Column by Lorna Greene, Gavel Writer -

I left school uniforms behind the day I graduated from my Catholic secondary school. I hoped I would never have to come across one again, unless I happened to pass children on their way home from school. Imagine my surprise when I arrived on Boston College’s campus only to soon realize that I had once again been thrown back into the world of the school uniform. Continue Reading

By Andrew Slade, News Editor -

For many college students with Facebook profiles, recent weeks have brought a new and unfamiliar sort of information into news feeds. This is the result of the virally popular Web site www.formspring.me, which allows users to create question boxes in which site visitors can anonymously post questions directed at the page’s owner. The owner may then opt to either answer or ignore the questions with which they are presented. Should they choose the former, the question and answer will appear below the question box for all to see.

In browsing the FormSprings of friends, one is likely to come upon assurances from the page creators that they know the concept is a bit odd and borderline creepy, but that it is a new and intriguing way to waste time through Facebook or other social networking Web sites. FormSpring has set up its site so that users are able to link their question pages to their Facebook accounts and have their responses automatically shared with friends through status updates. This is in addition to users’ manually posted statuses that often state something to the effect of, “formspring.me … ask me anything!!!”

By connecting their Web site to Facebook without simply making themselves another application, FormSpring seems to have latched onto the all too common concept of “Facebook stalking,” positioning itself well for expansion of its user base.

The general idea of anonymous correspondence, however, is not entirely new to Facebook. Formspring.me expands upon the idea of Honesty Box, a well-established application that allows one to send others with the Honesty Box app secret questions or com¬ments, and this application has nearly 2.5 million monthly active users. What sets FormSpring apart is the idea of allowing anyone to see the dialogue — albeit partially the work of an unknown party — between the two others involved, and that one not need have a Facebook account to use the site.

On whether the site concept is too invasive to prompt most people to create FormSprings, the jury is out. “I think it’s cool, but I would never do it. I just read other people’s answers,” Khushboo Pelia, A&S ’13, says.

Laura Ahn, LSOE ’13, says that the site has potential, but that people aren’t necessarily using it the right way.

“My friends have it, and some use it to make comments as a joke,” Ahn says. “I like the concept, but I wouldn’t make one given how I’ve seen it used.”

By Lauren Costello, Gavel Writer -

Imagine living under a roof occupied by a soldier 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This soldier stands idly by as your house is attacked, as the steel rods over your windows are hit with large rocks, trash is thrown into your yard, and even when your house is invaded by illegal settlers who believe that God is on their side. Imagine this soldier intimidating visitors, listening in with his machine gun clearly visible and reporting their conversations.

This is exactly what life is like for the Palestinian family that I met in the contested city of Hebron/Al Khalil in the occupied West Bank. I was among a group of Boston College students that visited the area at the beginning of January. I was shocked and disturbed by the horrendous conditions in which Palestinians are forced to live.

No amount of reading in class could have prepared me for the experience of going through a checkpoint in the West Bank, for hearing anti-Arab racism casually, unselfconsciously expressed, or for seeing the daily injustices of life in “the world’s largest open air prison,” as one woman described her society.

One night we were abruptly awakened by an Israeli soldier yelling outside, demanding that the family car be moved to accomadate road closings. Seeing the silent exasperation on their faces quickly let me know that this was just another inconvenience that they had to accept.

Before my trip, I could have explained to you the history of the conflict and how the map of Palestine has been steadily decreasing since 1967 due to the checkpoints and the separation wall. I would have been able to argue which sociological framing of the conflict (apartheid, sociocide) made the most sense to me, and I could have made a convincing argument as to why I believe a one-state solution is the only just possibility for the region at this point. While this ‘conflict’ may appear to be a war between people – a war shaped by different religious and cultural beliefs – it is actually about power and control shaped by political interests that use racist ideology to breed hatred among its citizens.

Imagine, however, what it’s like to be a Palestinian child walking to school daily past graffiti that says: “What’s the difference between an Arab and a trampoline? You take off your shoes to jump on a tram¬poline.” Additionally, less than five minutes away a Palestinian market functions as usual, except for the steel mesh overhead designed to protect shoppers from the bricks, trash and sewage-filled plastic bags that Israeli settlers throw down on the market.

I could not have foreseen what we would learn during our home¬stays in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the holy city of Bethlehem. We met families who could not feed their children and had lived in Dheisheh for three generations but still managed to hope that one day their lives would be different.

In my host family, the parents now have two different identification cards, and the father will not be able to see the birth of his third child because he is banned from entering Jerusalem to go to the hospital ten minutes away from his house.

Along with the horror, we also saw enterprise and hope embodied in the Palestinian Fair Trade As¬sociation that brings organic olive oil to a Whole Foods near you. We saw the amazing persistence of a Prisoners’ Rights NGO (Adda¬meer) that continues to fight injustice despite the fact that they are working within a prejudiced court system and 70 percent of Palestinian men will spend time in jail.

Mostly, there is an incredible gallantry of daily non-violent resistance. The attempt to live an ordinary Palestinian life amid the checkpoints, land seizures, road closures, and daily insults is truly admirable. While Palestinians nev¬er get used to the daily assaults on their lives, large or small, they meet these difficulties with “sumud.” This means a mix of forbearance and steadfastness that my host family explained in this way: “You have to just do it and move on with your day, because if you let it get to you all the time, you’d go insane. You can’t stop living.”

In some ways our trip can be viewed much like every other service or immersion trip; we saw poverty, resilience, and the requi¬site number of cute, photogenic children. And like most service trips, we are now challenging ourselves to find ways to put our knowledge and our experience to work in service to the world.

This trip is distinguished by the fact that the injustices we saw were not produced by a natural disaster or the slowly unfolding consequences of our capitalist system. The gross injustice we witnessed is produced by an illegal occupation that is crucially supported by American foreign aid, your tax dollars and mine.

We also found that as Americans of conscience, we have strong partners in both Palestine and Israel. A broad array of Palestinian organizations (representing rural and urban, secular and religious groups, academics, professionals, craftspeople, folks in the West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of the diaspora) invite us to join with them in a program of boycotts, sanctions and divestments against Israel that would impose non-violent but real costs on the illegal occupation (with the full support and encouragement of Israeli NGOs and human rights organizations, such as Who Profits and Zochrot). We all left Palestine with a clear message: time is running out, and this issue could not be more urgent. The question now is this: how do we, at BC, take up this call to action?

By Lauren Viola, Asst. Features Editor – (Photo courtesy of hrch.files.wordpress.com)

Santa,

ZUP

BC UR J2G hrs 2 tkts 2 Aruba 4U n ms Claus 4t mth of dec

O n mayB Rudy n d boyz cn join U

TTYL d Grinch

A quick translation:

Santa,

What’s up? Because you are just too good, here’s two tickets to Aruba for you and Mrs. Claus for the month of December. Oh, and maybe Rudy and the boys can join you?

Talk to you later,

The Grinch

Though this may not be the typical Christmas letter you wrote as a kid to Santa Claus, language like this is rapidly becoming the norm for all sorts of communication. Originally, it began as a short hand way to type to a friend on AOL messenger or send a quick text message without going over a 160-character limit. However, shorthand, abbreviations and minimized words have taken over the globe. Their latest captive: resumes.

New social networking sites seem to spring up daily, as their popularity seemingly increases by the minute. Whether used for reconnecting with old friends or colleagues, keeping in touch with people who are far away, sending fun messages to your friends down the hall or posting pictures to share with friends and family, there is no doubt that the online social network phenomena is quickly expanding to cover it all.

However, with information on the internet being globally public even with the use of certain privacy settings, there has always been a concern as to what is posted on these Web sites and who can potentially see them. For a college student, this concern usually winds down to two very important people: mom, and the person from whom your future paycheck will come.

But if we look past these concerns, and the precautions that need to be taken to make sure a potential boss does not see what you did last Friday night, we find that social networking sites can actually be helpful in finding a new career or in starting one.

A recent article in Newsday, entitled “Why U shld hire me!” says, “Job hunters who’ve whittled their resumes down to one page have a brand new challenge — getting them down to 140-character Tweets; make that 120 if you leave room for retweeting.”

Impossible? Kristin Borrero, CSOM ’11, thinks it might be. “Even trying to keep my resume to a page for me is extremely difficult, but to try to make it 140 characters I would find virtually impossible,” she said.

With such intense competition these days for every position on the market, resumes are an extremely important tool for students and older job hunters alike. A job seeker is trying to get their personality and qualifications across to a potential employer, especially since resumes are normally looked at before an interview process even beings.

“I usually try to get across something completely distinct and unique in that individual point while keeping it extremely strong and action based,” Borrero says what she tends to highlight on her resume. “I also try to incorporate some sort of numbers into it or some sort of quantitative measure of how I per¬formed in that job or activity so that the perspective employer can get a good picture of the actual benefit of the task that I was working on … a lot of employers only spend the first 30 seconds looking at your resume.”

This highlights how long we have to get our uniqueness, qualifications and important background informa¬tion across before our resume gets tossed to the side.

What the new wave of online resumes, or “twesumes” seems to be doing is forcing us to beat the employers to the punch, and only give them 30 seconds of information to read.

“Those who see Twitter as a job-search tool need a succinct but compelling ‘twesume,” Allison Hemming, founder and president of Manhattan talent agency Hired Guns, said in Newday. “It calls for focus and editing, and, if your story is neither short nor compelling, people won’t share it with others. And that’s networking death.”

So what can you actually say about yourself in less than 140 characters (about the length of this sentence) that would give any sort of true picture of who you are?

“I think I would try to highlight my passions as well as how I’d like to put those into work at a specific job or position,” Borrero says. “I don’t think that in 140 characters you can talk about your educational background, your extracurricular background, interests, your technical skills and your past work experience, you couldn’t even list those things in 140 characters.”

“Twesumes” seem to be about focus and branding yourself. “Whether it’s in written form or in an elevator pitch you need to have a brand and have that be a unique something,” Borrero says. “Something that’s unique and different about you, that sets yourself apart from somebody else that could easily say the very same things about themselves or has a lot of the same experiences.”

Though they may be a challenge for many to write, “twesumes” can be used for other purposes, such as a tagline on the back of your business card, or a starter for your cover letter or resume.

But with a “twesumes” present or not, and no matter whose tweets you are following, technology seems to have spread its grasp even deeper into the realm of job hiring and recruitment.

By Stafford Oliver, Gavel Writer -

Over winter break, I, like many other Boston College students, participated in a service trip. I know how many students partake in the “service culture” and that you may be thinking, “Yeah, I know. You’re going to talk about how your trip was so great and so special and so life changing, and blah blah blah.”

So what new information or perspective do I have to offer that you haven’t heard from countless friends? Continue reading.

I started the whole process in March of last year when I was selected to co-lead an Arrupe International trip to Agua Prieta, which is right on the border of Mexico. The whole thing feels like a whirlwind, from the information sessions, the hours of interviewing, and group selection to the weekly two-hour meetings. There was so much material to talk about and information to cover. If I uttered the words “let’s go over some logistics” one more time, the Arupe group would probably have mutinied against me. We did so much reflecting throughout the pre-trip phase, I felt like I was a CURA leader.

After submitting my last paper with the arrival of winter break, the thought that I was actually going to a different country within the next few days finally dawned upon me. Late in December, it was unclear if we would still go due to increased levels of violence in the nearby city of Nogales. Growing up in Baltimore (which is not exactly like The Wire, please don’t ask me if it is), I did not bat an eye upon learning of the shootings and drug deals, but our itinerary was indeed changed at the last minute. I returned to BC hoping and praying that I would be ready to accompany 12 others on a complete roller coaster.

The trip was organized by Borderlinks, an organization from Tucson, Ariz. Borderlinks was founded to educate groups about the conditions and the multiple perspectives of living at the border. I spent seven days rolling around in a van stuffed to the ceiling with book bags, sleeping bags, and 12 other mostly unwashed bodies. We slept at migrant shelters, visited a horrifying low-wage factory, met with a multitude of social justice organizations working on the behalf of migrants, visited a coffee co-op, witnessed a mass-deportation trial and were stopped by border patrol.

The most heart-wrenching moments came when we were putting those foreign language core classes to good use, talking with people who were deeply affected by the border wall and its many implications. My heart plumeted when I saw a 17-year-old youth group leader who had us singing and dancing on a Friday night, robotically working on an assembly line Monday morning. I can’t describe the shock of learning from a minister that the man I sat next to at Church used to smuggle human beings for a living. This comes after completing a seminar class and writing a research paper on human trafficking.

This trip went beyond meeting gracious people in Mexico, being inspired by dedicated folks who are actually making a difference, and engaging with an academic subject beyond a book or an essay. I was able to get real (in a way that is difficult inside of this ivory tower) with 12 incredible and insightful people that I would probably not have otherwise known. Not only did we share lots of disinfectant and powder, but lots of songs, hugs and most importantly, friendship.

I’m not sure if what I did or how I feel is representative of all those who have or will go on a service trip. I am, however, sure that I am too engaged and too inspired to let go of my experiences and simply move on.

By Tue Tran, Editor-in-Chief -

There are many degrees of homophobia. From the flippant usage of “that’s so gay” to injuring someone due to suspicions of him or her having a non-heterosexual orientation. At Boston College, GLBTQ students have expressed concern about the campus climate with regard to issues of sexual identity and the lack of support from the University.

Continue Reading

By Alison Athey, Assoc. Features Editor -

Many Boston College students have heard horror stories about the Plex, from students on the elliptical machines for hours on end to girls eating packets of Splenda so they won’t pass out while exercising. These are signs of a pervasive culture of disordered eating that has created a formidable presence on campus.

Forty percent of female college students have eating disorders, according to the Massachusetts Eating Disorders Association. To combat this widespread problem, Feb. 21 – 27 is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Dur­ing NEDAwareness there will be several online seminars that call upon healthcare practitioners, social workers and all those affected by eating disorders to raise awareness by organizing events in their own communities.

“Our aim of NEDAwareness Week is to ultimately prevent eating disorders and body image issues while reducing the stigma surround­ing eating disorders and improving access to treatment,” says The National Eating Disorder Associa­tion (NEDA) Web site.

“There is a difference between being healthy and being sick. There is such a fine line and it is being crossed all the time. It’s scary,” a Boston Col­lege senior who has had several close friends with eating disorders.

This student, who asks to remain anonymous to protect the privacy of her friends, remembers a close friend putting herself on Weight Watchers in the sixth grade. Instead of eating balanced meals on this diet program, the young girl would save all of her “points” for Twiz­zlers and Hohos.

Many BC students know that anorexia is characterized by restricted eating habits and that bulimia is based on binging followed by compensatory behaviors. The physical consequences of these disorders are far-reaching, among them nose bleeds, stained teeth, inability to menstruate, hair loss and the development of lanugo, a soft, coating of hair on the arms, face and back that occurs when body fat decreases too significantly. Accord­ing to the American Psychological Association, anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychotic disorder at 10 -15 percent.

No single cause of eating disorders is known, but research­ers believe that it is linked to a combination of factors, including genetics, depression, anxiety, famil­ial difficulties and imbalances of the neurotransmitter Seratonin.

Distorted self-image is a critical feature of eating disorders, and many sufferers experience feelings of inadequacy. High-achieving people with perfectionist tendencies are also vulnerable to disordered eating, which is a characteristic typical to students at competetive universities.

Women at BC may be especially at risk for developing eating disor­ders. NEDA states that anorexia is more prevalent in young, upper-middle class women, who make up a large proportion of the student body. However, anyone can develop an eating disorder, regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, size or sexual orientation.

There are many on-campus re­sources available to students with dis­ordered eating. University Counsel­ing Services and University Health Services offer some psychological and nutritional counseling. The University also employs a nutritionist available by appointment on Tues­days and Thursdays. The Women’s Resource Center (WRC) offers a variety of resources for people who struggle with disordered eating, as well as those who care for them.

“There are weekly support group meetings for those struggling with eating issues, and in the WRC we regularly see students strug­gling with eating issues or friends of students struggling with those issues,” says Rachel Lamorte a staff member at the WRC and A&S ’10.

The group, known as HOPE (Healthy Options for the Pressure of Eating) is facilitated by two graduate students who have extensive training in the area of eating issues.

The WRC is not planning any events related to National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Instead, they organize Love Your Body Week in the fall semester and offer ongo­ing services throughout the year.

“We try to make Love Your Body Week focused on healthy body image promotion and eating issues awareness to make it a positive week while also getting at some incredibly difficult issues,” says Lamorte, who was the chief coordinator of the event in 2008 and 2009.

“We’re always looking at the efficiency and effectiveness of our programs and we’ve had many stu­dents give positive feedback about Love Your Body Week,” she says.

Despite these services, BC students still hear those same horror stories from the Plex. It is clear that eating disorders have a large and negative presence on campus, but many students do not know how to help friends or address peers who engage in unhealthy eating and exercising habits.

The WRC Web site offers detailed advice to students who are concerned about loved ones who struggle with eating. They offer a guide on how to set up interven­tions, what to expect in the process, and a perspective on the subjective experience of people with disor­dered eating.

“It is so easy to go on with­out addressing [a friend’s eating disorder],” the anonymous source says. “If you catch it early enough, though, they can be helped in a relatively quick fashion, as opposed to being sent away [for treatment].”

When confronting a friend about his or her eating behaviors, it is im­portant to know common mistakes to avoid — telling a friend that she looks “disgustingly thin” can be in­terpreted as a compliment, whereas telling someone in recovery that she looks “healthy” can be seen as code for “fat” — but without the encour­agment of loved ones, few people know how to reach out for help.

“Many people who recover acknowledge the importance of friends who believed in them and kept trying to reach through to them,” says the WRC website.

Especially on college campuses, where residence halls become a second home to many students, friends and roommates can play an important role in helping to reduce and raise awareness of disordered eating.

By Meg Lister, Gavel Writer -

Every day, every person, somewhere, somehow, sits down on a toilet. Approximately 20 percent of these squats take place in a public bathroom. Moreover, a significant percentage of these public bathroom stalls are graffitied with personal reflections, confessions, poetry, prose, questions, and answers. We’ve all seen these markings, and perhaps even contributed to them. Each sentence or phrase is totally anonymous, untraceable, and yet provides an interesting insight into our culture. Continue Reading

By Benjamin Mayer, Editorial Assistant -

Technological resources have enabled a humanitarian response of an unprecedented nature, since a 7.0 earthquake struck Port Au Prince on Jan. 12. Live Internet feeds, satellite uplinks, and even texting are being utilized by news agencies, relief organizations, and family members of those in Haiti, to give aid to Haitians who are still in urgent need. Although the event has demonstrated the incredible utility of technology, this tragedy has also shown the current limit of its abilities. Continue Reading

By Andrew Schofield, Special Projects Editor -

Until Christmas Day, Yemen was a small, poor, and politically fragmented Arab nation in the eyes of most. But an attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit, Michigan, has placed Yemen at the forefront of the global fight against terrorism as considerable evidence points to the fact that Abdulmutallab acted with substantial aid from the Yemeni Al Qaeda cell. The latest attempt of terrorism only demonstrates a long developing problem in the country of Yemen: the increasing power of Al Qaeda throughout the country.

Abdulmutallab’s attempt, however, is not the first act of terrorism that can be traced back to the country’s Al Qaeda cell. In 2000, Al Qaeda orchestrated one of its most significant attacks at the time, the bombing of American destroyer USS Cole, in the port city of Aden, Yemen. In addition, the Yemeni cell has focused on bombing Yemeni government facilities and hotels known for their Western clientele.

But more recently, Al Qaeda has increased its efforts in Yemen in large part due to the influx of terrorists in Yemen. According to Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, nearly 2,000 Yemenis who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq are returning to Yemen to help the cause there. Many have been released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba or have escaped from Yemeni prisons. For example, in 2006, four high-profile terrorists escaped from a maximum-security including Nasser al-Wuhayshi and Qassim al-Raimi who would eventually become the leader of the Al Qaeda cell in Yemen and its military commander respectively. Although the core in Yemen remains small, its operations have become more sophisticated with the merging of the branch with the Saudi Al Qaeda branch.

In 2004, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, English speaking Internet imam of Al Qaeda returned to Yemen after prison time on security charges. Although American intelligence officials do not believe he holds much power, most are convinced that he provides a vital link between prospective recruits like Abdulmutallab and Al Qaeda. There is also increasing evidence of a connection between al-Awlaki and Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army officer who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in November. Furthermore, he provides Al Qaeda with protection by the powerful Yemeni tribe, the Awlakis. In Yemen, most tribal codes compel the tribe to provide assistance to a member and his colleagues, or in this case, al-Awlaki and Al Qaeda.

Yemen’s history of instability and chaos only aids the terrorist operations of Al Qaeda. Up until 1990, the present-day Yemen was divided into North Yemen, or what was part of the old Ottoman Empire, and South Yemen, the former British colony. After the unification, in 1994, civil war broke out as southern secessionists established the Democratic Republic of Yemen. Although the secession was quickly defeated, the chaos in Yemen continues.

Al Qaeda’s resurgence in Yemen comes in a particularly tumultuous time as President Ali Abdullah Saleh has recently increased efforts to combat Iran-backed Houthi Shiite rebels. Against these rebels to the north, Mr. Saleh has encouraged jihadists and radical Sunni groups to fight the Houthi, which appears to be feeding support for Al Qaeda according to some analysts. In addition, Mr. Saleh’s second priority appears to be quashing a secessionist movement in the south. As Abdullah al-Faqih, a political scientist at Yemen’s Sana University told the New York Times, “President Saleh’s first priority is to stay in power. Two, at this point, is the war in the north. Three is the south. And sometimes Al Qaeda doesn’t even make the list at all — it drops from the agenda.”

Compounded the problem that the Yemeni government appears to be distracted, the terrorist cells appear to be taking refuge in the rugged tribal lands of Yemen – lands that do not have much government supervision much like those of Pakistan. Furthermore, Yemen is the poorest Arabian country with 70 percent of its GDP coming from oil reserves that are expected to be depleted within the next decade.

Despite their focus in Afghanistan, the situation in Yemen has the full attention of the United States government. President Barack Obama has pledged to make the strengthening of his government’s relationship with Yemen and President Saleh a priority. United States Special Forces have been deployed to Yemen to teach and train Yemeni forces on counterterrorism techniques and the United States has begun sharing intelligence with the Yemeni government. Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman has pushed for increased efforts to combat Al Qaeda in Yemen and claimed that a government official in the Yemeni capital told him, “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”