Beginning in the fall of 2007, Columbia College will
allow students who take a class with the pass-fail option to see the grade they would have earned in the class and, if happy with that grade, have it listed on their transcript. Students will have from the time their grades are posted until two weeks into the next term to decide to list their grade or not. The policy notes that "D" grades will now be recorded on the transcript instead of being considered a "passing grade."
The power went out on central campus around 2:15 p.m. for about one minute yesterday. At press time, the exact reason for the outage remains undetermined. Assistant Director of Engineering and Utilities Ken Packard suspected, however, that the outage was caused by a "quirk in the control circuitry." He speculated that the power outage occurred when the College switched from using power from the national grid to using solely its own power plant. The College's power plant, which generally supplies 40 percent of campus power, was not capable of supplying all of the required power. Packard noted that this type of power outage is fairly infrequent; most power outages on campus are caused by a "bump" from the utility.
Winds that now blow from the west across the mid-latitudes of North America once blew from the east, according to a new study by Dartmouth researchers released Monday. The researchers argue that global climate change has led to different wind circulation patterns in the atmosphere, which has changed the direction of the wind. In determining the previous direction of the wind, researchers checked 20,000- to 30,000-year-old wood samples for moisture. The abundance of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in wood samples on the East Coast led researchers to conclude that winds had previously blown from east to west. The study, led earth sciences professor Xiahong Feng, was published in the online edition of the journal Geology.
