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MONDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2011
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Today: Rain/Snow
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High: 39 • Low: 18
The Rutgers men’s basketball team succumbed to No. 17 Syracuse, 84-80, on Saturday at the Carrier Dome, where the Knights last won in 1975.
Founder shares stories behind PostSecret project BY AMY ROWE ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR
The “most trusted stranger in America” visited Busch Campus Center last night to share his own secrets and hear some new ones. Frank Warren, the founder and curator of the PostSecret project — a website that shares anonymous secrets sent to his home — was the closing speaker for this year’s “Sex, Love & Dating” conference. “I think we all have secrets and we keep them in a box,” Warren said. “Every day, we decide to bury the box or open it and share secrets like gifts.” Warren started asking people to write their secrets on postcards on the streets of Washington, D.C., in November 2004 as part of an art project, he said. “I didn’t tell my neighbors or my friends,” he said. “I told my wife. She didn’t get it, but she supported me.” Warren said when he told his father about the project, he called him voyeuristic. “Maybe there’s some truth to that,” he said. “But it didn’t take me long to realize my crazy idea wasn’t so crazy.” On average, Warren receives 1,000 secrets each week sent to his Germantown, Md., home. He began scanning the homemade postcards he received and posted them to the website. “When [the website] went viral, I realized I tapped into something full of mystery and wonder,” he said. Warren spoke at length about the responses he hears from people, especially
those who tell him of the sense of community they feel when somebody else shares a secret they also keep. “Secrets unite people and build a hidden community,” he said. “There’s so much commonality between secrets you couldn’t see otherwise.” Warren said that reading so many secrets also helps him cope with his own. “I was struggling with secrets in my life,” he said. “The courage of these people sharing their secrets with me made me look at what I kept buried.” The PostSecret founder said he is ver y optimistic for the future of the Internet and hopes others will act on their ideas to start online conversations, pointing to Ifoundyourcamera.net as an example. “PostSecret is one simple, crazy idea,” he said. “There are 10,000 ideas as good as PostSecret or better. These ideas need people to believe in them to make them better.” Warren, who updates the website with new secrets every Sunday and published five books filled with secrets, has seen more than 500,000 secrets from all over the world since beginning the project. “The most common secret I get is, ‘I pee in the shower,’ which I can relate to,” he said. As part of his speech, Warren showed some secrets his publishers said could not be included in his books, for reasons from obscenity to copyright violations.
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Frank Warren, creator and curator of the PostSecret project, talks about his personal reasons for starting the website last night in the Busch Campus Center.
New Jersey workers practice caution with finances BY KRISTINE CHOI CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Employees re-entering the job market are equipped not only with their past work experiences but also with a better knowledge of savings and finances. Unemployed New Jersey residents have become wiser by taking on a savings state of
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mind and applying it to their newly attained jobs, said James Kinney, a certified financial planner at Financial Pathways in Bridgewater, N.J. “I believe people have learned that high levels of personal debt can be very dangerous,” he said. “Statistics show that Americans are using more of their earnings today to save and pay down debts.”
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METRO St. Peter’s University Hospital hosts an event to explore African culture.
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The Colorado State legistlature wants to establish a legal limit on THC-blood level for drivers.
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Deaf hip hop dancer Christina Sarni performs Friday night at “Dance to Eliminate,” a show that benefitted a UNICEF campaign to wipe out Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus.
size of an aircraft hanger doesn’t make it a good idea,” he said. Thomas Duf fy, president of Jersey Shore Financial Advisors in Middletown, said he is not sure if all workers have begun to apply these lessons, only that he is hopeful.
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Study shows effectiveness of alcoholism assessment tool BY ANDREW SMITH
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Sudden unemployment and high debt levels, especially among the unprepared, can be stressful and disastrous, but people can avoid these disasters by taking responsibility of their financial decisions, Kinney said. “I hope people learned that just because someone is willing and reckless enough to lend you enough money to buy a house the
Although the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) has been used as a tool for assessing alcohol abuse or addiction among teens, a recent study showed its effectiveness in predicting long-term alcohol abuse. The study, published Tuesday in the jour nal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,” sampled 597 Finnish twins of both genders and used RAPI as a way to assess problems like alcohol abuse and dependence at age 18 and again at age 25. Results confirmed a number of intuitions about early drinking, such as those who have palpable drinking problems in their youth often remain alcoholics into adulthood, said Helene White, a University professor of sociology at the Center of Alcohol Studies. “The study is a pretty strong finding — especially since they picked twins, so they controlled for a lot of environmental factors,” said White, one of RAPI’s creators. “What the study is basically showing is that problem drinking among adolescents is a fairly stable behavior.”
Findings show that among those diagnosed with alcoholism at the age of 25, there was a 74 percent probability their RAPI scores as 18 year olds was higher than average, he said. White said the real power of the study came in determining the value of RAPI as a diagnostic tool. “If you’re going to diagnose someone with a problem, you want something that’s been clinically proven to be a good diagnostic instr ument. When we published the RAPI, we weren’t claiming that it was,” White said. “Now I see this paper says that it has good predictive validity over time, so that’s impor tant.” While the study offers a new dimension to the RAPI as a clinical tool, White said the findings were not surprising, despite the study being the first of its kind. “The clinical sample [we used] actually had the DSM-III, [a manual that provides standard criteria for classifying mental disorders], diagnosis for their adolescents and they also had the RAPI and it correlated at a
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