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NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Rice Soccer 2009

By Yan Digilov

The injury bug happens to every team eventually. But for the women's soccer team, its presence has become all too infuriatingly commonplace. After graduating only one permanent starter from last year's roster, the 2009 women's soccer team features many familiar faces on the pitch, but if the coming campaign is to be remembered as a success the team will almost certainly have to keep away from the familiar bite of the injury bug.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Rice offers West Lot spaces to aid H-E-B employees

By Sarah Rutledge

In an unconventional venture beyond the hedges, Rice is hoping to have established a beneficial relationship with a local business by appealing to their pocketbooks. The employees from a recently-opened H-E-B Grocery Store, located on Buffalo Speedway and South Blvd., have been parking in West Lot free of charge since the beginning of the month, and will continue to park there until next Monday, Aug. 31.The employees are parking in West Lot 5, the lot adjacent to the police station and post office, off University Blvd. Parking Manager Mike Morgan estimated that the H-E-B employees use 50 to 100 parking spaces at any given time. He said since the lot normally has 180 spaces and is infrequently used, parkers should not be impacted by the spaces temporarily in use.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Sports Notebook: Rosa reaches NCAA semifinals

 

When junior Bruno Rosa began play in last May's NCAA Men's Tennis Singles Championship, it had been nearly forty years since Rice had produced a back-to-back All-American. But after running his way to the final 16, Rosa replaced Mike Estep (Will Rice '71), an All-American from 1969-71, as the last Owl to earn such honors.Having already led his team into the NCAA Tournament, Rosa joined then-senior Christoph Müller in the singles competition. While Müller fell in the first round to the University of Virginia's Sanam Singh, Rosa pushed past No. 8 Robert Farah of the University of Southern California, which was coming off of winning the national championship, in straight sets.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Collapse of print journalism not completely irreversible

By Casey Michel

I saw the implosion from the inside out. The collapse of journalism, the creaking and crumbling and crashing of an industry that keeps politicians to task and athletes in the glare. I saw the faces behind it, the dinosaurs who were too slow or too unaware to update the business model when they could.I was in the middle of it this summer, in the New York magazine district, gleaning the lessons learnt from the movers of the publishing world. They admitted their failings. They told me what to expect in the immediate future. They made sure that my job prospects were grounded in reality, stuck in the mud of the recession and the layoffs.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Students opt for historic housing at old Will Rice

By Jocelyn Wright

Historic Will Rice opened up this year to ensure that all incoming first-year students have beds on campus, and it will provide temporary on-campus housing to about 75 continuing and transfer students, Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman said. Although Will Rice College and Baker College will be under construction this year, the 1912 wing of Will Rice is not being renovated, and will stay open this year to house these students. Currently, Historic Will Rice does not have any of the traditional support systems of a residential college, such as masters or a chief justice, and all residents will remain affiliated with their residential colleges, although Forman said support systems similar to chief justices and student maintenance representatives might be added in the coming weeks.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

District 9 is out of this world

By Joe Dwyer

Aliens. Guns. Exploding heads. All can be found in District 9, and all are among the many reasons that you should spend your last day of Orientation Week at this flick.Born from the ashes of director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson's aborted Halo movie, District 9 is a fictional documentary of peculiarly unique proportions. In 1990, 20 years prior to the events in the film, a large alien ship drifted over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. However, none of the expected invasion, exploration or Signs-inspired raiding occurred. Instead, the ship simply ... parked. Not knowing who was on board or what the ship's plans were, humans cut their way into the behemoth and discovered it contained thousands of severely ill and malnourished alien workers. With no other option than to help them, District 9, a grimy Soweto-inspired slum, was set up outside the city to house the refugee alien population.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Minibus system can aid mass transit

By David Splinter

Standing on a street corner near the Pacific Ocean in Lima, Peru, I asked someone which bus could take me downtown. He pointed to a small 10-seater van pulling up behind us. A few of these minibuses would pass every minute and cost about a quarter.I'd seen them before, but never in such a system. And after using them to ride to and fro, I can honestly say that if there were minibuses in Houston and I had to wait less than a minute for one, I would probably sell my car.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Print version of GA ensures integrity

By Erin Doctor

Today, I am going to justify killing trees.The Rice University General Announcements that I received on the first day of Orientation Week three years ago still sits on my bookshelf, right between an unopened differential equations textbook and The Elements of Typographic Style. I don't consult it very often, but until the day I graduate from Rice that General Announcements book is not going anywhere.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Paper Heart ultimately charming, yet flimsy

By Brian Reinhart

In the first scene of the new mockumentary Paper Heart, Michael Cera (Juno), who plays himself, asks the director if the movie is "a quirky comedy, a romantic comedy." The director answers that it is. "Perfect," Cera says. "That's just what America needs."Of course, Paper Heart is not a necessary movie, or even an important one. But it is charming, funny and heartfelt nonetheless, cheerfully embracing its own insignificance and daring to break away from the clichés and celebrate young love between misfits.

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Finding their identities

By Josh Rutenberg

As the newest additions to the residential college system since Martel College in 2002, Duncan College and McMurtry College have already begun forming their own unique cultures and traditions. While the question of how to integrate the new colleges has long been in the works, Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman and others working on the transition are confident that the colleges will be able to find their own identities. "On move-in day, McMurtry and Duncan won't have independent governing bodies," Forman said. "It will take them some time to develop a sense of what it means to be a residential college."

NEWS 8/20/09 7:00pm

Brockman receives over $11 million in NIST grant

By Josh Rutenberg

Despite a tough economy and cutbacks in spending, Rice received $11.1 million in funding this summer from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to aid in construction of the Brockman Hall for Physics. Rice competed for and was awarded one of NIST's construction grants as part of federal stimulus funding. A previous donation from the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust allowed for construction of the building. With a new, additional source of funding, money originally slated for use on Brockman Hall construction will be freed up for use on other projects, a spokesperson for the development staff, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Gettin' schooled: Hanging with Rhyme University's Charles Iyoho

By Joe Dwyer

A little under a month ago, the Thresher sat down with Charles Iyoho, aka "Black Caesar," one half of the hip-hop duo Rhyme University. He was in town performing at an AIDS Foundation Houston benefit in Rice's own Grand Hall that night. What makes these brothers different from all the other blinged-out rappers dominating the airwaves today? Firstly, Charles has a master's degree from the University of Houston and his brother Tony, aka "Grayhound Bustrip," has a Ph.D. (Try that on for size, Fitty.) Caesar and Bustrip's parents also hail from Nigeria and the duo has lived around the globe in places as diverse as Muscat, Oman and Paris, adding a unique flavor and outlook to their rhymes.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Spirit squads stepping it up

By Yan Digilov

Two Bowl trips, a $27 million dollar renovation of the basketball facilities and the signing of one of the winningest basketball coaches in the nation are all just parts of Athletic Director Chris Del Conte's vision for the future of the Rice athletics. Simultaneously, with neither the resources of a full-time staff nor the ability to raise six-figure alumni donations, students leading the Rice spirit squads have been working to move their teams in a direction parallel to Del Conte's vision. The Owls' cheerleading and dance teams have both been through many changes in recent years after making concerted efforts to improve the quality of their performances. Their goal has been to significantly bolster student support on the sidelines.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Congratulation to recent graduates

By Staff Editorial

With last week's commencement, we see another crop of young minds exit the Sallyport and begin their post-college years (see story, pages 8-9). Thus, congratulations are in order. While it may not be the most opportune moment to end your Rice career, we know that if anyone can succeed in what CNN calls "The Worst Year to Graduate," it is you guys. You slogged through years of cumbersome construction, made your teachers swoon with your performance (we hope they didn't swoon too much, though - see story, page 1) and rode the Todd Graham roller coaster to its infuriating end, only to see Rice reach even greater heights at this year's Texas Bowl. Your time at Rice, these so-called "greatest days of your lives," will always be with you. You will always have a home within the hedges, and we couldn't be more excited to see you take your first steps into the world.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Rice professor on NASA mission to Hubble

By Michelle Phillips

If all goes according to plan, the Hubble Space Telescope will not be the only one reaping the benefits of Mechanical Engineering professor Michael Massimino's second mission to space. "[I have] a Mech-E T-shirt signed by all the students and faculty of the department," Massimino said. "It's on the Space Shuttle Atlantis now, and I hope to fly it in space and return it to the school."

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Commencement 2009

By Jocelyn Wright

"Don't have any pressure on you not to live your truth on a daily basis," Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International said during the 96th Commencement, held on Saturday. "Live your dream. It is not worth living life without that." Salbi founded Women for Women International, an organization that gives support to women in war-torn areas by providing basic necessities, education and microcredit loans for new businesses, at age 22. She said once she had discovered this was her passion she was often ridiculed for being so young.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

Government wrongly ignores inhumane torture tactics

By Rachel Marcus

"Some of life has to be mysterious. Sometimes in life you wanna just keep walkin'." This is what Peggy Noonan, Reagan speechwriter and frequent Republican pundit, had to say about the U.S. Attorney General's recent declassification of documents that describe a number of methods explicitly authorized by Bush Administration officials for use as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA. Among the approved procedures described are facial slaps, sleep deprivation, stress positions, enclosure of the prisoner in a small box with large insects and the most controversial of all these techniques, waterboarding.

NEWS 5/14/09 7:00pm

IT set to require e-mail authentication

By Jocelyn Wright

Information Technology will be changing the way e-mail is sent starting Oct. 15 by requiring authentication for all e-mail being sent from computers on campus networks.IT already requires authentication for e-mail sent off campus, Information Security Officer Marc Scarborough said. Requiring authentication is being applied to mail sent on campus to prevent Rice's e-mail servers from being blacklisted. Currently, Rice's e-mail servers can get blacklisted when computers connected to networks on campus are infected with a virus that uses Rice's server to send spam, Director of Systems, Architecture, and Infrastructure for IT Barry Ribbeck said.

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