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Daily Toreador The

FRIDAY, FEB. 8, 2013 VOLUME 87 ■ ISSUE 86

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Student Senate criticized for inactivity By MATT DOTRAY STAFF WRITER

Texas Tech’s Student Senate was accused of being absent and unproductive during its meeting Thursday. Stuart Williams, a senior history major from Lubbock, is a former senator and former chief justice of the Supreme Court at Tech. Williams spoke to the senators during open forum at the 10th meeting of Senate’s 48th session. Most of the work has been coming from the executive branch of student government, he said. In reference to last week’s meeting, Williams said he could not believe the

senators spent more than 20 minutes debating the question of whether or not to put the issue of tobacco and firearms on campus up for a vote during the student elections. “I don’t understand,” he said to the senators. “Then, they have (Student Government Association) vote against it. You’re the senate voting against putting something on the ballot to ask people a question and then people stand up and say, ‘Well, I want to see how they feel, but I don’t want to ask them a question.’ I don’t understand it.” The purpose of having a student government is to address the concerns of the students, he said, and arguing

Facebook graph search could disrupt user privacy settings By SCOTT MACWATTERS STAFF WRITER

Facebook has become one of the standard social networking tools for people around the world. With their new graph search feature, Facebook hopes to continue to connect people, according to its website. Facebook started in February 2004, and has amassed more than a billion users as of 2012, according to its website. Facebook graph search is a new feature for Facebook currently being tested by users who request it. The feature will replace the current title bar with a larger search box, according to the website. In the search box, users will be able to search for things like, “my friends who go to Texas Tech University in computer science,” or even “movies

liked by people who are film directors.” According to Facebook, when these terms are typed in the search box, Facebook will give a list of results based on information that has been shared with the user who searched for it. Allison Matherly, the coordinator for digital engagement at Tech, said she is currently testing out the graph search feature on her Facebook profile. She said her first impression of the feature was that it is creepy. “It’s really making all the data that you’re putting out there to everyone even more accessible than it was before,” Matherly said. “Before graph search, you could set your Facebook profile to where you weren’t searchable, and that’s now been done away with.” FACEBOOK continued on Page 5 ➤➤

Track and field, Sports

Texas Tech track and field prepares for weekend meet. SPORTS, Page 7

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against having students vote to answer those concerns does not make sense. Apart from a few brief resolutions, Williams said the attitude of the senators has been to put their heads down and coast until the summer. “We’re no going to talk about academics,” Williams said. “We’re not going to talk about infrastructure. We’re not going to talk about the fact that we have nowhere to put freshmen in the fall. We’ll have to keep building and building. We’re not going to talk about that at all. We’re not going to talk about any of the issues. We’re just going to plow ahead and do nothing.” With the elections later this month,

Williams said senators who are not passionate and committed should not run for re-election. At the meeting, Tech’s Senate passed a resolution, Senate Resolution 48.59, with 98 percent of the votes. According to the resolution, Tech’s senate recommends the construction of a shared path for students walking and biking between the Engineering Key and Murray Hall. Luke Cotton, an energy commerce major from League City, and a senator from the College of Business and the vice chairman for the committee on campus infrastructure, introduced the resolution.

There is not an easy access for bikers between the two buildings, he said, and the path would be safe and inexpensive, he said. “We had a meeting last night with campus infrastructure, and this was brought up as a meaningful expense coming from the Engineering Key to Murray Hall,” Cotton said. “We have not discussed it budgeting wise, but it won’t really cost that much. You’re just basically painting the areas for people to ride through the key.” Cotton said it is a quick fix before SGA introduces a large biking plan in the future. ➤➤mdotray@dailytoreador.com

African Ancestry TV host, scholar gives lecture on AfricanAmerican ancestry By EMILY GARDNER STAFF WRITER

Students, faculty and staff learned about ancestry at the inaugural AfricanAmerican History Month Lecture Series on Thursday night in the Student Union Allen Theatre. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, spoke at the event hosted by the Department of History. The event, created by assistant history professor Karlos Hill, consisted of speeches from Hill, Texas Tech’s Interim President Lawrence Schovanec, a clip from Gates’ Public Broadcasting Service show, “Finding Your Roots,” and a question-and-answer session with Gates. “The aim of the African-American History Month Lecture series is to highlight and raise awareness about the contributions that African-Americans have made to U.S. society, but also to the world beyond the U.S.,” Hill said. The lecture series was designed to bring a distinguished scholar in African-American history to speak each year, he said, for the Tech and Lubbock communities. Jacynda Ammons, an AfricanAmerican history doctoral student from Bismarck, Ark., said the lecture was a big event for the history department to get a well-known scholar to participate. “We really wanted to draw attention to the fact that we are lucky enough to have such a well-known scholar come to campus,” she said, “and try to maybe get some support to maybe do more events next year to try to do more of a month long celebration.” Ammons said she credits Hill with getting Gates to speak. Hill first mentioned the idea a year ago. Gates said he first became interested in ancestry in 1960 after his grandfather’s funeral. In 2000, he said he received a letter from a black geneticist at Howard University about a perfected method that allows a person’s ancestry to be traced by analyzing mitochondrial DNA. “Using this genetic fingerprint,”

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HENRY LOUIS GATES, Jr., host of the Public Broadcasting Service series, “Finding Your Roots,” talks about his studies in his own lineage and his studies in other iconic figures ancestry during the African-American History Month Lecture Series on Thursday in the Student Union Allen Theater.

Gates said, “they could trace what tribe or ethnic group a black person was from.” After receiving his results, he said he woke up with an idea to combine his passion for genealogy with the science of ancestry tracing through genetics to trace African-American ancestry back to the tribe they originally descended from. The result of this, Gates said, was “African American Lives,” a documentary, which traced the ancestry of African-Americans including Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Chris Tucker. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” he said. “We didn’t know if anybody would watch, and 8.6 million people, ladies and gentlemen, watched

‘African-American Lives.’” Because of the documentary’s popularity, PBS asked Gates to do a sequel. The result was “African-American Lives 2,” which Gates said featured Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman and Tina Turner and received more than 8 million views. Gates said he also made a documentary called “Faces of America” featuring Malcolm Gladwell and Kristi Yamaguchi, and now has a series titled “Finding Your Roots” with PBS. Jobi Martinez, director of Cross Cultural Academic Advancement Center, said she came to the event because she had followed Gates’ work and wanted to hear him speak. SPEAKER continued on Page 2 ➤➤

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