When not beating out Iowa City for the best college town, Ithaca can get a little dull during its down time. That might explain why a bunch of frat bros have created a new drinking game, now unfortunately available on YouTube. Produced by a vague "Society," the video borderline Chef Tony infomercial details "Russian Roulette," which consists of a frisbee, Solo cups, and Cornellians too sober to simply play beer pong or Kings (yes, we're also wondering why everyone isn't just piss drunk 24/7 in Ithaca).
Hey prospective college students! Are you struggling to decide which college is the right one for you? Well have no fear, because USA Today has come to your rescue with their brief write-up of some researcher's rankings of the nation's best college towns.
The college town is one of the most important factors for prospective students in making their college decision. After all, in a typical freshman's week of studying, crying, and having sex (not necessarily in that order), he or she has a massive two hours of free time to spend in the town. And when that student is in said town, it must contain the resources necessary to allow the student to fulfill his or her important tasks of running to Wegmans and buying pot (not necessarily in that order). Determining suitable college towns is not something to be taken lightly. That is why dozens of researchers and statisticians spent months laboring to identify the towns with the most optimal sketchy bar-to-student ratios.
And in the end, Ithaca came out on top! This is truly a great day for Cornell (and to a lesser and more communications-based extent, Ithaca College). Take that Columbia and Harvard! Ithaca truly is gorges, just like your mom.
Oh, and about those quotation marks in the title. First, Ithaca technically was the best college town in America. This article was written back in the beginning of September--well before the great Pig Microbe Armageddon of 2009. We didn't know about this article until now because, well, it was in USA Today and we haven't stayed in any hotels in the past month.
Secondly, a "college town" is defined in this instance as a metropolitan area with a population of under 250,000 people. There were four categories in total, with the other four consisting of metropolitan areas with over 250,000 people, over 1 million people, and over 2.5 million people. In that last category, New York was number 1 and Boston was number 3. So Columbia and Harvard may not necessarily agree to "taking that".
Finally, the towns Ithaca beat in its category include State College, Ames, and Iowa City. This competitive situation is known in economic game theory as the "guy with one leg versus the three guys with no legs in the Tour de France" condition.
Okay, so maybe its not so great a ranking for Ithaca. Cornell recognizes this, as they didn't even mention the article on their website. Though that may be due to this ranking's lack of wizarding movie tie-ins.
The girls who brought us the Harvard douchebag contest have extended their reach beyond Cambridge. Yesterday, Windsor Hanger '10, Stephanie Kaplan '10, and Annie Wang '11 of Harvard's Freeze College Magazine launched their new "collegiette's guide" called Her Campus, setting a new precedent for useless Ivy League publications (which, to be fair, could explain about 90% of all Harvard media enterprises).
After contacting co-founder and CEO Kaplan about what these three Prada Devil wannabes hope to accomplish with their new cyber digs, she responded with a lengthy mission statement:
From: stephanie@hercampus.com To: qichen@ivygateblog.com Subject: Re: IvyGate's inquiry about Her Campus Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:20 PM
HerCampus.com is an online magazine for college women that seeks to pave the way for the media industry to successfully make the transition online. Her Campus will transition magazines to today's digital world by individualizing its content college by college by setting up "My Campus" branches, beginning at Harvard and eventually expanding to 1000+ colleges and universities nationwide. By supplementing national with local content, Her Campus represents the future of online media.
Uh, was there ever a time when the internet wasn't national? Not only that, but the pearl-donning triumvirate of the Ivy League's new Seventeen seems to think they're the first ones to come up with the idea of female-oriented college media. Read more after the jump.
According to a spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, Ms. Le died from 'traumatic asphyxia,' caused by 'neck compression.'
This is a reversal from the statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which instead of releasing the cause of Le's death, stated
it would withhold that information indefinitely at the request of prosecutors. At the press conference, Lewis declined to comment on a report in The Hartford Courant that said Le died of asphyxiation.
This admission seems to suggest that the case is proceeding quickly, and is closer to identifying the perpetrator.
Police have recently identified 24-year-old Raymond Clark as a suspect in the Anne Le murder at Yale. Cops arrived at his apartment in Middletown, Connecticut but did not arrest him, claiming to only have a "person of interest." A lab technician at the lab where Le worked, Clark displayed visible chest marks and also failed a polygraph test. But according to a source close to Clark and his family:
Of course, he had scratches on his arm--from his cat. I know he didn’t do it, but I can’t understand how anybody would do that in the first place and put her in the wall like that. And they would have had to do it at night because certainly nobody could have done it during the day when everybody was looking.
Clark hadn't been seen since last Thursday following the Tuesday disappearance of Le. Le's body was found this weekend in a chute in the basement of the pharmacology research facility on 10 Amistad Street. Yale has since increased security in the surrounding area following the murder. Le's fiancé Jonathan Widawsky, who had been cleared of being a suspect, has been assisting police with their investigation.
Late this afternoon a woman's body was found in the basement of 10 Amistad Street at Yale Medical School. Based on the wording of Yale President Richard Levin's email to the community, the body is presumably Annie Le, the graduate student and bride-to-be who went missing last Wednesday. Today was to have been her wedding day.
Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified. I have met again with her family and conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community.
The body—which was hidden inside of the walls of the same building where Le was last seen—has yet to be officially identified by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Yesterday, investigators discovered a set of bloody clothes hidden in the ceiling of the Amistad building. Though the clothes did not match the outfit Le had been wearing when entering the building Wednesday morning, police began searching local landfills and an abandoned industrial area in Hartford for evidence.
Le's wedding has been canceled and her fiancé, a student at Columbia, is not a suspect.
Read President Levin's email in full after the jump.
Harvard Medical School recently announced that it would loosen its restrictive policies regarding student-media interaction. Called "ill-advised" and "problematic" by Harvard professors themselves, the old policy stated:
All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program.
Dr. Nancy Oriol, the developer of a guideline that essentially censored HMS students on medical conflicts of interests, continues to insist that the policy's goal was to "help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics."
This comes after HMS came under fire for its dubious approach to medical ethics and suspiciously opportunistic professors, including those who served as paid consultants to drug companies and brushed off questioning students who didn't want to kill their future patients. (HBS is looking less corrupt by the minute.) But in a less than prudent choice of PR action, HMS didn't even bother submitting its conflict of interest policies for review to the American Medical Student Association last year, promptly receiving the very non-Harvard grade F from the board in 2008.
Read more about the irony of Harvard's crappy report card after the jump.
A student at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has been the first to die of complications of swine flu in the recent outbreak on Cornell's campus. Warren Schor '11 of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity passed away at the Cayuga Medical Center. He was 20 years old.
Although approximately 450 students have presented flu-like symptoms, a representative of the Cornell Flu Line stated in a phone interview yesterday that so far only two students had been conclusively diagnosed with H1N1. Vice President of Communications Tommy Bruce now reports that number at 520. Neighboring Ithaca College has reported at least 18 students are symptomatic.
The Cornell Sunreports that, at the behest of Gannett Health Services, the Inter-Fraternity Council had instated a weeklong moratorium on social events to help prevent the spread of the disease. But, due to a flood of flu-related visits, Gannett also has stopped scheduling routine appointments, so they may just be canceling frat parties to avoid the standard Sunday morning rush for Plan B.
After the jump, the administration's response: a lesson in hygiene.
UPDATE: Some have questioned whether it's appropriate to have jokes in the same post that acknowledges a death. No element of this post mocks the deceased or those grieving—in fact, any humor is directed at the administration and their lack of response that precluded the student's death. However, since we wrote most the post before the death, then updated it afterwards, the tone may now be off. It's our policy never to take down posts, but as a concession we've added a more somber picture and adjusted some language.
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Brown: 
Hey prospective college students! Are you struggling to decide which college is the right one for you? Well have no fear, because USA Today has come to your rescue with their brief write-up of some researcher's rankings of the 
The girls who brought us the 
In the latest update into the case of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was discovered in the basement of Yale Medical School, 
Police have 
that it would loosen its restrictive policies regarding student-media interaction. Called "ill-advised" and "problematic" by Harvard professors themselves, the old policy stated:
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