Author Archives: Barrett Williams

Most college students hope to see improvements at their school accomplished within their four years, but student government representatives have even shorter time frames to get things done. The short terms for student representatives at Yale is one reason little has so far come of the proposed Bulldog Bucks and Campus Cash programs. The principal »

The problem with owning an iPhone, perhaps the most advanced phone on the market, is that most people on campus seem to think it really does make you a tool. YCC President Rebecca Taber defends her iPhone by noting that she never even owned an iPod, so when her Razr died last year, she considered »

How evil is Google? Harper’s Magazine recently commented on how Google’s environmentally-friendly policies really involve sucking up as much cheap electricity as possible, with little regard to how it is generated, as long as the location is close to a hydroelectric dam. Additionally, Google’s “server farms” bring little by way of employment for local towns »

Procrastination is every Yalie’s favorite pastime. This week, I discovered what is undoubtedly the best way to procrastinate: Crayon Physics. The final non-free version of this game has not been released yet, but the free version will provide you with at least 20 minutes of pure bliss. While you can find video clips of the »

Many Yalies have little reason to look beyond this country’s fine borders in their online travails. Still, even if we don’t really need to, it’s actually quite easy to interact with the international community online. Maybe you feel like chatting with your lover from your study abroad in Madrid last summer, or reading Spanish newspapers »

He must have broken protocol, but the guide named Leopard who showed us around the Moremi Wildlife Reserve in Botswana unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door. Leopard lived in one of the several company-owned one-room houses for a major portion of the year. The room was just wide enough to accommodate a double »

Mobile, cellular Internet is usually a luxury. If you bought your laptop in the past year, you may well have a built-in cellular modem. Even if you don’t, you can easily buy an add-in card to provide you with Internet almost anywhere you get a cell phone signal. But the add-in card will cost you »

Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps GRD ’59, formerly a Yale Economics professor working with the Cowles Foundation, spoke to the News about his influence on macroeconomics. Phelps is renowned for developing of the theory of the golden rule savings rate, bridging the gap between micro- and macroeconomics and discovering the reasons behind persistent high unemployment »

His name is Nicholas Negroponte, and one project over the course of the past several years has earned him tremendous amounts of attention: One Laptop per Child. He founded MIT’s Media Lab, where researchers work on creating “sociable” robots, new visual displays made out of cloth, and novel ways for humans to interact with computers. »

Having discussed a very abstract concept last week, I think I’ll return to something a good deal more technical. That something is the transition in the consumer-electronics industry toward “solid-state” storage in the place of conventional rotating “platter” and “head” technology. Most people know their hard drives as the first thing to die on their »

I grew up taking traditional, handwritten notes, most often in outline form. I wrote in cursive and rarely every referred back to these notes, mainly because they were often not as well organized as the textbook, and cursive is hard to scan if you are looking for specific information rather than reading a page of »

The guy with a Mac who plopped down next to me after coming in late to International Studies: Foundations quickly minimized his notes and began looking at a Web site that was summarizing the events of the MacWorld 2008 Expo in real time. A conditional fan of Macs myself, I was somewhat amazed that someone »