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Daytona warily embraces spring break crowds BY JEFF LIBBY KFIT CAMPUS Under banners for Trojan con doms and beer nuts, four young men with sunburned backs chugged beer from plastic cups then dove into the pool. Competing in the first leg of a relay race at the Desert Inn Motel on Monday afternoon, the buff guys were just another sideshow in the peak week of spring break. The month-long annual rite of spring generates $100 million for area businesses but leaves city of ficials queasy about the raunchy reputation that goes along with it. “If you throw up, you must throw up into the cup and contin ue drinking from the cup,” the DJ told the contestants. “Otherwise you’re disqualified.” Just before them, bikini-clad women had climbed a stage, chugged beer and then did 10 jumping jacks for the crowd. It was a mild day compared with Saturday when a bikini con test at the hotel spiraled out of con trol, according to police, ending with a hotel manager hurling ob scenities at police, women flash ing their breasts and men tossing drinks. But even as spring breakers funnel beer and eat chocolate off one another’s bodies for toss-away freebies from sponsors, few offi cials condemn college students for the indecent behavior. Instead, they mete out blame to a few lowbrow hotels and the high school kids who drive into town for the day looking to sneak into the packed pool decks unde tected. “It’s not the college kids, it’s the daytrippers. They’re the trouble makers,” said Daytona Beach City Commissioner Darlene Yordon. “Unfortunately, we have to be a baby-sitting service.” The three women arrested for public nudity on Saturday were all Floridians, from Sanford and Jacksonville, two of them 18 and another 22. “I loved it,” Yordon said. “The city’s really starting to enforce the laws on the books.” In a speech in the days leading up to spring break, Mayor Yvonne Scarlett-Golden said she would make good on a campaign promise to improve the atmosphere during special events. Her plan was to pa per the town with a request fc5r re spect. Police are not doing anything different this year, said Sgt. A1 Tolley, a spokesman. They are re sponding to complaints, notmon itoring hotels, he said. “It’s only a few hotels. This is not the norm on pool decks at spring break,” said Tolley. “Those days are gone, you know, the late ’80s, when the hotels would send out notices two days in advance and the DJs would get _ outrageous. They would have wet T-shirt contests that went over the top. But this is still going to happen.” Students on the beach Monday said police are needed to maintain control and most said the arrests were necessary. But they also said the nudity will not go away. .“I’m a girl who doesn’t really partake,” said Celeste Cumick, a nursing student on break from . University of Louisville, Kentucky. “But it’s a ritual. The guys have the beads and the girls flash. I don’t know why.” Search engine gives prying eyes power BY HARRY JACKSON JR. KRTCAMPtJS E.J. read the e-mail from her friend and couldn’t quite believe it. So she had to test it. She sat be fore her computer, called up the Google.com search engine and typed her home telephone num ber into the search window. Up popped her name, address, telephone number, zip code, and a map showing the location and directions to her home. “What is this, Big Brother snooping? Any (fool) can find me,” E.J. said, who asked that her name not be used. “I know this is supposed to be a service, but there’ll be some miscreant who’ll misuse this.” The Google search engine is the best known of what’s generi cally called reverse-lookup tools. It works like this: A user types in an answer, and the computer spits back the question. Type in a telephone number, name plus zip code, or some other combina tion of information, and the user gets phone book information about a person, place or thing. The most common praise — and criticism — of the tool is that, with a few keystrokes, searchers can instantly find someone. In some cases, that someone might not want to be found. “It’s a problem for someone who doesn’t want to be located,” says Michael Harris, a professor of human resources management at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Google, by the way, lets users erase personal information from its Web browser. Just click on the telephone beside your results and follow instructions. Still, Google spokesman Nathan Tyler warns, “We crawl the Web. We don’t create infor mation. They need to understand, that (removal) simply eliminates them from Google. They’re still on the Web.” E.J.’s question is the same as others who first discover their in formation on the Web: Can bad people find her? Experts reply that bad people can find her anyway. The Web just makes the search quicker. “We’ve had a lot of flat infor mation, nontechnical informa tion, out there for years,” says Nicolas Terry, a law professor at St. Louis University. “What tech nology enables us to do is to pro cess that. Access is amazingly fast.” Terry, however, doesn’t see re verse lookup as a bad thing. It’s just a fact of life as America ma tures in the information culture, the price of living in a free soci ety. Harris agrees. “We may not want to see our personal information on the Web, but we want to be able to find that restaurant or that friend or rela tive,” he says. “It’s all the same process.” The Internet is made up of sev eral elements, including elec tronic mail, newsgroup forums, the Web and numerous intranet subsystems accessible only by specialists. Casual users gener ally see a very small percentage of the Internet. The portion called the World Wide Web is simply a mon strously large database —compa rable to an electronic library or directory — that is a conglomer ate of smaller databases. For ex ample, you look for banks, then your bank, then your account, then the last check you wrote and so forth. When someone does some thing on a computer, information potentially is added to a database. That can be writing a comment on a newsgroup forum or using an ATM card at a grocery store — it’s in a database. Search en gines of any sort are programmed to “crawl” through accessible databases and scoop up little pieces of information, then re turn them to the searcher in one big piece. That includes person al information. While some information is protected from general browsing — such as bank records — much of the Web isn’t. For example, post your resume on a public site, and your life is an open syn opsis. The volume of information is incomprehensible. Observers now speak of the amount of in formation on the Internet in ter abytes, 1 trillion bits of informa tion. Google’s engine searches 3.4 billion Web pages to bring back information. For example, all recorded knowledge could be stored in 100 terabytes. Add graphics and streaming video, and that can add up. In Google’s reverse lookup, the search engine gathers personal information from the Yahoo.com White Pages, then adds maps from Yahoo! and MapQuest.com, and serves it up into one refer ence. The tool works with combina tions of telephone numbers, zip codes, names, first initials and last names, cities and so forth. Down the ladder, Yahoo! gets its information from phone book publishers. Phone book publish ers get their information from telephone companies, and tele phone companies get their infor mation from people who choose to publish their telephone num bers. Water CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6 students toting water bottles in evitably increases during the spring and summer months, but how is someone supposed to know how much water is enough? Jackie Beming. a spokesperson for the "American Dietetic _ Association, wrote in a recent re port, “You have to look at the color of your urine. If it’s that dark, ap ple-juice color, then despite the fact that you’re not thirsty, you’ve got to put more fluids in your body.” As off-putting as this may sound, it remains an accurate measure of how much water one should consume. Overall, most people tend to be adept at recognizing and respond ing to their bodies’ water needs. But recent research from the Dartmouth Medical School has corrected the common, textbook I assumption that claims water must be in liquid form. In fact, , many foods contain water and count towards one’s daily fluid consumption. For example, many fruits and vegetables are as much as 90 per cent water, and other foods such as yogurt, salmon and eggs are up to 75 percent water. As third-year hospitality and retail management student Carla Laiewski explained, knowing that she is getting water from what she eats wouldn’t affect her overall liquid consumption. She said she “would simply miss drinking it.” So, unless you regularly feel parched, you are probably get ting enough water. Raman and her staff’s new findings show that we don’t have to worry about slamming down that eighth glass. Comments on this story?E-mail gamecockfeaturesCdgwm.sc.edu ...I Httfl _