Opinion

The Student Services Referendum, better known as “My Student Life Initiative” was created in order to improve the quality of student life funding at UC Irvine due to the recent budget cuts. Many students are concerned with cutbacks, particularly in regards to ASUCI services such as concerts, university leadership conference, Anteater Awards, Greek life, club funding through the Student Programming Funding Board (SPFB), Martin Luther King symposium, speaker series and teacher luncheons.

For those of you who do not know, ASUCI elections are this week. That means that, once again, you will be asked, begged and, in some slate’s cases, bribed, into voting for this year’s candidates. Personally, I had high hopes when I started interviewing the good men and women who were running for office. Unfortunately, it did not take long before I realized that most of them were just as terrible as the politicians I elect in Washington.

Apple has been in the media spotlight a lot recently, but not for the debut of the new iPad or rumors of the next big product offering from the multinational tech giant. Two weeks ago, the Fair Labor Association, an industry watchdog group, released the findings of their investigation into the working conditions at the Foxconn factories in China, Apple’s largest supplier, finding widespread overtime compensation problems, as well as safety and health concerns. During peak operation the average employee worked more than 60 hours, and in some cases seven days a week. Of the 35,000 randomly selected employees surveyed by the FLA, 43 percent said that they had experienced or witnessed an accident.

For decades, victim advocacy groups have been demanding a broader definition of rape so that more sexual assault victims can also be considered rape victims. In the past few years, their demands have been backed up and heeded by prominent leaders like Vice President Joe Biden, which has resulted in the modernization of the definition of rape.

“What are you going to do with that degree?” This is the question I hear most often and instantaneously when I tell people I am a women’s studies major. Because in the eyes of many, the purpose of going to college is to prepare for a financially lucrative career.

Vladimir Putin has reared his ugly head yet again, not that it really ever went astray. His presence always loomed over current President Dmitri Medvedev, and it has been highly speculated that Putin never stopped calling the shots.

ASUCI elections occupy a liminal space between the rosy, naive popularity contests of pre-collegiate elections and the post-academic politics that some of our representatives are sure to follow after they leave UC Irvine. What we can easily forget sometimes, getting handouts on Ring Road and being told by our friends to sway votes in a certain direction, is that these aren’t simply popularity contests, and that we as a student body need to take the elections as seriously as possible. This isn’t just the job of the candidates themselves, but our duty as voters to take the political future of UCI as seriously as we can.

Oh, don’t mind me. In fact, you can ignore this column; I was just checking to see if you could actually read. Because if you’re one of the truly “gifted” individuals who grabbed a copy of New University this week, I can’t imagine you possess the capability to process the complex intricacies of the English language. But I digress.

I don’t know what Mr. Ryan “I don’t like anyone” Cady is talking about. I think that the readers of the New University are some of the smartest people I know. Really. Besides the fact that all of my knowledge of them is from comments and emails, I really think I know my audience. And they are smart, indeed! I mean, everything from their brilliant critiques, to their wonderful suggestions to their impeccable grammar, I have nothing but nice things to say about my fellow lovers of the paper.

On Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was found dead in an Orlando, FL suburb. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, claims to have shot him in self-defense after a 911 call in which he reported Martin as being suspicious and was advised not to pursue the youth.

We have all been warned to keep our social networking profiles clean from any incriminating evidence. But even the strongest of privacy settings may not be able to protect you from employer’s newest strategy: directly asking for the login information.

The safeguards we set on our Facebook profiles to prevent unwanted eyes from viewing them will cease to protect our profiles from potential employers. Recently, employers have insisted on having unrestricted access to the Facebook profiles of potential employees in order to gain a more comprehensive view on the candidates. The use of social network profiling is increasing in practice with more companies demanding either the applicant’s password or having a human resources “shoulder surf” his or her profile without any privacy settings during the interview.