The Week in Review

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Showering Optional

Sustainable Dartmouth is at it again. Next year, the most green-blooded of Dartmouth students will have the option of living in an environment-conscious living space, a.k.a. North Hall. On November 16th, John Wachter ‘09, Hannah Dreissigacker ‘09, Sam Welch ‘10, and Dan Susman ‘10 (all of whom hatched this idea last spring) got permission from administrators to use North Hall in their newest sustainability project. In 2010 the building will be renovated in order to better meet sustainable needs—fewer showers and electrical outlets.

In the meantime, some of the methods for making the living space more environmentally friendly include air-drying clothing and cooking meals using food from nearby organic sources. A trial run of these methods should take place on one of the McLaughlin floors during winter term; Computer Science professor Lorie Loeb hopes the program will spread throughout the cluster by springtime.

Gemma Ross ’08 is working with Loeb to develop a program to monitor students’ energy usage. With the aid of computers, an individual will be able to keep track of his energy consumption and make informed choices in order to limit it. The program will monitor both entire floors and single students in real-time, allowing them to view the immediate consequences of using a dryer or leaving their computer on. Of course, the program would also serve as a means of accountability—we hear that residents who overindulge will be made to swim through a grim mixture of granola and compost while flagellating themselves with Birkenstock sandals. Yikes.

Dartmouth’s Int’l Men of Mystery

A recent news release from the College announced, “Dartmouth ranks third in the nation among doctoral degree granting institutions in undergraduate study abroad participation.” The study noted that 60.9% of Dartmouth students studied abroad, behind only Yeshiva University at 75.1% and the University of Denver at 62.8%. Only two other Ivy League schools made the top forty: Princeton (34th) and Harvard (40th). When the College is compared to other liberal arts colleges, however, the picture is significantly less impressive. In fact, Dartmouth would just barely eke out a 40th place finish.

New Schoolery, Smartphones Form Pact, Invade

Sadly, Dartmouth is limping out of an Edenic and technology-free state of nature and into a brave, new world. In the past few years, the campus has seen a dramatic increase in the use of “smartphones” in conjunction with our simple and beloved BlitzMail system.

Soi-disant Smartphones (cell phones with internet and email capability) allow students to check and answer Blitz from anywhere on campus while avoiding the lines, germs, and computers at public Blitz terminals. Too often one walks across the Green and is surrounded by freshman with their phones out, checking blitz. Upperclassmen either sneer with disdain at the backwards freshmen or sneer at the backwards freshmen while hiding their envy. Undergraduate Advisors (UGA) are reportedly complicit in this paradigm shift; they place top priority on warning their freshmen residents against the evils of public blitz terminals. “Perhaps hundreds of people use those terminals per day (probably a few of whom have pink-eye and many others unwashed hands),” one anonymous freshman student was informed by her UGA. With a Blackberry or iPhone in hand, students are avoiding induction into Dartmouth. Upperclassmen attribute the increase in cell use since their freshman year to better coverage in Hanover.

A Commitment to Abstraction

Following the recent cleansing and delousing of Baker-Berry in November, Hood Museum of Art director Brian Kennedy promised that more works of Wenda Gu’s caliber will follow, and that the Dartmouth community need not worry about his commitment to the “language of abstraction.” Despite his bold commitment to art that will instigate a “dialogue,” all of the upcoming installations that Kennedy described seem to represent artists and cultures that produced legitimate positive reactions, including ancient Asian art. According to Kennedy, the challenge of art on campus is not the mindless and random quality of a mound of hair in the library, but the mindless and random actions by those particularly passionate critics that decide to interfere with the art.

Music Madness

Since the days of Napster and Lars Ulrich’s following rage, free downloading has evolved in new and more surreptitious ways. Now we can take advantage of peer-to-peer file sharing or bit torrent clients, and, while these new methods can’t be stopped, the Recording Industry Association of America has become more technologically adept themselves. When a person uploads files through a bit torrent program or downloads or uploads music with a peer-to-peer client, the RIAA can track his IP address. If this occurs on the Dartmouth network, the RIAA forwards the offending IP addresses to Ellen Young, manager of Consulting Services at Computing Services. She then blitzes the offending student asking him or her to remove the illegally downloaded material in the hope that the RIAA doesn’t continue to pursue the matter escalating to a subpoena and a lawsuit. If the student accidentally deletes the blitz or happens to forget about deleting the illegal content, his IP is blocked from accessing the Dartmouth network. When the student does heed Young’s warning but is tagged by the RIAA again, a warning isn’t sufficient: he must take his computer to the Computer Help Desk to get the content erased after the second warning and then meet with his dean after the third warning. Young notes that in past years she would send one or two such blitzes daily, but lately the number has grown to usually five or as many as ten. She credits this many-fold increase to the RIAA’s heightened vigilance—caused in part by the fact that the recording industry’s revenue has been slipping.

Library News

Dartmouth’s library system is quickly nearing capacity as a result of its 40,000 acquisitions per year. At this rate, the current library facilities will be at capacity and therefore require expansion in two to three years. Due to a lack of available space on campus, the college plans to expand the off-campus storage facility or build a new one to house the overflow. The current off-campus facility was erected in 1982 and expanded in 1992 but is nearing capacity itself. Dean of Libraries Jeffrey Horrell informed The Daily Dartmouth on November 19 that shifting journal subscriptions to electronic form is also part of the measures taken to increase shelf capacity.

In other library news, Rauner Library is looking to digitize a portion of its collection as well. The move would facilitate browsing large documents by turning them into searchable text. Older volumes, like those currently housed in Rauner, are especially suited for digitization to avoid degradation of the hard copy by repeated use. While Rauner has yet to begin a comprehensive digitization process, a Vermont digitization company is reportedly scanning, pro bono, all 12 million pages of the United States Congressional Serial Set, which contains all Congressional proceedings beginning from 1817 onward. The Serial Set will be made available to the College in four years. Other universities with much larger collections are also beginning to digitize their books, though the issue of copyright infringement remains a sensitive one with publishers. In the United States all works published before 1923 enter the public domain, but not including books published after that time would be crippling to any digitization project. In the mean time, universities are attempting to negotiate a mutually beneficial digitization scheme wherein publishers are compensated appropriately for their copyrighted materials.

Absurd Pinocchio Lookalike Distributes ‘Impeach-Mints’

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich advocated for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to a crowd of New England residents and Dartmouth students. The so-called “teach-in,” a reference to the sit-ins of the 1960s, was intended to educate its audience members on the history and process of impeachment. Instead, the educational forum was a remonstration by the public against the President, complete with “impeach-mint” peppermints. One Vermont resident noted that although she did not learn anything new, shockingly enough the event reinforced most of her opinions. During his visit to Hanover, Kucinich also signed copies of his autobiography “The Courage to Survive” at The Dartmouth Bookstore for roughly twenty people in attendance. Keep your eyes on this rising star.

Zywicki on Freedman

Trustee Todd Zywicki ‘88 has recently come into a spot of bother over remarks he made to the John Locke Foundation. The speech was part of a conference about reform in higher education at the John William Pope Center, a conservative think tank. Zywicki compared the Board of Trustees to Hugo Chavez and said that they are people “who don’t believe in God, [and] who don’t believe in country.” Zywicki later rescinded those comments; however, he stood by his characterization of former president James Freedman as a “truly evil man.” His refusal to back down from this assertion has caused considerable consternation among many alumni. The Alumni Council criticized Zywicki, and Ed Haldeman ‘70, the Chair of the Board, said that Zywicki’s ‘behaviour’ may be an item for the whole board’s consideration at their next meeting.

Blitz War

On November 14th NetBlitz, one of Dartmouth’s various BlitzMail programs, went down during an update of Dartmouth’s servers, and despite the popularity of the program the College said that it would not restore it, citing the availability of other means to log on to Blitz. NetBlitz, which was created by David Marmaros ’01, has been a popular alternative for Dartmouth students living abroad during off-campus study. In the past when it went down during server updates, the college allowed Marmaros, an employee of Google and student at Stanford’s computer science master’s program, to access the servers and bring it back online. However, Technical Services has said they will not let him do so and has no interest in seeing the program come back on Dartmouth servers. The reasoning for the College’s choice to try and get rid of NetBlitz remains obscured, and Marmaros has installed the program on Stanford servers for the time being (http://www.stanford.edu/~marmaros/cgi-bin/Bl.cgi).

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