MCF, held on Saturday, May 18, brought together about 20 different student organizations, with many performing in front of the large crowd and selling food. The variety of food ranged from the Filipino Student Association’s (FSA) chicken adobo, Indian Student Organization’s samosas, Chinese Student Association’s boba milk tea, Centro Americanos Unidos fried platanos with beans and sour cream, and more.

Fithawi Kudus, a fourth-year and performer of the student organization African Student Union (ASU), said he thoroughly enjoyed MCF and wished it happened every quarter.

“It’s one of the greatest — if not the greatest — events on campus,” Kudus said. “I think [MCF is] important because it brings awareness with all the different ethnicities here on campus as well as celebrating them on a grand stage.”

Third-year Kaitlyn Sandel was one of many students interested in showing different cultures through performance. She performed a mix of dance styles such as hip-hop, Polynesian and Tahitian with UCSC’s Rainbotz — a dance troupe involved with Rainbow Theater.

“The thing I love the most about MCF is literally every ethnic organization you can think of on campus is present here,” Sandel said. “Even an organization like ours, who doesn’t necessarily identify with a certain ethnicity.”

Another organization that had a presence at MCF was the Sabrosura Dance Troupe, who sold tacos and ensalada — an El Salvadorian drink of cantaloupe, lemon and other fruits — at the event. Member and third-year Noe Jimenez said the troupe practices all year.

“Our mission is to spread Latin American and Caribbean cultures and rituals through the art of dance,” he said. “We’re spreading the love of dancing and sharing our culture with everyone here today.”

There was a wide range of performances and styles at MCF, from FSA’s hip-hop dance troupe Haluan to Bay Area organization Native Boogie Beats, which brought dances such as the “Crow Hop” to the event, from many Native American tribes. They also united many from the audience in a collective song and dance around the field in front of the stage.

Iman Barre, former co-chair, member and dancer of ASU, said after noticing at her first MCF in her first year that there were no African dance performances, she decided to start ASU with fellow student Amanueo Tsighe. She said ASU has been working toward this show for a long time, practicing since the middle of last quarter. ASU performed both East and West African dance styles with music from Nigeria and Ethiopia.

Treasurer of the Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center and fourth-year Afam Ibekwe said he loved how many languages were present and how many students came out to support.

“It’s cool to see so many organizations come together to produce something beautiful, to showcase the diversity of UCSC,” Ibekwe said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Photos by Daniel Green, Jayden Norris, Daniela Ruiz and Jessica Tran

This male puma narrowly avoided being collared by a researcher with the Santa Cruz Puma Project (SCPP). The SCPP captures and collars mountain lions to collect data for better understanding puma behavior. Courtesy of Paul Houghtaling.

Sixty feet high in the forest canopy, the puma begins to fidget. From the tree next to her, biologist Paul Houghtaling shakes branches and yells to frighten her from her perch. Disgruntled, the puma grudgingly descends the tree’s trunk head first, clinging to the bark and hissing at the researchers waiting below.

“It wasn’t the most graceful thing,” said Houghtaling, the field biologist for the Santa Cruz Puma Project (SCPP), when telling the story. “She was backing out, snarling like a dragon.”

Called 38F, this female puma is one of many caught and collared by SCPP. Partnered with UC Santa Cruz and led by UCSC professor of environmental studies Chris Wilmers, SCPP researchers have spent the past five years collecting data to better understand puma behavior, physiology and ecology, and how each are affected by habitat fragmentation in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Since 2008, Wilmers and the 10 graduate students and staff members involved with SCPP have caught and tagged 38 pumas from their 17,000 km² study region in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Today, this landscape is a mosaic of open forest, rural neighborhoods and roads — all of which are surrounded by cities. The researchers collect data from them with GPS collars, samples from deer kill sites and 44 trail cameras.

SCPP published their first study, which encompassed four years of data, on April 17. The results confirmed their prediction that pumas tolerate human activity in their basic subsistence habits — feeding and moving throughout their territories — but they need larger environmental buffers to conduct reproductive behaviors, which include raising kittens, communicating and mating.

“Just because you see mountain lions doesn’t mean it’s good mountain lion habitat,” Wilmers said. “What they really need to sustain their populations are big open spaces that allow them to find mates and reproduce.”

According to the study, healthy reproduction rates in puma populations require access to mates and success at raising kittens. Like humans, puma romance begins with communication — but instead of Match.com, male pumas use scent markings to advertise their presence to females. These occur at scrape sites, where pumas kick up piles of duff and leaves and urinate on them. Often, like in 38F’s territory, multiple male pumas have to duke it out for the strongest scent.

“They’re having a pissing contest with each other, essentially,” Houghtaling said.

When a female puma likes what she smells, she answers with a screeching call, also known as caterwauling. If all goes according to plan, the two will meet up and mate for several days. The female will den and give birth to kittens several months later.

Researches from the Santa Cruz Puma Project use various methods, such as motion-sensor cameras. Photo by Daniel Green.

Wildlife Neighbors

As open space becomes more fragmented, Wilmers said being a responsible wildlife neighbor will become increasingly important to the survival of puma populations.

“The more fragmented a habitat becomes, the smaller the population’s going to be,” he said. “[It becomes] a bigger deal, things like depredation, because you’re killing a smaller and smaller population.”

While pumas are characteristically shy animals that avoid human neighborhoods, the study shows they occasionally eat pets left outside after dark, said Yiwei Wang, a graduate student who is part of the project. At night, when humans go to sleep, the decrease in human activity invites pumas to venture into the rural neighborhoods to look for food.

Wilmers said pumas have the highest chance of being shot in rural neighborhoods, where many people have pets that could potentially be prey for pumas. It is legal in California for landowners to shoot mountain lions that threaten their property — according to the published study, eight of the project’s collared pumas have been shot for preying on domestic  livestock since 2008.

Wang and other members of SCPP reach out to landowners in rural communities close to open space to educate them about how to minimize conflict with pumas.

“It kind of comes down to, are we going to be good neighbors?” Houghtaling said.

For SCPP researchers, being a good neighbor means putting pets in sheds at night, when lack of human activity might entice pumas to infiltrate neighborhoods in search for food.

Roads are another cause of puma mortality, particularly Highway 17. Two of the project’s collared pumas have been hit by cars, one of which died from the accident.

“There’s potential for making these large highways more pervious for animal movement,” Wilmers said, “by building overpasses or underpasses for wildlife to cross the highway rather than crossing the road and risk getting hit by a car.”

SCPP has a working relationship with Caltrans, the state agency that oversees planning and construction of highways, bridges and railways. With help from SPCC, Caltrans is currently working to draw up a plan to implement these changes, Wilmers said.

While being shot or hit by a car is unfortunate for individual pumas, Wang said, habitat fragmentation poses the largest threat to the population in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is currently at a healthy 70–100 adult individuals.

“Getting some individual [pumas] killed doesn’t necessarily impact the survival of the population,” Wang said. “We’re more concerned for conservation purposes of retaining valuable habitat and making sure that development doesn’t occur in places that are really important to pumas right now.”

Among these important areas are forested corridors connecting areas of open space, which serve as routes of access for pumas. Cutting these off affects their ability to find mates and reproduce. It also limits the ability for new individuals to join the population, Houghtaling said, which is vital to the population’s future genetic health.

Trained hounds are also used to track and capture pumas to study their movements and habits. Photo by Daniel Green.

The Pumas of the Project

“Every individual animal is interesting,” Houghtaling said. “They have their quirks, they’ve had their experiences and their ways of relating to things that are a little bit different from one individual to another.”

Of the original 38 pumas collared, 14 are still alive. One male, 16M, became a local celebrity when stories of his escapades on Highway 17 spread. 16M crossed the highway more than 30 times, survived getting hit by a car and boldly changed the location of his territory, risking being killed by the males whose territories he expanded into. He was a favorite among the researchers, Wang said, until he was shot in November 2012 for preying on livestock.

3M was the first male collared in the Santa Cruz Mountains. According to one of Houghtaling’s SCPP blog updates, 3M taught the researchers lessons about important corridors in neighborhoods, the significance of marking sites and the importance of “patience, ingenuity, perseverance, versatility and humility.”

“3M was like a ghost. His collar was junk, it broke right away and would very rarely send us a data point,” Houghtaling said. “That cat really pushed our edges to think outside the box.”

Houghtaling said 3M’s elusive behavior forced the researchers to become more creative with technology, like using satellite transmitters to monitor when a lion is scavenging a deer and sending updates from GPS devices directly to emails and smartphones.

The researchers have refined their methods since they first captured 3M and now have several ways of catching pumas. They use box traps baited with a fresh kill, padded snare traps or hound dogs to track and “tree” an individual, or chase it up a tree, like with 38F.

“It’s always very awe-inspiring to see such a large, powerful animal and then kind of render it helpless for a little bit,” Wang said.

Out in the field a few weeks ago, a scrape site in Cemex Redwoods caught Houghtaling’s eye. He squatted low to inspect a paw print in the exposed earth, still moist from the puma’s recent presence. This scrape may have been made by the uncollared male in 36M’s territory that had been eluding the researchers.

Houghtaling radioed Dan Tichenor, the houndsman. Tichenor brought out Osage, a wizened Plott hound, to inspect the site. Osage sniffed the scrape and his tail started wagging. He barked in a direction off the trail, but didn’t give the particular howl that signals he found a fresh scent. The uncollared male had evaded the researchers once again.

Tichenor said hounds are effective in chasing pumas because pumas instinctively avoid conflict with other predators they evolved with, such as wolves.

“These hounds may be getting by on the wolves’ coattails, so to speak,” Tichenor said.

Once the hounds have “treed” a puma, the researchers shoot it with a tranquilizer dart. The drugs take several minutes to have an effect. That brief window of time often involves a wild chase to ensure the puma doesn’t pass out in a dangerous situation, such as in water.

“Their safety is our number one priority,” said Veronica Yovovich, a grad student with SPCC. “No data is worth hurting a puma over. If things look risky at all, we will back off rather than ever put a puma at risk.”

When a puma has safely fallen asleep, the researchers check its vital signs, collect various data and samples and put the collar on.

After a puma has been captured and let loose, the researchers monitor its movements with three devices on the collar: a GPS, a magnetometer that serves as a compass and an accelerometer to measure vibrations. Walking, pouncing, running and climbing, among other movements, each have a specific signature in the accelerometer data. The researchers found the key to these signatures by putting captive pumas on treadmills.

“Everyone’s like, you can never get a mountain lion to run on a treadmill,” said Gabriel Elkaim, the project engineer. “Turns out a leg of ham will get the mountain lion to run on a treadmill.”

SCPP researchers investigate kill sites, such as the one pictured above, to get more information about pumas’ movement. Photo by Daniel Green

Collars, Kittens and Deer

Now that one data set has been published, SCPP is looking to broaden the horizons of the original study.

Elkaim and Wilmers have been working on a new collar design that creates its own energy with a Faraday generator — a device that uses energy from friction caused by the animal’s motion — and solar panels. This would allow the collars’ battery life to last for 10 years rather than the current 1–2 years.

Incorporating these generators into the study would save the time and energy taken to re-collar animals on a regular basis, something that would allow for a larger study size.

“It’d be awesome,” Houghtaling said. “Instead of 38 [pumas], we could be at 70.”

Wilmers hopes to collar more kittens to better understand how habitat fragmentation affects their survival. This tricky business involves finding dens and visiting them when the mother isn’t around. Wilmers also hopes to start tagging deer, whose populations are declining in the western United States, he said. This may be due to any number of factors, including being eaten by pumas, but Wilmers said he predicts a future study will point to habitat fragmentation.

Yovovich’s current study — a facet of SCPP’s larger project — focuses on the effect of pumas on subsequent links in the food chain, such as deer and plants.

“Conservation goals are to have a healthy, intact ecosystem,” Yovovich said. “Plants co-evolved with grazers and grazers co-evolved with carnivores, and so the best ecosystem is to have all those pieces in there sort of feeding into each other.”

Along with depredation, predators affect deer with what Yovovich calls an “ecology of fear.” This model suggests prey species avoid places where predators have an advantage, which allows the flora in these “feared” areas to flourish from lack of grazing. For her study, Yovovich predicts that deer will frequent areas higher in human activity because pumas characteristically avoid these areas.

In the eastern United States, pumas and wolves — top predators — went extinct during the 18th and 19th centuries due to human expansion. Today, deer populations have exploded in their absence and forest ecosystems are severely depressed due to extreme overgrazing, said John Laundré, an instructor at Oswego State University of New York.

Laundré said opponents of reintroducing pumas in the highly developed east argue pumas can’t tolerate humans and even pose a threat to humans. Data from SCPP shows the contrary.

“People in the west are beginning to realize that they’ve been living among cougars for quite some time now and they haven’t caused problems,” Laundré said.

Yovovich said aside from having pets eaten, there is nothing to fear from pumas.

“You’re more likely to get killed by your toaster than by a mountain lion,” she said.

Human-puma encounters — in the woods, on roads or in backyards — are inevitable as long as human development cuts into open space and infringes upon pumas’ territories. SPCC aims to educate rural landowners with their findings so these chance meetings can be less harmful for both pumas and humans, Wang said.

“A lot of things about mountain lions are just a matter of conscience,” Houghtaling said. “In the brief encounter that you have with this being — that can be kind of fear-inducing — it’s important to have the context of knowing that it’s having the same experience, asking ‘well, who are you?’”

Paul Houghtaling uses an antenna to scan for nearby pumas. They are tracked through a collar sending radio signals. Photo by Daniel Green.

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.”

Harley Frost sets himself up for a jump serve at UCSC men’s volleyball Senior Night. Photo Courtesy of Austin Einhorn.

Senior outside hitter Salvatore La Cavera III is the first to admit his team might not have as much physical talent as they had in past seasons. But this year the Slugs have something more important than talent — they have the will to compete.

“We have guys who pretty much foam at the mouth to play volleyball,” La Cavera said. “We’ve had a surplus of physical talent in years past, and this year we definitely have enough talent but we have guys who fight hardest when we get in very pressurized situations like the semi-final game [against Carthage College]. We have guys who love that chaos and aren’t afraid of it, which in my book outdoes talent any week.”

The Slugs beat Carthage College 3–1 and Fontbonne University 3–0 to advance to the semi-final round of the Continental Volleyball Conference (CVC) tournament. Carthage was on a 14-game winning streak prior to playing UCSC. La Cavera led the team with 17 kills in the game against Carthage. He was named the Sports Imports/AVCA Men’s Division III National Player of the Week in March.

The Slugs earned the No. 1 tournament seed with those wins and beat Stevenson College 3–2 to earn a spot in the championship game. Against Stevenson, La Cavera made 23 kills and libero Mauro Salinas made 25 digs. La Cavera, Salinas and outside hitter Jake Landel earned spots on the CVC All West Division Team. UCSC holds the most players from one college on the Division Team of eight players.

“We feel that we can still get better,” said head coach Todd Hollenbeck. “Every day I can see our players working together to succeed on and off the court. Being the No. 1 seed is only a number. Our goals for this season are more important than numbers and rankings.”

In the CVC Championship game, the Slugs fell to Juniata College in three close sets, 27–25, 25–22 and 25–22. With the loss their record fell to 15–7, but UCSC earned an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament based on their Division III No. 3 national rank and high finish in the CVC tournament.

“We went up early once again in the championship game but Juniata rallied to win the set on a couple of amazing plays,” La Cavera said. “Again we hesitated to make a move, and with the momentum that they had gained, the game never slowed down enough for us to catch back up. Our preparation for the NCAA tournament will be heavily based on our ability to refocus our efforts during the match and be able to counter the strengths of our opponents.”

The Slugs’ first NCAA game is April 26 against No. 2 Nazareth College, who is 31–1 on the season. The winner of the match will face off with the winner of Juniata and Rivier College in the semifinals the following day.

“If we are able to pass very efficiently then we can basically dictate the flow of the game, and that’s what we pride ourselves on and what we think that we are best in the nation at,” Mauro Salinas said. “So if we can be effective with that and work really well together on that, then it sets us up to do pretty much anything else in volleyball.”

Last season the Slugs lost to Carthage in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament but they hope this year their passion will allow them to have a chance in the championship game.

“We are a great team. Every player has a role and competes with confidence. We are focused and are ready to take care of business,” Hollenbeck said.

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

For many people, sustainability has become an empty word, devoid of action. However, the term will find itself refashioned, expanded and refreshed under an artistic lens for UC Santa Cruz’s upcoming Earth Week celebration — Digging Deeper: The Arts & The Earth.

“Art is rarely seen as an important part of sustainability and other environmental efforts,” said Earth Week intern Kelsey Smith. “The arts are such a great way to form a bridge and express a connection to the planet. That connection is the first step to saving the Earth.”

Taking center stage at the kick-off event Festival of Arts, the UCSC student community will be showcasing their creative talents, contributing to a broader creative understanding of sustainability. The evening will include performances of spoken word, dance, song, poetry, theater monologues, photographs and paintings, to name only a few.

Many campus organizations concerned with sustainability and the environment will also be present, tabling and raising awareness of on-campus opportunities to get involved in Earth Week activities year-round. This is part of the Earth Week team’s larger effort to make the event accessible to all disciplines at UCSC, asserting the universality of sustainability.

“My hope is that [participants] will come away inspired and confident that they can affect change right where they are — in their study,” said McKenzie Laird, the Chancellor Undergraduate Internship Program (CUIP) intern and creative mind behind this year’s theme. “They don’t need to change their major, they don’t need to join numerous environmental organizations – it all is important and it all has a role to play.”

Gena Hoggard, who is scheduled to perform a solo dance piece to Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song,” views the event as a way to open up an educated and emotional dialogue surrounding Earth Week concerns.

“If I am reaching out to someone and expressing my ideas, I am hoping for a reaction from [my audience],” Hoggard said.  “If you have a successful piece of art, you have made someone think about what you’re doing … It’s a cycle between the audience and the expresser.”

Interactive installments will also play a large role at the Festival of Arts, including an open mic segment after scheduled performances and collaborative art projects. One such project is the “community art project,” where participants are encouraged to add their own painted fingerprint to a leafless tree painted on a large piece of canvas.

“That interactive art piece is to have people take ownership of what they are seeing and hearing,” Laird said. “Even though a majority of the students present will not be having art displayed … they can still contribute and leave their mark. It’s our way to say that you are powerful.”

The Festival of Arts will be followed by campus-wide Earth Week related events, publicized on the Earth Week calendar. Winding down the week of festivities, participants are urged to attend the College Eight Earth Week finale — a film festival.

Beginning with a screening of “Wasteland” followed by a panel and discussion and ending with “Borne into Brothels,” both documentaries focus on a sustainability that is artistic and human-centered.

Ultimately, as Earth Week intern Dana Frederick said, the College Eight Earth Week events aim to create a dialogue surrounding and acknowledging all definitions of sustainability.

“I’ve come to have a much greater appreciation for the complexity and weight that it carries as a term.” Frederick said.  “Now, to me, ‘sustainability’ is ultimately about promoting longevity — whether that be the longevity of an ecosystem, an individual or our civilization at large.”

Festival of the Arts kicks off Friday April 19 at 7 p.m. in the College Eight dining hall. The Film Festival is April 27 at 1 p.m. in the College Eight Red Room. Both events will have free food provided. For more information please visit ucscearthweek.com

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

A small group of parents in Idaho made complaints to the Idaho State Department of Education. They were about tenth-grade biology teacher Tim McDaniel’s use of the word “vagina” while teaching human anatomy. This is not a joke.

McDaniel was teaching sex education in biology because the school’s health teacher would not teach information on sexual health.

Statistics show that many states where sex education is not mandated have higher teenage pregnancy rates. While it may seem obvious, talking about vaginas is necessary in  education, as is talking about human anatomy, sexual intercourse, STIs, pregnancy and other important aspects of sexual health that teens need to be aware of to better understand the consequences of their potential decisions.

A teacher who is brave enough to stand in front of a group of judgmental high schoolers and use the word “vagina” — in the context of a lecture on sexual intercourse and human anatomy — deserves a huge pat on the back for providing these students with valuable resources and facts. He also displayed noteworthy sensitivity, giving students the option to opt out of the lectures on sex education if it made them uncomfortable.

Sex education and HIV education are both requirements a state can mandate for school districts. Idaho — among other states such as Arkansas, Arizona and Texas — does not require that schools offer sex education or HIV education. Oddly enough, these same states have some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the nation, which has its own consequences. Only about half of teen moms have a high school diploma, as opposed to the 90 percent of women who did not have a teen pregnancy.

How are high schoolers supposed to be aware of the possible choices one can make, including having sex, safe sex, safe sex when he or she feels at least a little ready for the interaction or abstaining from the sexual interaction altogether, if no one teaches them about it? Leaving high schoolers only with the vague and disappointing instruction to abstain from embarking on a new frontier, sex, intrigues them to engage in risky behavior.

We need educators who are willing to explain honestly and professionally how sexual intercourse works and how individuals can engage in it in a healthy way that does not damage bodily health or risk the individual’s future.

We are all constantly surrounded by technology and in today’s world high school students can easily go on their computers at home and look up information about sexual intercourse and human anatomy. They may not find information that will help them form a healthy and honest perspective of sex. Teachers like Tim McDaniel are resources who can help high school students form their own perspectives on sex and make informed decisions on how and if they will engage in sex.

Illustration by Caetano Santos.

“I am tired, just as many of you are tired, of seeing our parents being oppressed and denied work opportunities,” said Katherine Tabares, a speaker and youth activist at the “Rally for Citizenship” demonstration at the nation’s capital this past Wednesday. “Not because of their skills — because they are very talented — but because of a nine-digit number that supposedly defines a person in the United States, when it should not.”

Like others who were brought to this country by their parents, Tabares and many Americans are calling for comprehensive immigration reform that is inclusive to all members of our community.

A draft of a comprehensive immigration reform bill was poised to be released this Tuesday but has been set back out of respect for the recent tragedy in Boston. However, leaked information from several anonymous sources suggests a significant component of the bill will focus on border security.

This bill — agreed upon by a bipartisan group of eight senators — will mark the first overhaul of immigration law since 1986. While it claims to create a pathway to citizenship for the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, the bill only makes citizenship available to those who arrived in the United States before Dec. 31, 2011.

Other qualifications include a clean criminal record and sufficient proof of financial stability or employment.

Only when applicants meet these qualifications will they be eligible for a 10-year probationary period for citizenship. This prospective pathway needs to be more effective, realistic and expedient.

This 10-year waiting period comes with a startling provision — the federal government must secure 90 percent border security before those eligible can apply for a green card and then eventually, citizenship.

While the legislation is written by a bipartisan group, efforts should be directed toward meeting a fair balance for contentious parts of the bill rather than rushing in a flawed draft to appease Republicans. The Democrats have exchanged a later cut-off date and a strict border security plan to create a long road to citizenship that in no way resembles their original plan for an easy, accessible path to citizenship.

In fact, this is the perfect moment for Republicans to appeal to Latina/o voters — who have remained an untapped and growing demographic — by softening their hardline stance on immigration. While comprehensive immigration reform is not the cure-all to appeal to Latina/o voters, it’s an important issue for many who vote — a fact that is slowly dawning on some Republican legislators.

The bigger picture does not point the finger at one party. We must all realize that a serious comprehensive reform bill involves presenting fair opportunities for undocumented immigrants who have proven their allegiance and good faith to this country. We need to rethink the measures of this bill which require 90 percent border security — an immense task immigrants would need to wait for the US to pull off before they gain citizenship.

The moment is now to pull down unfair obstacles on the path to citizenship.

Illustration by Caetano Santos.

A world of ever-growing media conglomerates has created a situation in which media ownership and influence has been concentrated into the hands of an elite group. “The Big Six,” — GE, Viacom, CBS, News Corp., Disney and TimeWarner — now own nearly 90 percent of the media Americans consume. In 1983, 50 companies shared this amount.

Though there was a considerable amount of journalistic disapproval of the Nov. 15, 2011 police raid on Occupy Wall Street, the ensuing abandonment of the issue by media was far too swift. This mass disregard for a violation of the constitutional right to peaceful assembly is a subtle, eerie reminder that the nation is rapidly losing avenues for expressing dissent. It’s not surprising that a September 2012 Gallup poll revealed 60 percent of Americans have little to no trust in the mass media, an all-time low. We didn’t succeed at occupying Wall Street, but the next step should be obvious: occupy the media.

The media landscape must be a forum for putting pressure on corrupt and underperforming representatives, not a shield or weapon for the 1 percent. When such a small group of people controls what the news covers, it can become impossible and/or dangerous to report on things that could negatively affect their image. A diversity of perspectives is needed, a redistribution of publishing power to a wider group of people from all walks of life could greatly increase media accountability.

The current state of the media industry is looking a lot like what made Wall Street so repulsive to the protesters in Zuccotti Park. Just as the capitalists on Wall Street became “the 1 percent” by accruing money at the expense of those who had less, the moguls at the top of the media world are accumulating corporate mergers with equal ferocity.

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its countless offspring protests illustrate how the American people are not afraid of expressing the sentiment that Wall Street is reifying capitalism’s highest stage, imperialism. This activistic energy should be shifted to the new 1 percent that is forming in the media business.

The Occupy Movement may no longer be active in the news, but the spirit of protest that occupiers renewed will never be destroyed. Occupying the media means more than an occupation of Times Square Studios or Rockefeller Center (though this could be a good start due to the increased visibility it would provide). This occupation will require a widespread change in consciousness and a rise in individual and group initiative.

The first thing activists can do is get involved in the media. Here at UCSC, students can choose from 16 different student media organizations with many varying focuses and approaches. Determined activists can also write letters to editors or pen their own investigative features and share them with other concerned students.

The free market’s potential hasn’t yet been completely monopolized, so another avenue is to be a media entrepreneur. A group of friends with unique perspectives and a lot to say can make their own commentary and/or news site together. Now publication can be as simple as clicking the ‘submit’ button on Twitter or a blog, or as risky as initiating a startup. In either case, we have the potential to take journalism back to its roots by recording the events of our lives and communities and how those in power affect them.

It’s clear there is no correct way of seeing things. True objectivity — the mainstay of most journalism — would require that all subjective perspectives be represented and shared. If we all make journalism a way of life and share our individual stories, we can prevent these perspectives from being lost or obstructed from the record of history. Occupying the media cannot be a revolution that takes place overnight, it will need to be a determined, painstaking evolution in thought and practice.

For our diverse country to be free, our information must be free and diverse as well.

Men’s rugby made it through Conference semifinals in Chico this last Saturday in a 22–19 victory against University of Nevada, Reno but then fell to Chico State the next day in Conference finals. It was nonetheless an impressive season with a 4–2 season record and some major victories in post-season.

Women’s Rugby ­

After an undefeated season, women’s rugby comes to a close with two losses in Sweet Sixteens, the first against CSU Northridge. Despite suffering a number of injuries, the team played the consolation game the next day against Utah Valley and lost this match as well. Despite these losses, the women’s team also had an impressive season, with a season record of 4–1 and another win following the end of their regulation season.

Men’s Volleyball

Men’s volleyball beat Stevenson College this past Saturday in a 3–2 nail-biter of a match but fell to Juniata College later that same day in a 3–0 sweep in the championship match for the Continental Volleyball Conference. Despite the dip in the team’s season record, the team will be heading to NCAA games because of their No. 3 national rank and impressive finish in the CVC tournament.

Men’s Lacrosse

The Slugs fell to a major rival, Saint Mary’s College, this weekend in an incredibly close game that ended 13–15. The team has another home game this weekend at 11 a.m. on the Lower East Field against Humboldt State University.

Men’s Tennis 

Currently ranked No. 10 in the nation, the team will wrap up a successful season at Claremont Mudd Scripps before heading off to Ojai Valley Tennis Tournament in Ojai, Calif.

Hieroglyphics / CunninLynguists — Oakland’s longest surviving hip-hop supergroup doesn’t trip up on ‘90s nostalgia or fading old-school rivalries. Transcending all that clouds the third eye and blacks out the crackling electricity of the west coast underground, Del tha Funkee Homosapien marches onward. Jazzy beats that would make the coolest cats purr, his hooks deliver a prophetic punch to the pre-millennium emcees who still lament the bustin’ caps of hip-hop’s past. Hiero secures the mic to the throne that stands tall in the deep underground of Bay Area 51. $18 in advance, $23 at door.

April 20, doors at 8 p.m., show at 9 p.m., The Catalyst

EVENTS

Spring Plant Sale — Whether you’re zoning out amid trees and “higher” worlds in UCSC’s backwoods or tucked away safely at home for a little leafy liturgy of your own. For some killer buds and sweet-smelling seeds that you can plant with a clear conscience, save your benjamins for a rainy day and come scope the springtime array of the Arboretum’s homegrown variety. Santa Cruz’s Mediterranean climate welcomes all drought-tolerant plants, which are available in both California native species and those native to Australia, New Zealand or South Africa, as well as cacti and succulents.

April 20, starts at noon and ends at 4 p.m. for the general public, UCSC Arboretum

Earth Day 2013 — Get off the beaten meadow and away from the predictably cloudy conditions for some green love at a local joint that’s totally family-friendly. Head out to San Lorenzo Park for an eco-holiday that pulls out all the stops, from hybrid cars and climbing walls to recycled fashion. Dank in a good way, its everything you want to know about compost. For more organic information and a full list of scheduled non-GMO events, visit ecocruz.org.

April 20, event begins at 11 a.m. and ends at 4 p.m., San Lorenzo Park

Illustration by Maren Slobody.

FRIDAY 4/19

Earth Day Jubilee

What: Celebrate Earth Day by creating environmentally-conscious arts and crafts, learning local natural history and connecting to nature with a community drum

circle.

April 19, 5 – 9 p.m., Museum of Art and History

$3 for students

The Big Lebowski

What: The midnight movie going into April 20 is “The Big Lebowski.” Sit back and relax with the Dude before and after you sit back and relax with mother nature on Earth Day, man.

April 19 and 20, midnight, The Del Mar

Costs $6.50

SUNDAY 4/21

Improv Workshop

What: Pretend you’re on “Whose Line Is it Anyway?” for an afternoon spent exercising your funny bone at SubRosa. No experience necessary.

April 21, 3 – 5 p.m., SubRosa community space

WEDNESDAY 4/24

Take Back the Night Rally & March

What: Sponsored by the UCSC Women’s Center, Engaging Education and Cowell College, the 32nd annual Take Back the Night event is part of a week — from April 22

to 26 — filled with activities speaking out against violence against women. Shatter the silence. Stop the violence.

April 24, 5 – 10 p.m., Rally and march starting in Quarry Plaza before moving throughout campus

A Project Homeless Connect (PHC) volunteer prepares a plate of spaghetti during the PHC event on April 9. Photo by Daniel Green.

About 500 volunteers assembled at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium last Tuesday, united for a common cause: to provide a variety of essential services to the county’s homeless population.

Ken Shaw, one of Santa Cruz’s Project Homeless Connect’s (PHC) 11 steering committee members, said the event brought students, church members and other members of the Santa Cruz community together to help those in need.

“The goal is to bring together for one day, 40–50 services under one roof. So our clients can get the help they need in one day, which normally would take months and months to achieve,” Shaw said.

PHC has organized the event for four years. Founded in San Francisco in 2004, the one-day community-wide event has since branched out to over 260 cities across the United States, as well as in Canada and Australia. The Santa Cruz chapter of PHC, which was founded in 2010, is sponsored by United Way of Santa Cruz and Applied Survey Research and partnered with Santa Cruz Shelter as well as Homeless Persons Health Project.

Services provided range from dental, medical and mental health services to haircuts and services for pets. Organizations like Dominican Hospital volunteered a medical RV that provided free health screenings, while the Salvation Army gave out clothing vouchers.

“We get all of our funding from donations, churches, private donations and in-kind donations [ranging from toiletries or reading glasses],” Shaw said.

This year’s event was held when support for the homeless population was questioned by some city residents and officials amid an ongoing public safety debate sparked by a spike in violent crime in the last few months.

Clothing vouchers were provided to the homeless at one of the tables during the Project Homeless Connect event. Photo by Daniel Green.

Vice Mayor Lynn Robinson recently proposed cutting $42,000 — roughly 25 percent — of the city’s funding for the Homeless Services Center, which provides meals, health services and a place to sleep, among other amenities. In a letter to the center’s executive director, Robinson expressed concern that Santa Cruz’s homeless population contributes disproportionately to crime and drug problems in the city.

“I’m convinced the services are not working,” Robinson said in an interview with the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “That is not the kind of agency that is giving our community a good outcome.”

Craig Reinarman, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz and member of PHC’s board of advisors who attended this year’s event, said those issues are linked only peripherally.

“They’re being painted by a very broad brush that lends itself to bad public policy,” he said. “I’m deeply troubled by what I see unfolding in Santa Cruz.”

Reinarman said those involved in criminal activity represent “only a small slice of the homeless population.” He said cutting financial support for the homeless is a counterproductive strategy in the long run.

“Study after study has shown that every dollar you invest in treatment will save you five to seven dollars in criminal justice fees,” Reinarman said.

Kymberly Lacrosse, a member of PHC’s steering committee who helped start the Santa Cruz chapter, said homelessness in Santa Cruz must be given deeper consideration before action is taken.

“People often want a quick fix, they’re freaking out thinking ‘this isn’t working, let’s cut funding’… that’s not going to get the results that we want,” Lacrosse said. “We need to have everybody on all views and angles of the problem participate in the process and make that decision together.”

People sign up for benefits at the Project Homeless Connect event. This was one of the many services available to the homeless at this event. Photo by Daniel Green.

The most recent statistics on homelessness compiled by Applied Survey Research (ASR) show that of Santa Cruz’s 60,342 residents, 2,771 are homeless — 4.6 percent. Samantha Green, senior research analyst for ASR said the homeless population is expected to grow, especially among young people.

“We have a generation of youth who are under the age of 25 who are struggling economically, they are accumulating large amounts of debt,” Green said. “The cost of living is just too high.”

Reinarman also stressed the impact the recent recession has had on the homeless population.

“We’re in the midst of coming slowly out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Reinarman said. “You have very high levels of unemployment, longer terms of unemployment, less public services available because they’ve been under attack and cut back, and you have hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in California alone … So you have people who sleep wherever they can.”

Marcus Kelly-Cobos was at the most recent PHC event. He was a homeless addict when he attended it a year ago. While he had initially only intended to “grab at some free stuff and services,” last year’s event had an unexpected impact after he found himself at a booth operated by Janus, a Santa Cruz rehabilitation center.

“For some reason I ended up at the Janus table, they gave me an assessment and a week later I was in the program. I got out and started getting really involved in the community,” Kelly-Cobos said. “I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t come last year … I was in bad shape I used to use needle … you know the whole bit … it kind of got me back on track”.

Kelly-Cobos has been sober since then and is now taking classes at Cabrillo community college, hoping to become a registered addiction specialist. He also interns at Janus and was recently asked to join PHC’s steering committee.

Lacrosse said examples like Kelly-Cobos’ demonstrate why it’s essential to keep services available to those in need.

“Every single person coming in has a story … it’s not ‘oh they’re a this person or that person’ that mentality is what has to change,” Lacrosse said. “We have to deal with the problem, not blame the people … it’s important we change the context of the conversation from the persons behavior, not judge them and look at what we need to do to help.”

That’s former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, describing the first targeted killing carried out by a U.S. drone on Feb. 4, 2002.

It may not have received much attention at the time, but in the past few months a growing movement of activists and anti-war organizations have made the United States’ use of drones their issue of choice, over a decade and 2,500 targeted killings later.

In Santa Cruz, local activist groups have come together to organize vigils for drone victims. The first occurred two months ago on President’s Day, a move intended to highlight Pres. Obama’s central role in the U.S. drone program.

Due in part to the recent surge of interest on the topic, Phillip Crawford, President of the Monterey Peace and Justice Center (MPJC), has invited Marjorie Cohn to speak at both the MPJC and Santa Cruz’s Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) on April 20.

Cohn, former President of the National Lawyers Guild and a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is an outspoken critic of U.S. drone strikes and is currently writing a book about the topic.

In the event, titled “Drones, Murder and Targeted Killing,” Cohn will explore the problems she sees with drone strikes and discuss how a national movement might successfully come together to halt their usage.

“We really need a strong anti-war movement along the lines of the Occupy movement that can challenge this idea of continual warfare,” Cohn said in an earlier interview with City on a Hill.

“There are protests going on all over the country right now, but they need to get stronger,” Cohn said. “Whether the American understand or accept it or not, these strikes are being carried out and civilians are being killed in our name.”

 Marjorie Cohn will speak at the Resource Center for Nonviolence on April 20, at 3 p.m., and again at the Monterey Peace and Justice Center on April 20, at 7 p.m. 

The Day worker Center of Santa Cruz County in Live Oak opened its doors on April 2 and offers day laborers the opportunity to work under fair treatment and pay. It is open Tuesday through Saturday 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Sunday. Photo by Jessica Tran.

In 2001, Javier Rodriguez was hired with four others to load materials onto a truck at a Santa Cruz County home. Many people in the county find employment in a similar fashion, waiting on sidewalks and outside of stores like Home Depot in search of a day’s work.

Before long however, Rodriguez’s employer that day began yelling at him and the other workers for not doing their jobs correctly. He grew uncomfortable with the verbal abuse and demanded to be returned to the street. While he and the others still received pay for that job, Rodriguez said he’s heard of employers who drop off day laborers after a job, promising pay, but never come back.

Rodriguez now does outreach for the Day Worker Center of Santa Cruz County, which opened its doors on April 2. Located at 2261 7th Ave.in the Live Oak area of Santa Cruz, Rodriguez said the center will allow workers to find safe jobs that pay fair wages. He also hopes the classes taught at the center will allow day laborers to improve their skills and ultimately put themselves on a path to more stable employment.

“My philosophy is that I will help every single person I hire,” Rodriguez said. “I’m willing to teach you what I know, so you can become your own boss. I want these people to go ahead in life too.”

The mission of the center, according to its website, is to “facilitate the hiring of day workers, both men and women; and to guarantee them dignified wages and safe working conditions in accordance with U.S. and California law.” In order to secure these improved conditions, the center provides training on workers’ rights and safety regulations and matches workers with responsible employers.

The center is led by director Mireya Gomez-Contreras, who has been working to open it since 2007 and is hopeful for the center’s future.

“I think we set a good foundation for the center to grow,” she said. “We’re going to have more people register and it will create a greater awareness for day workers.”

The center’s opening was delayed by the opposition of local residents, who protested outside of the proposed site of the center last summer, citing traffic and other concerns. Members of the Save Our Street (SOS) group held signs with slogans such as “No Day Worker Center Here,” in an attempt to have the center located elsewhere.

The Community Action Board, which had been responsible for planning the center, received approval from the county zoning administration in March of last year. However, SOS members hired an attorney and appealed the decision. After considerable discussion between the Community Action Board and SOS members, a conditional use permit was granted by the planning commission of Santa Cruz in July, allowing plans to open the center to go forward.

Conditions like tracking the methods of transportation for workers to and from jobs and no loitering on nearby streets helped the center find common ground with the community, Gomez-Contreras said.

“There has been tension but there has also been a lack of knowledge about the day worker centers,” Gomez-Contreras said. “We responded by being accessible.”

In the two weeks the center has been open, 19 job matches were made and 10 workers have been sent out to jobs, Gomez-Contreras said. The center matches workers with jobs suited to their skills by putting their names on a rotating list. Employers can contact the center for workers, and the workers who don’t get placed on a given day go to the top of the list for the next day.

“What I would like the center to become is a place where the workers learn their rights to be able to run the center themselves and advocate for themselves,” said operations manager Daisy Miranda. “ That’s ideally what I would like to see — for workers to protect themselves.”

In addition to the outreach he does with the center, Rodriguez also works as a landscaper for several longtime clients and no longer has to look for different jobs every day — something that wouldn’t be possible without the skills in landscaping, plumbing and construction work he’s gained over the years.

Having witnessed the impact of education first-hand, he’s hopeful the center will be able to move past the initial opposition it encountered and become a valuable resource for day workers in the county as time goes on.

“Give us a chance and give yourself chance to get to know us,” Rodriguez said. “That might change your perspective about day worker centers and your workers. First know us, then judge us.”

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.”

Residents of the Santa Cruz community gathered at the Santa Cruz High Theater on April 10 to discuss the importance of a needle exchange. Photo by Daniela Ruiz.

After a string of violent crimes and the shooting of two police officers in February, public safety has become the most hotly debated issue in Santa Cruz. In the latest installment of that discussion, local churches and nonprofits held a forum to address drug usage in the city.

On April 10, more than 100 locals gathered at the Santa Cruz High School Theater to learn more about needle exchange programs and homelessness at the Drugs, Public Health and Needle Exchange forum. The meeting was one of a three-part series called “Santa Cruz Forums on Safety and Compassion,” which aims to address public safety concerns in a compassionate and nonjudgmental environment, according to a member of the Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV).

The forum was sponsored by the RCNV as well as other local groups including The Circle Church, Community Action Board, Homeless Services Center and several other Santa Cruz organizations.

“Our goal is to make sure there is compassion and humanity and practical solutions, rather than punitive ones,” said forum organizer Pastor Steve DeFields-Gambrel of The Circle Church. “To improve Santa Cruz we need to come together in a calmer spirit.”

At the forum, a panel of experts discussed the benefits of needle exchange programs and addressed drugs and homelessness — topics that some on the panel said had received an unwarranted amount of negative attention lately.

“Some people blame the community for their alleged tolerance — as if tolerance were a dirty word — and the tolerance of drug culture in particular,” said Craig Reinarman, professor of sociology.  “The claim that tolerance and the needle exchange and homeless services cause addiction and crime is like claiming the barometer causes the storm.”

The city council’s closure in January of a local syringe exchange was another major issue discussed at the forum. Run out of a van by the volunteer group Street Outreach Supporters (SOS), the exchange operated on lower Ocean Street for 30 years before the owner of the property agreed, at the city’s behest, to prohibit SOS from continuing their operations.

SOS has since relocated their operations to the county health facility on Emeline Avenue, a move that’s caused a 38 percent reduction in the number of participants who use the site. Needle exchanges dispose of dirty needles and give out sterile needles in return.

Alex Kral, director of the Urban Health Program in San Francisco, said needle exchange services can combat pollution in the environment and help prevent the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users.

In a study conducted by Kral and his colleagues, 3 million needles were handed out through a syringe exchange program (SEP) in San Francisco. The amount of needles improperly disposed of there was compared to Miami — a city with no SEPs — where no new needles were handed out. The study showed that 13 percent of needles in San Francisco were improperly disposed of, compared to Miami’s improper disposal rate of 95 percent.

“We need a multi-pronged approach to making sure there are opportunities for people who are using drugs to get off of drugs or to use drugs safely to make sure they don’t do any harm to anybody else in the community, and that includes needle exchange programs,” Kral said. “It’s a societal issue.”

A multi-pronged approach is exactly what Giang Nguyen of the county Health Services Agency described in her presentation, which outlined the county’s plans to overhaul the syringe exchange program and related programs.

The plan will move the exchange at the health facility on Emeline Avenue indoors and create new needle exchanges in the county. Nguyen said she intends for those efforts to be accompanied by additional outreach and educational programs.

“Don’t shoot, don’t share. We’re not about promoting drugs,” Nguyen said. “We want to help the population with not spreading the disease and not hurting themselves.”

At the end of the night, the forum’s organizers said they hoped those who attended left with a better understanding of some of the issues influencing the public safety debate in Santa Cruz. Kral said he hopes that information provides perspective in a discussion that’s grown increasingly heated recently.

“These forums galvanize the people and help mobilize them,” Kral said. “To my understanding, there is a very small minority of people who are really loud [when it comes to these issues]. The best thing to do is try to work with people who are loud.”

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.

Performers YaliniDream (left) and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai (right) act out a scene in which their characters pray to Mary Magdalene, portrayed by Adeeba Rana (center) during the “Say You Heard My Echo” event. Photo-illustration by Daniel Green.

Picture Ground Zero. A chain link fence strewn with teddy-bears, cards, flowers and records contrasts the dark blockade of a construction site, with soft whites and bright reds attempting to bandage the damaged scenery. A buzz of impatient commuters and diligent workers fills the scene until an interruption by three enchanting voices. Together, they say:

“In the city that never sleeps, we’ve got no time for memorial poems.”

One of these voices belongs to Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, a Chinese-Taiwanese American writer and artist from New York. Alongside her are performing partners Adeeba Rana and YaliniDream.

Tsai presented her three-act play “Say You Heard My Echo” at the Stevenson Event Center on April 13 through the Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center, Student Union Assembly and Rainbow Theater. The show was produced by Tsai’s associates from Moving Earth Productions, the Asian-American Arts Alliance and director Jesse Jou.

The show explores the impacts of 9/11 on three fictional Asian-American women living in New York City a decade later. Their struggles with survivorship and faith prompt them to call upon three female religious icons: Mary Magdalene, Guan Yin and Aisha. The women undergo separate transformations as the years following 9/11 prompt change in their political, social and personal lives. The ever-present female religious figures act as mirror representations of the characters and help facilitate their fulfillment, guidance and enlightenment.

Tsai, who grew up in the culture of poetry slams in Chicago, has been able to take her love for spoken word around the world to places including Trinidad and China.

“Spoken word poetry at its very best allows people’s authentic stories, relationships to language and rhythms to shine through [in] a unique, culturally specific way,” Tsai said.

Act One illustrates the damaging effect of monotony and silence — a Catholic burlesque dancer’s survival mutes her expressiveness until she becomes immersed in the anti-war movement. The second act chronicles the unsettling downward spiral of a Buddhist Iraq War veteran and hip-hop emcee who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder upon her return home. The final act addresses the issue of families burdened by detention and interrogation as a Muslim librarian struggles to stay connected to her grandfather. Themes such as the fight for cultural pride and struggle for survival occur throughout the play and serve as a primary focus to connect these three female characters to their respective religious icons.

“I was playing guitar … and heard the words ‘say you heard my echo,’ then I saw an image of a woman being pursued by Mary Magdalene in New York City,” Tsai said.

Tsai’s goal is to show the depth of the experiences that marginalized groups undergo, with special investment in the personal aspects of her identity as a woman who is Asian-American.

“‘Say You Heard My Echo’ shows the breadth and depth of my own humanity through the work that I do … The honesty resonates with people far beyond myself,” Tsai said.

After the third act, the women came together just as they did in the introduction. Their presence together was representative of the power in diversity among different cultures as they brought restoration and healing and beckoned for action in unison, “Silence is never silent. All we have is time for renewal. Say you heard my echo. Say you heard my call.”

After the show, Don Williams, the director of Cultural Arts and Diversity at UCSC addressed the audience about the significance of a valued community through performing arts.

“Our goal is to receive a variety of scripts that deal with many cultures and there’s a lot of cultures that are never written about,” Williams said.

Williams is engaged in the ongoing production process of performances that celebrate diverse cultures.

“We here at the UC, especially Rainbow Theater, are always looking to seek Asian-American one-act plays,” Williams said.

“Rainbow! Rainbow!” echoed supporters in the crowd.

The previously barren stage found its emptiness overwhelmed by the powerful presence of everyone involved as a unified body. The performers of “Say You Heard My Echo” were surrounded by the embrace of laughter and liveliness by the student communities of Don Williams and the students of Cultural Arts and Diversity Resource Center, Student Union Assembly affiliates, and performers from Rainbow Theater.

“No matter how we feel on a given day, we’re never as spiritually or emotionally alone as we may feel,” Tsai said.

To follow Kelly Tsai’s performances and material visit yellowgurl.com.

City on a Hill Press: When did you first start producing music?
DJ Sam F: I started producing when I was 16. I used Garageband at first and then I used Reason. It was mostly hip-hop back then and I kind of rapped. It was pretty silly.

CHP: How did you get started producing at UCSC?
DJ Sam F: One of my friends from high school, Lucky Date, talked with me about being producers and making it a career. He kind of inspired me to get back into it. I took a class at UCSC on Logic the end of my sophomore year and since then I’ve been in Logic. For the past two years I’ve been producing EDM, but I wasn’t good at first. It took a while before
I liked the end result.

CHP: What types of EDM do you produce?
DJ Sam F: Dubstep, electro-house and “hip-hop step.” I’ve done a bunch of remixes that are about 100 beats per minute. People really like those but I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into a “remix genre” of what I do. I’m working on my EP now and it’s going to be electro. I also work on some glitch-hoppy, rap influenced EDM.

CHP: What other artists/genres influence your work?
DJ Sam F: Definitely Porter Robinson and Lucky Date. Skrillex has been a huge influence — his music has been super innovative and he started the whole “brostep” genre. People hate on it but I love Skrillex and I’ve always considered him as one of my favorite artists. I’m influenced a lot by the hyphy movement because I grew up in Berkeley, so you’ll find rap things [in my music] that allude to Bay Area hip-hop.

CHP: How would you describe your musical style?
DJ Sam F: It’s pretty complex. I do resampling — crazy techniques of making my sounds. I’ll program a synth, bounce it to a new file, edit it again, re-compress it and add more effects. Really complex, glitchy sort of sounds.

CHP: How long do you usually spend on a single track?
DJ Sam F: It depends. A hip hop remix I could do in two days, sometimes even a day. Originals I like to spend more time — really go back into fine detail and find everything that I do like, until I have a final product I can say I’m really proud of.

CHP: What is your process when starting a track?
DJ Sam F: Before I can do anything I need to clean my room, it’s like a weird OCD. If my bed’s messed up, in the back of my head, I’m like “I can’t produce.” Then I’ll usually start with drums or a sample and then layer it. I usually start with drums, then go to build, then drop.

CHP: What is your favorite part of performing?
DJ Sam F: I’m really into the vibes. When I drop a song and everyone is stoked, that’s the best for me. I just get really excited and I jump and see the crowd’s appreciation. Especially when it’s an original. So definitely “vibing” off the crowd.

CHP: What was the strangest or most interesting thing that has happened to you at a show?
DJ Sam F: This isn’t strange, just really unfortunate. There was a really drunk girl at MOTIV, and she came up and was lingering next to me in the booth. I asked if she could please move and get out of my space but she was like, “No, f*** you.” Then I was like, “Security, can you please tell this girl to leave?” Then she goes to the crowd and finds her boyfriend. They come up and then close my laptop and the music stops and I was like, “Security, get them.”

CHP: Is producing and performing music something you intend to pursue as a career?
DJ Sam F: Definitely. After I graduate I’m planning on moving to LA to network down there. It’s all about coming up with original music. I have a release on Universal Republic — I did a remix of The Lonely Island’s new song “Yolo” that comes out on Saturday.

CHP: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming producers?
DJ Sam F: Dedicate yourselves to it. It’s really hard and takes a lot. But if you’re committed to spending three hours a day, everyday — no exceptions — for like a year, then it’s definitely possible [to be successful]. I haven’t made it yet myself, I’m on a path to hopefully succeed. But it takes dedication and full commitment.

Sam’s music is available online on his SoundCloud and Facebook.
soundcloud.com/djsamf
facebook.com/djsamf

DJ Sam F gets the crowd going at the E-40 show.

DJ Sam F gets the crowd going at the E-40 show.

Sam F adds effects to the mix.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

DJ Sam F performs at The Catalyst before E-40.

Sam uses a variety of plugins.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F works with his production setup in his house

Sam works with Massive to craft his synths.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F programs synths and drums.

Sam F uses Apple Logic in his production.

Photo-Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The sun was up all night long. Marci Beitch unwraps the scarf covering her face and crawls out from under her sleeping bag, which is supposed to protect against temperatures of up to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beitch rises to her feet. Removing the plastic door of her tent, she steps out into the snow where a cluster of yellow tents dot the landscape. A 10 meter tall bright red crane fills her vision, standing above a hole in the center of the camp. Bracing against the cold, Beitch gets ready for another 10-hour work day at the bottom of the world: Antartica.

“There really wasn’t an average day,” Beitch said, in retrospect.

Beitch, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student, was one of about 50 researchers who called Antarctica home Jan. 21–31 during the 2012 and 2013 field season of the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD). The project brings together professors, engineers and graduate students from nine institutions to meet once a year in Antarctica. They set up base above Lake Whillans — a subglacial lake 800 meters beneath the ice. This year was the first that they transported, assembled and employed an environmentally-friendly drill to reach the lake.

For UCSC glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk, the research literally opened up new worlds. While Tulaczyk gazed at the framed picture of a barren Antarctic field that hangs on the wall of his air-conditioned office, he recalled the expedition’s purpose.

“The first focus of the project is to study microbial life, which survive in environments deficient in light, organic matter and oxygen,” Tulaczyk said. “This will allow scientists to better understand conditions of habitability for other planets and how genetic mechanisms enable microbes to survive under difficult conditions. The second focus is to study mechanisms of motion for the West Antarctic ice sheet, as this will allow scientists to better predict future changes in global sea levels due to a warming climate.”

Antarctica offers a short window of “hospitality” — November through the end of January — for any research to be safely conducted. The window was used sparingly for preparation, yet little time remained for actual research.

The core project took place over a five day drilling period from Jan. 21–26 and a five day data collection period from Jan. 27–31. This story serves as an inside look at the rigors of collegial research, as it was done before the clock’s minute hand effectively sealed the hole at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 31 — the project’s deadline.

The Antarctic research team lowers a cable 800 meters below the icy surface into a bore hole to collect temperature and seismic data. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Building Toward Antarctica

The expedition begins here, in the forested region of UC Santa Cruz.

UCSC has played a role in the WISSARD project from its very beginning when Professors Slawek Tulaczyk of UCSC and Helen Amanda Fricker of UC San Diego first developed the idea of drilling into Lake Whillans around 2007. The professors pitched their idea to other U.S. scientists and successfully pushed The National Science Foundation (NSF) for most of their funding, which came through several grants including ones made to UCSC, Montana State University and Northern Illinois University. Tulaczyk then joined with UCSC professors Andrew Fisher and Susan Schwartz to plan the project as a team.

Tulaczyk said UCSC’s temperature data will be shared with other universities that took part in the project. Seismic data collected by UCSC will be kept exclusively for the Earth and Planetary Sciences department to study for a couple years before it is released in a public database.

In early summer of 2012, UCSC instrument engineer Dan Sampson began coordinating with instrumentation specialist Robin Bolsey and UCSC undergraduate Kyle Johnson to prepare the necessary instruments for subglacial research.

“The idea was to put together as complete a geophysical [instrument] package as possible,” Sampson said.

While Sampson and Bolsey designed the equipment UCSC used in Antarctica, undergraduate students from the Earth and Planetary Sciences department helped improve instrument designs and prepare cables and storage boxes.

The team used National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to construct several instruments from scratch, like a sediment piston corer to snatch sediment from the lake and a seismometer to detect minute vibrations in the ice sheet.

“The undergraduates had no comprehensive engineering background,” Sampson said, “but their feedback as sophisticated users was invaluable in providing suggestions for improvement and they were an intelligent bunch with a lot of good ideas.”

Undergraduate students Krista Myers, Nick Geier and Connor Williams coiled miles of cable to place inside a 20 foot storage container at the edge of the woods behind Baskin Engineering.

“What we did was mostly to help reel the cables onto a large reel,” Myers said. “We’d reel 800 meters on this huge crank reel that we would

it was fun. We got to jam to some KZSC while we were reeling away for hours.”

Myers said while undergraduates didn’t receive school credit for their summer work, it did give them the resume-worthy experience of working on an international research project.

UCSC professor Slawek Tulaczyk lowers cables to the bottom of a subglacial lake. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Stepping Into Snow

With the summer almost over, undergraduates helped pack and ship instruments and miles of cables sent in October and November.  All supplies landed on the shore of Antarctica at the McMurdo Station. From there, many instruments were flown to the field site while monster truck-sized snow tractors hauled platform equipment across 600 miles of frozen tundra.

Professor Tulaczyk and UCSC graduate students Marci Beitch and Ken Mankoff learned how to operate instruments in the deep-field — a term researchers use for Antarctic sites which don’t offer the safety of a nearby permanent station with ready access to heating, water, food and emergency care. In Antarctica, being even 2 miles away from a permanent station is referred to as the deep-field. This camp found itself 600 miles away from safety.

After six years of planning, Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson and the grad students found themselves in one of the world’s most inhospitable places separated from their data by half a mile of ice.

“It’s different from almost any other place on Earth,” Tulaczyk said. “It’s like another planet.”

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers operated a hot water drill for five days to open an 800 meter deep borehole to the lake. Researchers rushed for five more days to conduct research at the borehole by the end of Jan. 31— the calendar end of Antarctic summer and the date NSF mandated researchers must leave the site to avoid encroaching harsh weather.

The man-made borehole began to slowly freeze over, and due to the Jan. 31 deadline, the hole could not be re-drilled and continually used for research.

Beitch recalled that working at the borehole in the middle of the night exposed researchers to minus 20-degree temperatures.

“I remember a very cold night,” Beitch said. “I was working until 4 a.m. or so at the borehole, during which a cup of very hot water developed an icy surface in less than an hour. One other day a freezing fog blew over the camp and little beads of fog were freezing to my eyelashes.”

With eyes framed in ice the researchers continued their work.

“Scientists were sending measurement and sample collection instruments down around the clock,” Beitch said. “Some were working up to 20 hours. There was no regularity to the days out there. It was like ‘Okay, I’m working a shift from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., I’m going to sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then I’m going back on another shift.’”

Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson, Beitch and Mankoff often deployed the instruments for other universities when those university team members took a break.

“We had a very collegial team on the ice,” Tulaczyk said. “Nonetheless, some difficult decisions had to be made as there was insufficient time to accomplish all the science experiments. We were able to prioritize and cut tasks but we walked away from the field season still talking to each other.”

To combat the monotony of endlessly lowering and pulling cables at the borehole, the drill team blasted music from a boombox.

“We played James Brown continuously,” Beitch said. “That heated us up, for sure.”

UCSC graduate student Grace Barcheck missed out on the soul-infused cable pulling, instead venturing out of the camp to set up GPS and seismic-recording devices 100 kilometers downstream from the Whillans ice flow.

Barcheck and two researchers formed the safety minimum of a three person group as they travelled on well-packed ski-doo snowmobiles. Riding for hours on what Tulaczyk likened to a mechanical bull, Barcheck finally pulled her ski-doo into the downstream site. The group spent nearly a whole day pitching camp and the next four days setting up seismometer and GPS instruments. After the planned five days ended, subtle isolation anxiety began and the group rode their mechanical bulls back to the  site.

“We came back and we were all really excited to see civilization,” Barcheck said. “[The main camp] consisted of  containers and some more tents, but it was such a relief to have more people around. It’s not that I didn’t like the people I was with, but isolation is very strange.”

A crane lowers instruments into the bore hole. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Working for the Play

Work in the frigid camp stopped on the last night of sampling, as researchers packed up supplies. Some exhausted researchers took up reading, guitar playing, chilly walks and cross-country snow skiing, which the deadline had earlier ruled out. On the last night, Mankoff took out a big marker and scribbled on the empty packing boxes to transform them into oversized playing dice.

“We didn’t actually play craps with them,” Mankoff said. “But we were going to try to play backgammon. When we had a short amount of downtime, people were having fun.”

After the fifth day the borehole started to freeze over as the experiments and James Brown music ceased.

The minus 20 degree Fahrenheit winds retook this deep-field site in Antarctica, as the researchers flew to McMurdo station on the Antarctic coast and from there toward the warmer comfort of home.

In that now frozen borehole the UCSC researchers left a three-component, short-period, high-gain seismometer, a string of geophones and a fiber optic temperature sensor to record future data, but what they took from that borehole is both more understandable and more meaningful.

“The UCSC team hadn’t planned to bring back samples of the sediment or water this season,” Beitch said, “so we did not get the permits to do so. The only things we were able to take from the field were the relationships, the fun times and the laughter with these incredible people that we got to work with. Being a part of such groundbreaking, or ice breaking work was so cool. It just epitomizes the word cool.”

Illustration by Caetano Santos.

Four inmates have died in the Santa Cruz County Jail since last August. To protest those deaths and the conditions at the jail, the Santa Cruz activist group Sin Barras organized a “Speakout” event at the Town Clock tower on April 6.

Led by the sounds of the Brass Liberation Orchestra, the crowd marched from the tower to the jail to bring awareness to unsafe conditions and a lack of medical care that Sin Barras described in a press release as amounting “to torture.”

Specifically, speakers condemned the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors for their decision to outsource county jail medical care to Monterey-based California Forensic Medical Group (CFMG). CFMG has been a defendant in several lawsuits across California over inadequate care, inmate abuse and neglect, including one in which a nurse employed by the company claimed that she contracted AIDS from inmates due to a lack of protective equipment.

Sin Barras, Spanish for “without prison bars” is a local organization that works to stop jail expansion, improve healthcare for inmates and end inhumane incarceration conditions. Many other Santa Cruz organizations and individuals raised their voices in solidarity along the parade route, including the Good Samaritan Mobile Medics, Becky Johnson of the Santa Cruz 11 and the Homeless United for Friends and Freedom (HUFF).

Standing outside of the jail, Sin Barras speakers decried the deaths of inmates that have occurred since last August, beginning with Felton resident Christy Ann Sanders who died while incarcerated for a probation violation. Inmates Brant Monnett, Rick Pritchard and Bradley Gordon Dreher have also died in the jail since then.

The participants expressed outrage over the perceived flaws of the Santa Cruz County jail, calling it representative of problems within the wider network of jails and prisons across the United States. One young woman wore a sign on her back that read, “Crime is a symptom of a culture that doesn’t nurture.”

Sin Barras urged the public to join them in mobilizing support against prison expansion, push for “de-carceration,” and attempted to demonstrate how the prison system has failed to improve crime prevention.

Tash Nguyen, a leader of Sin Barras, recounted her personal experiences of being incarcerated four times since she was a teen for political protests. She said she had been subjected to abusive strip searches and had observed violations of rules relating to family visits and protection from violence. She also said that prison breaks families apart, perpetuates violence and institutionalizes racism.

Simba, a former Black Panther, described similar experiences while in custody and said that “we all are affected because we all know a family member or a friend that has been in prison.”

Santa Cruz Sheriff Phil Wowak said the Santa Cruz County jail performed up to legally required standards for prisoner health care, family visits and protected the constitutional rights of inmates.

Becky Johnson — until recently a defendant in a case brought against her and 10 others by the Santa Cruz District Attorney for their role in the occupation of a vacant bank building two years ago — said steps must be taken to reform the jail system.

“[We need to] end the drug war, mandatory-minimum [sentences] and laws that were written to be used against people,” Johnson said.

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.”