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STUDENT LIFE
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS SINCE 1878 VOLUME 129, NO. 7
WWW.STUDLIFE.COM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2007
Blood drive to unite campus on Sept. 11 BY NICK HAWCO CONTRIBUTING REPORTER “One day, 12 locations, countless lives saved,” boast fliers posted throughout campus urging students everywhere to donate their time and their blood in the campus-wide drive on Tuesday. Students and faculty alike can give blood at any of the 12 sites, including selected academic buildings on main campus, residential areas such as the Village House and Wohl Center and locations on North and West Campus. This blood drive differs from previous efforts due to its solidarity. In the past few years, roughly six drives, under the control of different students groups, took place on campus, yielding between 600 and 800 units of blood annually. This year’s drive, run almost exclusively through the Community Service Office, has already registered over 600 donors online and estimates one thousand pints of blood donated next week. “It’s a unique partnership,” said Stephanie Kurtzman, director of the Community Service Office. “Historically, [the blood drives] have been very competitive...even the fact that we have shared marketing is huge.” The drive is sponsored by both the American Red Cross and the Mississippi River Valley Regional Blood Center. According to Kurtzman, almost all the blood donated
Tuesday will be used in local hospitals in and around the St. Louis metropolitan area. However, she also acknowledged that the blood will go wherever the need is greatest. “If there is a crisis somewhere else, [the blood will go there],” she said. For a blood drive held on Sept. 11, the sixth anniversary of one of the worst disasters on American soil, the symbolic meaning of donating blood is undeniable. Julie Meyer, a junior who works in the Community Service office, explains that the date chosen is “slightly strategic” and slightly convenient. Meyer explained that the drive is earlier enough in the year to ensure more opportunities to give later in the year. Drives must be spaced at least 56 days apart, the amount of time a donor must wait to be eligible to donate again. Future blood drives have already been planned for Nov. 6, Jan. 29, and April 1 of the 20072008 academic year, and look to provide many more units of blood to the St. Louis community than in previous years. A smaller drive will also be held on October 2 for those who are deemed temporarily ineligible to donate due to sickness or low iron count. “We don’t want anyone to be disheartened by being turned away,” said Meyer. To inform students about the drive, scores of fliers have
See BLOOD DRIVE, page 3
DAVID HARTSTEIN | STUDENT LIFE
New international students hunt through furniture at Saturday’s furniture drive hosted by Intervarsity International Friends. The furniture, donated by area families, was raffled off to those international students in attendance. This year’s drive, much larger than last year’s, was the second annual furniture drive put on by the organization.
Drive offers furnishing and community BY ANDREA WINTER NEWS EDITOR Last Saturday, new international graduate students gathered in the Millbrook garage to seek shelter from the rain and search for free furniture at the second Annual Furniture Giveaway. The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and the International Friends, a subset of the Asian Christian Fellowship, hosted the event. “We just wanted to bless
[the International Students], because we know how hard it is to get furniture when you go to a new place,” said Janet Atkin, a Washington University graduate of the class of 2004, who started the International Friends organization in 2002 and who spearheaded the first Annual Giveaway last year. The Millbrook garage was stocked with over 50 pieces of furniture including sofas, beds, dressers, tables, chairs and other household items
that were all donated by St. Louis families. Nearly all of the furniture was given away, with the exception of a few small items. Every item that was given away was delivered to the residence of each international student. “All the students help to deliver it to each others’ homes; some of the new students rode around and brought furniture to each other,” said Atkin. “It was a great community event be-
cause people worked together and helped each other out.” A barbecue and an information session on international activities followed the Giveaway. According to Atkin, the event was a definite success with a turnout of roughly 85 to 100 people. “The amazing part was to see how the older students helped the new students, and new students helped each
See FURNITURE, page 3
Facebook opens search listings to public; student reactions mixed BY PUNEET KOLLIPARA SENIOR STAFF REPORTER The recent decision by Facebook to make user search listings available for public viewing has caused mixed reactions among students, despite the implementation of special privacy features. The online social networking giant, based in Palo Alto, Calif., recently added the feature allowing any person
with an Internet connection, including people without Facebook accounts, to view users’ profile search listings in search engines and in Facebook’s search feature. A user’s profile search listing contains the user’s full name, profile photo and links enabling searchers to send the user a message or to add the user as a friend. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the motive
behind the change was to enable more people to connect with friends. “We wanted to give people who had never come to the site before, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to find their friends and connect,” she said. “Since anyone can join the site and perform a search, we felt that allowing this limited set of information to be available outside of Facebook
would enable more people to connect.” A spokesperson stated that Facebook has implemented privacy settings to give users the option of restricting who can see their search listing. Users can choose to hide their listing from non-friends and they can also choose to have their listings not indexed for viewing in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
“We always encourage people to control their privacy on Facebook through the granular settings provided on the site,” said the spokesperson. Most students disapproved of Facebook’s new feature, but they felt more comfortable about it with the inclusion of the privacy settings. “It bothers me, but they set the privacy settings so that you don’t have to have
[your search listing visible]… so that’s okay,” said junior Erica Woodruff. “They’re free to do what they want, as long as they give me the option of blocking my information from being searched publicly,” said junior Doug Horn, a Spanish and history double major. “So I’m not upset over it. I’m just glad they alerted everyone about it.”
See FACEBOOK, page 3
Geosciences Node software improves planetary data search BY PUNEET KOLLIPARA SENIOR STAFF REPORTER A new program recently developed by the Geosciences Node at Washington University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) has made searching for images of Mars much more painless. Programmers with the Geosciences Node, which is one of several nodes of NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS), created the program, known as the Mars Orbital Data Explorer (ODE), to allow scientists to use special search fi lters to pore over terabytes of Martian im-
ages stored at the Geosciences Node. The program, according to Susan Slavney, systems programmer/analyst with the Geosciences Node, allows users to narrow down their search by providing parameters like a time range, a series of orbital numbers and location on the planet. Another important part of the program, said Slavney, is the preview feature, which allows users to preview the images they are interested in viewing before downloading them. With terabytes of data to sort through, the ODE’s ability
Courts shots
to narrow down a user’s search focus represents, according to Slavney, a major innovation in planetary data searching and a shift in the Geoscience Node’s focus from simply saving data to making it easier to fi nd. “That’s a huge step forward,” said Slavney. “It sounds very simple, but it’s not been easy to do.” Keith Bennett, deputy manager for operations at the Geosciences Node, and Dan Scholes, software engineer and applications programmer, put the program together in Visual BASIC and released it in early June. They were unavailable for
comment. The ODE supports Martian images from several current and past NASA missions, including from those instruments associated with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Mars Express spacecraft. Additionally, future plans call for the addition of images from the Mars Odyssey 2001 spacecraft. A new set of data from Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), an imaging instrument on MRO that has been looking for signs of water on Mars since last November, was added to the ODE
We’ve got the blues If you missed these weekend Volleyball games, you can still catch a glimpse of the action, brought to you by our courtside photographers. Sports, page 8
If you’ve got a hankering for blues tunes and foods, Scene can chase away those blues with a look at St. Louis’ music specialty. Scene, page 4
on Sept. 7. Data from CRISM will eventually total over 400 gigabytes, which is more data than all previous Mars missions combined. With several future lunar missions in the works throughout the world, Slavney also hinted at the possibility of expanding the ODE to include lunar images from those missions. Slavney warned that ODE was designed for use primarily by scientists and that novice users may encounter difficulties using it. “You might be disappointed if you’re looking for pretty pic-
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tures,” said Slavney. “You really do have to sort of know what you’re doing, what you’re looking for.” NASA’s PDS has a similar Web application for novice users, known as the Planetary Imaging Atlas (PIA), which is hosted at NASA’s Imaging Node at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. The PIA is located at http://pdsimg.jpl.nasa.gov. The ODE can be accessed at the Geoscience Node’s Web site, which is located at http://ode. rsl.wustl.edu/mars.
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