Author: Madison Day

By Madison Day | Digital Managing EditorThink about 10 or 15 years ago when you were a kid eating dinner with your family. No one was on a smartphone scrolling through their Instagram feed; no one had their phones on the table waiting for a text to come in. It was just you, your family and the food — yum. However, now anytime you’re out for a meal, waiting in line for coffee or just relaxing with your roommates, it’s hard to imagine those scenes without your phone in them.We are constantly with our devices, and it is pretty much…

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By Madison Day | Digital Managing Editor Being between three major cities in Texas by only about 90 miles each direction has its advantages for Baylor students. Whether it’s heading down to Austin to rent a kayak on Lady Bird Lake or heading up to Fort Worth to catch a country concert at Billy Bob’s, the possibilities are endless. Many students, including Houston junior Meredith Cagley, enjoy going to Austin. “I love heading down to Austin for the weekend or even for just a day trip,” Cagley said. “I typically like to go to Zilker Park or South Congress for…

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By Preston Gossett | Contributor Six thousand tweets are posted each second, according to the Worldometers’ RTS algorithm. Upwards of 500 million tweets are posted each day, yet it’s only a select few users that dominate Twitter and other social media platforms. This begs the question: Whose voices are represented across Twitter? Breaking news, music releases, sports content and presidential nominee announcements are all included on Twitter, an interactive social media platform many turn to for information on daily events. A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that 80% of Twitter’s content comes from only 10% of its…

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Isabel Hamburger | Contributor As the year comes to close, Baylor students are looking back at their achievements on campus but also in Waco. In particular, the university estimates that students have donated more than 150,000 hours a year to volunteering and helping with local community service.Milford, Ill., junior Monica Van Hoveln has spent almost every school day this year bouncing between the after-school program at Indian Springs Middle School, Freedom City Football Club, the ACE Program at G.W. Carver Middle School and the Waco Family Abuse Center.“Helping other people makes you feel good about yourself,” Van Hoveln said. “It…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News EditorSooner or later, we will be graduating, getting jobs and moving to new cities. There are many great cities in the state of Texas and the rest of the country, but none truly compare to the glory of Austin. As is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country right now and the top city to live in the United States, according to U.S. News & World Report, the job opportunities and activities are endless. Austin is chock-full of beautiful outdoor sites and yummy taco places and is not named the live music capital…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News EditorMarch 1, 2015 — the day that changed it all. This is the day all 236 episodes of Friends were made available on Netflix, which ultimately sparked a cultural phenomenon in our generation. Friends first aired in 1994 and ended in 2004, a time when we were just wee little ones roaming around the playground carrying our beanie babies or sitting on the couch playing leap frog. Along with “Seinfeld,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and other ‘90s classics, these shows were iconic in their time and many, in particular Friends, have plausibly remained…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News Editor Poetry, Wind, Depth — these are the three words local abstract, impressionist artist Ty Nathan Clark might use to describe his artwork. Born in Sacramento, Calif., Clark moved to Texas 19 years ago with his wife, a Texas native. They lived in Austin for several years before moving to Waco about two years ago. “As a working artist it’s a little difficult to be in the middle of nowhere — art wise at least,” Clark said. “But what also drew us to Waco was the fact there’s a university here. There are always…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News EditorMany local Wacoans and Baylor students alike often moan and groan about Magnolia Market, it’s overpriced goods and the traffic it has brought to downtown Waco. However, Magnolia seems to bring more good than harm to the Waco community. For starters, it has brought a wealth of economic growth to city of Waco. Yes, the tourism can be a bother at times, but those 2.6 million people that visited Magnolia this past year also help the Waco economy greatly. It gives the town more exposure, and often the tourists trickle over to other local…

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Madison Day | Assistant News EditorStuck in the top of 10-foot-tall trees in France after a minor paragliding crash, Diana Castillo watches the sun meet the horizon as hues of peach and rose dilute the sky. Although not her intended destination, Castillo had a front row seat to the most beautiful sunset. Diana Castillo shared this story with the Analog Waco audience at their first event, titled “Lost in Waco,” and attended each meeting since. Analog Waco is a confessional storytelling event — each event driven by a certain theme. The idea behind this storytelling group is to be open,…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News EditorOn our planet, there are more than 326 million trillion gallons of water. Of those gallons, less than 3 percent is fresh water that humans can drink, and about two-thirds of that percentage are within glaciers and ice caps, according to WWF Global. Here in America and in many other industrialized nations around the world, we do not think about our water usage very much — you go to the sink, turn on the faucet and get a nice, cold, clean glass of water. It’s so easy and second nature for us that often…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News Editor Baylor’s Title IX staff has expressed concern over the past several years about the lack of a centralized case management database for reports that come into their office, according to the verification report from the Big 12 Conference Board of Directors that was released on Oct. 30. Currently, Baylor’s Title IX office uses shared drives, Excel tracking and the online platform Symplicity to organize their case information. With these separate platforms, the report found that it is difficult to easily document all of the information without duplication. Mark Mastin, Baylor’s senior director of…

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CORRECTION: In regards to the first sentence of this article, we would like to clarify that we mean to say “In statewide elections for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General and State Representative for District 56, all current representatives return to their seats for another term.”In statewide elections, all representatives return to their seats for another term. The blue wave seemed to miss Texas as major positions remained Republican.GovernorGov. Greg Abbott was re-elected for a second term as governor of Texas. Abbott won 56.2 percent of the votes, beating Valdez by 14.1 percent. Abbott won the majority in McLennan County with…

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Distinguished professor of neuroscience, psychology and biomedical studies and the graduate program director of the department, Dr. Jim H. Patton died Wednesday night in his home. Dr. Patton joined the Baylor faculty in 1980 and greatly influenced both his students and colleagues in his time at Baylor. Houston sophomore Meredith Cagley was in Patton’s Introduction to Neuroscience class last spring and considers it an honor to have had him as a professor. “Dr. Patton was a great professor because you could tell he was very intelligent and passionate on the topic, but at the same time he would always make…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News EditorOver the past few years, the political divide in our country has grown exponentially wider, and we have allowed people’s party affiliations to define their entire persona. When people hear someone is liberal or conservative, they tend to make snap judgements and attach the stereotypical image of that party to the individual.The political climate in our country has become so heated and so polarized that party labels have taken on a whole new meaning — it’s not just about your base political opinions anymore, it now determines what kind of person you are.Political parties…

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By Madison Day | Assistant News Editor A significant amount of waste produced in our country is organic material that could be composted. Composting is a natural way of decomposing and recycling waste back into the earth. With the recent approval for another landfill near Axtell, if Baylor implemented composting on its campus, waste could significantly be reduced both on campus and in the McLennan County community. Dr. Melinda Coogan, Baylor environmental science professor, says an integration of composting into Baylor’s sustainability efforts could truly have a large impact. “So, on the large scale, that is where we get into…

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