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April 3, 2000

Higher expectations	Algae taste-tests
Swinging for the fence	A rewarding relationship
Ya' better listen to the radio

Higher expectations

On Feb. 9, the CSU plan to motivate students to finish their remedial education was the subject of California Focus, an opinion column in the Solano County newspaper The Republic. Troubled by the high numbers of sophomores who had not completed remedial work (as many as 48 percent in 1998), the CSU notified students that if they did not finish by the end of their first full school year, they would be expelled. So far only 7 percent of remedial students in the CSU system have been dismissed. "When you make it clear that rules aren't going to be bent the next time, the tests will be taken, the required classes will be taken," said SF State President Robert Corrigan.

The March 26 issue of the San Jose Mercury News carried an Associated Press story about new research by SF State marine scientist William Cochlan that suggests urine from urban and agricultural runoff may contribute to potentially toxic blooms of marine algae, known as red tides. Together with UC Santa Cruz researcher Raphael Kudela, Cochlan, a researcher at SF State's Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies, studied one of the largest red tides in California's history and found that a species of algae known as dinoflagellates prefer to consume urea, an organic nitrogen found in urine, over its traditional meal of ammonia or nitrate, nutrients that occur naturally in the ocean. The bloom coincided with heavy storm runoff in Southern California. "We can't dismiss the fact that if you have a lot of urban runoff, you are going to pollute the coastal environment," said Cochlan.

On Feb. 28, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on one of the lighter topics discussed at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science--the science of baseball. One point of discussion was how new stadiums like Pacific Bell Park will influence the game. SF State history professor Jules Tygiel, who teaches a class on the history of baseball, expects a lot of "shell-shocked young pitchers" at Pac Bell: "Now we've entered into a generation of smaller parks, and players are stronger, as well. The shift has been from parks that favor pitchers to parks that favor hitters, and that's going to be the tone for some time to come."

The San Francisco Examiner reported March 15 on SF State student Cecilia Shephard, who received a Howard R. Swearer award from Brown University for being a driving force behind the redevelopment of the Hayes Valley public housing project. Gerald Eisman, director of SF State's Office of Community Service Learning, said that "the partnership of Cecilia's community with the university and the San Francisco Housing Authority has accomplished a great deal, and it will accomplish more in the future."

The March issue of the science journal Nature featured a book review by SF State biology professor Michael A. Goldman, who offered his perspective on Greg Bear's latest sci-fi offering, Darwin's Radio. The novel is the story of scientists studying and combating a retrovirus that suddenly becomes active after laying dormant in the human genome for millennia. According to Goldman, "it is superb 'hard' science fiction . . . an entertaining, even riveting story, delivered poetically . . . It takes a hard look at the challenges faced by a woman scientist with radical ideas, and the excitement of discovering a totally new way of looking at biological evolution."

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