Yawn

Bwog fell asleep at 8pm on Thanksgiving (and last night….oops), and was determined to find out why. Assuming those after-meal droopy eyes had something to do with science (the idea of a god of food comas was dismissed after much discussion), we set Bwogsleuth Zach Kagan on the trail. Here he presents a roundup of internet wisdom to reveal the cause of post-turkey sleep disorder.

It’s a familiar scene. You’re watching Thanksgiving day football, and your eyes start to droop. But it’s not just you—your whole family, aunts and cousins, that neighbor you only see three times a year—they’re all slouching in their chairs, lazily fighting the sweet embrace of sleep. Just then your Auntie Nora pipes up and says: “It’s the tryptophan! In the turkey!”

Ah! But you, seeker of truth, are just as much trapped in the cave as Auntie Nora, because the whole tryptophan in turkey causing drowsiness is but a myth. Pervasive myth at that: there’s even a Seinfeld episode where Jerry sedates his girlfriend with a big turkey dinner so he can play with her toys (it’s less creepy in context…well, on second thought it isn’t really). The truth is that that tryptophan is a mild sedative contained in turkey, but the story is a bit more complicated. It’s time to put your biochemistry caps on: tryptophan is an essential amino acid that you get from food. Your body needs it to make important stuff like boring ol’ vitamin B, but also fun neurotransmitters like serotonin and melatonin which calm you down and can make you drowsy. Case closed right? You eat lots of turkey, get ingest oodles of tryptophan, your brain goes into a serotonin producing overdrive, and you nod off to sleep halfway through Alcibiades’s speech.

If only it were that simple! There are a bunch of other amino acids in turkey as well, and tryptophan is one of the scarcer ones. Amino acids need to compete to get past the blood-brain barrier and on Thanksgiving there’s just too much competition and tryptophan gets drowned out. Really, the only way that tryptophan can make you drowsy is on an empty stomach, and how likely is that on turkey day? Turkey doesn’t even have a particularly high amount of tryptophan (both beef and soybeans contain more). So, what really makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving? The same thing that makes you sleepy after any meal.

Find out what after the jump!

Taking the road less traveled...it's a thing!

The Day of Judgment has come. Weep ye College undergrads for major declaration. For those deciding now how to spend a good chunk of their remaining years at Columbia, or for those reminiscing on that major they declared long ago and now regret (or have not really even nearly kind of sort of completed and are now super worried about), one half-question, half-wish comes up at this time of year: Can’t I just major in Undeclared? Bwog’s Scholastic Angst Bureau Chief Mark Hay holds the answers.

And the answer is yes, in a way. You can major in Undeclared.

“The reason for this,” says Columbia College Dean of Academic Affairs Kathryn Yatrakis, “is because the College came late to the major business as a result of our robust core curriculum.” Acknowledging the work the College demands of students towards the core, and bowing towards the spirit of that educational cornerstone, Columbia wishes to allow students to pursue what Yatrakis calls “a true liberal arts degree,” to explore classes of interest. But nodding towards the rest of the world as well, the College still wishes students to pursue a level of specialization in their undergraduate degrees.

So you can major in Undeclared. But you still have to pick a concentration—Columbia’s compromise with the world of specialization and the world of the core. A concentration, as far as requirements are concerned, sits somewhere between a major and a minor.

It says something then that concentrations exist, by all indications, as a tool to enable broad studies, but instead many Columbians choose to pack together all of their interests by declaring one, two, or three majors and/or concentrations. Read more…

If you’re like us, you’ve spent hours of valuable registration appointment time agonizing over whether to take a class with a visiting associate professor or an adjunct assistant. What do these titles actually mean? Bwog’s expert on esoteric distinctions, Jon Edelman, breaks it down.

According to the faculty handbook, there are twenty-three possible titles for the Arts and Sciences faculty, not counting the over 500 named professorships that go to members of “unusual academic distinction.”

At the bottom of the tenure track are Instructors, doctoral candidates who will become Assistant Professors when they complete their Ph.Ds. After roughly six years of original scholarship, good teaching (as measured by course evaluations), and service to the department (working on committees and such), Assistant Professors can be granted tenure by the already-tenured members of the department and become Associate Professors. Usually, if they publish enough, they’ll go on to become full Professors. Professors with “exceptional scholarly merit of the highest distinction and extended service to the university” can be appointed University Professors by the trustees. Only eight professors can hold this title at once, unless one of them is seventy, in which case an exception is made in anticipation of his or her retirement.

Adjuncts, on the other hand, have it rougher. Although there are Assistant, Associate and full adjunct Professors, and many are very accomplished, their positions can be terminated at will. The wages are lower, and the work is part-time. Many adjuncts hope to get picked up for tenure-track jobs, but it doesn’t often happen unless they write a major book. There are also assorted Lecturers (both part and full-time), Professors of Professional Practice (for the grad schools) and visiting faculty from other schools, who also have Assistant/Associate/Full distinctions. Does any of this mean anything about how good your professors will be? Who knows? In the meantime, we recommend sticking with CULPA.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Bwog has been operating under the commonly-held assumption that Core Professors have to petition with the Core office to give you anything under a B-. This, to us and scores of friends, was common knowledge. Um, guess we have to get on our shit.

From: Sarah Camiscoli
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 10:11 AM
To: Roosevelt Montas
Subject: Question about core grading

To Dean Montas,

My name is Sarah Camiscoli, I am a second year in the college, and I write for a publication on campus that is interested in investigating a question many of readers have presented to the writers about the core – Do professors of core classes really have to petition to give a student lower than a B-?

If you could write me back with a response to this question and any background information on how this question may have arisen (or if in fact this is true), it would be really helpful for us and for our readers. If you would like to meet in person at some point this week to talk about it, I could do that as well.

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Best,

Sarah

From: Roosevelt Montas
Date: Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:24 PM
Subject: RE: Question about core grading
To: Sarah Camiscoli

Dear Sarah—

I have never heard of what you suggest. As in other courses, Professors in the Core can assign any grade to any student. No petition is ever necessary to assign a grade.

Best,

Roosevelt Montas

You’ve tipped us about it for years, and we’ve sort of snickered about it since the dawn of Bwog. So we finally decided to investigate. Why is there a prominently located lactation room in Carman? Are there more? Is this a joke? You have questions, Jon Edelman has answers.

It’s not so much the idea of a lactation room that perplexes us as it is this particular one’s awkward location just off the front desk of Carman. Apparently this little milk-pumping haven is just one of eight others scattered throughout our campus. There are others in Uris, the Law School, the School of Social Work, Studebaker, Mudd and Lamont, but the most popular by far is the one at the CU Medical Center.

The rooms were installed by Columbia’s Office of Work-Life as part of a Breastfeeding Support Program, and in accordance with New York Labor Law 206-C, which requires employers to “provide a reasonable space where an employee can express milk in privacy.” Previously, nursing women at Columbia were relegated to their offices (if they had them), or to bathrooms to breastfeed.

So why on earth would anyone choose a freshman building to “express milk” – and the not-exactly-child-friendly, rowdiest one of them all at that? The placement of the lactation room in Carman was, as always, a matter of availability of space and convenience; Columbia has no secret contingent of nursing freshmen. Although the eight rooms serve over one hundred people, they are frequented most often by administrators, and masters and post-doc students. Undergraduates and professors only make up a tiny percent of the rooms’ patrons.

If for whatever reason you’ve ever tried to get inside, you would know that it’s locked. To gain access, you would have to register with the Office of Work-Life and obtain their super secret code, which changes every so often. So unless they happen to involve nursing mothers, rumors about sexcapades in the lactation room of Carman are most probably false. Each lactation room is impressively pimped out with a table, chair, and one or more “hospital-grade” breast pump. They have sinks and decorations, including bulletin boards for photos of the users’ children, racks of parenting magazines, and some have refrigerators (though the one in Carman doesn’t).

We are told that responses to the program thus far have been excellent, and the Office of Work-Life is seeking to expand it, so don’t be surprised to see even more lactation locations in the future.

Photo via flickr

One day, in a fit of rage, John McCain sarcastically asked how many times a person can graduate from Columbia. Mr. McCain may have had a point. Bwog stopped and asked: Wait, how many times can someone graduate? Matriculation Guru Derek Huang tries to answer this question by documenting one hypothetical student’s quest to earn as many degrees from Columbia as possible.

As we start following our student cursed with the insatiable passion for learning, a basic choice presents itself. Which undergraduate school should someone attend first: Columbia College or the School of Engineering and Applied Science? Why not both! Due to 4-1 or 3-2 programs, someone could easily graduate from both schools in five years, garnering both a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts. Depending on whether or not our student is naturally blessed with the ticket to entering Barnard, there is the option of a costly sex change operation to squeeze out four more years as an undergraduate. Then, our poor student would have to temporarily give up that which he/she has so dutifully pursued for the past nine years—academics—in order to qualify as one who has “chosen non-traditional paths in their education,” and thus allowed to enroll in the School of General Studies for another four years, and another Bachelor’s Degree.

After these thirteen years and four Bachelor’s Degrees, a staggering number of options would open up to our learning-addicted test case. The Columbia Business School, School of Nursing, Mailman School of Public Health, Graduate School of Journalism, School of International and Public Affairs, Graduate School of Architecture, Teachers College, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Social Work, and SEAS all offer at least one Master’s and one Ph.D. If we assume that, on average, it takes 2-3 years to earn a Master’s Degree and 4-5 years to earn a Ph.D., graduating with both degrees from each graduate school would take around 70 years, catapulting our philomath well past his or her prime.

Another 6oo years or so (but actually) documented after the jump.

Read more…

Anyone who has ever been late for a class knows that running up the uneven Steps of Low is basically impossible, even for the athletically inclined among us (i.e., not the Bwog staff). Many Columbians and pedestrians alike have puzzled over why the Steps’ spacing is so adverse towards mobility. Bwog’s Megan McGregor reports with answers:

Photo via CU Archives

Some tour guides have been heard telling prospies that the Steps were rebuilt after the ’68 riots to make storming Low a lengthy and difficult process. WikiCU also states that the stairs “[serve] as a physical barrier distinguishing academics at the top (welcomed by Alma Mater) from the commoners below.” Although these scenarios sound awesome, they were not the intentions of McKim, Mead and White. According to A Guide to Columbia University, a 1937 CU Press publication, the firm actually designed the stairs (and Low Plaza) to resemble the stylobate of the Parthenon (the lower level stretching 330 feet wide and constructed on a curve rising four inches in the center). The Steps we see today are the originals completed in 1897.

So next time you find yourself sprinting up Low’s onerous staircase, take a moment to appreciate the steps for what they are–not an anti-activist menace but our very own Grecian urban beach.

The abandoned stone structure on 119th and Amsterdam sort of looks like a medieval castle – a very, very small one. It isn’t quite the stuff of architecture classes, but the little building stands out – you’ve probably wondered what it is or was as you passed the forgotten, weedy lot. It’s not like there’s a dearth of old buildings around here, but everyone knows the deal on St. John the Divine, the old St.Luke’s hospital buildings, and you know, Columbia. Bwog unveils this final mystery – a riveting tale of the forgotten, the clandestine, the underground… literally.

The trail of the underground aqueduct in Manhattan

It turns out that the 119th street gatehouse, as it is called, is part of a now defunct and closed off aqueduct system that runs from the Croton River upstate, through the Bronx and under Amsterdam. The gatehouses give access to the New Croton Aqueduct and pumping mechanisms underground. The original Croton Aqueduct began construction in 1837 after a really big fire made it clear that a growing city needed a real water source and a real distribution system. Two reservoirs were constructed to hold water for the city brought in from Croton – one where the New York Public Library now stands and one on what would become the site of the Great Lawn in Central Park.

Read more…

To Columbians, Election Day means more than the clatter of local politics in Wien. The coming of democracy signals the end of debauchery; Halloween and our four-or-five-day break is over. But why do we break now instead of earlier in the semester like our Columbus-Day-hating brethren? Bwog’s own David Hu looked the gift horse so deep in the mouth that he ended up in the 1960′s.

You might have heard that the ‘60s saw a few “protests” at Columbia – that’s what they call it when students use large signs, free love, and building takeovers to criticize stuff, including the United States electoral system. Issues of the Spectator from November 1968 included topics such as “Is the U.S. electoral process worth saving?” and the “rottenness of the electoral process,” rather than today’s op-ed topics such as “hope” and “change.” Plus, only 146 students participated in the elections for student representatives in 1968; Columbia’s apathy towards the electoral system was clearly becoming a problem.

In an attempt to remedy the student body’s attitude, the University Senate proposed a 10-day holiday from October 24 to November 2 “in order to allow students and faculty members to participate in the 1970 general election campaign.” The provision passed the University Senate the first time, but failed to convince the trustees. Read more…

Welcome back to Ask Bwog, where we try to find the answers to Columbia’s persistent questions.

Anyone who has graduated from Columbia in the last 60 years can tell you that to earn a B.A. degree, you must either swim 75 m (three lengths of the pool) or take the beginner’s swimming PE class. The younger graduates can also tell you that SEAS students, strangely, do not share this ritual. Columbia legend offers a logical explanation: if one day Manhattan sinks, CC students would have to swim across the Hudson, but SEAS students could use their engineering skills to build a boat. 

As likely as this theory sounds, this bizarre division between CC and SEAS only came about less than two decades ago, as a result of a combination of misunderstandings, journalistic errors, Columbian bureaucracy, sketchy decision-making and a healthy amount of bitterness.

On September 5, 1991, the Spectator published an article titled “Swim test dropped as requirement.” Kathryn Yatrakis, then the Associate Dean of Columbia College, was quoted saying, “The Columbia College Committee On Instruction (COI) has agreed in principle to eliminate the swim test from the list of degree requirements effective immediately.” This article announced, “As of now, all Columbia College students will be free from the requirement. Students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) are still expected to swim, but the requirement is being review [sic].” Read more…

While we’re down here celebrating Columbus’s discovery of the New World and decrying the subsequent effects on indigenous people, our neighbors to the North are celebrating something a little different. No, Ithaca didn’t get a Chipotle yet… it’s Canadian Thanksgiving!

Every second Monday of October since 1957, Canadians have been gathering ’round to give thanks to the harvest of the year before. Although the official declaration by the Canadian Parliament stipulated that the day was to be a day of “Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed,” today many observe it as a secular holiday.

And yes, Canadians do eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and the Canadian Football League holds a Thanksgiving Day Classic as well. Many who observe this holiday speak English and bring their families together, and it can only be surmised that the color palette of the whole day is a mix of orange, brown, and mustard yellow.

So there isn’t much of a difference between American and Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? Nope… we’re just assuming one is aboot a few degrees cooler (in Celsius, of course).

Image via Flickr

Welcome back to Ask Bwog, a feature in which we answer the many burning questions of this campus.

If you have ever had the pleasure of taking the Official Columbia Campus Tour, you probably heard this story from your tour guide: when Ghostbusters was filmed at Columbia in 1984, the university set up a fund into which all the proceeds from the movie would go. This happened to be significantly more than they had expected, and so Columbia decided to use this fund to maintain campus lawns.

Another popular variation of this tale is that Columbia agreed to allow Ghostbusters to film scenes on campus on the condition that they would pay for Columbia’s lawn maintenance. Sound familiar?

LIES!

According to several members of Columbia Facilities, this myth is completely untrue. Ghostbusters did film scenes for their movie here: Drs. Venkman, Stantz and Spengler conceive of their ghostbusting plan on the steps of Low, and the School of Psychology and Parapsychology is in Schermerhorn Havemeyer. But while the Ghostbusters would have had to pay for any damage to the lawns while filming, they have never contributed to the ongoing maintenance of Columbia lawns.

We’re all for the truth here at Bwog, but the story is interesting enough to bring out a little Columbia pride.  Tour guides, fib away.

- Mahrah Taufique

Photo via Wikipedia

Remember when you were in eighth grade and you were forced to read The Catcher in the Rye? Remember when Holden asks that taxi driver where all the ducks in Central Park go in the winter? Remember how you thought that was somehow a metaphor for imminent escape from your acne-ridden 13-year-old existence? Yeah, we do too.

We can only imagine that resident Bwog Zoologist David Berke was thinking along the same lines when, on a stroll past St. John the Divine, and he wondered out loud where the Cathedral’s most famous creatures, its peacocks, go when it gets cold out. Unable to procure an answer and eventually discovering that many Columbians don’t even know about the existence of the peacocks at the Cathedral in the first place, we decided to investigate. Read more…

In 2005, the University Senate voted 53 to 10 (with 5 abstentions) against repealing the ban of ROTC on campus. At the time, the most recent student survey conducted about the issue (in 2003) showed that 65% of students were in favor of repealing the ban. Two days ago, only 49% of students who participated in the survey were in favor of repealing the ban. So what’s up with the 15% shift in attitudes? Here are a few theories.

1. Less favorable attitude towards the military. During the 2003 vote, September 11th was still fresh in the minds of everyone on campus, and some had even been in New York at the time. According to a 2005 New York Times article, “one supporter of the R.O.T.C. said yesterday that the Sept. 11 attacks may have softened attitudes toward the military.” In addition, the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, which was, at the time, actually popular. A Washington Post/ABC news poll in March conducted at the onset of the war showed that 62% of the country was in favor of military action in Iraq. Things are different now: besides New York locals, no current undergrads were at Columbia during 9/11, and it’s not at the forefront of the national consciousness like it was in 2003. And the War is of course deeply unpopular. Both these things could color students attitudes towards the military.

Read more…

As the NROTC results are being discussed and debated, it’s likely that the term margin of error is going to get thrown around. So, what is the margin of error? According to Jon Hill, Bwog’s Nate Silver Correspondent of Mathematical Wizardry, there is none. Here’s why:

Votes counted: 2,971

Undergraduate enrollment (2007 [2008 figure was unavailable]): 7,411

At a 95 percent confidence level:

= [1.96 * ((0.5)/sqrt(2971))] = 1.80 percentage points



With finite population correction:

= sqrt[(7411-2971)/(7411-1)] * 1.80 = 1.39 percentage points

Read more…