daily herald the Brown
vol. cxxii, no. 116
INSIDE
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Cry baby Study finds cry acoustics an indicator for autism
wednesday, december 5, 2012
Faculty votes to add URC lecturer position By Kate Desimone Senior Staff Writer
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Rabbi search Current rabbi steps down, Hillel works to fill position Page 8
The state of R.I. Members of media discuss economics and partisanship
today
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tomorrow
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Faculty membership on the University Resources Committee will increase from six to seven following a faculty vote Tuesday. The vote was part of the last scheduled faculty meeting this semester. The change creates a membership position for a lecturer or senior lecturer on the committee, which makes annual budget recommendations to the president. The proposal was brought by the Faculty Executive Committee and met with no discussion or questions before being brought to a vote. The motion’s rationale stated that after the URC added two undergraduate student members this year, raising its total student membership from five to seven, “(a)n objection was raised that faculty should not be a minority on a faculty committee.” The num-
ber of undergraduates on the committee was increased as a response to concerns that the URC’s budget recommendations — which include determining tuition hikes — are of particular relevance to students, The Herald previously reported. The motion is also part of continuing efforts from the FEC to include lecturers and senior lecturers, who are not tenure-track faculty, in faculty governance committees. Last month’s faculty meeting saw the passage of a motion to add a lecturer or senior lecturer to the FEC’s membership. The incentive option for immediate retirement of tenured faculty — which offers a year’s salary to encourage older faculty members to retire — will end in June 2014, pending a proposed one-year extension and enhancement to the current program, Provost Mark Schlissel P’15 announced. While the incentive / / URC page 5
since 1891
Dave deckey / Herald
A Chicago-based company recently bought MunchCard and will restart the service after tackling technological and legal challenges. See page 2.
U. switches to user-friendly faculty research database Physicists By Uday Shriram Contributing Writer
The University switched Tuesday to a new database for compiling and displaying faculty research profiles and curriculum vitae called VIVO. The new system allows faculty members to publicly upload and update their C.V.s and will replace the existing Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown. The transition was initially marred with technical difficulties and slow servers, but the Dean of the Faculty’s office is working to identify the source of the problems and remedy them in preparation for a “more relaxing introduction to VIVO” over the next year, said Kevin McLaughlin P’12, dean of the faculty, at Tuesday’s faculty meeting. VIVO will be “our public facing website for faculty research,” McLaughlin
said. The current database is “not kept up to date” and is “a clunky website, not very searchable, not very easy to update and pretty primitive,” he said. VIVO will require faculty members to update their information on the database every year and to provide a statement about their annual research progress to the faculty chair. The administration uses information from faculty member’s C.V.s to determine their salaries. Under the new system, faculty members will no longer be required to provide information such as what classes they taught, how many students were in each class or independent study projects they supervised. The University will “capture that information directly from the registrar” and “simplify the process for faculty to submit their updated C.V.s,” McLaughlin said.
Faculty members are being asked to upload information they want on the website, and to update it annually. Researchers from other universities will also be able to track faculty members who are performing research on a specific topic. The VIVO application can produce uniquely formatted C.V.s, such as a National Institutes of Health formatted C.V., which many professors at Brown need to apply for grants. Some faculty members had mixed views about the switch. “In principle, this is not a bad idea, but it would be good to understand who will be taking care of updating it efficiently,” said Roberto Serrano, professor of economics and chair of the department. “Often these new systems have glitches and frictions that are annoying to navigate through,” Serrano added. “And I do feel that the departments have
not been consulted sufficiently before implementing the change.” Serrano also said the current research directory has not proven useful. “I have almost never used it and when I have, prompted by some Google search, I have found the information there either outdated or incorrect,” he said. Some faculty members, including Serrano, do maintain updated information on their personal websites, but feel that if the University wants to implement a centralized system, it should properly update and maintain the site. A number of faculty members were apprehensive about the fact that the C.V.s on VIVO will be used to calculate faculty salaries. But James Valles, chair of the physics department, said that “C.V. data has always been used for evaluating a professor’s productivity and impact.” He / / VIVO page 5 added that de-
Alum makes ‘bartering sexy’ with closet swapping site By Mark valdez senior staff writer
Sari Azout ’10 and her childhood friend Sari Bibliowicz understand the experience of wandering into your best friend’s closet and finding a sweater there that she never wears — but that you know would go perfectly with a pair of jeans you own. “One lady’s trash is someone else’s treasure,” Azout said. “We wanted to make bartering something sexy.” In pursuit of this goal, they cofounded last month the online shopping market Bib and Tuck, which brings unwanted clothes from the closets of women across the nation to cyberspace. The website, which currently only offers women’s clothing, has already been featured in Vogue, Elle and Fast Company and continues to grow rapidly in membership.
Feature
Courtesy of BIb and Tuck
Bib and Tuck, an online bartering website co-founded by Sari Azout ’10, allows members to sell and purchase women’s clothing and accessories.
Threading the needle Bib and Tuck allows members to
sell clothes they don’t want anymore for “bucks,” which can be used to purchase goods from other members. Members decide on the value of the clothing and list the price in bucks. “You’re shopping without spending,” Azout said. When a member wishes to sell an item, it is referred to as a “bib,” while a purchase is called a “tuck.” Azout, an international student from Colombia, graduated from Brown with a concentration in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship. She said she was particularly inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit at Brown but wasn’t sure what she wanted to pursue after graduation. Initially, she took a job at Barclays Capital in New York as a bond trader and moved in with Bibliowicz, who was her childhood friend in Colombia. Bibliowicz was working for the travel section of Gilt Groupe, an online members-only shopping destination that “provides instant insider access to today’s top de/ / Fashion page 2 signer labels,”
across nation seek dark matter By Sonia Phene Staff Writer
Buried deep underground in Black Hills, S.D. lies a cavern with a titanium tank the size of a phonebooth. Over the next year, researchers hope this vessel will detect dark matter, the presence of which physicists have long been aware, but which has never been directly observed. The tank was filled with xenon gas Monday, one of the final steps of preparing to turn the detector on. The detector is being run through the Sanford Lab as part of the Large Underground Xenon experiment, a massive multi-institution effort to detect dark matter. Data collection is scheduled to begin in January. Modern physics only explains about 5 percent of the universe, the part that is made up of normal matter, or the things that we can see. The remaining part is made up of dark matter and dark energy, said Richard Gaitskell, professor of physics, who is one of many researchers working on the LUX experiment. “It is extremely embarrassing to admit that we don’t know what 95 percent of (the) universe is made of,” Gaitskell said. The ideas of dark energy and dark matter were born of astrophysical observations. In the 1990s, images of distant supernovae from the Hubble Space Telescope showed the expansion of the universe was accelerating, not slowing as was expected due to the effects of gravity. Scientists conceived the idea of dark energy as the underlying cause of this accelerated expansion and determined that it may make up 72 percent of the universe based / / Dark page 4
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