It’s Secret Society tapping time at Cornell! And while the only thing I’d personally like to tap is a keg, some vaguely important people are gathering in their towers and other assorted secret places to decide who will be the next batch of elitists to prance around campus wearing pins on their collars.

Now before the commenters rip me to shreds, I’m gonna let you in on my own not-so-secret. I ran the Cornell Concert Commission in 2009––a position that is normally welcomed into these organizations and allowed to view Slope Day from a higher vantage point. However, someone or other didn’t like me and so I was shut out of the club.

In fact, I was rejected by the lesser secret society too. Yet despite being given the negative nod by them, the Sphinx Head Society needs my help. Into my mailbox yesterday afternoon I received the message below from the 119th Tapping Chair (but shh – it’s a secret!).

from            Shayna Gerson <[REDACTED]@cornell.edu>
to
date            Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:32 PM
subject            ************* nomination
signed-by            gmail.com

hide details 1:32 PM (11 hours ago)

Hello,

You are being contacted because *********** has been nominated for membership in the Sphinx Head Senior Honor Society and you have been identified as a reference for him/her. Though *********** has already been identified as a candidate, we are still in need of a letter of recommendation to complete his/her nomination. If you are interested in writing a letter of recommendation for him/her, we would greatly appreciate it. The letter does not have to be long, we are just looking for a glimpse into the nominee’s leadership and character from someone who knows him/her well.

We will be reviewing all nominations starting Monday, so we will accept letters until Sunday at 9pm.

Thank you for your help,
Shayna Gerson
Sphinx Head Tapping Chair, 119th Tapping Class

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There’s about a 10-percent chance that an Ivy Leaguer is headed to the NBA next year. Senior Jeremy Lin of Harvard, along with Seniors Jeff Foote and Ryan Wittman of Cornell have all accepted invitations to compete in an NBA pre-draft invitational tournament at which 200 NBA managers and scouts will be watching closely.

The tournament, which originated in 1953, will be taking place April 7-10 at Churchland High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. Suitably, it’s called the 2010 Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. For four days, the players will compete in a 12-game tournament while simultaneously crossing their fingers behind their backs, searching for four-leaf clovers and rubbing rabbits feet. In the past, the tournament has kick-started the professional careers of players like Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen. Last year six players from the tournament were selected in the draft; so basically Lin, Foote and Wittman will only have to be better than the 58 other amazing basketball superstars to get the job they’ve always been dreaming of. Well, good luck, boys!

Cornell Professor James Cutting released a groundbreaking discovery out of Ithaca this week: Hollywood Blockbusters follow a pattern. Pretty nifty for an Ivy League Prof., right?

In all seriousness though, Prof. Cutting analyzed 70-decades worth of 150 high-grossing films made between 1935 and 2005. He discovered that since 1935 shot lengths have more and more often come to correlate with a mathematical pattern based on the human attention span. This pattern is known as 1/f fluctuation, or pink noise, and it says, “attention spans of the same length recur at regular intervals.” So Cutting essentially asserted that movie shots of the same length recur at regular intervals, especially in recent big blockbusters. [Full text of the paper here, if you're into that sort of thing].

In order to secure precious Cornell moneys to watch movies and make such assertions, Cutting built off of the original 1/f research done in the 90s at the University of Texas in Austin. He expanded the pattern to include the fact that modern smash hit movies obey the same 1/f fluctuation –– A formula which Cutting believes to “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans.” Interestingly enough, this pattern has also been found in the annual flood levels of the Nile River, in air turbulence and in music.

But before going to press, Prof. Cutting wanted to make it very clear that despite researching 150 Blockbusters, one shouldn’t overlook his taste. His favorite genre is Film Noir and you’ll be reassured to know that such high-brow art does not follow the 1/f law common to movies for the masses, like Star Wars Episode III, “which Cutting considers to be ‘just dreadful’.”

However, this still leaves one question unanswered: Is this Cornell-polished mathematical formula good enough to save the Film department from the administration’s mass budget cuts?

On May 8, 1977 one arm of Cornell University, the Cornell Concert Commission, did something that made Cornell look really damn cool. It was on that date that the Concert Commission sponsored the Grateful Dead in Barton Hall, resulting in the recording of famous Barton Hall 77 tapes.

But back to the point: Grateful Dead. Cornell. <3. Super famous concert. (Soooo famous the 2007 Ithaca Mayor declared May 8^th “Grateful Dead Day”!)

Well, thirty-plus hippie dippie years later and the Concert Commission is at it again –– minus Jerry Garcia. This go-around, founding Grateful Dead members Phil Lish and Bob Weir are returning to Cornell’s Barton Hall this Sunday with their new band, Furthur, which means that by weekends start, a lovely batch of Deadheads shall inhabit Ithaca.

But Sgt. Mospan from the Cornell University Police Department will have none of it. He’ll be doing everything in his power to ensure that every building on the Cornell campus is locked so tight that not even a spec from a Deadhead sneeze can enter. Read his wigged out letter after the jump:

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This coming Friday marks that rare event when you break out your interest in figure skating for the first time in four years and cross your fingers that the Jamaican bobsled team will actually take home the gold. You’ll obviously be doing all of this because, as NBC has making it clear with those 5 rings in the corner of everything they air, it’s the 2010 Winter Olympics. Surprisingly, though, Ivy Leaguers may find some brethren to support.

While the wickedly helpful Ivies in China blog does not appear to be returning for the Vancouver trip, we’ve done our best to gather the stats on who, if anybody (hello, Columbia, Penn and Princeton?) the Ivies will be sending to the games.

Dartmouth wins the gold (see what we did there?) with ties to nine athletes: from biathlon competitors (Laura Spector ’10 and Sara Studebaker ’07), skiers (Tucker Murphy ’04, Patrick Biggs ’06, Ben Koons ’08, Andrew Weibrecht ’09 and Tommy Ford ’12) and ice hockey players (Gillian Apps ’06 and Cherie Piper ’06) headed to Canada –– So when they’re not fighting to for the right to binge drink, it seems that the Big Green is cultivating Olympians, which is apparently no huge surprise since

Dartmouth has sent representatives to every winter Olympics since the Games’ founding in 1924.

The Harvard Crimson took the Ivy silver with ties to five females who may potentially be going head to head against one another as the women are divided by their home countries of the U.S. (Angela Ruggiero ’04, Julie Chu ’07 and Caitlin Cahow ’08) and Canada (Jennifer Botterill ’03 and Sarah Vaillancourt ’09) to battle it out in the hockey arena.

Cornell held down the bronze with three links to athletes who will all be representing different countries. There’s one woman (Rebecca Johnston ‘12) joining the Ivy ranks for Canada’s ice hockey team, one male (Douglas Murray ‘03) representing Sweden in ice hockey and one male (Jamie Moriarty ‘03) bobsledding for the gold, although he used to dawn the Big Red as a football player.

Yale and Brown each boast one Olympic bound alum (Natalie Babony ’06 and Becky Kellar ’97, respectively) with the Yalie rostered to play for Slovakia and the Brown grad adding to the Ivy saturation of Team Canada’s ice hockey line up.

As for Columbia, Penn and Princeton: the interwebs lack the typical bragging rights about sending any of you up to Vancouver… so we’ll just have to assume you’re hoping for better luck in 2014? Or maybe that you’ve just sent your admissions officers up there to hunt out some stellar Class of 2014 crop?

Six years ago Princeton started deflating grades because professors were giving out too many As. (And it wasn’t just because Princeton kids are so much smarter than those at other schools!) Profs were told that only 35 percent of grades (down from about 50 percent in 2004) were supposed to be A-plus, A or A-minus. The 3.46 mean GPA of the Princeton class of 2003 dropped to a 3.39 in the 2009 class.

Princeton senior Daniel E. Rauch told The New York Times about his major trepidation:

The nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies with a 3.8 from Yale.

(Applies where? We’re guessing Goldman Sachs.) An undergrad survey confirmed this sentiment establishing that 32 percent of students felt the grading policy was a top source of unhappiness.

But if Princeton really wanted to do a disservice to their students, they could have gone the Cornell route and started indicating class median grade averages on transcripts. So when you get a C-minus in ‘Human Sexuality,’ employers will not only know you’re bad in bed, but also that you’re flat out dense, since the median of everyone else taking the class was a B.

Instead, Princeton took a higher road and tried to calm doubts by doing some follow up research. They “studied the effects on admissions rates to top medical schools and law schools, and found none.” The administration also took some precautionary action by sending every transcript with a statement about the policy.

However, the students aren’t grasping the hard facts. The panic trickled up to The Daily Princetonian and in December the editorial board firmly stopped supporting the policy, citing fears that “the policy is hurting the prospects of Princetonians in both the job market and graduate school admissions.”

Yet that concern has already been squashed by the administration. So the clear inference to draw from this issue: today’s Princetonians are actually just dumber than ones of the past. The proof is in the GPAs.

The Cornell University Convocation is not for another 150 days or so, but the guest of honor has been announced: Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

In an email that was sent out to the Committee this evening, the Convocation Chair wrote,

As a group, we agreed that it was important to bring someone to campus who was interesting, offered unique perspective and who was historically relevant and significant.  As a Committee, we were able to arrange for one of the most powerful women in Washington to be our featured Convocation Speaker. This is something to be proud of.

So there you have it. At least this one-ups the not-so-college-graduate David Plouffe from last year.

On the other hand, one alum is less than thrilled. In response to The Cornell Daily Sun tweet, “University announces that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will speak at Senior Convocation on May 29, 2010,” retweeter @gnagesh said,

There goes my donation.

Regardless of your political leanings, the Convocation Committee Chair is right; Cornell has definitely secured one of America’s most powerful women to speak on the Hill. She’d better be wearing pretty heels, though.

Rumor has it that Robert Pattinson is about to be accepted to get his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at the Ivy best known for its cow population, Cornell University. How does Pattinson find the time to study in Ithaca when there are so many world-changing films in need of heartthrob? Alas, Pattinson’s only planning to stay in the Ith long enough to learn how to treat circus animals, so that he can run away with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Oh and before you get your Twilight panties in a twist, this is all cinema-magic. The real reason Pattinson is Ivy bound is because he’s in talks to star in the movie Water For Elephants, along with Reese Witherspoon and Sean Penn.

The movie, based on the book by Sara Gruen, will have Pattinson playing Jacob Jankowski (Crisis: Does that make fans Team Edward or Team Jacob now?!), a Cornell Vet student whose parents die, which causes him to drop out of the Big Red and run away with the circus, where he falls in love with Reese Witherspoon’s character, Marlena. Narrative genius! It’s set on the Cornell campus during the 1930s Depression Era. And yes, the studio is planning on going on location to Ithaca. Supposedly the filming is happening in June, so book your campus-to-campus tickets fast!

Maybe the University will even mow the entire slope for his arrival!

Cornell’s worst week has officially begun: Sorority Recruitment. And via recruitment material obtained by IvyGate, we know what potential new members witness inside the sorority walls. It’s all about the veneer of “class,” and is about as sincere as Tiger Woods’s promises of exclusivity. Girls are passive-aggressively told to avoid clothes that make them look “bigger,” and to keep their nails and makeup precisely in line with everyone else’s. Just because it’s exactly what you’d expect doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

As their frat-boy-hopeful counterparts are having the best week of freshman year, the sorostitutes-to-be get shunted between houses for a much more sober(ing) rush experience. Cornell becomes a winter wonderland of fruity drinks, contrived conversations about favorite Sex and the City characters (still!), and a fight for the best — read, skinniest and blondest — pledge class possible. Oh, and there’s screaming. LOTS of screaming.

But how do the upperclassman manage to lure the unknowing young ones into their sisterly lairs? Well, by putting their best foot… er, heels… forward, of course!

So, if you’re a Cornell freshman planning to get a bid to any house, you’d better take this bit of pre-rush shopping advice that one Recruitment Chair sent in an email to her chapter: “Since we all know that dear old Ithaca can be lacking in apparel supplies, try to make sure you have everything covered before you come back!” Covered is the last thing they’ll be — these girls’ breasteses are more used to face time at Sigma Phi on Saturdays at one a.m. than the inside of a bra.

But before you froshies rush (see what we did there?!) to the stores, here are a few more tips courtesy of a few anonymous sisters in three Cornell Panhellenic Chapters who kindly lent us their Recruitment Approved Style Guides. Now you’ll totes be able to get into Kappa Kappa Gamma (!) or, you know, just laugh hysterically at the fact that Ivy League students are given guides for how to get dressed in the morning.

AVOID SLUTTY

“Remember you are trying to impress GIRLS not BOYS, so being a sexed up vamp is really quite unnecessary.”

DON’T LOOK FAT

“Horizontal stripes & large cable knits make EVERYONE look bigger, so be careful”

GET YOUR HAIR DID

“Hair should be worn down or halfway up each day. Make sure hair is clean, brushed, and looks nice.”

More fun and fabulous fashion after the jump!

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