Several Ohio State U. students were rooting against the Dallas Cowboys on Monday, but it had nothing to do with their football team.

A group of OSU students in United Students Against Sweatshops stripped down and protested in front of Bricker Hall on Monday in an attempt to prevent a potential apparel deal between Dallas Cowboys Merchandising and OSU.

In a group of 15 students, all sporting cardboard signs and boxes, most of the men had no shirts on while several women went with only sports bras or strapped shirts to emphasize their point.

“We would rather go naked than wear Dallas Cowboys Merchandising Apparel,” said Terasia Bradford, a third-year in French and sociology.

The protest started in the basement of the Ohio Union where the students got their signs ready and moved on through the Oval while chanting “We don’t give a damn for sweatshop sweatshirts” to the tune of “We Don’t Give a Damn for the Whole State of Michigan.”

The group traveled to Bricker Hall where they delivered a letter of delegation stating their demands to the secretary office of university President E. Gordon Gee before heading back to the Union.

Nicholas Pasquarello, a fourth-year in psychology and sociology and co-president of USAS at OSU, said the demands included having the Cowboys’ merchandising company and its off-shoot Silver Star Merchandising, disqualified from the bidding process for an apparel deal, to have Rick VanBrimmer, director of trademarks and licensing for OSU, removed from the deal and fired and that students and faculty be allowed to participate in the decision for an apparel deal.

The University of Southern California recently signed a 10-year exclusive-merchandising deal with Silver Star Merchandising.

University spokesman Jim Lynch said in a statement Monday that OSU is currently talking to license apparel companies, including Silver Star Merchandising, about an exclusive apparel model.

USAS, however, said that Ohio State has been secretly communicating with Bill Priakos, chief operating officer for Dallas Cowboys Merchandising Ltd., since spring of 2010 in an attempt to secure the Cowboys bid.

The USAS has emails posted on their website, obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, between VanBrimmer and Priakos. In one of the emails, VanBrimmer responds to questions from Priakos about making a bid.

“The only caveat is that I may be forced into looking at ‘bids,’ simply because we are a state agency. But don’t fear that process,” VanBrimmer wrote to Priakos.

Pasquarello said there are several problems with the deal and Silver Star Merchandising.

“Silver Star has been in communication with Rick VanBrimmer for the past year-and-a-half basically setting up the ground work for Silver Star to come in and take a monopolistic contract for OSU apparel,” Pasquarello said. “It’s going to wipe out the hundreds of independent contracts we already have and basically have all of our apparel solely produced by Dallas Cowboys and Nike.”

Neither Silver Star Merchandising nor the Dallas Cowboy’s organization were able to be reached for comment.

The last problem the USAS has, and why it first got involved against Silver Star, is it believes Silver Star is using sweatshops in several countries.

“Looking on the surface we have found four reports from the Worker Rights Consortium detailing worker abuses in Indonesia, Bangladesh and El Salvador and one from the Fair Labor Association as well,” Pasquarello said.

Both are independent labor-rights organizations that monitor and try to stop the use of sweatshops by companies.

Lynch said in the university statement that OSU is a member of both organizations, is a leader on initiatives dealing with fair labor practice and has scheduled a meeting for Oct. 3 with USAS representatives to hear their concerns.

In Bradford’s opinion, the university has not done enough.

“I hoped in May that the university would make some changes, but we’ve seen that the university doesn’t actually care,” Bradford said. “We are more and more like a corporation and not an institution for higher learning.”

The darkest planet in the known universe would look as bright as a full moon if it were located in Earth’s solar system. Unfortunately, this planet is located 718 light years away from our solar system.

The planet, known as TrES-2b, probably absorbs 99.9 percent of the light that hits it, according to a report by David Spiegel, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton U. and David Kipping, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard U. Meanwhile, coal, one of the darkest materials on Earth, absorbs 95 percent of the light that hits it.

TrES-2b, called an “exoplanet” in scientific circles because it lies outside of our solar system, was discovered in 2006 and is one of approximately 150 “hot Jupiter planets.”

Hot Jupiter planets are exoplanets with masses that are near to or greater than Jupiter’s. They have temperatures of over 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit due to the proximity of their orbit to their respective stars.

TrES-2b is no exception, lying just 3 million miles from its star. For comparison, the distance between the sun and the Earth is 93 million miles, making the distance between TrES-2b and its star relatively short. This close proximity between planet and star helps heat TrES-2b to more than 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature so hot that the planet glows thermally and would appear 3,000 times brighter than Venus, our solar system’s brightest planet, if it were closer to Earth.

The planet’s high temperature further prevents the formation of the ammonia clouds that surround Jupiter and consequently reflect over a third of the sunlight reaching it.

Instead, TrES-2b’s atmosphere contains light-absorbing chemicals such as vaporized sodium and potassium and gaseous titanium oxide.

Though other hot Jupiters are closer to their stars than most planets — most of these Jupiters are over 10 times closer to their stars than Jupiter is to the sun — Spiegel and Kipping suspect that there is a mysterious additional component in the atmosphere of TrES-2b that contributes to its extraordinary ability to absorb light.

This discovery is among the first of its kind to find visible light — in addition to the more commonly observed infrared light — coming from an exoplanet, Spiegel said. Burrows and Speigel said they believe that the optical light received from TrES-2b may be attributed not to reflection but to its thermal emission.

Their observations and analyses are the most definitive confirmation yet of the presence of some optical absorber in the upper atmospheres of hot Jupiters.

“This is not the first reporting of the mystery element,” Spiegel said in a Princeton press release. “But it is the first identification of how non-reflective it can make a planet.”

Spiegel’s findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The college football world has been turned upside down.

Claims of the Atlantic Coast Conference taking over the entire East Coast fly left and right as U. Pittsburgh and Syracuse U. officially signed over from the Big East, moving the ACC to a total of 14 teams starting next September.

Days later, Texas A&M U. departed from the Big 12 without looking back, making headway into the Southeastern Conference.

And speculation remains of where more teams may be headed next.

Amid the talk and trade, the Big Ten Conference remains stable and quiet on realignment.

But Penn State journalism professor Malcolm Moran — who has more than 30 years of sports journalism experience for newspapers like USA Today, The New York Times, Newsday and Chicago Tribune — said his main concern with conference realignment has nothing to do the with the sports end.

It’s about the academics.

“All of that talk appears to have little or nothing to do with higher education and everything to do with expanding your broadcast for print,” Moran said. “If all of this was just about business, you could applaud them, but this is supposed to be about higher education.”

And Moran’s thoughts aren’t too far off.

This week, NCAA President Mark Emmert called the recent behaviors among college teams and conferences an example of misinterpreted interests for college athletes.

“I think what came across [with realignment] is that all we care about is money and what we can do that is to our advantage,” Emmert said. “Nobody was talking about what this is going to do for student-athletes or intercollegiate athletic programs. It was all about ‘let’s make a deal.’ ”

From turfs to term papers

Many of the athletic academic advisors at these top universities also face the same battle of pushing their students to the highest expectations in the classroom, as well as encouraging their time on the field, said Linda Caldwell, Penn State’s faculty athletics representative.

“There’s no doubt that people are saying that this is all about money because there’s no doubt that it’s about that,” Caldwell said. “But personally, we’re going to do our darndest to continue the Penn State way and the Big Ten way to put academics up there.”

The Big Ten — created in 1896 — is the oldest athletic conference in the country. And what makes the conference so unique is its corresponding academic equivalent called the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which holds the schools to specific academic standards, CIC Executive Director Barbara McFadden Allen said.

Since the CIC’s inception in 1958, the committee has engaged in $7.5 billion in research activities, Allen said. It also connects researchers on Big Ten campuses and allows schools to share study abroad programs and a library system database.

“[Big Ten schools] recognized that they were so powerful on the athletic field and yet here they were representing some of America’s leading institutions, so it made sense to come together,” Allen said. “And it still holds true today.”

Members-only benefits

But this same committee is what also remains at the core of the conference realignment conversation, as the Big Ten doesn’t readily accept new members into the conference. Currently, the committee is made up of the 12 Big Ten schools, as well as U. Chicago.

U. Nebraska-Lincoln’s induction into the Big Ten was finalized in the summer of 2010 and was the second school the conference added in 62 years. Other schools like U. Connecticut, Rutgers U. and U. Missouri have tried to join — and have been considered all the same — but have never gotten anything more than discussion.

“Nebraska has some of the most loyal fans in the country,” said Doug Anderson, the dean of the College of Communications and a Nebraska native. “Who’s going to get up in the morning to watch these games, Nebraska versus Wisconsin or Rutgers [versus] Wisconsin? Seriously.”

As a whole, Anderson said Nebraska has been around a long time and established itself as an academic university and an athletic competitor, with 21 varsity sports and five national football championships in the last 50 years.

“If you’re looking for an institution whose pedigree most commonly aligns with the then-current members of the Big Ten, Nebraska was the best choice,” Anderson said.

At the time of Nebraska’s membership, the Big Ten conference was the only conference to include all schools who held membership in the Association of American Universities, which helps further American universities’ standings internationally as well as assistance with grant and research funding.

As of April 2011, U. Nebraska-Lincoln was removed from the AAU due to insufficient grant funds — due largely in part to the location of Nebraska’s medical school, said Faculty Athletic Representative Josephine Potuto.

Because of the medical school’s location, any funding and grant money does not count toward U. Nebraska’s overall contribution to the AAU, Potuto said. The AAU also doesn’t honor any grant money in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, which is a huge program for Nebraska and home to world-renowned professors, Potuto said.

“AAU has criteria for membership and you don’t fare as well if you’re small,” she said of the university, which is home to 19,383 undergraduate students, according to College Board. “And I understand the fact they don’t count the medical school, but not to count the agricultural professors, that seems a little arbitrary, but I guess they can make their own decisions.”

As the realignment conversation continues to swirl around the conferences, the AAU may continue to hold many of the universities together on the academic and athletic fronts.

Assistant Athletic Director for Communications Jeff Nelson said there is “no doubt” that the AAU stands as an “extremely important component” of the Big Ten conference and its standards for the universities.

“That’s the reason why all the institutions exist,” Nelson said. “The goal is to provide great educational opportunities.”

A matter of ‘institutional trust’

Thankfully, Moran said, the Big Ten has established itself as a stable, secure conference and continues to hold its universities to those standards.

Despite the disputes among other conferences, Moran said the Big Ten’s “institutional trust” has helped to prevent squabbles among the teams.

“It’s not that everybody is getting along and holding hands all the time, but there’s a foundation of decade-long relationships between institutions,” he said. “There is a way to work it out without turning your back on your peers and walking away in a huff.”

After all, the universities exist to provide academic experiences for their students, while helping their athletes on the field, Nelson said.

“Across the board, all Big Ten schools are similar from that standpoint,” he said. “They’re all teams that are able to go out and compete for NCAA championships in a variety of different sports.”

Caldwell said Penn State athletes also stack up against other Penn State students in regards to their choice of majors and specific colleges. Caldwell and her colleagues looked into the numbers after a discussion at a Division I athletics meeting.

But as realignment talk continues and players attempt to keep their focus on the field, Big Ten university presidents are left to debate what to do going forward.

Nevertheless, Allen said there is nothing to worry about anytime soon.

“On the CIC’s end, we are not having those conversations and we’re not looking for new members,” Allen said. “I’m here to tell you […] the presidents of the Big Ten have always got it right.”

And it’s the relationship between athletics and academics that keeps the Big Ten strong.

“We fight on the fields on Saturday and we cooperate in the office on Monday,” Allen said. “We’re an amazingly powerful force when we work together.”

In a city of skyscrapers, cabs and closet-sized apartments, New Yorkers might soon be able to find their open green space underground.

Entrepreneurs Dan Barasch, R. Boykin Curry IV and James Ramsey are working to build a community green space the size of Gramercy Park below ground. The high-tech, subterranean park called the Delancey Underground is intended to replace a two-acre abandoned trolley terminal beneath the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

The developers plan to use advanced technology to channel sunlight underground and enable vegetation and plant life to grow.

“The concept that we might be able to create green space in some incredibly congested neighborhoods, in square footage no one really knew even existed, was something super compelling to us,” said James Ramsey, architect and co-founder of the Delancey Underground Project. “Add to that the coupling of an incredibly cool blend of cutting edge design and urban archeology, and you have a concept that we are quite literally prepared to devote our lives to.”

While the project is only in its preliminary stages and no official date of completion has been released, the developers have been working closely with New York City Community Boards and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The project will run in tandem with plans for the adjacent Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a large-scale urban renewal project to develop new properties between Delancey and Grand streets with a concentration on lower-income housing.

According to Ramsey, funding for Delancey will be from a variety of models, from special types of loans or private, tax-deductible donations, to federal tax credits. The total cost and completion date for the project have not been determined.

However, despite the creators’ enthusiasm for the project, the Delancey group is facing a number of issues that need to be addressed.

“So far, concerns have surfaced surrounding the usual associations we New Yorkers have about underground stations — light, rats, dirt, et cetera,” Ramsey said.

On the other hand, Louise Harpman, clinical associate professor of global design at NYU, believes the Delancey Underground is a laudable endeavor.

“The designers take something that is forlorn and overlooked and make it a destination,” she said.

The USA PATRIOT Act has done much for national security efforts in the ten years since it was passed. Inter-agency cooperation has increased, criminal laws regarding the financing of terrorism have been strengthened, and investigation techniques have been modernized. As a result, U.S. law enforcement is better equipped to combat the technological and dissipated nature of terrorist threats. These achievements have been made in concert with a series of productive and healthy public debates concerning the compromising of civil liberties for the sake of national security. These debates must be allowed to continue in order to ensure that the USA PATRIOT Act remains an effective deterrent against terrorism. It is essential that all details relevant to the manner in which the USA PATRIOT Act is enforced be revealed as soon as possible, so as to minimize any possible injury such a disclosure may have to the effectiveness of the law.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), both members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), recently called attention to how the Department of Justice may be misleading the public as to how the USA PATRIOT Act is being enforced. In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., they contend that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has interpreted Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act in a manner different from its commonly understood purpose. Section 215 is referred to by the Department of Justice as the “business records” clause, since it allows the government to apply to FISC in order to seize records or information pertaining to a private individual who can be linked to a national security case.

Members of the SSCI are informed of such uses of Section 215. In their letter, Senators Wyden and Udall state that rulings of the FISC have interpreted Section 215 in a way that is very different from the Department of Justice’s characterization of Section 215 as being “like a grand jury subpoena.” Rather, they assert that it is being used to access the private information of citizens not linked to espionage or intelligence cases, in such a way that “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Such a claim that the law is being loosely interpreted by the FISC is also corroborated by how the American Civil Liberties Union reported that “business records” seizures jumped from 21 instances in 2009 to 96 instances in 2010.

It is key to the integrity of the United States’ legal process that the explicit manner in which laws are enforced by the government is made public. The precedent exists for the government’s responsibility to clarify as much as possible the way in which the government intends to enforce laws. Perhaps most famously, the majority legal opinion resulting from the U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona set out clear guidelines as to how criminal suspects must be informed of their Fifth and Sixth amendment rights. The manner in which the FISC’s legal opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act is similarly pertinent to Fourth Amendment rights. American citizens must be made aware of what the government determines to be a reasonable search and seizure, so that they may remain confident that they are safe from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

In their letter, the Senators mention how the Department of Justice has stated that “Section 215 is not a secret law, nor has it been implemented under secret legal opinions by the Justice Department.” But they also note how such a statement is misleading, since the NSA General Counsel testified in July of this year that important interpretations of Section 215 are contained in classified legal opinions of FISC. It is crucial that the government cease political doublespeak in order to continue relying on “secret law.” If the relevant interpretations of Section 215 are declassified, the intelligence community can capitalize on their recent successes in order to strengthen the legality of the national security apparatus.

If details of how the USA PATRIOT Act is currently being secretly interpreted by the FISC are as contentious as Senators Udall and Wyden claim, they are liable to be leaked in a manner similar to previous indiscretions taken with domestic intelligence gathering. The ensuing public reaction would not be productive for U.S. national security interests. Given the law’s proven track record, President Obama was right to sign a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act earlier this year. But in order to prevent the debilitation of what has proven to be one of the more effective tools in the war on terror, he should also make public FISC’s secret legal opinions in which Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act is interpreted.