THE OLDEST COLLEGE DAILY · FOUNDED 1878 CROSS CAMPUS MORE ONLINE cc.yaledailynews.com y MORNING RAINY 40 EVENING RAINY 45 M. HOCKEY Yale slips in standings after disappointing weekend road trip PAGE B1 SPORTS DIABETES NON-MEDICAL DISADVANTAGES DISCOVERED PAGE 5 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY SOM Dean Synder gets to know students, shares vision over breakfast, tea PAGE 3 NEWS IRRATIONALITY ‘X EFFECT’ SKEWS ECONOMIC CHOICE PAGE 6 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Snow, finally! Full-grown children across campus got all giddy with the first snowfall in New Haven since October’s freak Nor’easter. Around an inch fell by midnight. The snow is expected to turn to rain Tuesday morning. Superstar. New Haven resident Betty Broadnax was named the Shubert Theater’s millionth patron on Saturday. Broadnax received a “special gift pack” for the honor, the New Haven Register reported. Golden Elis. Two Yalies walked away with Golden Globe awards Sunday night, proving once again that Yale’s finest artistes aren’t always doomed to starvation in Brooklyn. Meryl Streep DRA ’74 was crowned best actress in a drama for her role as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and Claire Danes ’02 won best actress in a TV drama for her performance in Showtime’s “Homeland.” Hooligans! Alex Fisher ’14 said he submitted a proposal to the Yale College Council’s 10K Initiative calling for the installation of a controlled- access gate on the path from York Street to Morse and Stiles. The gate would be placed “near the rear boundary” of Toad’s and be activated between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Way too popular. Though 584 students tried to shop Professor Alexander Nemerov’s “Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present,” the professor capped the class at 270 — the maximum number of students that the Yale University Art Gallery auditorium can hold. “In the past many students in the lecture were doing Facebook or email or all kinds of things on their computers,” Nemerov said. “So for me it’s better if there’s a room where that is not possible.” Rock the vote. Gov. Dannel Malloy and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill outlined plans on Monday to expand the state’s voter rolls. Proposed legislation would allow for web-based voter registration and registration on Election Day, as well as expand access to absentee ballots. Harvard looks abroad. Harvard Business School professor Krishna Palepu was named President Drew Gilpin Faust’s senior adviser for global strategy on Wednesday, the Crimson reported. Early admissions get tougher. A larger, more diverse group of early applicants to America’s most elite universities has made early admission more elusive, according to a New York Times article Friday. THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY 1917 After beating Princeton a few days prior, the undefeated Yale men’s hockey team loses to the Tigers, 4–3. Submit tips to Cross Campus [email protected]INSIDE THE NEWS NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 71 · yaledailynews.com BY NICK DEFIESTA AND JAMES LU STAFF REPORTERS Mayor John DeStefano Jr. is set to bring a bill to the Board of Aldermen Tuesday night that would make it easier for people with criminal records to get licenses and permits from the city. The ordinance amendment — which DeStefano and Amy Meek LAW ’09, the director of the city’s Prisoner Reentry Initiative, announced at City Hall Friday afternoon — would specifically seek to clarify and minimize the long-term con- sequences of a criminal con- viction. The proposal, called “Collateral Consequences,” would make it easier for former prisoners to obtain food cart and vendor permits, DeSte- fano said, thereby enhancing employment opportunities for those returning to the commu- nity from incarceration. “There is a group of indi- viduals, those who have older convictions on their records, who continue to face barriers to employment and stable suc- cess,” DeStefano said. “The city benefits as a whole when all residents have opportunities for stable employment.” The proposal builds on the city’s 2009 Ban the Box ordi- nance, which limits the fac- tors that can be considered in the employment of the re- entry population for public sector jobs, Meek said. Under the ordinance, the nature of an job applicant’s conviction, the length of time since the con- viction, the age at the time of the offense and additional information about rehabili- tation and good conduct after release cannot be discussed during the hiring process. In particular, the new bill will make it easier for former prisoners seeking to get a food cart or street vendor license, she said, adding that in the past, one out of every seven applicants for such a license was denied because of a prior criminal conviction. “When deciding whether or not to plead guilty to a partic- ular charge, people look at the Mayor seeks boost for ex-prisoners BY BEN PRAWDZIK STAFF REPORTER After the Connecticut state legisla- ture repealed the ban on Sunday liquor sales last year, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced a renewed push on Satur- day to undo the ban, prompting a mix of reactions from small retailers, lob- byists and consumers. Allowing Sunday alcohol sales was one of several “consumer-friendly” policy changes Malloy outlined at an Enfield, Conn. town hall meeting over the weekend. The governor also pro- posed legislation that would allow liquor stores to remain open until 10 p.m. instead of 9 p.m. and would per- mit restaurants and bars to serve cus- tomers until 2 a.m. every day instead of only during weekends. Malloy hopes to lift further regulation stipulating how alcohol is to be handled by distribu- tors, wholesalers, and retailers. “These laws are outdated and they artificially increase the price of alco- hol to Connecticut consumers,” Mal- loy said in an official statement. “By allowing Sunday sales, by removing distribution and sale restrictions and by amending permit regulations, we’re going to help Connecticut regain its competitive edge in this industry, and we’re going to give consumers a break.” Malloy’s proposal comes amid claims that Connecticut retailers are losing Sunday sales to New York, Mas- sachusetts and Rhode Island. These states previously had similar laws ban- ning Sunday liquor sales, but all three legislatures have repealed the regula- tions since 2002. Connecticut is one of only 13 states that still prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sundays. According to Malloy, the current state regulation results in $570 million of lost reve- nue annually for state retailers as cus- tomers flock to stores across the bor- der, though the governor did not cite a source for that figure. “As the years go by and other states modify their laws to reflect modern- day realities, our statutes have col- lected dust,” he added. Sunday liquor ban may end BY JANE DARBY MENTON AND ANTONIA WOODFORD STAFF REPORTERS After last summer’s Directed Studies pro- gram garnered enthusiastic reviews from alumni participants, Yale will also oer sum- mer courses in Grand Strategy and Shake- speare for alumni, their spouses and parents of Yale students this year. All 18 spots in Grand Strategy have been filled since registration opened in December, and more than half of the 15 participants who took last summer’s Directed Studies course have signed up for one of the new courses, said Pamela Schirmeister, director of the pro- grams and an associate dean for Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Schirmeister added that Yale may continue to expand its summer educational opportunities for alumni depending on alumni and faculty interest and the availability of space on cam- pus. “The whole idea of this is to expose alumni to what’s being taught at Yale,” said John Gad- dis, a history professor who teaches Grand Strategy and will lead sessions during the summer. The “Grand Strategy for Life” and “Shake- speare for Life” seminars will meet from May 27 to June 2 and each cost $4,800, while “Directed Studies for Life” will run from June 3 to June 15 at a cost of $6,500. After full days of class, participants in the courses will also be treated to evening activities and enter- tainments, such as a gala opening reception and cocktails on the Quinnipiac schooner on Long Island Sound, according to the Yale for Life program website. The Grand Strategy summer program will cover about one-third of the academic year syllabus, which spans two semesters, and include classic works by Thucydides, Vir- gil, Machiavelli, Kant and Clausewitz, said Charles Hill, a diplomat-in-residence who co-teaches Grand Strategy with Gaddis and will also teach the course with him this sum- mer. Schirmeister called the alumni response to the new Grand Strategy oering “immediate and overwhelming,” which she attributed to its name recognition among multiple genera- tions of alumni. “The idea was to try to oer courses that alumni would recognize and think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken that,’” Schirmeister said. While the Directed Studies and Grand Strategy summer seminars mirror courses already offered at Yale, Schirmeister said, the Shakespeare course will be designed spe- cifically for alumni. The seminar will exam- ine both literary and theatrical elements of Shakespeare’s plays, she said. David Kastan, an English professor who will co-teach the course, said that participants will be able to supplement their study by viewing exhibits remaining from this spring’s Shakespeare at Yale festival, which showcases the Universi- ty’s Shakespeare collections. Professors slated to lead the summer sem- inars said teaching alumni is exciting since people of varied ages can bring fresh perspec- tives to discussions. Jane Levin GRD ’75, who oversees the undergraduate Directed Studies program and taught the literature seminar to alumni last summer, said she was struck by how alumni drew on their life experiences to form inter- pretations much dierent from those of col- lege freshmen. “The frustration of the meaning of life, one of the central questions to many of these works, has a particular kind of urgency when you are older,” she said. Schirmeister added that for alumni, many Alumni summer programs expand SEE REENTRY PAGE 8 BY TAPLEY STEPHENSON STAFF REPORTER For students enrolling in Yale’s Naval Reserve Ocers Training Corps unit next fall, active duty commitments after graduation will partly hinge on their finan- cial aid choices. The Naval ROTC offers two types of funding to its students. The “scholarship program” pays four years of college tuition in exchange for five years of active duty service after graduation, while the “college program” sup- plements institutional finan- cial aid with just a small stipend and requires only a three-year active duty commitment. Naval administrators said in Decem- ber that they expect the scholar- ship program — which is widely used on a national scale — to be less popular at Yale because of the University’s generous finan- cial aid policy. But Lt. Molly Crabbe, who will oversee Yale’s Naval ROTC unit, said all but one of 24 prospective Yale students interested in the program have already applied for the scholar- ship option. The Navy’s scholarship pro- gram pays for a student’s tuition and books while also providing a monthly stipend that starts at $250 during freshman year, and increases by $50 each subse- quent year. The college program gives students a comparable sti- pend beginning in a midship- man’s junior year, but does not Two aid choices for NROTC SEE ROTC PAGE 8 SEE DS FOR LIFE PAGE 8 SEE LIQUOR PAGE 8 YDN, COLLEGE WINE, ODD BINS Over the weekend, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced his support for a repeal of the longstanding ban on Sunday liquor sales. I think there’s support [on the board] for people who have done their time to come back to society and assimilate as best they can. JORGE PEREZ Ward 5 Alderman, Board of Aldermen president
Transcript
T H E O L D E S T C O L L E G E D A I L Y · F O U N D E D 1 8 7 8
CROSSCAMPUS
MORE ONLINEcc.yaledailynews.com
y
MORNING RAINY 40 EVENING RAINY 45
M. HOCKEYYale slips in standings after disappointing weekend road tripPAGE B1 SPORTS
Snow, finally! Full-grown children across campus got all giddy with the first snowfall in New Haven since October’s freak Nor’easter. Around an inch fell by midnight. The snow is expected to turn to rain Tuesday morning.
Superstar. New Haven resident Betty Broadnax was named the Shubert Theater’s millionth patron on Saturday. Broadnax received a “special gift pack” for the honor, the New Haven Register reported.
Golden Elis. Two Yalies walked away with Golden Globe awards Sunday night, proving once again that Yale’s finest artistes aren’t always doomed to starvation in Brooklyn. Meryl Streep DRA ’74 was crowned best actress in a drama for her role as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and Claire Danes ’02 won best actress in a TV drama for her performance in Showtime’s “Homeland.”
Hooligans! Alex Fisher ’14 said he submitted a proposal to the Yale College Council’s 10K Initiative calling for the installation of a controlled-access gate on the path from York Street to Morse and Stiles. The gate would be placed “near the rear boundary” of Toad’s and be activated between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Way too popular. Though 584 students tried to shop Professor Alexander Nemerov’s “Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present,” the professor capped the class at 270 — the maximum number of students that the Yale University Art Gallery auditorium can hold. “In the past many students in the lecture were doing Facebook or email or all kinds of things on their computers,” Nemerov said. “So for me it’s better if there’s a room where that is not possible.”
Rock the vote. Gov. Dannel Malloy and Secretary of the State Denise Merrill outlined plans on Monday to expand the state’s voter rolls. Proposed legislation would allow for web-based voter registration and registration on Election Day, as well as expand access to absentee ballots.
Harvard looks abroad. Harvard Business School professor Krishna Palepu was named President Drew Gilpin Faust’s senior adviser for global strategy on Wednesday, the Crimson reported.
Early admissions get tougher. A larger, more diverse group of early applicants to America’s most elite universities has made early admission more elusive, according to a New York Times article Friday.
THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY1917 After beating Princeton a few days prior, the undefeated Yale men’s hockey team loses to the Tigers, 4–3.
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2012 · VOL. CXXXIV, NO. 71 · yaledailynews.com
BY NICK DEFIESTA AND JAMES LUSTAFF REPORTERS
Mayor John DeStefano Jr. is set to bring a bill to the Board of Aldermen Tuesday night that would make it easier for people with criminal records to get licenses and permits from the city.
The ordinance amendment — which DeStefano and Amy Meek LAW ’09, the director of the city’s Prisoner Reentry Initiative, announced at City Hall Friday afternoon — would specifically seek to clarify and minimize the long-term con-sequences of a criminal con-viction. The proposal, called “Collateral Consequences,” would make it easier for former prisoners to obtain food cart and vendor permits, DeSte-fano said, thereby enhancing employment opportunities for those returning to the commu-nity from incarceration.
“There is a group of indi-viduals, those who have older convictions on their records, who continue to face barriers to employment and stable suc-cess,” DeStefano said. “The city benefits as a whole when all residents have opportunities for stable employment.”
The proposal builds on the city’s 2009 Ban the Box ordi-nance, which limits the fac-tors that can be considered in the employment of the re-entry population for public
sector jobs, Meek said. Under the ordinance, the nature of an job applicant’s conviction, the length of time since the con-viction, the age at the time of the offense and additional information about rehabili-tation and good conduct after release cannot be discussed during the hiring process.
In particular, the new bill will make it easier for former prisoners seeking to get a food cart or street vendor license, she said, adding that in the past, one out of every seven applicants for such a license was denied because of a prior criminal conviction.
“When deciding whether or not to plead guilty to a partic-ular charge, people look at the
Mayor seeks boost for ex-prisoners
BY BEN PRAWDZIKSTAFF REPORTER
After the Connecticut state legisla-ture repealed the ban on Sunday liquor sales last year, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced a renewed push on Satur-day to undo the ban, prompting a mix of reactions from small retailers, lob-byists and consumers.
Allowing Sunday alcohol sales was one of several “consumer-friendly” policy changes Malloy outlined at an Enfield, Conn. town hall meeting over the weekend. The governor also pro-posed legislation that would allow liquor stores to remain open until 10 p.m. instead of 9 p.m. and would per-mit restaurants and bars to serve cus-
tomers until 2 a.m. every day instead of only during weekends. Malloy hopes to lift further regulation stipulating how alcohol is to be handled by distribu-tors, wholesalers, and retailers.
“These laws are outdated and they artificially increase the price of alco-hol to Connecticut consumers,” Mal-loy said in an official statement. “By allowing Sunday sales, by removing distribution and sale restrictions and by amending permit regulations, we’re going to help Connecticut regain its competitive edge in this industry, and we’re going to give consumers a break.”
Malloy’s proposal comes amid claims that Connecticut retailers are losing Sunday sales to New York, Mas-sachusetts and Rhode Island. These
states previously had similar laws ban-ning Sunday liquor sales, but all three legislatures have repealed the regula-tions since 2002.
Connecticut is one of only 13 states that still prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sundays. According to Malloy, the current state regulation results in $570 million of lost reve-nue annually for state retailers as cus-tomers flock to stores across the bor-der, though the governor did not cite a source for that figure.
“As the years go by and other states modify their laws to reflect modern-day realities, our statutes have col-lected dust,” he added.
Sunday liquor ban may end
BY JANE DARBY MENTON AND ANTONIA WOODFORDSTAFF REPORTERS
After last summer’s Directed Studies pro-gram garnered enthusiastic reviews from alumni participants, Yale will also o!er sum-mer courses in Grand Strategy and Shake-speare for alumni, their spouses and parents of Yale students this year.
All 18 spots in Grand Strategy have been filled since registration opened in December, and more than half of the 15 participants who took last summer’s Directed Studies course have signed up for one of the new courses, said Pamela Schirmeister, director of the pro-grams and an associate dean for Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Schirmeister added that Yale may continue to expand its summer educational opportunities for alumni depending on alumni and faculty interest and the availability of space on cam-pus.
“The whole idea of this is to expose alumni to what’s being taught at Yale,” said John Gad-dis, a history professor who teaches Grand Strategy and will lead sessions during the summer.
The “Grand Strategy for Life” and “Shake-speare for Life” seminars will meet from May 27 to June 2 and each cost $4,800, while “Directed Studies for Life” will run from June 3 to June 15 at a cost of $6,500. After full days of class, participants in the courses will also be treated to evening activities and enter-tainments, such as a gala opening reception and cocktails on the Quinnipiac schooner on Long Island Sound, according to the Yale for Life program website.
The Grand Strategy summer program will cover about one-third of the academic year syllabus, which spans two semesters, and include classic works by Thucydides, Vir-gil, Machiavelli, Kant and Clausewitz, said
Charles Hill, a diplomat-in-residence who co-teaches Grand Strategy with Gaddis and will also teach the course with him this sum-mer.
Schirmeister called the alumni response to the new Grand Strategy o!ering “immediate and overwhelming,” which she attributed to its name recognition among multiple genera-tions of alumni.
“The idea was to try to o!er courses that alumni would recognize and think, ‘Oh, I wish I’d taken that,’” Schirmeister said.
While the Directed Studies and Grand Strategy summer seminars mirror courses already offered at Yale, Schirmeister said, the Shakespeare course will be designed spe-cifically for alumni. The seminar will exam-ine both literary and theatrical elements of Shakespeare’s plays, she said. David Kastan, an English professor who will co-teach the course, said that participants will be able to supplement their study by viewing exhibits remaining from this spring’s Shakespeare at Yale festival, which showcases the Universi-ty’s Shakespeare collections.
Professors slated to lead the summer sem-inars said teaching alumni is exciting since people of varied ages can bring fresh perspec-tives to discussions.
Jane Levin GRD ’75, who oversees the undergraduate Directed Studies program and taught the literature seminar to alumni last summer, said she was struck by how alumni drew on their life experiences to form inter-pretations much di!erent from those of col-lege freshmen.
“The frustration of the meaning of life, one of the central questions to many of these works, has a particular kind of urgency when you are older,” she said.
Schirmeister added that for alumni, many
Alumni summer programs expand
SEE REENTRY PAGE 8
BY TAPLEY STEPHENSONSTAFF REPORTER
For students enrolling in Yale’s Naval Reserve O"cers Training Corps unit next fall, active duty commitments after graduation will partly hinge on their finan-cial aid choices.
The Naval ROTC offers two types of funding to its students. The “scholarship program” pays four years of college tuition in exchange for five years of active duty service after graduation, while the “college program” sup-plements institutional finan-cial aid with just a small stipend and requires only a three-year active duty commitment. Naval administrators said in Decem-ber that they expect the scholar-ship program — which is widely used on a national scale — to be less popular at Yale because of the University’s generous finan-cial aid policy. But Lt. Molly Crabbe, who will oversee Yale’s Naval ROTC unit, said all but one of 24 prospective Yale students interested in the program have already applied for the scholar-ship option.
The Navy’s scholarship pro-gram pays for a student’s tuition and books while also providing a monthly stipend that starts at $250 during freshman year, and increases by $50 each subse-quent year. The college program gives students a comparable sti-pend beginning in a midship-man’s junior year, but does not
Two aid choices
for NROTC
SEE ROTC PAGE 8
SEE DS FOR LIFE PAGE 8
SEE LIQUOR PAGE 8
YDN, COLLEGE WINE, ODD BINS
Over the weekend, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced his support for a repeal of the longstanding ban on Sunday liquor sales.
I think there’s support [on the board] for people who have done their time to come back to society and assimilate as best they can.
JORGE PEREZWard 5 Alderman, Board of Aldermen
president
OPINION .COMMENTyaledailynews.com/opinion
“Whatever “global engagement” Harvard has in mind, one doubts they will sell out the brand to an authoritarian regime for money.” ‘OBSERVER’ ON ‘NEW HARVARD ADMIN FOCUSES ON GLOBAL STRATEGY’
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Interviews show commitment to teachingDean Thomas Pollard’s directive that candidates for places in the graduate programs be interviewed should be welcome news to undergraduates. Since Yale considers teaching to be a part of
Personability matters in educators
Antonia Woodford’s article, (“Admins divided on interviews,” Jan. 11) reveals a disturb-ing aspect of graduate work in the humanities. Faculty opposition to the policy of interviewing applicants illuminates how we have neglected the role of teaching in scholarship.
Faculty insistence that “personabilty” is irrelevant to work in the humanities (as opposed to the sciences, where students work in com-munal labs) neglects that serving as teaching fellows, working with colleagues and applying for faculty jobs are all integral elements of grad-uate work. While charisma and extroversion should not be primary criteria for acceptance, we must acknowledge that a severe inability to communicate will prevent a scholar from mak-ing as significant a contribution to her or his field, limit job placement and hinder teaching.
If Yale is already investing approximately $143,000 in each humanities student, it is worth the time and funding to assure that we acquire the most qualified applicants. Profes-sor Eckart Frahm’s notion that, “Occasion-ally genius hides behind awkwardness, while inversely silver-tongued applicants can turn out to be shallow scholars,” implies that well-
spoken applicants are necessarily inferior academics. It is time that we overcome intellectual prejudice against personability and admit that social skills do not preclude genius, but often aid its e!ective-ness.
ANN PHELPSJANUARY 13The writer is a 2009 graduate of the Institute of Sacred Music and a Saybrook graduate affili-ate and research fellow.
graduate school education and guarantees teaching positions to graduate students in their third and fourth years, we have an obligation to admit students who have no obvious and insurmountable obstacles to becoming e!ective teachers in the classroom. What is at stake is not simply the protection of the graduate students from anything that could be interpreted as violating the rights of the disabled; what is at stake is the right of undergraduates to instructors who are not just “the best minds” on paper, but exemplary presenters of material and leaders of discussion. Though interviews are not perfect tools, they can reveal important information that will help faculty members make more informed choices about the students one can imagine placing in front of the classroom in a couple of years.
LESLIE BRISMANJANUARY 11The writer is the Karl Young Professor of English.
G U E S T C O L U M N I S T M I C H A E L M A G D Z I K
A specious case for scienceAs my sixth shopping period
experience winds to a close, I want to give some attention to perhaps one of the most despised compo-nents of the Yale undergraduate experience: the mandatory sci-ence credits.
In theory, the two required science credits serve to ensure “diverse intellectual pursuits for all Yale College students while encouraging flexibility and free-dom to expand on individual inter-ests, explore new curiosities, and take academic risks.” Hogwash. In practice, the science credits as they work now fail on all these counts and do active harm to the academic mission of Yale College.
For dedicated science students, the science requirement is mean-ingless. To non-science majors, however, they constitute a severe burden. There are huge draw-backs to the option of taking legit-imate science courses like organic chemistry or molecular biology. First, they tend to be very harshly curved, carrying the potential for devastating a semester GPA. This is doubly true insofar as one has to compete with much more ded-icated students who are certainly not there to casually explore new curiosities but rather to continue their inexorable march to medi-cal school and aren’t going to let 800 pages of rote memorization
stop them. To get a decent grade, a humanities student would have to structure his schedule around such a course — hardly a desirable outcome. Second, it’s bound to be harder work insofar as the human-ities student in question is not used to doing science work.
What are the alternatives? Large lecture classes taught essen-tially at high school levels, or sem-inars of the same stripe. Everyone knows about them, and everyone goes to them when in need of sci-ence credits. The work is rarely, if ever, intellectually stimulating for the student, and, perhaps worse, these courses are a waste of time for the unlucky professors stuck teaching them.
Instead of spending more time on their truly interested and more advanced students or on personal research, they need to engage with students who refuse to answer even the most basic questions when the teacher tries to have some interaction in lecture. No doubt the astronomy professors have cursed the requirement more than once during their respective stays at Yale.
But worse, the science credit often gets in the way of classes the student would find more inter-esting and derive more intellec-tual stimulation from. There’s such a wealth of o!erings at Yale
that every little spot in someone’s four-year schedule is a highly cov-eted prize. If we eliminated the science requirement, perhaps the security-track global a!airs major would take a course on educa-tion policy and decide he wanted to become a school administrator instead of secretary of defense.
The opportunity to experiment should not be confined to the strict boundaries of the Yale administra-tion’s vision. Instead, the admin-istration should trust students to take those di!erent classes them-selves.
For those who find the sugges-tion of doing away with the sci-ence distributional requirement altogether unpalatable, I have another proposal.
The Yale website suggests that “close study of a science devel-ops critical faculties that educated citizens need,” including an abil-ity to evaluate expert opinion, dis-tinguish demagoguery from sci-ence and develop new modes of thought via theoretical inquiry and experimental analysis.
If Yale College is interested in producing educated citizens, then instead of the hodgepodge of ran-dom lectures on topics that will never pertain to most humani-ties majors’ careers and lives (and let’s not kid ourselves — “Galax-ies and the Universe” is not going
to inspire confidence from major engineering or biotech com-panies), Yale should reduce the required science credits to one, get rid of the usual courses for non-science majors and create SCIE100 — “Public Science.”
The course could be a general overview of a bunch of aspects of science about which active citi-zens need to be informed. A sur-vey of the technologies and pro-cesses behind genetically modi-fied foods, global warming, clean energy and fossil fuel production, DNA as applied to criminal cases and paternity tests, and many more everyday topics would be far more beneficial than many of the current o!erings.
By comparison, the quanti-tative reasoning distributional requirement leads humanities majors to learn important skills like basic microeconomics, statis-tics and programming. The classes currently o!ered in that field fulfill their stated mission. But, by and large, the current classes non-sci-ence majors take fail the task they were created to carry out. They deserve reconsideration – and perhaps, ultimately, the axe.
MICHAEL MAGDZIK is a junior in Berkeley College. Contact him at
Yale students received their first Martin Luther King Jr. Day o! a decade ago. Since then, we have seen 10 years of Sun-day night parties and Monday morning hangovers. Some have participated in the Dwight Hall Day of Service; many have honored civil rights with typi-cal weekend flair.
After the first couple of years of no class Monday, even the contrarians stopped writing to these pages in protest. Every-one knew the old arguments, so why rehash? Yes, MLK day did awkwardly elevate one hol-iday over others (for example, Veterans Day). Oh sure, it con-torted shopping period into Houdini-esque convolutions. Yup, the Day of Service could just as easily occur on the Sun-day prior to MLK Day. Not to mention the bugbear known as diversity. All this was boring, culturally insensitive news.
And somehow we still fail to have meaningful discussions about civil rights.
So, instead of restarting this dead debate whole hog — which would end with me being termed a racist, clas-sist, sexist or some other -ist in tomorrow morning’s paper — I’ll take a few moments to reflect on a deeper message we can draw from MLK day.
Martin Luther King Jr. fought for civil rights, but Yalies little understand the sources of these rights. With the rise of social sciences, studying political philoso-phy has become less than sexy. Number crunching gobble-dygook is in; great dead males are out. Students can and do graduate without ever study-ing the foundations of West-ern rights and governance. Ask them to articulate the first principles of their moral sys-tems and they will stand agape. They may mumble something about human rights, dignity and other jazz. Poke a pin into the flu! and pop goes the logic.
This is not a new or radi-cal conclusion. Just last week, Harry Graver (“Lucretius at Yale,” Jan. 12) grappled with some of these issues. He came close to explicitly making the case for a core curriculum. I’ll take the extra step: Yale des-perately needs one.
But the faculty, mostly in the social sciences, will never agree to a core curriculum — the current, à la carte system allows their departments to grow because of student inter-est in cool-sounding topics. If Yale will not (or cannot) make students take classics, where else might they find discussion of first principles? Here again, we can look to Dr. King for the answer: in religion.
For MLK, rights came from God. His famous “I Have A Dream” speech likened the
Declaration of Inde-p e n d e n c e to a check p r o m i s -ing African Americans their rights, a check he cashed in close to two c e n t u r i e s later. He consciously e c h o e d T h o m a s
Je!erson, who wrote that rights derived from a Maker.
As a man of faith, MLK knew the source for his moral sys-tem — Christian scripture and belief. Indeed, churchgoers of all creeds tend to grapple with existential dilemmas in ser-mons and study groups, the same type of conversations we want students having in our classrooms. If we cannot make these conversations happen in academic environments, maybe we can foster them in religious ones?
Until 1926, Yale man-dated church attendance, pre-cisely because the Corpora-tion understood that contact with faith helps breed more moral students. Even after-ward, many used to attend ser-vices. In his time, University Chaplain William Sloan Cof-fin, Jr. ’50 packed Battell with undergraduates who heard him preach on a weekly basis. (Side note: Co"n marched alongside MLK in many of the protests for rights, propel-ling Yale’s chaplain onto the national stage.)
Yale will not reintroduce mandatory services, even if it included an option for agnos-tics or atheists. To suggest such an idea would be as naïve as to ask for a core curriculum. But maybe our current Chap-lain, Sharon Kugler, might be able to take a leaf out of Cof-fin’s book. Maybe voluntary Yale-wide sermons can make a comeback.
In order to be e!ective, Kugler will need to unabash-edly honest about her own morality, just as MLK was unafraid to blend his own reli-gion, politics and the phi-losophy that connects them. She will have to alienate some (maybe many) who disagree with her stance. The result might be controversial, but at least she would force stu-dents to confront the ethi-cal underpinnings of the civil rights movement we suppos-edly commemorated with our day o!.
NATHANIEL ZELINSKY is a junior in Davenport College. Con-
throwing cold water on my pas-sion for space exploration. They believe news reports that Presi-dent Obama cancelled the human spaceflight program, dooming NASA to slowly wither and die, and they try to nudge me away from denial. Fortunately, their narrative is wildly inaccurate; space exploration is poised for an exciting future.
The national media confuses the deserved cancellation of the space shuttle program with the death of space exploration. In real-ity, commercial companies will soon replace the outdated space shuttle to launch cargo and crew into orbit around Earth. NASA will no longer focus on providing taxi service to the International Space Station. Rather, a quest to explore the uncharted cosmos with both robots and humans will exploit the imaginative possibility of space.
In short, NASA is recapturing the excitement of the Space Race — without the fear of the Cold War.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Ameri-cans panicked because the shiny, beeping satellite represented an existential crisis. People evolved with a basic urge to explore the unknown, and their ability was threatened. Desperate to preserve American preeminence, NASA executed the spectacular Apollo Program, culminating in the 1969-’72 series of moon landings.
Most scientists never lost the drive to push the envelope in space, making the last four decades a golden age of exploration. Space-crafts have visited every planet in our solar system; the Hubble
telescope col-lected breath-taking images of distant gal-axies and neb-ulae. Planetary scientists have explicitly pri-oritized fre-quent small- to medium-scale missions over occa-sional flagship e!orts, ensur-ing the steady
return of engaging science. With the ongoing detection of shock-ingly diverse planets orbiting dis-tant stars, the possibilities for dis-covery are virtually limitless.
In contrast, the human space-flight program lost luster in 1975 after American and Soviet space-craft docked above the Earth, ending the Space Race. Lacking either an obvious threat from a foreign superpower or an ambi-tious new goal, public interest in human spaceflight quickly waned, prompting advocates of space exploration to hype engineering advances in lieu of novel excur-sions.
But technology development is only exciting if conducted in pur-suit of an accessible, exciting goal. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, yet launches soon seemed routine and even boring. The International Space Station is closer to Earth than Los Angeles is to San Fran-cisco. So a new emotional focus for the space program would be cause for celebration, not despair.
Although the national media enjoys blaming President Obama
for killing the shuttle program, credit actually belongs to Presi-dent George W. Bush, who sched-uled its cancellation for 2011 to lib-erate funding for the Constellation Program to return astronauts to the moon.
President Obama took deci-sive action in 2010 after an inde-pendent review panel concluded that the Constellation Program was hopelessly over budget and behind schedule. Instead of killing NASA, he committed to increas-ing overall funding by $6 billion over five years. The International Space Station will be operated as a national laboratory for science research through 2020 and NASA will continue designing a powerful rocket capable of reaching desti-nations beyond Earth’s orbit, such as asteroids and Mars.
Most importantly, President Obama strongly supports con-tracting with commercial compa-nies to transport crew and cargo to orbit around Earth. Private enti-ties are demonstrating impressive capabilities. For example, SpaceX, one of many commercial space-flight corporations, launched its Dragon spacecraft into orbit around Earth and recovered it safely in 2010. Cargo delivery to the International Space Station should occur this year and the first crewed Dragon flight is planned for 2015. Space tourism and trips beyond the earth/moon system will follow.
Of course, you will not cheer the continuation of a vigorous space program unless you consider it a worthwhile endeavor.
After all, reasonable people have criticized the space program since its birth as a tremendous waste of
money. According to several stud-ies, however, the average Ameri-can overestimates the percentage of the federal budget allocated to NASA (roughly 0.6 percent) by at least a factor of 10. Compared to expenditures like wars and bank bailouts, NASA appropriations might as well be a rounding error.
Eliminating funding for space exploration would not increase spending on other worthy causes, despite rhetorical attempts to pit NASA’s funding against domestic programs. In the current political climate, the money would likely be thrown into the pit of deficit reduction and tax cuts.
Conventional defenses of space exploration are pragmatic: Dollars are spent on Earth, not in space, to employ skilled workers. Com-mercial spino!s from NASA tech-nology — everything from life rafts to clean energy technology — improve lives every day. Without satellites, our ability to navigate, communicate and predict weather would vanish. But none of these reasons ignited the Space Race.
Ultimately, to support space exploration is simply to be human. Footprints on the moon and the tracks of Mars rovers both pro-vide an unadulterated, natural thrill. People and robots in space are uniquely capable of expand-ing our imagination, inspiring life-changing technology, moti-vating science and engineering education. Thanks to President Obama, the stage is set for decades of adventure.
JOSEPH O’ROURKE is a senior in Silliman College. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays. Contact him at
A 66,000-pound fuel cell arrived at Millennium Plaza behind City Hall Sunday morn-ing.
The fuel cell will pro-vide the majority of electric-ity to City Hall and the Hall of Records at 200 Orange St., as well as 60 percent of the heat and 30 percent of cooling for the buildings, said Christine Eppstein Tang, director of the city’s Office of Sustainabil-ity. The fuel cell is expected to save between $500,000 and $1,000,000 throughout its 10-year lease period and reduce the pollution generated by both buildings, said Giovanni Zinn ’05, a consultant employed by the city’s Office of Sustainabil-ity.
“We’re really excited to finally have it here,” Eppstein Tang said. “It’s a great achieve-ment for the city.”
Eppstein Tang said the Sus-tainability Office and engi-neering department worked with Connecticut-based com-pany UTC Power — which man-ufactured the fuel cell — for the past year to bring the fuel cell to New Haven. She added that the city benefits not only from having the cell but also from the included maintenance contract that states that UTC must fix
the cell if it is damaged. Eppstein Tang said the deci-
sion to get a fuel cell was not motivated by government reg-ulation, but made “perfect sense,” as it demonstrates the city’s commitment to renew-able energy while reducing costs. Since pollution-reducing technology is likely to change in the future, she added that the sustainability office and the city’s Department of Engineer-ing decided that leasing the fuel cell would be the best course of action.
Initially, officials considered other environmentally friendly and money-saving options such as building a high-effi-ciency boiler and chiller plant, Zinn said. But, he said, the fuel cell “leapt out immediately” because it saves money, helps the environment and is less dis-ruptive to install. Other advan-tages of a fuel cell, he added, are its compactness and low emis-sions and noise levels.
The fuel cell is a combined heat and power fuel cell sys-tem generating heat that can be used for space or water heating as well as for driving an absorp-tion chiller to provide cooling, said Jennifer Sager, spokes-woman for UTC Power.
She added that the fuel cell’s ability to utilize the heat byproduct increases its effi-ciency, and that the PureCell
Model 400 system used in City Hall has industry-best system efficiencies of up to 90 percent.
The PureCell Model 400 system also functions with-out consuming or discharging water in normal operations, she said, resulting in approximately 1.6 million gallons of saved water per year compared to the U.S. electric grid.
Though there are currently no estimates as to how much pollution the fuel cell will reduce, “every little bit helps,” Zinn said. The fuel cell will result in a net reduction of car-bon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions, said Rich Shaw, UTC’s regional sales director.
Due to its downtown location near City Hall, the fuel cell can
also serve an educational pur-pose, Eppstein Tang said. Once the fuel cell is in operation, she added, signs explaining the cell’s purpose to the public will be put up nearby.
Zinn said he sees the addition of the latest fuel cell as part of a citywide shift towards sustain-ability.
“New Haven is a leader in renewable technology, and this is continuing the trend,“ he said.
The fuel cell will be oper-ational within the next two months, according to Eppstein Tang.
FRIDAY, JAN. 13The article “Leaving society behind in ‘reWilding’” misstated the year of Adina Verson DRA ’12.
TODAY’S EVENTSTUESDAY, JANUARY 1712:00 PM “Simple Steps to Reducing Clutter — At Work and Home.” Susan Abramson, manager of the Yale WorkLife and Child Care Programs, will give this workshop focused on the di!erent types of clutter that can a!ect your life, both at home and at work. William Wirt Winchester Buidling (25 York St.), Room 208.
12:30 PM “The Ancients: Fraternalism, Faith, and Friendship.” This “Art in Context” talk will be given by Rosie Ibbotson, postdoctoral graduate fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. Yale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel St.).
“Education is a weapon whose e!ects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” JOSEPH STALIN FORMER PREMIER OF THE SOVIET UNION
BY THE NUMBERS CITY HALL FUEL CELL500-1000
Thousands of dollars in energy costs the city expects to save throughout its 10-year lease period as a result of the fuel cell.
66,000 Pounds the fuel cell weighs.
60% Portion of heating the fuel cell will provide for City Hall and the Hall of Records.
30% Portion of cooling the fuel cell will provide for City Hall and the Hall of Records.
EARL LEE/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
City Hall and the Hall of Recrods will now be powered by an environmentally-friendly fuel cell manufactured by UTC Power.
Green energy to power City Hall
Synder engages students over teaBY DANIEL SISGOREO
STAFF REPORTER
Throughout his inaugural year as School of Management dean, Edward Snyder has welcomed small groups of students into his o!ce over breakfast or tea.
In an effort to address stu-dent concerns and get to know the school’s student body, Sny-der has hosted informal 10-per-son meetings since the start of the fall. Snyder said the meetings are designed to help him gauge the pulse of the school as he embarks on several new projects, such as building partnerships with inter-national business schools, and give students information about administrative proceedings. Stu-dents who have attended the meetings say they appreciate see-ing Snyder’s interest in meet-ingthem and having the opportu-nity to share thoughts about the future of their young and devel-oping business school.
Before coming to Yale, Snyder served as dean of the University of Chicago’s business school — a school known for placing empha-sis on consulting and finance. Yale has traditionally attracted students interested in the public sector or in nonprofit work.
Michael Gitner SOM ’13, who attended one of the meetings, said he was curious to hear how Snyder plans to adapt his previ-ous experience to Yale’s business school philosophy.
“He came from Chicago, which is a very di"erent business school than SOM in a lot of cultural aspects,” Gitner said. “I wanted to see whether he was buying into our culture, and if he thought that our culture was valuable.”
Since the first breakfast meet-ing in October, Snyder has met with approximately 40 of the school’s roughly 450 MBA stu-dents over the course of four gatherings. At those meetings, discussions have included Sny-der’s travels, SOM’s reputation and student life concerns.
“I like conversations on that scale,” Snyder said. “Students have to know that I care about them and that I like them.”
While former SOM Dean Sha-ron Oster met all students pursu-ing Master of Business Admin-istration degrees when she co-taught “Basics of Economics,” a required class for all first-year MBA students, Snyder is not cur-rently teaching any classes and traveled extensively overseas on administrative business during his first semester. He said holding small meetings with students has helped him structure times for getting to know them.
The meetings have been extremely oversubscribed so far, said Samantha Piro SOM ’13, the SOM student government mem-ber who coordinates the meet-ings, with over 80 students regis-tering for the past three meetings. Students are admitted by lottery, she said, with five slots reserved for first-year students and five for second-year students.
The meetings are informal and guided entirely by students’ questions, Snyder said.
“It was a mix of first- and sec-ond-years and [Snyder] really just kind of said, ‘You know, at the end of the day, we’re really both new here,’” Anna Grotberg ’08 SOM ’13 said. “He basically just asked us, ‘Do you know what’s going on? What can I tell you?’”
Sura Tilakawardane SOM ’13, who attended Snyder’s first
meeting in the fall, said he and the other attendees were curi-ous to hear about Snyder’s trav-els. After that initial meeting, Tilakawardane said Snyder sent an email update to students about the projects he worked on while abroad.
Five students who have attended the meetings said the open format allowed them to raise concerns about problems they have noticed at SOM and ask about Snyder’s goals moving for-ward.
Jason Harp SOM ’12 said he
thinks Snyder’s transparency will help him transition smoothly into the deanship. Oster held simi-lar meetings during her tenure. He added that in his experience, the questions that students asked Oster focused on her, but the breakfast meeting Harp attended with Snyder seemed to focus more in his plans for the school.
Snyder took office this fall, after a yearlong sabbatical.
School of Management Dean Edward Synder has been holding informal meetings to share his vision for the school with students.
BY SHARON YINSTAFF REPORTER
The Yale University Press will likely make the Stalin Digital Archive, which will contain more than 28,000 documents related to former Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, available for pur-chase by this summer, according to John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press.
The project is the culmination of over 20 years of collaboration between Yale University Press and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI). David Schi"man, Yale University Press director of digital publish-ing, said students and faculty will gain access to the archive for free since Yale University Press pro-vides all publications to Yale Uni-versity Library.
“The main goal is to provide students and scholars access to the very important set of primary sources without the need to travel to Moscow,” Donatich said. “It is a new way of doing research made possible by the rapid development of digital tools that did not exist even 10 years ago.”
The archive includes Stalin’s personal papers, letters and private notes in the margins of various books, in addition to documents related to his work in government and foreign affairs, Schiffman said, comparing it to a presiden-tial library.
Though discussions about exploring and digitizing the Stalin papers began around 2005, and a formal agreement to digitize them was signed in 2009, the Stalin Dig-ital Archive is the result of a much longer relationship, Donatich said.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Yale University
Press began working with RGASPI to create the Annals of Commu-nism, a series of 25 volumes about the history of Soviet and inter-national communism. When the Stalin papers were declassified, RGASPI approached Yale Univer-sity Press with a proposal to digi-tize the documents, Donatich said.
The Annals of Communism series will be included in the Sta-lin Digital Archive, according to a YUP press release.
University Librarian Susan Gib-bons, who has seen several dem-onstrations of the archive and is a member of the Yale University Press Board of Governors, said the archive includes social media tools to allow researchers to interact and discuss the archive’s materials.
“The Stalin Digital Archive is not the digital equivalent of a tra-ditional book,” Gibbons said.
Though Tatjana Lorkovic, Slavic and East European Collec-tions curator at the Yale Univer-sity Library, said she believes the Stalin Digital Archive is not “com-plete,” she said the information is “very useful” for students and fac-ulty searching for primary source materials.
John MacKay and Vladimir Alexandrov, Slavic Languages and Literatures professors, added that the period of Soviet history cov-ered by the archive had far-reach-ing e"ects on the rest of the world, making it an important resource for researchers.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foun-dation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Carnegie Cor-poration of New York were among donors to the project.
8.3 Percentage of U.S. population with diabetes The American Diabetes Association reports that 25.8 million adults and children in the United States, or 8.3 percent of the nation’s population, su!er from diabetes.
CROSS CAMPUSTHE BLOG. THE BUZZ AROUND YALE THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
cc.yaledailynews.com
BY MARIANA LOPEZ-ROSASSTAFF REPORTER
After almost 15 years of research, Yale scientists have found that diabe-tes causes substantive non-medical consequences.
In a study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Health Affairs, researchers from the School of Pub-lic Health found that people suffer-ing from diabetes face significant non-medical consequences, includ-ing higher high school dropout rates and lower employment rates. These findings could influence future pub-lic health policies and clinical prac-tices related to diabetes, the study’s authors said.
“Our results highlight two rela-tively understudied aspects of diabe-tes — its educational consequences and the fact that they accumulate as early as adolescence and young adult-hood,” said Jason Fletcher, professor at the School of Public Health and the study’s lead author.
The report states that the high school dropout rate for young adults with diabetes is 6 percent higher than with those without the disease. The team also found that on average a per-son with diabetes earns $160,000 less than a person without diabetes over the course of his or her working life. By age 30, people with diabetes are 10 percent less likely to be employed than their peers without diabetes. The study does not distinguish between Type I and Type II diabetes, Fletcher said.
The researchers tracked 15,000 young people over a period of 14 years — from their high school years to their mid-30s — before arriving at these conclusions. Fletcher said that the non-medical consequences of dia-betes, mainly its educational conse-quences, are not commonly studied.
Meredith Hawkins, a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medi-cine in the Bronx, N.Y., who heard the authors present their work at the
publication’s release conference, said the trends found by the study could have been a result of its subjects’ dif-ficult economic and social situations — which may have made them more likely to become diabetic — rather than the disease itself.
Fletcher said that although there might be factors other than diabetes to account for their results, the team’s research was limited to examination of patients with similar health back-grounds who attended the same high school, minimizing the effect of other factors.
“Our findings suggest that researchers, clinicians and pol-icy makers may need to consider the early, non-medical consequences of diabetes in constructing new policies and clinical practice,” said Michael Richards SPH ’16, one of the paper’s authors.
Approximately 16 percent of the New Haven population has diabe-tes, according to a 2009 survey con-ducted by the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement at the School of Public Health and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation.
Our results highlight two relatively understudied aspects of diabetes — its educational consequences and the fact that they accumulate as early as adolescence.
JASON FLETCHERProfessor, School of Public Health
FIRST SNOWFALL OF WINTER
KAMARIA GREENFIELD/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
WINTRY WEATHER LIGHTS UP CAMPUSThe Elm City got its first true taste of winter as snow, sleet and freezing rain fell throughout the Northeast. While the storm, which dropped less than an inch of snow in New Haven Monday night, drew many students to the outdoors to play in the snow, the snow was expected to turn into rain by Tuesday morning.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGYLEAKSFROM THE
LABNot as bad as smoking, study finds“So what we smoke weed?”: Wiz Khal-ifa, a rapper from Pittsburgh, now has science to validate his question. Smok-ing marijuana may not be as harmful as smoking cigarettes, according to a study released last week by the Journal of the American Medical Association. In an analysis of 20-years of data from more than 5,000 men and women, researchers concluded that the ‘occasional’ joint may actually increase lung capacity and air flow. Yale School of Medicine assistant professor Jeanette Tetrault commented that the study doesn’t “really paint the entire picture of the potential e!ects of marijuana on the lungs”.
-Jacqueline Sahlberg
Racial education gapRegardless of their income, black school chil-dren, especially boys, receive less atten-tion, harsher punishments and lower grades than white school children, a recent study by the Yale Child Study Center said. Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advance-ment Project, said in an interview that one of the reasons for these numbers is the per-ception of black boys that teachers carry into their classrooms. Rather than suspend-ing or even arresting these children for mis-behavior at school, she said that they should receive support from parents, counsel-ors and teachers. “We need to put common sense back into the school codes,” she said.
-Jacqueline Sahlberg
Unpublished scientific studies stack upDo researchers who are given funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) actually have to publish their findings? Joseph Ross GRD ’06, assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale, led a study focused on the topic of unpublished evidence. The study, which used projects registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, a trial registry and results database maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, found that less than half of NIH funded trials were published in a peer reviewed journal.
-Mohammad Salhut
Just about everyone should jog moreExercise is not just beneficial for your looks, but your health too. Thomas Gill, a profes-sor at the Yale School of Medicine, led a study which found that people who have chronic conditions, women, those who are hospital-ized, and people who lack physical activity are most likely to develop a disability in their later years. Gill’s research team also found that an illness, injury or other potential causes of disability which cause hospitalization can increase by six times the likelihood of an indi-vidual being disabled in their old age.
“Every night, I have to read a book so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.” BRITNEY SPEARS RECORDING ARTIST
BY CYNTHIA HUASTAFF REPORTER
A recent report from ProPublica revealed that the frequency of autopsies in the United States has declined over the past century. What was once a typical hospital proce-dure is conducted on only 5 per-cent of patients today. The News sat down with John Sinard, director of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s autopsy service, to discuss the implications of this trend.
QDr. Sinard, could you give us some background on the issue
— how long have autopsy rates been decreasing, and why is this happen-ing?
AAutopsy rates in the United States in general have been
decreasing since around the 1950s. The most commonly cited reason is that autopsies aren’t as necessary as they used to be. With all the new imaging technology, the percep-tion is that we already know what is wrong by the time the patient dies. A number of studies however have shown this is not the case. Typically in 40 to 50 percent of autopsies, something is clarified or found that was not clinically known prior to the
patient’s death.
QWhat can an autopsy reveal?
AAutopsies are not like they are often portrayed on TV. The
autopsy is an anatomic examina-tion. It can address anatomic causes of death, such as infectious diseases, and it can determine the extent of disease, such as in the case of cancer. What it can’t do is identify physio-logical causes of death such as car-diac arrhythmia or a seizure.
AAlso, in hospital autopsies, we don’t do the types of expensive
pharmacological work that would be done for forensic autopsies. Occasionally we have families who request an autopsy because they’re concerned a patient has received too much of a drug, either in the hos-pital or in the nursing home, and an autopsy isn’t going to be able to answer those questions. It’s impor-tant not to confuse hospital autop-sies with forensic autopsies; foren-sic autopsy rates in comparison have remained steady.
QIn your opinion, under what cir-cumstances would an autopsy be
beneficial?
AThere are some cases where it’s particularly recommended:
if there’s uncertainty as to why the patient is dead, if it’s not clear where and how extensive cancer was at the time of death or if there’s any sus-picion that the patient may be suf-fering from a hereditary disease. Even an autopsy that finds nothing unexpected could be comforting for the family so they know patient was treated correctly.
QDo autopsies benefit medical research?
AIn general, the autopsies can be a source of tissue for medi-
cal research. Of course, when tissue is released for medical research from an autopsy, it’s always deidentified so researchers don’t know where the tissue came from. In general, over the years autopsies have helped in understanding the course of disease and why some tumors respond to certain therapies.
QHow often does Yale-New Haven Hospital conduct autopsies?
AWe do approximately 220 a year. For this last year, 13.5 percent
of hospital deaths were autopsied, but that’s not just Yale-New Haven
Hospital deaths – it also includes patients from other hospitals in the areas or patients who died outside of the hospital.
QIn addition to changes in medical practice, are there also financial
reasons for this decrease?
AFrom a financial perspec-tive, families are not typically
charged for autopsies. Insurance companies don’t pay for autopsies because they are included in qual-ity assurance payments to hospitals. The hospitals get these payments regardless and so have no financial incentives to do autopsies.
Q Do you believe autopsies are worth the cost?
AWhen one considers the cost of medical care, I think that
the autopsy is a great way to assess the care that a patient received and to a certain extent the appropriate-ness of that care. On a cost-by-cost basis, it’s one the least expensive thing that can be done. It’s a high yield for a low financial cost.
Indoor tanning may significantly increase the risk of developing early-onset skin cancer, a new Yale study has found.
A team of researchers from the Yale School of Public Health reported that individuals who used tanning beds at least once are at a 69 per-cent greater risk of developing basal cell carci-noma, the most common form of skin cancer, before the age of 40. The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of the Amer-ican Academy of Dermatology, found skin can-cer risk was correlated with frequency of tan-ning, and the e!ect was especially pronounced for women. Experts interviewed say that the study’s findings are unsurprising, given past research on the dangers of indoor tanning, but will still help raise public awareness of the issue.
“This study, in combination with the research done on melanoma, reinforces how dangerous indoor tanning can be,” said Leah Ferucci GRD ’09, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “If we prevent the initiation of indoor tanning, we could prevent many, many cases of skin cancer.”
The researchers interviewed 376 community members under the age of 40 with a history of basal cell carcinoma and 390 with no history of the disease. Each participant provided infor-mation on how frequently they visited tanning salons, as well as their age of initiation, dura-tion, and history of burns while tanning.
An increase of any of these factors was asso-ciated with elevated risk of developing BCC. For example, participants who had reported visiting tanning beds for at least six years were twice as likely to develop the disease as those who had never tanned indoors. Additionally, indoor tanning was associated with lesions in areas that sunlight would not normally reach, such as the limbs and trunk area, while natu-rally occuring lesions are generally found on the face or neck.
The cancer manifests itself as mole-sized skin lesions that are rarely fatal but costly to remove. Treatment costs can often be stagger-ing, as people diagnosed with the disease often develop more than one lesion. Ferucci said that one-quarter of early-onset BCC could be pre-vented if the threat of indoor tanning was elim-inated.
Women in the study were much more likely
to report having visited tanning salons, and they were found to be twice as likely to develop BCC after a single indoor tanning session. A strong association was not found in men, though this does not necessarily suggest that men are immune to tanning-related skin can-cer, as the population of tanning males was too low to find a significant result, Ferucci said.
Alan Fleischer, professor of dermatology at the Wake Forest Baptist Health Center, said that although the results did not shed new light on the issue, they can nevertheless help focus the public’s attention on the dangers of indoor tanning.
“Knowledge by itself is generally ine!ec-tive in changing behavior, but knowledge is required to e!ect change,” Fleischer said.
Recent data show that instances of BCC are on the rise, with 1 million cases reported in the United States each year — a 300 percent increase since 1994, according to a recent arti-cle in the journal Archives of Dermatology.
The public’s perception of the desirability and safety of tanning — be it indoors or out-doors — must be changed in order to decrease future instances of skin cancer, Fleischer said. He explained that too many Americans wrongly believe that burns are dangerous and
that burn-free tanning carries no risks. In fact, he said, all ultraviolet light exposure carries a risk of cancer.
Tanning salons are especially important to public health experts because people are more likely to make indoor tanning a part of their routine than outdoor tanning, said Bryon Adi-no!, professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Veteran’s Association North Texas Health Care System. For example, approximately 30 million Americans tan indoors each year, but on any given day, 1 million will visit a tanning salon.
The desire to frequent tanning beds may be driven by motives other than the appeal of a tanned complexion, Adino! said, because ultraviolet light rays have the potential to become addictive. Adinoff’s research shows that exposure to the light activates areas in the brain associated with drug addiction.
“It would explain why people continue to frequent indoor tanning salons despite known risks such as skin cancer,” Adino! said.
Seventy percent of early-onset basal cell carcinomas occur in females.
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
Ten cents is the wrong answer, but don’t feel too bad if that was the answer that came to mind: more than half of more than 3,000 college stu-dents selected that option, according to Shane Frederick, an associate professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, who designed the question in 2005 to test the ability of sub-jects to think rationally despite incorrect intu-itions. The high portion of subjects that select the wrong answer illustrates one of the main findings in contemporary behavioral studies, humanity’s frequent irrationality, said Frederick. Research-ers at the Yale School of Management, including Frederick, are at the forefront of the growing field of behavioral economics, which studies the often irrational nature with which people make eco-nomic decisions.
Frederick recently completed a roughly nine-year project, which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research in June 2012, in which he is the first researcher to show what he calls the “X e!ect” — that humans overestimate by an aver-age of 40 percent how much other people will pay for items ranging from a box of gourmet choco-lates to a pill that would increase one’s height by two inches. For example, the average person said they would only pay $191 for a pill to gain two inches of height, but that other people would spend $895. While Frederick said there is little doubt that the “X e!ect” exists, he said he was frustrated that it was so “stunningly di"cult” to figure out why people commit this error.
Drazen Prelec, a professor of management sci-ence and economics at MIT, said he knew the “X e!ect” as the “Shane e!ect” when Frederick was an assistant professor of management science at
MIT from 2002 to 2008, and praised the article for how it dealt with the lack of a definite expla-nation for the e!ect.
“What’s really special about this article is that it almost reads like a mystery story, and the mystery is why do people have this illusion,” Prelec said. “The article goes through one sus-pect explanation after another and more or less dismisses every one. We [only have] some clues about what might be the explanation.”
Others experts in the field found the lack of a definite conclusion more frustrating than Prelec did. Joachim Krueger, a professor of psychology at Brown University, said that while the article describes a “beautiful phenomenon,” its ulti-mate failure to propose a reason for the bias was “anticlimactic.”
Frederick said one of the possible reasons for the bias could be what his article calls “Asym-metric Salience of Expressions of Liking and Disliking.” In other words, individuals only see the people waiting in line for co!ee at Starbucks and not those who go elsewhere for their ca!eine drinks, causing the observers to overestimate the percentage of people who would pay $4 for a cup of co!ee.
Both Prelec and Frederick also identified the paper as having important practical implications in business negotiations.
“This is an important finding in itself, namely that in negotiations if people think that other people are willing to pay more, when someone is giving you their honest estimate, you will not believe them,” Prelec said.
Frederick’s paper is an example of behavioral economics challenging classical economic the-ory’s assumption that humans are capable of unlimited rational thought. In the second half of the 20th century, the concept of bounded rationality — that individuals are unable to con-sider all of the relevant information when mak-ing decisions — began to challenge the classi-cal assumption of total rationality, according to Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and mar-keting at the Yale School of Management. These first advances in behavioral economics came not from economists but from psychologists who identified the common biases and heuristics that humans use to make decisions under pressure.
“Behavioral economics is just an attempt to make our models of economic behavior psy-chologically more realistic,” said Nicholas Bar-beris, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management. “We hope that by doing so we can understand the world better and make smarter predictions about how the world works.”
Researchers at the Yale School of Management focus not only on behavioral economics, but also in the related fields of behavioral finance, which studies how people invest, and behavioral deci-sion theory, a more abstract study of decision making. Both Dhar and Frederick attribute the strength of overall behavior sciences research at the School of Management to the presence of this range of disciplines.
“If you pool across several departments — finance, organizational behavior, marketing, economics — I think it’s arguably the best in the world,” Frederick said. “[We have] the strongest group of behavioral people in many disciplines.”
Echoing Frederick, Prelec said that the School of Management features one of the world’s best groups of behavioral economics researchers.
Barbaris said that behavioral research at the School of Management has taken o! in recent years thanks in part by a $1.6 million donation by Yale alum Andrew Redleaf ’78 in 2004. All of the Yale faculty interviewed for this article have either recently completed or are currently under-taking research.
Apart from facilitating behavioral economics research, the Yale School of Management o!ers related courses open to undergraduate students, including “Foundations of Behavioral Econom-ics,” which Frederick teaches.
A team of researchers from the Yale School of Public Health has found a link between early-onset skin cancer and indoor tanning.
BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERGSTAFF REPORTER
A new Yale study shows that stress can reduce brain volume and function, even in otherwise healthy individuals.
Researchers from the Yale Stress Cen-ter analyzed the effect of experiencing stressful life events. The study, published Jan. 5 in the journal Biological Psychia-try, concluded that stress can decrease the amount of gray matter in the brain and make it more di"cult for people to manage stressful situations in the future. It also may aid e!orts to prevent stress-related disorders through screening and vigilance.
According to Rajita Sinha, program director for the Yale Stress Center and professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, the study is unique in ana-lyzing a healthy human population. While past studies have demonstrated that stress reduces brain volume in animals and psychiatric samples of patients, Sinha said that the study is the first to show the impact of cumulative stress on the brain in otherwise healthy subjects.
Study candidates completed psychiat-ric and physical health assessments that prescreened the population for substance abuse and head injuries, among other fac-tors. Each of the 103 healthy participants then participated in a cumulative adver-sity interview that estimated the degree of stress in their life through questions
about “traumatic” and “recent” occur-rences, such as as parental divorces and financial crises.
Researchers compared the results of the interview to magnetic resonance imaging scans of participants’ brains and deter-mined that higher levels of cumulative stress were associated with less gray mat-ter in the prefrontal cortex.
“We found that the accumulation of stressful life events was affecting key regions of the brain,” said Emily Ansell, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the study. “These key regions are the regions we believe regulate our emotions, help us control our impulses and help us process our daily experience. They also control our physiology. These regions have implications for long-term health.”
Researchers also determined that the changes in brain volume can serve as warning signs for future mental and social disorders, and chronic diseases. Sinha said that because the reductions in gray matter impair brain function, the body is less pre-pared to respond to stressful situations.
Sinha stated that the study may help in preventative treatment for stress-related disorders, such as depression and drug addiction. In the same way that doctors can treat people with high insulin levels to prevent diabetes, Sinha said that the study could enable doctors to monitor patients at risk for stress-related disorders.
“It’s di"cult to think of any disease in
which stress cannot play an aggravating or causative role,” Paul Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress, wrote in an email to the News.
Rosch added that the paper confirmed previous studies on the negative e!ects stress has on the prefrontal cortex.
Bruce Compas, professor of psychol-ogy at Vanderbilt University, said that anything that leads to a reduction in the number of connections between neurons, such as a decrease in gray matter, hurts the brain’s ability to store information and respond quickly to the environment. He also commended both the design and measurements of the study.
“So much of the function of di!erent organ systems is really related to what we do to ourselves, to our behavior and the choices we make.” said Sinha. “This is very exciting to us and to the field because it opens up testing and interventions for brain-related disorders.”
Sinha and her fellow researchers at the Yale Stress Center are now looking to find potential moderators that could poten-tially reduce the negative e!ects of cumu-lative stress on the brain.
Thirty-nine percent of Americans report that their stress level has increased over the past year, according to a report released by the American Psychological Association on Jan. 11, 2012.
Stress has deleterious e!ects on brain function even in healthy individuals, a new study by researchers at the Yale Stress Center shows.
YALE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
John Sinard directs Yale-New Haven Hospital’s autopsy service.
Indoor tanning linked to skin cancerBehavioral econ research flourishing at SOM
SHANE FEDERICK AND YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT A new School of Management study illustrates the irrational manner in which most people make economic decisions.
Stress causes brain shrinkage Autopsy director discusses falling rates
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
The field of behavioral economics challenges the classical economics assumption that humans are rational decision makers. Incorporating insights from both economics and psychology, behavioral econom-ics seeks to uncover the hidden heuristics and biases that shape our decisions. Below are a few examples of the most important concepts of behavioral eco-nomics as well as studies that support the findings.
ANCHORING Humans incorporate arbitrary figures, or “anchors,” when making decisions.
STUDY In a study at MIT, students bid on a range of items in an auction from $1 to $99 dollars. Before placing bids, they recorded the last two digits of their social security numbers on the bid sheet. Those students with higher numbers bid higher, and those with lower digits recorded on their sheets bid lower; for instance, when bidding for a cordless keyboard, those students with social security numbers ending between 80-99 bid an average of $55.64 while those ending between 00-19 bid $16.09 on average.
FRAMING A given situation can be described, or “framed,” in di!erent ways and elicit very di!erent decisions.
STUDY In a 1981 study, participants were asked to consider the following two responses to a disease that e!ects 600 people. In scenario A, participants could either save 200 people for sure or have a 1/3 chance of saving 600 and a 2/3 chance of saving none. In scenario B, participants could either let 400 people die for sure or have a 1/3 chance that nobody will die and a 2/3 chance that 600 people will die. Even though both “for sure” situations are equivalent and both gamble situations are the same, most participants in scenario A chose the “for sure” option while most participants in scenario B chose the “gamble.”
LABNot as bad as smoking, study finds“So what we smoke weed?”: Wiz Khal-ifa, a rapper from Pittsburgh, now has science to validate his question. Smok-ing marijuana may not be as harmful as smoking cigarettes, according to a study released last week by the Journal of the American Medical Association. In an analysis of 20-years of data from more than 5,000 men and women, researchers concluded that the ‘occasional’ joint may actually increase lung capacity and air flow. Yale School of Medicine assistant professor Jeanette Tetrault commented that the study doesn’t “really paint the entire picture of the potential e!ects of marijuana on the lungs”.
-Jacqueline Sahlberg
Racial education gapRegardless of their income, black school chil-dren, especially boys, receive less atten-tion, harsher punishments and lower grades than white school children, a recent study by the Yale Child Study Center said. Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advance-ment Project, said in an interview that one of the reasons for these numbers is the per-ception of black boys that teachers carry into their classrooms. Rather than suspend-ing or even arresting these children for mis-behavior at school, she said that they should receive support from parents, counsel-ors and teachers. “We need to put common sense back into the school codes,” she said.
-Jacqueline Sahlberg
Unpublished scientific studies stack upDo researchers who are given funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) actually have to publish their findings? Joseph Ross GRD ’06, assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale, led a study focused on the topic of unpublished evidence. The study, which used projects registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, a trial registry and results database maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, found that less than half of NIH funded trials were published in a peer reviewed journal.
-Mohammad Salhut
Just about everyone should jog moreExercise is not just beneficial for your looks, but your health too. Thomas Gill, a profes-sor at the Yale School of Medicine, led a study which found that people who have chronic conditions, women, those who are hospital-ized, and people who lack physical activity are most likely to develop a disability in their later years. Gill’s research team also found that an illness, injury or other potential causes of disability which cause hospitalization can increase by six times the likelihood of an indi-vidual being disabled in their old age.
“Every night, I have to read a book so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.” BRITNEY SPEARS RECORDING ARTIST
BY CYNTHIA HUASTAFF REPORTER
A recent report from ProPublica revealed that the frequency of autopsies in the United States has declined over the past century. What was once a typical hospital proce-dure is conducted on only 5 per-cent of patients today. The News sat down with John Sinard, director of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s autopsy service, to discuss the implications of this trend.
QDr. Sinard, could you give us some background on the issue
— how long have autopsy rates been decreasing, and why is this happen-ing?
AAutopsy rates in the United States in general have been
decreasing since around the 1950s. The most commonly cited reason is that autopsies aren’t as necessary as they used to be. With all the new imaging technology, the percep-tion is that we already know what is wrong by the time the patient dies. A number of studies however have shown this is not the case. Typically in 40 to 50 percent of autopsies, something is clarified or found that was not clinically known prior to the
patient’s death.
QWhat can an autopsy reveal?
AAutopsies are not like they are often portrayed on TV. The
autopsy is an anatomic examina-tion. It can address anatomic causes of death, such as infectious diseases, and it can determine the extent of disease, such as in the case of cancer. What it can’t do is identify physio-logical causes of death such as car-diac arrhythmia or a seizure.
AAlso, in hospital autopsies, we don’t do the types of expensive
pharmacological work that would be done for forensic autopsies. Occasionally we have families who request an autopsy because they’re concerned a patient has received too much of a drug, either in the hos-pital or in the nursing home, and an autopsy isn’t going to be able to answer those questions. It’s impor-tant not to confuse hospital autop-sies with forensic autopsies; foren-sic autopsy rates in comparison have remained steady.
QIn your opinion, under what cir-cumstances would an autopsy be
beneficial?
AThere are some cases where it’s particularly recommended:
if there’s uncertainty as to why the patient is dead, if it’s not clear where and how extensive cancer was at the time of death or if there’s any sus-picion that the patient may be suf-fering from a hereditary disease. Even an autopsy that finds nothing unexpected could be comforting for the family so they know patient was treated correctly.
QDo autopsies benefit medical research?
AIn general, the autopsies can be a source of tissue for medi-
cal research. Of course, when tissue is released for medical research from an autopsy, it’s always deidentified so researchers don’t know where the tissue came from. In general, over the years autopsies have helped in understanding the course of disease and why some tumors respond to certain therapies.
QHow often does Yale-New Haven Hospital conduct autopsies?
AWe do approximately 220 a year. For this last year, 13.5 percent
of hospital deaths were autopsied, but that’s not just Yale-New Haven
Hospital deaths – it also includes patients from other hospitals in the areas or patients who died outside of the hospital.
QIn addition to changes in medical practice, are there also financial
reasons for this decrease?
AFrom a financial perspec-tive, families are not typically
charged for autopsies. Insurance companies don’t pay for autopsies because they are included in qual-ity assurance payments to hospitals. The hospitals get these payments regardless and so have no financial incentives to do autopsies.
Q Do you believe autopsies are worth the cost?
AWhen one considers the cost of medical care, I think that
the autopsy is a great way to assess the care that a patient received and to a certain extent the appropriate-ness of that care. On a cost-by-cost basis, it’s one the least expensive thing that can be done. It’s a high yield for a low financial cost.
Indoor tanning may significantly increase the risk of developing early-onset skin cancer, a new Yale study has found.
A team of researchers from the Yale School of Public Health reported that individuals who used tanning beds at least once are at a 69 per-cent greater risk of developing basal cell carci-noma, the most common form of skin cancer, before the age of 40. The study, published in the December issue of the Journal of the Amer-ican Academy of Dermatology, found skin can-cer risk was correlated with frequency of tan-ning, and the e!ect was especially pronounced for women. Experts interviewed say that the study’s findings are unsurprising, given past research on the dangers of indoor tanning, but will still help raise public awareness of the issue.
“This study, in combination with the research done on melanoma, reinforces how dangerous indoor tanning can be,” said Leah Ferucci GRD ’09, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “If we prevent the initiation of indoor tanning, we could prevent many, many cases of skin cancer.”
The researchers interviewed 376 community members under the age of 40 with a history of basal cell carcinoma and 390 with no history of the disease. Each participant provided infor-mation on how frequently they visited tanning salons, as well as their age of initiation, dura-tion, and history of burns while tanning.
An increase of any of these factors was asso-ciated with elevated risk of developing BCC. For example, participants who had reported visiting tanning beds for at least six years were twice as likely to develop the disease as those who had never tanned indoors. Additionally, indoor tanning was associated with lesions in areas that sunlight would not normally reach, such as the limbs and trunk area, while natu-rally occuring lesions are generally found on the face or neck.
The cancer manifests itself as mole-sized skin lesions that are rarely fatal but costly to remove. Treatment costs can often be stagger-ing, as people diagnosed with the disease often develop more than one lesion. Ferucci said that one-quarter of early-onset BCC could be pre-vented if the threat of indoor tanning was elim-inated.
Women in the study were much more likely
to report having visited tanning salons, and they were found to be twice as likely to develop BCC after a single indoor tanning session. A strong association was not found in men, though this does not necessarily suggest that men are immune to tanning-related skin can-cer, as the population of tanning males was too low to find a significant result, Ferucci said.
Alan Fleischer, professor of dermatology at the Wake Forest Baptist Health Center, said that although the results did not shed new light on the issue, they can nevertheless help focus the public’s attention on the dangers of indoor tanning.
“Knowledge by itself is generally ine!ec-tive in changing behavior, but knowledge is required to e!ect change,” Fleischer said.
Recent data show that instances of BCC are on the rise, with 1 million cases reported in the United States each year — a 300 percent increase since 1994, according to a recent arti-cle in the journal Archives of Dermatology.
The public’s perception of the desirability and safety of tanning — be it indoors or out-doors — must be changed in order to decrease future instances of skin cancer, Fleischer said. He explained that too many Americans wrongly believe that burns are dangerous and
that burn-free tanning carries no risks. In fact, he said, all ultraviolet light exposure carries a risk of cancer.
Tanning salons are especially important to public health experts because people are more likely to make indoor tanning a part of their routine than outdoor tanning, said Bryon Adi-no!, professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Veteran’s Association North Texas Health Care System. For example, approximately 30 million Americans tan indoors each year, but on any given day, 1 million will visit a tanning salon.
The desire to frequent tanning beds may be driven by motives other than the appeal of a tanned complexion, Adino! said, because ultraviolet light rays have the potential to become addictive. Adinoff’s research shows that exposure to the light activates areas in the brain associated with drug addiction.
“It would explain why people continue to frequent indoor tanning salons despite known risks such as skin cancer,” Adino! said.
Seventy percent of early-onset basal cell carcinomas occur in females.
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
Ten cents is the wrong answer, but don’t feel too bad if that was the answer that came to mind: more than half of more than 3,000 college stu-dents selected that option, according to Shane Frederick, an associate professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, who designed the question in 2005 to test the ability of sub-jects to think rationally despite incorrect intu-itions. The high portion of subjects that select the wrong answer illustrates one of the main findings in contemporary behavioral studies, humanity’s frequent irrationality, said Frederick. Research-ers at the Yale School of Management, including Frederick, are at the forefront of the growing field of behavioral economics, which studies the often irrational nature with which people make eco-nomic decisions.
Frederick recently completed a roughly nine-year project, which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research in June 2012, in which he is the first researcher to show what he calls the “X e!ect” — that humans overestimate by an aver-age of 40 percent how much other people will pay for items ranging from a box of gourmet choco-lates to a pill that would increase one’s height by two inches. For example, the average person said they would only pay $191 for a pill to gain two inches of height, but that other people would spend $895. While Frederick said there is little doubt that the “X e!ect” exists, he said he was frustrated that it was so “stunningly di"cult” to figure out why people commit this error.
Drazen Prelec, a professor of management sci-ence and economics at MIT, said he knew the “X e!ect” as the “Shane e!ect” when Frederick was an assistant professor of management science at
MIT from 2002 to 2008, and praised the article for how it dealt with the lack of a definite expla-nation for the e!ect.
“What’s really special about this article is that it almost reads like a mystery story, and the mystery is why do people have this illusion,” Prelec said. “The article goes through one sus-pect explanation after another and more or less dismisses every one. We [only have] some clues about what might be the explanation.”
Others experts in the field found the lack of a definite conclusion more frustrating than Prelec did. Joachim Krueger, a professor of psychology at Brown University, said that while the article describes a “beautiful phenomenon,” its ulti-mate failure to propose a reason for the bias was “anticlimactic.”
Frederick said one of the possible reasons for the bias could be what his article calls “Asym-metric Salience of Expressions of Liking and Disliking.” In other words, individuals only see the people waiting in line for co!ee at Starbucks and not those who go elsewhere for their ca!eine drinks, causing the observers to overestimate the percentage of people who would pay $4 for a cup of co!ee.
Both Prelec and Frederick also identified the paper as having important practical implications in business negotiations.
“This is an important finding in itself, namely that in negotiations if people think that other people are willing to pay more, when someone is giving you their honest estimate, you will not believe them,” Prelec said.
Frederick’s paper is an example of behavioral economics challenging classical economic the-ory’s assumption that humans are capable of unlimited rational thought. In the second half of the 20th century, the concept of bounded rationality — that individuals are unable to con-sider all of the relevant information when mak-ing decisions — began to challenge the classi-cal assumption of total rationality, according to Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and mar-keting at the Yale School of Management. These first advances in behavioral economics came not from economists but from psychologists who identified the common biases and heuristics that humans use to make decisions under pressure.
“Behavioral economics is just an attempt to make our models of economic behavior psy-chologically more realistic,” said Nicholas Bar-beris, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management. “We hope that by doing so we can understand the world better and make smarter predictions about how the world works.”
Researchers at the Yale School of Management focus not only on behavioral economics, but also in the related fields of behavioral finance, which studies how people invest, and behavioral deci-sion theory, a more abstract study of decision making. Both Dhar and Frederick attribute the strength of overall behavior sciences research at the School of Management to the presence of this range of disciplines.
“If you pool across several departments — finance, organizational behavior, marketing, economics — I think it’s arguably the best in the world,” Frederick said. “[We have] the strongest group of behavioral people in many disciplines.”
Echoing Frederick, Prelec said that the School of Management features one of the world’s best groups of behavioral economics researchers.
Barbaris said that behavioral research at the School of Management has taken o! in recent years thanks in part by a $1.6 million donation by Yale alum Andrew Redleaf ’78 in 2004. All of the Yale faculty interviewed for this article have either recently completed or are currently under-taking research.
Apart from facilitating behavioral economics research, the Yale School of Management o!ers related courses open to undergraduate students, including “Foundations of Behavioral Econom-ics,” which Frederick teaches.
A team of researchers from the Yale School of Public Health has found a link between early-onset skin cancer and indoor tanning.
BY JACQUELINE SAHLBERGSTAFF REPORTER
A new Yale study shows that stress can reduce brain volume and function, even in otherwise healthy individuals.
Researchers from the Yale Stress Cen-ter analyzed the effect of experiencing stressful life events. The study, published Jan. 5 in the journal Biological Psychia-try, concluded that stress can decrease the amount of gray matter in the brain and make it more di"cult for people to manage stressful situations in the future. It also may aid e!orts to prevent stress-related disorders through screening and vigilance.
According to Rajita Sinha, program director for the Yale Stress Center and professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, the study is unique in ana-lyzing a healthy human population. While past studies have demonstrated that stress reduces brain volume in animals and psychiatric samples of patients, Sinha said that the study is the first to show the impact of cumulative stress on the brain in otherwise healthy subjects.
Study candidates completed psychiat-ric and physical health assessments that prescreened the population for substance abuse and head injuries, among other fac-tors. Each of the 103 healthy participants then participated in a cumulative adver-sity interview that estimated the degree of stress in their life through questions
about “traumatic” and “recent” occur-rences, such as as parental divorces and financial crises.
Researchers compared the results of the interview to magnetic resonance imaging scans of participants’ brains and deter-mined that higher levels of cumulative stress were associated with less gray mat-ter in the prefrontal cortex.
“We found that the accumulation of stressful life events was affecting key regions of the brain,” said Emily Ansell, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the study. “These key regions are the regions we believe regulate our emotions, help us control our impulses and help us process our daily experience. They also control our physiology. These regions have implications for long-term health.”
Researchers also determined that the changes in brain volume can serve as warning signs for future mental and social disorders, and chronic diseases. Sinha said that because the reductions in gray matter impair brain function, the body is less pre-pared to respond to stressful situations.
Sinha stated that the study may help in preventative treatment for stress-related disorders, such as depression and drug addiction. In the same way that doctors can treat people with high insulin levels to prevent diabetes, Sinha said that the study could enable doctors to monitor patients at risk for stress-related disorders.
“It’s di"cult to think of any disease in
which stress cannot play an aggravating or causative role,” Paul Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress, wrote in an email to the News.
Rosch added that the paper confirmed previous studies on the negative e!ects stress has on the prefrontal cortex.
Bruce Compas, professor of psychol-ogy at Vanderbilt University, said that anything that leads to a reduction in the number of connections between neurons, such as a decrease in gray matter, hurts the brain’s ability to store information and respond quickly to the environment. He also commended both the design and measurements of the study.
“So much of the function of di!erent organ systems is really related to what we do to ourselves, to our behavior and the choices we make.” said Sinha. “This is very exciting to us and to the field because it opens up testing and interventions for brain-related disorders.”
Sinha and her fellow researchers at the Yale Stress Center are now looking to find potential moderators that could poten-tially reduce the negative e!ects of cumu-lative stress on the brain.
Thirty-nine percent of Americans report that their stress level has increased over the past year, according to a report released by the American Psychological Association on Jan. 11, 2012.
Stress has deleterious e!ects on brain function even in healthy individuals, a new study by researchers at the Yale Stress Center shows.
YALE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
John Sinard directs Yale-New Haven Hospital’s autopsy service.
Indoor tanning linked to skin cancerBehavioral econ research flourishing at SOM
SHANE FEDERICK AND YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT A new School of Management study illustrates the irrational manner in which most people make economic decisions.
Stress causes brain shrinkage Autopsy director discusses falling rates
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
The field of behavioral economics challenges the classical economics assumption that humans are rational decision makers. Incorporating insights from both economics and psychology, behavioral econom-ics seeks to uncover the hidden heuristics and biases that shape our decisions. Below are a few examples of the most important concepts of behavioral eco-nomics as well as studies that support the findings.
ANCHORING Humans incorporate arbitrary figures, or “anchors,” when making decisions.
STUDY In a study at MIT, students bid on a range of items in an auction from $1 to $99 dollars. Before placing bids, they recorded the last two digits of their social security numbers on the bid sheet. Those students with higher numbers bid higher, and those with lower digits recorded on their sheets bid lower; for instance, when bidding for a cordless keyboard, those students with social security numbers ending between 80-99 bid an average of $55.64 while those ending between 00-19 bid $16.09 on average.
FRAMING A given situation can be described, or “framed,” in di!erent ways and elicit very di!erent decisions.
STUDY In a 1981 study, participants were asked to consider the following two responses to a disease that e!ects 600 people. In scenario A, participants could either save 200 people for sure or have a 1/3 chance of saving 600 and a 2/3 chance of saving none. In scenario B, participants could either let 400 people die for sure or have a 1/3 chance that nobody will die and a 2/3 chance that 600 people will die. Even though both “for sure” situations are equivalent and both gamble situations are the same, most participants in scenario A chose the “for sure” option while most participants in scenario B chose the “gamble.”
FROM THE FRONTPAGE 8 YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
125 Students accepted into Directed Studies Every year 125 lucky freshmen are accepted into the selective Directed Studies program, according to the program’s website.
But two liquor stores in New Haven — New Haven Wine & Liquor and the Grand Vin liquor store — told the News that Malloy’s proposal is misguided and will hurt small “mom and pop” retailers.
Chris Grandvin of the Grand Vin liquor store said that Connecti-cut stores are not losing business because of Sunday hours but instead because of prices. He said state reg-ulations governing the distribution and pricing of alcoholic beverages make liquor purchased in Connect-icut 20 to 30 percent more expensive than in border states.
“[Malloy] is lying to the pub-lic about this,” Grandvin said. “We can’t compete with Massachusetts or New York because of a state price structure — it has absolutely noth-ing to do with Sunday sales.”
Sunday liquor sale regulation has been debated in the Connecti-cut legislature for years, but politi-cal influence from the Connecticut Package Stores Association — the lobbying body that represents many state liquor stores — has thwarted past efforts.
Carroll Hughes, chief lobbyist for the CPSA, has stated previously that if similar legislation passed, market forces would push liquor stores to stay open seven days per week, cre-ating an undue fiscal and time bur-
den for retailers.Grandvin agreed, arguing that
Malloy’s proposed changes would effectively extend a six-day work week to a seven-day work week with no significant increase in foot traf-fic, leading to “the same amount of business but with more expenses.”
“[The proposed legislation] will only be advantageous for big liquor stores who have big pock-ets, and because of the price struc-ture, it’s going to kill small busi-ness,” Grandvin said. “It’s not going to help the small guy, and there are a lot of small guys struggling right now.”
Hughes said last year that Sunday sales would put an estimated 300 to 350 of the state’s 1,100 liquor stores out of business.
Malloy has dismissed this con-cern, pointing out that the proposed legislation would not require stores to sell liquor on Sundays but would give them the option to do so.
Grandvin said that the proposed changes stem from consumer con-venience and not the health of Connecticut businesses as Malloy claims.
“In this day and age convenience is everything — everyone wants immediate service,” Grandvin said.
Student reaction to Malloy’s pro-posal was mixed — of seven students interviewed, three said that the change would be convenient while
four said that they do not find the issue particularly important.
“I don’t think the [current law’s] repeal will have a big difference on my life,” said Paul Joo ’12. “I nor-mally get alcohol around twice a month, and I can generally expect when I want something on hand.”
Other students said allow-ing Sunday liquor sales would be a nice change and would make it eas-ier to schedule Sunday night social events.
The repeal has more public sup-port today than at any other point in the issue’s history, according to recent polling data. A March 2011 Quinnipiac University poll shows that Connecticut residents sup-port Sunday sales by a margin of 66 to 31 percent, up from 56 to 39 per-cent when similar legislation was debated last year.
A December 2009 study from the state’s General Assembly, titled “Connecticut’s Economic Compet-itiveness in Selected Areas,” con-cluded that Connecticut could col-lect an additional $2.5 to 3.1 million annually in excise tax revenue and approximately $5 million in added sales tax revenue if Sunday liquor sales were allowed — a total revenue increase of $7 to 8 million.
cover tuition costs.“The two programs are very dif-
ferent from a financial standpoint, but both will start students on a level playing field,” Crabbe said. “If they don’t want the schol-arship money, maybe because they’re uncertain if they want to make a career out of naval service or not, it’s a completely viable and respectable way to go.”
Students can apply for an ROTC scholarship as high school seniors, Crabbe said, and, if awarded the scholarship, must decide whether to accept the military’s assis-tance and longer term of service it requires.
University President Rich-ard Levin said Monday that the Yale administration had “detailed conversations” about financial aid with Naval officials over the summer. As Yale’s policy is need-based, Levin emphasized that stu-dents enrolled in the Naval ROTC program will get no less than their full need, regardless of who pro-vides the funding.
Still, military aid packages can bolster the financial support that Yale o!ers.
While there are no Naval ROTC midshipmen currently at Yale, Andrew Hendricks ’14, an Air Force ROTC cadet who commutes to the University of Connecticut’s program, said his military schol-arship made Yale a more realistic option.
“For me, personally, it was a big motivating factor, because my [Yale] financial aid package came in and it wasn’t that great, but the ROTC scholarship made Yale a lot more financially feasible,” he said.
Hendricks said most ROTC cadets he knows applied for and received a military scholarship, though he added that accepting the ROTC scholarship decreased his financial aid package from Yale.
Crabbe noted that accepting an ROTC scholarship does not bind students to the program.
If a student receiving an ROTC scholarship chose to drop out of the program during freshman year, the student would not be obligated to pay back any funding received from the military, Crabbe said.
“If they decide it’s not for them, they can leave [Naval] ROTC at the end of their freshman year with no obligation,” Crabbe said. “A stu-dent could go for an entire year of college paid for, say ‘thank you,’ leave and not have to repay any of that.”
From sophomore year on, Crabbe said students receiving Naval ROTC scholarships could
still drop out of the program with-out having to complete the ser-vice requirements, but would be required to repay the Navy for all tuition that the military had pre-viously covered — freshman year included.
Students will receive the rank of ensign in the Navy or second lieu-tenant in the Marine Corps upon completing the NROTC program.
short-term consequences, but later say they wish someone had told them all the other consequences of having a conviction,” Meek said. “An old record can follow somebody for a long time.”
Meek added that the proposal is in line with current recommendations from national organiza-tions like the American Bar Association and the Uniform Law Commission that address the national legal regime.
Ward 5 Alderman Jorge Perez, who was elected president of the Board of Aldermen earlier this month, said while the ordinance will be intro-duced to the board at its second meeting Tues-day night, no action will be taken until after public hearings have been held.
While Perez said he supported the idea behind the ordinance “conceptu-ally,” its ultimate passing will depend on the ordi-nance’s details, which he said he had not seen.
“I think there’s support [on the board] for people who have done their time to come back to society and assimilate as best they can,” Perez said.
The new ordinance is
not the Elm City’s only strategy for tackling the prison re-entry popula-tion, New Haven Police Department spokesman David Hartman said.
The NHPD will work with officers from pro-bation and parole to keep tabs on New Haven resi-dents who have recently been released from prison.
“It is not a scare tac-tic, it is simply to make the recently released prison-ers understand that police are watching them and that we know who they are and that individual offi-cers know where they are and what they’ve done and what to look out for,” Hartman said.
DeStefano said several times last year that around 70 percent of New Haven’s crime comes from either the narcotics trade or the re-entry population. This statistic has been cited repeatedly by munici-pal officials as the Elm City’s murder rate rose to a 20-year high in 2011.
Tuesday night’s Board of Aldermen meeting begins at 7 p.m.
of whom have “high-powered jobs,” summer courses provide a unique opportunity to return to the classroom and ponder “big ideas.”
“[Alumni] may eke out the time to read, or even to occasionally write something, but what they probably don’t have is an oppor-tunity to talk about what they’re reading and thinking,” she said.
Andrew Lipka ’78 and John Boardman ’64, who both attended Directed Studies last summer and will return for the Grand Strat-egy course, said the intensity of the program and the continuous nature of discussion helped them rediscover the thrills of classroom learning. Lipka maintains an active online discussion group for former students and faculty in the pro-gram, he said.
As of last Thursday, 24 people had registered for one of this sum-mer’s three courses.
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Questions or comments about the fairness or accuracy of stories should be directed to Max de la Bruyère, Editor in Chief, at (203) 432-2418.
Bulletin Board is a free service provided to groups of the Yale community for events. Listings should be submitted online at yaledailynews.com/events/ submit. The Yale Daily News reserves the right to edit listings.
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MIDWESTERN NERD AT YALE BY ERAN RAE MOORE
WATSON BY JIM HORWITZ
THAT MONKEY TUNE BY MICHAEL KANDALAFT
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SUDOKU MEDIUM
ON CAMPUSWEDNESDAY, JANUARY 182:30 PM “Galileo, Mathematics, and the Arts.” Mark A. Peterson, physics chair at Mt. Holyoke College, will give this talk. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.), Room 208.
4:00 PM “Who Speaks African? Language Diversity in Africa and its Implications.” Ann Biersteker, associate professor of African studies and instructor of Swahili, Sandra Sanneh, director of African languages and instructor of Zulu, and geography teacher Laura Krenicki will speak on a panel at this CAS-PIER workshop for educators. RSVP to [email protected]. Luce Hall (34 Hillhouse Ave.), Room 102.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 194:00 PM “Dominicanos Unidos: The Island — Diaspora Continuum in Dominican Literature and Culture.” Dixa Ramirez of the University of California, San Diego will speak. Hall of Graduate Studies (320 York St.), Room 401.
7:00 PM “Othello.” This 1952 film, directed by Orson Welles, is being screened as part of Shakespeare at Yale. Whitney Humanities Center (53 Wall St.).
8:00 PM Mindfulness Meditation Group. Sitting meditation followed by a discussion and informal lecture on the practice of mindfulness meditation (vipassana). Meditation instruction will be provided for beginners. Bring your own meditation cushion or bench. Dwight Chapel (67 High St.).
FRIDAY, JANUARY 2011:30 AM “Systematic Reviews and Public Policy.” Researcher Angeli Landeros-Weisenberger will speak as part of the series “Current Work in Child Development and Social Policy,” sponsored by the Edward Zigler Center. William L. Harkness Hall (100 Wall St.), Room 116.
4:00 PM “Are You Grieving?” A Conversation for Yale Students. Open to any student who is grieving the death of a loved one. Conversation led by Associate University Chaplain Callista Isabelle and Dr. Karen Ho!man of the Department of Mental Health & Counseling. Battell Chapel (400 College St.), Lovett Room.
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CLASSICAL MUSIC 24 Hours a Day. 98.3 FM, and on the web at WMNR.org. “Pledges accepted: 1-800-345-1812”Tuesday is Opera night!
BY DONNA CASSATAASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — When last seen in Wash-ington, House Republicans were furious with their own leader, Speaker John Boehner, and angry with their Senate Republican brethren over how the showdown over the Social Secu-rity tax cut turned into a year-end political debacle.
The holidays and three weeks away from the Capitol have tempered some of the bad feel-ings, but several GOP lawmakers’ emotions are still raw as Congress returns for a 2012 ses-sion certain to be driven by election-year poli-tics and fierce fights over the size and scope of government and its taxing, spending and bor-rowing practices.
In the week before Christmas, House Republicans revolted against the Senate-passed deal to extend the payroll tax cut for two months for 160 million workers and ensure jobless benefits for millions more long-term unemployed. Facing intense political pressure, Boehner, R-Ohio, caved, daring tea partyers and other dissenters to challenge his decision to pass the short-term plan without a roll-call vote. None stepped forward to stop him.
“A lot of us who went into battle turned around and no one was behind us,” freshman Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., said last week, sounding like the fight was still fresh and insis-tent that leadership had abandoned them.
“A lot of us are still smarting,” he added.The two-month extension that Senate
Republican and Democratic leaders Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid had characterized as a draw ended up as a big victory for Presi-dent Barack Obama at the end of a year in which Republicans had forced him to accept a series of spending cuts.
Grievances are certain to be aired at a House GOP retreat in Baltimore later this week. The strategy and agenda session also will be a gripe session for some of the 242 House Republi-cans.
“It might be a little more spunky than nor-mal,” said Rep. Jason Cha!etz, R-Utah.
Senators come back to Capitol Hill on Jan. 23.
The wave of Republicans who lifted the GOP to the House majority in the 2010 elec-tions emerged from their first year frustrated by the limitations of divided government and the recurring, down-to-the-wire fights over spending - in April, the squabble was over keeping the government operating, and in August lawmakers dueled over increasing the nation’s borrowing authority. And at year’s end, there was another rhetorical shoot-out over keeping the government running.
Tea partyers who came to Washington intent on deep cuts to counter the growing def-icit railed against the budget numbers and the all-too-frequent fights.
“There was a Groundhog Day quality to 2011,” said freshman Rep. Nan Hayworth, R-N.Y.
Boehner, who frequently had to rally the disparate elements of his caucus, was a bit bruised by the year’s final act. Still, he remains well in control of his caucus, with Republicans recognizing that any leadership challenge or internal strife now would be politically disas-trous.
In the coming year, House Republicans remain doubtful about accomplishing any-thing more than the must-do spending bills and a year-long extension of the Social Secu-rity tax cuts, unemployment benefits and a reprieve in the cuts to doctors for Medicare payments. Congress faces a Feb. 29 deadline to agree on a new extension, no easy task after last year’s deep divisions but politically inev-itable as lawmakers would be loath to raise taxes in an election year.
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GOP maps strategy in wake of tax debacle
SC rally marks MLK day BY JEFFREY COLLINSASSOCIATED PRESS
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Thou-sands commemorating the Mar-tin Luther King Jr. holiday Mon-day outside South Carolina’s capitol heard a message that wouldn’t have been out of place during the halcyon days of the civil rights movement a half-century ago: the need to protect all citizens’ right to vote.
A similar tone was struck at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King preached from 1960 until his death. There and in South Carolina, speakers condemned the voter identifica-tion laws they said are meant to suppress black voter turnout.
For most of 13 years in South Carolina, the attention at the NAACP’s annual rally has been on the Confederate flag that still waves outside the Statehouse. But on Monday, the civil rights group shifted the focus to laws requiring voters to show photo identification before they can cast ballots, which the group and many other critics say is espe-cially discriminatory toward African-Americans and the poor.
South Carolina’s new law was rejected last month by the U.S. Justice Department, but Gov. Nikki Haley vowed to fight the federal government in court. At least a half-dozen other states passed similar voter ID laws in 2011.
“This has been quite a faith-testing year. We have seen the greatest attack on voting rights since segregation,” said Benja-min Todd Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The shift in tactics was also noted by the keynote speaker, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Last month, Holder said the Justice Department was com-mitted to fighting any laws that keep people from the ballot box. He told the crowd he was keenly aware he couldn’t have become the nation’s first African-Amer-ican attorney general without the blood shed by King and other civil rights pioneers.
“The right to vote is not only the cornerstone of our gover-nance, it is the lifeblood of our democracy. And no force has proved more powerful, or more integral to the success of the great American experiment, than e!orts to expand the franchise,” Holder said. “Let me be very, very clear — the arc of American his-tory has bent toward the inclu-sion, not the exclusion, of more of our fellow citizens in the elec-toral process. We must ensure that this continues.”
Texas’ new voter ID law is cur-rently before the Justice Depart-ment, which reviews changes in voting laws in nine mostly Southern states because of their history of discriminatory vot-ing practices. Other states that passed such laws in 2011 included Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
Similar laws already were on the books in Georgia and Indi-ana, and they were approved by President George W. Bush’s Jus-tice Department. Indiana’s law, passed in 2005, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.
Critics have likened the laws
to the poll taxes and tests used to prevent blacks from voting dur-ing the civil rights era. Support-ers, many of whom are Republi-cans, say such laws are needed to prevent fraud.
“I signed a bill that would pro-tect the integrity of our voting,” Haley said in a statement wel-coming Holder to South Caro-lina.
At the Atlanta church where King once preached, the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock said some in America disrespect King’s legacy by “cutting o! those for whom he died and the principles for which he fought.”
He called voter ID laws an a!ront to the memory of the civil rights leader.
“You cannot celebrate Dr. King on Monday, and undermine people’s ability to vote on Super Tuesday,” Warnock said.
The King Day rally in South Carolina took place in the shadow of Saturday’s Republican presi-dential primary. State NAACP President Lonnie Randolph said people should vote any time they can, but said his group is nonpar-tisan. He said o"cials wouldn’t encourage its members — a gen-erally Democratic voting bloc — to disrupt the GOP’s process of choosing its nominee because “we don’t do the mean things.”
Jealous made one of the few references to the GOP field dur-ing Monday’s rally, saying he was tired of attacks on the move-ment, such as cuts to education funding.
“And I’m real tired of dealing with so-called leaders who talk out of one side of their mouth about celebrating the legacy of
Dr. King and then do so much out the other side of their mouth to block everything the man stood, fought and died for,” Jealous said.
The King Day rally in South Carolina was first held in 2000 to call for the Confederate flag to come down o! the capitol dome, and has continued after state leaders decided instead to place the flag on a 30-foot pole on the Statehouse lawn near a monu-ment to Confederate soldiers.
The flag was mentioned Mon-day — North Carolina NAACP president the Rev. William Bar-ber called it a “terrible, terroris-tic banner” — but it was not the focus.
The Confederate flag and voter ID laws are all examples of how blacks cannot stop fighting for civil rights, said 39-year-old Llewlyn Walters of Columbia, whose grandmother watched King speak and whose mother told him stories of the civil rights movement as he grew up.
“People’s hearts and minds change, but then they forget. The movement was great, but that one single generation couldn’t stop all the discrimination in this country any more than one single dose of antibiotic can fight a dis-ease,” Walters said.
In Washington, President Barack Obama and his fam-ily commemorated the day by helping to build bookshelves in a local school’s library. The presi-dent said there was no better way to celebrate King’s life than to spend the day helping others.
Obama’s attorney general ended his speech on a positive note, saying Americans can’t forget the progress this nation has made. After all, the nation elected a black president just 40 years after King was assassi-nated.
“In the spirit of Dr. King, let us signal to the world that, in Amer-ica today, the pursuit of a more perfect union lives on,” Holder said. “The march toward the Promised Land goes on, and the belief not merely that we shall overcome, but that, as a nation, we will all come together, con-tinues to push us forward.”
MARY ANN CHASTAIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, addresses the crowd during a rally at the South Carolina statehouse on Monday.
A lot of us who went into battle turned around and no one was behind us… A lot of us are still smarting.
MICK MULVANEYU.S. Representative, South Carolina
You cannot celebrate Dr. King on Monday, and undermine people’s ability to vote on Super Tuesday.
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IF YOU MISSED IT SCORES NCAA BSyracuse 71Pittsburgh 63
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NBAHouston 114Washington 106
“[Brown was] playing not to lose and not necessarily to win.... I went for [the steal] and fortunately it worked out.
REGGIE WILLHITE ’12CAPTAIN, M. BASKETBALL
SARAH HALEJIAN ’15ROOKIE OF THE WEEK, AGAINHalejian, a member of the women’s basketball team, was named the Ivy League’s top rookie for the second con-secutive week after scorin a career-high 18 points and shooting 50 percent from the field as Yale kicked o! Ivy League play with a win over Brown.
PROFESSIONAL LACROSSESENIORS PICKED IN MLL DRAFTMajor League Lacrosse teams have their eyes on two Elis. Matt Gibson ’12 and Greg Mahony ’12 were among 12 Ivy League lacrosse players selected in the MLL draft. Gibson was drafted by Chesapeake and Mahony by Boston.
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YALE DAILY NEWS · TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2012 · yaledailynews.com
NUMBER OF POINTS THE MEN’S HOCKEY TEAM IS OUT OF FIRST PLACE IN THE ECAC AFTER EARNING A LOSS AND A TIE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK THIS WEEKEND. Yale now sits at sixth place in the conference, though its has played fewer games than three of the teams ahead of it.
STAT OF THE DAY 5
BY KEVIN KUCHARSKISTAFF REPORTER
The Bulldogs’ trip to the North Country began with a blizzard, a delayed game and a seven-hour power outage at their hotel.
Things continued to look bleak for the men’s hockey team on Sat-urday when it faced a 3–1 defi-cit with eight minutes left in the second period against St. Law-rence (8–11–3, 4–5–1 ECAC), the ECAC’s 10th-place team. Though Yale (8–6–2, 5–3–1) came back to salvage a 3–3 tie, the result still
dropped them to sixth place in the conference standings. Things did not improve the next night as Yale let Clarkson come from behind and beat Yale in overtime, 5–4
Yale is now just 2–2–1 in its last five league games and hovering in the middle of the ECAC pack.
DROPPING TO SIXTHThe Elis’ contest with Clark-
son was scheduled for 7 p.m. Fri-day night, but a blizzard in upstate New York pushed the game back to Sunday afternoon. When the Elis returned to the ice against St. Lawrence Saturday night, they showed signs of rush.
The Saints jumped on Yale early in the game with a goal from Pete Child just 1:38 into the first period.
“They scored right o! the bat, so we were on our heels right away,” head coach Keith Allain ’80 said in a press release. “Our guys did a great job of battling back. This is a tough place to play.”
The Bulldogs regained some momentum when forward Andrew Miller ’13 scored with only two seconds remaining in the first period. But the Elis’ momen-tum would not last. On one of its
Painful weekend for men’s hockey BY JOHN SULLIVAN
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
It was a tale of two halves Fri-day night at the Brown’s Pizzitola Sports Center as the women’s basketball team faced o! against the Bears (9–5, 0–1 Ivy).
After going into halftime down by one, the Bulldogs (9–6, 1–0 Ivy) rallied down the stretch to come away with a 75–65 victory and a 1–0 start to their confer-ence schedule.
The Elis seemed to be well in control of this game during the opening minutes as they built up an early lead that Sarah Halejian’s ’15 two free throws stretched to 11 with 11:35 remaining in the first period. But from then on, Brown went on a 21–9 run to erase Yale’s lead and go into halftime with a narrow, one-point lead.
“We went out with the mindset that we had to win on defense,” guard Aarica West ’13 said. “They have good guards and good three-
point shooters, and we knew that we had to stop them to give our-selves a chance to win.”
The Bulldogs struggled to do this early on and allowed the Bears to shoot 60 percent from the field in the first half while managing only a 34.3 percent mark themselves. Yale kept itself in the game by grabbing 10 o!en-sive rebounds, allowing it to attempt 15 more field goals than Brown before halftime.
After halftime, the Elis stepped up their defensive e!ort and held the Bears to 33.3 percent shooting for the second half. They forced eight Brown turnovers while committing only one them-selves and continued to domi-nate the o!ensive glass. The team amassed a 21–6 edge in o!ensive rebounds for the game.
Head coach Chris Gobrecht, who could not be reached for comment Monday, told Yale Ath-letics that Brown dictated the pace of the game in the first half, but Yale was able to gain control of the action later in the match.
“Even when we had the lead [in the first half], it wasn’t our tempo,” Gobrect said to Yale Ath-letics. “It was still very much favoring them, so I didn’t feel very good about that lead and sure enough it didn’t hold up. I thought we worked a lot harder
Bulldogs take down Bears
Despite trailing for most of the game, Yale stormed back against Brown in its Ivy League opener. PAGE B3
DOWN TO THE WIREMEN’S BASKETBALL
MEN’S HOCKEY
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
MARIA ZEPEDA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Basketball captain Reggie Willhite ’12 led the Bulldogs’ come-from-behind victory against Brown on Saturday with two late steals that helped the Elis erase a three-point deficit in the last three minutes of play.
SEE M. HOCKEY PAGE B3 SEE W. BASKETBALL PAGE B2
YALE ATHLETICS
Amanda Tyson ’14 came o! the bench to score 12 points and grab eight rebounds as Yale opened Ivy League play with a defeat of Brown.
YALE 75, BROWN 65
YALE 31 44 75
BROWN 32 33 65
YALE 3, ST. LAWRENCE 3
YALE 1 1 1 3
ST. LAWRENCE 1 2 0 3
CLARKSON 5, YALE 4
CLARKSON 0 3 1 1 5
YALE 2 1 1 0 4
SPORTS Nadal takes on Federer o! the courtRafael Nadal accused Roger Federer of playing the “gentleman” and remaining silent regarding player grievances about the long tennis season. Nadal said that his Swiss rival is allowing the rest of the tour to “burn themselves.” The length of the professional tennis season, which begins on Jan. 1 and ends on Nov. 16, has been an annual source of annoyance for tennis players.
The women’s hockey team played and lost two games of catchup this weekend, falling to Clarkson and St. Lawrence on home turf.
“In the past, we’ve struggled the most after getting scored on, but this weekend we man-aged to pick up our intensity and put pressure on our opponents,” goaltender Genny Ladiges ’12, who played in both games, said.
Unfortunately, that pressure was not enough to even the lop-sided scoreboard: Yale (1–17–0, 1–10–0 ECAC) lost 2–5 to Clark-son (14–6–4, 8–3–1) on Friday night, and again, 7–1, to St. Law-rence (13–7–3, 7–4–1) on Satur-day afternoon. In both games, the Blue and White responded strongly to the goals of its oppo-nents but struggled to generate its own proactive energy.
The Golden Knights started o! Friday’s game strongly, scor-ing on a power play at 5:43 in the first period. However, the Bull-dogs responded quickly and forcefully, driving the game into the hash marks of the offen-sive zone, and forward Danielle Moncion ’13 got the puck over Clarkson goalie Erica Howe and into the net.
The Bulldogs maintained the 1–1 score for the rest of the period, and forward Stepha-nie Mock ’15 nearly scored on a breakaway o! of a two-on-one but did not make the shot, losing her stick in the process.
The second period saw the Bulldogs outshot 15–5, despite attempts to come back from increasingly further behind the Golden Knights. Clarkson scored at 9:31 and defender Heather Grant ’12 unsuccessfully tried to even the score with a breakaway shot a minute later. At 15:47, Clarkson tipped the puck over Ladiges and increased its lead to
3–1.The third period opened with
a Clarkson goal, but the Bull-dogs still fought for the game. At 15:16, forward Lynn Ken-nedy ’15 got the team’s second and last goal. But with just 2.9 seconds left on the clock, the Golden Knights scored again — and there was no time left for Yale to respond. Yale was out-shot45–28.
Saturday’s game did not end any better.
“St. Lawrence is very fast, and we had some di"culty adjusting to the higher speed of the game on Saturday,” defender Emily DesMeules ’13 said.
The Bulldogs struggled to adjust to a fast eight first min-utes, with the Saints dominating the game: Yale was outshot 8–0 in that amount of time. St. Law-rence scored twice in the mid-dle of the first period, but with
three minutes left in the period and only five Yale shots-on-goal thus far, the Bulldogs reacted. Team captain Aleca Hughes ’12 scored the Bulldogs’ first and only goal, and the team tried to continue the momentum with pass interception and a break-away shot. But for Yale, the game was over.
St. Lawrence scored four times in the second period, and once more in the third. Yale was outshot52–17.
This weekend marks Des-Meules’s third and fourth games back from a broken ankle — an injury she incurred in the first game of the season.
“It’s great to finally be back on the ice,” she said. “I knew coming back that it would take me some time to adjust, but I worked hard while I was out, so it has been easier to get back into playing shape.”
She added that she is not yet feeling 100 percent better but is focusing on day-to-day improvements.
The Bulldogs are currently five points out of the eighth and final playo! spot, so it is critical for them to win within the next three away games against Union, RPI and Brown — all ranked at the bottom of the standings.
The Bulldogs return to Ingalls Rink on Jan. 27 and 28 to take on Harvard and Dartmouth.
“We are all working hard and we know it is going to take some time to turn this around,” head coach Joakim Flygh said in an email to the News. “Everyone is dedicated to working hard and keep building on our culture of hard work for the future.”
After a month-long hiatus, the men’s and women’s track and field teams hosted 15 men’s teams and 16 women’s teams last week-end.
The Elis returned to the track Saturday for the 30th Yale Inter-collegiate Track Classic at Coxe Cage. The Elis hosted and com-peted against teams including the University of Connecticut, the University of New Haven, Sacred Heart University and Franklin & Marshall University. While the meet was unscored, the women and men had four and two first-place finishes respectively, and the teams showed promise against upcoming sti! competition.
Success in middle distance events highlighted the men’s team’s performance. Christopher Ramsey ’13 won the highly con-tested 800-meter run, with Julian Sheinbaum ’12 and Jacob Sandry ’15 close behind. Sheinbaum and
Sandry took second and third, respectively.
“While my race could have been better, I was happy when my performance in the 800,” Ramsey said. “Regardless of time, it’s always nice to win, and I felt like it was a good rehearsal for next week when we go up against Ivy League competition and beating people who really matter.”
Ramsey clocked in at 1.57.34. His personal best for the 800 is 1.52.27.
On the field, Mike Levine ’13, who won the All-Ivy in discus last year, placed second in the weight throw, while Central Connect-icut’s Rashad Williams, who is the reigning Penn Relays cham-pion, took the event. Like Ramsey, Levine said he was pleased with his performance, but he is look-ing forward to competing against Ivy League opponents.
In the relay events, the Elis capped off a third-place finish with John McGowan ’15, Char-lie Jaeger ’12, Timothy Hillas ’13 and Michael Pierce ’13 in a heav-ily contested 4x800-meter relay race during which two other
schools claimed the lead before Yale pulled ahead to finish the race.
“For me, Saturday was an opportunity get back into com-petition for the first time since my senior year of high school three years ago,” Mark Kaczor ’13, who claimed 13th place in the shot put, said. “I did not perform as well as I had hoped to, but I was glad to participate again in actual track meet, and for the first time in a collegiate environment.”
The women’s track and field team also made impressive strides in their events and took home four first-place finishes. Lindsey Ray-mond ’12 topped the field in the one-mile run, and Anna Demaree ’15 followed.
“The meet this weekend was a very positive way to begin the semester,” Raymond, a former city editor for the News, said. “I was happy with the team’s per-formance because it was a good starting point for our meet next weekend … I think everyone is looking to improve and build on their races and will continue to train hard.”
Alexa Monti ’12 placed first in a field of 38 to win the 60-meter dash, and Annelies Gamble ’13 secured a win in the 800-meter race. Emily Urciuoli ’14, who competed in the pole vault, became one of four Bulldogs to secure a first-place finish for the women.
Monti said she could not have asked for a better start to the sea-son. She added that her time of 7.87 seconds in the 60-meter dash was her personal best for her Bulldog years.
“Our first test as a team [is against] Dartmouth and Colum-bia, and I think we are in a good place to show the rest of the Ivy League that we are a force to be reckoned with,” Monti said. “If we can tap into our full potential, I think we can have a successful season.”
Both the men’s and women’s teams will face Dartmouth and Columbia in Hanover on Saturday in their first scored competition.
Lynn Kennedy ’15 scored a goal in the third period against Clarkson on Friday.
TRACK AND FIELD
SARAH ECKINGER/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The women’s and men’s team had four and two first-place finishes respectively at the 30th Yale Intercollegiate Track Classic.
WOMEN’S HOCKEY
to create more [opportunities] in the second half. We attacked a little bit better and we just forced the action.”
The Bulldogs’ second-half comeback got a huge boost from Amanda Tyson ’14, who came o! the bench in the second half to record 10 of her 12 points and seven of her game-high eight rebounds. Her efforts helped Yale to an 11-point advantage in the half. Eight of those rebounds were on the o!ensive side of the ball, and Tyson had six points in a four-minute span that helped the Bulldogs pull away from the Bears for good.
The 12 points, eight rebounds and seven o!ensive rebounds are all new career highs for Tyson. The sophomore also set new career-high marks in shots and free throws made, each at four.
Gobrecht added that Tyson’s performance was a key to Yale’s victory against the Bears.
“Amanda Tyson totally gets the game ball in this one,” Gobrecht said. “She was the one that came in and made things happen. She got on the offensive glass. She created some turnovers. She made some big buckets. She looks
really good in practice, so it didn’t surprise me that she came around and finally had a game that shows the player that we keep seeing in practice.”
Brown pulled to within one point of Yale’s 58 with 4:08 remaining in the game on Brown guard Sheila Dixon’s layup. Dixon led the Bears’ scorers with 20 points but was unable to lead her team to victory this time.
Only 13 seconds after Dix-on’s layup, Michelle Cashen ’12 answered with a layup of her own and was fouled. Cashen made the free throw to complete the three-point play and give the Bulldogs a four-point lead. Halejian scored Yale’s next seven points to out-match Brown’s four and stretch the lead to seven. Megan Vasquez ’13, West, Halejian and guard Allie Messimer ’13 all made free throws to close out the game. Vasquez finished with a game-high 23 points, to which she added five rebounds, two assists and two steals.
The Bulldogs return home this Friday night to face Brown again in their second league contest. Tip-o! is at 7 p.m.
Sarah Halejian ’15 was named Ivy League co-rookie of the week after scor-ing 18 points in Yale’s game against Brown on Saturday.
W. BASKETBALL FROM PAGE B1
SPORTS PEOPLE IN THE NEWS SIDNEY CROSBY
NHL star Sidney Crosby who has not played since early December because of lingering symptoms from a concussion that kept him out of the lineup for ten months last year, will meet with a neurologist this week. There is not timetable for his return.
Facing defeat in their first game of Ivy League play in front of a home crowd, the men’s bas-ketball team pulled through and answered the call against Brown to win 68–64 — despite having trailed for more than 35 minutes of the game.
Down 54–47 after Brown’s guard, Matt Sullivan, hit a layup with 7:44 to play, Yale (11–4, 1–0 Ivy) initiated its comeback. Brown (5–12, 0–1 Ivy) continued to hold o! the Elis and milk the
clock until guard Austin Morgan ’13 knocked down a three to make it 61–58 with less than three min-utes remaining.
Head coach James Jones then made the decision to switch cap-tain and defensive stopper Reg-gie Willhite ’12 on to covering Brown guard Sean McGonagill — with immediate results. Willhite stole possession from McGonag-ill and slammed the ball home on the breakaway to cut the deficit to one with just 1:42 left to play.
“They were playing not to lose and not necessarily to win,” Will-hite said. “We weren’t going to get enough possessions in the game if we kept on letting them run the clock down and chuck up shots… I went for [the steal] and fortunately it worked out. I got a couple of steals, and we ended up winning the game.”
The captain continued to take control of the game, again strip-ping the ball from McGonagill — who played all 40 minutes for the Bears. Willhite drained a jumper
from the elbow at the other end to give the Bulldogs a 62–61 advan-tage. The lead was Yale’s first since 17:26 in the first half.
Guard Mike Grace ’13 and Mor-gan converted all six of their free throws in the last minute to pre-serve the win.
Yale had wilted under Brown’s three-point barrage in the first half but kept the game close, trailing only 38–31 at the break. Brown shot 60 percent from beyond the arc in the first half, led by McGonagill’s perfect three-for-three. McGonagill led all scorers with 16 first-half points.
The Bears continued to hold the Bulldogs at bay for most of the second half. Jones said that he became worried about the out-come of the game.
“I can’t tell you that I thought we were going to pull this one out the whole time because I didn’t,” Jones said. “I thought that every time we made a run Brown had an answer. It took the last five min-utes of the game for us to ratchet
things up a little bit, especially on the defensive end and make some plays to give ourselves the oppor-tunity to win.”
Since the Ivy League has no conference tournament, the reg-ular season will decide the league champion and entrant in the NCAA Tournament in March. Center Jeremiah Kreisberg ’14 said that every game is important because the team’s goal is to win the Ivy League Championship.
The Elis last won a share of the Ivy crown with Princeton and Penn in 2002, but Penn advanced through the two-game playoff and earned the right to represent the Ancient Eight in the Tourna-ment. Yale has not been the lone Ivy League champion since 1962, a drought of 49 years.
Yale will travel to Brown for a rematch next Saturday Jan. 21.
IVY OVERALLSCHOOL W L % W L %Penn 2 0 1.000 9 9 .500
Harvard 1 0 1.000 15 2 .882
Yale 1 0 1.000 11 4 .733
Princeton 1 1 .500 10 8 .556
Cornell 1 1 .500 6 10 .375
Brown 0 1 .000 5 12 .294
Dartmouth 0 1 .000 4 13 .235
Columbia 0 2 .000 11 7 .611
LAST WEEK NEXT WEEK
SATURDAY, JAN. 14Yale 68, Brown 64
SATURDAY, JAN. 21Yale at Brown, 2:00 p.m.
S C O R E S & S T A N D I N G S
MEN’S HOCKEY
IVY OVERALLSCHOOL W L T % W L T %Cornell 4 1 1 .750 10 4 3 .676
Yale 2 4 1 .357 6 10 5 .405
Brown 2 2 0 .500 8 7 2 .529
Princeton 2 2 0 .500 7 7 3 .500
Dartmouth 1 1 1 .500 7 7 2 .500
Harvard 1 2 1 .375 4 6 6 .438
IVY OVERALLSCHOOL W L % W L %Princeton 3 0 1.000 13 4 .765
Yale 1 0 1.000 9 6 .600
Harvard 1 0 1.000 8 6 .571
Brown 0 1 .000 9 6 .600
Penn 0 1 .000 7 6 .538
Cornell 0 1 .000 5 9 .357
Dartmouth 0 1 .000 2 12 .143
Columbia 0 1 .000 2 13 .133
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
WOMEN’S HOCKEY
LAST WEEK NEXT WEEK
SATURDAY, JAN. 14St. Lawrence 7, Yale 1
FRIDAY, JAN. 20Yale at Rensselaer,
7:00 p.m.
IVY OVERALLSCHOOL W L T % W L T %Princeton 5 2 1 .688 8 10 4 .455
Cornell 5 1 0 .833 15 2 0 .882
Dartmouth 2 1 1 .625 11 5 2 .667
Harvard 1 3 0 .250 11 5 1 .676
Brown 1 3 0 .250 5 7 6 .444
Yale 0 4 0 .000 1 17 0 .056
WOMEN’S SQUASH
LAST WEEK NEXT WEEK
SUNDAY, JAN. 15Yale 8, Williams 1
WEDNESDAY, JAN. 18Trinity at Yale, 6:00 p.m.
IVY OVERALLSCHOOL W L % W L %
1 Harvard 3 0 1.000 9 0 1.000
Yale 2 0 1.000 7 0 1.000
3 Penn 2 1 .667 3 1 .750
Cornell 2 1 .667 6 3 .667
5 Brown 1 1 .500 4 2 .667
6 Princeton 1 2 .333 5 2 .714
7 Columbia 0 3 .000 3 4 .429
Dartmouth 0 3 .000 2 3 .400
MARIA ZEPEDA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Guard Austin Morgan ’13 went four-for-six from three-point range and led the Eli o!ense in scoring with 18 points against Brown on Saturday.
MEN’S BASKETBALL
six power plays, St. Lawrence’s Greg Carey scored to give his team a 2–1 lead. Carey struck again only seven minutes later to put Yale in a 3–1 hole.
Behind netminder Je! Malcolm ’13, who recorded 26 saves for the night, the Elis held the Saints at three and began mounting their comeback. Just under three min-utes into the third period, Kevin Peel ’12 put in a power play goal to bring the Elis within one. It was the only time Yale’s normally robust power play units converted on the night despite seven oppor-tunities.
Then, with less than five min-utes remaining in the game, for-ward Clinton Bourbonais ’14 scored the goal that ultimately sent the contest into overtime.
“Clint’s goal was the result of a great sustained o!ensive zone shift by that line,” Allain said. “[Antoine Laganiere ’13] and [Trent Ru!olo ’15] did a great job on the forecheck to keep pucks alive. Both of them were involved in getting Clint the puck in the slot. His shot went high glove side.”
Despite controlling the run of play during overtime, the Elis could not capitalize to take the win. Yale recorded four out of the five shots on target, but St. Law-rence goalie Matt Weninger man-aged to keep the puck out of the net.
A LAST-MINUTE LOSSOn Sunday, the Elis met a simi-
lar fate in overtime against Clark-son. But unlike Saturday night’s 3–3 draw with St. Lawrence, the Elis conceded with a min-ute remaining in the five-minute period to lose 5–4.
The Golden Knights (10–10–5, 4–4–3) scored the deciding goal on a controversial power play. A few minutes into the over-time period, the Yale bench was penalized for a comment directed
toward an o"cial. Within a min-ute, Clarkson’s Sam Labrecque put the puck in the net to win it.
“Officiating is always one of those things that you don’t have control over, and whatever the call is you just have to work past it,” Laganiere said. “I thought we did our best to try to turn it around. We were not frustrated and los-ing control, it was just our penalty against their power play.”
The game looked promising early on for the Blue and White. Ten minutes into the game, defenseman Tommy Fallen ’15 intercepted a clearance and fired a slap shot to give the Bulldogs the lead.
Laganiere followed this up with a similar e!ort about three min-utes later. After creating a turn-over in Clarkson’s end of the ice, Laganiere made a move past a Golden Knights defenseman and put the puck behind the Clarkson netminder Paul Karpowich.
The second period was filled with goals as the two teams com-bined for four tallies. Yale’s Bour-bonais kicked o! the scoring with his second goal in two days to put the Elis up by two once again.
“He’s been doing well all sea-son,” Laganiere said. “This week-end was particularly good statis-tically, but other weekends he’s done just as well.”
However, the Yale o!ense shut down after Bourbonais’ goal. Up 3–1 with less than two minutes remaining in the second period,
the Elis seemed to be in good shape. But the momentum shifted starting with a power play goal from Clarkson forward Ben Sex-ton. Another Yale penalty gave the Golden Knights a chance to tie things up, and Louke Oakley took advantage with 20 seconds remaining in the period. After a Sexton shot bounced o! the glass, Oakley took the rebound and put it in.
Only two minutes later, Oak-ley struck again to put the Golden Knights up 4–3. But yet again, the Elis overcame a deficit. Cap-tain Brian O’Neill ’12 deflected a Colin Dueck ’13 slap shot to knot things up.
For the second night in a row, the Elis struggled on special teams. After converting only one power play out of seven oppor-
tunities Saturday night, the Elis went 1–6 on Sunday.
“My power play unit had trou-ble keeping the play going and holding on to the puck,” Laganiere said. “I don’t know if it was due to increased pressure, but it was just not clicking as it usually does.”
On the penalty kill the Elis struggled as well. Despite hav-ing one of the best penalty kill-ing units in the ECAC, the Elis allowed three goals in Clarkson’s five power plays.
The Elis will be back in action at 7 p.m. Friday against Union and Saturday at 7 p.m. against RPI. Both games will be played at Ingalls Rink.
Yale’s swimming and diving teams smashed both the com-petition and the record books at their meet last Saturday against Penn and Dartmouth.
The women’s team (3–1 Ivy) beat Penn (3–6, 2–5 Ivy) 161–138 and Dartmouth (4–2, 3–2) 174–126, while the men’s team (5–0, 4–0) won 188–112 against Penn (5–3, 3–3) and 174–126 against Dartmouth (2–3 Ivy). The men’s and women’s teams each broke pool records along the way in events that included the 100-yard freestyle relay and the 400-yard freestyle relay for the women and the 200-yard invidiual medley, the 200-yard backstroke and the
200-yard butterfly for the men.“Going into the meet we just
wanted to win,” Joan Weaver ’13 said. “We won … but it wasn’t without a fight.”
The Bulldogs had more than just Penn and Dartmouth to fight at their most recent meet. Since Monday classes met on Friday because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, many members of the the team had to be in class late, and so the Elis did not check into their hotel in Hanover, N.H. until about 11:30 p.m. the night before the meet.
The swimmers were also phys-ically tired from their recent training trip and difficult prac-tice schedule, two team members said.
“At this point in the season it’s about training hard and racing tough,” said Cristina Teuscher, the head coach of the women’s
swimming and diving team. She added that the training
schedule is designed so that the swimmers will achieve their best times at Ivy League Champion-ships.
Despite these di!culties, both teams had strong performances at
Dartmouth. Alexandra Forrester ’13 set the pool record in the 100-yard freestyle with a time of 51.14. The relay team of Forrester, Cas-sidy Lapp ’15, Hayes Hyde ’15 and Weaver also broke a pool record in the 400-yard freestyle relay with a time of 3:28.67.
While she said Dartmouth is not known to host fast meets, Weaver said, it was still satisfy-ing to break a record at another school.
“Any time you take down someone else’s records at some-one else’s pool and have your name on their wall, that’s excit-ing,” she said.
The men’s team had its fair share of record-breaking excite-ment as well. Alwin Firmansyah ’15 broke two pool records in the 200-yard butterfly and 200-yard individual medley with times of 1:48.17 and 1:50.37, respectively.
Both records were almost 30 years old, men’s captain Christopher Luu ’12 said, and Firmansyah beat both records by over a second.
Another freshman, Rob Harder ’15, set the pool record in the 200-yard backstroke at 1:49.88.
“The freshmen once again proved to be a strong force,” Luu said.
But it was not just the fresh-men who had an outstanding meet. Goksu Bicer ’12 won all three of his events. For his first event of the day, the 200-yard medley relay, he teammed up with three freshmen — Mike Laz-ris ’15, Andrew Heymann ’15 and Firmansyah — to win with a time of 1:32.78. Bicer continued his win streak with a victory in the 100-yard freestyle, which he swam in 45.47, and the 100-yard butterfly, when he clocked in at 49.36.
The divers also had a suc-
cessful meet. Women’s captain Rachel Rosenberg ’12 won both the 1-meter and the 3-meter div-ing events for the women’s team, with respective scores of 271.95 and 270.45. For the men’s team, Tyler Pramer ‘14 took second in both the 1-meter and 3-meter events.
Yale now looks ahead to the Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet, which is traditionally the tough-est league meet for the Bulldogs.
“We’re all excited to get up [to Boston] and swim,” Weaver said, adding that she hopes “the whole team is ready to throw it out there and see what happens.”
The team will take on Har-vard and Princeton in Cambridge, Mass. from Feb. 3 through Feb. 5.
Despite numerous opponents this weekend, both the men’s and women’s squash teams remain undefeated.
The Brady Squash center hosted three men’s teams, No. 6 Cornell, No. 16 Columbia and No. 10 Williams, and four wom-en’s teams, No. 6 Stanford, No. 7 Cornell, No. 16 Columbia and No. 10 Williams over the weekend. By the time those opponents left, the Eli men’s record was 6–0 and the women were 7–0.
The No. 2 men’s team faced Cornell on Saturday. During the first round of matches, Rich-ard Dodd ’13, Neil Martin ’14 and Charlie Wyatt ’14 won their games at the No. 3, 6 and 9 spots, giving the Elis a 3–0 lead on Cor-nell. Captain Ryan Dowd ’12 and Robert Berner ’12 played the No. 5 and No. 7 games, respectively, to clinch the victory against Cor-nell.
“It was a highly anticipated match of the season because Cor-nell is a good team,” Dowd said. “[Wyatt’s] win at the No. 9 spot was really clutch.”
Dowd added that Wyatt had been down 0–2 against Cornell in his match and had to win his next three games to ensure his victory.
“There were a few key match points [Wyatt] won, and one of the games even went to 15–13 in overtime.”
The Elis managed to sneak past Cornell, 5–4.
On Sunday, the men’s team played one-sided matches against Columbia at noon and
Williams later in the afternoon. In their matches against
Columbia, the Bulldogs swept 9–0. Most of the matches were won 3–0, except for the No. 8 spot. Despite losing the second game, Sam Shleifer ’15 pulled o" a 3–1 victory for the Elis at the No. 8 spot.
The Bulldogs beat Williams 8–1. The highlight of these matches was at the No. 6 spot, played by Joseph Roberts ’15. Roberts was down 0–2 against Willams’ Andrew Maruca —the brother of former Yale squash player Mike Maruca ’11.
“We already had matches in the morning, and there wasn’t a lot of time to rest or eat lunch,” Roberts. “I was the first one to play, and it difficult at first to readjust. [My opponent] ini-tially took me by surprise. After the first two games, I adjusted to his playing style and found my rhythm.”
Roberts went on to win three games back-to-back to take the match.
The women’s team also hosted games this weekend, playing Stanford on Friday in addition to Cornell, Columbia and Williams during the rest of the weekend.
On Friday against Stanford,
Millie Tomlinson ’14, the No. 1 ranked player in the nation, won the No. 1 spot 3–0, with an 11–3, 11–3, 11–4 sweep. At the No. 2 spot, Kim Hay ‘14 won 3–1. Cap-tain Rhetta Nadas ’12 lost the first two matches of the No. 3 spot 5–11, 10–12, but managed to win the next three for the match.
Yale defeated Stanford soundly, 9–0.
On Saturday, Tomlinson and Hay again played and won the No. 1 and 2 spots against Cornell. The Bulldogs went on to win 9–0.
Against Columbia on Sunday, Tomlinson again played the No. 1 spot and won 3–0. Nadas played the No. 2 spot this time, also securing a 3–0 win. Lilly Fast ’14 played at No. 3, Issey Norman-Ross ’15 at No. 4, and Aly Kerr ’12 at No. 5. The Bulldogs swept the Lions 9–0.
Hay played the No. 1 spot against Williams. Nadas again played No. 2, and Alexandra Van Arkel ’12 played No. 3. Katie Bal-laine ’13, Shihui Mao ’15, and Kerr played the No. 4, 5 and 6 spots. Sisters Anne Harrison ’15 and Katie Harrison ’13 played the No. 7 and 8 spots. Coco Sierbert ’14 lost a really close match of five games at the No. 9 spot; the Elis defeated Williams 8–1.
The men’s and women’s teams are hoping the momentum from their undefeated season will pro-pel them to victories against Trinity, whose men’s team is ranked No. 1.
“Wednesday’s match will be tough, but we are confident in ourselves at this point,” Kenneth Chan ’13, who usually plays the top spot for the men’s team, said.
It was a highly anticipated match of the season because Cornell is a good team.
RYAN DOWD ’12Captain, men’s squash
BLAIR SEIDEMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The women’s squash team coasted to four wins, including one over No. 6 Stanford, over the weekend
SWIMMING
YDN
The women’s swimming and diving team broke pool records in the 100-yard and 400-yard freestyle relays at Dartmouth over the weekend, while the men’s team broke records in the 200-yard individual medley, backstroke and butterfly.
Any time you take down someone else’s records at someone else’s pool and have your name on their
