Daily Lobo new mexico
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
monday
December 1, 2014 | Volume 119 | Issue 72
Textbooks drain pocketbooks By Ana Jayme Two hundred dollars can go a long way for a college student, but most have been spending that amount on a single textbook. The average college student in the United States spends around $1,200 per year on books and supplies, according to The College Board. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that textbook prices have doubled in the past decade, and it is putting a damper on students both financially and academically. In 2013 the Student Public Interest Research Groups conducted a survey, titled “Fixing the Broken Textbook Market,” of 2,039 students from more
than 150 college campuses, they found that 65 percent of students surveyed decided against buying a textbook because of a high price. According to the survey, “94 percent of students who had foregone purchasing a textbook were concerned that doing so would hurt their grade in a course.” Madeleine Rademacher, a freshman majoring in pre-pharmacy, said that while she purchased all of her required textbooks for the fall semester, she ended up not using many of them. She wonders whether purchasing the textbooks was worth it, she said. The fact that not purchasing a textbook could affect her academic
performance is worrisome, she said. “When I started college I knew that the textbooks would be expensive, but I wasn’t expecting them to be as expensive as they are,” Rademacher said. To tackle this issue, UNM created a committee chaired by Stephen D. Burd, an associate professor for the Anderson School of Management. The Course Materials Committee is aimed at keeping college affordable for students. “It’s a tough thing to analyze because, if you look at it strictly in terms of dollars and cents, of all the things students spend money on to go to
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Textbooks page 3
Sergio Jiménez / Daily Lobo / @SXfoto
The average college student in the U.S. spends around $1,200 on textbooks each year, according to The College Board. To combat this, UNM has created the Course Materials Committee, which aims to keep college affordable.
Home, sweet home
Comp. Sci. prof. discusses privacy By Lena Guidi
Sergio Jiménez / Daily Lobo / @SXfoto
New Mexico head coach Bob Davie embraces senior safety Devonta Tabannah after the final home game against Wyoming on Saturday. The Lobos defeated the Cowboys 36-30 for their first home victory of the season. See page 12.
ASUNM to bring senate to students Student government f ields plans to stream meetings on YouTube By David Lynch Starting in the spring, the Associated Students of UNM will begin filming and sharing its meetings in an effort to increase transparency and further connect with the undergraduate students whom the student governing body represents. ASUNM Director of Communications David Ishmael said the organization will experiment with uploading videos to an archive on YouTube that students will be
able to access. The broadcasting of ASUNM meetings will be another step toward its goal of reaching out to students, Ishmael said. “(ASUNM) President (Rachel) Williams, at the start of her term, challenged the communications team with realizing her goal of being an open student government,” Ishmael said. “We bounced around ideas as to how to boost gallery attendance at senate meetings, and then we thought, ‘Why not bring the meetings to students?’” Ishmael said they will film the
business portions of ASUNM meetings, in which matters that affect the student body are discussed. Students will be able to tune in to see which appropriations are passed, as well as the introduction of bills and resolutions. ASUNM Vice President Jenna Hagengruber lauded Ishmael’s plan, and said she hopes that students will take advantage of the opportunity to stay informed. “With David’s very innovative mind and ASUNM’s passion to improve our communication and re-
lationship with the student body, we think we can make this a really wonderful thing for the students,” Hagengruber said. Ishmael said he hopes that bringing the meetings to undergraduates will make them more inclined to vote or even run for a position in the student government body. He said there is a lack of understanding among the undergraduate population of what exactly ASUNM does, and he hopes that this initiative helps
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ASUNM page 3
In May 2013, former National Security Agency subcontractor Edward Snowden leaked information about government surveillance activities, sparking an international debate about the role of government in protecting the privacy of its citizens. For the first time, many people both in the United States and abroad became aware of how precarious their internet privacy was. But for Jedidiah Crandall, a professor in UNM’s Computer Science Department, these revelations were met with little surprise. He had been studying internet surveillance and censorship since working on a doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Davis. Crandall said that while he didn’t become specifically interested in surveillance until graduate school, he was working with computers from a very early age. “My parents owned a software company when I was born, so as soon as I was able to sit up in a chair I was hacking away in Apple DOS on an Apple II,” he said. He said he became interested in internet censorship while attending a reading group about programming languages at UC Davis. “I used to go to it just for the free pizza,” he said. “One week someone suggested we read a paper about the packet-level details of the Great Firewall of China, and I’ve been hooked ever since.” Crandall’s research has two focuses: documenting internet censorship and analyzing potential threats to online freedom. He said he uses side channels, or information from encrypted devices that does not include the encrypted text itself, to measure certain kinds
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Crandall page 5