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New faces, familiar places: Year in review The 2014–2015 school year was marked by new faces — a new chancellor, president, governor and basketball coach. The year also featured stranger elements, including a brief Ebola scare, a new 50-foot canoe sculpture and a satirical Student Government campaign that ended in victory. Check out our year in review.
Pages 8 & 9 Photos by (top, from left) Amy Zhang, Griffin Smith and Lauren Ussery (bottom, from left) Marshall Tidrick and Daulton Venglar | Daily Texan Staff
CITY
City Council approves disease outbreak fund By Jackie Wang @jcqlnwng
As the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department continues to monitor two individuals for signs of the Ebola virus, nearly seven months after the first American patient was diagnosed, the Austin City Council approved supplemental funding Thursday for Ebola preparedness. The City Council accepted $183,906 from the Texas
Department of State Health Services to fund public health preparedness planning and responsiveness for Ebola and other infectious diseases, according to Janet Pichette, chief epidemiologist at the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Department. “We receive public health preparedness dollars [every year], and this is extra money to help accelerate preparedness planning,” Pichette said. The health department
works with the University in times of emergency, such as last fall, when a UT student was monitored for Ebola after potentially being exposed. The department is the initiator of all emergency infectious disease response, said Bob Harkins, associate vice president for campus safety and security. “In any infectious disease scenario, the lead and dictating agency ends up being Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services,” Harkins said. “For
CAMPUS
example, when Ebola situation erupted last fall, they notified us of the person.” The University’s response protocol is the same for all infectious diseases, including the mumps case diagnosed in a student Wednesday, Harkins said. “[The health department] usually talk about our responses and notifications and precautions and stuff,” Harkins said. “The UHS and the Healthy Horns’ side of
EBOLA page 2
Mariana Munoz | Daily Texan Staff
The Austin City Council approved funding for an Ebola preparedness plan Thursday.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Students protest sweatshops UT creates Chrome extension to clarify privacy agreements
By Sebastian Herrera @SebasAHerrera
For over five hours Thursday, students held a sit-in protest outside administrators’ offices to raise awareness of working conditions in factories that produce University apparel — eventually leading President William Powers Jr. to come down from his office to speak with the group. Students Against Sweatshops, a UT branch of the nation-wide United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), organized the protest, which focused on the licensing agreement UT approved in March with 289c Apparel. The agreement reduced official apparel suppliers from about 2,000 to 20 but also created a deal between the University and the Dallas Cowboys’ official apparel company. Franchesca Caraballo, USAS member and social work junior, said the
By Nashwa Babwa @nashwababwa
Michael Baez | Daily Texan Staff
Members of United Students Against Sweatshops protested at the Main Building on Thursday afternoon.
Cowboys’ apparel company is known for having sweatshops in countries such as Bangladesh and Indonesia. “The deal essentially means that the Cowboys’ merchandising will have a monopoly over our apparel, and that’s problematic because they have a long
range of labor rights abuses and human rights abuses in some of their factories located around the world,” Caraballo said. “The deal was made with no student input.” Caraballo said the organization will fight the 10-year
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Long paragraphs of borderline incomprehensible text in terms of agreement contracts will soon be slightly easier to read, thanks to UT’s Center for Identity. The Center released PrivacyCheck, a new browser extension created to scan and summarize online privacy policies, earlier this week. The program, a free extension available on Google Chrome, condenses information in privacy policies for users so they can understand the terms of consent before they click “I Agree.” The extension
summarizes how websites intend to use information such as email addresses, credit cards and social security numbers, according to Suzanne Barber, Center for Identity director and engineering professor. “These privacy documents are long, and they’re written in legal terminology, so nobody reads them,” Barber said. “[This] isn’t good, because we have to know what we’re agreeing to in order to not get our identity or information stolen. PrivacyCheck gives you a quick synopsis of what’s in the document. You may decide to go ahead and click ‘agree,’ but at least now you can do it as an informed consenter.” The extension organizes
privacy policies into 10 different-colored categories according to how companies or websites will use visitors’ information. A green icon means the website isn’t collecting information at all; yellow means the website will use information only for internal profit purposes; and red means the website is allowed to share information with external marketing or corporate firms. Katelyn Holley, English sophomore and Chrome user, said she is hopeful that the browser will help students make better decisions. “I’m one of those people who are like, ‘I want this,
CHROME page 5
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