Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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_Vol. 93, No. 21Monday September 27, 1999_ ina Community since 1Q08 WWW.GAMECOCK.SC.EDU UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Columbia, S.C. Committee aims to put brakes on cnme by Mackenzie Craven Senior Writer Student and faculty members discussed current issues, such as a Capstone to Coliseum walkway, call boxes and the Safe Ride program at the university Safety Committee meeting on Thurs day. Student Cabinet Safety Committee member Jeb Bush ex plained the path the lighted walkway would take from Capstone to the Coliseum. • SG Attorney General Chris Dorsel said: “The idea behind this is to have one main way to walk all the way from the Col iseum to Capstone, which branches off to the library and to South Tower, where we can heavily light it, cover up the dan gerous hiding places and also have call boxes.” Frank Mims, of Maintenance and Building Modification, said there are already call boxes on the path from the Coliseum to Capstone. “Most of the call boxes are on Greene Street; we have one behind Russell House and one by Thomas Cooper,” Mims said. “The best way would be to take the tunnel across.” Mims said call boxes are in the following locations: • Various locations up and down Greene street • On the comer of Main and Greene streets • Sumter Street, near the Horseshoe gates • At the comer of Bull and Greene streets The lighting issue will be examined more closely during the safety walk, which will take place later this year. The purpose • of the walk is to find out which areas of campus appear to be unsafe. Other plans for the walk include getting students’ opin ions about how much light should be added and other safety im provements. The city of Columbia has agreed to provide additional light ing as long as USC has the trees from Greene Street removed. Student Cabinet Special Projects Director Timothy Clardy proposed adding touch-tone phone pads to call boxes. “Call boxes are there for safety. I don’t see why you can’t add the utility to it,” Clardy said. According to Mims, Housing and the University Police De partment would have a problem with making call boxes into phone units because people might be more likely to make false calls and tear the phones off the unit. “We have touch pads at the call box by Thomwell, and I have actually had concerns placed on both by Housing and po lice about having the two-way because people hit the wrong button,” Mims said. Faculty members concluded that the boxes can’t be updat ed at the moment because of issues of funding and misuse. Clardy believes there should be phones included in the garages, as well. “I don’t know all the call boxes and if they can have phones in them, but especially in the garages it seems like you should be able to go to the call box and call somebody and come to at least walk with you if you are a young lady,” Clardy said. Dorsei also suggested putting a phone in the camera room of Blossom Street garage. “It seems like that would be a good start, to put a phone in there, and that way if someone wanted to call someone and say, ‘Could two people meet me? I am going to sit in my car, I am on the sixth level about six cars down,”’ Dorsei said. “If we could put a phone there, then that would be a good start and it would show we are looking for better communica tion and better safety,” he said. However, faculty committee memberRichard Conant be lieves that students aren’t going to waste time talking on the phone or waiting around the garage any longer than needed. Faculty members also encourage students to plan ahead and make prior arrangements. Students can call the Alpha Phi Omega Safety sec page 2 Surveillance cameras unmanned at Blossom Street r-ii ."" —ii - J ....:-;—:—im ii DSC PROPERTY 'l~ SPACES RESERVED , U HUS A DAY - KMC ENFORCED [| •#'" ft. \ .. * «.« *.i i fl. IL:.. I * i —_I TRAVIS LYNN The Gamecock The video surveillance room outside of the Blossom Street garage stands empty. The SG Safety Committee is looking for ways to make students feel safer oo campus, one of which is to have the cam eras in the garages viewed at all times. Web site makes class notes available to students for free by John Bailey Staff Writer A new Web site, StudentU.com, is posting lecture notes free of charge from classes at 109 colleges nationwide including USC. Company President Oran Wblf calls the Web page the ulti mate student network. “We try to provide the necessary educational resources for • success in school,” Wjlf said. StudentU is part of the Studyfree.com Network, and was launched nationally Sept. 7. Students apply to become note-takers for StudentU, and are then paid as much as $300 per semester to post their notes on the Web site. StudentU has recently created a rating system to be used by students to grade the notes and note-takers. To preserve the qual ity of the notes, a note-taker receiving deficient scores on his or her notes is encouraged to improve his or her performance or risk being replaced by another note-taker. Not every class at every school has notes posted. But the sight, and the number of classes on it, is growing rapidly. The site was serving 62 schools by the time it went nation al. Now, more than 90 schools are listed on the page. Accord ing to Wolf, the site is constantly receiving applications for ad ditional note-takers. “Some schools only have a few classes available online. Oth ers, like Texas A&M and the University of Iowa, have in excess of 80 classes posted,”'Wolf said. Wolf said he hopes that every school on the site will have' more than 50 classes posted. History junior Mark Simonovich said that he had not heard of StudentU.com, but that he would be interested in using the Web site. “College can be overwhelming sometimes. It would be nice to have a place to compare the notes I have to see if I’ve missed anything in my own notes,” h% said. Simonovich said he knows some professors at the Univer sity of North Carolina who make their notes available for sale in the university bookstores. If USC offered a similar service, he said he would buy notes if they were reasonably priced. Business sophomore Rusell Pinder said he would use the site as a secondary resource behind taking his own notes and at tending class. “I’d like to be able to pick up notes to a class I've missed sometimes,” Pinder said. Professor Gerasimos Augustinos, whose History 102 class is posted on the site, was surprised to leam that notes to his class could be found online. “This is something that has been done without my permis sion. No one has spoken to me about it,” Augustinos said. Postng class information on the Web site without autho rization from the professors raises the issue of class material be ing the property of the faculty, Augustinos said. It also undermines faculty and department efforts to create their own, authorized Web sites to provide help to students, he said. Several departments, including the history department, are working on creating their own Web sites to provide an ad ditional interactive resource for their students. These sites will contain copyrighted material authorized by the faculty, intended for use by students. Augustinos said supplemental help to students should come from the faculty and not an outside source with questionable le gitimacy and accuracy. StudentU has a disclaimer encouraging student to attend class and stating that the notes posted are those of a student, and not the professor. However, Augustinos remains concerned about students becoming dependent on such a resource. “Note-taking should be developed by the individual student as a skill,” he said. The site claims that it’s not a substitute for class attendance or note-taking as a whole, but Augustinos believes it provides too much opportunity for a student to neglect a class. Wolf said he would prefer to get permission from all the pro fessors with classes listed, but because of the size of the site and the number of classes it lists, that would be impossible. Professors at USC with classes listed on the sight are Oneil, Kilman, Kim, Augustinos, Glickman, Klaas, Wood and Nelson. The list changes daily, depending on which classes are in session that day and which ones are updated. | | Lady Gamecocks pile up 8 goals vs. Tigers Sean Rayford photo editor Senior forward Jennie Ondo, right, races toward the LSU goal in Sunday’s game. The Lady Gamecocks offense was potent in Sunday’s 8-1 victory, bringing their overall record to 6-2. E-mail undergoing change by Laura DeWitt Staff Writer Computer Services workers plan to satisfy students’ requests for a better e-mail system, but they’re unsure of the exact date the project will be completed. According to Bill Mowery, director of computer systems, Com puter Services is working to change the present CMS e-mail sys tem. The new program is called the University Infrastructure Pro ject. The project has several objectives. First, Computer Services wants to provide students with user authentication, a feature that will allow students to have only one user name and password for any e-mail account on campus. For example, Mowery said some students might have a regu lar CMS account, plus an additional account as an engineering ma jor. With the user authentication program, one password will sat isfy them both. A small prototype has already been tested for authentication with some graduate students in the Darla Moore School of Busi ness. Mowery said that it was successful, and it’s the “first big push” toward a better campus e-mail system. Another feature of the University Infrastructure Project would be integrated programs. Under this feature, the e-mail system would be based from a larger centralized server that could hold accounts for students, faculty members and staff. Currently, there are separate programs for faculty and students. Students use the CMS system, and faculty and staff use the Novel package Mowery said. The integrated programs are intended to help bring together mailing lists, syllabi and chat rooms to promote more communi cation between students and faculty. With Y2K and security scares, Computer Services is also look ing to relieve students’ fears. Mowery said'the new program will include intrusion detection to better protect students’ e-mail. The program should encrypt e-mail messages on a university-wide ba sis. Mowery hopes that this will create “total communication that goes beyond e-mail.” Once the new program is completed, it will no longer be known as CMS. However, Mowery said there’s no precise date for completing the project. “We don’t know what all this will entail. It may be several years,” Mowery said. According to Mowery, the cost for the project might be around six or seven figures. Computer Services is trying to get a grant to help fund the project, although Mowery wouldn’t fist the possible vendors. Although talk of a new system in the future is optimistic, some students say they’re not always satisfied with CMS. “I live off campus, so I see it easier to use Hotmail or Yahoo,” advertising junior Jane Johnson said. “Besides, it is always so slow, and you can’t use any graphics or pictures.” Mowery said that student CMS accounts send around 100,000 e-mails per day. E-mail see page 2 Weather Inside Datebook Online Poll Today 81 _66 Tuesday 79 65 jj Volleyball defeats 0 Wildcats and Volunteers J Page 8 Today • Carolina Productions, 3:30 p.m., RH Tuesday • AAAS, 6 p.m., RH Theater • RHA, 7 p.m., RH 307 * Will the Gamecocks win a football game this season? ,