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T H E O L D E ST C O L L E G E DA I LY · FO U N D E D 1 8 7 8

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 106 · yaledailynews.com

INSIDE THE NEWS MORNING EVENING

SUNNY SUNNY

51 58

CROSS CAMPUS Hush-hush? A concert listing

that said rapper T-Pain was scheduled to perform at Yale on April 24 — the Tuesday of Reading Week, which is the traditional date of Spring Fling — has been removed from associated act BIG RyAT’s website.

Franco-watch. James Franco

GRD ’16 will not attend the University of Houston’s creative writing program, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday. Franco deferred his admission to the university’s program last year, and in mid-February emailed the program’s director to say he would not be coming in the fall.

The Queen cometh. Actress

Parker Posey, the “Queen of the Indies” famous for her roles in independent films, will be on campus next month to star in “The Realistic Joneses” at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

The play is slated to run from April 20 to May 12, and also stars Johanna Day, Glen Fitzgerald and Tracy Letts.

Not corrupt. Connecticut is

one of the least-corrupt states in the nation, according to a study published on Monday by the Center for Public Integrity.

Connecticut scored an 86, earning it a “B” grade. Only New Jersey, which earned a “B+”, came out ahead of the Nutmeg State.

A new look. Willoughby’s on

York Street got a facelift over the past few days — the coffee shop now features freshly painted walls, new cushioned chairs and a new bar along the windows. The store also added 15 electrical outlets.

Busted. A man was arrested

Sunday after attempting to go paragliding off of East Rock, the New Haven Register reported Sunday. Vin Conti was preparing for a glide in East Rock Park when the winds turned against him and his kite got caught in some trees.

The victors. With 13 kills

apiece, roommates Daniel Frasier ’14 and Tammer Abiyu ’14 were crowned the champions of the Sophomore Class Council’s Sophomore Assassins. Because he made his final kill first, Frasier won the $200 gift certificate to Miya’s.

And a lamp! The Yale College Council announced on Monday that summer storage regulations have been amended to allow students to store one lamp. Last fall, administrators announced tighter storage restrictions that allowed students to store one couch per suite and one chair per student. After negotiating with the YCC, administrators added one bookshelf per student.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1948 The New Haven Communist Party distributes 3,000 pamphlets titled “A Fake Crisis! Yes!” across campus.

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INDOOR TANNING STUDY ON DANGERS TAKES HEAT

JOBS

FILMMAKING

M. SWIMMING

Hartford Democrats’ plan to boost jobs in the state nears passage

ANIMATOR DISHES ON TRENDS OF DISNEY, PIXAR AGE

Eight school records fall in fourth-place finish at Ivy championships

PAGES 8-9 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

PAGE 3 CITY

PAGE 5 NEWS

PAGE 14 SPORTS

Class sizes to rise at new SOM campus GRAPH STUDENT ENROLLMENT, FACULTY SIZE AT TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS

6.4

UC Berkeley

6.9 6.7

UChicago Columbia

6.4

Duke Harvard Michigan

7.1

MIT

7.1

Yale 0

500

8.0

8.0 5.0

Northwestern Penn Stanford

Student body Faculty

1000

BY GAVAN GIDEON STAFF REPORTER

another SOM professor, said small classes are not always effective, because an MBA education relies heavily on students’ previous business experiences.

“I really don’t like to be in a room [teaching] with fewer than 15 students,” she said.

“An MBA class is a little more about the range of experiences that the students bring to the classroom, so an elective class of eight just feels way too small.”

Rodrigo Canales, who

While efforts to centralize and streamline administrative services have recently come under fire from some faculty, one shared services center that handles research grant administration has received positive feedback from science departments.

Faculty Research Management Services offers professors assistance in applying for and managing funds sponsored by federal and nonfederal agencies, said Joanne Bentley, the unit’s director. Though the 16 employees of the shared services center have worked with more than 20 academic departments so far, Bentley said their work has been conducted primarily with major research departments in the sciences and social sciences. Bentley said the services FRMS offers are especially important now because federal funding levels have declined in recent years — increasing strain on faculty and staff as departments have needed to increase the number of proposals they make.

Efforts to reshape administrative services at Yale largely began in response to a federal investigation into Yale’s grant accounting practices that began in June 2006, Vice President for Finance

SEE SOM PAGE 6

SEE SHARED SERVICES PAGE 6

6.5

7.2 1500

2000

2500

SOURCE: BUSINESSWEEK’S 2010 BUSINESS SCHOOL RANKING DATA

Yale’s SOM has among the lowest student-to-faculty ratios of schools of its kind. The ratios above were calculated by dividing figures for total business school faculty by enrollment in MBA programs at each school.

BY DANIEL SISGOREO STAFF REPORTER The six-to-one studentto-faculty ratio at the School of Management is among the lowest of top business schools nationwide, but that will soon change.

The SOM student body will increase from roughly 450 to 600 students by fiscal year 2017, which SOM Dean Edward Snyder said will raise tuition revenue and ensure sufficient enrollment in the school’s wide range of course offerings. He said he thinks

the increase will not be large enough to detract from students’ classroom experiences, adding that the number of faculty would also rise once the school moves into its new, larger campus in 2013, though not enough to maintain the current student-tofaculty ratio. Though many educational institutions take pride in small classes, four SOM professors interviewed said business schools in particular benefit from having many students who can draw from their work experiences in discussion.

“We’re just really small,” Snyder said. “We have to build a lot of the same curricular infrastructure as everybody else, but we don’t have as many students.”

Professor Shane Frederick, who teaches courses on consumer behavior, said he felt classes with fewer than 20 students might not have the “critical mass” necessary to sustain dynamic class discussion. Still, he said it can be difficult to manage and encourage participation among 30 students or more.

Judith Chevalier ’89,

Concerns arise over NHPD gunshot tracking

BY JAMES LU STAFF REPORTER The reliability of New Haven’s ShotSpotter system, a series of sensors which detect and locate gunshots in the city’s central neighborhoods, has come under question after several missed gunshots and false reports in recent weeks.

After the system of audio detectors, which uses acoustic triangulation to register gunshots, failed to report gunfire in a number of recent cases — including the city’s first homicide of the year on Saturday in Dixwell — the New Haven Police Department is reviewing its continued use. Though NHPD spokesman David Hartman said the department has not decided whether to retain or tweak ShotSpotter, he added that some of the inaccuracies are attributable to the “human-like” errors of the system because it must hear gunshots in the same way as witnesses.

“ShotSpotter is quite human, in that not only does it hear things, but it has to make an analysis of what it hears,” Hartman said. “When something goes pop, bang or boom, the system has to register it and them determine what kind of pop, bang or boom it was, and sometimes it doesn’t get it right.”

ShotSpotter was launched in the Elm City September 2009 and comprises over 20 sensors that were installed with funds from a $500,000 grant from the Justice Department.

When a sensor detects a loud noise and registers it as a gunshot, the three sensors nearest it locate the shot to within four feet and alert NHPD dispatchers.

Recently, however, ShotSpotter has failed to pick up several gunshots and even registered several instances

Office unifies grant services

State boasts strong winter job growth

of nonexistent gunfire. Hartman said the system recorded no gunshots in or around the Dixwell neighborhood, where the Elm City’s first homicide victim of the year was found Saturday morning at the intersection of County and Munson streets.

“Then again, there were also no earwitness reports either — it could either be a fault of the system or the gunfire could have taken place in a vehicle, where it wouldn’t be picked up,” he said.

ShotSpotter is quite human, in that not only does it hear things, but it has to make an analysis of what it hears.

DAVID HARTMAN Spokesman, New Haven Police Department Physical structures and other environments that cause echoes can hamper the system’s ability to detect gunshots, the company’s official website notes.

In response to the department’s reliability concerns, representatives from ShotSpotter’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters came to the NHPD’s Union Avenue headquarters last month to explain a newly developed protocol to prevent false alarms.

Data from ShotSpotter will now be directed to a company-wide diagnostic system, which can differentiate between gunshots and other possible acoustic triggers, before the information is passed to the NHPD’s SEE SHOTSPOTTER PAGE 4

CHRISTINA TSAI/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Gov. Dannel Malloy priased the state’s economic development efforts, saying they helped Connecticut beat the national unemployment rate by 0.3 percent.

BY BEN PRAWDZIK STAFF REPORTER January was a good month for Connecticut’s job seekers.

Connecticut private sector employers added 7,700 jobs during January 2012, and the unemployment rate for the state fell to 8.0 percent, according to the Connecticut Department of Labor, beating the national average of 8.3 percent. The DOL’s January data is positive news following last December’s report, which showed a loss of about 1,000 jobs accompanied by a reported exit of some unemployed people from the labor market, pushing the overall unemployment rate down.

Unemployment in December stood at 8.1 percent, and the January report, which was released last week, marks the sixth consecutive month that the state’s unemployment rate has fallen.

“The [DOL’s] report is encouraging — another sign that we are beginning to see a recovery when it comes to job creation,” said Gov. Dannel Malloy in a press release last week. “We continue to outpace the national average, which is a testament to the hard decisions we made last year to stabilize our state’s finances and focus on job creation.”

Since January 2011, Connecticut has added a total of 16,300 private sector SEE UNEMPLOYMENT PAGE 4

PAGE 2

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION

“Before we start ‘rethinking the humanities,’ perhaps we should re.COMMENT call the all-too-human consequences that follow upon moral comproyaledailynews.com/opinion mise.” CARP800 ON “WHY I LIKE YALE-NUS”

Prepare for the worst W

e return from break at a dangerous time for the United States and for the world. Iran’s internal politics are murky and unstable, and our intelligence services are reduced to guesswork as the Iranian nuclear program rolls forward. Candidates in election mode bluster and beat war drums, tripping over themselves to establish their national security bona fides. But if the moment for military action comes, will we support President Obama in doing what is necessary?

College campuses have long been bastions of anti-war activism, and college students are often considered the most viscerally pacifist voices in the country. At the height of the Vietnam War, Yale’s own chaplain, Reverend William Sloane Coffin, was one of the nation’s leading anti-war activists. Coffin advocated declaring Battell Chapel a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and was even convicted of conspiracy to abet draft resistance. In the early 1970s, student anti-war protests occupied campus quadrangles, convulsing the University and drawing the National Guard.

But sophisticated opposition to war has always been tempered by recognition of war’s occasional necessity. The same Coffin who so bitterly opposed the Vietnam War fought enthusiastically in World War II. Not all wars are unjust or ill-conceived, and we too should stand ready to support decision to use American military might in the service of international peace and in defense of innocent life.

Most of us understand this intuitively. Widespread student support for ROTC’s return to Yale belies the myth of automatic college pacifism. Similarly, the somewhat tasteless celebration that swept campus on the evening when Osama bin Laden was killed represents an endorsement of properly used American military power.

Student opinion on American interventionism is far more sophisticated than the common caricature suggests. Our moral compass is not that different from the rest of America’s. We prefer to avoid war, but we understand its occasional necessity. We will oppose costly and arbitrary uses of force, but limited action to preserve peace and protect innocents seems sensible.

With Iran, the stakes could not be higher. The world finds itself confronted by a fanatical and oppressive regime that defiantly moves ever closer to developing nuclear weapons.

Despite decades of sabotage and increasingly biting sanctions from Western governments, the Iranian regime defies inspectors, enriches uranium far beyond the level required for civilian purposes and builds secret enrichment plants beneath fortified bunkers.

Of course, a nuclear-capable Iran would be a global catastrophe. As Saudi Arabia, Egypt and

others desperately seek to keep pace, the inevitable arms race would turn the world’s most volatile YISHAI region into a SCHWARTZ nuclear tinderbox. The The Gadfly p o s s i b i l ity of nuclear terror — by Hezbollah, Hamas or other Iranian-sponsored terror groups — would increase dramatically. After all, deterrence is no defense against shadow groups.

When a nuclear bomb goes off in a major city center — without indication of whether its origin was in Pakistan, Iran or North Korea — against whom do we retaliate?

Deterrence might not even work against the Iranian military. The Soviet Union’s leadership was cold, rational and selfinterested; the Iranian regime is defined by a fanatical devotion to a radical brand of Islam. Leading clerics and politicians have publicly endorsed the practical application of apocalyptic political theology, and the unpredictability of Iranian politics raises the very real possibility that these men could soon gain control over Iran’s military.

No doubt some hear echoes of arguments in the lead up to the Iraq War. But we are a different country than that which blundered into unwinnable wars post-9/11, and the evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons program far surpasses anything we had in Iraq. Too often we forget that the paralyzing fear of repeating previous mistakes can be just as damaging as failure to learn the lessons of history.

No one wants war; President Obama has pushed for sanctions and publicly rebuked others for their bellicosity. The Israelis have used every available tactic, assassinating scientists and deploying computer viruses, in a desperate attempt to forestall war. But the overwhelming consensus of the American political leadership — both Democrats and Republicans — is that containment of a nuclear Iran is simply not an acceptable option.

This month, Obama committed American power — including our military might — to preventing an Iranian bomb.

None of us has the information necessary to determine the proper moment when time runs out and sanctions and sabotage must yield to military action. But given the Iranian regime’s fanatical obstinacy, it seems increasingly probable that we will reach such a point. We should pray that the regime sees reason, but we must prepare for the worst.

And if our president’s hand is forced, we must once again defy the simplistic caricature of the Ivy League pacifist.

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

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POINT

COUNTER-POINT

GUEST COLUMNIST SAM COHEN

GUEST COLUMNIST

Activism should go beyond Facebook

GENG NGARMBOONANANT

O

ver break, a new topic dominated Facebook and Twitter: #KONY2012.

The nonprofit Invisible Children launched this mass activism campaign with a viral video protesting the horrific actions of Joseph Kony, the leader of a rebel group in central Africa called the Lord’s Resistance Army.

The LRA is a brutal and destructive force. It abducts children and rapes and kills women and men, often forcing children to kill their own parents. And it’s been doing so for 26 years. Invisible Children is right to publicize Kony’s crimes — there’s no doubt about that. But the group and its “Kony 2012” campaign are not helping the situation in Africa.

I give Invisible Children credit for trying to raise awareness about the LRA and its atrocities. It is no easy task to get thousands of college students sharing photos and videos. And raising awareness is good — if people know about an atrocity, they are more likely to try to do something, whether it is contacting their government or raising money for charities.

But my biggest qualm with Invisible Children — besides its directors who pose for pictures holding enormous guns and get arrested for public masturbation — is that it seems to be raising awareness for awareness’s sake.

While the group claims it spends 80 percent of its money on program expenditures, less than a third of that goes to actual programs on the ground in Africa.

The rest goes to travel, salaries and video production.

In fact, Invisible Children’s director of ideology (director of what?) proudly states that “we are an advocacy and awareness organization,” not an aid organization. But Invisible Children doesn’t go on to direct viewers to an aid organization in its video — it asks for donations.

For about a week, my newsfeed was flooded with Kony statuses.

As I write this, however, there is not a single Kony-related post on my newsfeed. Not one. By using a viral video, Invisible Children’s campaign went the way of all viral videos: massive interest followed by only occasional mention.

The “Kony 2012” campaign allowed me to feel like I had made a contribution by clicking a button or posting a link, when in reality I did nothing to hasten Kony’s downfall.

Kony is no longer the hot topic.

W

But that’s okay, because all the rich, white kids in America got to feel good for a few days about our kinship with African children, right? That doesn’t exactly seem like lasting awareness.

Invisible Children offers only one solution to the problem: U.S. troops. There are a lot of evil people in the world — and many other warlords in central Africa — but should we send in troops to kill all of them? I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but the group doesn’t even address the implications of its suggestions, and forgive me if I think a cute five-year-old shouldn’t set U.S. policy.

What’s more, the LRA hasn’t actually been in Uganda for about five years, and not because it has expanded to other countries as Invisible Children’s video implies. It has limped to other countries in its weakest state in 26 years. The LRA is still a destabilizing force in central Africa, but the real picture is very different from the one the video paints.

There is also not a single African on Invisible Children’s board of directors. It strikes me as a sort of modern “White Man’s Burden” — those poor, poor Africans obviously need the help of white Americans! The video does not promote African agency in solving an African problem. Most “Kony 2012” fans have watched one video and maybe read some articles; that does not make us experts on Africa.

With any luck, Joseph Kony and the LRA will be captured or killed soon, before more lives are destroyed. My problem with Invisible Children lies not in its finances or board of directors; it lies in its definition of activism.

Activism for any cause cannot just be a fad, a bracelet you wear or a status update you post.

It needs to be a sustained effort by people who actually care. I hope I’m wrong, and the awareness Invisible Children raised changes more than a few Facebook statuses. But either way, if you actually want to affect the situation in central Africa, look to charities that actually do work on the ground — unsexy, un-videoed, unceasing work that causes real change, not just passing fads.

SAM COHEN is a freshman in Calhoun College. Contact him at samson.cohen@yale.edu .

Give ‘Kony 2012’ a chance I

f you had told me before break that a video about a Ugandan warlord, in seven days, would get more views on YouTube than the videos for Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” ZBB’s “Chicken Fried” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s extraordinary hit “Call Me Maybe” had amassed — combined — I would have called you a lunatic.

But Invisible Children, in a remarkable video calling Americans to act to popularize and encourage the capture of Joseph Kony, has done just that. The group created the most viral, most popular human rights campaign in recent history. It’s one of the most successful, too.

Recently, the publicity surrounding “Kony 2012” has turned negative. Critics say the video is too little, too late. They say it oversimplifies and misleads. A few days ago, a nonprofit group showed the video to people whose families Kony had directly affected, and these Ugandans reportedly reacted poorly to the movie. They thought Invisible Children had commercialized their suffering.

I understand these criticisms, and I appreciate the instinct for people to pause and question whether the campaign is really worthy of its acclaim. I agree that catching a warlord will barely begin to solve all of Africa’s problems. I agree that the video lacks nuance — that change is not a rudimentary five-step formula. I agree that it dramatizes for effect.

But we’re not talking about writing a thesis here. We’re not discussing whether this video has educational value, whether it considers every argument and whether it describes the conflict with pinpoint accuracy. Invisible Children didn’t set out to produce a comprehensive documentary on the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Rather, Invisible Children is trying to raise awareness. It is faced with the harder, more practical task of capturing people’s interest, engaging them with their government’s efforts to stop Kony and maintaining civic engagement beyond 2012.

There’s always going to be a trade-off between total accuracy and popular appeal. It’s a fine balance, and Invisible Children has found it.

Invisible Children has made caring about human rights and

justice fashionable, especially about a region that has been too readily ignored over the past century. That’s an extraordinary feat.

It made it easy for people to feel like part of the campaign — by sharing it on social networks and discussing it with friends. It took advantage of America’s consumerist culture, along with our love for drama and intrigue, and nestled its human rights campaign right in the heart of it.

If Invisible Children had tried to explain everything about the conflict or chosen to portray Kony in exact objective detail, the video would not have gained this much traction. It probably would have been a typical, failed human rights campaign — one that sought to raise awareness but instead failed miserably at doing so. No one wants to watch a 30-minute academic lecture in his free time on a story we’ve heard played out countless times on academic circuits and in the media.

So when critics decry the video as useless or naïve, I’d ask them to weigh the practical against the ideal. They’re frightened because they somehow think it’s morally wrong to ignore the little details or to paint a black-and-white portrait of a long and winding conflict. After all, that’s the spirit that has defined everyone’s academic careers: that nuance, comprehensiveness and precise attention to detail are the keys to a good argument.

That’s not the case in the real world. What’s actually morally wrong and naïve is to try the same traditional approach to raising awareness, knowing that it is almost always doomed to fail. The cost of inaction is much higher than the cost of oversimplifying or dramatizing a conflict.

Kony 2012 is not designed to fade into the woodwork like most news stories. Even if Joseph Kony isn’t captured this year, the campaign has already left a lasting impact. It’s a legacy of citizen engagement in government policies — a legacy that, even if it doesn’t bring about the demise of the LRA, will change how we appeal to people’s better angels.

GENG NGARMBOONANANT is a freshman in Silliman College.

Contact him at wishcha.ngarmboonanant@yale. edu .

Dangerous games

hile civilians died in Syria and pundits raged over Iran, I was out walking in Rancho San Antonio, 4,000 acres of riparian woods and upland pasture in the hills over Los Altos, California. Rounding a bend, I came across three mule deer — scrappy, undersized specimens, hungry from the drought. I expected them to bound away, and was shocked when they didn’t — when they remained, staring and grazing, while I passed by within feet of them.

I felt strangely affronted. As a pacifistic vegetarian, I’ll admit I didn’t pose a significant threat to the deer. But I didn’t want them to know that. I felt that these creatures owed me timidity, even if I couldn’t quite articulate the reason until I caved to peer pressure and bought a copy of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.”

Published way back in the fall of 2008, Collins’ romantic scifi teen gorefest has enjoyed a recent surge of popularity among the college kids who missed its debut, thanks in large part to an aggressive publicity campaign for the upcoming film. For those who have yet to be taken in by the striking images of a bowwielding Jennifer Lawrence, the book concerns a futuristic North America in which an oppressive central government conscripts the children of the hinterlands to slaughter each other in annual gladiatorial games.

“The Hunger Games” simultaneously condemns and celebrates violence, the inherSAM ent perversity LASMAN of the “Battle Royale”Beartrap like plot and the emotional demises of certain characters coexisting uneasily with writing that shows its true muscle in scenes of bloodshed. No one is reading these books for a revelatory look at teenage love — they are there for the action.

Collins herself claims that the book and its sequels arose in response to an evening of flipping TV stations through images of real war and reality entertainment that soon began to blur together. Besides this critique of modern media culture, it’s also easy to read an incisive attack on American imperialism — a government that enlists young men and women from beyond the centers of political power and sends them off to kill in the wilderness. The film’s release will occur less than two weeks after a stock trader-turned-soldier slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians on his fourth deployment to a combat zone, and its vision of innocents transformed into brutal killing machines by the inscrutable dictates of a powerful state offers an implicit, timely comment.

Besides these clear contemporary references, there is something more elemental about the violence of “The Hunger Games.”

The novel’s heroine succeeds in large part because she is a killer, a poacher who dispatches squirrels and lynxes without sentimental compunction. Yet she kills out of hunger. Bushmeat supplements her meager diet at home; in the arena, food and water are systematically denied or hidden to force the competitors into battle.

While there are a few allusions to literal cannibalism, the name and nature of the brutal contest both allude to an ecology of eat-orbe-eaten.

Our other violent heroes kill for justice, for love, even perversely for fun. But hunger is a different and more terrifying motivation. We have an inherent revulsion towards acknowledging our own predatory instincts.

That was the terror of the original human-hunting tale, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” in 1924. To some extent, it’s the same fear that pervades our language’s first horror story, “Beowulf,” still bone-chilling over a millennium after it was written down. In their nocturnal battle, the warrior hero and his ogreish foe grapple until the listener can no longer tell them apart. Zombie films and literature play on many phobias, but not least among them is the simultaneously sickening and elating premise that scores of other humans must be decapi-

tated, or they will feast on the flesh of you and your loved ones.

By highlighting the twinned terror and attraction of killing for food, “The Hunger Games” harks back to an unfathomable past, to Neanderthal bones bearing the cut marks of flint knives.

What does our primal and conflicted relationship toward hunger and its bloody necessities have to do with this moment in time — with uprisings and viral videos of African atrocities, the drawing down of some wars and the potential escalation towards others?

I would hazard that it means we must fear ourselves more than we do. Leaders, activists and artists alike have often overestimated their capacity to do global good and underestimated their very real ability to make the world worse. And part of that, “The Hunger Games” suggests, lies in how easily we forget our predatory nature, the awful psychic link between surviving and killing, which wreaks havoc whether suppressed or unleashed.

The unfazed deer of Rancho San Antonio had little to fear from me. Instead, they served as a reminder that I could not afford to be so complacent.

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

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 3

PAGE THREE TODAY’S EVENTS TUESDAY, MARCH 20

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS JAMES LEVINSOHN James Levinsoh, the Charles A. Goodyear Professor of Global Affairs and director of the Jackson Institute, focuses his work on international economics and industrial organization. He has conducted work in Senegal, Botswana and South Africa.

Dems’ jobs plan heads for passage

12:30 PM “The Homes of William Morris.” This “Art in Context” talk will be given by Imogen Hart, assistant curator at the Yale Center for British Art Department of Exhibitions and Publications.

Yale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel St.).

4:30 PM “Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.”

Odd Arne Westad, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, will give this ISS BradyJohnson Grand Strategy Lecture. Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), lecture hall.

5:30 PM “Understanding Careers in the UN System: A Conversation with Will Davis of UNDP.” Will Davis, director of the Washington Representation Office of the United Nations Development Program, will speak. Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), International Room.

CORRECTIONS MONDAY, MARCH 19

A Cross Campus item reported that “Freshman Lunch” is an initiative of the Yale College Council. In fact, it is a program of the Freshman Class Council.

Long Wharf embarks on expensive upgrade

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER This summer, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre will receive a facelift.

Starting in June, the theater will undergo its biggest renovation since the 1970s, when the management added a second theater to the building. Supported by a $3.8 million fundraising campaign launched last fall, the construction will focus on improving patron comfort in the existing theaters, said Steven Scarpa, Long Wharf’s director of marketing and communications. The theater will install a new heating and air conditioning system, bigger bathrooms and improvements to the comfortability of the seating, he said.

“Long Wharf has terrific plays, but the actual coming here can be physical painful,” managing director Joshua Borenstein DRA ’02 said. The current seats are “really uncomfortable,” Scarpa said.

Now is the ideal time to upgrade the building, Borenstein said: in February 2011, Long Wharf signed a lease to stay in its current location until 2022, which means that any renovations that take place now will benefit the theater for at least 20 years.

Borenstein added that the Long Wharf is on “solid financial footing,” enabling the theater to undertake a project of this magnitude. Seventy percent of the project’s cost, $2.56 million, has already been raised, Scarpa said, $1.25 million of which comes from a donation by The Tow Foundation, a grantmaking foundation based in New Canaan. This is above industry standards for this stage in a renovation, he added, as projects are typically announced with only about half of the necessary money raised.

Construction on the theater will begin in June, Borenstein said, and should be completed

by the fall, in time for the first production after Thanksgiving.

The renovation is set to tackle the various aspects of the Long Wharf’s problems with patrons’ discomfort. Expansion of bathrooms, which will double in size, ise expected to reduce wait times, while new heating and air conditioning systems are intended to combat complaints that Long Wharf is always too hot or too cold, Scarpa said.

Seating at Long Wharf is so dysfunctional that playgoers now have to sit sideways in some sections because there is not enough room otherwise, Borenstein added. Scarpa said he hopes complaints will end after the 486 uncomfortable seats at Long Wharf are replaced by 405 plush seats with more legroom.

The holistic renovation will also upgrade the aesthetics of the Long Wharf Theatre, Scarpa said, describing the construction as an “overall facade face lift.” The lobby will receive new lighting and furnishings, and the entrance to the theater will be lined with birch trees.

While the exterior of the theater will retain its industrial look, the renovations will make it more visible from the road, said Rick Weiss, the project’s architect, as there is currently very little visible evidence the building is indeed a theater.

After the renovation is complete, the building will feature a lit sign visible from the road, Weiss said.

In addition to improving audience members’ comfort, Scarpa said the renovations will include one modification to the stage itself. When construction is through, the theater will feature a new lighting grid, allowing artists more design flexibility.

The Long Wharf Theatre received a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1978.

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

LONG WHARF THEATRE

The Long Wharf Theatre is planning extensive renovations.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

With approval from a key committee, Democrats in the State Senate are close to passing legislation aimed at boosting employment in the state.

BY NICK DEFIESTA STAFF REPORTER With the approval of a key committee in Hartford, Senate Democrats’ “Jobs Plan” is a step closer to passage.

Last week, the General Assembly’s Commerce Committee, of which Democrats are a majority, approved the employment plan, first proposed by state Senate leadership in January. The bill will now head back to the full General Assembly, where it must pass both the House and Senate before the legislative session ends in May in order to become law. Because both the House and the Senate are dominated by Democrats — in the House there are 52 Republicans and 99 Democrats, while the Senate consists of 14 Republicans and 22 Democrats — the bill’s passage appears likely.

According to Senate Democrats, the plan, which focuses on aiding job growth in small businesses, will protect and increase

the number of in-state jobs. The proposal has five major components: expanding the state’s definition of a small business from 50 to 100 workers, fighting unemployment discrimination, starting a “Made in Connecticut” marketing campaign, expanding programs to help post-9/11 combat veterans find work in the state and creating a “Connecticut Treasures” program to highlight the state’s educational and tourist destinations.

The measure seeks to further the momentum created by an October jobs bill passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly with a nearly unanimous vote.

The October legislation invested $60 million in city infrastructure, eased regulations on businesses, cut business taxes and provided funds for small businesses to expand.

By expanding the definition of a small business, the Democrats’ plan would boost eligibility for state small-business aid. Sen-

ate Democrats estimate that it would extend loans and grants to an additional 2,600 companies.

State Sen. Steve Cassano, Democrat of Manchester, said a broader definition of a small business will not only increase the number of applicants eligible for state loans, but will also help firms undertake expansions they might not otherwise.

“The doomsday predictions that manufacturing is dead in Connecticut are way off base,” Cassano said. “All you have to do is look at the recent growth in small manufacturers … to see that. There is long-term stability there.”

The plan also calls for an expansion of the state’s Subsidized Training and Employment Program, or STEP-Up, to benefit veterans who served in combat in the past decade. According to a 2011 report by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, the unemployment rate for these veterans in Connecticut is 15.5 percent, compared with 11.5

percent nationally.

State Republicans, meanwhile, have yet to bring up an alternative comprehensive jobs plan. Instead, they have offered smaller proposals — most notably business deregulation and tax relief measures for businesses — that have so far received little attention.

But one of the Republicans’ proposals — for a gas tax cap — has not gone unnoticed on the other side of the aisle, as gas prices across Connecticut exceed $4 per gallon in some areas. Senate Democrats announced Monday that they would seek to cap the gas tax at its current level and strengthen the Department of Consumer Protection’s ability to prosecute gasoline profiteering.

The current unemployment rate in Connecticut is 8.0 percent, slightly below the national rate of 8.3 percent.

Contact NICK DEFIESTA at nicholas.defiesta@yale.edu .

Global affairs announces capstones

BY ANTONIA WOODFORD STAFF REPORTER The first class of seniors in the global affairs major will work on capstone projects next semester for clients ranging from the World Bank to a United States Department of Energy laboratory, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs announced Monday.

The capstone projects, which replace the senior essay or project requirement common to other majors, are designed to give students in global affairs hands-on experience with policy work. While some universities make similar real-world projects a component of master’s programs, Director of the Jackson Institute James Levinsohn and Director of the Capstone Projects Sean Smith said they do not know of any requirement comparable to Yale’s at the undergraduate level. Eight global affairs majors interviewed after the announcement said they were pleased by the diverse project offerings and said the capstones were a main attraction when they applied to enter the newly created major last year.

“It’s an extremely unique and awesome opportunity to advise a real client,” Eric Levine ’13 said. “I look forward to the level of responsibility. Our assignments for the class will have a real impact.”

Rising seniors in the major will rank their preferences for the projects in the coming weeks and be assigned to one of six projects, which include a study of armed groups operating in Western Africa for the Genevabased Small Arms Survey and a project on cybersecurity for Pacific Northwest National Laboratories of Richland, Wash., by the end of the semes-

ter. Three projects emphasize international security and three focus on international development — corresponding to the two tracks of the global affairs major — but they are designed so that students from both tracks can complete any of the options, global affairs Director of Undergraduate Studies Susan Hyde told the roughly 40 students at the announcement in Luce Hall Monday evening.

In an interview with the News, Smith described the projects as a “bridge” between typical classroom work global affairs majors have done at Yale and the type of work they might do postgraduation.

“These are going to be different kinds of classes than they’ve ever done before,” Smith said.

“It’s going to challenge them in different ways.”

Eight to 10 students will collaborate on each project, and will attend weekly in-class meetings with an instructor who has expertise in their project’s area. The projects will require students to conduct research in the area their client selects and to produce reports of that research that the clients can then use in their operations, Smith said.

He added that the Jackson Institute has funding available to support travel for the projects, for students who need to visit their clients or conduct off-campus interviews for their research.

Capstone projects that involve working for nongovernmental organizations and government agencies exist as part of master’s programs at some other universities. Students in master’s of public administration programs at both New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wil-

son School of Public and International Affairs are required as part of their degree to work in teams on projects for client organizations.

Smith said he spoke to some professors that oversaw master’s level capstone courses at other universities, but that he and Levinsohn “had a pretty clear sense of what we wanted to do” when creating Yale’s capstones. Smith said he and Levinsohn approached potential clients between July 2011 and this January.

Smith emphasized that the results of the first year of capstones will significantly impact the global affairs major going forward.

“The reputation of this program is going to be to a large degree built by what [the first class of seniors] produce, and how the experience goes for this set of clients,” Smith said.

“That’s an enormous opportunity for these particular students to influence the experiences that everyone who comes after them will have.”

Global affairs majors interviewed said they have looked forward to the capstone projects since they applied to the global affairs major. Two of eight students interviewed said they had feared one project would be more appealing than the others, but added that they felt satisfied with all the options after the announcement.

Sam Dorward ’13 said he thought the directors of the global affairs major had “hyped up” the projects, but that the projects lived up to those high expectations.

The global affairs major was approved in December 2010.

Contact ANTONIA WOODFORD at antonia.woodford@yale.edu .

GLOBAL AFFAIRS CAPSTONE PROJECTS CLIENT: US DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY, OFFICE OF TERRORISM AND FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Project: Assessing the efficiency of economic sanctions in preventing terrorism.

CLIENT: SMALL ARMS SURVEY

Project: Study of armed groups operating in western Africa.

CLIENT: PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY

Project: Looking at possible forms for global cybersecurity agreements.

CLIENT: WORLD BANK, INTERNATIONAL FINANCE CORPORATION

Project: Examining link between urbanization and economic growth in developing countries.

CLIENT: MOTHERS2MOTHERS

Project: Analyzing the effectiveness of programs to reduce transmission of HIV and AIDS in mothers and children.

CLIENT: FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS

Project: Examining effects of different investments in agriculture on rural development and women’s social and economic empowerment.

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

165

Construction fuels strong January GRAPH UNEMPLOYMENT RATES SINCE JANUARY 2011

15

Conn.

New Haven

Decibel level produced by a shot from a .357 magnum pistol

Gunshots are loud. Normal speech produces sound pressure around 60 decibels, and the threshold for pain is around 140 decibels. Gunfire often produces pressures of 150-160 decibels, for periods of up to two milliseconds.

Doubts arise over gunshot detector

12

9

6 6

March Jan.Jan.Feb.Feb. AprilAprilMayMayJune March JuneJulyJulyAug.Aug.Sept.

Sept.Oct.Oct.Nov.Nov.Dec.Dec.Jan.Jan. 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2012 SOURCE: CONNECTICUT DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

UNEMPLOYMENT FROM PAGE 1 jobs, with January 2012’s job growth representing nearly half of that figure. State officials attribute that growth to gains in the construction and manufacturing sectors.

The state added 1,400 manufacturing jobs and 3,100 construction jobs in January.

“We’ve had a mild winter, so construction projects have been able to come online earlier than usual,” said Alissa DeJonge GRD ’00, director of research at the Connecticut Economic Resource Center.

DeJonge added that construction is a cyclical component in Connecticut’s economy, and that sector often increases activity in March and April as cold weather subsides.

Concurrent with the increase in statewide building, City Hall spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton ’04 said New Haven is experiencing “a boom in construction.”

The city’s Schools Capital Program, which seeks to rebuild or renovate every New Haven public school, and construction on Yale facilities are key drivers of that growth, she added. Benton also said construction on the 360 State Street apart-

ment complex, the conversion of the old Winchester Repeating Arms Factory into a business office, and utility company upgrades such as the Public Service Enterprise Group power plant demonstrate strong private construction activity.

But despite strong construction growth, New Haven’s January unemployment rate stood at 12.5 percent, well above the state average. Benton said the key to meeting New Haven’s challenges — including high unemployment, the state’s second-lowest home ownership rate, the state’s secondhighest percentage of subsidized housing participation, and a high incarceration rate — is improving the city’s public schools.

“There is no better job creation program, wealth creator, or violence-reduction initiative than the success of our public schools,” Benton said. “We need to make sure all of our young people are graduating from high school ready to succeed in today’s economy.”

The state’s manufacturing sector experienced strong job gains in part because of a weakened U.S. dollar, making exports relatively less expensive, DeJonge said. She added that some of the research and devel-

opment work that had previously been outsourced from Connecticut returned to the state during January.

“It’s more of the advanced manufacturing that is gaining in Connecticut,” DeJonge said. “You aren’t going to get simple things in the inventory line — that’s not coming back — but advanced manufacturing like aerospace and turbine development is coming back.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national unemployment rate is falling in part because some people have given up on searching for jobs and have exited the labor market altogether. DeJonge said that this trend is also present in Connecticut, where the labor force is smaller now than it was a year ago. However, she added that the number of discouraged workers quitting their job search is difficult to track accurately.

In October, the state legislature approved a $1 billion jobs bill for new and expanding business assistance, workforce development and job training programs.

Contact BEN PRAWDZIK at benjamin.prawdzik@yale.edu .

47 Whalley Ave (across the Courtyard Marriot) Parties welcome We take reservations We cater

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The reliability of ShotSpotter, a system the NHPD uses to detect gunshots citywide, has recently been called into question.

SHOTSPOTTER FROM PAGE 1 911 response center. Before this change, reports from the ShotSpotter sensors were sent directly to dispatchers.

A 2011 report by the company titled “ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System Efficacy Study” acknowledges that “false positives” — ShotSpotter reports that do not come from gunshots — are the “single most common complaint” of users and pose an operational problem.

The report found that 67 percent of alerts on average are caused by actual gunfire.

Still, NHPD Chief Dean Esserman told the New Haven Register he wanted to talk to ShotSpotter officials again to ensure that all questions about the system’s performance are resolved. He said his department needed to “either gain

confidence in ShotSpotter” by resolving the reliability issues or shut it down.

Hartman noted that despite the accuracy issues, the system has proven useful in reporting many shootings that go unreported by earwitnesses.

“If we can’t get this system to work to its full potential, then one train of thought is, ‘Why support this system?’” he said.

“The other train of thought is that you’re going to get some false readings in anything like this, and if you consider the one false reading with 11 positive readings, do you throw away the dozen eggs when one’s cracked?”

ShotSpotter systems operate in more than 45 cities around the United States, including Los Angeles and Boston.

Contact JAMES LU at james.q.lu@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

NEWS

“Independent films are where you really get to cut your teeth and have some fun and do the things that mainstream Hollywood doesn’t want to do.” ANTHONY ANDERSON ACTOR

Animator talks challenges of independent film

BY YANAN WANG STAFF REPORTER At a Pierson College Master’s Tea on Monday, filmmaker Dennis Tupicoff said his first project took little more than a book and some “craziness.”

In front of an audience of about 15, Tupicoff discussed the trend toward realism in animation and the financial constraints of independent filmmaking. Co-hosted by Pierson College and the Film Studies Department, the event was organized by Miheala Mihailova ’10 GRD ’16, a doctoral student in the Film Studies and the Slavic Languages and Literature departments, who met Tupicoff last year at the Animated Realities conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Tupicoff noted that while there are often financial constraints to independent filmmaking, these same restrictions can help a filmmaker discover different creative approaches toward a traditional medium.

“When you say animation, people usually think cartoons such as ‘Looney Tunes,’” Mihailova said. “[Tupicoff] is working in a whole different vein.”

Best known for his animated shorts and animated autobiographies, Tupicoff deals with loss, trauma and memories in his films, Mihailova said, adding that films such as “His Mother’s Voice” and “The Darra Dogs” transform Tupicoff’s personal experiences into visual narratives.

In addition to describing his creative process, Tupicoff spoke candidly about the harsher realities of working independently as opposed to

operating under a large production company. Tupicoff said he had envisioned creating a film with technology that transforms photographs into motion images — the project, however, would have cost him $500,000 for every four minutes of animated film. While he ultimately produced the work as a less expensive liveaction short, Tupicoff cited the piece as an example of an endeavor that was “technically possible, but financially impossible.”

I don’t try to understand it, but I do like to exploit it. Essentially great works are made out of sketches and dribbles — unbelievable amounts of thrashing things through.

DENNIS TUPICOFF Filmmaker In 1975, after graduating from Australia’s Queensland University with degrees in history and government, the Melbourne native created his first cartoon after teaching himself animation techniques from a book. The cartoon was a fourminute project that Tupicoff described as one of his most ambitious undertakings, as he had no prior experience in the field. Tupicoff’s knowledge was so limited, he said, that

he had not known how to use a camera’s zoom function. Even today, he claims to know little about the technical mechanics of drawing.

“I don’t try to understand it, but I do like to exploit it,” Tupicoff said. “Essentially great works are made out of sketches and scribbles — unbelievable amounts of thrashing things through.”

With the numerous resources now available to aspiring filmmakers, all that is really needed is a little persistence, Tupicoff said. However, a far greater challenge is that of making adult animation relevant in the age of Disney and Pixar. To accomplish that goal, Tupicoff said, it is necessary to make “films that are strange and adult, that aren’t just cute.”

He added that in his experience there are no rules in creative expression — and if there are, they are best broken or ignored.

Jason Douglass ’13, a film studies major who attended the talk and is undertaking an independent study of Japanese anime, said he was interested in how Tupicoff viewed animation’s function within the film world as a whole, noting that there seems to be a universality in animation not found in live-action genres.

Beau Gabriel ’14, who also attended the talk, said that he appreciated Tupicoff’s advice on how to succeed as an animator with little to no former training in drawing and art.

A screening of some of Tupicoff’s films in William L. Harkness Hall followed the Master’s Tea. Contact YANAN WANG at yanan.wang@yale.edu .

JOYCE XI/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Filmmaker Dennis Tupicoff discussed trends and financial challenges in the contemporary film world.

MARCH MADNESS ACROBATICS COME TO CROSS CAMPUS

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CHRIS MORRIS

KANSAS STATE CHEER SQUAD MAKES PIT STOP AT YALE En route to support their women’s basketball team in Bridgeport at the Wildcats’ Tuesday game against UConn, a contingent of six members of the Kansas State University cheerleading team used Sterling Library as a backdrop for some stunting and tumbling.

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT At larger SOM campus, class sizes to increase GRAPH AVERAGE CLASS SIZES AT TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS IN 2010

80 60 40 20 0

UC UChicago Columbia Duke Harvard Michigan MIT Berkeley

SOM FROM PAGE 1 teaches the first-year “Innovator” core class, said the student body would have to increase far more than it will for students to lose opportunities to work directly with professors. Snyder said first-year classes will not grow because an extra section will be created, and Canales said students’ first-year experiences will not be affected as a result.

James Freeland, senior associate dean for faculty and research at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, said large class sizes can also foster an intimate academic environment. At Darden, he said, courses must have at least 25 students, and class sizes average 45.

Still, Darden has numerous policies in place to help students form relationships with professors, he said, including an “open-door policy” encouraging students to visit professors at any time rather than restricting meetings to scheduled office hours.

But not all business schools champion large class sizes. Rajan Madhav, senior associate dean of academic affairs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said a “big

Northwestern

Penn Stanford

MARY MCCARTHY AMERICAN AUTHOR AND CRITIC

Science depts praise shared grant handling SHARED SERVICES FROM PAGE 1

Core Class Elective

100

“Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

Yale

SOURCE: BUSINESSWEEK

selling point” of the school’s MBA program is its “intimacy.” Many courses at the school — which has roughly 800 students and a student-to-faculty ratio of six to one — are capped at 15 students.

In addition to increasing class sizes, the rise in the student population at SOM will give the school a larger amount of tuition revenue, which is more stable than funds from other sources such as fundraising and endowment income. Diane Palmeri, SOM’s associate dean of finance and administration, said in a Feb. 29 email that roughly two-fifths of the school’s operating budget will come from tuition revenue once the student body rises to its new size.

Freeland said small increases in student body size can substantially increase revenue. He added that the cost of employing a full-time faculty member — which hovers around $300,000 per year when benefits and research support are taken into account — is difficult to meet without a large student body.

There are roughly 100 faculty members at SOM. Contact DANIEL SISGOREO at daniel.sisgoreo@yale.edu .

and Business Operations Shauna King said at the Yale College faculty meeting in February. The investigation examined 6,000 grants to the University from 30 federal agencies, and concluded in December 2008 when the University agreed to pay $7.6 million for purportedly mishandling federal research grants.

As administrators examined Yale’s systems following the investigation, they determined there was a lack of consistency in how different departments handled similar administrative tasks, King said. In an effort to streamline some of those processes for grant administration — which King called “an area of complexity and regulation where mistakes are of high consequence to individual faculty members and to the institution” — FRMS was officially launched in May 2011.

Though roughly 20 professors protested Yale’s efforts to implement shared services on a broader level at the February meeting, King introduced FRMS at the meeting as one example of a shared services unit that has received “positive acclaim” from departments and faculty applying for grants. But some professors criticize the more general shared services business model as an across-the-board system that does not meed the needs of individual departments.

When King and University President Richard Levin introduced shared services as a University-wide initiative prior to the recession, the goal was to reduce the burden on faculty and staff rather than to cut costs. They were forced to re-evaluate their priorities in the wake of the budget crisis, and now say shared services will also help tighten finances.

Staff in FRMS were transferred from other areas of the University, including a number of departments on Science Hill, King said, adding that some FRMS positions were paid for by cutting positions in her own office. Whereas departmental staff have a wide range of responsibilities, Bentley said FRMS employees help departments meet the requirements associated with different grants by focusing on tracking sponsored research.

Since the onset of recession in 2008, federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health have faced cuts, which have trickled down to colleges and universities that depend on grant income as a large portion of their revenue. At Yale, income from grants and contracts made up roughly 24 percent of the operating budget in fiscal year 2011.

The decline in funding has forced Yale’s departments to submit more grant applications, which Bentley said requires a wider knowledge of sponsor agencies.

“We’re grappling with the amount of the demands

we have for the service,” she said.

FRMS has helped small departments by providing needed expertise in grant administration, and has helped some larger departments compensate for turnover and reorganization in staff caused by retirements and vacancies, Bentley said.

Bentley said staff in FRMS meet regularly with faculty applying for funding and administrators, and provide them reports on their work. Departments and their faculty have only worked with the shared services center if they have requested its assistance, she added.

The shared services center offers both pre-award and post-award assistance to departments, Bentley said. Pre-award assistance involves helping principal investigators — generally the faculty applying for grants — determine whether they are eligible for the funding, ensuring all the sponsor agency’s requirements are fulfilled and improving the overall quality of the proposal, Bentley said. Post-award support involves tracking grants after they are awarded to ensure funding guidelines are met, expenditures are occurring at an appropriate pace and faculty have satisfied their commitment to the agency, she added.

Bentley said some centralized University services were provided to departments before the official launch of FRMS, but not “with the formality or extensiveness we have today.”

The Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology receives both pre-award and postaward support from FRMS, department chair Ronald Breaker said. While all the department’s work in grant administration was handled “in the distant past” by one departmental staff member, Breaker said, in recent years the department has added a new employee and has also gradually shifted work to the shared services unit.

Breaker said the team of grant administration experts at FRMS have “taken everything our faculty members have thrown at them so far,” including a record high of grant applications submitted in a single quarter.

“Before our full transition to the external units for Pre-Award and Post-Award support, we were really overstressing our internal systems, particularly when major grant submission deadlines approached,” Breaker said in an email in late February.

FRMS provides pre-award support to eight major research departments and 13 other departments, and post-award support to seven major research departments and 19 other departments.

Contact GAVAN GIDEON at gavan.gideon@yale.edu .

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

BULLETIN BOARD

TODAY’S FORECAST

TOMORROW

Areas of fog before 10am. Otherwise, partly sunny, with a high near 68.

THURSDAY

High of 71, low of 49.

High of 75, low of 49.

SMALL TALK BY AMELIA SARGENT

ON CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21 3:30 PM “Evolution in a Vaccinated World.” Andrew Read of Pennsylvania State University will give this seminar. Sponsored by the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Fund and the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Class of 1954 Environmental Sciences Center (21 Sachem St.), Room 110.

6:00 PM “Art & Music: A Conversation Between David Byrne and James Murphy.” The Yale School of Art presents this conversation between DFA Records co-founder James Murphy and Talking Heads member David Byrne, moderated by John Schaefer. Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel St.), Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall.

WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ

THURSDAY, MARCH 22 4:00 PM The 2nd Annual Amy Rossborough Memorial Lecture: The Crunk Feminist Collective. Susana Morris and Eesha Pandit of the Crunk Feminist Collective will discuss the collective’s ideals, goals and relation to “mainstream” feminism.

RSVP to esi.hutchful@yale.edu to attend dinner at 5:30 p.m.

Linsly-Chittenden Hall (63 High St.), Room 101.

4:30 PM “Singled Out: Conversation with the Creator of Israeli TV Series ‘Srugim.’” This conversation with Laizy Shapiro, director of Srugim, will be moderated by Hebrew senior lectors Ayala Dvoretzky and Shiri Goren. The talk will give a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the show and at the challenges of being a religious producer in the Israeli TV industry.

Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale (80 Wall St.).

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FRIDAY, MARCH 23 6:00 PM Yale School of Art Thesis Exhibition: MFA Sculpture 2012 Part 1 Closing Reception. Featuring the work of Peter Moran, Sonia Finley, Thomas Hutton, Randi Lynn Shandroski and Carlos Vela-Prado. Yale School of Art (Green Hall) (1156 Chapel St.).

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2 Medium with a lot of talk 3 Ate, as soup 4 Price to pay: Abbr.

5 Bullfighter’s cloak 6 “Road” film co-star 7 __ Sketch: drawing toy 8 Hägar creator Browne 9 Suffix with benz10 Wind River Reservation tribe 11 Kind of lamp with a tungsten filament 12 One who doesn’t hog 15 “__ Easy”: Ronstadt hit 18 Decoding org.

23 Something to wear 25 Sot’s speech problem 27 Money 28 Atlantic Division NBA team 31 Balt. Orioles’ div.

34 Step on someone’s toes, so to speak 35 Mac alternatives 38 Brussels-based defense gp.

Monday’s Puzzle Solved

SUDOKU MEDIUM

3

7 1 8

(c)2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

39 Shrinking sea 40 Marathoner’s need 41 They may be coined 44 Street opening 45 Became a contestant 46 Gadget you can count on?

47 “This ___”: “How strange” 48 Well-heeled Marcos

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3/20/12

50 Sculptors’ subjects 52 Resist authority 54 Earth-friendly prefix 57 Neither an ally nor an enemy: Abbr.

61 Common URL ender 62 Slangy aboutface 63 Printer resolution meas.

9 6 1 8 3 2 7 1

5 7 2 9 3

2 6 1

5 8

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY The right kind of science I

n the past couple of months, we’ve seen two high-profile lessons about how science, as a way to uncover truth, is supposed to work. The first case was inspiring, the second disheartening. Both have PENIEL something to teach us about doing science.

DIMBERU Last fall, a team of researchers from the Technophile OPERA Collaboration in Gran Sasso, Italy shocked the world with their report of clocking neutrinos — electrically neutral subatomic particles — traveling faster than the speed of light. As the speed of light had long been considered the universal speed limit, this announcement prompted equal shares of excitement and skepticism. Could Einstein’s theory of relativity actually be wrong?

When a second attempt of the experiment showed the same 60-nanosecond difference between the time it should have taken the neutrinos to travel and the time it did, it looked like the physics world would be turned upside down.

But as the saying goes, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” A few weeks after the paradigm-shifting results were first announced, the researchers found a small error in their measurement that could account for the 60-nanosecond discrepancy. To the layperson, this may have looked like a huge failure. No doubt the scientists were embarrassed. However, this is precisely how science works.

Experimental results are provided to the scientific community (usually in the form of a publication in a peer-reviewed journal) for confirmation and eventually to inform new lines of research.

The researchers that made the discovery did not entirely believe the results themselves, and they wanted to have the greater scientific community help them validate the findings. The point is not whether the results were correct or not (though I’m glad Einstein wasn’t wrong), but that the truth won out and the scientific method prevailed.

Juxtapose the neutrino story with one that continues to unfold from the University of Tokyo. Prominent molecular biologist Shigeaki Kato is currently under investigation by the university for allegedly manipulating data from dozens of publications over more than a decade. These include several articles in top-tier scientific journals including Cell, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Suspicion of Kato’s alleged scientific misconduct came to light when a 2009 publication was corrected in late 2011.

While the authors claimed that the correction would not affect the results and conclusions of the original publication, they admitted to having “inadvertently duplicated or erroneously created” images. This admission raised more than a few eyebrows, and when one curious researcher pored over 24 different publications from Kato’s group dating back to 2001, he discovered a myriad of images that appear to have been doctored. The anonymous researcher brought the allegations against Kato by making a nearly six-minute video showing the manipulated images and posting it on YouTube.

After watching the video, I can say that the evidence against Kato appears convincing. However, it would be prudent to wait for the university’s investigation to conclude before drawing any conclusions. But Kato’s group has already retracted two publications from 2004 and 2007, citing unintended plagiarism in both papers.

If the allegations of doctored images are true, it would be a monumental fraud. Science is always based on previous work, whether it is one’s own previous work or that of others in the same field. Publication of false data wastes the time and money of others who may then base their research on the false data. There are certainly times when an honest mistake ends up in a paper, and most researchers will publish a correction when they or someone else picks up on the error. But a decade’s worth of data manipulation is not a mistake. It is a deliberate masking of the truth to advance one’s career.

Science does not need punitive measures against those who are wrong, such as the team in Switzerland, because being wrong can still teach us something. However, intentional falsification of experimental results harms everyone involved, and it harms the integrity of the scientific method. This is not the right way to do science, and I hope that, as it did in the neutrino story, the truth will prevail here as well.

PENIEL DIMBERU is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunobiology.

Contact him at peniel.dimberu@yale.edu .

“As an example to others, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.” MARK TWAIN AMERICAN WRITER

Tobacco increases Yale researcher backs dino diversity marijuana risk

BY RAHUL DHODAPKAR CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Nicholas Longrich, postdoctoral fellow in the Yale Department of Geology & Geophysics, published an article in the Feb. 29 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, claiming that two similar dinosaurs are actually different species, not just adult and juvenile versions of the same species. A self-proclaimed defender of Cretaceous diversity, Longrich hopes that his research can be a methodological example for other groups hoping to clarify questions of classification. The News spoke with him about his research and plans for the future. led you to ask this question QWhat about the triceratops and the torosaurus?

A

Well, it wasn’t much of an issue until recently. There was a paper put out by some researchers from a museum in the Rockies questioning whether they might be the same. And the basic idea is not, on the surface, all that far-fetched in the sense that the argument is that what looks like separate species might in fact be young and adults of the same species. This has happened in the past — the classic example of this is an animal they named nanotyrannus as a kind of dwarf tyrannosaur, and it’s since been shown it’s just a juvenile T-rex. It’s about the same time, same place, it’s clearly not a mature animal, and we can line up all the skulls from smallest to largest and they grade perfectly from a nanotyrannustype thing into a T-rex. So it’s definitely the case that you can mistake a juvenile for a new species … and it’s been proposed that that’s what’s happening here … but I kind of wanted to push back and say no, we’ve been doing it right. There’s been this back-and-forth between having lots of species or having too few, and it’s not just paleontology, I think it’s taxonomy in general.

Nowa-

days people discover new genes, back then they discovered new species. It was a big thing to describe them, and so they named tons and tons of species and over the past hundred years people have been more conservative and kind of whittled those down. But now it’s kind of swinging the other way, and I think as we’ve gotten a little bit better at classifying things and coming to understand variation more and evolution, we’ve come to realize that there are quite a few species.

Maybe not quite as many as the Victorians were naming, but quite a lot.

So there’s kind of this perpetual war on how to classify life — there’s naming a species, but first, how many species are there?

Q

BY SARAH SWONG STAFF REPORTER

And without live tissue to distinguish, it must be very difficult.

A

It’s difficult, and even with living animals it can be tricky. I think the issue is that people like to think in discrete categories, you know, like you’re either this or you’re this. And nature doesn’t work like that, nature is about continuums … I mean the tree of life, ultimately, all these species, if you go back far enough, they all turn into one species, and so there are no hard and fast lines. You’re trying to draw distinctions between things that are ultimately continua and there are points along those continua where it’s really clearly distinct, but there are other places where it’s a bit iffy.

Q

So what kind of metrics do you use to determine that?

A

Species, or years, or — ?

Q

I guess, in this particular situation, when you were doing your analysis of torosaurus and triceratops, what assays did you use?

CREATIVE COMMONS

A

CREATIVE COMMONS

What we did is we kind of sat down and asked, if you want to tell whether things are juvenile or adults, then how do you do that?

And we came up with three things. These are three things, they’re testable predictions, that if you are adults and juveniles of the same species then you have three things, and if any one of them isn’t the case then you have to say that they are different species. The first is that they have to actually occur in the same time and the same place. If the juveniles are all 10 million years older than your adults, you’ve got a bit of a problem. Or if your juveniles are all in Asia, your adults are all in North America … If they’re part of a single population they should have basically the same range … and that is sort of the case here, these guys, [triceratops and torosaurus] for the most part they occur in the same rocks, and they have a very similar range in time, so you can’t reject the possibility that they are one species based on that, but there are two other things.

One is if the torosaurus is just the adult triceratops, then fairly obviously it has to be an adult, all of them have to be adults, and that’s one of the new things we did and the main thing that we did was we looked at whether the torosaurus were adult or not by looking at skull sutures …

Looking at these things we found a number of torosaurus where the skulls aren’t fully fused up, and that implies that they’re not fully grown. So on that basis, if we have torosaurus that aren’t f u l l y mature, i f they’re not adult then they

can’t be the adult of triceratops. So that was one of the big things, and we also went into the issue of the third thing that we need. If one is just kind of turning into the other, we expect to see a transformation series.

If you line up a bunch of fossils you should kind of see them morph into each other.

And we argue that you can’t do that with torosaurus and triceratops.

I guess as a final question, what QSo, implications do you think your research has?

A

There are these kind of eternal battles over diversity, but where it really matters is, you have to understand diversity to understand changes in diversity.

If you want to understand diversification events like adaptive radiations or how climate change might be driving diversity, or if you want to understand extinction events where you lose species, you have to know how many species there are in the first place.

you think we’re headed for another QDo mass extinction?

A

We’re in it. We’ve been in it for 10,000 years or longer, 50,000 to 10,000 years if not longer than that.

We’ve been kind of s---ty to the Native Americans, so it kind of feels a bit mean to blame them for wiping out the mammoths … but that’s what happened.

Humans come into North America/South America and all the big animals disappear, and it’s a repeated pattern here. I don’t think people really recognize how severe it is; I think there’s a bigger extinction in Africa than people have recognized previously, 30,000 to 40,000 years, modern humans get into Eurasia and species start to go extinct there — things like Irish elk and wooly rhinos. They get into Asia, species start going extinct there, we’re even wiping out other species of hominid out of southeast Asia. If you remember the hobbits from Indonesia, they were one of

the species to get wiped out as modern humans move into the area. Then humans get into America 10, 15,000 years ago, all the big animals disappear from North America/South America. And then they start going onto islands, and they hit New Zealand, they hit Madagascar, they hit all the Caribbean islands, they hit the Polynesian islands. Every place people go, species get wiped out, and it’s the large tasty things with low reproductive rates. And then we’ve gone from that to this wave of habitat modification where we are modifying land for agriculture. So yeah, we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers James Yu ’99, left, and Cary Gross, right, has found that some patients who received treatment for prostate cancer may not have needed it.

BY DANIELLE TRUBOW STAFF REPORTER Some men with prostate cancer may be getting too much treatment, according to Yale School of Medicine researchers.

In a study published Jan. 27 in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, Yale researchers found that over the past decade in the United States, there has been a rise in prostate cancer treatments among patients who may not need them. According to Cary Gross, the paper’s lead author, they found

that men who are the least likely to benefit from treatment — those with short life expectancies and nonaggressive cancers — are more likely to be treated for their cancer now than they were a decade ago.

Medical experts say that this study is the latest in a growing body of literature highlighting that not all patients diagnosed with prostate cancer are endangered by a lifethreatening disease, and not all need treatments.

“When a patient’s initial assessment shows what looks like a nonaggressive tumor, then it’s

unlikely that the cancer is going to progress during the patient’s lifetime,” Gross said. “The majority of men with these nonaggressive tumors are likely to die with their prostate cancer but not from their prostate cancer.”

He said that more than half of men who die over the age of 75 would have some evidence of prostate cancer, but that fewer than 5 percent of them die from the disease.

Gross contrasted prostate cancer with leukemia and pancreatic cancer, which are much more

There’s something about tobacco use that seems to worsen marijuana use in some way.

ERICA PETERS Psychiatry postdoctoral fellow, Yale School of Medicine Another of Agrawal’s papers examining nongenetic factors that motivate youth to use cannbis and marijuana was accepted by late month’s issue of Addiction. She hypothesized in the paper that the similar act of smoking may cause cannibis and tobacco use to reinforce each other.

The study reinforces the conclusions of existing literature on polysubstance use, RAND Drug Policy Research Center co-director Rosalie Pacula said in an email. Whether “cannabis and tobacco, alcohol and cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes, or cocaine and meth,” polysubstance use generally leads to more significant dependence and psychosocial problems, she said.

Yale Medical School psychiatry professor Kathleen Carroll and University of Arkansas psychiatry professor Alan Budney co-authored the paper.

A

Yes and no, I mean the asteroid was crazy, like there’s basically no plant eaters that survived the end of the Cretaceous period, and the reason why is because there’s no photosynthesis. Imagine no food for like six months, and that’s probably what happened, and we’re allowing a functional ecosystem to keep going, we’re not shutting down primary productivity, but we’re taking more and more chunks of it. We’re converting large swaths of land over from feeding bison, whatever, mammoths …

QTo feeding us.

A

Yeah, wheat for humans, corn for cows. And the remaining species we haven’t hunted to death for their meat are being marginalized … but yeah. Come back in a couple of months and we’ll have a cool new story for you. We have a cool fossil snake that is a transitional snake between lizards and snakes. The body is all snakey but it has the mouth of a lizard.

Contact RAHUL DHODAPKAR at rahul.dhodapkar@yale.edu .

He said that paying health care providers for the quality, not the quantity, of their care would help to remedy this problem.

Doctors should take into account their patients’ life expectancies in addition to the attributes of tumors when making recommendations, said James Yu ’99, a member of Yale’s Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy, and Effectiveness Research Center and one of the authors of the paper.

“Low-risk men with short life expectancy should have a very frank discussion about watchful waiting and a frank discussion about the potential side effects of treatment,” Yu said. “They should be reassured that they may not need treatment.”

Mark Schoenberg, director of urologic oncology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said that treatments often have large nega-

tive side effects, so doctors should offer treatments only to those patients who need it and will live long enough to derive the benefit it.

Schoenberg said this study further calls attention to the fact that many patients who are being offered therapy may not need it.

“How do we identify the important cancers that could be treated early and cured for the benefit of the patient and how do we differentiate those cancers from cancers that have no real clinical significance?” Schoenberg asked.

The study analyzed 39,270 patients in a Medicare-linked database who were diagnosed with localized prostate cancer between 1998 and 2007.

Contact DANIELLE TRUBOW at danielle.trubow@yale.edu .

BY THE NUMBERS PROSTATE CANCER 17 % 69 2.8 % 2.5 m

Risk for a man in the United States developing prostate cancer at some point in his life.

The average age, in years, for a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the United States.

Chance of a man in the United States dying of prostate cancer.

Number of men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point that are still alive today.

Tanning advocate blasts Yale research

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER A recent Yale study linking indoor tanning and skin cancer is under attack by a pro-tanning website, but experts defended the study’s findings.

Goran Olsson, better known online as “The Tanning Guru,” published a detailed critique of a Yale study, first released in the December 2011 issue of the American Academy of Dermatology journal, which linked indoor tanning to an increased risk of developing basal cell carcinoma.

Calling the research “a typical sun-scare product” designed “to fuel the prohibition side in the debate of legal restrictions for indoor tanning,” Olsson pointed out methodological flaws in the research and claimed that the authors of the study had financial conflicts of interest which led them astray from the truth. The study’s authors denied Olsson’s allegations, and experts said Olsson’s criticisms represent a larger trend within the tanning industry of dismissing unfavorable research.

“My specialty is to discover and disclose patterns that [do] not coincide with common sense and logic,” Olsson said in an email. “Your generation has already been brainwashed with the widely (and wildly) exaggerated dangers of sunlight.”

The study compared 376 participants under the age of 40 with a history of BCC and 390 with no history of the disease. Participants provided information on how frequently they visited tanning salons, as well as when they first began tanning in salons, how long their tanning sessions are and what burns they have received from tanning. The study found that an increase in any of these factors elevated the risk of developing BCC.

This is typical of the inudstry to try to discount the findings of the research that we have been doing.

DEANN LAZOVICH Associate professor, University of Minnesota School of Public Health Olsson hired a statistician, Philipp Schapotschnikow, to help him critique the statistics presented in the study. Schapotschnikow said that the study’s key finding, that people are at a 69 percent greater risk of developing BCC if they have ever used a tanning bed, only pertained to groups already at risk, such as people with fair skin.

He added that the study’s authors said that approximately one-quarter of early-onset BCCs could be prevented if individuals never tanned indoors, which he called a faulty statistic.

“It is not clear from the paper where these figures come from,” Schapotschnikow said. “Furthermore, this statement is much more restrictive than it needs to be. It would be sufficient to compute the number of early-onset BCCs that could have been avoided when individuals stopped indoor tanning after their third burn or after their second burn on the same place.”

Schapotschnikow also pointed out that the study asked subjects to self-report their tanning histories, which could lead to recall bias, as mem-

F R O M T H E

LAB

Cellphones cause behavioral disorders in offspring

Exposure to radiation during pregnancy can cause defects in the brains of offspring, a Yale study on mice has found. “This is the first experimental evidence that fetal exposure to radiofrequency radiation from cellular telephones does in fact affect adult behavior,” said senior author Hugh S. Taylor, M.D., professor and chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, in a press release.

The study found that if pregnant mice were placed in a cage near an active cellphone, their children were more likely to develop behavioral disorders similar to ADHD. Taylor cautioned that more research is needed to tell if a similar effect would occur with humans, but said that limiting cellphone exposure for fetuses “seems warranted.”

Contact SARAH SWONG at sarah.swong@yale.edu .

QWe are the asteroid?

Prostate cancer overtreated, study suggests likely than prostate cancer to be life-threatening. The vast majority of patients with leukemia or pancreatic cancer would benefit from treatment, he said.

Prostate cancer is one of most challenging cancers in the medical field because it does not meet the normal public perception of what a cancer is, said Jonathan Simons, president and chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, an organization that funds and aids research on prostate cancer. There are more than 20 types of prostate cancer, and while some are fatal, many are inactive.

“This paper highlights the further importance of offering patients choices, because not one size fits all for prostate cancer,” Simons added.

He said that patients with nonaggressive and local tumors should be carefully watched and observed rather than treated.

Simons attributed the rise in treatment rates for patients who are unlikely to benefit from the treatment to the “terror of the word ‘cancer.’”

“The problem is that when most patients hear cancer, they don’t hear anything else,” Simons said. “If you tell someone they have cancer, it’s hard for them to hear anything else other than ‘I have cancer. I could die.’”

Gross, by contrast, said that excessive treatments were the result of their increased availability to patients and financial incentives for doctors and hospitals to conduct more costly treatments.

Teenagers who see marijuana as a relatively low-risk drug may be more at risk for addiction than they realize, a new Yale paper says.

Co-occuring cannabis and tobacco use is significantly more likely to cause cannabis abuse and dependence than only cannabis use, according to a paper by Yale researchers accepted by the peerreviewed journal Addiction last month. Psychiatry postdoctorate fellow Erica Peters said that she noticed consistent evidence across the literature of her conclusion and conducted the review to build momentum for the area of study. She said her study did not answer questions about the chemical pathways or the specifics of the drug interactions, but opened the door for future research.

“There’s something about tobacco use that seems to worsen marijuana use in some way,” Peters said.

She said that both simultaneous use — in the form of blunts, marijuana in a cigar wrapper — and use on separate occasions make cannabis more addictive. Co-occuring use also intensifies psychosocial problems, such as anxiety, depression and legal difficulties. The study found that adolescents were less likely to have good grades and more likely to have drunk alcohol in the past month.

Ninety percent of cannabis users also smoke tobacco, said Arpana Agrawal, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. By contrast, only 40 to 50 percent of tobacco users also smoke cannabis, she said.

“If you’re going to tackle one, you have to consider the other,” she said.

Agrawal said that for the first time, the Yale paper provides a “really comprehensive, systematic” understanding of cannabis dependence and abuse over the lifetime of an individual who

smokes tobacco and cannabis.

The important next step is to understand the best approaches to clinical treatment for cooccuring users, Peters said. Clinicians have yet to develop a effective treatment for cannabis dependence, so understanding that tobacco affects the majority of cannabis users is important, Agrawal said.

LEAKS

ories were unlikely to be accurate decades after the fact.

According to DeAnn Lazovich, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and the Masonic Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota, most of Schapotschnikow’s criticisms were unfair. For example, the 69 percent statistic was an amalgam of groups with different risks — so the fair skin group is at an even higher risk.

“This is typical of the industry to try to discount the findings of the research that we have been doing,” Lazovich said. “They’re free to do it and say what they want, because there is no one monitoring the accuracy of what they are saying.”

Lazovich acknowledged that Schapotschnikow was correct that recall bias could affect the study’s accuracy. However, she said that this sort of problem exists in every self-reported epidemiological study, and it is not grounds to dismiss the data.

Olsson also pointed out several financial conflicts of interest that could have biased the study.

For example, the study thanked James Platt from Yale Dermatopathology, a scientist who at one point owned a patent for a process to produce fake tanning products. Olsson said that Platt’s financial interest in fake tanning products made him a competitor to the indoor tanning industry, and that this study’s result could have benefited him financially. Ones of the study’s authors, Ruth Halaban, senior research scientist in dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine, received an award from the International Federation of Pigment Cell Societies in 2011, a group Olsson says is funded primarily by L’Oréal. Olsson described L’Oréal as the world’s largest manufacturer of chemical sun-protection cosmetics and “founder of the sun-scare campaign.”

Platt, who was not an author of the study, said he had no financial interest in attacking tanning salons. He explained that although he was a former employee of Vion Pharmaceuticals, he never had any stock in the firm, which went out of business two years ago. In addition, he denied ever seeing the study’s data, much less distorting it.

Halaban likewise denied being influenced by financial motivations or having any conflicts of interest.

“The unfounded claims and blatant inaccuracies in this report are consistent with the overall tactics of the indoor tanning industry, which were clearly illustrated in the recent congressional investigative report on this industry,” said Susan Mayne, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and senior author of the study.

In February 2011, the Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who represents New Haven, published a report cataloguing the misinformation spread by the indoor tanning industry. Committee investigators contacted 300 tanning salons nationwide, posing as fair-skinned teenage girls, and their findings reported that 78 percent of the tanning salons falsely claimed that tanning would be beneficial to the health of a fair-skinned teenage girl.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, nearly 70 percent of tanning salon patrons are Caucasian girls and women, primarily aged 16 to 29 years.

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

White rice likely to cause type 2 diabetes An analysis of existing medical research conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, published in the British Medical Journal, found that Asians who ate high levels of white rice were 55 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than Asians who ate low levels of white rice. Asians were the most affected group, but the study said the risk of type 2 diabetes increases 11 percent for each additional serving of rice consumed each day. “White rice has long been a part of Asian diets in which diabetes risk was very low,” says David Katz, associate professor of public health at Yale University, according to ABC News. “It is white rice plus aspects of modern living — including less physical work — that conspire to elevate the incidence of type 2 diabetes.”

800,000 lives saved from lung cancer by tobacco prevention efforts A Yale study used a mathematical model to calculate that anti-smoking measures saved around 800,000 lives from between 1975 and 2000 by decreasing the rate of lung cancer. The study was published online in the journal of the National Cancer Institute, and also claimed that a further 2.5 million deaths could have been prevented by even stricter tobacco control measures, since the vast majority of lung cancer cases are the result of smoking. In addition, the authors calculated that 603,000 of the saved lives were male.

Biplane design could break sound barrier Qiqi Wang, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has produced a computer model to simulate the performance of planes at near-supersonic speeds. Wang found that a biplane would produce much less lift than a regular, onewing plane, meaning that it would require less fuel and produce a smaller supersonic boom. His team built on a similar model from the 1950s, by German engineer Adolph Busseman, which was able to fly at supersonic speeds without large amounts of drag, but could not generate enough lift to reach those speeds.

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY The right kind of science I

n the past couple of months, we’ve seen two high-profile lessons about how science, as a way to uncover truth, is supposed to work. The first case was inspiring, the second disheartening. Both have PENIEL something to teach us about doing science.

DIMBERU Last fall, a team of researchers from the Technophile OPERA Collaboration in Gran Sasso, Italy shocked the world with their report of clocking neutrinos — electrically neutral subatomic particles — traveling faster than the speed of light. As the speed of light had long been considered the universal speed limit, this announcement prompted equal shares of excitement and skepticism. Could Einstein’s theory of relativity actually be wrong?

When a second attempt of the experiment showed the same 60-nanosecond difference between the time it should have taken the neutrinos to travel and the time it did, it looked like the physics world would be turned upside down.

But as the saying goes, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” A few weeks after the paradigm-shifting results were first announced, the researchers found a small error in their measurement that could account for the 60-nanosecond discrepancy. To the layperson, this may have looked like a huge failure. No doubt the scientists were embarrassed. However, this is precisely how science works.

Experimental results are provided to the scientific community (usually in the form of a publication in a peer-reviewed journal) for confirmation and eventually to inform new lines of research.

The researchers that made the discovery did not entirely believe the results themselves, and they wanted to have the greater scientific community help them validate the findings. The point is not whether the results were correct or not (though I’m glad Einstein wasn’t wrong), but that the truth won out and the scientific method prevailed.

Juxtapose the neutrino story with one that continues to unfold from the University of Tokyo. Prominent molecular biologist Shigeaki Kato is currently under investigation by the university for allegedly manipulating data from dozens of publications over more than a decade. These include several articles in top-tier scientific journals including Cell, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Suspicion of Kato’s alleged scientific misconduct came to light when a 2009 publication was corrected in late 2011.

While the authors claimed that the correction would not affect the results and conclusions of the original publication, they admitted to having “inadvertently duplicated or erroneously created” images. This admission raised more than a few eyebrows, and when one curious researcher pored over 24 different publications from Kato’s group dating back to 2001, he discovered a myriad of images that appear to have been doctored. The anonymous researcher brought the allegations against Kato by making a nearly six-minute video showing the manipulated images and posting it on YouTube.

After watching the video, I can say that the evidence against Kato appears convincing. However, it would be prudent to wait for the university’s investigation to conclude before drawing any conclusions. But Kato’s group has already retracted two publications from 2004 and 2007, citing unintended plagiarism in both papers.

If the allegations of doctored images are true, it would be a monumental fraud. Science is always based on previous work, whether it is one’s own previous work or that of others in the same field. Publication of false data wastes the time and money of others who may then base their research on the false data. There are certainly times when an honest mistake ends up in a paper, and most researchers will publish a correction when they or someone else picks up on the error. But a decade’s worth of data manipulation is not a mistake. It is a deliberate masking of the truth to advance one’s career.

Science does not need punitive measures against those who are wrong, such as the team in Switzerland, because being wrong can still teach us something. However, intentional falsification of experimental results harms everyone involved, and it harms the integrity of the scientific method. This is not the right way to do science, and I hope that, as it did in the neutrino story, the truth will prevail here as well.

PENIEL DIMBERU is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Immunobiology.

Contact him at peniel.dimberu@yale.edu .

“As an example to others, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.” MARK TWAIN AMERICAN WRITER

Tobacco increases Yale researcher backs dino diversity marijuana risk

BY RAHUL DHODAPKAR CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Nicholas Longrich, postdoctoral fellow in the Yale Department of Geology & Geophysics, published an article in the Feb. 29 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, claiming that two similar dinosaurs are actually different species, not just adult and juvenile versions of the same species. A self-proclaimed defender of Cretaceous diversity, Longrich hopes that his research can be a methodological example for other groups hoping to clarify questions of classification. The News spoke with him about his research and plans for the future. led you to ask this question QWhat about the triceratops and the torosaurus?

A

Well, it wasn’t much of an issue until recently. There was a paper put out by some researchers from a museum in the Rockies questioning whether they might be the same. And the basic idea is not, on the surface, all that far-fetched in the sense that the argument is that what looks like separate species might in fact be young and adults of the same species. This has happened in the past — the classic example of this is an animal they named nanotyrannus as a kind of dwarf tyrannosaur, and it’s since been shown it’s just a juvenile T-rex. It’s about the same time, same place, it’s clearly not a mature animal, and we can line up all the skulls from smallest to largest and they grade perfectly from a nanotyrannustype thing into a T-rex. So it’s definitely the case that you can mistake a juvenile for a new species … and it’s been proposed that that’s what’s happening here … but I kind of wanted to push back and say no, we’ve been doing it right. There’s been this back-and-forth between having lots of species or having too few, and it’s not just paleontology, I think it’s taxonomy in general.

Nowa-

days people discover new genes, back then they discovered new species. It was a big thing to describe them, and so they named tons and tons of species and over the past hundred years people have been more conservative and kind of whittled those down. But now it’s kind of swinging the other way, and I think as we’ve gotten a little bit better at classifying things and coming to understand variation more and evolution, we’ve come to realize that there are quite a few species.

Maybe not quite as many as the Victorians were naming, but quite a lot.

So there’s kind of this perpetual war on how to classify life — there’s naming a species, but first, how many species are there?

Q

BY SARAH SWONG STAFF REPORTER

And without live tissue to distinguish, it must be very difficult.

A

It’s difficult, and even with living animals it can be tricky. I think the issue is that people like to think in discrete categories, you know, like you’re either this or you’re this. And nature doesn’t work like that, nature is about continuums … I mean the tree of life, ultimately, all these species, if you go back far enough, they all turn into one species, and so there are no hard and fast lines. You’re trying to draw distinctions between things that are ultimately continua and there are points along those continua where it’s really clearly distinct, but there are other places where it’s a bit iffy.

Q

So what kind of metrics do you use to determine that?

A

Species, or years, or — ?

Q

I guess, in this particular situation, when you were doing your analysis of torosaurus and triceratops, what assays did you use?

CREATIVE COMMONS

A

CREATIVE COMMONS

What we did is we kind of sat down and asked, if you want to tell whether things are juvenile or adults, then how do you do that?

And we came up with three things. These are three things, they’re testable predictions, that if you are adults and juveniles of the same species then you have three things, and if any one of them isn’t the case then you have to say that they are different species. The first is that they have to actually occur in the same time and the same place. If the juveniles are all 10 million years older than your adults, you’ve got a bit of a problem. Or if your juveniles are all in Asia, your adults are all in North America … If they’re part of a single population they should have basically the same range … and that is sort of the case here, these guys, [triceratops and torosaurus] for the most part they occur in the same rocks, and they have a very similar range in time, so you can’t reject the possibility that they are one species based on that, but there are two other things.

One is if the torosaurus is just the adult triceratops, then fairly obviously it has to be an adult, all of them have to be adults, and that’s one of the new things we did and the main thing that we did was we looked at whether the torosaurus were adult or not by looking at skull sutures …

Looking at these things we found a number of torosaurus where the skulls aren’t fully fused up, and that implies that they’re not fully grown. So on that basis, if we have torosaurus that aren’t f u l l y mature, i f they’re not adult then they

can’t be the adult of triceratops. So that was one of the big things, and we also went into the issue of the third thing that we need. If one is just kind of turning into the other, we expect to see a transformation series.

If you line up a bunch of fossils you should kind of see them morph into each other.

And we argue that you can’t do that with torosaurus and triceratops.

I guess as a final question, what QSo, implications do you think your research has?

A

There are these kind of eternal battles over diversity, but where it really matters is, you have to understand diversity to understand changes in diversity.

If you want to understand diversification events like adaptive radiations or how climate change might be driving diversity, or if you want to understand extinction events where you lose species, you have to know how many species there are in the first place.

you think we’re headed for another QDo mass extinction?

A

We’re in it. We’ve been in it for 10,000 years or longer, 50,000 to 10,000 years if not longer than that.

We’ve been kind of s---ty to the Native Americans, so it kind of feels a bit mean to blame them for wiping out the mammoths … but that’s what happened.

Humans come into North America/South America and all the big animals disappear, and it’s a repeated pattern here. I don’t think people really recognize how severe it is; I think there’s a bigger extinction in Africa than people have recognized previously, 30,000 to 40,000 years, modern humans get into Eurasia and species start to go extinct there — things like Irish elk and wooly rhinos. They get into Asia, species start going extinct there, we’re even wiping out other species of hominid out of southeast Asia. If you remember the hobbits from Indonesia, they were one of

the species to get wiped out as modern humans move into the area. Then humans get into America 10, 15,000 years ago, all the big animals disappear from North America/South America. And then they start going onto islands, and they hit New Zealand, they hit Madagascar, they hit all the Caribbean islands, they hit the Polynesian islands. Every place people go, species get wiped out, and it’s the large tasty things with low reproductive rates. And then we’ve gone from that to this wave of habitat modification where we are modifying land for agriculture. So yeah, we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.

CREATIVE COMMONS

A new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers James Yu ’99, left, and Cary Gross, right, has found that some patients who received treatment for prostate cancer may not have needed it.

BY DANIELLE TRUBOW STAFF REPORTER Some men with prostate cancer may be getting too much treatment, according to Yale School of Medicine researchers.

In a study published Jan. 27 in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, Yale researchers found that over the past decade in the United States, there has been a rise in prostate cancer treatments among patients who may not need them. According to Cary Gross, the paper’s lead author, they found

that men who are the least likely to benefit from treatment — those with short life expectancies and nonaggressive cancers — are more likely to be treated for their cancer now than they were a decade ago.

Medical experts say that this study is the latest in a growing body of literature highlighting that not all patients diagnosed with prostate cancer are endangered by a lifethreatening disease, and not all need treatments.

“When a patient’s initial assessment shows what looks like a nonaggressive tumor, then it’s

unlikely that the cancer is going to progress during the patient’s lifetime,” Gross said. “The majority of men with these nonaggressive tumors are likely to die with their prostate cancer but not from their prostate cancer.”

He said that more than half of men who die over the age of 75 would have some evidence of prostate cancer, but that fewer than 5 percent of them die from the disease.

Gross contrasted prostate cancer with leukemia and pancreatic cancer, which are much more

There’s something about tobacco use that seems to worsen marijuana use in some way.

ERICA PETERS Psychiatry postdoctoral fellow, Yale School of Medicine Another of Agrawal’s papers examining nongenetic factors that motivate youth to use cannbis and marijuana was accepted by late month’s issue of Addiction. She hypothesized in the paper that the similar act of smoking may cause cannibis and tobacco use to reinforce each other.

The study reinforces the conclusions of existing literature on polysubstance use, RAND Drug Policy Research Center co-director Rosalie Pacula said in an email. Whether “cannabis and tobacco, alcohol and cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes, or cocaine and meth,” polysubstance use generally leads to more significant dependence and psychosocial problems, she said.

Yale Medical School psychiatry professor Kathleen Carroll and University of Arkansas psychiatry professor Alan Budney co-authored the paper.

A

Yes and no, I mean the asteroid was crazy, like there’s basically no plant eaters that survived the end of the Cretaceous period, and the reason why is because there’s no photosynthesis. Imagine no food for like six months, and that’s probably what happened, and we’re allowing a functional ecosystem to keep going, we’re not shutting down primary productivity, but we’re taking more and more chunks of it. We’re converting large swaths of land over from feeding bison, whatever, mammoths …

QTo feeding us.

A

Yeah, wheat for humans, corn for cows. And the remaining species we haven’t hunted to death for their meat are being marginalized … but yeah. Come back in a couple of months and we’ll have a cool new story for you. We have a cool fossil snake that is a transitional snake between lizards and snakes. The body is all snakey but it has the mouth of a lizard.

Contact RAHUL DHODAPKAR at rahul.dhodapkar@yale.edu .

He said that paying health care providers for the quality, not the quantity, of their care would help to remedy this problem.

Doctors should take into account their patients’ life expectancies in addition to the attributes of tumors when making recommendations, said James Yu ’99, a member of Yale’s Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy, and Effectiveness Research Center and one of the authors of the paper.

“Low-risk men with short life expectancy should have a very frank discussion about watchful waiting and a frank discussion about the potential side effects of treatment,” Yu said. “They should be reassured that they may not need treatment.”

Mark Schoenberg, director of urologic oncology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said that treatments often have large nega-

tive side effects, so doctors should offer treatments only to those patients who need it and will live long enough to derive the benefit it.

Schoenberg said this study further calls attention to the fact that many patients who are being offered therapy may not need it.

“How do we identify the important cancers that could be treated early and cured for the benefit of the patient and how do we differentiate those cancers from cancers that have no real clinical significance?” Schoenberg asked.

The study analyzed 39,270 patients in a Medicare-linked database who were diagnosed with localized prostate cancer between 1998 and 2007.

Contact DANIELLE TRUBOW at danielle.trubow@yale.edu .

BY THE NUMBERS PROSTATE CANCER 17 % 69 2.8 % 2.5 m

Risk for a man in the United States developing prostate cancer at some point in his life.

The average age, in years, for a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the United States.

Chance of a man in the United States dying of prostate cancer.

Number of men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point that are still alive today.

Tanning advocate blasts Yale research

BY MICHELLE HACKMAN STAFF REPORTER A recent Yale study linking indoor tanning and skin cancer is under attack by a pro-tanning website, but experts defended the study’s findings.

Goran Olsson, better known online as “The Tanning Guru,” published a detailed critique of a Yale study, first released in the December 2011 issue of the American Academy of Dermatology journal, which linked indoor tanning to an increased risk of developing basal cell carcinoma.

Calling the research “a typical sun-scare product” designed “to fuel the prohibition side in the debate of legal restrictions for indoor tanning,” Olsson pointed out methodological flaws in the research and claimed that the authors of the study had financial conflicts of interest which led them astray from the truth. The study’s authors denied Olsson’s allegations, and experts said Olsson’s criticisms represent a larger trend within the tanning industry of dismissing unfavorable research.

“My specialty is to discover and disclose patterns that [do] not coincide with common sense and logic,” Olsson said in an email. “Your generation has already been brainwashed with the widely (and wildly) exaggerated dangers of sunlight.”

The study compared 376 participants under the age of 40 with a history of BCC and 390 with no history of the disease. Participants provided information on how frequently they visited tanning salons, as well as when they first began tanning in salons, how long their tanning sessions are and what burns they have received from tanning. The study found that an increase in any of these factors elevated the risk of developing BCC.

This is typical of the inudstry to try to discount the findings of the research that we have been doing.

DEANN LAZOVICH Associate professor, University of Minnesota School of Public Health Olsson hired a statistician, Philipp Schapotschnikow, to help him critique the statistics presented in the study. Schapotschnikow said that the study’s key finding, that people are at a 69 percent greater risk of developing BCC if they have ever used a tanning bed, only pertained to groups already at risk, such as people with fair skin.

He added that the study’s authors said that approximately one-quarter of early-onset BCCs could be prevented if individuals never tanned indoors, which he called a faulty statistic.

“It is not clear from the paper where these figures come from,” Schapotschnikow said. “Furthermore, this statement is much more restrictive than it needs to be. It would be sufficient to compute the number of early-onset BCCs that could have been avoided when individuals stopped indoor tanning after their third burn or after their second burn on the same place.”

Schapotschnikow also pointed out that the study asked subjects to self-report their tanning histories, which could lead to recall bias, as mem-

F R O M T H E

LAB

Cellphones cause behavioral disorders in offspring

Exposure to radiation during pregnancy can cause defects in the brains of offspring, a Yale study on mice has found. “This is the first experimental evidence that fetal exposure to radiofrequency radiation from cellular telephones does in fact affect adult behavior,” said senior author Hugh S. Taylor, M.D., professor and chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, in a press release.

The study found that if pregnant mice were placed in a cage near an active cellphone, their children were more likely to develop behavioral disorders similar to ADHD. Taylor cautioned that more research is needed to tell if a similar effect would occur with humans, but said that limiting cellphone exposure for fetuses “seems warranted.”

Contact SARAH SWONG at sarah.swong@yale.edu .

QWe are the asteroid?

Prostate cancer overtreated, study suggests likely than prostate cancer to be life-threatening. The vast majority of patients with leukemia or pancreatic cancer would benefit from treatment, he said.

Prostate cancer is one of most challenging cancers in the medical field because it does not meet the normal public perception of what a cancer is, said Jonathan Simons, president and chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, an organization that funds and aids research on prostate cancer. There are more than 20 types of prostate cancer, and while some are fatal, many are inactive.

“This paper highlights the further importance of offering patients choices, because not one size fits all for prostate cancer,” Simons added.

He said that patients with nonaggressive and local tumors should be carefully watched and observed rather than treated.

Simons attributed the rise in treatment rates for patients who are unlikely to benefit from the treatment to the “terror of the word ‘cancer.’”

“The problem is that when most patients hear cancer, they don’t hear anything else,” Simons said. “If you tell someone they have cancer, it’s hard for them to hear anything else other than ‘I have cancer. I could die.’”

Gross, by contrast, said that excessive treatments were the result of their increased availability to patients and financial incentives for doctors and hospitals to conduct more costly treatments.

Teenagers who see marijuana as a relatively low-risk drug may be more at risk for addiction than they realize, a new Yale paper says.

Co-occuring cannabis and tobacco use is significantly more likely to cause cannabis abuse and dependence than only cannabis use, according to a paper by Yale researchers accepted by the peerreviewed journal Addiction last month. Psychiatry postdoctorate fellow Erica Peters said that she noticed consistent evidence across the literature of her conclusion and conducted the review to build momentum for the area of study. She said her study did not answer questions about the chemical pathways or the specifics of the drug interactions, but opened the door for future research.

“There’s something about tobacco use that seems to worsen marijuana use in some way,” Peters said.

She said that both simultaneous use — in the form of blunts, marijuana in a cigar wrapper — and use on separate occasions make cannabis more addictive. Co-occuring use also intensifies psychosocial problems, such as anxiety, depression and legal difficulties. The study found that adolescents were less likely to have good grades and more likely to have drunk alcohol in the past month.

Ninety percent of cannabis users also smoke tobacco, said Arpana Agrawal, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. By contrast, only 40 to 50 percent of tobacco users also smoke cannabis, she said.

“If you’re going to tackle one, you have to consider the other,” she said.

Agrawal said that for the first time, the Yale paper provides a “really comprehensive, systematic” understanding of cannabis dependence and abuse over the lifetime of an individual who

smokes tobacco and cannabis.

The important next step is to understand the best approaches to clinical treatment for cooccuring users, Peters said. Clinicians have yet to develop a effective treatment for cannabis dependence, so understanding that tobacco affects the majority of cannabis users is important, Agrawal said.

LEAKS

ories were unlikely to be accurate decades after the fact.

According to DeAnn Lazovich, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and the Masonic Cancer Center at the University of Minnesota, most of Schapotschnikow’s criticisms were unfair. For example, the 69 percent statistic was an amalgam of groups with different risks — so the fair skin group is at an even higher risk.

“This is typical of the industry to try to discount the findings of the research that we have been doing,” Lazovich said. “They’re free to do it and say what they want, because there is no one monitoring the accuracy of what they are saying.”

Lazovich acknowledged that Schapotschnikow was correct that recall bias could affect the study’s accuracy. However, she said that this sort of problem exists in every self-reported epidemiological study, and it is not grounds to dismiss the data.

Olsson also pointed out several financial conflicts of interest that could have biased the study.

For example, the study thanked James Platt from Yale Dermatopathology, a scientist who at one point owned a patent for a process to produce fake tanning products. Olsson said that Platt’s financial interest in fake tanning products made him a competitor to the indoor tanning industry, and that this study’s result could have benefited him financially. Ones of the study’s authors, Ruth Halaban, senior research scientist in dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine, received an award from the International Federation of Pigment Cell Societies in 2011, a group Olsson says is funded primarily by L’Oréal. Olsson described L’Oréal as the world’s largest manufacturer of chemical sun-protection cosmetics and “founder of the sun-scare campaign.”

Platt, who was not an author of the study, said he had no financial interest in attacking tanning salons. He explained that although he was a former employee of Vion Pharmaceuticals, he never had any stock in the firm, which went out of business two years ago. In addition, he denied ever seeing the study’s data, much less distorting it.

Halaban likewise denied being influenced by financial motivations or having any conflicts of interest.

“The unfounded claims and blatant inaccuracies in this report are consistent with the overall tactics of the indoor tanning industry, which were clearly illustrated in the recent congressional investigative report on this industry,” said Susan Mayne, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and senior author of the study.

In February 2011, the Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who represents New Haven, published a report cataloguing the misinformation spread by the indoor tanning industry. Committee investigators contacted 300 tanning salons nationwide, posing as fair-skinned teenage girls, and their findings reported that 78 percent of the tanning salons falsely claimed that tanning would be beneficial to the health of a fair-skinned teenage girl.

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, nearly 70 percent of tanning salon patrons are Caucasian girls and women, primarily aged 16 to 29 years.

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

White rice likely to cause type 2 diabetes An analysis of existing medical research conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, published in the British Medical Journal, found that Asians who ate high levels of white rice were 55 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than Asians who ate low levels of white rice. Asians were the most affected group, but the study said the risk of type 2 diabetes increases 11 percent for each additional serving of rice consumed each day. “White rice has long been a part of Asian diets in which diabetes risk was very low,” says David Katz, associate professor of public health at Yale University, according to ABC News. “It is white rice plus aspects of modern living — including less physical work — that conspire to elevate the incidence of type 2 diabetes.”

800,000 lives saved from lung cancer by tobacco prevention efforts A Yale study used a mathematical model to calculate that anti-smoking measures saved around 800,000 lives from between 1975 and 2000 by decreasing the rate of lung cancer. The study was published online in the journal of the National Cancer Institute, and also claimed that a further 2.5 million deaths could have been prevented by even stricter tobacco control measures, since the vast majority of lung cancer cases are the result of smoking. In addition, the authors calculated that 603,000 of the saved lives were male.

Biplane design could break sound barrier Qiqi Wang, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has produced a computer model to simulate the performance of planes at near-supersonic speeds. Wang found that a biplane would produce much less lift than a regular, onewing plane, meaning that it would require less fuel and produce a smaller supersonic boom. His team built on a similar model from the 1950s, by German engineer Adolph Busseman, which was able to fly at supersonic speeds without large amounts of drag, but could not generate enough lift to reach those speeds.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Dow Jones 13,239.13, +0.05%

S NASDAQ 3,078.32, +0.75% S

NATION

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Oil $107.47, -0.57%

Panel: security depends on schools

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10-yr. Bond 2.37%, +0.08%

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Electronics rules may ease in air

BY JOAN LOWY ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks at the National Press Club in Washington. The nation’s security is at risk if America’s schools don’t improve, warns a task force led by Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s school system.

BY KIMBERLY HEFLING ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — The nation’s security and economic prosperity are at risk if America’s schools don’t improve, warns a task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s school system.

The report, obtained by The Associated Press, cautions that far too many schools fail to adequately prepare students. “The dominant power of the 21st century will depend on human capital,” it said. “The failure to produce that capital will undermine American security.”

The task force said the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies face critical shortfalls in the number of foreign language speakers, and that fields such as science, defense and aerospace are at particular risk because a shortage of skilled

workers is expected to worsen as baby boomers retire.

According to the panel, 75 percent of young adults don’t qualify to serve in the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records or inadequate levels of education. That’s in part because 1 in 4 students fails to graduate from high school in four years, and a high school diploma or the equivalent is needed to join the military. But another 30 percent of high school graduates don’t do well enough in math, science and English on an aptitude test to serve in the military, the report said.

The task force, consisting of 30 members with backgrounds in areas such as education and foreign affairs, was organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based research and policy organization focused on international issues.

The report was scheduled to be released Tuesday.

Too many Americans are deficient in

both global awareness and knowledge that is “essential for understanding America’s allies and its adversaries,” the report concludes.

“Leaving large swaths of the population unprepared also threatens to divide Americans and undermines the country’s cohesion, confidence, and ability to serve as a global leader,” the report said.

Rice and Klein said in interviews that they are encouraged by efforts to improve schools such as the adoption of “common core” standards set in reading and math in a vast majority of states and the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” competition, in which states compete for federal money in exchange for more meaningful teacher evaluations.

But, they added, the pace to improve America’s schools must accelerate.

“The rest of the world is not sitting by while we, in a rather deliberate fashion, reform the education system,” Rice said.

WASHINGTON — The government is taking a tentative step toward making it easier for airlines to allow passengers to use personal electronic devices such as tablets, e-readers and music players during takeoffs and landings.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it is “exploring ways to bring together all of the key stakeholders involved” — including airlines, aircraft manufacturers, consumer electronics makers, and flight attendant unions — to discuss whether there are practical ways to test devices to see if they are safe for passengers to use during critical phases of flight.

Technically, FAA rules already permit any airline to test specific makes and models to determine if they generate enough power that they could interfere with sensitive cockpit radios, navigation instruments and other critical equipment. But few airlines have done that kind of extensive testing because there are so many devices, and testing them all — or even many — isn’t practical.

Instead, the fallback position has been to comply with FAA rules requiring passengers to turn off all electronic devices while the aircraft’s altitude is below 10,000 feet.

Even if a device were tested and approved for use today, later iterations of the same machine might be different enough that they’d have to be tested again. Today’s Apple iPad, for example, isn’t the same as the original iPad developed three years ago.

“Can any device do this? The answer is no. All devices are not

created equal. Some have more power than others,” said Kevin Hiatt, chief operating officer of the industry-supported Flight Safety Foundation of Alexandria, Va. Another concern is the “additive effects” of a planeload of 200 people using devices at once versus one passenger using a device, said Kenny Kirchoff, senior research and development engineer at the Boeing Co. Recently manufactured planes have more shielding built into their wiring and other electronic equipment to prevent most electromagnetic interference, but planes that pre-date the early 1990s don’t have nearly as much shielding, he said.

While acknowledging “this is an area of consumer interest,” the FAA said in a statement that “no changes will be made until we are certain they will not impact safety and security.”

Steve Lott, a spokesman for Airlines for America, a trade association for major carriers, said airlines would “work cooperatively with the FAA on any opportunities to evaluate personal electronic devices to ensure customers can use these products safely during flight.”

One device that won’t be included in the discussions: Cell phones, including smartphones.

Another government agency — the Federal Communications Commission — already prohibits their use aloft for reasons unrelated to safety concerns. Because planes travel at hundreds of miles per hour, cellphones on airliners could skip so rapidly from cell tower to cell tower that they might interfere with the service of phone users on the ground, aviation experts said.

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

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WORLD

“My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians.”

ABDUR RAHMAN KHAN FOUNDER OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN

Four slain at French Jewish school

BY JOHANNA DECORSE AND JAMEY KEATEN ASSOCIATED PRESS TOULOUSE, France — A motorbike assailant opened fire with two handguns Monday in front of a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi, his two young sons and a girl. One witness described him as a man chasing small children and “looking to kill.”

One of the guns he used also had been fired in two other deadly motorbike attacks in the area that targeted paratroopers of North African and French Caribbean origin, officials said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested one person was responsible for all the killings.

A massive manhunt was under way and the terrorism alert level was raised to its highest level ever across a swath of southern France surrounding Toulouse. Hundreds of officers increased security at schools, synagogues and mosques around the country, and Sarkozy said 14 riot police units “will secure the region as long as this criminal” hasn’t been caught.

Monday’s attack revolted France and drew strong condemnation from Israel and the United States. Sarkozy called it the worst school shooting in French history.

France has seen a low drum roll of anti-Semitic incidents but no attack so deadly targeting Jews since the early 1980s.

This country is particularly sensitive toward its Jewish community because of its World War II past of abetting Nazi occupiers in deporting Jewish citizens.

French prosecutors were studying possible terrorist links but the motive for all three attacks was unclear. Still, issues about religious minorities and race have emerged prominently in France’s presidential campaign, in which the conservative Sarkozy has taken his traditional hard line against immigration.

News that the gun was used in attacks last week around Toulouse fueled suspicions that a serial killer was targeting not only Jews but French minorities.

In all three cases, the attacker came on a motorcycle, apparently alone, and then sped away.

Monday’s attack was as quick as it was terrifying. A 30-yearold rabbi, Jonathan Sandler, and two of his sons were killed just before classes started at the Ozar

Hatorah school, a junior high and high school in a quiet neighborhood, Toulouse Prosecutor Michel Valet said. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the sons were four- and five-years-old.

Another child, the seven-yearold daughter of the school principal, was also killed, school officials said. Valet said a 17-year-old boy was also seriously wounded.

“He shot at everything he had in front of him, children and adults,” Valet said. “The children were chased inside the school.”

Nicole Yardeni, a local Jewish official who saw security video of the attack from the single camera near the school gate, described the shooter as “determined, athletic and well-toned.” She said he wore a helmet with the visor down.

“You see a man park his motorcycle, start to shoot, enter the school grounds and chase children to catch one and shoot a bullet into her head,” Yardeni said.

“It’s unbearable to watch and you can’t watch anymore after that.

He was looking to kill.”

The bodies were brought in hearses to the school Monday night for an evening vigil. All of the dead had joint Israeli-French citizenship and will be buried in Israel, the Israel Foreign Ministry said.

A police official said the same powerful .45-caliber handgun used in Monday’s attack on a school in Toulouse was used in shootings four days ago that killed two paratroopers and seriously injured another in nearby Montauban, and in an attack that killed a paratrooper eight days ago in Toulouse.

In Monday’s attack, which took place about 8 a.m., the killer also used a .35-caliber gun, the police official said. At least 15 shots were fired at the school, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

A police union official in Paris said the shooter knew weapons well to handle a .45-caliber handgun plus a second gun.

“The shooter is someone used to holding arms,” Nicolas Comte of the SGP FO police union. “He knows what he’s doing, like an ex-military guy.”

Sarkozy rushed to Toulouse to visit the school with Richard Prasquier, the president of CRIF, the umbrella group representing Jewish organizations.

“This act was odious, it can-

REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A makeshift shrine is seen at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school, where a gunman opened fire killing four people in Toulouse, France, on Monday. not remain unpunished,” Sarkozy said.

“We do not know the motivations of this criminal. Of course, by attacking children and a teacher who were Jewish, the anti-Semitic motivation appears obvious. Regarding our soldiers, we can imagine that racism and murderous madness are in this case linked,” he said Monday night after returning to Paris.

Sarkozy’s challengers for the presidential vote in April and May also hurried to the scene.

The slain rabbi taught at the school and reportedly arrived from Jerusalem last September with his wife and children.

France has the largest Jewish community in Western Europe, estimated at about 500,000, as well as its largest Muslim population, about 5 million.

Toulouse, a southwestern city north of the Pyrenees mountains, has about 10,000 to 15,000 Jews in its overall population of 440,000, said Jean-Paul Amoyelle, the president of the Ozar Hatorah school network in France. He said its Jewish community is well integrated into the city.

The school targeted Monday, behind a high white wall, was cordoned off by police, who then escorted other children out as forensics police combed the scene. Six bullet holes circled an aluminum fence that surrounds the school.

One officer held a distraught girl, her face in her hands. A mother and son wearing a yarmulke walked away from the site, their faces visibly pained.

“Everything leads one to believe that these were racist and anti-Semitic acts,” Toulouse Mayor Pierre Cohen said on BFM-TV. “This is a Jewish school, well identified as such, and it is normal to think that anti-Semitism is at cause,” CRIF said in a statement.

Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told The Associated Press the suspect made his getaway on a dark-colored scooter - just as the assailant or assailants did in the two deadly shootings last week.

On March 10, a gunman on a motorbike shot and killed a paratrooper in Toulouse. Last Thursday, a gunman on a motorbike

Lawyer: Afghan killings suspect remembers little

BY GENE JOHNSON AND JOHN MILBURN ASSOCIATED PRESS FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — The lawyer for the Army staff sergeant accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan civilians in a nighttime shooting rampage met his client for the first time Monday and said the solider has a sketchy memory of the massacre.

Lawyer John Henry Browne said Robert Bales remembers some details from before and after the killings, but very little during the time the military believes on a killing spree through two Afghan villages.

“He has some memory of some things that happened that night.

He has some memories of before the incident and he has some memories of after the incident.

In between, very little,” Browne told The Associated Press by telephone from Fort Leavenworth, where Bales is being held.

Pressed on whether Bales can remember anything at all about the shooting, Browne said, “I haven’t gotten that far with him yet.”

Bales, 38, has not been charged yet in the March 11 shootings, though charges could come this week. The killings sparked protests in Afghanistan, endangered relations between the two countries and threatened to upend American policy over the decadeold war.

Earlier Monday, Browne met with his client behind bars for the first time to begin building a defense and said the soldier gave a powerfully moving account of what it is like to be on the ground in Afghanistan.

Browne said he and Bales, who is being held in an isolated cell at the military prison, met for more

than three hours in the morning at Fort Leavenworth. Browne, cocounsel Emma Scanlan and Bales were expected to talk again in the afternoon.

“What’s going on on the ground in Afghanistan, you read about it. I read about it. But it’s totally different when you hear about it from somebody who’s been there,” Browne told The Associated Press by telephone during a lunch break. “It’s just really emotional.”

Browne, a Seattle attorney who defended serial killer Ted Bundy and a thief known as the “Barefoot Bandit,” has said he has handled three or four military cases.

The defense team includes a military defense lawyer, Maj. Thomas Hurley.

At their meeting, Browne said Bales clarified a story, provided initially by the soldier’s family, about the timing of a roadside bomb that blew off the leg of one of Bales’ friends. It was two days before the shooting, not one, and Bales didn’t see the explosion, just the aftermath, Browne said.

The details of the blast could not be immediately confirmed.

Military officials have said that Bales, after drinking on a southern Afghanistan base, crept away to two villages overnight, shooting his victims and setting many of them on fire. Nine of the dead were children and 11 belonged to one family.

Bales arrived at Fort Leavenworth last Friday and is being held in the same prison as other prominent defendants. Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is charged with leaking classified documents to the WikiLeaks website, has been held there on occasion as he awaited trial.

Bales is “already being inte-

grated into the normal pretrial confinement routine,” post spokeswoman Rebecca Steed said.

That includes recreation, meals and cleaning the area where he is living. Steed said once his meetings with his attorneys are complete later in the week, Bales will resume the normal integration process.

He has some memory of some things that happened that night… In between, very little.

JOHN HENRY BROWNE Attorney for Robert Bales, suspect in Afghan shootings Bales’ wife, Karilyn, offered her condolences to the victims’ families Monday and said she wants to know what happened.

She said her family and her inlaws are profoundly sad. She said what they’ve read and seen in news reports is “completely out of character of the man I know and admire.”

“My family including my and Bob’s extended families are all profoundly sad. We extend our condolences to all the people of the Panjawai District, our hearts go out too all of them, especially to the parents, brothers, sisters and grandparents of the children who perished,” Karilyn Bales said in a statement.

Court records and interviews show that Bales had commendations for good conduct after four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enlisted in the military after the

Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

He also faced a number of troubles in recent years: A Florida investment job went sour, his Seattle-area home was condemned as he struggled to make payments on another, and he failed to get a recent promotion.

Legal troubles included charges that he assaulted a girlfriend and, in a hit-and-run accident, ran bleeding in military clothes into the woods, according to court records. He told police he fell asleep at the wheel and paid a fine to get the charges dismissed.

In March 1998, Bales was given a $65 citation for possessing alcohol at Daytona Beach, Fla. He did not pay the fine nor did he defend himself in court. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but it later expired.

If the case goes to court, the trial will be held in the U.S., said a legal expert with the U.S. military familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case.

That expert said charges were still being decided and that the location for any trial had not yet been determined. If the suspect is brought to trial, it is possible that Afghan witnesses and victims would be flown to the U.S. to participate, he said.

After their investigation, military attorneys could draft charges and present them to a commander, who then makes a judgment on whether there is probable cause to believe that an offense was committed and that the accused committed it.

That commander then submits the charges to a convening authority, who typically is the commander of the brigade to which the accused is assigned but could be of higher rank.

opened fire on three uniformed paratroopers at a bank machine in Montauban, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Toulouse, killing two and critically wounding the other.

The mother of one student, Corinne Tordjeman, had just finished dropping off her 14-year-old son Alexandre when the attacker came. Alexandre described hearing the shots and parents shouting and how he saw blood all over the ground.

Her younger daughter was supposed to go to a birthday party this weekend with the girl who was killed.

The killer “knew that killing Jewish children would make a lot of noise, but tomorrow it could be a Christian, a Muslim, or anyone else,” she said.

One man who lives near the school had just spoken with the rabbi.

“I said “Bonjour” to him like normal,” said the 29-year-old, asking to be identified only by his first name, Baroukh. “Then he went out into the school entrance. I heard the shots and I turned around and saw him on the ground. He looked dead. But

I didn’t have much time to see who did it because I panicked and started running away.”

Paris police said Monday they are also investigating threats against two synagogues in Paris from last week. A police official said there was no apparent link between those threats and Monday’s shooting.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said “whether it was a terror attack or a hate crime, the loss of life is unacceptable.”

The U.S. government said it joined France in condemning this unprovoked and outrageous act of violence in the strongest possible terms.”

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of the victims, and we stand with a community in grief,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

Special prayers were offered Monday at a Paris synagogue, attended by Sarkozy, and at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

A minute of silence in all French schools was to be held Tuesday and Sarozy also planned to meet with Jewish and Muslim leaders.

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

We see you. design@yaledailynews.com

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

AROUND THE IVIES

GEORGE CLOONEY ACTOR

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

T H E B R O W N D A I LY H E R A L D

Clooney praises Harvard humanitarian initiative

Student apartments eyed for Thayer

BY JOHN ELZINGA CONTRIBUTING WRITER Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, George Clooney, an actor and human rights activist, praised the humanitarian work of a Harvard group.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, an organization based primarily at the Harvard School of Public Health that brings together undergraduates and graduate students to work on a variety of social action projects, contributes to the Satellite Sentinel Project which Clooney cofounded.

Speaking of the Harvard students’ contributions to his efforts to expose the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Clooney said to the Congressional committee, “They stay up all night working. They’re young people and they’re just doing it …

They’re all heart.”

The Satellite Sentinel Project, founded in 2010, uses satellites to capture images of areas in Sudan where humanitarian violations may occur. Students working at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative analyze the data that the satellite cameras collect and that workers in Sudan communicate.

The combination of human reports and photographic evidence lets Harvard analysts “see beyond a shadow of a

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“I’m really white trash.”

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They stay up all night working. They’re young people and they’re just doing it… They’re all heart.

GEORGE CLOONEY Actor Furthermore, the vital information makes its way to the Sudanese people. “One of our biggest fans is Sudan,” Davies said. “One time, we issued a report about a city that was

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Gilbane Development Corporation has proposed the construction of a four-story luxury apartment complex on Thayer Street between Meeting Street and Euclid Avenue.

The building would be modeled after others built around the country near college campuses, said Robert Gilbane, chief executive officer and chairman of the company.

The complex would consist of 102 furnished apartments, housing a total of 277 students in single bedrooms, each with a private bathroom and connected to a living room with a 42-inch plasma screen television, Gilbane said. Residents would have access to yoga studios, fitness clubs, group study rooms, an underground parking lot, bike storage and an interior courtyard encircled by the building complete with barbeque pits.

“We’re developing the next level of student housing,” Gilbane said. He estimated that rent for these “luxury” apartments would cost between $1,000 and $1,400 per month. Gilbane said the rate was comparable to rents at other buildings in the area, particularly considering that the estimates reflect 2014 price levels and include heating, cooling, electricity, cable and wireless Internet. “What the students are getting is a higher-quality apartment,” he added.

about to be invaded, and the radios picked it up within hours.

This led to the evacuation of 15,000 people out of a city that was about to be attacked.”

Satellite technology, unprecedented in the field of humanitarian aid, has been key to the project’s prominent accomplishments. “We are the only people who are getting great information as well as visuals out to the people,” Davies said.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative addresses a variety of global problems through handson research.

“It’s a credit to Harvard that HHI is here and pushing the limits of what is possible,” Davies said. “People come from all over with special skill sets, young people who have driven this product from day one.”

Heck added, “People who care so much about the work make for an awesome environment.

I’m a statistics concentrator, and it’s great to apply what I’m studying on a day-to-day basis while playing on the same team as people like George Clooney.”

Clooney, an actor who starred in films including “Ocean’s 11,” “Up in the Air,” and “The Descendants,” was arrested two days after his testimony while protesting at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. He was released several hours later after paying a $100 fine.

doubt what is happening” in troubled regions, said Benjamin I. Davies, the deputy direcHARVARD tor of operations for the satellite program.

Analysis compiled by Harvard students has been cited in the U.S. Senate and British Parliament and published by media outlets on multiple continents.

“Seeing that my work can impact policy is extremely fulfilling,” said Jody P. Heck, a member of the analysis team.

“It’s exciting to go to work every day knowing that I have an effect.”

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BY ELIZABETH CARR CITY AND STATE EDITOR

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Gilbane said he hoped the complex would help Thayer Street merchants by bringing stuBROWN dents closer to their businesses. “A bunch of the merchants on Thayer Street have been struggling,” he noted.

Gilbane embarked on the project nine months ago.

He said he was discussing his apartment developments near colleges across the country while receiving a haircut at Squires Salon, and the barber suggested he build a similar complex for Brown students. While lecturing to a group of Brown students for the Entrepreneurship Program, he described his complexes near other campuses and asked how many students would be interested in living in similar apartments.

“One hundred percent of students raised their hands,” he said. “We think it would be a big hit.”

“It’s an upgrade for the street, for the neighborhood,” said David Schwaery, owner of Squires Salon and the property on which the apartments would be built.

In addition to installing an underground parking structure, the company would repave the sidewalks, plant new trees and install historic street lamps, Gilbane said.

The building ’s main entrance would be located

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on the corner of Euclid Avenue and Thayer Street, where Sahara is currently located, and the apartments would be located within the block behind the Thayer Street fronts. Mark Najib, owner of Sahara, was unaware of the proposal before speaking with The Herald and declined to comment on the proposal before discussing it further with Schwaery.

“That building will fit in perfectly with the Thayer Street neighborhood,” Schwaery said. Gilbane and his architects studied the East Side’s architecture to plan a building that would complement the area.

Schwaery currently rents to about 15 students. “I see how dangerous it is for open homes, the way they are now,” he said, noting that the enclosed nature of the building would create a “safety envelope” for the students.

Schwaery said though he is excited by the prospect of the complex, he is also cautious — the proposal will need the Providence City Council’s approval before work can begin.

If the plan is approved, construction would begin in June 2013 and be completed in time for the 2014 school year, Gilbane said. The company has reached out to make the university aware of its plans, but it is building the complex independent of the university as a purely private enterprise.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

SPORTS Bulldogs place fourth at Ivies

ZOE GORMAN/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Freshmen proved instrumental in Yale’s fourth place finish at the Ivies.

SWIMMING FROM PAGE 14 school records — in the 500-yard freestyle, the 1,000-yard freestyle, the 200-yard butterfly, the 100-yard breastroke, the 200yard breastroke, the 800-yard freestyle relay, the 100-yard butterfly and the 200-yard individual medley.

The Bulldogs beat times that had been the standard for 20 or 30 years, Rob Harder ’15 said. The sheer number of school records broken is rare, even for the Ivy League championships, Heyman said, when swimmers taper to achieve faster times. “ Ho p e f u l ly [ t h e b ro ken records] will attract further recruits as we enter into the buliding stage and try to break into the top thre in the Ivy League,” Harder said.

Dominski added that he cannot remember another meet in his Yale career that contained as many broken records.

Harder had a strong individual meet and placed second in all three of his events. He broke the school record of 4:24.81 in the 500-yard freestyle in 4:20.66 and the record of 9:07.43 in the 1,000-yard freestyle with a time of 9:04.64, and then continued his strong performance with a time of 15:17.50 in the 1,650-yard freestyle.

“That’s a pretty impressive performance by a freshman,” Dominski said of Harder’s effort.

Fellow freshman Alwin Firmansyah ’15 placed third in the 200yard individual medley with a time of 1:47.17, which took down a school record of 1:43.31. He also placed third in the 200-yard freestyle with a time of 1:46.21.

On March 9-10, Rachel Rosenberg ’12 represented Yale in the Zone Diving Championships in Buffalo, N.Y., but did not place high enough to receive a bid to nationals. Rosenberg took 10th on 1-meter with a score of 483.75 (final scores at the Zone Diving

Championship combine scores from the preliminary and final rounds) and sixth on 3-meter with a score of 563.25.

“I had a decent meet, but the goal was to get first or second on 3-meter,” Rosenberg said, “[so] I certainly wasn’t happy about it.”

She added that if she had performed dives, such as her reverse two-and-a-half, to her fullest potential, she would have been in contention to place in the top two spots and qualify for nationals.

Rosenberg still retires after a phenomenal final season at Yale.

She won first on the 3-meter at every dual meet, placed first on the 3-meter at Ivy League championships and scored top 10 finishes in both the 1- and 3-meter events at the Zone Diving Championships.

This year’s strong freshman and sophomore classes, as well as a promising group of recruited swimmers, gives the swimming and diving teams hopes for an improved season next year.

“There were many school records broken [in the past], but not by a majority of freshman,” Dominksi said. “That’s good for next season and the upcoming years. This freshman class has a chance to do a lot.”

Heyman called the recordbreaking at the Ivies an indication of a “change in culture the team’s going through” for the men’s team that could break the Elis into the top tier of Ivy League swimming and lead them to place higher in coming years.

On the women’s team, Alexander Forrester ‘13 competed last weekend at NCAA Championships in Auburn, Ala. The highlight of the meet was her performance in the 100-yard butterfly.

She headed into the meet seeded 16th, but finished an impressive sixth overall. Her time of 51.93 bested her own Yale record of 52.35.

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

Mixed early results for Yale SOFTBALL FROM PAGE 14 Elis, 17–7, but a last-minute run in the seventh, bringing the score to 10–8, was not enough to overcome the Bulldogs’ rally. Pitcher Kristen Leung ’15 (1–1) took the win.

“This is not a ‘We’re just here to have fun’ team,” Reinalda said.

“They want to win. They are very competitive.”

While in Florida, the Bulldogs beat Lehigh in another late rally.

Meg Johnson ’12 started the inning with a single, stealing second later on. After a single by Jennifer Ong ’13 and an error, Johnson crossed the plate to bring the Elis to a 4–3 victory.

Though they ultimately lost to Holy Cross 7–6, the Bulldogs again did not give up until the end.

The two runs they scored in the bottom of the seventh, however, were not enough to secure a win.

“This is not a team that rolls over and dies,” Reinalda said.

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS PEYTON MANNING It was confirmed yesterday that Manning will go to the Denver Broncos after spending over a decade in Indianapolis. He will replace Tim Tebow as the team’s starting quarterback. The Broncos finished last season 8-8 and took the A.F.C. West Championship.

Gymnastics looks to ECACs GYMNASTICS FROM PAGE 14 that the team’s performance was “unfortunate” this late in the season when it should be improving. The team had falls on both beam and bars, with scores of 46.425 and 46.175, respectively, its two lowest events of the meet.

The highlight of the meet for Yale was a flawless floor exercise. The team scored a 48.250, its highest mark of the competition. Feld was Yale’s top scorer on floor with a 9.75, good enough for sixth on the event.

Andsager’s bar routine was another bright spot for the Bulldogs, scoring a 9.7. Joyce Li ’15 was the top all-around scorer for Yale; she placed fifth with a score of 38.425.

After a tough week of practice, the team turned it around at the George Washington Invitational. Not only was the meet encouraging because the team posted a new season high score, but the team also exhibited consistency, particularly in the first three events. On bars, beam and floor, the team counted no falls toward its overall score.

Vault was especially strong for the Bull-

dogs. The team’s score of 47.900 was its highest of the season. Yale’s top three finishers on vault, Feld, Li and Stephanie Goldstein ’13, all scored above a 9.5.

Beam posed the biggest problems for the Bulldogs. After an unblemished meet, the team was forced to swallow two falls in their team score. Without those falls, “we would have been neck and neck with George Washington,” Andsager said.

Despite its low points, Yale had two strong performances. The top two Yale finishers of the event were Morgan Traina ’15 and Feld, who scored impressive figures of 9.8 and 9.775, respectively.

The Bulldogs performed well individually, a fact demonstrated in the all-around results: Traina (38.575), Feld (38.35) and Li (38.35) swept the top three spots.

“When it came to the podium and awards, we swept most of the events,” team captain Mia Yabut ’12 said.

The Elis’ second trip to Towson last weekend proved better than their first, but it still did not live up to their full potential.

The score of 189.325 was the product of three strong events, and one severely below

par. Beam was the event on which the team struggled the most, as evidenced by a low score of 46.200. The event was riddled with falls.

“The first person hit her routine, and after that everybody fell on something,” Feld said, adding that she hopes the team has the falls “out of their systems” and will be more consistent next weekend at ECACs. The other three events — vault, bars and floor — were successful for the Bulldogs.

They scored 47.825 on vault, 47.275 on bars and, in another impressive floor display, 48.025. Individual highlights included Yabut, who scored a 9.775 on vault, which placed her in a five-way tie for fifth on the event. Andsager continued her domination on bars with the team’s top score of 9.675.

The team’s top all-around finisher was Feld, who placed third with a 38.4.

Yale’s next gymnastics meet, the ECAC Championship, will take place March 24 in Philadelphia at noon.

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

Sailors beat tricky winds

ZEENAT MANSOOR/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The sailing teams faced shifting wind patterns that ranged from 30-knot gusts to breezes of less than five knots over break.

SAILING FROM PAGE 14 ors with a range of weather conditions, ranging from 30-knot gusts on the first weekend to breezes of less than five knots during the third weekend. Fauer said the teams faced shifting and unpredictable wind patterns that made it difficult for them to prepare for each race.

Despite the victories this weekend, including a 28-point lead by the coed team last weekend, sailing head coach Zachary Leonard said both teams still

have room to improve.

“All of the sailors performed well during at least one weekend,” Leonard said. “[But] few performed well during all three of them.”

Improving consistency will be a key focus in the teams’ training this season, he added, which will consist of practices out in the water on Tuesdays through Friday. He added that he is optimistic that the teams will continue to deliver a strong performance in upcoming regattas.

The women’s team will head to Med-

ford, Mass., next weekend for the Duplin Trophy, while the coed team will participate in three regattas, all happening Saturday and Sunday. The coed team will host the Owen, Mosbacher and Knapp Trophies, which serve as the de facto Ivy League sailing championships, and other members of the team will attend the Boston Dinghy Cup at MIT or the Southern Series One at Salve Regina.

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

Relay teams takes second

BY JORDAN KONELL STAFF REPORTER On Saturday, the men and women’s track teams kicked off their outdoor seasons at the Northridge Invitational, hosted by California State University, Northridge, where they took two secondplace finishes.

TRACK

Yale only competed in the 4-by400-meter races.

The men’s team finished in a strong second place with a time of 44.06 seconds, just behind Cornell and ahead of Cuesta College. The women’s relay team placed second as well with a time of 49.40 seconds, bested only by a team of unaffiliated professional runners. The women’s team beat out racers from Cornell, Pepperdine and Moorpark College.

“The conditions at the meet were not

ideal,” women’s team captain Alexa Monti ’12 said. “However, [we] competed hard and got the stick around the oval. We look forward to working on the relay throughout the remainder of the outdoor season.”

Both teams will compete in full force on March 31 at the University of Connecticut Invitational.

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

Nelson cited strong contributions by freshman team members in their first collegiate softball games. Nelson said pitcher Kylie Williamson ’15 stayed very “composed on the mound.”

“The team this year has a different vibe,” Dunham said. “We all have confidence we can do well, win games and do it together.”

The freshmen said they were thrilled to get out and play some games after a month of 6 a.m. practices.

“It’s good to get out on the field and be outside,” Onorato said.

“We could see how what we’ve been working on all winter has been working out for us.”

The team will next play Marist at home in a doubleheader on Wednesday. The Red Foxes swept the Elis two years ago, though last year’s match was cancelled due to rain.

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

ANDREW GOBLE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

In their first outdoor races of the season, the men’s and women’s 4 by 400 relay teams earned second place finishes over the weekend.

IF YOU MISSED IT SCORES

MLB Minnesota 8 Boston 4

SOCCER Chelsea 5 Leicester 2

SPORTS QUICK HITS

ALECA HUGHES ’12 FINALIST FOR CITIZENSHIP CUP Hughes, a forward and captain on the women’s hockey team, is one of five collegiate finalists for the Coach Wooden Citizenship Cup. The award goes each year to a college and a professional athlete who each demonstrate excellent leadership.

NBA Boston 79 Atlanta 76

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NHL Buffalo 7 Tampa Bay 3

MLB St. Louis 4 Atlanta 3

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

MATT GIBSON ’12 EARNS SPOT ON IVY HONOR ROLL Gibson, an attackman on the men’s lacrosse team, earned a spot on the Honor Roll this week following his standout performance in Yale’s 8-7 loss to Cornell last weekend. Gibson had two goals and two assists in the game. The Elis will take on Princeton this Saturday.

“The team this year has a different vibe. We all have confidence we can do well and win games.”

CHELSEY DUNHAM ’14 PITCHER, SOFTBALL YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Bulldogs shatter eight records

Elis strive for consistency

CRISTIANA MANOLE/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

The gymnastics team excelled in floor exercise on Mar. 2.

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER BLAIR SEIDEMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Yale finished fourth at Ivy League Championshiops, 37.0 points behind third place Columbia, but the team broke eight school records.

BY MONICA DISARE STAFF REPORTER Fourth place at the Ivy League championships does not tell the whole story of the 2011-’12 men’s swimming and diving team.

M. SWIMMING At the Ivy League championships in Princeton, N.J., from March 1-3, Yale’s 678.5 points were not enough to top Princeton’s (7–0, 8–0 Ivy) 1,049.5 points,

Harvard’s (6–1, 6–2 Ivy) 944 points or Columbia’s (4–3, 7–4 Ivy) 715.5 points.

Although the Bulldogs (5–2, 6–2 Ivy) earned the same fourth-place finish as last year, they broke eight school records, a clear indication of the team’s continued improvement.

“It was happy but bittersweet,” Mike Dominski ’13 said, “We were very happy with the team performance, [but] we were disappointed we didn’t get third.”

While Dominski said the Elis had hoped to place in the top three in the Ivy League, Andrew Heyman ’15 explained

Softball splits doubleheader

BY MASON KROLL CONTRIBUTING REPORTER After finishing its season opener at the Rebel Spring Games in Kissimmee, Fla. on March 16, the softball team (4–6, 0–0 Ivy) headed back to New Haven to take on Central Connecticut at home on March 15. The Bulldogs split Thursday’s double-header, losing the first game 4–0 but coming back for a 10–8 win in the second.

SOFTBALL Though the Elis outhit the Blue Devils in the first game, they were unable to translate their six hits into runs. Head coach Barbara Reinalda said the team made many “mental mistakes,” contributing to eight Bulldogs left on base and lost scoring opportunities. A rally early in the sixth inning, including a double by captain Christy Nelson ’13 and a single by Sarah Onorato ’15, left runners on second and third at the inning’s conclusion.

Central Connecticut, on the other hand, took advantage of three hits and an error to score four runs in the first three innings.

Pitcher Chelsey Dunham ’14 (3–2), who pitched the complete

the Ivy League as a whole is improved from last year. Four teams from the Ivy League will be represented at the NCAA championships, a greater number than in recent years, Heyman said. Although Yale will not send any swimmers to the NCAA championships, members of the team point toward an improved dual season record as a sign of a successful season.

Yale’s record jumped from 2–5 last year in the Ivy League to 5–2 this year.

The swimmers also smashed eight SEE SWIMMING PAGE 13

Spring break was a rollercoaster ride for the Yale gymnastics team.

GYMNASTICS The Bulldogs competed for three consecutive weeks over the break with mixed results. Their first meet, held at Towson University against Towson and William and Mary on March 2, was a disappointment both in terms of their score (187.950) and their last-place finish. The team then bounced back at the George Washington Invitational six days later with a season-high score

of 191.175. The third meet of the break, a quad meet on March 16 at Towson with the University of Pennsylvania and George Washington University, was a mixed bag for the Elis. A disastrous beam rotation dragged down their score, while strong rotations on vault, bars and floor left the team hopeful for the upcoming ECAC Championship.

“We know what we need to do on beam, and if we do that we’ll have a really great team score [at ECACs],” Tara Feld ’13 said.

Lindsay Andsager ’13 said the team’s meet against Towson and William and Mary was its “worst meet of the season.” She added SEE GYMNASTICS PAGE 13

Bulldogs rise to victory

game, faced her second loss of the season, bringing her ERA to 1.94 in 36 innings of work.

In the following game, the Bulldogs found themselves down 7–2 in the bottom of the fifth. Starting with a single by Virginia Waldrop ’12, who had two RBIs in the second, the Bulldogs turned the inning into a rout. By the end of the frame, the Blue Devils’ starter Jordan Tingley had been replaced, Tori Balta ’14 had doubled to bring Waldrop across the plate a second time and the Bulldogs had gained eight runs.

We turned the game around and turned the momentum in our favor.

SARAH ONORATO ’14 C/OF, Softball “Before we knew it, we had batted around,” Onorato said.

“We turned the game around and turned the momentum in our favor.”

Central Connecticut outhit the SEE SOFTBALL PAGE 13

STAT OF THE DAY 8

ZEENAT MANSOOR/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Both the coed and women’s sailing teams capped successful spring breaks with victories in the last weekend of the recess.

BY CLINTON WANG STAFF REPORTER Yale’s No. 1 women’s sailing and No. 2 coed sailing teams ended spring break on a high note — both teams clinched firstplace finishes in the final weekend of the recess.

SAILING The women’s team reached second

place at its second spring season regatta in Charleston on March 3 and 4, followed by fifth place at Navy Intersectional in Annapolis the subsequent weekend. The team rounded off the spring break with a victory at the St. Mary’s Intersectional last weekend.

The coed team placed third at the Eckerd Intersectional in its first weekend of the break and fifth in the following weekend’s St. Mary’s Team Race. Last weekend, the team came in fifth at the Veitor

Trophy but rose to first place at the Truxton Umsted Intersectional at the Naval Academy.

“I think we were able to sail really well despite the light and tricky conditions,” Marlena Fauer ’14 said. “We definitely learned a lot from our mistakes and are ready to take this gained knowledge to the next regatta to further improve.”

The weekends challenged the sailSEE SAILING PAGE 13

THE NUMBER OF UNIVERSITY RECORDS THE MEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING TEAM BROKE DURING THE IVY LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIPS EARLIER THIS MONTH. Some of the records had been in place for more than 30 years, and a majority were broken by freshmen.