Harvard Blanks Gridders With Stellar Defense

By wpengine | October 15, 2003

No. 23 Harvard (4-0. 2-0 Ivy) struck early and often on Saturday, scoring 20 points in the first half en route to a 27-0 win over the football team on Schoellkopf Field. Fast start and offensive prowess aside, however, it was a failed fourth-down conversion by the Red that stands out as the turning point of the game.

Trailing 20-0, Cornell (1-3, 0-2) began its third possession of the second quarter on the Harvard 38-yard line. The Red drove 33 yards on 10 plays to place itself at third-and-one on the Crimson five-yard line. Unfortunately for the Red, rush attempts by senior fullback Todd Newell and sophomore tailback Andre Hardaway failed, keeping Cornell off the board as time ran out in the half.

“We had just driven the ball 40 yards, and the majority of the damage was on the ground. We were banging out six yards, we were banging out nine yards,” explained head coach Tim Pendergast, “and I felt like we had two chances to get a yard, and I really felt like we could do it. But we came up short.”

“If they had scored before halftime, it’s a completely different game in the second half,” Harvard linebacker Dante Balestracci said. “Being able to stop them on fourth down like that and just run off the clock and go into halftime up 20 points was huge.”

The sequence of plays was the personification of the stinginess the Crimson defense displayed throughout the game. Drive after drive, Harvard frustrated the Red, limiting the Red to 247 yards of total offense.

“The defensive strategy was let’s make them throw the ball to win, because although they did a good job of that, they’re more of a running football team,” said Harvard head coach Tim Murphy. “We don’t want them to dominate the tempo of the game, and we wanted to make them play a little left-handed, so to speak.”

The strategy paid off, as the Cornell offense was handcuffed all day. Meanwhile, the Harvard offense, led by junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, continued its assault on the rest of Division I-AA. Fitzpatrick passed for 165 yards and rushed for 83 more to pace the Crimson’s 375 yards of total offense.

The Crimson scored touchdowns on three of its first four possessions of the game. On Harvard’s second possession, running back Ryan Tyler culminated a 10 play, 62-yard scoring drive with a five-yard run for a touchdown. Kicker Adam Kingston missed the extra point attempt, giving Harvard a 6-0 lead. On the very next possession, Fitzpatrick called his own number, running 10 yards for a touchdown and a 13-0 Crimson lead.

Harvard’s third score came on a five-yard touchdown reception by Brian Edwards early in the second quarter.

The trend of offensive efficiency did not continue into the second half, as the Cornell defense finally began to clamp down.

“I think we were a little more conservative in the second and third quarters. We wanted to pound the ball a little bit and run some time off the clock. We thought that our guys would be able to dominate the line of scrimmage,” said Fitzpatrick. “A lot of credit to them, they stopped our running game in the second quarter a lot. They were definitely a good defense.”

Harvard got on the board again late in the third quarter on a 64-yard touchdown reception by Corey Mazza.

“I thought that our defense really fought tooth and nail, and really came up with some big plays ourselves against a really talented outfit who’s averaging 531 yards per game and 41 points,” Pendergast said.

Junior punter Mike Baumgartel was again a bright spot for the Red. He averaged 44.7 yards on six punts, including a long of 61 yards. He had two punts land inside the Harvard 20-yard line.

“Mike’s a consistently very excellent performer for us,” said Pendergast. “I don’t know what the numbers say, someone might be a yard in front of him in the league average, but Mike’s the best punter in the league.”

Another positive point for Cornell was the return of sophomore tailback Hardaway, who rushed for a net of 46 yards on 19 carries. This game marked Hardaway’s return from injuries that limited him for the first three weeks of the season.

“Being an athlete, being a ballplayer, being a competitor, there’s no better place I’d rather be than out on the battlefield,” he said.

Archived article by Owen Bochner

Literary Magazines Thrive on Campus

By wpengine October 16, 2003

Epoch, Cornell’s graduate literary magazine, garners national attention and claims the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates as former writers. Yet despite — or quite possibly because — of this legacy, Cornell’s undergraduate literary scene thrives. Boasting almost half a dozen magazines, each committed to fulfilling a unique niche in Cornell’s literary life, the various editors, scribes and copyists of these publications work long hours to bring Cornell the best of itself. Rainy Day, Cornell’s oldest surviving undergraduate literary magazine, is released biannually at the start of every semester. About 800 copies of the magazine are distributed throughout the Cornell campus. Work, however, begins long before, as the staff of approximately 25 canvasses the campus to encourage contributors, handing out flyers and chalking up the sidewalk. “Getting submissions is the biggest part,” explains current editor Christopher Kang ’04. “If in a week I get twenty to thirty submissions, I’m really happy.” Although these submissions come primarily from the student body, Rainy Day has happily printed stories and poetry from parents, alumni and even a dining facilities janitor. But of the four to five hundred submissions the magazine receives annually, only about twenty works are printed. A partial reason for the selectivity is Rainy Day’s emphasis on longer narratives, which Kang feels are often excluded from other publications. “We represent other sides of the Cornell literary scene, especially longer narratives and poems,” he told The Sun. Choosing to focus only on the written word, Rainy Day has no photography or art aside from the cover. Also focusing on the written word is relative newcomer [plug] poetry magazine. Last year, Arnold Seong ’04 set out with a staff of six to “start a magazine because we didn’t feel the magazines on campus were inclusive enough … we wanted to include all genres of poetry.” The biannual magazine prints 300 copies a semester, each issue filled with poems of varying length and style. With this sharp focus on poetry, [plug] has grown to a staff of sixteen and into a robust program that involves much more than just the printed page. “The magazine will no longer be the most important part of [plug],” Seong explains. “Our main goal is for people to just read and share poetry.” To these ends, [plug] has been passing out poetry on Ho Plaza, hosting readings and poetry slams and sponsoring guest lectures and speakers such as Douglas Mao. The organization also boasts a robust website that will host spoken poetry that can be downloaded and enjoyed. “We try to show people all the different things poetry is,” Seong said. “We try to expand their definition of it.” Forword, funded by the Cornell Women’s Resource Center, also works at expanding definitions. Silvi Alcivar ’04 explains that Forword “gives voice to women and women’s issues. It’s been called the feminist magazine, but it’s really open to the entire Cornell community, directed to address women’s issues.” The magazine started in 1995 as a newsletter entitled Athena, which provided a forum for the Women’s Resource Center. It gradually grew into a full-fledged literary magazine and today prints 400 copies annually. The magazine also hosts a showcase in late April where art, poetry, and live readings are presented. The Ethos yearbook focuses on chronicling the minority experience at Cornell through poetry, art and photography. “The goal of the yearbook was and is to depict the efforts, struggles and various accomplishments of traditionally underrepresented ethnic groups at Cornell,” explained Editor Richetta Coelho ’04. Recently, the yearbook moved into a magazine format, in order to increase readership and student participation. This move has brought Ethos to “be more than just a picture book, but finally something that people were interested in reading once they got their copy and being involved in once they read it,” Coelho added. Established in 1976, the staff of 25 puts out 250 copies, which are sold at the Office of Minority Affairs at the end of the year. Finally, Lackadaisical: A Shortage of Flowers, is another newcomer. Founded in 2001, it has a lighter take in a literary world that Editor Becca Epstein ’04 admits is “inspiring and intimidating,” especially to those outside the English major. “A lot of talented writers and artists on campus … don’t get to express themselves creatively in their field of study. So we try to reach out to students of all majors.” Lackadaisical continues to grow, currently having about 15 members on staff, including many veterans who continue to improve the quality of content and layout. The biannual publication prints about 750 copies, which are distributed freely all over campus. Another major development in Cornell’s literary magazine scene is the reintroduction of Temple of Zeus readings, coordinated by Prof. Lamar Herrin, English, which have been influential in bringing RainyDays, [plug] and Forword together as they help plan and stage the weekly readings. The publications all sponsor readers and help get the word out about the event. “We didn’t really communicate with the other publications before,” admits Kang. “But the readings have really opened up a dialog between the publications.” He added that, because each publication has a specific focus, there’s more cooperation then competition: “There’s something for everyone.” Archived article by Michael Morisy
Cornell Hosts Biology Workshop

By wpengine October 16, 2003

Biology professors from colleges and universities from across New York State made their way to Cornell this past weekend for a four-day workshop designed to bolster undergraduate education in the rapidly developing field of bioinformatics. The workshop, entitled “Bioinformatics in Biology Education: Working with Sequence, Structure and Function,” aimed to provide professors and students with the tools necessary to take advantage of resources and data that are becoming increasingly available through public sources such as the Internet. “We aim to put the most powerful tools available into the hands of students,” said John Jungck, principle investigator for the program and Mead Chair of the Sciences at Beloit College in Wisconsin. Workshop attendees piled into the Cornell Theory Center in Rhodes Hall to hear a dozen lecturers speak on a variety of bioinformatics topics. While the realm of bioinformatics is expanding to include many different fields, this weekend’s workshop focused primarily on phylogeny, which is the genetic relationship between organisms, and population evolution. “I view bioinformatics as the triangulation of biology, evolution and information science. It’s very interdisciplinary from the get go,” Jungck said. Bioinformatics includes a wide range of applications in disparate arenas such as drug design, conservation and forensics, according to Jungck. “Perhaps you want to look at extinction conservation for endangered species or maybe you want to know if your can of tuna contains whale meat. Bioinformatics gives you the tools to do that,” Jungck said. Jungck hopes to get these tools into the hands of students by addressing their professors and answering their questions. “I’m a new assistant professor at Vassar College and I’ll be teaching classes on the human genome, genetics and bioinformatics next semester. I don’t know a lot about phylogeny so I thought this would be a good chance to expand my understanding,” said workshop attendee Kam Dahlquist. Bioinformatics, like any other science, is not simply answers. According to Jungck, a central problem in the field and in biology in general is the understanding of complex systems and networks of genes. “One of the biggest problems is understanding the complex interactions between genes and the web of gene expression. We need to get a better idea about both the fragility and robustness of such highly connected systems,” Jungck said. For example, conditions like cancer and obesity cannot be attributed to the vagaries of a single gene. These conditions originate from a combination of genetic, molecular and environmental dysfunction, thus complicating our understanding, according to Jungck. Jungck hopes that by putting today’s best tools into the hands of tomorrow’s scientists, these complications can be deciphered. The workshop was part of a three-year program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The program, Bioinformatics Education Dissemination: Reaching Out, Connecting and Knitting-together (BEDROCK), is a series of eighteen workshops aimed at undergraduate biology instruction. The workshop at Cornell is the seventh in the series. “Wherever we have a workshop, we always try to take advantage of the local resources and at Cornell that means genomics and supercomputing,” Jungck said.Archived article by Philip Lane