Your Voice: Letters to the Editor
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Most American parties are actually not a Party in the USA
By Christiaan Wijers
Columnist
Welcome back everyone! I hope everyone
had an amazing break full of good food,
sleeping, showering without shower shoes
and maybe partying? Because ‘merikuh loves to party, right? At least that’s what everyone has always been telling me.
For example, one of America’s finest artists spread the word all over the world that
Americans like to party: “It’s a party in the
USA!” With these wonderful words, and of
course her unquestionable artistic qualities, did Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Hannah Montana, give me hope for my party future in
the U.S. According to the American version
of Justin Bieber, American parties would be
big, there would be a lot of people, and the
music would be awesome.
However, after half a year of thorough investigation, I have to say that I am rather
disappointed and that I feel betrayed by
Miley and her promises of the Gardens of
Eden for party people — yet another reason to despise her. Miley made me believe
that U.S. people really knew how to party
it up, but I am not so sure about that any-
more, from what I have experienced.
In my imagination, U.S. parties would
be crowded, but unfortunately, they are
not. Okay, maybe I should correct myself
there — the parties are still crowded, but
not in the nice kind where you still have
space to move and where you don’t have
to walk over people’s toes when you want
to get something to drink. Rather, they are
packed, hot and sweaty. It’s more like a semi
truck transporting poultry.
The reason why U.S. parties are so packed-
parties might be because people don’t want
personal space. I have the feeling that all
people go to parties just to “get some.” And
at U.S. parties, people hope to accomplish
this by grinding and creeping on girls by invading their personal space.
This leads me to my next point. I have the feeling that the fact that people go to par-
ties to get some is the reason that parties
end so early. Once everyone has found a
girl to hook up with, they peace out. This
is usually around 1 a.m. No, I don’t think
the quiet hours are to blame for the early
endings of parties.
Yeah sometimes I really miss home with
its cool parties — going out at one in the
morning and returning at 7, waking up at
5 p.m. with a tattoo on your face, a tiger in
your bathroom and your best friend miss-
ing. They should really make a movie based
on that... Tot ziens!
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Larger recycling bins are necessary and important to campus
By Rob Moore
Staff Writer
 Courtesy of Rob Moore
We’ve all had it happen to us before. You
have a garbage bag full of cardboard boxes
that held textbooks from Amazon, stacks of
notes from all the intro classes you know
you shouldn’t have taken, or cans from a
night of sharing fun and beverages with
friends. You lug it all the way down three
flights of stairs, knowing that the work you
did sorting the papers from the plastics, the
glass from the aluminum, and the card-
board from the other trash will all pay off.
Then you come to your recycling bin out
back to see that it is full to the brim. You
try to stuff it in the top, but the full bin can’t
take any more. You let out an exasperated
sigh, leave the bag next to the bin and swipe
yourself back into your hall.
To bring up the size of recycling bins may
sound trivial, but the simple change of in-
stalling new recycling bins outside of resi-
dence halls that can actually manage the
capacity of recyclable materials coming out
of these halls would have a substantial effect on Denison’s green culture.
You may find it exasperating the first time,
but after seeing the bins overflowing day
after day, what incentive does Joe Deni-
son have to spend all the time recycling if
he is consistently met by overflowing bins?
The clearly undersized bins do more than
show a lack of support for recycling from
our facility services. They also discourage
students from developing recycling habits,
which is antithetical to our university mission of developing a “community in which
individuals respect one another and their
environment.”
Additionally, there are aesthetic concerns.
As Denisonians, we pride ourselves on the
natural beauty of our campus. Who wants
to live on a campus that is littered with
trash? What kind of prospective student
sees an overflowing recycling bin and says
“I want to go to Denison”?
Probably the strangest part about this
problem is that it has been left unaddressed
since my freshman year, or even earlier.
When I lived in Kappa Sigma house, I re-
call having the same make of recycling bins
outside of our house, and it was a physical problem even then. Now as a senior in
Stone Hall, the recycling bins are consistently overflowing, especially on the weekends.
Jeremy King, Denison's campus sustainability coordinator, has persistently advocated to facility that the undersized bins
should be scrapped for larger ones, but his
opinion has gone unheeded by those who
can make change.
The procurement of larger bins for Deni-
son residence halls is not a difficult project.
I hope that student advocacy groups such as
DCGA and Green Team will work together
to let administrators know that we, as stu-
dents, think this warrants action. Denison did not get where it is today through one
big change, but through a series of little
victories on issues such as this. I hope that
we’ll work to make sure that our campus
never settles to do anything less than it can
for the environment and for our campus
community as issues like this continue to.
_______________________
Rob Moore is a senior from Bexley, Ohio.
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The many problems with
SOPA and why it won’t work
By Peter Hurford Special to the Denisonian
On January 18, many websites – ranging
from Wikipedia and Google to Reddit and
Dinosaur Comics – decided to shut down
in some way to protest the Stop Online Privacy Act, “SOPA”. Given this shut down, we
have to wonder – what’s up? Why is the
Internet coming out in droves to oppose
this legislation, as opposed to some other
legislation, or no legislation at all? What’s
so terrible about this bill?
Here are a few of the big problems with
SOPA that have led the Internet to staunch
opposition:
Big problem #1: SOPA places an unfair
burden on websites
Under the current law, the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), when a
person uploads something to a website that
violates copyright, the owner of the copy-right can have the court order that site to
take down the material. Provided the website in question complies with this request
and is not knowingly perpetrating copy-
right violations, the website is what DMCA
calls a “safe harbor” and will not get further
penalty – even if it is served with repeated
violations.
SOPA will change this by greatly reducing the “safe harbor” provision seen in the
DMCA and greatly increasing the responsibility of sites to combat copyright infringement themselves through the scanning and
regulating of their own material, rather
than wait for take-down requests. SOPA
would allow an entire site to be blocked be-
cause its users engage in copyright theft on
their own accord.
This is why websites such as Reddit could
be shut down. Reddit contains many
original, legal posts; yet still are bogged
down with a tiny minority trying to violate copyright. Under SOPA, they will find
themselves having to patrol the millions
of posts with filters to find and remove all
copyrighted material and then put in place
methods to block that material from ever
being posted again.
Big problem #2: SOPA will not actually stop
intellectual theft
This burden to websites seems strict,
but maybe it’s necessary to stop Internet
piracy? However, it turns out that SOPA
doesn’t even accomplish what it sets out
to do. SOPA is going to be like the Digital
Rights Management (DRM) of the Internet – the annoying thing that is supposed
to prevent people from duplicating DVDs,
but in reality just annoys those who buy the
DVDs legally by making them unable to
skip the previews.
This has to do with how SOPA plans on
handling pirated content that comes from
outside the US, such as on ThePirateBay.
Since many sites outside of the US are outside the jurisdiction of the US to directly
shut down, the government will instead
have their websites delisted from the Domain Name Registrar.
The way this works is that, in reality, sites exist as a series of numbers like
163.129.308.417 which are connected to
domain names like www.example.com.
The government could then sever this
connection, so that going to www.example.
com won’t direct you to 163.129.308.417
and thus not get you the content. But pi-
rates who are in the know could just access
163.129.308.417 directly and circumvent
this block. Thus, as this argument goes, all
the government has done is put the tiniest
of hurdles in front of the pirate, while se-
verely inconveniencing all of the legal users.
Big problem #3: SOPA contains vague lan-
guage that will allow it to be abused
Another complaint about SOPA is that
people will stretch vague language to shut
down what is, in reality, innocent. For in-
stance, I could personally try to shut down
a site I don’t like by posting copyrighted
works from multiple anonymous accounts
and then reporting that site to the Department of Justice.
Initially, claims of abuse seem exaggerated. But copyright holders do have a stun-
ning history of overreaching in exactly this
fashion. Recently, Viacom was accused by
Google of uploading its own copyrighted
content to YouTube and then suing Google,
the owner of YouTube, for damages — with
Viacom employees even going as far as up-
loading content from Kinkos and doctor-
ing it to look stolen. Another company,
Universal, was caught taking down materi-
al on YouTube under a copyright claim for
a copyright they didn’t even own. Lastly,
there have been cases of companies going
after YouTube videos of children solely
because they were singing along to copy-
righted songs.
Conclusion
SOPA seems well intentioned, and we as
a nation definitely need to do something
more serious about intellectual property
theft. However, SOPA is simply not the answer – it is the equivalent of stopping the
Mafia by bombing New York City.
Just look at MegaUpload. This was the ex-
act kind of website the government wants
to shut down – the kind of site that directly
profits off of copyright infringement. This
site could be shut down purely through the
use of the DMCA, without requiring SOPA
at all. If the government already can do
what it wants to do, why do we need the
marginal benefits of SOPA at the large costs
to Internet users and providers?
SOPA puts major financial costs on websites to somehow come up with filters that
will remove and prevent all copyright in-
fringement on their site, and contain vague
language that will make websites even easier to abuse. This is an impossible task for
websites to handle, and comes at very little
benefit. No wonder everyone is up in arms
against SOPA.
_________________
Peter Hurford is a sophomore from
Cincinnati, Ohio.
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Abroad housing anxiety: supposedly something ‘great’for my Denison education
By Emily Sferra
Special to The Denisonian
It is the fear of every Denison student
who goes abroad. Not being able to live
with the friends that you have made over
the last two years due to a lack of rooms in
the lottery, and thus being forced to live in
an isolated single on North Quad. Having
to walk across campus in the unshoveled
snow and sleet just to grab dinner in Huffman with your lucky friends living on East
Quad.
While studying in Rome for the last four
months of 2011, this is the nightmare that
haunted my subconscious at least once a
week. In all seriousness, the housing issue at Denison has plagued me from the
very beginning of my Off-Campus study
experience.
Prone to anxiety anyway, I
found myself upset many times from last
spring until January about housing. After various arrangements with friends had
fallen through, I found myself having to go
through the spring lottery, which inconveniently started at midnight Rome-time.
I entered the lottery with a number in the
bottom ten, but still hoped that a friend
with what I thought was a relatively good
number could pull me up. Unfortunately,
what would be a good number in the fall
lottery was not even close to getting a double in the spring lottery. The night ended
for me with tears and no bed on campus.
It was truly disheartening to return to
America with no idea where I was going
to live in the spring. Throughout winter
break I logged onto Webmail every single
day, hoping for any email from Denison,
and experienced many a sleepless night. It
wasn’t until after the New Year that I heard
from Residential Education and Housing.
And then, I played the waiting game for
five more days until I finally found out that
I would be living in Crawford with a student whose roommate had transferred.
Some people reading this may say that my
anxiety was unfounded, and that I knew all along that Denison would provide housing,
in fact, that they had to. To those people I
say, our campus may be small but the location of a student’s housing does matter. It
seems silly after living in a city with an hour
commute to and from class that the walk
across campus is daunting, but for some it
is. If I had ended up on North or South
Quad, I seriously doubt that I would interact with my friends as often as I do now. A
walk up or down the Hill always has been
and will always be easily discouraged by
wind, weather, or too heavy of a backpack.
I believe that if Denison truly wants to encourage its students to go abroad, the spring
housing process must be transformed. I
don’t posit myself as a higher education
administration expert in any sense, but I
do not think that I should have been subjected to the stress of not knowing where I
was going to live until a week before my return, simply because I had the motivation
to leave our little bubble and get real world
experience. While abroad, I was never truly able to get Denison out of my head be-
cause of my uncertainty over housing. The
transition back to campus is rough enough
for many of us abroad students (reverting
back to Sodexo and the cornfields of Ohio)
even without the fear that we may believing in the basement of “horny Shorney.”
I
consider myself very fortunate for landing
a spot on East Quad, but I know there are
other students who were not as lucky. Although I hope it is not intentional, it seems
as if the administration is almost punishing
students who go abroad for the loss of one
semester’s tuition with anxiety, stress, and
the possibility of living in an isolated dorm.
I call for the administration to review the
process of the spring housing lottery im-
mediately, in hopes of making the return to
campus less stressful and even a bit more
exciting for students who enrich their liberal arts education through study abroad
experience.
_______________
Emily Sferra is a junior from Toledo, Ohio.
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