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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 101 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

SUNNY CLEAR

39 42

CROSS CAMPUS That’s more like it. Just

two weeks after Yale’s students were named least attractive in the Ivy League by datemyschool.com, the Huffington Post published a list on Monday ranking Yale as one of the nation’s “hottest” schools. This list, though, features schools that are “the place to be,” in some unquantifiable way, not schools with attractive students. Also on the list are Brown and Boston College.

Harvard did not make the cut.

Circle of life. In an email

to members on Monday, Mory’s announced that it had hired Jeff Caputo as its new executive chef. Caputo served as executive chef at Scoozzi, the Chapel Street restaurant that closed last fall. Prior to Scoozzi, Caputo worked as a chef at Citibank Customer Dining, Dock’s Oyster Bar and Seafood Grill and River Café, among others.

Postracial Connecticut? An analysis of data on traffic stops in Connecticut published in the Hartford Courant over the weekend showed that blacks and Hispanics were far more likely to receive a ticket or court date during a traffic stop than their white counterparts pulled over for the same offense. “The apparent discrimination by police officers undermines our residents’ confidence in the criminal justice system,” Gov. Dannel Malloy said in response to the report. “These statistical findings are very troubling.”

SUPERCONTINENT IN MANY EONS, ‘AMASIA’ SEEN

LIQUOR LAWS

ONE BUTTON WENZEL

W. SWIMMING

Small stores express concern over reforms proposed by Malloy

SITE EXPANDS TO NEW RESTAURANTS, PARTY ESSENTIALS

Elis meet season-long goal with 3rd-place finish at Ivy championships

PAGES 8-9 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

PAGE 3 CITY

PAGE 5 NEWS

PAGE 14 SPORTS

SOM network follows unconventional model

BY DANIEL SISGOREO STAFF REPORTER Though the School of Management is leading efforts to create a network of foreign business schools, SOM Dean Edward Snyder has emphasized that institutions in the network will operate as equals.

The new Global Network for Advanced Management that Snyder is planning for SOM and roughly 20 other business schools from around the world will include both prominent institutions overseas and less globalized ones in developing nations. As Snyder recruits institutions for the network, which will collaborate on projects and exchange ideas, he said his priority is to lay a foundation that member schools can use in determining the network’s specific activities — not to have SOM run the network. Seventeen business schools from six continents have joined the network so far, and administrators at participating institutions said they appreciate having an opportunity to shape the network according to their needs.

“We’re really just trying to create the infrastructure,” Snyder said. “Then we’ll ask, ‘What would students and faculty like to do with the network?’ ” Most leading American busi-

MAP GLOBAL NETWORK FOR ADVANCED MANAGEMENT

YDN

The School of Management’s Global Network for Advanced Management will span roughly 20 business schools from around the world. ness schools form partnerships with international schools in developed nations, Snyder said, often ignoring a subset of schools in nations that are rising to economic prominence. But he said the upcoming network will

Guillermo Selva, the dean of INCAE Business School, a member of the network with campuses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, said he finds the collaborative nature of the network particularly appealing because all

schools involved will share their areas of expertise with the others. While INCAE is well known in Latin America, Selva said the school often does not receive SEE GLOBAL NETWORK PAGE 4

DeStefano proposes homeowner tax relief AFTER REVALUATION GIVES SOME HIGHER TAX BILLS, BUSINESSES TO PAY THE PRICE OF RELIEF

BY DIANA LI STAFF REPORTER

Merger comes into focus.

Yale-New Haven Hospital and St. Raphael’s Hospital filed an application earlier this month with the Office of Health Care Access that lays out their plans for the merger of the two hospitals, the New Haven Independent reported Monday.

Under the proposal, Yale would invest $129.5 million in capital improvements in the first five years.

bring together a broader mix of schools, in addition to creating programs that will mutually benefit all institutions. Snyder added that SOM will serve as a member institution rather than as a leader in the new network.

JACOB GEIGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

On Monday, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. presented his Homeowner Fairness Initiative, an attempt to mitigate property tax increases.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. announced a plan Monday to help homeowners shoulder the burden of rising tax bills due to recent property revaluations.

DeStefano presented what he dubbed the Homeowner Fairness Initiative at a City Hall press conference as an attempt to mitigate the impact of a 2011 property

revaluation that caused the value of many properties in the city to appreciate, triggering increased property tax bills. Under DeStefano’s plan, tax increases for homeowners would be phased in over a period of five years, while commercial properties whose value appreciated since the last revaluation in 2006 will pay higher taxes to compensate the city. All properties that have depreciated in value since 2006

will have their lower property taxes implemented immediately, DeStefano said.

The revaluation, which occurs every five years, called for a decrease in the property tax rate, or the mill rate, from 4.39 percent to 4.056 percent for about 75 percent of homeowners, according to DeStefano. The mayor’s plan seeks to provide tax relief for the other 25 percent — mostly in East Rock where tax rates could rise as much as $10,000 — who face an increased tax burden due to their SEE HOMEOWNERS PAGE 6

YCC trip to Stamford? A new

daytime talk show, “Trisha,” will be filmed at NBC’s studios in Stamford, and will add 50 jobs, NBC announced Monday.

A day to remember. Today is

National Pancake Day at IHOP. To claim your free pancakes, you can head to one of several IHOP restaurants in the New Haven area. There’s one in Hamden on Dixwell Avenue, and another on Boston Post Road in Orange.

Organize your social life.

A new app designed to help students find and organize activities is launching on campus this week. Chime, as its creators call it, lets members announce what events they are planning and what events they would like to organize. The app is available for iPhone and Android.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1943 The city prepares to hold a mock air raid, with sirens and fake bombings.

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Teaching fellows assist with seminars

BY IKE SWETLITZ AND CHRISTINA WANG CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS

ECOLOGY AND RELIGION

Pair pioneers new field

T

hough science and religion may seem incompatible to some, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim see them as complementary. After arriving to Yale — the only university to offer a joint degree in ecology and religion — six years ago, the couple has built on past work to establish the interdisciplinary field further. LILIANA VARMAN reports.

In an effort to increase the number of quality teaching opportunities for graduate students fulfilling their requirements, a new program piloted this semester by the History Department has paired doctoral candidates with professors to teach seminars.

The Seminar Fellow Program allows graduate students to help design, plan and teach seminars normally led solely by faculty members, said Judith Hackman, director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Teaching Fellow Program. Administrators said the initiative started this semester with four history seminars since the History Department struggled to find space for graduate students seeking positions. Hackman and Pamela Schirmeister ’80 GRD ’88, associate dean of Yale College and the Graduate School, said they will decide whether to expand the program after gathering feedback from participants and consulting with directors of graduate studies.

“Graduate students are always looking for teaching that will help them learn better how to teach and also help them on the job market,” Hackman said.

Hackman and Schirmeister said they hope the new program will resemble Associates in Teaching (AT), a

After spending four days by himself in the Mojave desert without access to food, Stephen Blackmer FES ’83 DIV ’12 found his calling. The 49-year-old had spent his life working to conserve New England forests, but said that trip expanded his views on how to protect the environment. In 2007, two years after his return, Blackmer said he heard a voice in his head urging him to quit his job and ponder a new direction for his work.

Now a Yale Divinity School student set to graduate this spring, Blackmer has pursued study of what he calls “environmental theology” through which he has explored the connection between Christianity and

SEE FELLOWS PAGE 6

SEE ECOLOGY PAGE 4

EMERGING EARTH COMMUNITY

John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker have championed the interdisciplinary field of ecology and religion.

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT “I was denied a teaching job because (I quote from the rejection letter) yaledailynews.com/opinion

Responding to Secure Communities

S

ecure Communities has met resistance in New Haven — and

rightly so.

T

he Secure Communities program that took effect in Connecticut last week has met overwhelming resistance from citizens, scholars and city officials. The program — under which the FBI must share fingerprints of anyone arrested with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for review, and ICE may in turn request that local prisons detain suspects — has prompted a number of concerns. Governor Dannel Malloy, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and the Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic have joined immigration activists in questioning the program on constitutional and practical grounds. They are right to be concerned.

New Haven has a turbulent history of federal immigration enforcement. A 2007 ICE raid in Fair Haven increased fear among the city’s Hispanic population.

Citizens know that New Haven police do not often deport illegal immigrants.

Enforcing Secure Communities may drive a wedge between citizens and police, threatening the community policing new NHPD Chief Dean Esserman has promised to return to the city.

Secure Communities is supposed to be used to deport dangerous criminals.

Instead, as a September 2011 Department of Homeland Security report acknowledged, immigrants targeted

by ICE through the program have thus far mostly been arrested for minor crimes, if any. Although most deported immigrants indeed live in the country illegally, Secure Communities may lead to undue detention. Moreover, deporting people who have committed no additional offenses is a misguided use of funds and resources.

Still more worrisome is that some police departments have checked fingerprints against an outdated list, leading to deportation of naturalized citizens. If the feds are going to tell the New Haven Police Department

how to handle immigration enforcement, they ought to have a handle on how immigrants interact with New Haven officials. But in a telling gaffe, ICE recently sent an email about the program to former police chief Frank Limon, who hasn’t been in office — or in town — since October. A program so potentially damaging to police relations would be better handled by an agency more in touch with the city.

States have some power to control the program’s execution. New York, Illinois and Massachusetts have refused to enforce the federal mandate, which does not provide states with funds to enforce ICE detention.

Connecticut could follow in their footsteps.

Malloy said he will handle enforcement of Secure Communities on a caseby-case basis. We applaud that decision. In some cases, the program may remove criminals from New Haven.

In others, though, it may do little but undermine tenuous relationships between police officers and the communities they serve.

DeStefano has called Secure Communities “flawed and in need of correction” because it fails to target repeat offenders. Because the program is executed by the state, DeStefano can do little on his own to keep it out of New Haven. But if New Haven is forced into the program, at least DeStefano has shown he cares about his constituents.

The Law School clinic filed a class action lawsuit earlier this month to challenge Secure Communities’ constitutionality. We’re glad to see a murky program subject to scrutiny. Local lawyers’ engagement with the federal policy is a step towards reasserting local control.

Last week, New Haveners of all stripes banded together in objection to Secure Communities. At this point, perhaps that sort of clear — if cautious — united action is the best way to secure a community.

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COPYRIGHT 2012 — VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 101

‘THEANTIYALE’ ON ‘MSA

Enough with leadership A

merican society, and Yale in particular, has a leadership fetish. Republican candidates regularly bash the president for his failure to show leadership (whatever that means), fellowship and internship applications regularly instruct applicants to describe their leadership experiences and Yale University’s three-sentence mission statement asserts unequivocally that our purpose is to “educate [students] for leadership in scholarship, the professions, and society.” Naturally, all movements need leaders and founders, but, increasingly, it seems that our collective obsession with leadership for its own sake undermines the very goals to which our leaders purportedly lead us.

Everywhere we turn at Yale, leadership is the prism through which our success and worth are evaluated. Professors praise and academic prizes reward classroom leadership. Student culture is far worse: I watch classmate after classmate fall into a sickening rat race of institutional ladder-climbing.

The message we are receiving is overwhelming: If by the time you graduate you have not been the musical director of an a cappella group, the editor-in-chief of a publication, the captain of a sports team, the president of a cultural group and the chairman of a political society, then you probably shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.

On its most basic level, lead-

ership culture suffocates individual students, pushing us in ill-fitting directions and creating bizarre incentives.

How YISHAI many of us SCHWARTZ find ourselves hunThe Gadfly devoting dreds of hours into causes we care little about in a desperate climb to official leadership? In the process, we lose hundreds of irretrievable hours we may have spent studying and serving causes closer to our hearts. Worse, we perform our duties shallowly and opaquely, looking for accolades and positive feedback rather than genuine accomplishment. This is an impressionable time, and these are the worst sorts of work habits we could possibly be forming.

The problem runs deeper, affecting and afflicting relationships. How many of us have watched friends drift away from organizations as they realize that prospects for advancement are limited and so determine that their time is better spent elsewhere? Before our eyes, our culture breeds the brash opportunism that shatters friendships, triggers contempt and spawns mistrust.

Far worse than what this obsession with leadership does to individual students is what it does to

the causes we claim to serve. Is YIRA really doing its best to educate and engage students about international relations when students are constantly jockeying for leadership roles? Is the Yale Political Union optimally fostering debate and political discourse when parties and members are constantly preparing for elections?

Then there is the needless fracturing of institutions and subsequent dilution of organizational strength. Yale College currently lists 441 officially registered undergraduate organizations, and many more teams and institutions are unregistered. With an undergraduate population of 5,300, this is completely out of proportion.

The proliferation has got to stop.

It seems unimaginable that each organization is contributing something genuine. Is the Committee for Freedom adding something that the Libertarians aren’t already offering? Indeed, it sometimes seems that there are more conservative undergraduate institutions than there are undergraduate conservatives. More organizations means more leadership positions (and more UOFC funding), but it also means more bureaucracy and less substantive work.

If everyone is an organizational president doing the leading, I can’t help but ask: So who is following? There is a medieval kabbalistic phrase: “There can be no king without a people.” The entire concept of leadership is meaning-

less if no one follows. If everyone leads, then we are all individually leading ourselves nowhere. Following well is an essential part of getting things done. Yet no one seems to be glorifying the followers.

We need a fundamental change in culture. We need to move from a valorization of leadership to a celebration of accomplishment.

Institutions need to praise the job well done and the part well played, regardless of whether that part is a cog in the machine or the entire mechanism’s inventor. The ancients understood the world as a harmony; we each have a role, and performing it well should be our highest goal.

We need to abandon the vacuous language that makes fostering abstract, morally neutral concepts like leadership or service into our central mission. We should ask: service to what? Leadership of whom, and for what purpose?

Surely the content — the purposes one serves or to which one leads — is what’s important.

We need to refocus on the substantive issues and recommit ourselves to asserting positive values.

So when you find yourself praising someone for leadership, stop and think whether it is the leadership or the cause that ought to be praised. And if it’s the latter, maybe you ought to save some praise for the followers.

YISHAI SCHWARTZ is a junior in Branford College. Contact him at yishai.schwartz@yale.edu .

F I R ST WO R L D P R O B L E M S M A D E L E I N E W I T T

More politics in science S

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‘your beard would create a community problem.’”

cientists tend to dream big but work small. Achieving a lofty but distant goal such as understanding the history of life might involve spending months making detailed measurements of mammalian skulls; discovering Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars requires a neurotic obsession with fiber optic cables. Methodical attention to detail is usually a comfortable — and rewarded — source of new discoveries and technologies. But in politics, scientists face a grave problem they cannot solve with small tweaks and incremental progress.

Support for science is steadily slipping among policymakers and the public — thanks in part to the concentrated efforts of anti-science corporations and politicians — even as science becomes more essential to understanding our complicated world. If this trend is not reversed, we risk entering an era in which innovation stagnates and people make critical decisions based on emotional whims.

Why the sudden alarm? After all, there is no immediate crisis.

Unfortunately, there is no way to combat the pervasive problems facing science without drastic action — and now is as good a time as any to halt our drive toward a new Dark Age. Flat or declining research budgets are the most obvious symptom of lackluster support for science. President Obama is a reliable cheerleader for science, and his

budget request for 2013 represents a continuation of his support. Still, the relatively huge funding increases for three of JOSEPH the most wellO’ROURKE off agencies — the National Space Cadet Institute of Standards and Te c h n o l og y, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation — fall far short of achieving, for instance, the two-fold increase in funding relative to 2006 that was forecast by the bipartisan America COMPETES Act in 2007. Most other agencies now face slashed budgets or funding increases that fail to keep pace with inflation. In this austerity-hungry political climate, science’s fiscal future will only become bleaker.

Congress is particularly reluctant to fund large scientific projects, and some scientists, frankly, deserve blame. The James Webb Space Telescope — an infrared telescope that would characterize exoplanet atmospheres and image the universe’s first stars — is the largest single line item for American science, with a projected total cost of $8.7 billion. As recently as 2002, however, astronomers estimated that the telescope would

cost only $2.5 billion. Irresponsible lowballing secured initial Congressional approval for the project, but the inevitable cost overruns sucked money away from a plethora of other worthy missions, including, as of last week, NASA’s Mars exploration program. But these budgetary shenanigans would not be necessary if scientists had more political clout in the first place.

The relative absence of scientific voices from the national conversation is more harmful than mere fiscal constraints on scientists’ own research. Out of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only nine are scientists or engineers. The scarcity of American scientists in government is a rarity in the developed world; in China, for instance, scientists and engineers dominate top government positions. Without scientists in office, elected officials make decisions requiring analytical thinking solely because of poll numbers and, more importantly, fail to appreciate the impact of investing in fundamental research.

Again, this is partly the fault of scientists, since scientists are as electable as anyone. Of course, accusations of elitism force all politicians to tread carefully. Republican Senator Scott Brown is fond of calling his opponent “Professor Elizabeth Warren,” seemingly to counter her self-portrayal as an outspoken advocate of the middle

class. And if anything would make scientists unelectable, it is their jealous protection of their reputations for complete impartiality.

Still, if scientists can master their fields of study, they certainly have the intellectual dexterity to succeed in politics.

Active participation is necessary to counter people who have few qualms about corrupting science to defeat opponents and inconvenient regulations. According to Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, scientists are “scared to death” of the massive financial resources deployed in discussions on everything from genetically modified crops to climate change. For Republican politicians, accepting the scientific consensus on climate change or evolution is tantamount to selling Texas to Iran, and unlimited super PAC contributions from anti-science corporations will only amplify their rhetoric.

Political engagement may seem unnatural and risky to many scientists. But the alternative is the disappearance of reliable research funding and the marginalization of scientific fact. And that benefits no one.

JOSEPH O’ROURKE is a senior in Silliman College. Contact him at joseph.orourke@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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PAGE THREE TODAY’S EVENTS TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28 4:00 PM “Abundance.” University of Chicago sociology professor Andrew Abbott will give the Hollingshead Lecture.

Reception to follow. Sterling Memorial Library (128 Wall St.), lecture hall.

4:30 PM “The Accelerating Universe.” Harvard University astrophysicist Robert Kirshner will give the Gruber Science Fellowship Lecture. A reception will follow in the McDougal Center common room. Hall of Graduate Studies (320 York St.), Room 119.

5:30 PM “American Made.” Join the Intercultural Affairs Council and the Department of Justice for dinner and discussion about this award-winning short film, which tells the story of a Sikh family waiting for roadside help for their broken-down car. It deals with stereotyping, intergenerational dynamics, issues of exclusion and interethnic relations. Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 102.

“Each of us needs something — food, liquor, pot, whatever — to help us survive. Dracula needs blood.” FRANK LANGELLA ACTOR

Small stores fear liquor proposals

BY CHRISTOPHER PEAK STAFF REPORTER Small liquor store owners are protesting a package of reforms to liquor laws announced by Gov. Dannel Malloy last month.

Malloy proposed a number of changes to the state’s liquor laws in January, the most popular of which was a repeal of the state’s Sunday blue laws, which forbid the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

But several small liquor store owners in Connecticut said the proposed repeal is a red herring intended to distract the public from the rest of the bill, which

contains several provisions — including one that would eliminate current restrictions on distributors providing wholesale discounts to liquor stores — that will harm the interests of small business owners. A public hearing will take place before the state legislature’s General Law Committee today at 11 a.m. in Hartford, and supporters of the reforms will rally at the Capitol an hour before the hearing.

“Malloy isn’t doing this for small businesses,” said Sanjay Patil, a manager at College Wine & Liquor who plans to travel to Hartford today to protest Mal-

5:30 PM “Desires, Loves, and Reasons.” Divinity School ethics professor Margaret Farley will give the second Nathaniel W. Taylor Lecture on the theme “Freedom, Obligation, and Love.” The lecture series addresses the question of the meaning and possibility of human freedom of choice. Sterling Divinity Quadrangle (409 Prospect St.), Niebuhr Hall.

6:00 PM “The Arab Spring: Where Is It Heading?” Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University will speak. Co-sponsored by the Yale Friends of Israel and the council on Middle East Studies. Luce Hall (34 Hillhouse Ave.), Room 203.

New group seeks to build town-gown ties

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER Middleman, a new student organization that aims to connect Yale students to neighborhoods beyond campus, has launched a new blog to document the city’s arts culture and local politics.

The blog, which went live on Feb. 18, features articles, slideshows and video interviews about the Elm City.

The organization’s president and primary contributor to the blog, Alan Sage ’14, said much of the content comes from a wide network of contacts he created while studying the city’s hip-hop scene for a summer research project.

In addition to blogging, Middleman hopes to use this network to facilitate connections between groups on campus and areas of the Elm City outside Yale, Sage said.

Before Alan [Sage ’14] came along, Yale seemed like it was unreachable for anyone around .

PEPE VEGA Owner, Nitro “Our mission was to develop a network of people throughout the city and use their resources to improve relations between Yale and New Haven,” Sage said. “A lot of efforts could be better directed if people knew more about the city.”

In the process of writing a book about New Haven’s hip-hop culture this summer, Sage said he connected with many of the city’s most influential artists, and through these connections became acquainted with many local business owners and other city residents. Though pieces on the blog may touch on sensitive issues of crime, Sage said they will not report incriminating facts but rather focus on big-picture trends.

According to the blog’s video director Michael Lomax ’14, photos and videos will convey “a personal feel,” as they will allow the city’s residents to tell their own stories.

One 10-minute video interview, which Middleman will upload later this week, features a local rapper named Frank Mellow describing a history of NHPD brutality as an inspiration for his music.

The video, Sage said, is an example of the ways in which New Haven’s hip-hop scene can be viewed as a lens through which to view many of the problems that plague the city.

He added that the blog does not aim to show that people like Mellow need Yale’s help or

community service, but rather to provide them with a means to share their stories.

Tone B, a New Haven-based rap artist, said Middleman is filling an important role in improving town-gown relations. If Yalies became more familiar with the city’s art scene, he said, the psychological gap between students and their surroundings might begin to close.

“The lack of communication draws a big barrier between New Haven natives and Yale students,” he said.

“Yale is surrounded by the ’hood, but when you get people from even the suburbs, they act like they don’t want to interact with the people around them.”

Prior to the creation of the blog, Middleman — which was founded last fall and receives funding from the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee — explored other ways to connect student organizations and city residents.

Along with the Urban Collective, a Yale urban studies discussion and advocacy group, Middleman coordinated a talk in October about the history of the Dixwell neighborhood.

Additionally, they organized several dinners at which community leaders including former rapper Hugh Gallman, DJ Ronald Moody and community activist Darrell Allick had dinner at Yale with Middleman members over the course of the semester.

Sage said one of Middleman’s most successful initiatives has been its partnership with Elmseed Enterprise, an undergraduate-run microloan organization that provides small local businesses with small loans and technical assistance. Jenny Dai ’14, Elmseed’s director of Spanish outreach, said Sage was able to connect Elmseed with three clients last semester.

Pepe Vega, the owner of Nitro, a sports apparel store on Whalley Avenue, received a $3,000 Elmseed loan in the fall that helped him expand his collection to include women’s shoes in an exchange facilitated by Middleman. Vega said the expansion would not have been possible without the loan and that his customers view the University in a more favorable light as a result of students’ attention to the store.

“Before Alan came along, Yale seemed like it was u n rea c h a b l e fo r a nyo n e around,” Vega said. “This is definitely a great thing he’s doing — it will bring the two separate communities together.”

As of Monday night, Middleman’s blog had 10 posts.

Contact MICHELLE HACKMAN at michelle.hackaman@yale.edu .

loy’s proposals, which he said threaten to drive him out of business. “He is working for the big stores.”

Connecticut is currently one of only two states in the United States that does not allow Sunday liquor sales, and the state’s bars and liquor stores must stop selling alcohol hours before those in neighboring states.

New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island residents can all purchase alcohol in liquor or grocery stores after noon on Sundays.

Under Malloy’s proposals, the state would allow liquor sales to extend until 10 p.m. for stores and until 2 a.m. for bars and restaurants. In a Jan. 14 statement, Malloy said the state is losing millions of dollars in liquor sales as residents drive across the borders to obtain alcohol on Sundays or after-hours on other days.

Karl Ronne, owner of the Wine Thief on Crown Street, said he was in favor of Sunday liquor sales.

“I pay rent 365 days a year, but I can’t open on a Sunday,” he said.

But small liquor store owners objected to other provisions in Malloy’s package, including one that would eliminate current restrictions on laws preventing wholesale discounts.

Currently, all Connecticut distributors are required to offer the same price to all retailers regardless of whether they purchase in bulk. “Removing these restrictions will not only give retailers more flexibility and lower shelf prices for consumers, it will allow the Department of Consumer Protection to refocus vital resources on enforcing our liquor laws and protecting consumer safety,” Malloy said in

SARAH ECKINGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Several local liquor stores have expressed concern that Gov. Dannel Malloy’s proposal to repeal a ban on Sunday liquor sales, as well as several other provisions, could place them at a disadvantage against larger retailers.

the January statement.

Malloy announced a compromise on Monday, setting a minimum price for retailers’ liquor prices, after Bill Fore, president of County Wine and Spirits in New Preston, Conn., protested the disadvantage he said small liquor stores would face if distributors were allowed to provide wholesale discounts.

Malloy isn’t doing this for small businesses. He is working for the big stores.

SANJAY PATIL Manager, College Wine & Liquor “[Minimum price requirements] are what allow a small retailer like me to play on a relatively level playing field with big box stores,” Fore said at a press conference Friday.

Malloy’s proposal would establish a new permit system allowing grocery stores with beer-only permits to open liquor stores in the vicinity of their current locations, as long as they have their own separate store space and cashiers, among other requirements. The proposal would also allow one proprietor — whether an individual person or a corporation — to own up to six liquor stores, an increase from the current two-store limit. An earlier version of Malloy’s bill proposed an increase to nine stores per owner, but Malloy reduced the number Monday after receiving many complaints from small liquor stores over the weekend.

Under Malloy’s proposal, the state would also have the power to set the maximum number of liquor licenses it issues, rather than leaving that responsibility up to municipalities. Malloy said in the statement that the change “will promote increased competition and flexibility among store owners.”

But small business owners said this competition will drive small liquor stores out of business. As stores begin to fail, Ronne said, the laws Malloy has proposed will allow large chains to buy the defunct stores’ permits. If this were to happen, he said, chains would be able to expand across the state, pushing more small businesses out of the market.

“It’s going to hurt small businesses,” he said. “People are going to lose jobs. Mom-andpop stores are going to have a rough time.”

Supervisors at the local Stop & Shop declined to comment.

Connecticut’s prohibition on Sunday alcohol sales was enacted in 1933.

Contact CHRISTOPHER PEAK at christopher.peak@yale.edu .

Yale to host U.K. high schoolers

BY TAPLEY STEPHENSON STAFF REPORTER A U.K. charity announced Tuesday that it will pay for lowincome students in the United Kingdom to study at Yale this summer as part of a program intended to expand to other schools across the United States.

The Sutton Trust, which supports education and social mobility programs for low-income students in the United Kingdom, will sponsor around 60 high school students to spend a week in New Haven and take classes run by the program on Yale’s campus. The Trust already runs similar programs at seven U.K. universities, and Yale will be the first American school to host a program.

In the past, administrators have said Yale would consider adding summer programs as a way to raise revenue for the University, but Kellie Elliott, Yale’s director of conferences and events, said the partnership was motivated by Yale’s international recruiting goals.

“Yale is trying to be more international, with the [Singaporean] campus and so forth, so this way we have a chance to bring international students here to demystify the whole college experience,” Elliott said. “I think

they’re going to go to a lot of cultural classes, and to learn the differences between studying in the United States and studying in Europe.”

Elliott said Yale was approached in September by Sir Peter Lampl — the Sutton Trust’s founder and a friend of Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale. The University then spent the next seven months evaluating the curriculum the Sutton Trust had offered to institutions in the United Kingdom.

Studying at a U.S. university is an appealing prospect to many U.K. state school students.

SIR PETER LAMPL Founder, The Sutton Trust Brenzel could not be reached for comment Monday.

Elliott added that the program has not given Yale any specific syllabi for the classes it would teach, but she said Yale expected to receive them in the coming weeks.

While Elliott admitted that the week-long program may be too short to get a full experience of the American education system, she said the program is expected to expand to three weeks if this year’s trial proves successful.

“A lot of first-year programs tend to test the water and see what the draw is, because while they’re very successful in the U.K., this will be the first [U.S.] campus that they’re on,” Elliott said.

Ronald Ehrenberg, director of Cornell’s Higher Education Research Institute, said more students in the United Kingdom are considering studying in the United States since the cost of education in the United Kingdom has increased in recent years as U.S. colleges have increased their financial aid packages.

Given this rising interest among U.K. students in attending U.S. universities, Lampl said in a press release that he expected the program to expand to several elite U.S. schools.

“Studying at a U.S. university is an appealing prospect to many U.K. state school students,” Lampl said in a press release. “If successful, we intend to establish many more U.S. summer schools next year and beyond — opening a pipeline for U.K. students to reap

the benefits of higher education at leading U.S. universities.”

The program’s website says it will give preference to students who will be the first in their families to attend college and whose households make roughly $63,000.

Still, Ehrenberg said studying in the United States may not be the best option for needy students, since many colleges do not offer need-blind admissions for international students.

“Cornell, for example, offers all U.S. citizens need-blind admissions and then meets the full need of all of these students,” Ehrenberg said. “However, for international students we have a fixed total financial aid budget which limits the number of needy foreign students we actually can admit.”

Yale, on the other hand, offers need-blind admission to international applicants and will meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all admitted students.

Applications for the Sutton Trust’s Yale program are due April 15.

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

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT SOM builds global network

YDN

SOM Dean Edward Snyder is leading an effort to create an international network of business schools that will collaborate with SOM. GLOBAL NETWORK FROM PAGE 1 recognition beyond the region.

He added that INCAE can offer the network a useful perspective on business issues, as it is based in two countries that have weathered extensive political and economic strife.

Miriam Erez, director of MBA programs at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, another member of the network based in Israel, said her school currently collaborates extensively with just one American institution, the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. Erez said Technion’s alumni typically enter high-technology industries, and that the school could approach business matters from a scientific angle within a global network.

“Israel has a very good model for technological innovation and entrepreneurship,” Erez said.

“I’m sure that other countries have other strengths that they can bring into the network — each participant should introduce their strengths or their perspectives or their resources.”

Both Selva and Erez said the “network” model of international partnerships will prove mutually beneficial to all schools involved.

Though Selva said the Yale brand has been instrumental in establishing the network, he said the organization will weight all schools equally and pursue a “more comprehensive perspective of sharing and collaboration” than seen at standard bilateral or trilateral business school partnerships.

As for better known institutions, Snyder has recruited INSEAD — a business school with campuses in Singapore, France and the United Arab Emirates — and several others to the network.

Other countries have other strengths that they can bring into the network — each participant should introduce their strengths or their perspectives or their resources.

MIRIAM EREZ Director of MBA Programs, TechnionIsrael Institute of Technology INSEAD has a “long history” of collaboration with international business schools and will help guide a network of less experienced members, Dean Dipak Jain said in an email Monday. He added that the school’s diverse faculty and student body, which represents more than 80 countries, will be another asset to the group.

Further details on the network will be revealed at launch events in New York and New Haven in April.

Contact DANIEL SISGOREO at daniel.sisgoreo@yale.edu .

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

CHARLES DARWIN ENGLISH NATURALIST

Program builds on couple’s legacy ECOLOGY FROM PAGE 1 the environmental movement. Blackmer already had a degree from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, but said he viewed Yale as the best place to combine religious studies with his previous work.

Yale is the only university in the country that offers joint master’s degrees in religion and ecology from both the University’s divinity and environment schools. Yale Divinity School professor Margaret Farley GRD ’70 ’73 and environment school professor Stephen Kellert GRD ’71 created the program in 2003, but Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, who are married, arrived to teach at Yale in 2006, giving the program “a new lease on life,” said former environment school Dean Gus Speth ’64 LAW ’69.

While Tucker estimated that seven students are currently pursuing the joint master’s degrees in religion and ecology at Yale, the growing program represents just one way the couple has worked to establish the interdisciplinary field as a course of study.

BLENDING SUBJECTS

Religious worldviews and ethical attitudes vary across the globe, Tucker said, but because they all shape the relationship between humans and the Earth, they can serve as an impetus to solve environmental problems.

In 1973, a 22-year-old Tucker began teaching English literature and language at a women’s university in Okayama, Japan, where she said she further deepened her appreciation for nature while experiencing the beauty of Zen gardens and the Japanese countryside. But only on a 1974 visit to Saigon on her way back to the United States did she first feel compelled to bring religion into the discussion of environmental problems.

“The devastation of Agent Orange was evident across the countryside with its subsequent effect on people,” Tucker said. “It was almost too much to bear, but it was only the beginning.”

Over the past 35 years, she added, the consequences of technological modernization — such as increased car usage and engineering projects in Asia — have adversely affected the environment. One of the most important issues in the field of religion and ecology is determining how to balance economic development and environmental protection, she added.

Before working to pioneer the field of religion and ecology, though, Tucker returned to school to learn more about religions of the world. Tucker earned a master’s degree in the history of religions at Fordham University — where she met Grim, who was pursuing the same degree — followed by a Ph.D. in Confucianism and Asian religions at Columbia University.

After 20 years of studying and teaching world religions at universities across the country, the couple looked to unite religion and ecology on a large scale. They took a leave of absence from teaching jobs

at Bucknell University to serve as senior research fellows at Harvard University’s Center for Study of World Religions.

There the two organized and raised funds for a conference series on world religions and ecology that began in 1996. In doing so, they laid the foundations for the joint field of religion and ecology.

EXPANDED REACH

The idea to combine the fields of religion and ecology had slowly gained momentum in the late 1980s as a result of interreligous dialogue about the environmental crisis, said John Berthrong, associate professor of comparative theology at the Boston University School of Theology.

Berthrong said he first encountered the concept in the late 1980s, but said Tucker and Grim took the initiative to begin the interdisciplinary discussion.

“Dr. Tucker and Dr. Grim put the wheels under this idea that a number of us had been thinking, and they crystallized it,” Berthrong said.

Despite enthusiastic responses, finding initial support and funding for the Harvard conferences posed some challenges, Grim said. Berthrong attributed some of the initial skepticism to the perception many had of a disconnect between science and religion.

Grim said he and his wife had to persuade scholars, religious leaders and environmentalists of the field’s legitimacy because it had not formally existed before. Doing so, he said, entailed persuading scholars that old religious texts could be re-examined and reconstructed in order to apply ancient ideas to modern problems such as climate change and pollution.

The conference ultimately drew 800 people over three years, facilitating group discussions based on papers submitted by participants in fields ranging from humanistic and religious studies to the natural and social sciences.

Following these three conferences, in 1998, the couple founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology, an international interfaith project that hosts conferences for environmentalists and scholars of religion, Tucker said. By increasing dialogue, she added, they aim to bridge the gap between theory and practice. From the start of the Harvard conferences to 2004, attendees of the Harvard conferences contributed to a series of 10 volumes published by the Harvard Center for World Religions under the direction of Tucker and Grim. Those volumes, Tucker said, explore how various religious foundations can be applied to the idea of environmental stewardship and ethics.

While Harvard was the ideal host for the conferences due to the University’s focus on world religions, Tucker said, the couple returned to teach at Bucknell.

COMING TO YALE

In 2006, Yale invited Tucker and Grim to expand the interdisciplinary study of both religion and ecology, already institutionalized through a joint master’s program three years earlier, said Kellert, who

CROSS CAMPUS THE BLOG. THE BUZZ AROUND YALE THROUGHOUT THE DAY.

helped start Yale’s joint master’s program. Due to the University’s leading programs in religion, theology, environmental studies and bioethics, Yale was the perfect place for the couple to continue their work, he added.

“Having really helped to create this field, we wanted to come to the only place that offered such a master’s program,” Tucker said, adding that the distinguishing factor between Yale and other universities is the equal role both graduate schools play in offering such a program.

Tucker said that the joint study of religion and ecology is still in its early stages, but interest in the program is increasing.

The program is making an effort to raise money so the environment school and the divinity school can offer more more scholarships for students, and last year the Porter Chair in Religion and Environmental Stewardship was awarded to Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, the Episcopal school within the Divinity School.

Rev. Stephanie Johnson DIV ’10 ’12, an Episcopal priest pursuing a second master’s degree at Yale in sacred theology, said she had not considered the possibility of combining her interests in religion and the environment until she arrived at Yale.

“I’d always been an environmental planner in my professional life and a devout Christian in another part of my life — I never thought that they would be related in a way,” she said.

Shortly after arriving at Yale, she said she heard conversations about faith and ecology. Initially, she said, she resisted such conversations because she thought she was called to be an Episcopal priest, but after attending a conference organized by Tucker and Grim, she said she realized she needed to re-envision her ministry. Now, Johnson said she is working with the New York City Bishop of the Episcopal Church to encourage members to participate in activities such as working in the church garden, in hopes that they will view the land as part of God’s creation.

Johnson and Blackmer said Grim and Tucker have been supportive of their work, and have served as sources of inspiration for them.

“They’re very interested in training and developing people who can carry this work on,” Blackmer said.

The Forum plans to host a summer symposium on religion and environmental stewardship this June, said Tara Trapani, the Forum’s administrative assistant. The Symposium, she added, will mark the first time scientists from the environment school and theologians from the divinity school will come together to discuss topics such as climate change, pollution, ecosystems and environmental justice. Tucker said she and her husband hope the symposium will become an annual event.

Contact LILIANA VARMAN at liliana.varman@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

Wenzel Urbandictionary.com lists the first definition of a Wenzel as, “The act of exposing and bringing to justice an internet scammer.” The second definition, however, refers to the famous sandwich available at Alpha Delta.

One Button Wenzel relaunches, expands

BY CHRISTOPHER PEAK CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The website that made Wenzels available with the click of a button now offers more than just the popular sandwiches from Elm Street’s Alpha Delta Pizza.

One Button Wenzel — a website that invited students to “Wenzel me” by ordering customized Wenzels for delivery — relaunched last week as Crunchbutton. The new website has expanded its food offerings to include eight new restaurants in an effort to better meet college students’ late-night needs, said Youbeo, Inc. CEO Judd Rosenblatt ’11, who helped start One Button Wenzel and then created the new website with his high school friend Ian Webster.

While One Button Wenzel allowed students to design their own Wenzels by selecting toppings and sides, Crunchbutton has added non-food choices — condoms at $1 apiece and red Solo cups at 50 for $5 — to those options. Crunchbutton includes five additional restaurants that will deliver their food through-

out New Haven late into the night: Brick Oven Pizza, Little Salad Shop, China King, Zaroka and Thai Pan Asian. Students can also place orders for pickup at Yorkside Pizza, A1 Pizza on Broadway and Gourmet Heaven.

“We listened to our customers — fellow Yalies — who wanted us to expand,” Rosenblatt said in an email Monday. “So we’re making it really easy for Yalies to order anything they want with the click of a button.”

It’s not Wenzels. People aren’t going to one-button Zaroka.

MIKE JIN ’13 Cameron Musco ’12, a computer science and applied math double major who developed One Button Wenzel with his identical twin Christopher Musco ’12, Steven Winter ’11 and Rosenblatt, said it made sense to create

Crunchbutton based on the success of One Button Wenzel. The original website, which launched last April, was so popular that Alpha Delta had to hire an additional employee to accommodate all the Wenzel requests, he said.

Alpha Delta manager Mahmut Turan said the website has generated at least 50 Wenzel orders a night.

Still, an owner and a manager at two other restaurants expressed concern about the website. Adam Juarez, the night manager at Gourmet Heaven, said some students who order for pick-up never come to the store to get their food.

“After Toad’s and the bars close, everyone wants to order because they don’t want to stand in line,” Juarez said. “Some students must fall asleep.”

George Koutroumanis, a coowner of Yorkside Pizza, called Crunchbutton “abstract” and “impersonal.”

Rosenblatt said he plans to include other restaurants in Crunchbutton’s ordering options and plans introduce a mobile app for the website soon. Cameron

Musco said Crunchbutton may expand to other campuses as well.

The system is “zero hassle” for its users, Rosenblatt added. Like One Button Wenzel, Crunchbutton sends an automatic email to the restaurant once an order is submitted. “[The simplicity of repeat ordering] should appeal to a drunk college kid just as much as your grandmother,” Rosenblatt said.

“We are focusing on colleges first.”

Sezgin Ilitli, the manager at A1 Pizza, said the restaurant is not involved with the website. But Rosenblatt said his company is still implementing its partnerships with the new restaurants.

“We’ve spoken with them about joining and they are waiting on getting a computer to receive incoming orders,” Rosenblatt said.

“In the meantime, we’re so dedicated to letting Yalies order their favorite food that we’re immediately calling in orders ourselves!”

Christopher Musco said the limited availability of on-campus food outside of regular dining hours will help Crunchbutton succeed.

CATAPULTS TAKE OVER DAVIES

But Mike Jin ’13 said he does not think the new website has improved One Button Wenzel significantly, since it offers foods that are not in high demand among students.

This should appeal to a drunk college kid just as much as your grandmother.

JUDD ROSENBLATT ’11 CEO, Youbeo “It’s not Wenzels,” he said.

“People aren’t going to one-button Zaroka.”

Cameron Musco said Crunchbutton is simpler for ordering food than Campusfood, an online food ordering service used by Yale along with colleges and universities across the country. Campusfood was purchased in September 2011 by online ordering website GrubHub, which now has more

ENGINEERING WEEK CONCLUDES WITH A LAUNCH As part of last week’s Engineering Week, hosted by the School of Engineering & Applied Science, students competed in a catapult launch contest held in Davies Auditorium on Friday.

Med students parody Yale

BY MARIANA LOPEZ-ROSAS STAFF REPORTER Second-year Yale School of Medicine students lampooned their administrators and celebrated their class last weekend in Harkness Memorial Auditorium.

A tradition since 1949, the Second Year Show mixes singing, acting, dancing and films to parody the school’s way of life and its faculty. The show marks the start of second-year students’ seven-week study period for their board examinations, and is one of their final events before they begin their separate clinical rotations next year.

This year’s theme, “The iPocalypse,” featured Assistant Dean Michael Schwartz represented as a giant iPad — a reference to the school’s initiative this year to give every student an iPad 2 to save paper and increase coursework accessibility.

“It’s a great event for us,” Samantha Wang MED ’14, co-director of this year’s show, said. “It shows that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and it reminds us that in moments of stress we need to just relax and keep laughing.”

The show started with a live performance of “Kid Doc” led by music director Max Petersen MED ’17 GRD ’17, followed by a striptease from the male students.

The “deans” of the school appeared next — students dressed up with fake beards and powdered hair, each with exaggerated personalities.

Alexandra Thomas MED ’17 GRD ’17, who played Associate Dean for Student Affairs Nancy Angoff, said she enjoyed her

role, adding that Angoff helped by lending her clothing and jewelry.

To the tune of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night,” the class’s video showcased student life pictures alongside lyrics such as “Only pass and never fail, thank God I got into Yale,” referring to the school’s pass/ fail grading policy for the first two years — notable among medical schools.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and … in moments of stress we need to just relax and keep laughing.

SAMANTHA WANG MED ’14 Co-director, School of Medicine Second Year Show Performers also tackled common medical student stereotypes during the show, including academically obsessed Harvard graduates dreaming of becoming neurosurgeons and Peace Corps volunteers committed to deworming children in Africa. A film called “MD/PhDs don’t give a s---” presented the dual-degree candidates as lab-consumed, overworked and uncaring for patients.

James Jamieson, professor of cell biology and director of Yale’s MD/PhD program, commended the show, adding that the collaboration between the students needed to organize the show is important

for future doctors and scientists. He added that the parody of MD/PhD students is just “a spoof” that does not really represent a division between MD and MD/PhD candidates, as “they are all on the same boat.”

Planning started in October, Wang said, adding that about 95 percent of the class of 2014 participated in some way. She said she decided to co-direct the show along with Conor Grady MED ’14 because both had experience in acting.

Thomas said that she thinks the show was a good way for her class to bond in culmination of their preclinical years before starting their separate rotations. She added that she was glad so many people made time for the show in spite of the time constraints they have as medical students.

Schwartz also praised the students’ performance — especially those that depicted him.

“Their exaggerations, I hope, of my mannerisms hit home and were humorous for me. I think that the goal of the show is to parody life at the school and to be a bit silly, so one needs to take the negatives with a grain of salt and be able to laugh at oneself,” Schwartz said. “In speaking with one of the students at the show she said the goal was to be ‘funny but not mean.’ I thought that they hit that goal in how I was played.”

Around 600 students attended the Friday and Saturday performances. All proceeds were donated to the Medical School’s Hunger and Homelessness Charities.

Contact MARIANA LOPEZ-ROSAS at mariana.lopez-rosas@yale.edu .

Contact CHRISTOPHER PEAK at christopher.peak@yale.edu .

Concert tracks Bard’s music across Atlantic

BY JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTER

VICTOR KANG/PHOTOGRAPHRY EDITOR

than 250,000 restaurant menu options and appears on campuses nationwide.

Abby Hunt, public relations manager for GrubHub, said in an email Monday that the company’s free mobile app is a significant advantage of the services, because it allows students to “order anywhere, anytime hunger strikes.”

Over 22 percent of GrubHub’s revenue comes from orders come from “mobile orders,” according a statement GrubHub released in September after purchasing Campusfood.

Hunt also said GrubHub’s variety — with 57 restaurants near Yale’s campus — make it competitive with Crunchbutton. But Christopher Musco said the more limited listings on Crunchbutton help students select from New Haven’s best food options by narrowing their choices.

Alpha Delta is open 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Sunday through Wednesday, and 3 p.m. to 4 a.m. Thursday through Saturday.

Halfway through a concert at the Whitney Humanities Center Monday afternoon, 13 singers hopped across the pond, switching from British to American interpretations of Shakespeare’s lyrical texts mid-performance.

In the “Shakespeare in Song: American vs. British” performance, members of Music professor Richard Lalli’s MUS ’86 “Performance of Vocal Music” course each chose and performed two songs of either early 19th-century British or 20th-century American composition, which interpreted lyrics from various Shakespearean plays. Part of the “Music at the Whitney” concert series, the performance was intended to allow audience members to compare the two styles.

“The British pieces tend to have more pronounced emotional peaks. The American pieces tend to be a little more level in terms of emotional contour,” Lalli said. “That’s a big generalization, but it’s true.”

[The song is] literally dialogue; it wasn’t a very important piece for the play. But knowing [the story] changed the way I performed the song.

LISA ZHANG ’15 Lalli added that the songs from Britain, written during the Romantic Victorian Period, take a more emotional approach to interpreting Shakespeare’s language, while the 20th-century American pieces tend toward the theatrical, as they were often written for staged productions.

This stylistic disparity was clear in the two interpretations of “When Icicles Hang By The Wall,” a song from “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” The bass vocalist Tobias Kirchwey ’14 performed a darker British interpretation of the song written

by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1925, while soprano Liang Yu ’14 performed a more dramatic American version of the song by Dominick Argento from 1970.

Lalli’s “Performance of Vocal Music,” which has a different theme each term determining the repertoire, is focusing on songs written for Shakespeare’s texts this semester in light of the campus-wide Shakespeare at Yale festival. Students in the class chose songs to perform from a collection of about 100 different versions of Shake-

spearean lyrics and worked individually with Lalli and Sara Kohane, a Music Department lecturer, to receive coaching on the pieces’ performance.

In order to perfect the British versions of the songs, the students listened to British actors reciting sonnets to “get the sound of the British inflection in [their] ears,” Lalli said.

“There was definitely a difference [between the British and American performances] in terms of the way you pronounce things,” said Terrence ChinLoy ’14, who participated in the concert. “[The] British would roll all the r’s, and in an American song you wouldn’t do that.”

Lalli said that rather than focusing their energy on the text’s dramatic interpretation, students were encouraged to improve their skills as vocalists.

Nevertheless, he had the students research Shakespeare’s plays and read their songs in context to better understand the text.

Lisa Zhang ’15 said this helped her perform “She Never Told Her Love” by Joseph Haydn in 1795. Based off the text of “Twelfth Night,” the song describes Viola — the play’s disguised protagonist — and her inability to tell Duke Orsino she loves him. “[The song is] literally dialogue; it wasn’t a very important piece for the play,” Zhang said. “But knowing [the story] changed the way I performed the song … Looking at the song’s text, you can see the foreshadowing and how it plays into the plot.”

Sarah Norvell ’15 said that it struck her as “unfair” that the texts of Shakespeare’s songs are so often overlooked in his plays.

“The lyrics really do add to the play in an emotional sense,” Norvell said.

The concert ended with a duet by Chin-Loy and Aria Thaker ’14, who performed an 1851 interpretation of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet

by Stephen Foster, called “Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?” The happy, lilting melody of the song plays out over a discussion between Juliet and Romeo on whether the birdsong they hear is that of a nightingale or lark, which would signal either the coming of the night or morning and whether Romeo had to leave or not.

“The sound of it is very 19thcentury America,” Chin-Loy said. “It’s not a very romantic take, but it has the American sense of charm to it.”

For the remainder of the term, “Performance of Vocal Music” students will study Shakespeare’s lyrics in French and German translation.

Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT Mayor proposes tax relief

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” HENRY ADAMS WRITER

History Dept. offers trial FELLOWS FROM PAGE 1

JACOB GEIGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. spoke to reporters Monday as he announced a plan that would mitigate the increase in the property tax bills of some homeowners whose property values rose in the city’s 2011 revaluation.

HOMEOWNERS FROM PAGE 1 properties’ appreciation. Businesses will not see any help from the program.

“As the initiative only applies to residential property, commercial taxpayers don’t really reap the benefits and as a result, will pay slightly higher taxes,” DeStefano said. “The idea was to focus specifically on homeowners and give them five years to catch up.”

DeStefano explained that the city had three options in response to the property revaluations: fully implement the new values, utilize a state law that allows the city to phase in the changes over time for all property owners or to create a new option that would need approval from both the Board of Aldermen and the state legislature.

The first two options, DeStefano said, would provide inadequate tax relief to homeowners who saw a significant increase in their property revaluations.

The Homeowner Fairness Initiative, which requires the Board of Aldermen’s approval, would only affect how long homeowners will have until they must eventually pay their new property taxes, not the absolute value of their final tax levels, DeStefano said.

“I’m really happy about this plan and I know a lot of the residents are too,” Ward 10 Alderman Justin Elicker said, adding that the Board of Aldermen held a meeting several weeks ago to discuss

the city’s options in responding to property revaluation, and the mayor’s proposal appeared likely to pass the Board. “Without this plan, we might push out middleclass folks who can’t adjust to the new tax rates that quickly,” Elicker said. “We would end up with a neighborhood of very wealthy professors and New York investors, and we want a mixed neighborhood.”

Elicker said that he expects an influx of reactions from residents and business owners now that DeStefano has announced the details of the plan.

Several residents attended DeStefano’s Monday press conference. Though no one in attendance explicitly criticized the Homeowner Fairness Initiative, at least five expressed frustration at what they perceived to be a long-term pattern of property tax increases.

“Most of us have been here for more than five years, and my taxes have gone up over 300 percent since I’ve been here,” said Mona Berman, a resident of Wooster Square. “As we’re getting older, our potential income decreases and our property values increase, and this phase-in doesn’t really address the true issue. This is just another band-aid that doesn’t get to the heart of the solution.”

DeStefano responded by explaining that the real antidote to the high property tax burden New Haveners face lies in tax reform at the state level.

The Office of the Asses-

sor received about 1,700 appeals from property owners about their assessments after the 2001 evaluation, 1,500 appeals after the 2006 evaluation and 1,100 appeals after the 2011 evaluation, DeStefano said, citing the decreasing appeals as evidence of improvement in the city’s revaluation process.

But Berman said she thought that the decrease was instead the result of the “psyche of fear” that the government has instilled in taxpayers.

A group of five residents gathered outside the meeting and asked that the municipal government focus on bigger issues like balancing the budget, arguing that property taxes are a misguided way of fixing the city’s financial woes.

“We bought our house when the neighborhood was less than ideal — there was a house at the end of the street that was a drug den, there were hookers and there were people dying,” Berman said. “We worked together to clean up the place, and now we’re being penalized for making it a great neighborhood and for wanting to make our houses nicer places.”

New Haven’s 2011-’12 fiscal year budget projected that the city will collect $222,981,970 in property taxes, or approximately 47 percent of the city’s general fund.

Contact DIANA LI at diana.li@yale.edu .

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competitive program where students and faculty members apply jointly to teach lectures or seminars. The Seminar Fellow Program is less costly than the AT program, which they said has been “hugely successful but really expensive” since its launch three years ago. Unlike the AT program, the Seminars Fellow Program will pay graduate students using funding already allocated to them for their teaching requirements. Three courses in the AT program met last fall, and the 12 are running this spring, according to the website of the Teaching Center of the Graduate School.

Bill Rando, director of the Graduate Teaching Center and the AT program, said the two programs will complement each other.

“The AT program really showed just how terrific it is when faculty members and graduate students are in the class together,” he said.

Two faculty members and two teaching fellows in the Seminar Fellows program all said the complementary dynamic between the two instructors has enhanced the classroom experience. History professor Glenda Gilmore, teaches “The American South, 1870 to the Present,” said she works closely with her teaching fellow Andy Horowitz GRD ’14 to plan the syllabus, tweak it week-toweek, provide feedback on essays and lead class discussions.

“Because there are two of us, we can engage more deeply with the student seminar leaders each week, and we can offer everyone more advice on their research papers,” Gilm-

ore said in an email. “We have developed roles in class that I hope are complementary.

He stops the discussion and demands facts and chronologies; I ruminate about southern oddities like night soil and ham.”

Michael Bustamante GRD ’15, who is the seminar fellow for history professor Gilbert Joseph’s course “History of Mexico since Independence,” said in an email that he has appreciated the chance to see how a “veteran professor” conducts a seminar, adding that he has been “inspired” by Joseph’s passion for the material.

Four students in classes with seminar fellows also expressed enthusiasm for the program. Connor Kenaston ’14, who is taking Gilmore’s

course, said the seminar fellow in the course elevates the level of discussion.

“I get the sense that [the professor and seminar fellow] both know the topic really well, so the back and forth is really smooth,” Kenaston said. “[The seminar fellow] really helps balance the discussion.”

The four junior history seminars that have seminar fellows are “Problems in American Historical Memory: The Civil War,” “The American South, 1870 to the Present,” “Selected Topics in Lesbian and Gay History” and “History of Mexico since Independence.”

Contact IKE SWETLITZ at isaac.swetlitz@yale.edu and CHRISTINA WANG at christina.wang@yale.edu .

SPECIAL TEACHING OPPORTUNITIES FOR TFS PART TIME ACTING INSTRUCTORS

PTAIs teach independently but are still overseen by a faculty member who creates a syllabus that should be consistent across all sections. Some examples of courses include introductory English classes, calculus classes, music classes and most language classes.

RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE SEMINARS

These independent seminars must be approved through a application process that spans the course of a semester.

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENTS

Graduate students in the Language and Literature departments are ensured provisions for and are required to teach a seminar at least one term in four.

PRIZE TEACHING FELLOWSHIP

Students who were previously TFs or PTAIS are qualified to apply for this fellowship, which allows its winners to design and teach their own course.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST

TOMORROW

Sunny, with a high near 44. Northwest wind 5 to 8 mph increasing to between 13 and 16 mph.

High of 40, low of 36.

THURSDAY High of 46, low of 30.

WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ

ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 29 5:30 PM “Representing Rural Society: Surveyors, Surveying and the Surveyed in Late 17th-Century England.” This talk will be given by Steve Hindle, the W.M. Keck Foundation director of research at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Yale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel St.).

7:30 PM “Homegrown: Jazz by Yale Composers.” The Yale Jazz Ensemble, directed by Thomas C. Duffy, will present a concert of jazz by Yale composers, including Garth Neustadter MUS ’12, Lamtharn Hantrakul ’15 and Jeff Fuller ’67 MUS ’69. Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St.), Morse Recital Hall.

THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT

THURSDAY, MARCH 1 12:15 PM “How Environmentalism Shapes People’s View of Nature.” Sudha Vasan, of the Delhi School of Economics, will speak. Lunch will be provided. Kroon Hall (195 Prospect St.), Room G01.

4:30 PM “Tomorrowland: American Prosperity … or Bust.”

Paul Solman, a correspondent for “The PBS NewsHour,” will give this International Security Studies Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Lecture. Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), lecture hall.

7:30 PM Belly Dance Workshop. This relaxed, beginner-level workshop will introduce you to this empowering dance and teach you some basic moves! Free admission, no registration required.

Office of International Students and Scholars (421 Temple St.).

ZERO LIKE ME BY REUXBEN BARRIENTES

FRIDAY, MARCH 2 12:00 PM “Fukushima’s Victories and Victims: Contemplating Alliances Between Japanese Soccer, the State, and Nuclear Power.” Butler University anthropology professor Elise Edwards will give this lecture as part of the Japan Anthropology Colloquium Series. Anthropology Department (10 Sachem St.), Room 105.

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PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“I never sleep on planes. I don’t want to get ‘incepted.’” JACK DONAGHY 30 ROCK CHARACTER

Sleep cycles linked to health

Super Smash continents predicted

BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERG STAFF REPORTER Connecticut could border the Andes Mountain Range instead of the Long Island Sound in millions of years, according to a new theory proposed by Yale scientists.

Researchers from Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics have developed a new supercontinent formation theory, which predicts that the continents will next come together in a giant landmass called Amasia, will form over the North Pole in 50 to 200 million years.

The model, which is based on analyses of ancient rocks, challenges previous predictions on the location of the next supercontinent. Lead author Ross Mitchell GRD ’12 said the theory, published in the journal Nature on Feb. 8, could lead scientists to a better understanding of Earth’s history and modern-day composition.

[the continents].” Hoffman was not involved with this study.

The Yale geologists analyzed the magnetism of ancient rocks and the relative positions between three previous supercontinents, including the last supercontinent, Pangaea, which formed over 300 million years ago and began to break apart 200 million years ago. Mitchell explained that when lava cooled and sedimentary layers solidified to form rocks millions of years ago, the metal within the rocks aligned with the Earth’s magnetic pole at unique latitudes.

Analyzing this paleomagnetic data

enabled the research team to map the movement of the continents relative to the magnetic north pole throughout time.

“We found that once a supercontinent formed, it tended to swivel around its own center.” said David Evans ’92, senior author and professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. “If we extrapolate that pattern, we can predict the location of the next supercontinent.”

From outer space, the entire supercontinent land mass would oscillate clockwise and then back counterclockwise, an effect called

“true polar wander,” Mitchell said.

Based on true polar wander and the paleomagnetic data analysis, the Yale geologists proposed an “orthoversion” model in which the next supercontinent will be located 90 degrees away from Pangaea, which was centered near modernday Africa. By this model, Amasia will form when the Americas meet Europe, Asia and Australia at the North Pole, closing the Arctic Ocean. Evans said Antarctica may remain separated from Amasia.

The previously proposed “introversion” and “extroversion” mod-

els predict the formation of the next supercontinent along the equator either 0 degrees or 180 degrees away from Pangaea, respectively.

Mitchell explained that, in addition to making a prediction for millions of years from now, the new model would have practical applications. It could help energy firms such as Shell Oil Company find new oil reserves by analyzing how the continents aligned when the mineral deposits formed millions of years ago, he said. The research could also help scientists study how species dispersed when Pangaea broke up,

BY THOMAS VEITCH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

and could lead to better understandings of the earth and its changing surface geography.

“The history of the supercontinents is crucial to understanding the history of life, and the history of mineral and ore deposits,” Mitchell said.

Hoffman coined the name Amasia in 1992, as a joke about the future proximity of America and Asia, he said.

Contact JACQUELINE SAHLBERG at jacqueline.sahlberg@yale.edu .

This is the most exciting work in Precambrian geology in recent years.

PAUL HOFFMAN Geology professor, Harvard University “This is the most exciting work in Precambrian geology in recent years,” said Paul Hoffman, professor of geology at Harvard. “Contrary to the previous models that were purely geometrical, the new model actually makes sense geodynamically. It considers the forces that are acting on the [tectonic] plates and moving

While a 2-degree increase in the temperature of waters near Antarctica will not make much of a difference for humans, it may cause the extinction of native fish species.

A research group led by Thomas Near, Yale associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, outlined the evolutionary history of Antarctic fish, which developed antifreeze proteins tens of millions of years ago to survive in subzero polar conditions. The study, published online Feb. 13 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that these fish may be threatened by the rise of water temperatures in the region.

Environmental experts said that polar ecosystems are very vulnerable to even slight temperature changes.

“The development of polar climatic conditions that shaped the [evolution] of Antarctic fish is now reversing,” Near said. “The increasing temperature of the Southern Ocean, with the potential for the arrival of invasive species and disruption of food webs, is the greatest threat to the survival of this unparalleled [diversity].”

Tens of millions of years ago, rapid cooling in the Antarctic led to the mass extinction of fish acclimated to warmer temperatures, with the surviving fish developing antifreeze proteins. The study shows that new species arose as the fish adapted to fill the ecological gaps left by the

tend to get sick more and benefit less from vaccinations, he said.

Abaluck added that the relationship between sleep and learning is as clear as that between sleep and health. For example, he said, people perform much worse on cognitive tasks after sleeping for only one hour — and they also feel “awful.” But although people reach a sleep plateau after getting five to six hours of sleep per night for a week and no longer feel sleepy, their performance on cognitive tasks is just as impaired as after only an hour of sleep.

“If I could go back to college, I would prioritize sleep more,” Abaluck said. “I would try to keep as regular a sleep time as possible — even on the weekends.”

Fikrig also joked that students should think twice about studying into the wee hours if they want to stay healthy.

Ran Matsumoto ’14 said she is not surprised to hear that immune function and sleep might be linked, since she always feels worse after not getting enough sleep.

“I feel that a lot of the time [Yale students] put academics before sleep,” Matsumoto said.

A spring 2011 survey by the News found that the Yalies said they average 6.4 hours of sleep per night.

to a catastrophic decrease in biodiversity.”

David Barnes, a scientist in the British Antarctic Survey, said the study was important because it explained how fish adapted to living in hostile environments.

He added that while climate change represents a major threat to fish and other fauna native to Antarctica, the exact mechanism endangering them is still unknown, since patterns of marine warming and other effects of climate change are so complex.

He said that it is likely that in the long run climate change will create new ecological balances and ecosystems in unpredictable ways, as the mass extinction of Antarctic fish before the development of the antifreeze protein did millions of years ago.

The study was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.

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

Suganthi Balasubramanian, associate research scientist in Mark Gerstein’s lab in Yale’s Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department, was the lead Yale author in a paper published in a February issue of Science as part of a collaborative effort called the 1000 Genomes Project. This project aims to sequence the genomes of a large number of people in order to serve as a comprehensive resource on genetic variation. The research deals with genetic changes called lossof-function variants, which are predicted to seriously disrupt protein coding within the body. As part of an initiative led by Yale and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Balasubramanian and fellow researchers worked to experimentally filter a range of these variants to develop a highquality catalogue of the variants that cause true loss of function. kind of data analysis QWhat did you do, and how did it fit into the larger project?

A

Our main role at Yale was to annotate these genetic variations. We know [the variations] are in the genome but we need some kind of identification, some signpost to see where is it and what it means.

So we looked to see if [the variations] are in a protein coding region, and, if so, how do they change the amino acid sequence of the protein? This was essentially our role in the 1000 Genomes Project: to map and provide functional annotation of all the coding variants.

light does your QWhat research shed on other

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study shows that the water temperature increase in the Antarctic region may result in the extinction of many native fish species.

erroneous variation calls, and you have to make sure you are really seeing what you see. The 1000 Genomes provided us with 3,000 loss-of-function variants, and we went through a long process of analysis with computational and experimental filters and came to only 1,285 true loss-of-function variants. There are lots of sequencing studies being done right now that look for genetic variation but in order for them to be clinically relevant, they have to be carefully validated.

Our study provides a high quality catalogue of loss-offunction variants. you describe the proQCould cess of collecting the data and building the catalogue?

A

After the work of many different groups, we receive a huge file that tells us where the different variants are in the human genome. We looked at this these files for 185 different people of different ancestries, and we’d map the variant to protein-coding regions and annotate them. I’d look at the genome in a linear representation, and I wanted to know what site the variant was in — was it in a coding gene? Is it in an entron? Is it in a non-coding region? This is what annotation is. I wanted to know where the variants landed, and I’m particularly interested in the ones that land in a protein-coding gene, which only constitute less than 2 percent of the genome. So to functionally annotate these variants, we first map them to coding gene, then we figure out what it does to the protein and what changes in function it causes. This has been done before, but we’re doing it on a large scale and fast.

genetics research today?

are the clinical impliQWhat cations of this catalogue?

A

A

Essentially this project contributes several things. First, people generally assume that loss-of-function variants are rare and, when observed, very harmful because they lead to disease and aren’t very common. People haven’t questioned why we see so many loss-of-function variants. Our careful analyses show that it’s very important to validate these variants.

There are many ways to make

1000 Genomes Project, and Phase I has data on over 1000 samples now. This work here was only the pilot phase. So we are going to get a much bigger catalogue. Our goal is to use the empirical rules we learned to build a more comprehensive loss-of-function catalogue from the 1,000 Genomes data … We’ll also add on other filters. So far we’ve look at variations one at a time, but now we’ll look at other variations in the same gene to see the overall effect on gene. Of course we’re also very interested in building an experimental chip where you can basically go and look at these variations in thousands of people. We want to target some specific variations, and we want to develop a system where you can probe only these specific variations. This is our big hope, and we hope

specific variations?

A

A

This work was based on only on 185 samples. The next step is called Phase I of the

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study shows that maintaining a regular sleep cycle is important for healthy immune function.

Google, help improve the mean T

Essentially, we now have a candidate set of loss-offunction-containing genes, and this can now be used for target gene prioritization for diagnosing and treating diseases.

are the project’s next QWhat steps?

Kimberly Yonkers, professor of psychiarty at the Yale School of Medicine, is a member of a committee for the American Psychiatric Association that is working on a new definition of PMDD for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She wants the disorder, characterized by melancholy and depression, to be separated from the more common PMS in the new edition of the DSM, to be released this year.

would be the clinical QWhat benefit of only probing the

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

SUGANTHI BALASUBRAMANIAN

Yale researcher Suganthi Balasubramanian is part of the 1000 Genomes Project, which aims to provide a comprehensive resource on genetic variation.

The Boston Globe reported Sunday that a squirrel monkey died of dehydration in a lab at Harvard Medical School at the end of Decmber. This is the third monkey to die in the past two years at a New England research facility, and the United States Department of Agriculture cited Harvard for improper safety procedures at their labs.

Yale prof calls for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder to be taken seriously by DSM

it’ll lead to some good clinical discoveries.

When you sequence someone, you typically have 3 to 4 million variations, and it’s impossible to know which ones might be interesting in terms of biological functions or need closer looking at. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack; we need some way to figure out which variants to look at. So with a small subset to probe, you have a more defined targeted data set to experimentally research.

Harvard monkey dies at Harvard Med School

A panel of 22 scientists and advisors for the Food and Drug Administration voted in favor of approving Qnexa, a new weight loss drug.

The FDA found that Qnexa may cause heart problems and memory loss, but the drug’s maker’s disputed the findings. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, said that Qnexa may be necessary, but was not a good option. He cited a dearth of weight loss drugs and “desperation” as the only reason that the drug was approved.

Faulty genetics not at fault

BY JOY SHAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

LAB

Qnexa proceeds as weight loss drug, over Yalie objections

YALE

extinction. This process eventually gave rise to the 100 species of fish now living in Antarctic waters, which all possess the ability to withstand cold temperatures.

But Near said that these polar adaptations have rendered Antarctic fish unusually sensitive to warmer water temperatures, making climate change a dire threat to Antarctica’s fish populations. A decline in the fish population would cripple the rest of the ecosystem by removing a major food source for penguins and seals, he added.

Sarah Gille ’88, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that even small temperature changes in certain regions near Antarctica could allow the influx of invasive species more adapted to warmer water. She added that Antarctic waters were by no means the only ecosystem threatened by climate change.

“Species and ecosystems evolve over tens of millions of years in response to changing environmental conditions,” Gille said. “The concern about modern climate change is that it might happen faster than ecosystem response times, and the result could lead

F R O M T H E

Contact THOMAS VEITCH at thomas.veitch@yale.edu .

Yale scientists predict that the continents of the Earth will come together in a giant landmass over the North Pole in 50 to 200 million years. They call this supercontinent Amasia.

Antarctic fish threatened

BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER

Yalies who stay up late studying for their midterms may be weakening their immune systems.

A new study published Feb. 16 in the journal Immunity has revealed a relationship between circadian rhythms and immune system activity in mice. According to Erol Fikrig, Yale professor of epidemiology and microbial pathogenesis and the lead author of the study, this finding demonstrates the importance of keeping regular sleep cycles to stay healthy. It also has implications for making vaccinations more effective, he said.

“We’ve known for quite some time that people intuitively say they get sicker when they’ve had jet lag and poor sleep,” Fikrig said.

He said the study was important because it was the first to specifically link circadian rhythms with the expression of Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR-9), a protein involved in immune function in mice. The gene for TLR-9 was expressed in varying degrees depending on the time of day, with the highest levels found while the mice were active, he said.

The research showed that when mice were exposed to an infection, the “outcome” varied depending upon the time of day of the exposure.

While he stressed that the study has not yet been conducted in humans, Fikrig posited that sleepcycle disruption might weaken

human immune systems. He said when an individual’s circadian rhythms are “out of whack,” gene expression for certain immune proteins might be suppressed.

The study may lead hospitals to reconsider certain standard practices that disregard the importance of sleep, Fikrig said. For example, nurses often wake patients up in the middle of the night for checkups, but this practice could be deleterious to patients’ immune systems.

The study also examined the effectiveness of vaccination at different times of day. Responses to vaccines in mice varied with the time of day they received the vaccines, indicating, Fikrig said, that there could be an optimal time of day for humans to be vaccinated.

Brian Abaluck ’01, a sleep specialist at Sleep HealthCenters — a health care provider specializing in sleep medicine — cautioned that it was “dicey” to extrapolate animal studies to humans. “[I] would not change my recommendations to patients based on a single mouse study,” Abaluck said.

Nonetheless, he said studies like this one add to general knowledge about sleep and health.

Abaluck said the study is consistent with his understanding of sleep health, since previous studies have shown that sleep deprived mice eventually die from “overwhelming infection.” Other studies have shown that people who do not get adequate sleep

LEAKS

he data revolution is coming. While online marketing is getting fat off trillions of cookies, biology is exploding with DNA sequences, sports teams are selecting players who are undervalued by traditional metrics and public health researchers are mining queries to Google and posts on Facebook and Twitter to follow and predict disease outbreaks. Even disciplines typically devoid of data dumps, like the humanities, are getting in on the action: e-book libraries allow literary critics to follow specific words over time.

It’s becoming clear that our brave new world requires us to understand numbers and make sense of data, regardless of our field — but are we prepared to do so? Probability and statistics are the branches of mathematics that cover the important tasks of prediction and interpretation, yet few Americans take a full probability and statistics course in high school.

Arthur Benjamin, a colorful ‘mathemagician’ and mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College has championed the idea that statistics should replace calculus as the focus of high school math. In a 2009 TED talk, Benjamin went so far as to claim that “If all the American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we are in today.”

I’m confident (95 percent) that the quants and financiers responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown had taken some probability and statistics courses, so I don’t think that requiring a single high-school course would have been a panacea. And as

someone who was awestruck by the world of derivatives and integrals, I find it a bit unfair to jettison calculus for the cold, hard practicality JESSIE of statistics. But MCDONALD Benjamin makes a good point.

Technophobia Even though I’m in a scientific field, I have never used calculus for any of my experiments. It’s my half-semester of college probability and statistics that I use and wish I had taken more of.

Without engaging too much in the pure math versus applied math debate, I believe probability and statistics should be standard, ideally at both the secondary and collegiate levels. Realistically, even if every American high school student is required to take an introductory stats course, I doubt they’ll remember the difference between a Gaussian and binomial distribution 15 years later. We need a deeper mode of numerical education that highlights examples of probability and statistics in our everyday lives.

How about having every K-12 class, regardless of discipline, begin or end with a probability and statistics “problem”?

Is this practical? Probably not.

Many teachers will be able to work in a topic-appropriate, ripped-fromthe-headlines query that teaches a valuable lesson about statistics in three minutes, but I realize it might not happen for everyone. That’s

where data-driven Google could step in.

In terms of essential skills for the 21st-century, being able to search for something online is probably number one — even above understanding the t test. With this in mind, Google created a daily search puzzle, Google-a-day, to help people develop good search skills (and no doubt, for Google to learn about how people search). By the same token, Google may be able to fill a gap in modern education by providing its own daily probability and statistics problem. They could kick it off with a doodle (the famous Google logo decorations) celebrating the March 23 birthday of Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician and pioneer in the field of probability. Google should then also advertise this service to schools to encourage teachers to begin incorporating probability and statistics into their daily lessons.

Outsourcing education to private companies wouldn’t normally be my first choice, but it’s in the interest of all parties to raise kids who are excited by data and enjoy playing in the ‘big data’ sandbox. Adults, not just students, could dip their toes in as well, helping America deal with the deluge of data inundating almost every industry.

The Google stat problem-a-day won’t be a complete fix, obviously, but I bet that it’ll be statistically significant.

JESSIE MCDONALD is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunology. Contact her at jessica.mcdonald@yale.edu .

Tanning website attacks Yale study for its author’s financial ties to cosmetics firms The website Tanner’s Rights, whose stated purpose is to promote the idea that tanning salons are safe, posted an article disputing a Yale study publised earlier this year. In December Yale released a study concluding that tanning salons significantly increased their users’ risk of cancer. The article claims that “in what appears to be a possibly fraudulent marketing ploy on its surface … their [sic] is a connection between one of the researchers as a shareholder of a L’Oreal tanning lotion company.” The article on Tanner’s Rights did not attempt to contact the Yale professors for comment.

Yale study finds genes behind teen vulernability to cocaine A new Yale study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that teenage brains were more vulnerable to cocaine addiction than adult ones. In mice, the brain tried to respond to cocaine use with defensive measures, but this tended to lead to addiction. Researchers concluded that the results were probably due to the brain’s attempt to protect itself during the teenage years, which are formative from a neurological perspective.

Elephantine societies revealed by footpints A research team led by Yalies analyzed 7 million-year-old elephant footprints in the Arabian desert to look at the social structures of the group of elephants. They concluded that the elephants demonstrated two separate types of behavior: herding by the females and solitary wandering by the men.

“It’s like walking back in time,” said Andrew Hill, senior author of the paper, in the press release. There are no longer any elephants in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, where the research was conducted.

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“I never sleep on planes. I don’t want to get ‘incepted.’” JACK DONAGHY 30 ROCK CHARACTER

Sleep cycles linked to health

Super Smash continents predicted

BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERG STAFF REPORTER Connecticut could border the Andes Mountain Range instead of the Long Island Sound in millions of years, according to a new theory proposed by Yale scientists.

Researchers from Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics have developed a new supercontinent formation theory, which predicts that the continents will next come together in a giant landmass called Amasia, will form over the North Pole in 50 to 200 million years.

The model, which is based on analyses of ancient rocks, challenges previous predictions on the location of the next supercontinent. Lead author Ross Mitchell GRD ’12 said the theory, published in the journal Nature on Feb. 8, could lead scientists to a better understanding of Earth’s history and modern-day composition.

[the continents].” Hoffman was not involved with this study.

The Yale geologists analyzed the magnetism of ancient rocks and the relative positions between three previous supercontinents, including the last supercontinent, Pangaea, which formed over 300 million years ago and began to break apart 200 million years ago. Mitchell explained that when lava cooled and sedimentary layers solidified to form rocks millions of years ago, the metal within the rocks aligned with the Earth’s magnetic pole at unique latitudes.

Analyzing this paleomagnetic data

enabled the research team to map the movement of the continents relative to the magnetic north pole throughout time.

“We found that once a supercontinent formed, it tended to swivel around its own center.” said David Evans ’92, senior author and professor of geology and geophysics at Yale. “If we extrapolate that pattern, we can predict the location of the next supercontinent.”

From outer space, the entire supercontinent land mass would oscillate clockwise and then back counterclockwise, an effect called

“true polar wander,” Mitchell said.

Based on true polar wander and the paleomagnetic data analysis, the Yale geologists proposed an “orthoversion” model in which the next supercontinent will be located 90 degrees away from Pangaea, which was centered near modernday Africa. By this model, Amasia will form when the Americas meet Europe, Asia and Australia at the North Pole, closing the Arctic Ocean. Evans said Antarctica may remain separated from Amasia.

The previously proposed “introversion” and “extroversion” mod-

els predict the formation of the next supercontinent along the equator either 0 degrees or 180 degrees away from Pangaea, respectively.

Mitchell explained that, in addition to making a prediction for millions of years from now, the new model would have practical applications. It could help energy firms such as Shell Oil Company find new oil reserves by analyzing how the continents aligned when the mineral deposits formed millions of years ago, he said. The research could also help scientists study how species dispersed when Pangaea broke up,

BY THOMAS VEITCH CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

and could lead to better understandings of the earth and its changing surface geography.

“The history of the supercontinents is crucial to understanding the history of life, and the history of mineral and ore deposits,” Mitchell said.

Hoffman coined the name Amasia in 1992, as a joke about the future proximity of America and Asia, he said.

Contact JACQUELINE SAHLBERG at jacqueline.sahlberg@yale.edu .

This is the most exciting work in Precambrian geology in recent years.

PAUL HOFFMAN Geology professor, Harvard University “This is the most exciting work in Precambrian geology in recent years,” said Paul Hoffman, professor of geology at Harvard. “Contrary to the previous models that were purely geometrical, the new model actually makes sense geodynamically. It considers the forces that are acting on the [tectonic] plates and moving

While a 2-degree increase in the temperature of waters near Antarctica will not make much of a difference for humans, it may cause the extinction of native fish species.

A research group led by Thomas Near, Yale associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, outlined the evolutionary history of Antarctic fish, which developed antifreeze proteins tens of millions of years ago to survive in subzero polar conditions. The study, published online Feb. 13 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warned that these fish may be threatened by the rise of water temperatures in the region.

Environmental experts said that polar ecosystems are very vulnerable to even slight temperature changes.

“The development of polar climatic conditions that shaped the [evolution] of Antarctic fish is now reversing,” Near said. “The increasing temperature of the Southern Ocean, with the potential for the arrival of invasive species and disruption of food webs, is the greatest threat to the survival of this unparalleled [diversity].”

Tens of millions of years ago, rapid cooling in the Antarctic led to the mass extinction of fish acclimated to warmer temperatures, with the surviving fish developing antifreeze proteins. The study shows that new species arose as the fish adapted to fill the ecological gaps left by the

tend to get sick more and benefit less from vaccinations, he said.

Abaluck added that the relationship between sleep and learning is as clear as that between sleep and health. For example, he said, people perform much worse on cognitive tasks after sleeping for only one hour — and they also feel “awful.” But although people reach a sleep plateau after getting five to six hours of sleep per night for a week and no longer feel sleepy, their performance on cognitive tasks is just as impaired as after only an hour of sleep.

“If I could go back to college, I would prioritize sleep more,” Abaluck said. “I would try to keep as regular a sleep time as possible — even on the weekends.”

Fikrig also joked that students should think twice about studying into the wee hours if they want to stay healthy.

Ran Matsumoto ’14 said she is not surprised to hear that immune function and sleep might be linked, since she always feels worse after not getting enough sleep.

“I feel that a lot of the time [Yale students] put academics before sleep,” Matsumoto said.

A spring 2011 survey by the News found that the Yalies said they average 6.4 hours of sleep per night.

to a catastrophic decrease in biodiversity.”

David Barnes, a scientist in the British Antarctic Survey, said the study was important because it explained how fish adapted to living in hostile environments.

He added that while climate change represents a major threat to fish and other fauna native to Antarctica, the exact mechanism endangering them is still unknown, since patterns of marine warming and other effects of climate change are so complex.

He said that it is likely that in the long run climate change will create new ecological balances and ecosystems in unpredictable ways, as the mass extinction of Antarctic fish before the development of the antifreeze protein did millions of years ago.

The study was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.

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

Suganthi Balasubramanian, associate research scientist in Mark Gerstein’s lab in Yale’s Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department, was the lead Yale author in a paper published in a February issue of Science as part of a collaborative effort called the 1000 Genomes Project. This project aims to sequence the genomes of a large number of people in order to serve as a comprehensive resource on genetic variation. The research deals with genetic changes called lossof-function variants, which are predicted to seriously disrupt protein coding within the body. As part of an initiative led by Yale and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Balasubramanian and fellow researchers worked to experimentally filter a range of these variants to develop a highquality catalogue of the variants that cause true loss of function. kind of data analysis QWhat did you do, and how did it fit into the larger project?

A

Our main role at Yale was to annotate these genetic variations. We know [the variations] are in the genome but we need some kind of identification, some signpost to see where is it and what it means.

So we looked to see if [the variations] are in a protein coding region, and, if so, how do they change the amino acid sequence of the protein? This was essentially our role in the 1000 Genomes Project: to map and provide functional annotation of all the coding variants.

light does your QWhat research shed on other

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study shows that the water temperature increase in the Antarctic region may result in the extinction of many native fish species.

erroneous variation calls, and you have to make sure you are really seeing what you see. The 1000 Genomes provided us with 3,000 loss-of-function variants, and we went through a long process of analysis with computational and experimental filters and came to only 1,285 true loss-of-function variants. There are lots of sequencing studies being done right now that look for genetic variation but in order for them to be clinically relevant, they have to be carefully validated.

Our study provides a high quality catalogue of loss-offunction variants. you describe the proQCould cess of collecting the data and building the catalogue?

A

After the work of many different groups, we receive a huge file that tells us where the different variants are in the human genome. We looked at this these files for 185 different people of different ancestries, and we’d map the variant to protein-coding regions and annotate them. I’d look at the genome in a linear representation, and I wanted to know what site the variant was in — was it in a coding gene? Is it in an entron? Is it in a non-coding region? This is what annotation is. I wanted to know where the variants landed, and I’m particularly interested in the ones that land in a protein-coding gene, which only constitute less than 2 percent of the genome. So to functionally annotate these variants, we first map them to coding gene, then we figure out what it does to the protein and what changes in function it causes. This has been done before, but we’re doing it on a large scale and fast.

genetics research today?

are the clinical impliQWhat cations of this catalogue?

A

A

Essentially this project contributes several things. First, people generally assume that loss-of-function variants are rare and, when observed, very harmful because they lead to disease and aren’t very common. People haven’t questioned why we see so many loss-of-function variants. Our careful analyses show that it’s very important to validate these variants.

There are many ways to make

1000 Genomes Project, and Phase I has data on over 1000 samples now. This work here was only the pilot phase. So we are going to get a much bigger catalogue. Our goal is to use the empirical rules we learned to build a more comprehensive loss-of-function catalogue from the 1,000 Genomes data … We’ll also add on other filters. So far we’ve look at variations one at a time, but now we’ll look at other variations in the same gene to see the overall effect on gene. Of course we’re also very interested in building an experimental chip where you can basically go and look at these variations in thousands of people. We want to target some specific variations, and we want to develop a system where you can probe only these specific variations. This is our big hope, and we hope

specific variations?

A

A

This work was based on only on 185 samples. The next step is called Phase I of the

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study shows that maintaining a regular sleep cycle is important for healthy immune function.

Google, help improve the mean T

Essentially, we now have a candidate set of loss-offunction-containing genes, and this can now be used for target gene prioritization for diagnosing and treating diseases.

are the project’s next QWhat steps?

Kimberly Yonkers, professor of psychiarty at the Yale School of Medicine, is a member of a committee for the American Psychiatric Association that is working on a new definition of PMDD for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She wants the disorder, characterized by melancholy and depression, to be separated from the more common PMS in the new edition of the DSM, to be released this year.

would be the clinical QWhat benefit of only probing the

Contact JOY SHAN at joy.shan@yale.edu .

SUGANTHI BALASUBRAMANIAN

Yale researcher Suganthi Balasubramanian is part of the 1000 Genomes Project, which aims to provide a comprehensive resource on genetic variation.

The Boston Globe reported Sunday that a squirrel monkey died of dehydration in a lab at Harvard Medical School at the end of Decmber. This is the third monkey to die in the past two years at a New England research facility, and the United States Department of Agriculture cited Harvard for improper safety procedures at their labs.

Yale prof calls for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder to be taken seriously by DSM

it’ll lead to some good clinical discoveries.

When you sequence someone, you typically have 3 to 4 million variations, and it’s impossible to know which ones might be interesting in terms of biological functions or need closer looking at. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack; we need some way to figure out which variants to look at. So with a small subset to probe, you have a more defined targeted data set to experimentally research.

Harvard monkey dies at Harvard Med School

A panel of 22 scientists and advisors for the Food and Drug Administration voted in favor of approving Qnexa, a new weight loss drug.

The FDA found that Qnexa may cause heart problems and memory loss, but the drug’s maker’s disputed the findings. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, said that Qnexa may be necessary, but was not a good option. He cited a dearth of weight loss drugs and “desperation” as the only reason that the drug was approved.

Faulty genetics not at fault

BY JOY SHAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

LAB

Qnexa proceeds as weight loss drug, over Yalie objections

YALE

extinction. This process eventually gave rise to the 100 species of fish now living in Antarctic waters, which all possess the ability to withstand cold temperatures.

But Near said that these polar adaptations have rendered Antarctic fish unusually sensitive to warmer water temperatures, making climate change a dire threat to Antarctica’s fish populations. A decline in the fish population would cripple the rest of the ecosystem by removing a major food source for penguins and seals, he added.

Sarah Gille ’88, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said that even small temperature changes in certain regions near Antarctica could allow the influx of invasive species more adapted to warmer water. She added that Antarctic waters were by no means the only ecosystem threatened by climate change.

“Species and ecosystems evolve over tens of millions of years in response to changing environmental conditions,” Gille said. “The concern about modern climate change is that it might happen faster than ecosystem response times, and the result could lead

F R O M T H E

Contact THOMAS VEITCH at thomas.veitch@yale.edu .

Yale scientists predict that the continents of the Earth will come together in a giant landmass over the North Pole in 50 to 200 million years. They call this supercontinent Amasia.

Antarctic fish threatened

BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER

Yalies who stay up late studying for their midterms may be weakening their immune systems.

A new study published Feb. 16 in the journal Immunity has revealed a relationship between circadian rhythms and immune system activity in mice. According to Erol Fikrig, Yale professor of epidemiology and microbial pathogenesis and the lead author of the study, this finding demonstrates the importance of keeping regular sleep cycles to stay healthy. It also has implications for making vaccinations more effective, he said.

“We’ve known for quite some time that people intuitively say they get sicker when they’ve had jet lag and poor sleep,” Fikrig said.

He said the study was important because it was the first to specifically link circadian rhythms with the expression of Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR-9), a protein involved in immune function in mice. The gene for TLR-9 was expressed in varying degrees depending on the time of day, with the highest levels found while the mice were active, he said.

The research showed that when mice were exposed to an infection, the “outcome” varied depending upon the time of day of the exposure.

While he stressed that the study has not yet been conducted in humans, Fikrig posited that sleepcycle disruption might weaken

human immune systems. He said when an individual’s circadian rhythms are “out of whack,” gene expression for certain immune proteins might be suppressed.

The study may lead hospitals to reconsider certain standard practices that disregard the importance of sleep, Fikrig said. For example, nurses often wake patients up in the middle of the night for checkups, but this practice could be deleterious to patients’ immune systems.

The study also examined the effectiveness of vaccination at different times of day. Responses to vaccines in mice varied with the time of day they received the vaccines, indicating, Fikrig said, that there could be an optimal time of day for humans to be vaccinated.

Brian Abaluck ’01, a sleep specialist at Sleep HealthCenters — a health care provider specializing in sleep medicine — cautioned that it was “dicey” to extrapolate animal studies to humans. “[I] would not change my recommendations to patients based on a single mouse study,” Abaluck said.

Nonetheless, he said studies like this one add to general knowledge about sleep and health.

Abaluck said the study is consistent with his understanding of sleep health, since previous studies have shown that sleep deprived mice eventually die from “overwhelming infection.” Other studies have shown that people who do not get adequate sleep

LEAKS

he data revolution is coming. While online marketing is getting fat off trillions of cookies, biology is exploding with DNA sequences, sports teams are selecting players who are undervalued by traditional metrics and public health researchers are mining queries to Google and posts on Facebook and Twitter to follow and predict disease outbreaks. Even disciplines typically devoid of data dumps, like the humanities, are getting in on the action: e-book libraries allow literary critics to follow specific words over time.

It’s becoming clear that our brave new world requires us to understand numbers and make sense of data, regardless of our field — but are we prepared to do so? Probability and statistics are the branches of mathematics that cover the important tasks of prediction and interpretation, yet few Americans take a full probability and statistics course in high school.

Arthur Benjamin, a colorful ‘mathemagician’ and mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd College has championed the idea that statistics should replace calculus as the focus of high school math. In a 2009 TED talk, Benjamin went so far as to claim that “If all the American citizens knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we are in today.”

I’m confident (95 percent) that the quants and financiers responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown had taken some probability and statistics courses, so I don’t think that requiring a single high-school course would have been a panacea. And as

someone who was awestruck by the world of derivatives and integrals, I find it a bit unfair to jettison calculus for the cold, hard practicality JESSIE of statistics. But MCDONALD Benjamin makes a good point.

Technophobia Even though I’m in a scientific field, I have never used calculus for any of my experiments. It’s my half-semester of college probability and statistics that I use and wish I had taken more of.

Without engaging too much in the pure math versus applied math debate, I believe probability and statistics should be standard, ideally at both the secondary and collegiate levels. Realistically, even if every American high school student is required to take an introductory stats course, I doubt they’ll remember the difference between a Gaussian and binomial distribution 15 years later. We need a deeper mode of numerical education that highlights examples of probability and statistics in our everyday lives.

How about having every K-12 class, regardless of discipline, begin or end with a probability and statistics “problem”?

Is this practical? Probably not.

Many teachers will be able to work in a topic-appropriate, ripped-fromthe-headlines query that teaches a valuable lesson about statistics in three minutes, but I realize it might not happen for everyone. That’s

where data-driven Google could step in.

In terms of essential skills for the 21st-century, being able to search for something online is probably number one — even above understanding the t test. With this in mind, Google created a daily search puzzle, Google-a-day, to help people develop good search skills (and no doubt, for Google to learn about how people search). By the same token, Google may be able to fill a gap in modern education by providing its own daily probability and statistics problem. They could kick it off with a doodle (the famous Google logo decorations) celebrating the March 23 birthday of Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician and pioneer in the field of probability. Google should then also advertise this service to schools to encourage teachers to begin incorporating probability and statistics into their daily lessons.

Outsourcing education to private companies wouldn’t normally be my first choice, but it’s in the interest of all parties to raise kids who are excited by data and enjoy playing in the ‘big data’ sandbox. Adults, not just students, could dip their toes in as well, helping America deal with the deluge of data inundating almost every industry.

The Google stat problem-a-day won’t be a complete fix, obviously, but I bet that it’ll be statistically significant.

JESSIE MCDONALD is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunology. Contact her at jessica.mcdonald@yale.edu .

Tanning website attacks Yale study for its author’s financial ties to cosmetics firms The website Tanner’s Rights, whose stated purpose is to promote the idea that tanning salons are safe, posted an article disputing a Yale study publised earlier this year. In December Yale released a study concluding that tanning salons significantly increased their users’ risk of cancer. The article claims that “in what appears to be a possibly fraudulent marketing ploy on its surface … their [sic] is a connection between one of the researchers as a shareholder of a L’Oreal tanning lotion company.” The article on Tanner’s Rights did not attempt to contact the Yale professors for comment.

Yale study finds genes behind teen vulernability to cocaine A new Yale study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that teenage brains were more vulnerable to cocaine addiction than adult ones. In mice, the brain tried to respond to cocaine use with defensive measures, but this tended to lead to addiction. Researchers concluded that the results were probably due to the brain’s attempt to protect itself during the teenage years, which are formative from a neurological perspective.

Elephantine societies revealed by footpints A research team led by Yalies analyzed 7 million-year-old elephant footprints in the Arabian desert to look at the social structures of the group of elephants. They concluded that the elephants demonstrated two separate types of behavior: herding by the females and solitary wandering by the men.

“It’s like walking back in time,” said Andrew Hill, senior author of the paper, in the press release. There are no longer any elephants in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, where the research was conducted.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

NATION

T

Dow Jones 12,982.00, +0.10%

S NASDAQ 2,611.00, +0.12% Oil $108.07, -0.45%

S S&P 500 1,369.20, +0.14% T

10-yr. Bond 1.92%, +0.00

T Euro $1.34, -0.31%

S

NYPD used federal funds to monitor Muslims

BY EILEEN SULLIVAN ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Monday it has no control over how the New York Police Department spends millions of dollars in White House grants that helped pay for NYPD programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance. In New York, the police commissioner said he wouldn’t apologize.

The White House has no opinion about how the grant money was spent, spokesman Jay Carney said. The Associated Press reported Monday that the White House money has paid for the cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and paid for computers that stored even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.

The money is part of a little-known grant intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA. It’s unclear exactly how much was spent on surveillance of Muslims because the HIDTA program has little oversight.

The AP confirmed the use of White House money through secret police documents and interviews with current and former city and federal officials. The AP also obtained electronic documents with digital signatures indicating they were created and saved on HIDTA computers. The HIDTA grant program is overseen by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Carney said the White House drug policy office has no authority to direct, manage or supervise any law enforcement operations, including the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims.

“This is not an administration program or a White House program,” Carney said. “This is the New York Police Department.”

The disclosure that the White House is at least partially paying for the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods complicates its efforts to stay out of the fray over the controversial counterterrorism programs. Carney described the Office of National Drug Control Policy as a policy office, but he did not say whether the White House sees the NYPD’s programs as good policy.

Not everybody is going to be happy with everything the police department does, that’s the nature of our business.

RAY KELLY Police Commissioner, New York City In New York, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was again unapologetic. Kelly said that some local politicians who questioned the NYPD’s methods were pandering to voters in upcoming elections, and said that others — including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez and Newark Mayor Cory Booker — were wrong to question the department.

“Not everybody is going to be happy with everything the police department does, that’s the nature of our business,” Kelly said. “But our primary mission, our primary goal is to keep this city safe, to save lives. That’s what we’re engaged in doing.”

The Obama administration has pointedly refused to endorse or repudiate the NYPD programs it helps pay for. It remains unclear whether the White House knew how the NYPD was spending the grant money until the AP asked the White House about it last week.

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan speaks at the White House in Washington. Millions of dollars in White House money has helped pay for New York Police Department programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance

Obama vows to stay Afghan course

BY ANNE GEARAN AND ROBERT BURNS ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is sticking determinedly to its stay-the-course message in Afghanistan despite a week of anti-American riots, the point-blank killing of U.S. military advisers and growing election-year demands to bring the troops home.

In an echo of the Bush administration on continuing the unpopular war in Iraq, the White House and Pentagon insisted Monday that the wave of violence against Americans will not derail the war strategy in Afghanistan or speed up the calendar for bringing American forces home.

“We work alongside thousands of Afghans every single day to ensure a better future for the Afghan people. And nothing that has happened over the past week is going to deter us from that goal,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

“We’re making progress. We have put the enemy on its heels in many parts of the country.”

Administration spokesmen were at pains to answer the larger question of whether to keep fighting a war that has lost support not only in the United States but also among the people the U.S. has pledged to protect. The perception that Afghans are ungrateful for U.S. sacrifice and are turning on their American advisers complicates President Barack Obama’s plan to ease out of combat against Taliban extremists over the next two years.

Under current strategy, tens of thousands of U.S. forces will remain in Afghanistan at least through the end of this year and Afghan forces would have full control of the country’s security by the end of 2014. Both Democrats and Republicans have said the timetable should move up.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the violence will not mean faster troop withdrawal. He pointed to Obama’s rationale for expanding the war early in his presidency.

“The No. 1 priority, the reason why U.S. troops are in Afghanistan in the first place, is to disrupt, dismantle and ultimately, ultimately defeat al-Qaida,” Carney said.

Administration officials said they believe Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s fragile government could collapse and the Taliban would regain power if the U.S. were to walk away. Their argument recalls the Bush administration insistence at the

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaks during a campaign rally at the State Capitol on Monday, Feb. 27, 2012 in Nashville, Tenn.

Gingrich attempts to undercut Santorum

BY KEN THOMAS ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOHAMMAD SAJJAD/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pakistani students rally to condemn the reported burning of Qurans in Afghanistan by U.S. troops, in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Monday, Feb 27, 2012. height of violence in Iraq that the war was in U.S. national security interests and that abandoning a commitment to stabilize the country would squander painful U.S. sacrifices.

But even in Iraq, cases of supposedly friendly forces turning their guns on American troops were very rare.

As with Iraq, voters in the U.S. are questioning the wisdom of a long-running conflict they once largely supported.

This time, with the U.S. election campaign well under way, discontent with the war in Afghanistan is compounded by its high monetary cost at a time of tightening budgets.

A Pew Research Center poll indicates that more than half, 56 percent, of Americans want troops removed from Afghanistan as soon as possible, while just 38

percent believe the U.S. should stay until Afghanistan is stabilized. The poll was taken just before Obama’s State of the Union address in late January.

Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Monday the United States should move faster to bring forces home now.

“The sooner the better,” Durbin said on MSNBC. “The president is right to start bringing the troops home. I would say to him: Do it more quickly.”

Although a military spokesman said protests over the mistaken U.S. burning of Muslim religious material are ebbing, the depth of anger at U.S. forces was evident in a suicide bombing at one base and the possible attempted poisoning of American soldiers by a kitchen worker at another.

NASHVILLE — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Monday slammed rival Rick Santorum as a “big labor Republican,” accusing him of siding with unions over Memphis-based FedEx when the Senate grappled with a labor dispute in the 1990s.

Gingrich, the former Georgia congressman and House Speaker, is hoping to revive his struggling campaign in the South, and he tailored his message Monday to Republican voters in Tennessee. Although polls show a close race between Santorum and Mitt Romney, Gingrich challenged the former Pennsylvania senator and his conservative credentials.

“I think there are profound reasons that Rick lost the Senate race by the largest margin in Pennsylvania history in 2006 and I think it’s very hard for him to carry that all the way to the general,” Gingrich said. “Then he comes South and you take the case right here. He voted for

the unions over FedEx. I suspect most folks in the state don’t know that. But in fact he was a big labor Republican in Pennsylvania and I suspect when you get to Memphis and you say to people, `Gee, this is a guy who wanted to guarantee that FedEx give in to the unions.’ Santorum won’t be as popular the following morning.”

Gingrich was referring to a provision in a 1996 spending bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that sought to help FedEx truck drivers in their efforts to organize. A group of Democrats held up the FAA bill to protest what they said was an attempt to help FedEx prevent its truck drivers from forming a union.

In 2006, Democrat Bob Casey soundly defeated Santorum in his re-election bid.

Gingrich said if Romney wins the Michigan primary on Tuesday, “you’ll see things start to clarify. If, as people expect, you end up with a Romney victory in Michigan tomorrow, I think you’ll see Santorum getting a very different second look.”

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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AROUND THE IVIES

“Our nation is today a powerful nation.”

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD PRESIDENT, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

T H E C O L U M B I A S P E C TAT O R

Republicans to invite Ahmadinejad to speak

BY YASMIN GAGNE SENIOR STAFF WRITER Members of the Columbia University College Republicans are planning to invite Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus, according to multiple documents reviewed exclusively

by Spectator.

Two CUCR Executive Board members denied that the group was looking to invite the Iranian president. But when asked for comment on Sunday, CUCR President William Prasifka sent Spectator a statement — signed “The Board, Columbia University College Republicans” — neither confirming nor denying that the group plans to invite Ahmadinejad to campus.

“Every year CUCR invites a series of speakers to campus,” the statement read. “Our aim is to enhance the intellectual diversity of the educational environment and to provide a forum for even the most controversial political figures.”

One draft of CUCR’s invitation to the Iranian president — dated Feb. 14, and signed “The Columbia University College Republicans” — says that the group would pay him a $20,000 speaker’s fee, with the money coming from “private donors and foundations in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.” Another document obtained by Spectator breaks down the costs associated with a potential event, estimating $6,000 for security and technology, $3,000 for dinner, and $11,000 for transportation.

The invitation, however, was developed without the knowledge of some CUCR board members.

CUCR Executive Director Tyler Trumbach said he didn’t know of any plans to invite Ahmadinejad to speak, and CUCR Regent Director of Creative Affairs Nashoba Santhanam issued a statement to the campus blog Bwog, saying that

“the Columbia University College Republicans does not — nor has ever intended to COLUMBIA — invite Iranian President Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia.”

“The CUCR remains opposed to Ahmadinejad’s hostile and intolerant regime,” Santhanam said in the statement. “Any other rumors are factually inaccurate and in direct contradiction to previous statements and positions of the CUCR.”

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas.

LEE BOLLINGER President, Columbia University The Feb. 14 draft invitation also says that the group “would love to have the chance for our members to hear you speak about your feelings about American foreign policy, your experience as the president of a great nation, Iran’s role in the creation of a two-state solution in Palestine, and the important role of religion in government.”

Ahmadinejad spoke on campus during the World Leaders Forum in 2007, after being invited by the School of International and Public Affairs. That invitation sparked

intense controversy on campus and ignited a national media firestorm.

Republican politicians and commentators were particularly critical of Columbia for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. Sen. John McCain said at the time that “a man who is directing the maiming and killing of American troops should not be given an invitation to speak at an American university.”

The CUCR draft invitation to Ahmadinejad said that Columbia “remains an institution with limited ideological diversity, a fact that the administration has repeatedly refused to address, even in the face of increased media attention.”

“To fill the ideological void left by the university both inside and outside the classroom, we take the initiative to invite conservative scholars, politicians, and activists in order to broaden the discussion of issues and provide students with diverse points of view so that they can be challenged to form their own opinions,” the invitation says.

CUCR already made waves this semester by floating the possibility of bringing controversial immigration activist and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist back to campus to speak.

The Minuteman Project claims to provide legitimate aid to U.S. law enforcement by patrolling the Mexican border for illegal immigrants, but critics have accused the group of being a thinly veiled racist organization that practices vigilante law.

Gilchrist’s last trip to Columbia — in fall of 2006 and also at the request of CUCR — ended in a violent brawl.

In remarks introducing Ahmadinejad at the 2007 World Leaders Forum event, University President Lee Bollinger condemned Ahmadinejad’s views on Israel

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Members of the Columbia University College Republicans are planning to invite Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to return to Columbia to speak. and his human rights record, saying that Ahmadinejad showed “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” But Bollinger also defended Columbia’s right to invite Ahmadinejad to speak in the interest of promoting freedom of expression.

“It should never be thought

that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas,” Bollinger said at the time.

In his speech, Ahmadinejad defended his views on the Holocaust — he has questioned whether it happened — claimed that there is no homosexuality in Iran, and denied that his country has ambitions to create a nuclear weapons program.

T H E C O R N E L L D A I LY S U N

Committee seeks to change sexual assault reporting

BY MICHAEL LINHORST STAFF WRITER Cornell’s system for resolving sexual assault accusations against students will soon be transformed if a resolution passed by the Codes and Judicial Committee is approved. Despite a debate stretching across several months, the practical effects of the resolution — which the CJC passed Friday by a vote of five to one — will likely be very similar to those of a proposal rejected by the committee in November.

Friday’s resolution aims to move accusations against students into a system comparable to the process already in place for faculty and staff members. The changes must still be approved by the University Assembly and President David Skorton before taking effect.

The resolution, which is an attempt to bring Cornell into compliance with new directives from the U.S. Department of Education, first states that the C JC would prefer to make no changes to the Campus Code of Conduct beyond several smaller alterations the committee approved on Feb. 10.

But CJC members conceded that Skorton, on advice from the University Counsel’s office, is not likely to accept that system, so they built an alternative into the resolution. If Skorton rejects the first choice, the document says he should transfer the process of resolving sexual assault accusations from the Code of Conduct to University Policy 6.4, “contingent on an administrative overhaul of that policy.” That second option mirrors a proposal that the CJC rejected in November by a vote of six to three.

Policy 6.4, currently used for accusations against faculty or staff, calls for an investigator to gather the facts relating to the accusation, decide whether the alleged assault occurred, and then recommend corrective actions.

The process created by that policy, which will likely be adjusted before it is used for students, is markedly different from the one currently in place for accusations against students. The existing system, under the Code of Conduct, includes a variety of protections for the accused — protections that are modeled after the criminal justice system — that Policy 6.4 does not incorporate. Among them is the use of the University Hearing Board, which hears arguments by the opposing sides and then makes a decision. Under the Code, both sides of the dispute can also bring in outside lawyers to help argue their cases.

In response to a letter issued by the Department of Education in April, the University Assembly passed an amendment last spring

that kept sexual accusations against students within the Code but lowered the burden of proof required for the accuser to win the case. Pursuant to the Department of Education’s directive, CORNELL the amendment also gave accusers the same rights to appeal the decision as the accused receive.

The University Assembly’s amendment was intended to be temporary and remain in place only until the assembly and the CJC crafted a permanent response to the Department of Education’s directive.

That permanent response was approved by the CJC on Friday. The resolution included two choices “to say what we thought the University ought to do, but also to say, if the University was unwilling to do that, what we thought it should do,” according to history professor Rachel Weil, who helped craft the final resolution.

If the Cornell administration chooses to pursue the first choice presented in the resolution, no additional changes will be made to the Code of Conduct. That would mean the repeal of last spring’s emergency amendment and a return to the higher burden of proof — known as the “clear and convincing evidence” standard — for sexual assault accusations. But it would keep in place four changes to the Code the CJC approved at its Feb. 10 meeting.

Those four changes were created to address some of the concerns of victim advocates.

The changes included an option for either the accuser or the accused in sexual assault cases to request that they face a Hearing Board composed of only faculty and staff, not students.

They also added a requirement that crossexamination of the accuser be conducted by “written questions submitted in advance or in real time, including follow-up questions,” that are read aloud by the chair of the Hearing Board.

Although the first option included in Friday’s resolution addresses several concerns raised by victim advocates about Cornell’s current system, it does not include the lower standard of proof advocates say is necessary in sexual assault cases, which often include no evidence beyond the testimony of the accuser.

The advocates also argue that the so-called Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education in April requires the lower standard of proof — known as the “preponderance of the evidence” standard.

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

Novak Djokovic and Mardy Fish move ahead in Dubai Djokovic and Fish both advanced to the second round of the Dubai Tennis Championships yesterday. It was Djokovic’s first match since the Austrialian Open almost a month ago. He defeated Cedrik-Marcel Stebe 6-4, 6-2. Fish beat Andreas Beck of Germany 6-1, 6-1 to advance to the next round of play.

Elis struggle at indoor Heps

BY JORDAN KONELL STAFF REPORTER Despite valiant efforts in their last indoor meet of the season, both the men and women’s track teams finished in last place at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships in Ithaca, N.Y., this weekend.

TRACK & FIELD The men finished their first day of competition on Saturday with five team points, good for fifth place. This was in large part thanks to Timothy Hillas ’13, who secured four points for the Elis with a fourth-place finish in the 3,000meter run with a time of 8:16.10.

Mike Levine ’13 contributed another point on Saturday. He took sixth in the weight throw with a season-best 17.35 meters. While Levine was disappointed with both his individual performance and the Bulldogs’ standing, he also said he thinks the team will improve in its upcoming outdoor competition, which will begin after spring break.

“I definitely feel like I should have thrown farther than I did,” Levine said. “Personally I am looking forward to throwing my main event again, the discus, which is not contested indoor. Our team is much better suited for outdoor as we have returning high scorers in the 200m, steeplechase and discus, all of which are not contested indoors.”

Captain Matthew Bieszard ’12, who matched his previous peformance against Harvard and Princeton and attained a silver medal in the 400-meter dash, highlighted the men’s second day of competition on Sunday. Bieszard’s success also earned him second team All-Ivy honors. He will compete at next week’s IC4A Championships at Boston University with a qualifying time of 48.40 seconds. His time is the seventh best in Bulldog history.

Bieszard said he was pleased by his performance. “I went into the meet with the intention of winning and came out with a PR and some silverware. I stuck it to my competitors on the first lap of the finals and made them beat me. Only one succeeded.”

The Elis middle distance relay team consiting of John McGowan ’15, Clifford Van Meter ’14, Charlie Jaeger ’12 and Timothy Hillas ’13 also found success, placing fifth and also qualifying for the IC4A Championships. The 4 x 400 meter relay team also captured sixth. The Bulldogs finished the meet with 16 team points, which placed them in eighth place.

Princeton won the meet with 184 team points.

Like the men, the women’s track and field team placed at the bottom of the standings in eighth place among its eight Ivy League competitors. However, the event was marked by a few promising individual highlights.

Amanda Snajder ’14 scored the only team points on Saturday with a fourth-place finish in the pentathlon. Day two of the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships fared better for the Elis and was capped off by impressive finishes by Nihal Kayali ’13 and Annelies Gamble ’13.

Kayali placed fifth in a highly contested one-mile run with a time of 4:49.96. She improved her personal best by almost a second.

“Overall I was happy with the way I executed my race and I’m thrilled to have some hardware to show for it,” Kayali said. “We need to refocus our efforts on developing depth within our squad so that when one person underperforms or gets injured we have bodies to step up and perform in those positions. At the time being, we lack that depth, and it showed this past weekend,” she added.

Gamble had the only podium finish for both the men and women’s squad at the invitational. She placed third in the 800-meter run, which contributed six points to the team’s total.

“I kept getting boxed in but by the last stretch, I was able to pull away, and it was just a mad kick to the finish,” Gamble said. She added that her third-place finish has made her even more eager to start the outdoor season.

A select group of Elis will compete next week at the IC4A Indoor Track and Field Championships at Boston University.

Contact JORDAN KONELL at jordan.konell@yale.edu .

W. swimming takes third

BRIANNE BOWEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Captain Rachel Rosenberg ‘12 and Paige Meneses ‘13, above, will compete in the Zone Diving Championships on March 9-11.

W. SWIMMING FROM PAGE 14 Forrester, Hyde, Tsay and Joan Weaver ’13 were behind Yale’s victorious Ivy League finale.

The Ivy League Championships is the biggest meet of the season for Yale. The deck was packed with swimmers from every Ivy League school cheering as loudly as they could for their teammates. About half the Yale swim team lost their voices, Rosenberg said.

The “energy level, excitement, and pressure are all inherently raised since [it’s] Ivies” Liao said in an email.

While this meet marks the end of the season for most swimmers, some will continue on to NCAA championships. Swimmers with the best B cut times, a national

cut-off standard, will advance to championships in mid-March.

Although Yale swimmers with B cut times are still waiting to see if they will receive an invitation to nationals, the team is hopeful that Forrester will qualify in the 100-yard butterfly. As for the divers, Rosenberg and Paige Meneses ’13 will compete in the Zone Diving Championships on March 9-11.

Forrester’s preliminary time of 52.51 in the 100-yard butterfly is well under the NCAA B cut time of 54.62.

Princeton (5–2, 5–2) won last year’s championships while Harvard (7–2, 7–0 Ivy) took second place.

Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .

ANDREW GOBLE/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The women’s track and field team finished last in the Ivy League at indoor championships over the weekend.

Yale struggles on bars GYMNASTICS FROM PAGE 14 mentally to make the switch from not competing to competing in a matter of minutes, but she made the switch successfully, contributing a solid 9.375 to the team’s score.

Bars was the biggest disappointment of the day, even though it has been the team’s strongest event for the past couple of meets.

Last weekend, however, it was the team’s worst event, as the Elis finished with a score of 46.850. Two falls were counted against the team’s overall bars score. Those mistakes, levied on skills ranging from release moves to dismounts and pirouettes, proved too great for the team to overcome. Team members said they were unsure what caused the problems on bars: Traina said the team had been performing strong bar routines both in practice and in competition — so Sunday may just have been an uncharacteristically bad day for the team, she added.

The Elis were able to put their bars performance behind them and rally on beam.

The team posted its highest score of the season on beam (48.125) and only counted one fall toward its team score. With a back handspring layout step out series and a side aerial, Traina took first place on beam with a 9.825, her highest score ever.

“I’m proud of how everybody handled the rest of the meet,” Feld said. “We kept our spirits up throughout the meet, which is a big deal.”

The team finished the meet with a good floor rotation, but it was not enough to move the team out of fourth place. Top Eli finishers on the floor event were Stephanie Goldstein ’13 (9.725), Joyce Li ’15 (9.675) and Feld (9.650).

The team now has its sights set on the ECAC meet, which is a championship meet that includes all Ivy League teams and a few other schools such as Towson University and Temple. The ECAC meet is slightly more important than the Ivy League Championships because teams as well as individuals have the opportunity to qualify for NCAA regionals, Traina said. Also, since all the Ivy League teams will be at ECAC’s, Feld said it is the team’s chance for redemption.

The team’s next meet is on March 2, against Towson and William and Mary, at Towson.

Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .

JOYCE XI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Tara Feld ’13 finished with a 9.650 on her floor exercise to lead Yale over the weekend.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

SPORTS

TEAMS IN THE NEWS THE SACRAMENTO KINGS Yesterday the city of Sacramento, the Kings and the NBA announced plans to finance a new arena in Sacramento. The announcement followed three days of intense negotiations in Orlando, FL.

Sailing wins Bob Bavier Team Race SAILING FROM PAGE 14 Leonard added that the weekend provided good sailing conditions for competition, despite the freezing weather.

By the end of the first day, the Bulldogs were in third place with an 11–4 tally, but went on to win all 12 races the next day. The tournament result came down to the last race against Stanford, in which crew member Genoa Warner ’12 said the Yale team narrowly beat the Cardinal. Warner added that team members did not even know the overall score until after the entire event.

Leonard attributed the team’s victory to the experience of the three skippers, Joseph Morris ’12, captain Cameron Cullman ’13 and Chris Segerblom ’14.

While colder weather in the Northeast meant that the team only had one full day of practice before the event — compared to nearly a month for some of the Bulldogs’ western and southern rivals — the team had weekly meetings during the winter offseason to discuss team race strategy.

Heather May ’13, who crewed for the Bulldogs, said the team has not changed its racing strategies over the years, but focused on how they would implementing them during the meetings. She added that she was pleased by how the team performed, and at this point the team’s technique just needs fine-tuning.

The Bulldogs will train for the first week of spring break in Florida after competing next weekend at the Eckerd Intersectional in St. Petersburg, Fla. Leonard said the team’s training program in Florida will depend upon the weather conditions there.

YDN

The coed sailing team started off its spring season on the right track with a victory in South Carolina, despite having only one day of practice since the end of the fall season.

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

Fencing teams slip in national meet FENCING FROM PAGE 14 all. In foil, the Bulldogs fell to Brown by a score of 45–22. One of the key foilists, Lauren Miller ’15, has not recovered from her injury, which played a big role in the poor results: Épéeist Maryne Dijkstra ’15 had to step in for Miller. In saber, the team took on North Carolina but lost 45–25, with standout saberist Madeline Oliver ’13 not competing in the match. Overall, épée ended in eighth, foil in ninth and saber in 13th place overall.

We did not perform up to my expectations of the team, but that said we were fencing very short-handed.

JOSE D. MARTINEZ ’12 Foilist and team manager, men’s fencing

“We focused on enjoying today’s match and our team really did,” Shaffer said. “It prepared us for the upcoming NCAA Northeast Regional in two weeks.”

As last year’s defending champions, the men’s team also could not grab a single medal and failed to defend its title on Sunday.

“Today’s match was not the

best,” foilist and team manager Jose Martinez ’12 said. “We did not perform up to my expectations of the team, but that said we were fencing very short-handed.”

Last season’s silver medalwinning épée and foil squads both fell to the Tar Heels in the first round by a score of 38–45 and 45–41, respectively. Although the saber squad also failed to win back the bronze medal, it went on to the second round after defeating local rival No. 9 Sacred Heart, 45–37.

Men’s team captain Shiv Kachru ’12 said that the tournament was tougher this year, as more teams competed at a higher level. Although head coach Henry Harutunian had said in an interview before the championship that his saber squad was somewhat weaker than other weapons in the Ivies, last weekend it was the Bulldogs’ best weapon. However, the Elis faced the Lions in the second round and lost 45–37, failing both to revenge their loss in the Ivies two weeks ago and to proceed to the semi-finals in the tournament. The men’s saber squad ended in the seventh spot, foil in ninth and épée in 10th.

“We had a pretty bare-bones squad because of injuries and illness, so a mixture of starters and alternates fenced,” Martinez said.

The Elis now have two major competitions awaiting them: the NCAA Northeast Regional and

JENNIFER CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

After eighth places finish at the U.S. Collegiate Squad championships last weekend, the fencing teams will look to rebound at the NCAA Northeast Regional. the National Championship.

“I want more fencers from my team to qualify,” Kachru said.

“Last year we had three [including myself] qualify in foil and épée. I wish the saber does better so that we can get the num-

ber up.”

Since the team’s major matches of the season are during and shortly after spring break, members of the team said that those who do not have active clubs in their hometowns or live

too far away to make travel worth the trip will stay in New Haven to practice. Other fencers will also make good use of their time by visiting their original clubs, fencing some different opponents and working with their old coaches.

The Elis will compete in the NCAA Northeast Regional on March 11.

Contact EUGENE JUNG at eugene.jung@yale.edu .

Danica Patrick back on track after Lap 2 wreck

BY CHRIS JENKINS ASSOCIATED PRESS DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Danica Patrick got back on the track after being involved in an accident just two laps into her Daytona 500 debut.

After her crew made extensive repairs to her battered race car, Patrick finally returned to the race down 62 laps to the leaders — earning cheers from the grandstands as she pulled out of the garage area.

The accident came just minutes after the green flag dropped

Monday night, beginning when Elliott Sadler turned five-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. He shot into the wall, then rolled back down the track.

Patrick was coming along behind the accident and was caught in the chaos. Her car took a hit and swerved down to the infield grass, where she somehow slid between two spinning cars.

That was about the only good luck she’s had all week.

Her Daytona Speedweeks tally is three wrecks in three races, and none were of her

doing.

She was wrecked in Thursday’s qualifying race, and after winning the pole for the Nationwide Series race, she was wrecked by JR Motorsports teammate Cole Whitt.

Then came Monday, where Patrick once again was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the crash, Patrick’s No. 10 team worked furiously to repair her car in the garage, with crew members wielding new parts, heavy-duty tape, tools and even a welding torch.

She remained strapped into

her car as the laps ticked away until her crew finally wheeled the car out of the garage. She fired the engine back up, getting cheers from fans watching from a balcony above the garage area.

It was the continuation of a disappointing Speedweeks for Patrick, who has left IndyCar to concentrate full-time on NASCAR this season. Daytona is one of 10 Sprint Cup Series races Patrick plans to run for StewartHaas Racing this season.

She’s also running a full season in the Nationwide Series for JR Motorsports.

Neither project is off to a flying start.

Patrick was running well in her qualifying race Thursday when she got caught in a wreck on the last lap of the race, taking a hard, high-speed hit to the impact-absorbing SAFER barrier on the backstretch.

Patrick then won the pole position for the Nationwide race on Saturday, becoming the first woman to win a NASCAR pole position since Shawna Robinson in 1994. But Patrick was caught in a crash when Whitt, her teammate, nudged her rear

bumper and sent her spinning into the wall.

Patrick vented her frustration on the radio with her team immediately after the wreck, then acknowledged after the race that she wanted an explanation. Whitt said he didn’t mean to wreck Patrick, saying the incident was a result of the bumper-to-bumper style of racing at Daytona.

Patrick eventually got back into the race after her crew made extensive repairs to her car in the garage area. She finished 38th.

IF YOU MISSED IT SCORES

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SPORTS QUICK HITS

GREG MANGANO ’12 NBA SCOUTING OPPORTUNITY Mangano, a center on the men’s basketball team, has accepted an invitation to play in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in Portsmouth, Va., April 11-14. Scouts from all 30 NBA teams will be there to evaluate potential players.

MBBALL Georgetown 59 Notre Dame 41

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NHL Rangers 2 Devils 0

NHL Nashville 2 Los Angeles 1

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE yaledailynews.com/sports

MEN’S LACROSSE TWO BULLDOGS MAKE HONOR ROLL Brandon Mangan ’14 and Conrad Oberbeck ’15, who both play attack, made the Ivy League Honor Roll this week following their contributions to Yale’s 19-6 win over St. John’s last weekend. Mangan scored four goals, and Oberbeck contributed two goals to the team’s win.

“I’m proud of how everybody handled the rest of the meet.

We kept our spirits up throughout the meet.

TARA FELD ’13 GYMNASTICS YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Swimmers exit season with splash WOMEN’S SWIMMING

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER

BRIANNE BOWEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The women’s swimming and diving team met its goal of a third place finish at the Ivy League Championships last weekend at Harvard.

There were tears of joy on Saturday as members of the women’s swimming and diving team realized they had reached their year-long goal — to place third at the Ivy League Championships in Cambridge, Mass.

The team was behind only Harvard (1478.5) and Princeton (1310.5), and defeated Columbia (8–1, 6–1) by the small margin of 1075.5 to 1057. Captain Rachel Rosenberg ’12, who placed first in the three-meter diving event, and Hayes Hyde ’12 who placed first in the 200-yard butterfly, both had standout performances.

“It was the perfect ending to our season,” Cynthia Tsay ’13, a freestyle and backstroke swimmer said.

This meet has been the team’s focus since the beginning of the season. On the final day of Ivies, team members wore shirts that said, “One meet, one taper.” As the slogan suggests, Yale swimmers (3–4, 3–4) did not taper until the very end of the season, a sign of their discipline and dedication to their goal of third place at the Ivy League Championships.

The team knew beating Columbia and placing third would be no easy task. Columbia had an impressive 6–1 record in the Ivy League and had defeated Princeton in a previous dual meet. But by the time Joan Weaver ’13 touched the wall in the last event of the meet, the 400-yard freestyle relay, it was

evident the Bulldogs had clinched third place ahead of the Lions.

This year’s third-place finish is a substantial improvement over last year’s fifth-place mark.

Rosenberg’s first-place finish in the three-meter diving event was a huge contribution to the team’s success. As a seasoned diver with victories on threemeter at every dual meet, expectations for Rosenberg were high, and she exceeded them. She executed even her difficult dives, such as a reverse two-and-ahalf, to the best of her ability. She finished the event with a 340.00, which was over 40 points above her closest competitor, and earned her the honor of diver of the meet.

“Every dive was as good as I could have I imagined,” Rosenberg said.

The Elis enjoyed individual successes in swimming events as well as diving events. Alexandra Forrester ‘13 (52.53) and Hyde (54.36) took first and second in the 100-yard butterfly. Hyde won the 200-yard butterfly with a time of 1:57.65. Forrester set the Yale record in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 49.58 and took second in the event.

Relays were also strong for the Bulldogs. The team’s first win of the meet was in the 200-yard medley relay, where Tsay, Hyde, Forrester and Athena Liao ’12 broke the pool record with a time of 1:41.05. They also won the last race of the event, the 400yard freestyle relay (3:20.21).

SEE W. SWIMMING PAGE 12

Gymnasts fall to fourth

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER A fourth-place finish is not what the Yale gymnastics team had in mind heading into last weekend’s competition.

GYMNASTICS The Bulldogs failed to capture the Ivy League title last Sunday at the Ivy League Championships hosted by Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y. Mistakes on bars caused the team to place fourth with a score of 190.725, behind Penn (192.65), Cornell (191.875) and Brown (191.075). The standout individual of the meet was Morgan Traina ’15, who placed third all-around and first on beam.

“No one really said anything [after the meet],” Mia Yabut ’12, the team captain said, “We all knew how everyone was feeling

and how disappointed we were.”

The team goal since the beginning of the season was to win Ivy League Championships, so their lack of improvement upon last year’s results was a letdown. But despite their lack of movement in the standings, the two-point difference between first and fourth was much closer this year than last year’s 6.4point spread. The small margin meant the Bulldogs would have been competitive for the title if they had they minimized their mistakes, Yabut said.

The first event, vault, was well executed, with Tara Feld ’13 leading the squad with a 9.750.

Tabitha Tay ’14 was asked to compete on vault only minutes before the competition began, when teammate Brianna Chrisman ’15 hurt her knee in warmups. Feld said it is difficult SEE GYMNASTICS PAGE 12

JENNIFER CHEUNG/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The United States Collegiate Squad Championships were hosted by NYU .

JOYCE XI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The gymnastics team faced trouble on what is usually its best event, bars, resulting in a fourth place finish.

Fencing teams take eighth place

BY EUGENE JUNG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Elis show no signs of winter rust

BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER With only one day of practice, the No. 4 Yale coed sailing team pulled off a tight team victory this weekend.

SAILING A three-pair team represented the Bulldogs at the two-day Bob Bavier Team

Race, which marked the team race season opener for the team. Hosted by the College of Charleston on the Cooper River in South Carolina, the race saw the team sail to a 23–4 victory, edging past No. 9 Stanford’s record of 22–5 and No. 2 Charleston’s third-place record of 21–6.

In team racing, each of a school’s three boats face off against another school’s fleet of three boats. A team’s score is equal to the sum of the ranks of its three boats,

STAT OF THE DAY 6

and the team with the lowest score wins the round. Each school competes in a total of 27 rounds.

“This victory was a great place to start off this season,” sailing head coach Zachary Leonard ’89 said. “We’re still trying to shake the rust off, and we’ve got a lot of improvement to make, but we were pretty solid across the board.”

SEE SAILING PAGE 13

Plagued by injuries, the men’s and women’s fencing teams had to settle for eighth place at the United States Collegiate Squad Championships on Sunday.

FENCING Although members of the men’s team said the championships, hosted at New York University, are typically treated as a “pre-match” for the upcoming NCAA Tournament, the team was nevertheless disappointed by its failure to win any medals. The

women’s team earned 72 points in competition, while the men’s team won 77 points.

The women’s team made it to the round of eight in épée. In the first round, women’s épée faced Brown for the second time this season and proceeded to the next round after defeating the Bears with a 45–38 score.

“I was really happy to beat Brown [in épée] again in the first meet,” captain Robyn Shaffer ’13 said.

However, in the next round, the Elis lost 45–28 against St. John’s, the team that eventually went on to take third place overSEE FENCING PAGE 13

THE NUMBER OF TIMES WOMEN’S BASKETBALL GUARD SARAH HALEJIAN ’15 HAS WON IVY LEAGUE ROOKIE OF THE WEEK THIS SEASON. Only two other Bulldogs, Melissa Colborne ’07 and Katy Grubs ’97 have won that many Ivy League Rookie of the Week awards.