THE DAILY COUGAR Straight from Sarajevo: Café Pita Plus offers cheap eats /LIFE & ARTS Issue 97, Volume 74
Final Countdown: With five games left, Cougars break streak /sports Friday, February 20, 2009
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TODAY’S WEATHER
3-day forecast, Page 2
Hi 100 Lo 32 www.thedailycougar.com
Students network online
Putting private information on internet has pros, cons By Shruti Purohit The Daily Cougar
Students are using social networking Web sites such as Facebook and Myspace, and video sharing sites such as Youtube to satisfy their diverse technological needs. UH alumnus Pat Lam is a member of SoReal Cru, a Houston dance group that competed in MTV’s second season of America’s Best Dance Crew. Lam said he used Youtube to build the dance crew’s career. “Publicity definitely helped us. The way we marketed ourselves helped our public image a whole lot,” Lam said. “There are millions of people on Youtube everyday, so we have a huge potential to gain more and more fans.” The dance crew uses Youtube to keep fans updated. Video clips of the group practicing, traveling, or just having a good time with each other are shown. “Having SoRealCruTV on Youtube helped us stay relevant and it also keeps all the fans and others involved and updated with our crew,” Lam said. Besides using Youtube to keep in touch with fans, SoReal Cru also uses Youtube as a form of free advertising. “We advertise our booking e-mail on all our Web sites,” Lam said.
David Shih The Daily Cougar
Students put their meal plan where their mouth is by completing surveys to critique Dining Services on Thursday outside of Science and Research Building 1.
Dining to be made over Service needs input to improve output; RecycleMania discourages wasting food By Jonathan Harris The Daily Cougar
see FACEBOOK, page 3
Electronic resources rule research Librarians say students lose out by not using print literature By Sara Ali and Hafsah Hashrmi The Daily CougaR In 2001, World Wide Web users witnessed the launch of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that allows any user to contribute by writing and editing articles. The rise of electronic resources was marked in 2007 when Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, with more than 2 million articles. For students such as industrial engineering senior Affaf Bokhetache, Wikipedia is a primary search engine. “Usually anything or topics of research I don’t find on Wikipedia, I Google it and with citations I’m not restricted to anything,” Bokhetache said. However, with this surge of availability for online resources, students often do not make the effort to explore reference hard copies, said Mildred Joseph, assistant librarian at the M.D. Anderson Memorial Library. see WIKIPEDIA, page 3
After nearly a year of negotiations, UH System Board of Regents approved a plan Monday to renovate the Moody Towers dining hall. During the next eight weeks, UH Dining Services will be conducting different forms of research to get student opinions of dining services to better assess changes for the future. Student Government Association Vice President Jonas Chin said the approval means a total overhaul of the sub-par Moody Towers cafeteria. “It’s going to totally redesign the Moody Towers, and it would be complete by fall 2009,” Chin said. “It’s going to change the entire experience. Different g g Chin dining options, more open seating areas and then a private eating setup.” This is but one of the dining projects SGA is working on. They also plan to nullify mandatory meal plans and allow the campus-wide use of Cougar Cash including restaurants such as Sonic and McCallister’s. “In April 2008, we set goals to change the food services here on campus. We met with University Services and discussed a revamp. Now we’re getting ready to bring a whole new concept to UH,” Chin said. “The surveys that will be going on will help us know what students are thinking and what we need to make sure that they are happy. We plan to have some sort of kickoff within the first week of March.”
Sevelia Johnson, marketing program manager of UH Dining Services, will help conduct intercept surveys around campus next week. She said surveys are one of the many methods UH will use to gather research and information about the UH community. “We are conducting intercept surveys next week also. It’s all part of the MarketMATCH process. It’s an exclusive master planning process that lasts for 16 weeks,” Johnson said. “The process consists of chat room discussions, focus groups, online surveys and intercept surveys. Everyday we’ll be in different parts of the campus community.” Earlier this month, Dining Services gathered research using chat room conversations with UH students. Participants were rewarded with $25 Chili’s Too gift cards. The same will occur with coming focus groups. “What we’re doing is ensuring we’re meeting the needs of the students to ensure the right services on campus because dining solutions should mirror the lifestyles of the students,” Johnson said. “We’ll be advertising the focus groups in each academic neighborhood and those who participate will receive a Chili’s Too gift card.” Another incentive to update dining is UH’s plan to add 2,000 freshman beds to campus by 2011. Director of Business Services Esmeralda Valdez said the renovations are greatly needed because the Moody Towers is outof-date. “We’re currently looking at a proposal to renovate the Moody Towers to accommodate freshman increase in population because of the new housing project,” Valdez said.
“Besides the fact that it’s over 50 years old, a lot of the cooking equipment and infrastructure haven’t changed since it was constructed.” Along with the renovations, there will be additions to the menu. Dining Services is considering a Mediterranean grill to serve wraps and pitas, a Mongolian grill to serve wok and stir-fry and a fresh bakery. “There would still be one set price, but there would be eight mini-restaurants like a food court where they would prepare the food right in front of you,” Valdez said. “Also with the replacement of the kitchen equipment, the kitchen would go from taking up 50 percent of the space to only 30 percent, leaving room for additional spaces. It will add 1,000 square feet for private dining which would be good for organizations to hold meetings.” This week, University Services has also been making changes of a different color in the UH dining experience. Through the Clean Plate Club and Garbage to Garden programs, that color is green. The Clean Plate Club is an event officially going on this week that encourages students to think about what they put on their plate at dining services and to be sure they will eat it rather than let it go to waste. “We have been giving out information on the amount of food that we waste each year and to tie into that we also have the Garbage to Garden event,” said Emily Messa, assistant vice president of University Services. “Any fruit rinds and food scraps that are non-meat and non-dairy can be placed into a container located where students place their trays and those scraps are recycled as compost. see DINING, page 3