Campus News

Three members of the Institute of Marine Sciences earned kudos in recent months. The California Academy of Sciences elected professor of biology Dan Costa as a fellow. IMS director and professor of earth sciences Gary Griggs joined the National Research Council’s Committee on Coastal Engineering Research and Education Needs. Lastly, the Society for Marine Mammalogy…

The science journal Nature recently ran a commentary piece by linguist Geoffrey Pullum on the Oakland school board’s decision to recognize Ebonics as a language. Pullum argued that Ebonics, which he calls African American English, is a dialect of English with its own grammatical rules, no different from a dialect of, for example, Arabic or…

Nominations for three open Staff Advisory Board positions are due by April 30. Board members will serve two-year terms beginning July 1. Nominees must be staff members who are not represented by an exclusive bargaining agent. For a nomination form or for more information, contact Jo Ann McFarland at (408) 459-3260 or joann@cats.ucsc.edu. Gateway to…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–The sight of hummingbirds sipping the sweet nectar of sages is a sure sign that spring has returned to the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden. The 25-acre organic Farm features gardens, orchards, and fields of row crops. The smaller Alan Chadwick Garden is a delightful mix of vegetables, dwarf fruit trees, and…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–An impressive array of organic perennials will be among the hundreds of plants for sale at the annual UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden plant sale on Saturday and Sunday, May 3-4. Hours are 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. each day in the Barn Theater parking lot at the intersection of Bay and…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Carla Freccero, a professor of literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present an Inaugural Lecture titled "Archives in the Fiction: History and Literature in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron." The talk takes place at 8 P.M. on Wednesday, April 16, on Performing Arts Second Stage. The talk is…

April 22 Talk On Harrison’s Music And Politics Is One Of Several Ucsc Events Honoring The Composer SANTA CRUZ, CA–Musicologist and flutist Leta Miller will present an inaugural lecture titled "Sounding Off: Lou Harrison’s Musical Politics" at 8 P.M. Tuesday, April 22, in the Music Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The talk…

A simulated collision between two galaxies, created by UCSC astrophysicist Lars Hernquist and former UCSC postdoctoral researcher Chris Mihos, now at Johns Hopkins University, was nominated for a 1997 Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the science category. The awards recognize innovative uses of information technology. The galaxy collision, featured in the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage, is…

An ecologist with a quantitative bent, Marc Mangel has issued a call to his colleagues to change their methodology. Put simply, he wants them to use more sophisticated statistical methods to test their data against their descriptions of the world. To that end, Mangel has prepared "a new kind of tool kit" for ecologists to…

UCSC students, faculty, and staff and members of the Santa Cruz community are invited to a public forum on Thursday, April 17, to discuss possible sites for a new fitness and weight-training center in the East Field House area. The forum takes place from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Fireside Lounge at Cowell College.…

John L. Halverson, a founding faculty member of Stevenson College and a professor of literature here for 27 years, died in Santa Cruz on Friday, March 28, after several months of illness. He was 69. Halverson was born and raised in Iowa. Before entering college he served for three years in the U.S. Air Force.…

The Heaven’s Gate mass suicide got the phones ringing at the home of UCSC’s resident cult expert, Anthony Pratkanis, who spoke with KION-TV, the Contra Costa Times, Sacramento Bee, and San Jose Mercury News. An editorial in the Eureka Times-Standard praised chemist Joe Konopelski’s efforts to synthesize a potential cancer-fighting compound in his lab. Konopelski’s…