Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Brown Daily Herald T hursday, F ebr uar y 28, 2008

Volume CXLIII, No. 25

Dean of the College receives advising funds

By Franklin Kanin News Editor

At the meeting of the University’s highest governing body last weekend, the Corporation endorsed the suggestion to increase the budget of the Office of the Dean of the College by $550,000.

According to the University Resources Committee report, the increase should make “permanent a $200,000 allocation provided for pilot programs” for 2008, with an additional $350,000 which will “permit the Dean to begin implementing changes to Brown’s advising system, to support a possible science resource center, to enhance support for undergraduate research and for curriculum development.”

Professor of Political Science Terrence Hopmann, a URC member, said the committee left the actual allocation of the increased funds to the dean of the College.

“We divided things as best we

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

Some feel aided, but some don’t

T his w ee k i n p o st -

could, but to a large degree we left it to the discretion of each of the departments — in this case, the dean of the College — to decide what to do with it and how to allocate it,” he said.

The budget increase will mainly fund initiatives suggested in the Task Force on Undergraduate Education’s report, such as improvement of advising resources, faculty support and the curriculum, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron said.

“Once I start dividing it up, I think there’s only a little bit for all,” Bergeron said. “But it will help.”

If a group of faculty advising fellows is created to support professors, the money would help fund them, Bergeron said. “There have been suggestions about developing new initiatives in certain lower division courses in math and science,” she said. “I would just like to be able to move for ward on some of continued on page 6

By Debbie Lehmann Higher Ed Editor

als. “We use human interviews, as do most national interest groups,” said Darrell West, a professor of political science and director of the Taubman Center. Rasmussen uses “an automated phone call, and you would choose either Obama or Clinton, and as a result, it does not include the uncommitted choice that would be found on ballots during

The University’s new financial aid policy has sparked mixed reaction among students, with some pleased about the changes and others saying they do not go far enough.

In addition, many students interviewed by The Herald, some who receive financial aid and some who do not, were unaware of any changes or did not know how the new policy would affect them.

A 20 percent increase in the financial aid budget approved by the Corporation last weekend will completely eliminate loans for students from families with incomes under $100,000 — roughly 60 percent of financial aid recipients. Students from families above this income bracket will see a reduction in loans. In addition, parental contribution will be eliminated for families making under $60,000 a year.

Though satisfied with his financial aid for his freshman year, Owen Hill ’10 said he was unhappy with the aid package he received this year.

But the new policy — which Hill called “awesome” — means he will have no loans. Hill added that many of his friends will also see their loans eliminated and that a “fair amount” will now attend Brown for free.

“Obviously we can’t spend all our money on this,” Hill said. “But cutting out loans is a great first step.

I’m satisfied.”

continued on page 4

continued on page 4

Courtesy of Fox Broadcasting

Inside, Post- interviews “Arrested Development’s” Will Arnett this week.

New poll shows Clinton’s local lead is widening Brian Mastroianni Senior Staff Writer

A new poll shows Sen. Hillar y Clinton, D-N.Y., leading Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., by 15 points in

METRO Rhode Island, meaning her lead has widened in what has become an important primary for the for-

mer first lady. Conducted on Feb. 23, the telephone survey reached 1,035 Rhode Islanders, according to Rasmussen Reports, the private public opinion company that did the poll.

The Rasmussen poll found 53 percent of those surveyed would vote for Clinton versus 38 percent who would vote for Obama. Though closing the gap separating him and Clinton in other states, in Rhode

Island Obama is facing a state that “has historically always wanted to go against the tide — for instance, Rhode Island was the last of the original 13 states to ratify the constitution,” Associate Professor of Political Science Wendy Schiller said. These results differ from those released by the Taubman Center for Public Policy on Feb. 11. That survey, which found Clinton leading by eight points, reached 739 individu-

Bio dean to appear in ‘grand, old Oprah Land’

WiFi comes to the SciLi

By Kurt Walters Contributing Writer

By Kyla Wilkes Contributing Writer

Students and faculty requiring Internet access for their studying and research can now venture beyond the first three floors of the Sciences Library. All 14 floors of the concrete library have been equipped with wireless Internet.

The SciLi proved particularly challenging for wireless Internet implementation, said Mark Shelton, leader of Media Services. The high book shelves and thick concrete walls absorb the signal. In order for the signal to be available at the edges of each floor, where patrons work in cubicles or chairs, more networking equipment, such as routers and cabling, was needed.

“Because of the way the building is made, putting in that infrastructure is difficult because you have to cut through the concrete floors,” Shelton said.

Due to these difficulties, it cost $52,700 and took nine weeks to complete all 14 floors of the SciLi,

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CAMPUS NEWS

Alex DePaoli / Herald

From left, Scott Cary ’10 and Raphael Stern ’10 enjoy freedom from wires.

Director of Network Technology Tim Wells wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. The nine weeks were spread over a period of three months, and most of the work was done over winter break, with some of it spilling into February, according to Wells.

The project is part of Computing and Information Services’ ongoing plan to expand the University’s wireless network, said co-leader of Integrated Technology Services Jean Rainwater. Rainwater said after the dormitories, the SciLi was CIS’s top priority. Library services had

getting hot in here U. goes green and reduces costs by heating with natural gas

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CAMPUS NEWS

received numerous requests for wireless Internet from both medical students who study on the 11th floor, which is designated for their use, and undergraduates. The John Hay Library, the next building that CIS prioritized after the SciLi, is almost entirely equipped as well, Rainwater said.

The SciLi is home to a variety of offices, all of which were equipped with temporary Internet access before the project was completed, said Medical School Librarian Tovah continued on page 4

SHutting down files Congress wants colleges to pull the plug on illegal file sharing

11

OPINIONS

Students who turn on their TVs after class tomorrow might see a surprisingly familiar face on the screen. An interview with Marjorie Thompson ’74 PhD’79 P’02 P’07 P’09, associate dean of biological sciences, will be featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show at 4 p.m.

The episode, entitled, “The Age of Miracles: The New Midlife” is about “women who are changing the definition of middle age”, according to Oprah’s Web site. Beyond her day job as an administrator, Thompson is also a mother of seven and a celebrated finger-style guitarist.

Though she didn’t meet Oprah herself, Thompson said it was an incredible experience to work with her organization and be filmed for the show. Of Oprah’s huge, efficient organization, Thompson said, “It’s like a sovereign nation — grand, old Oprah Land.”

How she got chosen for Oprah, Thompson said, was a bit of a mystery. Back in October or November,

Choosing Clinton Rhode Island Sen. Rhoda Perry P’91 and Rep. Edith Ajello endorse Hillary

sunny, 32 / 28 www.browndailyherald.com

195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

Thompson sent in a package about her life as a dean in response to a call for submissions for a different story, she said. In January, unbeknownst to her, her publicist sent in one of her albums to the show. She said she doesn’t know how the “armies of people working on this kind of stuff” settled on her in particular, but that it probably didn’t hurt that she got to “hang out and work with famous people” as a performing artist.

Indeed, she does work with some pretty famous people. She said she started off simply, happening upon guitar playing at age 10 because she couldn’t fit a piano in her New York City apartment. Today, she says she has a “rich relationship” of performing with people like former Jefferson Airplane lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen. He and other trusted friends spurred Thompson on to write her own music and pursue a career. Now, Thompson has released four professional albums and plays about 70 gigs a year.

Thompson said her segment of continued on page 4

tomorrow’s weather Sirens today from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Partly sunny tomorrow — but probably only from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com

T oday Page 2

Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Menu

But Seriously | Charlie Custer and Stephen Barlow

Sharpe Refectory

Verney-Woolley Dining Hall

Lunch — Hot Ham on Bulky Roll, Wild Colonial Risotto, Cheese Tomato Strata, Apple Turnovers. Swiss Fudge Cookies

Lunch — Falafel in Pita, Enchilada Bar, Cavatini, Creole Mixed Vegetables, Swiss Fudge Cookies

Dinner — Spinach and Rice Bake, Spice Rubbed Pork Chops, Oven Browned Potatoes, Ice Cream Sundae Bar

Dinner — BBQ Chicken, Risotto Primavera, Stir Fry Vegetable Medley, Garlic Bread, Apple Turnovers

Enigma Twist | Dustin Foley

Sudoku Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

Gus vs. Them | Zachary McCune and Evan Penn

© Puzzles by Pappocom

RELEASE DATE– Thursday, February 28, 2008

Los Angeles Times Puzzle C r o sDaily s w oCrossword rd

Opus Hominis | Miguel Llorente

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

ACROSS 1 Tikrit native 6 Sources of delight 10 Baked ristorante dish 14 Place for a panel 15 “__ and Away”: 1960s hit 16 Enthusiasm 17 Backpack feature 18 Gp. that funds psychiatric drug testing 19 Use a sieve 20 Nickname that was a tribute to a Native American 23 Zambia neighbor 26 The Rams of the NCAA’s Atlantic 10 Conf.

27 Broadband letters 28 “Growing Up in New Guinea” author 32 Dander 33 Normandy battle site 34 Downside element 38 Fall spot 40 Brother of 44Across 43 Greek street fare 44 Queen Aleena Hedgehog’s only daughter 46 Genesis grandson 48 Space station for about 15 years 49 1979-’81 truckerwith-chimp TV comedy 53 Show with Miami and NY spin-offs 56 In the past 57 Coarse, as a sense of humor 58 Signal receiver 62 Grade sch.

63 Patriot’s target 64 Kick back 68 On the main 69 Buckwheat noodle 70 Host 71 Show whose final episode aired 2/28/83, and this puzzle’s theme 72 Mosque leader 73 Last word

DOWN 1 Contingencies 2 Claptrap 3 SFO announcement 4 Chowder ingredient 5 Antelopes found in 23-Across 6 Throw out 7 Mayberry moppet 8 Nanki-Poo’s love 9 Ball 10 Citrusy flavoring 11 Troy story 12 Five-generation political family 13 Big name in chips 21 Defects, figuratively 22 “The King and I” setting 23 Brigitte’s friends 24 “Taxi” character Elaine 25 Inexperienced 29 “Xanadu” band, briefly 30 Buff 31 Relic source 35 Expansion NLer of 1962 36 Dickens’s Heep 37 Regretful

39 Bird’s bill 41 Bond pmt.

42 Borat’s creator 45 Barely admitting air 47 Scenes of spirited conversations?

50 Graf’s partner 51 Looie’s underling 52 Rodeo bull 53 Trounce

54 Huevos rancheros condiment 55 Notions in Nîmes 59 Ningbo nursemaid 60 Big brass 61 Gouda alternative 65 Standoffish 66 “__ Misérables” 67 August baby, often

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

War and Peas | Linda Zhang and Eli Jaffa

xwordeditor@aol.com

2/28/08

Classic Deo | Daniel Perez

By Donna S. Levin (c)2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

If you do one thing on College Hill today...

Don’t go to White Castle — go hear why Kal Penn supports Barack Obama.

1:10 p.m., Alumnae Hall

T he B rown D aily H erald 2/28/08

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U. saves $25,000 on heating with natural gas

UCS votes Lester ’11 onto exec board

By Lauren Pischel Contributing Writer

At the general body meeting of the Undergraduate Council of Students last night, one student was voted onto the executive board while another was voted off a task force.

The former was Ryan Lester ’11, who ran unopposed, and was subsequently elected, to the position of appointments chair in an internal election, which became open after Erik Duhaime ’10 resigned earlier this week.

The latter was Brian Lee ’09, whom the council voted to remove from the Undergraduate Finance Board oversight task force for failure to attend meetings or respond to e-mails.

Also at the meeting, Student Activities Chair Drew Madden ’10 proposed two motions which got approved at the meeting. The first was a code change which stipulates that UCS will review every Category III group every three years, reviewing a third of them each year.

The other was UCS’ official recommendations to Director of Student Activities Ricky Gresh and the Campus Center Planning committee for the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus center.

Madden also motioned for two groups to receive Category I recognition and two groups to be elevated to Category II groups, all of which were approved. The Tone Deafs, an a cappella group, was granted Category I status. Global Extentions, a group which proposes to discuss issues and host events about those issues, also received this status, pending a name change. BrowNation and the Brown Social Enterprise Club were both elevated from category I to category II status.

In other UCS news, the University Resource Committee recommended an $18-increase to the student activities fee. UCS should find out by tomorrow whether or not the Corporation approved that recommendation, Madden said.

Brown may not be harnessing the sun’s energy, but by using more natural gas this winter, the University has reduced its heating bill as well as its negative environmental impact.

The University has so far saved $250,000 by relying more heavily on natural gas this year. The University will likely save around $600,000 by the end of the heating season, said Chris Powell, director of sustainable energy and environmental initiatives.

Besides saving Brown money, using natural gas also makes the University “cleaner and greener” Powell said.

Previously, the University had relied more heavily on bunker fuel.

Bunker fuel, one of the least distilled forms of petrol, releases more carbon, sulfur and nitrogen gases — all greenhouse gases — than natural gas does . “You are emitting more pollutants for the same amount of work” when using bunker fuel, said Steven Hamburg, associate professor of environmental studies.

On Earth Day last April, President Ruth Simmons announced that the University would reduce emissions of fossil fuels from its central heating plant by 30 percent in the fiscal year of 2008, a Nov. 1 Herald article reported.

To achieve this goal, the University switched to a completely natural

— Franklin Kanin

Proposed plan requires some to purchase health insurance

By Dana Teppert Staff Writer

On Feb. 12, Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts announced her proposal for a new comprehensive healthcare reform package called the Healthy Rhode Island Reform Act. The Act consists of

METRO a series of eight bills aimed at expanding health insurance for the 13 percent of Rhode Islanders without coverage, but it does not mandate coverage for the state’s poorest individuals.

Robert’s announced her proposed legislation amid growing concern over the rising costs for a new healthcare reform law in Massachusetts, with which Robert’s plan shares some features. A Feb. 3 Boston Globe article reported that the Massachusetts plan could cost as much as $1.35 billion annually by 2011, even as the state’s budget tightens.

Rhode Island is facing a similar budget crunch, with a $151 million deficit this year. To remedy the budget shortfall, Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65 proposed to reduce state spending by $130.9 million this year in order to balance the largest deficit in the last two decades, according to a Feb. 1 Providence Journal article.

Despite the budget woes, Roberts told The Herald, “What’s important to note is that these eight bills have no significant budget impact.”

While Massachusetts issued a mandate that requires all adult residents of the state to have health insurance coverage or face legal penalties, Roberts’ proposed plan does not. Roberts said the fundamental difference between her plan and the Massachusetts law is that while her office confronted issues of cost control from the beginning, “Massachusetts is just starting to look at those issues.”

Roberts’ plan would institute an individual mandate that requires state residents with annual incomes

exceeding 400 percent above the federal poverty line — $40,840 for an individual, and $82,600 for a family of four — to purchase health insurance.

The Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner estimates that more than 10 percent of the Rhode Island uninsured, about 15,000 Rhode Islanders, would be covered by this mandate.

The plan also requires businesses with more than 10 employees who do not provide insurance for their employees to pay $1,000 annually per full time employee to the state. The funds would then be used to support coverage for the uninsured.

Roberts said that her plan is important because “our hospitals can’t afford to provide growing levels of free care.”

Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, in Pawtucket, lost $15,048,332 in uncompensated care — free care and allowances for debters — for fiscal year 2007, Louise Paiva, the hospital’s director of public relations and marketing, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

The uninsured in Rhode Island have little choice but to go to the emergency room because they can’t afford preventative care and chronic disease management, according to the Healthy Rhode Island Reform Act. “We also know that the cost of care finally provided in an emergency room is being passed along to everyone else through higher taxes and increased insurance premiums,” a summary of the act reads.

The major problems with financing healthcare reform in Massachusetts is that “the price (of insurance) for individuals and the price that firms have to pay who are not offering health insurance is probably not high enough,” said Vincent Mor, professor of medical science and chair of the Department of Community Health. “There are enough people who have not paid, both employers continued on page 6

gas heating system in the months that see less demand for natural gas — October, November, April and May. In the winter, the University runs mostly off natural gas supplied by an energy company. But when the demand for natural gas exceeds the energy supplier’s ability to provide it, they can tell the University to switch to its bunker fuel system, Powell said.

Low temperatures and high gas prices usually cause these interruptions, he added.

The University further saved money on heating by changing how it bought its fuel. Previously it had purchased all of its fuel in August.

This year it bought natural gas in “layers” effectively spreading “the price risk over several months,” Powell wrote in an e-mail.

The total cost of heating will not be known until the end of the heating season; however, last year about $6 million was spent on heating fuel, according to The Herald article.

Despite the fact that this winter has been significantly colder than last, this year’s greenhouse gas emissions have remained flat, Powell said.

The University in January announced plans to further reduce carbon emissions following the recommendations of the University’s Energy and Environmental Advisory Committee. The plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 42 percent below 2007 levels in existing buildings, having new construction

Min Wu / Herald

Though this year’s winter was chillier than the last, Brown has actually saved on heating costs by using natural gas.

meet a silver standard in an energyfriendly rating system and reducing greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings 15 to 30 percent.

In the future, Brown is looking to expand its co-generation capacity to further reduce heating costs and environmental impact, Powell said. Co-generation is the ability to generate both electricity and heat from the same fuel by use of steam.

Major changes, however, are needed before co-generation can be realized, he said.

The electricity produced from continued on page 6

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Reaction to financial aid Dean, mother, artist to appear on Oprah changes still forming continued from page 1

continued from page 1 But other students weren’t as enthusiastic. Molly Jacobson ’10 said she was pleased that Brown was “at least conscientious enough to follow Harvard’s lead,” but disappointed that the changes did not affect her.

“I’m still stuck in the middle class abyss that so many students fall into,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson, who decided with her parents that she would pay for college herself, said she will have to pay off $140,000 in debt after she graduates.

“On paper, my parents’ income doesn’t fall under the $100,000 benchmark,” Jacobson said. “But that doesn’t mean I still don’t need help paying for my education.”

Jacobson acknowledged that Brown’s endowment pales in comparison to Harvard’s. Still, she said, several colleges with endowments far smaller than Brown’s — including Bowdoin and Colby — recently eliminated loans completely from financial aid packages.

“When I heard that Bowdoin — a school I got into — eliminated loans, I was like, ‘Damn!’ ” Jacobson said.

“I kind of cringed inside.”

A tuition freeze, Jacobson said, would have been a more welcome change, as it would have affected all students and “attacked the problem at its heart.”

Mike Da Cruz ’09, an active member of Students for a Democratic Society, which rallied Saturday for a tuition freeze, said there is “a lot more to deal with when it comes to financial aid and high tuition costs.”

Da Cruz, who has “a fair number of loans, but not as many as some people,” said he expects to have fewer loans with the new policy. Still, he said, this is an issue of priorities, and Brown has made “some bad choices” in recent years, including raises for top administrators.

Scott Middleton ’10 also said the changes could have gone further.

“I’m happy that the University eliminated contributions for families that make under $60,000,” Middleton said. “But I don’t personally know too many people who fall into that income bracket, so I don’t think the University has gone far enough.”

On a personal level, Middleton will see all his loans replaced by grants. But he said the changes

“weren’t that significant,” as loans do not make up the bulk of his financial aid package.

Students also had mixed reactions about the elimination of the “no-work” policy, which allowed students to avoid working during their first year at Brown.

Da Cruz called the repeal of the rule “a substantial step backward,” adding that working during the week is a “huge burden that hits less privileged students hard.”

Priscilla Gamino ’08 also said she was displeased with the decision because of the difficulties of adjusting to college in a student’s first year.

“I know my first semester I was struggling just figuring out how to study,” said Gamino, who now works for Brown Dining Services. “Having the pressure of work would have been bad. You need a one-year transition without having to worry about work or money.”

But Hill and Middleton said they preferred a decrease in loans, and better financial aid in general, to a break from working freshman year.

The Office of Financial Aid tried to look at the “overall benefit to students” in deciding to eliminate the work-study exemption, said Director of Financial Aid James Tilton.

“This gives students the choice of whether to work or borrow, and we’ve heard from many students that they’d rather have their loans reduced,” he said.

Even though the loan reductions won’t affect her, Jacobson was not troubled by the elimination of the “no-work” rule, saying that “students are responsible for their education.”

Still, she said she was frustrated with the new financial aid policy and the notion that several of her friends are now on full rides, “going through Brown without really having to have a job.”

But for Hill, the new policy draws on limited resources and targets just the right group of students.

“My friends who were in that gap were always saying, ‘It’s expensive, it sucks, but whatever,’ ” Hill said.

“But my friends who were inside the income bracket were always like, ‘Wow, I have to get a job. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to go here next year.’ The people who needed help got help.”

Courtesy of Brown.edu

Associate Dean of Biological Sciences Marjorie Thompson ’74 PhD’79 P’02 P’07 P’09

Wireless installed in the SciLi

the show was filmed last Wednesday in Los Angeles and mainly involved an interview on her life story that — not surprisingly — had a lot of questions about her age and her unconventional activities. She also said there was a lot of footage of her playing that might be used.

In fact, Thompson said she doesn’t quite know what will air on the show because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I’m totally worried; I’m absolutely petrified,” Thompson said.

During the filming though, she said she was “too tired” to be nervous, as she had just taken a 10-hour flight.

Meghan Markowski ’10 responded to the news of Thompson’s appearance with a quick fist pump and an “I love Oprah!” Other students interviewed by The Herald were not quite as enthused.

“I’ve never seen Oprah before, but I’ll definitely be watching tomorrow,” said Hannah Holdstein ’09, who is a teaching assistant for Thompson’s class BIOL 0320: “Vertebrate Embryology.” Holdstein called Thompson an inspirational person not only in her guitar playing, but also because “she basically created the biology department, made it what it is today.”

Thompson’s family is similarly supportive. Her daughter, Caitlyn Thompson ’09, said, “I think we’re all really in shock right now.”

Feb. 23 R.I. Democratic primary poll Not sure 9%

continued from page 1 Reis, whose office is located on the seventh floor of the building.

Since internet access is not new for the offices, the installation of wireless is a more significant change for students, who have already started using it. Shristi Pandey ’11 and Rosalie Elkinton ’11, who were studying on the 11th floor, said the wireless was working well. Both Pandey and Elkinton were pleased with the installation of Internet on the higher floors since the Friedman Study Center is more of what Pandey called a “social atmosphere.”

She said the upper floors offer fewer distractions. Alvin Adisusanto ’09, who was found studying on the seventh floor, agreed.

“It’s so hard to find a computer (in the Friedman Study Center), especially during exam period,” he said. Adisusanto said the Internet was at times a distraction from work, but overall he would prefer to have the wireless despite the temptation to surf the Web.

Thanks for reading.

Obama 38%

Clinton 53%

Automated telephone survey of 1035 Rhode Islanders on Feb. 23

Steve Delucia / Herald

Clinton solidifies her lead in Rhode Island primary continued from page 1 the actual primary,” West said.

Demographically, the state suits a Clinton victory, Schiller said. “We have a large number of older voters, and a fairly large Hispanic population, as well as registered Rhode Island Democrats who will vote for a Clinton win,” Schiller said.

In terms of reaching out to local voters, both candidates are running active campaigns, West said.

“Obama is focusing on a more grassroots campaign, while Clinton is relying more on the political establishment and endorsements from major political players,” West said.

“Both are doing a good job here; her core consists of long-standing organizational strength, while he seems to have a lot of enthusiasm surrounding his campaign,” Schiller said.

In terms of spending in Rhode

Island, Obama has been investing more in television advertisements.

According to a Feb. 23 Providence Journal article, Obama has been spending three times as much as Clinton on TV spots. He has booked more than 640 commercial slots at a total cost of $156,000, compared to Clinton’s 160 TV spots at a cost of $43,000, the article reported.

The amount of spending on TV advertisements in Rhode Island shows that Obama is trying to target Clinton’s areas of strength in the state, Schiller said.

Though not as publicized as the Ohio and Texas primaries to be held the same day, Schiller and West said the Rhode Island primary would still matter. “Every delegate matters, since it is a close race between Clinton and Obama,” West said. “I think Obama has a lot of momentum, but in terms of the Democratic nomination, nothing will be decided on March 4th,” Schiller said.

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Legislation asks colleges to curb illegal downloading

By Anna Millman Staff Writer

Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum Assoc.

Children at a camp at the Haffenreffer got an early introduction to anthropology.

U. helps local children attend Haffenreffer Students from Providence public elementary schools will soon be visiting Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology in Bristol as part of a pilot program funded by the Office of the President, according to a January press release from the museum. The museum is “excited to reach out to Providence,” said Geralyn Hoffman, curator of programs and education at Haffenreffer.

In addition to allowing 1,200 children to visit the museum for free, the Museum Expedition Scholarship program will compensate each school up to $175 to cover the cost of a bus. The reimbursement of transportation costs is especially important for schools since, as Hoffman said, “most can’t make the trip out to the museum.”Hoffman said the Haffenreffer sent letters announcing the program to the principals of the city’s Title I-designated schools — which are considered “disadvantaged” under the No Child Left Behind Act. Spots go to the first 25 schools to respond, she said.

Tehani Collazo ’91, director of education outreach, said the program was directed at “young people from low-income backgrounds.”

The Haffenreffer’s philosophy of participatory learning engages students with exhibits focused on various Native American groups, world cultures, archaeology and other subjects. In addition, the museum’s programs for schoolchildren help teachers reach Rhode Island curriculum standards in subjects ranging from history to the arts, according to the museum’s Web site.

Marisa Quinn, assistant to the president, said the program was part of the office’s “ongoing effort of outreach to Providence schools.”

Socorro Gomez-Potter, principal of the Reservoir Avenue School in Providence, was excited about the trip for her fourth grade class. Since the school has an annual budget of only $23,000 with no money allotted for field trips, the students “wouldn’t have been able to participate without the program,” Gomez-Potter said. The fact that the program “comes with transportation is an incredible plus,” she added.

Brown has over 80 education outreach programs ranging from faculty members working with teachers on professional development to graduate students helping out in classrooms, Collazo said.

— Zunaira Choudhury

U. seeking Banner guru A new position in the Office of the Provost has been created to fill the void left by Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, who took leave this semester after having overseen the Banner project since March 2006.

Styled as “director of institutional research, assessment and academic information systems,” the position will give the provost representation in various campus offices “to make sure that new technologies match our academic needs,” said Deputy Provost Vincent Tompkins ’84.

“The role of this person will be to help set priorities for the identification and implementation of new academic information systems that will complement Banner and generate important data,” said Tompkins, who chairs the search committee charged with finding Dunbar’s replacement. “We wanted someone who could provide leadership around what will be some difficult questions about academic information systems, post-Banner.”

Funds for the position were approved at this month’s Corporation meeting after a recommendation by the University Resources Committee, which proposed a budget to President Ruth Simmons. Tompkins said he plans to finish the national search “sometime this spring” and have someone in place and working by the beginning of July.

The URC report, which recommends $361,000 for “staffing related to the Banner implementation and the need to enhance our academic assessment capabilities,” also suggests creating positions in admissions, business and financial services and the Graduate School.

Tompkins said most of these other positions are not new but instead are positions that were once considered temporary but will now be made permanent.

“These are positions that were funded through the Banner project,” Tompkins said. “They were made secure.”

Scott Houde, a computing manager at the Grad School, will receive some of the recently approved funding, but he said his job — “everything from, ‘I’m having trouble with my e-mail’ to installing complicated software” — won’t be any different after the administrative changes.

“Not much is changing from my point of view,” Houde said. “Just where the money is coming from.”

— Chaz Firestone

Bills to renew the Higher Education Act have passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Both versions of the bill are similar, with requirements for universities and colleges to fight illegal file sharing. The Senate’s version of the bill only requires colleges to educate their students about the consequences of illegal file sharing. The House bill goes a step further, requiring colleges to “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity,” according to the bill.

The wording in the House’s bill has provoked controversy in the higher education community, said Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, a nonprofit information technology organization for higher education. “We don’t like the federal government requiring every college and university to do these things.

We think it’s the right of a college and university to do it if they want to, but it’s way out of line for the federal government to ask them to do it,” he said. “There are all kinds of complications, both policy legal complications, financial complications and poor performance,” he added.

In a Feb. 6 letter to Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who sponsored the House bill, the president of the American Federation of Musicians labor union said that the bill would benefit struggling artists.

“Musicians may make music for love, but they also must eat and feed their children,” wrote the president, Thomas Lee. Piracy also damages fans of music since it drives artists out of business, Lee wrote. “Hopefully, H.R. 4137 will become law and will help educate young Americans about the value and importance of copyright to the artists whose work they love.”

The Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit educational organization, wrote a letter on Feb. 6 supporting the bill to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Patrick Ross, the executive director of the alliance, wrote, “The use of publicly funded university networks to steal copyrighted works is quite serious, and this bill addresses that use without placing undue burdens on our higher education system.”

Right now, the House bill would only require colleges and universities to create a plan to prevent illegal file sharing. “Just to be clear, the bill wouldn’t actually require us to start monitoring or do anything like that,” Director of Government Relations and Community Affairs Timothy Leshan said. “It’s asking for us to come up with a plan for how we could potentially prevent the illegal use of downloading.”

The bills from both houses are now in conference, where differences between both versions are being ironed out, Leshan said. As of now, it’s not certain whether the controversial wording will end up in the final version.

Brown does not currently regulate on-campus internet access, said Michael Pickett, vice president for computing and information services and chief information officer. “I personally don’t have any interest in (preventing illegal file sharing) since I think it sets a difficult prec-

edent in terms of an Internet service provider monitoring content,” Pickett said. “That’s not something Brown has been in the business of, nor do we have any interest in doing that.”

Though Brown has an obligation to educate its students on the consequences of illegal file sharing, it doesn’t have to do more than “the same as every other internet service provider in the country, which is provide private solid service,” Pickett said.

Luker said he supports the Senate’s take on digital theft prevention, but that the House bill goes beyond simply providing “an educational directive” to colleges and universities.

Pickett said the House bill’s digital theft reporting requirements would place an unfair burden on colleges. “This matter really is a judicial matter. If you think of it as breaking the law then it should be something that the judiciary committee or someone else talks about.

They’re the ones that deal with copyright infringement in general,” he said.

Leshan said there were a number of requirements in the bill that Brown and other higher education institutions did not like. “We have expressed concerns to our Congressional delegations and others about these provisions in the bill and other universities have done the same.

It’s not clear how it will play out,” Leshan said.

Luker said the clause on digital piracy in the House’s bill was added mainly because of forceful promo-

tion by the entertainment industry.

He explained that in 2005 the MPAA conducted a study blaming college students for 44 percent of income lost through illegal file sharing. The MPAA recently discovered a data error in their results, and publicly said that college students only accounted for 15 percent of lost income. But Luker said that file sharing on campus could account for as little as three percent, since most college students in the U.S. live off campus. However, “it’s hard to dispute (the MPAA’s study) because it’s a secret study,” he said. “They won’t share the questions or the answers or anything about it even though we’ve asked for it.”

Leshan said if universities are required to make plans, they could also be required to implement them in the future. “If we have to create a plan, it could come back to haunt us in the sense of the Department of Education saying, ‘Well you had a plan, and you still potentially have students who are downloading things illegally. Why aren’t you stopping this?’ ” Universities would also face the technical problem of creating a feasible plan, Luker said. Presently there is no really effective legal alternative through which colleges can provide music and videos, he said, adding that technological deterrents of digital theft do not work well. Pickett said this may make any plans ineffective. “It’s easy to create a plan, but it’s not really a feasible plan. It’s not going to be as effective as I think they imagined it would be,” he said.

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Health-care plan forces coverage for some continued from page 3 and employees.”

Massachusetts requires employers who do not provide health insurance to pay $295 per full time employee.

He added that Massachusetts was unable to manage cost control. “How do you control costs is a very complicated issues and pretty hard for a state to do that all by itself,” he said.

Mor said that he was not in a position to comment on the Robert’s reform act, though he will be meeting with her today.

Rhode Island’s reform legislation will likely have the biggest impact on small businesses. Roberts said that she meets with small business owners in an effort to maintain a dialogue with people who agree and disagree with the proposal. “There is concern in the business community,” she said.

The number of businesses in Rhode Island that will be affected by

the legislation “was not a statistic we were able to obtain,” said Linda Lulli, who serves on the board of directors at the Rhode Island Business Group on Health was involved in discussions on the plan. The Business Group on Health’s 75 member companies all offer insurance to employees. Lulli said that despite differing views between the member companies, “overall the Business Group on Health supports the tenets behind the legislation — affordability and quality and value of healthcare.”

The legislation also introduces an agency called the Rhode Island Health Insurance Access Hub, known informally as HealthHub RI. Modeled on the Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Connector, it will allow individuals and small business owners to buy insurance online, by phone or in person.

Roberts compared HealthHub RI to the online travel agency Travelocity, which provides consumers with op-

tions at a range of prices. HealthHub will allow Rhode Island residents to compare different insurance plans, she said.

Though HealthHub’s goal is affordable coverage, what qualifies as “affordable” has yet to be determined, Roberts said. HealthHub will have a board that includes representatives for consumers, insurance companies and government officials who will establish what the minimum amount of coverage should be, Roberts said.

For the very poor and uninsured, who are not mandated under Robert’s plan to purchase health insurance, future discussions will determine when to subsidize insurance, Roberts said.

After the reform act is put in place, the state needs to look at who in Rhode Island is left without insurance and then decide “how much is an employer’s responsibility and a taxpayer’s responsibility,” she added.

Dean of the College still deciding use for dough continued from page 1 those proposals.”

Knowing how much of the new budget can actually be allocated to each area will be helpful, she said, though allocations for specific areas have not yet been determined. Some specific areas of the additional money will include looking into writing requirements and international education and advising programs, such as the Meiklejohn program.

Additionally, she said she would like to see an incremental increase

in the number of Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships. “It would be great if we could increase the number of UTRAs by 30 or 40 percent next year,” she said.

The dean of the College’s office actually came to the URC with a proposed increase of $1 million, Bergeron said. “Of course, you always ask for a lot more than what you get.”

Hopmann said the URC had to give most departments less than they would have liked. “We would have liked to give more to the Col-

lege and to lots of things, but we always face a resource constraint situation — there is always so much to allocate, and only so much in the budget,” he said. “Financial aid became a major priority that took up a lot of resources.”

Bergeron said the dean’s office will have no trouble using the increased budget. “In the end, a few hundred thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money. We can use that ver y quickly,” she said. “I mean, it’s great. I’m not scoffing. But we won’t have any trouble finding use for it.”

Emissions rate flat in colder winter continued from page 3 the steam could power the cooling system, reducing the University’s demand for electricity in the summer.

This dual heating-cooling system would reduce how much the University spends on electricity, as well as creating a more efficient system, Hamburg said.

Switching completely off gas to renewable energy is not in Brown’s immediate future, Powell said. Most forms of renewable energy such as solar and wind power are not yet costeffective, nor does the University have the proper space for them. It is much more feasible for Brown to invest in

renewable energy projects elsewhere than create its own, he said.

Brown can improve its energy policy in other ways, Aden Van Noppen ’09, founder of emPOWER and member of the EEAC, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “Many of the windows on campus lose heat around the frame,” and these windows need to be replaced, Van Noppen wrote.

There are “‘smart’ heating systems that monitor when people are in the building or room,” according to Van Noppen. Deploying this kind of system would save fuel in “places like the BioMed Center that stay heated all night even though no one is there,” she added.

W orld & n ation Thursday, February 28, 2008

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Israeli-Gaza violence flares anew, killing 12

By Richard Boudreaux Los Angeles T imes

Tony Perry / Los Angeles Times

A machine gunner patrolling a lake near Haditha, Iraq. Government leaders rejected yesterday a law requiring nationwide elections.

A setback for U.S. as Iraqi leaders veto law

By Amit Paley Washington Post

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi government leaders on Wednesday rejected a law that required nationwide elections by the fall, dealing a serious blow to a measure that the U.S. considers a key benchmark of political reconciliation in Iraq.

Parliament passed the legislation two weeks ago. The veto by Iraq’s presidency council was an unexpected setback. Lawmakers will now have to reconsider the measure, which they only agreed to as part of a three-law package reached after weeks of political wrangling so divisive that some called for the dissolution of parliament. The other two laws — the 2008 budget and an amnesty that could apply to thousands of detainees in Iraqi prisons — were approved by the presidency council.

“This is a huge disappointment,” said the Shiite deputy speaker of parliament, Khalid al-Attiyah, through an aide. “The political blocs all agreed on this law before. Now we will have to try to start all the deals and agreements from the beginning.”

The legislation was vetoed because of the opposition of Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite vice-president who sits on the three-member presidency council, which must approve all laws unanimously, according to his aides and other lawmakers. Abdul-Mahdi’s aides said he believed the law was unconstitutional and would put too much control in the hands of the central government instead of the provinces.

The passage of the law, which delineated the scope of provincial powers, was considered a crucial step not just because it fleshed out the constitution’s definion of Iraq as

a federal state, but because it would have required provincial elections to be held by Oct. 1. The last nationwide elections took place in 2005.

The presidency council — whose other two members are President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and the country’s second vice president, Tarik alHashemi, a Sunni — remains firmly committed to holding the elections

by Oct. 1, according to Naseer Ani, the chairman of the panel. Aides to Abdul-Mahdi said he expects the planning for the elections to go on even as parliament debates the bill.

But Western diplomats said they worry that most political parties have no incentive to make sure the elections are held, since many of them are likely to lose out to newly formed parties or those that boycotted the elections in 2005. continued on page 8

Problems with ‘virtual fence’ plague feds

By Spencer Hsu Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a “virtual fence” along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from linked, towermounted sensors and communications and surveillance gear, federal officials said Wednesday.

Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Homeland Security Department officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee.

While the department took over that initial stretch Friday from Boeing, authorities confirmed that Project 28, the initial deployment of its Secure Border Initiative network, did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol.

The announcement marked a major setback for what President Bush in May 2006 called “the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history.”

The virtual fence was to be a key component of his proposed overhaul of U.S. immigration policies, which

died last year in the Senate.

Investigators for the Government Accountability Office had earlier warned that the effort was beset by both expected and unplanned difficulties. But Wednesday, they disclosed new troubles that will require a redesign and said the first phase will not be completed until near the end of the next president’s first term.

In an interview, Gregory Giddens, the department’s executive director for the border effort, confirmed that “we ... have delayed our deployment as we work through the issues on Project 28. While there is clear urgency of the mission, we also want to make sure we do this right.”

The department has said that the initial effort, while flawed, still has helped it apprehend 2,000 illegal immigrants since September. It estimated in 2006 that it would spend $7.6 billion through 2011 to secure the entire 2,000-mile southern border, an ambition that was meant to win support from conservatives for a new law creating a guest-worker program and a path to legalization for 12 million illegal immigrants.

But officials Wednesday said they now expect only to complete

the first phase of the virtual fence’s deployment — roughly 100 miles near Tucson, Yuma, Ariz. and El Paso — by the end of 2011, instead of by the end of 2008. That target falls outside Boeing’s initial contract, which ends in September 2009 but can be extended.

The virtual fence was to complement a physical fence that the administration now says will include 370 miles of pedestrian fencing and 300 miles of vehicle barriers on the border that was to be completed by the end of this year. The GAO said this portion of the project may also be delayed and that its total cost cannot be determined.

Physical fence construction is costing about $4 million a mile, Giddens said, although he said DHS is hoping to cut the average cost to $3 million a mile. The president’s 2009 budget does not propose funds to add fencing beyond the 700 or so miles meant to be completed this year.

“The total cost is not yet known,” said Richard Stana, the GAO’s director of homeland security and justice issues, told members of the subcommittee, because DHS officials “do not continued on page 8

JERUSALEM — An Israeli warplane blew up a minivan carrying senior Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, prompting a rocket blitz from the Palestinian enclave that killed a middle-age student on a college campus in southern Israel.

Four Palestinian civilians and seven militants were killed in the escalation of aerial attacks, and the Israeli student’s death brought new pressure on the government to launch a full-scale ground offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory.

Rocket attacks by the Islamic group have brought increasingly hawkish rhetoric from Israel in the six weeks since President Bush visited the region to promote peace talks between the Jewish state and the secular-led Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank.

But Israel has no means to intercept the short-range rockets in flight, and to stop them Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faces a range of unpalatable choices.

They include a risky cease-fire deal with Hamas and an invasion that could sabotage the struggling U.S.backed peace effort and inflict far heavier casualties on both sides.

Olmert, speaking to reporters in Japan on Wednesday, appeared to rule out a wider conflict in Gaza for now. But he warned that “no one in Hamas, neither the low-level officials nor the highest echelon, will be immune” from targeted Israeli strikes such as those carried out hours earlier.

Five camouflage-uniformed members of Hamas’ armed wing died when two missiles fired from the air incinerated their white minivan in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis.

Hamas said they included Omar abu Akar, 26, a senior engineer in the production of homemade Kassam rockets fired almost daily at Israeli communities and Aziz Masoud, 21, commander of a rocket-launching squad.

As Hamas was bur ying the five men, rockets began raining on Sderot and other Israeli border communities in the Negev Desert.

By evening the army had counted more than 40 rockets, including one that struck harmlessly near a hospital in the city of Ashkelon.

Another exploded on Sapir Academic College’s palm-shaded campus on the edge of Sderot, killing Roni Yichia in the parking lot.

Shrapnel pierced his chest, Israeli officials said, and the 47-year-old part-time student died as fellow students tried to revive him.

Israeli television stations showed a second man with leg wounds being carried from the scene on a stretcher.

Separate air strikes on rocketlaunch sites in densely-populated northern Gaza killed two other militants and three civilian bystanders, including two teenage boys, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

After dark, Israeli missiles struck Hamas strongholds, including the Interior Ministry headquarters in Gaza City. Shrapnel spraying from that site killed a 6-month-old boy in a nearby residential building, the health ministry said.

Kassam rockets are wildly inaccurate, but militants have fired thousands of them from Gaza over the past seven years, disrupting life and fraying nerves on the Israeli side of the border. The student fatality was Israel’s 13th caused by the rockets and the first since May. A Hamas statement called the barrage retaliation for “the Zionist massacre” that killed “five of our best fighters.”

U.S. and Israeli officials have long worried that Hamas’ selfexclusion makes the peace talks launched in December a risky venture. The militant movement, which advocates the Jewish state’s destruction, has the will and the weapons to undermine the first substantive Israeli-Palestinian necontinued on page 8

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Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Iraqis veto election law continued from page 7 The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, for example, now controls much of the local government in southern Iraq, but if elections were held it might lose many of those positions to the movement of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which did not take part in the last provincial contests. The Iraqi Accordance Front, the powerful Sunni bloc led

by Hashemi, might lose power to new Sunni politicians affiliated with the Awakening movement that began in western Anbar province.

“Everyone says that they are all for provincial elections, but there is a lot of foot-dragging going on here,” said one Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to damage his relationships with his Iraqi counterparts.

“I think a lot of these politicians would be happy if elections never took place.”

Abdul-Mahdi was most concerned about two provisions in the law, his aides said. One would have allowed the national parliament to remove provincial governors in certain circumstances; the other would have given parliament control over aspects of the budgets for individual provinces.

Also on Wednesday, the head of the Iraqi Journalists Union, Shihab al-Tamimi, died after he was shot by unknown gunmen over the weekend. He was among more than 175 journalists and media supporters workers who have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

U.S. has trouble getting immigrant fence working continued from page 7 yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed, the materials to be used, or the cost to acquire the land.”

The pilot virtual fence included nine mobile towers, radar, cameras and vehicles retrofitted with laptops and satellite phones or handheld devices. They were to be linked to a near-real-time, maplike projection of the frontier that agents could use to track targets and direct law enforcement resources.

GAO investigators said that Boeing selected software designed for police dispatchers that could not initially process the massive amounts of sensor data. As a result, imagery could not instantly reach a Tucson command center 65 miles to the north, making it hard for operators to lock cameras on targets.

Radar systems were also triggered inadvertently by rain and other environmental factors. Cameras had trouble resolving images at five kilometers when they were expected to work at twice that distance, Stana said.

He added that the system was developed with “minimal input” from Border Patrol agents, resulting in an unworkable “demonstration project” instead of a operating pilot system. He blamed DHS for acting too hastily in trying to deliver a working pilot by last June.

The effort produced “a product that did not fully meet user needs, and the project’s design will not be used as the basis for future ... development,” Stana testified, adding that DHS plans to replace most

of the components.

A nongovernment source familiar with the project said that the Bush administration’s push to speed the project during last year’s immigration debate led Boeing to deploy equipment without enough testing or consultation.

With more time, the source said, equipment and software will be tested more carefully and integrated with input from Border Patrol agents in three remote locations. “Doing it this way mitigates all kinds of risk,” said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Those running the project “basically took equipment, put it on towers and put it out there without any testing as such” because of the tight deadline.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday that the department would “take elements” of the pilot project and apply them elsewhere, but that it planned to expand the number of mobile ground surveillance units from a handful to 40 and to double its fleet of three unmanned aerial vehicles. Boeing has offered the DHS a $2 million credit of the $20.6 million already paid for the pilot project.

“In some form or fashion, technology is going to be virtually every place in the border. But it’s not necessarily going to be in the configuration of P28,” Chertoff said, adding that unmanned aerial systems in particular “will play a major role” in most border areas.

Boeing spokeswoman Deborah Bosick said the company is referring all questions to the DHS.

Israeli, Palestinian violence flares up again continued from page 7 gotiations since 2001.

Promoted by Bush with the goal of an agreement by the end of his term, the talks so far have produced little but discord. And they have been overshadowed by turmoil in Gaza.

Neighbors of one militant in the minivan said he had recently returned from artillery training in Iran or Syria, slipping into Gaza from Egypt during a 12-day breach in a border wall blown up last month by Hamas militants.

“The Hamas terror endangers not only the lives of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, but also the peace and stability of the entire region,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday evening.

Pressure for a harsher response came Wednesday from right-wing parties outside Olmert’s broad coalition government and members of his own centrist Kadima party.

“The writing was on the wall,” said Yuval Steinitz, a member of parliament from the right-wing Likud party. “The question is whether to wait for a bigger tragedy or to launch an operation to eradicate the terror of the Kassams.”

Olmert has tried to weaken Hamas through diplomatic pressure, selective military strikes and a punishing economic embargo that has drawn intense international criticism. The Israeli leader, reluctant to go further, is wary that an invasion could backfire and benefit Hamas, which won parliamentary elections two years ago and still has considerable popular

support in Gaza.

But Defense Minister Ehud Barak said this month that the military had been ordered to prepare plans for a ground assault.

“We are nearing the end of the army’s ability for restraint,” said David Tal, a Kadima lawmaker. ^(Begin optional trim)< Israel could stop the rockets by occupying launch zones across Gaza. But that would drag Israel back into a costly occupation of the territory from which it withdrew military bases and settlements less than three years ago.

Hamas and smaller militant groups are believed to have 35,000 fighters among Gaza’s 1.5 million people. Combat on that scale in crowded urban areas would bring heavy civilian and military casualties and make it impossible for Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, notwithstanding his disdain for Hamas, to continue peace talks with Israel.

“Israel must not fall into the trap that Hamas is laying for us and march into Gaza,” Amos Oz, Israel’s best known writer, warned in a recent article. “The occupying forces will not have a single quiet day. Nor will Sderot.” ^(End optional trim) Israeli analysts say less drastic military measures, such as intensifying the current operations or assassinating Hamas political leaders, might deter the attacks. But they would run the risk of prompting more suicide bombings inside Israel like the one that killed an elderly woman in the southern city of Dimona this month.

Parties’ frontrunners focus on each other

By Mark Barabak and Maeve Reston Los Angeles T imes

Please be advised, between 12 and 1 p.m. today, the University will test an emergency warning siren.

If you have any questions, please contact the Department of Public Safety at 863-3322.

DUNCANVILLE, Texas — Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama sparred long distance Wednesday over Iraq and terrorism, previewing a likely foreign policy debate should the two men face each other in the fall.

The exchange was sparked by a response Obama gave in Tuesday night’s debate with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both Democrats favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which McCain opposes.

Asked if he would reserve the right as president to send U.S. troops back into Iraq to quell an insurrection or civil war, Obama replied: “As commander in chief, I will always reser ve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if alQaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad.”

Reacting Wednesday morning in Tyler, Texas, McCain taunted: “I have some news: Al-Qaida is in Iraq. ... It’s called `al-Qaida in Iraq.’ “ Some in the audience laughed.

“If we left ... they wouldn’t be establishing a base,” the Arizona Republican said. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends.”

Obama responded at a rally in the sports arena at Ohio State University. “I have some news for John McCain,” the Illinois Democrat said, leaning into the crowd for emphasis. “There was no such thing as `al-Qaida in Iraq’ until George

Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.”

Noting that McCain tells audiences that he would follow Osama bin Laden to the “gates of hell” to catch him, Obama brought the crowd of more than 7,000 to its feet by jibing, “All he has done is to follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq.”

The back-and-forth framed the case the two men, still fighting to clinch their respective party nominations, are likely to make against each other in a general election campaign.

McCain suggests Obama, 46, is too callow to serve as commander in chief. “If we do what Senator Obama wants to do — and that’s an immediate withdrawal — that would mean surrender in Iraq,” McCain said at a noontime town hall in San Antonio. “I guess that means that he would surrender and then go back.”

Obama asserts that McCain, 71, is too wed to the policies of President Bush and old-line Washington.

“He’s tied to the politics of the past,” Obama told the crowd in Columbus. “We are about policies of the future.”

The Democrat left Ohio to campaign in this Dallas suburb and in the college town of San Marcos; the two states hold primaries Tuesday that pose a potential make-or-break challenge for Clinton. In the race for superdelegates, Obama gained and Clinton lost one Wednesday when Democrat Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, an icon of the civil-rights movement, changed sides and endorsed Obama.

“I understand he’s been under

tremendous pressure,” Clinton told KTRK television in Houston in a satellite interview. “He’s been my friend. He will always be my friend.”

The New York Democrat campaigned Wednesday in Ohio, where she focused on the state’s ailing economy and accused Obama and McCain of failing to address the surge in home foreclosures.

“Senator Obama does not have a plan,” Clinton told reporters on a flight from Cleveland to Columbus.

“Senator McCain doesn’t have a plan.”

She said she was pleased by Tuesday night’s debate in Cleveland, saying she succeeded in drawing contrasts with Obama and in demonstrating her credentials.

Clinton ignored suggestions that she failed to change the essential dynamic of the Democratic race, which has tipped Obama’s way since early February, as he reeled off 11 straight victories. “What’s important is that we have a lot of people yet to vote,” Clinton said.

In Zanesville, she hosted what was billed as an Economics Solutions Summit, where Clinton again pledged to fix the problems she sees with the North American Free Trade Agreement. The pact with Mexico and Canada was signed into law by her husband.

“We’re going to have trade that lifts up our families — pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-American trade,” Clinton told several hundred supporters. She also touted her plan to put a moratorium on home foreclosures. “Too many Ohioans are losing their homes,” Clinton said.

“The numbers are staggering.”

Thursday, February 28, 2008

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

On track for Sat.’s Ivy League champs Equestrian riders struggle to continued from page 12 seconds.

The top finisher in the field events was Bryan Powlen ’10, who earned third place in the shot put with a distance of 51-01.00 feet.

David Howard ’09 finished fifth in the same event, while posting 51-04.50 feet in the weight throw to earn ninth. The long jump was an equally strong event for the Bears as Mars came in fourth with a jump of 21-11.75 and Miles Craigwell ’09 earned 10th. In the pole vault Zach Jaffa ’08 was the top finisher for Brown with a fifth place finish.

“Heps is the pinnacle of the season. It is the most important team competition of the season for certain. With that said, we need to treat it like any other meet,” said Head Coach Craig Lake. “It is our goal to control our attitude and effort going into the meet, as these are the only things we can control, and if we do this well, we will be happy no matter what the results are in the end.”

The Harvard facility continues to bring success to the Brown women after their epic defeat of Ivy League oppenent Cornell the last time they entered the Gordon Indoor Track Center just over a month ago. There were four first place finishes for the women this weekend, including two on the track and two in the field.

Thelma Breezeatl ’10 continued

to build on her success from last week’s meet as she crossed the finish line first in the 60-meter dash, posting a time of 7.63 seconds. Dianna Anderson ’09 finished first in the 60-meter hurdle with a time of nine seconds flat, while teammate Natasha Smith ’11 was close behind in second place.

The Bears had even more success in the field. Leading the pack again was Akilah King ’08, who finished first in both the long jump and the triple jump, while getting a personal best in the former. This is the second week in a row King has finished first in the long jump on only the third time she has competed in the event.

“She is a tremendous athlete and an extremely hard worker. She sacrifices a lot of herself for the sake of this team. She could probably contend to win in certain events if she only focused on those,” Lake said. “She is a terrific leader of this team. Her work ethic, team spirit, and dedication are commendable.

She has two more Heps left with us, and we are already dreading her graduation.”

Also successful in the long jump was Rachel Biblo ’11, who finished third with a distance of 18-01.00 feet and was followed by Brooke Staton ’11 and Alexandra Thomas ’08. In the triple jump Shannon Stone ’10 finished fourth, while Staton and Biblo picked up fifth and sixth, respectively. The Bears

finished second and third in the high jump, with Grace Watson ’11 finishing second with a height of 5-08.50 feet and Anna Cook ’11 finishing right behind her with 5-04.50 feet.

Danielle Grunloh ’10 continued the Bears’ strong performances in the shot put by picking up a second place finish, while Brynn Smith ’11 came in right behind Grunloh, placing third in the event. Smith also competed in the weight throw, earning fifth place with a distance of 51-06.50 feet.

The pole vault saw three topeight finishes for Brown with Tiffany Chang ’08 finishing fourth at 11-05.75 feet. Keely Marsh ’08 and Cassandra Wong ’11 followed with finishes of fifth and eighth, respectively.

This weekend is the highlight of the season for the Bears as they look to bring home an Ivy League Championship. Brown will be looking to upset top competitors Princeton and Cornell.

“Bringing home an Ivy League title is always at stake. Princeton and Cornell are going to be tough to beat, but if we can stay tough, focused, positive, and confident, we’re going to be in it to the end,” King said. “Most importantly, you can’t expect to win or place big if your team doesn’t have heart. We have heart and we definitely have the potential. We expect to do big things this weekend.”

Wrestling finishes season on a low note continued from page 12 as Columbia took the next four matches. Matt Gevelinger ’09 kept the hope of a comeback alive when he defeated Mike Pushpak with a major decision 16-5, earning four team points, narrowing down the team point differences to within nine, 20-11.

But at 197, Brandon Stearns ’09

Rochelson ’09: Baseball full of surprises continued from page 12 the Mets are in trouble. Also, Billy the Kid’s strikeout-to-walk ratio was his worst since — you guessed it — the 2000 season. So we’re looking at a 36-year-old power pitcher with declining control who’s giving up mostly fly balls — I’m no soothsayer, but Wagner may lose his job to Joe Smith by July.

Robby Cano hits 30 home runs Cano has developed into an elite second baseman, but some non-believers have claimed that he has reached his power ceiling with 19 home runs last year. But I would point to his steadily increasing walk-to-strikeout ratio as a classic indicator of blossoming power. Matt Holliday is a perfect parallel — as Holliday’s BB/SO ratio climbed (at the same rate as Cano’s), his power increased until his breakout 34-homer season at age 26. Guess how old Cano is?

Ellis Rochelson ’09 believes the Rocket

lost by one point, 6-5, to Nick Sommerfield, which sealed the victory for Columbia. Nevertheless, Mock took home the last win of the day for the Bears at the heavy-eight class as he defeated Lou Miller with a 11-4 decision.

Amato said the highlight of the weekend was that the three senior captains won “their last dual matches in Brown uniforms.”

The team has one week to

prepare for the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association tournament, which will decide who will advance to nationals.

The wrestlers are having a lot more individualized practice this week than normal, according to Amato.

“Everyone is excited,” Savino said. “The guys are focused are doing whatever they can to get ready for Easterns.”

maintain lead over UConn continued from page 12 about this sport.”

Elizabeth Giliber ti ’10, Amy Cameron ’08, Emily Cole ’08, Emily Bourdeau ’10 and Stephanie Syc ’08 all took blue ribbons for Brown, but none were point riders.

Another bright spot for Brown was that five Bears pointed out of their classes, meaning the riders accumulated enough points in their divisions over the entire season to move up to the next class level of difficulty. Tasindi and Emma Clippinger ’09 pointed out in Novice Flat and Clippinger took the blue ribbon. Rosie Bogan ’08, Joyce Kwok ’08 and Lucia Corso ’08 all pointed out in Walk Trot Canter. This also qualified them for Regionals. Although competing at Regionals is a prestigious honor, it does not count towards the team’s regular season score because it is an individual competition. Overall, 18 Brown riders have qualified individually for

Regionals.

“Qualifying for Regionals is a big honor, but it’s an individual thing, and taking fifth on Saturday really just made the final two shows more important for our team,” Gruener said. “We have to maintain our lead if we want a shot at Nationals.”

The Bears need to find a way to hold onto their slim Region One lead over UConn in the final two regular season matches if they want to move on to postseason competition. Next weekend’s show, hosted

by Connecticut College, will be held Saturday at the Mystic Valley Hunt Club in Gales Ferry, Conn. The final show of the regular season will take place two weeks later at Johnson and Wales’ Equestrian Center in Rehoboth, Mass.

“We’re continuously training and know next weekend is a really important show for us,” Shen said.

“UConn is our stiffest competition, and all of our focus is going to be on beating them.”

E ditorial & L etters Page 10

Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

S t a ff E d i t o r i a l

Gap-year goodness On Feb. 18, an Ivy League school announced that it would institutionalize a gap-year program, which would allow about 10 percent of its incoming class to spend a year abroad before starting their freshman years. The program would be “a break from the pressure to excel,” said the professor who will chair the working group that will set up the program. It will help students “form an international perspective” and better prepare them for their college experience, the professor said. It will also help the university become a global “center for a multitude of scholarly networks humming with activity,” according to the university’s Web site.

Independent students spending time abroad before starting college and a university that wants to make itself an international center. Sounds like Brown, right? Wrong.

Our friends in New Jersey beat us to the great idea of an institutional gap year. We’re surprised that our administration, so focused on internationalizing Brown, hasn’t already seen that such a program would appeal to Brown students. The institutionalized gap year makes accessible to more students an adventure that they would then share with others on College Hill.

A break from the formal education process would give students a stronger appreciation of Brown’s expensive education. For many students, college is simply a four-year academic extension of high school.

Time away from academics is key. While classes matter, they matter less when students have — quite literally — the world at their feet. The benefits of the typical study abroad experience is that students can immerse themselves in other cultures, improve their foreign language skills and visit sites they’ve never seen before while living in other countries for several months.

But why go to class — frankly, often at an institution whose academics can’t compare to Brown’s — when you could work for the U.N., build homes for refugees in Kenya, teach English to Bulgarians or spend time with a host family learning about their traditions? Students can get more out of an experience abroad by skipping class and instead working in a foreign country.

Some of the biggest deterrents of a gap year are the financial expense and the idea that taking time off from academics is only for the academically confused or lazy. Creating and funding an actual gap-year program would allow students who otherwise couldn’t afford the expense of traveling to go to a foreign location. A University-approved gap year would also calm some of those parents worried about their children seeming like slackers.

Students accepted to the University would benefit from such a program — and administrators should be placated by the fact that they’d simultaneously improve Brown’s profile abroad, simply by students’ connection with the University. Brown should take advantage of the opportunity to achieve an administrative goal and an enriching experience for students in one package.

T he B rown D aily H erald Editors-in-Chief Simmi Aujla Ross Frazier editorial Arts & Culture Editor Robin Steele Asst. Arts & Culture Editor Andrea Savdie Higher Ed Editor Debbie Lehmann Features Editor Chaz Firestone Asst. Features Editor Olivia Hoffman Metro Editor Rachel Arndt Metro Editor Scott Lowenstein News Editor Mike Bechek News Editor Isabel Gottlieb News Editor Franklin Kanin News Editor Michael Skocpol Opinions Editor Karla Bertrand Opinions Editor James Shapiro Sports Editor Whitney Clark Sports Editor Amy Ehrhart Sports Editor Jason Harris Asst. Sports Editor Benjy Asher Asst. Sports Editor Andrew Braca Asst. Sports Editor Megan McCahill

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A lexander S ayer G ard - M urray

L e tt e r s Enforcing racial qualifications for MPCs is problematic To the Editor: Wednesday’s article on the MPC program (“Wilde’s ’11 bid to become first white MPC falls short for now,” Feb. 27) raises the possibility, but by no means proves, that race is a dominant factor in choosing MPCs. I hope it is not, and I hope that senior administrators make it clear that race (as opposed to the ability to interact effectively with different races) as a criterion for MPC selection is wrong.

Many years ago I saw restrooms marked “white” and “colored.” These existed, in part, because it was

To the Editor: Yesterday’s article about freshman Annalisa Wilde’s ’11 failed attempt to become a Minority Peer Counselor has left a foul taste in my mouth (“Wilde’s ’11 bid to become first white MPC falls short for now,” Feb. 27). Where does the average, middle-class, white male turn for race-related advice? I scorn the Third World Center for passing up the opportunity to have a counselor that could help bridge the racial gap that one can argue they themselves have built through their program. For example, as cited from the article, the “TWC is able to create such a powerful sense of community because it chooses to define its community as one based on race.” I find it ironic that a community so focused on equality continues to exclude the majority of Brown students. Why does there have to be an exclusive sense of “us” as minorities over a sense of “us” as Brown students? As human beings?

Future MPC Adam Kiki-Charles ’11 raised many

thought whites would not use the same sanitary facilities as blacks. Time has shown those expectations to be false. I think it is insulting and demeaning to students of color to think that they could not accept white MPCs. If my racist white Southern relatives could adapt to racially mixed bathrooms, I think Brown students can adapt to a diverse MPC population.

J. William Suggs Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Feb. 27

close-to-home points in his addition to Li’s article.

In reference to having a non-minority MPC, he remarked, “They could empathize, but they still would not be able to connect on the same level, and I think that’s something that’s really important.” I find myself feeling exactly as he described with the current MPC situation: where can I find someone to discuss race-related issues with me and be able to connect? If minority students can feel comfortable speaking only to a minority counselor, am I allowed to feel the same way? Perhaps this lack of real discussion and advice to non-minority students can be the source of ignorance or racism. With petty remarks about equal-opportunity of involvement at Brown aside, I remain frustrated with the outreach efforts of the Third World Center and the Minority Peer Counselor program, and, in fact, hope they contact me with a solution.

Andrew James Migneault ‘11 Feb. 27

C o r r e ct i o n An article in The Herald (Michelle Obama stumps in Warwick, Feb. 21) said that Michelle Obama attended a private fundraiser while in Providence. In fact, there was no fundraiser. Obama spoke at a rally for Rhode Island Women for Obama at the Biltmore Hotel.

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O pinions Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Page 11

U.S. public mental health care system as unstable as its patients RENATA SAGO Opinions Columnist Mental health is a delicate subject — one that society both exaggerates and understates for its own comfort. Sensationalized “meltdowns” have emerged as a new form of entertainment culture as the Whitney Houstons and Britney Spears of the world face public scrutiny, while the Steven Kazmierczaks (the Northern Illinois University shooter) and Seung-Hui Chos (the Virginia Tech shooter) who once pleaded for attention and received none — that is, until they attained it through their own desperate ends. Suicide and homicide are endemic in a post-9/11 American society plagued by paranoia and disillusionment. There seems to be a proliferation of individuals afflicted with inconceivable mental and emotional distress that births an unnerving hatred for self and society. These feelings are problematic in themselves, and when acted upon they pose even more of a threat to society. The public mental healthcare system is designed to prevent such occurrences. Instead, inadequate public health policy facilitates crises.

The U.S. public mental health-care system has been rendered unstable by its crippling incompetence. Antiquated and ineffective, the system drifts away from the stability it is designed to reinstate. Reflecting the limitations of progress in public health policy, the system offers little assistance to its patients. Instead, it wedges patients into a narrow chasm of ineptitude, immobility and indifference. Paralyzed by apathy, the system resorts to either

institutionalizing patients or creating the illusion of deinstitutionalization by placing them in open society.

Inadequate resources are key in understanding the plight of the public health system. The affluent have access to premier private institutions that ensure their stability (though I question why Ms. “Piece of Me” Spears has not taken advantage of these resources). Regular individuals, by contrast, are not able to utilize these institutions. Some do not even have access to healthcare at all.

and unqualified to make the best decisions.

In over-emphasizing individual freedoms and offering individuals’ families little jurisdiction in determining possible treatment, the system fails. The problem is that there is no easy way to discern whether the individual, the family or the institution is in the position to make the best judgment.

Furthermore, it is difficult for institutions to even diagnose mental instability. I have grappled with understanding what a “normal” personality is. Perusing the DSM

There exists little discernable difference between the state of the US public mental health care system and its incarceration system.

Individuals who are placed within the system encounter insurmountable obstacles, as they are expected to make sound decisions about their well-being when they are incapable of doing so. Every individual has the right to make choices that he or she deems appropriate. Yet, this right must be reconciled with the fact of mental instability. The public mental healthcare system often discounts the fact that such individuals are in fact unstable

leads to the realization that just about every personality trait is a “disorder.” It is difficult to find adequate treatment for disorders, as an individual may exhibit symptoms of several disorders and be treated for all — or only one — of them. The system casually dismisses individuals with poor follow-up, offering the individual little confidence. The overall mentality is that these individuals do not have the potential to attain stability.

Mental health issues are quelled, but never fully resolved.

The system thrives on desensitization, viewing patients as subjects of experimentation instead of individuals. Rather than understanding circumstances through an exclusive lens, the system shoves patients into generalized categories that devalue the nature of their illnesses. Mental health issues derive from a series of often inexplicable factors. Some are social. Others are not. The system discredits potential social catalysts of mental instability, like poverty, race and — for some soldiers — war trauma.

The most harrowing issue is the public healthcare system’s failure to rehabilitate individuals committed to asylums and its indiscretion in allowing individuals to exist in society without rehabilitation. There exists little discernable difference between the state of the U.S. public mental healthcare system and its incarceration system. Asylums are jails — mere buildings that dehumanize the existence and devalue the character of individuals.

Both institutions are simply spaces that hold in what society refuses to deal with. This sad state is reminiscent of formerly authoritarian regimes in the process of democratization — not the United States of America.

As unfeasible as a task it may seem, change must be implemented within the public mental healthcare system. To allow it to further collapse would be a disappointment to not only those who suffer from mental health issues, but also the rest of society. It will not only affect society, but also reflect upon it as well.

Renata Sago ’10 is psyched to see a change in the system

Why we are voting for Hillary

BY SEN. RHODA PERRY AND REP. EDITH AJELLO Guest Columnists We have represented the Brown community in the Rhode Island General Assembly for many years, and we have been proud to sponsor bills and advocate for the progressive issues that so many Brown students care about, from marriage equality to publicly financed elections. These issues are not always popular at the State House, but we believe in fighting for the causes that matter to us and to our constituents. Working with Brown students, we have helped push through meaningful changes in state laws as varied as the legalization of medical marijuana and electronic filing requirements for campaign finance reports to facilitate public viewing of these records.

On Tuesday March 4th, Rhode Island voters get to help determine who will be the Democratic candidate for President. We strongly urge you to join us in voting for U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Our state and our nation face significant challenges, and it is critically important that we have a strong progressive leader in the White House who is ready to address those problems immediately.

It is clear to us that Hillary is the leader our country needs right now for the pressing issues crying for attention. We must bring our troops home from Iraq and take care of them upon their return. We must establish peace and order in Afghanistan. We must end the economic recession and mortgage crisis here at home. We must foster green economic development to combat global warming. We must provide universal health care. We must fund increases to Pell grants and more affordable loans for higher education.

Hillary Clinton has demonstrated to the nation and the world that she is strong both personally and politically. Hillary has been

tempered by attacks for her decision to lead the effort for health care in the 1990s as well as to stay in her marriage. With steely determination, along with great intelligence and proven concern for the well-being of children and families, she made history with her election to the United States Senate representing New York. Hillary is ready to bring our progressive visions to reality in Washington.

Hillary’s campaign is certainly exciting to us because we believe it is past time for our country to have a woman president. But, more importantly, Senator Clinton’s candidacy comes at a time when our country needs a

of women’s rights, to speak at the World Conference on Women. She proudly proclaimed that “human rights are women’s rights... and women’s rights are human rights.” Her words inspired and empowered women and girls all around the world, including the two of us.

We know that actions speak louder than words. In Hillary Clinton we have a leader who offers us not just a vision of the future but a record of translating her promises into policies. Women across the country now have over-the-counter access to the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Millions of low-income children have health care coverage through the

In Hillary Clinton we have a leader who offers us not just a vision of the future but a record of translating her promises into policies. leader with a resume like hers. She has always been willing to fight when it is necessary to fight, not just when it is easy or showy. Health care is now one of the most pressing issues as high costs place impossible burdens on individuals and small businesses. Hillary took on the special interests in the 1990s when she attempted to make health care affordable and accessible. While she lost that fight, she’s never given up on her goal of guaranteeing adequate health care for all Americans.

As First Lady, Hillary Clinton traveled to China, a nation not known for its promotion

State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Public elementary and secondary schools in Arkansas improved measurably with her efforts there. Hillary fought and stalled attempts to write discrimination into our federal Constitution through the Federal Marriage Amendment. Internationally, as First Lady and then as a senator, she worked to advance peace in Northern Ireland.

We’ve been disappointed to see Hillary Clinton’s experience devalued during this campaign because she was First Lady. We believe that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s record

speaks to her enormous potential to bring change as President. Recently we listened to Richard Holbrooke ’62 and were struck by his description of the international challenges the next President will inherit. Holbrooke described our nation as involved in two wars — and possibly on the cusp of a third with Iran — with an increasingly powerful China and global environmental problems. Holbrooke said that generals know and respect Senator Clinton and would be comfortable with her as our Commander-in-Chief. We agree with Holbrooke that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not just the best-prepared candidate, but also the one with the clearest vision to lead our country through the problems both at home and abroad, the problems we know of and the others that will inevitably arise.

As we begin to restore and expand economic prosperity for every American — not just the wealthiest, to bring our troops home and heal their wounds, to stop global warming while building a new and stronger green economy, to guarantee reproductive freedom, to expand the rights of LGBTQ Americans, to build a public education system for the 21st century, to provide access to higher education at a manageable cost, to provide health care that is universally available and affordable, we need a president with immense personal and political strength and as much depth and breadth of experience as we can possibly find.

In Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrats have a candidate who can both win in November and immediately begin implementing progressive policy changes.

We each vote for our own vision of a brighter future for all Americans. We hope that you share our vision and will join us in voting for Hillary Clinton on March 4th.

Rhoda Perry P’91 and Edith Ajello are a state senator and representative, respectively.

Their districts include College Hill.

S ports T hursday Page 12

Thursday, February 28, 2008

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Four wins for w. track at champs

Baseball’s 2008 surprises

By Nicole Stock Contributing Writer

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1789 Benji forgot to mention a few certainties in this world: the Yankees and the Red Sox will scuffle for first place all season long; Pujols will go .300-30-100; Mike Sweeney will get hur t.

Ellis Rochelson But every year, MLB Exclusive there are some surprises. Last year, for instance, the Indians shocked everyone with a 96-win season and a swift beating of the Yanks in the playoffs.

Dustin Pedroia, the Sox’ scrappy, five-foot-nine second basemen, hit a healthy .317 to win Rookie of the Year. And did you know that Eric Byrnes, the hard-nosed outfielder for the Diamondbacks, stole 50 bases last year? The 2008 season starts in just over a month — what won’t go according to plan?

Dontrelle Willis’ triumphant return When the Tigers acquired Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis from the Marlins, analysts focused mainly on the addition of Cabrera.

This is understandable; 24-year-old Cabrera is one of the best hitters in the game, while Willis posted an ugly 5.17 ERA last year. There’s reason to believe, however, that Willis is poised for a huge comeback. We witnessed D-Train’s potential for greatness in 2005, when he won 22 games with a sparkling 2.63 ERA. He regressed in 2006 to a more reasonable level of performance: 12 wins, 3.87 ERA. His severe regression in 2007 was largely due to his 38 percent increase in home runs allowed. This stat might be frightening if Dontrelle had suddenly started giving up more fly balls than usual, but his ground ballto-fly ball ratio remained identical from ’06 to ’07. This means that his inability to keep the ball in the park was likely due to bad luck – more fly balls just happened to go a few extra feet and clear the wall. When this luck evens out in 2008, Willis will be left with an ERA back near 4.00.

This leaves the Tigers with one of the best rotations in the American League, and they will regain the AL Central crown.

Billy Wagner implodes This prediction is somewhat bold, but I’m not afraid to say it — Billy Wagner will be downright, Armando Benitezesque-awful this season. There are several indicators that a sharp decline is around the corner for the Mets’ closer. First of all, we return to the ground ball-tofly ball ratio. In 2007, this ominous number began to shrink. He went from 1.77 in 2006 to 0.87 in 2007. He gave up more fly balls than grounders for the first time since 2000 when he posted a 6.18 ERA. Wagner is a power pitcher and he cannot afford to give up a ton of fly balls — his 96 MPH fastball will leave the park just as fast. If this trend continues, continued on page 9

decision.

“Individually, I was really happy about my results,” said Savino, who won the next day against Columbia as well. “As a senior, I was excited to get two wins to finish the dual meet.”

Head Coach Dave Amato thought the team wrestled better against Cornell, which is a much better team, than against Columbia.

“Against Columbia, a few matches didn’t go our way,” Savino added.

At the star ting 125-pound match, Columbia got a four point lead with a major decision. But two captains, Schell and Savino, quickly stole back the lead in the next two matches with a major decision and a decision win respectively. But the Bears’ momentum stalled there

The USA Track and Field New England Championships last Sunday at Harvard were a good stepping stone for Brown as it prepares to compete this weekend at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships in Ithaca, N.Y. The heptagonals are the pinnacle of the season for the Bears as they look to close out the indoor season with a bang. Even though some of the team members did not compete last Sunday in order to rest for this coming weekend, the Bears still had many strong finishes.

The men turned in several strong performances, headed by Matthew Jasmin’s ’09 first place finish in the 60-meter hurdles. Jasmin is looking to take this performance into next weekend.

“Even though it does feel good to win New Englands my main goal is to perform well at Heps,” Jasmin said. “I’m definitely going to focus on improving upon my personal best at Heps as well as score some points for Brown.”

Christian Escareno ’10 turned in another strong performance in the one-mile run, crossing the finish line third with a time of 4:16.12, a personal best. Escareno also took home an eighth place finish in the 800-meter run. The 60-meter dash proved tough for the Bears as Joseph Mastrangelo ’09 earned a 13th place finish and teammate Deshaun Mars ’08 finished 15th. Mastrangelo had a better finish in the 200 meter, earning sixth with a time of 22.52

continued on page 9

continued on page 9

Ashley Hess / Herald

Tri-captain Mark Savino ’08 captured two key wins for his team over the weekend in N.Y. against Columbia and Cornell.

Wrestling loses its last two dual meets

By Han Cui Spor ts Staff Writer

The wrestling team competed in its final two dual meets of the season in New York against Cornell on Friday and Columbia on Saturday. Although the Bears lost 31-9 to No. 15 ranked Cornell, the team wrestled “some great matches (with) great intensity,” according to tri-captain Mark Savino ’08. The next day, the Bears faced off against the Lions and suffered another loss, 23-14.

But all three senior captains won their matches against Columbia, ending their dual meet careers on a high note.

In the dual against Cornell, Chris Musser ’09 star ted the action at the 165-pound weight class. Musser scored an early takedown in the first period and headed into the final period 2-1.

But with 15 seconds remaining

in the match, his opponent Mike Mackie scored a reversal and came back 3-2.

The Big Red went on a winning streak and took the next three matches. At the 174 and 184-pound weight classes, Kasey McCurdy ’11 and Matt Gevelinger ’09 wrestled against the No. 10 and No. 17 ranked opponents, respectively. At 197, Leo Saniuk ’09 lost another close match, 4-3, giving Cornell a 15-0 lead in team points.

In the next heavy-weight class match, tri-captain Levon Mock ’08 gave the team a confidence boost when he pinned his opponent 32 seconds into the second period, earning six team points for the Bears. But the team lost the next two matches at 125 and 133 pound-weight classes. At 141, Savino picked up the last team win of the day when he defeated Nick Bridge with a 5-3

Equestrian takes fifth at Wesleyan, Region Lead

By Megan McCahill Assistant Spor ts Editor

After an encouraging second place finish to UConn two weekends ago, the equestrian team placed fifth at Wesleyan’s Windcrest Farm on Saturday, finishing 12 points behind first place UConn. The first place team at the end of the regular season qualifies for the Zone 1 Championship, from which the top two teams advance to IHSA Nationals. Brown started off the season with a sizeable lead in the region, but since the Thanksgiving break it has been steadily declining. As a result of Saturday’s fifth place finish, Brown, which had a 19 point lead over the Huskies in Region One, now stands only seven points ahead of their rivals with only two shows remaining in the regular season.

“It was disappointing to lose some of our lead, but because we all felt we rode pretty well it didn’t really hurt our team morale,” said Dakota Gruener ’11. “We were expecting to do better but the judges didn’t rule in our favor.”

Brown point riders got off to an encouraging start when Whitney Keefe ’08 finished second in Open Fences, but that turned out to be one of the few highlights of the day

for the Bears. Gruener, who upset UConn’s top rider to take High Point Rider the previous weekend, placed sixth in Intermediate Fences. In Novice Fences, Irmak Tasindi ’08 finished fourth.

“Nobody on our team felt like they rode poorly,” Gruener said.

“I personally disagreed with a lot of the judges’ scoring on different divisions but that’s the way it goes in a sport with subjective judging. You win some and you lose some.”

Keefe took third in Open Flat, Emma Bogdonoff ’10 finished sixth in Intermediate Flat and Tasindi placed third in Novice Flat.

Stephanie Carmack ’08 pinned fifth in Walk Trot Canter before Kona Shen ’10 finally gave the Bears some much needed points with a blue ribbon in Walk Trot.

“It’s always a little harder when your class is last in the day because you know exactly how important your points could be,” said Shen. “But everyone who is chosen to score is under equal pressure. We actually rode well on Saturday; it just turned out that the people who placed well weren’t chosen to count for points, and that’s one of the toughest things continued on page 9

Courtesy of Amy Lowitz

Emma Clippenger ’09 pointed out in the Novice Flat, earning a blue ribbon as well as a bid for regionals, at Wesleyan on Saturday.