The Week In Brief

Committee to boost Yale voter registration

Stand Up and Vote organizer and Dwight Hall Co-Coordinator Shayna Strom, DC '02, attributes this decline partly to a sense of disenfranchisement among Yalies. "I think a lot of students feel like they can't impact the issues, but they can," Strom said.

Another reason for the apathy among unregistered students, Strom said, is the economic prosperity of the past decade. "It's a comfortable time for people right now and Yale's a comfortable place," Strom said. "What people here sometimes fail to realize is that there are a lot of ignored issues deserving their attention." Part of the responsibility for Strom and the other committee members is to persuade students to register by reminding them of such issues.

In the hopes of turning voter apathy into enthusiasm, "Stand Up and Vote" raised over $2,000 in a fundraising event hosted at Caffé Adulis on Wed., Sept. 20. A number of state senators and representatives attended, as well as members of the Board of Aldermen and Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. Proceeds from the event will be used to employ six to eight undergraduates who will raise awareness on campus in a grassroots effort to encourage voter registration.

While the Stand Up and Vote committee will assist students in filing absentee ballots from their home states, organizers encourage students to register in Connecticut. "Officials understand that the Yale student body represents a considerable chunk of the city population and that Yale students are taken into account by the census," Strom said. "They want students to participate in local elections because the more votes mean more money and more resources for New Haven."

—Strand Conover

Psych department brings in new brains

With six senior faculty retiring and three junior faculty leaving for tenured positions elsewhere in the past few years, Yale was left with a lack of faculty specializing in popular disciplines such as developmental psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience.

With this trend ongoing, "we were losing the best [graduate] cognitive science people to places like Stanford, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon," Salovey said. "We were also losing excellent students in developmental psychology."

Over the past year, though, Yale's psychology department has been doing some serious rebuilding. The graduate department saw its enrollment rise 67 percent this year, and, over the last three years, 15 new faculty members have been hired.

Among the highlights of the recent recruitment effort, Salovey said, is cognitive scientist Marcia Johnson, formerly of Princeton. Johnson focuses on brain activities underlying memory and currently teaches the popular senior seminar "Psychological and Social Processes of Reality Monitoring." At Yale, she will also have more laboratory space than she did at Princeton, according to Salovey.

"We can now compete for the best students in these new areas of psychology," Salovey said. "These people are pushing the limit of their psychological discipline."

—Brian Ginsberg

Yale students campaign against Citigroup

On Thurs., Sept. 14, two dozen volunteers, including students from the Yale Student Environment Coalition (SEC), set up shop outside of Dwight Hall voicing their disapproval in 118 phone calls made to local Citibank branches and headquarters in New York. Yale was not alone: Princeton, the University of Southern California, and NYU were three of 12 universities participating in the nationwide call-in.

According to participant Katie Legomsky, TD '02, Citigroup's worldwide offices fund the Three Gorges Dam in China, a pipeline running through the rainforests of Chad and Cameroon, and strip mines in Chile and Argentina. In China alone, over a dozen endangered species around the site are threatened with extinction, and two million people will be displaced, she said. Citigroup maintains that these allegations are spurious and that destruction does not result from their projects. Although other financial institutions may fund similar projects, students are targeting Citigroup because their consumer branch, Citibank, can underwrite projects with money made from credit card payments and student loans.

The campaign was launched on Thurs., Sept. 21 with an event featuring a speech by the field director from the Rainforest Action Network. Fifty people took part in the event, which will be televised on a local New Haven station (channel 10 or 29). Organizers were galvanized by the turnout. "It was a huge kickoff success," Beka Econo-mopoulos, the East Coast grassrooots coordinator for the Rainforest Action Network, said.

—Janet Kim

TANYA PALOMO/YH Look ma, no clothes! Yalies get down and dirty at Timothy dwight's perenially popular Exotic Erotic dance. For more nudity, see page 13.

Around The Globe

Police in Caracas, Venezuela recently made a large deposit in the country's Central Bank: 290 pounds of pure cocaine.

The anti-narcotics department has inadequate storage space for the 8.2 tons of cocaine that it has seized in busts in recent months and has turned to the financial institutions for help. "There is even drugs in the bank director's office," Javier Carrera, the anti-narcotics director at the Public Prosecutor's office, remarked.

Yalies who wish to offer their dorm rooms for storage are invited to do so by the Venezuelan police.

Dubai schoolchildren get educated

This month, a popular Dubai, United Arab Emirates retailer sent schoolchildren promotional packages of chocolates and videos. But parents were shocked to see that the supposedly educational films actually depicted homosexual pornography. "Instead of the cartoon show, it was a disaster,'' Khamis Mohammed al-Suweidi said in the Ittihad newspaper.

So far, police have confiscated 400 videos and are seeking more for seizure. Rather than face destruction, the videos will be sent to Blockbuster for rental starting next week.

Police start lucrative side business

In China's Jiangsu province, a police station made big bucks by hiring prostitutes to lure customers into rooms where the police would then arrest and "fine" them.

Business was just splendid—until they were shut down by another police station. According to the Xinmin Evening News, "Depending on how much money the police pulled in, they would issue a bonus to the girls." The paper did not detail just what this "bonus" constituted, though CHIPS fans can venture a guess.

—Compiled by Amsalu Dabela and Vanessa Janowski from Yahoo! News.

HEARD

"Today we talk about how the mafia is like a giant octopus." —Federico Varese, The State and Organized Crime "You don't have to speak the language—you just sit there and get cultured. Just look at me for five minutes and you get cultured." —Bassam Frangieh, Intensive Standard Modern Arabic "Don't read the footnotes—they will either mislead or confuse you. Only I get to do that." —Bill Dereiscweicz, Modern British Novel "I've been using the word `chastity' promiscuously." —John Rogers, Milton

YALE INDEX
1. Number of Olympic Games in progress in Australia:	1
2. Number of Olympic Games in progress in the U.S.:	0
3. Total number of Olympic Games held in Australia:	2
4. Total number of Olympic Games held in the U.S.:	7
5. Number of Sydneys in Australia:	1
6. Number of Sydneys in the U.S.:	2
7. Number of Olympias in Australia:	0
8. Number of Olympias in the U.S.:	6
9. Number of Olympias in the Dukakis family:	1
10. Number of Olympics index writers have been in:	0
11. Number of Olympias index writers have been in:	0
12. Number of Olympia Dukakis' index writers have been in:	0
13. Percentage of index writers who would enjoy being in Olympics:	100
14. Percentage of index writers who would enjoy being in Olympia:	50
15. Percentage of index writers who would enjoy being in Olympia Dukakis:	0

—Compiled by Joey Ax and Aaron Zamost

1, 2) Bob Costas; 3, 4) Microsoft Encarta; 5, 6, 7, 8) Mapquest.com; 9) Michael Dukakis; 10, 11) Long-term memory; 12) Short-term memory; 13, 14) Index writer survey; 15) Human decency

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