Championship goes swimmingly
All eyes may have been on the fortunes of the UA men’s basketball team this week, which concluded its season with a disappointing first-round loss to West Virginia in the NCAA tournament, but elsewhere Wildcat women were winning a national championship. Saturday, the UA women’s swimming team dominated the competition to win the first-ever national title for a UA swimming squad. After several close seasons – finishing second in the NCAA last year and third the two years before – the championship is all the sweeter. Coach Frank Busch and his hardworking team have earned a Pass.
Pennington-McQuitter
Petty resignations are a time-honored tradition in student government, but this year’s crop of ASUA officials did an excellent job avoiding entanglement in too much political intrigue – until this week, at least. Yesterday the Wildcat reported on the resignation of ASUA Senator James Pennington-McQueen, who cleared out his desk and submitted a letter of resignation after disappointing results in this year’s student government elections, saying his departure came because he was “”fed up with the incompetence of the people”” in ASUA. Pennington-McQueen has plenty of valid criticisms regarding the way student government works, but resigning this late in the school year is an immature move that won’t solve any of the frustrations that drove him away from ASUA. His callow quit gets a Fail.
Window pain
When police arrested two men in December for sitting outside UA’s new College of Architecture building and firing at its glass facade with air pistols, it seemed to be the end of an annoying wave of vandalism that left 37 glass panels damaged or shattered. But after a three-month break, the juvenile vandals are at it again. Another four windows were found broken March 9, continuing the costly caper. Although students often study in the building at all hours, pellets haven’t yet penetrated the second pane of the double-paned glass used in the building, so nobody’s been harmed. But the stupid shootings have a high price: Each windowpane costs about $3000 to replace. Vandalizing the Architecture building isn’t harmless fun – it endangers students and wastes money that ought to be used for more pressing needs. The perpetrators of the latest round of pellet pranks deserve a Fail.
Big Brother is watching YouTube
Popular video-sharing site YouTube announced March 19 that it has added a new, free feature to the site called YouTube Insight, which allows video makers to monitor the geographic locations where their videos are being watched, as well as their popularity over time. Though ostensibly a tool to help the creative geniuses who provide the site with its content, the data is attractive to advertisers, too. In fact, Google, parent company of YouTube, touted the new service’s benefit to advertisers on its official blog, equating the new service with “”one of the world’s largest focus groups.”” Although YouTube’s commitment to giving site members more information can hardly be faulted, bored college students should be able to watch their viral videos in peace without fretting about some unseen executive taking notes on which TV spot for the latest Will Smith vehicle plays the best in the Southwest. The new service will have some value for users, but like everything online, it comes with a price: access for advertisers. That merits an Incomplete.
