Ivy League Notebook

At a Thurs., Mar. 14 faculty meeting, Cornell Provost Biddy Martin announced the university's new program in which each incoming freshman will be sent a free copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond so each freshman can be prepared to discuss it during Freshman Orientation. Walter Cohen, dean of Cornell's Graduate School, said, "There is a concern to get Freshmen Orientation off to an academic start." Faculty members plan to discuss the book with students on the second day of orientation. The first day of orientation has been reserved for Cornell students to fill out their applications to transfer to Camp Yale.

Princeton

Russell Crowe, who won the Oscar for best actor at the Academy Awards on Sun., Mar. 25, joined a movie shoot on the Princeton campus on Wed., Mar. 27. Since the scenes to be filmed this week take place in the '40s, students have been asked to remove their bicycles from one courtyard, and security has been beefed up to protect expensive equipment. The movie company supposedly chose Princeton because the school's social life still resembles the one F. Scott Fitzgerald described in his 1920 novel This Side of Paradise.

Harvard

A foreign chemical was found this week in a bottle of Diet Coke that afforded a university worker with a hospital visit last month. Tests revealed a substance similar in molecular makeup to diesel fuel, a discovery not surprising to the employee, who remembers the bottle of Diet Coke smelling like fuel. Despite this discovery, Coca-Cola stands by its own tests, and claims it did not find anything out of the ordinary. Robert Lanz, Coca-Cola's vice president of public affairs, claimed, "We got the results back and we were able to determine that there was no problem with the drink." It may not taste good, but if it can run your car, it should get you through that problem set.

—Compiled by Lise Clavel and Zach Weinman from the Cornell Daily Sun, the Daily Princetonian, and the Harvard Crimson

The Week in Brief

At a news conference held Tues., Mar. 27, New Haven Police Chief Melvin Wearing announced that Yale will offer a $100,000 reward for information on the murder of Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin. This sum triples the amount of cash previously available in the Jovin case. Since March 1999, Gov. John Rowland has sponsored a reward of $50,000, the maximum allowed by state law.

Although two years have passed since the night of Dec. 4, 1998, when Jovin was discovered bleeding from stab wounds in a wealthy New Haven neighborhood, the circumstances of her death remain largely unknown. The Jovin family has criticized Yale along with city police both for their failure to protect Suzanne and their inability to determine what happened.

In order to collect the $150,000 reward, a person must provide police with the information that results in an arrest and conviction. Investigators involved with the case maintain that Jovin most likely knew her murderer. —Alison Smith

New Haven civilian review board created

On Wed., Mar. 21, promising to create an increased level of trust between civilians and police, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. announced the city's first civilian police review board. Created by an executive order from the mayor, the board will hear complaints against the police and review the department's own internal investigations. Ten of the board's 15 members will be local community activists.

DeStefano's announcement capped a nearly four-year crusade led by Emma Jones of East Haven, whose son Malik was fatally shot by police on Mon., Apr. 14, 1997. Since then, Jones and other members of the Malik Organization have fought for a strong, independent police review organization that has the full power to investigate police conduct.

Detractors claim DeStefano's new board falls short of such a goal. The board is a committee of the existing police commission and can neither launch its own investigations nor subpoena witnesses. Although the board may recommend discipline for officers, its recommendations are not binding. Jones did not attend the mayor's announcement ceremony, claiming the mayor's plan is crippled by such shortcomings. "I want a civilian review board, a real one," she said. Jones held a press conference on Fri., Mar. 23 to announce her own plans for civilian review of the police. —Zander Dryer

Depression accelerates progress of HIV

HIV-positive women who suffer from depression are more likely to die than those who are not depressed, according to a recent study by Yale researcher Jeannette Ickovics, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health.

Ickovics' study lasted seven years. "Women with chronic depression were more likely to have disease progression," she said.

The study focused on the effects of depression on disease progression and survival rate for 765 HIV-positive women. "The implication is that early diagnoses and treatment of depression are critical," Ickovics said. "If we can effectively treat depression among these women, we have the opportunity to not only prolong their lives but also to enhance their quality of life."

Ickovics added that the study has implications for both men and women who suffer from depression and said that more research on how depression affects disease progression is necessary. "We still need to do more research to find out how the mechanism works." The study also found that women with advanced cases of HIV were more susceptible to effects of depression. Nearly one quarter of the chronically depressed patients died during the study while only eight percent of women with little or no sign of depression died. —Amsalu Dabela

Abortion: the "maternal-state conflict"

On Mon., Mar. 26, Lynn Paltrow gave a talk entitled "Reproductive Freedom and the War on Drugs." Paltrow came to Yale fresh from her victory in the Supreme Court case, Ferguson v. Charleston. A six-to-three majority of the Court ruled that testing pregnant women for illegal drug use without their consent constitutes an unlawful search because the test is often used to incriminate the patient. Women who went to a city hospital in Charleston, S.C. to deliver were tested for drug use—allegedly without their consent. A positive result was then used to put the women in what the state claimed was a drug rehabilitation program. Paltrow argued that the "rehabilitation" program was actually incarceration.

The vilification of drug-using pregnant women grew out of the scare in the late '80s over so-called "crack babies"—babies whose mothers had used cocaine during pregnancy and who would be plagued by permanent health problems and be a burden on society. Subsequent research has shown that the health problems named as the consequence of prenatal exposure to cocaine were actually less severe than those associated with alcohol exposure. Many of these "crack babies" have since grown up to be healthy, functional adults.

While Paltrow was elated at the achievement of a long-sought-after goal, she urged the audience to get involved in issues at the intersection of the war on abortion and the war on drugs. Paltrow believes that the two issues are inextricably linked because they involve the government is interfering with individuals' rights to control their own bodies. To illustrate her point, Paltrow contrasted the stigmatizing of drug-addicted pregnant women who mostly birth healthy babies with the favorable portrayal of women who risk death to carry sick babies to term. The concern is not for infant health, she argues, but about regulating who gets to reproduce. "These are not maternal-fetal conflicts; these are maternal-state conflicts," Paltrow said. —Georgina Cullman

Heard

Economics 115

"Rolling Rock? Everybody can drink Rolling Rock—my-nine-year old kid drinks Rolling rock!" —Doron Ben-Atar, Early National America

"We eat, we drink, we fuck ourselves to death."

—Lawrence Manley, Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances

Index

3. Academy Awards awarded to Ridley Scott's Gladiator: 5

4. Academy Award nominations for Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car?: 0

5. Academy Awards awarded to Danny's Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car?: 0 6. Gladiator's awards/Gladiator's nominations: .425

7. Dude's awards/Dude's nominations: undefined

8. Pot-smoking dogs in Dude, Where's My Car?: 1

9. Pot-smoking dogs in Gladiator: 4

10. Pot-smoking dogs in Traffic: 0

11. Pot-smoking "dogs" in Traffic: A lot

—Compiled by Schuyler Schouten

1,2,3) The New York Times; 4, 5) www.snubbingdude.com; 6,7) Ian Shapiro, "Democratic Justice at the Academy Awards: A Statistical Model"; 8) the scene in the guru's pagoda; 9) the Arab market scene—seriously!; 10,11) counting with numbers is fun .

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