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celebrates Banned Books Week NEWS: UNT Page 2 student finds treasure in trash ARTS & LIFE: Dumpster-diving Page 3 still bound by gender roles VIEWS: Society Page 5
Seniors lead women’s soccer team Story on Page 4
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
News 1, 2 Arts & Life 3 Sports 4 Views 5 Classifieds 6 Games 6
Volume 94 | Issue 20
Sunny 83° / 59°
ntdaily.com
The Student Newspaper of the University of North Texas
‘World-class artist’ to perform tonight BY BRADFORD P URDOM Contributing Writer
Since she was four years old, Mariangela Vacatello has studied music. Growing up in Naples, Italy, she had her first performance at age 14. Now, she’s 27 and was a finalist for the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The UNT Fine Arts Series will start with a performance by the UNT Symphony Orchestra and guest artist Vacatello at 8 tonight in the Winspear Performance Hall. “We are trying mostly to reach out to the undergraduate-college population and get them thinking about the arts in a different way,” said Deanna Brizgys, a graduate assistant with the UNT Fine Arts Series. “It’s just a good opportunity for students to have the experience of seeing a world-class artist right on their campus.” Vacatello will play Franz Liszt’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” with the UNT Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor David Itkin. “The important thing this music does is grab people,” Itken said. In an e-mail interview with Vacatello, she said why the Listz concerto is important to her personally. “I played this concerto for the first time with the orchestra in
Milan when I was 14, and exactly 10 years later, in the same month, they asked me to play it again,” she said. She also said success at her age is difficult because she constantly keeps her performance level high while continuing to develop herself culturally. “Keep in mind that music is like
“ ... music is like life: both things change over time ... ”
—Mariangela Vacatello finalist in 2009 Van Cliburn piano competition life: both tings change over time and, hopefully, in the right direction, so I have to be careful to be myself always, forever,” Vacatello said. When asked what an undergraduate who is not familiar with classical music could take away from her performance, Vacatello said, “They should understand that the same emotions they find in another kind of music they can discover also in the classical.” UNT students can see Vacatel lo tonig ht at t he Winspear Performance Hall in the Murchison Performing
PHOTO BY DREW GAINES/ INTERN
Guest pianist Mariangela Vacatello, a Van Cliburn International Piano Competition finalist, plays piano with UNT’s Symphony Orchestra during Monday’s rehearsal. She will perform at the Murchison Performing Arts Center at 8 tonight. Arts Center for free with their student ID. General admission is $20 for adults, $15 for seniors, UNT faculty and staff, and $10 for non-UNT students.
The Fine Arts Series has several events planned for this year with performances by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and presentations by Michael Ian Black and
Frank Warren, the creator of the blog PostSecret.com. For more information on the UNT Fine Arts Series, visit web3. unt.edu/fas.
To see multimedia for this story, visit ntdaily.com
Growth prompts more buses Cyber Cemetery holds dead sites
BY JORDAN FOSTER Staff Writer
The transportation department added another bus stop and two more buses to the Centre Place route, which accommodates a large student population in two major apartment complexes. The move is part of the department’s broader mission to optimize transportation services for a growing university. UNT’s enrollment reached 36,206 this fall, the highest in school history. “We are re-allocating our recourses to get the maximum bang for the buck based on ridership trends,” said Joe Richmond, director of transportation. Richmond said high ridership makes it hard for the transportation department to keep up. Sometimes students can’t get a ride on the Centre Place route because buses become so full in the mornings. The new stop is near the Forum apartments on Centre Place Drive. The Forum, a new complex finished this summer, can house 1,100 people. Richmond said roughly 65 percent of those residents ride the Centre Place buses each day, which also serve the Campus Place apartments. The highest number of riders on that bus route was 722 in one day. “The cha l lenge is rig ht now. The ridership is up to 1.6 million,” Richmond said, referring to the total number of bus rides during the 2008-2009 school year. Richmond obser ved t he Centre Place route on a Tuesday during peak hours, which is a high ridership day. There were ten buses that came during that hour. Two of them couldn’t pick up any passengers because they were full.
BY CAROLYN BROWN Senior Staff Writer
PHOTO BY KAITLIN HOAG / PHOTOGRAPHER
Many students rely on UNT transportation to take them to their next class. “We had 50,800 hours of service this year approximately,” Richmond said. “That’s the highest number we have ever put out.” The transportation department has a total of 27 buses in the morning spread over eight routes. An average of 15,000 passengers ride the buses every day and 53 passengers per hour of service, Richmond said. Clifton Bell, who has been driving for Denton County Transportation Authority since 2006, has witnessed the increase on the Centre Place route. He began driving for the route this semester. “There has definitely been an increase in riders because that place is so popular now. It’s a very nice facility,” Bell said. Lauren Gern, a sociolog y senior, has been riding on the route for two years and said the
increased ridership makes it hard for her to catch a bus. “I wish they could add another route somehow, and make it less crowded because it’s always crowded, especially in the morning,” Gern said. The department of transportation is working hard to keep up with the inf lux of students, Richmond said. But at certain times of the day, buses will drive pass stops w it hout pick ing up students if the bus is already full and the riders need to get
to class on time. Richmond said that happens most commonly before 9 a.m. classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and 9:30 a.m. classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “All I can say is if you’re going to a 9 o’clock class, you have to go really early,” Richmond said. “If you walk out there and you can’t get on that bus, look at the schedule and get on the bus before. The solution is to catch the bus before.”
By The Numbers 15,000 53
Average number of riders every day Average number of riders per hour
When some government Web sites die, they go to the Cyber Cemetery, where people can dig them up with a search engine instead of a shovel. UNT’s libraries work with the U.S. Government Printing Office and the National Archives and Records Administration on the Cyber Cemetery, an archival project that allows people to view the defunct government Web sites it holds. The sites typically come from agencies and commissions that have been discontinued or lost their funding, said Cathy Hartman, assistant dean for digital and information technologies. “Most of it is really excellent material that the public should continue to have access to,” Hartman said. The Cyber Cemetery is free and open to all computer users. It contains 48 Web sites available to the public, and nine more are archived but not visible, according to a September 2009 UNT library report. The site gets an average of 4,895 visits per day, and an average of 149,313 monthly visits. The most popular Web site is the 9/11 Commission. Web sites that the library is still working to make available include two from the office of former first lady Laura Bush. Hartman helped create the Cyber Cemetery in 1997 and said she has seen many changes in the content and methods used to capture it. “It’s very different structures of Web sites,” she said. “They’re much more interactive and complex than they used to be.” The Government Documents
Department and Digital Projects Unit work together to capture the Web sites, said Suzanne Sears, head of the Government Documents Department. The team uses several methods to figure out which Web sites will need saving. “It’s part investigative work, part luck and part word of mouth,” she said. Sears said she will sometimes scan news sources to find out which commissions will shut down or contact other libraries. In recent years, some agencies have contacted the library because of its growing reputation in the field, she said. Mark Phillips, head of the Digital Projects Unit, said after they’ve identified the sites, “crawlers” or “web harvesters” harvest material from the sites to be placed in the Cemetery. The team has begun using Heritrix, a software designed for archival projects that provides more detail about the archiving process and allows them to keep track of more complex information, Phillips said. “The most challenging part is finding out before things go away that they’re going to go away,” he said. S e a r s s a id t he C y ber Cemetery can be useful to people who want to look back through history at how different government administrations have worked. “Digital information is the most at-risk right now for being preser ved,” she said. “The digital information is disappearing before our eyes. Unless people step up and capture that, it’s not going to be available for future generations to investigate why a certain policy was made and why we did this.”