I WEDNESDAY, FEB. 3, 2010 t D Collegian Rossilynne Skena Editor-in-Chief Holly Colbo Business Alamiger About the Collegian: The Daily Collegian and The Weekly Collegian are pub lished by Collegian Inc., an independent, nonprofit corpo ration with a board of direc tors composed of students. faculty and professionals. Pennsylvania State University students write and edit both papers and solicit advertising for them. During the fall and spring semesters as well as the second six-week summer session, The Daily Collegian publishes Monday through Friday. Issues are distributed by mail to other Penn State campuses and individual subscribers. Complaints: News and edito rial complaints should be pre sented to the editor. Business and advertising complaints should be presented to the business manager. Who we are The Daily Collegian's edito nal opinion is determined by its Board of Opinion, with the editor holding final responsibility. 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Security too costly, powerless If a solution costs a lot of money and doesn't real ly solve anything, can you call it a solution? More to the point why pay for security moni tors at a cost of $l6 per hour if they can do little more than check names off a list? That's what the Interfra ternity Council (IFC) is doing This semester, a new social policy has been implemented, and one ele ment of the policy stipu lates that fraternities will hire security personnel to guard doors and social monitors to ensure the IFC's rules for parties are being followed. MOONWALK Housing issues create headaches By Caitlin Cullerot AT some point during your Penn State career, you will be screwed by housing. It doesn't matter if you choose to live on campus or downtown. It's going to happen. Maybe it's already hap pened to you. Maybe fresh man year you MY OPINION received your housing assign ment and scanned the docu ment excitedly, imagining what your roommate would be like, if you would be best friends, if you would braid each other's hair and paint each other's nails and then you saw the dreaded words: SUPPLEMEN TAL HOUSING. Instead of liv ing in a cozy double, you end up crammed into a room with sev eral other students. Think it's hard to study and sleep around one other person's schedule? Try seven. As Penn State's population continues to grow, the universi ty has done everything possible to fit students into every crevice available. Lounges have been converted to eight person dorm rooms. RAs have been forced to share rooms with students. And Simmons Dining Hall will soon close for renovations to create additional living space. Instead of alleviating the Accordir ig to IFC presi dent Max Wendkos, some fraternities; were unhappy with the ni. - nv policy They have good reason. The effoi rt seems like lit tle more tl 'lan a publicity inspired n love. Security personnel won't check IDs , so liability from any I inderage drink ing would :;till rest with the fraterr city where the violation to place. The average s( curity guard isn't trainE 4:1 to break up fights. He or she would have to ca 11 police, mean ing the damage from a fight coul(.1 start and finish before son with authority :3teps in. If the IF C is going to GlkSs 11',5 A TR4eOl6 c!..;; problem by building new dorms, though. the university is wrapped up in the construction of the $215 million Millennium Science Complex and expand ing the newly built arboretum. While these are both great projects, students can't exactly sleep on the arboretum lawn and bathe in its fountain. The problem doesn't get any better if you choose to move off campus. Leasing a downtown apartment means camping out with sleeping bags and tents for hours on end in the chilly October weather, and even then you're not guaranteed a place. I experienced this last fall, when my roommates and I bundled up in scarves and long underwear at 4 a.m. and head ed to the Nevins Real Estate Management office. As we walked, we congratulated each another on our plan to arrive five hours before the office opened. Who else would be crazy enough to wait in line hours before dawn? Apparently dozens of others. Some students were fast asleep inside tents. Others were sipping Irish coffee to try to stay awake. We headed for the end of the line, which was easily 100 people long when we arrived. The students in front of us said people had been camping out since noon the day before. Needless to say, we did not get an apartment. To make matters worse, Nevins' policy with security deposits was to cash checks pay for profe:ssional secu rity, why not go all the way and make it effective? That way, the money spent will do more than cosmetic work. Or, if the cost for effec tive security is too much, why not police parties effectively with in-house solutions? At most fraternities, members al ready guard the entrances and exits and presum ably take care of any violations of frater nity rules. Right now, the IFC is looking for a middle ground solution, but in this case, tl - iat solution offers too little and costs too much. LUNAR PRO 'RAM immediate+ . v and reimburse you later if you ' were not offered an apartment. Because we each had about $5OO tied up in Nevins' office from early October until Thanksgiving break, none of us could afforf I to put down a deposit anywhere' else. After getting the bad news, we contacted every other rental con ipany in State College, d esperate to find a place. Thz Lnkfully, Associated Realty Pry )perty Management (ARPM) s aid it had a few places left . but would need us to come in it nmediately. We toured an apartment the next day and a greed to sign the lease righ t away so we wouldn't lose the p lace. We went back to the rental office with the real tor, check books and pens at the ready, but it was too late another g ,roup was signing the lease to f ne very apartment we had just k seen shown. Thougl i ARPM worked with us to res( rive the issue, horror stories lil re this illustrate just how dire the housing situation at Penn state really is. Neither the univ( .!rsity nor the down- ltors seem able to odate student needs It other college is it ry to camp out to adequate housing? town rea accomm At wh; necessa receive ne for Penn State to edge the issue and It's tir acknowl ew extra dorms build a f illerot is a senior majoring in n and is the Collegian's ay columnist. Her e-mail s cmcs2l7@psu.edu. Caitlin CI journalisr Wednesd address i THE DAILY COLLEGIAN Food choices a subsidized U.S. sickness By Braden Katz WH E \ our parents were in college, the sight of an obese person was a rarity. Today, those who are excessively overweight are no longer considered a minority. The National Institute of -in Aim c ' Health found that 64.5 per cent 2 ' of Americans are over weight and nearly a third of the population is clinically obese. MY OPINION Although these numbers are already staggering, the country is only getting fatter. By 2015, 75 percent of Americans are expected to be overweight and 41 percent obese according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. With numbers like these, the argument that individual irresponsibility or lack of self-control is the sole cause of the obesity epidemic would be irrational. Although there is certainly some individual fault, America's eating problem can be seen in the center aisles of the everyday grocery store and the absurdly low prices of fast food items. This connection is no coincidence. As author Michael Pollan frankly put in an interview with Christian Science Monitor, "We are subsidizing obesity" U.S. crop subsidies were initially used to ensure the financial survival of farmers and thwart off famine during the great depression. Now though, crop subsidies serve a different purpose. Today, the most highly subsidized crop is corn. Corn subsidies jumped from around $2.5 in 2004 to more than $9 billion dollars in the past two years. As a result, junk food products contain ing subsidized-corn ingredients are extremely cheap. This skews the food mar ket for consumers to purchase unhealthy foods. Anyone gulping a Coke, biting into a KFC drumstick. munching on a Twinkle or par taldng in all three is ingesting some form of processed corn. Among the most lethal and popular of the corn concoctions is high-fructose corn syrup. This serves as a fatty sweeten er found in soft drinks, yogurts, cookies, salad dressing and countless other prod ucts. Meanwhile. vegetables and other healthy selections in the grocery store are either imported from foreign countries or their producers receive little to no aid from the government. The prices tell the story For low-income families, the rational choice among the gro cery aisles would be the cheap, less-healthy foods instead of expensive vegetables. Not surprisingly. poverty is one of the most prominent indicators for higher obesity Food production companies catering to the fast food industry use subsidized corn to feed their animals because it's cheap. In turn, fast food companies use subsidized ingredients to create food-like items on the dollar menu. Although many of these junk-food items may seem cheap at first, we are all paying the price. With cancers, diabetes, heart dis ease and countless other health problems that arise from an unhealthy diet, it is esti mated that we are paying more than $75 billion a year because of our poor eating habits. Taxpayers are paying corporations to cook for us. Consequently, companies have created a system that provides extremely cheap items containing three ingredients that our bodies are hardwired to love: salt, sugar and fat. We are all getting sick because of it. Braden Katz is a junior at The University of Kansas and is a columnist for The University Daily Kansan. There is No Name on My Ballot Gov. Ed Rendell announced yesterday that Pennsylvania is gearing up to send medical and humanitarian aid to Haiti and its earthquake victims. This announcement followed a letter sent by the governor to the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security. Rendell said he has enlisted the planning efforts of state departments to receive Haitian patients in the near future. Read more from There is No Name on My Ballot and the rest of The Daily Collegian's blogs at psucollegian.com. THON `The THON community came togeth er for its annual Road to THON dinner, a closed event last Thursday in celebra tion of the efforts to raise money and awareness "for the kids." About 800 people, including THON vol unteers, Four Diamonds families and corporate sponsors banded together to recognize the hard work of everyone involved with THON. Read more from the THON Blog and the rest of The Daily Collegian's blogs at psucolleglan.com.
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