02_13_12

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Barnes sets scoring mark Forward breaks UTD career points record PAGE 10

VOLUME XXXII, NO. 3

First rule of Fight Club: A gentleman never tells PAGE 7

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF UTD — WWW.UTDMERCURY.COM

FEBRUARY 13, 2012

Check out our Facebook page >> We will be giving away a $25 gift card to the UTD bookstore.

Student inspires refugees to study human rights Senior teaches teens in Thailand for six weeks

ANWESHA BHATTACHARJEE Features Editor

HALEY HERNANDEZ/COURTESY

(From left) Aung So Win, senior Brittany Ellenberg and Htoo Naing Lin attend class in a schoolhouse for Burmese refugee youth in Khao Lak city of Thailand. Win and Lin were two of eight students taught by Ellenberg.

A project on documenting work conditions in the rubber plantations of south-west Thailand landed political science senior Brittany Ellenberg at the forefront of a human rights campaign for Myanmar’s refugees last fall. An internal political conflict within Myanmar has resulted in more than 140,000 Burmese people illegally immigrating to Thailand in search of work and a safe haven, according to an April 2011 Time Magazine article. Ellenberg’s work with the Foundation for Education and Devel-

opment, or FED, took her to the southern Thai city of Khao Lak, where she intended to record discriminatory employment practices of such refugees, including youth and teenagers, in various Thai plantations and farms. As her work progressed, she decided she wanted to learn more about the youth working in these plantations. Ellenberg thought the senior year classroom in the FED schoolhouse would be the best place to start her research, she said. “I went into the classroom and introduced myself as a political science major who had worked with United Nations before … and they started asking all these questions,”

Comets watch their waste lines Trash recycling contest underway SHEILA DANG Mercury Staff

she said. “They wanted to know what the United Nations and (the United States) were doing for them, and then one of the kids asked ‘Why isn’t anyone helping us?’” Ellenberg then set out to help them understand human rights better and to empower them with the knowledge and hope to stand up for their rights. For the remaining six weeks of her stay, she taught classes aimed to educate the eight-student senior class of the FED youth outreach program about different human rights activists and movements in the past, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights

see ELLENBERG page 14

Geography to go off the map SHEILA DANG Mercury Staff

UTD launched its participation in RecycleMania 2012 with the display of Mount Trashmore, an exhibition of one day’s worth of trash produced on campus at the Chess Plaza on Feb. 8. This is UTD’s fifth year as part of RecycleMania, a recycling competition that takes place Feb.5- April 6 among more than 550 colleges and universities to reduce waste and promote recycling programs on campus. Along with the recycling competition, RecyleMania is a student video contest. This year’s theme is The Spirit of Recycling, in which video submissions must relate a unique quality of their school to recycling. “Winning is not our total objective, it’s just a friendly competition. The prize is basically recognition,” said building services manager Bron Clayton. Thea Junt, energy conservation and sustainability manager, got the idea for a trash display from a similar event that took place at Northwestern University. To collect waste for Mt. Trashmore, the janitorial crew emptied garbage cans across the campus at

we do and it adds up over our lifetimes.” The recycling competition is split into eight categories such as bottles and cans, per-capita recycling and gorilla, which measures the total weight of recycling produced by each school. Currently, UTD ranks fifth in paper recycling, tenth in

Due to an overall lack of interest, the geography program is slated to be combined with geospatial information science, or GIS, starting 2015. James Marquart, Dean of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences said the decision was made by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board which sets the standards for degree programs across the state. Geography was designated as a low-producing program; UTD has graduated less than 25 geography majors in five years. “Because we can’t grow the program, what we’re going to do is combine (geography) with GIS,” Marquart said. “(The coordinating board) wants us to utilize the resources we have in the biggest programs that generate the largest number of students. We’re combining the two to get the head count up so we can maintain all of it.” According to adviser Nora Hernandez, the program adds only five to seven new students each year. Marquart attributes the lack of student

see RECYCLE page 5

see GEOGRAPHY page 5

CHRISTOPHER WANG/STAFF

Senior Saskia Versteeg dresses as a trash monster during a RecycleMania event on Feb. 8 on the Chess Plaza. RecycleMania runs from Feb. 5 to April 6 and is a competition between universities nationwide.

the end of the day which was then piled on the Chess Plaza. Displays of items that UTD recycles such as aluminum cans, bottles, paper and batteries were also placed alongside the garbage. “We hope it generates some discussion of what we can recycle on campus and where people can do it,” Junt said. Saskia Versteeg, physics senior

and president of Students for Environmental Awareness, also hopes that the Mt. Trashmore display will be an eye-opener for many students. “I really hope that students get a visual for how much trash not just UTD, but the world, produces each day,” Versteeg said. “We might not think about where our Styrofoam cups go…but there is a definite impact of each and every little thing

Rate My Professor pursues partnership with UTD Officials question ethics of online ratings, anonymous student feedback

PAUL DANG Mercury Staff

The teacher rating website, ratemyprofessor.com, has approached UTD with an offer to collaborate its rating system with the University’s grade distribution data, but while the venture was recently introduced to the Academic Senate on Jan. 18, some UTD officials have say it raises many questions that must be addressed before they decide to log on to this domain. Judd Bradbury, a business professor, served as a faculty member who discussed the proposition in the Senate. He said his main concern was

how UTD might provide its grade distribution data to an outside organization, leaving the university potentially powerless to control how the site might use the information. Also, by partnering with the site the university would also tacitly endorse the site’s content. The popular RateMyProfessor site, now owned by the mtvU subsector of Viacom, allows students to rate and comment on their professors based upon the criteria of Helpfulness, Clarity, Easiness and Overall Quality. The rating system operates on a 5.0 scale and averages all of the submitted ratings to create a final

see RATEMYPROF page 5

TROI CLUSE/STAFF

MTVU’s teacher rating website, ratemyprofessor.com, allows students to anonymously comment on and rate their professor’s performance. The site recently approached UTD to gauge the university’s interest in officially using the rating system.


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