I have connections. I don’t mean connections of the ligament-and-tendon variety, although I do have those as well (if I didn’t, that headshot up there would be assuredly different) — I refer of course to the connections that us Ivy League students are privy to, the kind that coalesce out of glances and furtive handshakes in the smoky back-rooms of bars.

More specifically, I have connections to the Ithaca Bureau of Investigations, a little-known but powerful organization located in the secret passageways below the clock museum. The IBI is primarily concerned with the monitoring of alien life, which, as you may have surmised, is particularly active in Ithaca. Through a series of improbable events that I won’t bother to recount (it involves three bowling balls, a two-dollar bottle of wine and a rather embarrassed emu), I became the official IBI-Daily Sun liaison, serving to control The Sun’s alien-related content (“What alien-related content?” you wonder — my point exactly) in exchange for privileged information.

Recently, I came across one such privileged document so shocking and so important that I felt I must share it with you. It seems that Cornell has been infiltrated by alien anthropologists, funded by a generous grant from the Intergalactic Science Foundation, who have posed as undergraduates in order to write an ethnography of the human race, no doubt to insidious ends. I have a copy of the translated notes for the ethnography, and I will reprint them in full in the following space so that you can be prepared for whatever may come of them. Although I realize that making this document public puts my reputation, my position at The Sun, and indeed my life itself at risk, I am willing to make that sacrifice to become the Daniel Ellsberg of our generation. A noble act? Certainly, but I would expect no less of a journalist such as myself.

Continue reading An Anthropologist on Mars…

In the past decade, Google has become an indispensable part of American culture. And, much like American culture, Google is slowly but surely taking over the world — albeit while engendering far less resentment from its conquered. This is not surprising, as Google has revolutionized the way that people get information; its centralizing approach elegantly and efficiently fills needs we didn’t even know we had. Just in the past year or so, Google has introduced: Google Maps, which trounces Mapquest if only because of its lack of intrusive ads; Google Print, which allows you to search the full text of an ever-increasing number of books; and Google Scholar, which enables you to easily find research articles and, if you’re on a university network, locate them on campus (a windfall for those of us who have struggled with the Cornell Library Gateway’s cumbersome “Find Articles” feature). Google now also offers service through text messaging. I’ve never been prouder to be an American.

When it comes to the social sciences, however, Google serves an entirely different sort of purpose. While it is excellent for tracking down facts, figures, and research articles — all of which involve its capacity as a referrer to other sources of information — it also serves as a source of original information in its own right. It’s an index of nearly everything written in the public domain of the Internet, and as such it can provide information about the information that’s available — “meta-information,” if you will. Anybody who has begun a paper by citing Google statistics (“The phrase ‘I love tomatoes’ returns 9,370 search results in Google. Clearly, the tomato has become a beloved institution in the English-speaking world”) has taken advantage of this function.

Continue reading What’s in a Name?…

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took a brief sojourn from the Op-Ed pages this past Sunday, writing a feature article for the magazine section entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” In the article, Dowd ponders the question of whether feminism is dead; in support of this thesis she cites an apparent increase in adherence to traditional gender roles and seeming apathy in response to social inequality.

What surprised me most about the article — aside from the fact that, when not making up cutesy nicknames for politicians, Dowd can write eloquently and thoughtfully and almost completely non-irritatingly — was a statistic she provided in a section on “power dynamics.” Dowd writes: “A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.”

Holy crap. That’s quite the staggering figure, and it certainly bolsters Dowd’s assertion that “the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men.” But statistics are funny things sometimes. They carry with them an air of factuality, of incontrovertibility — if the numbers say it, it must be the case. And to an extent that’s true; statistics are descriptions of observations, and as such they don’t lie (assuming the numbers aren’t fudged).

The problem is that statistics can easily be abused and misinterpreted, and they all-too-frequently are. Researchers are usually pretty good about discussing the limitations and caveats of their own findings, but journalists — propelled by the goal of making information newsworthy — are notoriously bad at letting numbers speak for themselves. Since most of us rarely read the actual research articles, most of us never question the secondhand assertions framing the data.

Continue reading Statistic Abuse…

About a year and a half ago, I used this space (”Annelidanger,” 4/21/2004) to raise awareness about an insidious problem on the Cornell campus - namely the way that worms slither onto the sidewalk in the rain and are, for lack of a better term, totally gross. Though an Ad Hoc Committee on Worm Welfare has yet to be assembled, I have been satisfied with the public response and, for 19 months, I have laid down my arms against a sea of squashed yucky things.

But now I must take them up again.

If you’ve been on the Arts Quad, you’ve probably noticed them. They blanket the sidewalk that runs north-south in front of Stone Row (Morrill, McGraw and White Halls) in numbers never seen before, quantities too staggering to believe. Thousands of caterpillars darken the cement, flattened by the treads of unsuspecting undergrads and gallivanting grad students. And at night — oh, the scene! — the sidewalk lives with the teeming, wriggling bodies of thousands more. It’s positively fulsome.

Continue reading Don’t Tread on Me…

Let’s begin today with a pop quiz. Take out your number two pencils, everybody.

1. A man and a woman conceive and give birth to a child the “old-fashioned” way. Who are the child’s parents?
2. A man and a woman adopt a 10-month-old infant. Who are the child’s parents?
3. A woman has in vitro fertilization with another woman’s egg and her male partner’s sperm. The egg is implanted in her uterus and she gives birth to the child. Who are the child’s parents?
4. A man and a woman employ a surrogate mother to be implanted with a donor ovum that has been fertilized with donor sperm. The surrogate mother gives birth to the child, and the original man and woman take custody of it. Who are the child’s parents?

The answer to the first question is likely obvious, but the other questions seem to beg for a more nuanced use of terms: the distinction between genetic parents and what I’ll call familial parents (those who actually raise the child) is useful for answering the second and third questions. The fourth question adds a third term to the mix, one that we don’t usually use but that perhaps we should: a biological parent — currently, it can only be a biological mother — is one who carries the child prenatally and gives birth to it. (This relationship is not insignificant, as the number of surrogate mothers reluctant to give up the children they birth can attest.)

Continue reading And Baby Makes n…

It’s odds-and-ends day, which means that today’s column will be devoted to rejected seeds of columns and ramblings that couldn’t be stretched into 850-word screeds. Enjoy! (Or, more accurately: Skim and then turn to the crossword!)

A Day in the Life of my Upstairs Neighbors (A One-Act Play)

Scene: An elephant stampedes across the floor. Heavy Male #1 stirs in bed, then opens his eyes.
Heavy Male #1: Hey, where did that elephant come from?
Heavy Male #2: (Pogo-sticks into the room) Beats me.
Heavy Male #1: Good morning, housemate! Boy, I sure am exhausted from that four-hour sumo wrestler DDR tournament we held late last night.
Heavy Male #2: I’m not surprised you’re tired; I saw you pounding away at that anvil afterwards. You’re such a workhorse!
Heavy Male #1: What can I say? Just doing my job as a part-time smithy.
Heavy Male #2: Hey, catch! (Lobs a cannonball at Heavy Male #1)
Heavy Male #1: Oops! (Cannonball falls to floor) Oh well, maybe tomorrow morning. It’s 6:03 a.m., you know what that means!
Heavy Males #1 and #2: CLOG-DANCING!

Continue reading Odds and Ends…

Unless you’ve been bedridden for the past few weeks, you’ve without a doubt seen them around campus: the big, shockingly red, somewhat disorienting archways standing in front of the most frequented buildings on each quad, causing pedestrians to take detours to avoid walking under them for some inexplicable reason. Some have pejorative signs tacked up on them; some are lying on the ground in three pieces, the targets of student discontentment.

According to an e-mail I just received from the Human Ecology administration, the uppercase name for the arches is “Diversity Archways,” and they’re scattered about the campus in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the phrase “Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds.” Also according to the e-mail, some of the arches are slated for interactive projects; the one in front of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall has been opened up as public forum, and members of the Human Ecology community are invited to “write down [their] thoughts using the rainproof materials provided, and … [s]taple them any way [they] wish to the archway using the staple guns and ladder provided.”

This whole arch thing brings up three interesting questions. One, have we become so desperate for things to commemorate that we’re now marking the anniversaries of phrases? Two, how much is Cornell paying in liability insurance to cover the countless injuries that will invariably result from the unfortunate combination of staple guns and ladders? Three, and most importantly, why are we, as a culture, so goddamned bad at memorializing?

Continue reading In Memoriam…

Two weekends ago: I accidentally cut off the tip of a finger while chopping lettuce, and spent my Saturday evening in the emergency room; a housemate nearly burned down the apartment when a pot of oil burst into flame; and the bathtub drain became stuck closed, leaving us with a tub filled with five inches of standing water and nowhere to shower.

Last weekend, in an attempt to recreate the excitement, I went to the 2005 New York State Fair. Before I start writing about the fair, let me just say that the topic has already been covered relatively recently in The Sun. A year ago, Alex Linhardt ‘06 wrote about the New York State Fair for Daze in arguably one of the finest pieces to appear in the section in the past decade. Linhardt discussed his reason for going to the fair, which was to discover the heart of America, to become acquainted with a country that had so long been a stranger. Ultimately, he was disappointed. Well, I harbored no such hopes of enlightenment. I went because I thought it would be goofy. And I was not disappointed.

Continue reading Stay Down, Crawl Out…

Last winter I went to Disney World with a couple of friends, and while other visitors waited in seemingly endless lines to go on the newest rides — rides that turn you upside-down, rides that skim precipitous drops, rides that accelerate at ungodly rates that bring to mind scenes from cartoons in which a character’s body shoots forward while his head remains behind, his neck stretching comically long — we spent our most pleasant late afternoons and evenings in that haven for pregnant women and children who are not yet “this tall”: Tomorrowland. Contrary to what its name suggests, Tomorrowland is less a peek into the future and more a glimpse into the past; the “tomorrow” to which it refers was decades ago. It is filled with rides and exhibits that were sleek and modern 40 years ago but now seem quaint and adorably misguided, like a drawing done by a five-year-old.

The gem of the Tomorrowland collection is the Carousel of Progress. Originally built for the 1960 World’s Fair in collaboration with General Electric, the Carousel cycles riders through four animatronic dioramas taking place in different times — the turn of the 20th century, 1920, 1940 and “today” — each of which features the same family boasting about their newest technological comforts. When G.E. withdrew their sponsorship in the early 1990s, the Carousel was refurbished, both to eliminate all mentions of G.E. and to modernize “today’s” diorama. The updated take-home message, very much a vestige of the early nineties and once again adorably misguided, seems to be that videophones are the wave of the future and will revolutionize telecommunications as we know it.

Continue reading A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow…