The green life. Today, architecture students will dedicate the house they designed and built for the annual First-year Building Project. Photovoltaic cells on the roof make this year’s structure — made for a disabled female veteran and her family — partially solar powered. It is also furnished with items from IKEA.

But Crimson is greener. Harvard earned an A- compared to Yale’s B+ in the College Sustainability Report Card for 2009 published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Yale’s F in endowment transparency, compared to Harvard’s C, marked the greatest discrepancy between the two schools. Harsh.

At least someone has a solution. The National Bureau of Economic Research has published “The Panic of 2007,” a paper by School of Management professor Gary B. Gorton. His argument? The cause of the Wall Street panic boils down to the sudden influx of information recently available to investors.

Rocking the vote. David Trinh ’12 prevailed at the Freshman Prize Debate hosted by the YPU on Tuesday with a novel argument: Americans should vote for Barack Obama, he said, to strengthen the Republican Party. Trinh said he left 30 minutes into the debate because he thought he had “no shot of winning.”

Another opinion. The YCC’s student dean-search committee has narrowed its list of desired candidates from 13 to five, including a (confidential) top choice. YCC President Rich Tao ’10 turned the list over to President Richard Levin yesterday.

Merry pranksters. Two Pundits took the stage and played “99 Red Balloons” from a boombox in John Gaddis’ “Cold War” lecture yesterday. As red balloons fell from the balcony, more Pundits unraveled banners that read “EXPENSE,” “GRANDEUR” and “TBIYTB.” Gaddis’ response? “That was better. Not the best I’ve seen — but better.”

Congratulazioni! Pierson College Dean Amerigo Fabbri, memorable to Piersonites for his Italian accent, has been appointed to another three-year term, Master Harvey Goldblatt announced in an e-mail Wednesday.

Endangered performance arts. A petition to continue and develop the two-year-old World Performance Project was posted on the door to Trumbull College dining hall Wednesday. By 10:15 last night, it had attracted nearly two dozen supporters.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY

1969 Contractors spent the day cleaning and partially rebuilding the 50-year-old Harkness Tower, the top of which, because of pollution, looked like the “mouth of a smoke stack.”

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