What's The Problem Madison Ivy Fixed
The 200-year-old institution, located just across the Connecticut River from Vermont, has become a case study of how to tackle the sometimes interrelated problems of fraternity misbehavior and alcohol abuse.
what's the problem madison ivy
Dartmouth's public airing of its own dirty linen - through a variety of well-publicized campus programs - has reemphasized the popular stereotype of the college as a ''drinking'' and ''partying'' school. But the willingness of Dartmouth administrators to face the problem head on has also won praise.
Teachers, administrators, and students in the fishbowl that is Dartmouth give differing opinions on the seriousness of the alcohol-abuse problem. They also disagree over whether Dartmouth's problem is any different from that encountered at other schools, and over why Dartmouth's name is so often associated with alcohol abuse. Two themes frequently emerge.
Jeffrey Fennelly is one such link. A sophomore from Madison, N.J., who studies English literature, he says his own interest in combating alcohol abuse goes back to the alcohol problems he saw in several of his own friends.
Fennelly says he steps in to help when other students refer someone to him - or when he notices someone he knows repeatedly missing classes. He may take the student aside and supportively try to help the student understand the problems the drinking is causing. In extreme cases, he may encourage the student to check in with the college health service for treatment and counseling.
“The degree to which it is an issue is as individual as the institutions and the states they’re in,” says Roland King, vice president of public affairs for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents 1,000 schools. “But it’s tough to separate out any perceived tax loss from the societal benefits an institution like Princeton brings to the area in which it’s located.” University officials realize that the thousands of jobs and cultural benefits their institution provides are not on taxpayers’ minds as property taxes rise and they read about Princeton’s $8.3 billion endowment. New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation. “When you get your tax bill you don’t think, ‘They do so much good,’” says Pam Hersh, the university’s director of community and state affairs. Hersh represented the university in negotiations on the recent agreement with the borough. “But we’re lucky. We have an excellent relationship with the town in spite of the fact that everyone wants more money.” One critic is David Goldfarb, a borough councilman for the last 12 years and the only one to vote against the recent agreement. “What I’m looking for is a contribution that is equal to the amount it costs us to provide services to the university. The burden falls disproportionately on the borough. We provide most of the university’s police and health services,” says Goldfarb, who believes the university’s voluntary payment should be between $500,000 and $1 million. “The fact that they do more than they have to does not mean they should not do more.” Hersh believes the disagreement probably will get worse, considering New Jersey’s fiscal problems and the dependence municipalities and school districts have on property taxes. In Connecticut, the issue moved the state to begin a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) program that reimburses communities that host universities and colleges. Thanks to the program, New Haven receives nearly $20 million from the state on behalf of Yale on top of the what the university pays on its own, a total of $22 million in voluntary payments for fire services over the past dozen years, according to a Yale spokeswoman. New Jersey does have a PILOT program, but it only covers towns that are home to state universities and other state institutions. John Wilson, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in New Jersey, calls Connecticut “the envy of the rest of the country.” According to Joan Youngman, a senior fellow with the Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this debate is not likely to end. “Universities can marshal not only political and popular support but also data demonstrating their economic benefit to the community,” she writes in a report on tax-exempt issues and town-gown relationships. “At the same time, efforts by local government to conserve and expand the tax base ensure that controversies of this sort will continue, and that this seemingly simple issue will continue to be ambiguous, complex, and provocative.”
“I feel as if I know the parameters and problems of the issue,” he says. The challenge for rebuilding the site, Allen explains, is to knit this devastated area back into the city through a mix of housing and office space, transportation hubs, and memorial. Princeton’s architecture program has long taught such an urbanist approach to design, with attention on designing the fabric of a city – the streets, transportation, and public spaces – as well as individual buildings. Allen wants to strengthen this focus further, and the participation of seven Princeton professors and alumni among the 27 architectural firms on the design teams is likely to help. The call for redesign submissions began last summer when, after a public viewing, six designs initially submitted for the site generally were acknowledged to be inadequate. “What came out of ensuing discussions was a need to make the redesigned site more of a vital part of the city,” Allen says. Hundreds of teams submitted ideas; the second set of teams was chosen in late September. These finalists had six weeks to produce sets of designs, which were made public December 18 and can be seen at www.renewnyc.org. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority will choose the most promising of these by the end of January and create proposals for public review. Allen, whose team is headed by the NYC-based firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, is working with the landscape architect group Field Operations to bring a mix of visual art and landscape architecture to the project. The team United Architects includes visiting professors Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos from U.N. Studio of Amsterdam; the firm Reiser+Umemoto, headed by assistant professor Jesse Reiser; and architects Greg Lynn *88 and Kevin Kennon *84. United Architects, considered to be the most experimental of the seven finalist teams, showcases the work of an emerging, younger generation of architects. Visiting professor Peter Eisenman is part of a team that includes four other firms. Eisenman, the architect for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, whose area is roughly the same size as the World Trade Center site, thinks the entire project must serve as a memorial. “I don’t believe that we should put a memorial in a little square with lights and statues and then we put up a huge building,” he says. “The memorial and the building have to be one and the same.” Reiser believes the faculty members’ work on the New York project reaches students directly. “We’re teachers and practitioners both,” says Reiser. “Both realms inform each other. The content of the material that we deal with in our practice parallels our interests in research and the kinds of courses I teach at Princeton.”
Nevertheless, the book does convince me that we are all fundamentally shaped by our DNA, more so than any other factors. To me, this means life is like a constrained optimization problem for which we may choose the objectives but not the constraints. That is, your free will can still decide where you land, so long as the target is within the feasible set.
The initial idea of the paper was proposed by Ruijie Li, then a visiting student from Southwest Jiaotong University. He read about the mechanism design issues in ride-sharing, and was convinced that more research is needed in this direction. In this paper we focus on a feature that many ridesharing users care about: the schedule displacement (i.e., the difference between the desired and actual arrival time) in matching. By assuming the users bid for shared rides by reporting their valuation of the displacement, we are able to analyze the matching and pricing problem using the auction theory, including the well-known VCG scheme. The paper was published in Transportation Science in 2020. A preprint may be downloaded here.
Abstract: This paper considers a carpool matching (CaMa) problem in which participants price shared rides based on both operating cost and schedule displacement (i.e, the absolute difference between the desired and actual arrival times). By reporting their valuation of this displacement, each participant in effect bids for every possible shared ride that generates a unique value to her. The CaMa problem can be formulated as a mixed integer program (MIP) that maximizes the social welfare by choosing matching pairs and a departure time for each pair. We show the optimal departure time can be determined for each pair a prior, independent of the matching problem. This result reduces the CaMa problem to a standard bipartite matching problem. We prove that the classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) pricing policy ensures no participant is worse off or has the incentive to misreport their valuation of schedule displacement. To control the large deficit created by the VCG policy, we develop a single-side reward (SSR) pricing policy, which only compensates participants who are forced by the system to endure a schedule displacement. Under the assumption of overpricing tendency (i.e., no participant would want to underreport their value), we show the SSR policy not only generates substantial profits, but also retains the other desired properties of the VCG policy, notably truthful reporting. Even though it cannot rule out underreporting, our simulation experiments confirm that the SSR policy is a robust and deficit-free alternative to the VCG policy. Specifically, we find that (1) underreporting is not a practical concern for a carpool platform as it never reduces the number of matched pairs and its impact on profits is largely negligible; and (2) participants have very little to gain by underreporting their value. 041b061a72