14 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(08/19/06 4:00am)
July 13 - Football games against ACC rivals N.C. State and Virginia Tech will provide a trial run for UNC's Web-based student-ticket system, campus officials said this week.
The new system, announced this summer, is primarily meant as a method for distributing tickets to men's basketball games. But UNC wants to give it a test run to work out any kinks, said Clint Gwaltney, director of ticket operations.
Students will go to a Web site that allows them to sign up to receive tickets. Later, they'll get an e-mail with a link to a Web site that allows them to print off the tickets - which students must provide at the Kenan Stadium gate along with their One Card.
The football tickets, unlike those for basketball games, will be for general admission seating.
Otherwise, the trials will be run in a "similar fashion" to the basketball distributions in the fall, Gwaltney said.
In a July 9 interview, Gwaltney also addressed many of the concerns students have raised about the new ticket policy.
Rachel High, president of the student-run Carolina Athletic Association, said this week that she's received "mostly negative" feedback about the change since the plans were made public.
"It's more or less to benefit the students," Gwaltney said, arguing that the old system of Saturday-morning distributions in front of the Smith Center didn't provide all students with an equal opportunity to get tickets.
While the requirement that students be on South Campus by 7 a.m. naturally attracted die-hard Carolina fans to distributions, he said, it also meant that graduate students who don't live near Chapel Hill, as well as students who had to work on Saturday morning, were unable to get tickets.
If anything, Gwaltney said, the new system will help more people get tickets without affecting the fans who already showed up for distribution on a regular basis.
That's because it eliminates the Ceiling Fan program, which allowed 500 students to get tickets to every game. It also erases the need for the CAA's ticket distribution committee, which received close to 100 tickets for every game.
Those 600 tickets will be made available to all students for each game.
"Every student who pays the athletic fee has the right to go to the games," Gwaltney said.
He also said the idea of an online ticket system was first considered about two years ago. That's around the same time the University entered into an agreement with Paciolan Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based company, to sell merchandise and tickets on tarheelblue.com, the athletic department's official Web site.
Paciolan also is running the student-ticket program, Gwaltney said, and will get 50 cents for every ticket students print.
"There's definitely a cost involved," he said.
Another cost: The company's software prevents a change to one of the most unpopular parts of the new plan, its inability to give students group seating in the Smith Center.
Students still will be able to get as many as two tickets to every game, but there is no way to ensure that groups can sit together.
"It is an unfortunate casualty," Gwaltney said, "but it's a product of the software."
High, the CAA president, said she's received many complaints about the change.
"People talk about how they've gone in groups all these years in the past, and they really think it's not going to be fun to just sit with one person," she said.
She says she expects to continue to meet with Gwaltney about the new program.
"Students have really made their complaints meaningful and specified what parts (of the policy) they don't like and why," she said.
"That's exactly what I want and exactly what I need."
Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.
(07/20/06 4:00am)
MUSICREVIEW
Sufjan Stevens
The Avalanche
2.5 Stars
(The following is a conversation between Sufjan Stevens, who will play at Memorial Hall on Sept. 21, and the Judeo-Christian God.)
STEVENS: Are you there, God? It's me, Sufjan.
GOD: I am here, my child.
STEVENS: Oh, good. D'ya mind if we chit-chat a little bit?
GOD: Well, I've got a prayer appointment with The Killers at 4, but I can spare a few moments.
STEVENS: Well, Yahweh, I had a question about my goal in life. I want to write music about America, but I don't know if America will listen.
(07/13/06 4:00am)
MUSICREVIEW
Thom Yorke
The Eraser
3 Stars
Maybe it's because us college students came of age - musically and otherwise - when Radiohead first burst onto the national stage with "Creep," that pouty paean to self-loathing.
(07/13/06 4:00am)
Football games against ACC rivals N.C. State and Virginia Tech will provide a trial run for UNC's Web-based student-ticket system, campus officials said this week.
(06/29/06 4:00am)
News that the distribution of men's basketball tickets is moving online has sparked strong reaction from many students - and caused the president of the Carolina Athletic Association, students' liaison to the athletics department, to solicit their input.
"Details of the online policy haven't been finalized yet," CAA President Rachel High wrote in a letter to the editor that has been published in today's Daily Tar Heel.
"Now is the time to voice your concerns. Rather than me telling the decision-makers how I think students feel about the policy, I'd like to be able to show them your exact words. I encourage students to e-mail me specific complaints, praises, concerns and/or suggestions you have regarding the new policy."
High wrote the letter in response to feedback she heard from UNC students and saw on the DTH Web site about the athletics department's proposed policy, which will replace the current system of Saturday-morning distributions at the Smith Center.
Students said putting tickets online would allow fair-weather fans to obtain them more easily. Under the current plan, they said, only people willing to show up on South Campus at 7 a.m. get prime positions in the stands.
Complaints also centered on a pair of logistical problems with the new system: its inability to let students choose whether they want riser seats behind the Tar Heel basket and its inability to give more than two students seats next to one another.
Typical of the comments on the DTH Web site - or, at least, of the comments that are printable - was an anonymous posting saying: "This sucks. I should have gone to Duke."
In an interview last week, High said that she shared students' concerns but that officials with the athletics department said there wasn't much they could do to change the system. She was out of town this week and wasn't available for comment.
James Allred, UNC student body president, said he didn't play much of a role in drafting the proposal. But he said the argument that it would take tickets away from Carolina's best fans isn't a good one because student tickets go uncollected for almost every home game.
Records show that after distribution for last year's game against ACC foe Clemson, more than 1,000 seats remained uncollected.
Student tickets for UNC's game against Illinois - a rematch of the 2005 national title game that brought a top-10 team to Chapel Hill - suffered the same fate.
Online distribution is the athletics department's final shot at getting students to use all the tickets allotted to them, Allred said. Student tickets that go uncollected under the plan would be put on sale for the general public.
"I think it's very fair," Allred said. "I understand that some students have this notion that it's necessary for students to stand out in the cold and wait for tickets, but I don't think that's a good argument."
Not everyone was opposed to the proposal.
"The idea that the former distribution procedure is somehow more 'fair' than the new one doesn't hold up," a commenter wrote on the DTH site. "What is fair, for example, in assuming that everyone has the same opportunity to wait on tickets for six hours on a Saturday morning? Some people have to work on academics or a job. Some, especially grad students, have familial responsibilities that preclude participating in the old distribution process."
Associate Athletic Director Clint Gwaltney, director of the UNC Ticket Office, could not be reached this week for comment.
Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.
(06/22/06 4:00am)
Tar Heel basketball fans, take note: The eternal struggle between you and your Saturday-morning alarm is over.
That's because, in a move that has been contemplated for years, the distribution of men's basketball tickets for students is moving online.
"It's a matter of working out the kinks and making sure that when it's put in place this year, it's put in place as well as possible," said Rachel High, president of the Carolina Athletic Association - the student arm of the athletic department.
Officials still are working out the details of the new system, which is set to be ready this fall. But the process's building blocks, though subject to change, are in place.
Students will go online at the beginning of the school year and register to receive tickets to individual games - not blocks of games, as in the current system.
Some time before each contest, the online distribution system will randomly select the students who will actually get tickets.
The system then will e-mail those students, and students must confirm that they want the tickets and will be able to attend the game in question.
The tickets themselves will come to students' in-boxes as an e-mail attachment. They must be printed out and presented at the student entrance to the Smith Center, along with a One Card.
Every ticket that isn't claimed during the original distribution will be placed into a second distribution a few days before every game. Tickets still not claimed will be put on sale to the public.
In general, the system will make getting tickets more convenient for students, High said. But certain aspects of the proposal trouble her, she added.
For example, students won't be able to obtain tickets in groups as they were able to do under the old system. Each student still will receive two tickets to games, but as of now, there are no plans to allow fans to get seats next to more than one of their friends.
"It's something I, personally, have one of the biggest problems with," High said. "It's something that is brought up every single time I meet with the ticket office. . I'm a strong advocate that people should be able to sit with who they want, but the ticket office is telling me it's not possible."
There also is no way under the new system for students to indicate whether they want seats in the risers behind one of the Smith Center's baskets - an opportunity many students turned down under the old policy.
That means students who don't want their riser seats will have to visit the CAA's online ticket forum to swap seats with other students.
"We're trying to figure out if there's a way we can have a separate distribution for riser tickets, but we're not just sure with the technology that it's possible," High said.
Athletic officials also plan to change the way students enter the risers. The current first-come, first-serve system that encourages diehard fans to line up hours before games will be replaced with a system in which riser tickets are numbered - cutting back on the amount of security UNC has to provide.
"The University has hated that people line up for risers any time," High said.
The athletic department, which is in charge of ticket distributions, has long wanted to move the process online in order to cut down on manpower and make the process more convenient.
Associate Athletic Director Clint Gwaltney, who has been working out most of the details of the new plan with High, was out of town watching UNC in the College World Series and was not available for comment.
Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.
(04/27/06 4:00am)
MOVIEREVIEW
'Silent Hill'
1.5 Stars
Several bits of humor are scattered throughout "Silent Hill," director Christophe Gans' film adaptation of the popular video-game series.
Unfortunately, only one of them - the playing of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" on a jukebox - is intentional.
Beyond that, the joke's on us, and it's 125 minutes long.
As you've probably heard, "Silent Hill" looks gorgeous, and Gans' team deserves credit for the film's expert set design, costumes and cinematography.
(02/23/06 5:00am)
It was a plan full of possibility.
Buoyed by start-up money from an anonymous donor, the UNC system was going to provide students access to four major sources of legal downloads. It would say, "Go ahead. Download music and movies to your heart's content. It's all legal. Heck, use our money."
It would then evaluate that pilot program and come up with a way for students at all 16 UNC campuses to snatch their favorite songs and movies from the Internet - without running afoul of copyright laws.
But more than a year later, the pilot program - which grew to include six campuses, including UNC-Chapel Hill - has come and gone. Though the UNC system has inked contracts with Cdigix, Napster and Ruckus Network, three of the most popular media providers among college students, not a single campus uses any of the services.
In short, UNC-CH doesn't provide its students with access to cheap, legal downloads.
That puts the United States' oldest public university in line with the majority of its peers. Of the thousands of colleges across the nation, fewer than 100 provide subsidized legal downloads.
But the small handful that do say they're doing the right thing.
They range from tiny liberal-arts colleges to mammoth institutions including Wake Forest University, the University of California-Berkeley and University of California-Los Angeles. And - spurred by student demand and the sense that legal downloads might offer a school a competitive advantage - their numbers are growing.
Is it possible that UNC-CH could join their ranks?
John Streck, assistant vice chancellor for telecommunications at UNC-CH says maybe. And maybe not.
"I haven't heard the topic come up," Streck said. "There's a lot of other things on the table that we're having to deal with, and because of that, I think those issues are driving more of our attention."
Still, he added, a groundswell of student support could prompt the University to consider the possibility - especially if it could be done cost-effectively.
"If there's something going on and there's both illegal and legal ways of doing it, we're going to try to do that legally," Streck said.
Unfulfilled promise
UNC-CH's experience with legal downloads was more of a whirlwind romance than a long-term commitment.
Along with students at N.C. State University, Tar Heels living in campus housing had one semester - spring 2005 - to try out one of four legal downloading services for free. The University made Napster, Ruckus, Cdigix and RealNetworks' Rhapsody available to that group of more than 7,000 students - many of whom, campus administrators say, likely were using peer-to-peer services such as Kazaa or LimeWire to swap media files illegally.
Roughly 40 percent of eligible students eventually signed up for that pilot program. It wasn't quite the 85 percent who signed up for Napster at Penn State University in 2003, but student leaders and administrators were still encouraged.
By the time the program ended in May, it seemed inevitable that legal music and movie downloads were here to stay. By fall 2005, the UNC system had signed deals with Napster, Ruckus and Cdigix that allowed - and still allow - each individual campus to make a deal with one or more providers.
"It enables the campuses to have a longer-term arrangement in providing those resources to students," said Robyn Render, the UNC system's vice president for information resources, in a September interview with The Daily Tar Heel.
"We certainly do anticipate that some of them will."
But UNC-CH took a different route - one similar, in fact, to that of the university down U.S. 15-501.
"Music is available everywhere," said Larry Moneta, Duke University's vice president for student affairs. "We don't need to be an intermediary for music access."
Duke once subscribed to the Cdigix service, but that was as part of a larger digital initiative that has since expanded to include the iPod, Moneta said. In his experience, Duke students who want legal music are willing to sign up and pay for it themselves. Only a few students have asked for a university-backed program.
Duke also takes measures to control the amount of bandwidth each student eats up, so it doesn't need legal downloading to help maintain the campus network.
All those reasons, Moneta said, add up to a compelling case for Duke to stay out of the downloading game.
"Duke has never entertained, in any way, a music program," he said. "And I don't imagine that we ever will."
If any of that sounds familiar, it should. Most universities that don't provide legal downloads tend to echo Moneta's comments.
They point out that students who really want legal downloads still can get them, using services ranging from Apple's popular iTunes to RealNetworks' Rhapsody to the providers under contract with the UNC system. Students simply have to pay the full cost of using the services.
There's also not much evidence to suggest that students will stop participating in illegal file-sharing if they have a legal alternative. And it's often hard to justify a subsidy for services, such as legal downloading, that relate only tangentially to an institution's academic mission.
Especially when more students seem to care about "legalizing it" than legal music.
Before Yue Ke got a cease-and-desist notice from Columbia Pictures, the UNC-CH sophomore computer science and economics major was downloading everything he could to his laptop in Teague Residence Hall.
"Movies, programs, games, music - you name it, I probably downloaded it," Ke wrote in an e-mail. "On average, I probably accounted for a third to half of the total network traffic for my dorm, which was about four to five movies every day. And within three weeks, I filled up a 60-gig MP3 player."
The bottom line is this: To some college administrators, Ke is the sort of student who justifies the subsidizing of legal downloading - if it were legal, he'd pay.
To others, he represents every undergrad who just wants to get things free, legality be damned.
And Ke himself? He'd pay for legal downloads - if the price were right.
"Everyone knows that college students are broke," he wrote. "If it was included in housing or tuition or something that I would be paying for anyways, I'd probably use it."
Short of conducting a time-consuming poll, there's no real way of knowing what all students think. But if enough of them speak up, Streck said, things could change.
"We'll take a look at these things," he said. "And if it helps and enhances the student experience at the University of North Carolina, that's a good thing."
What are other schools doing?
Penn State University
The first college in the country to offer legal downloading programs to its students uses Napster, which is paid for with student fees. The cost of a permanent download of a song (as opposed to the streaming-audio format) is 99 cents per track.
UC-Berkeley
Berkeley was one of the first schools in the country to give its students access to RealNetworks' Rhapsody downloading service. Students pay a flat fee of $2 per month for unlimited use; the program isn't available to students who don't pay.
Wake Forest University
The Demon Deacons are piloting Cdigix, a program aimed at college campuses and students. Cdigix's streaming audio is free for students, with individual tracks running 89 cents a pop to download.
Contact the A&E Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.
(02/17/06 5:00am)
A fire broke out at a University chilled-water facility Thursday afternoon, sending black smoke billowing across a Carolina-blue sky but doing little to disrupt campus services.
The blaze began shortly before 4 p.m. in an external tower of the North Chiller Plant, which is located next to the Student Health Service building.
The Chapel Hill Fire Department sent three engines, a ladder truck and 22 firefighters to the scene, according to a University press release. The flames had diminished by 4:30 p.m., and the blaze was under control just after 5 p.m.
All employees were accounted for after the incident, said Randy Young, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.
The fire department still isn't sure what started the blaze and will continue its investigation today.
The North Chiller Plant is one of three chiller plants that supply chilled water for air conditioning to University facilities. It is the oldest chiller facility on campus.
Jim McAdam, manager of chilled-water systems for UNC, said the fire was confined to two of the six cells on one of the plant's towers.
The tower was inoperative and wouldn't have gone back online until April or May, he added.
"We have a lot of excess capacity this time of year, so we didn't need it," McAdam said.
He said the North Chiller Plant alone provides more than 10,000 tons of cooling capacity - "tons" in this case being a unit to measure refrigeration, not weight.
The tower that burned provided about a third of that tonnage - a significant amount, but not enough to disrupt service on a day when all other chiller plants ran normally, and the peak demand for campus cooling was between 6,000 and 7,000 tons.
As dark clouds stretched across campus Thursday, a crowd of onlookers rushed to the scene from all around.
Freshman Brad Lockwood said he was walking by the Bell Tower about 4 p.m. with freshman Jordan Fieldstein when they saw the smoke.
"When we got over here, there was no one," Lockwood said.
He said the fire department and police arrived on the scene within five minutes.
"You could see the woodwork around the chiller was on fire," Fieldstein said. "It was spreading and growing."
Police taped off the area around the plant, which trapped more than 50 cars in the Bell Tower parking lot. Buildings surrounding the plant were evacuated on a voluntary basis, and Student Health Service continued to operate on a normal schedule.
Ray Dubose, director of campus energy services, said the biggest concern about the fire is getting the North Chiller Plant back up to speed by this summer.
Workers will be at the plant today to talk with McAdam about how quickly - and how cheaply - UNC can get the plant running at full capacity. Dubose said he thinks University workers will get things under control.
"This is their job, and they have a lot of expertise in doing this," he said. "So I have no concerns that we'll be able to resolve this."
Assistant University Editor Stephanie Newton contributed to this article.
Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.
(02/13/06 5:00am)
The headline on the lead story in the Sept. 21, 2004, edition of The Daily Tar Heel told readers that something pretty important had just happened: "Student body secretary gives up post."
A few weeks later, on Oct. 11, another story of import hit the DTH: "Allred chosen to fill office."
The articles explained how Bernard Holloway had left the office of student body secretary and how James Allred had filled the open spot. They explained that Holloway left the office due to personal reasons and that Allred's positive attitude enabled him to get the post. They explained how the moves affected the student body.
But there was just one problem: They didn't explain what really happened.
The real story is one of deceit and loyalty, of pride and hurt feelings. The main characters don't agree on its details.
And 24 hours before polls are set to open in this year's campus elections, it could shed a whole new light on the race between Holloway and Allred for student body president.
Calabria and his officer corps say they couldn't trust Holloway and had to ask him to resign for the good of the student body. Allred faces questions about his closeness to other University administrators, notably his father, and about his relationship with Calabria.
Those ideas have loomed over this year's race.
Calabria and Allred have suggested that Holloway's ambition gets in the way of his ability to lead. Holloway's camp suggests that Calabria's accusations are untrue and that he might have capitalized on his rocky relationship with Holloway to install Allred - a "prodigal son," in Holloway's words - as secretary.
A forced resignation
By late August, just two weeks after school had started, things had gone sour between Calabria and Holloway. Specifically, Calabria and his officer corps were angry that Holloway had told the DTH about a "constituent response system" that they hadn't heard about.
According to a letter to the DTH that was never sent or published but that outlines the reasons for Holloway's forced resignation, many student leaders also became angry when they read about the constituent response system in the newspaper. Many of them had been named as participants even though they had never heard of the system - leading Calabria's officer corps to determine that Holloway had done only minimal work on the project.
In a recent interview Calabria explained why he became so upset with Holloway at the time.
"It is irresponsible to lie to the DTH," he said, "but even worse to lie to those you're working with and for."
Holloway says that his work on the system was an outgrowth of his work on Calabria's platform and that the DTH misrepresented the progress he'd made. It was "in-progress, ongoing stuff," he said, and Calabria's officers didn't seem to understand that.
"Their questioning quickly turned into interrogation of my motives," Holloway said. "It made me uncomfortable."
That night, Calabria told Holloway he would have to resign unless he owned up to his behavior and changed some of what Calabria said were his negative habits - including taking credit for others' actions, neglecting Student Code updates, being dishonest toward others and unlocking the doors to officers' offices.
It was a unanimous choice among the officers.
Holloway stepped down Sept. 20. He says Calabria didn't talk to him about his complaints before asking him to step down.
"I didn't do anything wrong," he said.
"But it wouldn't have been worth it to sit there and work with four people who didn't want to work with me."
Lingering questions
Those four people - Calabria, Student Body Vice President Alexa Kleysteuber, Chief of Staff Tre Jones and Treasurer Natalie Russell - were more than happy to work with Allred.
"I'm not usually the type who's going to park the proverbial car in the Pit," Allred said, comparing himself with Holloway. (Former Student Body President Justin Young once parked a car in the Pit to protest what he thought were unfair student parking policies.)
But the degree to which Allred has acted for himself has come under question. During campaign forums questioners have asked Allred about his relationship with his father, Steve, UNC's executive associate provost. And Holloway suggested in an interview that James Allred's unwillingness to push buttons helped him in the secretary post.
Allred says he's willing to stand up to his father on issues ranging from tuition to funding for the C-START student-teaching program.
"I've never had a problem critiquing my father," he said, adding that the two have learned to separate their work life from their family life. When the Calabria administration prepared its presentation to the Board of Trustees last year opposing the administration's tuition plan, Allred said, that pitted him directly against his father, who helped to defend that plan.
There are also questions about how much Calabria's friends, including Allred, knew about Holloway's resignation - and how much they kept quiet.
Allred told the DTH that when he applied for the secretary position, he thought Holloway had resigned for personal reasons.
It wasn't until later, he said, that he came to know that Holloway had been asked to step down. Even now, Allred said, he doesn't know most of the details.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I really don't know almost anything," he said.
The other people who got an interview for the secretary post - DTH columnist Ginny Franks, Student Congress Rep. Anisa Mohanty and Brian Phelps - knew Holloway had been asked to resign, but they weren't sure about the details, Mohanty said. She also confirmed that Allred didn't know what had happened until after he took office.
Two people close to the Calabria administration at the time suggested that it's highly unlikely that Allred didn't know what had happened, but both Mohanty and Allred said that's not the case.
Mohanty saw no need to tell Allred what had happened, she said, because she ran in the same circle of friends as him and thought he would find out what had happened.
Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.
(10/11/05 4:00am)
Like any good Catholic, I'll begin this column with a confession: I once thought about going to Duke.
(09/15/05 4:00am)
Might as well get to the point: I fired Jillian Bandes yesterday.
(01/11/05 5:00am)
RALEIGH, March 4 — U.S. Sen. John Edwards ended his bid for the presidency Wednesday, returning to his home state to make his final speech as a Democratic candidate for the White House.
(01/11/05 5:00am)
July 8 — Sen. John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate Tuesday, calling on the Southern populist in hopes that his small-town demeanor and skill on the stump will invigorate Kerry’s bid for the White House.