Union Programming Board Helps Students Relax

This large inflatable was brought in by the Student Alumni Association as part of an event they hosted Wednesday with the Union Programming Board to help students relax through Dead Week. PHOTO: Eli J. Mapes

            The Union Programming Board at The University of Oklahoma held an event on the East Lawn of the Oklahoma Memorial Union on Wednesday to help students relax during their busiest week of the semester.

            UPB brought in Eskimo Sno to serve free snow cones. According to their online calendar, they aimed for students to, “come out for a study break”.

            The Student Alumni Association co-programmed the event with UPB, and was responsible for bringing in an inflatable bounce house.  Blessing Ikpa, a member of the SAA, said that she was hoping for a turnout of at least one hundred.

            But even as an event coordinator, Ikpa is dealing with stress, which is why the SAA decided to pitch in for the event. “I know for me, I’m cramming to get all my studying and papers done so I feel like it’s just like a nice stresser in between the day for everyone just to come out and get snow cones and to play on a bounce house, because you never really see bounce houses on college campuses so why not?” said Ikpa.

Other students also seemed to be finding the event enjoyable. ”I’ve just been stressed out with school because I’ve got like 4 finals and 3 presentations to do in the next 2 weeks and so I just think this is a really good stress relief because it can just kind of can take your mind off of it,” said Junior Hannah Homburg.

According to their website, the next event that UPB will be hosting is their BasketBall ShootOut on Thursday, May 1^st, where students can, “win some cool prizes by playing the Basketball Shootout game.”

University of Oklahoma Junior Hannah Homburg talks about the event held by the Union Programming Board and the Student Alumni Association, which was aimed to help students de-stress during Dead Week. VIDEO: Eli J. Mapes (TRT: :25)

Boyer Speaks of New Journalism Technology

Brian Boyer holds a question and answer session for journalism students in the Hall of Fame Room of Gaylord Hall. PHOTO: Eli J. Mapes

     Technologist turned journalist Brian Boyer was open to questions from journalism students before a lecture he was giving at Gaylord Hall concerning some of his projects.

     Boyer, whose website shows him as having worked for ProPublica, the Chicago Tribune, and now National Public Radio, spoke about how he uses data in order to enhance his journalistic abilities. He cited many of his own projects, but highlighted a search engine called Panda.

     Boyer explained how Cook County, where Chicago lies, has a website where a journalist could go and find any warrant they needed, but only by last name. This renders the site almost useless, because unless they journalist knows the name of the person, is it nearly impossible to find the warrant. Journalists often need the reverse of this, because they will often use the warrant to get the name of the person in order to determine the newsworthiness of a story.

     Boyer says there is no way to see the warrants in chronological order, so he developed Panda, which uses code to go into this data base and rip the information and rearrange it in a more useful way on its own website. On the new website, you can search keywords to find crime data, or even just see all the warrants in chronological order. He describes Panda as, “sort of like a Wiki or an internal website for newsrooms to store data and share it amongst themselves.”

     The journalism students had a positive response to the self-acclaimed hacker journalist’s visit. One student claimed his work is “very cool”, and went on to say how nice it is to see a new angle on journalism.

NPR journalist Brian Boyer responds to a question from Tyler Jones about using “hacking” as a method of journalism by explaining the PANDA software, which helps Chicago journalists sift through crime data more efficiently. VIDEO: Eli J. Mapes (TRT: 1:35)

Drumline Section Leader Pushes Through Season

Eli J. Mapes

When The Pride of Oklahoma, The University of Oklahoma’s marching band, changed directors last season, it created a lot of media attention as alumni and students were not happy with the new director’s performance. This placed a lot of stress on The Pride’s leadership team, including Kyle Davey from the drumline.

Still today, articles from the OU Daily can be found on their website speaking of different sections within the band having different responses. For example, the tuba section completely boycotted a practice. Along with these articles, there are some other articles calling out President Boren for allowing the hire to happen. Even with all these articles, you never really heard anything about Davey’s drumline.

Although he did not believe it was the correct way to go, Davey said it got to the point within the band that they were speaking of overthrowing the band’s new leadership. Davey says that he felt that leading by example was the easiest way to get his section through the season, so he just tried to block out all the negative attention and focus on playing.

A member of his section, Hannah Dennis, noted his leadership throughout the season, as well as the entire leadership team. She says Kyle, “always did a good job keeping us motivated to focus on our music and producing the best show we could for the football game that week.”

Although many students are saying that they are now done marching with Pride as a result of last season’s drama, the new director, Justin Stolarik, is expected to stay at OU.

Drumline section leader Kyle Davey speaks about how he chose to deal with the change in the band’s leadership and how it affected him as a student. VIDEO: Eli J. Mapes (TRT: 1 minute)