NEWS
11/13/08 6:00pm
RPC gets Esperanza right
After years of declining attendance and profit loss, Rice Program Councilhas found the key to hosting a successful Esperanza.
After years of declining attendance and profit loss, Rice Program Councilhas found the key to hosting a successful Esperanza.
As online registration for spring semester classes began this week on ESTHER, some students encountered several inconveniences which prevented them from signing up for upper-level courses. For this registration period, the Registrar's Office is implementing the prerequisite rule established by the academic departments, which bars students who have not taken the required courses from registering for classes, Registrar David Tenney (Sid '87) said. Instead, students will need to bring a Special Registration form to the appropriate department and obtain the professor's signature to enroll in the course. However, the main difficulty was differentiating between what the academic departments deemed as hard prerequisites, which are absolutely required courses, and soft prerequisites, which are recommended courses, Tenney said.
On March 7, 2007 Lee Greenwood watched as her son, Joseph Nichols, an African-American, was brought into the death sentence chamber after he was transported there in a manner designed to scrape away at his dignity. Joseph wrote before his execution, "They cut off all my clothes and stripped me naked. I finally got a pair of boxers but my feet were shackled together, my hands were chained and then another chain bound my feet, went up over my shoulders and bound my hands. This is how our people were brought here from the motherland, naked and chained, and this is how I will leave."
Last Friday I got the chance to sit down with Matt Berninger, lead singer of The National, after the band's fully "get up and dance" concert in the Central Quad. Clad in all black, wearing sunglasses, drinking whiskey on stage and smoking a Marlboro, he seemed like the ultimate rock star - until I talked to him and found out he was a totally normal guy. Which is the ultimate rock star cliché, right?I asked him a few random and not-really-music-related questions, and what follows are excerpted answers. The full interview will be bouncing around the airwaves of RTV5 at some undetermined point in the future.
The building formerly known as Autry Court now has a new name and a new face, after almost two years of construction. Former Rice basketball player Bobby Tudor (Hanszen '82) fulfilled a longtime dream when he donated $7 million for Autry renovations, which began in February of 2007. Tudor Fieldhouse had its grand opening last Friday and will open for the 2008- '09 basketball season tonight when the women's basketball plays California State University-Northridge. The athletic court itself will keep the name Autry in honor of Mrs. James L. Autry, whose daughter donated to the gymnasium building. Assistant Athletic Director and Media Relations Director Chuck Pool said a new Autry Court has been a dream for a very long time. Bobby Tudor, after whom Tudor Fieldhouse is named, was told that renovations to Autry Court were on the table when he went on his high school recruiting trip to Rice 31 years ago. The plans became a reality when Rice received a $7 million contribution from Tudor and his wife, Phoebe. Tudor is a former Rice basketball player and is now chairman and CEO of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., LLC.
To coincide with this week's arrival of the highly anticipated and much-hyped video game Mirror's Edge, EA and EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) have also released a digital album featuring the game's theme song by Lisa Miskovsky, as well as five different remixes by noted dance and electronica artists Benny Benassi, Junkie XL, Paul Van Dyk, Teddybears and Armand Van Helden. As a whole, the album is a solid effort and definitely worth a listen, but listeners shouldn't expect anything groundbreaking.The title track, "Still Alive" (not to be confused with the hilarious end-credit song by GLaDOS at the end of Portal), is performed by Swedish pop rock star Miskovsky, who enjoys a considerable reputation across the pond in Sweden but is relatively unknown here in the states, although she did help write of "Shape Of My Heart" for the Backstreet Boys in 2000.
Due to student complaints about the vagaries of honor code violation notifications, the Honor Council voted Tuesday to specify the information in the initial e-mail sent to students under investigation. Students will now be notified of the class in which the honor code violation is being contested before their initial investigative meeting with the council. The council hosted a mock trial Tuesday to show students how an honor code violation is dealt with, the result of concerns raised at its Consensus Penalty Structure meeting in October, President Jackie Ammons said. After the trial, the floor was opened to discussion and afterward, the council voted on an issue raised by students in previous weeks about the transparency of the process, Ammons, a Brown College junior, said.
Many students attempting to register for their Spring 2009 classes discovered this week that there is a new error message to be found in the ESTHER system: "Pre-req and Test Score Error." Newly-implemented by the Registrar's Office, the change comes on the heels of of the double-booking restriction put into effect during registration for this semester (See story, page 1).This newest change signals a disturbing trend in the Registrar's Office. In conjunction with the pending changes to the academic calendar, which will greatly diminish the timeframe in which students can modify their schedules, the double-booking restriction curtailes the possibilities of the course shopping period. Prerequisite checking - and the associated errors within ESTHER related to it - has done nothing to repair this situation. In fact, ESTHER's failure to properly identify cross-listed and in-progress courses has prevented students from registering for courses in which they belong.
Who is Matisyahu?An Ashkenazi Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation of the biblical name Matthew?
Everyone likes art, right? The glass boats recently hung from the ceiling of Fondren Library are supposed to be the first of many projects around campus, according to the Arts Committee. Art may well be an "essential element to achieving our mission as a great university," as President David Leebron said during the official unveiling of the sculptures. However, as enjoyable as art can be, there remain several much more direct ways to make Rice a better school.The unveiling ceremony was exciting enough for there to be wine. The pavilion was crammed with men in sportcoats and women in bright skirts holding wine glasses while the four plasma screens featured the oozing of molten glass. Leebron stood somewhere in the middle of them all. Around 5:45 p.m., the group made its way into the library to admire nine glass boats hanging from the ceiling. A few inspirational speeches were given, a few pictures taken on BlackBerry phones. A student employee at the front desk, referring to them as "radishes," wondered if the rumors about the cost of the boats were true.
Once infamous for its low turnout and unpopular venues, this year's Esperanza attracted an unprecedented 1,000 students, the highest number the Rice Program Council has seen in recent years. The formal, this year hosted on campus in a tent between the Jesse H. Jones School of Management, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Shepherd School of Music, sold out last Thursday, two days before the event last Saturday. While last year saw an increased turnout of 550 students for Esperanza, this year's turnout almost doubled. RPC Formals Committee co-Chair Maggy Taylor said she was surprised and pleased by the turnout.
The football team turned its bowl eligibility into a cemented bowl berth last Saturday with a 38-31 homecoming win over Army at Rice Stadium. The victory improved the Owls' record to 7-3, which ensures that they will play in a bowl game for the second time in three years. The team also set a new single-season Rice scoring record. "It used to be that when we got a win we were excited," senior quarterback and Conference USA Offensive Player of the Week Chase Clement said. "We're striving for so much more. We have such a talented team. We've done so much, we've come so far that just winning isn't enough. We want to get better so we can continue to win."
Two guys who steal their Wi-Fi from coffee shops are about to destroy your GPA, and you're going to thank them for it. As the new independent game studio 2D Boy, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, formerly of Electronic Arts, have lovingly crafted World of Goo into one of this generation's most innovative, accessible and entertaining games.World of Goo was released in October with a simple premise and a terrifying amount of detail. The main gameplay mechanism is easy to figure out. Each level is full of wide-eyed, amorphous Goos of varying colors and qualities. The player picks up a Goo and drags it toward a pre-placed cluster of other Goos, where the Goo grows appendages and affixes itself to the structure. Ultimately, the player seeks to move all the Goos to an exit pipe on the other side of the level. Each new Goo changes the weight and balance of the whole construction, making the game a limited physics simulator.
The International Visiting Fellows Program fosters collaborative work among Rice professors and researchers from diverse communities on environmental and sustainability issues, but the program may not be able to sustain itself if its co-directors are unable to secure future funds. The residence program is in its second year and runs out of Rice's Energy and Environmental Systems Institute. The program invites professors in engineering, the natural sciences and the social sciences to conduct a research project with at least one faculty member for a period of two to nine months, co- Director Carrie Masiello said.
Architecture. Music. Rice schools of the arts rank among the best around. In 2006, the Design Futures Council ranked Rice's Undergraduate Architecture program second in the nation. The Shepherd School of Music was one of eight music schools chosen by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for its Conservatory Project. However, when it came to visual and dramatic arts, Rice somehow slipped off the radar.Well, that's all about to change, according to Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts Christopher Sperandio.
The winter months and the end of the year are looming. With them, sprawling dramas, emotionally empowered cinematography and tear-inducing performances will soon inundate the box office, wooing audiences, critics and, most importantly, the Academy. A Best Picture nomination is viewed as the highest achievement for directors, a lofty goal reserved only for the cinematic elite.One of the films vying for the 2009 Oscars is Clint Eastwood's Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie (Mr. & Mrs. Smith). It's been a while since fans have seen a film with Jolie front-lining in a serious role (as much as I appreciated Wanted, in which she had approximately four lines and relied on her exotic eyebrows and luscious lips for 95 percent of the movie).
Over the past week, I heard all the amazing things that Hispanic Studies Professor James Castañeda accomplished in his lifetime. They read like the accomplishments of not one great man, but of five or six. Some of the highlights include playing for the Baltimore Orioles, Cordele and Real Madrid, being decorated by King Juan Carlos I for his scholarly contributions to studies of Spain and spending 47 years as a professor at Rice. That's probably more than twice your age, and is almost half of the time that Rice has been around. In addition, he also served 21 years as a Rice baseball coach and 15 years as a Rice golf coach, during which the team attended the NCAA tournament three years in a row. He also published five books, numerous articles, 52 book reviews and accepted over 80 speaking engagements, and he worked with countless committees that helped push Rice forward both academically and athletically. Do you see why it is almost impossible to imagine what Rice University would be like without him?
For the first time in decades the Rice Gallery will not be hosting the Visual and Dramatic Arts student art show this year during graduation. Many students and faculty are upset and taking action.Rice Gallery Director Kimberly Davenport, who took her post in 1994, said she decided not to host the VADA senior show after several years of dwindling attendance and interest.
For all intents and purposes, Division I basketball is back at Rice University. After playing their home games last season in front of sparse crowds at the Merrell Center and Reliant Arena, the Owls are returning home Saturday to play their first game on campus in over a year and a half. Saturday's game at 3 p.m., featuring the defending Big Sky Conference champions and 2008 NCAA tournament participant Portland State, will also mark the debut of first year head coach Ben Braun and the renovated Tudor Fieldhouse.