wednesday, february 6, 2013
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The Wednesday, February 6, 2013 issue of The Brown Daily HeraldTRANSCRIPT
wednesday, february 6, 2013 since 1891vol. cxlviii, no. 11
InsIde
Public intellectProf. receives science communications fellowship
Ramen remedyNew site seeks out free food for starving students
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Flood gatesMoraff ’15 asks why money rules education policy
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tomorrow
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Daily HeraldtHe BRown
By JENNIFER KAPLANSENIOR STAFF WRITER
The Brown Student Health Insurance Plan will cover 14 different sexual reas-signment surgery procedures starting in August, Director of Insurance and Pur-chasing Services Jeanne Hebert confirmed in an email to The Herald.
The move makes Brown one of a handful of schools and healthcare pro-viders nationwide to cover the surgeries.
“We identified this as an important benefit for students to have access to,” Hebert wrote, adding that the change was in line with “Brown’s efforts to support all students.” The coverage will be funded through renewal rates paid for next year’s
student healthcare coverage, she wrote. In general, the total package of sexual reassignment surgeries, hormone therapy and other services can cost up to $50,000.
Kelly Garrett, LGBTQ Center coordi-nator, said she has strongly advocated this change for the past several years. A mile-stone in the movement to add coverage for these surgeries was the inclusion of hormone treatment in the current school year’s coverage plan, Garrett added. The sexual reassignment procedures that will be covered are “very standard and very comprehensive,” she said.
In the past, transgender students did not have access to sex reassignment sur-geries at Brown and often were barred from treatment due to high costs, Garrett said. “I know people where it’s taken them 10 years because they needed to save money,” she said. The LGBTQ Center has no statistics on how many transgender students are at Brown, and it is difficult to get accurate
student health plan to cover sex reassignmentThe change is part of a broader attempt to make U. policies more inclusive of transgender students
By ANdREw smythSENIOR STAFF WRITER
DJ A-Trak and rapper Kendrick La-mar will headline Friday and Satur-day night, respectively, for this year’s Spring Weekend.
The concert, scheduled for the weekend of April 19 to 21, will also feature Providence’s What Cheer? Bri-gade, New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, experimental rock band Dirty Projectors and indie standard Deer-hunter. The lineup was announced Wednesday at midnight by the Brown Concert Agency.
The acts, which were booked un-usually early this year, were announced several weeks ahead of schedule due to concerns about leaking, said BCA Booking Chair Emma Ramadan ’13.
“We were thinking about announcing way earlier than usual anyway, and then there were a few rumors, so why not just do it?” she said.
Confusion mounted after a false lineup — which included The Postal Service, Grouper, Toro Y Moi, The Sounds of Capitalism and two “more acts to be announced in March” — was sent in a fraudulent email to BlogDai-lyHerald. The lineup, which appeared to be sent from the student email ac-count of BCA Publicity Chair Raillan Brooks ’13, was published on Blog and later retracted. It is unclear who sent the email, Brooks said, and whether “The Sounds of Capitalism” is or ever was a real band.
BCA members said they were con-fident in the choices for this year’s lineup. The festival will coincide with Coachella Valley Music and Arts Fes-tival for the third year in a row, The Herald previously reported.
“I think people will be really hap-py with the two headliners and the other acts. It
a-Trak, Kendrick Lamar to headline spring weekendWhat Cheer? Brigade, Big Freedia, Dirty Projectors and Deerhunter will also perform
COURTESY OF A-TRAK
Canadian electronic musician dJ A-trak is just one of a host of performers scheduled to perform at spring weekend this year.
By mAxINE JosELowSENIOR STAFF WRITER
Brown faculty members may see in-creased tuition assistance and retire-ment benefits, as the faculty endorsed a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Employee Benefits at its meeting Tuesday night.
Faculty members all voted in favor of the report, with no abstentions.
One of the report’s major recom-mendations was an increase in the Tuition Aid Program benefit, which provides tuition assistance to faculty and staff members’ children who at-tend the University as undergradu-ates, said Harold Roth, professor of religious studies, who presented the report to the faculty.
“Brown’s tuition benefit for em-ployees’ children attending Brown is not competitive with those of our peers,” including those that have com-parable endowments, Roth said. The report recommends raising Brown’s tuition benefit “to a level minimally competitive with our peers,” from 24 percent of tuition to 36 percent, Roth said. The increase would cost the University a little over $2 million annually, he said.
One faculty member expressed concern that 36 percent was not an ambitious enough goal, since the mean percentage among the Univer-sity’s peer institutions is 37 percent. “If we’re trying to stay competitive, wouldn’t we
faculty votes unanimously for improved benefitsThe University has lagged behind peers in providing retirement and tuition assistance for faculty
By ELI oKuNUNIvERSITy NEWS EdITOR
Clad in purple and wearing strips of gray duct tape across their mouths, sev-eral dozen students streamed into the Sharpe Refectory at lunchtime Tuesday to stage a demonstration against sexual assault at Brown.
The event, organized and led by a group of Minority Peer Counselors, was intended to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and urge students to take an active role in preventing it, organizers told The
Herald following the event.After roughly 75 students arranged
themselves in a loose arc near the sal-ad bar, they tore off the tape and read aloud a series of protest statements in unison. The demonstrators declared they were “representing the silenced voices.”
The demonstrators cited several sta-tistics — that one in six women is sexu-ally assaulted in her lifetime and that national studies generally indicate an average of 5 percent of college women are assaulted each year. For Brown, that statistic becomes 157 students assaulted annually, organizers said, the number that provided the name of the MPCs’ effort, the 157 Project.
The event arose out of the work-shops that MPCs usually hold each semester — a
demonstrators give voice to victims of sexual assaultThe 157 Project aims to call attention to the prevalence of sexual assault at Brown
RAChEl KAPlAn / hERAld
Brown is set to join a group of universities, including Cornell, harvard, stanford and Penn, that cover at least some sex reassignment surgeries.
By sAm hEFt-LuthySENIOR STAFF WRITER
Brown email addresses can be imper-sonated by any user inside or outside of the Brown network through email spoofing websites, evidenced by an email supposedly sent from Brown Concert Agency Publicity Chair Rail-lan Brooks ’13 to multiple press outlets Tuesday with a false Spring Weekend lineup.
“(Email spoofing) is an inherent insecurity in the Internet,” said Chief Information Security Officer David
Sherry, one that is “inherent in all email servers” and not just Brown’s.
The email’s source code revealed the message was a hoax sent from a third-party service that allows any user to modify an email’s “from:” field and impersonate another address. If done cleverly enough, the email will appear at first glance to have actually been sent by that user.
Sherry said trying to crack down further on these sorts of spoofing at-tempts “would be a losing battle” and would “cause issues for all emails.”
“I did know that it was possible to impersonate other email addresses, but I had never seen it happen,” said Kareem Osman ’14.
“This was obviously a lighthearted example,” he added. “But you can ob-viously think
false spring weekend lineup sent to campus press outletsA third-party website allows spoofers to create realistic fake email accounts
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university news2 THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
12 p.m.
Party Manager Training
List 120
4 p.m.
“Potential History of Palestine”
Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
4:30 p.m.
Welcome Back Social
Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
7 p.m.
Mid-Year Activities Fair
Sayles Hall, Campus Center
SHARpE REFECTORY VERNEY-WOOLLEY
LuNCh
dINNER
Stir Fry Tofu Lo Mein, Fried Tofu, Grilled Citrus Herb Chicken, Yellow Cake with Frosting
Chopped Sirloin with Mushroom Sauce, Pastito, Mashed Potatoes, Rotini, Yellow Cake with White Frosting
Vegan Nuggets, Popcorn Chicken with Dipping Sauces, Lyonnaise Potatoes, Oreo Chocolate Chip Bar
Sausage and Pepper Sandwich, Vegetarian Spinach Strudel, Rotini, Oreo Chocolate Chip Fudge Bar
WEdNESdAY FEbRuARY 6 THuRSdAY FEbRuARY 7
C R O S S W O R d
S U d O k U
m E N U
C A l E N d A R
Shefali Luthra, PresidentLucy Feldman, Vice President
Samuel Plotner, TreasurerJulia Kuwahara, Secretary
The Brown Daily Herald (USPS 067.740) is an independent newspaper serving the Brown University community daily since 1891. It is published Monday through Friday during the academic year, excluding vacations, once during Commencement and once during Orientation by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. Single copy free for each member of the community. POSTMASTER please send corrections to P.O. Box 2538, Providence, RI 02906. Periodicals postage paid at Providence, R.I. Subscription prices: $280 one year daily, $140 one semester daily. Copyright 2013 by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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want to at least go toward the middle of the pack? It should be a long-range goal to be competitive in the mid-range of our peers,” he said.
Roth said the committee would accept the faculty member’s criti-cism “as a friendly amendment to the report.”
Besides a hike in the tuition ben-efit, the report also proposed changes to faculty retirement benefits. One proposal recommended the creation of a center for emeritus faculty mem-bers, which would be modeled after the Koerner Center at Yale. The re-port also suggested expanding the current Phased Retirement Option — which gradually reduces workload and pay until a faculty member re-tires — from three to five years and
establishing a savings account to help faculty members save for health care in retirement.
“Hopefully the report will guaran-tee that faculty and staff have a voice,” Roth said. “This will also benefit the University because when employees feel their voice is being heard, they are more likely to buy in” to the Uni-versity’s initiatives, he said.
Following Roth’s presentation, Provost Mark Schlissel P’15 an-nounced the formation of search committees to replace key admin-istrators who are stepping down at the end of this academic year. Ed-ward Wing, dean of medicine and biological sciences, Clyde Briant, vice president for research, Stephen Las-sonde, deputy dean of the college and Michael Pickett, chief information officer for computing and informa-
tion services, are among those the search committees will seek to re-place, Schlissel said.
Schlissel also said the Academic Priorities Committee has been sifting through 82 proposals from faculty members for future University Sig-nature Academic Initiatives.
The proposals have a significant degree of overlap, so the committee will “work on shaping the proposals into clusters” and encourage collabo-ration among faculty members who submitted similar proposals, Schlis-sel said.
President Christina Paxson an-nounced changes to this year’s Com-mencement. This year, faculty mem-bers will sit “up front, looking out, instead of in the audience” and will be presented with teaching awards, Paxson said.
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was another tough year because we are on Coachella weekend again,” Ramadan said.
“We are just a group of students that are serving a function for the community,” she added in regards to how BCA selects each year’s lineup. “It really is for the students.”
Saturday headliner Kendrick La-mar, who finished eighth in a student poll conducted by the Undergraduate Council of Students to gauge interest in potential Spring Weekend acts, will perform just months after his debut album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” was released to high critical acclaim last October. Lamar performed as a mu-sical guest on Saturday Night Live in January.
“He’s blowing up right now,” Ra-madan said. “The weekend before (his album) dropped, we put out a bid, we got it, and we’re really happy. … I’m very proud of that one.”
Canadian DJ A-Trak, who emerged on the electronic music scene when he was crowned DMC World DJ Cham-
pion at the age of 15, will headline a Friday night full of raucous energy. “We always try to get an electronic person because that’s what people want,” Ramadan said.
A-Trak, as part of the electron-ic duo Duck Sauce, has garnered a Grammy nomination for the track “Barbra Streisand,” which topped the charts in 13 countries. A-Trak has toured with Kanye West as West’s personal DJ, and he owns his own record label, Fool’s Gold.
What Cheer? Brigade, a brass band based in Providence, will re-prise its abridged appearance at last year’s Spring Weekend. “We kind of shafted them last year because Child-ish Gambino’s flight was delayed. We had to push their set in order for him to do his sound check, so we wanted to bring them back this year as a gesture of good will,” Ramadan said. “Also they’re just so good.”
Big Freedia is the starlet of New Orleans bounce music — a high en-ergy, hypersexual hip-hop genre with huge beats. She also has a day job as an interior decorator. “The shows are
insane. It’s just people getting up there and shaking their asses and having a good time. It’s just going to be really crazy,” Ramadan said.
Dirty Projectors, a project of Yale alum David Longstreth, constructs songs with intricate guitar work and playful vocal harmonies. “They’re someone we’ve wanted to bring for a long time, and it’s just never worked out,” Ramadan said. “Now they’re fi-nally big enough and available.”
Indie rock darling Deerhunter, whose 2005 album “Cryptograms” remains a critical favorite, combines classic rock, electronic and pop ele-ments into a lush enigma the group calls “ambient punk.”
“They’re going to have an album come out 10 days before Spring Week-end, so it’s perfect,” Ramadan said. “There’ll be a lot of buzz around them, and it’s a notoriously good live show.”
What Cheer? Brigade, Big Freedia and A-Trak will perform Friday, April 19, and Dirty Projectors, Deerhunter and Kendrick Lamar will take the stage Saturday, April 20. Tickets will go on sale in early April.
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data due to self-reporting and the nature of some students’ gender identity changes during their time in college, she said.
Though doctors have declared these surgeries medically necessary, insurance companies typically deem them cosmetic and exclude them from coverage across the United States, Garrett said. Mean-while, without access to hormones and surgery, transgender people may “face discrimination” because others may not accept their gender identity and presenta-tion, she said.
Noah Lupica ’16, who is in the process of undergoing procedures to become male, said the change would be crucial for transgender students, especially given
the high costs of the surgeries. “Like with anything, it depends on the person, but the fact that Brown is now offering these surgeries is life-saving for them,” he said.
Lupica went through the “first stage of surgery” in high school, which “in es-sence allowed me to come into myself,” he said. Though all transgender people are different, he said, the list of female-to-male surgeries the University will now cover all of his needs.
Surgery in high school changed his life, Lupica said. “I feel free to go through life and not make that be my primary concern,” he said. “Cisgendered people, ordinarily most people, don’t even think about how limiting it can be to not feel comfortable in their own skin.” The term cisgender refers to people who identify
with the gender associated with their biological sex.
Garrett said the coverage change could not have happened without the help of student advocacy, including from the student group GenderAction, a sub-group of the Queer Alliance. Members of Gender Action, a small group that meets with University officials to advocate for transgender issues, pressed for the change in insurance policy through letters to administrators, said Maddy Jennewein ’14, a member of the group.
“Brown has joined a pretty small group of colleges that give full benefits for trans students,” Jennewein said. Cit-ing the fact that most health care plans across the country do not cover sexual reassignment surgeries, Jennewein added, “I think it’ll be a huge impact for trans students. … This is a really great oppor-tunity for them.”
Universities that offer coverage for at least some sex reassignment surger-ies as of 2012 include Cornell, Harvard, Stanford University and Penn, according to resources compiled by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy and lobbying organization.
The insurance policy changes are part of a broader effort to address University policies affecting transgender students, Garrett said. Other attempts to improve University policies, she added, include training people at Health Services and Psychological Services, creating and disseminating lists of gender-neutral bathrooms on
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university news 3THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
The opinion pages of the daily Pennsylvanian have over the past week hosted a multifaceted debate about the racial diversity — or lack thereof — of Penn’s administrative leadership.
last Wednesday, a group of six senior African Studies faculty members wrote a guest column lambasting what they called President Amy Gutmann’s failure to install any racial minorities in deanships during her tenure, which began in 2004. Though Gutmann has made public commitments to diversity at Penn, the professors wrote, “her stated vision for a more diverse administration and faculty at the university has yet to be matched by actions taken by her and those she has appointed.”
The faculty members highlighted an annual dinner Gutmann holds for minority faculty members as an example of the “cosmetic” dedication to diversity they said her presidency has favored over substantive change.
In the following days, responses in the daily Pennsylvanian followed from the Faculty Senate chair, the chair of the Board of Trustees and an alum, all of whom defended Gutmann for what they described as a genuine commitment to diversity and her progress in diversifying the student body.
Gutmann responded Thursday with an open letter in thr paper highlighting her initiatives — including a $100 million initiative to boost faculty diversity — while acknowledging that, in the area of administration, “progress has been slow and … we need to work ever harder.”
The harvard cheating scandal that gained national media attention last summer came to a conclusion Friday, when dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael Smith announced in a campus-wide email that about 70 students were forced to withdraw temporarily last semester, the Crimson reported last week.
The number represents about 1 percent of the undergraduate student body, the Crimson reported. The announcement came after widespread publicity about the controversy surrounding a take-home final in a government course, “Introduction to Congress.” harvard’s Administrative Board investigated roughly 125 cases of possible cheating, with slightly over half ending in forced withdrawals, the Crimson reported.
The university’s handling of the scandal has prompted disapproval from some quarters, including the investigated students, parents, alums, donors and former dean of the College harry lewis, who criticized the length of time the proceedings took and what he described as the poor instruction of the course, the Crimson reported.
harvard administrators have said they publicized the case in order to spur campus dialogues about academic honesty, and they have proposed new recommendations for faculty members about how to avoid cheating, the Crimson reported. They have also proposed establishing an honor code.
BY E l I O K U nU n I v E R S I T Y n E W S
E d I TO R
T h I S W E E K I n h I G h E R E d group of MPCs decided they wanted to
turn a sexism resource workshop into a more public demonstration of the reality of sexual assault at Brown and the way sexual assault is a “gendered act of violence,” said Sydney Peak ’15, one of the organizers.
The MPCs wanted to make the frequency of sexual assault at Brown real for students who might not rec-ognize its pervasiveness, and “visually representing” the number 157 was a powerful tool, Peak said.
“It’s just outrageous that this is hap-pening every year,” she said. Statisti-cally, “we all know someone” who has been assaulted, even if students aren’t aware of it, she added.
The demonstration emphasized steps students can take to prevent sexual assault, like intervening if they see anyone taken advantage of while intoxicated at parties. Another goal of the event was to display campus sup-port for assault victims by removing the silence and stigma surrounding the issue, said Will Furuyama ’15, an MPC and organizer. “Those people shouldn’t need to come forward for people to rally behind them and sup-port them,” he said.
Event participant Eddie Cleofe ’15 said he hoped the demonstration could “begin discussions outside of the activ-ist circles here at Brown.”
Though people understand that it happens elsewhere, “sexual assault is something that’s abstract here at Brown,” Cleofe said. Students’ percep-tions of the campus community often stifle discussion or acknowledgment of
the issue, he said — “I think it largely has to do with the (perceived) Brown ethos of being a super liberal, super sexually safe place. … It’s a greater is-sue about just the silence and assumed safety on this campus.”
Because the organizers wanted to maintain some secrecy about the dem-onstration during its planning stages, they reached out to various student groups and social media, having in-terested students contact a special 157 Project email for more information, Peak said. The group gathered in the Ivy Room Tuesday before entering the Ratty around 12:15.
The group finished the demonstra-tion to scattered applause and snaps in the dining hall. Afterward, students expressed appreciation for what Ari Beller ’16 scalled a “powerful experi-ence.”
“People know (about sexual assault) because people hear the statistics, but it is kind of abstract,” he said. “People don’t really recognize what it means until it happens to them personally or someone they know.”
Sonia Aronson ’14 said the num-ber 157 stood out to her, especially because students can sometimes judge or deny others’ claims of assault. “Girls are really quick to write off other girls’ complaints about guys coming onto them,” she said.
Many students said they had not realized sexual assault was so prevalent at Brown.
Though current data on sexual as-sault at Brown are difficult to come by, a 2005 Alpert Medical School survey found that between 4 and 5 percent of undergraduate women reported be-
ing assaulted within the past year, said Bita Shooshani, coordinator of sexual assault prevention and advocacy at Health Services. But that study relied on a small sample size and less-than-ideal sampling methods, Shooshani said, so Health Services is planning a more comprehensive campus survey to be conducted in the fall.
A recent American College Health Association survey found that about 1.6 percent of undergraduate men re-ported having been assaulted — mean-ing attempted or actual sexual penetra-tion — each year, Shooshani said.
Shooshani, who event organizers said is a vital campus resource for sexual assault victims, said she thought the demonstration was important for taking national statistics and “repre-senting what that would look like on our college campus.”
Shooshani said she often hears people voice the perception that sexual assault is uncommon at Brown, which she connected to “the general myth that sexual assaults are happening by strangers.” Since students view Brown as a community, she said, they expect few assaults to happen.
But in reality, about 90 percent of assaults on college campuses are by people the victims know, she said.
Organizers said they have taken other steps to spread awareness and bolster support for sexual assault vic-tims, including distributing table slips about resources on campus. They will also work with the organizers of One Billion Rising@Brown, a campus af-filiate of an international campaign against gender violence, to hold a series of events on Valentine’s Day.
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campus and advocating for gender-neutral housing options for students.
“I think we have a great reputation as a liberal school that attracts a lot of different students,” Jennewein added. “I’m glad our student policies are now up to par with the student body.”
It has not yet been decided whether this coverage will be extended to the staff health insurance plan, Garrett said. “The insurance plans are com-
pletely separate, so we’re in the discus-sion,” she said.
For female-to-male surgeries, the new coverage plan will include “mas-tectomy, hysterectomy, salpingo-oo-phorectomy, vaginectomy, metoid-ioplasty, scrotoplasty, urethroplasty, placement of testicular prostheses (and) phalioplasty,” Hebert wrote. For male-to-female surgeries, cover-age will include “orchiectomy, penec-tomy, vaginoplasty, clitoroplasty (and) labiaplasty.”
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Questions of administrative diversity surface at Penn
one percent of harvard undergrads forced to withdraw in cheating scandal
university news4 THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
By JoNAthAN stALoFFCONTRIbUTINg WRITER
Students, faculty members and com-munity members alike huddled in the corner of Brown Bookstore Monday evening to hear Professor Emeritus of History James T. Patterson discuss his new book, “The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America.”
Patterson began by playing a re-cording of “Eve of Destruction,” the 1965 song by Barry McGuire that inspired the title of the book. Pat-terson described the song as the first clearly topical anti-war and anti white racism song and as “an anthem for a young generation of rebels.”
Using the themes of the tune as a segue to the focus of his lecture, Pat-terson emphasized 1965 as the first of the tumultuous years that historians typically use to characterize “the 60s.”
Patterson centered his attention on the disparity between Americans’ hopeful expectations entering 1965 and the often-ignored events that foreshadowed disaster. Examining the contemporary spirit, Patterson read a statement delivered by President Lyndon Johnson at the 1964 Christ-mas Tree Lighting — “these are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.”
Despite the passage of the Vot-ing Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Act and Elementary and Secondary Edu-
cation Act, Patterson stressed that Johnson’s “Great Society” in 1965 had its flaws.
“All this legislation, Great Soci-ety legislation … led people to want more. This was particularly true of young people and those in the Civil Rights Movement,” Patterson said.
“Race relations was a problem” as well, Patterson said, noting riots erupting in Los Angeles ghettos and that a staggering 47 percent of blacks at the time lived in poverty according to federal standards.
In addition to domestic turmoil, Patterson highlighted developing conflicts on the global scene. As early as February and March of 1965, Johnson escalated American military involvement in Vietnam with Opera-tion Rolling Thunder, beginning a bomb campaign in South Vietnam in retaliation for attacks on Ameri-can soldiers. Americans remained mostly ignorant of Johnson’s foreign policy. In June 1965, Patterson said one Washington Post columnist was “thanking God” for having Johnson as president, saying America did not have to worry about him bombing Vietnam.
That same year, Johnson said “we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But by 1969, more than 500,000 American troops returned home in caskets.
Patterson said he felt sorry for Johnson. The president had a repu-tation for secrecy, he said, but “the thing about most presidents, you know, I feel very strongly about this — they don’t tell us anything.”
Prof. discusses racial conflicts, lasting national legacy of 1965James Patterson analyzes the impact of 1965, from the Vietnam War to the civil rights movementBy mAx ERNst
STAFF WRITER
“Today miracles occupy the same place as illusive effects,” but they should be distinguished from magic, said Hent de Vries, professor in the humanities and philosophy and director of the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, in a talk Tuesday night about miraculous events.
Before an audience of about 20 community members, professors and students in Pembroke Hall 305, de Vries spoke about the changing theoretical perspectives of the miracle through-out history and how such theory can inform modern philosophical inquiry.
Engaging with texts from a variety of philosophers across different eras,
de Vries explained how the philosophy of the miracle has changed. The idea of the miracle is almost ridiculed in light of scientific discovery in the modern era, he said.
“Today, miracles are seen as misin-terpreted science,” de Vries said.
But to understand such events, both past and present views on miracles need to be evaluated and synthesized to create an interpretive framework that explores broader philosophical questions, he said. This task will be even more important for understand-ing religions and events in an age of technological innovation, de Vries said.
The lecture, titled “Of Miracles, Events and Special Effects,” is part of de Vries’ week-long residency on campus, which also included a symposium on Monday called “‘Religious Radicalisms’ and Modernity: Allies or Enemies?” Today’s 12 p.m. master seminar — also a part of the residency — will be re-stricted to faculty members and invited graduate students, offering participants
the opportunity to engage in careful philosophical analysis of a short story.
All these events were rescheduled from the fall, when they were canceled due to Hurricane Sandy, said event coordinator Kit Salisbury, department manager at the Cogut Center for the Humanities. But the University had been trying to set up the series long before last fall, seeking to host events to complement the Center’s focus on de Vries’ brand of philosophical inquiry, wrote Michael Steinberg, director of the Cogut Center and professor of history and music, in an email to The Herald.
“Hent de Vries is the preeminent philosopher of the new interest in reli-gion,” Steinberg wrote. “We have been trying to invite him to campus since 2007,” he added, when the group held a Faculty Fellows symposium focused on de Vries’ work.
“Hosting de Vries was years in the making,” Salisbury said. “He is very well thought of in the humanities.”
Lecture examines history of miraclesAs part of his weeklong residency, professor questions philosophy of religious wonders
By mAggIE LIvINgstoNESTAFF WRITER
Starting next semester, SafeRide will still be on call — but it will be called a different name.
First Transit Inc., a company used by Yale and Princeton, will replace University Shuttle LLC as the campus shuttle service provider July 1, said Beth Gentry, assistant vice president of administration and financial services.
University Shuttle’s contract with Brown expires June 30, Gentry said. The “SafeRide” name will end with Brown’s relationship with University Shuttle, because the name is registered property of the company, she said.
Gentry led a committee to research and compare other available shuttle companies, she said. The committee comprised representatives from the Transportation Office, the Purchas-ing Department, the Department of Public Safety and the Alpert Medical
School.The shuttles running on campus
include daytime shuttle BrownMed/Downcity Express, morning and eve-ning shuttle South Main Street Ex-press, nighttime SafeRide, SafeRide onCall and the Student and Employee Accessibility onCall shuttle, according to the transportation office website. All will be replaced with new First Transit vehicles, Gentry said.
The University issued a Request for Proposals to shuttle companies in early September, a common business practice, Gentry said. The committee analyzed a comprehensive set of data and ultimately decided First Transit was the best fit for Brown.
“The clear advantages of First Transit are that we will be getting brand-new shuttles and that their price was less than (University Shut-tle),” Gentry said, though she was un-able to give specifics about the savings. “We looked at a whole litany of crite-ria, including price, drivers, training, maintenance, service and staffing.”
SafeRide’s new name is still a work in progress, as are the complete finan-cials of the transition, Gentry said.
University Shuttle could not be reached for comment.
First Transit Inc. offers new shuttles and more competitive prices for transportation services
saferide contract ends, new service hired
of ways that it would be bad” — emails to which a user might respond with sensitive information, Osman said.
At 9:53 a.m. yesterday, The Her-ald and BlogDailyHerald received an email from Brooks that stated the Spring Weekend lineup announcement was forthcoming. At 10:32 a.m., The Herald posted a brief article online attributing the information to Brooks.
Ten minutes later, BlogDailyHerald received an email claiming to be from Brooks’ email account, with subject “Lineup.” The body read: “Friday: The Sounds of Capitalism, Toro Y Moi. Saturday: The Postal Service, Grouper. More acts to be announced in March.”
The Sounds of Capitalism and Grouper are not real bands, Brooks said, and The Postal Service is cur-rently booked to perform at Coach-ella Valley Music and Arts Festival the Saturday of Spring Weekend. But, BlogDailyHerald editors said, because Brooks was their source for the pre-vious Spring Weekend information, they published the lineup reported in the email.
“That’s usually what we do when we receive an email from BCA,” said Blog-DailyHerald Editor-in-Chief Meredith Bilski ’14. “We put (the information) up on the Blog.”
Though Brown’s security filter flagged the message as suspicious, the system marked it as a “soft fail,”
allowing the email through with the fraudulent “from:” address intact.
Brooks and Bilski both said no one from their respective organizations sent the fraudulent email.
“The people on BCA understand the consequences of leaks,” Brooks said. “I trust them as my friends and as people who are professionally invested in this to not do something like that.”
“People on our staff are ethical, and they would not do this on purpose,” Bilksi said. “We were anticipating a Spring Weekend lineup from them, and we wouldn’t have made one up on our own.”
-With additional reporting by Ra-chel Margolis
/ / spring page 1
www.browndailyherald.com
feature 5THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
By JuLIE yuECONTRIbUTINg WRITER
Though many students only venture to J. Walter Wilson to attend classes and collect Amazon textbook shipments, Brown Pen Pals is giving students a reason to check their mailboxes again.
Meia Geddes ’14 and Nestor Noyola ’14 are bringing letter-writing back to life at Brown through the group, which started last semester. Brown Pen Pals became an official non-funded Category I group this January and is continuing to pair up interested, anonymous partici-pants to facilitate a relationship through the written word.
Pen to paperGeddes, a former Herald staff writer,
said she conceived the idea at the end of her sophomore year. When she men-tioned it to her friend Noyola, his enthu-siasm was immediate, she said. Noyola, who has corresponded by mail with a high school friend for three years in col-lege, said one can “achieve very different conversations” and “connect at a much deeper level” by writing letters instead of texting or emailing. These digital meth-
ods lack the permanence and weight that letter-writing requires, Noyola said.
“I was excited when Meia wanted to bring that element (of physical letters) to Brown,” he said.
Though some participants in the group sampled pen pal correspondence in elementary school or high school, they said writing letters has become a much more intense and insightful experience as they grow older and busier.
“Putting words in ink allows me to be much more open and think about what I’m saying,” letter-writer Jonathan Rubins ’16 said. But the letters are “pretty sporadic,” he added, noting he receives letters from his pen pal about once every two weeks.
“Every time I send a letter, I end up checking my mailbox a lot more,” he said.
Pairing upGeddes and Noyola sent out a prefer-
ence form to their new members before setting up pairings, asking them to specify how often they would write, on a scale from “Avid” to “Once in a Blue Moon.” The form also asked future letter-writers to specify their semester level, gender and preferences for their pen pal’s gender and
meeting frequency. Expected frequency of writing is the most important factor in pairing pen pals, Geddes said.
The form also featured open-ended questions about what writers would like to discuss with their pen pal.
“You get a lot of philosophers,” Ged-des said. “(The participants are) interested in philosophy, big questions of life, rela-tionships, classes, religion.”
Geddes and Noyola matched up the pen pals by hand. Eschewing complex computer functions, the two coordina-tors printed out their Excel spreadsheet of participant preferences and cut each participant’s name out into strips. They matched these strips one by one, pairing the individuals with tape.
sincerely, AnonymousBut the logistics of starting the group
were complicated, Geddes said.“I wasn’t sure if it would work because
of the anonymity of it all,” Geddes said. Mail without return addresses is gener-ally suspect in the U.S. Postal Service, but due to the cooperation of the Brown University Mail Services staff, Brown Pen Pals are able to maintain participants’ anonymity.
Rubins said the anonymity of having a pen pal has been liberating. He said he still hasn’t seen the pen pal to whom he’s
been writing since last semester.“It’s a lot more honest,” Rubins said.
“I say things I don’t even want to admit in my own head.”
He also noted how quickly the con-tents of his letters became intimate. He and his pen pal began with brief intro-ductions and discussed their interests and activities, but their correspondence soon escalated to discussing personal thoughts, he said.
Michelle Zheng ’16 shared Rubins’ enthusiasm for the system’s anonymity. Both she and her pen pal from last se-mester have decided to put off meeting until May, because not knowing has been “too much fun.”
“You can be very selective with what you convey,” Zheng said. “It’s been inter-esting to get to know this person from the perspective of just their brain.”
“It’s not scary,” Lauren Galvan ’16 said about not knowing the identity of her pen pal. “It’s exciting and different.”
Though the prospect of meeting with their pen pal would be exciting, writ-ers expressed concern that connecting in real life would end the letter-writing relationship.
“It wouldn’t be anonymous anymore,” Galvan said. “You would begin convers-ing with them over email or text (mes-saging).”
Rubins’ friendship with his pen pal is quite unlike his friendships in the real world, he said.
“I don’t know too many superficial details about him,” Rubins said, adding that they now share personal reflections rather than personal details. “It’s a type of friendship you wouldn’t get by meeting a person right away.”
Zheng said when she finally meets her pen pal she predicts, “we’re going to be such good friends because we have so much in common.”
For now, Rubins said, there is the added suspense of not knowing who his pen pal is.
“This person might be in one of my classes, and I would never know it,” he said.
Looking forwardParticipants were enthusiastic about
the program and encouraged more stu-dents to join.
Brown Pen Pals currently has more than a hundred participants, the coordi-nators said, and more people have been signing up. They have considered ex-panding to other college networks and to alums, but due to the anonymity clause, they said it might be difficult.
“Brown Pen Pals is all about connect-ing people,” Geddes said.
you’ve got mail: students rediscover letter-writingAnonymous authorship gives students a chance to correspond with campus pen pals
By sAm hEFt-LuthySENIOR STAFF WRITER
Students who go off meal plan may face a critical challenge — finding a way to save as much money on food as
humanly possible. One group of students has attempted
to tackle that problem — a team of four, including juniors from both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, launched freefoodatbrown.com last week. The website that works to bring student groups and undergraduates to-gether with the promise of free food and the chance for a new experience.
The website’s co-creator Charles Yeh ’14 said it has had almost 900 visits from more than 350 unique users since launching. The site collects information from Morning Mail, runs a program to determine what event descriptions might include free food and posts those events on the website two days in ad-vance.
“Brown Morning Mail has a feed with structured data,” said Max Song ’14, one of the website’s creators. “We’re taking that feed and running very simple machine learning. There’s some key-words that we’ve identified that really positively correlate with free food events — we weight those very heavily.”
The idea for the site came out of an experiment that Song and Yeh assigned themselves last semester.
“There was almost a challenge to see how fast we could do it,” Song said. “Ninety percent of the project took place within a 48-hour window.”
The pair worked with RISD Dual Degree student JS Tan ’15 and RISD student Sam Jau. From a Friday night
until Sunday evening, the four seques-tered themselves in an upper floor of the Center for Information Technology and took the project from concept to completion.
“We sat around the table and for the most part lost track of time,” Song said. “The all-nighter between Friday night and Saturday morning was totally un-noticeable.”
Yeh handled most of the back-end work of the website — accessing the Morning Mail data and trying to de-termine what words are most correlated with free food.
“It’s actually really simple,” he said. “It’s just by probability. We found that looking for some words like ‘free’ and ‘food’ was actually really bad. … You find a lot of non-free-food events. Even adding ‘pizza’ was surprisingly bad.”
Rather than choosing any event with a description that includes the word “food,” the site creates a probabilistic model based on the likelihood that any individual word — like “reception” — in the event’s description is a signal that free food will be at the event.
“We multiply all the probabilities together,” Yeh said. “It’s not perfectly accurate because it’s only single words. We do have to check it and make sure that it is right.”
“I was a little more interested in the idea behind the project, the whole ‘48 hours to completion’ thing,” Jau said. “Kind of proving that design is about simple solutions to complex problems.”
Jau, who is studying graphic design at RISD, took charge of the visual aspects of the site’s creation. The layout is clean and easy to navigate, with a sidebar la-beled “Today’s Menu” that lists three days’ worth of food at a time. Simple icons represent the time and location of events on the “menu,” and minimal-ist logos of pizza, ice cream and various drinks line the banner at the top.
“I wanted to create a really user-friendly interface,” he said. “We went through a bunch of different ideas, like
maybe creating something for mobile instead of Web because people would be checking this stuff on the go instead of in front of a computer — or maybe even creating an app.”
Jau said that the team may be look-ing to expand the site into new medi-ums such as smartphone applications. One possible feature could be pop-up notifications when a free food event is nearby, Yeh said.
Though BlogDailyHerald runs a similar “Free Food Digest” based on the same principles, the creators of free-foodatbrown.com said the two publica-tions are different in the markets they try to serve.
“There’s no sense of competition,” Song said. “Everyone is doing it for the sake of Brown students — there’s not much to gain from one person using this website.”
BlogDailyHerald publishes com-mentary along with each event, while Song said freefoodatbrown.com is hop-ing the site’s free food-recognition algo-rithm will eventually become sophisti-cated enough that human oversight will be unnecessary.
“Right now, it’s about being — as much as we can be — automated, so there’s little overhead,” he said. “The human element costs a lot more time and investment than our ultimate mis-sion, which is to get the information out there for people to have a reliable way of accessing it.”
Song said the group originally wor-ried about whether freefoodatbrown.com might encourage students to attend events solely for the food. The group members said they agreed that it prob-ably would, but decided that was not necessarily a bad thing.
“You’d be surprised at how many people go to events that they don’t want to be at and discover that they learn something new,” Song said.
“You go there because of pizza, but you learn about all these different clubs,” Yeh said. “It’s a good trade-off, I think.”
new site sniffs out free food on campusStudent-made website uses algorithm to identify events most likely to include free food
by Sobor’s work, neighboring frater-nity Delta Tau soon asked Sobor and Fradin to help them create a similar table of their own, he added. Sobor said this series of events inspired his current furniture-decorating busi-ness.
Sobor, who relies largely on word-of-mouth commission, said he typi-cally only asks students to repay him for the cost of materials used. He then transforms their old furniture with masking tape and neon-hued geo-metric patterns, he said.
Weiss said Sobor’s T-shirts and furniture have created a consider-
able buzz on campus. She added his success may be due in part to his “Chicago hustle” — a persistent drive for self-promotion and willingness to utilize all resources available, a characteristic she attributes to their urban hometown.
“You almost have to beg people to buy your art because you have no credibility,” Weiss added. Sobor promotes his work heavily by sell-ing T-shirts and posters on the Main Green, advertising on Facebook and giving T-shirts and posters to friends.
“If someone comes in and says they like my work, I usually give it to them,” Sobor said. “ But I always say ‘refer me’ — say it was me who did it.”
/ / threads page 8
universitynews
editorial6 THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
C O R R E C T I O N S P O L I C YThe Brown Daily Herald is committed to providing the Brown University community with the most accurate information possible. Corrections may be submitted up to seven calendar days after publication.
C O M M E N TA R Y P O L I C YThe editorial is the majority opinion of the editorial page board of The Brown Daily Herald. The editorial viewpoint does not necessarily reflect the views of The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. Columns, letters and comics reflect the opinions of their authors only.
L E T T E R S T O T H E E D I T O R P O L I C YSend letters to [email protected]. Include a telephone number with all letters. The Herald reserves the right to edit all letters for length and clarity and cannot assure the publication of any letter. Please limit letters to 250 words. Under special circumstances writers may request anonymity, but no letter will be printed if the author’s identity is unknown to the editors. Announcements of events will not be printed.
A D V E R T I S I N G P O L I C YThe Brown Daily Herald, Inc. reserves the right to accept or decline any advertisement at its discretion.
E d I TO R I A l C A R TO O N b y j a s o n c o n n o r
“You almost have to beg people to buy your art
because you have no credibility.”— Sarah Weiss ’15
See threads on page 8.
E d I TO R I A l
In an article published in The Herald last week (“Expanding engineering school considers off-campus space”), students raised well-founded concerns about the impact of expanding the School of Engineering down College Hill into the Jewelry District, a move currently under discussion by University administrators.
We do not oppose constructing new buildings — indeed, Barus and Holley, where engineering is housed, is in drastic need of renovations. But we urge the University to reflect on the consequences such a move could have on Brown’s undergraduate community and academic environment. In expanding the School of Engineering, administrators must consider and ad-dress these valid concerns to preserve the academic spirit that defines Brown.
A new building downtown would be logistically frustrating, both for scheduling classes and for developing relationships between students and professors. Undergraduates are simply not equipped to travel so far from College Hill and its dormitories while pursuing other on-campus activities throughout the day. Even if the building were to only host graduate-level seminars, juniors and seniors looking to push themselves in the engineering department would still sometimes enroll in these and would thus be forced to make a trek to get to class.
This problem would extend to any professors with offices in the new building. How often would students go to office hours if their professors were more than a 20-minute walk away? Or if they prioritized these profes-sors and their classes, what would they have to sacrifice in order to travel to those important sessions? As engineering student Emily Toomey ’15 told The Herald last week, “Accessibility is a huge thing that Brown offers.” We cannot let such a significant aspect of our education slip away.
Most egregiously, this kind of move could easily undermine the very ideals of Brown’s academic cornerstone, the New Curriculum. The entire undergraduate experience is centered on the ideal of broad ranges of experi-ences — of students being given the reins of their own education and control over their own academic and intellectual destinies.
Placing classes and professors far from main campus essentially creates yet another premium on the free time of engineering concentrators, limit-ing their experiences and likely their choice of classes to those that are local and convenient. This physical divide in disciplines is simply unacceptable if we truly believe the ideals of the New Curriculum should stand for every undergraduate student, regardless of concentration.
Only off-campus students and those able to pay for parking permits around campus have access to cars, and not all students have the money for bikes or other similar non-automotive forms of transportation. An express bus route, like the one used by Alpert Medical School students housed on College Hill, could help mitigate the effects a geographic divide could have.
Still, the fact remains that a building in the Jewelry District is just not the same as having a building for work, communication and learning within walking distance of the undergraduate community and student dormitories. Any sort of expansion downtown must carefully consider and account for these issues and work to make the trip from College Hill as painless and accessible as possible, so that growing the School of Engineering adheres to and expounds upon Brown’s academic mission and student goals.
Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board: its editor, Dan Jeon, and its members, Mintaka Angell, Samuel Choi, Nicholas Morley and Rachel Occhiogrosso. Send comments to [email protected].
q U OT E O F T h E d Ay
breaking new ground downtown
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opinions 7THE BROWN DAILY HERALDWEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
When Bill Gates puts a huge chunk of his fortune into the American educational system, a few things happen: Schools re-ceive funding they desperately need, edu-cational policy is fundamentally corrupt-ed, Bill Gates receives extensive attention and praise and Bill Gates’ lifestyle stays exactly the same.
That Bill Gates is willing to donate his excess money doesn’t indicate that Bill Gates has any idea what he’s talking about — he doesn’t — or that Bill Gates should have any role in forming educational poli-cy — he shouldn’t. And yet Bill Gates puts hundreds of millions of dollars behind the system of paying teachers based on test scores. Then desperate school districts grab onto the money so that endless stan-dardized testing, the worst idea in Ameri-can education policy, marches onward.
It’s great Bill Gates’ money is pay-ing for education instead of sitting in a vault somewhere, but there are balances and trade-offs. If we let the dollars of the wealthy force us ever closer to the abyss of standardized test-driven schools, we as a society lose something valuable. We have to ask ourselves whether Gates and his ilk should be allowed to impose their agenda by virtue of having money.
Brown University has a Bill Gates prob-lem. We decided long ago the governance of Brown was for sale to the highest bid-
der, which is why exactly half of the Cor-poration’s trustees and fellows are wealthy financiers. Like Bill Gates, these people have given away thousands and millions and, in the case of esteemed trustee, mul-tibillionaire and Securities and Exchange Commission insider trading person of in-terest Steven Cohen P’08 P’16, billions of dollars. Like Bill Gates, they are not neces-sarily benevolent or wise or good at run-ning a university just because they gave away some percentage of their money.
The Corporation places a higher pri-ority on creating a glitzy and expanding
university than on creating an affordable and diverse university. It shows disregard for its workers and graduate students. It’s worth thinking about whether the shared affluence of most Corporation members is related. The trustees aren’t evil — they aren’t bad people — but the bulk of them come from the same place with the same perspective. Filling our governing body with people coming from a single back-ground — the financial industry — is a
bad idea and can be traced back to this fallacy that donating a pile of money qual-ifies anyone for anything. Our “money-for-power” governance scheme results in some seriously misplaced priorities.
Rhode Island has a Bill Gates prob-lem. While the state’s wealthy cannot yet directly buy seats in the state legislature, the business community’s wealth and in-fluence have still managed to pollute public policy. Witness the shift of focus away from the state’s persistently under-funded public universities and colleges and toward so-called “job training pro-
grams” funded by a combination of pub-lic and private money. We retain the por-tion of higher education that benefits the wealthy: creating a supply of well-trained workers. We neglect the other piece — creating literate, better-educated citizens and all the other important things a liber-al education is supposed to do. We churn out workers and abandon liberal educa-tion. This is just one example of the mon-ey-for-policy swaps that occur all the time
within governments across the country. It’s generally not a nefarious process. It’s just an unjust and undemocratic way to make public policy.
Then there are campaign contributions — the more unsavory Bill Gates prob-lem facing state, local and federal govern-ments. With campaign contributions, the public benefit is even lower and the pub-lic cost is even higher. We get well-funded political campaigns and a steady stream of 30-second ads, and we lose a democratic system of government. This is a more ob-viously corrupt instance, as the wealthy benefactors are directly enriching them-selves by dismantling regulations and winning lucrative government contracts. But Bill Gates buying influence over ed-ucation policy and a defense contractor buying a House seat differ only by degree.
There is a school of thought that claims none of this is a problem — that the in-terests of the business community are our interests, the perspective of Wall Street is our perspective. Those of us who don’t buy it need to recognize the pitfalls in-herent in the charity of the rich. Brown should raise money without using its own governance as a bargaining chip. Govern-ments should raise money through taxes, not through voluntary handouts from the rich that in turn pollute democracy.
We all can benefit from the charity of the wealthy, and they should be encour-aged to give. But they should not be per-mitted to buy our institutions.
daniel Moraff ’14 can be reached at [email protected].
our bill Gates problem
Brown should raise money without using its own governance as a bargaining chip.
Struggle: The word evokes famous phras-es, including “no pain, no gain,” and “there are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” Accompanying these sayings are stories of individuals who pushed through failure to achieve success. These stories include those of Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school bas-ketball team, Thomas Edison, who made hundreds of attempts to find the right light bulb filament, and Abraham Lin-coln, who lost eight elections. We cele-brate these individuals and their stories. But unfortunately, we focus on their ul-timate success, rather than applying their strength and determination to our own lives. We should strive to adopt their character when facing failure, given that experiencing and overcoming adversity can increase our happiness.
For centuries there has been specula-tion about the relationship between ad-versity and happiness. Although modern research is driving us toward an answer to be sure, the question is far from set-tled. A 2010 study in the Journal of Per-sonality and Social Psychology concluded that those who had experienced negative life events had higher mental and gener-al wellbeing than those who had not. As a caveat, the study also concluded there is a level of adversity at which point ad-
versity decreases wellbeing. The research-ers modeled the relationship between adversity and happiness as a U-shaped curve. The study stated that “in moder-ation, whatever does not kill us may in-deed make us stronger.” If we are looking to boost our happiness, we would be wise to seek out moderate struggles.
Most struggles involve a mental chal-lenge. One must solve a problem that ap-pears difficult, even impossible. Brains
love this challenge. The 2008 study “Im-proving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory” concluded that in-tense mental exercise increases perfor-mance across a whole array of cognitive functions. One might say this study con-cluded that what doesn’t kill you makes you smarter. A follow-up study exploring the relationship between dopamine levels and mental training concluded that in-
tense mental training increases the “bind-ing potential” of a particular dopamine receptor. This dopamine receptor furthers mental functioning and motivation. The results of this study are in keeping with what Einstein once said: “One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.” It’s worth asking: What can I do to stretch myself mentally?
Struggles can boost a person’s resil-ience to future adversity. The Ameri-can Psychological Association suggests 10 ways to build resilience. Half of them involve learning from struggle. For in-stance, one suggestion is to “look for op-portunities of self-discovery after a strug-gle with loss.” Another is to “avoid seeing crises or stressful events as unbearable problems.”
Though struggles may be painful, these studies suggest that they can in fact eventually promote intelligence, resil-ience and happiness. Unfortunately, de-spite the famous sayings and scientific evidence, adversity is regarded primarily as something to avoid. Even students at Brown can be tempted by the normal hu-man inclinations to sleep more, take an “easy” class or skip exercise.
Sometimes struggle is avoided to the point where perfectionism develops. Per-fectionists limit themselves to what they are already good at or familiar with to avoid confronting potential failure in new subjects or experiences. While tak-ing a class S/NC might be a healthy way to get into a new and challenging subject, it also can be the tool of the perfectionists overly worried about their GPAs. Perfec-tionists feel comfortable but don’t experi-ence much personal growth.
Brown students, having been high achievers already, are perhaps more sus-ceptible than most to perfectionism. But it actually would be healthier for us to experience more setbacks. So take a re-ally hard class, pick up an instrument or muddle your way through learning a new language.
And generally, if you are one to set goals, I’d say seek out healthy struggles — struggles that won’t kill you. It might pay off in the long run.
Oliver hudson ’14 welcomes your comments. he may be reached at
struggle and growth
If we are looking to boost our happiness, we would
be wise to seek out moderate struggles.
OlIvER hUdSOnopinions Columnist
daily heraldtHe BRownscience & research
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2013
hospice use and ‘unwanted care’ on riseThough the percentage of seniors who died within three days of
beginning hospice care nearly doubled between 2000 and 2009, the proportion of dying seniors in intensive care also rose, according to research co-authored by Joan Teno MS’90, professor of health services policy and practice in the Public health Program. The study was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Teno and her team of researchers examined the Medicare records of more than 840,000 people over 66 years of age who died between 2000 and 2009, according to a University press release. They found that while health care designed to alleviate suffering and make patients more comfortable has become more popular over the last decade, many seniors still undergo “aggressive” treatment, leading to multiple hospitalizations and stays in intensive care units.
“Poor communication leading to unwanted care is an epidemic in many systems,” said co-author david Goodman, dartmouth professor and director of the Center for health Policy Research, in the press release. “The patterns of care observed in this study reflect needlessly painful experiences suffered by many patients.”
healthcare providers may pursue more aggressive treatments to garner reimbursements for service fees from Medicare, Teno said in the release.
“We need a system where doctors and hospitals are paid for delivering high-quality, patient-centered care that understands the dying patient’s needs and expectations and develops a care plan that honors them,” she added.
human activity erodes Cape CodSeventy years of human activity have led to the erosion of Cape
Cod’s sea banks, according to a study led by Tyler Coverdale ’10 published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment last month.
Coverdale and other researchers involved in the study analyzed aerial pictures of Cape Cod’s marshes dating from the 1930s to the 2000s to determine how disruptions to the shore’s natural ecology have snowballed over time, according to a University press release.
In the 1930s, people sought to decrease the area’s mosquito population by digging ditches to drain the marshes. Though not destructive at the time, the ditches let water flow through, allowing a new type of grass to grow and a different species of grass-eating crab — the Sesarma crab — to thrive.
This did not become an issue until decades later, when development on Cape Cod spurred an increase in recreational fishing. Fishermen have been capturing the crab’s main predators, enabling the new species to “roam unchecked,” according to the press release.
The crabs’ eating has destroyed the marshes, according to the release.
Coverdale’s image analysis found that the marshes without the trenches and fishing infrastructure have fared better.
transposable elements expressed in aging cells
As a cell ages, its ability to temper the harmful effects of transposable elements — floating strands of dnA — weakens. lowered control over these strands may be one reason why an individual’s health declines as he or she ages, according to a study led by University researchers published in the online edition of the journal Aging Cell last month.
Transposable dnA elements can increase an organism’s genetic diversity, but they can also disrupt normal cell functioning, according to a University press release. Cells work to confine these strands of dnA to prevent them from being expressed into proteins.
“We barely seem to be winning this high-stakes warfare, given that these molecular parasites make up 40 percent of our genome,” said John Sedivy, professor of medical science and study senior author.
The researchers found that chromatin — the combination of dnA and protein that lives in cells and plays a key role in trapping and controlling transposable elements — changes as cells age.
In young, healthy cells, chromatin structures are more open around dnA parts that need to be expressed into proteins, and they remain closed around transposable elements that could cause harm. But the researchers observed that in older cells, once-open chromatin became more closed and once-closed chromatin became more open. This leads to increased expression of transposable elements, according to the press release.
It is unclear how much damage the transposable elements cause when expressed, Sedivy said in the press release. “Is the transposition really bad for the organism, or is it something that happens so late that by that point the organism has already accumulated so much age-associated damage?” he asked in the release.
Sedivy said scientists should still consider “coming up with an existing drug therapy” to combat the expression of transposable elements.
BY KATE nUSSEnBAUM, SCIEnCE & RESEARCh EdITOR SCIEnCE & RESEARCh ROUndUP
After exploring other interests, Danny Sobor ’15 returns to his artistic roots with his T-shirt designs and prints
By ELAINE KuCKERtzCONTRIbUTINg WRITER
With a knack for colorful, street art-inspired designs, Danny Sobor ’15 incorporates Brown-specific cultural references in prints that can be found
across campus. Sobor said he came to Brown with a developed
interest in screen printing and stencil-ing — he designed and sold T-shirts in his hometown of Chicago.
“I came to Brown wanting to make a splash,” Sobor said. He first gained recognition for posters and T-shirts featuring Ruth Simmons’ face ac-companied by the caption “T(Ruth).”
The image is popular and can be found in many sophomores’ rooms, said Sarah Weiss ’15, a fellow T-shirt designer. Sobor continued his print-work, later producing “Thank God
it’s Chicken Finger Friday” T-shirts, which he sold outside the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall this past spring. He also designed a poster with an image of President Christina Paxson’s face attached to a dinosaur body with the caption “T-Pax,” according to his website, dannysobordesigns.com.
In his first year at Brown, Sobor tried to stay away from the Visual Arts concentration despite his strong interest in art. He took “12 classes in 12 different departments,” including economics, education and neurosci-ence, he said.
Though he spent his days explor-ing Brown’s diverse academic offer-ings, Sobor said he devoted many late nights to his artwork — a passion that became his means of relaxation. Sobor said he continued using stencils to create spray-painted works of art on canvas in the stairwells of Emery-Woolley during this time.
As a sophomore, he “decided to channel the majority of his energy into creative pursuits,” Sobor said. He said he plans to create his own concentration, “something like neu-roaesthetics — a cross between art and neuroscience,” he added.
Since choosing to devote more time to his art, Sobor has started ex-perimenting with a wider variety of artistic genres. “I try to be a jack-of-all-trades — poster-making, T-shirt making, logo design and just general artwork,” he said.
Sobor said he has taken on as many projects as he can handle, focusing on logo designs for stu-dent groups. He regularly designs for Brown Concert Agency and Im-providence and often receives emails from other student groups for T-shirt design commissions.
His website showcases the variety of media with which he works, from traditional painting to his recent foray into furniture design. But his distinc-tive style — described by suitemate Noah Fradin ’15 as “psychadelic mini-malism” — pervades his work.
Last spring, when Sobor and his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers spray-painted a table for their house, a new project, “Swag My Furniture,” took off, Sobor said. The table featured colorful geometric patterns on the legs and an image of a woman holding a burning copy of Jane Eyre.
Impressed
students dig brunonian threads
By KRIstINA KLARACONTRIbUTINg WRITER
Assistant Professor of Biology Ste-phen Porder was awarded the Leopold Leadership Fellowship, which aims to train environmental scientists to share research with the general public and policymakers in order to effect positive change. Porder received the fellowship last week.
“I think (Porder) sees it as one of his missions as a professor to educate the general public and the people who will be leaders not only in science, but the general student who goes on to do great things in other fields,” said Shel-by Riskin GS, who previously worked as a graduate student in Porder’s lab.
The Leopold Leadership Program was founded by a group of past pres-idents of the Ecological Society of America in 1998, said Pam Sturner, executive director of the program. The ecologists created the initiative because they felt the science used by policymakers when making environ-mental decisions was not up to date with university research, she said.
Fellows will travel to Wisconsin this summer for an intense week of training during which they will learn how to speak to the media, congressio-nal representatives and federal agen-cies, Sturner said. Recent fellows have also used their training to engage with local and global non-governmental organizations and small businesses, she added.
During the training week, fellows will form a yearlong action plan to apply what they learn, Sturner said.
The program builds a community of scientists interested in using their scholarship and research to promote actual change, according to its website.
“I’m excited to plug into that net-work,” Porder said.
Porder’s lab studies the develop-ment of tropical forests and the envi-ronmental consequences of convert-ing them to industrial-sized farms, he said.
“Global environmental change rep-resents the single biggest challenge to humans in the 21st century,” Porder said, adding that people must priori-tize environmental sustainability.
“Environmental questions that are most pertinent now are very com-plicated and require a level of scien-tific understanding that many people do not have,” Porder said. But many scientists are hesitant to share their research with the general public, in part because public outreach is not emphasized in the tenure process at
most universities, he added. “What counts is grant dollars and peer-re-viewed publication.”
Another challenge for researchers trying to take public action lies in the concept of a scientist as an “impartial arbiter” of data, Porder said, adding that researchers’ work is often criti-cized when they act as advocates for particular causes.
Scientists are not always comfort-able speaking to the public, he said, adding that “it’s not what we’re trained to do.” He is excited to improve his own scientific communication skills through the fellowship, he said.
Citizens must also take it upon themselves to become scientifically literate, Porder said, calling scientific literacy the “pathway to enlightened citizenship in this century.”
Prof. named Leopold Leadership fellowThe program aims to help researchers publicize work and engage with non-scientists
COURTESY OF STEPhEn PORdER
training this summer will help Assistant Professor of Biology stephen Porder share his research on rainforests with policymakers and the public.
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arts & culture