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Monday, April 14, 2014
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UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY
Faculty petitions against Shared Services
Heartbleed bug barely disturbs University
By Madlin Mekelburg @madlinbmek
President William Powers Jr. received a letter signed by more than 100 faculty members opposing Shared Services on Tuesday. The letter — authored by radio-television-film senior lecturer Anne Lewis, English associate professor Mia Carter and law professor Julius Getman — petitions Powers to withdraw his endorsement
which he issued March 31 of Shared Services, Shared Services is a plan designed to save money by centralizing University human resources, information technology, procurement and finance services in various ways across campus. Kevin Hegarty, executive vice president and chief financial officer, has said approximately 500 jobs will be eliminated in the centralization process, primarily through attrition
and retirement. Powers’ endorsement of the final report and findings of the Shared Services Steering Committee launched the first two pilot versions of the plan in the College of Education and the Office of the Provost. According to Mary Knight, associate vice president for financial affairs and member of the Shared Services Steering Committee, members of the committee have been meeting with
the business officers of both departments to discuss the specifics of the pilot. According to Lewis, the letter from some faculty members is a more formal expression of an online petition opposing Shared Services with more than 1,000 signatures from students, faculty, staff and other members of the community. The letter focuses on various aspects of Shared Services, including the impact it could
have on the support systems that exist between staff and faculty in a department. “A lot of [staff] have been at this university for a long time, and a lot of them have been in that department for a long time,” Lewis said. “They do multiple functions: They take care of each other, [and] they take care of us. It’s a creative function. We build these departments
year long,” Hogg said. “This year we had one committee, [Texas Traditions], planning three events including 40 Acres Fest. It was 15 of us
REVUE page 2
BUG page 2
FACULTY page 2
Texas Revue blends idiosyncratic talent By Alex Wilts @alexwilts
Jenna VonHofe / Daily Texan Staff
Suwetha Amsavelu, Plan II and biology senior and member of the dance team Nach Baliye, performs during the Texas Revue talent show at the Hogg Auditorium on Saturday evening.
“[Gu winning] just proves to me that he has that true level of talent that other acts haven’t quite reached yet,” said Hogg, marketing and business honors senior. “And he is a graduating senior, so
that definitely opens the floor up next year for someone.” Hogg said, even though the audience may not have noticed any changes, the planning stage for this year’s Texas Revue was completely
different from previous years. According to Hogg, this is the first year Texas Traditions has planned the talent show. “Last year, there was one committee where all they did was plan this event all
@itsmorebueno
While a flaw in an online security protocol has threatened the safty of passwords and other sensitive information on the Internet, it should not significantly impact the University, according to Cam Beasley, the University’s chief information security officer. The flaw, nicknamed the “Heartbleed bug,” affects OpenSSL, which is a secure connection many websites use to communicate sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. The flaw is believed to have been written by a German programmer in March 2012 and was discovered by researchers from Finland and from Google. Dubbed one of the biggest Internet security flaws in history, Bloomberg reported the bug affects over two-thirds of all Internet websites. The bug could also affects smartphones, routers and other systems that employ OpenSSL. Beasley said Heartbleed’s impact on the University is minimal, though he did confirm OpenSSL is used in UT information systems. “[There is] no real risk to students using central IT services, but it is possible that various Internet services they use could have experienced some exposure depending on if they were vulnerable and how long they took to patch systems,” Beasley said. “Several systems were patched once the update became available, but no critical services were exposed.” Classical archaeology senior Beth Rozacky said, though the flaw is worrying for some people, she feels the information that could be potentially
CAMPUS
Hula hooping, beat boxing and Indian classical dance were only a few of the acts performed Saturday in the Hogg Auditorium at the Texas Revue, the University’s annual talent show that was attended by more than 1,000 students. This year Nach Baliye, a coed fusion dance team that performs Bollywood dancing, took home the “Best Overall” award of $1,500. Thomas Gu, mathematics senior who practices the art of Chinese yoyoing, or “diabolo,” won the technical excellence award of $750 for the second year in a row. Gu said he was not expecting to win, especially since he messed up during his performance when one of his yoyos rolled off stage. “Even when I mess up, the crowd is still super into it,” Gu said. “At this point, that’s the whole reason why I keep [performing]. I love the crowd.” Kelly Hogg, chair of Texas Traditions, the committee that plans Texas Revue, said it is common to see similar acts perform and even win year after year, but their domination does not last forever.
By Nicole Bueno
RESEARCH
Professor addresses archaic misconceptions regarding aging By Hayden Clark @HaydenS_clark
While, for young adults, negative stigmas may surround growing old, a visiting professor said there are misconceptions about misery of aging in a lecture at the University on Friday. In her lecture titled “Exploding the Misery Myth,” Laura Carstensen, Stanford University psychology professor, said some assume older people are more depressed because they are closer to death. “When I entered this field, about 30+ years ago, at that time there was very little research on emotion and aging, or well-being and aging,” Carstensen said. “It was mostly on biological and cognitive
changes with age. The idea was, of course, emotion follows the same course and people are getting increasingly vulnerable— increasingly frail. They get increasingly depressed, sad and anxious. After all they’re coming closer and closer to the end of their lives, so why wouldn’t that be?” Carstensen said, as people get older, their social circles get smaller, and they do not interact with as many people, which allows for more meaningful relationships with the people with whom they do interact. “It turns, and many people began to find that older people are not sad and anxious and lonely,” Carstensen said. “In fact, they have lower rates of every known form of psychopathology except for dementia,
which is by definition a disease by old age and a brain-based disease by old age.” Carstensen said young adults, not older people, experience the highest rates of depression. “People keep telling people your age this is the best time in your life,” Carstensen said. “I think, knowing that emotionally speaking, that’s not true. That in fact, it’s the flip — that this is probably the worst time in your life — [that] can help people think about the future more easily.” According to Carstensen, research on older populations should not focus on the size of social circles. “At one point we decided we should not simply be looking at how large or small social net-
Stanford psychology professor Laura Carstensen speaks to an audience at the O’Donnell Jr. Building on Friday afternoon.
Amy Zhang Daily Texan Staff
works are but who are in those networks,” Carstensen said. “We don’t believe this is about age as much as it is about time, future time.” Karen Fingerman, psy-
chology and human studies and family development professor, used the example of college freshmen attending parties to meet new friends, hoping
Austin Reggae Festival April 18-20 • Butler Park Easy Star All-Stars, Inner Circle Everton Blender and More www.austinreggaefest.com Benefitting the Capital Area Food Bank
to increase the size of their social circle. “It was adaptive when you were a freshman to go to a
PSYCHOLOGY page 2