ASUCD Senate meetings are scheduled to begin Thursdays at 6:10 p.m. Times listed are according to the clock at the Apr. 9 meeting location, the Memorial Union’s Mee Room.

Joe Chatham, ASUCD president, present

Chris Dietrich, ASUCD vice president, present

Joemar Clemente, ASUCD senator, present

Danny Garrett, ASUCD senator, present

Justin Gold, ASUCD senator, present

Erin Lebe, ASUCD senator, present

Kevin Massoudi ASUCD senator, present

Justin Patrizio, ASUCD senator, present

Laura Pulido, ASUCD senator, present

Shawdee Rouhafza, ASUCD senator, present

Trevor Taylor, ASUCD senator, present

Mo Torres, ASUCD senator, present

Previn Witana, ASUCD senator, present

Jack Zwald, ASUCD president pro-tempore, present

Meeting called to order at 6:10

Presentation

Chatham presented a State of the Association speech, and urged the student body to strive for unity to create effective student government and to improve intra-organizational communication.

Appointments and confirmations

Brian Kim was confirmed director of City and County Affairs.

Chintan Desai was confirmed an alternate commissioner of the External Affairs Commission.

Laura Kroeger, Allison Ramiller and Chelsea Norris were confirmed commissioners of the Gender and Sexuality Commission.

Jacqueline Limon, Anisha Chikarmane, Mona Navid and Kelly Riggle were confirmed commissioners of the Academic Affairs Commission.

Daniel Goodman was confirmed commissioner of the Internal Affairs Commission.

Court Announcement

Justice Rudy Ornelas announced that the Student Court will hold a pre-hearing conference Wednesday at 8 p.m. in an undisclosed room to discuss matters of Case 46, “Ambriz vs. ASUCD Elections Committee.”

Consideration of Urgent Legislation

Resolution “X,” authored by Talia MacMath, coauthored by Maryam Taeb and introduced by Patrizio, to officially support California Senate Bill 48 authored by California State Senator Elaine Alquist and Senate Bill 386 authored by California State Senator George Runner, passed unanimously.

Senate Resolution 25, authored and introduced by Zwald, co-authored by Amanpreet Singh, opposing the disproportionate burden placed on ASUCD commercial units by the University Rate Group, passed unanimously, with some amendments.

Public Announcements

Marcus Tang, chair of the Academic Affairs Commission, announced that tomorrow is the last day to add or drop a class.

Laura Brown, chair of the Gender and Sexualities Commission, announced that the Davis Feminist Film Festival will be held on Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Theatre. She also announced that GASC is sponsoring “Queer Tours” conversation series, which will discuss the biological argument for gay civil rights. The series will begin on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in MU II.

Christine Pham, chair of the Picnic Day committee, announced that the committee will hold a pie-eating contest on Tuesday at noon on the MU patio, and a cow-milking contest on Wednesday afternoon in the Quad. She also noted that the forecast for Saturday, the day of Picnic Day, is sunny.

Dietrich announced that Lobby Corps will hold a training session on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the center office, and Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the conference room for Lobby month.

President’s report

Chatham announced that the association is looking at budget details in lieu of increasing budget cuts. He said that the cuts probably won’t affect ASUCD’s budget too much. He also announced that Tipsy Taxi’s transportation financial situation project is working out, and that officials should know in the next couple of weeks who the new UC Davis chancellor will be. The decision will be announced at the regents‘ May 5 meeting. The advisory committee has narrowed their choices down to two candidates.

Torres announced that the senate@ucdavis.edu e-mail address is working.

Taylor announced that Mondays at 4:15 p.m. the Coho personnel will hold meetings in the Coho.

Other business

Zwald announced that there have been senators who have not reported their office hours, and that those who do not report their office hours will face consequences.

Meeting adjourned at 9:42 p.m.

LAUREN STEUSSY compiles the senate briefs and can be reached at campus@theaggie.org. 

Over 1000 people gathered around drum circles and traditional dancers in the Pavilion on Saturday for the 37th annual UC Davis Powwow. The event, presented by the Native American Student Union (NASU) attracted an estimated 1,300 guests during the course of the daylong event.

“Our culture is important,” said Larsky, a member of the Colville tribe in Washington. “Without our culture, we’re a dying breed.“

Larsky, like many of those in attendance, was wearing his traditional regalia of brightly colored garments, buckskins and feathers. Many others wore jingles on their outfits, creating a harmony of bells amid the thunderous drumbeats and vocables.

Organizers estimated that there were approximately 40 different tribes from all over the U.S. at the powwow on Saturday, which ran from 10 a.m. to midnight.

The day began with a ceremonial gourd dance, followed by the grand entrance. The traditional dances were accompanied by drum hosts Northern Eagle and Southern Express. In between various competitive dances, individuals partook in free-spirited intertribal dances with members from the participating tribes.

The powwow also offered a craft area and booths for vendors, who sold Native American art, clothing and food.

“Our powwow is the most traditional event that’s open to the public,” said chair of the powwow committee April Negrette. “This is sacred ground, and we’ve all left our negative energy out.”

Negrette, a member of the Shoshone-Paiute tribe and sophomore wildlife, fish and conservation biology major and Native American studies minor, said that events such as this help to give recognition to the small population of Native American students on campus. She estimated that there are about 186 self-identified Native Americans, a small number of which get involved with NASU.

The event was funded by a variety of individuals and organizations such as ASUCD, the tribes who attended the event, vendors and the NASU, which held fundraisers to support the powwow.

– Text by Lauren Steussy

Tony Simon, a neuroscientist with the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, was recently awarded a five-year $2.6 million grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue his research on the gene linked to autism, schizophrenia and ADHD.

Simon, who has found that the deletion of the gene leads to various disorders, has been conducting research to discover how the brain changes when the deletion takes place.

“I want to explain why the learning difficulties come about and I want to fix those difficulties,” said Simon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

The funding will allow Simon to continue his work and test hypotheses that help further his research.

“It’s a huge relief [to have received the grant] because we have built a really big program here and I think the M.I.N.D. Institute is a leader in the field of developmental disorders,” Simon said. “We want to see this through and we are excited to have another five years to research to help people understand this disorder.“

His research primarily focuses on brain development and the learning difficulties associated with the chromosome deletion. Simon has discovered that children with this particular deletion syndrome struggle to understand time, space and numbers, which he has termed “spatiotemporal hypergranularity.“

Ingrid Leckliter, licensed clinical psychologist and associate clinical professor of pediatrics, is involved with Simon’s research by conducting comprehensive assessments of children that have frequent or common mental health and developmental issues.

“I take [Simon’s] findings from his research and think about it in the context of children from my assessments, and see if we can form recommendations on how to help them,” she said.

Through his research, Simon has come to the conclusion that video games may be of some help to children who have difficulty processing space and time.

The grant will specifically be focused on testing out this hypothesis to see if video games will actually help these children.

“Work has been done showing that when college kids play action video games they increase their spatial and temporal knowledge,” Simon said. “They process things faster and more of it. If we build our own versions of video games, then we can actually retrain the brains of [children with the deletion].“

This will result in reducing the learning difficulties these children have. Leckliter hopes that in the next five years of research, more answers will be found.

“I’m hoping [research] gives us more insight into how children’s brains develop and how that impacts their functioning and ultimately whether or not we can do things that change their developmental pathways,” she said.

The M.I.N.D. Institute is an interdisciplinary research center where parents, community leaders, researchers, clinicians and volunteers collaborate to study and treat autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

CORY BULLIS can be reached at campus@theaggie.org. 

The expansion of the United States‘ government and growth of secret agencies has fueled its population’s belief in conspiracy theories, said Kathy Olmsted, a professor in the department of history and author of recently published Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11.

“As government abuses are exposed, as they often are because we live in a relatively open society, Americans look at that evidence and decide, ‘Well, if we know that the government did this, then who is to say the government didn’t do [other things].‘”

Real Enemies published by Oxford University Press, is Olmsted’s third book on government secrets. The book details the increase in state power throughout the 1900s, and is the product of five years of research in university libraries throughout the country where conspiracy theorists have deposited their manuscripts and letters.

“I spent a lot of time in Washington D.C., and exotic places like Laramie, Wyoming – next time I’ll try and choose something that involves research in Venice – but I was all over the map,” Olmsted said of her travels.

Among those whose mysteries Olmsted tries to unravel are scientist Linus Pauling, who faced FBI harassment as a suspected communist during the Cold War, and Sylvia Meagher, an analyst for the World Health Organization who was deeply invested in disproving the government’s version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

After your first book, what made you want to keep exploring?

My first book was on the congressional investigation of the CIA and FBI after Watergate, and after that came out in 1996 a lot of people began contacting me, and they were really engaged with the subject, and had read congressional reports. [The reports] exposed a lot of crimes and abuses by the FBI, and a lot of the people who began contacting me were convinced they were the victims of secret conspiracies by government agencies, so I started to get interested in the interplay of the relationship between real government conspiracies and conspiracy theories about the government.

Have you taken anything from your books into the classroom with you – and vice versa – does anything from your classroom find its way into your books?

Definitely, I think with all of us our research informs our teaching and our teaching helps us to formulate questions for our research. In this particular case, the most direct application in my teaching has been that I’ve taught classes on conspiracy theories – I teach a seminar for history majors and an upper division lecture class.

In my acknowledgements I thank my undergraduates first because they’ve really helped me. A lot of my undergraduates give me materials – they forward me links to websites, etc. One gave me a box of books on conspiracy theories from the 1950s that he‘d picked up at an estate sale. So I get a lot of information from my undergraduates, but also they ask questions that help me realize what I need to clarify in my writing – they pose new questions or suggest new links that send me off in new directions.

What would you say could be done to mitigate the spread of conspiracy theories?

It’s up to the government to be open and transparent so that people believe that they can find out what their government is up to. When the government is secretive and refuses to disclose information then people tend to suspect the worst.

How do the students you interact with feel about 9/11?

They’re very interested in 9/11. For a lot of students, 9/11 is their Kennedy assassination – they’re fascinated by it and want to understand it and answer its unanswered questions and they see it as a mystery that they can solve and are very engaged with it. 9/11 is what draws them to conspiracy theories – it’s the one they know most about and are most interested in.

What are your feelings on 9/11? Does it merit being defined as a conspiracy?

I’m interested in why so many people believe in conspiracy theories – I don’t believe the controlled demolition theory myself – but I’m interested in why so many Americans would be so distrustful of their government to think it was capable of that mass murder, so what I do in the book is look in to what other things did the Bush administration do to destroy the public’s trust in the government.

I’m interested in why 9/11 theories are so widespread – about a third of Americans believe that the Bush administration was somehow involved, and a majority of those are ages 18-29, so it’s very prevalent among my students, and it’s what got me interested in seeking why so many people would be so distrustful that they would believe that what they had seen on TV was an elaborate ruse that was put on by their government.

Does this say anything about our generation’s [the 18-29 demographic] trust of the media?

Absolutely – the Internet makes alternative versions of events more readily available, so alternative conspiracy theories can spread more quickly.

MIKE DORSEY can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.