Today's Paper

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, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · VOL. CXXXV, NO. 30 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

SUNNY CLOUDY

66 46

CROSS CAMPUS

KETAMINE DRUG MAY TREAT DEPRESSION

FOOTBALL

DEMS

ECUADOR

Running back and transfer student Varga faces eligibility complaint

PROFESSORS CONSIDER RACE AND THE ELECTION

Goverment official pushes plans to preserve national park

PAGES 6-7 SCI-TECH

PAGE 12 SPORTS

PAGE 3 NEWS

PAGE 3 CITY

Officers decry patrol changes Yale administration moves security officers from traditional posts inside facilities to outside patrols

And you thought you were old.

Today, Yale celebrates its 311th birthday. Since its founding in 1701, the University has granted 261,657 degrees and served as the alma mater for numerous actors, novelists, playwrights, federal judges and United States presidents.

Happy birthday, Yale!

Yale administration reduces police overtime

YALE ADMINISTRATION

Our neighbors up north.

The Pierson College dining hall filled with Canadian undergraduates, graduates and faculty members on Monday night in celebration of the 19th annual Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner, hosted by Pierson College Master Harvey Goldblatt GRD ’78. Though Goldblatt has hosted this event for nearly two decades, the Monday spectacle will mark his last: Goldblatt announced he would step down from his position as master of Pierson College at the end of the 2012’13 academic year.

a shellfish truck crashed into the Loria Center last week, shattering the glass door and denting the metal paneling, employees of the center say the University has ordered a customized replacement door that is expected to arrive in a few months. In the meantime, the hole in the Loria entrance has been covered with wood paneling and painted to blend in with the entrance’s stainless steel foundation.

Both the adjacent door and handicapped entrance are fully functional.

Cameras for cops. The East Haven Town Concil has approved $115,000 to install dashboard cameras in East Haven police cars in an effort to monitor officers’ behavior while they are out on patrol.

The move comes after East Haven became the subject of national news after several officers were accused of alleged racial profiling against Latinos.

Weighing affirmative action.

Yale Law School Dean Robert Post LAW ’77 wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing the merits of racebased affirmative action in law school admissions. He stressed the importance of attracting a diverse group of students with various perspectives. Thirtytwo percent of Yale Law School’s Class of 2015 identify as students of color, according to the school’s website.

Teaching history in the streets. Eleven students from

High School in the Community hit the Elm City streets as part of a “Discover New Haven” class to learn about the city and update an outdated history text about New Haven’s neighborhoods. The students began downtown and Wooster Square before venturing out to a housing complex they call the “Skittles.”

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1701 Yale is founded after the General Court of Connecticut votes for an “Act of Liberty to erect a Collegiate School.”

Submit tips to Cross Campus

crosscampus@yaledailynews.com

ONLINE y MORE cc.yaledailynews.com

BY LORENZO LIGATO STAFF REPORTER

NEW PATROLS: LINKING YALE’S SECURITY ACTORS

The shellfish are okay. After

YALE POLICE

On-duty Yale Security officers replace police on extra-duty walking patrols

CITING CHANGES TO DEPLOYMENT PATTERNS, SECURITY OFFICERS ACCUSE THE UNIVERSITY OF UNION BUSTING

BY JANE DARBY MENTON AND JULIA ZORTHIAN STAFF REPORTERS Amidst reports of tension between the Yale Police and administration, sources with close ties to Yale Security have accused the University of altering deployment policies to penalize the security force for unionizing — a change the sources said jeopardizes student safety.

Multiple sources with close ties to

Yale Security — who asked to remain anonymous due to concern about retribution — claimed the administration recently changed security patterns as a form of “retaliation” after Yale Security unionized in 2010. They alleged that the administration has left established security posts like parking garages largely unattended by transferring security officers to walking patrols. Administators have also breached the security officers’ contracts, the sources said,

Family dispute ends in tragedy

BY LORENZO LIGATO STAFF REPORTER A sibling dispute ended with the death of two brothers on Monday morning, bringing the total number of homicides in New Haven to 12 this year.

Daniel Shwisha, 44, fatally shot his brother, Gordon Shwisha, 45, outside of their family business’ facility shortly before 7:50 a.m., and later killed himself at their parents’ home in Westport, police said.

The New Haven Police Department received reports of gunfire in the parking lot of Electrix, Inc., a large architectural lighting fixture wholesaler located at 45 Spring Street, department spokesman David Hartman said. When the officers arrived at the scene, they found the body of Gordon Shwisha, which had suffered from multiple gunshot wounds, in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. Shwisha, the owner of Electrix, Inc. was pronounced dead at the scene.

At approximately 8:30 a.m., Daniel Shwisha drove to his parents’ home at 10 Rustic Lane in Westport, where he shot himself in the head, police said.

The parents of the suicide victim — Haim and Birthe Shwisha — called the Westport Police Department to report the incident, saying they were not sure if their son was still breathing.

The Westport police and emergency medical units, unaware of Shwisha’s involvement in the recent homicide in New Haven, responded to the scene and began treatment of the victim, according to Westport Police spokesman Sam Arciola.

Arciola said Daniel Shwisha was transported to Norwalk Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 9:13 a.m.

While Shwisha was being treated, the Westport police received a call from the NHPD reporting that the suspect in yesterday morning’s homicide, who they identified as DanSEE SHWISHA PAGE 4

Bars react to party policy

YALE SECURITY

Since administrators instituted stricter regulations on off-campus parties this August, some local clubs and businesses are refusing to host student events.

In an effort to comply with the new policies, which require students to register all offcampus parties expected to draw more than 50 students, 168 York Street Café and Thali Too have recently rejected student groups’ requests to host parties in their facilities. Joe Goodwin, manager of 168 York Street Café, said he turned several student groups away from his venue because Yale’s new regulations “sent a clear message about drinking offcampus” to New Haven restaurants. Still, several establishments, including Oaxaca Kitchen at 228 College St., are continuing to hold parties for undergraduates.

If [underage] students want to come in to drink and party, that’s not going to happen.

JOE GOODWIN Manager of 168 York Street Café

by moving and segmenting shifts and reducing overtime opportunities with the hiring of security guards through unaffiliated security companies.

Associate Vice President for Administration Janet Lindner told the News last week that the changes are a result of budget conditions and will not threaten student safety. On Monday, she also denied any claims of retaliation, adding that she “completely respect[s]” the Security union’s contract and right to organize.

But the sources with Security ties disagreed.

When the new off-campus party regulations were initially announced, John Meeske, associate dean for student organizations and physical resources, told the News that the policy is “largely” intended to address underage drinking. “We abide by whatever the University imposes,” Goodwin said. “It’s very cut-and-dry — if [underage] students want to

SEE SECURITY PAGE 5

SEE BARS PAGE 4

Terror suspects face trial in New Haven

BY MATTHEW LLOYD-THOMAS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER After nearly a decade of fighting extradition to the United States, Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan arrived in New Haven early Saturday from Great Britain on charges of aiding terrorist organizations.

The two suspects are accused of operating a website to raise funds, recruit fighters and provide material support for terrorists in Afghanistan and Chechnya — charges to which they plead not guilty on Saturday morning. The affidavit in support of extradition cited the Connecticut address of Ahmad’s Internet provider as the reason for holding the men in New Haven.

Ahmad and Ahsan are British nationals who have been held in Great Britain without formal charges since 2004 and 2006, respectively. The two arrived in the U.S. early Saturday along with three other suspects who all lost legal battles to prevent extradition from Great Britain. The

other suspects, who face charges for the bombing of American embassies in Africa in 1998 and for attempting to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon, are currently being held in New York.

“Today I have lost my eight year and two month battle against extradition to the US,” Ahmad said before criticizing the extradition process.

“By exposing the fallacy of the UK’s extradition arrangements with the US, I leave with my head high having won the moral victory.”

Ahmad’s father also denounced his son’s extradition, saying that “after over 40 years of paying taxes in this country, [he is] appalled that the system has let [him] down in a manner more befitting of a third world country than one of the world’s oldest democracies.”

Following Ahmad’s eight years of detention without formal charges, multiple advocacy organizations have formed to free the terror suspect and alter SEE TRIAL PAGE 5 t h e

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

.COMMENT "As this trend continues, Yale will be synonymous with yaledailynews.com/opinion

GUEST COLUMNIST C H R I S T I A N VA Z Q U E Z

O

'IGGIS' ON "FOR A VISIBLE YALE CORPORATION"

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T A N I R U D H S I VA R A M

Keep our colleges alive ur residential colleges still function as microcosms of Yale.

Without the residential colleges it’s unlikely that I would have lived with a Sigma Alpha Epsilon rugby player, a former Dramat board member, a Yale Daily News editor or two members of Mixed Company.

I probably would have lived and interacted with the people that do the same extracurricular activities and take the same courses as me. I never would have been exposed to members of the student body that are now some of my best friends.

Some say that the colleges are divisive and inefficient. But this misses the more accurate criticism of our residential colleges: they are losing their distinctiveness.

The colleges are increasingly becoming devoid of their value — becoming little more than glorified dormitories.

First, Yale eliminated independent college endowments. By removing a direct connection between residential colleges and their alumni in the form of donations, Yale has created a disconnect that removes the college from its history. As of 2010, alumni now can donate to a general fund that is then distributed to all of the colleges. The anonymity present in this system will surely hurt long-term fundraising for the colleges. Since then, Yale has worked to equalize the spending that each college has allocated per year.

We have allowed this to happen — we failed to resist homogenization when our residential college plates were taken from us. These were the last vestiges of autonomy, of separate college identities that have slowly disappeared.

There was a time when residential colleges were vibrant communities of student activity — some colleges printed weekly newsletters, and IMs and college-wide events were widely attended. This reflects our responsibility to the colleges. We must show up if we also want to ask for more.

As a result of the evened spending, residential colleges no longer can hold events that were intended exclusively for the members of that college.

Pierson no longer holds its trip to Italy; senior happy hours have become a rarity, and the actual events that a college can hold have become less appealing.

Although these events were for a particular college, our communities grew from these smaller collective experiences.

Guests from other colleges were often welcome.

unaccountability."

But residential college life shouldn’t stop with social activities. In decades past, seminar rooms in residential colleges were filled with students in sections exclusive to that college. Who wouldn’t want to take their economics section with their residential college friends?

We are slowly going from having 12 vibrant communities with distinctive colors and traditions — Branford’s green, gold and blue or Timothy Dwight’s bright red and white — instead moving toward a monolithic grey.

As Yale proceeds with plans to develop the 13th and 14th colleges, we must be wary of the type of identity that they are likely to develop, if any.

How can we renew the residential college system, when our masters and deans seem to be leaving so rapidly and appear to have less autonomy than ever before?

The masters are the most empowered in making each college a true community rather than a physical building that we only pass through for four years. In her second year as the master of Branford College, Elizabeth Bradley has begun a weekly senior colloquium with 18 Branford seniors. We discuss issues of life after Yale.

Over the course of the last five weeks, many of us have been able to establish a much deeper relationship with her and our college community.

At Oxford and Cambridge, the models we have emulated for our system and our architectural style, the colleges are all encompassing because students also take their courses through the colleges.

We should strive for residential colleges that are equally central to our experience, rather than relegating them to a simple housing system. The college system can go a long way toward enriching our education along a breadth of disciplines and interests, through the Teas, conversations and activities that they can provide.

When Edward S. Harkness donated the funds to establish the first eight residential colleges close to 80 years ago, his mission was to further the British model on American soil.

Our colleges are the reason many of us chose Yale over other peer institutions — we must demand that they become a priority for our administration. Then we must make the colleges a priority for ourselves.

CHRISTIAN VAZQUEZ is a senior in Branford College.

Contact him at christian.vazquez@yale.edu .

A different kind of expansion I

t’s an unfortunate reality that the liberal arts curriculum — the most holistic and balanced form of undergraduate education — is almost exclusively concentrated along a few thousand miles of the American east and west Coasts.

Though other countries are beginning to embrace the liberal arts model, their efforts will take time to flourish. For instance, the United Kingdom’s New College of the Humanities embraces the liberal arts, teaching logic, critical thinking, scientific literacy and applied ethics in its core curriculum. However, only a handful of these kinds of projects exist outside the United States. Where they do exist, they have yet to attain the same level of prestige that established institutions command; NCH has learned this lesson from its attempts to compete with Oxbridge for the most qualified applicants. Thus, the growing international population at most American liberal arts schools is a red herring. The vast majority of high school graduates abroad can harbor no meaningful aspirations of ever studying at a premier liberal arts school.

In light of this problem, YaleNUS only serves to fill the vacuum that exists in Asian education systems. While some people at Yale strongly oppose the very notion of Yale-NUS, I’ve interacted with a significant number

of others who oppose our specific engagement with Singapore.

These are two separate criticisms and deserve to be considered separately.

Let’s turn our attention to the latter complaint. Imagine that Yale could start this process again — targeting our global expansion elsewhere. Would Yale be better served by inviting a different nation to host its educational experiment?

DON’T IGNORE THE NEED FOR GLOBAL LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION With a staggering 1.2 billion people, India is the world’s largest democracy. It has uncontested status as a growing economic power, as evidenced by its membership of the informal BRIC bloc of rising global players. Furthermore, thanks to President Richard Levin, Yale boasts very close ties with India, especially with the Indian Parliament. During his tenure, Levin has overseen not only the creation of the Yale India Initiative and the India-Yale Parliamentary Leadership Program, but also increased numbers of Indian applicants — and

thus Indian students — flocking to New Haven.

Transplanting Yale’s international campus to India might have assuaged the critics and fearmongers currently condemning YaleNUS. India’s rich democratic heritage carries with it numerous success stories of free speech and peaceful protest. The spirit of Gandhian civil disobedience still persists in Indian democracy: protest marches are perhaps too commonplace in contemporary Indian politics.

This spirit exists at the college level too. Student leaders at prestigious Indian institutions like the University of Delhi wield significant political power (in fact, they contribute much more substantially to Indian politics than the YCC). Furthermore, political parties in India have major youth wings, and encourage, rather than stifle, political activism. Basing Yale’s international campus in India certainly would have eliminated the biting rhetoric currently targeting Yale-NUS — criticisms that target the country’s perceived lack of freedom or compare it to something out of Orwell’s “1984.”

So why not India? It’s a thriving democratic polity with a powerful economy that, based on recent trends, is opening up to the world. In some ways, it was a near-perfect candidate that was unfairly snubbed. India would

be an ideal hub to unite students from Afghanistan to Vietnam.

And most importantly for the fate of the liberal arts, India has been trying hard to liberalize its rigid educational model. Union Minister for Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal has undertaken numerous steps to reform the Indian high school educational system, hoping to foster the critical thinking skills that the liberal arts education aims to inculcate. The introduction of Yale in India would have been an almost perfect complement to the entire process.

While a Yale campus in India can only be a fleeting dream, perhaps it is necessary to consider this alternate reality to understand where our true opposition to Yale-NUS comes from. Indeed, are we opposed to the idea of Yale opening campuses abroad, or is it just the Singaporean version of this idea that offends us?

Hopefully, introducing India as a counterfactual will help us better understand our positions on Yale’s international expansion. And should our neighbors in Cambridge decide to visit New Delhi in the future, maybe we’ll understand the extent of our missed opportunity for a different kind of international expansion.

ANIRUDH SIVARAM is a sophomore in Calhoun College. Contact him at anirudh.sivaram@yale.edu .

GUEST COLUMNIST CHLOE DRIMAL

Don’t judge imagination T

confidence — we knew what we wanted. If my mother asked what I felt like for dinner, I responded, “macaroni and cheese.” Now it takes me a half-hour to look at a menu.

As we got older, we began to care a little more about other’s opinions, unsure if our own were correct. When I was seven, a girl found out about my five imaginary friends. She called me weird and whispered about it to all her friends at naptime.

I cared about her opinion, so I began ignoring my five friends.

Somewhere along the rope of time and elementary school hallways we gained inklings of insecurities — we needed opinions. We needed to know why we weren’t being picked first for recess kickball.

By our 20s, many of us have gained back our confidence. But just because we may not need opinions doesn’t mean we aren’t going to get them, and sometimes it’s hard not to care.

No one likes to get a nasty email

he other day I saw a little girl, not more than threefeet tall, talking to the empty street. It made me think of my friend Jared, a friend who hadn’t crossed my mind since I was seven. He was a friend that only I could see.

Some people had one imaginary friend. I had five — Barbie just didn’t do it for me. Some kids didn’t talk about their imaginary friends at all, while others talked about them in a slightly unhealthy way. A girl in my carpool, after arriving to my house, always informed me where in the car Witchy-Witch was sitting; I found this extremely annoying as she always got the other window seat. But still, I sat in the middle, not telling her or Witchy-Witch that she should move. How could I understand two people who weren’t me?

But in reality, she probably wouldn’t have cared. We were five. If you called me fat I would have giggled; now I can’t say the same. At that age we exuded

ripping into one’s writing or what they decide to write about. An athlete’s game will begin to decay the more a coach’s opinion begins to cloud their mind. A relationship’s happiness will be tainted by a parent’s quick judgment.

NOT EVERY OPINION NEEDS TO BE SHARED Too many people observe a situation when they inhale and give their opinion as they exhale. The person you are inflicting your opinion on may not need to hear it. They may have already heard it, or they may just figure it out themselves.

Opinions aren’t bad and sometimes they are necessary — I’m giving you mine right now.

But not every opinion is crucial, and maybe if we practice filtering our opinions, only the necessary

ones will be said.

Maybe your athlete will get better without that critique, and he’ll find his own way of scoring that winning goal. Maybe your friend’s boyfriend isn’t your type, but she could be falling in love.

So why don’t we go back to the days when we talked to ourselves and didn’t care? Giving someone an opinion doesn’t make you more important and doesn’t give you a claim on whatever they accomplished — in the end, they did it themselves.

Maybe it’s time to stop trying to make everyone into ourselves, telling them how we would go about it. By the looks of it, they did a pretty good job by following their own instincts thus far.

And for those of you getting these unsolicited opinions, just walk away and follow your heart.

It got you to Yale.

CHLOE DRIMAL is a senior in Calhoun College. Contact her at chloe.drimal@yale.edu .

G U E S T C O L U M N I S T D H R U V A G G A R WA L

The bubble's good for us

YALE DAILY NEWS PUBLISHING CO., INC. 202 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 432-2400 Editorial: (203) 432-2418 editor@yaledailynews.com Business: (203) 432-2424 business@yaledailynews.com

EDITOR IN CHIEF Tapley Stephenson

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Liliana Varman

MANAGING EDITORS Gavan Gideon Mason Kroll

SPORTS Eugena Jung John Sullivan

ONLINE EDITOR Caroline Tan OPINION Marissa Medansky Dan Stein NEWS Madeline McMahon Daniel Sisgoreo CITY Nick Defiesta Ben Prawdzik CULTURE Natasha Thondavadi

ARTS & LIVING Akbar Ahmed Jordi Gassó Cora Lewis Jack Linshi MULTIMEDIA Raleigh Cavero Lillian Fast Danielle Trubow MAGAZINE Daniel Bethencourt COPY Stephanie Heung Emily Klopfer Isaac Park Flannery Sockwell

PRODUCTION & DESIGN Celine Cuevas Ryan Healey Allie Krause Michelle Korte Rebecca Levinsky Rebecca Sylvers Clinton Wang PHOTOGRAPHY Jennifer Cheung Sarah Eckinger Jacob Geiger Maria Zepeda Vivienne Jiao Zhang

PUBLISHER Gabriel Botelho DIR. FINANCE Julie Kim DIR. ADV. Sophia Jia PRINT ADV. MANAGER Julie Leong

ONL. BUSINESS. MANAGER Yume Hoshijima ONL. DEV. MANAGER Vincent Hu MARKETING & COMM. MANAGER Brandon Boyer

BUSINESS DEV. Joyce Xi

ILLUSTRATIONS Karen Tian LEAD WEB DEV. Akshay Nathan Earl Lee INSIDER'S GUIDE Elizabeth Chrystal Catherine Dinh

THIS ISSUE COPY ASSISTANTS: Natalia Dashan COPY STAFF: Ellie Malchione, Adrien Chiem PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS: Laura Peng EDITORIALS & ADS

The News’ View represents the opinion of the majority of the members of the Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2014. Other content on this page with bylines represents the opinions of those authors and not necessarily those of the Managing Board. Opinions set forth in ads do not necessarily reflect the views of the Managing Board. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false or in poor taste. We do not verify the contents of any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co., Inc. and its officers, employees and agents disclaim any responsibility for all liabilities, injuries or damages arising from any ad. The Yale Daily News Publishing Co. ISSN 0890-2240

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

SUBMISSIONS

All letters submitted for publication must include the author’s name, phone number and description of Yale University affiliation.

Please limit letters to 250 words and guest columns to 750. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit letters and columns before publication. E-mail is the preferred method of submission.

Direct all letters, columns, artwork and inquiries to: Marissa Medansky and Dan Stein Opinion Editors Yale Daily News opinion@yaledailynews.com

COPYRIGHT 2012 — VOL. CXXXV, NO. 30

C

laude Levi Strauss, the father of structural anthropology, was often said to observe humans like ants, discerning universal laws that guided their behavior. Today’s anthill is Facebook; the universal law is the inevitability of misunderstandings.

Context is indeed king — what is acceptable in one place may be abominable in another. During the Orientation for International Students, one of my friends — a student from a conservative country — did not allow us to take photographs of him in our funny talent show costumes.

It would incense his friends if they saw it on Facebook, he said.

While I probably should have laughed it off or ignored it, the comment stuck with me.

For all the personal liberty afforded to us by virtue of our liberal education, why would someone care about what others sitting thousands of miles away from the Yale bubble think?

As I thought about it, I realized my friend’s situation struck

nearer to home. Along came Safety Dance, with its amazingly outrageous costumes and outfits reminiscent of the exaggeratedly colorful 80s. Post-Safety controversy aside, I had a wonderful time dancing and hanging out with my friends.

When the pictures from that night were put up on Facebook, the reality of the Yale bubble became clearer to me. My highschool acquaintances posted comments on my pictures that — while maybe too colloquial and mundane to appear here — suggested that I somehow had become a changed person.

I would have to be a fool to be disheartened by these snide asides from people on the other side of the world. But I was taken aback, and wondered how many other Yalies waste their time thinking about the reactions of people back home.

Only a few decades ago, the only way a Yalie from, say, the West Coast — let alone India — could communicate with friends and family back home was via a

letter or a long-distance phone call. Now, with the advent of Skype and Facebook, every dorm party can be streamed into the dorm rooms of high school friends.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t prefer returning to the Stone Age and replacing social media with carrier pigeons, but I find the overexposure a bit tedious.

Though we only can live in one city at once, we increasingly find ourselves also squeezed into the semi-real world of social media — wedged between where we came from and where we are now.

Perhaps the most inspiring speech I’ve heard so far at Yale was the address delivered by Dean Mary Miller during freshman orientation. During her speech, Miller asked us to leave the expectations of others behind and forge our own destiny at Yale: the heart of exploration and knowledge. Too many hours are lost Skyping girlfriends in another state or at another college, too much thought is given pondering comments from ran-

dom acquaintances. Too much energy is wasted carrying the baggage of the past.

Obviously, we are all free to interact with others as we deem fit — to deal with the past on our own terms. After all, we alone can make the decisions that affect us; we can’t outsource responsibility to others. That being said, the ghosts of the past should be only secondary to the exciting stuff that goes on at Yale.

I never imagined I could sit at a dining hall table and chat with someone, only to later realize my conversation partner was an ultra-famous professor emeritus. I never imagined my freshman adviser — the person helping me pick intro courses — would be researching a cure for cancer. But all this has happened — Yale has made it happen. And I’m not missing all of this for Facebook.

DHRUV AGGARWAL is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact him at dhruv.aggarwal@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

NEWS

“Today’s restaurant is theater on a grand scale.” MARIAN BURROS FOOD COLUMNIST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

CORRECTIONS MONDAY, OCT. 8

State restaurant week begins

The article “Anti-Semitism program hosts talks” misidentified Patrick Weil as Nicholas Weil.

Carmen Anthony Steakhouse of New Haven

Professors talk race with Dems

BY JACK NEWSHAM CONTRIBUTING REPORTER With four weeks until Election Day, professors David Blight and Elizabeth Alexander joined the Yale College Democrats on Monday night to discuss the effects of racial politics in the presidential race.

After thanking the Yale College Democrats for their efforts on behalf of Democratic candidates, Alexander began the conversation in the Branford College common room by talking about how voters can be “better readers of racial codes.”

She said academic skills can be useful for “decoding” the racial subtexts in messages conveyed

by President Barack Obama and former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney in their contest for the presidency.

Alexander also described the challenges Obama has faced during his tenure in an office that has historically been dominated by Caucasians. While she said that Romney “stands in as the white father of the heteronormative nation” in photographs that juxtapose him with his running mate Paul Ryan and their families, Alexander noted that the current First Family has had a difficult time defining itself as “the American family.”

At the same time, Alexander said Obama has had to avoid becoming “the spectacle of black male rage.” When he reaches out to black audiences, Alexander said, Obama’s language must be subtle when “calling up the specter of righteous black males.” Alexander also noted that such subtlety has deep cultural roots — historically, “smart black people get killed.”

Blight, the director of the Gilder Lehrmann Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, criticized the large-scale lack of youth participation in politics. “16 million Americans turned 18 since 2008,” he said. If half of them voted, “Obama would be

elected in a minute.”

Blight began by explaining past Republican efforts to appeal to minority voters, which he said ended during the 2004 campaign to reelect George W. Bush and his 2006 speech at the NAACP. He said the Republican party’s base lies with predominantly white, middle to upper-middle class Americans who “are not even close to a majority.”

Blight added that since 2008, the Republican party has said “‘forget black and brown people.’”

But Blight broke with Alexander on how Obama should engage Romney on the campaign. Asserting that the Republican party “is suppressing the vote of black people, brown people, poor people,” Blight said he thinks “Obama’s got to wag his finger in [Mitt Romney’s] face, and make him answer this.”

Because of Democratic party timidity, no one is pointing out the racist nature of voter ID laws except left-wing blogs, Blight said, mentioning Obama’s performance at last week’s debate in particular.

“That’s like motherhood!

Apple pie! The right to vote!”

Blight said. “Obama didn’t even bring [voter ID] up.”

Yale College Democrats membership coordinator Lincoln Mitchell ’15 commended the speakers, noting that “hiding from the angry-blackman stereotype can at times be crippling, because you need to be confrontational.”

Tyler Blackmon, a freshman in Jonathan Edwards college, said he enjoyed the talk, which was attended by roughly 20 students. He noted that while race is sometimes a sensitive subject of discussion, it is a central issue in the 2012 elections.

Alexander wrote and delivered a poem at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.

Consiglio’s

Sage American Restaurant

Contact JACK NEWSHAM at jack.newsham@yale.edu .

BY AMANDA CHAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Restaurants across Connecticut are participating in a statewide Restaurant Week by offering special menus for a multicourse meal with a fixed price of $20.12.

From Oct. 8 through Oct. 14, 100 restaurants in Connecticut will participate in the fifth annual Connecticut Restaurant Week, in which eateries statewide offer meals for a reduced price. In addition, participating restaurants will offer a Pink Drink Special as part of Pink Power, a year-long campaign to raise awareness and money for Connecticut breast cancer research sponsored by WTNH Channel 8 and Connecticut Breast Health Initiative.

Menus offered may include a three-course meal, two-for-one specials or a specialtypriced bottle of wine.

“Restaurant Week provides diners with a unique opportunity to go out and enjoy a great meal at a great price. Restaurants from Mystic to Stamford to Litchfield are participating in this year’s event,” said Nicole Griffin, executive director of Connecticut Restaurant Association, in a press release. “Restaurants and customers alike benefit from this great week of meals and deals. Connecticut is home to so many wonderful varieties of cuisines and Restaurant Week is a fantastic way to showcase them.”

According to the Connecticut Restaurant Week website, there are three restaurants in New Haven participating in the promotions: Carmen Anthony Steakhouse of New Haven, Consiglio’s and Sage American Restaurant. Toad’s Place will also feature a Pink Drink Special this week, according to the restaurant week’s website.

Connecticut Restaurant Week has given business a boost in years past, said Scott Scalabrino, the general manager of Carmen Anthony Steakhouse of New Haven. Though the increase in number of customers in years past has not been as noticeable as it typically is during the annual New Haven Restaurant Week in November, he said, the statewide Restaurant Week has definitely led to an influx of customers which he said he expects to see again this year.

But New Haven restaurants may not see much more business from Yalies this week.

Out of 20 students surveyed, none said that they were likely to take advantage of Restaurant Week promotions.

A major reason for students’ lack of interest in the promotion, the majority of students surveyed said, is because of the inaccessibility of the participating restaurants. All three of the New Haven restaurants participating in Restaurant Week are about a mile from Yale’s main campus. Many students also said they prefered eating in dining halls over restaurants.

“Twenty dollars isn’t all that cheap,” Daniel Kovalcik ’15 said. “And walking off campus is a hassle.”

The restaurants’ distance from campus may be hurting their name recognition among students, as one student, Kim Fabian ’15 said she was unfamiliar with the three participating restaurants.

New Haven Restaurant Week, Connecticut Restaurant Week’s citywide counterpart, will be from Nov. 11 through Nov. 16 this year.

Contact AMANDA CHAN at amanda.chan@yale.edu .

Environmentalist pledges preservation

BY JENNY DAI STAFF REPORTER Though Ecuador is 2,972 miles away from New Haven, Ivonne Baki, the leader of the government’s environmental initiative, plans to bring her cause to college campuses across America.

Baki — the Secretary of State of Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT initiative and the Ecuadorian ambassador to the U.S. from 1998-’02 — discussed her nation’s pledge to protect the Yasuní National Park from petroleum drilling in a Monday talk at the Yale School of Architecture’s Hastings Hall. Under the project, Ecuador pledges to keep roughly 800 million barrels of petroleum permanently underground, while also asking the international community to compensate the country with $3.6 billion — half the revenue the buried oil would have produced if it were exported in 2007.

“Yasuní means sacred land,” Baki said. “What we have over the Yasuní is by far more than what we

have under it.”

Baki said the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa began the Yasuní-ITT initiative in 2007 as a “gift to humanity.” She said the Ecuadorian government plans to invest the $3.6 billion in renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and hydroelectric energy.

The nation has collected $200 million thus far, she said, adding that it aims to recieve the rest within the next 12 years, which is the predicted length of time necessary for the entire economy to shift to sustainable energy.

Baki introduced the initiative at the talk through promotional videos and answered questions from a panel that consisted of Keller Easterling, professor at the School of Architecture; Alexander Felson, professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies and founder and director of the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory; Daniel Göhler, visiting scholar at Yale; and Chadwick Oliver, professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies and director of the

BY THE NUMBERS YASUNÍ PARK 20 23 10 1m

Percent of Ecuador’s oil reserve under Yasuní park Number of globally threatened mammal species whose critical habitat is Yasuní Number of primates in the Yasuní, including the threatened white-bellied spider monkey Hectares that make up the national mark

Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry.

Because the Yasuní-ITT concept is new and approaches climate change through prevention rather than remediaton, Baki said she finds it takes longer to gain support for her cause. Baki said she started a campaign in Ecuador last year to raise domestic awareness and has recently come to the United States to meet with corporations, international aid organizations and students at Yale and Georgetown. She added that she targets young people for support because she finds them to be the most sympathetic to her mission. “[It was] students from Yale that went to the Yasuní and found this fungus that dissolves plastic,” Baki said. “When I heard about that, I said ‘this is the place to be,’ especially because they care so much about environmental protection.”

According to Raúl Erazo Velarde, consul general of Ecuador in Connecticut, the consulate has also made an effort to contribute to the Yasuní-ITT initiative by establishing connections with relevant Connecticut civil society organizations and educating local public school students on the issue.

After the presentation, panelists and audience members said they appreciated Baki’s visit but voiced concerns about the practicality of the initiative.

Oliver said he was skeptical about whether Ecuador could uphold the commitment to leave the petroleum reserves untapped forever.

“The question is what lever-

JACOB GEIGER/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Ecuadorian environmentalist Dr. Ivonne Baki discussed her nation’s pledge to preserve the Yasuní National Park. age does everyone else have over Ecuador to ensure that you follow this,” he said.

Alark Saxena, a graduate student in the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences, said he also had doubts about the permanence of the pledge, as such promises are generally easier in theory than in practice. He added that he is particularly concerned about the government’s ability to

manage the loss in revenue that would have otherwise come from oil exports.

Clodia Lesnick, an Ecuadorian living in Bridgeport, Conn., said she supports Yasuní-ITT because of the impact it will have on worldwide environmental efforts.

“It’s not only important for the environment and it’s not only for my country or the U.S. but for all human beings,” she said.

The event is co-sponsored by the Yale School of Architecture, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry, Tropical Resources Institute, Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory and the Architecture/F&ES joint degree program.

Contact JENNY DAI at wenjing.dai@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT Murder leads to suicide SHWISHA FROM PAGE 1 iel Shwisha, might be heading to the Rustic Lane residence, Arciola said.

The New Haven and Westport police departments said they will work closely with each other to investigate any connection between the two incidents.

Repeated calls to the Electrix, Inc. facility went unanswered, but employees interviewed by the New Haven Register yesterday morning said there had been tensions between the two brothers over the family business.

The Secretary of State’s business listings identifies Haim Shwisha as president of Electrix, Inc., Gordon Shwisha as secretary and Daniel Shwisha as director.

According to its website, Electrix, Inc. “is an established architectural lighting fixture manufacturer” and has been in business since 1962.

Contact LORENZO LIGATO at lorenzo.ligato@yale.edu .

Fill this space here.

JOIN@YALEDAILYNEWS. COM

Horror-filled moments came in the early morning hours of the April 13, 1910, as a fire in the chair shop at the New Haven Jail occurred. The blaze melted bars in the jail and brought death to six firemen and injury to dozens others. Box 63, named after the notorious fire call box number 63 pulled on that tragic morning, called the brave men of Engine House No 3 to fight what would become the most devastating blaze in NHFD

Businesses reject student parties BARS FROM PAGE 1 come in to drink and party, that’s not going to happen.”

Goodwin said he began to think more harshly about state laws on alcohol consumption after the University released its new policies for off-campus parties. While in the past the club hosted “parties with cocktail-hour food and mixers” for student organizations, now only patrons over the age of 21 are allowed into the club’s grounds during late-night hours.

But University administrators said they had no involvement in the club’s policy change. Meeske said the University has not officially communicated with local bars.

“We trust local bars to obey the Connecticut laws, so they are a very good place for students to hold events,” Meeske said.

Carl Carbone, a managing partner at Box 63 on Elm Street, said the venue adopted a “more aggressive approach” to the issue of underage drinking after the University implemented its new policy.

Starting this fall, Carbone said, staff at the bar have started to scan all patrons’ IDs and monitor the bar on the second floor of the late-night hotspot to ensure no underage individuals sneak into the establishment. While Carbone confirmed that he was never officially approached by the University, he said he was involved in informal discussions with police officers and administrators.

“It is clear that the University frowns upon businesses that serve alcohol to students,” Carbone said.

Despite some bars’ efforts to enforce stricter alcohol policies, several student organizations hosted events at off-campus venues this weekend.

The International Student Organization held a party at Oaxaca Kitchen Saturday night and the Yale International Relations Association hosted an event Friday at Kudeta on Temple Street. ISO President Carl Sandberg ’14 and YIRA Executive Director Sophia Clementi ’14 could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

The off-campus party regulations were announced to students in an Aug. 10 email.

Contact LORENZO LIGATO at lorenzo.ligato@yale.edu .

SARAH SULLIVAN/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The International Student Organization held a party at Oaxaca Kitchen Saturday night without any problems.

DESIGN We’re the best-looking desk at the YDN.

We see you. design@yaledailynews.com

Box 63

r e c y c l e y o u r y d n d a i l y

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.” MALCOLM X AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSLIM MINISTER AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST

Officers say changes jeopardizes student safety SECURITY FROM PAGE 1 “Ever since we unionized, the University has been making our lives miserable,” said one source with close ties to Yale Security and about 10 years of service to the University, adding that at some points during the weekend, Yale Security “only [has] one person patrolling all of the garages at Yale.”

“They’re messing around with our shifts, cutting them up in ways that aren’t in the contract, and that’s a breach of contract,” another source close to Yale Security with almost 20 years of service to the University said.

“But the administration is saying ‘management’s rights’ mean they can do whatever they want.

They’re playing games with us.”

Since September, administrators have reassigned security officers — traditionally posted inside University facilities — to street patrol roles, replacing professionally trained Yale Police Department officers.

Unlike Yale Police officers, Yale Security guards are unarmed and not authorized to detain suspects or make arrests. Lindner,

who oversees both Yale Police and Yale Security, said that management’s rights gives administrators “the right to think about how to run and deploy” security forces.

Lindner said the changes were part of a push to establish security officers as more visible presences on campus for both members of the Yale community and potential criminals. She said that while there have been changes to patrol assignments, walking patrols for security officers are not a new occurrence, as Yale Security guards have traditionally completed tours on foot, bike and segway as part of their duties.

“Instead of walking through the residential college, [the security officer] will now step outside,” Lindner said. “They have visible neon jackets so they’re much more of a presence.”

But the sources with close ties to Yale Security said security officers see these changes as punitive. The source with almost 20 years of service said security officers are now stationed along the Farmington Canal, where

an undergraduate was assaulted on Sunday. He added that security officers ought to be provided with training and self-defense if they are to be stationed in areas that traditionally have seen high crime rates like Farmington Canal.

Lindner said security officers are “fully capable” of carrying out their job, and she refuted the claim that the they are not adequately trained for their positions.

“They wouldn’t be working at Yale University if they weren’t competent professionals who were trained and know how to handle their professional duties.

No one’s asking them to be police [officers],” Lindner said.

She added that a Yale Security officer’s job is to prevent crime, with duties like providing Safe Rides services and calling Yale Police officers during any criminal incidents.

But the source with about 20 years of service disagreed and expressed concerns about security officers’ safety.

“The administration is putting us where all the crime is the worst — they want us in the

problem areas with a bright green shirt,” the source said.

“We’ve got a target on our backs.”

The source who served the University for about ten years expressed concern that the administration will work to phase out Yale Security by increasingly hiring privately contracted — and therefore nonunion — personnel referred to as “casuals” as security officers retire.

They have visible neon jackets so they’re much more of a presence.

JANET LINDNER Associate vice president for administration Lindner said administrators have not cut any security or police officers and does not plan to reduce the hours of current employees in favor of privately contracted “casuals.” She explained that while Yale Security is currently made up of

full-time employees, part-time employees and some “casuals,” the administration is moving toward a workforce that largely consists of regular part-time employees who work about 20 hours a week. Lindner added that this accommodates many officers who have two jobs.

But despite Yale’s hiring criteria that “casuals” possess a strong knowledge of Yale, the source with about ten years of service to the University said that these unaffiliated security guards do not know the University as well as Yale Security officers and added that the “casuals” receive overtime work when unionized officers do not.

The source also said that the union brought charges of unfair labor practices against the University last week and added that the union is considering a vote of no-confidence in security management in the near future.

Lindner said she was unaware of these charges and added that officers can utilize the grievance process within their contracts to formalize any complaints.

Security Chief Union Steward Mike Rubino declined to com-

ment.

Yale Security voted to unionize in November 2010, citing concerns for job security and alleged departmental mismanagement. Throughout the process, the administration challenged unionization efforts through the National Labor Relations Board, successfully disputing Yale Security’s eligibility to unionize under an AFLCIO union and later contesting ballots in its unionization bid.

After about a year of negotiations and 15 bargaining sessions, Yale Security officers, now represented by the International Union of Security Police and Fire Professions of America (SPFPA), reached a formal contract agreement with the University in November 2011.

The SPFPA represents approximately 140 Yale Security Officers.

Everett Rosenfeld contributed reporting.

Contact JANE DARBY MENTON at jane.darby@yale.edu. Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

Federal officers handle suspects in New Haven TRIAL FROM PAGE 1 extradition arrangements between the United States and Great Britain.

“Today we have seen the failure of our judiciary,” a British group called “We are Babar Ahmad” said in a press release Friday.

Cindy Buys, a professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Law specializing in extradition law, said the length of time Ahmad and Ahsan have been held without charges is primarily due to their own efforts in filing numerous appeals seeking to prevent extradition in British courts as well as at the European Court of Human Rights.

In a statement, the U.S. Attorney’s District of Connecticut Office commended those involved in the extradition process and said it continues to seek a fair trial for the suspects.

“The government’s commitment to presenting this case to a jury during a fair and open trial has never wavered,” U.S. Attorney David Fein said.

Ahmad and Ahsan’s situation is unusual compared to other terrorism cases because the suspects will be tried in U.S. Federal Court rather than sent to Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. dentention facility in Cuba that traditionally houses terror suspects.

Buys said use of federal courts rather than sentencing at Guantanamo Bay is likely a provision of preexisting extradition agreements between the U.S. and Great Britain. Citing other international extradition agreements,

Buys said more terror suspects might be tried in the same way as Ahmad and Ahasan over the coming years due to the American military’s diminishing presence in the Middle East.

“Part of the reason they’re going to federal court is that we did not caputre them ourselves nor were they turned over to us abroad on the battlefield like many of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay,” Buys said. “This might be more common in the future.”

Neither the mayor’s office nor the New Haven Police Department have indicated any concerns over the safety of the New Haven community as a result of the court appearances. Though Ahmad and Ahsan are being tried in New Haven, the U.S. Marshal’s Office has handled the security preparations surrounding their arrival.

“It’s not our show. This is entirely federal. We have absolutely no involvement whatsoever,” New Haven Police Department Spokesman David Hartman said.

The U.S. Marshal’s Office could not be reached for comment.

Before his arrest in 2004, Ahmad worked in the IT department at the University of London, and Ahsan was training to become a librarian at the time of his arrest in 2006. If convicted, the two face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Contact MATTHEW LLOYDTHOMAS at matthew.lloyd-thomas@yale.edu .

KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ashfaq Ahmad, father of Babar Ahmad, speaks to media outside The Royal Courts of Justice in London Friday, Oct. 5, 2012.

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.” AMY WINEHOUSE MUSICIAN

Professor talks alcohol misuse

Drug treats depression in hours

BY BRIANNE BOWEN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER A drug known on the street as “Special K” could be the newest innovation in anti-depression treatment.

In a review article published in “Science” on Oct. 5, Ronald Duman and George Aghajanian, psychiatry professors at the Yale School of Medicine, brought together more than a decade of research on the drug ketamine and its potential to become the first new class of anti-depressant medication in over 50 years. Though ketamine causes psychosis in high doses, scientists have found that low doses can reverse the signs of depression — and even suicidal urges — in just a few hours.

“The idea that a drug could produce a rapid improvement rather than taking several months to feel better is really an important idea and it really challenges the thinking about how anti-depressant medications might work,” Yale Chair of Psychiatry John Krystal said. “I think [it provides] a lot of hope for the future for the treatment of depression.”

Krystal, along with his collaborator Dennis Charney, was the first to link ketamine to the alleviation of depression in the 1990s. Ketamine has long been used as a pediatric and veterinary anesthetic and was originally explored by psychiatrists as a way to study schizophrenia, Krystal said.

Traditional anti-depressants, known as SSRIs, have been shown to take an average of seven weeks to produce improvement in major depressive disorder, Krystal said. Patients must take medication daily, and for one third of these patients, current medications provide no relief, he added. By contrast, ketamine rapidly reverses the disease’s physiological and behavioral effects.

Ketamine has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression in 70 percent of those patients who previously did not respond to treatment, Duman said.

Duman’s work has contributed to the understanding of the pathway by which ketamine works. While SSRIs block the re-uptake of serotonin, a neurotransmitter commonly thought to contribute to feelings of well-being, ketamine acts on the glutamate neurotransmitter system, which mediates the fast transfer of information in the brain.

“We think that’s why ketamine is able to produce such a rapid response,” Duman said.

While chronic stress and depression lead to the loss of synapses — key con-

According to a recent study, child abuse is on the rise.

Yale School of Medicine professor of pediatrics John Leventhal and Julie Gaither GRD ’14 have determined that cases of child abuse may have increased in the past decade.

The results of their study, which was published in the November issue of the journal “Pediatrics,” show a 4.9 percent escalation in child abuse cases from 1997 to 2009.

These results conflict with the data from an earlier study conducted

by University of New Hampshire sociology professor David Finkelhor, which indicated a 55 percent decrease in instances of physical abuse of children in the United States from 1992 to 2009.

Alice Forrester, executive director of the Clifford W. Beers Clinic child and family advocacy center, said she was “not surprised” by Leventhal’s results. Given the current state of the economy, Forrester said, many families face economic pressures, which can lead to yelling and domestic violence.

The studies completed by Leventhal and Finkelhor differ in several ways, most notably in their data collection techniques. Finkelhor considered “substantiated cases of physical abuse” — cases which have undergone legal review by a child protective services commissioner and are registered in the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect data system — while Leventhal scrutinized reports from the Kids’ Inpatient Database.

Leventhal said he considered all

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have developed a standardized checklist that evaluates the success of techniques emergency department physicians use when administering brief interventions to patients. These brief interventions aim to remedy patient misuse of alcohol, and the newly developed tool is the first of its kind to measure their effectiveness. Inspired by an earlier study regarding the effectiveness of brief intervention, Michael V. Pantalon, a research scientist in Emergency Medicine at Yale and lead author of the study, spoke with the News on Tuesday afternoon.

nections between cells that play a critical role in all brain function, including mood and emotion — ketamine reverses this degenerative process. The drug both stimulates synaptic growth and removes inhibitions to regeneration.

“Ketamine effectively takes your foot off the break and steps on the gas,” Krystal said.

The review’s findings are “totally against what we’ve always believed about degenerative disorders,” said Aghajanian, the paper’s coauthor.

“Depression is a neurodegenerative disease, and people long thought that it was very hard to reverse such a thing,” Aghajanian said. “That’s the amazing thing about ketamine — it reverses the changes within 24 hours.”

Ketamine is already FDA-approved as an anesthetic, which has led some doctors to begin prescribing it “offlabel” to severely depressed or suicidal patients. This practice is concerning, Krystal said, because the drug is still in the experimental stages and has considerable risks, from potential abuse to side effects that may resemble schizophrenia. In addition, patients relapse after one to two weeks, losing the new synapses formed and the corresponding improvement in their depression.

Research into the safety of re-administering the drug is still ongoing.

Aghajanian said researchers are now looking for safer alternatives to ketamine. These alternatives — several of which are currently in clinical trials — would hopefully follow the same pathway as ketamine but cause fewer side effects, he added. Another area for further development is the drug’s method of administration. Ketamine is currently administered intravenously, but future research will explore ways to deliver the drug orally or intra-nasally.

“All this work has really stimulated a back and forth between bench and bedside research around the world,” said Carlos Zarate, a researcher in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “So that’s the exciting part — it’s actually luring industry back into psychiatry, at least on the depression side.”

Each year, major depressive disorder affects 14.8 million Americans over the age of 18 — 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the NIMH.

First off, congratulaQ:tions on the development

of this new tool. Can you briefly describe the findings of the study?

A

: After finding out that our brief intervention works for ER patients, we wanted to make sure that we had a way for people to implement the brief intervention in the way that it was meant to be implemented.

The only way to do that with counseling intervention was to develop a checklist that people can use to rate someone else’s implementation and make sure they were doing it correctly. And so based on our data in a prior study where we studied the effectiveness of the brief intervention, we developed a scale that captured the essence of the intervention and rated the several hundred audiotapes. After analyzing all that data, we boiled it down to an eight item version that captured the heart, the essence, of the intervention, such that if doctors or nurses or TAs were doing those eight things, that they were hitting the heart of it and would like to get the intervention to be as effective as the ones in our prior study.

sort of things are Q:onWhat this checklist?

Contact BRIANNE BOWEN at brianne.bowen@yale.edu .

Child abuse on the rise, study shows

BY KATHRYN CRANDALL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

BY ISABELLA D’AGOSTO CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

cases of children hospitalized for severe injuries caused by physical abuse and did not limit himself solely to cases that had gone through an official legal process. Leventhal said he chose this method because he and his colleagues nationwide “were seeing the contrary” of Finkelhor’s earlier results.

This contradiction, he said, could be attributed to the increased difficulty of substantiating physical abuse cases over the years. Leventhal added that an increase in the number of hospitalizations for minor injuries caused by physical abuse could also play a role in the overall increase in child abuse cases.

Regardless, Leventhal’s study stresses that child abuse remains a prevalent issue in society today. He added that 54 percent of the hospitalizations studied were for children under the age of one and that the prevalence of abuse should provoke national consideration of injury prevention for young children.

Janna Wagner, co-founder of the New Haven early childhood education foundation All Our Kin, said early childhood programs may present a solution.

“If [these programs] builds reciprocal and responsive relationships with families, they can support families in crisis and, ideally, are able to recognize signs of abuse and neglect while also supporting positive parenting strategies.”

A report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds, according to ChildHelp.

Contact KATHRYN CRANDALL at kathryn.crandall@yale.edu .

A

Resilience proves malleable

BY JULIET RYAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Research shows there is a secret formula to resilience — with practice and training, almost anyone can learn to better adapt to high-stress situations.

Steven Southwick, professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and Dennis Charney, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Mount Sinai Hospital (who formerly worked at Yale), began researching resilience at Yale University 15 years ago. Their article in the Oct. 5 issue of Science Magazine enumerates the factors that allow people to lead successful lives even after experiencing extremely stressful situations.

“We were working with patients with PTSD and depression, and it occurred to us that we could learn from people who had also been under a lot of stress but who had not developed depression,” Charney said.

Southwick and Charney gathered information from interviews conducted with groups of people including prisoners of war, special forces and victims of abuse and natural disasters. The team also interviewed people living in poverty in inner cities and first responders to 9/11 calls, Charney said.

Each person interviewed experienced stressful situations but had not demonstrated any signs of mental illness. All had certain psychological and neurobiological features in common, Southwick said.

“We kept hearing the same things from all the different groups,” Charney said.

Charney said there are ten factors that make someone resilient. One of the most important qualities, he said, is realistic optimism — the ability to clearly identify challenges and overcome them.

“The real skill is learning to accept that which you truly can’t change and focus instead on what you can change,” Southwick said.

Another important aspect of resilience, Southwick said, is the presence of social support. Southwick and Charney’s research findings showed a very strong association between how extensive and supportive one’s social network is with one’s ability to manage stress and trauma. When faced with a stressful situation in the presence of trusted friends, Southwick said, harmful stress-related chemicals are muted by oxytocin, a compound related to attachment and other pro-social behaviors.

Many people are far more resilient that they think and have a far greater capacity to rise to the occasion.

STEVEN SOUTHWICK Professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine Southwick said stress is not necessarily bad — someone who is able to adapt to stressful situations is able to increase his or her resilience. In situations beyond one’s control, such as child abuse and combat, though, overwhelming stress tends to be toxic to the nervous system, he added.

Research participants who said they maintained control in unpredictable situations often were able to avoid developing PTSD and depression, he said. Those who were overwhelmed by uncontrollable stress, he added, were more likely to suffer from mental health disorders because they produced consistently high lev-

els of stress-related chemicals, such as cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are harmful to the cardiovascular and nervous systems.

“Stress is part of our lives,” said Bruce McEwen, professor of neuroscience and neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University. “Early life experience with stress is very important — the more adversity that the child experiences, the more likely they are to develop mental health issues.”

Alternatively, McEwen said, children who grow up in an entirely stress-free environment may not able to build up the right tools to deal with hardship, and the feeling of empowerment in overcoming challenges is very important in developing resilience.

Southwick said there are simple ways to bolster resilience and deal with the negative effects of stress.

Exercise, sleep, good nutrition, vacation and meditation can all help suppress toxic levels of stress chemicals.

Studies have shown that after one year, a constant exercise regimen has the same effect as the antidepressant Zoloft in patients with mild to moderate depression, he added.

While there is a genetic component to resilience, Southwick said its influence is less important than one might expect.

“The biggest insight that we have realized is that many people are far more resilient that they think and have a far greater capacity to rise to the occasion,” he added.

The research duo published a book called “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges” in July.

Contact JULIET RYAN at juliet.ryan@yale.edu .

: The intervention that we were measuring

with the checklist is called the Brief Negotiation Interview, and it has four simple steps to it and the checklist items for step one, for example, would be: ‘Did the practitioner ask for the patient’s permission to talk about alcohol?’ It might seem like a simple item on the checklist, but we’ve found over and over again that since it’s such a sensitive issue, if you ask people permission to talk about it, they’re much more likely to open up. That was one item. Another item is, it may sound slightly counter intuitive, but we asked people to rate how ready they were to cut down on their drinking on a scale of one to 10 — where one means not at all, and 10 means totally — and they would give us their rating. Let’s say they said only a four, for example. The next question would be ‘Did the doctor ask the patient why he or she did not pick a lower number?’, which everybody sort of does a double take on. But that question is the heart of this intervention where we’re asking people why they have any motivation to cut down on their drinking, versus the more traditional and ineffective question, which is ‘Why aren’t you more ready to cut down on your drinking?’

That does not work. So the key checklist question was asking people why they were not less ready to cut down.

What was the research Q:process like for figuring this out? Were there any significant challenges faced?

A

: It’s important to know that this was sort of a study within a study. The development of the new tool was a study within a larger study that was evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention. So the effec-

tiveness of the intervention, that happened, and was published several months prior to this. And then the checklist was developed within that process. This was a study that recruited almost 900 patients in a very busy, chaotic emergency department. One challenge was to convince physicians and TAs at Yale, New Haven and New York that they were equipped to do yet another thing. They always counsel patients about alcohol, but here was a new way to do it briefly and to get at those people who are not already alcoholics. So the first challenge was to get real world practitioners onboard and convince them that we can train them well. But with this checklist it really made it much, much easier. People were able to see exactly what we were looking for and they said, “Oh we can do that. All we have to do is say the things on this laminated card that you give us?”

And we said yes. It was challenging to recruit patients, to train practitioners, but with a manualized approach and a checklist to show them that they can really easily figure out what they need to do, it went much smoother.

How would you describe Q:your role as “ lead author” of the study?

A

: I’m sort of your quality control in counseling intervention, if you will. I’ve done this for 15 years now at Yale and so I’ve become an expert in tracking and supervising people who are implementing counseling interventions in randomized controlled trials. For me it was a bit of a change to do this within the emergency room, but it was really exciting to be able to find that something as quick as 7 minutes really works. It was even more exciting to find out that we can disseminate it broadly because anyone who wants to do this now will know how well they’re actually doing it and how likely they are to get good results. That’s what this new tool gives us.

Q

: What sort of effect do you predict the study will have?

A

: Well, that’s a great question. For a number of years — say, in the last five to seven years — we’ve had really good evidence that brief interventions around substance abuse, done by physicians, work. So we’ve known brief interventions work, but we have not yet had any kind of validated scale or tool like this one that will tell people whether or not they are doing it correctly. Sure, if the counseling intervention works, that’s great, but it can only be broadly disseminated if people know how well they’re doing it. That’s what the effectiveness rests on. It’s different than when you study a medication. You know what compound is in that tablet, and you know it’s going to work when you give it to people; you don’t need the same sort of quality control. So my prediction for the impact here is that now physicians more broadly — especially in the ER — wil be more likely to do brief intervention because this checklist will show exactly what is expected of them, and it makes it much easier to implement it when you know it’s effective and you know exactly what you need to do to make it effective.

you have any furQ:therDoresearch plans in this topic?

A

: Yes, so we are now going to apply this tool to brief interventions done in emergency rooms that have to do with opiate-dependent patients, as well as people who are smokers who are trying to quit with brief intervention. So the new tool will be adapted for those two populations and broadly disseminated to other investigators. That’s the key here.

Before this study, we didn’t have a scale like this that was validated. Now that we do, our hope is to broadly disseminate it to other brief intervention researchers so that we can all know how well people need to do the intervention in order for it to be effective.

Contact ISABELLA D’AGOSTO at isabella.dagosto@yale.edu .

OCD Research Clinic preps for future

BY LEAH MOTZKIN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER For the past 25 years, the Yale Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Research Clinic has been at the forefront of groundbreaking research to help the comprehension and treatment of OCD. Under the leadership of Director Christopher Pittenger ’94 GRD ’94 and Assistant Director Michael Bloch, the research center has continued to gain renown for its clinical and lab-based OCD research. As OCD Awareness Week — which lasts from Oct. 8 until Oct. 14.

— begins, the clinic continues its focus on raising awareness of the disorder within the New Haven community.

The disorder, Pittenger said, affects 2 percent of the population on average.

Symptoms of the disorder include a fear of being contaminated, making mistakes and hurting oneself or others. These fears are often accompanied by compulsions to act in ways that alleviate these stresses, such as excessive cleaning or elaborate rituals. While it is rare to cure the disease, the clinic aims to alleviate these symptoms in OCD patients so that they can function on a normal level.

OCD is not just what you see on a television program.

SUZANNE WASYLINK Nurse manager at Yale OCD Research Clinic Pittenger said the clinic’s current research focuses on the brain’s glutamate neurotransmitter system. The clinic’s research examines the neurobiological and genetic abnormalities in the brain with the ultimate goal of normalizing these irregularities. To do so, he said, the researchers are studying the effects of Riluzole, an FDA-approved drug that is used to treat Amyotrophic

Lateral Sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease, on OCD patients.

So far, Riluzole has been shown to help about two-thirds of trial patients alleviate OCD symptoms.

The glutamate hypothesis — which states glutamate may play a role in normalizing OCD symptoms — has gained repute in the field, Pettinger said.

Genetic evidence, MR Spectrocopy results and cerebral fluid measurements have continued to show positive signs that the clinic is pursuing the correct path, he added.

The clinic’s project scope will expand over the next five years, as two new studies will complement the current work on glutamate, Pittenger said.

One is a five-year project that questions whether the different manifestations of OCD are different varieties of one disease or symptoms of a different disorder. To answer this question, the clinic will scan the brains of 100 people with OCD and 100 control subjects.

“I’m trying to get not just measures of glutamate, but measures of basically everything — structure, brain function, intelligence tests … ” Pittenger said.

Ultimately, he added, the data they receive will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate students who seek a database of comparative brain scans for research.

The second project is a biofeedback study that could ultimately find a drugfree way of alleviating the anxiety associated with OCD. The project, Pittenger said, involves training OCD patients to control the parts of their brains associated with the disorder by informing patients of their brain activity as it is monitored.

The clinic hopes to plan OCD awareness events to both help people with OCD understand what resources are available to them and to change public perception of the disorder. The clinic’s nurse manager, Suzanne Wasylink, said she believes providing the community

VICTOR KANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Research Clinic hopes to increase awareness of the disorder and alleviate symptoms. with a general education about what OCD is may be the best way to help the change the stigma surrounding mental illness.

“OCD is not just what you see on a television program,” she said.

Portrayal of the disorder and other mental illnesses in popular culture often

show it to be either dangerous or quirky, said clinic research assistant Mac Kelly.

This portrayal, he added, proves problematic because it either unjustly vilifies people with OCD or trivializes their condition.

The clinic was founded as a treatment center in the 1980s by physicians

Wayne Goodman and Dennis Charney.

The research center was responsible for the first clinical trials of both SSRIs and Neuroleptics, the medications most commonly used to treat OCD. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

“Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.” AMY WINEHOUSE MUSICIAN

Professor talks alcohol misuse

Drug treats depression in hours

BY BRIANNE BOWEN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER A drug known on the street as “Special K” could be the newest innovation in anti-depression treatment.

In a review article published in “Science” on Oct. 5, Ronald Duman and George Aghajanian, psychiatry professors at the Yale School of Medicine, brought together more than a decade of research on the drug ketamine and its potential to become the first new class of anti-depressant medication in over 50 years. Though ketamine causes psychosis in high doses, scientists have found that low doses can reverse the signs of depression — and even suicidal urges — in just a few hours.

“The idea that a drug could produce a rapid improvement rather than taking several months to feel better is really an important idea and it really challenges the thinking about how anti-depressant medications might work,” Yale Chair of Psychiatry John Krystal said. “I think [it provides] a lot of hope for the future for the treatment of depression.”

Krystal, along with his collaborator Dennis Charney, was the first to link ketamine to the alleviation of depression in the 1990s. Ketamine has long been used as a pediatric and veterinary anesthetic and was originally explored by psychiatrists as a way to study schizophrenia, Krystal said.

Traditional anti-depressants, known as SSRIs, have been shown to take an average of seven weeks to produce improvement in major depressive disorder, Krystal said. Patients must take medication daily, and for one third of these patients, current medications provide no relief, he added. By contrast, ketamine rapidly reverses the disease’s physiological and behavioral effects.

Ketamine has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression in 70 percent of those patients who previously did not respond to treatment, Duman said.

Duman’s work has contributed to the understanding of the pathway by which ketamine works. While SSRIs block the re-uptake of serotonin, a neurotransmitter commonly thought to contribute to feelings of well-being, ketamine acts on the glutamate neurotransmitter system, which mediates the fast transfer of information in the brain.

“We think that’s why ketamine is able to produce such a rapid response,” Duman said.

While chronic stress and depression lead to the loss of synapses — key con-

According to a recent study, child abuse is on the rise.

Yale School of Medicine professor of pediatrics John Leventhal and Julie Gaither GRD ’14 have determined that cases of child abuse may have increased in the past decade.

The results of their study, which was published in the November issue of the journal “Pediatrics,” show a 4.9 percent escalation in child abuse cases from 1997 to 2009.

These results conflict with the data from an earlier study conducted

by University of New Hampshire sociology professor David Finkelhor, which indicated a 55 percent decrease in instances of physical abuse of children in the United States from 1992 to 2009.

Alice Forrester, executive director of the Clifford W. Beers Clinic child and family advocacy center, said she was “not surprised” by Leventhal’s results. Given the current state of the economy, Forrester said, many families face economic pressures, which can lead to yelling and domestic violence.

The studies completed by Leventhal and Finkelhor differ in several ways, most notably in their data collection techniques. Finkelhor considered “substantiated cases of physical abuse” — cases which have undergone legal review by a child protective services commissioner and are registered in the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect data system — while Leventhal scrutinized reports from the Kids’ Inpatient Database.

Leventhal said he considered all

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have developed a standardized checklist that evaluates the success of techniques emergency department physicians use when administering brief interventions to patients. These brief interventions aim to remedy patient misuse of alcohol, and the newly developed tool is the first of its kind to measure their effectiveness. Inspired by an earlier study regarding the effectiveness of brief intervention, Michael V. Pantalon, a research scientist in Emergency Medicine at Yale and lead author of the study, spoke with the News on Tuesday afternoon.

nections between cells that play a critical role in all brain function, including mood and emotion — ketamine reverses this degenerative process. The drug both stimulates synaptic growth and removes inhibitions to regeneration.

“Ketamine effectively takes your foot off the break and steps on the gas,” Krystal said.

The review’s findings are “totally against what we’ve always believed about degenerative disorders,” said Aghajanian, the paper’s coauthor.

“Depression is a neurodegenerative disease, and people long thought that it was very hard to reverse such a thing,” Aghajanian said. “That’s the amazing thing about ketamine — it reverses the changes within 24 hours.”

Ketamine is already FDA-approved as an anesthetic, which has led some doctors to begin prescribing it “offlabel” to severely depressed or suicidal patients. This practice is concerning, Krystal said, because the drug is still in the experimental stages and has considerable risks, from potential abuse to side effects that may resemble schizophrenia. In addition, patients relapse after one to two weeks, losing the new synapses formed and the corresponding improvement in their depression.

Research into the safety of re-administering the drug is still ongoing.

Aghajanian said researchers are now looking for safer alternatives to ketamine. These alternatives — several of which are currently in clinical trials — would hopefully follow the same pathway as ketamine but cause fewer side effects, he added. Another area for further development is the drug’s method of administration. Ketamine is currently administered intravenously, but future research will explore ways to deliver the drug orally or intra-nasally.

“All this work has really stimulated a back and forth between bench and bedside research around the world,” said Carlos Zarate, a researcher in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “So that’s the exciting part — it’s actually luring industry back into psychiatry, at least on the depression side.”

Each year, major depressive disorder affects 14.8 million Americans over the age of 18 — 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the NIMH.

First off, congratulaQ:tions on the development

of this new tool. Can you briefly describe the findings of the study?

A

: After finding out that our brief intervention works for ER patients, we wanted to make sure that we had a way for people to implement the brief intervention in the way that it was meant to be implemented.

The only way to do that with counseling intervention was to develop a checklist that people can use to rate someone else’s implementation and make sure they were doing it correctly. And so based on our data in a prior study where we studied the effectiveness of the brief intervention, we developed a scale that captured the essence of the intervention and rated the several hundred audiotapes. After analyzing all that data, we boiled it down to an eight item version that captured the heart, the essence, of the intervention, such that if doctors or nurses or TAs were doing those eight things, that they were hitting the heart of it and would like to get the intervention to be as effective as the ones in our prior study.

sort of things are Q:onWhat this checklist?

Contact BRIANNE BOWEN at brianne.bowen@yale.edu .

Child abuse on the rise, study shows

BY KATHRYN CRANDALL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

BY ISABELLA D’AGOSTO CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

cases of children hospitalized for severe injuries caused by physical abuse and did not limit himself solely to cases that had gone through an official legal process. Leventhal said he chose this method because he and his colleagues nationwide “were seeing the contrary” of Finkelhor’s earlier results.

This contradiction, he said, could be attributed to the increased difficulty of substantiating physical abuse cases over the years. Leventhal added that an increase in the number of hospitalizations for minor injuries caused by physical abuse could also play a role in the overall increase in child abuse cases.

Regardless, Leventhal’s study stresses that child abuse remains a prevalent issue in society today. He added that 54 percent of the hospitalizations studied were for children under the age of one and that the prevalence of abuse should provoke national consideration of injury prevention for young children.

Janna Wagner, co-founder of the New Haven early childhood education foundation All Our Kin, said early childhood programs may present a solution.

“If [these programs] builds reciprocal and responsive relationships with families, they can support families in crisis and, ideally, are able to recognize signs of abuse and neglect while also supporting positive parenting strategies.”

A report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds, according to ChildHelp.

Contact KATHRYN CRANDALL at kathryn.crandall@yale.edu .

A

Resilience proves malleable

BY JULIET RYAN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Research shows there is a secret formula to resilience — with practice and training, almost anyone can learn to better adapt to high-stress situations.

Steven Southwick, professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, and Dennis Charney, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Mount Sinai Hospital (who formerly worked at Yale), began researching resilience at Yale University 15 years ago. Their article in the Oct. 5 issue of Science Magazine enumerates the factors that allow people to lead successful lives even after experiencing extremely stressful situations.

“We were working with patients with PTSD and depression, and it occurred to us that we could learn from people who had also been under a lot of stress but who had not developed depression,” Charney said.

Southwick and Charney gathered information from interviews conducted with groups of people including prisoners of war, special forces and victims of abuse and natural disasters. The team also interviewed people living in poverty in inner cities and first responders to 9/11 calls, Charney said.

Each person interviewed experienced stressful situations but had not demonstrated any signs of mental illness. All had certain psychological and neurobiological features in common, Southwick said.

“We kept hearing the same things from all the different groups,” Charney said.

Charney said there are ten factors that make someone resilient. One of the most important qualities, he said, is realistic optimism — the ability to clearly identify challenges and overcome them.

“The real skill is learning to accept that which you truly can’t change and focus instead on what you can change,” Southwick said.

Another important aspect of resilience, Southwick said, is the presence of social support. Southwick and Charney’s research findings showed a very strong association between how extensive and supportive one’s social network is with one’s ability to manage stress and trauma. When faced with a stressful situation in the presence of trusted friends, Southwick said, harmful stress-related chemicals are muted by oxytocin, a compound related to attachment and other pro-social behaviors.

Many people are far more resilient that they think and have a far greater capacity to rise to the occasion.

STEVEN SOUTHWICK Professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine Southwick said stress is not necessarily bad — someone who is able to adapt to stressful situations is able to increase his or her resilience. In situations beyond one’s control, such as child abuse and combat, though, overwhelming stress tends to be toxic to the nervous system, he added.

Research participants who said they maintained control in unpredictable situations often were able to avoid developing PTSD and depression, he said. Those who were overwhelmed by uncontrollable stress, he added, were more likely to suffer from mental health disorders because they produced consistently high lev-

els of stress-related chemicals, such as cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are harmful to the cardiovascular and nervous systems.

“Stress is part of our lives,” said Bruce McEwen, professor of neuroscience and neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University. “Early life experience with stress is very important — the more adversity that the child experiences, the more likely they are to develop mental health issues.”

Alternatively, McEwen said, children who grow up in an entirely stress-free environment may not able to build up the right tools to deal with hardship, and the feeling of empowerment in overcoming challenges is very important in developing resilience.

Southwick said there are simple ways to bolster resilience and deal with the negative effects of stress.

Exercise, sleep, good nutrition, vacation and meditation can all help suppress toxic levels of stress chemicals.

Studies have shown that after one year, a constant exercise regimen has the same effect as the antidepressant Zoloft in patients with mild to moderate depression, he added.

While there is a genetic component to resilience, Southwick said its influence is less important than one might expect.

“The biggest insight that we have realized is that many people are far more resilient that they think and have a far greater capacity to rise to the occasion,” he added.

The research duo published a book called “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges” in July.

Contact JULIET RYAN at juliet.ryan@yale.edu .

: The intervention that we were measuring

with the checklist is called the Brief Negotiation Interview, and it has four simple steps to it and the checklist items for step one, for example, would be: ‘Did the practitioner ask for the patient’s permission to talk about alcohol?’ It might seem like a simple item on the checklist, but we’ve found over and over again that since it’s such a sensitive issue, if you ask people permission to talk about it, they’re much more likely to open up. That was one item. Another item is, it may sound slightly counter intuitive, but we asked people to rate how ready they were to cut down on their drinking on a scale of one to 10 — where one means not at all, and 10 means totally — and they would give us their rating. Let’s say they said only a four, for example. The next question would be ‘Did the doctor ask the patient why he or she did not pick a lower number?’, which everybody sort of does a double take on. But that question is the heart of this intervention where we’re asking people why they have any motivation to cut down on their drinking, versus the more traditional and ineffective question, which is ‘Why aren’t you more ready to cut down on your drinking?’

That does not work. So the key checklist question was asking people why they were not less ready to cut down.

What was the research Q:process like for figuring this out? Were there any significant challenges faced?

A

: It’s important to know that this was sort of a study within a study. The development of the new tool was a study within a larger study that was evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention. So the effec-

tiveness of the intervention, that happened, and was published several months prior to this. And then the checklist was developed within that process. This was a study that recruited almost 900 patients in a very busy, chaotic emergency department. One challenge was to convince physicians and TAs at Yale, New Haven and New York that they were equipped to do yet another thing. They always counsel patients about alcohol, but here was a new way to do it briefly and to get at those people who are not already alcoholics. So the first challenge was to get real world practitioners onboard and convince them that we can train them well. But with this checklist it really made it much, much easier. People were able to see exactly what we were looking for and they said, “Oh we can do that. All we have to do is say the things on this laminated card that you give us?”

And we said yes. It was challenging to recruit patients, to train practitioners, but with a manualized approach and a checklist to show them that they can really easily figure out what they need to do, it went much smoother.

How would you describe Q:your role as “ lead author” of the study?

A

: I’m sort of your quality control in counseling intervention, if you will. I’ve done this for 15 years now at Yale and so I’ve become an expert in tracking and supervising people who are implementing counseling interventions in randomized controlled trials. For me it was a bit of a change to do this within the emergency room, but it was really exciting to be able to find that something as quick as 7 minutes really works. It was even more exciting to find out that we can disseminate it broadly because anyone who wants to do this now will know how well they’re actually doing it and how likely they are to get good results. That’s what this new tool gives us.

Q

: What sort of effect do you predict the study will have?

A

: Well, that’s a great question. For a number of years — say, in the last five to seven years — we’ve had really good evidence that brief interventions around substance abuse, done by physicians, work. So we’ve known brief interventions work, but we have not yet had any kind of validated scale or tool like this one that will tell people whether or not they are doing it correctly. Sure, if the counseling intervention works, that’s great, but it can only be broadly disseminated if people know how well they’re doing it. That’s what the effectiveness rests on. It’s different than when you study a medication. You know what compound is in that tablet, and you know it’s going to work when you give it to people; you don’t need the same sort of quality control. So my prediction for the impact here is that now physicians more broadly — especially in the ER — wil be more likely to do brief intervention because this checklist will show exactly what is expected of them, and it makes it much easier to implement it when you know it’s effective and you know exactly what you need to do to make it effective.

you have any furQ:therDoresearch plans in this topic?

A

: Yes, so we are now going to apply this tool to brief interventions done in emergency rooms that have to do with opiate-dependent patients, as well as people who are smokers who are trying to quit with brief intervention. So the new tool will be adapted for those two populations and broadly disseminated to other investigators. That’s the key here.

Before this study, we didn’t have a scale like this that was validated. Now that we do, our hope is to broadly disseminate it to other brief intervention researchers so that we can all know how well people need to do the intervention in order for it to be effective.

Contact ISABELLA D’AGOSTO at isabella.dagosto@yale.edu .

OCD Research Clinic preps for future

BY LEAH MOTZKIN CONTRIBUTING REPORTER For the past 25 years, the Yale Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Research Clinic has been at the forefront of groundbreaking research to help the comprehension and treatment of OCD. Under the leadership of Director Christopher Pittenger ’94 GRD ’94 and Assistant Director Michael Bloch, the research center has continued to gain renown for its clinical and lab-based OCD research. As OCD Awareness Week — which lasts from Oct. 8 until Oct. 14.

— begins, the clinic continues its focus on raising awareness of the disorder within the New Haven community.

The disorder, Pittenger said, affects 2 percent of the population on average.

Symptoms of the disorder include a fear of being contaminated, making mistakes and hurting oneself or others. These fears are often accompanied by compulsions to act in ways that alleviate these stresses, such as excessive cleaning or elaborate rituals. While it is rare to cure the disease, the clinic aims to alleviate these symptoms in OCD patients so that they can function on a normal level.

OCD is not just what you see on a television program.

SUZANNE WASYLINK Nurse manager at Yale OCD Research Clinic Pittenger said the clinic’s current research focuses on the brain’s glutamate neurotransmitter system. The clinic’s research examines the neurobiological and genetic abnormalities in the brain with the ultimate goal of normalizing these irregularities. To do so, he said, the researchers are studying the effects of Riluzole, an FDA-approved drug that is used to treat Amyotrophic

Lateral Sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease, on OCD patients.

So far, Riluzole has been shown to help about two-thirds of trial patients alleviate OCD symptoms.

The glutamate hypothesis — which states glutamate may play a role in normalizing OCD symptoms — has gained repute in the field, Pettinger said.

Genetic evidence, MR Spectrocopy results and cerebral fluid measurements have continued to show positive signs that the clinic is pursuing the correct path, he added.

The clinic’s project scope will expand over the next five years, as two new studies will complement the current work on glutamate, Pittenger said.

One is a five-year project that questions whether the different manifestations of OCD are different varieties of one disease or symptoms of a different disorder. To answer this question, the clinic will scan the brains of 100 people with OCD and 100 control subjects.

“I’m trying to get not just measures of glutamate, but measures of basically everything — structure, brain function, intelligence tests … ” Pittenger said.

Ultimately, he added, the data they receive will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate students who seek a database of comparative brain scans for research.

The second project is a biofeedback study that could ultimately find a drugfree way of alleviating the anxiety associated with OCD. The project, Pittenger said, involves training OCD patients to control the parts of their brains associated with the disorder by informing patients of their brain activity as it is monitored.

The clinic hopes to plan OCD awareness events to both help people with OCD understand what resources are available to them and to change public perception of the disorder. The clinic’s nurse manager, Suzanne Wasylink, said she believes providing the community

VICTOR KANG/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Research Clinic hopes to increase awareness of the disorder and alleviate symptoms. with a general education about what OCD is may be the best way to help the change the stigma surrounding mental illness.

“OCD is not just what you see on a television program,” she said.

Portrayal of the disorder and other mental illnesses in popular culture often

show it to be either dangerous or quirky, said clinic research assistant Mac Kelly.

This portrayal, he added, proves problematic because it either unjustly vilifies people with OCD or trivializes their condition.

The clinic was founded as a treatment center in the 1980s by physicians

Wayne Goodman and Dennis Charney.

The research center was responsible for the first clinical trials of both SSRIs and Neuroleptics, the medications most commonly used to treat OCD. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

NATION

“That’s the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” SID WADDELL ENGLISH SPORTS COMMENTATOR AND TELEVISION PERSONALITY

Obama looks to regroup

BY JULIE PACE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Barack Obama is greeted by a crowd after arriving yesterday in San Francisco, where he is campaigning and fundraising.

WASHINGTON — As the White House race shows signs of tightening nationally, President Barack Obama’s campaign is banking on a massive get-outthe-vote operation and stateby-state shades of economic improvement to maintain its apparent polling edge in battlegrounds from Ohio to Virginia.

Republican Mitt Romney, reenergized by last week’s debate, is flashing new confidence on the campaign trail and pressing toward the political center on both foreign and domestic

issues. But aides have outlined no clear path to winning the 270 Electoral College votes required to gain the White House.

“Things are going pretty good,” the usually cautious Romney said Monday with a smile.

Among Democrats, the swagger of the previous few weeks has all but vanished since the debate.

“Ultimately this is a tight race, and it’s going to remain a tight race until the end,” said Bill Burton, who runs Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super political action committee.

Indeed, one month from Election Day, polls show a close race.

13,000 got suspect steroid shots

BY MIKE STOBBE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — As many as 13,000 people received steroid shots suspected in a national meningitis outbreak, health officials said Monday. But it’s not clear how many are in danger.

Officials don’t how many of the shots may have been contaminated with meningitis-causing fungus. And the figure includes not only those who got them in the back for pain — who are most at risk — but also those who got the shots in other places, like knees and shoulders.

There was no breakdown on the number of back injections, said Curtis Allen, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those injected in joints are not believed to be at risk for meningitis, he said.

The number of people sickened in the outbreak reached 105 on Monday. Deaths rose to eight,

with another fatality in Tennessee, the CDC said. Tennessee has the most cases, followed by Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio.

Investigators suspect a steroid medication made by a specialty pharmacy may be to blame.

About 17,700 single-dose vials of the steroid were sent to 23 states.

Inspectors found at least one sealed vial contaminated with fungus, and tests were being done on other vials.

The first known case of the rarely seen fungal meningitis was diagnosed last month in Tennessee. The steroid maker, New England Compounding Center of Framingham, Mass., recalled the drug, and over the weekend recalled everything else it makes.

“While there is no indication at this time of any contamination in other NECC products, this recall is being taken as a precautionary measure,” the company said in a

statement.

Meningitis is an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, and a back injection would put any contaminant in more direct contact with that lining.

Symptoms on meningitis include severe headache, nausea, dizziness and fever. The CDC said many of the cases have been mild and some people had strokes.

Symptoms have been appearing between one and four weeks after patients got the shots.

A Michigan man whose wife’s death was linked to the outbreak said Monday that he, too, was treated with steroids from one of the recalled batches.

“Not only have I lost my wife, but I’m watching the clock to see if anything develops,” George Cary said, as friends and family gathered for his wife’s wake in Howell, 60 miles northwest of Detroit.

His wife, Lilian, 67, had been ill

since late August, but meningitis wasn’t detected until Sept. 22, her husband said. She died Sept. 30.

Michigan officials have not released the names of two people who have died in the outbreak in that state, but did say one was a 67-year-old woman.

Fungal meningitis is not contagious like the more common forms. The two types of fungus linked so far to the outbreak are all around, but very rarely causes illness. Fungal meningitis is treated with high-dose antifungal medications, usually given intravenously in a hospital.

The steroid is known as preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate, which the compounding pharmacy creates by combining a powder with a liquid.

Doctors should contact any patient who got doses from any of the recalled lots, and should look back at their records as far back as mid-May, CDC officials say.

And with millions of Americans already voting and the potential for game-changing moments diminishing, the candidates have little room for error as they seek to sway a narrow swath of undecided voters.

Obama aides acknowledge Romney’s strong turn on the debate stage helped him shift gears from a rocky September.

But they also argue that Romney’s momentum was arrested somewhat by a Friday jobs report showing the unemployment rate declined to 7.8 percent, the lowest level of Obama’s presidency.

They say the president was thrown during the debate by

what they call Romney’s willingness to abandon his previous positions, including his $5 trillion tax cut proposal. In the next debate - and in television advertisements before then — the Democrat and his aides are expected to accuse Romney of lying about his own plans.

Romney’s team, meanwhile, is tempering expectations that tightening national polls will translate into success on the ground in the key states most likely to decide the race. Things may be moving in the right direction, they say, but significant work remains.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST Rain likely, mainly before 7am. Cloudy, with a high near 60. Northeast wind around 9 mph.

TOMORROW High of 65, low of 46.

WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ

ON CAMPUS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9 7:00 PM Masculinity as a Mascarade. Donald Moss, author of the new book Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Man (2012), is a psychoanalyst and on the faculty of The Institute for Psychoanalytic Education at NYU Medical Center. Moss also wrote Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny and Terror (2003) in addition to many articles addressing topics ranging from Freud to sexuality to racism. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Masculinity, investigates how men shape themselves in relation to the unstable notion of masculinity. St. Anthony Hall (483 College St.).

8:00 PM Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in the 2012 Elections. Join us for an hour of fast-paced conversation and questions on topics that matter to us. American studies and WGSS professor Laura Wexler, African-American studies professor Crystal Feimster, ER&M and American studies professor Albert Sergio Laguna, history professor Jennifer Klein, and Trinity College WGSS professor Robert J. Corber will speak. William L. Harkness Hall (100 Wall St.), Rm. 309.

THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10 7:30 PM Just One Paycheck Away: A Panel On Homelessness In New Haven. Want to deepen your understanding of the issues of hunger and homelessness in New Haven? We’ll be having a panel discussion and Q&A with local advocates and service providers. Join us for what is sure to be an informative event! All are welcome — you don’t have to be a member of YHHAP. LinslyChittenden Hall (63 High St.), Rm. 102.

8:00 PM Horowitz Piano Series At Yale Presents: Wei-Yi Yang. Pianist Wei-Yi Yang will perform the complete Goyescas of Enrique Granados, with projected images of Goya’s art, which inspired the piano suite; also on the programme will be music inspired by Spain, composed by Debussy & Ravel. Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St.).

ZERO LIKE ME BY REUXBEN BARRIENTES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 5:45 PM Swing Dance Lessons: Intro Swing I. Learn the basics

y SUBMIT YOUR EVENTS ONLINE yaledailynews.com/events/submit SCIENCE HILL BY SPENCER KATZ

To reach us: E-mail editor@yaledailynews.com Advertisements 2-2424 (before 5 p.m.)

2-2400 (after 5 p.m.)

Mailing address Yale Daily News P.O. Box 209007 New Haven, CT 06520

Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Editor in Chief Tapley Stephenson, at (203) 432-2418.

Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.

To visit us in person 202 York St. New Haven, Conn. (Opposite JE)

CLASSIFIEDS

CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Actor Lorenzo 6 Crumbly cheese 10 Mt. Rushmore’s state 14 Where Crockett famously fought 15 Disappearing Asian sea 16 Running rate 17 Design theme 18 *Ginger ale brand 20 *It gets you a ticket to ride 22 Badminton target 23 “Arrested Development” star Jason 26 Rushing units: Abbr.

27 “Star Trek” weapon 31 Makes an appearance 33 Investor’s online destination 34 *Hold that might precede a noogie 38 Give out, as a signal 39 Loser to DDE 40 School near Burlington, North Carolina 41 *Umpire’s call 44 Fix on a stake 46 Loggers’ contest 47 Get the better of 48 Cup rim 51 Tom Brokaw’s domain 53 French president’s palace 55 *Sack with letters 60 *Neck-and-neck election campaign 63 “Cheers” barmaid 64 Broadway auntie 65 Bleacher feature 66 To no __: fruitlessly 67 Nestlé ice cream brand 68 Air France hub 69 Drink with steamed milk DOWN 1 Baby bleater 2 1966 N.L. batting champ Matty 3 Protective floor coverings

THE TAFT APARTMENTS Studio/1BR/2BR styles for future & immediate occupancy at The Taft on the corner of College & Chapel Street. Lease terms available until 5/31/13. It’s never too early to join our preferred waiting list for Summer/Fall 2013 occupancy. Public mini-storage available. By appointment only. Phone 203-495-TAFT. www.taftapartments.com.

CALL (203) 432-2424 OR E-MAIL BUSINESS@ YALEDAILYNEWS.COM

10/9/12

By Neville Fogarty

4 “I __ you are!”

5 Convenience for an overnight guest 6 Emerald side 7 Hurler’s stat 8 Sunbather’s shade 9 The Heart of Dixie 10 Practice with gloves 11 Papa 12 Harsh-smelling 13 Conservative pundit Alan 19 Ate in style 21 Hard to come by 24 Level of authority 25 “The Simpsons” watering hole 27 Nestling noise 28 Webmaster’s file type 29 Verdi’s “Caro nome,” e.g.

30 Lascivious cloven-hoofed creature 32 Took a siesta 35 Name of several Norwegian kings 36 Neb. neighbor

Want to place a classified ad?

Monday’s Puzzle Solved

SUDOKU EASY

5 7

(c)2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

37 Plastic construction toy 39 Novelist Waugh 42 Lisa of “A Different World” 43 2005-’07 attorney general Gonzales 44 Nebraska neighbor 45 Broadway fare 48 “I insist!”

49 Trojan War epic 50 Miniature

10/9/12

52 Nail file material 54 Mariners’ pronouns 56 Volcanic flow 57 Sitter’s handful 58 Hit the ground 59 Powerful wind 61 Word that can precede either part of each starred clue’s answer 62 Animation frame

7

3 4 5 2

2 1 4 6 7 6 4 1 6 5 8 3 4 6 3 9 4 3 8 5 2 4 7 3

THURSDAY High of 63, low of 46.

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WORLD

“Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics.”

RON REAGAN POLITICAL ANALYST AND SON OF PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

Nobel awarded for stem cell, early cloning work

BY MALCOLM RITTER AND KARL RITTER ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — Two scientists from different generations won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for the groundbreaking discovery that cells in the body can be reprogrammed into completely different kinds, work that reflects the mechanism behind cloning and offers an alternative to using embryonic stem cells.

The work of British researcher John Gurdon and Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka — who was born the year Gurdon made

his discovery — holds hope for treating diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes by growing customized tissue for transplant.

And it has spurred a new generation of laboratory studies into other illnesses, including schizophrenia, which may lead to new treatments.

Basically, Gurdon, 79, and Yamanaka, 50, showed how to make the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without the ethical questions those very versatile cells pose, a promise scientists are now scrambling to fulfill.

Once created, these “blank

slate” cells can be nudged toward developing into other cell types.

Skin cells can ultimately be transformed into brain cells, for example.

Just last week, scientists reported turning skin cells from mice into eggs that produced baby mice, a possible step toward new fertility treatments.

Gurdon and Yamanaka performed “courageous experiments” that challenged scientific opinion, said Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

“Their work shows … that

while cells might be specialized to do one thing, they have the potential to do something else,” Melton said. It “really lays the groundwork for all the excitement about stem cell biology.”

Another Harvard stem cell researcher, Dr. George Daley said, “I don’t think anybody is surprised” by the award announcement. “The fact that these two share it together is inspired.”

In announcing the $1.2 million award, the Nobel committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute said the work has “rev-

Chavez may face economic limits

BY IAN JAMES AND FRANK BAJAK STATUS LINE CARACAS, Venezuela — During his re-election campaign, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez promised to deepen the public aid programs and reforms that have formed his vaunted “21st century socialism.” That message won him a surprising 11-percentage point win Sunday in what many had seen as a tight race.

Still, he’s set to start a fourth presidential term under the toughest circumstances he’s faced with the prospect that his government’s free-spending days may be over. That will likely limit how much Chavez can expand the government programs that have helped make him so popular.

In the coming years, the country of 29 million people must defuse economic time bombs such as rapidly expand-

ing public debt, one of Latin America’s highest inflation rates and a weakening currency.

Experts say Chavez will need to make hard economic choices in the coming years, including whether to devalue the currency, the bolivar, which would make the money in Venezuelans’ pockets suddenly worth a lot less.

“He’s going to have to deal with some very basic, mundane capitalist things, like reducing inflation,” which stands at 18 percent, said Eduardo Gamarra, a Latin American studies professor at Florida International University in Miami.

“Investment in social issues is great, but he needs to do other things as well that are going to make that economy more productive.”

Making Chavez’s task harder is an opposition that, for the first time in his nearly 14 years in power, includes nearly half

of all voters, who cast ballots Sunday for challenger Henrique Capriles.

It’s not a formidable defeat for the opposition, nor is it a big triumph for Chavismo. Never has the opposition been so strong.

MARIANA BACALAO Political science professor, Central University of Venezuela Although Chavez won by 11 percentage points, it was his smallest margin of victory ever and less than half of his lead in the last election in 2006. Meanwhile, with about 97 percent of ballots counted the opposition had gained about 2.2 million

more votes than it did in 2006, compared to about 735,000 more votes that Chavez won.

“It’s not a formidable defeat for the opposition, nor is it a big triumph for Chavismo,” said Mariana Bacalao, a political science professor at Central University of Venezuela. “Never has the opposition been so strong.”

Even as he celebrated victory before tens of thousands of jubilant supporters early Monday, Chavez appeared to acknowledge he has let down some Venezuelans. Polls say many people are worried about everyday ills such as soaring homicide rates, power blackouts and crumbling infrastructure.

“I pledge to you, I repeat, to every day be a better president than I’ve been,” he said, while also promising greater effectiveness and efficiency from a government whose payroll has bloated to at least 2.4 million people.

olutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.”

Gurdon showed in 1962 that DNA from specialized cells of tadpoles, like skin or intestinal cells, could be used to clone more tadpoles. In 1997, the same process led to the cloning of Dolly the sheep, showing it would also work in mammals.

Gurdon told reporters in London that at the time of his discovery, it had “no obvious therapeutic benefit at all … It was almost 50 years before the value — the potential value — of that

basic scientific research came to light.”

Forty-four years after Gurdon’s discovery, in 2006, Yamanaka and his team moved beyond tadpoles. They showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mouse skin cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.

The work was later repeated with human cells.

In theory those primitive cells are “blank slates” — like embryonic stem cells that can be turned into any cell in the body.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 11

SPORTS

Sports IQ: In rowing, what is the “stroke” seat?

When a boat has more than one rower, the rower closest to the stern of the boat is referred to as “stroke.” The stroke rower sets the stroke rate and rhythm for the rest of the crew to follow.

Elis eligibility challenged

Women’s crew sees strong start

BY PATRICK CASEY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER The women’s crew team started its year with a strong showing at the Head of the Housatonic on Saturday, including a win by one of its boats in the collegiate 8+ event by more than nine seconds. Yale raced four pairs, four 4+ and four 8+. The eights placed first, third and ninth in a race against other Division I teams. The fours placed second, third, fourth and eigth, falling to Radcliffe’s top boat, which clinched the first spot.

W. CREW

SARA MILLER/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Running back Tyler Varga ’16 rushed for 799 yards and 15 touchdowns for the University of Western Ontario last year.

VARGA FROM PAGE 12 dent athletes on a yearly basis.

According to NCAA rules, transfer students — including those from international institutions — must have fulfilled “one academic year in residence” before competing in athletic competitions. But there are exceptions: If a transfer student plays a sport other than baseball, basketball, men’s ice hockey or Football Bowl Subdivision football, he or she may waive the yearin-residence requirement. Yale plays football in the Football Championship Subdivision, one tier lower than the FBS within Division I. As a member of Ontario University Athletics (OUA), a regional association analogous to college athletics conferences in the United States, University of Western Ontario abides by the OUA constitution’s ruling that each member may award a maximum of 47 “athletic financial awards” to players on

their respective football teams. Each student is not allowed to receive more than 4,000 Canadian dollars-worth of benefits per academic year.

We’re at the liberty of the NCAA and whatever they so choose to take timetable-wise, we have to abide by their rules.

TONY RENO Head coach, Yale football team UWO Football Director of Academic Programs Rande Kostal said the University’s definition of scholarships could be distinct from that of scholarships in America.

“We don’t have any tradition of giving athletes a full ride or a break aca-

demically,” Kostal said.

He added that unlike at traditional American colleges, scholarships at UWO are awarded to student-athletes only after gaining admission to the University on their own merit. Even then, Kostal said that these scholarships are handed out at the discretion of the head coach.

As Varga’s season remains shrouded in uncertainty, Reno and the University will not speculate on the possible penalties. On Saturday, Reno declined to comment on whether the Bulldogs could have to vacate the season’s lone victory — a Sept. 15 win at Georgetown in which Varga dashed for 103 yards and two scores.

Varga leads the Bulldog ground attack with 319 rushing yards and three touchdowns this season.

CROSS COUNTRY FROM PAGE 12 that the meet was her first crosscountry race of the season. Demaree finished first among the Bulldogs and 14th overall, covering the fivekilometer course in 17:45.86.

“Personally, I’m just really happy to be racing again,” Demaree said.

“Every time … we step on the line, there’s just a lot of positive energy and a lot of excitement about where we are as a team and where we’re headed.”

Isabel Amend ’16, Annelies Gamble ’13, Hannah Alpert ’15 and Jacqueline Sahlberg ’13 rounded out the top five for the Bulldogs, finishing 21st, 47th, 65th and 71st overall, respectively.

Although men’s team head coach Paul Harkins also chose to rest many of the team’s top runners, the team mustered a third-place finish.

“The meet was great,” Sandry said. “Why we run is to prove to ourselves that we can challenge ourselves on an everyday basis to build towards something bigger.”

Sandry paced the Bulldog runners and finished 10th overall. Matthew Thwaites ’13, Sam Kirtner ’13 and Duncan Tomlin ’16 followed, placing 27th, 31st and 32nd overall, respectively. Isa Qasim ’15 represented the last scoring runner for the Bulldogs but finished less than 45 seconds behind Sandry and 42nd overall.

Sandry noted that the meet showcased the team’s depth, a sentiment that Harkins echoed.

“On any given day there’s a couple of guys that ran in that second group who could potentially be in our top group,” Harkins said. “But Jacob [Sandry] showed that he should be probably in that top group when he’s running well.”

The men’s and women’s cross country teams will continue their seasons this Friday at the Wisconsin Invitational in Madison, Wis. The Yale women ran to a sixth-place finish while resting their top runners this weekend.

I was really pleased with how we raced ELIZA HASTINGS ’13 Porter said the team does not focus on the fall races.

“Our training is not geared toward the fall races, but it is geared toward the spring” he added.

The women’s crew team heads to Boston for the Head of the Charles in two weeks and then will round out the fall season with the Princeton 3-Mile Chase on Oct. 28.

“The Charles is definitely the biggest regatta of the fall season, so it’s always nice to get a chance to face off against some of our big competitors and get a look at early speed,” Madison Lips ’14 said.

She added the team will continue to train hard on and off the water.

The Elis will travel to Boston on Oct. 20 to compete at the Head of the Charles.

Contact PATRICK CASEY at patrick.casey@yale.edu .

Contact CHARLES CONDRO at charles.condro@yale.edu .

Bulldogs display depth

ANNA-SOPHIE HARLING/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Races at the regatta are head races, in which boats compete with one another based on time trials.

At the collegiate level, none of the Ivy League attended until recently. But this year, Brown and Radcliffe competed in the regatta.

“Radcliffe is defending Ivy champion, they’re very good and have 14 seniors, whereas we have only four seniors,” head coach Will Porter said.

“We are just happy to compete with Harvard women and Brown since they are our biggest rivals.”

Yale’s winning boat in the 8+ finished in 15:14.19, beating Harvard Radcliffe’s second place boat by more than 10 seconds and Brown’s fourth place boat by more than 23 seconds.

In the 4+ event, Radcliffe’s winning boat finished with 16:28.24, beating the second place Yale by more than 47 seconds. But Yale’s three top placing boats managed to place second, third and fourth of 15, holding off three more Radcliffe boats. Yale was the only team

to compete in the entire open women pairs event and finished with times ranging from 18:27.93 to 19:26.99.

“It was the first time our freshman put on the Yale uniform and raced with the squad and became a part of the team,” captain Eliza Hastings ’13 said.

“I was really pleased with how we raced, and I think we’re just going to keep trying to build our momentum.”

Contact ALEX EPPLER at alexander.eppler@yale.edu .

CAROL HSIN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The 8+ placed first, third and ninth in a race against other division I teams and dem-

Elis overtake Army, St. Bonaventure

MARIA ZEPEDA/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yale will host the ITA Regional Championships for the Northeast region next Thursday.

M. TENNIS FROM PAGE 12 and John Huang ’13 each winning two matches. Together, they made up more than 50 percent of the victories for Yale in doubles play. Zach Dean ’13 and Matt Saiontz ’15 also won their match decisively 8–3 on Saturday.

“I thought we played well,” Brown said. “It has been the best weekend so far for me as I was able to play more aggressively.”

On the second day of the match, the Bulldogs left the tennis center with a record of 13–2. In contrast to the day before, Yale went undefeated in its four doubles matches. All pairs had easy victories, winning by at least six games each. Daniel Faierman ’15 and Tommy Ratchford ’14 were able to pull out a win after losing the day before in a tough 9–8 match.

Brown said the highlight of his weekend was extending his singles winning streak to 11 matches Army’s No. 1 Asika Isoh 6–4, 6–3.

Hoffman and Huang were able to bounce back quickly from their losses in Tulsa last week. Hoffman defeated Elliot Fanshel of St. Bonaventure 7–6, 6–2. Huang defeated Oscar Yanez of St. Bonaventure 6–2, 6–1.

“I was really proud of the team for playing so consistently the entire weekend,” Hoffman said.

After two weeks off, the Bulldogs will host the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Regional Championships for the Northeast region, which starts on Thursday, Oct. 18.

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

IF YOU MISSED IT SCORES

SOCCER Liverpool 0 Stoke 0

SOCCER Man Utd 3 Newcastle 0

SPORTS QUICK HITS

NFL Denver 31 New England 21

y

NFL Miami 17 Cincinnati 13

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

SARAH HUGHES ’09 OLYMPIAN RETURNS TO YALE The Olympic gold medalist figure skater is coming to Yale on Thursday for a Master’s Tea hosted by Jonathan Edwards college. Hughes shocked the world in 2002 by overtaking gold-medal favorite Michelle Kwan to claim the top prize in the ladies’ singles event.

MEN’S BASEBALL SIX PLAYERS ADDED TO ROSTER The Bulldogs announced the addition of six new players to their roster. Outfielder Jake Semones ’14 and five freshmen — Nate Adams ’16, Chris Lanham ’16, Brent Lawson ’16, Christopher Moates ’16 and Tom O’Neill ’16 — will join the team in competition this spring.

NFL New Orleans 31 San Diego 24

“Every time...we step on the line there’s just a lot of positive energy and a lot of excitement about where we are as a team.

ANNA DEMAREE ’15 WOMEN’S CROSS COUNTRY YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Caught up in customs

Bulldogs win 41 matches

BY ADLON ADAMS STAFF REPORTER At the first home tournament of the fall season the Yale men’s tennis team won 41 of its 44 matches in two consecutive days.

M. TENNIS The Bulldogs hosted Army and St. Bonaventure at their Yale Shootout this past weekend at the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center in New Haven. The tournament lasted two days and featured both singles and doubles matches.

“It was a great weekend overall,” Zach Krumholz ’15 said. “It seems like everyone on our team is playing well and that our hard work is paying off on the fitness side.”

On the first day of play, Yale went undefeated in 22 singles matches. Jason Brown ’16 continued his winning streak in singles to 10 matches on Saturday after two easy wins against St. Bonaventure’s Luis Guevara and Army’s Caison Best.

In doubles, the Elis went 6–1, with the senior duo of Marc Powers and captain Daniel Hoffman and the pair of Patrick Chase ’14 SEE M. TENNIS PAGE 11

SARA MILLER/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Running back Tyler Varga ’16 leads the Bulldogs and is third in the Ivy League this year with an average of 106.3 rushing yards per game.

BY CHARLES CONDRO STAFF REPORTER

SHARON YIN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Elis demonstrated strong play with Sunday’s total win-loss record of 13-2 in doubles.

For three weeks it seemed that nobody could stop running back Tyler Varga ’16. Then, last week, the NCAA received a complaint about Varga’s eligibility.

After powering his way to 799

yards, 15 touchdowns and the Canadian Interuniversity Sports Rookie of the Year award in 2011, Varga transferred to Yale from the University of Western Ontario. But Varga did not dress for Saturday’s 34–14 defeat against Dartmouth after Yale received word of the NCAA complaint.

Head coach Tony Reno stated that the University was informed of the complaint regarding Varga’s eligibility late Friday evening. While teammate and running back Mordecai Cargill ’13 expressed hope that Varga would be able to return to the field next week, Reno was less certain.

“We’re at the liberty of the NCAA

and whatever they so choose to take timetable-wise, we have to abide by their rules,” Reno said.

Director of Athletics Tom Beckett added in a message to the News that the University’s Compliance Office reviews the eligibility of all Yale stuSEE VARGA PAGE 11

Elis improve on last year’s results

BY ALEX EPPLER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Before Sunday’s New England Championships at Stanley Park in Massachusetts, Jacob Sandry ’15 decided that he would try to reverse a tendency he had noticed in his running — slowing down in the middle of races.

CROSS COUNTRY This time, when the top runners set a brisk pace, Sandry attempted to stick with them for the entire race. The decision paid off, and Sandry broke his personal record by more than a minute and finished in the race’s top 10 with a time of 24:36.45 over the eightkilometer course.

Even while resting most of their top runners, the men’s and women’s cross-country teams managed impressive results at Sunday’s New England Championship meet. Racing against 37 teams from the region, the No. 30 women’s team accumulated 218 points en route to a sixth place

finish, while the men scored 142 points to place third.

Running with a national ranking for the first time in seven years, the women’s team led off the day without several of its top runners, as head coach Amy Gosztyla opted to rest them before the team’s national invitational meet this coming weekend. Yet the squad still managed to greatly improve on its results at last year’s New England Championships, where it finished 16th.

Gosztyla characterized the meet as an opportunity for Bulldog runners outside the team’s top group to compete in a highlevel meet.

“It was a really, really good race for kind of the more developmental group that’s looking to build and get better, to be breaking into that varsity group over the course of the season and the year to come,” she said.

Among others, Gosztyla noted that Anna Demaree ’15 gave a superb effort, especially given SEE CROSS COUNTRY PAGE 11

ANNA-SOPHIE HARLING/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale men improved upon their 17th-place finish last year to come in third this weekend at the New England Championships.

STAT OF THE DAY 41

NUMBER OF MATCHES WON BY THE YALE MEN’S TENNIS TEAM OUT OF 44 PLAYED LAST WEEKEND. The Bulldogs faced off against Army and St. Bonaventure at the Cullman-Heyman Tennis Center.