Sixty five students have come down with gastroenteritis this month, University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua said.
There was a brief power outage in Witherspoon Hall on Thursday at around 3:45 p.m.` An ice melt system that keeps snow from collecting on the steps experienced a short circuit, University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua explained in a statement.As a result, the building’s main circuit breaker tripped, which it’s designed to do, Mbugua said. It took the University staff about 45 minutes to isolate the circuit that was having an issue and then to reset the breaker. The power was completely restored to Witherspoon Hall at around 4:30 p.m.
Students at residential colleges will no longer have to sort their recyclable trash. The rest of campus is expected to follow suit by the end of 2014. Unlike the University’s current recycling system, which requires waste to be separated into paper, cans and bottles and “remaining trash,” single-stream recycling only distinguishes between contaminated and non-contaminated materials, Greening Princeton co-president Misha Semenov ’15 said.
Dr. Bruce J. “BJ” Miller ’93 makes a living taking care of the dying. Miller, a palliative care specialist, was recently selected to receive one of the Project on Death in America’s annual Leadership Awards at the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine’s 2014 Annual Assembly in San Diego, according to his co-worker Dr. Shelley Adler. In 2011, Miller became executive director of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke has joined the Brookings Institution, a bipartisan economic think tank, as a distinguished fellow in residence. Bernanke, who served two four-year terms at the Fed, was an economics professor at the University from 1985 until 2005.
Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson dismissed a claim against real estate developer AvalonBay on Tuesday, the Trenton Times reported. A citizens’ group called Association for Planning at Hospital Site had gone before Judge Jacobson with the claim that AvalonBay, which hopes to convert the former Princeton hospital on Witherspoon Street into housing, had not properly addressed issues of dust levels, asbestos and medical waste disposal. The Association for Planning at Hospital Site argued against AvalonBay on the grounds that new development in the area needs to be more responsible.
The Princeton town council recently established a list of priorities to accomplish in 2014. A number of mandatory commitments confront the council over the next year.
An event featuring Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt ’76 and Google Ideas founder Jared Cohen was canceled Wednesday due to bad weather, a spokesman associated with the event announced.
The McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning began holding study halls on Saturdays for the first time last week.
Transparency and accountability in financial markets are keys to investor confidence, former U.S.
Terrence Meck ’00, co-founder and president of The Palette Fund, donated $150,000 to FRS 157: Philanthropy to sustain the course for three more years.
Three Princeton graduates launched a nonprofit organization in Sept. 2013 that collects stool samples and provides hospitals withscreened, filtered and frozen material for clinical use. Mark Smith ’09, James Burgess ’09 and Carolyn Edelstein ’10 created OpenBiome, which has already been featured in The New York Times. Edelstein explained that fecal transplants have been proven effective in fighting harmful intestinal bacteria, noting that while antibiotic treatments for the infection are approximately 80 percent effective, fecal matter transplantations, also known as FMTs, are around 89-92 percent effective. Smith explained that the process of an FMT starts far before one heads into the surgical room, noting that an FMT is an extremely complicated process that first requires finding a donor to undergo a very rigorous set of screenings, come in and produce fecal material to be processed.
The Office of Career Services is considering making changes to its current recruiting system by expanding the range of employers and helping students in the recruitment process deal with interviews for different companies that happen at the same time, according to Executive Director Pulin Sanghvi. Sanghvi explained that Career Services will be pursuing a technology strategy inspired by the dating website eHarmony. "We will pursue a strategy inspired by eHarmony, in which we actively capture evolving student interests and preferences, and then use that information to build relationships with the organizations they are most interested in, and create more informed matches," he said.
During a lecture on Tuesday, former Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Julie Gerberding discussed the challenge of developing vaccines to deal with the growing number of new infectious diseases that have limited antimicrobial treatments. Gerberding began with an overview of the problems the CDC and vaccine companies face in properly distributing vaccines around the world.
MIT history professor Craig Steven Wilder argued that colleges were responsible for reinforcing slavery in antebellum America and that slavery played a pivotal role in establishing American universities. Drawing upon his book published this September, “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” Wilder described in a lecture on Tuesday what he calls “the extraordinary role the college played in deciding who could be educated and who couldn’t.” “We don't expect to look at colleges and see slavery,” Wilder said. Wilder stressed that universities have an obligation to confront their pasts, producing a “three-dimensional” depiction of their histories as institutions that accept the responsibility of producing knowledge. In his book, Wilder portrays universities as pillars of the anti-abolition movement, mentioning by name institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Brown and Trinity University during the lecture.
The primary election for the Young Alumni Trustee position will have 17 current seniors on the ballot, the University announced on Tuesday. One graduate from each of the four youngest graduating classes currently serves in the University’s Board of Trustees as a YAT.
Two weeks ago, Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam announced that he is gay, and thus will become the first openly gay player to enter the NFL draft.
Town attorney Edwin Schmierer will step down from his position after a town council meetingon Monday, according to the Princeton Packet. Schmierer served as the municipal attorney for more than 30 years and has represented both the former borough and the former township of Princeton before the two merged.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s job approval among the residents of the state has dropped 15 points since the Bridgegate Scandal, according to Monday’s Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press Poll. Christie is also an ex officio member of the University’s Board of Trustees. The poll shows that 61 percent of the residents who have been following the Bridgegate story believe that the governor is not being completely honest about denying any knowledge about the incident, and 50 percent think that the governor was personally involved in the scandal. The governor’s personal rating has also dropped significantly from 70 percent of respondents being in favor of Christie last year to 44 percent saying they are in favor of him this year. Since the scandal, Christie has kept a low profile.
Only 24 students enrolled in the second-semester component of the Humanities Sequence — listed as HUM 216-219 — compared with 47 students who were enrolled in the class for the fall semester.
