*** out of *****

To any ’60s and ’70s rock-lovers out there: Be ready to rejoice when Steeple is played through your computer or, even more appropriately for the sound of the album, through a dusty boom box on your back porch.

Wolf People, the rock band from Britain, will release its first album, Steeple, with Jagjaguwar Records on Oct. 12.

In February, the band released the much softer-sounding Tidings, a compilation of 15 singles put together by the band’s lead vocalist, Jack Sharp. The collection is merely a taste test of Wolf People’s overall sound, showcasing only a few of the band’s late-60s, early ’70s influences.

These Grateful Dead-era influences are clearly present in Steeple, with such tracks as “Banks of Sweet Dundee Pt. 1” and “Morning Born.” All echo the far-out sounds of this rock ’n’ roll band with soft trailing lyrics and heavy musical tones.

The album is highly centered on the instrumentation, with many long guitar riffs throughout the nine songs that are often accompanied by light drumming and the sounds of a tambourine.

Completely void of lyrics, “Cromlech” highlights the band’s harmonious musical talents, including two guitarists, one bassist, and a drummer. The song starts of rather chaotically — similar to the end of a guitar solo — and builds up to a more cohesive ending.

The songs blend together so well that it is difficult to tell when one song ends and a new one begins.

Usually, only the introduction of a new instrument is the only indication of a change in song.

It is evident that the four band members like to jam, especially the drummer, Tom Watt, with his steady thumping rhythm present in all of the songs. The crisp clash of the cymbals are also apparent throughout the album, adding to the rich background sound.

The addition of the flute in the song “Tiny Circle” brings a surprising quirkiness to the tune and also serves to make it the most upbeat track of the album. “Tiny Circle” emphasizes the band’s common pattern throughout its songs — extensive and fast-paced instrumental jams that lead into short spurts of gentle sounds.

During the rare lyrical moments throughout the album, Sharp’s high-pitched voice accents the ends of words, often holding onto them until he has no more air to keep them up. His voice is also nasally at times, sounding a bit like the voice of Fran Healy, the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Travis. This is especially noticeable in the song “Silbury Sands.”

Steeple sounds as if it were recorded 40 years ago, like something that would have been played in Eric Foreman’s basement on “That ’70s Show.”

Overall, Steeple is sure to be a hit with nostalgic ’70s rock fans. Those who play this album will be taken back to another era; an era of bell-bottoms, boom boxes, and real rock ’n’ roll.

Harvard’s wireless internet coverage can be patchy—just ask anyone with class in Sever. But professors who teach in the few classrooms without wireless internet should enjoy it while it lasts. Before long, new technology will bring distracting YouTube videos to every square inch of campus.

The five-member Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved new rules last week which allow wireless devices to transmit in the television spectrum, enabling faster speeds, more network capacity, and much greater range for Wi-Fi devices. Never mind the effects on college lectures—the new rules will strengthen our economy and standard of living by providing broader and better internet access across America and by allowing rapid communication between devices like TVs and computers in new and exciting ways.

The new regulations open up frequencies between analog television channels, called “white spaces,” which were originally meant to guard against interference. Waves in this lower frequency spectrum can penetrate walls, travel for miles, and transmit data as fast as a cable modem. That means single Wi-Fi hotpots could cover entire buildings or even city blocks.

The FCC’s decision to allow unlicensed access to the spectrum, rather than auctioning off sections to the highest bidder, as has been their custom in the past, is one of the plan’s biggest strengths. Though it won’t generate revenue for the federal government, open access to white spaces will give even startup companies a chance at creating unique devices which take advantage of the technology’s long range.

Given the many potential applications of the technology, allowing open access to innovators makes perfect sense. The new, stronger Wi-Fi may open up new avenues for home entertainment, allowing transfer of high-quality video clips between computers, televisions, and other screens around the house. In addition, providers of emergency services will be better able to service disaster regions or monitor health of patients.

Devices that use white spaces may also be the cheapest way to provide high-speed internet connection to remote regions of the U.S., where phone and cable companies often will not provide broadband through the landlines. Doing so may help close the sizeable connection speed gap between the U.S. and other countries like Korea or Sweden.

If freeing up white spaces can generate several billion dollars in annual revenue, according to one Microsoft study, then why didn’t the FCC act earlier? Certain technology companies began been pushing for the FCC to open up the spectrum between the TV channels as early as 2007.

The FCC dragged its feet in the past because of concerns about interference, and rightly so. If a cell phone on the street mistakenly broadcast on the same frequency as the wireless microphones inside a concert venue, it could bring a Ke$ha concert screeching to a halt. Some earlier FCC plans to placate the opposition not only provided for a database of blocked frequencies but would have also required devices to perform an electronic search of frequencies in use. However, the FCC is right to drop the search requirement, a redundancy that would have made new devices more expensive. The new plan relies on the database of used frequencies and also reserves two channels for wireless microphones, which is an apt compromise.

Pundits who worry about confusion and interference problems underestimate the ability of the free market to resolve frequency disputes on its own. The last thing phone manufacturers want to see is a newspaper article about how their product shut down the microphones at the Super Bowl.

Given the promise of the technology, it is a shame that opening up the white spaces could not have happened years ago. However, claims that the new rules come too late, are too limited, or are simply timed to affect the November election, are hogwash. Phone and computer companies will eagerly resume production on white spaces-enabled devices as soon as they are given the opportunity.

Systems using white spaces communication have already been shown to work in the field. The city of Wilmington, N.C. has already been running a successful test of a wireless network using white spaces. Their system collects data from traffic cameras, allows police to view real-time security feeds from around the city, and broadcasts data from water sensors previously reachable only by boat. Expanding the technology to big cities like New York City might be more difficult, given the number of theaters and bars which use wireless microphones, but the Wilmington case, as several tests by Microsoft and others confirm, shows that the technology is viable and has real benefits.

In this economy, we should by no means allow a vital resource, even something intangible like a frequency spectrum, go unused. Opening up the white spaces for wireless communication was a no-brainer, and the changes to the rules cannot go into effect soon enough.

The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert yesterday warning citizens to exercise extra caution if traveling to Europe, effective from now until Jan. 31. Apparently, when the name “Osama Bin Laden” enters airwaves, it’s time to stick our heads in the sand and wait until the safety of February travel. Unfortunately, the world does not strictly follow U.S. travel alerts. It’s never particularly safe to travel—and that shouldn’t matter.

In a nation overloaded with counter-terrorism and security experts and watchers, we have become masters of the vague threat alert. The latest: terrorists mimicking the tactics of the tragic 2008 Mumbai attacks in any one of Europe’s three biggest countries. Osama Bin Laden may or may not be involved; so might other leaders. Of course, the same experts who can divine terrorists’ intent do so only before strictly necessary. The official who spoke to the Associated Press also said there were no indications that there was a capability of such attacks to actually take place. So to summarize: Al-Qaeda wants to attack tourists in Europe but probably doesn’t have new methods to do so.

This is newsworthy if you strongly believed that Al-Qaeda didn’t want to attack Europe. I, for one, was expecting Middle Earth to be a target—but the intent to target the United Kingdom, France, or Germany? This New Yorker and eyewitness of the 2006 Heathrow terrorism scare never saw that one coming.

Of course, I may have been too flippant just now, but consider what this travel alert really means. It’s not as serious as a “Travel Warning,” such as is currently in place for Mexico. The struggling war on drugs in that country is rated as a higher risk for Cabo San Lucas aficionados. In Europe, the State Department just wants you to be mindful of “the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure.” Tourists should remember that they are not safe on subway, rail, aviation, and maritime services. The State Department must not have to take taxis when they travel—if cabs are the only safe mode of transportation left to us, we are in trouble.

The United Kingdom duly followed the United States in upping its traveler threat level. France was already at its second-highest threat level, which apparently already included vague, non-imminent attack possibilities, so they stayed put. No arrests have been made in connection to the alleged plot that has sparked all this. The BBC, however, reports that, according to “European officials,” several people are still under surveillance. This should be particularly troubling here in a nation where we are used to not a single person ever being under surveillance, thanks to the Constitutional stand taken by the Bush administration. Oh, wait.

Along with the media’s job to report that the State Department issued this warning—and if you agree with the warning, you should be glad that the media duly publicizes it—the media has of course not let us down in adding a hysteria factor to the story. The BBC, in a mostly responsible article on the alert that concludes with a section on America’s corresponding increase in drone attacks in Pakistan, still includes a gem speculating that the alert may hurt European tourism industries. Then there are whole articles that write this speculation large. The Associated Press, for example, posits that Europe’s economy may take a hit before quoting experts as saying that it actually will be the same. Well done, AP: providing a balanced look at a ridiculous question by contrasting the comments of several random, concerned tourists with the opinions of actual experts who don’t see this as a major concern yet.

If anything, the speculation of a financial effect from this travel alert will be potentially self-fulfilling. Spreading doubt sells, but it also creates more doubt. Hopefully those who are considering travel to Europe will take in the State Department’s alert, process it, and continue with their plans. Reading stories about how they might stay at home, hurting European business, would only make them reconsider whether they should in fact stay (to avoid hypocrisy—travelers reading this story: Go!).

All travel comes with risk. An attack may happen eventually in Europe; it’s happened in the recent past in Madrid, London, and elsewhere. That attack may even have similarities to Mumbai and would be a human disaster. We must of course hope that any such attempts are thwarted before they begin. Yet, if such an attack does happen, it will not validate this alert and its media attention. Tourists should always be vigilant and aware of their surroundings—traveling in a foreign place is not entirely safe even without the prospect of terrorism. Tourists can get robbed, ripped off, scammed—it happens every day in every travel destination in the world.

Such generalized, half-measure alerts may appease the 24-hour news cycle. The government can always say—if something tragic does happen—that it warned its citizens to be vigilant. But vigilance alone would most likely not be enough to ensure safety in such a situation. And we should all keep our eyes open when we travel, if only to avoid the guy on the corner who won’t leave us alone until we buy one of his Eiffel Tower pencil sharpeners.

I accepted the offer as soon as I heard the magical phrase “paid internship” and I quit as soon as I heard the words “toilet cleaning.”

Filling in data logs, running around D.C. dropping off bank deposits in the dense heat of summer and reorganizing moldy accounting books from the 1980s seemed rather doable, as long as I got my $8-an-hour paycheck at the end of week. But bathroom cleaning was where I drew the line.

Given my summer experience, searching for internships for next spring leaves me with a mixed sense of utter dread and anticipation. Internship shopping seems to boil down to one question: Do I take the unpaid internship knowing I will have to take on another job, or will I risk another fiasco in which “intern” and “in-house maid” are interchangeable?

In April, the New York Times wrote a controversial piece about the legality of hiring unpaid interns for free labor. Soon after, media outlets like the Huffington Post, DCist, and even The Hatchet joined the controversial chorus. Now, five months later, how is GW helping students navigate the 2010-2011 paid and unpaid internship cycle?

When I asked the GW Career Center about its internship policy I received the following statement from Executive Director Marva Gumbs Jennings:

“To provide support to students interested in experience outside the classroom, the GW Career Center serves as a clearinghouse for full-time, part-time, internship and other experiences in the local region and beyond through the GWork database. We allow employers to post their internships in GWork to the attention of GW students providing the latter an opportunity to assess which internship may be best for them.”

The fact that our Career Center simply acts as a “clearinghouse” – impersonally spewing out background checks and crowd-sourced student information about potential employers – is an issue.

The Career Center should be actively rooting for us: blowing horns and holding giant megaphones and foam fingers at every interview.

Our parents may have worked their first jobs for the pay of a McDonald’s hamburger in the 1970s, but it seems fall 2010, D.C. interns are up against something 10 times fiercer than meager wages. We are asked to clean bathroom handles for extremely anal bosses, we stand out in the freezing rain campaigning for money from blasé businessmen, and – fulfilling every intern stereotype – we get coffee for our bosses.

This city runs on interns the way oil tankers run on petroleum, and yet the internship market often seems like open hunting season in a metropolitan jungle. Given these realities, the Career Center should be like a proud parent, the chairman of our personal fan club even, when we apply for internships, instead of leading us astray.

There is no doubting that we all love Facebook.

Our love of Facebook comes from our love of sharing, and on Facebook, everything from pictures to our relationship status is up for grabs. As college students, we have never really questioned the idea that it’s just our friends we are updating with this information. But who else is keeping tabs on what we did last weekend?

At this point, the answer is anyone who wants to.

Many college students are definitely guilty of oversharing. Students at our very own University post incriminating messages on friends’ walls, or upload party pictures with those oh-so-innocent-looking Solo cups or change their statuses to describe how hungover they are. So the main issue is one of privacy. Even once someone deletes his or her Facebook long after those partying days are over, the content will remain on the web… forever.

In an attempt to get a handle on this situation, the company released a statement in the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities that says, “You own your information. Facebook does not.” Although this seems straightforward, Facebook fails to define who the “you” actually is. And this statement isn’t very comforting when we realize that though we may own the content, we can’t control how long it stays on the web – or who sees it once it is there. If our Facebook fingerprints linger in cyberspace, even long after our accounts are deleted, there is no telling who will have access to that information.

Employers, for example, have been quick to catch on to this loophole in social media networks. The owner of a daycare center in my small hometown includes “Googling” a prospective employee in her hiring process. She claims that an interview and application aren’t enough anymore, and that you can learn most about a person by what he or she puts on the web for friends to read. She once chose not to hire someone after reading the girl’s tweets about how she hated going to work.

So if these small corporations are looking you up online, one can only imagine what the larger ones are doing. A recent New York Times article revealed that even federal law enforcement and national security officials “are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet.” Essentially they want Congress to be able to wiretap all “software that allows direct peer to peer messaging.” This includes Facebook, Skype and BlackBerry.

If Facebook and other social media cannot get a handle on cyberspace ownership, and allow everyone from our Barney’s manager to the head of national security onto our Facebook walls, then we are left to pick up – or rather put together – the pieces.

We have to adjust our level of privacy, and I am not talking about changing our Facebook settings. When you write things or post pictures on Facebook or Twitter, really think about who is going to have access to them. Would you want your new boss at Morgan Stanley to know that you ‘are so hungover from the keg stand marathon on Saturday’? If the answer is no, then don’t post it, because as of now, Facebook is forever.

Being obese can be bad for your health, and for your wallet. That’s the conclusion a group of George Washington U. professors drew when calculating the cost of obesity.

Researchers calculated the actual price a person pays per year for being obese, and found that additional annual costs for obese women stand at $4,879, and $2,646 for obese men.

Higher direct medical costs, including hospital or doctor’s office care, emergency room visits and prescription medications are some of the primary reasons for the costs associated with obesity. Even simple personal expenditures, like clothing or other daily needs, can cost more for an obese person, the study found.

“As a person goes from overweight, to obese, to moderately obese, to morbidly obese their cost of living increases exponentially,” Christine Ferguson, associate research professor of health policy and one of the study’s authors, said.

“We are saying that if you lose an increment of your weight it will improve your economic status,” Ferguson said.

The six-month study also found a gender discrepancy in the work-related expenses for obese male and female workers. While researchers found no loss in wages for an obese man, 40 percent of an obese woman’s additional yearly expense of $4,879 results from lost wages.

Ferguson said an actual double standard in the workplace for obese men and women would be the subject of more research, but added that “there are a lot of things that are harder as a female than a male in the workplace.”

Potential racial and ethnic disparities could be a topic for future research in obesity-related costs, she added.

Ferguson said there is an incentive to talking to people about losing weight.

“There has been a lot of conversation about the cost of obesity on the national level but not that much on the individual level,” Ferguson said. “We want to make people look at it from a personal perspective.”

The Major League Baseball season ended Sunday, and the Divisional Series begins tomorrow afternoon. Eight teams are still standing after 162 games, and one of them just won the American League East for the second time in three seasons — and it isn’t the Yankees or the Red Sox.

It’s the Tampa Bay Rays.

Before they open their series with the Texas Rangers, I think it’s appropriate to pose this question about the Rays: How the heck did they do that?

For perspective, since the AL East took its current five-team form in 1995, four of the five teams in the division have won the division title. The Boston Red Sox won the first flag in ’95 and then waited until 2007 to repeat the feat. The Baltimore Orioles took home the division championship in 1997 and haven’t won since. As you might have guessed, the Yankees won the other 11 times. (The fifth team, the Toronto Blue Jays, last made the playoffs in 1993 and decided, after winning two consecutive World Series, to quit while they were ahead.)

So since 1998, only the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays have won the AL East, and only the Yankees and Rays have won it more than once.

That’s all well and good, you might say, but what’s the big deal? Well, there’s $179 million. That’s how much the Rays have committed to combined Opening Day payroll over the last three seasons.

Then there’s $206.3 million. That’s how much the Yankees committed to this season’s Opening Day payroll. Add up the last three seasons, and New York’s total comes to a whopping $616.7 million.

Before you close the paper because you’ve heard the “ridiculousness of the Yankee payroll” story a million times, know that I know that the Red Sox haven’t shied away from the tab during that three-year span, either, committing to more than $417.5 million in Opening Day payroll since 2008. The Orioles and Blue Jays have also outspent the Rays over the last three seasons.

The point I’m making is probably obvious by now: The Rays, who hadn’t even enjoyed a winning season as a franchise prior to 2008, have done something fiscally incredible by beating the Yankees two out of three times despite the fact that New York spent more money this season alone than Tampa Bay has spent in total over three years. It’s even more impressive that the Rays outdid the top two spenders in all of Major League Baseball — the Yankees and Red Sox — with the second-to-lowest payroll in 2008 and the 21st-highest out of 30 teams this season. Imagine how much there would have been to talk about if Tampa Bay had beaten the Phillies in the ’08 World Series and won the whole darn thing.

So this column isn’t about the need for a salary cap or knocking the Yankees for paying Alex Rodriguez almost as much money this season ($33 million) as the entire 25-man roster of the Pittsburgh Pirates made ($34.9 million). It’s simply a call to all fans to pause before the playoffs begin tomorrow — whether your team is still playing or not — and appreciate the little baseball miracle that is the ball club from Tampa Bay.

It wasn’t long ago that the Rays were more famous for a Dennis Quaid movie about a hard-throwing reliever named Jim Morris (“The Rookie”) than they were for their play on the field. Some didn’t take them seriously until they knocked the Red Sox out of the American League Championship Series in Game Seven in 2008 on their way to the World Series. Others watched them miss the playoffs last year and dismissed ’08 as a fluke.

But now they’re back.

So pay attention to the Rays this time. They may not be the same again after this year as key players like Carlos Peña, Carl Crawford and Rafael Soriano hit the free agent market this offseason, but the current group has one more shot at it.

And if for no other reason, wish the Rays well because — no offense to the Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers — they might soon be the only thing left standing between the Evil Empire and another World Series at Yankee Stadium.

Never in recent years has a simple question inspired so much debate. The economic rise of China and the military buildup that has followed Beijing’s boom in capital resources has driven American scholars and strategists into a frenzy of speculation over what most mainstream analysts see as an inevitable clash of great powers.

Robert Kaplan, a contributor for The Washington Post, argues that China’s increased naval power could soon squeeze the U.S. Navy — and thus American power projection — out of the East Asian sphere. The House’s recent passage of a bill imposing high tariffs on over $300 billion worth of Chinese exports to the United States has led to even more fervent speculations that the United States and China could soon butt heads; some have said that this indicates an economic conflict has already begun. For U.S. strategists, the question now becomes not if, but how U.S. interests abroad will be forced to shift because of Beijing’s resurgence.

Taking for granted that China is the most powerful state in East Asia, we must accept that the Chinese will likely make a bid for regional hegemony. This means pushing the United States away from Taiwan, and restricting American access to the first island chain, creating a sphere of influence that curves from southern Japan to the northernmost tip of the Philippines and on to Malaysia and southern Vietnam. China’s navy is technologically inferior to that of the United States, but the Chinese are specifically targeting the weaknesses of American seagoing forces. Some pessimistic projections claim that Chinese submarines will be able to force American carriers and destroyers out of the South China Sea within 10 years. Regardless of timelines and specific dates, China’s military deterrent is strong, and it’s only going to get stronger.

China’s economic power is also substantial, especially considering the methods Beijing has used to manipulate international trade through currency inflation. The renminbi is currently undervalued by 20 to 25 percent compared to the U.S. dollar, meaning that Chinese goods are selling in the United States at extremely low prices while American goods are relatively more expensive in China. This creates a trade deficit between the two states that has shifted manufacturing overseas and led to high job loss in the United States. While the Senate has not yet passed the blanket Chinese tariff bill, the die has more or less been cast. Washington is fed up with Beijing’s economic policy, and for better or for worse, our Congress is trying to do something about it.

This means three things for American interests. First, Washington’s influence in the Far East will likely be shaken up. Alliances could shift and tensions will rise. For the past several months, China’s relations with her neighbors have been strained at best: Relations with Japan and India, for example, are more dismal than they have been for years. If China doesn’t back down from congressional pressure, East Asian states will either bandwagon with what they see as a rising People’s Republic or join with the United States to balance — and hopefully slow — China’s progress.

Second, as other authors have speculated, this could mean a new trade war with China: Chinese goods will be less competitive in the United States, which might lead the Chinese to block American goods in retaliation. While this won’t force Chinese goods out of the United States, it will make them more expensive and could lead to a resurgence of American jobs or imports from other, more economically friendly, states.

Finally, and most importantly, Washington strategists might finally recognize what experts on African politics have seen on the horizon for years: A new Cold War is probably brewing with China. Not the Cold War of our grandparents, with great powers building satellite states in the developing world, but rather a period of economic tension and institutionalized conflict between the world’s two great powers. The international system is not bipolar yet, but it soon will be, and states around the world will inevitably side with one power or the other. China’s expansion into Africa is a perfect example of this: Just a few years ago, most African nations were in favor of Taiwanese independence. Now, as China invests more and more capital into countries like the Sudan, these states have increasingly favored China’s policies. This is indicative of the way the world will look in the near future.

This is not to say that America will soon be embroiled in a dire conflict. Economic embargoes could easily be avoided through World Trade Organization negotiations. American troops are not days away from armed conflict with the Chinese. Nevertheless, it is of vast strategic importance to consider the ways in which China will increasingly threaten American interests abroad.