• Three winners -- the one-millionth follower, and two additional winners chosen randomly from our following -- will win a new iPad 2.



• Ten winners with the best #HuffPost1M tweets will be Retweeted by HuffingtonPost in the days after we hit 1,000,000.



• Fifteen winners, picked randomly from our followers, will get a #FollowFriday shout-out from @HuffingtonPost on the Friday after we cross 1,000,000 followers.

The past year has seen that vision realized — and then some. Reading the news is no longer a solitary experience. Today, news is shared and social. If you want proof, look to the past few weeks: There was Aaron Sorkin's blog post about Sarah Palin's Alaska, which garnered nearly 100,000 Likes on Facebook; a news story on a possible cure for HIV that brought in over 300,000 readers from Twitter; and Michael Moore posting bail for Julian Assange, which saw 30,000 Likes and Facebook shares.

Not to mention HuffPost's Facebook page (with 187,000 fans and growing) and our Twitter page (nearing 775,000 followers).

Suffice it to say, Social News is big and getting bigger.

Stories You Might Like

That's why we're so excited to launch the first big feature in the next generation of Social News.

Using the articles and interests that you've made public on your Facebook profile — both from within Facebook and across the web — we've developed a recommendation engine to help point you towards HuffPost stories tailored to your personal tastes.

If, like me, you watch Jon Stewart every night, we'll serve you up the newest story about the comedian. A reader of The New York Times? Here's the latest. Where it gets interesting, though, is when the system starts to anticipate your interests. Hence, I may not be a fan of Madonna on Facebook, but because I'm a fan of similar artists, I get the latest on the Queen of Pop.

To help launch this exciting new product, we're inviting you, our Social News users, to give it a first run. You have to be connected through Facebook to participate.

Then, click here to try it out!

You'll notice in the Social News column a three-story recommendation module, which you can paginate through to find up to 30 stories that you might like.

How do we compute such things? I was crunching a few numbers on the whiteboard this morning, and... Just kidding; our super-smart engineers have been working for months to make this work.

Once you've signed up, let us know how the recommendations look. Good? Great? Way off base? Let us know by clicking the "Feedback" link within the module, or by tweeting at us.

HuffPost Beta

Which brings me to my next point. We'll be rolling out a ton of new social features in early 2011, and we'd love your input.

One great way to do that is through Twitter. By following our Beta account, you can get updates on HuffPost's newest features, and help us tinker, test, and get them right.

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA's position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences

This is not true. We have instructed State Department employees not to access the WikiLeaks site and download posted documents using an unclassified network since these documents are still classified. We condemn what Mr. Assange is doing, but have given no advice to anyone beyond the State Department to my knowledge.

From: Office of Career Services

Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:26 PM

Subject: Wikileaks - Advice from an alum

To: "Office of Career Services (OCS)"


Hi students,

We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

Regards,
Office of Career Services

Far above the busy humming

Of the bustling town,

Reared against the arch of heaven,

Looks she proudly down.

Many people were and are truly depressed by the prison-like atmosphere created by the 'cure' applied to the suspension bridge...I do not take it as a given truth that saving one young (or old) life from self-destruction is to be weighed more heavily than the rare opportunity the suspension bridge once offered thousands of people every year to be immersed very closely in God's beauty.

Oddly, a victim mentality persisted within the upper echelon of the university. In April of that year, a professor of animal physiology wrote to Rhodes, "I am sure that in the future suicides will be committed again at Cornell by students and by faculty members, but is each of us to blame except in John Donne's sense that the bell tolls for all of us?" When the next month, Channel 13 Eyewitness News ran a segment on the gorge suicides, one Cornell official complained that they were "singled out" because "our famous gorges...are so dramatic and photogenic." And after a student death in 1988, a university condolence letter reminded the grieving parents that "since 1970, there has been, on average, one suicide a year at Cornell," as if they might take solace in the statistical unlikelihood of their loss. The suicide myth, wrote the vice president who authored the note, "seems to have taken on a reality of its own, independent of the facts." Six years later, after another death, a university trustee asked President Rhodes -- who, at the time of his retirement in 1995, was the Ivy League's longest-serving president -- at a meeting of the executive committee if the gorges were influencing the number of suicides. Firearms, the president reflected, yes; but the gorges? No.



At around the time Mark Sherman enrolled at Cornell, Jakub Janecka, the 2008 victim, was born in Uherské Hradiště, a town on the Morava River in the former Czechoslovakia. In the 1980s, the Janeckas immigrated to Honesdale, about 30 miles northeast of Scranton. While his siblings adjusted well to American life, Jakub struck his teachers as plainly intelligent, but implacably frustrated. "He was a good boy, a serious boy, who puzzled over the big questions in life," wrote Robert Simons, an English teacher at the local high school. "Perhaps more accurately said, he attacked the big questions in life." Jakub's thick accent, strange style of dress and sharp mind intimidated some of his classmates, one friend remembered. Unlike his friends, Jakub never dated. He was drawn into occasional fights with locals. Eager to leave Honesdale, Jakub decided on Cornell University, where his older brother was already studying.

Few people on campus remember Jakub Janecka. Those who do use words like "quiet" or "withdrawn." "His brother made more of an impression," said Stephen H. Zinder, a professor of microbiology who had been Jakub's advisor. "Jakub was a quiet, reserved type of student. It's not like he made some big impression." Another professor who taught both brothers said in an e-mail message that he too remembered the older brother well, but didn't remember much about the "latter Janecka," adding that he was "much less engaged."



Student records confirm as much. While it wasn't a blemish-free transcript, according to Bonnie Comella, director of advising and operations for the Biology Department, Jakub's grades raised no red flags. He enrolled in the fall of 1993, and after a leave of absence in the fall semester of 1995, stayed through the summer. The next fall, Jakub spent a semester at sea, traveling from St. Croix to the Netherland Antilles and Honduras. Although he graduated in the spring of 1998, Jakub stayed in Ithaca for the next two years, taking classes and working on campus. "He had been a sort of introverted extrovert," remembered Christopher Morris, a friend who played rugby with both of the Janecka boys. "He loved being with friends and having a good time," Morris said, "but there were times when he was quiet, and people wondered if he was still here."

It was in Mann Library where Jakub met Tom Clausen, a Cornell librarian. In 1997, and then again in 1999, Jakub found work at the library. "Very respectful, very quiet-natured," Clausen remembered of Jakub, when we spoke last year behind the circulation desk. "He didn't have a demonstrative personality." In May of 2002, Jakub sent word by e-mail that he had been abroad in the Czech Republic, but was hoping to apply to graduate school in the U.S. "The conditions there weren't that good," Jakub wrote. "I'm e-mailing to ask you if you would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me?" Clausen was surprised by the request, since he had never directly supervised Jakub, but agreed nonetheless. Over the next three years, as Jakub vacillated between numerous schools and degrees, he called on Clausen with almost startling regularity for recommendation letters. In 2002, it was for a master's in education; in 2003, for the AmericaCorps Volunteer program, but by December, a PhD program in biology; and finally, in 2004, for both a PhD and a master's in biology.

Jakub settled finally on a graduate program in theology at the University of Scranton. "I am really enjoying it as it is very interesting," he wrote Clausen. "So things are going well." Along with his response, Clausen included a few of his own original poems, one of which described "hemlocks lean[ing] out over the river," and another, "taking in the river view/I see my feelings for this life/quite like the trees/leaning slightly downstream."

"Thanks for the poems," Jakub responded,

I really enjoyed them especially the two that had the river in them. They reminded me of when I used to work by the Delaware River and the way the flow of the river felt both somewhat wistful and also soothing, so that it also caused real ambivalent feelings in me, on the one hand a kind of liberation on the other a kind of regret, like those poems.


Regards,

Jakub

At Scranton, Charles R. Pinches, Chair of the Theology Department, remembered Jakub as a frequent visitor to his office. "He would get on certain matters that were always puzzling me," Pinches said, "They were genuine, no question. They were pressing, I suppose. But they also were kind of strangely ordered to me." Jakub told Pinches that he "wanted to know about spiritual life and biological life both," and upon graduation, would be applying for a masters in biology. With some reluctance, Pinches agreed to write Jakub a letter of recommendation.


In 1994, after a fifth student died in the gorges in the span of three years, the New York Times came to campus. The latest victim, who had graduated a few months earlier, jumped early one morning after a late night of drinking. Coming on the heels of an accidental fall two weeks before, the Times reported, "university officials, worried about the numbers of student deaths, were striving to counter the growing impression that there was something peculiar about Cornell that led its students to take their own lives at a higher rate than elsewhere." Aggravated by the bad press, one local alumna sent a scornful letter to the editor. "I suppose it is easier to invent some sort of mythological danger in the gorges on the Cornell campus or in the weather, or the cows," she said, "than to analyze what drives a young person to take his or her own life." In truth, the question of whether or not the gorges induce suicide, which has been debated internally for decades, remains unresolved.



By the numbers, Cornell does not have a suicide problem. When computing rates of student suicide, many colleges use 7.5 suicides per 100,000 students as a benchmark, a figure taken from the Big Ten Student Suicide Study conducted in 1997. For the total population between the ages of 15-24, the rate is higher: 9.9 per 100,000, according to the Center for Health Statistics for the year 2006. With 20,633 students enrolled in Ithaca as of this fall, Cornell should theoretically experience 1.5 student suicides per year. According to Timothy Machell, director of mental health initiative, there were 10 student suicides from 2000 to 2005, and three between 2006 and 2010, which puts Cornell beneath either average.

The misperception that Cornell does have a suicide problem, Machell said in an e-mail, "is due in part to the highly public nature of suicides in the gorges that run through our campus." Also, he said, unconnected gorge suicides are often assumed to be linked to the university. In the past few years, Cornell has taken an aggressive stance on mental health, training everyone from librarians to handymen to be on the lookout for signs of distress, to which Machell attributes the decline in student deaths.

Are the gorges, then, nothing more than a geographical idiosyncrasy, the noose or handgun writ large beneath campus? As Murphy, the vice president, acknowledged, the gorges "can be scary places at times like this." If the mythology that that fear breeds is indeed fallacious, then how should the university countenance its existence? And how to explain the enormous potency of the mythology -- "a feeling," as the Times wrote, "that if the gorges were not there, perhaps some of the suicides would not have happened." If there's no clear answer today, it's not for lack of interest.

In 1981, a professor of anthropology named James Siegel published interviews with pedestrians as they crossed the suspension bridge. Looking downstream, Siegel and his class asked the passersby how the view made them feel. One respondent answered simply, "I want to jump."

Q: How come?

A: Oh, not because right now it makes me want to jump so much as because it's just such a thing about these gorges.

Q: What do you mean? Because you have passed by so many times and thought things and that's what you think now?

A: No, no. It's the gorges and what there is about them.

Q: You mean the history and that you know that people jump?

A: Yes, the history but also just because of what I think added to it. I always want to jump.

Q: Well, what is it? Just look at it and say what it is.

A: Well, it's so far down. And it's water you know and somehow it seems a beautiful way to die. To go out with it.

For Siegel, the "frequent mention of death and particularly of suicide" he encountered was "often a function of the logic of sublimity." In 1764, Immanuel Kant speculated that anyone who beholds "deep gorges with raging streams in them, wastelands lying deep in shadow and inviting melancholy meditation, and so on is indeed seized by amazement bordering on terror, by horror and sacred thrill." Under such circumstances, thought Kant, a man would be "diminished to insignificance," seeing only the "misery, peril, and distress that would compass the man who was thrown to its mercy." As his subjects contemplated the downstream abyss, Siegel noted, the thought of suicide was eerily comforting.

At bottom, the question for Cornell is not whether the gorges afford a dangerous outlet for the disconsolate or disturbed (by all accounts, they do). It's if, absent the gorges, some of the suicides could be avoided. Common sense suggests, as one official told the Times in 1994, "if you put a barrier up on a bridge, that people won't die from that bridge. Even if barriers were installed, people could just go somewhere else." That's the same thing people said about the Golden Gate Bridge, until a landmark 1978 study proved otherwise. To test the hypothesis that people thwarted from committing suicide "would simply and inexorably go someplace else to commit the act," Richard H. Seiden, then a professor at Berkeley, tracked down 515 people who attempted suicide but were restrained. His findings showed that 90 percent of the would-be victims did not later die of later suicide attempts, and that the notion that "attempters will surely and inexorably 'just go someplace else,' is clearly unsupported by the data." During the debate in the late 70's over suicide barriers in Ithaca, the director of suicide prevention at the time, Nina K. Miller, cited Seiden's data in a Letter to the Sun's Editor. "I hope we can persuade those who are most opposed to the barriers," Miller wrote, "to examine some of the data which indicates such barriers are effective anti-suicide measures." Thirty years later, Machell says, "Suicide can be prevented, and limiting access to the means to die is one part of the equation." But "most importantly," he said, is a comprehensive approach that emphasizes education, counseling and support services.


Would heightened barriers or enhanced security have mattered for Jakub Janecka? Some think not. "It seemed like he must have come back here with a very clear intention," says Tom Clausen. Over the years, Jakub had visited Ithaca from time to time, always calling on Christopher Morris's father, the late M.D. Morris, when he arrived. On Jakub's last visit, Morris heard nothing.

Jakub arrived in Ithaca on Oct. 7 carrying only a small black nylon suitcase, with very little clothing inside. He checked in at a gloomy stopover at the foot of campus called the Hillside Inn. There, said the desk clerk, he would shuffle by without returning the clerk's greetings. "He was so interiorized, so introverted," the clerk remembers, "it looked like he was in a mental mess." His condition was no different the next day. On the bridge that afternoon, unlike so many who had hesitated at the precipice, Jakub was quick and decisive. Witnesses said he jumped headfirst.

But if he never intended to return that evening to the Hillside Inn, then why was Jakub carrying a key for Room 202? And what use would he have had for the $271 in cash police found in his pockets? Jakub paid upfront for a three-night stay at the inn, according to the clerk, which was two more nights than he needed. And a suicide note? Nothing but a small notebook with several local numbers inside, which, when the inspector followed up, were for local landlords and employment services. Jakub had no mental health issues, his family told police, although after finishing his master's degree in biology at the Catholic University of America, he was depressed due to a lack of employment -- the very reason, they said, why he had come to Ithaca in the first place.

In the gorge, mouth agape, arms spread, and shirt scrunched up past his stomach, it seemed to onlookers like Jakub might just be taking a nap. The white ball cap had fallen ten feet away. A few inches of water flowed underfoot. In the years after his graduation, Jakub was consumed by an apparent wanderlust, for answers to unformed questions, until finally "his searching must not have felt worthy anymore," says Clausen. His English teacher, Robert Simons, wrote, "Not having followed his life into manhood, we can only assume that he continued to be a searcher after he went out of our view."


Especially in this day and age, cries for help come in any number of ways. The week before he died, Matthew Zika, the most recent victim, posted a poem he had written on Facebook. It was, he said, "the culmination of one week of doing nothing," penned instead of completing a problem set. About waking up, or trying to, Zika ruminated:

Something's in the way, though

ducttape binding my arms,

holding me from reaching the light switch

that could shed light on this isolation

chamber. but who am I

to suppose correct wiring.

For all I know, the light bulb

is dead.

So here I sit, instead.

Then, on March 9, at 2:03am, Zika updated his Facebook status with a portentous message. "My hope in living life," he wrote, "is that if one day someone told me it would be my last, I could smile and nod knowing full well that I did all I could with the time I was given. Never put off until tomorrow what you'd be okay having never done." On Friday, after his death had been reported, a friend posted to Zika's wall, "I think you mean never put off until tomorrow what you wouldn't be okay having never done."

Yet for all the red flags planted in Zika's profile, a close inspection of Bradley Ginsburg's Facebook account would have yielded little cause for concern. Responding to a friend in October, Ginsburg wrote that "everything's great," and that "it's sick here." "There's mad frat parties," he continued, "the campus is ridiculously nice, my classes are pretty cool, and everyone's really chill." The workload was heavy, Ginsburg concluded, "but it's definitely worth it."

In the 1970s, an alumnus named Howard Cogan created a slogan for the ten square miles of his hometown he said were "surrounded by reality": ithaca is gorges. Emblazoned today across apparel, mugs and bumper stickers on campus, in town, and even across the world, the catchphrase has become a kind of catchall for the small city. So when tragedy strikes, it's not in Ithacans' nature to search the proverbial wall for clues; the handwriting's right there on the tee shirts. "Cornell is a river of students," Hubbell said, "a city of eternal youth." Far above Cayuga's waters, the people of Ithaca look on their gorges as neither quirk nor quiddity -- but just what the pun says: gorgeous. "As a townie and alumna," one disgruntled resident wrote some years ago, "I take exception to your blaming my beautiful gorges for just being there. Ezra Cornell must be turning in his grave, having searched for the most beautiful place to found his institution, where any person could find instruction in any subject," she said, quoting the university motto.

"I don't think suicide was quite what he had in mind," she wrote, "when he placed Cornell high above Cayuga's waters."
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