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(02/06/14 7:16pm)
You, the reader, will never see the litany of corrections that went into this article before it made its way to publication, because it was composed entirely upon a computer screen — I say “composed” instead of “written” because there is an important distinction to be made between “writing” and “typing.” Almost all essays and papers college students submit are now started and finished digitally — in many cases, one submits the paper by email and receives an electronically submitted grade in return, an exchange that occurs completely within the virtual realm. Perhaps in the days before Microsoft Word, there would have been a few complete, handwritten drafts of a paper before any attempts to type it out, since antiquated typewriters admit no margin for error. But the modern principles of convenience and speed have all but rendered obsolete the idea of handwritten intermediaries between the thought and its expression as the typed word — not the written word. At the most, some prewriting and brainstorming is performed with pencil and paper, but more often than not, the typical student has neither the time nor the patience to write out a single handwritten draft of a 10-page paper, let alone two or three.
(12/02/13 9:53pm)
Last week, the 2013 USG elections were held over a three-day period, with the results announced over Thanksgiving break. Although many newly elected and reelected USG officers walked away with well-earned victories, the lackluster voter turnout is a disappointing sign of Princeton students’ apathy toward the USG. Based on the reported vote counts, just over 1,900 students —much fewer than half of the total undergraduate student body, which numbers over 5,000 —voted in this year’s elections. In last year’s USG presidential election, just under 2,300 students voted, including fewer than 500 seniors —a slightly better figure, but still a pitifully low percentage of the overall undergraduate population. This isn’t just a result of increased apathy among upperclassmen; in this year’s freshman class council elections, only 677 freshmen out of a class of 1,291 students voted. Any American citizen is used to the phenomenon of low voter turnout —even in our presidential elections, the turnout is rarely over 60 percent —but we Princeton students are supposed to be more politically informed than the average person, more aware of the need to participate in the political processes that directly affect us.
(11/25/13 11:01pm)
In light of the recent meningitis cases on campus and the ensuing news coverage that has catapulted us into the national media spotlight, we should take a step back and consider the general state of public health among the undergraduate student body here at Princeton. Seventy-six percent of the interviewed respondents in The Daily Princetonian’s poll last week said they would accept the meningitis B vaccine not yet licensed by the FDA. Based on previous years’ numbers for FluFest, the annual flu vaccination clinics offered through University Health Services, an increasing majority of Princeton students and faculty elect to receive the flu vaccine each year. However, if we look past these highly visible and well-publicized threats to the student body’s health, there are many more issues that are largely ignored amid the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the meningitis outbreak.
(11/11/13 9:04pm)
Last week, The Daily Princetonian published a news article about a petition circulated by graduate students that opposed the demolition of the Butler Apartments. The students worry that the demolition will leave a large number of them without on-campus housing. The petition cited concerns over the administration’s target of housing 70 percent of its graduate students on-campus —a higher proportion than that of most of Princeton’s peer schools —as still too low in a wealthy suburban town where housing prices are far too high for graduate students to afford. Moreover, priority in assigning housing is given to newer graduate students, so the 70 percent figure is not evenly distributed across all years —from their third year onward, housing for graduate students is nowhere near guaranteed. The students are also concerned that they will be forced to live far from campus in order to find affordable housing, even as they continue to serve as preceptors and instructors for undergraduate courses. Although the University maintains that the local rent market will allow graduate students to find relatively affordable and conveniently located housing, Princeton’s wealthy suburban neighborhoods seem to suggest otherwise.
(10/07/13 7:08pm)
AlcoholEdu has been part of Princeton’s smorgasbord of freshman orientation activities for several years, but this year the Class of 2017 had an additional online course to take before they set foot on campus. “Unless There’s Consent,” a program designed by SHARE to educate incoming freshmen on sexual harassment and abuse, is well-intentioned. Last year, when the results of a 2008 survey revealed that around 15 percent of female undergraduate students at Princeton had experienced “non-consensual vaginal penetration” during their four years here, there was anger, there was misanthropy and there was plenty of debate over what the administration could do to bring that number closer to zero. As of now, only the freshmen have taken “Unless There’s Consent” and there have only been five weekends for them to apply its lessons, so it isn’t really possible to gauge its effectiveness with hard data yet. However, it isn’t difficult to see how the program could have been created as a knee-jerk reaction to the uproar surrounding the survey’s results, instead of a long-term solution to a perennial problem.
(09/23/13 8:30pm)
This semester, the computer science department decided to officially rescind the non-pass/D/fail designation for COS 126: General Computer Science, after instituting it for 126, COS 217: Introduction to Programming Systems and COS 226: Algorithms and Data Structures last semester. Although a large number of the students who take COS 126 each semester are engineering or computer science majors who cannot P/D/F the class anyway, there are also many students for whom COS 126 is not a required course. Computer science and programming are becoming more and more ubiquitous in nearly every academic field, and for many students, COS 126 is not any less worthwhile just because it is not a required course. Some students who take a course P/D/F do so to take care of a distribution requirement with minimum effort, but others P/D/F a course because they are doing poorly despite their best efforts and want to prevent their GPA from suffering because of it. COS 126 probably does not attract too many students looking for an easy QR course, but the P/D/F option allows students with little or no experience in programming to take the course without worrying about grades, which are always a concern when large introductory courses combine with the grade deflation policy.
(09/18/13 9:11pm)
Toward the end of last year, as most of us were trying to figure out which classes to take this semester, the subject of good and bad professors often came up when my friends and I were trying to choose courses. For the best and worst ones, all one has to do is scan through the evaluations on ICE or go to a website like RateMyProfessor in order to gauge the general consensus. However, even when the official course evaluations don’t have much to say about a certain professor, word of mouth works just as well. For example, when the economics department decided to change up the assignment of professors to courses this year, word spread quickly that Harvey Rosen would be teaching ECO 100: Introduction to Microeconomics in the fall instead of in the spring, and long before the official course catalog came out, many students knew that Rosen was going to be the fall term professor. A cursory glance through previous years’ evaluations for ECO 100 is enough to determine that Rosen is one of the most popular and well-liked professors for the course, one of the select few who can make a full house at McCosh 50, which seats a whopping 480 students, seem like a small class.
(02/06/13 11:00pm)
The Harvard cheating scandal is once again a hot topic, as the school has just decided to punish over half of the 125 implicated students through forced withdrawal — essentially a one-year suspension — and half of the remaining students were placed on disciplinary probation. I’m sure most Princeton students will remember hearing about the cheating scandal just as the fall semester was starting in September. While it gives us yet another reason to point and laugh at Harvard, the incident also highlights many of the issues present in the college education system, even at top-tier institutions.
(01/08/13 11:00pm)
This pastweekend, a curious story appeared in the news about a man in California who had been arrested for driving alone in a carpool lane, not because he was in a hurry to get to work or go home, but because he was trying to make a political statement. He had brought the articles of corporation for a company with him in the car and was making the claim that, because corporations are people, there was another person with him and therefore he could legally drive in the carpool lane. Obviously, he was expecting to be arrested and will probably have to pay a fine, but his actions bring up what seems to be a recurring problem in American politics: poorly thought-out protest.
(11/27/12 11:00pm)
Like many Princeton students, I went home for Thanksgiving and was greeted by a hefty feast and a happy family. We went out after dinner to see the fireworks display nearby—it's not exactly the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but the city closed off a few blocks, and food vendors lined the streets to take advantage of a crowd in the mood for eating.
(11/13/12 11:00pm)
It appears that David Petraeus GS ’87, who seemed poised to be Princeton’s next president, has definitely been ruled out as a potential successor to Shirley Tilghman. His extramarital affair is not something revolutionary — sex scandals happen in politics all too often — but his position as director of the CIA raises many suspicions regarding national security, especially in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi. As more details about the story are being released, it is quickly becoming apparent there is much more to this scandal than simply an affair.
(10/03/12 10:00pm)
The iPhone 5 has arrived. It is barely different from last year’s iPhone 4S, yet it still commanded the same level of fanaticism from Apple fans, who camped out in front of stores for hours just to get their hands on one. Five million of them were sold during launch weekend — no other product has ever inspired that kind of demand. However, I don’t think the iPhone 5 deserves its hype.