There are two Division I schools that have “Crimson” in their nicknames. Tomorrow night, the Virginia women’s basketball team will complete the rarely seen season series against these two teams. The Cavaliers already downed the Alabama Crimson Tide 69-48 last week and will tangle with the Harvard Crimson tomorrow at University Hall.

Virginia’s (3-1) game against Harvard (2-2) will be the first time in school history that the teams have played.

Harvard was picked second in the Ivy League preseason poll after posting a 20-8 record in 2004-05.

The Crimson will be led by guards Laura Robinson and Jess Holsey and forwards Maureen McCaffery and Shana Franklin.

Robinson and Holsey will provide a good test for the Cavaliers’ strong backcourt. Known for her defense and reliable ball-handling, Robinson will likely try to contain Virginia’s star point guard Sharnee Zoll. Assistant coach Jeff House is not concerned about Zoll being disrupted by the pressure.

“Sharnee does what she does,” House said. “She’s an aggressive point guard that applies pressure to other team’s guards. They’ve got to adjust to her. They’ve got to think of [what they need to do] to combat Sharnee.”

In the frontcourt, the battle between Virginia forward Tiffany Sardin and McCaffery will be crucial. McCaffery, though one of the tallest players in the starting lineup, prefers to take advantage of her jump shot rather than score from the low post. She is averaging 5.5 three-point attempts per game and has connected on 50 percent of them. McCaffery also leads the team in rebounding, making her a dual threat on the court.

“Tiffany’s well-equipped [to defend perimeter players] from playing here on the perimeter her first three years,” House said. “And now [that she is] banging down inside, [she is prepared] for whichever area she’s in.”

Harvard as a team has taken 70 three-point attempts in four games, which translates into an exceptional 17.5 treys per game. Much of these shots are a result of the up-tempo offense that Harvard employs.

“They’re an athletic team that likes to run,” House said. “They push the basketball. They’ll be deliberate in the half-court, but they want to push the ball and get layups or they want to shoot threes.”

So far, the three-point strategy has served Harvard well, as the team is shooting an impressive 43 percent from the land of plenty. To slow down this onslaught of deep shots, Virginia will need to make a concerted effort in fast-break defense.

“Anytime when you’re playing a very good three-point shooting team, you have to do a very good job of finding people in transition,” House said. “You have to stop the break by getting to the paint and then pushing back out and finding [three-point] shooters.”

Neither House nor Sardin felt that the team was due for a letdown of any kind after such a successful trip during the Thanksgiving week.

“We’ve got to stick to our game plan,” Sardin said. “We’re not taking anything lightly this year, and we’re going to go out and do what we do best.”

If the Cavaliers are able to stifle the deep threats of Harvard tomorrow, Virginia will vault to 4-1 and leave the Crimson seeing red.

Run down the list of names on the Virginia swim team and one is sure to stand out. However, it’s not because he’s a six-time All-American, holds an ACC title and was named 2005 ACC Swimmer of the Year. No, the thing is that amid the Ryans, Tonys and Davids of the swim team a name like Vanja Rogulj is going to stand out.

Originally from Zagreb, Croatia, Rogulj came to the United States and began swimming for Virginia in 2003.

“There used to be an assistant swim coach from U.Va. that was from Croatia,” Rogulj said. “I was working with her in a lot of the camps, and I basically got recruited by her.”

Rogulj was not the first member of his family to attend college in the United States. His older brother went to college in New York, although the elder Rogulj no longer swims.

“He used to swim,” Rogulj said. “But he said when I beat him he’s going to stop.”

Of course, Rogulj doesn’t necessarily represent the typical little brother rival. Rogulj has competed twice for Croatia in the Olympics, the first time at Sydney in 2000 and then in Greece last year.

“Sydney Olympics were amazing,” Rogulj said. “Maybe it’s because those were my first Olympics, but I just think that the whole coordination and the arrangement of the Olympics in Sydney were a lot better. In Greece, the spirit, the whole atmosphere, wasn’t as good as in Sydney.”

Although Rogulj still swims for his National and club teams in Croatia, he has done plenty to contribute to Virginia swimming as well. At the Cavaliers’ last meet, Rogulj won both the 100 and 200 meter breaststroke. He was one of two Cavaliers to win two events, with senior Fran Crippen capturing the 1,000 and 500 meter freestyle. Rogulj’s time in the 100 meter breast stroke automatically qualifies him for the NCAAs. Incredibly, it was his first time swimming the 100 breast this season. Last year he secured the ACC title in the 200 meter breast.

Virginia coach Mark Bernadino says Rogulj brings more than just sheer talent to the team.

“Anytime you’re dealing with one of the premier athletes of the world, they’ll bring confidence,” Bernadino said. “He brings everybody a high degree of confidence. He’s just one of the nicest people in the world.”

Although Rogulj’s accomplishments now speak for themselves, like all athletes, he still had much to work on when he walked on to the pool deck at Virginia. Even though he had already competed in the Olympics for Croatia, the routine and workouts at Virginia were different from those back home.

“I think when he came, he wasn’t as prepared to handle the physical workload … relative to what he did in Croatia,” Bernadino said. “He’s developed tremendously in his time here. He’s gone from being someone who would struggle with time sets and longer workouts to someone who’s really comfortable in his training, really comfortable with his race strategy.”

Although only a junior, Rogulj’s is poised to have another record-breaking year.

“I think he’s well positioned to challenge for the NCAA title this year if he improves his strength and reaction times off the block,” Bernadino said.

Billy Campbell does not usually get a lot of minutes, but when he does, he makes them count. In Tuesday night’s win over Northwestern, he provided the Cavaliers with a spark off the bench as his clutch three-pointer allowed Virginia to regain momentum and take control of the game. It has been these types of big plays that have earned the senior from Atlanta not only the respect of his teammates but also more playing time.

“He gave us a spark,” Virginia coach Dave Leitao said in reference to Campbell’s shot. “That three was huge because it cut the deficit in half. It was an energy lift.”

Despite coming up big in the clutch, Campbell is most recognized by his teammates for his hard work in practice. As the team’s primary scout player, Campbell gives the starters a good model of how the upcoming opponents will play.

“He helps the guards out a lot in practice because he puts a lot of pressure on us,” junior guard J.R. Reynolds said. “He does a tremendous job.”

The most unique part of Campbell’s situation, however, is not how he has managed to find success as a walk-on, but rather his consistent success as a student. Campbell turned down admission to Harvard in favor of Virginia. While at Virginia, he has continued to succeed in the classroom and has been named to the ACC Honor Roll in both his freshman and junior years.

“The only thing that he’s not real smart about is that he turned down going to Harvard, but he ended up in a pretty good place,” Leitao said with a smile. “He plays and practices with passion, and I think he does a really good job at living with a passion.”

Campbell’s intelligence is recognized by his teammates as well.

“Billy is definitely the smart guy on the team,” Reynolds said.

The Cavaliers, however, will need more than just Campbell’s smarts this Sunday when they face Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets are coming off of a two-point loss to No. 13 Michigan State and will be looking for their first win in conference play.

Georgia Tech is led by sophomore guard Anthony Morrow and sophomore center Ra’sean Dickey. It will be Dickey, however, who the Cavaliers will have to worry about containing. With a 6-foot-9, 225-pound frame, Dickey will create a mismatch for the smaller Virginia frontcourt.

Meanwhile, the Cavaliers will continue to rely on the consistent play of sophomore co-captain Sean Singletary and freshman Mamadi Diane, and perhaps look for Campbell’s spark off the bench.

As seen in the Northwestern game, just one shot can shift the momentum from one team to another.

“Billy plays real hard,” Reynolds said. “He gets hyped [when he hits a shot], and that gets everybody going.”

Matt Deasey has filled up the stat box with a whopping three minutes this season and not a single other statistic. He is far and away my favorite player on the basketball team.

I met Matt last year when we were both on Resident Staff together in Lile dormitory. I can honestly say he was the most positive, energetic person with whom I have ever worked. Not just on Residence Staff, I mean anywhere. The kid has a smile perpetually glued to his face. He’s one of the few RAs I know whose kids genuinely liked him. They hung out with him more than any other group of residents did with their RA, maybe in the history of U.Va. And you know why? Because Matt is possibly the nicest guy at U.Va. (Amazingly, Matt has not only stayed on Resident Staff, but is now a Senior Resident. I think he has one of those time devices that Hermione got in “Prisoner of Azkaban” to keep up with everything.)

Part of the reason I never would’ve guessed Matt had it in him is he’s so humble. Most people let on that they are really freaking good. Not Matt. He mentioned he was recruited, but mostly by small schools that were way below his academic abilities.

Before making the team currently posing as a member of the ACC, he was president of our club water polo team. Unfortunately, he had to quit that far more successful and fun-to-watch squad to play hoops. Here’s what current president Jeff Barry had to say about his departure:

“I would say that where losing Deasey hurts us most is during crunch time. We still have a lot of very talented water polo players, but we lost that one guy we could go to when we really needed a goal.”

Speaking to Jeff made me think: Some guys are really fun to hang out with but are absolutely miserable to play sports with. We all know people like this. Either they complain to the refs the whole time, take stupid chances trying to do too much or have an annoying ritual before every beer pong shot. Maybe Matt is really an awful person to play sports with and the nice guy act doesn’t translate at all to being a good guy in the locker room. So I asked Jeff.

“Deasey was a great teammate, a great leader,” he said. “He was always the one during timeouts that really kept people motivated and focused.”

Here’s an example that Matt shared with me about his tryout that shows that the Leitao Era is a whole new ball game.

“There was this one guy who wasn’t touching the lines on sprints. Coach threw him out immediately, like five minutes in.”

Maybe Gillen would have done the same thing, but I doubt it.

Matt made the team because he outplayed or outhustled everyone at tryouts. Still, I think the fact that a high-character guy like Matt made the team is a sign that Leitao will make sure his team conducts itself, on and off the court, in the right way.

The Cavalier Daily has discovered that the Dec. 2 Science column, “Browser Wars: A New Hope,” used a significant amount of ideas and conclusions without attribution from a Dec. 15 PCWorld column, “Browser Wars,” by Michael Desmond. The Cavalier Daily is retracting the column and apologizes to its readers for publishing the piece. The similar headline is a mere coincidence because the writer of the headline never read the PCWorld column.

A mother rocks her baby’s cradle gently, while the tune of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” fills the air. In the hopes that their child will grow up to be an intelligent or creative individual, many parents have adhered to such music-introduction techniques, which are often controversial in child-rearing.

But since studies of what we now call “The Mozart Effect” began in the 1950s, researchers have discovered that music can do more good than we had previously thought.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that exposure to music, in the form of learning to play an instrument from a young age, can have a positive impact on speech ability in musicians versus non-musicians. Specifically, the ability to grasp a spoken language and differentiate more easily between sounds is more pronounced in the adult musicians who had begun to play instruments prior to the age of seven. The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. in November, which brings together approximately 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world.

While she is not a firm believer in the Mozart Effect alone, first-year College student and music major Jennifer Kellett does believe that music can have a positive impact on children.

“I do think listening to music will help children gain skills that they cannot get elsewhere when they are younger,” she said.”I’ve been playing for 11 years, and I think it helps me set goals … and it might help kids to have something to work towards.”

Postdoctoral Associate Nadine Gaab and Prof. John Gabrieli at MIT, along with their team of researchers, carried out the study at Stanford in 2004. Their findings are to be published this December in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The study, which consisted of up to 40 individuals, dealt with two different aspects of sound and speech perception. The first part, consisting of 28 individuals, showed that musicians were much faster and accurate in detecting the slight split-second differences between pairs of syllables, such as ba or da, than non-musicians.

The second part of the study involved the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to map neural activity and function by directly analyzing blood flow to the various parts of the brain. The purpose of mapping the brain activity was to determine whether or not exposure to music changes the brain’s sound-processing abilities. Participants were asked to listen to three tones and then reproduce what they had heard by pressing specific buttons on a panel.

The result indicated that musicians outperformed non-musicians and were correct 85 percent of the time, whereas the average for non-musicians was 50 percent. But according to Gaab, the fMRI revealed that the areas of the brain that control language ability had been altered with training in music. These alterations had resulted in more efficient processing of sound perception and timing, which obviously played a dual role in speech and music.

For Gabrieli and other researchers, who hope to use these data and future studies for broader application, the findings could help children with below average reading or speech abilities. But young children are not the only ones who can benefit from such studies. With more information about brain activity and speech development, the researchers also hope to investigate possibilities for those with dyslexia, seniors whose speech ability and verbal memory are declining, and even people learning a second language, Gaab said.

For now, it seems that many opportunities exist as to how music can affect the brain. It’s up to researchers to find out how and why, so that such secrets of the brain can be unlocked and applied to memory and speech developmental skills, especially for younger children.

Participation in the oldest honor society in the nation, Phi Beta Kappa, is facing competition from newer honor organizations and is struggling with a lack of familiarity that is inhibiting membership at some public universities.

The organization, which boasts 17,000 members among 270 chapters according to Phi Beta Kappa’s national Secretary John Churchill, is launching a campaign to connect local chapters with the national body. Chapters located at some larger state universities, particularly in the west, are struggling with lower acceptance rate among prospective initiates, according to Churchill.

Traditionally Phi Beta Kappa has been the most elite of national honor’s accessible to liberal arts undergraduates. The University chapter formed in 1907 and includes University President John T. Casteen, III. Nationally, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas and actress Sela Ward, among other notables, are also members. Churchill says this has made Phi Beta Kappa a name associated with distinction more broadly.

“When I hear a sportscaster say on television that Derek Jeter is Phi Beta Kappa at shortstop, what that says to me is that in the culture at large Phi Beta Kappa is a byword for excellence,” said Churchill.

Still, in light of a more crowded field Phi Beta Kappa has a harder time standing out even among those who familiar with honor societies, including the president of the University chapter of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Milena Arciszewski. The NSCS was cited in a Nov. 4 Wall Street Journal article as a competitor of Phi Beta Kappa.

“It is not the case that there is massive disinterest in Phi Beta Kappa,” said Churchill. “It is a very highly sought after and widely recognized honor.”

At the University, between 100 and 140 students are offered the opportunity to join, according to Richard Handler, University Phi Beta Kappa president. Usually 120 to 130 accept. Administrators run the chapter; Handler is also the associate dean of academic programs in the College. Every year the top fourth years, and a few exemplary third years are invited into the organization. To qualify for the honor, students must be within the top 12 percent of their class which means most inductees average about a 3.6 GPA. The group currently has 1,177 active members.

Even such stellar grades don’t assure admission. To be eligible students must also display what Handler describes as a “breadth and depth” in the liberal arts. Students must have taken a challenging full course load, a lighter semester for a student carrying the minimum for full time students of 12 credits often disqualifies applicants, Handler said. Students are also expected to have taken courses among various disciplines including sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

The organization “is the most prestigious honor organization in the country,” said Handler, “Everyone recognizes it. It means something to say I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from U.Va.”

Other Phi Beta Kappa members seem to agree.

“I was an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley in 1969 and I was elected, and it was a big honor and I was proud of it,” said Spanish Prof. Alison Weber, “I went to grad school, and I think when people look at my CV [curriculum vitae] and see Phi Beta Kappa and they are impressed.”

Some students don’t join the society because they are unaware of it, Handler speculated. Churchill said this was a problem nationally.

“At a big place like U.Va. kids don’t get an e-mail or aren’t interested,” said Handler, “Anybody that knows about it wants to join, but a lot of people don’t know.”

While Handler says that the University’s membership numbers have held steady, national membership may be decreasing due to the emergence of newer honor organizations boasting similar opportunities as Phi Beta Kappa.

NSCS arrived on Grounds five years ago, but in actual fact only became active within the last two years.

“Member involvement has gone up dramatically,” said Arciszweski, who said she feels that the increase is due to innovative community service projects the group engages in. “Most [groups] do the token 5k and fundraising, we did a book dive for textbooks for Afghanistan.”

Another group to open its doors at the University is Golden Key, which arrived in 1987. Casteen is also a member of the Golden Key, said chapter President David No.

The group consists of third and fourth year students in the top 15 percent of their class and currently has 500 members at the University.

No says that the group, like NSCS, offers various career opportunities, achievement recognition, and access to internships, as well as, full time positions.

“To be honest a lot of people join just because it sounds good,” said No. “It is good to have it on your resume and make a lot of people interested, but at the same time, a lot of members join but don’t really become a part of it.”

No, like Arciszweski, admits that he joined initially, because he thought it would look good on his resume, and then later became interested in the leadership opportunities available through the organization.

While the jury may still be out as to how newer organizations compare with the “prestige” of the old, it is up to students and their parents to distinguish between valid organizations and what Handler describes as “rip off honor organizations.”

“There are all kinds of new organizations that have sprung up, some of which are useful and some of which that are just trying to [get students to] sign up for money,” Handler said.

Students in the University Law School will have the opportunity to assist in providing pro-bono legal services to low-income members of the Charlottesville community through a new program starting next semester.

The Family Advocacy Program is a partnership between the Law School, the University Medical Center and the Legal Aid Justice Center.

“Our clients have medical problems and legal problems that seem to be all intertwined,” Legal Aid paralegal Liz Moore said. “This program seems to be taking into account all of their problems and refers them to people who can help them.”

Students will work directly with medical care providers and social workers to help patients with a “broad range of civil-legal problems” such as housing, employment and Medicaid, Legal Aid Executive Director Alex Gulotta said.

Students participated in the program initially, but there were problems with allowing students to work in patient-care areas of the Medical Center, said Kimberly Emery, Law School Dean of Pro Bono and Public Interest.

Students are expected to be able to begin volunteering with the program in January, said Greg Nelsen, a clinical social worker at the Medical Center.

“It gives people a way to access services without having to get that on their own,” Nelsen said. “There are a number of people who are aware of legal aid but who may not know how to contact legal aid or be aware of what they actually do.”

Diane Pappas, director of child advocacy at the Medical Center and associate professor of clinical pediatrics, along with Emery, approached Legal Aid about starting the program last year after learning of a medical-legal clinic in Boston.

The University “is perfectly situated with the Law School, the Medical Center and Legal Aid,” Pappas said. “So we had all the right players in town.”

The medical-legal clinic currently operates two days a week and is staffed by Emery, Moore and Nelsen.

“Dr. Pappas and those at the clinic recognized that they have such a significant volume of low-income people coming through there that there would be a lot of people that could benefit from this,” Gulotta said. “They can identify families that have social-legal problems that are compounding their health problems.”

Although there are hopes that the program will be able to offer more help more days a week and expand into other areas of the Medical Center, it does not have any funding at this point, Nelsen said.

Jurors from the open honor trial of third-year College students Joe Schlingbaum and Lindsey McClung early last month disagree on the exact reasoning for the not guilty verdict. Two jurors from the trial spoke with members of The Cavalier Daily on condition of anonymity in order to maintain the confidentiality of deliberations.

One juror says she thinks the verdict reflectedresulted from the insignificance of the assignment, while another says she believes the jury voted not guilty because the two students were unaware their actions violated the honor code. All 10 jurors were invited to speak to The Cavalier Daily, but only two agreed to be interviewed for this article.

A jury of 10 randomly selected students found Schlingbaum and McClung not guilty of collaborating on homework assignments for a political theory class during the spring 2005 semester. The homework assignments in question accounted for four percent of the overall grade.

In order to be found guilty of an honor offense, four-fifths of the jury must agree that the student committed the act and had dishonorable intent, meaning the student knew or should have known the act was an honor offense. If that super-majority is reached, the jury then considers whether the offense is serious enough that “open toleration of such an act impair[s] the community of trust enough to warrant permanent dismissal from the University.” A majority the jury must vote guilty on the seriousness clause to result in an overall guilty verdict. Students found guilty of honor offenses are permanently expelled from the University, a punishment known as the single sanction.

Juror 1, a fourth-year College student, said she voted guilty on act/intent and not guilty on seriousness. According to Juror 1, nine out of the 10 jurors voted guilty on act/intent after about an hour of deliberation. Because this surpassed the four-fifths majority, the jury then discussed seriousness for about 15 minutes and voted. In the seriousness vote, only one juror voted guilty while the other nine voted not guilty, Juror 1 said.

Juror 2, a College student, said she also voted guilty on act/intent and not guilty on seriousness. According to Juror 2, the jury reached the not guilty verdict because Schlingbaum and McClung maintained they did not intentionally cheat.

“We did find them guilty under act and intent,” Juror 2 said. “But as far as seriousness, they did not knowingly cheat and, unless they were deceiving the entire jury and the entire room, we generally believed that they did not know what they were doing was wrong.”

Juror 1, however, had a different interpretation of the verdict and deliberations. She said she believes the majority of jurors voted not guilty because of the relative insignificance of the assignment.

“I think a lot of people are unwilling to hold someone accountable for an honor offense unless it’s a serious one,” she said. “It was just a homework assignment. While they did it, to me, it’s not enough to expel them from the University.”

Honor Committee Chair David Hobbs, who chaired the trial and was present for the juror’s deliberations, said he disagrees with Juror 1′s assessment of the verdict. Though he said it was impossible for him to know exactly why a juror chooses to vote a certain way, he does not think the jury’s decision about seriousness was decided solely based on the size of the assignment.

“As far as the discussion, a lot more factors than just the size of the assignment went into the decision for seriousness,” Hobbs said. “It wasn’t just the percentage of the total grade that factored into jurors members minds as far as whether this particular act was serious.”

Though Juror 2 said she might have voted differently if a punishment other than the single sanction were an option, she was pleased with the overall outcome of the trial.

“I think that the way the system is set up … achieved its goal,” Juror 2 said. She added she felt comfortable with the fact that Schlingbaum and McClung received no official punishment.

Unlike Juror 2, however, Juror 1 said she was not happy with the outcome of the trial.

“I really think they deserve some sort of more minor punishment,” she said. “So, in that sense, I really think the honor system doesn’t work. They got off completely scot-free. In reality I think a lot of people believe because they were guilty of act/intent, they deserve some punishment. But I am happy they weren’t expelled because I don’t think their actions deserve expulsion.”

As far as ways to improve the honor process, Juror 1 said she thinks it would be helpful for jurors to have guidelines concerning what constitutes seriousness.

“We had no precedents to look at,” she said. “We had to make the decision on our own. I think it would be appropriate to see what is considered seriousness. A final exam, a midterm, a paper that’s a significant part of the grade, then, obviously, cheating merits expulsion. If a kid cheats on a quiz that is 5 percent of his grade, I don’t know if that’s serious enough or not. It really depends on the jury panel. In some sense, these two kids got lucky that they had a jury panel that voted the way they did.”

The juror surveys released before Thanksgiving Break by the Committee contain surprisingly little about either the deliberations or the issues with seriousness. However, question six does reveal ambiguous feelings concerning the opinions on the single sanction.

Jurors anonymously fill out eight open-ended questions following the deliberations but before the reading of the verdict. The questions cover a variety of aspects of the trial, including a question specifically concerning the impact of the single sanction on their decision.

On the single sanction question, none of the jurors indicated they absolutely would have voted differently if the option of a lesser sanction existed, but two indicated they might have voted differently depending on what the lesser sanction entails. Five students indicated they would not have voted differently, and the remaining four left the question blank.