Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998
Friday october 21, 2016 vol. cxl no. 92
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } STUDENT LIFE
U. community members help fight hunger By Mashad Arora contributor
MASHAD ARORA :: CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Around 100 University students, alumni, and local middle and high school students gathered Thursday evening to discuss food insecurity and prepare bagged goods for a hunger awareness service event. Participants sat around tables and engaged in discussions around hunger and food security in the community. After that, they worked to sort and bag canned and dry goods to benefit the Princeton Cornerstone Community Kitchen and HomeFront Food Pantry. The food was donated by local grocery stores, including Wegmans
and Trader Joe’s. The event was held on the first day of a three-day Alumni Volunteer Weekend at the University. “We are absolutely thrilled to have so many alumni interested in engaging in service and equally thrilled to have some of our undergraduate student leaders lead you in this service activity,” Elsie Sheidler, associate director at the Pace Center for Civic Engagement, said. “It’s really nice to see alumni engaging in service,” Dan Rounds ’17, a participant, said, noting how the event brought together alumni as well as University and local school students.
Cathleen Kong ’20, a volunteer at the Community House, said she thought the event could have been better publicized but it was worthwhile and meaningful nevertheless. Alumni expressed positive sentiments about participating in the event and looked forward to the Alumni Volunteer Weekend. Victoria Bjorklund ’73, an attendee and Board of Trustees member, said that she was delighted to see the focus on service that the Pace Center and the University have. “I feel that if you’re going to live a meaningful life you have to include service as a See FOOD page 3
PROTEST
LECTURE
Bergstrom discusses “false facts” in science By Samvida Venkatesh staff writer
“False facts” are being canonized in scientific literature due to the under-publication of negative results, said Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at the University of Washington. The lecture, titled “Modeling Scientific Activity,” consisted of a two-part discussion on scientific activity, the first being publication bias leading to the canonization of “false facts,” and the second a game theoretic model of the questions that scientists choose to pursue. Bergstrom explained that to accurately accept as true 99.9 percent of facts at a p-value of 0.05, over 40 percent of the obtained negative results need to be published. Negative results are those that show non-correlations between variables rather than correlations, or those that
show non-differences between experiments rather than differences, he explained. “If fewer than 10-40% of negative results are being published, we have a serious problem — yet reputed journals like ‘Cell,’ ‘Nature,’ and ‘Science’ never publish negative results,” Bergstrom said. He added that editors of many scientific journals were dismissive of the fact that negative results could contain any information at all. Bergstrom said that this means some reasonable fraction of the facts in our textbooks and review papers are false. Mathematical models show that the average reader is unable to gauge the truth of a claim if they see a disproportionate number of positive results, he explained. Part of the problem, he said, See FACTS page 2
ELAINE ROMANO :: ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR
Project Solidarity, a program by SPEAR, held a performance art protest agains solitary confinement. The protest will end 5pm Friday and will close with a lecture at Frist 302. STUDENT LIFE
LECTURE
Schenkkan talks Green Princeton, Pink House host “upcycled” costume-making event “All the Way,” Lyndon B. Johnson staff writer
By Hamna Khurram contributor
Lyndon B. Johnson is a Shakespearean figure in the sense that he was outsized — he was big in his ambitions, his triumphs, his failures, — said Robert Schenkkan in a talk about his play “All the Way.” Schenkkan is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “The Kentucky Cycle.” His play “All the Way” won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2014. He discussed his play with Julian Zelizer, public affairs professor at the University. “He’s always been in my head,” Schenkkan said when asked why he decided to write a play about Lyndon B. Johnson.
Schenkkan grew up in Austin, Texas, the same place where Johnson was born, raised, and rose to power. The play’s first act follows Johnson’s first year as president, right after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Schenkkan talked about his choice to write the play about this time period given Johnson’s long political career. In a play, Schenkkan said that it is critical to make “the stakes as high and as real as possible.” These conditions, he said, were true for that point in Johnson’s career; the United States was recovering from the death of its former president while starting See LBJ page 2
On Oct. 20, Green Princeton hosted a Do-It-Yourself costume-making event at 99 Alexander Street. From 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., students were invited to bring clothes and other supplies to trade and fabricate into costumes for Princetoween. The event was advertised as an “upcycle” event, where students could turn old clothes into new and creative costumes. Lindsey Conlan ’18, the president of Green Princeton, demonstrated this idea with her own costume creation. She decided to take a spare white t-shirt, draw a skeleton on the shirt, and cut out the parts of the shirt not meant to represent bone. Conlan explained that by wearing a black shirt underneath the shirt she had cut out, she could create a skeleton effect, all from things she already owned.
99 Alexander Street, the location for this event, is also known as the Pink House. Starting in fall 2016, this house has played host to Princeton Social Sustainability, which is a group of 10 juniors focused on creating a community focused on sustainable living and activism, according to the Pink House website. Two of the residents, Sophia Alvarez ’18 and Gavin Hall ’18, were in attendance at the Green Princeton event and volunteered information about the Pink House project. Though having just started this fall, the Pink House has hosted a number of sustainability-related events. This includes a series of sophomore dinners, which were open to sophomore students in Forbes College. These students were invited to come to the Pink House and use the facilities available to cook a sustainable meal using local ingredients. Hall and Alvarez
In Opinion
Today on Campus
The Editorial Board makes some suggestions for CPS and MHI to expand programming on mental health, and columnist Jacquelyn Thorbjornson calls for language requirement reforms. PAGE 4
4 p.m.: Near Eastern Studies will host a panel discussion featuring Dr. Charles Benjamin (Near East Foundation), Sherine Tadros (UN, Amnesty International), Firas Khayal (UNHCR), Charlotte Alfred (Refugees Deeply). Peyton Hall Lecture Hall 145.
were happy with the turnout of these events, adding that participants definitely seemed engaged. “We got to talk about sustainability, which is something that doesn’t usually happen at Princeton,” Hall said. Some events have been more eccentric. On Oct. 16, for example, a group of Pink House residents led a mushroom hunt near Princeton, teaching participants about edible mushrooms in the wild. Apparently, the harvest was bountiful; residents report a surplus of leftover mushrooms. “We still have so many mushrooms,” Alvarez chuckled, asking others at the costume event: “does anyone want some mushrooms to take home?” When asked about plans for future expansion of events to students, both Hall and Alvarez expressed interest in opening up See COSTUME page2
WEATHER
By Samuel Garfinkle
HIGH
76˚
LOW
50˚
Rain. chance of rain:
80 percent