A new project led by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography aims to reduce human exposure to beach contamination through a three-pronged approach of real-time coastal monitoring, source identification and improved management and regulation.
The city of Imperial Beach awarded Scripps scientists $750,000 to study coastal pollution as part of a project funded by the State Water Resources Control Board and Gov. Gray Davis’ Clean Beach Initiative.
Parts of Imperial Beach’s coastline were closed 39 times in 2000 — more than half of these closings occurred during the peak tourist months of summer. The sources of bacterial contamination responsible for these closures are difficult to pinpoint due to the various possible sources, including the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant outfall, the Tijuana River outflow, northward flow of wastewater from Mexico and local runoff from Imperial Beach.
Under the newly funded project, Scripps scientists have designed a system for monitoring coastal circulation and movement of distinct water types. The “”Coastal Monitoring System”” combines data from radar instruments that map surface ocean currents and a suite of in-water instrumentation.
Study: GPA better predictor of minority success than S.A.T. I
High-school grades are far more reliable than S.A.T. I scores in predicting how well minority students will do in college, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis. Merna Villarejo, a professor emerita of microbiology at UC Davis, presented the findings Nov. 17 at a conference, “”Rethinking the S.A.T. in University Admissions,”” sponsored by the Academic Senate Center for Faculty Outreach at UC Santa Barbara.
The researchers, who examined the college performance of 1,274 minority students who entered UC Davis as freshmen from 1988 through 1994, found that high school preparation was associated with persistence and performance from basic science classes all the way through to graduation. Villarejo said the study indicates that high school GPA is the single most important predictor of all positive academic outcomes measured.
In a study with implications for university admission procedures, Villarejo and Barlow found that higher S.A.T. scores did correlate with students’ success in basic math and chemistry, as well as their chances of graduating with at least a B average — the minimum required for most graduate and professional programs. However, the study found that high-school GPA far outweighed S.A.T. scores in predicting the students’ chances of success in college. Moreover, the study found that a program of academic enrichment and personal support can largely compensate for poor high school preparation.
UCSD students take top prize in programming contest
A team of three UCSD computer science students took first prize at the annual Association for Computing Machinery Southern California Region Programming Contest on Nov. 10 at Riverside Community College. The winning team will go on to represent the region in the 26th Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals sponsored by IBM on March 23 in Honolulu.
The winning “”UCSD Paper”” team consisted of undergraduates Matthew Fedder, Stefan Schoenmackers and graduate student Jeremy Lau, all from UCSD’s computer science and engineering department. The UCSD teams went up against 54 teams from 21 universities — including groups fielded by previous winners of the competition, such as the California Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College. Each team was given one computer and six problems to solve in five hours. UCSD Paper was the only team to solve five problems in the allotted time.
An intra-UCSD competition sponsored by The Dini Group was held earlier this fall to select the members of each UCSD team from a field of approximately 60 contestants. The three teams then competed against each other in two practice rounds using problems and solutions supplied by graduate students John Bellardo and Greg Hamerly, as well as Don Yang, a recent CSE graduate — all participants in previous programming contests. Additional support and coaching was provided by CSE faculty members Geoff Voelker and Rick Ord.
National Academy of Sciences to hold symposium at UCSD
Scientific advances ranging from the Internet to the oceans will be discussed at a public symposium to be sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences at UCSD at 1 p.m. Nov. 29 in the Price Center Theater. The public symposium is being held in conjunction with a regional meeting of some 80 NAS members at UCSD.
Speakers will include faculty of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and experts in the fields of cancer research, computer science, and information technology. According to speaker Larry M. Smarr, these seemingly disparate topics require remarkably similar infrastructure for their research because of the need for information sharing and shared computation of data.
The symposium will be broadcast from 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. via live streaming video at rtsp://132.239.50.152:554/encoder/nas.rm. After the meeting, the presentations will be archived for on-demand viewing.
