Articles filed under “In the news”

… and hide the pre-frosh, because this guy’s creeping on everybody out here.

courtesy of theridernews.com

courtesy of theridernews.com

According to Public Safety’s recent email, a 68-year-old man named Tony A. Kadyhrob is stalking New Jersey college campuses for young girls (ages 18-30) after recently being released on bail for attempting to grab a student at Rider University. He was then stopped at The College of New Jersey, and apparently told the cops that he’s been trolling NJ campuses for over a month, including Princeton University.

Oh. my. god. what.

In addition to looking like the love child of Christopher Walken and Adolf Hitler, here are a few things you need to know about Tony Kadyhrob:

While it’s easy to freak out over a face like that (the infamous campus masturbator has nothing on this guy), Princeton’s Public Safety has received no reports of Kadyhrob ever being spotted on campus. Still, if I hear any cowbell on my way to class, I am running away as fast as I can.

UPDATE 4/6/11: Princeton Borough Police detained and released Kadyhrob this morning on Wiggins Street. Anyone got a can of pepper spray I can borrow?

Apr 5, 2011

Campus Safety Alert: Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife…

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When the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership was founded by President Tilghman in December 2009, its stated goal was to address an increasingly evident and concerning fact: women at Princeton were, in some way, flying under the radar. The number of women involved in leadership roles and the number winning academic prizes took a nosedive beginning in 2000. Somehow, the experience of women at Princeton was fundamentally different than that of their male peers.

Screen shot 2011-03-22 at 12.04.23 AM

(From left to right) Figure 1: Representation of Princeton Undergraduates in Highest Profile Leadership Positions on Campus, 1970-2010, by Sex and by Decade; Figure 2: Winners of Pyne Prizes, 1970-2009, by Sex and by Decade

President Tilghman charged the committee to address “the critical question of whether women undergraduates are realizing their academic potential and seeking opportunities for leadership at the same rate and in the same manner as their male colleagues.” After a year of work in focus groups, committees, surveys, and conversations, here’s what the committee of 9 faculty members, 6 undergrads, and 3 administrators came up with.

Continue reading…

Mar 22, 2011

Committee on Women’s Leadership Seeks to Bridge the Campus Gender Divide

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from Politico.com

Cool tie. (from Politico.com)

Last May, the Prince and Mudd Library launched the Larry DuPraz Digital Archives, which offers scans of The Daily Princetonian from its early issues in 1876 through 2002. Going through the collection, named after the paper’s former production manager and informal adviser, is like stepping back in history. I highly recommend it, when you’re feeling a bit of that Princeton nostalgia, or wondering if Wendy Kopp ’89 lived in your dorm room. Sit back, click around, and travel back to a time when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was that senior who was always winning awards and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was that kid who got arrested after the drug bust in his room in Cuyler.

Wait, what?

So, the real reason I started looking into the Prince archives was because I stumbled across a Politico blog post about Daniels’ curious arrest in 1970. (Unfortunately, the Prince archives aren’t available for that year–they’re in the process of uploading every year.) Daniels, one of the frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination, was charged with two counts, marijuana possession and maintaining a nuisance (the nuisance being his room, 111 Cuyler, out of which undercover officers said they purchased marijuana and LSD.)

Continue reading…

Feb 18, 2011

On Prince Archives–and Ruining Any Chance You Have of Running for President?

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If you were one of the thousands of people keeping an eye on Punxsutawney Phil last week, then you already know we’re due for just one more week of winter.

If you weren’t, check out (a very confused looking) Phil in this video. (Also of note: Phil’s powers are apparently not limited to meteorological prediction. Stick it out until 4:40 in the video to hear his athletic insight).

Lest you didn’t believe in Phil’s meteorological powers, it seems like he might have nailed it this time. Or else the meteorologists at The Weather Channel have started using the shadow-seeing method too (which may be an improvement to their current methods, anyway). Check out this week’s surprisingly Spring-like forecast after the jump.

Continue reading…

Feb 13, 2011

Punxsutawney Phil and Meteorologists Reach Agreement on Predictions

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Photos taken by Robert Joyce '13 and Prathik Root '12 (Middlebury College).

Study abroad took on a whole new level of intensity for Robert Joyce ’13, one of five Princeton students who were supposed to spend this semester in Egypt.

Joyce, who was on a program with Middlebury College in Alexandria, just returned to the United States a few days ago. His story of what he and fellow students saw during the Egyptian protests involves tear gas, burning trucks, and staying up all night to fight off thugs with a nail-studded 2×4. Basically, like something out of an action movie.

The other four students were Oren Samet, Michael Gibbs, Kelly Roache and Tal Eisenzweig, all juniors who were on a Woody Woo task force in Cairo. All of them are safely back in the U.S. now, and meeting with a dean today to discuss options for the rest of the semester.

Read the full story at thePrinceton Packet and Newsweek.com.

Feb 4, 2011

IN PRINT: Students Escape from Cairo and Alexandria

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solarpanelAs early as the summer of 2012, Princeton will be looking a little greener.  The University plans to install a solar collector field that would generate 8 million kilowatt-hours per year – that’s enough to power 700 homes, or 5.5 percent of Princeton’s total energy use.

The 5.3-megawatt solar field will have 16,500 photovoltaic panels, and it’s expected to be one of the biggest single installations at a U.S. college.  It would be significantly larger than the systems at Harvard and Yale, the only Ivies to make The Princeton Review’s 2011 Green Colleges Honor Roll. (Anyone else smell a little competition here?)

This won’t be the first solar power system at Princeton.  The Forrestal Campus’s Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) building hosts an array of 5,000 panels installed in 2009, and the new Frick Chemistry Laboratory has 216 panels.  The proposed project, which is an order of magnitude larger, should cut Princeton’s electric bill by approximately 8% per year.

A unique funding plan made the more ambitious proposal possible.  Princeton will lease, not own, the system and pay for it by selling renewable energy credits.  Eventually, the University will stop selling credits and claim the carbon emissions reduction, which will help achieve its goal of returning to 1990 emissions levels by 2020.

And because it wouldn’t be complete without educational value, the field will deliver a continuous real-time data feed from the solar field, which students and faculty will be able to use for research.

So where is the University going to put 16,500 solar panels?  The solar field will be on 27 acres between the Dinky line, the canal, Washington Road, and Route 1, although you might not see them since the plan also calls for some new landscaping.  Solar power may be cool, but a sea of rotating electronic panels might be a little too sci-fi for this town.

Check out more details on the project here.

Feb 2, 2011

Here Comes the Sun

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Chargin up their lazer (sic) Photo credit. Frank Wojciechowski

Princeton researchers are chargin' up their lazer (sic). Photo credit: Frank Wojciechowski

That’s right. Take that, Austin Powers.

Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering has developed a new laser that can detect and identify trace chemicals in the air, which is 1000 times more sensitive than the laser technology being used today.

With funding from the Office of Naval Research, Princeton’s engineers expect that this laser could eventually produce a remote, bomb-scanning military device small enough to be mounted on a tank. As professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Richard Miles told TG Daily:

“In general, when you want to determine if there are contaminants in the air you need to collect a sample of that air and test it…but with remote sensing you don’t need to do that. If there’s a bomb buried on the road ahead of you, you’d like to detect it by sampling the surrounding air, much like bomb-sniffing dogs can do, except from far away.”

Oh, it can also detect pollution. Technology that both the army and the peace-loving environmentalists can agree on? Science, you amaze me.

Read more about our super awesome lasers here.

Feb 1, 2011

Princeton Unveils Bomb-detecting Lasers

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The total cost of attending Princeton — tuition, food, housing — will go up by 1% next year, which is the smallest increase in 45 years. So although you will be paying more, it’ll be by the smallest margin in a looooong time.

The decision was made in light of the rough economy and the university’s relative stability. Read the full story at the Times of Trenton.

Here are the official numbers from the Report of the Priorities Committee (you can read that whole document here):

A fee package comparison between this year and next year

A fee package comparison between this year and next year

Jan 25, 2011

IN PRINT: You Will Pay “Less More” To Go Here Next Year!

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If the new semester has you thinking about your upcoming workload, consider this. A new study shows that college students today spend only 16 percent of their time studying or in class and lab, far less than students in previous decades. Nine percent of their time is spent on working, volunteering or club activities, and the rest (75%) is on sleeping and socializing.

As a result, almost half of all undergraduates in the country show no academic gains in their first two years of college, and student performance gains are “disturbingly low,” according to the report. Thirty-six percent of students left college without any “significant improvement in learning,” as measured by performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

The CLA is a test that “gauges critical thinking and analytic reasoning,” according to The Week. That means that the authors of the study didn’t measure learning in any specific field, but rather critical thinking ability, which critics say isn’t the best measure of a college education.

The average GPA of the students surveyed might surprise you: 3.2.

From ABC News:

“These are really kind of shocking, disturbing numbers,” says New York University professor Richard Arum, lead author of the book, published by the University of Chicago Press.

He noted that students in the study, on average, earned a 3.2 grade-point average. “Students are able to navigate through the system quite well with little effort,” Arum said.

The report is based on a book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. It surveyed 3,000 students at 29 unnamed universities.

Jan 23, 2011

New report: College students only spend 16% of time studying or in class

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"I am quite muscular and am standing in a room that is lit in such a way so as to maximize the splendor of my muscles!"

Timothy Ferriss ’00 has written a book that will transform you into a hypermuscled, knife-sharp sex god. That is, if you trust his methods. Ferriss plies a special brand of hand-waving alternative-medicine voodoo magic, prescribing dubious fixes like ginger and sauerkraut (if you want to put on muscle) or protein and lemon juice (if you want to lose fat). Or, alternatively, if you seek “wolverine sex,” try his carefully calibrated diet of 4 Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds, 2 cod-liver oil capsules, and butterfat. (And seriously don’t even think of eating that 5th Brazil nut, if you or your partner hope to get out alive.)

But apparently people believe this stuff: his book, ”The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times hard-cover advice list.

Ferriss, who majored in East Asian Studies, has since veered more into the field of Bat**** Insane. After graduating, he started up a nutritional supplement company called BrainQuicken — even his thesis (“Acquisition of Japanese Kanji: Conventional Practice and Mnemonic Supplementation”) seems to have something to do with that. He is all about self-improvement though vague alchemical means.

Continue reading…

Jan 23, 2011

Timothy Ferriss ’00 Releases How-To-Be-Godlike Self-Help Book

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Recently, bloggers have gotten ahold of President John F. Kennedy’s old college application essays, and boy, were standards different back then.

EDIT: JFK’s Harvard essay reads like this: (Source)

“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I felt that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a “Harvard man” is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.”

But wait… they found his application essay to Princeton was nearly identical.

Hey now, cut the late Mr. President some slack. It’s not like we all didn’t do a little tweaking on our Common App. (“Sure, Yale’s my top choice…”) On the other hand, he only spent 6 weeks at Princeton before going to Harvard.

Critics argue that if Kennedy applied today, he would not have been admitted to an Ivy League school with these essays. But honestly, if JFK could reapply knowing everything we do today, wouldn’t his essay be entitled “How I’m Going to Become a Pimpin’ Ladykiller/President of the United States Before My Untimely Assassination That Will Go Down in History as a Government Conspiracy”?

That’s what I called mine.

Moral of the story to Princeton students aspiring for elected office: guard your college apps.

Jan 22, 2011

JFK’s Princeton College App: It’s Okay To Copy/Paste

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Princeton received a record 27,115 applications for the class of 2015, according to a statement from the university. The number is a 3.3 percent increase from last year’s 26,247 applications for the class of 2014, when applications jumped by almost 20 percent over the class of 2013.

The university intends to enroll 1,300 freshmen in the fall, which means that the admission rate will definitely be over at least 5 percent.

“The depth of the applicant pool is impressive, and, as in previous years, we will have extremely difficult decisions to make in the coming weeks because of the quality of this year’s applicants,” Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said in the statement. “With the increase in applications, it’s clear that the University’s academic excellence, students’ unrivaled access to world-class faculty members and our generous financial aid policy continue to have tremendous appeal to prospective students.”

The biggest trend is online–only 1 percent of applicants submitted a paper version of the application (Why? Who are these 270 high school seniors?) and almost all of them applied with the Common Application.

The 27,115 applications have set a record for the seventh year in a row, though the jump in applicants is markedly smaller than the 20 percent last year.

College Confidential? Unimpressed.

Screen shot 2011-01-19 at 3.45.12 PM

Update:

Other schools also set records…that were perhaps more impressive. (And that’s why we do these posts, to impress ourselves.) Harvard received 35,000 applications, a 15 percent increase from last year, according to Bloomberg. Dartmouth and Penn saw similar jumps, and Brown saw a 2.9 increase to 31,000 students. Columbia saw applications rise 32 percent, to 34,587.

One reason these schools are setting records year after year could be that it’s getting easier than ever to apply to colleges, thanks to the Common App. According to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s Freshman Survey, the percentage of students who applied to 7 or more colleges doubled to 23 percent from 1999 to 2009.

Jan 19, 2011

Class of 2015 sets new applications record, College Confidential is like, meh.

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