Most are probably under the impression that Cornell is locked in some sort of traumatic stupor these days. It’s certainly been a rough semester for the students on Ithaca’s East Hill. Even looking past the awful, tragic deaths that have plagued the campus of late, Cornellians have had a rough time of it — especially in the court of pubic opinion, where they have suffered a rash of unfavorable media attention. Also, effing Andy Bernard.

Still, amidst all the badness, there’s at least been one unequivocal bright spot: the men’s varsity basketball team, who just received their third NCAA Tournament bid in as many years. The 12th-seeded Big Red are poised to face off against the Eastern region’s number five seed — the Temple University Owls — in Jacksonville this Friday. This to cap off a historic season that saw Cornell become the first Ivy League team to crack the national rankings in over a decade.

What’s been the secret to the Red’s success?

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HuffPo’s new college vertical just printed a great, sad article about the history of suicide at Cornell, “suicide capital of the combined Ivy League, Big Ten, Little Three, and Seven Sisters.” A staggering amount of research seems to have been involved — and to our mind, the saddest story is that of Shirley Slavin, in 1940:

Shirley Slavin arrived with her mother to enroll for freshman classes. After a few days on campus, she journeyed to the east side of Fall Creek, lingering for nearly an hour. In front of more than twenty witnesses, Slavin asked a passerby to hold her books and purse — and then leapt 125 feet to her death.

The article also delves into the history of suicide prevention at Cornell — including the shocking/wistfully sad rejection of “suicide bars”‘ construction on the gorges.

In 1977, such barriers had been added to the suspension bridge over Fall Creek, which one professor described as a “claustrophobic channel with a honky-tonk garishness worthy of Las Vegas [where] serried ranks of close-spaced bars make a prison corridor.”

The post is part of author Rob Fishman’s Masters’ thesis at Columbia School of Journalism — go read it, please!

Our Cornell frat hazing story has gotten the Internet all in a tizzy; it’s currently lighting up the front page at Huffington Post and enflaming the feisty Gawker-crowd (also, these nerds). Just to add to the fun/fuel the fire, look what we just stumbled on, right on the front-page of the Cornell ADPhi chapter website:

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Zero Tolerance for Hazing at Alpha Delta Phi

Several Cornell websites help visitors to learn about allegations of hazing at Cornell, report alleged hazing incidents, explore non-hazing group-building activities, and find out what they can do to prevent hazing. Take a look at: Hazing at Cornell and services for victims of hazing.

The best part? The links lead nowhere.

Yes; frats haze, no big deal. We think only an idiot would subject oneself to it, but to each his own.

But lying and hypocrisy? Didn’t know that was a brotherhood kind of thing… Ritual abuse, however “voluntary,” seems a little bit like Monica Lewinsky; you only get in trouble when you start fibbing about it.

The bros of “literary fraternity” Alpha Delta Phi (yeah, really…) may not be living up to their noble, stated aims. IvyGate has received an exclusive copy of an email sent to this year’s ADPhi pledges, detailing their hazing lineup. We’ve also gotten our hands on an anonymous report of the night’s disgusting, dehumanizing festivities.

The young pledges were:

• Forced to chug a slurry of dogfood, tabasco sauce, and sour cream;
• Run relay races, while blackout drunk, through the great halls of the ADPhi manor–filled with flour, beer, and water–while being pelted with dodgeballs;
• Jog naked laps outside the house in the below-freezing Ithaca winter;
• Stand outside in a “lineup” for two hours, with only a shirt, jacket, tie and slacks.

Brotherhood and ritual abuse FTW!

ADPhi bros: we hope you successfully vented all of your testosterone/closeted-homoeroticism/self-esteem-issues/meathead aggression on these defenseless freshmen. We don’t want to see exploding sweatpants in the back-row at lecture.

Defenseless freshmen: Remember when Pike–that other frat at your college–poisoned those other defenseless freshmen? Maybe a warning sign…? The experience sure doesn’t sound like, in the words of the ADPhi website, a

process [that] enhances individual self-respect as well as fostering responsibile concern for others within the chapter

I bet hypocrisy tastes even better mixed with dog-food and sour-cream.

Full ADPhi email (fun fact: from a kid I went to high school with!) after the jump:

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• Brown: Snoop Dogg, MGMT to perform at Spring Weekend — jealous! Although we hear MGMT’s new album is dreadful :-(
• Columbia: Fifteen years of renovations, and Butler Library is still something out of a Bosch painting this time of year.
• Cornell: “Cornell Law School: Ever Heard of It?”
• Penn: Tom Green could win an Oscar and a Nobel, and his obituary would begin with that “My bum” song.

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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• Brown: “Brown Dining Services’ new Club Plan meal option, which allows seniors to enjoy gourmet food at the Faculty Club, kicked off this year and attracted four subscribers.”
• Columbia: This blurb on an Italian restaurant has — so far! — 51 comments. Welcome to the internet, Spectrum!
• Cornell: “Wind turbines. PRETTY WIND TURBINES.” -Cornell Daily Sun
• Harvard: Faust indicates that she is literally the opposite of Larry Summers — like, if they were in the same room, the room would explode.
• Princeton: The image accompanying this article, of a Princeton girl buying Cheerios at the supermarket in lieu of an eating club is poignant. Very penultimate-scene-of-Hurt Locker. It’s after the jump!

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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: “I feel that an event that cost $27,000 and took 11 months to plan speaks for itself.” Um, right!
• Dartmouth: SO IT BEGINS. (Student Council, we mean!) Life is about to get sooo much more irritating, you guys.
• Harvard: There’s a new Egyptology professor — does this mean Indiana Jones is like real life now?
• Princeton: Ivy Council to meet at Princeton, will accomplish a great deal, probably.
• Yale: Student scores $666 on Jeopardy!, the real version for adults even! (Your IvyGate blogger feels a bit amateur now.)

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?