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December 24, 2025 | Latest Issue
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New Ultraseek search engine remaps dated Dartmouth website

By Jessica Chen | February 7, 2005

For students roaming the Dartmouth website with mouse clicks of frustration, Computing Services has found a solution, launching a new search engine Friday that promises to make the website more user-friendly. The new search feature expands index capacity on the search engine from 100,000 to 1 million documents, allowing better-matched search results.

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Rocky director gives Bush high marks on Social Security plan

By Matthew Beale | February 4, 2005

In the wake of Wednesday's State of the Union address, which focused heavily on President Bush's proposed Social Security reforms, economics professor and Rockefeller Center Director Andrew Samwick expressed support of plans to partially privatize Social Security, the most controversial piece of the President's proposed overhaul. Samwick, who recently returned to the College from an advisory position as chief economist on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors to the President in Washington, concurs with many of Bush's proposals but is concerned about the lack of implementation details. Although Samwick disagrees with Bush's State of the Union characterization of Social Security as "headed towards bankruptcy," he said he believes the system is in trouble.

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Dartmouth wins NSF grant for neuroscience center

By Kelsey Blodget | February 4, 2005

A team of Dartmouth researchers headed by former Dean of the Faculty and cognitive neuroscience pioneer Michael Gazzaniga beat out dozens of colleges across the nation Tuesday to receive the National Science Foundation's $21.8 million grant, the largest peer-reviewed grant ever awarded to the College, to establish a new Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience. The competitive applicant pool was comprised of 60 colleges including other Ivy League institutions and prestigious universities, but NSF ultimately chose Dartmouth, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston College, and the University of Washington to accommodate the new neuroscience centers. "It doesn't mean that the other schools are at all bad, they just didn't have everything integrated as well as we did," Gazzaniga said. Dartmouth's CCEN will study the relationship between the science of learning and the practice of learning in the classroom. "For years, someone would come up with an idea for teaching something, find out the method doesn't work five years later, and then move onto the next fad," education and psychology professor Kevin Dunbar, one of the CCEN's co-principal investigators, said.

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Greek GPAs fall just short of College average

By Dax Tejera | February 4, 2005

The average Fall term GPA for houses in the Coed, Fraternity and Sorority system was just narrowly below the entire undergraduate College average, according to Office of Residential Life data obtained by The Dartmouth.

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Rocky staffer runs for Lebanon City Council

By Alex Belser | February 3, 2005

The infamous "scream" speech may have brought former Vermont governor Howard Dean's campaign for the White House to an end, but it has not silenced the young voters who helped give him legs during the race -- people like Rockefeller Center student activities coordinator Karen Liot Hill '00. After taking part in the grassroots charge for Dean and then jumping on the John Kerry bandwagon, Hill is now campaigning for herself in an effort to land a spot on the Lebanon City Council. Hill, 26, said she is running because she wants to become more involved in the town where she lives and to bring a younger perspective to the council. "The people that are active tend to be of a certain generation," Hill said of the council.

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Yo-Yo Ma's sister tells of the healing powers of music

By Jennifer Garfinkel | February 3, 2005

Yeou-Cheng Ma, sister of famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, discussed the beneficial effects of music on health during a lecture Wednesday night in Filene Auditorium. Ma called music "a universal language," in that everyone starts off as bilingual, accustomed to the music of a mother's high voice and cooing in addition to language. "It's just a matter of whether or not you keep it," Ma said. She pointed out that the temporal lobes in the back of the head deal with music, but in professional musicians it is the left side of the brain that deals with music.

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College policy renders seventh sorority unlikely

By Matthew Abbott | February 3, 2005

A record-high turnout for female rush this year forced the Panhellenic Council to turn away 21 disappointed sophomore women, prompting some members of the Dartmouth community to mull the possibility of lifting the moratorium on new sororities. But even with the limited capacity of current sororities and unusually large pledge classes, the Student Life Initiative poses a formidable obstacle to the creation of a seventh Panhell sorority. There are currently six sororities that are members of Panhell, and a number of these houses had pledge classes exceeding 50 women during the Fall term. Despite these large pledge classes, there were still several women who did not receive bids at sororities. According to Zobeida Torres '06, Panhell's vice president of recruitment, between 240 and 300 women rushed houses during Fall term.

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SA amendments fail, dismissal confirmed

By Elise Waxenberg | February 2, 2005

Student Body President Julia Hildreth '05 began Tuesday night's Student Assembly meeting by briefly addressing the dismissal of Brian Martin '06 from the committee chair post to which he was confirmed last week. The Assembly went on to vote down proposed amendments that would have eased constitutional changes and allowed instant-runoff voting in elections for student body president. Hildreth assured members of the General Assembly that the executive committee "never meant for you to be out of the loop" during her remarks about Martin's removal from office.

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Endowment growth tops 15 percent

By John Mitchell | February 2, 2005

Despite an impressive 15.7 percent rate of return last year, the College's endowment dropped to 21st in a ranking of the country's largest university endowments, according to a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Dartmouth's return on its endowment ranked second to Harvard's in the Ivy League this year.

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Paley brings candor to campus as visiting writer

By Linzi Sheldon | February 1, 2005

Grace Paley, the famed short-story writer and poet who weathered the Great Depression, protested the Vietnam War and created believable and vivid characters with wry humor along the way, will offer students her sometimes-unorthodox literary expertise as a Montgomery Fellow this term. Paley grew up the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Bronx, N.Y.

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Nichols imparts vision, recalls history of activism

By Clare O'Keeffe | February 1, 2005

Local author and activist Robert Nichols began his term as a Montgomery Fellow Monday. A resident of nearby Thetford, Vt., Nichols said he plans to share his unique worldview with the student body. Born in Worcester, Mass., in 1919, Nichols remembers his childhood being shaped by Charles Lindbergh's first transatlantic flight in 1927. "I remember going up to the attic, and being positioned in the window and told that Lindbergh's plane was coming back after he'd flown to Paris -- I do remember looking in the sky and seeing it fly back," Nichols said. After serving in the Pacific during World War II, Nichols studied at the Harvard School of Design.

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