T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 111 · yaledailynews.com
INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING
SUNNY SUNNY
29 46
CROSS CAMPUS
CELL PHONES STUDY CONFIRMS RADIATION RISKS
THE NEW SAFETY?
MENTORING
SAILING
Crushes and Chaperones moves to Commons without alcohol incidents
SPLASH DRAWS STUDENTS FROM REGION TO CAMPUS
No. 1 co-ed sailing team coasts to Ivy trophy and Boston Dinghy Cup
PAGES 6-7 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
PAGE 3 NEWS
PAGE 5 NEWS
PAGE 12 SPORTS
Yale takes brand to Singapore
Yale sells. A new advertising campaign for Gant’s Yale Co-op shirt features real-live undergrads, modeling Gant clothing. With the campaign comes a video called “Campus Talks,” in which a number of students wax poetic about fashion and life at Yale.
BY JAMES LU STAFF REPORTER
Since Yale-NUS College was first announced, officials at Yale have repeatedly assured faculty, students and staff that their agreement with NUS allows Yale to withdraw its name and support from the joint college at any time, if needed. Levin said in a Sunday email that this type of agreement is typical of a partnership or joint venture between institutions. “If disagreements were to arise, there would first be an attempt to reconcile them before separating,” Levin wrote. “But Yale has the right to terminate its involvement and the use of its name, if it becomes necessary. Both
With the appointment of four new assistant chiefs, New Haven Police Department Chief Dean Esserman attempted to restore stability to a department that has seen high leadership turnover in recent years. Flanked by Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and Board of Police Commissioners Chairman Richard Epstein, Esserman nominated four candidates to fill the department’s assistant chief slots, which have been vacant for almost two months. Lt. Thaddeus Reddish, Capt. Denise Blanchard, Lt. Luiz Casanova and state’s attorney’s office inspector Achilles “Archie” Generoso will become assistant chiefs in charge of professional standards, administration, patrol and investigative services, respectively. Esserman said he will rely on his new leadership team as he seeks to implement a series of changes intended to revive a community policing strategy that city and police officials hope will better address the city’s crime problems. “From this day forward, the team that has been assembled will commit itself to community policing and the protection of the city,” Esserman — who formerly served as an assistant chief in New Haven before ultimately heading the Providence, R.I. police — said. “My great pride is that all four come from New Haven, are part of New Haven and know this great city.” Monday’s announcement ended several weeks of speculation about Esserman’s picks. He had not indicated in advance whether he would pick internal or external candidates, but promised not to bring “anyone
SEE YALE-NUS PAGE 4
SEE ASST. CHIEFS PAGE 8
Get ready for “Girls.” The new HBO series “Girls” — which stars Allison Williams ’10 as a 20-something public relations professional with her act together — is receiving rave reviews in advance of its premiere. It landed a major profile in New York Magazine on Monday, which said the show is “like nothing else on TV.” “Girls” debuts April 15. Welcome, welcome. Melanie
Maskin, formerly a librarian at Swarthmore College and Kenyon College, will join the library at the Center for Science and Social Science Information as its librarian for political science, international affairs, public policy and government information.
We have a winner. Michelle
Bell, a professor of environmental health at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, has received the inaugural Prince Albert II de Monaco/Institut Pasteur Award. The award honors her research, which has focused on the ways air pollution and extreme weather contribute to mortality and affect health outcomes, in addition to the ways climate change could affect public health.
Yale’s not alone. Starting in
the fall of 2012, Princeton University will prohibit its freshmen from attending events affiliated with fraternities and sororities — that means freshmen at Princeton will not be allowed to attend formal and semiformal events held by Greek organizations, in addition to rush events, according to a report from the Committee on Freshmen Rush Policy released Monday afternoon. Another winner. Novelist Julie Otsuka ’84 has won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel, “The Buddha in the Attic,” the organization announced on Monday. The novel tells the story of Japanese picture brides brought to California from Japan in the early 20th century. In winning the award, Otsuka beat out Don DeLillo, Anita Desai, Russell Banks and Steven Millhauser. Standing together. Little Owl, the wife of Iron Thunderhorse, the imprisoned leader of the Quinnipiac tribe, is planning for her tribe to sign a “Sacred Bond of the Covenant” with Occupy New Haven, the Independent reported. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY
1943 The University releases details on how students can expect the draft to proceed. Submit tips to Cross Campus
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New NHPD leadership unveiled
AVA KOFMAN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
T
wo News staff reporters, AVA KOFMAN and TAPLEY STEPHENSON, traveled to Singapore over spring break, interviewing more than 80 sources on the founding of Yale-NUS College — how Singaporeans view the project, how the liberal arts function in Singapore and how the country’s values differ from those on Yale’s campus. reports. The following is the first in a three-part series.
SINGAPORE — The Yale name will take on new meaning here. In the fall of 2013, the University will launch the first college bearing its name since Yale was founded nearly 300 years ago — a partnership with the National University of Singapore known as Yale-NUS College.
YALE-NUS PART 1 OF 3 When University President Richard Levin and University Provost Peter Salovey
first announced the project in September 2010, a small group of professors objected to Yale’s decision to open a jointly run campus in a nation that they said could not support the University’s values. That debate intensified in New Haven earlier this month when roughly 150 professors gathered at the Yale College faculty meeting for nearly three hours to hear colleagues voice concern about Yale-NUS. The tensions at the faculty meeting had reverberations across the Pacific, as many Singa-
poreans began questioning Yale’s long-term commitment to the project. Students interviewed at NUS and prospective Yale-NUS applicants asked whether the news they had heard — that some members of the Yale community do not approve of the partnership with NUS — was true, and how invested Yale is in the project. Though administrators at both schools have reaffirmed their commitment and moved forward with planning the college, many students, faculty and others following the project
have continued to wonder: Why is Yale naming a campus abroad, and why in Singapore?
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Engineering facility Captains consider roles on, off field slated for old DUH site STUDENT LEADERSHIP
BY LINDSEY UNIAT STAFF REPORTER
Last Thursday, University President Richard Levin invited the 33 varsity captains across all Yale sports as well as the teams’ head coaches to his house for a dinner in recognition of the student leaders of the University’s athletic programs. Levin, who described captainship as a “breeding ground for leadership skills” in an interview with the News last week, welcomed the approximately 60 attendees with a short speech and an informal buffet. “It’s a nice gesture to know that the Athletics Department is not just the Athletics Department, but considered an important part of the campus as a whole, and a tradition at Yale,” former soccer captain Chris Dennen ’12, who attended the dinner, said. Stehpen Gladstone, the heavyweight crew coach, said that in his two years working at Yale, he has come to find that students here attribute greater importance to the role of varsity team captain than students at other schools where he has coached did, including those at Harvard, Princeton and Brown. With the conclusion of the winter sports season, varsity
teams are now in the process of electing captains for the 2012’13 season. Only athletes vote — the coaches have no formal say in who becomes captain — and Gladstone said that the captain chosen is not necessarily the best athlete on the team. Instead the captain needs to be an effective communicator, a good leader and an inspiring team member, he said. “The position is really a tangible example of leadership at Yale, so its influence extends beyond the team,” said Allison Cole ’99, assistant athletic director for development and outreach, who meets with captains once a month. Still, only nine of 51 students interviewed said they could name any of the current varsity captains, and most of those interviewed said that they perceive the role of a captain as a leader on the team rather than on campus. While five current captains interviewed acknowledged a necessary role they serve within the larger Yale community, all agreed that their main focus as a team captain is on bridging the gap between the coach and the team members.
BRIDGING THE GAP
Women’s hockey head coach Joakim Flygh said that he relies
on the captain to relay information to the team and to get feedback from the players. Women’s tennis captain Steph Kent ’12 described the role similarly, adding that if the team is feeling tired, for example, it is her role to suggest to the coach that the team may need a lighter week. “The captain is a respected member of the team and is a teammate before a friend,” women’s hockey forward Steph Mock ’15 added. “It is a difficult role to fill — to be approachable yet a venerated member of the team — but it is so important to the team chemistry.” Kent and men’s golf captain Jeff Hatten ’12 said that their roles as captains for sports based on competition between individuals are “fundamentally the same” as those between groups, such as soccer and ice hockey: they said they try to make sure everyone on the team is working hard, even though they are not playing together. Still, Kent added that overcoming the inherent competitiveness within the team can be difficult. Heavyweight crew captain Tom Dethlefs ’12 described his role as the coach’s “personal lens into the team,” but added that SEE CAPTAINS PAGE 8
SHARON YIN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The building at 17 Hillhouse Ave. will become a new facility for the School of Engineering and Applied Science. BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER Administrators are moving forward with plans to open a new engineering facility next fall at the site of the former Yale University Health Services building at 17 Hillhouse Ave. The new space will be designed to facilitate teaching and research in electrical engineering, mechanical engi-
neering and materials science. School of Engineering and Applied Science Deputy Dean Vincent Wilczynski said the $19 million project will help accommodate an expanding faculty and provide students with more work space. “The facility will put faculty with similar research interests in physical proximity, [which] will promote collaboration and SEE 17 HILLHOUSE PAGE 4
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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
OPINION
“Unless there’s a dollar-sign attached, Levin is tin-eared. I’m glad the alumni are starting to close their wallets.” ‘BOOGS’ ON ‘RECRUITMENT CAPS COME AT A COST’
.COMMENT yaledailynews.com/opinion
Stop scientist More than a wrinkle in time assassinations L A
mericans and Israelis agree that Iran must not develop a nuclear weapon. But while virtually all credible American experts support crippling economic sanctions as the best deterrence for now, many in Israel are unsatisfied with nonlethal tactics. Most egregiously, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, allegedly sponsors the assassinations of civilian scientists in Iran. Compared to another largescale military conflict in the Middle East, a program of sabotage and targeted killings may seem like a relatively responsible method of delaying Iran’s putative nuclear ambitions. Ultimately, however, these assassinations are counterproductive to American and Israeli interests, not least of all because they are simply an indefensible use of lethal force. The accusations are shocking: Many believe that Israel supports the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which the United States formally designates as a terrorist organization, to murder civilian scientists in Iran who have no proven ties to an active weapons program. In January 2010, a nuclear physics professor at Tehran University was killed when a motorcycle bomb detonated outside of his home. In November 2010, two separate car bombs killed a nuclear engineer and wounded another scientist, Fereydoun Abbasi, who now heads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Two gunmen on motorcycles shot an engineering student outside of his daughter’s kindergarten in July 2011. Most recently, in January, a motorcycle bomber killed another scientist in Tehran. Israel, of course, does not accept official responsibility for these assassinations, but denials are often issued with a smirk. In contrast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected accusations of “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” echoing condemnations from other American officials of violence against civilians. Given America’s covert involvement in the Middle Eastern countries over the decades, however, such denials are not considered ironclad. Admittedly, civilian scientists’ lives are not always sacrosanct. During World War II, American and British forces launched a bombing campaign called Operation Crossbow to neutralize German scientists — including the ever-controversial future NASA-whiz Wernher von Braun — who were developing longrange weapons like the V-2 rocket that terrorized British innocents. Thousands of civilian scientists staffed the Manhattan Project, and Los Alamos certainly would have been a target for the Japanese military had it had the capacity to reach it. These targeted scientists shared two things. First, they were actively involved in the development of weapons to kill other peo-
ple; second, killing the scientists would have delayed weapons production and saved lives. No public evidence proves JOSEPH that either of O’ROURKE these criteria applies to the Space Cadet Iranian scientists who are currently being murdered. Granted, intelligence from within Iran is murky and extremely difficult to collect. But according to a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Iran halted nuclear weapons development in the fall of 2003, although it could still restart the program. The consensus of intelligence analysts willing to speak on the record is still that Iran’s leaders have not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb. No scientist can be condemned for working on a nuclear weapons program if no such program exists. So, people who publicly claim that Iranian scientists deserve assassination must support a death sentence for the mere technical aptitude to contribute to a weapons program, should one materialize. This is patent nonsense — imagine the outrage if someone made such a claim about American or Israeli citizens. And does killing Iranian scientists deter Iranian leaders from pursuing a bomb? Almost certainly, no. It only bolsters Iran’s rationale: In their eyes, Israeli agents will feel free to kill Iranians until a suitable deterrence is developed. Furthermore, murdering a few scientists and destroying factories may be relatively easy, but obliterating technical knowledge is nearly impossible. If the technical capability of Iran were truly threatened, scientists would be hidden and protected. Force will not stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb, unless the United States military decides to invade and occupy — a certain disaster and as yet a political impossibility. Israel, most likely, does not have the military capability to destroy all potential targets within Iran, so any attack would do nothing more than delay a newly determined Iran. President Obama often declares that all options are on the table for dealing with Iran. Allowing all options, unfortunately, may excuse some terrible things. Assassinating civilian scientists during peace is not an acceptable substitute for war. Though America also lacks unimpeachable moral authority, every diplomatic pressure should be applied to convince Israel to halt these killings, for Israel’s own sake. JOSEPH O’ROURKE is a senior in Silliman College. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays. Contact him at joseph.orourke@yale.edu .
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ast Saturday night, Ezra and Maayan announced their engagement. They’re close friends of mine, completing their second and third years of college. On the first Sunday of break, I spent hours dancing at the wedding of another good friend, a young professor in the Computer Science Department. The room was filled with the energy of a community celebrating as two people started life together. Yesterday afternoon (like many afternoons), I wandered up to the second floor of the Slifka Center. I was looking for Adina, the precocious two-year-old daughter of members of the rabbinic staff. On a Friday morning a few weeks ago, I stopped by the doors of a memorial service for Paula Hyman, an iconic Jewish feminist historian. I hovered briefly, listening as members of the Yale faculty and the local community eulogized a fearless trailblazer. Each of these is an isolated event, but together they tell a story. They are stages in the standard human life. We are familiar with these moments from our home communities. Where we come from, people get engaged, they
get married, they have children and they die. But these are also experiences that seem totally removed from life at Yale. YISHAI For too SCHWARTZ many of us, the four years The Gadfly we spend as undergraduates are a wrinkle in time. The average Yale undergraduate finds the thought of a junior-year engagement farcical. And when was the last time most of us attended a funeral, celebrated a birth or spun a small child by the arms? The absence of these moments reveals something about the way we view our time in college. These years are not part of our lives; they are a holding pattern. At Yale, we exist in a strange Never Never Land with others precisely the same age. Very briefly, we are forever 21. Here, there are no weddings to celebrate and no deaths to mourn. Aside from the families of masters and deans (and they are some of Yale’s most undervalued trea-
sures), children are absent. Even the adults who touch our lives most are reduced to transient shadows that float in and out of classrooms. Professors are brilliant voices and devastating red pens. They are resources, but only on the rarest of occasions are they people. In turn, we feel cut off from the natural flow of life. Most of us would never consider getting engaged, because that is something that happens in the real world of old people and small children. And of course, we are not yet in this real world. But when we decide we have not yet begun our real lives, so much of what Yale offers falls on deaf ears. Can literature, philosophy and the humanities really inspire us if we temporarily bracket ourselves off from the organic lives they examine? What’s more, our decisions here become less significant. We can slack off, sleep late and not put effort into our relationships because it’s not part of real life anyway. There is also something decidedly selfish about isolating yourself among peers at the height of their physical and mental power
while ignoring children and grandparents. We’ll do service projects for the underfed overseas, but only after abandoning the vulnerable in our own families. College culture is probably a symptom of a larger cultural malaise. Families delegate child care and care for the elderly. Americans are frightened by age and responsibility and would rather pay for nursing homes than take care of their loved ones. But merely recognizing that we are not the source of a problem does not absolve us of the responsibility to fight it. These college years are bright and unique, but we ignore the rest of life’s trajectory at our own peril. Life is full of milestones and natural cycles that inspire happiness and affirm our highest values. So when you see your dean’s young daughter playing in your courtyard, stop and play with her. Her laughter may be the most important Yale lecture you ever hear. YISHAI SCHWARTZ is a junior in Branford College. His column runs on Tuesdays. Contact him at yishai.schwartz@yale.edu .
G U E ST C O LU M N I ST N O R A JAC O B S E N
Save the Blue Dog Cafe Four years ago, I was a student intern at the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center. Every afternoon, a large number of kids came straight from school and stayed as late as they could, taking advantage of tutoring that was structured and available at any time. We offered programs for children and adults in the neighborhood. But when I came back the following year, Yale had shuttered the Center and let go of our director and staff, all without notifying the student staff. We had a meeting open to all, with tears and protestations, but to no avail. Yale wanted to streamline the programs — supposedly, the Center wasted too much. The University even noted that the games the children used were run down too quickly. When I walk by the Center now, I almost never see anyone from the neighborhood. What was once a great connection between Yale and the New Haven community was sundered. Trust was broken, as was our relationship to the com-
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munity. A branch of Yale’s administration had made these decisions behind closed doors. This year, the same impulse to quantify and consolidate appears to threaten the Blue Dog Café, a student-run café in the common room of HGS that serves primarily grad students but also undergraduates, staff and faculty. Yet again, it appears that these decisions are being made with a purposeful lack of transparency. The writing is on the wall: A recent online survey sent to students by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences administration proposes replacements for the Blue Dog Café, including a “Yale Campus Dining-run facility” and “high quality vending.” This is the second survey in the past two years assessing the Blue Dog and signaling that the administration wants it removed. Further, conspicuously absent on the Student Life Fellow application is a position at the Café. No new workers means no new managers, and no new managers means no Blue Dog Café.
Yale’s child in Singapore Michael Fischer’s description (“Yale-NUS is not Yale,” March 23) of the relationship between Yale and Yale-NUS College is largely accurate. I believe the name “Yale-NUS College” appropriately signals that relationship. Yale-NUS College is a child with two parents. As such, it is quite different from any branch campus. It is still quite young, but already it displays its own individuality while carrying the unmistakable influence of its parents. As with human beings, I doubt that this child will be confused with its parents, despite being similarly named. I have personal experience with this; my own father is a prominent academic, and while we share a surname, I do not recall a single incident in which his scholarly work was attributed to me or vice versa. Certainly, the key participants are not confused about the relationship between Yale and Yale-NUS. Prospective students are aware that they are signing up for a different educational and social experience and for a different degree from what they would recieve at Yale College; prospective faculty members are acutely aware that they will not have appointments at Yale University. Nevertheless, the influence of Yale on YaleNUS College has been profound. Yale-NUS reflects Yale’s values and Yale’s concerns in a way that no college founded solely by NUS, or by any other institution in the world, could possibly do. Yale is deeply embedded in the DNA of Yale-NUS College, sufficiently so that it is appropriate that the new institution carry the Yale name, for the same reasons that individuals in all societies generally bear a name in part inherited from their parents. CHARLES BAILYN MARCH 23 The writer is A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Astronomy and Physics and Inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Yale-NUS College
Writing minority experiences The major publications of our time are in no way representative of the wide array of personalities and opinions that make up the world. The Yale Daily News, New York Times or Washington Post are by no means the only
This will not be the first time I’ve seen Yale create a community of some kind, only to dismantle it when most of the students who would protest are gone. It only takes one person in a powerful position who wants to mechanize and streamline and doesn’t understand the love that goes into a quirky place. My fear is that students will return to find that something beloved, the Blue Dog Café, has been replaced by “a Yale Campus Dining-run facility” — or worse, “high quality vending.” I know this does not seem important, but it is yet another step in the streamlining of Yale until no distinguishing features are left. Beginning in my undergraduate years, I worked at the Blue Dog Café and expanded my relationships with a range of students. I gained experience in management and got to know and serve the wider student community. The Café may be small, but it creates a kind of home in our common room. When it is closed, the space is barely used.
I do not want a mechanized dining experience. I want the Blue Dog Café, which has made this space so friendly for the past 15 years. I hope that the Café may be allowed to continue as managed and run by students for students,and can carry on for years to come creating an unquantifiable community space. But there’s still time to voice our opinion. We can write to the Dean of the GSAS, the Graduate Student Assembly and the McDougal Center administration. The Blue Dog Café must not simply be replaced by Yale Campus Dining or vending machines. We can only hope that the administration will consider our voices and what it means to have something that is studentrun and responds to student needs.
source of intellectual content on the globe. They are dominant influences on society, but not the entirety of it. On the Internet and in print, thriving communities give voice to more than the men Julia Pucci (“Why women don’t write,” March 26) bemoans — people of color’s voices, women’s voices, queer voices. This diversity is out there. I am a woman. I am AsianAmerican. These identities have led to experiences that have shaped me profoundly. They color my interactions with the world. Not to speak of these issues is to cut out some of the most important things I can say as a human. I would not write so much about myself if there were anyone I knew better. We keep writing feminine opeds because they need to be heard to fight the marginalization of women’s rights. If the only form of diverse or interesting journalism is considered to be the traditional masculine fields — money, war and science, though important, have historically run rampant with the masculine hegemony — then we silence conversation before it even begins. This is my experience. People of Yale, continue to write the things that move you. The human experience is not universal. We all have opinions and cannot be silenced.
tistics, the first of which simply refers to the ratio of male to female bylines in eight newspapers. From this lone statistic (plus a similarly content-blind gender ratio for submissions to a single paper), Pucci jumps to the unfounded conclusion that female columnists write only about women’s issues, which is based (as far as I can tell) on nothing more than Pucci’s unsubstantiated impressions. Beyond this irresponsible distortion of fact, much of the rest of Pucci’s thinking is un-rigorous and, frankly, offensive – the implicit equation of reproductive rights and feminism with Pucci’s “romantic endeavors” trivializes the very material stakes of these issues for millions of American women, and the attempted use of the Washington Post’s 2008 submissions ratio to prove that “this is no matter of the repression of female writers” is naive. “Let’s talk about the economy, our military campaigns, science and the trials and tribulations of the human experience,” Pucci says. Even if there were some basis for her assertion that women are not already talking passionately and intelligently about these issues, the implied division of these topics from “the female angle” dangerously overlooks the manifold ways in which they shape and are shaped by the daily lives and thoughts of women (and, yes, even feminists). Indeed, perhaps one such feminist might explain for Pucci the ways in which discussions about, say, reproductive rights are discussions about the economy, science and the trials and tribulations of the human experience.
LARISSA PHAM MARCH 26 The writer is a sophomore in Calhoun College.
Women’s issues are universal issues Julia Pucci’s column (“Why women don’t write,” March 26) was poorly reasoned and factually unsound. She cites two sta-
NORA JACOBSEN is a second-year student at the Divinity School and a 2010 graduate of Saybrook College. She is a former manager of the Blue Dog Café.
SAM HUBER MARCH 26 The writer is a junior in Morse College.
YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 3
PAGE THREE TODAY’S EVENTS TUESDSAY, MARCH 27
“Why can’t we not be sober? I just want to start this over.” “SOBER” TOOL
No alcohol incidents at Crushes
2:15 PM “Responding to 3-11: Preserving History in the Wake of Disaster.” This symposium will examine how the catastrophic disasters in Japan last year have revived the issue of how historical materials — both materials affected by disasters and materials on disasters — can be collected, restored and preserved in the face of major disasters. Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), International Room. 3:30 PM “Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China.” Andrew Kipnis, senior fellow in anthropology at the Australian National University, will give a paper summarizing the major arguments from his book “Governing Educational Desire,” examining the intensity of educational desire in Shandong. Anthropology Department (10 Sachem St.), Room 105. 5:00 PM “Adapted to a Symbolic Niche: How Less Became More in Human Evolution.” Terrence William Deacon, a biological anthropology and neuroscience professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will give this Shulman Lecture. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Room 208. 6:00 PM “Disease Detectives: Stopping Outbreaks Before They Stop You.” Yale graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will speak for about an hour. The presentation will be geared specifically toward nonscientists (adults and students). Science in the News at Yale is a community outreach project of Yale Science Diplomats. New Haven Free Public Library (133 Elm St.). WENDY LIN/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Branford’s Crushes and Chaperones dance moved to Commons for the first time this year, but no alcohol-related incidents were reported.
CORRECTION MONDAY, MARCH 26
In the article “Students react to Fling picks,” Betsy Cowell’s ’12 name is misspelled as Betsey Lowell.
Dems to advocate for ‘student ward’ BY DAN STEIN STAFF REPORTER At a Monday meeting of the Yale College Democrats, students expressed shared interest in ensuring Ward 1 remains primarily inhabited by Yalies after the ward’s boundaries change in the current redistricting process. T h e m e e t i n g b ro u g h t together members of the Dems, the Ward 1 Democratic Committee co-chairs, and Yale spokesman Michael Morand ’87 DIV ’93, a former Ward 1 alderman, for a discussion of the future of Ward 1, whose shape and size have become uncertain because the 2010 Census revealed that its population is below the legal minimum for the city’s 30 wards. The Dems discussed concerns about how the ward’s borders may ultimately be determined. After a Board of Aldermen special committee meeting last Tuesday held to discuss Connecticut’s recent redrawing of state representative districts — which split Ward 1 into three districts — some students said they feared that Ward 1 could also be cut into three pieces for the purpose of keeping Ward 1 voters within a single district. But Ward 1 Democratic Committee Co-Chair Ben Crosby ’13 said that he believed that the lines of Ward 1, traditionally known as the Yale ward because it includes eight residential colleges and Old Campus, were “pretty unlikely to change dramatically.” That sentiment was echoed by Board of Aldermen President and Ward 5 Alderman and Board President Jorge Perez, who said he had not heard of any plans to split up the Yaledominated ward. “One of our goals, required by law, is not to take any one population and reduce their strength at the voting booth,” Perez told the News Monday evening. “If we were to make their voting block less significant, that would be a problem.” The concern of respecting specific populations in the redistricting process was echoed by Ward 1 Alderwoman Sarah Eidelson ’12, who wrote in a Monday email newsletter to her constituents that splitting Ward 1 would “dilute minority voting power” by causing an “influx of Yale voters into Wards 2, 7 and 22.” Still, Ward 1’s current configuration faces challenges
related to population and polling locations. According to the latest census, the target population for each of New Haven’s 30 wards is 4,326, with a 5 percent margin above and below. Crosby said that the ward is “about 100 people shy of 4,000, and 200 people too small in total.”
We want a student ward not out of some power play; we want a student ward because it’s the best way for us to be citizens of the city BEN CROSBY ’13 Co-chair, Ward 1 Democratic Committee With respect to polling locations, the state representative districts dictate where citizens vote for Connecticut and national elections, and Eidelson said it is “preferable to have as many residents of a given ward voting in the same location as possible.” In last Tuesday’s special committee meeting, concerns were raised about the need for additional funding to construct polling places in wards split by state representative district lines. Dems President Zak Newman ’13 said he had been hearing conflicting reports, but he added that he believed the ward would not be changing dramatically. After the Monday meeting, Perez confirmed that the special redistricting committee plans to release a proposed ward map at an April 4 public hearing on ward redistricting. Newman and other members of the group made plans to testify in support of a Yalecentric Ward 1 at the hearing. Newman said he plans to speak about ways in which a “student ward” has been good for both students and the city as a whole. “We want a student ward not out of some power play; we want a student ward because it’s the best way for us to be citizens of the city,” Crosby said. By city ordinance, the committee must finalize a new ward map by the end of May. Contact DAN STEIN at daniel.stein@yale.edu .
BY MADELINE MCMAHON STAFF REPORTER Despite more than doubling in size from last year, Branford College’s annual Crushes and Chaperones dance on Saturday had no alcohol-related incidents. Crushes and Chaperones assumed the same model as Silliman College’s Safety Dance when it relocated from the Branford dining hall to Commons for the first time this year, after Branford was forced to shut its doors early when the dining hall reached capacity last spring. Though the crowds at Crushes have grown significantly — this year’s dance attracted more than 1,000 students, Branford Master Elizabeth Bradley said in an email Sunday — the Yale Police Department reported that the Branford event saw none of the alcohol-related incidents that have historically marked Safety Dance. “With Crushes, the sole focus of the night is the dance itself — people aren’t sitting around drinking,” said Rachel Ruskin ’12,
a Branford student who helped plan the event. Ruskin said she thinks Safety Dance facilitates a culture of heavy drinking because both administrators and students assume the event will involve excessive alcohol use. Administrators’ efforts to limit alcohol consumption at the dance itself are ineffective because they encourage students to drink more heavily beforehand and intensify alcohol consumption over a short period of time, she said. This fall’s Safety Dance saw five alcohol-related hospitalizations, and another eight students were sent to Yale Health for alcohol-related issues. Though attendance at Crushes has grown dramatically from last year’s 400 students, the event has not begun to attract the same numbers as Safety Dance, which drew 2,400 students to Commons this fall, Silliman Master Judith Krauss told the News in October. Bradley said she thinks the absence of alcohol-related hospitalizations at Crushes might
have been related to the timing of the event. Because Crushes and Chaperones occurs in the spring, she said, students, particularly freshmen, have had more time to learn their drinking limits than they did before Safety Dance, which is held in the fall. Crushes did attract some alcohol-related problems. Bradley said some students arrived at the dance “falling down drunk,” but added that dance organizers and Yale police declined those students entry. Yale Police Department Chief Ronnell Higgins and assistant chiefs Steven Woznyk and Michael Patten did not return requests for comment made Sunday and Monday about the Branford dance. Karen Lazcano ’14, who attended Crushes this weekend and Safety Dance in the fall, said she thought fewer students seemed severely intoxicated at Branford’s event. She added that students tend to associate hard drinking with Safety Dance more
than they do with other residential college dances. “I guess Safety Dance just has the tradition and hype to it where everyone gets wasted,” she said. Jonathan Villanueva ’14 said he thinks the “hype” of Safety Dance leads to its relatively high number of alcohol-related incidents. But Villanueva said Crushes did not have that same hype because the dance has not yet acquired a reputation for excessive drinking. Villanueva added that students likely did not feel as much pressure to drink heavily before Crushes because many other campus events took place at the same time, allowing students to attend multiple parties over the course of the night. By contrast, few other campus events take place the night of Safety Dance, he said. The Crushes and Chaperones dance began in 2007. Contact MADELINE MCMAHON at madeline.mcmahon@yale.edu .
Election day registration advances BY NICK DEFIESTA STAFF REPORTER A state election reform bill passed a key hurdle last week when it was approved by the General Assembly’s government administration and elections committee. The bill, proposed by Gov. Dannel Malloy and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, would allow voters to register to vote on Election Day and online, and enable harsher punishments for impeding voting access. The committee voted largely along party lines, with all 10 Democrats and one Republican voting in favor of the reforms and four Republicans voting against it. According to Merrill, nearly one-third of eligible voters in Connecticut are not registered to vote and less than half of eligible voters voted in the 2010 midterm elections. The bill would increase both voter registration and turnout by making it easier for residents to register, said Democratic State Sen. Gayle Slossberg, the committee’s co-chair. Slossberg added that the online voter registry proposed by the bill, which would include all registered voters, would help reduce the possibility of voter fraud by allowing poll workers to determine if a voter has already voted at another polling location. Republicans, though, argued that Election Day registration would make last-minute fraud easier, with any errors undetectable until days after an election is over. Rep. John Hetherington, Republican of New Canaan, offered an amendment to the bill that would require voters who register on Election Day to provide photo identification, which he said would dramatically cut down on cases of voter fraud in the state. But Democrats defeated the amendment in a 10-5 partyline vote, arguing that a photo ID requirement would dispropor-
ROBERT PECK/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
A bill proposed by Gov. Dannel Malloy to allow voters to register on Election Day passed committee last week. tionately affect youth, seniors and minorities, who are much less likely to have a driver’s license. The bill now heads to the floor of the General Assembly, where it stands a strong chance of passing, given the Democratic majority in both chambers. If signed into law, the reforms would be in effect for this November’s federal elections. The issue of Election Day voter registration has a long history in the state, as former Gov. John Rowland, a Republican, vetoed a similar bill in 2003, and a federal judge ruled against same-day registration in 2005. In 2009, the state House passed a similar bill
after six hours of debate with a partisan 81-65 vote, but the bill never advanced in the Senate. According to an analysis by the nonprofit San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), Election Day voter registration has been shown to increase overall turnout by 3 to 6 percent. SPUR also found that it primarily benefits young, minority and disabled voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. According to SPUR, states that currently offer sameday voter registration have not experienced problems with the administration of elections or increased fraud. The bill would likely help
avoid incidents such as one that occurred in November at Wesleyan University, where half of the nearly 450 students who were registered to vote were discovered to have registered using their post office boxes instead of their mailing addresses, which is against state law. The students could not vote in last fall’s elections, an outcome that sameday registration could have prevented. In 2010, 41.7 percent of eligible Connecticut voters cast their ballots, higher than the national rate of 37.8 percent. Contact NICK DEFIESTA at nicholas.defiesta@yale.edu .
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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
FROM THE FRONT
The Republic of Singapore The Republic of Singapore is made up of 63 islands. It has been ranked by various publications as “partly free” and a “hybrid regime.” According to its constitution, it is a representative democracy. In 1970, trial by jury was abolished, and trials are now assessed entirely by judges. Corporal punishment is a penalty for crimes ranging from immigration offenses to rape.
Yale-NUS moves ahead, though questions linger YALE-NUS FROM PAGE 1 parties hope and expect that such action will never be necessary.” Considering Yale reserves the right to terminate the contract and in light of the recent controversy, several prospective YaleNUS students have expressed concern over whether the collaboration will last. “I understand there is negative sentiment on the Yale campus — what happens if I get in and this intensifies?” one student asked an admissions representative at a Yale-NUS open house on March 17. “The name of Yale is very important — you could see how the degree becomes compromised without it.” There is also precedent for international campuses failing in Singapore: Due to enrollment and budget problems with its parent university in Australia, the University of New South Wales in Singapore closed in June 2007, just one semester after it opened. But that school was only partially sponsored by the Singaporean government, which is fully financing Yale’s venture. Ng Cher Pong, deputy secretary for Singapore’s Ministry of Education and a member of the Yale-NUS Board of Governors, said both Singaporean students and employers have expressed “tremendous interest” in implementing a pure “liberal arts model for Asia.” The ministry was never looking to “import wholesale” a liberal arts model from New Haven, Ng said, but rather to partner with a school that could help Singapore develop an educational system that would produce a greater “diversity of talents and experiences.” Nearly all of 27 Singaporean students interviewed said the greatest benefit of Yale-NUS is its association with the Yale name. “For a student going to YaleNUS, it’s really probably because there’s a Yale name there and they think it will be able to get them jobs,” said Wang Yufei, a student at Raffles Institution, an elite junior college from which Yale-NUS hopes to recruit students. “A big part Yale-NUS is the name itself.” Still, Yale-NUS is beginning to
create its own iconography and traditions. At a special Yale-NUS prospective student workshop earlier this month, about 40 top applicants were invited to design possible crests for the school’s residential colleges — currently referred to as RC1, RC2 and RC3, which Yale-NUS inaugural Dean of Faculty Charles Bailyn said may be named by donors. The school has selected its colors — Yale Blue and NUS Orange — but has not yet picked a crest, mascot or fight song. Despite the advantages of the Yale name, some Singaporean students still question how Yale will shape the curriculum at Yale-NUS. Others claim that some applicants might be mainly interested in attending Yale-NUS for its association with the Yale brand, regardless of the liberal arts model. “There’s a cynical response and then there’s an excited response,” prospective student Linus Seoh said. “The cynical response is people are just jumping on the Yale bandwagon.” Even if Yale continues to support the project, the college’s name may not include “Yale” or “NUS” in 10 or so years, Bailyn said. Just as Yale College adopted the name of Elihu Yale after he donated nine bales of goods, a collection of books and a portrait of King George I in 1718, Bailyn said a substantial donor to YaleNUS could also potentially cause the institution to be renamed. “If somebody comes along and gives us 100 million or half a billion dollars, I think we’d have to consider it,” Bailyn said. “I have to say, that old Elihu Yale, he got a good deal cheap.”
A ‘HUB CITY’ FOR GLOBAL LEARNING
Supporters of the new college in Singapore and New Haven have pointed to many benefits the country can offer Yale or any university looking to expand to Asia — the highly educated population, a booming economy, and ethnic and religious diversity. “[Singapore] is very influenced by the migration from China, India, Southeast Asia and other places,” said Abby Adlerman SOM ’86, an American citizen living in Singapore, who has
consulted several universities on international partnerships in the country. “[There is] a very rich culture here that people don’t appreciate until they get here.” Roughly 75 percent of Singaporean citizens are of Chinese descent, according to the country’s 2011 census, and Indians and Malays each account for about 10 percent of the population. With a large population of expatriates primarily from Japan, the United States and Europe, noncitizens make up 20 percent of the island’s population. Other foreign nationals are from developing nations in East Asia, such as Bangladesh. The nation has an even greater religious diversity, and it is not uncommon to see a mosque across the street from a Buddhist temple or a Christian church.
[There is] a very rich culture here that people don’t appreciate until they get here. ABBY ALDERMAN SOM ’86 Shawn Tan ’01, vice president of the Yale Club of Singapore, said Singapore’s cultural and religious diversity is invaluable in attracting an international pool of students and donors to YaleNUS. Although the majority of Yale-NUS students will hail from Singapore, the college aims enroll students from across Asia and the world, Yale-NUS Dean of Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan ’03 told the News in September. “Yale-NUS will give Singapore more potential to attract students from the region, especially from India and China,” Tan said, calling the country a “neutral ground” for students of diverse backgrounds. Though Singapore was a “sleepy backwater town” in its earlier years, Tan said the government has transformed the island from a trading port to a “hub city” for industries such as biotechnology, banking and medical tourism over the past few decades.
Now, the country is working to offer more academic opportunities. Singaporean universities, with help from the Ministry of Education, have already partnered with more than 20 leading universities from the United States, Europe and Australia, and in 2009, administrators at NUS approached Yale with a proposal for what has become Yale-NUS. Singapore is widely known as “Asia light,” a mix of Asian and Western cultures. English is the country’s most common spoken language, crime is low and the island’s health care is among the best in the world. The country’s cleanliness and order comes at a price — littering fines can reach $1,000 and jaywalking can lead to arrest. Peter Lees SOM ’06, a board member of the Yale Club of Singapore, said the stereotype of Singapore as “bland, manufactured and boring,” is changing as the country becomes more livable. But Tan, Adlerman and others living in Singapore say the country’s culture might help Yale and its faculty to adjust to the region. “Singapore is a place with training wheels to do this,” said Nicky Nole ’06, events coordinator for the Yale Club of Singapore.
A GROWING TREND
Yale’s move into Singapore comes at a time when major American institutions — New York University, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, among others — have established partnerships or dual degree programs in the country. Levin said Yale officials did not have a specific plan in mind before NUS administrators approached them in early 2009 with the offer to help build an entirely new campus in Singapore. But the University was seeking a “major initiative abroad” to advance Yale’s international standing. Still, several Yale faculty have questioned if the University “sold out” in partnering with NUS, as well as if Yale is expanding for the sake of expansion. Mark Oppenheimer, a Yale lecturer in the Political Science Department, said he is “generally skeptical
about the globalization fetish” and academic “gold rush” in Singapore. In the initial Yale-NUS prospectus that Levin and Salovey sent to the Yale College faculty in September 2010, they predicted that “most of the world’s leading universities” would have campuses abroad by the year 2050. While some existing programs in Singapore grant degrees from their home institutions, Yale-NUS diplomas will bear the words “Yale-NUS College” but be issued solely by NUS. But changing those arrangements is not without precedent. Patrick Casey, senior vice dean of research at Duke-NUS, said the school’s degrees were originally to be awarded by NUS, but the Duke board decided to grant joint degrees instead because they were confident in the school’s “Duke quality.” University Vice President Linda Lorimer said for YaleNUS to grant a “real Yale degree” would require a vote of approval from the Yale College faculty. In a March 3 email to a group of Yale College faculty that political science lecturer Jim Sleeper provided to the News, film studies and American studies professor Charles Musser suggested that Yale faculty reevaluate in six to 10 years whether the University should issue Yale-NUS degrees along with NUS, or whether Yale should remove its name from the project entirely. Though Yale professors have criticized Levin for moving ahead with Yale-NUS without adequately consulting the faculty, Levin has maintained that the decision to open the new college ultimately rested with the Corporation. “It would take a violent human rights violation in Singapore to convince the Yale administration to withdraw,” said Christopher Miller, a professor of African American studies and French at Yale and an outspoken critic of the venture. “Faculty protests alone are unlikely to do so.” Levin said Yale plans to monitor the college through a standing consultative committee, composed of half Yale and half NUS faculty, and through an annual report that the president of Yale-
NUS will deliver to the Yale Corporation. He added that the Corporation plans to conduct an official review of the college three and six years into the venture. NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan said administrators at Yale-NUS are focusing on the school’s quality before any changes to the diploma, though he added that these could be possible in the future. “From our point of view, what we really want is the substance,” Tan Chorh Chuan said. “Right now it’s just an NUS degree, and I think that may evolve over time, for now we are focused on building the program.” For part two of this series, a look at how the Yale-NUS liberal arts program will function as a new education model in Singapore, see Wednesday’s News. Contact AVA KOFMAN at ava.kofman@yale.edu and TAPLEY STEPHENSON at preston.stephenson@yale.edu .
TIMELINE YALENUS COLLEGE SEPTEMBER 2010 University President Richard Levin and University Provost Peter Salovey first announce that Yale will partner with the National University of Singapore to launch YaleNUS College. MARCH 2011 Yale and NUS sign the official agreement to create the college and Levin says administrators are satisfied with the budget the Singaporean government has proposed. FEBRUARY 2012 Yale-NUS opens its first batch of applications to students as part of a special admissions round ending April 1. FALL 2013 Yale-NUS is slated to open for its inaugural class of students.
Old DUH building to house Engineering facility 17 HILLHOUSE FROM PAGE 1 interdisciplinary research,” Wilczynski said. “Its work areas and open classrooms will also draw individual students and groups.” The first floor and basement will house teaching facilities and academic support offices, and the second and third floors will include laboratories, offices and conference rooms for 12 professors and their research teams. The new offices will be filled both by new faculty and professors currently working in other buildings, though Wilczynski said it has not been determined who will move to the renovated
building. He said some recipients of the 10 Malone professorships — newly created faculty positions funded by John Malone ’63 for which Wilczynski said searches are “well underway” — will have offices at 17 Hillhouse Ave., and some current Yale faculty expressed interest in moving to the renovated building when the plan was presented at a Feb. 29 faculty meeting. Mary Mu ENG ’17, who studies microelectronics, said she hopes Yale will hire professors with more diverse research backgrounds. She added that few professors conduct research in her specialty, giving her little oppor-
tunity to explore different types of research in her first year. Zurez Khan ’12, an electrical engineering major, said he thinks the renovations will help replace outdated equipment and accommodate the increase in engineering majors in recent years that has resulted in more crowded labs. The building will include six classrooms, including a 50-seat classroom outfitted with computers and a large “technology-enhanced” classroom, all of which will be available for individual and group study spaces when they are not being used for classes. The facility will also offer the
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library services previously available at the Engineering and Applied Science Library, which temporarily moved from Becton Center to Dunham Laboratory last winter to make way for the new Center for Engineering Innovation & Design, University Librarian Susan Gibbons said. She added that an engineering librarian, a science data librarian and an ITS engineering research services manager will be available to provide consultative services to SEAS students and faculty. University President Richard Levin said the fourth and fifth floors of the building will not be renovated because he said
the four lower floors will meet the engineering school’s current needs and because of budgetary constraints. “Should they need more space in the next three years, we’ll see if the funds are available.” Levin said. “We’re operating in a tight budget environment, so it seemed unnecessary to renovate more space than we’d need in the near term.” Deputy Provost for Academic Resources Lloyd Suttle said that the project was a high priority among projects in the 2013 fiscal year capital budget. The project comes as the University is also renovating sev-
eral other of its science and engineering spaces, including Kline Chemistry Laboratory and the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design. “This project is similar in scope to the renovation of other offices, laboratories and teaching spaces in the sciences and social sciences,” Suttle said. Yale University Health Services was founded in 1971 as the Department of University Health, moving to the current health center at 55 Lock St. in fall 2010. Contact CLINTON WANG at clinton.wang@yale.edu .
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PAGE 5
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“Shoplifting is victimless crime. Like punching someone in the dark.” NELSON MUNTZ “THE SIMPSONS”
Splash returns to Yale
BY DIANA LI STAFF REPORTER
BY ANDREW GIAMBRONE STAFF REPORTER After undergraduates introduced a Yale branch of the national Splash teaching program in October, the event more than doubled its student attendance when it returned to campus on Saturday. Though excess demand forced organizers to cap registration for the inaugural Yale Splash, codirector Sebastian Caliri ’12 said the program could accommodate all 325 interested middle and high school students this past weekend. Roughly 60 Yale undergraduates — up from 36 in the fall semester — volunteered to teach at Yale Splash this past weekend, and the program also expanded its teaching space from Leet Oliver Memorial Hall to include Sloane Physics Laboratory as well. The flagship program of Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit Learning Unlimited, Splash holds events on college campuses in which undergraduates teach classes to middle and high school students for the day. Splash currently takes place on 16 college and university campuses across the country — a significant increase from the four on which it began in September 2009. The program aims to pique students’ academic interests and to introduce them to Yale’s campus and resources, Caliri said, adding that Yale’s talented student-teachers make its branch of the program particularly strong. “Our greatest strength is, and will continue to be, the quality and creativity of our teachers, which is a testament to the quality and creativity of the Yale student body,”
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Students examined mathematicians’ attempts to model romantic relationships with differential equations and calculus.
BENJAMIN HOROWITZ
As part of the Splash program, undergraduates served as student-teachers for hundreds of high school and middle school students. Caliri said. Caliri and co-director Benjamin Horowitz ’14 said the Yale Risk Management Office and the Yale College Dean’s Office — which must be consulted if undergraduates use Yale’s facilities to host non-Yale-affiliated programs — were less strict about the program’s safety and liability arrangements for Saturday’s event than in the fall, which he said resulted from close collaboration between the offices and program organizers. For example, student-teachers were no longer required to take attendance at the start of every class. The registration cost of the program was the same as October’s, at $10, but this weekend Yale Splash offered a new $5 lunch option. The program also provided far more financial aid this spring, covering the full $15 cost for 65 middle and high school students, as opposed to just four in the fall — an increase of $975. Caliri said the financial aid budget came primarily from the $10 program fees, which also paid for printing, teacher T-shirts and class supplies. Caliri also said Splash coordinators set up a parents’ lounge in the first-floor lobby of Kline Biology Tower, an amenity not offered in October, to give parents a place to wait while their children participated in the program. Alkesh Shah, who drove his seventh-grade daughter to Yale from their home in Boston, said he thought Splash would offer her a chance to make friends while preparing for high school and college.
Hy Braverman, who lives in Connecticut, said he was excited for his 14-year-old grandson to learn from Yale students in a “fun kind of environment.” “This program is a way for kids to broaden their horizons and collaborate with other students their age,” Braverman said. “Anything that builds your foundation in learning is good. I just hope my grandson becomes more enthusiastic about things that spark his interest.” Four of five middle and high school students who attended Yale Splash said they would like to participate in the program again. Koraima Cedeno, a 10th-grade student at Bridgeport’s Central High School, said she visited Yale for the first time while attending Splash, and plans to discuss her experiences with the program in her college applications. Nzingha Primus, a ninth-grade student who lives in Brooklyn and attends the Cinema School in the Bronx, said she woke up at 3 a.m. to take the train from Grand Central Station to New Haven with her father. “The best part [of Splash] is feeling like you’re a college student yourself, having the feeling that you’re in a college classroom and being taught a college-level course,” Primus said. Splash began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, and has attracted thousands of students to the school’s campus each year since then. Contact ANDREW GIAMBRONE at andrew.giambrone@yale.edu .
Artist talks inspiration, styrofoam BY URVI NOPANY STAFF REPORTER While art students may start out working in pencil and charcoal, artist Tom Friedman gave some insight in a Monday talk into the successful use of more unconventional materials, such as hair and Styrofoam. Friedman, who has exhibited his work across the globe from London to Tokyo, spoke to a group of around 30 art students and faculty at the School of Art Monday night about the inspirations for his works since his first solo exhibition in 1991. Best known for the radical and often humorous nature of his work, Friedman’s multimedia creations range from collages made of cut-outs from porn magazines to Styrofoam and paint sculptures. After a seven-year absence from the United States to show i n te r n a t i o n a l ly, Fr i e d m a n marked his return to the states with an exhibition titled “New Work,” which debuted at the Luhring Augustine gallery in New York on Feb. 11. Of the many materials he has incorporated into his art — past resources include newspaper, sawdust and human hair — Friedman said his preferred medium is Styrofoam balls. He spent a year creating a painting entitled “Verisimilitude” made entirely of white and multi-colored Styrofoam balls glued to
Stores look online for security
paper and mounted on a large board, a perfectly symmetrical abstract piece that was shown as part of “New Work.” For a 2008 solo exhibition called “Monsters and Stuff” at the Gagosian Gallery in London, Friedman created a lifesize zombie out of the lightweight material.
I think of [using Styrofoam] as building the piece from the atom up… The Styrofoam is like a stand in for the atoms and molecules that make up everything. TOM FRIEDMAN Styrofoam artist “I think of [using Styrofoam] as building the piece from the atom up,” Friedman said. “First I made the skeletal structure, then added a layer of tendons and finally a layer of flesh over that. The Styrofoam is like a stand in for the atoms and molecules that make up everything.” Friedman said he also enjoys playing with words in his art: he created a painting which
on a first glance looks like the word “verisimilitude” typed 30 times in a vertical column. Each one, however, is misspelled in a slightly different way, Friedman said, adding that the painting was actually hand-drawn and intended to give the illusion of being typewritten. “I think [Friedman’s work] is a great example of how extreme thinking doesn’t have to be dry, dead or dogmatic but through really using one’s hand can show much more complex emotional and intellectual ideas,” said Associate Dean of the School of Art Samuel Messer. Three School of Art students at the talk said they appreciated gaining insight into the influence of Friedman’s personal life on his work. Friedman attributed the inspiration for a large collage of faces looking directly ahead to his wife, adding that he placed a photograph of her at the forefront of the collage. “I really liked the way he explained how he came up with the concept behind each piece and how his personal life affected his work,” art major Leeron Tur-Kaspa ’13 said. Dean of Yale School of Art Robert Storr curated Friedman’s breakout exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1995. Contact URVI NOPANY at urvi.nopany@yale.edu .
If recent weeks are indicative of a trend, Facebook may be local stores’ new secret weapon in deterring potential robbers. Local stores that experienced robberies in the past two weeks have begun to aid police efforts by posting pictures from their surveillance cameras on Facebook and asking for tips and information from the public. The Blossom Shop on Orange Street, for instance, posted photos of a break-in and received tips almost immediately. Theirs and others’ success has other shopkeepers considering Facebook as a new crime-busting tool. “We put his picture on Facebook and within 15 minutes, we got a response with his address and stuff about the criminal’s history, like how he’s been in jail before,” said John Loricco, the owner of Blossom Shop. “That response actually put the nail in the coffin, and the police have taken him in for questioning.” The Blossom Shop was robbed on March 12, when a man kicked in the door and stole the cash register when the store was closed. Blossom Shop’s owner explained that putting images of robbers online enabled anyone on Facebook to contribute information about the criminal. Originally, he had decided to put the robber’s picture on posters and have neighboring businesses post them, but one of his employees suggested using Facebook instead. After a similar break-in at East Rock Pharmacy last week, owner Daniel Tavares said he would consider putting up photos from his surveillance cameras on Facebook, and would talk to the police about it. “Putting up his picture might
bring a lot of publicity to what happened and allow a lot of people to see the person’s face,” said Tavares. Employees of both stores said they improved security since the robberies by installing new doors and surveillance systems and by finding a safe place for their money at night. Five store owners from shops on Chapel and Orange streets said it is important to find ways to combat crime and discourage people from stealing, as shoplifting is an inevitable and potentially costly fact of running a business.
Most shoplifters don’t realize that we have security systems. SERGIO BERARDELLI Owner, Celtica Speciality Gift Shop “We have lots of attempted shoplifting, but most shoplifters don’t realize that we have security systems,” said Sergio Berardelli, owner of Celtica Specialty Gift Shop on Chapel Street. “The police then get here within minutes, and they’ve been great.” Jakob Nyberg, the store manager at Urban Outfitters on Broadway, agreed that the police are very helpful in dealing with shoplifting when they arrive at the scene, though at times they arrive too late to catch a robber. He said the police can arrive anywhere from immediately to 20 minutes after the store catches a shoplifter. Nyberg said Urban Outfitters relies less on technology and more on its employees, who he said are constantly around and aware of the store’s customers. Employees learn how to
spot shoplifters in their stores by becoming familiar with the kinds of behaviors they typically exhibit, he added. But when asked whether his store would use methods involving posting surveillance camera pictures online to combat shoplifting, Nyberg was skeptical, and said he thought only actors within the justice system had the legal right to post these pictures. “That doesn’t even sound legal to me, so I can’t imagine that we would do something like that from a legal standpoint,” Nyberg said. “I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, but I can’t imagine putting up pictures of people before they’ve been prosecuted. As a business, you could be sued for all sorts of things.” But New Haven Police Department spokesman David Hartman said distributing photographs of suspects can improve the rate at which police apprehend thieves. By reaching out to community members and neighborhood officers who may have witnessed a particular incident, the department gets “more eyes” to help solve crimes, he explained. Phylis Satin, owner of Wave Gallery on Chapel Street, said she had never thought about using this method and was not immediately sure how she felt and whether she was comfortable with the idea. “If somebody’s doing something wrong, and there’s a technological way you can be caught without anybody getting hurt, I guess that sounds like something good,” she concluded. According to the New Haven Independent’s Crime Log, there were 39 incidents of shoplifting in New Haven in February. Contact DIANA LI at diana.li@yale.edu .
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY What the frack? B
ack in Janu a r y, the O b a m a a d m i n i s t ra t i o n blocked construction of the full Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada to SAHELI the United States. Oh, how times SADANAND have changed. Last week, President Technophile Obama went to Oklahoma and in a rapid reversal — even for a politician — he declared he would expedite construction of the southern part of the Keystone pipeline, extending from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast. Not only is administration approval unnecessary for this section of the pipeline since it doesn’t cross the border, but somewhat hilariously, this flip-flip managed to unite environmentalists and conservatives in anger. The former feel betrayed and the latter think this is a political ploy in an election year. Both groups are right.
TAR SANDS ARE BAD. OIL DEPENDENCE IS BAD. GET REAL ON YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROMISES, OBAMA. The Keystone pipeline has attracted criticism because, if fully constructed, it would involve drilling tar sands in Alberta. Tar or oil sand drilling — the oil is literally mixed into the sand — is a particularly unclean and difficult method for oil extraction, requiring more effort and leading to substantially more dissemination of greenhouse gases than other methods. Proponents of the pipeline have argued it would lower American dependence on imported oil and create thousands of jobs. At a time when our oil supply is in foreign hands and the unemployment rate is over 8 percent, these are pretty good selling points. However, a study by the Cornell Global Labor Institute has shown that the economic benefits of the pipeline are offset by its high risk for spills. Between 2007 and 2010, pipelines that carry tar sand-derived oil suffered more spills per mile than pipelines carrying conventional crude oil. As originally proposed, the pipeline would cross through a fresh water source in Nebraska that serves over 2 million Americans and provides water to irrigate farms and ranches. Additionally, the Keystone pipeline will not substantially increase Canadian oil imports to the United States, according to the Department of Energy. Finally, there are concerns that if TransCanada — the corporation in charge of the pipeline — gets approval for the northern part of the pipeline, oil will simply bypass the Midwest and be shipped out from the Gulf for profit. The risk and ramifications of oil spills should not be lightly dismissed. It is time that supposedly pro-environment politicians take concrete steps to wean us off oil. One immediate step that Congress can and should take is renewing the renewable energy production tax credit, which will otherwise expire by the end of this year. This tax credit incentivizes renewable energy projects, sustaining the wind energy industry, for example. I understand why Obama, facing a difficult re-election, changed his tune on the Keystone pipeline. A drop in gas prices or the unemployment rate would both be good for his political prospects. Pretending consistency, the Obama administration will argue that it never intended to definitively reject the pipeline. But sanctioning the Keystone pipeline — even if the president claims that he still wants the northern part to be rigorously evaluated before he allows it to be built — is not the solution to our energy or economic problems. In fact, it may create more issues than it solves. SAHELI SADANAND is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunobiology. Contact her at saheli.sadanand@yale.edu .
800K
Cell phones linked to behavioral problems BY MAX EHRENFREUND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER In 2010, Hanyia Naqvi was working on a Yale School of Medicine project to study the effects of cell phone radiation on brain growth. The researchers taped old flip phones to the sides of cages with pregnant mice inside. The phones fascinated the mice, remembered Naqvi, a master’s degree candidate at Southern Connecticut State University. “Some mice would just come and sit there,” she said. Two years later, the data from the study, finally published, reveals that pregnant women should be wary of spending any unnecessary time with their phones. Hugh Taylor ’83, one of the authors of the study, said his team exposed the unborn mice to radiation from phone signals constantly until their birth, a total of about 19 days. The pups later showed subtle but consistent differences in behavior, and samples of their brain tissue responded differently in electrical experiments. Taylor and the other authors stressed that their findings, published online in Scientific Reports on March 15, may not apply to humans. But as a simple precaution, Taylor suggested that pregnant women keep their phones away from their bodies as much as possible. This study adds to concern among scientists about a number of suspected health consequences of cell phone radiation, but is the first experimental confirmation of an effect on brain development in utero that lasts into adulthood. “This is really just the beginning of a wider investigation,” Taylor said. The researchers conducted a number of behavioral tests on the mice, including one for memory in which they gave the mice toys such as rubber duckies and ping pong balls. The following day, the researchers returned the same toys to the mouse’s cage, but on the third day, they gave the mice only one of the toys along with something new. The goal was to see if the mice were more interested in the new object, or if they seemed to remember the old toy at all. Taylor described the mice in the experimental group as “hyperactive” and “happy-go-lucky.” They had weaker memories, were more active, and less anxious than their counterparts who had not been exposed to cell phone radiation. He said the differences were slight and would not have been apparent without the tests. He and his co-authors noted that according to recent research, children today are more likely to develop hyperactivity disorders, and the group speculated that pregnant women’s use of cell phones might be a partial explanation. John Walls, a vice president of the Washington, D.C., lobbying group CTIAThe Wireless Association, emphasized the differences between mice and humans in response to the concerns raised by the
study. “This new animal study presents results that, as the study authors themselves recognize, require other analysis and validation before any scientific conclusions may be reached of any relevance to human health,” he said in an email. Bryan Luikart, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, said he would not recommend that people use their cell phones differently based on the results of the Yale study. The scale of the changes found in mouse behavior is relatively small, even though the mice’s mothers had been exposed to radiation from the phones constantly during pregnancy, he said. He added that he would like to see the experiment duplicated by another group. “There are a lot of differences between mice and humans, so I don’t want to be alarmist,” Taylor said. Still, he added:
“What’s wrong with precaution?” The researchers also took tissue samples from the prefrontal cortexes of mice in the experiment. As in humans, the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain controls a mouse’s attention. Slight differences in how these tissues conducted electrical signals suggested that the radiation from the phones had somehow altered the structure of the mice’s brain cells. That the effect of the radiation lasted well after the mice had been separated from the phones was “a significant finding,” said John Wargo FES ’81 GRD ’84, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Wargo was not involved in the research for this study, but he and Taylor worked together on a review of dozens of studies on cell phones and health. The report, released in February, was published by
Environmental and Human Health, an advocacy group in North Haven. Some of the studies they reviewed had alarming results, such as suggesting that people who begin using cell phones as adolescents are much more likely to develop some brain cancers, and linking cell phone radiation to reduced male fertility. But other studies were inconclusive. It is hard to say anything confidently about the health risks of cell phones, Wargo said, because wireless technology changes so quickly that controlled, long-term studies are difficult. At the end of the report, however, he and his co-authors, including Taylor, recommended that the federal government set manufacturing standards for the amount of radiation emmitted by cell phones. Wargo explained that caution is necessary not because he is certain that
There is sound evidence that supports the use of … hard-hitting images … to encourage smokers to quit. THOMAS FRIEDEN Director, Center for Disease Control
KAREN TIAN/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
John Morrell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, former director of systems engineering at Segway, and current director of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design at Yale, studies and creates machines that connect hardware and software with human action. The News spoke with him about his research and current projects.
sounds like your philosophy on QItrobotics is humanizing technology.
A
I believe that the big challenges we face are integration challenges — we have a lot of very advanced science. We have a lot of science discovery that we haven’t been able to realize productively in our human existence … and when we try to integrate lots of technologies together, we often increase the complexities of our lives rather than simplifying it. I think that’s a normal evolutionary process, but I like to be sensitive to the needs of human beings when we think about the technologies we put in our life. It’s part of my Yale education.
Q
What is the current project that you are working on that you are most excited about?
A
The current project — there’s a couple, because I tend to multitask — I’m interested in what we can do with computation to help people be more effective. That’s loosely called the field of human-machine interaction, but I tend to think about not so much humancomputer interaction, which is interacting directly with the computer, but more how we interact with machines that may have computers in them, like cars, or transportation is where its most obvious right now, but robotic instruments, robotic surgery. So the project we’re working on right now … I have a student Jean Zheng who’s working on how we perceive touch in a peripheral way. We know that peripheral vision is a phenomenon where we can have our eyes focused on something and still perceive things in the periphery. The same is true of our sense of touch, but it’s not clear how it works, and so this notion of peripheral sensing is something we’re trying to explore and it’s pretty new. We don’t really know what we’re going to find from it. I find it really interesting because it’s a mix of both the design of the device that may be stimulating your sense of touch, physiology — human perception, and cognitive science, where we study what we pay attention to. I love that it’s cognitive science, physiology, and machine design all in one. That’s probably the one I’m most
Q
Do you have any technologies in mind that we haven’t realized?
YALE SCHOOL OF ENGINERRING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
According to mechanical engineering professor John Morell, the biggest challenges facing scientists have to do with the integration of multiple advanced technologies. excited about. was the reasoning behind QWhat your tele-operated door-opening machine?
A
In the world of robotics, if you look at where robot systems have been very useful in the past decade, it’s places like the Middle East, where you’ve got roadside bombs or dangerous environments … where you’d like to go in and get a look around, as well as humanitarian situations where you’ve got massive destruction, whether earthquakes
hurricanes or whatever. There are times when you would like to get a look around without having to put a person at risk. The robots that currently exist are track vehicles but they can’t even get through a door in most cases, or getting through is an extremely complex operation. So I was trying to figure out if there was a way to make a very simple device with fewer computers, fewer sensors, that could get through a door. Right now, if you’re a bad guy, a countermeasure against one of these robots is to just close the door. And the robots either have to blow the door up … and if you’ve got civilians behind it that’s
A
The stated promise of technology is still pretty far ahead of where we are, whether it’s in robotics or medicine — but less in medicine. Expectations have been far in front of what we can do for the past 20 years or so in the robotics field.
Q
Can you predict a date for when robots take over the world?
A
Well, I don’t think they will. I think robots are pretty impressive, but I think a lot of the people working on robots forget how impressive human beings are, looking at what human beings are capable of. I think automated systems are coming — obviously, they’re here. If you look at how much effort goes into checking in at the airport, they have a lot fewer people at the counters.
You walk in, you swipe your credit card, it starts a conversation with a bunch of computers all over the place, it figures out who you are, probably checks in with Homeland Security, does a few other things, so they need fewer people there. That kind of movement of information is fairly easy. But, when you talk about manipulation, there still isn’t a robot that can pick fruit off a plant. There still isn’t a robot that can put a spoon to someone’s mouth and feed an elderly person. Manipulation is a really hard problem and we’re a long way from that. So computer devices can exert a lot of control and a computer network that’s run amok could take down the power grid and cause all kinds of problems, but we can still unplug them. They’re so far from being able to do basic manipulation tasks, which is why it’s an important research area. They’ll only take over the world if we abdicate all responsibility and let them. That’s probably the bigger risk: that we’re getting too passive. I believe in the value of using our bodies, so when people talk about using computers to save work over and over, I’m sort of thinking, do we really want to obsolete our bodies? Because there’s a lot of cells dedicated — our brain, some fraction of the cells in my body — are dedicated to actually being able to do something physical and to spend time trying to obsolete those cells seems like a mistake.
QThat was a really thoughtful answer.
A
Well, I started looking at robotics sometime in college and then in grad school and I was really excited about it, but I also like using my body. I’m an athlete and I like making things and I really think it’s a mistake to obsolete our bodies. We’ll get to the right answer eventually, but we may have swung too far toward labor-saving at this point. Contact ANISHA SUTERWALA at anisha.suterwala@yale.edu .
FROM
“The study shows that tobacco control strategies have saved lives in the United States,” said Theodore Holford GRD ’73, co-author of the study and professor of public health and statistics at Yale. “The proportion of deaths that were averted is about 30 percent of those that could have been.” The Yale team was one of six research groups that developed independent models to quantify the impact of changes in smoking behaviors on lung cancer mortality rates in the United States. The researchers reconstructed the smoking histories for individuals born between 1890 and 1970 and used that data to analyze the association between smoking and lung cancer deaths. Combining the results of the models, the study determined that had everyone quit smoking following the Surgeon General’s first report
Center to study rare genetic diseases
on smoking in 1964, over 2.5 million lung cancer deaths could have been prevented. As it was, 32 percent of those 2.5 million deaths were prevented. The study reported that by 2000, the lung cancer death prevention rate — representing the number of lives saved over the number that could be saved if everyone stopped smoking — had reached 44 percent. Holford attributed this acceleration to the success of anti-tobacco efforts, such as advertisements that discourage the consumption of tobacco products by children. “The estimates in this study are very important to show what we can accomplish [with interventions],” said Kenneth Warner GRD ’74, professor of public health at the University of Michigan. “People tend to assume that the smoking problem has been taken care of, but we have close to a fifth of adults still smoking today.” Warner added that taxes on tobacco products, laws that create smoke-free spaces and educational media campaigns are the three most effective anti-smoking interventions. Last Monday, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) launched a $54 million, 12-week national anti-tobacco advertising campaign called “Tips from Former Smokers.” The campaign features people who are living with smoking-related diseases and disabilities, such as 57-year-old Annette who smoked for over 30 years and had a lung removed after being diagnosed with lung cancer at age 52. “Although they may be tough to watch, the ads show real people living with real, painful consequences from smoking,” CDC Director Thomas Frieden said in a March 15 press release. “There is sound evidence that supports the use of these types of hard-hitting images and messages to encourage smokers to quit, to keep children from ever beginning to smoke, and to drastically reduce the harm caused by tobacco.” Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and is expected to kill over 160,000 Americans in 2012, according to a January report released by the American Cancer Society. Contact JACQUELINE SAHLBERG at jacqueline.sahlberg@yale.edu .
Lukewarm reaction to weight loss drugs BY CASEY SUMNER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER A new weight loss drug recently approved by an Food and Drug Administration panel has received a mixed response from two Yale professors. A panel of medical experts voted 20 to 2 last February to approve the diet drug Qnexa, which opens the door for the FDA to approve the drug later this year. But David Katz, an obesity expert and director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, and Silvio Inzucchi, a professor of endocrinology, expressed reservations about the ruling, citing weight loss drugs’ notoriously poor history. Katz said he generally agreed with the panel, noting the drug helped patients lose a modest amount of weight — roughly 10 percent — more than a placebo. But he questioned the ultimate value of drugs in solving the problem of obesity, particularly because of their side effects.
About the only thing that works for serious obesity is anatomyaltering surgery. DAVID KATZ Director, Yale Prevention Research Center “It’s not that they don’t work,” he said, “but when they do work, there’s hell to pay.” He cited the drug rimonabant, which decreased appetite but also resulted in increased risk for depression and suicide. Izzuchi also said that drugs like simbutramine and fen-phen were pulled from the market because of their association with cardiovascular problems. In 2010, the same FDA panel rejected Qnexa over concerns about the drug’s potential cardiovascular
THE
LAB
A new study shows that public health efforts against smoking have saved nearly 800,000 lives over 25 years.
In a piece of good news for public health officials, a new study based on a Yale model shows that tobacco control initiatives have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Anti-smoking campaigns and policies prevented almost 800,000 lung cancer deaths in 25 years, according to a study published March 14 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The researchers estimate that without antismoking policies, which began in the 1950s, an additional 552,000 men and 243,000 women would have died from lung cancer between 1975 and 2000. But scientists say further policies and awareness campaigns are needed to eliminate tobacco-induced deaths.
no good. I was basically looking for not a disposable solution, but an expendable solution. Right now a lot of the times robots are so expensive that people don’t want to put them at risk. The other project that’s going on in the lab I’m pretty excited about is related to this one, which is trying to improve stairclimbing capability of balancing robots.
LEAKS
SAGAR SETRU/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Contact MAX EHRENFREUND at max.ehrenfreund@yale.edu .
BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERG STAFF REPORTER
BY ANISHA SUTERWALA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Their study says that if everyone had quit smoking from the moment the U.S. Surgeon General issued his first warning in 1964, 2.5 million deaths could have been avoided.
Anti-smoking efforts save lives
cell phones are dangerous, but because there is growing evidence of “biological responses” to normal levels of cell phone exposure. Taylor is the director of the reproductive endocrinology and fertility division at the School of Medicine. He advises his patients: “If you’re in your car, put the phone on the seat next to you instead of in your pocket. If you’re in your home or office, put the phone on a table or a desk. A small difference in distance makes quite a difference in radiation exposure.” Cell phones emit radiation which is less intense than microwaves but more intense than radio waves.
Yale robot guru says no revolution likely
The number of deaths anti-smoking campaigns have saved in the last 25 years, according to the National Cancer Institute.
An $11.2 million grant by the National Institutes of Health is funding a new Yale research center that will focus on individuals with rare genetic disorders. A disorder is defined as “Mendelian” if it affects fewer than 200,000 Americans, a category that includes 6,000 diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. “There are roughly 22,000 genes in the human genome,” said Richard P. Lifton, Genetics Department chair and Sterling Professor of Genetics, in the press release. “Right now we know what diseases result when about 3,000 of those are mutated. We know almost nothing about what happens when the remaining ones are mutated.” A total of 25 million Americans are affected by some sort of Mendelian disorder.
YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS
SEAS, NASA, collaborate on experiments on combustion in microgravity A Yale research team from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is working in tandem with American astronauts to learn more about the process of combustion. This research, completed on March 23, could shed light on the chemical tranformation that turns burning coal into soot. If successful, it could aid efforts to decrease urban pollution, industrial pollution, and car pollution. Beijing should be paying attention.
New imaging method expands MRI applicability A Yale research team has devised a new imaging technique that can see inside of solid objects, such as rocks and bones. Currently, MRIs can map the interiors of objects that are high in water content, but not objects lacking water. This new technique detects phosphorus atoms, rather than hydrogen ones, and can therefore operate without water molecules. The researchers call it the “quadratic echo MRI of solids,” according to the press release. Unfortunately, it cannot yet be used on living creatures.
Elderly minds lose ability to move on from completed tasks A new Yale study has found that elderly minds are less effective at multitasking because they cannot move on as quickly as younger brains. Researchers, using older and younger rats as their test subjects, expected to find that the parts of the brain which did spatial reasoning were the most affected by aging processes. Instead they found that the brain lost its ability to adapt to new situations and move on when old tasks were completed or obsolete.
ABC NEWS
Obesity expert David Katz and endocrinology professor Silvio Inzucchi have questioned the approval by an FDA panel of Qnexa, a new weight loss drug. risks. But the drug came up for approval again this year after a new study assessed the risk. In the trial, patients experienced improvements in blood pressure, but also saw a mild increase in heart rate, which is linked with a risk for heart attack or stroke. Katz said the drug might be worth the risk of cardiovascular issues for patients with extreme weight problems. “Everything in medicine is about risk benefit pay-offs,” he said. “About the only thing that works for serious obesity is anatomy-altering surgery.” Inzucchi also said that there is a shortage of obesity treatments for severe cases, explaining that a weight loss drug would help fill the large gap between traditional diet and exercise routines and expensive, complicated bariatric surgery. But both men agreed that no weight loss drug is a magic bullet. Katz said that the very idea of a diet pill goes against the grain of our metabolic systems, which are designed
to help us survive when calories are scarce. Elaine Morrato, who sat on the panel in both 2010 and 2012 when it examined Qnexa, defended her decision to vote for approval. “It had a better characterization of the risk, and it had a better risk management program,” she said. She also emphasized that the drug’s proponents had a fuller plan for education about its appropriate use, all of which explains why the panel ultimately approved Qnexa, among other drugs being considered. She said the drug would be limited to seriously obese individuals, for whom the benefits outweigh the risks and other options short of surgery, such as dieting and exercise, would not suffice. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its expert panels, though it typically does. A final decision on Qnexa is expected by April 17. Contact CASEY SUMNER at casey.sumner@yale.edu .
YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS
Could aspirin reduce colon cancer risk? According to three British studies, taking aspirin regularly can reduce one’s chance of contracting or dying of colon cancer. According to the study, “individuals who took aspirin every day were 36 percent less likely to be diagnosed with metastatic cancer, while those taking aspirin for five years or more were 15 percent less likely to die from cancer.” This could be helpful because millions of Americans are already prescribed aspirin by their doctors as an anti-heart attacki measure. However, the drug can also cause internal bleeding in the stomach and intestines, causing the study’s authors to caution that the current medical guidelines for aspirin prescriptions should not yet be revised.
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY What the frack? B
ack in Janu a r y, the O b a m a a d m i n i s t ra t i o n blocked construction of the full Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada to SAHELI the United States. Oh, how times SADANAND have changed. Last week, President Technophile Obama went to Oklahoma and in a rapid reversal — even for a politician — he declared he would expedite construction of the southern part of the Keystone pipeline, extending from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast. Not only is administration approval unnecessary for this section of the pipeline since it doesn’t cross the border, but somewhat hilariously, this flip-flip managed to unite environmentalists and conservatives in anger. The former feel betrayed and the latter think this is a political ploy in an election year. Both groups are right.
TAR SANDS ARE BAD. OIL DEPENDENCE IS BAD. GET REAL ON YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROMISES, OBAMA. The Keystone pipeline has attracted criticism because, if fully constructed, it would involve drilling tar sands in Alberta. Tar or oil sand drilling — the oil is literally mixed into the sand — is a particularly unclean and difficult method for oil extraction, requiring more effort and leading to substantially more dissemination of greenhouse gases than other methods. Proponents of the pipeline have argued it would lower American dependence on imported oil and create thousands of jobs. At a time when our oil supply is in foreign hands and the unemployment rate is over 8 percent, these are pretty good selling points. However, a study by the Cornell Global Labor Institute has shown that the economic benefits of the pipeline are offset by its high risk for spills. Between 2007 and 2010, pipelines that carry tar sand-derived oil suffered more spills per mile than pipelines carrying conventional crude oil. As originally proposed, the pipeline would cross through a fresh water source in Nebraska that serves over 2 million Americans and provides water to irrigate farms and ranches. Additionally, the Keystone pipeline will not substantially increase Canadian oil imports to the United States, according to the Department of Energy. Finally, there are concerns that if TransCanada — the corporation in charge of the pipeline — gets approval for the northern part of the pipeline, oil will simply bypass the Midwest and be shipped out from the Gulf for profit. The risk and ramifications of oil spills should not be lightly dismissed. It is time that supposedly pro-environment politicians take concrete steps to wean us off oil. One immediate step that Congress can and should take is renewing the renewable energy production tax credit, which will otherwise expire by the end of this year. This tax credit incentivizes renewable energy projects, sustaining the wind energy industry, for example. I understand why Obama, facing a difficult re-election, changed his tune on the Keystone pipeline. A drop in gas prices or the unemployment rate would both be good for his political prospects. Pretending consistency, the Obama administration will argue that it never intended to definitively reject the pipeline. But sanctioning the Keystone pipeline — even if the president claims that he still wants the northern part to be rigorously evaluated before he allows it to be built — is not the solution to our energy or economic problems. In fact, it may create more issues than it solves. SAHELI SADANAND is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunobiology. Contact her at saheli.sadanand@yale.edu .
800K
Cell phones linked to behavioral problems BY MAX EHRENFREUND CONTRIBUTING REPORTER In 2010, Hanyia Naqvi was working on a Yale School of Medicine project to study the effects of cell phone radiation on brain growth. The researchers taped old flip phones to the sides of cages with pregnant mice inside. The phones fascinated the mice, remembered Naqvi, a master’s degree candidate at Southern Connecticut State University. “Some mice would just come and sit there,” she said. Two years later, the data from the study, finally published, reveals that pregnant women should be wary of spending any unnecessary time with their phones. Hugh Taylor ’83, one of the authors of the study, said his team exposed the unborn mice to radiation from phone signals constantly until their birth, a total of about 19 days. The pups later showed subtle but consistent differences in behavior, and samples of their brain tissue responded differently in electrical experiments. Taylor and the other authors stressed that their findings, published online in Scientific Reports on March 15, may not apply to humans. But as a simple precaution, Taylor suggested that pregnant women keep their phones away from their bodies as much as possible. This study adds to concern among scientists about a number of suspected health consequences of cell phone radiation, but is the first experimental confirmation of an effect on brain development in utero that lasts into adulthood. “This is really just the beginning of a wider investigation,” Taylor said. The researchers conducted a number of behavioral tests on the mice, including one for memory in which they gave the mice toys such as rubber duckies and ping pong balls. The following day, the researchers returned the same toys to the mouse’s cage, but on the third day, they gave the mice only one of the toys along with something new. The goal was to see if the mice were more interested in the new object, or if they seemed to remember the old toy at all. Taylor described the mice in the experimental group as “hyperactive” and “happy-go-lucky.” They had weaker memories, were more active, and less anxious than their counterparts who had not been exposed to cell phone radiation. He said the differences were slight and would not have been apparent without the tests. He and his co-authors noted that according to recent research, children today are more likely to develop hyperactivity disorders, and the group speculated that pregnant women’s use of cell phones might be a partial explanation. John Walls, a vice president of the Washington, D.C., lobbying group CTIAThe Wireless Association, emphasized the differences between mice and humans in response to the concerns raised by the
study. “This new animal study presents results that, as the study authors themselves recognize, require other analysis and validation before any scientific conclusions may be reached of any relevance to human health,” he said in an email. Bryan Luikart, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, said he would not recommend that people use their cell phones differently based on the results of the Yale study. The scale of the changes found in mouse behavior is relatively small, even though the mice’s mothers had been exposed to radiation from the phones constantly during pregnancy, he said. He added that he would like to see the experiment duplicated by another group. “There are a lot of differences between mice and humans, so I don’t want to be alarmist,” Taylor said. Still, he added:
“What’s wrong with precaution?” The researchers also took tissue samples from the prefrontal cortexes of mice in the experiment. As in humans, the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain controls a mouse’s attention. Slight differences in how these tissues conducted electrical signals suggested that the radiation from the phones had somehow altered the structure of the mice’s brain cells. That the effect of the radiation lasted well after the mice had been separated from the phones was “a significant finding,” said John Wargo FES ’81 GRD ’84, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Wargo was not involved in the research for this study, but he and Taylor worked together on a review of dozens of studies on cell phones and health. The report, released in February, was published by
Environmental and Human Health, an advocacy group in North Haven. Some of the studies they reviewed had alarming results, such as suggesting that people who begin using cell phones as adolescents are much more likely to develop some brain cancers, and linking cell phone radiation to reduced male fertility. But other studies were inconclusive. It is hard to say anything confidently about the health risks of cell phones, Wargo said, because wireless technology changes so quickly that controlled, long-term studies are difficult. At the end of the report, however, he and his co-authors, including Taylor, recommended that the federal government set manufacturing standards for the amount of radiation emmitted by cell phones. Wargo explained that caution is necessary not because he is certain that
There is sound evidence that supports the use of … hard-hitting images … to encourage smokers to quit. THOMAS FRIEDEN Director, Center for Disease Control
KAREN TIAN/STAFF ILLUSTRATOR
John Morrell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, former director of systems engineering at Segway, and current director of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design at Yale, studies and creates machines that connect hardware and software with human action. The News spoke with him about his research and current projects.
sounds like your philosophy on QItrobotics is humanizing technology.
A
I believe that the big challenges we face are integration challenges — we have a lot of very advanced science. We have a lot of science discovery that we haven’t been able to realize productively in our human existence … and when we try to integrate lots of technologies together, we often increase the complexities of our lives rather than simplifying it. I think that’s a normal evolutionary process, but I like to be sensitive to the needs of human beings when we think about the technologies we put in our life. It’s part of my Yale education.
Q
What is the current project that you are working on that you are most excited about?
A
The current project — there’s a couple, because I tend to multitask — I’m interested in what we can do with computation to help people be more effective. That’s loosely called the field of human-machine interaction, but I tend to think about not so much humancomputer interaction, which is interacting directly with the computer, but more how we interact with machines that may have computers in them, like cars, or transportation is where its most obvious right now, but robotic instruments, robotic surgery. So the project we’re working on right now … I have a student Jean Zheng who’s working on how we perceive touch in a peripheral way. We know that peripheral vision is a phenomenon where we can have our eyes focused on something and still perceive things in the periphery. The same is true of our sense of touch, but it’s not clear how it works, and so this notion of peripheral sensing is something we’re trying to explore and it’s pretty new. We don’t really know what we’re going to find from it. I find it really interesting because it’s a mix of both the design of the device that may be stimulating your sense of touch, physiology — human perception, and cognitive science, where we study what we pay attention to. I love that it’s cognitive science, physiology, and machine design all in one. That’s probably the one I’m most
Q
Do you have any technologies in mind that we haven’t realized?
YALE SCHOOL OF ENGINERRING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
According to mechanical engineering professor John Morell, the biggest challenges facing scientists have to do with the integration of multiple advanced technologies. excited about. was the reasoning behind QWhat your tele-operated door-opening machine?
A
In the world of robotics, if you look at where robot systems have been very useful in the past decade, it’s places like the Middle East, where you’ve got roadside bombs or dangerous environments … where you’d like to go in and get a look around, as well as humanitarian situations where you’ve got massive destruction, whether earthquakes
hurricanes or whatever. There are times when you would like to get a look around without having to put a person at risk. The robots that currently exist are track vehicles but they can’t even get through a door in most cases, or getting through is an extremely complex operation. So I was trying to figure out if there was a way to make a very simple device with fewer computers, fewer sensors, that could get through a door. Right now, if you’re a bad guy, a countermeasure against one of these robots is to just close the door. And the robots either have to blow the door up … and if you’ve got civilians behind it that’s
A
The stated promise of technology is still pretty far ahead of where we are, whether it’s in robotics or medicine — but less in medicine. Expectations have been far in front of what we can do for the past 20 years or so in the robotics field.
Q
Can you predict a date for when robots take over the world?
A
Well, I don’t think they will. I think robots are pretty impressive, but I think a lot of the people working on robots forget how impressive human beings are, looking at what human beings are capable of. I think automated systems are coming — obviously, they’re here. If you look at how much effort goes into checking in at the airport, they have a lot fewer people at the counters.
You walk in, you swipe your credit card, it starts a conversation with a bunch of computers all over the place, it figures out who you are, probably checks in with Homeland Security, does a few other things, so they need fewer people there. That kind of movement of information is fairly easy. But, when you talk about manipulation, there still isn’t a robot that can pick fruit off a plant. There still isn’t a robot that can put a spoon to someone’s mouth and feed an elderly person. Manipulation is a really hard problem and we’re a long way from that. So computer devices can exert a lot of control and a computer network that’s run amok could take down the power grid and cause all kinds of problems, but we can still unplug them. They’re so far from being able to do basic manipulation tasks, which is why it’s an important research area. They’ll only take over the world if we abdicate all responsibility and let them. That’s probably the bigger risk: that we’re getting too passive. I believe in the value of using our bodies, so when people talk about using computers to save work over and over, I’m sort of thinking, do we really want to obsolete our bodies? Because there’s a lot of cells dedicated — our brain, some fraction of the cells in my body — are dedicated to actually being able to do something physical and to spend time trying to obsolete those cells seems like a mistake.
QThat was a really thoughtful answer.
A
Well, I started looking at robotics sometime in college and then in grad school and I was really excited about it, but I also like using my body. I’m an athlete and I like making things and I really think it’s a mistake to obsolete our bodies. We’ll get to the right answer eventually, but we may have swung too far toward labor-saving at this point. Contact ANISHA SUTERWALA at anisha.suterwala@yale.edu .
FROM
“The study shows that tobacco control strategies have saved lives in the United States,” said Theodore Holford GRD ’73, co-author of the study and professor of public health and statistics at Yale. “The proportion of deaths that were averted is about 30 percent of those that could have been.” The Yale team was one of six research groups that developed independent models to quantify the impact of changes in smoking behaviors on lung cancer mortality rates in the United States. The researchers reconstructed the smoking histories for individuals born between 1890 and 1970 and used that data to analyze the association between smoking and lung cancer deaths. Combining the results of the models, the study determined that had everyone quit smoking following the Surgeon General’s first report
Center to study rare genetic diseases
on smoking in 1964, over 2.5 million lung cancer deaths could have been prevented. As it was, 32 percent of those 2.5 million deaths were prevented. The study reported that by 2000, the lung cancer death prevention rate — representing the number of lives saved over the number that could be saved if everyone stopped smoking — had reached 44 percent. Holford attributed this acceleration to the success of anti-tobacco efforts, such as advertisements that discourage the consumption of tobacco products by children. “The estimates in this study are very important to show what we can accomplish [with interventions],” said Kenneth Warner GRD ’74, professor of public health at the University of Michigan. “People tend to assume that the smoking problem has been taken care of, but we have close to a fifth of adults still smoking today.” Warner added that taxes on tobacco products, laws that create smoke-free spaces and educational media campaigns are the three most effective anti-smoking interventions. Last Monday, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) launched a $54 million, 12-week national anti-tobacco advertising campaign called “Tips from Former Smokers.” The campaign features people who are living with smoking-related diseases and disabilities, such as 57-year-old Annette who smoked for over 30 years and had a lung removed after being diagnosed with lung cancer at age 52. “Although they may be tough to watch, the ads show real people living with real, painful consequences from smoking,” CDC Director Thomas Frieden said in a March 15 press release. “There is sound evidence that supports the use of these types of hard-hitting images and messages to encourage smokers to quit, to keep children from ever beginning to smoke, and to drastically reduce the harm caused by tobacco.” Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and is expected to kill over 160,000 Americans in 2012, according to a January report released by the American Cancer Society. Contact JACQUELINE SAHLBERG at jacqueline.sahlberg@yale.edu .
Lukewarm reaction to weight loss drugs BY CASEY SUMNER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER A new weight loss drug recently approved by an Food and Drug Administration panel has received a mixed response from two Yale professors. A panel of medical experts voted 20 to 2 last February to approve the diet drug Qnexa, which opens the door for the FDA to approve the drug later this year. But David Katz, an obesity expert and director of the Yale Prevention Research Center, and Silvio Inzucchi, a professor of endocrinology, expressed reservations about the ruling, citing weight loss drugs’ notoriously poor history. Katz said he generally agreed with the panel, noting the drug helped patients lose a modest amount of weight — roughly 10 percent — more than a placebo. But he questioned the ultimate value of drugs in solving the problem of obesity, particularly because of their side effects.
About the only thing that works for serious obesity is anatomyaltering surgery. DAVID KATZ Director, Yale Prevention Research Center “It’s not that they don’t work,” he said, “but when they do work, there’s hell to pay.” He cited the drug rimonabant, which decreased appetite but also resulted in increased risk for depression and suicide. Izzuchi also said that drugs like simbutramine and fen-phen were pulled from the market because of their association with cardiovascular problems. In 2010, the same FDA panel rejected Qnexa over concerns about the drug’s potential cardiovascular
THE
LAB
A new study shows that public health efforts against smoking have saved nearly 800,000 lives over 25 years.
In a piece of good news for public health officials, a new study based on a Yale model shows that tobacco control initiatives have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Anti-smoking campaigns and policies prevented almost 800,000 lung cancer deaths in 25 years, according to a study published March 14 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The researchers estimate that without antismoking policies, which began in the 1950s, an additional 552,000 men and 243,000 women would have died from lung cancer between 1975 and 2000. But scientists say further policies and awareness campaigns are needed to eliminate tobacco-induced deaths.
no good. I was basically looking for not a disposable solution, but an expendable solution. Right now a lot of the times robots are so expensive that people don’t want to put them at risk. The other project that’s going on in the lab I’m pretty excited about is related to this one, which is trying to improve stairclimbing capability of balancing robots.
LEAKS
SAGAR SETRU/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Contact MAX EHRENFREUND at max.ehrenfreund@yale.edu .
BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERG STAFF REPORTER
BY ANISHA SUTERWALA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Their study says that if everyone had quit smoking from the moment the U.S. Surgeon General issued his first warning in 1964, 2.5 million deaths could have been avoided.
Anti-smoking efforts save lives
cell phones are dangerous, but because there is growing evidence of “biological responses” to normal levels of cell phone exposure. Taylor is the director of the reproductive endocrinology and fertility division at the School of Medicine. He advises his patients: “If you’re in your car, put the phone on the seat next to you instead of in your pocket. If you’re in your home or office, put the phone on a table or a desk. A small difference in distance makes quite a difference in radiation exposure.” Cell phones emit radiation which is less intense than microwaves but more intense than radio waves.
Yale robot guru says no revolution likely
The number of deaths anti-smoking campaigns have saved in the last 25 years, according to the National Cancer Institute.
An $11.2 million grant by the National Institutes of Health is funding a new Yale research center that will focus on individuals with rare genetic disorders. A disorder is defined as “Mendelian” if it affects fewer than 200,000 Americans, a category that includes 6,000 diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. “There are roughly 22,000 genes in the human genome,” said Richard P. Lifton, Genetics Department chair and Sterling Professor of Genetics, in the press release. “Right now we know what diseases result when about 3,000 of those are mutated. We know almost nothing about what happens when the remaining ones are mutated.” A total of 25 million Americans are affected by some sort of Mendelian disorder.
YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS
SEAS, NASA, collaborate on experiments on combustion in microgravity A Yale research team from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is working in tandem with American astronauts to learn more about the process of combustion. This research, completed on March 23, could shed light on the chemical tranformation that turns burning coal into soot. If successful, it could aid efforts to decrease urban pollution, industrial pollution, and car pollution. Beijing should be paying attention.
New imaging method expands MRI applicability A Yale research team has devised a new imaging technique that can see inside of solid objects, such as rocks and bones. Currently, MRIs can map the interiors of objects that are high in water content, but not objects lacking water. This new technique detects phosphorus atoms, rather than hydrogen ones, and can therefore operate without water molecules. The researchers call it the “quadratic echo MRI of solids,” according to the press release. Unfortunately, it cannot yet be used on living creatures.
Elderly minds lose ability to move on from completed tasks A new Yale study has found that elderly minds are less effective at multitasking because they cannot move on as quickly as younger brains. Researchers, using older and younger rats as their test subjects, expected to find that the parts of the brain which did spatial reasoning were the most affected by aging processes. Instead they found that the brain lost its ability to adapt to new situations and move on when old tasks were completed or obsolete.
ABC NEWS
Obesity expert David Katz and endocrinology professor Silvio Inzucchi have questioned the approval by an FDA panel of Qnexa, a new weight loss drug. risks. But the drug came up for approval again this year after a new study assessed the risk. In the trial, patients experienced improvements in blood pressure, but also saw a mild increase in heart rate, which is linked with a risk for heart attack or stroke. Katz said the drug might be worth the risk of cardiovascular issues for patients with extreme weight problems. “Everything in medicine is about risk benefit pay-offs,” he said. “About the only thing that works for serious obesity is anatomy-altering surgery.” Inzucchi also said that there is a shortage of obesity treatments for severe cases, explaining that a weight loss drug would help fill the large gap between traditional diet and exercise routines and expensive, complicated bariatric surgery. But both men agreed that no weight loss drug is a magic bullet. Katz said that the very idea of a diet pill goes against the grain of our metabolic systems, which are designed
to help us survive when calories are scarce. Elaine Morrato, who sat on the panel in both 2010 and 2012 when it examined Qnexa, defended her decision to vote for approval. “It had a better characterization of the risk, and it had a better risk management program,” she said. She also emphasized that the drug’s proponents had a fuller plan for education about its appropriate use, all of which explains why the panel ultimately approved Qnexa, among other drugs being considered. She said the drug would be limited to seriously obese individuals, for whom the benefits outweigh the risks and other options short of surgery, such as dieting and exercise, would not suffice. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its expert panels, though it typically does. A final decision on Qnexa is expected by April 17. Contact CASEY SUMNER at casey.sumner@yale.edu .
YALE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATIONS
Could aspirin reduce colon cancer risk? According to three British studies, taking aspirin regularly can reduce one’s chance of contracting or dying of colon cancer. According to the study, “individuals who took aspirin every day were 36 percent less likely to be diagnosed with metastatic cancer, while those taking aspirin for five years or more were 15 percent less likely to die from cancer.” This could be helpful because millions of Americans are already prescribed aspirin by their doctors as an anti-heart attacki measure. However, the drug can also cause internal bleeding in the stomach and intestines, causing the study’s authors to caution that the current medical guidelines for aspirin prescriptions should not yet be revised.
PAGE 8
YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
FROM THE FRONT
“The strength of the group is the strength of the leaders.” VINCE LOMBARDI FORMER HEAD COACH, GREEN BAY PACKERS
Captains balance roles
Esserman announces team
CAPTAINS FROM PAGE 1
tions earlier this year.
ASST. CHIEFS FROM PAGE 1
the other team members also have strong relationships with their coach. Gladstone, his coach, described the captain as the “symbolic contact person” on the team, someone who can tell him the thoughts and impressions of team members, but also said that this relationship is not necessarily unique to the captain. “I form personal relationships with all of the athletes on the team,” he said. “A hierarchy of communication is really not the case.” Lightweight crew captain David Walker ’12 agreed that while his role is somewhat unique in terms of communicating with the coach off the water, when racing he is just “one of nine people in the boat working together to try to win.”
ON-CAMPUS ROLES
from New York or Providence” into the NHPD leadership. Esserman delivered on his promise by promoting three officers from within the department — Blanchard runs the police training academy, Casanova heads the patrol division and Reddish is district manager in the Newhallville neighborhood — and Generoso, who headed the NHPD’s narcotics unit and served as district manager in the Dwight neighborhood in the early 1990s. “Twenty years ago when I was hired, it was then Assistant Chief Esserman, under Chief [Nicholas] Pastore, and I basically grew up in this department under community-based policing,” Blanchard said. “It is a part of me, it is very natural, and just as I grew up with it, many of the other officers did, and it never went away.”
ONE PER TEAM
On the team, the captain’s responsibilities include making sure none of the team members are struggling, fielding questions or concerns from teammates, keeping everyone motivated at practice and helping to organize practice times. But all 33 varsity captains serve not only as liaisons between coaches and team members but also within the whole athletic community: the Captain’s Council, a group that meets monthly with Cole, who is primarily involved in fundraising for development and outreach for the Athletics Department. “Yale Athletics wanted to give the captains an opportunity to learn from each other about best leadership practices and to share common issues or successes,” Cole said, adding that the council has been a tradition since before she was a student. Cole, who served as the women’s lacrosse captain during her senior year, said the meetings provide a good opportunity to talk about issues affecting both the Athletics Department and the campus as a whole. In February, she said, the council discussed issues of sexual harassment and hazing. Yale is the only Ivy League school and one of the only universities in America with an explicit rule that each team have only one captain, Cole added. As a result, Cole said, “the captain is a very visible person.” Benedict said that captains are often consulted by the administration for feedback on issues within the athletic community, due to their demonstrations of effective leadership. She and three other captains interviewed said that they feel captainship is an established position of leadership on campus, similar to leaders of political groups or student publications. The administration required all captains to attend the Student Leadership Training sessions required for all leaders of registered undergraduate organiza-
Hatten noted that besides participating in the Captain’s Council, there are no other duties assigned to captains on campus. Still, Walker, the lightweight crew captain, said captains have an opportunity to serve as role models for their team members, and other Yalies, on campus. For example, women’s hockey captain Aleca Hughes ’12 has helped organize the Mandi Schwartz Marrow Donor Registration Drive at Yale for the past two years, and has founded the Mandi Schwartz Foundation, which aims to support youth hockey players living with cancer in honor of their teammate who died of leukemia last year. Former soccer captain Dennen said inidividual teams take on many community outreach projects, which he said may not necessarily be noticed by other members of the Yale community. For example, the soccer team, led by Dennen, volunteered at a New Haven charter school for underprivileged students, and the lacrosse team has carried out similar outreach efforts. “I hope captains are seen as leaders on campus,” Dennen said. “It’s a huge honor to be elected, and it requires a lot of hard work and determination.” Captains also hold leadership roles in other areas. Women’s basketball captain Michelle Cashen ’12 and field hockey captain Erin Carter ’12 both work for Yale Sustainability, Cashen as the research assistant for athletics and Carter as the Sustainable Bulldogs engagement coordinator. Still, many students are unaware of these projects carried out by the captains and other athletes. “I think captains are more influential in the context of their teams,” George Ramirez ’15 said. “They represent Yale to the media, but toward the average student, they don’t really have much influence. I just haven’t met any — they don’t go around introducing themselves like YCC representatives or something.” Rachel Miller ’15 said that she does view captains as leaders on campus. Though she couldn’t name any captains, she added that she cannot name the leaders of every organization on campus. Diana Enriquez Schneider ’13 said she thinks the captains are very important in the Athletics Department, and as such hold meaningful positions in the eyes of those on campus. But varsity sailor Sarah Smith ’15 said captains are a source of untapped potential in terms of impacting the rest of the student body. “I think they are mainly important for their teams,” Smith said. “Not that they couldn’t be great campus leaders — I just don’t think the position is utilized in that way.” Contact LINDSEY UNIAT at lindsey.uniat@yale.edu .
NEW LEADERSHIP, NEW PLANS
The four appointees must now be confirmed by the Board of Police Commissioners, which will next meet Wednesday evening at the NHPD’s Union Avenue headquarters. Epstein said at the press conference that he and his four colleagues on the board were very supportive of the “outstanding team” Esserman has assembled, and were excited to work with the new leadership. DeStefano said he likewise supported the new management team, adding that when he recruited Esserman to be chief, he promised to give him full control over the police leadership. “I have a straightforward mission to try and find strong leadership for the department and then let the leadership of the department run the department,” he said. Esserman said the new assistant chiefs will provide the leadership to restructure and strengthen the department, in line with the strategic vision he presented for the first time to the department last week. He announced a two-phase strategic plan last Tuesday that will see the department swell to 467 officers over the next year, and ultimately expand to 497 officers within
JAMES LU/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
NHPD Chief Dean Esserman introduced four new assistant chiefs at a City Hall press conference Monday. three years. This growth will allow the movement of more personnel to patrol capacities, which will allow the department to better execute its community policing initiatives, NHPD spokesman David Hartman said. By putting more officers out in the neighborhoods — the NHPD will field 40 walking beats and a full complement of car beats under the new plan — Esserman hopes to strengthen community engagement and move the department from enforcement to proactive policing, Hartman said. “The city is looking for leadership that is in alignment with their expectations of officers,” Casanova said. “Collectively, we can accomplish much and improve our credibility through listening, effective communication and trust.” Along with the new appointments, City Hall is also working on measures that intended to address job security concerns for assistant chiefs who have not served 20 years with the department — the minimum required to receive a pension — such as Casanova, who has worked at the NHPD for 16 years. One proposal, which the city will submit to the Board of Aldermen, would allow assistant police or fire chiefs to trade 30 days of sick time in exchange for an extra year of service toward a pension, said
Rob Smuts ’01, who oversees the NHPD as the city’s chief administrative officer. City Hall spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton ’04 said the changes to pension provisions were “procedural hurdles,” and that Monday’s announcement set a “longer, larger vision for where we want the police department to be.”
‘CAROUSEL’ OF LEADERSHIP
In the past several years, the department has adopted a number of different public policing initiatives. Ward 17 Alderman Alphonse Paolillo Jr. attributed this to a “carousel” of leadership at the NHPD. When the Board of Police Commissioners approves the new slate of assistant chiefs, the Elm City will have seen 11 assistant chiefs in just three years. The high turnover in assistant chiefs has been caused, in part, by the regular change at the top: the department has had four chiefs since 2008. Less than a year ago, the NHPD staged a similar announcement to Monday’s when then-Chief Frank Limon appointed three new assistant chiefs: John Velleca, Patrick Redding and Petisia Adger. When the trio was nominated Apr. 12, Epstein said the appointments would help secure the NHPD’s “fragile” position in the city — Limon
abruptly announced his resignation Oct. 17 and was replaced by Esserman, who was sworn in Nov. 18. Velleca announced his retirement a month after Esserman’s arrival, and shortly afterward, Esserman asked Adger, Redding and Tobin Hengsen — who Limon brought with him from the Chicago Police Department — to step aside in January so that he could form his own management team and move the department in a “new direction.” With the new slate of assistant chiefs officially established on Monday, city and police officials expressed hope for increased stability in the NHPD’s leadership. “Having all four grow up in New Haven, build their careers in New Haven, represents a signal that the NHPD wants to build its bench and wants to build its next generation of leadership from within,” Benton said. Paolillo, who is vice-chair of the Board’s public safety committee, said while he didn’t have a “crystal ball,” he thought the Board of Aldermen will likely have a fruitful working relationship with the department’s new leadership team. Esserman’s current contract runs through Feb. 1, 2014. Contact JAMES LU at james.q.lu@yale.edu .
YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 9
BULLETIN BOARD
TODAY’S FORECAST
TOMORROW
Sunny, with a high near 49. Breezy, with a north wind between 16 and 20 mph.
THURSDAY
High of 52, low of 40.
High of 54, low of 36.
WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ
ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28 12:00 PM “State of the EPA: A Conversation with Tseming Yang.” Yang, deputy general counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, will speak about some of the EPA’s current projects and priorities. Lunch will be served. Sterling Law Buildings (127 Wall St.), Room 120. 5:30 PM “Cafeteria Man.” This hour-long film focuses on social activists and citizens working to change the way kids eat at school. After the screening, Tim Cipriano, executive director of food services for New Haven Public Schools, will join Jeannette Ickovics, director of Community Alliance for Research and Engagement and curator of the Peabody Museum exhibit “Big Food,” in a discussion of the state of school food in New Haven. Peabody Museum (170 Whitney Ave.), auditorium.
ZERO LIKE ME BY REUXBEN BARRIENTES
8:00 PM “De Profundis: The Deep End.” Music for low instruments, including Mozart’s “Duo for bassoon and cello,” Penderecki’s “Serenata for three cellos,” and Bruckner’s “Aequalae for three trombones.” Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St.), Morse Recital Hall.
THURSDAY, MARCH 29 6:30 PM “Sustainable Parks for the 21st Century.” New York City Department of Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe will give the Myriam Bellazoug Memorial Lecture. Myriam Bellazoug ARC ’91 died at age 30 when her plane to Paris, where she had designed a residential building, crashed off of Long Island. Paul Rudolph Hall (180 York St.), Hastings Hall.
SATURDAY MORNING BREAKFAST CEREAL BY ZACH WEINER
FRIDAY, MARCH 30 7:30 PM Yale Concert Band presents: “Harvest.” The Yale Concert Band, directed by Thomas C. Duffy, presents its spring concert. Music includes J. Mackey’s “Harvest: Trombone Concerto,” F. Ticheli’s “Blue Shades” and R. Strauss’ “Serenade for Winds,” as well as a performance by the Yale Band Percussion Ensemble. Woolsey Hall (500 College St.).
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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
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Supreme Court hears health law arguments BY MARK SHERMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — As demonstrations swirled outside, Supreme Court justices signaled on Monday they are ready to confront without delay the keep-or-kill questions at the heart of challenges to President Barack Obama’s historic health care overhaul. Virtually every American will be affected by the outcome, due this summer in the heat of the election campaign. On the first of three days of arguments the longest in decades — none of the justices appeared to embrace the contention that it was too soon for a decision. Outside the packed courtroom, marching and singing demonstrators on both sides — including doctors in white coats, a Republican presidential candidate and even a brass quartet — voiced their eagerness for the court to either uphold or throw out the largest expansion in the nation’s social safety net since Medicare was enacted in 1965. Tuesday’s arguments will focus on the heart of the case, the provision that aims to extend medical insurance to 30 million more Americans by requiring everyone to carry insurance or pay a penalty. A decision is expected by late June as Obama fights for re-election. All of his Republican challengers oppose the law and promise its repeal if the high court hasn’t struck it down in the meantime. On Monday, the justices took on the question of whether an obscure tax law could derail the case. Audio of the day’s argument can be found at: http://apne.ws/H8YR1x The 19th century law bars tax disputes from being heard in the courts before the taxes have been paid. Under the new health care law, Americans who don’t purchase health insurance would have to report that omission on their tax returns for 2014 and would pay a penalty along with federal income tax on returns due by April 2015. Among the issues facing the court is whether that penalty is a tax. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., defending the health law, urged the court to focus on what he called “the issues of great moment” at
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the heart of the case. The 26 states and a small business group challenging the law also want the court to go ahead and decide on its constitutionality without delay. But one lower court that heard the case, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., has said the challenge is premature. No justice seemed likely to buy that argument Monday. The justices fired two dozen questions in less than a half hour at Washington attorney Robert Long, who was defending the appeals court ruling. “What is the parade of horribles?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor, if the court were to decide the penalties were not a tax and the health care case went forward? Long suggested that could encourage more challenges to the long-standing system in which the general rule is that taxpayers must pay a disputed tax before they can go to court. The questions came so quickly at times that the justices interrupted each other. At one point, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sotomayor started speaking at the same time. Chief Justice John Roberts, acting as traffic cop, signaled Ginsburg to go first, perhaps in a nod to her seniority. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, as is his custom, stayed out of the fray. Verrilli also faced pointed questioning over the administration’s differing explanations for whether the penalty is a tax. “General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax. Tomorrow you are going to be back and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax,” Justice Samuel Alito said. Verrilli said Monday’s argument dealt with the meaning of the word in the context of the 19th century law, the Anti-Injunction Act. Tuesday’s session will explore Congress’ power to impose the insurance requirement and penalty. In that setting, he said, Congress has the authority under the Constitution “to lay and collect taxes,” including the penalty for not having insurance. Still, he had trouble keeping his terms straight. Answering a question from Kagan, Verrilli said, “If they pay the tax, then they are in compliance with the law.” Justice Stephen Breyer jumped in: “Why do you keep saying tax?” Breyer reminded Verrilli he should be saying penalty.
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Cameron explores Earth’s deepest spot BY SETH BORENSTEIN ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — In James Cameron’s fantasy films, like “Avatar” and “The Abyss,” the unexplored is splashed in color and fraught with alien danger. But on his dive to the deepest place on Earth, reality proved far different: white, barren and bland. Yet otherworldly — and amazing. “I felt like I literally, in the space of one day, had gone to another planet and come back,” Cameron said Monday after returning from the cold, dark place in the western Pacific Ocean, seven miles below the surface. “It was a very surreal day.” Cameron is the first person to explore the deepest valley in the ocean since two men made a 20-minute foray there more than half a century ago. He spent about three hours gliding through the icy darkness, illuminated only by special lights on the one-man sub he helped design. That was only about half as long as planned because his battery ran low. This deepest section of the 1,500-mile-long Mariana Trench is so untouched that at first it appeared dull. But there’s something oddly dark and compelling about the first snippets of video that Cameron shot. It’s not what you see, but where it puts you. There is a sense of aloneness that Cameron conveys in the wordless video showing his sub gliding across what he calls “the very soft, almost gelatinous flat plain.” “My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity,” Cameron said. It may not have looked all that dramatic and, in a way, Cameron was “doing exploration with training wheels,” said Andy Bowen, who heads the deep submergence lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. But it was an amazing start.
The images “do lack the visual impact of highly colorized 3D spectacular representations of the ocean,” Bowen said. But there are still “dramatic discoveries to be made.” The minute-long snippet, released by trip sponsor National Geographic, is just a coming attraction. Cameron will keep diving in the area, some 200 miles southwest of the island of Guam, where the depth of the trench is called Challenger Deep. And he’s already filming it in 3D for later viewing. To Cameron, the main thing was to appreciate just being there. He didn’t do that when he first dove to the wreck of the Titanic, and Apollo astronauts have said they never had time to savor where they were. “There had to be a moment where I just stopped, and took it in, and said, `This is where I am; I’m at the bottom of the ocean, the deepest place on Earth. What does that mean?’” Cameron told reporters during a conference call. “I just sat there looking out the window, looking at this barren,
desolate lunar plain, appreciating,” Cameron said. He also realized how alone he was, with that much water above him. “It’s really the sense of isolation, more than anything, realizing how tiny you are down in this big, vast, black, unknown and unexplored place,” the “Titanic” director said. Cameron said he had hoped to see some sort of strange deep sea creature that would excite the storyteller in him, but he didn’t. He didn’t see tracks of small primitive sea animals on the ocean floor, as he did when he dove more than five miles down several weeks ago. All he saw was voracious shrimp-like critters no bigger than an inch. In future missions, Cameron plans to bring “bait” — like chicken — to set out. Cameron said the mission was all about exploration, science and discovery. He is the only person to dive there solo, using a lime-green sub called Deepsea Challenger. He is the first person to reach that depth — 35,576 feet — since it was initially explored in 1960.
MARK THEISSEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
James Cameron completes the first ever solo dive to the ‘Challenger Deep.’
YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
PAGE 11
SPORTS 3 fencers are AllAmerican
PEOPLE IN THE NEWS SERENA WILLIAMS Williams had 20 aces on Monday in her victory against Samantha Stosur 7-5, 6-3. The win advances her to the quarterfinals of the Sony Ericsson Open. Stosur beat Williams in the 2011 U.S. Open.
Elis end with highest score competitor of the day, and performed her routine without a mistake and earned a 9.425. Yabut said this “set the tone for the entire meet.” Yale went on to have only one routine with a fall on this event, which did not count towards the team score, and several standout performances. Stephanie Goldstein ’13 and Joyce Li ’15 were Yale’s top two finishers on the event, scoring a 9.65 and 9.725 and placing 11th and sixth respectively. Scoring on the next event, floor, caused some raised eyebrows from members of the team. The team scored a total of 47.325 points for the event, which is lower than 47.780, the Elis’ average score on floor this year, even though nobody on the team fell. “We don’t feel that our score or our placement reflects the way the team performed,” Feld said. Feld was the highest scorer on the event for the Bulldogs with a 9.600, whereas Feld’s average score for floor is 9.745. A highlight of the event was Goldstein’s routine, which contained different tumbling than she usually competes, including a double pike in her first tumbling pass and a double back tuck in her third pass. The routine earned her a 9.575. The Bulldogs finished strong
BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER The gymnastics team scored high, but placed low at the ECAC Championships.
GYMNASTICS FENCING FROM PAGE 12 As the grand finale of his college fencing career, Kachru posted the team’s highest finish, seventh place, and contributed significantly to the Bulldogs’ final standing. He started off strong on the first day with five consecutive wins, leaving him in fourth place. But he allowed himself to slip three places on Sunday with 14 victories overall and a 0.609 in percentage. “Since it was my last match, I was more relaxed and wanted more fun,” Kachru said. “I was disappointed with my second day’s result, but I am happy with what turned out,” he said. Considering the fact that he finished in the twenty-first spot last season, he had every reason to be satisfied with the results. This year’s Second-Team All Ivy Cohen slipped 14 notches from last year’s third place finish with nine wins and a 0.391 percentage. Although he struggled on the first day, he rebounded on the second day, finishing in seventeenth place. “The second day was a chance for me to improve after a tough time on the first day, which I was just not fencing well,” Cohen said. “In the end, I did not do as well as I would have liked but was happy with the way that I bounced back from my poor result on the first day,” Cohen said. In saber, Benzimra qualified for the first time in the NCAA after taking fifth place at the Northeast Regional Championship. He took twelfth place in the tournament. The host Ohio State ended up winning the championship, trailed by Princeton with a 21-point gap. Kachru said the Tigers invest hugely in their fencing program. “They have three coaches, one in each weapon,” Kachru said. “It is always a draw for stronger fencers to be recruited since it [Princeton] already has many strong fencers, which keep the ball rolling,” he added. The Elis have now officially completed their winter season. Kachru said it was a good season despite the team’s falling short in achieving its goal of the Ivy title. He added he is very satisfied with how young fencers like foilist Sam Broughton ’15 and Cohen are stepping up. Miller said many of the fencers will continue training consistently at their respective clubs during the summer.
The ECAC Championships, hosted at Penn last Saturday, was the Bulldogs’ last meet of the season. The team placed seventh, with a score of 191.45, finishing 2.95 points behind Penn, the top ranked team at the meet. This was a season-high score for the Elis, and the highest the team has earned in four years. The Bulldogs counted no falls towards their overall score. “The standings mean nothing to us,” said Mia Yabut ’12 the captain of the team, “It’s not even a mixed bag for us, it was a good way to end.” Although Yale placed last at ECAC’s, the season as a whole was an improvement from last year. Head coach Barbary Tonry said the team posted consistently higher scores throughout the season, and team members Yabut and Tara Feld ’13 said they are enthusiastic about these advances. “Yale gymnastics is on an upward trend,” Feld said. The final meet of the season began, for Yale, on beam. Maren Hopkins ’14 was the first
SOFTBALL FROM PAGE 12
PROVIDENCE 8, YALE 0 PROVIDENCE
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Sailing takes Boston Dinghy Cup Fauer ’14 said the patchy Sunday breezes made boat positioning tricky since the wind pressure was not always visible. Fauer, who won the B division by six points with Eugenia Greig ’14, said the team’s consistency in every race was the key for its victory. “We didn’t go out to win every race right from the beginning, but rather put ourselves in a position in the top five with opportunities to pass boats,” Fauer said. “Joe [Morris] and I [also] did a good job of communicating between the A and B division sets and relaying important information about the breeze and the course.” Crew Genoa Warner ’12, who competed for the Boston Dinghy Cup in the A division, also attributed the victory to the team’s consistency and readiness to adapt to the shifting waters and sailing conditions. She added that the Charles River, where the regatta was held, often has unpredictable conditions, although it did not prove to be as tricky this weekend. Warner added that the team sailed in unfamiliar boats usually used in England called “Fireflies,” adding another level of complexity to its racing. The women’s team com-
Contact MONICA DISARE at monica.disare@yale.edu .
JOYXE XI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Morgan Traina ’15 was named ECAC Rookie of the Year.
Williamson earns her first win
Contact EUGENE JUNG at eugene.jung@yale.edu .
SAILING FROM PAGE 12
on vault and bars. Yabut, who competed a laid-out Yurchenko half and earned Yale’s top vault score of 9.675, said the Elis looked “powerful” on vault. “I’m still not sure sure why our scores were so low, but they did a good job,” Tonry said. Bars for the Bulldogs, who struggled with consistency this season, earned the team its highest event score of 48.325. The top competitor for Yale was, once again, Lindsay Andsager ’13, who scored a 9.725. After struggling on bars in recent meets, this rotation was a great way to end the meet and the season, Feld said. Yale gymnastics has its sights set on next year. The team hopes to gain four new freshman, and loses only two seniors. Tonry added that the team should be stronger next year. As for Yabut, the end of her gymnastics career is still a bit “surreal,” she said. “If I was going to end this is the best way I could have done it,” Yabut said. At ECAC Championships, Goldstein, a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major, won the ECAC ScholarAthlete Award. Morgan Traina ’15 was named ECAC Rookie of the Year.
no outs. The Bulldogs escaped the situation with only one run scored thanks to a strong defense and a key strikeout by Williamson. Nelson said the moment was a momentum change for the team. Yale recovered with a run in each of the fifth, sixth and seventh innings. After a tense eighth inning — including throwing out a Providence runner at home — the Elis surrendered the deciding run in the ninth after a costly throwing error. “We knew we were at their level, and we definitely could have won those games,” Nelson said. “We were at a higher level than the way we were playing.” Though the Elis lost their first match against Bryant on Saturday 12–0 in only five innings, they rebounded for a 9–8 win in the nightcap. While Nelson said the team’s offense had been “unstable and inconsistent” on Friday, on Saturday afternoon it turned around. Sarah Onorato ’15 snagged
two doubles, and Meg Johnson ’12 went 3 for 4, nearly hitting for the cycle with a single in the second, double in the third and homer in the fifth. With a double from Virginia Waldrop ’12, the Bulldogs tied the score 6–6 at the top of the sixth to force extra innings.
We knew we were at [Providence’s] level, and we definitely could have won those games. CHRISTY NELSON ’13 Captain, softball
“When everyone on the team is on, the whole thing works out in our favor,” Williamson said. With a single by Nelson and two errors on Bryant, the Bulldogs scored three runs at the top of the eighth to bring the score to 9–6. At
the bottom of the eighth, Bryant responded. After scoring two runs, Bryant had a runner on third with two outs — but Yale secured the win after the batter lined out. After pitching her second extra innings game this year, Williamson secured her first collegiate win. “It’s incredibly impressive for a freshman to stay mentally tough, keep fighting and go into extra innings,” catcher Chelsea Janes ’12 said. “The way she battled and got her first win was awesome.”(Janes is a staff columnist for the News) Williamson said the game was a true team effort, citing a strong performance from the defense helping her make plays and get the outs. The Elis only had one error in all eight innings. The Bulldogs will next play Fairfield (12–13) on Wednesday. Over the weekend, they will face their first Ivy League competition of the season against Columbia (5–14, 0-0) and Penn (13-10, 0-0). Contact MASON KROLL at mason.kroll@yale.edu .
Yale drops Oxford scrimmage M. SOCCER FROM PAGE 12
peted in a team racing format at the Duplin Trophy Team Race Regatta. In a team racing format, three boats from one school compete collectively against three boats from another, and the result of that race is determined by the sum of their places. Crew Amanda Salvesen ’14 said she was pleased with the third place result, adding that they conquered the undefeated Boston College. “I think we consistently improved over the weekend, and in our final race, our work really came together and we began to work as a team,” Salvesen said. Skipper and captain Emily Billing ’13 said that only one of the six team members who participated in the event had had experience in team racing prior to the regatta, adding that the sailors thought of the race as a learning experience. While the coed team will practice team racing in preparation for the Southern New England Team Race Intersectional at Connecticut College next weekend, the women’s team will focus more on fleet racing for the Brad Dellenbaugh tournament in Providence, R.I., also next weekend.
aged to score three goals. Oxford captain Julian Austin said the Blues “kept possession well” and “got better as the game went on.” Tompkins said the game was an “experimental process.” The coaches for both teams accounted for the fact that Oxford is at the end of its season, while Yale is just beginning its spring training. Tompkins said he could tell Oxford had been playing a lot, whereas Yale was not as fit. “We aren’t in the condition we’d hoped we’d be,” Tompkins said. “Hopefully we’ll fix things up before we have to play the Ivies.” Thalman said the three goals in the second half “came off our own errors” and are “easier to fix” than if they weren’t. For spring training he hopes to “work on our possession, be sharper midfield, and create goals through a combination plan.” As well as tactics, the team will work on being “calmer and more controlled.” Oxford is on a tour of the United States and will be playing Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers and the New York Athletic Club in the coming weeks. Oxford tied 1–1 with Harvard last Saturday. “Harvard was great but Yale passed a lot more.” Austin said.
Contact CLINTON WANG at clinton.wang@yale.edu .
Contact JOSEPHINE MASSEY at josephine.massey@yale.edu .
GRAHAM HARBOE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Scott Armbrust ’13, right, scored for Yale as it lost a friendly against Oxford this weekend.
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SPORTS QUICK HITS
ALECA HUGHES ’12 FINALIST FOR GIANT STEPS AWARD Hughes, captain and forward on the women’s hockey team, and the Mandi Schwartz foundation she started are one of three finalists for the NCAS’ Giant Steps Award. The nomination is in recognition of Hughes’ community service through athletics.
W. BBALL Baylor 77 Tennessee 58
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GYMNASTICS GOLDSTEIN, TRAINA EARN HONORS Stephanie Goldstein ’13, right, earned the ECAC Scholar-Athlete award while Morgan Traina ’15 was awarded ECAC Rookie of the Year following ECAC championships Sunday. Goldstein competed in all of Yale’s meets this season, while Traina was outstanding in the all-around.
W. BBALL Stanford 81 Duke 69
BASEBALL U. Pacific 7 Brown 4
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“The standings mean nothing to us. It’s not even a mixed bag for us. It was a good way to end. MIA YABUT ’12 CAPTAIN, GYMNASTICS YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
Softball surges in nightcaps
Elis fall to Oxford in friendly BY JOSEPHINE MASSEY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The Yale men’s soccer team played England’s Oxford University for the first time in 25 years at home Sunday but lost 3–1 in the friendly.
M. SOCCER
I’ll be ready when we play against Ivies this weekend.” The Bulldogs were shut out 8–0 in six innings in their first game against Providence. With only one hit — a single by Tori Balta ’14 in the bottom of the fourth — they could not compete with the Friars. In the second game, the Elis were down 2–0 at the top of the fifth inning. The bases were loaded, and there were
The game was the first match of the spring for the Bulldogs, who ended their first winning season in six years this past November with an 8–7–2 record. Although the game was a scrimmage that did not count towards the team’s standings, the matchup gave Yale a chance to work on tactics and ball possession in a competition setting, head coach Brian Tompkins said. “[The team] made some mistakes and [Oxford] made a good job of punishing those mistakes,” Tompkins said. “[I’m] pleased with a lot of the play and thought they passed the ball well.” Yale started the first half of the game strong and gained a 1–0 lead with a goal by Scott Armbrust ’13. Yale’s energy was high, and goalkeeper and captain Bobby Thalman ’13 made several saves. Oxford’s coach Mike Cave told the News at half-time that Oxford’s concentration “slipped for a bit.” In the second half, Yale’s energy took a toll. Although Yale made several attempts on goal, none went in, while Oxford man-
SEE SOFTBALL PAGE 12
SEE M. SOCCER PAGE 12
BRIANNE BOWEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Softball captain Christy Nelson ’13 had a single in the eighth inning in the nightcap against Bryant, helping Yale to clinch a 9-8 victory. BY MASON KROLL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The softball team refused to bow out after crushing losses in the opening games of their double-headers against Providence (8-17) and Bryant (5–14) on Friday and Saturday, respectively. In the second game of each series, the Bulldogs (6–10, 0-0 Ivy) brought their opponents to extra innings, falling to Providence 4-3 but besting Bryant 9–8.
“This weekend, we didn’t come out as hard as we could have the first game, but we channeled our anger and frustration into the second,” captain Christy Nelson ’13 said. “You don’t want to lose back to back.”
SOFTBALL Kylie Williamson ’15 won her first collegiate game after pitching eight innings against Bryant, improving her record to
Fencers take 12th place BY EUGENE JUNG CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The fencing team grabbed the 12th spot in the NCAA Championships after going through a tough four-day tournament, with three fencers being named AllAmericans.
FENCING Foilist and captain Shiv Kachru ’12, epeeist Peter Cohen ’14, saberist Nathaniel Benzimra ’13, as well as foilist Lauren Miller ’15 from the women’s team traveled to Ohio and earned a total of 50 points, repeating the rank they earned last season. Miller’s seventh-place individual finish made her an All-American in her first NCAA championship. “I never would have believed I could be an AllAmerican fencer my freshman year,” Miller said. She won 15 of her 23 matches, including contess against fencers from this year’s champion Ohio State and archrival Harvard in her fourth and thirteenth match,
1–3. Pitcher Chelsey Dunham ’14 faced two losses this weekend, taking a major hit to her ERA and evening her record at 4–4. Last Monday, head coach Barbara Reinalda worked with Dunham to change the beginning of her windup, in an effort to achieve better timing. Dunham said she didn’t have enough time to adjust. “The change was made too late in my season, and it had a bad affect on my performance [last] weekend,” Dunham said. “I am going back to my old style so that
Sailing takes Ivy title BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER Last weekend, the No. 1 coed sailing team handily won the Ivy title, with positive results for the coed and women’s teams elsewhere as well.
respectively. “I have known most of the fencers that I faced since high school, and it was interesting to see how they have adapted to college fencing,” Miller added. With a percentage of 0.652, she contributed 15 points to the Bulldogs’ side despite having to play with an injury she incurred several weeks ago. She had to skip the United States Collegiate Squad Championships last month and focused on qualifying for the NCAA championships by taking ninth place in the NCAA Northeast Regional Championship on March 11. Whereas members of the women’s team in two different weapons qualified for last year’s championship, nly women’s foil represented the Elis this year, taking thirteenth place overall thanks to Miller’s efforts. However, the men’s team had all three weapons competing. Kachru and Benzimra each took the All-American honor for their weapons.
The coed team dominated the Owen, Mosbacher and Knapp trophies, the de facto Ivy League sailing championship, which it hosted from the McNay Family Sailing Center in Branford. Additionally, the Elis captured the Boston Dinghy Cup at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a third-place finish at the Southern Series One at Salve Regina in Newport, R.I., The No. 2 women’s team finished third at the Duplin Trophy Team Race Regatta at Tufts University. “We’ve definitely improved, and we can improve even more,” sailing head coach Zachary Leonard ’89 said. “We’ve been [able to spot] bad situations before they arise.” The Ivy regatta had 12 fleet races for each division. In a fleet race, 20 boats, each representing a different school, compete for first place. Crew Isabel Elliman ’12, who won the A division in the Ivies with skipper Joe Morris ’12 by a 19-point lead, said sailing in home waters gave the coed team an edge. Elliman added that the team was able to adjust quickly to the range of different sailing conditions that confronted the team. The Bulldogs faced gusts peaking at 15 knots on Saturday and fluctuating winds on Sunday of less than 10 knots. Skipper Marlena
SEE FENCING PAGE 12
SEE SAILING PAGE 12
SAILING
STAT OF THE DAY 191.45
YDN
The coed sailing team, which was recently named No. 1 natonally, rolled to a slew of weekend victories.
THE TEAM TOTAL OF THE GYMNASTICS TEAM IN THE ECAC CHAMPIONSHIPS ON SATURDAY. While the team took seventh place, the score was its highest of the season. Penn won the meet with a score of 194.4