Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, issued a global day of darkness on Wednesday, shutting down the digital encyclopaedia for twenty four hours.

The blackout was a protest at Internet anti-piracy laws which have been proposed by the US Congress. Visitors to the website were unable to access articles and were instead presented with a letter urging them to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The blackout is cited on the Wikipedia website as having two purposes: to raise public awareness of SOPA and PIPA, and to encourage people to share their views with their representatives. Wales claims that if these bills are passed they will “endanger free speech and set a frightening precedent of internet censorship for the world.”

Oxford students were confronted with the daunting prospect of surviving the day without access to 3.8 million freely available articles. Some teetered on the brink of despair. Isra Hale, a first year medic at St Anne’s, stated, “I really needed them today, I feel disowned and disheartened. It’s such an essential component of my academic life.”

Michael Connolly, a first year chemist, commented, ‘I suppose the cause is good and this is an effective way to make the US government listen. But I really need to know what a peroxodisulphate anion is for my prelabs tomorrow.” Another first year, Xin Fan, expressed agreement. “I think Jimmy Wales gravely underestimates how difficult it is to throw together an unrealistically and suspiciously cogent essay using only YouTube clips of children’s history documentaries and the snippet view on Googlebooks.”

Other students adopted a more make-do spirit. “I get that it’s annoying; we all use Wikipedia,” commented Jasmine Krishnamurthy-Spencer, “but at the end of the day we should probably have a wider resort of websites.”

The prospect of both bills becoming law has caused widespread anxiety. Oscar Boyd, first year geographer, said, “Once the bills are passed they can shut down websites – completely black them out – meaning that they will never appear on search results.” Claire Gianotti, an American visiting student, voiced similar concerns. “I’d be worried if the American Congress enacted legislation that restricted our use of Wikipedia.”

Come Thursday, students were relieved to find the website up and running again. Jasmine remarked, !It really makes you appreciate how much we use and depend on it.! Her friend, Toby Huelin, added, “I might donate now it’s come back.”

The Oxford Women’s Open, a debating competition for women only, is set to be held this weekend for the third year running.

The conveners of the Open feel that ‘the top levels of debating simply do not bear out the kind of gender parity that IONA should be seeing after decades of female involvement’.

Ania Dulnik, President of Oxford Women in Politics, explained that they give money to the Oxford Women’s Open because “it runs consistent with our values in that it empowers young women to challenge themselves in a particularly demanding field.”

However the event is not without controversy, with some male members of the university labeling it “divisive.”

Some male students expressed the opinion that “gender specific events exacerbate a divide more than they close the gap” and that “integration, not exclusion, ought to be the priority.”

One student stated, “The unavoidable suspicion is that one only avoids competition when one can’t compete.”

Alex Body, a third year classicist, disagreed. He said that “if women are under-represented or under-achieve in debating, positive measures should be taken to help them,” and added, “if an event like this will have a positive effect on female participation in debating, then it has my vote!”

Susie Deedigan, a second year historian, said that she thought that the competition “could have the potential to seem divisive to some people in the same way as, for example, female-only careers events; however because there is a smaller representation of women in debating, it is important to hold women’s only events.”

The competition also has strong support from Ben Woolgar, a third year PPEist from Balliol, who was recently crowned ‘Best Speaker’ at the World University Debating Championships in Manila. He stated that the Women’s Open “is certainly a brilliant idea.”

Woolgar expressed that the problem of female representation ‘is less bad now than it was three years ago when I started debating at the university” thanks, in part, to the Women’s Open. He also pointed to Australia as a leading example of integrated debating, having had affirmative action requirements and Women’s Officers in all its major debating societies “for generations.” They consequently produce “a much larger number of successful female debaters.”

Josephine Anselin, a fourth year Engineering student at St Hilda’s, is preparing to compete in Morocco’s “Marathon des Sables,” the self-proclaimed “toughest footrace on Earth,” in which participants will run six marathons in six days.

The annual event, which welcomes participants to its webpage with the line, “Welcome to the world of lunatics and masochists,” began in 1986, and has since witnessed the deaths of two competitors.

The gruelling ultra-marathon will see Anselin run 151 miles, completing an average of one marathon per day. In addition, she will carry all food supplies and a sleeping bag on her back, in temperatures of up to 50°C.

When asked why she wished to participate in such a race, Anselin explained that she has “always been a fan of cross country,” and has been “running seriously since the age of eighteen.” She described the completion of her first marathon, when she was sixteen years old, as aged 16, as “just for fun.”

Anselin claims to have drawn her inspiration to take part in the “Marathon des Sables” from “a close friend who completed it on ten occasions, and won it three times.” She added that the stories she heard about the event “played a large part” in her motivation.

She explained that taking on the ultra-marathon was “mainly as a personal challenge,” but added that she felt it “would be wrong to complete the event without taking the opportunity to contribute to charity too.” She has chosen to run for Médecins San Frontières, a medical charity based in her native France, which she described as an “international, independent, humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters.”

Due to the necessity of carrying all supplies, her diet will largely be composed of “different flavoured powders and gels.” The Blues runner commented, “It’s great – you can have porridge flavoured powder for breakfast, which actually tastes like porridge, and you can have a different flavour for every meal.”

She claims she is most scared of “the blisters you can develop whilst out there,” adding, “Your feet don’t get any time to recover so they just get worse.” Nevertheless, she puts this down as another mental challenge to deal with which is “part of the fun.”

Anselin is currently training by running “between 90 and 110 kilometres every week,” and she admits that this has “had an effect” on her social life, adding, “I can’t go out as much anymore!” She explained that she frequently “comes back from a 30K run” at the same time that her friends are “coming back in from a night out.”

Sam Hussain, a fellow fourth year student, commented, “Josephine is ridiculously driven and probably insane; she normally gets back into college from her casual weekly marathon before I’m even out of my pyjamas. This race is for people who find marathons too easy.”

Another friend of Anselin’s, third year student Alice Kent, expressed admiration, describing “the mental strength and independence [required] to sign up for something as daunting as this, without knowing anyone else.”

After Morocco, Anselin plans to “focus on finals exams” and has the aptly named “Diagonale des Fous” (“The madmen’s diagonal”) in her sights; another ultra-marathon, though this time with a gradient as the course leads competitors up and down a mountain side.

A recent posting on a talent agency website indicates that Cambridge will be the subject of a new reality TV show. ‘Best in Cambridge’ will be shot in a similar style to ‘Made in Chelsea’ and ‘The Only Way Is Essex.’

According to the post, the “twenty-somethings of Cambridge” will bring “a unique angle on popular reality shows,’ as the love lives and partying of eight to ten characters will be captured on camera. The characters include an aspiring actor, a nightclub manager, a beauty salon owner and an ‘investment professional.’

Early reports, which had suggested that the characters of the show will be Cambridge students, were not accurate. Josh K Fay, who wrote the original post on the talent agency website, made this clear, saying, ‘There has been an amazing response, but people thought it was about Cambridge University students. It is not.’ Fay explained that the people responsible for the post are simply a group of his Cambridge friends, who think a Cambridge-based reality show is “a great idea,” and they “want someone to back it.’

During the last academic year, a top production company allegedly made initial enquiries to make Oxford the subject of a new reality show. This show was to be based on the lives of Oxford students, and was also to be similar in style to ‘Made in Chelsea’ and TOWIE. According to Victor Greenstreet, former JCR President of St Hughs College, the initial enquiries were made to OUSU but the project was shelved after alleged intervention by university authorities.

Kieran Corcoran, editor of ‘The Tab’ in Cambridge, has spoken out against the concept of a show based in Cambridge, however. He expressed the view that if ‘Best in Cambridge’ is made into a television programme it ‘will establish a caricature we’ll all come to hate – even the people who fit it quite well’.

Corcoron argued that Cambridge already has problems with image misrepresentation, saying that ‘Best in Cambridge’ will only worsen ‘the awful gap between reality and Reality.’

Oxford student Danielle Bunting commented on the proposed reality show, saying that there is no point making another reality show like TOWIE, unless they take advantage of the one thing Cambridge is known for – its university. Vikram Nagarajan agreed, remarking, ‘there seems precious little else there really.’

Jess Gaunt noted that the proposed ‘characters’ such as actor and nightclub manage don’t fit the Cambridge stereotype. She observed, ‘I don’t think even people who watch The Only Way Is Essex would be interested in this.”