The first pre-election debate in several years is scheduled for May 14 and aims to spotlight candidates’ stances on key issues.

The event will take place at the 9/10 Multi-purpose Room at 8 p.m., and will be televised on campus television on SCTV channel 28.

As the official student government of UC Santa Cruz with an annual budget of over $400,000, SUA directly represents the undergraduate student body to on-campus administrators, the UC Student Association, the UC regents and the United States Student Association (USSA).

Despite a history of low voter turnout, SUA organizing director Kevin Huang is optimistic for next week’s election. This year, he hopes SUA can show students the importance of this year’s election through outreach.

“UCSC students are politically conscious,” Huang said. “It’s a matter of catching students’ attention so they can show they care.”

Historically, voter turnout has rarely surpassed 30 percent. During last year’s election, only 20.09 percent of the total student body voted.

Constitutional amendments require a quorum 20 percent of the undergraduate student body’s vote — but last year’s amendment votes tallied about 17 percent and none of the proposed amendments were allowed to pass.

Former chair of SUA and current president of USSA Tiffany Loftin said low voter turnout is chronic in many student government elections across the country, rarely surpassing 50 percent voter turnout per campus.

“Not enough students know about student government elections or where and how to vote,” Loftin said.

Plans to increase voter engagement are in the works, said SUA elections commissioner Kelly Herron.

“The elections commission is working really hard to publicize the voting period to encourage all students to vote,” said Herron, who has been focusing on outreach to freshman and students who live off campus. “We are using social media to try to reach out to them.”

Elections coordinator Lucy Rojas said current SUA members have also been working with UCSC faculty to boost voter participation regarding the proposed new fees.

“The campaign groups associated with the proposed fees each year do an amazing job in encouraging voter turnout, and many of the groups typically work together on outreach and advertising,” Rojas said. “Our office tries hard to provide regular communication with students during the elections season.”

Elections Past and Present

Last year, a mishap occurred when candidates’ applications were posted online for eight days instead of the required 14. This was discovered after voting had begun, invalidated all votes cast. The elections commissioner stepped down and Fairooz Faggouseh took over the position, who also stepped down soon after. A third and final elections commissioner then took over the position.
Afterwards, new candidates applied for representative positions and a remedial election took place.

Faggouseh said she thinks the organizational efforts of this year’s election will make all the difference in this election.

“The success of [this year’s] elections really depends on the amount of support that is available from advisors, SUA members and other students as well.”

The Future of Flyering

SUA recently ratified a ban on classroom flyering, effective next year — an often used outreach method in previous elections. Huang said the ban has been put in place in an effort to reduce waste on campus, but is concerned voter turnout may lessen when the new policy is implemented.

“There are 16,000 students on this campus,” Huang said. “There’s no way you’re going to reach [a significant percentage] of them without those flyers.”

Current SUA chair Nwadiuto (DT) Amajoyi said she sees the ban as an opportunity for methods of outreach to evolve.
“One thing for sure is that the banning of flyers will require all future candidates to get more creative in reaching out to the student body and also raising awareness of themselves as candidates,” Amajoyi said.

Former SUA chair Kalwis Lo said with or without flyers, it’s up to students to make change.

“Full time students are busy,” Lo said. “They need to realize that [by participating], they can make a difference as an individual.”

Illustration by Maren Slobody

Correction: The verb in the headline of this article “Empower” has been corrected from past to present tense.

Students from over 20 organizations on campus are coming together for a week of spreading human rights awareness on May 13–17.

Representatives from Legal Education Association for Diversity (LEAD), Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan, African Student Union, African Black Student Alliance and Sigma Lambda Beta — a multicultural fraternity on campus — are organizing and leading daily demonstrations and evening events concerned with current social issues that affect communities of color.

The week will consist of demonstrations in Quarry Plaza from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. regarding issues like racial profiling, the dangers of misrepresentation in the media, abuses in the workplace, the prison industrial complex, immigration and combating xenophobia.

“All our members have personal connections to these issues,” said a representative for LEAD and one of the principal organizers, second-year John Alcala. “These are humanitarian causes. Little is getting done to get people emotionally invested in these issues.”

The organizations and students involved in the planning look to raise visibility of social issues and to open lines of communication between ethnic and student organizations on campus. The committee of representatives, which includes ethnic resource centers, Rainbow Theatre, Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), Sin Barras and many other organizations look to encourage an interpersonal connection through poetry, testimonials, artistic expression and speakers to facilitate discussion during the evening events, to be held at on-campus locations.

“It’s about bringing communities together to show that we can work together in solidarity,” second-year Alfonso Quintero, a principle organizer. “We have to show each other that we are not alone and that we’re here for each other. We want to transform a bunch of individuals into a community.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

Stephen McCabe’s jeans are stained with earth — as the Arboretum’s director of development and research, he has spent the day preparing for the Arboretum’s annual plant sale on April 20.

“Some of the plants have even been imported from South Africa or Australia,” McCabe said. “[They] are just nothing like anything people have seen before.”

McCabe has been preparing to put over 2,000 plants from around the world on sale for an event he expects will draw a crowd of about 400.

“We have some people that have been so excited that they have driven from San Diego [and] Redding,” McCabe said. “There’s a couple that have driven down at least four times from the middle of Oregon for our plant [sale].”

However, while it seems nothing can stop these road-trippers, McCabe said he has been disappointed by low student turnout at the plant sale.

“We’d like more students to come here,” McCabe said.

Recent budget cuts to the arboretum have made the plant sale more important than ever, especially to help fund work-study students, McCabe said.

“It’s really a challenge to raise money every year but the plant sale is one of the ways we raise money,” McCabe said, “and some of that money goes to pay for our work-study students.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The student-led conservation project “Drop Your Own Drip” (DYOD) has been going strong since last year. A student competition that delivers water usage data to on-campus residents, DYOD offers prizes to apartments able to significantly reduce their consumption.

Third-year Sarah Angulo facilitates the project, which was created as part of the Education for Sustainable Living program. She said the project holds lasting attention of the school’s Student Environmental Center, receiving funding and support.

“UCSC has taken a lot of steps against waste in general but not enough emphasis has been put on saving water,” she said.

If UCSC is able to stand out against other universities in water conservation, the campus could see more funding for its sustainability efforts. Still, Angulo said, there are some big issues to tackle.

“Since the beginning [of DYOD], student water consumption has actually gone up,” Angulo said. “I don’t know why this is so but I hope this project raises awareness.”

DYOD could also affect the Long Range Development Plan, a long-debated plan to enroll more students and develop the currently forested upper campus.

“We have to practice better water conservation for this to happen,” Angulo said. “We want to use the exact same amount of water we’re using now but with thousands more people.”

While the future effect of DYOD on LRDP is not known, water conservation will always be important for California and the campus.

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

As UCSC continues to push toward “zero waste by 2020,” paper towels are now in the crosshairs of campus environmentalists. Beginning next year, Cowell College will no longer supply paper towels in the dorms or the apartments.

Cowell and Stevenson administrative officer Jim Carter said student awareness and involvement in conservation has been critical.

“[To be totally] sustainable by 2020 is ambitious, but it’s a good goal,” Carter said. “We want to do whatever we can to get as close to that goal as possible.”

Stevenson and Cowell coffee shops are moving away from paper products as well, as around 40 percent of landfill waste campus-wide is paper towels alone.

Last spring, Stevenson students proposed to replace paper towels with reusable personal hand towels. The switch was a success and the idea has been spreading across campus.

“Awareness about waste is growing and we’re trying to reduce waste wherever possible,” Carter said. “This includes cardboard corrals during move in, swap meets during move out,” and now the absence of paper towels throughout the whole year.

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

UCSC professor of physics Sue Carter has long fought to keep solar-generated sustainable energy a viable technology. Last month, Carter was elected chair of the American Physical Society’s Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications (GERA) — an organization focused on the safe generation, transmission and use of energy with a minimal impact upon the earth’s environment.

“While the cost of solar energy has been significantly lowered over the last few years,” Carter said, “one of the main remaining arguments against solar energy is that it takes up more land per energy produced than fossil-fuel technologies.”

Carter has been hard at work researching the possible use of solar panel crop covers. Ideally, the covers will promote plant growth, reduce water consumption and pesticide use and generate renewable electricity.

“The solutions to the world’s energy challenges are solvable,” Carter said.

Carter’s message to the campus generates its own energy.
“Believe in your abilities and be persistent in pursuing your goals,” Carter said. “It is okay, and even commendable, to focus on what you can do for society rather than what you want society to do for you.”

Don WILLIAMS describes Destination Higher Education, which introduces students to the UCSC community. Photo by Jessica Tran.

As 33 high school students pile out of buses into Cowell Circle, volunteers, interns and coordinators of Destination Higher Education (DHE) greet them with hugs and welcome signs. These students will spend their next three days immersed in UC Santa Cruz, courtesy of DHE, a Student Initiated Outreach program (SIO).

DHE introduces underprivileged high school students and potential transfer students from low-income communities to the benefits of a university environment. Held from April 11 to 13, the program offered introductory workshops ranging from financial aid to admissions guidelines and bonding activities for the students, each of whom has been accepted to UCSC for Fall Quarter 2013.

DHE is one of several SIO programs funded by Engaging Education, a UCSC student outreach and retention center. Other SIO programs include Oportunidades Rumbo A La Educación (ORALE) and A Step Forward (ASF), both of which collaborate with DHE.

Due to decreased funding and housing limitations, DHE has been forced to cut back on the number of students they take into the program, said DHE coordinator Jabari Brown.

“This year is about 33 participants, as opposed to other years there have been about 50, 60, 70,” Brown said.

This economic downturn is one share in the broad spectrum of programs affected by budget cuts, said director of admissions Michael McCawley.

“Budget cuts have affected all of us,” McCawley said. It is part of the landscape that we’re all dealing with.”

Chancellor Blumenthal helps fund DHE — he meets each dollar raised for DHE with $1.25 — but DHE would like to see permanent funding granted, said Fithawi Kudus, coordinator for DHE and UCSC fourth-year. For now, McCawley said the key to sustaining SIO programs is learning to stretch the dollar in different ways and seeking alternative methods to deliver the same content.

Despite these funding limitations, for Kudus, the mission of the weekend could still be made a reality.

“The goal for me is a 100 percent yield rate. Every student that we bring up on this program can walk away saying, ‘There’s no way that I’m not going to UC Santa Cruz,’” Kudus said.

For Amari Williams, DHE intern and first-year, DHE was crucial in deciding which university to attend.

“If it wasn’t for that program or the program we’re doing here,” Amari Williams said, “I wouldn’t have come here.”

Throughout the program, the students also learned about key campus figures and organizations. Chancellor Blumenthal and director of Rainbow Theater Don Williams were key speakers at the opening and closing events. DHE students also had the opportunity to participate in breakout events, where they met with organizations such as the African Student Union and ethnic fraternities and sororities. DHE intern Shiku Muhire said part of these events’ purpose was to allow participants to engage with African-American and other communities DHE students can participate in if they choose to attend UCSC.

“[The groups give] students a little better perspective about what their own community will look like when they step foot on campus,” Muhire said.

Since its founding about 15 years ago by UCSC graduate Keith Curry, DHE has been committed to welcoming and encouraging voices that are often unheard on college campuses, Amari Williams said. Curry offers one of these DHE members a $2,000 scholarship following attendance of the program each year.

While DHE primarily focuses on black high school students, this year the program encouraged participation from a greater range of ethnic groups from underprivileged communities, Amari Williams said.

“It’s about not just thinking they’re stuck in this one program or one community,” she said. “We want to let them know everyone has their certain struggles, but at the end of the day we’re all the same.”

This year, ORALE, which focuses on Latino and Latina UCSC students, and ASF, which is geared toward new Filipino UCSC students, hosted their outreach programs April 11–13. These programs came together with DHE several times during the weekend to host collaborative events, said DHE coordinator Jabari Brown.

“The great thing about DHE is that it’s not a program alone in its mission to bring diversity to this campus,” said Fiwathi Kudus, DHE coordinator.

Continual support for students who decide to attend UCSC in the fall is crucial, Kudus said. Mentoring and tutoring are essential to easing first-years who haven’t traditionally had as much support as other students into the college environment.

“While this is an outreach program and we show them the vision here on the UCSC campus for the students,” Kudus said, “it’s also about having the retention programs and maintaining these programs, keeping them alive and going and spreading the knowledge.”

Amari Williams would like to see changes with the program in coming years, mainly concerning the degree of campus participation in DHE.

“I would like to see more people reaching out toward the program,” she said, “Not just us reaching out to them, but them trying to help us out because that’s actually what makes the students want to be here.”

Speakers David Talbot and Hector Tobar discuss their experiences working in media and where they think it is headed. Photo by Daniel Green.

Two UC Santa Cruz alumni recently spoke about being involved in two media worlds: a mainstream and a progressive, a digital and a print, a formulaic and a free.

In “Transforming Medi(a)ocrity,” an event held on April 12 sponsored by UCSC’s SOAR/Student Media/Cultural Arts and Diversity center, students, members of student media and faculty had the opportunity to discuss ongoing and contemporary media issues with alumni Héctor Tobar and David Talbot.

David Talbot and Héctor Tobar both wrote for local publications while attending UCSC — TWANAS for Tobar and an underground paper for Talbot — and went on to do groundbreaking work in the media.

As founder of Salon.com, Talbot stressed the need for more than “one-dimensional” media and invoked UCSC students’ ability to rethink what’s possible. Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said that no pressure — to meet a deadline, to appeal to the online community’s hyper-short attention span, to tell the story people want to hear — can compare to the voice inside that urges media makers to get the story that resonates beyond pomp and circumstance.

The atmosphere was focused, the discussion fruitful.

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

Earlier this month, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees chapter 3299 (AFSCME 3299) released a report entitled “A Question of Priorities,” which decried understaffing at several UC medical centers.

With over 22,000 members — including cooks, custodians, medical center workers and many more — AFSCME  3299 has long contested issues of worker treatment within the UC. Numerous UC medical center workers’ testimonies in April’s whistleblower report have said UC medical center staff cuts and overworking policies have become a dangerous trend.

Recently, according to the report, inadequate staffing at some UC medical centers has put patients in immediate jeopardy. At UC Irvine and UC San Francisco medical centers, some patients endured pressure sores from staying in one position too long, because medical center staff were stretched too thin. According to the report, the California Department of Health has cited UCI’s medical center for pressure sores on nine separate occasions within the last three years.

Todd Stenhouse, communications director for the local 3299 branch of AFSCME, said the UC medical centers’ decisions have resulted in insufficient care for patients.

“Accountability is the biggest part of this. We call for things like enforceable staffing standards within the UC system,” Stenhouse said. “[When] you go to the hospital, your grandma goes to the hospital or your friend goes, you want to make sure that the frontline care is adequately resourced, and that’s a function of budget priorities. There’s no such thing as cutting corners in a healthcare delivery system.”

In 2012, The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) reported that the revenue from the UCSF and UCLA medical centers increased by 16 percent in a three-year period. UC San Francisco medical center will be cutting 300 hospital positions this year. Deputy director of public affairs at UCSF Karin Rush-Monroe said the UC medical centers are not unique in financial woes and national health care reform has added new pressures.

“One of the primary mandates arising from health care reform is to advance the quality and safety of patient care, but at lower costs. Hospitals across the country are facing these pressures and UCSF Medical Center is no exception,” said Rush-Monroe in an e-mail.

President of the local 3299 branch of AFSCME, Kathryn Lybarger, said the UC has hired temporary workers in an effort to fill vacant spaces while increasing or maintaining revenue.

“Our folks are people who have gotten training in order to spend their work lives taking care of patients,” Lybarger said. “Increasingly what we’re seeing is that they’re filling what used to be full-time, career positions with folks who work for temporary organizations. Oftentimes these are new graduates who come with very little training.”

Amid budget and staff cuts, UCSF is planning to build a new medical center in the Mission Bay section of San Francisco to “meet unfunded state-mandated seismic requirements as well as to expand UCSF’s patient access,” Rush-Monroe said. She said UCSF is trying to combat the cuts in a number of ways.

“We plan to diversify and expand our revenue sources, use our new electronic  medical record to improve the quality of our documentation of care, improve the safety and efficiency of our care processes and aggressively negotiate with drug and supply manufacturers,” Rush-Monroe said. “However, more than half of our expenses are for our employees and we must also address these costs.”

The University Professional & Technical Employees union (UPTE) also works closely with the California Nurses Association and AFSCME to protect medical workers across the UC.

Secretary and interim president of UPTE for Local-3 UCSC, Phil Johnston, said understaffing is a university-wide issue. As a tech worker at UCSC, Johnston said he and his three coworkers currently carry out the expected workload of five or six employees.

“I know what it was like when the university had the funding they needed to execute their mission to the degree that they need to,” Johnston said. “Unfortunately, for the past 30 years, the funding has been gutted and it’s like death by a thousand cuts, literally. Budget cuts in this case.”

According to various media outlets, a California Highway Patrol news release said Molly Armanino, 19, lost control of the Mazda she was driving on the southbound lanes of the highway. The car hit a bridge railing and rolled over onto a service road on the side of the highway.

Armanino and a third passenger were able to exit the vehicle and attempted to get help from passing commuters. Both had sustained moderate  injuries and were sent to Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo for care.

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

To detect a supermassive black hole, astrophysicists need a supermassive computer. With the use of supercomputer simulations, two UC Santa Cruz astrophysicists discovered that up to 2,000 black holes may inhabit the halo of dark matter that surrounds the Milky Way.

“This is not paper and pencils,” said Piero Madau, a UCSC astrophysicist who worked on the project. “This is state of the art, fancy stuff.”

Valery Rashkov, an astrophysics graduate student, conducted the black hole research. He submitted a paper about the study on March 15 to Astrophysical Journal — the foremost international astrophysics research journal — where it is currently undergoing the peer review process.

To find the black holes in the galaxy, Rashkov and his mentor Madau added black holes to the supercomputer simulation Via Lactea 2 (VL-2) ­— a simulation originally created in 2007 by a team of UCSC astrophysicists using the supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“We used a trick to add black holes to the original simulation,” said Madau, who was part of the VL-2 research team. “That trick allowed us to find a solution to the problem without rerunning the simulation from scratch.”

Like a film of a multi-billion year exodus, the simulation uses glowing spots of ochre against a black screen to represent smaller patches of dark matter, a mysterious particle that dictates the formation of cosmic structure. It simulates how these smaller patches came together to form the larger dark matter structure in the Milky Way today.

Halos of dark matter envelop known galaxies, Madau said. By following the movement of these halos of dark matter in VL-2, astronomers were able to follow the movement of the galaxies the dark matter enveloped. Like the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, these smaller galaxies may host black holes too.

“If you believe that each of these smaller galaxies have a black hole at its center, when they fall in to form the Milky Way, these black holes won’t go away,” Rashkov said.

Adding black holes to these dark matter halos enabled Rashkov to observe how black holes may have merged with one another in the formation of the galaxy. Black holes are extremely dense, which means they have an immense gravitational pull. When they come in close proximity to one another, they gravitationally suck one another in and merge. When two black holes of different masses merge, the asymmetrical factors cause an excess of velocity in one direction, or, what Rashkov calls a “kick.”

“If that kick is very large, it could actually remove [the black hole] from the Milky Way,” Rashkov explained.

Projected distribution of black holes in the Milky Way’s galactic halo. Photo courtesy of Valery Rashkov.

Through studying these kicks, astronomers found destinations in the Milky Way’s outer dark matter halo of where each black hole was “kicked.” Rashkov’s results showed that up to 2,000 black holes may reside in and around the galaxy.

“We used to think about black holes and galaxies as systems that are isolated. There’s a galaxy and there’s a supermassive black hole at its center,” Madau said. “Supermassive black holes in galaxies are not supposed to be isolated. They’re supposed to be surrounded by a family of black holes that are just like them.”

Astronomers will be able to test these models as observation and simulation technologies improve. When this happens, these studies will potentially elucidate the channels of formation of black holes that inhabit the Milky Way — processes that are currently a mystery, Rashkov said.

“That would really be the cool implication,” Rashkov said. “We would finally pin down in what kind of parent, what kind of dwarf dark matter halos [the black holes] formed.”

Ronan the sea lion gained internet fame for her ability to follow a beat. Photo courtesy of brendan wakefield, Pinnipedlab.ucsc.edu NMFS Permit 14535

Everyone moves to the beat of their own drum. For Ronan the sea lion, this beat includes the Backstreet Boys.

Ronan, who currently resides at the Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory at the Long Marine Laboratory, can nod her head to the beat of a song. This contests scientists’ previous conception that only humans and birds have rhythmic capabilities, said Peter Cook, a graduate psychology student at UC Santa Cruz who works with Ronan.

“For a long time people thought that only humans can move to a beat and dance,” said Andrew Rouse, Cook’s partner in the study and a graduate of UCSC’s biology program, “Within the last five years we have seen that this is not true … we just haven’t asked the question in the right way.”

Ronan’s dance moves have gone viral — a video of Ronan dancing, recorded by the Pinniped Laboratory, has reached over 1 million views on YouTube.

The paper on the study, written by Cook, Rouse, Margaret Wilson and Colleen Reichmuth, was published online in the Journal of Comparative Psychology at the beginning of April. It details the experiments Ronan participated from April to August of 2012. The results primarily focus on the number of Ronan’s head bobs in direct correlation with the different complex beats and tempos in the music. The authors conclude that these results may go against the theory of vocal mimicry, which suggests that animals capable of repeating spoken phrases also possess beat keeping abilities.

“There was a theory that only animals who were vocally flexible could do it,” Rouse said, “but no one had actually tested an animal that wasn’t vocally flexible.”

Cook and Rouse introduced Ronan to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Down on the Corner,” a classic American folk song. Ronan didn’t take to this song, Cook said, instead turning her ears to the pop genre. She became a particular fan of the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody,” to which she dances in the YouTube video.

Cook said the three month process of attuning Ronan to the music started as a fun side project but quickly grew into something much more noteworthy than just another cute animal video. Ronan was the perfect candidate for this study, Cook said, because of her young and extremely enthusiastic energy, her attentiveness and willingness to participate.

Ronan came to the Long Marine Lab after she was found in the wild, unable to survive on her own. Ronan was released three times into the ocean but returned each time in poor health, said Colleen Reichmuth, animal behaviorist and head of the Pinniped Laboratory. After the third time, the Pinniped Lab chose to adopt Ronan rather than send her to a zoo or any other form of captivity.

“We’ve felt really fortunate that Ronan has joined our team,” Reichmuth said.

Peter Cook works with Ronan the sea lion on some basic husbandry behaviors that are used in daily health examinations and in training experimental research behaviors. Photo courtesy of brendan wakefield, Pinnipedlab.ucsc.edu NMFS Permit 14535

Rouse said they wanted to compare Ronan’s dance moves to Snowball the dancing cockatoo, another animal with dancing abilities to have gained popularity on the web. Unlike humans, birds such as Snowball were formerly believed to be able to keep a beat due to their vocal mimicry skills. Ronan, a sea lion with no vocal mimicry skills, suggests otherwise.

Cook said vocal mimicry may aid the spontaneity of the process, yet enough training and time may possibly produce similar results. As a sea lion, Ronan already possesses a natural ease of head movement, so bobbing and moving afforded little difficulty. After she found the beat, she just kept getting better, Cook said.

Rouse said that Ronan is a prime example of his ever-evolving understanding of animals, which constantly challenges what we know as a standard normative.

“A large part of it is that people tend to underestimate what animals can do,” Rouse said.

There remains a great deal of unknown in Ronan’s rhythmic capabilities, but these questions and inquiries drive the scientists to do more research, Rouse said. He hopes to expand Ronan’s ability to deal with more complex beats and, in light of her partiality to move to the pop genre, look further into her music preference.

“We’re discussing maybe looking how she may do with a complex form, or not done in standard time,” Rouse said.

Ronan’s ability was something thought to be impossible, Rouse said, and not only does this change the way we view rhythmic capabilities in sea lions, but animals such as dogs and horses as well. With training specific to their style of learning, Rouse said that other animals may be able to pick up a beat just as Ronan had.

Cook and Rouse both said that they look forward to training Ronan further to expand her rhythmic capabilities.

Ronan the sea lion and Peter Cook worked on attuning to music for three months. Photo courtesy of brendan wakefield, Pinnipedlab.ucsc.edu NMFS Permit 14535

“Can [sea lions] do jazz?” Cook said, “A lot of humans can’t even do that.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

UC Santa Cruz fourth-year Wesley Goto has more on his mind than senioritis. The Porter community assistant (CA) has been hard at work designing the Asian-American cultural festival, a “dream project” for the graduating student.

The festival, which will take place in the Porter breezeway from 1–5 p.m. on April 14, will showcase a broader definition of Asian culture with the aim of dispelling stereotypes.

“The Asian Cultural Festival is a big celebration of Asian culture,” Goto said. “I’m not talking about the stereotypical Chinese, Korean, Japanese. We’re trying to pull in a little bit of everything. This is a celebration of true culture — not just [a] play on stereotypes.”

The event will consist of many booths where patrons can learn about many Asian cultures in a fun and interactive way. At Goto’s booth, for instance, he and his team will teach the history and mythology behind the nearly 400 year-old art of origami.

“The festival will host different booths at which students will make crafts while learning about Asian culture,” Goto said. “Each station will be fun, but will also carry with it a historical lesson or something to take away.”

Goto said he hopes the event has a lasting effect on the student body.

“Stereotypes don’t reveal the true fundamentals of culture,” Goto said. “The biggest thing I see with the stereotyping of individuals is that you don’t really know what’s really there,  the core fundamentals of the culture.”

Goto said education should not be  restricted to classrooms and hopes that the event’s outdoor location will draw a diverse crowd of passersby.

“Living on campus … your education is primarily in the classroom,” Goto said. “Our job is to educate beyond the classroom, in a non-traditional way.”

Fellow Porter CA Halan Guedi has invited local artists to showcase their Asian culture-inspired work in art installations, which will be located in the I-Lounge at Porter College.

Porter CA and assistant planner Victoria Anderson said the event will be a “big festival”.

“It’s a celebration of history, tradition, culture,” Anderson said. “We’re here to educate, [but also to] just have fun!”

How will the group measure the success of the event?

“Success means that they are walking away with something that they didn’t know before and they learned it in a fun way,” Goto said. “The biggest thing that I am trying to push is appreciation for things that you don’t necessarily identify with.”

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The way we store and access data in the modern world is changing, now more than ever. To keep up with the times researchers at UC Santa Cruz have spent years trying to find a place just to fit it all.

After over a decade of research into data storage, UCSC will soon open the new Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS) with collaboration and financial support from some of the information industry’s biggest names.

Darrell Long, a UCSC professor of computer science and a storage systems researcher, said there is an enormous amount of data out there — “big data,” as he referred to it — that is constantly being saved in huge quantities. Without a comprehensive filtering method, going back to find old files will be difficult, he said.

“We keep accumulating data — so much that it can easily get lost in space,” Long said. “We want to make it easier to find it.”

For years, the Storage Systems Research Center, which is part of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, has analyzed a wide array of data storage topics. The new CRSS however has the backing of the National Science Foundation — arming UCSC researchers with an increased arsenal of tools. The CRSS also has over a dozen sponsors from major tech companies, including Hitachi, Intel, HP, IBM, Samsung and SanDisk. Altogether, the CRSS has a $465,000 annual budget at its disposal.

Graduate student Ian Adams said UCSC’s research has kept sponsors interested, and the program funded. He added that graduate students involved in the program were seeing “no shortage of job offers.”

“A lot of us are leaving soon, so all of these projects could use more help,” Adams said.

Adams said he is excited by the recent access to a research project concerning genomic data alongside Hitachi and UCSF.

“There are a lot of different projects going on at the same time, so all of us are kind of working on different things,” Li said.

Professor Long said he hopes to preserve the format of current files as the days of our lives integrate with a digital environment.

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

Some theatrical seasons are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. The 2013 summer lineup recently announced by Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC) may very well have the stirrings of greatness — it has at least proven that it can stir anticipation.

Marco Barricelli, SSC’s artistic director, said the company will perform “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Henry V” and “Tom Jones” this summer. In the fall, SSC will perform “Shakespeare Unscripted” as its annual fall benefit production, and in the winter SSC will collaborate with the UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts program to put on “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.”

“We’re looking forward to a very successful season,” Barricelli said.

The two Shakespeare plays provide the company’s traditional balance of comedy, history and tragedy, Barricelli said.

“These plays are terrific choices,” said Sean Keilen, a UCSC associate professor of literature who teaches classes about Shakespeare. “I am eager to see them both.”

The company hasn’t produced “The Taming of the Shrew” since the summer of 2004 and the wide gap of nine years merits a reproduction, Barricelli said. Among other things, it’s a comedy about a man’s attempts to woo a headstrong woman so that other suitors can propose to her younger sister, who by the rule of her father cannot marry until her older sister does.

“‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ a relatively early comedy, includes some of Shakespeare’s most original and unsettling reflections on gender, education and marriage,” Keilen said.

In the summer of 2011, SSC put on “Henry IV, Part I,” and in the summer of 2012, the company put on “Henry IV, Part II.” This summer’s production of “Henry V” will complete the trilogy.

“It’s like ‘Lord of the Rings,’ or those kinds of movies that are out now,” Barricelli said.

The play follows King Henry V, once an unruly adolescent, as he assumes the throne after his father’s death. It chronicles the history of his invasion of France and the politics, betrayals, romances and intrigues that surround the 15th century.

“‘Henry V’ is a culmination of [Shakespeare’s] work in the genre of the history play, which he more or less invented,” Keilen said.

Theatrical director Jon Jory’s stage adaptation of “Tom Jones,” based on Henry Fielding’s novel, will be the fringe production. Annually, the fringe production is put on entirely by SSC acting and production interns.

“It’s an incredible moment for us all to get to see [the interns] spread their wings and fly,” said Lydia Bushfield, SSC’s interim marketing manager.

“Tom Jones” enacts the story of a man entangled in the complications that arise during the pursuit of his true love. Although desperate for one woman, other women fall for him, lust after him and pursue him in his struggle for his true love’s hand.

“It’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s charming, it’s really well written,” Barricelli said. “I think it will be a great time for everybody involved.”

Unlike previous seasons, all three of the summer plays will be held outdoors in the Redwood Grove — a setting reminiscent of many a midsummer night’s dream.

“The language in [the plays] is adaptable to different spaces,” Barricelli said. “There is scope out there, in the Redwood Grove. It adapts itself well — it can really support metaphor on stage.”

Performing outside recalls the feel of the open air Globe Theatre in London, Barricelli said, where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed in the 17th century and continue to be performed today.

“That’s more along the aesthetic of what Shakespeare was writing,” Barricelli said. “They didn’t have the luxury of lights.”

Courtesy of Lydia Bushfield.

Structural renovations are also being done on the stage. The previous platform had “run its course,” Barricelli said and SSC is using the necessary tuneup to address a range of prior issues, such as expanding backstage and storage space. They also plan to use it as an opportunity to incorporate the natural setting of the Redwood Grove into the stage itself.

“We’re making it in such a way that now the trees are part of every set,” Barricelli said. “It’s much more about embracing the natural beauty of that space and the vertical lines of all those trees growing up to the heavens — that’s part of our signature.”

In the fall and winter, SSC will move indoors to the UCSC Theater Arts Mainstage for “Shakespeare Unscripted” and “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.” Keilen said he is very excited for “Shakespeare Unscripted” — a play where the actors allow the audience to shape and change the original play by calling out suggestions.

“Living at such a great distance from Renaissance England, we tend to think of Shakespeare’s works as fixed monuments: printed books, scholarly editions, authoritative texts,” Keilen said. “But during Shakespeare’s own lifetime, the scripts that he wrote were fluid texts, endlessly revisable in performance.”

Keilen said that it is important to encourage students to approach Shakespeare’s works as “sources of unusual ideas … as things to learn with.”

“The unusual interdisciplinary environment at UCSC — where people in literature, theater arts, and Shakespeare Santa Cruz come together to engage Shakespeare — means that UCSC will have an important role to play in Shakespeare’s future, whatever form it takes,” he said.

Tickets are on sale now at shakespearesantacruz.org. “The Taming of the Shrew” will run from July 23 – Sept. 1, “Henry V” from Aug. 6 – Sept. 1, “Tom Jones” from Aug. 20 – Sept. 1, “Shakespeare Unscripted” on Oct. 13 and “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” from Nov. 15 – Dec. 8. 

During the hearing, assistant district attorney Joanna Schonfield said that one day prior to Triplett’s original report of a brutal rape, Triplett posted two advertisements on the Santa Cruz region of Craigslist. In the second ad, Triplett asked for somebody with a “strong hand” to injure her.

After attending the regional Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender conference on the UCSC campus on Feb. 17, Schonfield said Triplett met up with a respondent to the second craigslist ad. The man beat Triplett up and then had sex with her. According to court records, Triplett assessed the extent of her injuries afterward and directed the man to hit her more.

Shortly after the two parted ways, Triplett dialed 911 and was taken to Dominican Hospital but declined to release clothing or DNA samples for evidence.

Schonfield said that no charges have been filed against the man who beat and had sex with Triplett, and that he has been cooperating with investigators.

“[A criminal offense] requires that there be no consent [for sexual activities] — and that the person committing them be aware that there is not consent,” Schonfield said in a later interview with City on a Hill Press.

Outside of court, Triplett’s father told reporters that the story was being mischaracterized. Richard Triplett said that his daughter had invited the beating, but had not invited the sex.

“There are two sides to every story,” Triplett said to the Register Pajaronian. “Morgan asked for some trouble, but she did not ask to be sexually assualted.”

Triplett has been allowed to return to school on the conditions that she use the Internet only for school work, attend weekly counseling and return to court when summoned. Schonfield said that Triplett has a history of pathological lying and had been feeling suicidal in the days before the event.

“My understanding is she is seeing a counselor [in Santa Barbara] and we just wanted to make sure she continued for as long as the case continues,” Schonfield said.

As the trial continues, Schonfield may seek restitution for the costs of the UCSC police department’s investigation. The next court date is set for May 23.

Porter Quad is a common place for people to smoke on campus. After the implementation of the tobacco ban, this will no longer be an option. Photo by Daniel Green.

Chancellor George Blumenthal reminded the campus community in an e-mail on March 25 tobacco will soon be banned from UC campuses. Come Jan. 1, 2014 the 8 percent of students who smoke on UC campuses and the 10 percent of UC employees who smoke will have to take their cigarettes, cigars and all other tobacco products off campus and off all UC properties.

“We cannot be on the forefront of healthcare if we cannot ask ourselves to eliminate, at least attempt to eliminate, these types of behaviors on our campuses and in our medical center,” said Steven Gest, medical director of Santa Cruz’s Occupational Medical Center and assistant clinical professor at UCSF.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, 1,129 college campuses are currently 100 percent smoke free and 766 of these have a 100 percent tobacco-free policy. This is a marked increase from the 290 college campuses that were 100 percent tobacco-free, according to the American Lung Association, as of November of 2012.

“It’s really a bit of a tidal wave,” said Saladin Sale, the UCSC director of Risk Services and co-chair of the campus committee to oversee the implementation of the policy.

System-wide, Kevin Confetti, the director of workers’ compensation for University of California Office of the President, is co-leading the tobacco-free policy implementation. Confetti said a 100 percent tobacco-free campus will be difficult to achieve.

“There are a lot of nooks and crannies on our campuses,” Confetti said. “Our campuses are very, very large.”

Because implementers of the policy cannot be everywhere all the time, the policy will be primarily enforced “educationally.”

“The first 12–24 months of the policy … we’re hoping that, instead of using a stick, for lack of the better word, that we can help educate folks and get them to appreciate and understand the benefits of tobacco cessation,” Confetti said.

UC plans to educate smokers and nonsmokers within the UC community by offering cessation education, referral and resources, over-the-counter and prescription tobacco cessation medications, telephone, individual or group counseling and on-site individual and group support as educational outlets.

Steven Gest said that smoking does not only affect smokers.

“There’s been a recent uptake in the incidence and severity of asthma, and we’ve been searching for the root cause of that,” Gest said. “Second hand smoke has been allocated as one of the partial root causes.”

UCSC students and faculty consistently complain about secondhand smoke, said Jean Marie Scott, associate vice chancellor of risk and safety services and co-chair of the committee that oversees the implementation of the tobacco ban with Saldin Sale.

“We have quite a few faculty and students, and staff members, in any given year who are very much impacted from secondhand smoke,” said Scott, who said she has worked at UCSC for over 20 years. “With the new policy going into effect, I’m hopeful that we’re better able to mitigate and have people cooperate in a way that they’re not impacting folks across the campus with secondhand smoke.”

This new policy will also reduce the amount of litter on UCSC’s campus, Scott said, after reporting the huge volumes of cigarette butts that currently litter UCSC’s campus.

It also invokes the question of whether smoking is a right or a privilege, said Steven Gest. He said it is a right in the privacy of an individual’s own environment, but it is also a privilege that should be restricted when it negatively influences and infringes upon others.

“The greater society is not willing to absorb the cost of your decision,” Gest said.

Sale hopes a dialogue regarding the ban will continue within UCSC communities.

“In the months to come, we’re going to be having a very open campus discussion around these issues,” Sale said. “Hopefully we can really model a very positive thing for the rest of California society.”

With this first edition of Growth set to release April 4, 2,000 magazines will find themselves spread across campus on benches, in libraries and on dining room tables. The new publication channels various viewpoints on the Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), the university’s official plan to expand current academic, residential and administrative infrastructure into upper campus. The magazine voices the perspectives of students, administrators, scientists and indigenous communities, among others.

“I think it’s really important for dialogue to happen,” said lead Growth organizer Noah Miska, explaining why he hoped Growth would be a helpful tool for a variety of readers. “In the interest of figuring out where everyone is coming from, it is helpful to speak with people you might fundamentally disagree with.”

Miska said Growth came together through the collective efforts of staff from The Disorientation Guide (DisGuide), a yearly back-to-school guide introducing students to issues that often go unpublished in mainstream media. Miska, who helped produce DisGuide last year, said the two publications have different objectives.

“They serve different purposes,” Miska said. “DisGuide is an introduction to the university as a whole and a whole different array of political perspectives, whereas Growth is intended to focus deeply on this one issue.”

This one issue — the LRDP — was finalized in mid-September of 2006 by the University of California’s central governing body, the Board of Regents. Plagued by lawsuits and administrative difficulties since its inception, if the LRDP is successful the campus will expand above Kresge College, the UCSC Camper Park and Science Hill. Most recently, the plan’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) failed approval by a panel of California’s 6th District Court of Appeal on the grounds that the EIR “misdescribed the project’s objectives, that this misdescription skewed its consideration of alternatives, and that the EIR was inadequate because it failed to consider any potentially feasible alternatives that would avoid or limit the significant environmental impact of the project on the city’s water supply,” the ruling said. The fate of the LRDP is currently in limbo while that lawsuit plays out.

Despite this most recent development, Growth editor and recent UCSC graduate Zora Raskin said the publication is another step in a tradition of resistance to upper campus expansion. She said that she hopes this magazine will serve as a resource for future activists and other students at UCSC.

“Resistance to the LRDP is a constant battle that goes through rises and falls depending on court cases and what the UC is pushing,” Raskin said. “We thought this magazine would be important as a resource for future organizers and activists. So, to have publications like this even long after we’re gone, to lend history and hopefully facts and strategies to this struggle.”

The publication, composed of contributions from various campus groups, individual perspectives and interviews with top UCSC administrators, was designed to provide a space for dialogue among many points of view. Second-year environmental studies major Jack Mazza said he wished his contribution — a poem, placed from the perspective of forest dwellers — would speak for those who could not.

“There is so much nature and beauty right in our backyards,” he said. “I wanted to show this community of living things — not humans — that can’t tell the university ‘don’t cut here.’ I was trying to be a voice for them.”

Readers may find Growth in dining halls, cafes and other locations on campus.

Students share the love as they participate in de-stressing activities organized by the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Society. Photo by Lauren Romero

In the grassy Porter Meadow, students gathered to relieve pre-finals anxiety for the first ever Lovapalooza on March 9. Organized by the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Society (BMC), Lovapalooza was designed to create time for rest and relaxation in the Santa Cruz community.

“We’re all stressed out over finals and all the other stuff we have going on in our lives — like our housemates not washing their goddamn dishes. We need the chance to come out and relax,” said Dennis Peterson, one of the founders of Empower Pathways (EMPATH), a BMC committee that helped organize Lovapalooza.

The festival began around 1 p.m. with a potluck, later transitioning into workshops in Qigong, yoga, massage and acupressure. Attendees also participated in music making, face painting and meditation throughout the day. All of the workshops were student-led and taught techniques for relaxation. In attendance were members of the UCSC community and students from another chapter of the BMC at Cabrillo Community College.

Chelsey Otis, a BMC member who helped organize the event said it was planned and executed within a week.

“We weren’t really technical or into the logistics,” Otis said. “We wanted to just go in and connect with every student and create a space where they can explore themselves and be open and not judged by anything or anyone.”

Otis said the BMC was established a little over a year ago with the goal of creating an alternative learning experience for their members. According to their website, the BMC fosters creativity in education of students, unlike the mainstream model of education, which the site said, “requires memorization and regurgitation of facts and theories.”

BMC hosts other events like their open-mic nights, held at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, that foster unity through collective thought. They invite guest speakers and lecturers who talk about an array of subjects including neuroscience and psychopharmacology.

“The BMC have awesome speakers come and talk about things that I [am] interested in. Stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily get from class and school even though UCSC is very versatile,” said a student who preferred to identify himself as Moss and attends BMC events frequently.

Some of Lovapalooza’s attendees laid out blankets while others tugged at guitar and banjo strings as they gathered around the meadow. Members of the BMC welcomed newcomers making their way down to the crowd.

“There’s a lot of positive energy here and that’s true about a lot of these events and a lot of these people,” Moss said as he combed his handlebar mustache into place. “I really enjoy hanging around the BMC because they’re so open-minded and they’re so into learning about consciousness.”

As day turned into evening, attendees gathered on the unsewn quilt of beach towels and sheets to talk among each other and enjoy the company of their relaxed peers.

Although he’s finishing his last quarter at UCSC, Dennis Peterson said he hopes the BMC will continue to host Lovapalooza annually.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard about an event like this happening through a student organization,” said Peterson. “I hope there’s another.”

Courtesy of Sativa Chang

Dressed with sprigs of bright flowers in their hair and singing along to Destiny Child’s “Survivor,” demonstrators marched from the Quarry Plaza to the clock tower in a rally to “end the radical acceptance of rape culture,” according to the event’s Facebook page.

The rally took place on International Women’s Day, March 8. It began around noon at the Quarry Plaza and students and community members marched their way to the clock tower at 1:30 p.m.

“A huge intention behind the rally was to note that rape is a political and social issue and not a private or individual issue,” said Courtney Hanson, who is part of Feminits Working on Real Democracy (“F Word), the organization that helped bring the event together. “One way we see rape culture manifested is how the only prevention made available or being discussed is surrounding the victim rather than addressing its prevalence.”

Students, staff and community members attended the event. The rally began at the Quarry Plaza where several students shared personal stories about issues ranging from rape, transphobia or sexual and gender-related violence.

“Sexism, hate, violence, racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives,” said Ashley Nguyen, a member of F Word who said it was important to use difference to rally around a cause. “We need to realize that yes, these are individual experiences of hate, but the hate is systemic.”

Another speaker was Pamela Scott, a 44-year-old undergraduate student. Scott shared her personal story dealing with rape.

“I’ve been silent for too long,” Scott said. “I had to keep quiet when I was raped by my uncle and when I was gang raped at 14. I had not worked through those wounds. I held shame, which perpetuated my silence.”

Another speaker, Eliana Willis, performed her rendition of the song “I Like Giants” by Kimya Dawson.

“The song is partly about women who feel insecure or depressed,” Willis said. “One way we can feel secure and find our place is through activism and demonstrations like these.”

After Willis’ performance, attendees gathered their signs and belongings to march 3.5 miles to the clock tower.

Demonstrators carried signs that featured phrases like “Consent is Sexy” and shared several chants. The rally caught attention from surrounding traffic as drivers honked their horns in support.

“I had a quiz today for my class but I thought this is more worthwhile of my time,” said one student who preferred to remain anonymous.

For some students attending the event, the rally was a reaction to the recent sexual violence that happened on campus and the way in which the campus administration responded.

“The administration could have addressed how common rape is and how it is commonly afflicted by acquaintances, not strangers,” Hanson said. “Rape is made into a private and personal issue rather than an issue of power. We need to provide spaces for discussions for solutions.”

The rally aimed to spread an awareness for the way in which rape is treated as a crime.

“I wish we could talk about rape as much as we talk about a car theft or burglary,” Scott said. “I wish rape wouldn’t be treated as an individual problem.”

Stevenson’s Apartments (pictured) and Kresge’s J/K Apartments (not pictured) will be undergoing renovations
this coming 2013–14 school year. Photo by Sal Ingram

Two housing communities on campus, the Stevenson Infill Apartments and Kresge apartment buildings J and K, will likely be closing for repair in June and may remain closed until September 2014.

News of the closure came only a few weeks ago, said Cowell and Stevenson housing coordinator Jed Milroy.

“It was really unexpected,” Milroy said. “It came as a big surprise.”

While the repair project is still pending approval from the UC Board of Regents, Milroy said he will take the closure as a given as he begins assigning housing for the upcoming academic year.

In an email to City on a Hill Press, UC Santa Cruz director of capital planning Steve Houser said comprehensive repairs are needed to correct the problem of water seeping in from the exterior walls.

“We did not anticipate having to perform repairs at Stevenson Infill and Kresge J/K so soon,” said Houser of the housing projects on campus, which were completed in 2004. “It is disappointing to be experiencing these issues so soon after completion.”

Comprehensive maintenance and repairs of campus housing and dining halls typically occur every 10–15 years, Houser said.

The projected repairs mean that 317 bed spaces will no longer be available for the 2013–14 academic year. Options to help accommodate the students who may hope to live in Kresge J/K and Stevenson Infill Apartments are being discussed.

During a meeting with Cowell and Stevenson students on March 12, Milroy said college affiliation will be a factor.

“If you are Cowell or Stevenson affiliated, you have priority … to live in the Cowell apartments [next year],” Milroy said. “That also means that if you wanted to move in [to Cowell apartments] with your buddy from College Eight, unfortunately, it’s probably not going to be this time.”

As with the Cowell apartments, priority to live in the Redwood Grove apartments near Kresge college will go to Kresge affiliates.

While the priority status for Kresge and Cowell/Stevenson affiliates only applies during the online pre-selection process, the decreased amount of bed spaces — and therein, increased demand — will likely elicit much less college-affiliation diversity within the Redwood Grove and Cowell apartments next year.

While some of the doubles in the apartments will likely be modified to small triples, Milroy said, he hopes there will still be a significant amount of single rooms available.

“The units themselves are perfectly fine,” Milroy said.

“But an issue [of continual water damage] like this is just not something you want to wait on.”

UCSC has a syndicated housing system, which means the cost of construction projects in one area is continually borne by the student housing revenue generated across the entire campus. The upfront cost of the repairs, Houser said, are likely to be externally financed. The buildings were originally constructed at the same time as the Cowell and Porter apartments, costing roughly $64 million in total.

“We are still trying to finalize the repair scope,” Houser said. “As a result, we do not yet have a confirmed project cost.”

UC President Mark Yudof has only two more regents meetings to attend before his slated resignation in August. Shortly into the March 13 meeting, Yudof expressed his dismay over the recent UC Student Health Insurance Plan (UC SHIP) actuarial error, which chalked up a $57 million deficit.

UC Student Association (UCSA) president Raquel Morales attended the meeting and urged the regents to redact the lifetime cap currently in place under UC SHIP and asked that emergency funding, rather than student premiums, pay for the UC SHIP deficit.

A discussion over the election of a new UC president occurred in a closed meeting. A recent UC press release said a national executive search firm is currently working to submit candidates to a special committee within the board that includes academic, student, staff and alumni advisory groups.

UCSA president Morales, who also chairs the student component of the special committee, also addressed the regents on a variety of UCSA concerns. While stressing the continued need for increased state funding and a tuition freeze for all UC students, Morales called the regents’ attention to a number of more acute stances held by UCSA.

While UCSA supports online education, Morales said the platform must not replace classroom learning. Morales also discouraged Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent proposal of a max unit cap. After concluding her presentation, the regents did not ask any follow-up questions of Morales.

Discussion over the progress of two fiscal stability projects — the Working Smarter initiative and Onward California — were met with approval by the regents.

The savings from the Working Smarter initiative, a five-year project launched in 2010 to cut down on administrative expenses, is slightly ahead of schedule with 34 projects currently underway. Overall, the initiative is intended to save the UC $500 million.

The majority of the over $200 million already saved comes from enterprise risk management, which includes the cost of workplace hazards like lab safety. The initiative is in collaboration with a similar initiative at Cal State University called Synergy.

The regents also viewed a series of videos available as part of the Onward California campaign, which aims to elicit more private donations from individuals and business organizations for the UC. The campaign is also targeting celebrity sponsors and corporate donors.

Chairman of the Board of Regents Sherry Lansing said Onward California, and future projects like it, must be seen as an integral component of revenue for the UC, citing the continuously decreasing certainty of state funding.

New ideas for the project were bounced around at the meeting, including a UC-owned social media platform. This would market student participation to raise funding for student scholarships at each of the UC campuses. The platform is expected to launch in October 2013.

Student Regent Jonathan Stein tweeted his approval of the social media proposal, encouraging the regents to consider more out-of-the-box ideas like this one.

The regents approved the construction of a teaching and learning center for health sciences at UCLA, the funding of which will mostly be covered by gifts UCLA has raised. Representatives from UC Santa Barbara and UC Merced also proposed student housing expansion plans to accommodate increasing enrollment with discussions to continue.

Illustration by Caetano Santos

How do you eat a galaxy? By being an even bigger galaxy. Over the course of the last year, UC Santa Cruz astronomers Alis Deason and Puragra Guha Thakurta and their team of collaborators found that our Milky Way may have a cannibalistic past.

“Cannibalization” occurs when a small galaxy comes into the proximity of a larger galaxy in space. When this happens, the immense gravitational pull of the larger galaxy pulls the smaller into its orbit. Over the course of billions of years, the larger galaxy swallows up the smaller galaxy’s stars, which is why the process is called “cannibalization.”

“If you imagine a smaller galaxy falling into our galaxy, it’s like a series of pendulums,” said Laura Prichard, an undergraduate exchange student from the University of Leeds who helped with the research. “So they’re all swinging through the galaxy, but then they all seem to gather at one point — when they’re stopping, turning around — and then they swing back again.”

This turnaround point is at approximately 100,000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way, which is also believed to be the extent of the smaller galaxy’s orbit. Alis Deason, the lead author of the study, said this relationship can be explained by the stars “remembering” their former orbit — they turn around at this point because it marks the extent of their former galaxy.

“Usually these stars continue to follow the same orbit that the satellite did,” Deason said, “because the orbits of the stars here generally retain memories of their initial conditions.”

For the study, the team used seven years worth of images of the Milky Way’s neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, taken from Guha Thakurta’s and others’ previous studies. Using Andromeda as a reference point, the astronomers measured the relative movement of 13 stars in the Milky Way’s outer halo during this seven-year period.

In the measurements she took from the images, Deason found that the stars’ movements were noticeably odd.

“What we’d expect in theory is that these stars mainly move backwards and forwards, what we call radial motion,” Deason said. “We found that their tangential motion, or sideways motion, was actually about the same as the radial motion. We had expected it to be a lot smaller. We’re kind of puzzled by this and we came up with the idea that perhaps these stars are what we call a shell.”

Like the pendulums in Prichard’s metaphor, this “shell” is the area where the oscillating stars slow down and stop before they assume their former course.

At this radius, the Milky Way’s density of stars sharply declines, a curiosity that may be explained by cannibalism. Guha Thakurta said the stars might still be trapped by the swallowed galaxy’s gravity. Gravitationally, they “remember” their origins. But the stars’ memories run deeper than gravity.

They may also chemically “remember” their former galaxy. Deason said smaller galaxies are metal-poor because they don’t have as many stars forming. Because stars are the element factories in galaxies, less stars or less mass means lighter elements.

“The fact that the star halo is metal-poor is suggestive that a lot of the stars came from smaller galaxies,” Deason said.

While a shell seems likely, it is not the only plausible reason for the astronomers’ observations.

“This is astronomy, so there are always several explanations,” Deason said. “It’s very hard to say we’re 100 percent certain.”

Other plausible explanations include that stars move more tangentially than astronomers previously thought or that these stars formed “in situ.” This means that the stars had formed from gas within the Milky Way, but were then “kicked out,” or ejected from a more central position by an incoming satellite, Deason said.

The evidence from these 13 stars most strongly suggests a cannibalization event, Deason said, but more research is needed to confirm this.

The team hopes to extend their research by applying for access to the Hubble Space Telescope’s image archives. If the access and funding are granted, they will be able to resume data collection in May 2013. Deason said she and her team predict they will find between 500 and 1,000 more shell stars, if their current theory is correct.

“[Further research] really offers the potential to completely map out these sorts of events throughout the galaxy, see how common these sorts of cannibalism events are,” Guha Thakurta said. “Or, we may find that this one that we already found is the only big one, everything else is smooth, even that would be a statement about the history of our galaxy’s eating habits. This finding is an eye-opener for astronomers. The potential is immense.”

Photo illustration by Christine Hipp and Sal Ingram

In the 500 milliseconds it took you to read “in the” at the start of this sentence, you formed a rough subconscious prediction that this sentence would feature one comma and two clauses.

This is not magic. You are not exercising psychic powers. Welcome to the field of psycholinguistics.

UC Santa Cruz linguistics professors Matthew Wagers and Sandra Chung were recently awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to do research on sentence structure comprehension. The three-year grant starts April 1.

Wagers and Chung will work with educator and author Manuel F. Borja in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Their research will focus on the endangered Chamorro language, spoken in the Mariana Islands, and they will look into how humans pre-construct a sentence while listening to it before it is fully said.

City on a Hill Press sat down with Wagers and Chung for a question and answer session. Topics included the psychological processes of listening and speaking, and the cultural richness in all languages.

City on a Hill Press: What are your backgrounds in the field of linguistics?

Matthew Wagers: We’re both theoretical linguists, we’re both interested in how structure can vary across languages and how the structure of language tells us something about the mind. My specific area of research is psycholinguistics, which has to do with language comprehension and language production, meaning listening, reading and speaking.

Sandra Chung: My field is syntax — I’m interested in the structure of sentences across languages. I’ve been working on the Chamorro language since the mid-1970s. Given [that] it’s endangered, increased documentation could ultimately help the community maintain the language or revive it.

CHP: What are the main goals of this research?

Wagers: Most research in language comprehension is done on English, German, French, Japanese and Chinese. Most [linguistic] studies are done in a university [setting], on students who are 18–22. We want to address two worries: one, that we’re working with such a small slice of the world’s languages and two, that the techniques we have are so adapted to a particular type of person that maybe our scientific conclusions do not represent the whole picture. We want a general theory of the human mind and human language. To have a general theory, you have to sample appropriately.

CHP: Both types of your research focus on pre-forming sentence structure before it has been fully spoken. This seems relevant to the phenomenon of people being able to finish each other’s sentences. Is your research related to this phenomenon?

Wagers: That’s not a bad way of thinking about it. The rate of speech and understanding is so fast you do not wait until the end of the sentence to understand it. You develop understanding moment by moment. In a colloquial sense, that is sort of like finishing each other’s sentences, but more so in terms of structure, not content, and mentally not verbally. In our experiment there’s no dialogue, it’s individuals listening to sentences. One of the ways to understand anything is to simulate ways in which the other person might have made it — an analysis by synthesis theory. In a certain sense, it’s a more technical way of saying …

CHP: Finishing each other’s sentences?

Wagers: Yes.

CHP: What methods will your research use in the Northern Mariana Islands to track the mental processes going on in someone trying to understand a sentence?

Wagers: We use self-paced listening, where we’ll record whole sentences then splice them into phonological phrases. To hear the sentence as a whole you stitch it back together by successively pressing a response button, We analyze the time between button presses. The other technique is preferential looking. We take our laptop and play sentences that are normal and those that have anomalies like, ‘Which boy did you iron?’ Then we investigate, ‘When does that disruption occur for the listener?’ We take a video and work with a team of undergraduates here who go through the videos frame by frame. It’s an evolving snapshot of their opinion of the sentence.

CHP: How do the processes of understanding a spoken sentence differ from understanding a written sentence?

Wagers: Written and spoken materials differ in registers and styles of speech. Another difference is more psychological. If you’re reading a sentence, you don’t read one letter at a time, you read a whole word at a time. The rate in which you intake the information, not the rate exactly, but, the …

Chung: The rate at which it is presented.

Wagers: Correct. The rate it is presented is different. In speech you’re not just guessing at the word level, you’re also guessing at the syllable level.

CHP: What is the most interesting aspect of language for both of you?

Chung: I appreciate how all languages are equally rich. My goal is to use theories of sentence structure to make it clear to other scientists that smaller languages of the world have as much to reveal about how the mind works as English does.

Wagers: To me, it’s the fact that it puts together these familiar pieces in new ways each time. How can you have a theory that accounts for both the familiarity of language and the novelty of it? It’s a new thing each time.

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

Roughly 40 UC Santa Cruz students lobbied in Sacramento March 3 as part of the March for Higher Education, an annual protest for higher education reform. While turnout was smaller than last year’s action, over 1,000 UC, CSU and community college students came to show their investment in the issues at hand.

The UC Student Association (UCSA) organizes travel and accommodations for UC students annually, with Banana Slugs joining the tide of other UC students through Student Union Assembly (SUA). Organizing director of SUA and representative of UCSA Kevin Huang spoke of the experience in Sacramento.

“We try to make sure that … the conference isn’t just for the delegates, [but also for] people who go who are able to come back and bring the information and knowledge back onto our campus,” Huang said.

Approximately 2,000 students marched almost one mile from Raley Field to the Capitol Mall on the morning of March 3. As per a pre-planned lobby schedule negotiated by UCSC third-year and UCSA legislative liaison Maria Jennings, groups of UCSC students met up with multiple local representatives afterward and lobbied for a broad spectrum of issues. In an effort to maximize influence, students mostly met with legislators local to Santa Cruz.

Students discussed the budget for UC, online education, caps on class credits, campus diversity, Proposition 13 and Cal Grant reform. They also lobbied legislators to address the high school-to-prison pipeline, citing an increasing amount of California high school students being sent to prison before any form of higher education.

Having arrived in Sacramento late Friday evening, the UCSC students attended a series of worshops on effective lobbying on the weekend.

“Our students were really engaged throughout the entire conference,” Huang said.

His last year attending as a student, Huang said he was encouraged to see younger participants.

“Most of the people who came were first- and second-years who never experience things like this,” Huang said. “It was a great growing environment for these students.”

Students lining up for local foods at eleventh annual Earth Summit event. This year’s event will be held at the College 9/10 Multipurpose Room on Friday, March 8. Photo by Sal Ingram.

The annual campus Earth Summit is a space for students to unite in their passions for environmental sustainability and justice. This year’s event, the twelfth so far, will be held this Friday from 11 a.m.– 5 p.m. at the College Nine/Ten Multipurpose Room.

This year’s theme is “Branch Out! Fostering Inclusive Solutions,” which highlights the importance of inclusiveness between various interdisciplinary perspectives of sustainability. The event will be free and offer fresh local foods, a wide variety of interactive workshops, live music and several keynote speakers.

“The Earth Summit is a great way to bring together all the sustainability organizations, students, staff and faculty that otherwise might be segregated or focused in their goals,” said Melissa Ott, the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP) intern for the Sustainability Office’s Education and Outreach team. “It brings us all together for one big celebration and it also brings sustainability to our consciousness in a fun and entertaining way.”

The event will hold two workshop sessions, with five to six different workshop options ranging from recycled art to yoga to discussion on habitat destruction. The festival features local food from the Bagelry, Zameen Mediterranean Cuisine, Redwood Pizzeria, Staff of Life, Kerri’s Kreations and more. There will be two keynote speakers — Flora Lu, who is an environmental studies associate professor who specializes in ecological anthropology and Maya Salsedo who is a food justice activist and has done award-winning work for her work on the Youth Food Bill of Rights. The event will also feature live music from the band Second Floor Funk.

Katherine Lippus, the CUIP intern for the Student Environmental Center, said anyone interested in getting involved with the sustainability movement on campus is encouraged to come. Students may contribute to the Blueprint for a Sustainable Campus, a plan created years ago by the Student Environmental Center to document a sustainable vision for campus. Students may also network with other students in sustainability organizations and can learn about upcoming internship opportunities.

Students voiced their support for UC Santa Cruz service workers outside of the Cowell/Stevenson and College Nine/Ten dining halls on Feb. 27. Photo Courtesy of Victoria Salgado.

As negotiations continued for a new UC service worker contract, UC Santa Cruz workers rallied in front of the Cowell/Stevenson and College Nine/Ten dining halls. Held on Feb. 27, the actions were two of many organized by the UC service worker’s union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME 3299), across the 10-campus system.

“We take care of you — UC take care of us!” picket signs read as UCSC dining hall workers and students united to demand greater respect as UC employees.

A critical component of the discussion at the bargaining table, hosted at UC Davis, is the issue of pension plans and retiree health benefits.

The UC recently proposed a two-tier pension and retiree health benefit plan, which would increase all service worker persion contributions by 1-2 percent of wages, and raise the minimum age of retirement from 50 to 55 for employees hired after July 1 of this year.

As part of ongoing discontent with worker treatment, AFSCME 3299 organizer for UCSC Rebecca Gilpas also spoke about larger issues at hand.

“UC is the third largest employer in California, so they have the power to increase or decrease the standard of life,” Gilpas said. “But you’re told that if you don’t like it,  there’s another person in line — get out. Shame!”

Dining hall worker and longtime AFSCME activist Maria Padilla spoke of environmental working conditions at the dining halls that students can see.

“Every year, it seems like more and more students come to the dining halls and we have just the same amount of workers,” Padilla said.

Photo Courtesy of Victoria Salgado.

Director of housing services David Keller and two assistant managers of employee and labor relations watched the rally from a short space away. Keller said they had no control over the contract negotiations themselves and that they were in attendance as part of their job.

The rally also focused on students’ connection to dining hall workers. Of the roughly 40 individuals present at both rallies, about half were students. Similar to the Jan. 31 action, in which scores of students and employees came out, a Facebook event was organized by the Student Labor Action Project.

Organizing director of the Student Union Assembly and former student dining hall worker Kevin Huang led chants at the rally and criticized dining hall hiring practices in a later interview with City on a Hill Press.

“The administration is definitely overcompensating [the need] to hire new full-time staff by hiring part-time student workers,” Huang said. “We’re not as trained — we don’t have the time to fully commit to a full-time job like a service worker from AFSCME.”

Huang added that it was heartening to see so many workers in attendance.

“It was really powerful to see the workers themselves step out and show some courage in urging their employer [to grant] respect and dignity in the workplace,” Huang said.

Last Thursday, however, another bulletin appeared — the victim in the report admitted she fabricated the story, and a sexual assault had not occurred near the Quarry Amphitheater on Feb. 17.

UC Santa Cruz police chief Nader Oweis said he posted the update within hours of her confession.

“We basically threw every resource that we had — including the assistance of the city police department and the district attorney’s office — to investigate this crime,” Oweis said. “From the evidence that we gathered, it led us to having to ask her some more questions to validate the information that she gave us and that’s when we received that admission. It wasn’t [admitted] during an interrogation, it was through some follow-up questions.”

The case has been sent to the Santa Cruz County district attorney, who will determine whether to prosecute the woman. Almost all of the details of the case must remain undisclosed until the district attorney takes further action.

In light of Santa Cruz’s recent spike in violent crime, including the attempted homicide of a student at an off-campus bus stop, Oweis has maintained the increased patrols for the time being.

“Our community has a very deep sense of unease,” Oweis said. “Because of everything else that’s still continuing within the community, I just feel it’s prudent to keep the extra patrols, and that it may help us to prevent some of these types of crimes from reccurring.”

Sexual violence prevention educator Caitlin Stinneford has been working closely with the UCSC Police Department, as part of an ongoing effort to provide students and staff with the resources they need.

“I am very fortunate that the police here work very closely with my office … [sexual assaults] are the top crimes they focus on,” Stinneford said. “I think when more information is able to come out, students will feel a lot better.”

Stinneford said she finds that stranger rape is emphasized more than acquaintance rape, even though acquaintance rape occurs more often.

“We don’t want people who have had acquaintance assaults to be forgotten or for their assault to be considered not that big of a deal because it’s not so public,” Stinneford said. “We really wanted to make sure that the community felt supported, both in their fears around this particular thing but also that in general they knew they had support.”

Sarah Edelstein, an organizer for the candlelight vigil “Safe in the Dark” on Feb. 20, said the event was still valuable because the issue of  rape culture still exists.

“[Safe in the Dark was] a discussion and hopefully the start of a much larger discussion about rape culture on our campus as a whole,” Edelstein said, “which is why when I found out that this was falsified, I realized that the [event] ended up being about so much more than just this incident … about hopefully starting a real dialogue on this campus about something that happens a lot more than we would care to admit and often happens and goes completely unreported.”

Edelstein said she hopes this falsified experience does not deter other victims from coming forth.

“I hope this doesn’t create more of a culture of denial and more of a culture of fear and of ignorance,” Edelstein said. “I hope that … other people who are victims of sexual assault are not now feeling [discouraged] from coming out about it, because they think they’ll be met with [disbelief].”

UCSC will have more opportunities to connect over the issue of sexual violence in April, which is sexual assault awareness month. 

Students with concerns about

sexual violence may contact

the office of Sexual Assault Prevention

and Education at 831-459-2721, and the UCSC Women’s Center at

831-459-2169. The Rape Crisis

Hotline can be reached at 888-900-4232.

FLOWERS AND SIGNS were left on the bridge Tyler Collins fell from. Photo by Daniela Ruiz

On Feb. 27, undergraduate student Tyler Collins died after falling 75 feet off of the pedestrian bridge near Colleges Nine and Ten. UC Santa Cruz police and fire officials found Collins in the ravine below the bridge around 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning. According to an email sent out by campus provost/executive vice chancellor Alison Galloway, Collins sustained serious injuries and was airlifted to Valley Medical Center where he later died.

Further details about this tragedy are scarce because the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office wants to complete its work before releasing information. There is an investigation pending. The UCSC Police Department has found no evidence of foul play, said spokesperson for UCSC Jim Burns.

This loss was another tragedy within the Santa Cruz community, which also recently suffered from the loss of two police officers earlier that week.

Collins was a second-year computer science major from Mountain View, California.