materials. Only two students were tried in the following three years — one in 2009-’10 and one in 2010-’11.

But Yale does not actively police its networks for illegal activity. Instead, when it traces an act of Internet piracy to Yale’s networks, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sends the University’s copyright agent warnings of copyright infringements, which include the violator’s IP address and the name of the copyrighted file.

The RIAA, an organization representing record labels and distributors that seeks to protect the companies’ intellectual property rights, focuses much of its legal efforts on file sharing of pirated music at college and uni-

versity networks nationwide because universities can more easily address complaints than most other Internet service providers.

Though the RIAA maintains the right to sue students, punishment is left largely to the discretion of universities, yet Yale’s relatively relaxed response may not deter all students from illegal activity.

‘A RATHER LIBERAL POLICY’

Last November, a sophomore in Berkeley said she received an unwelcome email. The sender? “Copyright Agent.”

The sophomore, who wished to remain anonymous because of her illegal activities, estimated that 60 percent of her current music library came from illegal downloads.

She added that many people she knows at Yale also download illegally.

This email was her second warning: when RIAA notifies Yale of a student’s first violation of copyright law, the University calls for the student to delete the illegal file. The SEE PIRACY PAGE 6

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT “I guess maybe the banks don’t want a clear view of the people they’re yaledailynews.com/opinion

ripping off.”

‘MSMONEYPENNY’ ON ‘OCCUPY ASKED TO LEAVE THE GREEN’

Writers need The age of historical ignorance shame Y O

n Friday, Mostafa alAlusi and Faisal Hamid (“Fighting Islamophobia at Yale,” Feb. 17) argued that criticism and suspicion by security officials and politicians has been overly broad, targeting all Muslims rather than specific, clearly defined sub-groups. Similarly, the writers described on-campus parties where drunken slurs were directed at Muslim students. They said the very safety of Muslim students in New Haven has been called into question.

Needless to say, the possibility that students are being subjected to ethnic slurs and feel unsafe should alarm the entire Yale community. Regardless of one’s position on the relative merits of the NYPD’s recently revealed anti-terror tactics, basic civility, tolerance and student safety should be completely uncontroversial — and nonnegotiable. And that is precisely why I found the comments — 130 at last count — that followed the article on the News’ website so mind-bogglingly disturbing.

By now, the News’ staff has already removed the most egregiously hateful comments, but here are some highlights: One poster, user-name Arafat, called on all free people to “inform themselves regarding the tyrannical, fascist, intolerant, murderous and depraved nature of Islam.” Later on, he explained: “Ultimately, it’s the relgion [sic] itself which is rotten … The Islamic theological blueprint is flawed to its very core.”

Another, calling himself RexMottram08, wrote: “Islam: the religion of peace that flies planes into buildings, mutilates female genitals and declares war on Western civilization.”

Anyone familiar with the history of anti-Semitism will recognize these kinds of statements. Deliberate blindness to nuance and diversity within a tradition and the use of selected examples to assert that a religion is essentially incompatible with Western civilization are vile tricks that would make Bruno Bauer proud.

I assume that most of these offensive commenters aren’t Yale students, but the bottom line is that we have no way of knowing. Indeed, the thing that bothers me most about these comments is their anonymity. “Arafat,” “RexMottram08” and the multitude of other usernames allow commenters to hide their identities and avoid responsibility for their vulgarity and vitriol.

Of course, there are times when anonymity can serve a purpose. In repressive regimes or failed states, activists and advocates are legitimately concerned that using their names might bring physical violence and harassment. In some extreme cases, these dangers exist even

in strong, liberal states — English author Salman Rushdie’s years of hiding and Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s YISHAI murder are SCHWARTZ proof of this.

Obviously, the The Gadfly ideal solution to this kind of violence is vigorous policing, but given limited resources, a case for anonymity is conceivable.

But there must be a clear line between anonymity intended to preserve security against violent and illegal acts of retaliation and anonymity used as a shield against legitimate response and public opprobrium. The former must be allowed as a regrettable concession to an imperfect world; the latter is irresponsible, cowardly and detrimental to civil society It is by no means obvious that free speech can coexist with a stable social order. Indeed, given the frequency of hate speech, lies and misrepresentation, freedom and stability often seem to come into sharp conflict. But the knowledge that our actions and statements have consequences for us forces us to think critically about what we write and say and thus protects society from the worst effects of free speech.

Liberty — of any kind, including speech — is only sustainable and justifiable when it is coupled with responsibility. Otherwise, we have total bedlam.

Anyone who claims that words are never dangerous is a fool. A public sphere where groups are constantly engaged in ad hominem, nasty, incoherent, and vulgar attacks inevitably undercuts a tolerant and peaceful society. Free speech is dangerous, and personal responsibility is the only check that allows us to preserve public decency while maintaining this core value.

There is no question that we have to ensure that the public forum is a safe place to write and speak without fear violence and vandalism. In the U.S., thankfully, we usually have such a space. But with that safety must come responsibility.

When I write, I know my name (and now face) will appear next to my ideas, and I am constrained by the basic fear of public shame. Fear of shame allows me to tug myself back to reality when my thoughts have crossed red lines. Shame is what protects us — and society — from our own worst demons. And shame is something that Friday’s commenters were lacking entirely.

YISHAI SCHWARTZ is a junior in Branford College. His column runs on Tuesdays. Contact him at yishai.schwartz@yale.edu .

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upon our culture occurred at the hands of militant Protestants.

We prefer to focus our ire on religions we see as inherently SAM — LASMAN intolerant Islam being the bugbear of the Beartrap moment.

There is certainly a dangerously anti-archaeological bent to radical Islam. Many high-profile cases in recent years have involved Buddhist relics — most famously, the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.

And just last week, thugs broke into the National Museum of the Maldives and destroyed nearly thirty priceless Buddhist artifacts.

“The whole pre-Islamic history is gone,” the museum’s director told the New York Times — an exaggeration that nonetheless underscores the scale of the loss.

Buddhist art, with its Hellenistic appreciation of the human form and its occasional sexual openness, is particularly jarring to the most puritanical Muslims.

And unlike Hindus in India, who often retaliate violently against iconoclasm, there are virtually no Buddhists left in Afghanistan or the Maldives (or much of the Muslim world) to defend their heritage.

(For those who would cite this as

inherent proof of Muslim intolerance, I could discuss the size of the current population of traditional polytheists in Europe, Australia and the Americas, but I digress.)

There’s even a linguistic bias — in Persian, Urdu and other languages of Muslim South Asia, the sin of idolatry is known as “botparasti,” an archaic term for Buddhism.

Yet claiming that Islam harbors an inherent vendetta against Buddhism — or against pre-Islamic history and culture in general — is like arguing that Anglicanism is inherently anti-Cornish.

That argument highlights the excesses of radicals and ignores the deeper complications of history and culture. Destructive acts must be weighed against undeniable truths — like the Islamic preservation and transmission of countless classical works that would otherwise have been lost.

The Arabic word for the time before Muhammad — Jahiliyya, or “The Age of Ignorance” — seems unduly offensive until you recall that the English word “paganism” is remarkably similar. It comes from the Latin paganus, meaning rural or rustic — hence ignorant or backward.

And just as Christians have long venerated their pagan heritage even while professing their disdain or dressing ancient customs in the trappings of Christmas and Easter, so Islam is full of Jahiliyya. The poetry of ancient

Arabia suffuses not only the Quran but also the entire corpus of classic Islamic literature. Iranian ayatollahs address God as Khoda, a word once reserved for the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda. Popular Islamic mystic traditions like Sufism owe nearly as much to Neoplatonic philosophy as to Quranic doctrine.

To argue that any religion is inherently opposed to history, culture or even its own competing creeds is to misunderstand the actual interactions of faith and human life. Yet by the same token we cannot ignore the incalculable damage that fundamentalist revisionism has caused to our global heritage.

Religious extremism denies the realities of both history and the present. In its rejection of all historical facts outside the bounds of its own propriety, religious extremism bears an uncanny resemblance to the politically correct fanaticism that would rename buildings and denude libraries or curricula of offending classics.

Both phenomena are marked by a troubling belief that when narratives compete, there must be a winner and a loser, a version to exalt and a version to expunge.

Justice and history should never be forgotten — or confused.

SAM LASMAN is a senior in Berkeley College. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays. Contact him at samuel.lasman@yale.edu .

GUE ST COLUMNIST DIANA ENRIQUE Z

Defining secure communities T

he first scare came in December. I received news from City Hall that the Secure Communities Act was to be implemented in New Haven. I broke into a cold sweat as I considered the implications of the act.

Secure Communities is an act passed by the federal government in October 2008, set to go live state by state across the United States by 2013. The bill includes provisions to merge local police databases with background checks run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Everyone whose profile is filed in local political stations will have her immigration status checked through ICE’s database. Ideally, the bill is supposed to target people with criminal records who live in the United States illegally, but in practice this bill does not secure our communities.

One of the victims of Secure Communities was a friend of mine who lived in a city where the act was enforced. He was a student finishing high school. He was driving too fast one day, and his back taillight was out. He was pulled over by a cop. He argued with the policeman and was taken in to the police station. From there, his profile was entered

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ale so venerates written words and old stone that it’s hard to imagine a world that does not accord respect to such relics. Yet cathedral-shaped Sterling would have offered a tempting target to the most determined and destructive attackers Anglophone culture has ever seen.

Between 1536 and 1541, religious vandals systematically destroyed the monasteries of England, Wales and Ireland. Henry VIII, motivated by greed, politics and paranoid anti-Catholicism, licensed his agents to gut, demolish and plunder the institutions that had been the primary repositories of English knowledge for nearly a millennium.

Architectural marvels were smashed, the remains of legendary monarchs destroyed (including those of Alfred the Great and possibly King Arthur) and countless irreplaceable writings were lost.

Worcester Priory had a collection of six hundred unique manuscripts — a mere six survived the Dissolution. The consequences for other British cultures were even more dire — the major centers of Cornish culture, Glasney and Crantock, were destroyed — along with their libraries — and the Cornish language never recovered.

Most Americans know little to nothing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and most self-appointed culture warriors seem blithely unaware that by far the greatest damage ever wreaked

into the computer. His name was flagged, so the police had to detain him. He was deported.

Imagine a world where people you grew up with, friends who mentored you, your co-workers and other Yale students are afraid to leave campus — not because they look at this week’s crime rates or because they have not explored the city before, but because simply encountering a policeman on the street could mean deportation and a radical change in their futures.

Imagine a world where you cannot go home to visit your family less than two hours away because getting on a train could mean being subjected to a random search and detention by an ICE officer.

Do you feel comfortable knowing that other students, some living in your dorm or studying in your classes, are afraid to talk to anyone about family members who have been detained? Do you feel comfortable knowing that these people have to worry about where they will go over winter break, since home isn’t an option for fear of detention en route?

To many of us, the police may look like symbols of order and safety. Under the previsions of this bill, immigrants are encour-

Debate, don’t demonize, the NYPD

Reading about the New York Police Department’s monitoring of Muslim students’ associations, I find it highly unfortunate that the NYPD found itself in a position where it felt the need to monitor the activities of student groups. However, the reaction here at Yale represents a disturbing misunderstanding of the situation.

Yesterday, Jess Belding (“Stand up for Muslims’ rights,” Feb. 20) and MSA representatives at Yale seem to have abandoned the benefits of a useful dialogue on whether profiling by age and religion is morally justifiable. Instead, they have favored a shrieking reaction that would have been more appropriate if a police department had thrown a student group in jail for no particular reason.

Whether the NYPD was justified in its actions of keeping tabs on the Muslim students’ associations is an important debate that deserves attention. However,

aged to fear and avoid the police forces by going underground in society. This means that when an immigrant is robbed or becomes the victim of a crime, she is less likely to report it. All efforts to improve relationships between the local immigrant community and the police force will be cast aside, and we compromise the security of our community. This is not a risk I support. We are asking for crimes against immigrants to go unreported.

Community organizers and government officials alike refer to the last time ICE conducted raids in New Haven. Houses in Fair Haven were raided; children disappeared from schools, businesses stayed closed and workers stayed home from their jobs. New Haven is still rebuilding the trust in our community that was lost as a result of these raids.

Those raids weren’t specifically tied to Secure Communities, but they are also the result of federal interference in the way Connecticut handles its immigration policy. Connecticut has shown in other ways that its policy on immigration is more lenient than that of other states. For example, Connecticut’s labor policy requires employers to respect contracts regardless of a worker’s

hearing the actions of the NYPD characterized as “a violation of our civil rights” and “destroying the very conditions that make Yale a world-class university” by MSA President Mostafa Al-Alusi or “unconstitutional” by Belding is very concerning. No one has a civil right to not have his website monitored or a government file made on him. The Constitution certainly says nothing about the matter. As much as we might prefer otherwise, not all behavior that we believe to be insensitive, hateful or despicable is prohibited by U.S. law or the Constitution.

It is unfortunate that we as Yalies seem to have found no other way to deal with an upsetting political problem than to call its perpetrators criminals or violators of civil rights. I really hope that we can do better.

JOHN MASKO FEB. 20 The writer is a sophomore in Saybrook College.

immigration status.

Does a community that encourages vigilantes to report anyone they suspect might be an undocumented immigrant — despite the hours of work that immigrants put in everyday, the families they raise and put through school and the taxes they pay under false social security numbers — sound like a secure community?

The act originally stipulated that cities could opt out of enforcement. But too many cities opted out. Now, all states will be required to implement the act’s provisions on a staggered timeline. In December, Connecticut received the go-ahead.

In most of the country, police departments support Secure Communities. But in New Haven, both citizens and public officials rallied around the immigrant community. I hope Connecticut will follow Massachusetts, Illinois and New York in refusing to enforce the federal act.

As Secure Communities rolls out in Connecticut, ask yourself, is this really building a secure community?

DIANA ENRIQUEZ is a junior in Saybrook College. Contact her at diana.enriquez@yale.edu .

Revoke asbestos magnate’s honorary doctorate

Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss billionaire who was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters by Yale in 1996, was recently sentenced to 16 years in prison and fined tens of millions of euros by an Italian court in Turin.

Schmidheiny is former owner of Eternit, an asbestos-cement company which operated in Italy and 34 other countries through the mid-1980s. The court judged him knowingly responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 people from asbestosis and various asbestosrelated cancers.

Yale should take back its degree, which was obviously granted without due diligence regarding the sinister origins of Schmidheiny’s multi-billion-dollar fortune. It would not be unheard of to take back an honor; Fred Goodwin, the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, recently had his knighthood withdrawn for derelictions much less lethal than those of Schmidheiny.

For more background on this case, readers may wish to consult the recently published book “Eternit and the Great Asbestos Trial,” which was released on Feb. 13, the day the Schmidheiny verdict was announced.

DANIEL BERMAN FEB. 14 The writer is a 1964 graduate of Trumbull College.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

PAGE THREE TODAY’S EVENTS TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 5:00 P.M. “Music, Media, & the Environment.” A panel discussion featuring leading environmentalists and an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and composer, and including excerpts from the PBS documentary “John Muir in the New World.” Kroon Hall (195 Prospect St.), Burke Auditorium.

7:00 P.M. Yale-New Haven Regular Singing. Come sing from the Sacred Harp, an American shape-note songbook first published in 1844. Newcomers welcome. William L. Harkness Hall (100 Wall St.), Room 205.

CORRECTIONS MONDAY, FEB. 20

The Sports Monday spread contained several errors. The score for women’s basketball was mistakenly listed as “Yale 71, Harvard 51” instead of “Harvard 71, Yale 51.” The men’s basketball box score contained the women’s team records instead of those of the men’s team. A caption for the men’s hockey article “Elis blast Ivy foes” referenced Kevin Limbert ’12, even though Kenny Agostino ’14 was pictured in the photograph.

THURSDAY, FEB. 16

The article “Lovins advocates for energy efficiency” stated that the United States gets 41 percent of its electricity from oil and 40 percent from coal. In fact, the United States gets about 45 percent of its electricity from coal and only about 1 percent from oil.

‘Bulldog O’ prompts new ITS policies

BY LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO STAFF REPORTER Following the University’s purchase of the “Bulldog O” supercomputer last spring, Information Technology Services is now working to equalize the access that Faculty of Arts and Sciences research groups have to it and the four other supercomputer clusters.

In response to increased faculty demand for access to Yale’s high performance computers, a provost-appointed subcommittee drafted and passed a policy earlier this academic year that streamlined guidelines for supercomputer usage, committee co-chair and applied physics and physics professor Sohrab Ismail-Beigi said. The new policy is designed to give FAS work groups fair access to Yale’s computing resources, he added.

We have seen a significant number of research publications and results that have come from using these clusters. [Yale has] hired faculty who insisted on better access to high performance computers.

ANDREW SHERMAN High performance computing specialist The new rules ask FAS research groups to rank their tasks by priority, Ismail-Beigi said, and redefine the 5 percent share of supercomputer access that faculty research groups have traditionally been granted to account for the different processing capacities that the computer clusters have.

Under the University’s former policy, the majority of FAS research groups were granted 5 percent shares of total access to Yale’s supercomputers, high performance computing specialist Andrew Sherman said.

But that figure did not account for differences between the power and speed of various computers, he added.

Sherman explained that smaller FAS work group tasks should be performed on Yale’s smaller supercomputers, while larger tasks requiring more memory should be reserved for Yale’s most powerful supercomputer, Bulldog O. Ismail-Beigi said ITS is working to design a queuing system that will determine which tasks should be con-

ducted on certain machines, and at what times, to maximize efficient use of those computers.

“Heavy hogs should run at low priority and save up some of their time,” Ismail-Beigi said. “We want users to think a bit about what it is they are trying to accomplish.”

Though the new policy has been approved, Sherman said research groups will continue operating under the old system until ITS finalizes its new method for calculating access to supercomputers.

The updated system will weigh the priority levels that FAS research groups assign to their jobs, memory and power requirements, and past resource usage by groups when determining where jobs will fall in the queue, Ismail-Beigi said. For example, he said, a group that constantly files its tasks as high priority would likely use up its 5 percent allocation more quickly than a group that has tasks of different priority levels.

Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said in an email Monday that the University’s investment in high performance computing has both helped faculty recruitment and advanced faculty research. He said researchers can choose to purchase additional access to supercomputers if they feel a job would require more space than the standard 5 percent, adding that grant funding is available for that purpose.

Sherman said Yale’s supercomputer capabilities have doubled since the University acquired Bulldog O in spring 2011 and made it available for use that fall. “[Bulldog O] was a big shot in the arm for us,” Sherman said. “We have seen a significant number of research publications and results that have come from using these clusters. [Yale has] hired faculty who insisted on better access to high performance computers.”

More than 100 research groups that use Yale’s five computing clusters, of which 39 groups have a total of 214 individual accounts on Bulldog O alone, Sherman said.

Programs conducting research on the machines range from the Physics Department to the School of Music, he said. Sherman added that the Geology & Geophysics research team is granted roughly one-third of Bulldog O’s usage, because the team paid for about one third of the computer’s costs.

Bulldog O can process at 52.53 trillion calculations per second.

Contact LIZ RODRIGUEZ-FLORIDO at liz.rodriguez-florido@yale.edu .

451

The temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit, at which paper burns, according to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.

In fact, paper can actually ignite at much lower temperatures.

Students protest Arizona law

BY CHRISTINA WANG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER At 1:10 p.m. Monday, two students dressed in dark suits pushed a red library cart down the middle aisle of Commons dining hall and grabbed books from about 30 students, all wearing red, who then individually filed into the procession. The group marched in a line and audibly chanted, “No book ban, no book ban!”

The protest was staged against Arizona’s House Bill 2281, signed

by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer in May 2010. The law bans all public school curricula of which “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.” An email sent to multiple student groups by Katherine Aragon ’14, who helped lead and organize the event, said the protest’s objective was to “simulate the stealing of books from students during lunchtime, in order to help Yale students visualize the academic and emotional effects of this type of legislation.”

The event was primarily organized by MEChA de Yale, a student group that seeks to “promote Chicano empowerment” through education and political activism, but also drew supporters from various cultural groups across campus.

Immediately following the procession, which lasted a few minutes, Aragon spoke through a megaphone to a lunchtime Commons crowd to urge Yalies to educate themselves about the consequences of the law.

“Under the vague language of the bill, the ban could include anything from historical explorations of slavery in the United States, to momentous events in American history such as the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement,” Aragon said.

“Who decides where to draw the line in deciding what history and perspectives are valid to teach?”

Some school districts had been resisting implementation of the law, but in January of this year,

Tucson Unified School District, one of the largest school districts in Arizona, was found to be in violation of state law for having one or more classes “designed primarily for one ethnic group, promoting racial resentment and advocating ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals” by an administrative law judge.

The district was to have 10 percent of its monthly state aid withheld until it complied with the law, but opted to implement the law by disbanding its Mexican American Studies program.

Paulo Costa ’14, another leader of the demonstration, said that it was events like these that inspired him and other Yalies to get involved with MEChA’s protests.

“I want to be a professor and I think that it’s very undemocratic for the government to ban books in a society that is supposed to be free,” Costa said.

Protest participants interviewed had different reasons for their support of its cause.

Christofer Rodelo ’15 said that he felt it was important for Yalies to be educated about events that happen around the country and “make room for discourse about these important topics.”

Who decides where to draw the line in deciding what history perspectives are valid to teach?

KATHERINE ARAGON ’14 For Marlena Vasquez ’13, the law carried consequences that hit closer to home.

“I care about this bill because I’m Latino, and because these books tell my family’s history,” she said. “When people are trying to remove our stories from the American narrative, I feel personally attacked.”

VICTOR KANG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Students protested perceived censorship in Arizona with a display in Commons Monday afternoon.

Proponents of the law, however, say it is a way to emphasize students’ individual identities and to prevent students from grouping themselves solely on the basis of race.

“Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals, and not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds,” Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said in an April 2010 press release.

“This is consistent with the fundamental American value that we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into. Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism.”

Monday’s protest is one of multiple events that MEChA plans to host in order to raise awareness about the law, Aragon said.

After the initial protest, students passed out flyers that detailed the time and location of a “teach-in,”

in which Yale professors Stephen Pitti, Alicia Camacho and Birgir Rasmussen will dine with students and discuss the effects of the law.

At an organizing meeting on Sunday night with MEChA members and other protest supporters, Aragon said she hoped the group’s actions would make an impact beyond campus. MEChA has been working on activist efforts in conjunction with some high schools in Arizona, and hopes to send them a video montage of their protests to show support.

“We want to be a spectacle, and create awareness against this horrible bill,” Aragon said. “We want to let students in Arizona know that we’re here to support them, even if we’re all the way on the other side of the country. We want legislators in Arizona to know that we are watching.”

The “Teach-In” will take place at 7 p.m. in William L. Harkness Hall on Wednesday.

Contact CHRISTINA WANG at christina.wang@yale.edu .

Lecture series merges arts, sciences

BY MASON KROLL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Every Tuesday afternoon at the Whitney Humanities Center, 11 students find themselves at a cultural crossroads.

In the sixth iteration of the Robert Shulman Lecture Series supplementing Yale music professor Gary Tomlinson’s “Music and Human Evolution” course, students are exploring the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. Founded in 2007, the Shulman Lecture Series acts as the extension of an undergraduate seminar each year that focuses on the intersection between the arts and sciences, by bringing in experts to present lectures on the seminar’s precise field of study. This year, Tomlinson aims to teach “how it is humans came to be musicking beings in the first place.”

While Tomlinson pointed out three key areas of study in his course — archeology, music cognition and evolution — his students will also engage in ethnomusicology, paleoanthropology and genetics. The students come to the class from several different majors, including Cognitive Science and Humanities.

“It is entirely possible for humanists who haven’t studied science to be suspicious of its methods and claims, and it’s also a possibility that scientists who love music think they understand it and that the humanities have nothing to offer,” Tomlinson said. “That is a mistake.”

Tomlinson is no stranger to science. In fact, he was a biochemistry major for three years. After taking several music classes, he was swayed to become a music major and ultimately a musicologist. He said there are many humanistic topics that gravitate toward a real engagement with science.

Over the course of the semester, Tomlinson will bring in three professors to complement his seminar on “Music and Human Evolution.”

In their day-long visits, speakers will teach a class, deliver a public lecture to the Yale community and join the students for a private dinner.

Today, Jamshed Bharucha,

president of the Manhattan-based Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art college, will deliver the semester’s second public lecture, “The Alignment and Synchronization of Brain States through Music,” at the Whitney Humanities Center. Bharucha, a classically trained violinist and cognitive neuroscientist, will discuss music from an evolutionary standpoint, focusing on how people can synchronize their brains through music. By eliciting the same emotion and getting people to move in synchrony, Bharucha said music fosters social cohesion.

Sally McBrearty, a former Yale professor currently teaching archeology at University of Connecticut, spoke on Jan. 31 about paleoanthropology. In the third and final Shulman Lecture of the year that will take place March 27, Terrence Deacon, the chair of the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, will discuss “How Less Became More in Human Evolution.”

As an active musician, Bharucha said that the interplay between the sciences and the humanities is the future of academics.

“Historically, the disciplines [of science and the arts] have been treated as fairly isolated and represented by different departments in universities,” Bharucha said. “But the ideas themselves are becoming a lot more interconnected across disciplines. There are tremendous numbers of very interesting relationships yet to be explored.”

The lecture series was created in honor of Robert Shulman, a founding fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center and a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Shulman, who taught at Yale from 1979 through 2002, said the classes on contemporary civilization and literature he took as an undergraduate at Columbia University had an enduring impact on him.

While Shulman neither funded nor initiated the lecture series, his simultaneous engagement with the arts and sciences prompted the Whitney Humanities Center to dedicate the series to him, according to a press release from the Cen-

ter.

According to Shulman, the lecture series has been a “step in the right direction” in conveying to Yale students the interdisciplinary nature of academics today.

“It’s not that scientists should read books or an English major should understand thermodynamics, but there is a similarity in epistemology,” Shulman said. “If that were appreciated, we could make the arts and sciences much closer.”

This spirit of collaboration across departmental divides has invigorated the series, which over its six years has been cross-listed under the Humanities, Astronomy, Religious Studies, History, History of Science and Medicine, Philosophy and Music Departments. Speakers have included playwrights, professors and Pulitzer Prize winners.

There is, after all, a historical precedent for melding the arts and sciences.

There are tremendous numbers of very interesting relationships yet to be explored.

JAMSHED BHARUCHA President of Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art As professor Paola Bertucci, who taught the 2010 Shulman Lectures entitled “Science and Spectacle in the Enlightenment,” noted, mathematicians in the early modern world perceived themselves as humanists and engineers considered themselves artists.

“The distinction between the sciences and the humanities does not have a long history,” Bertucci said. “It dates back to the 19th century when science became a profession. For a long time, natural knowledge was produced by people who had very diverse backgrounds and who strove to reach universal knowledge rather than specialization.”

History professor Daniel Kevles taught the inaugural series,

“The Drama of Science,” in 2007.

Kevles said his students read plays and novels that took up compelling historical and scientific issues, comparing fictionalized accounts to historical events. A portion of the class, for instance, focused on the Scopes “Monkey Trial” and the 1955 play “Inherit the Wind.”

Since Kevles, seven professors have sought to integrate the sciences and the humanities in their syllabi for the Shulman series seminar. In 2011, philosophy professor Jonathan Gilmore and Richard Prum, a professor in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and curator of vertebrate zoology for the Peabody Museum, taught “The Evolution of Beauty,” in which Tomlinson, then teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the first lecture. In 2009, the late University Librarian Frank Turner taught “Darwin and Darwinism” to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book “On the Origin of Species.” And in 2008, astronomy & physics professor Charles Bailyn and former religious studies professor Ludger Viefhues-Bailey’s “Religion and the Big Bang” was so popular that they taught it again the following year.

“We deliberately stepped away from the ‘culture wars’ aspect of the subject and indeed found some real commonalities between the ways scientists and philosophers think about the question of the origin of the universe,” Bailyn said. “It was intellectually very exciting.”

According to Norma Thompson, the director of undergraduate studies for the Humanities Department, there are tentative plans for psychiatry professor William Sledge and comparative literature professor Moira Fradinger to co-teach a course on psychoanalysis for the 2013 Shulman Lecture Series. In the class, students will observe the field from multiple angles, including neuroscience, cognitive science and Sigmund Freud’s influence on literature.

Contact MASON KROLL at mason.kroll@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“We’re a place of differences. We’re a place that sees a strength and places a value on welcoming folks from all over.” JOHN DESTEFANO JR. MAYOR, NEW HAVEN

City urges resistance to ‘flawed’ federal program ICE FROM PAGE 1 ing Secure Communities to the June 2007 ICE raid on city residents that resulted in a settlement paid to 11 of those arrested after they sued federal immigration authorities. “Now, for the second time in five years, the Department of Homeland Security is about to make New Haven less safe and less secure.”

Under Secure Communities, ICE officials are given biometric information collected by local police departments in routine arrests and then issue detainment requests to states for positive matches of people residing in the country illegally. DeStefano and other city officials said Secure Communities is “flawed and in need of correction,” and does not serve the purpose for which it was designed — often deporting residents with no criminal record or first-time offenders who have committed minor, nonviolent crimes.

He cited a September 2011 report by the Department of Homeland Security that found “the impact of Secure Communities has not been limited to convicted criminals, dan-

SECURE COMMUNITIES HOW IT WORKS

When local police run fingerprints through the FBI database, they send them to immigration officials to check for immigration status.

CURRENT IMPLEMENTATION

Twenty states have not yet fully implemented Secure Communities, including Louisiana, Illinois, Washington and most states in the Northeast.

CONTROVERSY

Critics of Secure Communities contend it does not complete its intended purpose, targeting immigrants who have a minor or nonexistent criminal record.

gerous and violent offenders, or threats to public safety and national security,” and called on ICE to defer the start of the program until after these concerns have been addressed. If that does not happen, DeStefano said he hoped Gov. Dannel Malloy will distinguish between serious and low-level offenses when choosing to honor detainment requests by federal agents.

“The governor shares the opinion of many police chiefs that this policy could lead to a situation where victims and witnesses in the immigrant community would be reluctant to cooperate with local and state law enforcement, something that would completely undermine the goals of this program,” Mike Lawlor, Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, said in a Monday statement.

The implementation of the program in Connecticut will begin on Wednesday, nearly six months after Gov. Malloy requested a delay due to concerns outlined in the Department of Homeland Security report.

He also said the program “essentially converts local law enforcement offers into de facto agents of [ICE],” a situation that police officials in New Haven said they would prefer to avoid.

NHPD Chief Dean Esserman, who was brought to New Haven last fall as the city publicly renewed its commitment to a community policing strategy, said the majority of police chiefs across the nation have found Secure Communities harmful to their policing efforts.

“At a time when America’s police are trying to build trust across the nation, this does not help,” Esserman said.

ICE officials could not be reached for comment Monday as the agency’s office was closed for Presidents Day.

A CONTROVERSIAL PROGRAM

Secure Communities was piloted in 2008 under the Bush administration to identify and deport “the worst of the worst” undocumented residents, DeStefano said. It was then expanded under the Obama administration — currently, Secure Communities is enacted in about two-thirds of jurisdictions across the nation

— and is set to become mandatory nationwide by 2013.

Under federal law, local police departments run suspects’ fingerprints through the FBI database to see if they have a criminal record. But under Secure Communities, those fingerprints are also checked with the ICE database to determine if the suspect is undocumented.

If ICE has reason to believe the suspect is an illegal immigrant, the agency can issue a detainment request to the state, allowing the suspect to be held for up to 48 hours while immigration officials — who will decide whether to initiate deportation proceedings against the suspect — arrive.

ICE officials say the program has resulted in an 89 percent increase in the number of convicted criminals deported

by ICE between October 2008 and October 2011, as well as a 29 percent reduction in deportation of non-criminals.

But the effectiveness of Secure Communities was questioned aggressively by press conference attendees. Jessica Vosburgh LAW ’13, who is a member of the Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinic, said a study of the Secure Communities in Fairfield County — the only county in the state where the program is operational — found that, since its implementation in June 2010, 71 percent of those deported were first-time offenders or guilty of minor crimes such as shoplifting or traffic violations. Only 16 of the 133 people removed by ICE in Fairfield County were convicted of serious felonies, such as rape or homicide.

According to ICE’s website, the number of people removed from the country for misdemeanors will decrease over time. Already, the number of deportations for misdemeanors decreased from 40 percent of all deportations in fiscal year 2009 to 29 percent in fiscal year 2011.

Vosburgh argued that Secure Communities is “unconstitutional” and an “impermissible encroachment” on liberty because it undermines cities’ ability to govern themselves.

The implementation of Secure Communities, she said, would contradict NHPD General Order 06-2, enacted by then-Chief Francisco Ortiz in 2006, which instructed police officers not to

inquire about a person’s immigration status during routine law enforcement.

DeStefano said that ICE officials never informed New Haven officials that Secure Communities would be implemented, and that the city learned of it independently. City Hall spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton ’04 said the city was looking into the possibility that an official notice was sent to former NHPD Chief Frank Limon’s email address.

When the city learned Secure Communities would become mandatory next year, city leaders — along with State Reps. Pat Dillon, Roland Lemar and Candelaria — spoke out against it at a press conference in December.

Following the press conference, DeStefano proposed a state bill allowing undocumented city residents to vote in municipal elections.

MURKY LEGAL TERRITORY

The 2011 Homeland Security report stated that ICE has ignored requests for exemption from law enforcement departments who did not wish to participate in the program.

“Once a state or local law enforcement agency voluntarily submits fingerprint data to the federal government, no agreement with the state is legally necessary for one part of the federal government to share it with another part,” ICE Director John Morton wrote in a letter to state governors last August.

New York, Massachusetts and Illinois, as well as several jurisdictions in California, have all fought against Secure Communities’ implementation. But Morton said that, regardless of local protest, the program will continue to roll out until 2013, when it will be in place across the nation.

According to Benton, ICE will likely ignore the city’s requests to delay the program’s implementation and New Haven will be under Secure Communities as of Wednesday. The question, she said, is to what degree the state decides to cooperate with the program.

In his statement Monday, Lawlor indicated that the state may not honor all of ICE’s requests.

“The governor has asked Department of Corrections Commissioner Leo Arnone to create an ongoing review of how

Yale-NUS follows existing model SINGAPORE FROM PAGE 1 has given the program a strong reputation.

“We… have had to work hard at ensuring that potential students know what we have to offer,” Richardson said in a Monday email, “but once they know that, they see the point of USP quite readily.”

There was [already] serious interest in moving towards the liberal arts in Singapore.

RICHARD LEVIN University President The honors program, which will continue after Yale-NUS opens, offers slots to only 150 of NUS’s roughly 26,000 students. The participants live in a residential college with a design similar to those planned for Yale-NUS and take seminar classes with roughly 10 to 35 students.

University President Richard Levin said the program’s success suggests the potential for liberal arts to flourish in Singapore on a larger scale.

“I think it shows that even before starting the venture with Yale, there was serious interest in moving towards the liberal arts in Singapore,” Levin said.

Charles Bailyn, Yale-NUS inaugural dean of faculty, said that administrators of the Yale-NUS and the USP have worked closely

in recent months to develop plans for the new college, and several USP professors are serving on the committee that will select the college’s faculty.

Bailyn added that a USP course on AIDS taught by George Bishop, a professor in the USP, was the model for one of Yale-NUS’s core curriculum courses, “Current Issues in Science and Social Science.”

Penelope Laurans, master of Jonathan Edwards College and special advisor to the University president, said she visited the program in 2008 — before discussions began over Yale-NUS — for a peer evaluation and found that students, faculty and alumni working in Singapore seemed to value their experiences in the program.

But Laurans said Yale-NUS — which will eventually have 1,000 students taking two-thirds of classes in fields outside of their majors — will emphasize liberal arts more than the USP. “The models have similarities, but their emphases are slightly different: One is a program integrated into already existing University structure; the other is an entirely new college which uses the resources of a major university,” Laurans said in a Sunday email.

“The new college is an extension of the USP idea.”

Yale-NUS’s inaugural class will have 150 students, and it will not reach its total capacity of 1,000 students until the 2016-’17 school year.

Contact TAPLEY STEPHENSON at preston.stephenson@yale.edu .

CHRISTOPHER PEAK/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

At City Hall on Monday, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. attacked an immigration enforcement program beginning operation in the state tomorrow. this program is implemented and what the ramifications are, and see what if any corrective action is needed going forward,” Lawlor said in the statement.

“Decisions on how to respond to each request will be made on a case-by-case basis.”

Since the state’s role in Secure Communities is to carry out ICE’s requests for detainment, Arnone will be responsible for whether it complies with the requests and detains undocumented residents while immigration reviews are performed.

Michael Wishnie ’83 LAW ’93, who runs the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy clinic, said Secure Communities may be unconstitutional and that Malloy is not legally obligated to comply.

According to officials such as Ward 16 Alderwoman Migdalia Castro of Fair Haven, the program threatens not only to strain the city’s policing efforts but also to instill fear in an entire community.

After the 2007 ICE raids — when federal agents detained 29 Fair Haven residents in what city

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officials said was retaliation for the city’s immigrant-friendly ID card program passed two days earlier — Castro said a large part of the city’s immigration population stopped going to work, shopping and attending school for some time.

“This is not something that sends families to work,” Castro said. “It divides.”

“Secure Communities jeopardizes our safety by creating a community of mistrust,” said Latrina Kelly, the interim director of Junta for Progressive Action, an immigrants’ rights advocacy group. She added she has been contacted by New Haven residents who are afraid of what might happen when the program starts.

Since Secure Communities’ activation through Feb. 7, nearly 120,000 people have been deported through the program.

Contact NICK DEFIESTA at nicholas.defiesta@yale.edu and CHRISTOPHER PEAK at christopher.peak@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

“The idea of human rights as a fundamental principle can be seen to underlie throughout Islamic teachings.” ALI HOSEINI-KHAMENEI AYATOLLAH, IRAN

Yale Farm eyes composting

BY LILIANA VARMAN STAFF REPORTER A small group of graduate and undergraduate students have committed to meeting weekly to discuss options for enhancing the Yale Farm’s sustainability.

Though still in their initial stages, the workshops are intended to lead to the construction of a compost toilet for the Yale Farm, said Kendall Barbery FES ’13, a special projects coordinator at the Yale Sustainable Food Project and leader of the workshops. Doing so would constitute a sustainable, permanent solution to the Yale Farm’s current dependence on portable toilets. The idea to create a compost toilet, Barbery added, was not hers, but has been discussed by School of Forestry & Environmental Studies students in the past.

“There’s an ongoing need for facilities in close proximity for visitors to the Farm, but what that is and what is appropriate hasn’t been determined,” she said.

The workshop series currently aims to bring students together and discuss design possibilities, she added. At the meetings, Barbery delivers a presentation about composting toilets and then the group discusses potential designs.

Over the past year, Barbery said, a portable toilet has been sporadically available for Farm visitors, but this type of facility is both chemical-intensive and not cost-effective. Although

Barbery has prior experience with composting toilet projects, she said she is interested in implementing a new initiative in an urban setting.

“I wouldn’t say that a compost toilet is necessarily the solution, but having an academic conversation about a composting toilet is part of the solution,” she added.

Having an academic conversation about a composting toilet is part of the solution.

KENDALL BARBERY Special Projects Coordinator, Yale Sustainable Food Project At their first meeting, Barbery said, the group considered various technologies — such as flush toilets and manufactured composted units — and discussed their advantages and disadvantages. She added that she decided that the group’s focus would be on composting toilets after the majority of attendees expressed interest in the technology at its first meeting. Workshop participants will also take into account the needs and constraints of the site in terms of slope, prevailing wind, solar access, neighbors and general site usage while brainstorming designs, she added.

During Monday night’s workshop — the group’s second

Prof traces Iran from 1979

meeting — students focused on the pros and cons of various types of composting toilets, Barbery said. She added that her presentation highlighted composting toilets from Vermont, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom and national parks throughout the United States.

Barbery said there is currently a core group of five student participants — primarily undergraduates — and that other students have expressed interest via email.

“I love the hands-on aspects of the project — walking around the site and observing slope, water flow, solar access — not to mention the designing and building components,” said Hannah Sassoon ’15, a workshop attendee.

To publicize the workshops, Barbery reached out to Skillshare, an undergraduate organization that provides logistical management to support workshops that teach a non-academic skill, Skillshare president Sophie Mendelson ’15 said.

Although she has yet to attend the composting workshops, Mendelson said she hopes to in the future.

“It’s nice to really build a tangible thing and make a lasting contribution in a way that people will see and interact with,” Mendelson said.

Meetings are held Mondays from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Urban Resources Initiative building at 301 Prospect St. Contact LILIANA VARMAN at liliana.varman@yale.edu .

BLAIR SEIDEMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Mirjam Kunkler, a Princeton professor and Middle East expert, discussed the evolving dynamics of religion and politics in historical and present-day Iran.

BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA STAFF REPORTER Political theorist and Princeton professor Mirjam Kunkler described the interaction between religious and secular elements of the Iranian constitution as “complicated” during a talk Monday afternoon.

Before a crowd of roughly 30 people in Rosenkranz Hall, Kunkler traced religious elements in the nation’s constitution as they have evolved since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Kunkler, who has written a monograph on the subject, said the two prominent Iranian leaders during the period, Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, used the constitution as a medium for exerting their religious authority, adding that the ayatollahs’ actions have enabled contemporary political scientists to follow the deepening connections between Islam and the country’s political structure. “[Iran’s] uniqueness lies in the way its government has been exploited by various political factions to promote their vision,” she said. “This is what makes Iran a great case study both for political scientists and for students of politics.”

Kunkler said the original draft of the Iranian constitution adopted in 1979 under Ayatollah Khomeini surprisingly had many democratic elements that would

be inconceivable in presentday Iranian society. Under this version of the constitution, Kunkler said, men and women were considered equal, and women could serve as judges. The Guardian Council, a political body charged with interpreting the constitution, did not hold the veto power it now holds over legislation passed by the Iranian parliament, she said.

But due to the strong presence of conservative clerics, the final draft of the constitution that was adopted in October 1979 restrained many civil liberties, Kunkler said. In the final version, she said, women were not allowed to interpret Islamic law as judges, and Islamic law superseded secular law in all cases.

She added that a 1989 amendment of the constitution under Ayatollah Khamenei ameliorated what she said were infringements on civil rights. “[Khamenei] believed he could try to make up through new traditions and institutions the authority he lacked as a religious figure,” she said, explaining that many people looked down on Khamenei because he did not have the title of marja — the highest religious title in Shia Islam.

For instance, Kunkler said, Khamenei amended the constitution to suggest that leaders should earn legitimacy through political experience rather than religious title. The

amendment also increased the power of the Special Court of the Clergy, previously considered unaccountable and nebulous, whose role was to prosecute all transgressions of the clergy, she said.

Kunkler said the constitution has also influenced the way some Iranian women are educated in hawzas, or religious seminaries.

“On one hand, hawzas have become more modernized in terms of their curriculum, offering comprehensive B.A. and M.A. degrees to women,” Kunkler said, “yet the way funds and stipends are distributed is still strictly regulated by religious authorities.”

Marilyn Moger, a retiree from Milford, Conn., who attended the talk, said although she found it difficult to follow Kunkler’s detailed account of Iran’s political history, she learned much about Iranian society from the talk.

“I was most intrigued by the way Kunkler portrayed the shifting roles of women in Iranian society,” she said.

Philip Gorsky, a sociology professor, said he thought Kunkler successfully articulated the complicated nature of Iran’s government.

Mirjam Kunkler holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

Contact ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA at aleksandra.gjorgievska@yale.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“The existence of moral dilemmas … does not signify that there is some inconsistency … in the set of … moral directives under which we define our obligations.” RUTH BARCAN MARCUS PHILOSOPHER

Marcus seen as visionary, mentor MARCUS FROM PAGE 1 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1941. Five years later, she earned a doctorate in philosophy from Yale. In 1959, Marcus took her first teaching post as a part-time professor of philosophy at Roosevelt University in Illinois, where she worked until becoming head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1964. Marcus returned to Yale in 1973 as a professor of philosophy and taught in the department until her retirement in 1992.

As a professor, Marcus was known for her toughness, but also for her open and supportive attitude.

While former students said they initially found her intimidating, they added that they quickly recognized Marcus’ warm, generous and funny personality. Former students also described Marcus as an excellent mentor — particularly to women entering academia — and many said she inspired

them to pursue careers in philosophy.

“She was a regular mother hen to her students, coddling us along, scolding us [when] necessary,” said Diana Raffman ’75 GRD ’86, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and a former student of Marcus’. “The world is a poorer and much smaller place without Ruth in it.”

In addition to holding multiple professorships, Marcus also served as chair of the American Philosophical Association from 1976-’83. While serving in the post, she continued to influence the field of philosophy by increasing transparency in hiring practices at academic institutions across the country. She won numerous accolades for her work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal and the American Philosophical Association’s Quinn Prize for service to philosophy.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong GRD ’82, a philosophy professor at Duke and one of Marcus’ former students, described her as an

original thinker whose contributions to logic created a new branch of philosophy.

The world is a poorer and much smaller place without Ruth in it.

DIANA RAFFMAN ’75 GRD ’86 Former student of Ruth Barcan Marcus “She started off way ahead of the philosophical crowd and led them in new directions,” SinnottArmstrong said.

Colleagues said Marcus influenced all those around her, even beyond her field. Michael Della Rocca, a Yale professor of philosophy who joined the department the year before Marcus retired, said she always supported her younger colleagues, including him.

Marcus’ talents were not confined to the academic arena — she was also an excellent athlete. As a

student at NYU, she was a champion fencer and would have competed at the Olympics had the games not been cancelled because of World War II. Longtime friend and colleague Robert Fogelin GRD ’60 recalled that their squash games were as intense as their intellectual debates.

Friends and family said they remember Marcus as someone who was equally devoted to her personal and professional lives, adding that her strong will and love of learning were her defining traits.

“I think she will always be a model of the philosophical life,” Sinnott-Armstrong said. “She showed how one can be a serious philosopher with very high standards and a compassionate person.”

Marcus is survived by her children, Jim, Peter, Katherine and Libby.

Contact HOON PYO JEON at hoonpyo.jeon@yale.edu and JANE DARBY MENTON at jane.menton@yale.edu .

Piracy policies vary among schools PIRACY FROM PAGE 1 second infringement results in disabled network access until the student meets with his or her dean in order to sign the IT Appropriate Use Policy.

The sophomore said she was relieved to find the punishment so lenient. Since receiving the two warnings, she said she decided she has continued to download illegal music but has done so more discreetly — she now avoids popular and recently released titles.

“The first time I got caught, I was so scared it would be really bad,” the sophomore said. “But my dean and master didn’t say anything about it. [The University’s] reaction to it wasn’t serious.

I just had to email back and say I promise I wouldn’t do it again.”

After the University receives a complaint from the RIAA, the copyright agent traces the IP address to the corresponding Yale NetID in order to identify the offender and send the appropriate email warning. In the case of undergraduate violations, the Master and Dean of the student’s residential college are included as recipients as well.

A junior who also wished to remain anonymous said she was surprised to receive her first notice last April since she believes her friends download more copyrighted material than she does and have not been caught.

When she got her second notice in December, she said she had already forgotten about the first.

A third infringement, according to Yale College Executive Committee chair Carol Jacobs, requires the student to testify before the committee.

In all nine cases that the committee has seen since it began trying cases six years ago, the

charged student received a reprimand, a decision that leaves the student unpunished but with the understanding that another breach would lead to more severe punishment.

“It’s a rather liberal policy,” Jacobs said. “The way Yale handles [piracy] is with patience and integrity.”

None of the students heard by the committee last fall contested the charges, Jacobs added.

Seven out of 13 students randomly interviewed said they have downloaded copyrighted files illegally using Yale’s network. Two had received copyright infringement notices.

Ike Lee ’15, who has not pirated Internet files at Yale, said he doubts that all students who download music illegally at Yale are caught. He added that pirating files while at home over break is less risky.

“There’s nothing so urgent that can’t wait until I get back home to download instead,” Lee said.

PIRATES NATIONWIDE

Colleges and universities nationwide have taken various approaches to addressing complaints, many of which involve more serious punishments for copyright violators than those that Yale issues.

Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, Yale and other universities are not liable for copyright infringement on their networks as long as they respond to every complaint and enforce anti-piracy policies such as terminating network access for repeat offenders. With the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, attention turned specifically to internet policies on college campuses. University adminis-

trators were required to follow three guidelines: inform students about copyright law and policies, implement a plan to “effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials” by its network users and offer alternatives to illegal downloading.

Some universities, for example, impose fines at a second violation, ranging from $35 at Cornell University to $500 at Stanford University. University of California, Los Angeles, requires that first-time violators attend workshops with the dean of students. For second infringements, students must undergo a formal sanctioning process, including a discussion with the dean, writing an essay and passing a computer checkup. Internet access is suspended until each process is completed, and a third violation may lead to a student’s suspension.

Others impose limits on user activity, unlike Yale. Nearby Southern Connecticut State University blocks all peer-topeer traffic and contacts users who download a large amount of data, while UCLA imposes limits on the amount of data that students can download or upload in a given time span. But very few, if any, universities actively monitor their networks for illegal activities. All rely on notifications from the RIAA. University President Richard Levin said he has not been heard formal concerns about the issue since the RIAA initiated conversations with universities about enforcing copyright laws nearly a decade ago.

A Yale junior who received two violation warnings said she hoped the department would better inform students about the consequences of illegal download-

ing for undergraduates. Yale’s ITS website describes the process by which Yale receives complaints and addresses them, though four students interviewed who had not illegally downloaded said they are not aware of the consequences.

ITS spokesman Jane Livingston said that ITS hosted an antifilesharing poster and video campaign targeted at undergraduates in 2008 and sees reviving the campaign as a possibility to increase awareness. She added that said ITS has not made any recent policy changes regarding copyright infringement, and does not plan to do so in the near future.

“Networked systems will always have vulnerabilities, including those that allow for copyright infringement,” Livingston said, adding that ITS tries to reduce illegal downloading through regular evaluations of the network’s configuration.

Elizabeth Stark, a computer science professor who teaches courses on media law, said she believes the best anti-piracy policies would help students acquire copyrighted works legally for a reasonable price. She suggested that Yale could offer discounts to students to purchase media from Spotify or Netflix.

Lee, a freshman, said he strongly opposes any active enforcement by the University, calling it “too paternalistic.”

“If Yale chooses not to punish kids for underage drinking, which is a much bigger and more important problem to deal with, then it makes no sense for ITS to punish students for doing something like this,” Lee said.

Contact CLINTON WANG at clinton.wang@yale.edu .

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Mostly sunny, with a high near 44. Low of 37.

THURSDAY

High of 56, low of 40.

High of 53, low of 43.

WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ

ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 3:00 P.M. Shakespeare at Yale presents: “Shakespeare at the Yale Rep.” “Shakespeare at Yale Rep” features production photographs and posters that illuminate the theater’s rich history of staging Shakespeare’s dramas, from Alvin Epstein’s landmark productions in the 1970s to more recent reimaginings by Bill Rauch and Mark Lamos. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Room 108.

4:30 P.M. “Concord of Sweet Sounds: Shakespeare’s Musical Influences.” The program will explore Renaissance England and the composers, foreign influences, and popular songs and dances that shaped Shakespeare’s musical offerings. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (121 Wall St.).

THE CLOSET BY MAX RITVO AND NGOZI UKAZU

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23 5:00 P.M. “‘Save Our Children’: Gay Rights, Conservative Politics, and Racial Conflict in the 1970s.” Gillian Frank, a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University, will speak.

Sponsored by the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. Hall of Graduate Studies (320 York St.), Room 211.

8:00 P.M. “Good Goods.” The Yale Repertory Theatre presents Christina Anderson’s production of “Good Goods.” Directed by Tina Landau ’84. Tickets can be purchased at www.yalerep.org.

Yale Repertory Theatre (1120 Chapel St.).

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 11:00 A.M. “Can Animals be Moral?” The Program in Agrarian Studies presents this lecture by University of Miami philosophy professor Mark Rowlands. Institution for Social and Policy Studies (77 Prospect St.), Room B012.

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PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Private equity According to investopedia.com, private equity is “equity capital that is not quoted on a public exchange.” Private equity investors invest directly into private companies or buy out public companies, delisting their public equity. Private equity companies sometimes pool funds in order to buy out large public companies.

StickK helps the irresolute

BY DAN WEINER STAFF REPORTER A website founded by three Yalies is dedicated to helping people keep resolutions.

Roughly four years after two Yale professors and a student in the Yale School of Management launched stickK.com, a website that lets people impose monetary penalties on themselves if they fail to keep their promises, the service has more than 150,000 users, including upwards of 300 affiliated with the University.

According to Sam Espinosa ’06, Director of Marketing at stickK, the website is currently focusing on integrating the services of high-tech companies to make it easier for people to report their successes and more difficult for them to falsify their prog-

EXAMPLES OF COMMITMENT COMMIT TO WRITING IN A JOURNAL DAILY

Sixteen-week contract.

Each week failed give $7 to anti-charity (George W. Bush Presidential Library).

WRITE 20 PAGES OF THESIS IN 10 DAYS

Ten-day contract. Give $20 if failed to anti-charity (Americans United for Life).

BE IN BED BY 1 A.M. EVERY NIGHT

Twenty-six-week contract.

Each failed week give $10 to anti-charity (The Manchester United Fan Club).

ress. One Yale student who used stickK praised the service for its effectiveness but added that he might only enter into a new contract if he knew beforehand that he could complete it.

StickK is a free online service that offers “commitment contracts,” or agreements to accomplish some task by a certain date or else face potential monetary or social punishment. The website has a handful of preset goals, including “Lose Weight,” “Exercise Regularly” and “Quit Smoking,” but the users have the ability to define their own objectives, a feature that Ian Ayres ’81 LAW ’86, stickK Co-Founder and professor at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management, said contributes to the popularity of the service.

“I have read about 10,000 of the self-designed commitments and they cover such a wide range of human emotion and behavior,” he said. “Some people committed to gain weight, others to lose weights. Some people committed to quit playing video games, some people committed to get to the next level on their PS2 Warcraft game. You just see this whole arch of human struggle.”

According to Espinosa, stickK contracts become increasingly more effective as they hold people more accountable for their resolutions. While agreements without any form of potential punishment succeed only 29 percent of the time, adding a “referee” — a friend or family member to monitor and record progress on the website — brings the success rate to 59 percent.

Monetary incentives further increase the success rate of resolutions. Contracts can stipulate one of three types of fines for failure: giving money to a particular person, to a charity, or

to an “anti-charity” — a group that the user dislikes. Suggested anti-charities range from the NRA Foundation and Freedom to Marry to American lobbying organizations to the English Premier League Fan Clubs. Espinosa said the success rates was around 80 percent for contracts that include an anti-charity clause.

It’s kind of internal insurance … It’s a way to back up … that you really intend to do this.

IAN AYRES ’81 LAW ’86 Co-founder, stickK Carl Chauvin ’12 structured his stickK contract with a monetary incentive: after three years rowing for the varsity crew team, he quit last spring but wanted to stay in shape. He heard about stickK from Louis Gilbert ’12, who interned at the company last summer, and decided to enter into an eight-week contract at the beginning of the fall that said that he would have to pay his brother $20 for every week in which he exercised fewer than four days. Chauvin said he only missed his goal once in eight weeks.

“I had a great experience with it,” he said. “I thought it helped me a lot, and if there is something I want to do that I think is going to be hard to motivate myself to do, I would definitely use it again.”

However, Chauvin said that he has not been as diligent about working out since the stickK contract expired a few months ago. While tempted to enter into another agreement, he said that

is not sure if he has the motivation to justify signing a new contract, given the financial risk of failure.

Ayres said that even people who were certain to fulfill their resolutions might use stickK as a way to demonstrate, to themselves or others, that they are serious about their goals.

“It’s kind of internal insurance,” Ayres said. “Even if you believe you are likely to do it, it’s a way to back up to yourself and possibly to others that you really intend to do this.”

Each time an individual breaks a contract that involves a penalty fee, stickK collects a percentage of that fee. Ayres said stickK collects 19.5 percent of contract defaults to charities and 29.5 percent to anti-charities.

StickK’s other major revenue source is its corporate contracts. In the fall of 2010 stickK began to offer commitment contracts for companies that wanted to encourage certain employee behavior. Employees that meet goals, such as arriving to work on time, earn points in a reward store. StickK currently has about 15 companies enrolled in the program, and Espinosa said that

stickK hopes to grow this pool, since companies, unlike individuals, pay to offer stickK’s service to their employees.

Since so much of the reporting on users’ progress comes from friends of clients, stickK faces the issue of making sure that their reports are reliable, but Gilbert said that stickK’s growing partnership with third-party developers has helped it enforce contracts. For instance, while people might have once lied about their weight when entering it online, stickK’s recent integration with an Internet-connected scale makes it harder for users to fake the data. According to Espinosa, stickK plants to collaborate with other services, including the exercise application “CardioTrainer” and the location-based social network “Foursquare,” to help monitor progress on resolutions.

In addition to Ayres, stickK’s founding team included economics professor Dean Karlan and Jordan Goldberg ’06, then a student at SOM and the current CEO of stickK.

Money committed since stickK’s founding Commitments created

Cigarettes not smoked

Conflict of interest disclosure ‘no panacea’

More information may not always make markets work better, say two Yale professors.

A new paper by Gary Gorton, a professor at the School of Management, and Guillermo Ordoñez, a Yale economics professor, argues that a lack of information in shortterm debt markets can actually help the market run more efficiently, though it can also cause a vulnerability to external shocks. An outside expert said the paper, published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ran counter to the prevailing view that financial transparency is always beneficial, and could have implications in financial regulation.

They write that banks use shortterm debt, backed by collateral, as a method of transactions within the banking system. The problem with this market, Gorton said, is that it is often too expensive for firms to research the quality of the collateral underlying the loans. Instead, firms choose to assume an equal distribution of quality within the collateral held by different firms.

“So, instead of knowing which borrowers have good collateral and which have bad collateral, it all starts to look alike,” Gorton said.

The authors say the practice is an efficient way for the traders to value the collateral, but it creates fragility in the sort-term debt market. If a firm or individual begins producing information about the collateral, perhaps fearing its quality, then only firms with good collateral will be able to borrow, which leads to a credit crunch.

For example, Ordoñez said, mortgage backed-securities are often used as collateral in this market, because they tend to have a good rating and are too complex to research profitably. But if firms begin to question the general quality of that sort of asset, then it would lose its value as collateral.

“The economy can produce bad outcomes, even though everyone understands what’s going on,” Gorton said.

According to Ordoñez, there is room for regulators to counter the fragility of the market by producing information about quality of collateral, but they must first determine that the costs of the fragility outweigh the system’s benefits.

Gorton cautions that fragility is not inherently bad, because it is a

Daylian Cain, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, is an expert in conflicts of interest, especially cases in which one person has interests at odds with another individual for whom he or she serves as an adviser. He spoke to the News about disclosure regulation in the financial industry. drew you to research disQWhat closure policies?

A

Two Yale professors published a paper arguing that short-term debt markets can run more efficiently when they are lacking in transparency.

GARY GORTON Professor, Yale School of Management “Even the government cannot eliminate risk completely, and nor would it want to,” he said.

Both authors said this paper’s insight — that increased information can hurt the economy — runs counter to many established opinions about transparency in financial markets. Ordoñez said that the obsession with transparency in the financial markets since the 2007 crisis could actually inhibit the functioning of those markets. How-

ever, the paper did not speculate about the origins of the 2007 financial crisis, which saw a serious credit crunch.

Gorton said that the paper’s insights are largely theoretical and did not recommend specific details about how regulation should work.

Arvind Krishnamurthy, a professor of finance at Northwestern University, agreed with the authors about the importance of their research. He added that there were many issues of “information, debt and financial crises” that modern economics had not yet explained.

“As the authorities move to put in place new financial regulations, they are very much driven by a worldview in which transparency is an unmitigated virtue,” Krishnamurthy said.

“We also need to know the ‘right’ amount of opacity for the economy.”

A debt asset is generally considered short-term if it has a maturity date of one year or less.

Contact CASEY SUMNER at casey.sumner@yale.edu .

KAREN TIAN/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

Workouts completed

BY PAAVAN GAMI CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

CREATIVE COMMONS

When I started grad school at Carnegie Mellon, Don Moore and George Loewenstein were researching the psychology of conflicts of interest. I recounted my thoughts on disclosure and the three of us started to design experiments to look into these issues.

Prior research on the “anchoring bias” (the tendency for people to mentally stick to, or be affected by, what was in their heads just a moment ago) had already shown that even what are known to be randomly generated suggestions have a powerful effect on subsequent judgment. I worried that if a disclosure that some advice is totally random does not sufficiently warn an audience, then surely some vague disclosure that advice “may be biased by a financial conflict of interest” is also likely to fall short as a warning device. Years of research had long shown that biased advice is very difficult to ignore. Our research not only showed that disclosure can fail to sufficiently help matters, but it can also have perverse effects; for instance, it can morally license advisees to give even more biased advice “because the audience has been warned” (caveat emptor). With Sunita Sah, Loewenstein and I have also shown that disclosure can place inappropriate pressure on the audience to heed the advice — for example, in order to avoid insinuating that the doctor’s advice has been corrupted.

there any other topics in the QAre financial world that are drawing your interest?

A

Pension funds allocating their assets to private equity have reaped little or no rewards on average, according to a Yale study.

Martijn Cremers, associate professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, concluded in a recent paper that returns on private equity over the last 10 years were no better than the stock market.

Investments in public equity were on average unlikely to yield more profit than investments in stocks or bonds, because of their high management fees. However, some experts disagreed with the findings, saying that private equity is still a good option for asset allocation.

According to the paper, private equity funds had a spectacular run in the 1990s where it returned an average net return of 21.5 percent to its investors. Impressed by this performance, institutional investors increased their investment in private equity, bringing the total funds in private equity from $200 million to $2 billion in the last 10 years. But the Midas touch of private equity disappeared at the turn of the century and the returns fell to an average of 4.5 percent in the last 10 years, the paper said.

“If I had to summarize it in a nutshell, pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities,” Cremers said.

Since private equity is more volatile than stocks or bonds, a portfolio with a large asset allocation in it would have a high amount of risk.

For example, the paper said, the net returns from private equity fell from a profit of 36 percent in 2000 to a loss of 21 percent the next year.

Even as the profits in private equity took a hit in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, private equity fees continued to climb. Cremers explained that in addition to taking a cut from the share of returns, known as the performance fee, private equity managers also charge an overall management fee on the invested capital. He said the average management fee has increased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 4.2 percent in 2010. Private equity fund managers have taken 70 percent of the gross profits made in the last decade as fees, Cremers said.

Steven Kaplan, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago, disagreed with the findings. According to his research, every dollar a pension fund put into private equity earned 20 percent more than it would have in Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Accounting for management and performance fees, he said, private equity funds have outperformed public markets by an average of three percentage points over the past 20 years.

Kaplan pinned the drastic difference in results on unreliable data.

“Cremers does not have particularly good performance data [but] we do,” Kaplan said.

In the past several studies have relied on commercial data sets pro-

Contact DAN WEINER at daniel.weiner@yale.edu .

BY CASEY SUMNER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Even the government cannot eliminate risk completely, and nor would it want to.

BY ZEENAT MANSOOR STAFF REPORTER

BY THE NUMBERS STICKK $9.8 m 140 k 300 k 2.5 m

Markets’ transparency questioned

natural part of credit markets. He said he prefers managing fragility rather than attempting to eliminate it.

Private equity returns disputed

Well, we still think that transparency is a good thing and agree that disclosure will surely be part of the solution. So now we are more focused on how to improve disclosure because the word is

out that it is no panacea. Also, I am interested in the notion that it is not only the intentionally corrupt that give bad advice, but also the unintentionally biased. Wellmeaning professionals often think that they are being objective when in fact their advice partly serves their own interest. If the public better appreciated this fact, perhaps disclosure would serve as a better warning. As it stands, most audiences think that their advisers would never intentionally mislead them, conflict or no conflict. Even if this were true, bad advice can be given unintentionally: good intentions do not ensure good advice. do you collaborate with QHow peers from other schools? Are most of the experiments conducted here at Yale?

A

I collaborate across several labs, at Duke, Carnegie Mellon, [the University of Pennsylvania], in Germany, and here at Yale. I also often use online subject pools, some maintained by Yale SOM (E-lab). We use many Yale community members in our experiments, as well as people from around the world. The Internet (and Skype) has widened my ability to collaborate and collect data across brick-and-mortar borders.

several pieces of advice rather than choosing one to run with. And, for example, when it comes to listening to advice from alumni interviewers on who to accept at Yale, keeping a clear sense of what your “prior” inclination was (based on standardized scores, GPA, etc.) and deciding ahead of time how much weight to put on the interviewer’s advice can also help protect against being overly affected by expert advice. Finally, linear models can sometimes help substitute for expert opinion, but that is another story. you think financial models QDo have started to take behavioral factors into account?

A

Ours remains a new and growing field, but yes, heads are turning. Regulators have been surprisingly aware of and open to the findings of my disclosure research.

On the other hand, it is sometimes (neoclassically) thought that irrationality can be beaten out of the

market. The problem with this view is that there are “limits to arbitrage”; for instance, while the housing bubble might have been correctly seen as an irrational mispricing and deviation from fundamental values, it remained difficult to predict exactly when to “short” (or predict downturns in) the market. One can go bankrupt trying to outsmart the masses.

Perhaps we ought to better understand ourselves first, and psychological insights can help us do just that. Also, Yale has one of the best psych programs on the planet, so we are fortunate to have so many sources of insight on campus. That said, knowing the many ways that the human mind is limited does not imply that those limits disappear once noticed. Clearly an exciting direction for future research is how to overcome these limits — or (as I tell the MBAs) at least how to “manage” them.

A

DAYLIAN CAIN

Organizational behavior professor Daylian Cain researches how disclosure of bias helps — or doesn’t help — audiences make sound decisions.

ANDREW METRICK/NBER

MARTIJN CREMERS/YALE

Business professors from across the nation, including (clockwise from top left) Ayako Yasuda, Steven Kaplan, Martijn Cremers and Andrew Metrick, shed light on the rewards — or lack thereof — from investing in private equity funds. vided by Thomson Venture Economics, which is problematic for analysis, Kaplan said.

Ayako Yasuda, associate professor of management at the University of California, Davis, shed light on the problems of gathering definitive data. Unlike pension funds, private equity funds are not legally required to disclose their activities, so all data available is based on voluntary disclosure, which is subject to bias.

Pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities.

MARTIJN CREMERS Finance professor, Yale School of Management “What’s missing is not just random noise,” Yasuda said. “Even a very small percentage of the missing data could mean that it is being systematically obstructed, which could create hidden bias.”

The difficulty in collecting data about private equity makes the field’s performance uncertain, if not controversial, Kaplan said.

Yasuda contended that the 4.5 percent average return, which Cremers calculated, is no worse than the turbulent performance of the stock markets in the last decade.

“It’s a period in which the bench-

mark also performed poorly,” Yasuda said.

She agreed private equity funds tend to have higher fees than other investment asset classes, but said the performance fees are typically structured to avoid consuming all the net returns for investors in lowperformance funds.

In an underperforming market, private equity fees may seem exorbitant, but they are within reason during economic booms, such as the 1990s, Deputy SOM Dean Andrew Metrick said. Compared to a hedge fund, private equity charges a lot less, he said.

Metrick said that private equity funds also allow its institutional investors to invest in buyouts and ventures as partners, which means that pension funds may bypass a large portion of the overall fee. Such transactions are not included in Cremers’ data because they are not available to the researchers, Metrick said.

The key for pension fund managers is to find the right private equity investments, which requires enormous skill and long-term dedication, Metrick said.

For the unsophisticated investor, making investments in private equity funds is “like throwing darts at a newspaper,” he said.

The paper was co-authored by Aleksandar Andonov and Rob Bauer of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Contact ZEENAT MANSOOR at zeenat.mansoor@yale.edu .

Does ‘Obamacare’ jive with behavioral econ?

I

avoid the pitfalls your research has uncovered?

STEVEN KAPLAN/U.CHICAGO

GUEST COLUMNIST NICHOLAS TORSIELLO

Contact PAAVAN GAMI at paavan.gami@yale.edu .

sort of policy recomQWhat mendations would you make to

We found positive results in presenting unbiased second opinions alongside advice that was disclosed as conflicted. But these unbiased opinions need to be basically put right in front of the decision-maker. In a paper led

by Sunita Sah, we also found that “cooling-off periods” helped, as did having advisees make their choice away from the prying eyes of the adviser. Other research has shown that savvy repeat-players can learn to better use disclosure.

On advice-taking more generally, research suggests that actively “considering the opposite” might help. In other words, when getting advice, first consider what might be wrong about the advice (especially when it is advice that you are happy to hear), rather than first considering all the evidence in favor of it. Although not always appropriate, using the “wisdom of the crowd” suggests averaging

$

AYAKO YASUDA/UC DAVIS

f you paid any attention to the news and debates surrounding health care reform, you might have come away with this bottom line: the system is broken. Our annual bill is growing — over $2.5 trillion last year — as our chronic health ills pile up. Of particular concern are weight gain and tobacco use that lead to diabetes, hypertension, and other cardiovascular and preventable diseases. The current administration is trying to be serious about these issues, and one method on the table is the use of financial incentives.

There are many factors influencing one’s health, though, including varying degrees of access to highvalue quality care, to affordable insurance and services, and to available practitioners and opportunities for healthy living. Essential, too, are our habits and behaviors regarding the things we choose to ingest and the actions we (do not) take over time. The extent to which standard incentives can succeed is unclear.

Enter both consumer-directed health care (CDHC) and the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act, the national health policy reform legislation signed on March 23, 2010, and dubbed ‘Obamacare’ by some commentators. The for-

mer describes a general trend among employers, insurers, and policymakers seeking to increase personal responsibility and engagement during decision-making related to one’s health. The act incorporates some aspects of CDHC from both institutional and individual perspectives. It affects insurance markets through restructuring, coverage expansions, mandates, and other regulations that will coexist alongside alterations in Medicare payments and taxes. An example of change at the consumer level is found in Title I of PPACA. In there is a provision authorizing an increase in the maximum incentive amount that an employer-sponsored wellness program may offer a worker. Previously this was capped at 20 percent of his or her health plan cost, but now the threshold will rise to 30 (or eventually up to 50) percent of cost.

Industry and academic reports reveal mixed data on the effectiveness and the efficiency of such incentives. While employees seem to respond in the short term by acting healthier, most revert to their normal behaviors within a few months or a year. In addition to the uncertainty surrounding CDHC and wellness initiatives, there are concerns about how to apply these programs

equitably across diverse populations.

Congress was careful to include it its program requirements some stipulations meant to limit any disparities. However, these rules do little to capitalize on what we know about how humans deviate from truly rational agents. For instance, there is a consensus that we generally place too much weight on low-probability events, something which contributes to the attractiveness of lotteries and could be harnessed by employers offering health incentives. In addition, the act is mute on best practices for providing information and distributing payments. Here, we know that framing matters: people choose differently when options are presented in terms of gains versus losses, health versus financial implications, and even calorie counts versus an exercise equivalency needed to burn them off. The saliency, timing, frequency, and bundling of rewards or penalties also are key components in driving behavior change. Optimizing the use of health incentives therefore will require consideration of our biases for the present and the status quo, our limited attention and selfcontrol, and our aversions to losses, ambiguity, and regret.

Despite its (and CDHC’s) over-

all assumption of rationality among health care consumers, PPACA does take advantage of some of the systematic decision errors and heuristics that have been illuminated by behavioral economists. Larger firms will be required to automatically enroll employees into health insurance coverage; they may opt out, but evidence ranging from retirement planning to organ donor registration shows that people overwhelmingly tend to stick with a default. For Medicare insurance, copayments must be waived for screenings and other preventive services. The act also requires chain restaurants to label standard menu items with their caloric content. These last two are cases where changes in the decision environment are designed to guide or nudge people toward healthier choices.

If the Supreme Court does not dismantle PPACA, and if the secretary of health and human services seeks to raise the incentive level above 30 percent of coverage costs, the conversation might benefit from more discussion around attributes of wellness incentives other than their magnitudes.

Contact NICHOLAS TORSIELLO at nicholas.torsiello@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Private equity According to investopedia.com, private equity is “equity capital that is not quoted on a public exchange.” Private equity investors invest directly into private companies or buy out public companies, delisting their public equity. Private equity companies sometimes pool funds in order to buy out large public companies.

StickK helps the irresolute

BY DAN WEINER STAFF REPORTER A website founded by three Yalies is dedicated to helping people keep resolutions.

Roughly four years after two Yale professors and a student in the Yale School of Management launched stickK.com, a website that lets people impose monetary penalties on themselves if they fail to keep their promises, the service has more than 150,000 users, including upwards of 300 affiliated with the University.

According to Sam Espinosa ’06, Director of Marketing at stickK, the website is currently focusing on integrating the services of high-tech companies to make it easier for people to report their successes and more difficult for them to falsify their prog-

EXAMPLES OF COMMITMENT COMMIT TO WRITING IN A JOURNAL DAILY

Sixteen-week contract.

Each week failed give $7 to anti-charity (George W. Bush Presidential Library).

WRITE 20 PAGES OF THESIS IN 10 DAYS

Ten-day contract. Give $20 if failed to anti-charity (Americans United for Life).

BE IN BED BY 1 A.M. EVERY NIGHT

Twenty-six-week contract.

Each failed week give $10 to anti-charity (The Manchester United Fan Club).

ress. One Yale student who used stickK praised the service for its effectiveness but added that he might only enter into a new contract if he knew beforehand that he could complete it.

StickK is a free online service that offers “commitment contracts,” or agreements to accomplish some task by a certain date or else face potential monetary or social punishment. The website has a handful of preset goals, including “Lose Weight,” “Exercise Regularly” and “Quit Smoking,” but the users have the ability to define their own objectives, a feature that Ian Ayres ’81 LAW ’86, stickK Co-Founder and professor at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management, said contributes to the popularity of the service.

“I have read about 10,000 of the self-designed commitments and they cover such a wide range of human emotion and behavior,” he said. “Some people committed to gain weight, others to lose weights. Some people committed to quit playing video games, some people committed to get to the next level on their PS2 Warcraft game. You just see this whole arch of human struggle.”

According to Espinosa, stickK contracts become increasingly more effective as they hold people more accountable for their resolutions. While agreements without any form of potential punishment succeed only 29 percent of the time, adding a “referee” — a friend or family member to monitor and record progress on the website — brings the success rate to 59 percent.

Monetary incentives further increase the success rate of resolutions. Contracts can stipulate one of three types of fines for failure: giving money to a particular person, to a charity, or

to an “anti-charity” — a group that the user dislikes. Suggested anti-charities range from the NRA Foundation and Freedom to Marry to American lobbying organizations to the English Premier League Fan Clubs. Espinosa said the success rates was around 80 percent for contracts that include an anti-charity clause.

It’s kind of internal insurance … It’s a way to back up … that you really intend to do this.

IAN AYRES ’81 LAW ’86 Co-founder, stickK Carl Chauvin ’12 structured his stickK contract with a monetary incentive: after three years rowing for the varsity crew team, he quit last spring but wanted to stay in shape. He heard about stickK from Louis Gilbert ’12, who interned at the company last summer, and decided to enter into an eight-week contract at the beginning of the fall that said that he would have to pay his brother $20 for every week in which he exercised fewer than four days. Chauvin said he only missed his goal once in eight weeks.

“I had a great experience with it,” he said. “I thought it helped me a lot, and if there is something I want to do that I think is going to be hard to motivate myself to do, I would definitely use it again.”

However, Chauvin said that he has not been as diligent about working out since the stickK contract expired a few months ago. While tempted to enter into another agreement, he said that

is not sure if he has the motivation to justify signing a new contract, given the financial risk of failure.

Ayres said that even people who were certain to fulfill their resolutions might use stickK as a way to demonstrate, to themselves or others, that they are serious about their goals.

“It’s kind of internal insurance,” Ayres said. “Even if you believe you are likely to do it, it’s a way to back up to yourself and possibly to others that you really intend to do this.”

Each time an individual breaks a contract that involves a penalty fee, stickK collects a percentage of that fee. Ayres said stickK collects 19.5 percent of contract defaults to charities and 29.5 percent to anti-charities.

StickK’s other major revenue source is its corporate contracts. In the fall of 2010 stickK began to offer commitment contracts for companies that wanted to encourage certain employee behavior. Employees that meet goals, such as arriving to work on time, earn points in a reward store. StickK currently has about 15 companies enrolled in the program, and Espinosa said that

stickK hopes to grow this pool, since companies, unlike individuals, pay to offer stickK’s service to their employees.

Since so much of the reporting on users’ progress comes from friends of clients, stickK faces the issue of making sure that their reports are reliable, but Gilbert said that stickK’s growing partnership with third-party developers has helped it enforce contracts. For instance, while people might have once lied about their weight when entering it online, stickK’s recent integration with an Internet-connected scale makes it harder for users to fake the data. According to Espinosa, stickK plants to collaborate with other services, including the exercise application “CardioTrainer” and the location-based social network “Foursquare,” to help monitor progress on resolutions.

In addition to Ayres, stickK’s founding team included economics professor Dean Karlan and Jordan Goldberg ’06, then a student at SOM and the current CEO of stickK.

Money committed since stickK’s founding Commitments created

Cigarettes not smoked

Conflict of interest disclosure ‘no panacea’

More information may not always make markets work better, say two Yale professors.

A new paper by Gary Gorton, a professor at the School of Management, and Guillermo Ordoñez, a Yale economics professor, argues that a lack of information in shortterm debt markets can actually help the market run more efficiently, though it can also cause a vulnerability to external shocks. An outside expert said the paper, published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ran counter to the prevailing view that financial transparency is always beneficial, and could have implications in financial regulation.

They write that banks use shortterm debt, backed by collateral, as a method of transactions within the banking system. The problem with this market, Gorton said, is that it is often too expensive for firms to research the quality of the collateral underlying the loans. Instead, firms choose to assume an equal distribution of quality within the collateral held by different firms.

“So, instead of knowing which borrowers have good collateral and which have bad collateral, it all starts to look alike,” Gorton said.

The authors say the practice is an efficient way for the traders to value the collateral, but it creates fragility in the sort-term debt market. If a firm or individual begins producing information about the collateral, perhaps fearing its quality, then only firms with good collateral will be able to borrow, which leads to a credit crunch.

For example, Ordoñez said, mortgage backed-securities are often used as collateral in this market, because they tend to have a good rating and are too complex to research profitably. But if firms begin to question the general quality of that sort of asset, then it would lose its value as collateral.

“The economy can produce bad outcomes, even though everyone understands what’s going on,” Gorton said.

According to Ordoñez, there is room for regulators to counter the fragility of the market by producing information about quality of collateral, but they must first determine that the costs of the fragility outweigh the system’s benefits.

Gorton cautions that fragility is not inherently bad, because it is a

Daylian Cain, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, is an expert in conflicts of interest, especially cases in which one person has interests at odds with another individual for whom he or she serves as an adviser. He spoke to the News about disclosure regulation in the financial industry. drew you to research disQWhat closure policies?

A

Two Yale professors published a paper arguing that short-term debt markets can run more efficiently when they are lacking in transparency.

GARY GORTON Professor, Yale School of Management “Even the government cannot eliminate risk completely, and nor would it want to,” he said.

Both authors said this paper’s insight — that increased information can hurt the economy — runs counter to many established opinions about transparency in financial markets. Ordoñez said that the obsession with transparency in the financial markets since the 2007 crisis could actually inhibit the functioning of those markets. How-

ever, the paper did not speculate about the origins of the 2007 financial crisis, which saw a serious credit crunch.

Gorton said that the paper’s insights are largely theoretical and did not recommend specific details about how regulation should work.

Arvind Krishnamurthy, a professor of finance at Northwestern University, agreed with the authors about the importance of their research. He added that there were many issues of “information, debt and financial crises” that modern economics had not yet explained.

“As the authorities move to put in place new financial regulations, they are very much driven by a worldview in which transparency is an unmitigated virtue,” Krishnamurthy said.

“We also need to know the ‘right’ amount of opacity for the economy.”

A debt asset is generally considered short-term if it has a maturity date of one year or less.

Contact CASEY SUMNER at casey.sumner@yale.edu .

KAREN TIAN/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR

Workouts completed

BY PAAVAN GAMI CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

CREATIVE COMMONS

When I started grad school at Carnegie Mellon, Don Moore and George Loewenstein were researching the psychology of conflicts of interest. I recounted my thoughts on disclosure and the three of us started to design experiments to look into these issues.

Prior research on the “anchoring bias” (the tendency for people to mentally stick to, or be affected by, what was in their heads just a moment ago) had already shown that even what are known to be randomly generated suggestions have a powerful effect on subsequent judgment. I worried that if a disclosure that some advice is totally random does not sufficiently warn an audience, then surely some vague disclosure that advice “may be biased by a financial conflict of interest” is also likely to fall short as a warning device. Years of research had long shown that biased advice is very difficult to ignore. Our research not only showed that disclosure can fail to sufficiently help matters, but it can also have perverse effects; for instance, it can morally license advisees to give even more biased advice “because the audience has been warned” (caveat emptor). With Sunita Sah, Loewenstein and I have also shown that disclosure can place inappropriate pressure on the audience to heed the advice — for example, in order to avoid insinuating that the doctor’s advice has been corrupted.

there any other topics in the QAre financial world that are drawing your interest?

A

Pension funds allocating their assets to private equity have reaped little or no rewards on average, according to a Yale study.

Martijn Cremers, associate professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, concluded in a recent paper that returns on private equity over the last 10 years were no better than the stock market.

Investments in public equity were on average unlikely to yield more profit than investments in stocks or bonds, because of their high management fees. However, some experts disagreed with the findings, saying that private equity is still a good option for asset allocation.

According to the paper, private equity funds had a spectacular run in the 1990s where it returned an average net return of 21.5 percent to its investors. Impressed by this performance, institutional investors increased their investment in private equity, bringing the total funds in private equity from $200 million to $2 billion in the last 10 years. But the Midas touch of private equity disappeared at the turn of the century and the returns fell to an average of 4.5 percent in the last 10 years, the paper said.

“If I had to summarize it in a nutshell, pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities,” Cremers said.

Since private equity is more volatile than stocks or bonds, a portfolio with a large asset allocation in it would have a high amount of risk.

For example, the paper said, the net returns from private equity fell from a profit of 36 percent in 2000 to a loss of 21 percent the next year.

Even as the profits in private equity took a hit in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, private equity fees continued to climb. Cremers explained that in addition to taking a cut from the share of returns, known as the performance fee, private equity managers also charge an overall management fee on the invested capital. He said the average management fee has increased from 2.4 percent in 2000 to 4.2 percent in 2010. Private equity fund managers have taken 70 percent of the gross profits made in the last decade as fees, Cremers said.

Steven Kaplan, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago, disagreed with the findings. According to his research, every dollar a pension fund put into private equity earned 20 percent more than it would have in Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Accounting for management and performance fees, he said, private equity funds have outperformed public markets by an average of three percentage points over the past 20 years.

Kaplan pinned the drastic difference in results on unreliable data.

“Cremers does not have particularly good performance data [but] we do,” Kaplan said.

In the past several studies have relied on commercial data sets pro-

Contact DAN WEINER at daniel.weiner@yale.edu .

BY CASEY SUMNER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Even the government cannot eliminate risk completely, and nor would it want to.

BY ZEENAT MANSOOR STAFF REPORTER

BY THE NUMBERS STICKK $9.8 m 140 k 300 k 2.5 m

Markets’ transparency questioned

natural part of credit markets. He said he prefers managing fragility rather than attempting to eliminate it.

Private equity returns disputed

Well, we still think that transparency is a good thing and agree that disclosure will surely be part of the solution. So now we are more focused on how to improve disclosure because the word is

out that it is no panacea. Also, I am interested in the notion that it is not only the intentionally corrupt that give bad advice, but also the unintentionally biased. Wellmeaning professionals often think that they are being objective when in fact their advice partly serves their own interest. If the public better appreciated this fact, perhaps disclosure would serve as a better warning. As it stands, most audiences think that their advisers would never intentionally mislead them, conflict or no conflict. Even if this were true, bad advice can be given unintentionally: good intentions do not ensure good advice. do you collaborate with QHow peers from other schools? Are most of the experiments conducted here at Yale?

A

I collaborate across several labs, at Duke, Carnegie Mellon, [the University of Pennsylvania], in Germany, and here at Yale. I also often use online subject pools, some maintained by Yale SOM (E-lab). We use many Yale community members in our experiments, as well as people from around the world. The Internet (and Skype) has widened my ability to collaborate and collect data across brick-and-mortar borders.

several pieces of advice rather than choosing one to run with. And, for example, when it comes to listening to advice from alumni interviewers on who to accept at Yale, keeping a clear sense of what your “prior” inclination was (based on standardized scores, GPA, etc.) and deciding ahead of time how much weight to put on the interviewer’s advice can also help protect against being overly affected by expert advice. Finally, linear models can sometimes help substitute for expert opinion, but that is another story. you think financial models QDo have started to take behavioral factors into account?

A

Ours remains a new and growing field, but yes, heads are turning. Regulators have been surprisingly aware of and open to the findings of my disclosure research.

On the other hand, it is sometimes (neoclassically) thought that irrationality can be beaten out of the

market. The problem with this view is that there are “limits to arbitrage”; for instance, while the housing bubble might have been correctly seen as an irrational mispricing and deviation from fundamental values, it remained difficult to predict exactly when to “short” (or predict downturns in) the market. One can go bankrupt trying to outsmart the masses.

Perhaps we ought to better understand ourselves first, and psychological insights can help us do just that. Also, Yale has one of the best psych programs on the planet, so we are fortunate to have so many sources of insight on campus. That said, knowing the many ways that the human mind is limited does not imply that those limits disappear once noticed. Clearly an exciting direction for future research is how to overcome these limits — or (as I tell the MBAs) at least how to “manage” them.

A

DAYLIAN CAIN

Organizational behavior professor Daylian Cain researches how disclosure of bias helps — or doesn’t help — audiences make sound decisions.

ANDREW METRICK/NBER

MARTIJN CREMERS/YALE

Business professors from across the nation, including (clockwise from top left) Ayako Yasuda, Steven Kaplan, Martijn Cremers and Andrew Metrick, shed light on the rewards — or lack thereof — from investing in private equity funds. vided by Thomson Venture Economics, which is problematic for analysis, Kaplan said.

Ayako Yasuda, associate professor of management at the University of California, Davis, shed light on the problems of gathering definitive data. Unlike pension funds, private equity funds are not legally required to disclose their activities, so all data available is based on voluntary disclosure, which is subject to bias.

Pension funds got similar returns to what they would have gotten had they invested in passive equities.

MARTIJN CREMERS Finance professor, Yale School of Management “What’s missing is not just random noise,” Yasuda said. “Even a very small percentage of the missing data could mean that it is being systematically obstructed, which could create hidden bias.”

The difficulty in collecting data about private equity makes the field’s performance uncertain, if not controversial, Kaplan said.

Yasuda contended that the 4.5 percent average return, which Cremers calculated, is no worse than the turbulent performance of the stock markets in the last decade.

“It’s a period in which the bench-

mark also performed poorly,” Yasuda said.

She agreed private equity funds tend to have higher fees than other investment asset classes, but said the performance fees are typically structured to avoid consuming all the net returns for investors in lowperformance funds.

In an underperforming market, private equity fees may seem exorbitant, but they are within reason during economic booms, such as the 1990s, Deputy SOM Dean Andrew Metrick said. Compared to a hedge fund, private equity charges a lot less, he said.

Metrick said that private equity funds also allow its institutional investors to invest in buyouts and ventures as partners, which means that pension funds may bypass a large portion of the overall fee. Such transactions are not included in Cremers’ data because they are not available to the researchers, Metrick said.

The key for pension fund managers is to find the right private equity investments, which requires enormous skill and long-term dedication, Metrick said.

For the unsophisticated investor, making investments in private equity funds is “like throwing darts at a newspaper,” he said.

The paper was co-authored by Aleksandar Andonov and Rob Bauer of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Contact ZEENAT MANSOOR at zeenat.mansoor@yale.edu .

Does ‘Obamacare’ jive with behavioral econ?

I

avoid the pitfalls your research has uncovered?

STEVEN KAPLAN/U.CHICAGO

GUEST COLUMNIST NICHOLAS TORSIELLO

Contact PAAVAN GAMI at paavan.gami@yale.edu .

sort of policy recomQWhat mendations would you make to

We found positive results in presenting unbiased second opinions alongside advice that was disclosed as conflicted. But these unbiased opinions need to be basically put right in front of the decision-maker. In a paper led

by Sunita Sah, we also found that “cooling-off periods” helped, as did having advisees make their choice away from the prying eyes of the adviser. Other research has shown that savvy repeat-players can learn to better use disclosure.

On advice-taking more generally, research suggests that actively “considering the opposite” might help. In other words, when getting advice, first consider what might be wrong about the advice (especially when it is advice that you are happy to hear), rather than first considering all the evidence in favor of it. Although not always appropriate, using the “wisdom of the crowd” suggests averaging

$

AYAKO YASUDA/UC DAVIS

f you paid any attention to the news and debates surrounding health care reform, you might have come away with this bottom line: the system is broken. Our annual bill is growing — over $2.5 trillion last year — as our chronic health ills pile up. Of particular concern are weight gain and tobacco use that lead to diabetes, hypertension, and other cardiovascular and preventable diseases. The current administration is trying to be serious about these issues, and one method on the table is the use of financial incentives.

There are many factors influencing one’s health, though, including varying degrees of access to highvalue quality care, to affordable insurance and services, and to available practitioners and opportunities for healthy living. Essential, too, are our habits and behaviors regarding the things we choose to ingest and the actions we (do not) take over time. The extent to which standard incentives can succeed is unclear.

Enter both consumer-directed health care (CDHC) and the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act, the national health policy reform legislation signed on March 23, 2010, and dubbed ‘Obamacare’ by some commentators. The for-

mer describes a general trend among employers, insurers, and policymakers seeking to increase personal responsibility and engagement during decision-making related to one’s health. The act incorporates some aspects of CDHC from both institutional and individual perspectives. It affects insurance markets through restructuring, coverage expansions, mandates, and other regulations that will coexist alongside alterations in Medicare payments and taxes. An example of change at the consumer level is found in Title I of PPACA. In there is a provision authorizing an increase in the maximum incentive amount that an employer-sponsored wellness program may offer a worker. Previously this was capped at 20 percent of his or her health plan cost, but now the threshold will rise to 30 (or eventually up to 50) percent of cost.

Industry and academic reports reveal mixed data on the effectiveness and the efficiency of such incentives. While employees seem to respond in the short term by acting healthier, most revert to their normal behaviors within a few months or a year. In addition to the uncertainty surrounding CDHC and wellness initiatives, there are concerns about how to apply these programs

equitably across diverse populations.

Congress was careful to include it its program requirements some stipulations meant to limit any disparities. However, these rules do little to capitalize on what we know about how humans deviate from truly rational agents. For instance, there is a consensus that we generally place too much weight on low-probability events, something which contributes to the attractiveness of lotteries and could be harnessed by employers offering health incentives. In addition, the act is mute on best practices for providing information and distributing payments. Here, we know that framing matters: people choose differently when options are presented in terms of gains versus losses, health versus financial implications, and even calorie counts versus an exercise equivalency needed to burn them off. The saliency, timing, frequency, and bundling of rewards or penalties also are key components in driving behavior change. Optimizing the use of health incentives therefore will require consideration of our biases for the present and the status quo, our limited attention and selfcontrol, and our aversions to losses, ambiguity, and regret.

Despite its (and CDHC’s) over-

all assumption of rationality among health care consumers, PPACA does take advantage of some of the systematic decision errors and heuristics that have been illuminated by behavioral economists. Larger firms will be required to automatically enroll employees into health insurance coverage; they may opt out, but evidence ranging from retirement planning to organ donor registration shows that people overwhelmingly tend to stick with a default. For Medicare insurance, copayments must be waived for screenings and other preventive services. The act also requires chain restaurants to label standard menu items with their caloric content. These last two are cases where changes in the decision environment are designed to guide or nudge people toward healthier choices.

If the Supreme Court does not dismantle PPACA, and if the secretary of health and human services seeks to raise the incentive level above 30 percent of coverage costs, the conversation might benefit from more discussion around attributes of wellness incentives other than their magnitudes.

Contact NICHOLAS TORSIELLO at nicholas.torsiello@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 10

WORLD

160

Divisions remain over Greek deal

BY GABRIELE STEINHAUSER AND SARAH DILORENZON ASSOCIATED PRESS BRUSSELS — Eurozone governments worked into the night on Monday, hoping to agree on a long-awaited rescue package for Greece that would save it from a potentially calamitous bankruptcy next month, but several key points of division remained, senior officials said.

Finance ministers meeting in Brussels Monday were still wrangling over how to reduce Greece’s debt load further and impose even tighter control over the country’s spending, and negotiations were expected to stretch late into the night. Rich countries like Germany and the Netherlands and the International Monetary Fund want to be sure that Athens can eventually survive without aid.

But after months of delays, time for Greece is running out. The country needs to secure the euro130 billion ($170 billion) bailout so it can move ahead with a related euro100 billion ($130 billion) debt relief deal with private investors. That deal needs to be in place quickly if Athens is to avoid a disorderly default on a bond repayment on March 20.

“I am of the opinion that today we have to deliver, because we don’t have any more time,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg who also chairs the meetings of eurozone finance ministers, said as he arrived in Brussels.

An uncontrolled bankruptcy would likely force Greece to leave the 17-country currency union and return to its old currency, the drachma, further shaking its already beaten economy and creating uncertainty across Europe.

Heading into the meeting earlier Monday, ministers were optimistic that a deal could be reached.

“We now have all of the elements to achieve an agreement,” said French Finance Minister Francois Baroin.

“Greece knows what it has to do, and we’ll watch over it continually. We also know what we have to do.”

But the finance ministers were also negotiating on several fronts, trying to move Greece’s other creditors to increase their commitments. Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos rushed to Brussels to back up his finance chief, Evangelos Venizelos, in talks with the IMF, the European Central Bank and representatives of private holders of Greek debt.

The goal is to bring Greece’s debt down

to around 120 percent of gross domestic product by 2020 — the maximum the IMF sees as sustainable. At the moment, the country’s debt load stands at more than 160 percent.

Last week, a new report prepared by the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF concluded that the new bailout, Greek spending cuts, and a planned euro100 billion debt relief from private investors would still leave Greece’s debt at almost 129 percent of economic output by the end of the decade.

Ministers were exploring several options to close that gap, but as talks dragged on Monday, no final solution appeared imminent.

I am of the opinion that today we have to deliver because we don’t have any more time.

JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER Prime Minister, Luxembourg A Greek official said Monday morning that there seemed to be agreement on further reducing the interest rate on Greece’s first, euro110 billion bailout as well as having national central banks in the eurozone, which also hold some Greek bonds, participate in the debt relief. The official was speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.

However, other officials questioned the participation of national central banks, as well as whether the ECB would be willing to transfer profits from its Greek bond holdings back to Athens.

On the sidelines of the finance ministers’ meeting, Venizelos headed into a new round of talks with representatives of Greece’s private bondholders — mostly banks and investment funds — to explore whether they would be willing to accept further losses.

A current plan foresees private creditors swapping their old Greek bonds for new ones with half the face value, lower interest rates and much longer repayment periods.

But now some countries are pushing for bondholders to also give up on an accrued interest payment of around 5.5 billion Euros on their old bonds, a demand

that could further discourage investors from signing up to the debt swap.

Amid the ever-changing mood over the country’s rescue, some frustration was setting in among the Greeks.

“Greece comes into today’s Eurogroup meeting having fulfilled all the requirements for the approval of the new program,” Venizelos said. “For Greeks, this is a matter of national dignity and a national strategic choice and no other integrated and responsible choice can be opposed to it.”

The Greek parliament has faced down violent protests to approve the austerity measures demanded by the eurozone. Its main political leaders have committed in writing to uphold the bailout terms even after general elections in April. On Monday in Athens, the government introduced in parliament another two pieces of emergency legislation that would introduce austerity measures including wage and pension cuts.

Despite Athens’ efforts, however, some countries have indicated their patience with Greece was growing short.

“We’ve seen that Greece time and time again fails to satisfy the conditions that the international community makes. … In the Netherlands, it really is an issue that you have to lend money to a country that for the umpteenth time hasn’t held itself to its agreements,” said Jan Kees de Jager, the finance minister from the Netherlands, which has been especially hard on Greece. “So it’s indeed essential to me, and also the Dutch government, that we have control over the money that we’re going to lend.”

To that end, Greece is expected to be forced to set up a separate account that would ensure it services its debt. This escrow account would give legal priority to debt and interest payments over paying for government services. That would maintain pressure on Greece to stick to promised austerity and reform measures and spare the eurozone the risk of a destabilizing default.

The escrow account would, however, be an unprecedented intrusion into a sovereign state’s fiscal affairs and could ultimately see Greece forced to pay interest on its debt before paying salaries to teachers and doctors.

In addition, Greece’s international creditors would station permanent representatives in Athens to monitor the country’s progress.

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The percentage of Greece’s gross domestic product to debt ratio.

By 2020, the EU hopes to cut this number to 120 percent.

Syrian forces mass outside rebel stronghold

BY BRIAN MURPHY AND ZEINA KARAM ASSOCIATED PRESS BEIRUT — Syrian tanks and troops massed Monday outside the resistance stronghold of Homs for a possible ground assault that one activist warned could unleash a new round of fierce and bloody urban combat even as the Red Cross tried to broker a cease-fire to allow emergency aid in.

A flood of military reinforcements has been a prelude to previous offensives by President Bashar Assad’s regime, which has tried to use its overwhelming firepower to crush an opposition that has been bolstered by defecting soldiers and hardened by 11 months of street battles.

“The human loss is going to be huge if they retake Baba Amr,” said Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The central city of Homs — and in particular the opposition district known as Baba Amr — has become a critical ground for both sides.

The opposition has lionized it as “Syria’s Misrata” after the Libyan city where rebels fought off a brutal government siege. Assad’s regime wants desperately to erase the embarrassing defiance in Syria’s third-largest city after weeks of shelling, including a barrage of mortars that killed up to 200 people earlier this month. At least nine people were killed in shelling Monday, activists said.

Another massive death toll would only bring further international isolation on Assad from Western and Arab leaders.

“The massacre in Syria goes on,” said U.S. Sen. John McCain during a visit to Cairo, where he urged Washington and its allies to find way to help arm and equip Syrian rebels.

McCain, a senior member of the Senate Armed Service Committee, said he did not support direct U.S. weapons supplies to Syrian opposition forces, but has suggested the Arab League or others could help bolster the fighting power of the anti-Assad groups.

The U.S., he said, could assist with equipment such as medical supplies or global positioning devices.

“It is time we gave them the wherewithal to fight back and stop the slaughter,” he said.

Assad’s fall also would be a potentially devastating blow for his close ally Iran, which counts on Syria as its most reliable Arab ally and a pathway for aid to Tehran’s patron Hezbollah in Lebanon. But McCain urged for “like-minded” Western and Arab nations also to guard against attempts by al-Qaida or other extremists to exploit a leadership vacuum if the regime crumbles.

“For us to sit back and do nothing while people are being slaughtered … is an affront to everything America stands for and believes in,” said McCain, suggesting that the Republicans could seek to make Syria a central campaign issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.

But U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a visit to

Mexico on Monday, dodged a question about whether the U.S. could accept Arab countries or others arming the Syrian rebels.

We are all working for the planned friends of Syria meeting at the end of this week, which we think will give us a chance to come together and chart a way forward,” she said.

She said the meeting in Tunisia “will demonstrate the Assad regime is increasingly isolated and that the brave Syrian people need our support and solidarity.”

But she said that should be expressed through humanitarian help and encouragement to the Syrian opposition to promise that everyone there will be represented in a new Syria.

In Cairo, Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby suggested at a news conference that Russia and China — two countries that recently supported Damascus by vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s regime — may be shifting their positions.

“There are some indications, especially from China and to some degree from Russia that there may be a change in their stance,” he said, without elaborating.

Syria-based activist Mustafa Osso told The Associated Press that Assad’s military should face strong resistance as residents plan to fight until “the last person.” He added that Homs is facing “savage shelling that does not differentiate between military or civilians targets.”

It is time we gave them the wherewithal to fight back and stop the slaughter.

JOHN MCCAIN U.S. Senator (R-Ariz.)

The Baba Amr neighborhood on Homs’ southwest edge has become the centerpiece of the city’s opposition. Hundreds of army defectors are thought to be taking shelter there, clashing with troops in hit-and-run attacks each day.

Amateur videos posted online showed what activists said were shells falling into Baba Amr. Black smoke billowed from residential areas. Phone lines and Internet connections have been cut with the city, making it difficult to get firsthand accounts from Homs residents.

In Geneva, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said the group has been in talks with Syrian authorities and opposition groups to negotiate a cease-fire in some of the most violence-torn areas.

“We are currently discussing several possibilities with all those concerned, and it includes a cessation of fighting in the most affected areas,” the spokeswoman, Carla Haddad, told the AP. She said the talks weren’t aimed at resolving any of the entrenched political differences.

“The idea is to be able to facilitate swift access to people in need,” Haddad said.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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Obama focuses on college costs

BY KIMBERLY HEFLING ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — Access to college has been the driving force in federal higher education policy for decades. But the Obama administration is pushing a fundamental agenda shift that aggressively brings a new question into the debate: What are people getting for their money?

Students with loans are graduating on average with more than $25,000 in debt.

The federal government pours $140 billion annually into federal grants and loans.

Unemployment remains high, yet there are projected shortages in many industries with some high-tech companies already complaining about a lack of highly trained workers.

Meanwhile, literacy among college students has declined in the last decade, according to a commission convened during the George W. Bush administration that said American higher education has become “increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive.” About 40 percent of college students at four-year schools aren’t graduating, and in two-year programs, only about 40 percent of students graduate or transfer, according to the policy and analysis group College Measures.

College drop-outs are expensive, and not just for the individual. About a fifth of full-time students who enroll at a community college do not return for a second year, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to an analysis released last fall by the American Institutes for Research.

There’s been a growing debate over whether post-secondary schools should be more transparent about the cost of an education and the success of graduates.

President Barack Obama has weighed in with a strong “yes.”

During his State of the Union address, Obama put the higher education on notice: “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” he said. “Higher education can’t be a luxury — it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

He wants to slightly reduce federal aid for schools that don’t control tuition costs and shift it to those that do. He also has proposed an $8 billion program to train community college students for

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Oil prices up after Iran export cuts

BY PABLO GORONDI ASSOCIATED PRESS

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Barack Obama speaks at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., about the accessibility of college education in America. high-growth industries that would provide financial incentives to programs that ensured their trainees find work. Both proposals need congressional approval.

At the same time, the administration is developing both a “scorecard” for use in comparing school statistics such as graduation rates as well as a “shopping sheet” students would receive from schools they applied to with estimates of how much debt they might graduate with and estimated future payments on student loans.

American’s higher education system has long been the backbone of much of the nation’s success, and there’s no doubt that a college degree is valuable. It’s now projected that students with a bachelor’s degree will earn a million more dollars over their lifetime than students with only a high school diploma, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says.

But Obama’s statement to Congress jolted the higher education establishment, which believes that college isn’t just to create foot soldiers for industry and that the use of measured outcomes would hurt the humanities, meaning fewer students will turn to Shakespeare and instead study

engineering, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

The community has already been reeling over an earlier administration decision to require career college programs — many of which are at for-profit institutions — to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing federal aid.

“It’s the notion that the … federal government will begin to say we want to know what we’re paying for and we want to make sure that people don’t pay for education programs that take them nowhere, especially if the program is supposed to get them a job, we want it to get them a job, Carnevale said.

Some fear that Obama might want to apply the “gainful employment” standards to traditional four-year degree programs. Robert Moran, director of federal relations at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said reporting requires time and resources, and it’s even more difficult to gauge the success of a graduate with an English degree than someone with a very specific career certificate.

Oil prices jumped to a ninemonth high above $105 a barrel on Monday after Iran said it halted crude exports to Britain and France in an escalation of a dispute over the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program.

By Monday afternoon, benchmark March crude was up $2.02 to $105.26 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since May. The contract rose 93 cents to settle at $103.24 per barrel in New York on Friday.

Iran’s announcement will likely have minimal impact on supplies, analysts said, because only about 3 percent of France’s oil consumption is from Iranian sources. Britain had not imported oil from the Islamic republic in six months.

“The price rise is more a reflection of concerns about the further escalation in tensions between Iran and the West,” said commodity analyst Caroline Bain of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Banning the tiny quantities of exports to the U.K. and France involves very little risk for Iran — indeed quite the opposite, it catches the headlines and leads to a higher global oil price, which is something Iran is very keen to encourage.”

Markets in the United States are closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

Iran’s oil ministry said Sunday it stopped crude shipments to British and French companies in an apparent preemptive blow against the European Union after the bloc imposed sanctions on Iran’s crucial fuel exports. They include a freeze of the country’s central bank assets and an oil embargo set to begin in July.

Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam

Qassemi had warned earlier this month that Tehran could cut off oil exports to “hostile” European nations. The 27-nation EU accounts for about 18 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

Tehran also is considering extending the embargo to other European countries, a semiofficial Iranian news agency reported Monday.

The head of Iran’s state oil company Ahmad Qalehbani was quoted by the Mehr agency as saying that the country would stop selling crude to nations who take action against Tehran.

The EU sanctions, along with other punitive measures imposed by the U.S., are part of Western efforts to derail Iran’s disputed nuclear program, which the West fears is aimed at developing atomic weapons.

Iran denies the charges, and says its program is for peaceful purposes.

Oil prices also rose on hopes that Greece’s new bailout deal will be approved on Monday as well as by China’s decision to boost money supply bid to spur lending and economic growth.

China’s central bank said Saturday it will lower the ratio of funds that banks must hold as reserves, a move that frees tens of billions of dollars.

Oil has jumped from $96 earlier this month amid optimism the global economy may grow more this year than previously expected. J.P. Morgan raised its Brent crude price forecast to as high as $135 from $120 — on Monday, the April Brent crude contract was up 79 cents at $120.37 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

“Building economic momentum has the potential to pull oil prices higher for the next 12 to 24 months,” J.P. Morgan said in a report.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

AROUND THE IVIES

42

The percentage of undergrad UPenn students who receive financial aid.

Though UPenn’s percentage is lower that Yale’s 54 percent, the number rose by 5 percent this year.

T H E D A I L Y P E N N S Y L VA N I A N

THE DARTMOUTH

Tuition jumps 3.9 percent

Frats finish probation

BY SHELLI GIMELSTEIN STAFF WRITER The cost of a Penn education is on the rise.

At its stated meeting on Friday, the Board of Trustees approved a 3.9-percent increase in undergraduate tuition. Undergraduate costs for tuition, fees and room and board for the 2012-13 academic year will total $56,106 — an increase from $53,976 in 2011-12.

Last year, overall student costs also increased by 3.9 percent.

Though this year’s tuition hike will affect undergraduates across the board, it does mark Penn’s second-lowest increase in the past 44 years, according to Penn President Amy Gutmann.

At the same time, the trustees announced on Friday that the overall financial aid budget for undergraduates will increase by 7.7 percent — the same rate as last year — to $181 million.

Of the $15.6 million in net tuition revenues, $5.6 million will be allocated toward financial aid, according to Vice President for Budget and Management Analysis Bonnie Gibson.

While many of Penn’s peer institutions have not yet announced tuition for the upcoming year, tuition at Stanford University will increase by 3 percent, while Cornell and Princeton universities each plan to raise tuition by 4.5 percent.

“If you benchmark against our peers, we’re below average in the increase in costs and we are way at the top as far as our financial aid policy goes,” Gutmann said. “We want to make sure that we fulfill our commitment to making a Penn education accessible to all undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need.”

According to Gutmann, tuition funds account for just 70 percent of the direct costs of a Penn education.

“The large part of our costs [go toward hiring] highly talented faculty who could write their check in anywhere,” she said.

Students’ current financial-aid packages will not be affected by the tuition increase and will continue to be based on demonstrated need, according to Gibson.

“We do our best to predict what we believe our financial budget should be in any given year,” she said. “We have needed more money than we had in the budget for every year in the past five years.”

Director of Student Financial Aid Bill Schilling explained that this has largely been due to

the increasing number of students with need and grant eligibility as a result of the economic recession.

During Fiscal Year 2011, which ended June 30, 2011, 53 percent of all PENN aided undergraduates and 57 percent of all incoming freshmen received grants of at least $35,000 per year, he said.

“The increase [in tuition] is not going to be the tipping point for a whole lot of students,” Schilling said. “If it is, we’ll address it.”

For regular decision applicant QP Wang — a senior at Rutherford B. Hayes High School in Delaware, Ohio — “the unparalleled education and unlimited opportunities of Penn is what sets it apart.”

“Slight tuition increases will not cause me to displace another college for Penn,” he wrote in an email.

However, he added that students who are less certain about their top choice school — particularly those from middle-income families — would be more likely to think twice about applying with the tuition hike in mind.

Regular decision applicant Devasia Manuel — a senior at St. Columba’s School in Delhi, India — feels that tuition increases at schools like Penn are particularly significant for international students who do not fall under the University’s need-blind admissions policy.

He wrote in an email that “international students are likely to complete their education in their home countries if they feel that the cost associated with Penn does not guarantee the same returns after graduation in the form of job prospects.”

Top Colleges Educational Consultant and Admissions Strategist Steven Goodman — a 1989 Graduate School of Education graduate — believes that leading universities like Penn should break the trend of tuition increases, especially in light of potential cuts in government funding.

Tuition hikes “mask the need for the university to simply cut spending in a way that will enable it to efficiently serve the students who come to Penn.”

At the same time, he added, reducing tuition “would communicate to future applicants that Penn genuinely welcomes middle-class students.”

BY KELSEY ANSPACH STAFF WRITER With discussions regarding hazing still dominating campus conversation, two fraternities have recently finished Collegemandated probationary sentences for hazing violations that occurred during Fall term. Alpha Delta fraternity’s probation, which began Nov. 8 for a violation of the Social Event Management Procedure policy and a hazing violation, ceased Feb. 13, according to AD president Jason Zins ’12. Theta Delta Chi fraternity’s probation, which began Nov. 17 for two SEMP violations — incurred for parties held over the summer — and a hazing violation in the fall, ceased Feb. 17, TDX president Will Mueller ’12 told The Dartmouth. Since their probation began in the fall, both brotherhoods have worked to modify their internal framework and refocus their missions as organizations, Zins and Mueller said.

Zins said many rumors about the relationship between hazing and AD’s probation are misguided.

“There were things printed in other publications and widespread belief of a story which is not entirely true — there was no alcohol, no nudity and no distinguishable difference between brothers and new members,” Zins said.

Allegations against TDX for hazing were similarly innaccurate, according to Mueller.

“The allegations were strong and nothing in comparison to what we had,” Mueller said.

“But since those allegations, the whole Greek system has gotten onboard for change, and it’s been a lot easier to motivate their members to get on board.”

Social probation is a time

when organizations can refocus on their mission a n d va l ues without DARTMOUTH other dist ra c t i o n s , according to Meredith Smith, assistant director of the Undergraduate Judicial Affairs office.

“Each [organization] has different founders, values and mission statements, and for a lot of organizations, it can be a real time of reflection,” Smith said.

“It is what you make of it — it’s up to you and your organization to decide where you’re going to go forward from here.”

The UJAO works with GLOS to ensure that Greek organizations have a support network as they move forward in making these changes.

“Along with GLOS, we constantly make sure that between our two offices, and any other office on campus, any organization on campus knows that they have a place to turn to,” Smith said. “We remind organizations that although the judicial process is reactive, it lets these organizations be proactive to prevent future problems.”

Both AD and TDX have used their time on probation to refocus on their values as organizations and make structural changes in order to prevent future problems, according to Mueller and Zins. “[AD] started with a retreat with the whole brotherhood at the beginning of the Winter term,” Zins said. “We went through all our documents with our entire brotherhood, including our code of conduct and risk management, and made and voted on amendments. We also revamped our governing docu-

ments, which was an ongoing process through the term.”

The house was retrained in SEMP policy and conducted discussions on the correct way to run a party and how members should act both inside and outside of the house, according to Zins. All junior members joined Green Team, he said.

“Starting at the retreat, we came up with a new vision statement,” Zins said. “We sat down multiple times with the entire brotherhood to refocus on what AD is about.”

The organization has taken steps to ensure that these changes continue to be effective in the future, he said.

“We’ve put a lot of this on paper to make sure that this continues when we’re gone,” Zins said. “We have a new member manual, and have scheduled meetings at the end of the term once or twice a year to make sure that everything we’ve done pays off in the future.”

The brotherhood at AD is optimistic about the positive impact that these changes will have.

“We’ve made a lot of progress since last term,” Zins said.

“We’ve definitely put in a lot of hard work, and we’ve definitely grown from it as a house. We’re excited to be back.”

During its time on probation, TDX has restructured its internal framework, including the succession of officers, according to Mueller.

“We’ve given a new description of each position and how we want to pass them off,” Mueller said. “We also developed a framework for baseline qualifications for each member, a new description of morals and values and how we see each member upholding them.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

SPORTS

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS MANNY RAMIREZ On Monday, Ramirez reached a contract with the Oakland Athletics valued at $500,000 if he makes the A’s major league roster. Ramirez retired last year after receiving a 50-game suspension resulting from a second failed drug test.

W. tennis defeats Princeton in finals W. TENNIS FROM PAGE 14 triumph over Princeton’s No. 1 doubles pair, Hilary Bartlett and Lindsay Graff. At Nos. 2 and 3, Yale’s No. 37 pair Elizabeth Epstein ’13 and Annie Sullivan ’14, and No. 41 pair captain Steph Kent ’12 and Blair Seideman ’14 enjoyed a bit more comfort, tallying 8-4 and 8-5 wins, respectively. (Seideman is a staff photographer for the News.)

Leading 1-0, all the Bulldogs needed for the championship were three of their six singles match points. Singles play got underway at No. 3, where Yu defeated her Princeton counterpart Rachel Saiontz 1-6, 6-1, 6-1, to give the Elis a 2-0 lead. The story was similar at No. 1, where Epstein battled back against Bartlett to win 2-6, 6-2, 6-1.

Epstein chalked up her comeback to more aggressive play.

“I was a lot more aggressive going into the second set,” Epstein said. “[Bartlett] is great at mixing up her shots, and I just tried to take the high balls on the rise. She’s very good at mixing up the pace, and I was able to handle that much better in the second and third sets.”

After tight losses for Seideman and Sullivan at Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, Kent gave her team the fourth point it needed with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 success at No. 4.

Much like Epstein, in the tournament-clinching match, Kent took the initiative. She said her opponent lacked a serious weapon in her game, which put the pressure on Kent to win every point.

Yale head coach Danielle McNamara agreed with her captain and stressed her team’s patience and grit in topping a tough-to-beat Princeton team.

“Our players were just very gritty

and determined to get out there and play really long points and do whatever it took to win the matches,” McNamara said. “Princeton makes a lot of balls and gives you a lot of chances to beat yourself. You have to play aggressively against them but you also have to make your shots.”

Already this spring, the Bulldogs have defeated No. 21 Notre Dame, No. 31 Oklahoma, and No. 32 Arkansas. Their only loss came against No. 10 Michigan in a nail-biter, 4-3. Currently, Yale is the highest ranked Ivy League team at No. 25 in the country, followed by Brown at No. 38 and Princeton at No. 43.

Yale’s lofty ranking has both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, stepping up and beating the likes of Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Princeton is the only true way for the team to test itself.

“Even though we won ECAC last year, we are ranked higher this year and we’re fairing much better against the higher nationally ranked teams,” Seideman said. “Beating Princeton makes a statement and proves we deserve to be the highest ranked Ivy.” But moving forward, all of Yale’s opponents will be looking to take down the giants.

“To be honest, I feel like every match is going to be a test,” McNamara said.

“We’ve had a fair amount of success so far this season, so every team we play is going to be gunning for us. We need to consistently show up.”

Next weekend, Yale travels to Syracuse, N.Y., to take on No. 60 William & Mary and No. 73 Syracuse.

Contact JOSEPH ROSENBERG at joseph.rosenberg@yale.edu .

Bulldogs suffer sweep

BRIANNE BOWEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The men’s tennis team was unable to win a majority of matches in doubles against Harvard, Princeton or Columbia.

M. TENNIS FROM PAGE 14 he won his No. 3 match against Harvard’s Alex Steinroder and his No. 2 match against Princeton’s Augie Bloom. Hoffman lost against Columbia’s Nathaniel Gery, but Yale was able to win two of its matches against the Lions, seeded seventh, to close the tournament with a close 3–2 loss.

“I think the team played pretty

well actually,” Blumenkranz said. “We now know that we have a good shot at beating those teams come Ivy season.

We still feel fine despite the losses.”

Blumenkranz and Kyle Dawson ’14 won their singles matches in straight sets at No. 3 and No. 4. The Elis were unable to win a majority of matches in doubles all weekend.

Dawson said the sole goal for this year is to win the Ivy League title,

Gymansts dazzle in final home meet

adding that the team hopes to accomplish this by working on overall fitness.

The Bulldogs will take a break this weekend but will host the Yale Round Robin tournament at the CullmanHeyman Tennis Center on March 3.

Contact ADLON ADAMS at adlon.adams@yale.edu .

Yale notches 5 vs. Dartmouth W. HOCKEY FROM PAGE 14

JOYCE XI/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Lindsay Andsager ’13 placed first on the uneven bars Saturday with a score of 9.800 as Yale beat Southern Connecticut with its best overall score this year.

GYMNASTICS FROM PAGE 14 towards its score. Led by Tara Feld ’13, who scored a 9.700 for her Yurchenko full, Yale scored a 47.375 for the event. Yabut, who was unable to compete in the beginning of the season due to an injury, came in close behind with a vault score of 9.650, her personal best and second place in the meet. Yabut was the only teammate to compete a Yurchenko half, a trick just a bit less difficult than the Yurchenko full because it involves only a half twist during the layout coming off the vault. The senior captain said she was happy to finish her last home meet on a high note.

“I’m proud of the way it ended for me at home.” Yabut said.

The Bulldogs stayed tough on bars and scored the most points, 48.350, in this event. Lindsay Andsager ’13, once again, showed why she is a bars specialist.

Andasager performed a Shaposh — a release trick in which the gymnast flings herself from the low to the high bar while upside down — and stuck a double tuck dismount, a routine which earned her a 9.8000 and first place in the event. “[Andsager] works bars with elegance” Tonry said.

Ansager’s performance was far from the only highlight on the uneven bars. Morgan Traina ’15 was close behind Andsager with a 9.775. She finished her routine with a stuck double tuck dismount. Joyce Li ’15 also posted a

strong score of 9.725. The trio of Andsager, Traina and Li took first, second and fourth respectively.

Although beam contained some falls, and one that counted to the team’s score, the event was not riddled with the usual number of mistakes.

“Our beam performance as a team definitely improved from last week,” Traina said in an email, “so it seems like the extra routines in practice are paying off.”

The dynamic freshman duo of Traina (9.775) and Li (9.725) led the team on beam with a 1.2 finish.

Feld (9.825) and Stephanie Goldstein ’13 (9.700) finished in first and second place. Feld began her routine with a double pike,

ended it with a double tuck, and made few errors in between.

Yale intends to take the momentum from this meet and channel it towards Ivy League Championships. “The team morale is very high leading into Ivies,” Traina said. “We are confident that if we hit our routines the way we have in practice, we have the potential to win.”

The key is to hit 24 out of 24 routines, Tonry said, and with continued confidence, a meet without falls is within reach.

The Ivy League Championships will take place on Feb. 26 at 1 p.m. in Ithaca, N.Y. Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .

the game.

“It was great that we had scoring chances against Dartmouth and capitalized on our power play,” head coach Joakim Flygh said. “But we struggled to contain both Dartmouth’s and Harvard’s top lines. Dartmouth’s first line was on the ice for six or seven goals, and Harvard’s first line scored all their goals.”

Yale was outshot 45-33 against the Big Green.

G oa l te n d e rs Jaimie Leonoff ’15 and Genny Ladiges ’12 both played in net for Yale.

L a d i ge s sa i d t h a t although the team played well offensively, it lacked strong goaltending and defensive play. She added that it was the overall highest scoring hockey game in which she has ever played.

The results of Saturday’s game, although more consistent with the rest of the season, were nonetheless remarkable in that Harvard forward Lyndsey Fry scored all four of the Crimson goals — two in the first period, one in the second, and one in the third.

The Bulldogs were outshot 47-17, and Ladiges made 43 saves.

Harvard scored on one of its six power plays, but Yale failed to capitalize on any of its seven.

“I thought that we played a more complete game against Harvard, despite being shut out,” Ladiges said. “We failed to take advantage of all of the power plays we had, but managed to shut down some of their top offensive weapons.”

The Bulldogs are no doubt disappointed with their season, as the one and only time they won a game was on Nov. 11 in overtime against Union.

But Ladiges said that the team has progressed from October to February and that this season will serve

as a “building block for the future.”

Flygh added that the roster is still far from fully healthy, as some players need surgery and some are still recovering from concussions sustained earlier in the season.

“We have had a few players that have played through injuries all year, and we all appreciate their commitment to the team,” Flygh said. He added that it is imperative for the team to recover so it can train during the off season, have a full roster during practices, and become more competitive for next season.

The players, however, remain hopeful for the future of the team.

“I’m extremely proud of how this team pulled together at the end,” forward Lauren Davis ’12 said. “We really played some of our best hockey towards the end of the season, and I hope that is an indicator for how next season will begin.”

Last season Yale finished in a three-way tie for eighth place in the league.

Contact LINDSEY UNIAT at lindsey.uniat@yale.edu .

DARTMOUTH 10, YALE 5 DART

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First period goals: Sasha Nanji (Dartmouth) 10:06; Erica Dobos (Dartmouth) 10:47; Nanji 15:20; Alyssa Zupon (Yale) 16:15; Reagan Fischer (Dartmouth) 18:42 Second period: Fischer 00:43; Camille Dumais (Dartmouth) 7:31; Sally Komarek (Dartmouth) 8:31; Danielle Moncion (Yale) 11:20; Stephanie Mock (Yale) 17:32; Dumais 17:40; Aleca Hughes (Yale) 19:17 Third period: Moira Scanlon (Dartmouth) 5:00; Moncion 10:37; Dumais 12:26

HARVARD 4, YALE 0 HARVARD

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First period goals: Lyndsey Fry (Harvard) 8:01; Fry 13:07 Second period: Fry 7:59 Third period: Fry 8:17

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COED SAILING SEVENTH PLACE WEEKEND FINISH The No. 3 coed sailing team finished in seventh place at the Charleston Spring Intersectional hosted by the College of Charleston in South Carolina. No. 4 College of Charleston took first place followed by No. 9 Stanford and No. 8 Georgetown.

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HAYDEN LATHAM ’15 IVY LEAGUE ROOKIE OF THE WEEK Latham, a guard on the women’s basketball team, earned rookie of the week after garnering ten points against both Dartmouth and Harvard this weekend.

Latham was out for much of the season with a concussion sustained on Dec. 28 when the Elis played Florida State.

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“Beating Princeton makes a statement and proves we deserve to be the highest ranked Ivy. BLAIR SEIDEMAN ’14 WOMEN’S TENNIS YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

W. tennis takes ECAC championship

BY JOSEPH ROSENBERG STAFF REPORTER In beating Princeton on Sunday to win the ECAC Indoor Championship for a fourth consecutive year, the No. 25 Yale women’s tennis team (6-1 overall, 0-0 Ivy) continued its torrid start to the spring season.

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER Yale Gymnastics will springboard into the Ivy League Championships this weekend on the heels of another season-high score.

W. TENNIS Hosted by Yale at the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center, the tournament featured eight teams from the conference and three days of play. On Friday, the No. 1-seeded Bulldogs defeated No. 8-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson (4-4, 0-0 NEC) 7-0, including a clean 3-0 sweep of the doubles matches to win the doubles point.

In the semifinals on Saturday, the opponent was different, but the score line remained the same as the Elis ran over No. 54 Boston College (6-4, 1-1 ACC) 7-0.

On Sunday, Yale met No. 43 Princeton in the finals. The Tigers (5-2, 0-0 Ivy) were the No. 3 seed in the ECAC tournament, and Yale’s opponent in the finals last year. Princeton proved more formidable opposition, but the Bulldogs pulled out a 4-2 victory.

Yale secured the doubles point, as all three pairs won their matches. In fact, the Eli duos won all nine of their matches last weekend. At No. 1, Vicky Brook ’12 and Hanna Yu ’15, ranked No. 27 nationally, pulled out an 8-7 SEE W. TENNIS PAGE 13

GYMNASTICS

GRAHAM HARBOE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The unranked Yale men’s tennis team suffered three straight losses to other Ivy League schools during the ECAC Indoor Championships in Hanover, N.H.

M. TENNIS The Bulldogs, seeded No. 8 for the tournament, went into the weekend with a 4–0 record and came out 4–3. The Elis fell to nationally ranked No. 60 Harvard and No. 70 Princeton 4–1 in the first and second rounds.

The tournament ended with a 3–2 loss to Columbia on the last day.

“I thought we had been playing well and were in a good position to be successful this weekend,” Daniel Hoffman ’13 said.

“We have been working really hard, so it was disappointing that we couldn’t come away with a better result.”

He added that even though the team had received a lower seed, he felt going in that the Bulldogs had an opportunity to do well.

The tournament started out late for Yale on Friday because the matches before Yale’s ran late. The team was scheduled to play in the last four matches of

The Bulldogs crushed Southern Connecticut State University, 190.825–187.9 on senior night, their last home meet of the season, Saturday. The overall score was the highest the team has managed all season. That peak is well timed as the Elis head into Ivy championships this weekend. Morgan Traina ’15 and Joyce Li ’15 continued their exceptional performances all around and placed first and second for the meet with scores of 38.575 and 38.350 respectively. “[The meet was] just the boost of confidence we need to win at Ivies next week,” said Mia Yabut ‘12, the team captain.

The Elis hope to score even better at Ivy League Championships next weekend. Although pleased with the continued improvement, the team fell just shy of its goal to score 191 points, head coach Barbara Tonry said. The team has broken 190 points a few times this season, but has yet to reach 191. One fewer bobble, step or fall would have placed the team over the 191 mark, she added.

Even so, the team members fell fewer times than normal.

On vault, the Bulldogs counted no falls

Women’s tennis captain Steph Kent ’12 provided the necessary fourth point for the team’s championship finish this weekend.

Bulldogs fall to three rivals

BY ADLON ADAMS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Elis boost confidence for Ivies

the day, which pushed back two hours past their 6 p.m. start time.

Yale’s matches also ran longer than usual, as No. 1 pair, Hoffman and Marc Powers ’13, won 8–6, and No. 3 pair of John Huang ’13 and Patrick Chase ’14 lost 8–6. Harvard won the doubles point at No. 2 when the Crimson defeated Yale’s Erik Blumenkranz ’12 and Joel Samaha ’12 in a tight 9–8 match. Harvard went on to win all three singles matches.

“We had a great comeback at No. 2 doubles,” head coach Alex Dorato said. “We were very close to beating Harvard, who was the top team in the tournament.”

Powers strained his achilles tendon during the match against Harvard, and dropped out of the singles lineup the rest of the weekend. Dorato said that even though Powers was able to play doubles, he played at about half his potential.

The Elis got up early Saturday morning to play the No. 4 seed Princeton, but fell 4–1. The Tigers swept their doubles matches and won three out of four singles matches. Hoffman earned the points for Yale in singles against Harvard and Princeton when SEE M. TENNIS PAGE 13

SEE GYMNASTICS PAGE 13

Hockey concludes difficult season

BY LINDSEY UNIAT STAFF REPORTER In its last weekend of play, the women’s hockey team ended its worst season in history with its highest-scoring game of the year, albeit a loss.

W. HOCKEY The Bulldogs (1-27-1, 1-20-1 ECAC) fell 10-5 to Dartmouth (18-8-2, 14-6-2 ECAC) on Friday night in Hanover, N.H. Saturday night saw the team shutout 4-0 by Harvard (20-8-1, 17-4-1 ECAC) in Cambridge, Mass.

The team, which is ranked 12th in the 12-team conference, will not see post-season play, as only the top eight teams make the playoffs. Dartmouth and Harvard are ranked fourth and second in the conference, respectively.

I’m extremely proud of how this team pulled together at the end.

LAUREN DAVIS ’12 Forward, women’s hockey The ECAC quarterfinals will take place this upcoming weekend. Cornell, Harvard, Clarkson, Dartmouth, St. Lawrence, Quinnipiac, Princeton and Brown will each play three games amongst themselves in hopes of making it to the semifinals in two weeks.

STAT OF THE DAY 25

JENNIFER CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The women’s hockey team finished its season last weekend with losses to Dartmouth and Harvard.

Despite the defeats, the Bulldogs did manage an offensive breakthrough this weekend — they scored a season-high of five goals against Dartmouth.

Forwards Alyssa Zupon ’13, Danielle Moncion ’13, Stephanie Mock ’15, and captain Aleca Hughes ’12 all made their marks on the scoreboard Friday night.

Moncion scored twice, and the team managed to take advantage of two power plays during SEE W. HOCKEY PAGE 13

THE NATIONAL RANKING OF THE WOMEN’S TENNIS TEAM. THE BULLDOGS ARE THE HIGHEST RANKED TEAM IN THE IVY LEAGUE, AHEAD OF NO. 38 BROWN AND NO. 43 PRINCETON. Last season the Ivy champion Elis finished the year with a No. 30 ranking and an NCAA Tournament berth.