Campus briefs
Vandal jumps on, damages cars
Three cars were damaged in an early morning attack in the Dunne parking lot, Sunday, Oct. 23.
An individual was reported leaping from car to car around 2:30 a.m., in an instance of "drunk vandalism," according to Phil Beltran, assistant director of campus safety.
Three cars were dented and had footprints across their bodies.
The culprit remains unknown.
Freshman election turnout high
Nearly half of the freshman class voted in the fall Associated Students senator elections, in what Election Chair Julia Niles said was the "best turnout ever."
For the first day of elections, 616 people voted. The class of 2010 is about 1,300. Last year only 15 percent of freshmen voted for their class senators.
Two run-offs were held the following days between Kevin Schmitt, Christopher Dirago and Katherine Quinn-Shea. The combined turnout for both elections was 126.
Erin Kelly, Jake Lyssy, Jaison Mathew, Katherine Nicholson, Monique Teixeira and Katherine Quinn-Shea will be the new Associated Students freshmen senators.
They will be sworn in at the Oct. 26 senate meeting.
ROTC trophy awarded to Santa Clara
A trophy honoring ROTC students who won the Ranger Challenge, a prestigious military competition, will be displayed in the Walsh Administration Building until Nov. 3.
The trophy, a three-and-a-half foot tall wooden bear, will be presented to the Office of the President, Thursday morning, and afterward will be displayed in the Walsh Administration Building.
The Ranger Challenge is test of students' leadership, problem solving and physical abilities. Tasks in the challenge include marches, field exercises and marksmanship. In 2005, Santa Clara won the small school category of the challenge.
Santa Clara won the competition, which included over 19 other ROTC programs representing universities from California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
Campus e-mail delivery delays
E-mail messages sent from GroupWise accounts may be delayed in their delivery to non scu.edu addresses.
The gateways which connect the e-mail system to the internet, routing outward-bound e-mails for delivery, are currently being overloaded by 10 times more traffic than usual, according to Todd Schmitzer, manager of networking and telecommunications for Information Technology.
The traffic is being caused by several factors, Schmitzer said. A main culprit is a new type of spam that blocking programs have yet to counter, in addition to new viruses which generate spam e-mails. The effect of the traffic is similar to a denial of service attack, which floods a network with traffic that blocks use.
Schmitzer said mainly older messages from the past few days were affected and some are still being delivered, however current e-mails are being delivered on-time.
"We're tying to mitigate it, to try to improve how the gateway handles it," Schmitzer said. "Right now we're seeing most e-mail traversing timely."
From staff reports. E-mail news@thesantaclara.com.