Triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker '04 earned himself a place on the U.S. team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the International Triathlon Union World Cup in Beijing last month, according to The Valley News. Shoemaker finished first, beating out Hunter Kemper and Andy Potts, both well-established Olympians, by 13 and 35 seconds respectively. His cross-training began at Dartmouth, going from the track to the pool to strengthen his swimming side. Shoemaker's running abilities are already well set: he won the 2002 Heptagonal Games cross-country crown, according to Dartmouth Sports. In 2005, he won the under-25 world triathlon championship in Japan, and this year he will compete at the World Cup in Greece and Cancun, The Valley News reported.
Pranking has reached new heights at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prompting college officials to set a "hacking" policy. Hacking, MIT's nickname for "pranks," is a long-time MIT tradition. Past hacks include dressing Harvard University's John Harvard statue as the video game Halo 3's Master Chief character to the more recent, and more serious, dumping of sodium metal in the Charles River and a break-in at the faculty club. The students' claim that they were practicing the tradition of "late-night exploring" is no longer accepted by the MIT administration as the school attempts to create more serious rules regarding pranks.
Hany Farid, head of Dartmouth's Image Science Group and professor of computer science, was profiled in Tuesday's New York Times for his involvement in digital forensics at the College. Farid was responsible for creating the digital forensics sub-field within the computer science department and currently designs programs to detect image forgery in digital media and scientific research. "In today's world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour's worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries," Farid said in The New York Times. Farid's programs are designed to detect light consistencies and pixel values, which change when the image is altered. One such program has been sold to a Canadian bounty fishing company, which uses the software to determine whether photographs have been tampered to increase the size of fish. Farid's work has also brought him into the courtroom, where he served as an expert witness in cases dealing with surveillance cameras and child pornography, defending or incriminating based on whether the media evidence had been tampered with. This year, Farid will teach Numerical and Computational Tools and Concepts in Computing at the College.
