If you’ve ever been frustrated by Unitrans, tonight at 6 in the Davis Community Chambers is the time to speak up.

Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) will be holding an “Unmet Transit Needs” hearing tomorrow for four counties in the Sacramento area including Yuba, Yolo, Sacramento and Sutter.

Tonight’s meeting, an annual requirement from the California Transportation Act, will provide an opportunity for members of the public to speak out about issues concerning them in public transportation.

“This is an open book chance for people to come in and say that they have needs that need to be met,” said Geoff Straw, general manager for Unitrans.

Straw said SACOG takes the comments from these meetings into careful consideration following two filters. The first will look at the financial feasibility of the suggestion with existing funds and the second looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of the suggestion.

“This is an important test [within the community] because there are a lot of transit needs that are unmet,” Straw said.

Straw also said that some of the best ideas have come from such annual meetings with the public, such as Uni-Ride, a bus stop to bus stop program that allows people to have a shuttle transport them from one bus stop to any other.

Fatima Sajjadi, a junior psychology major and regular bus rider of the D, P and Q lines to campus, said that there can be some areas of improvement for Unitrans.

“I don’t really have any problems with the actual buses, but sometimes they can be 15 minutes late and then I’m late for my classes,” she said.

Sajjadi also said that on some days buses on the D line can be overcrowded, especially when it rains.

Straw encourages students who have suggestions or issues to come to the meeting and voice their opinions. Issues that have been brought up in the past to him usually concern more weekend services. One of the biggest problems, he said, was getting more drivers to meet those needs.

“We have done a good job over recent summers with getting more drivers. This past summer, we got 58 new ones. Now we have room for possibility,” he said.

If one is unable to attend the meeting, Straw encourages people to send comments and concerns to unitrans@ucdavis.edu or to SACOG at transit_needs@sacog.org.

Davis Community Chambers is attached to City Hall, located on Fifth and B streets. For more information about the meeting, go to unitrans.ucdavis.edu.

ANGELA RUGGIERO can be reached at campus@theaggie.org

On the night of World AIDS Day, 1,280 people gathered in the Jackson Hall of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts to listen to a talk by author Tracy Kidder.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World was this year’s featured work for the Campus Community Book Project.

During the presentation Kidder explored his process of writing the book and shared issues he encountered. With his joking manner and friendly speech, the author had the audience erupting in soft laughter repeatedly throughout his presentation.

Kidder began with a background on Dr. Paul Farmer, the story’s main character. A Harvard medical student at the time, Farmer joined his friends in Cange, Haiti in 1983 to create a health system for the Haitian population suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis. In 1987, Farmer and his friends founded an organization called Zanmi Lasante, Haitian Kreyol for “Partners in Health.“

PIH now has nine hospitals and clinics serving a million people and works in nine different countries. The organization has 6,500 employees, fewer than a hundred of which are American, Kidder said.

“Mostly it has been an adventure in pubic health in medicine,” Kidder said.

He accompanied his anecdotes of his interactions with Farmer and his travels to Haiti with a slideshow of before-and-after pictures of patients and health care facilities in Haiti, depicting PIH’s work in the area.

One picture featured Alcante, an 11-year-old boy before he had any treatment for TB. Sitting on a bed, the picture showed Alcante’s skin clinging to the bones of his malnourished frame.

“The drugs to treat this disease had been around for a very long time,” Kidder said. “This form of TB, at this time it was thought to be relatively unimportant because it’s not contagious. These drugs still work, and this is the proof.“

The audience gasped at another image of the same boy, but this time healthy and smiling. Several stories like Alcante’s and many before-and-after pictures demonstrated the magnitude of PIH’s work in Haiti. There are thousands of before-and-after pictures like this, Kidder said.

“Enough photographs, they are unfair competition for writers,” Kidder said as he ended the slideshow.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author went on to describe his experience in writing Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Another problem Kidder encountered during his writing was the profile’s tone. Kidder tried to make his descriptions of places like the central prison, the mountainous Central Plateau of Cange, Haiti and the urban slums outside of Lima, Peru “not flashy, but vivid.” He wanted to make the reader see the same places of extreme suffering for which Farmer had a passion for alleviating.

“I wanted to make scenery as if the reader were following that square of light through darkness,” Kidder said.

Kidder traveled with Farmer, shared hotel rooms with him, visited sites of his childhood and interviewed his family, friends and even former girlfriends. Kidder said he had a difficult time finding a less than virtuous thing about Farmer, but he promised the audience he tried. He said he aimed to make a vision that was true and credible.

“I tried to do most obvious thing – the thing every writer tries to do – to depict Paul’s foible,” Kidder said. “I didn’t hope to achieve balance,” Kidder said. “I have views about objectivity and balance and [they are] not relevant here.“

To Kidder, the choice to write in the first person meant that he had to make himself a character on the page. He said he included his own thoughts and feelings to provide a foil for the reader.

“The narrator shifts the frame of reference,” Kidder said. “I remember searching for the right moments in story to make this acknowledgement.“

To reconcile the suffering he saw in Haiti, Kidder spoke to Farmer and eventually came to share Farmer’s view that “we have to admit that some of our privileges have been built through creating misery elsewhere.“

“This is something that everyone can do something about, even in smaller ways,” Kidder said. “[Farmer] was trying to say that we are all connected, all of us are in the human tribe. My travels showed me more reasons for despair than I had ever witnessed or imagined, but it was exhilaration – it illuminated the huge gap of what can be done and what is being done.“

Kidder ended the lecture with a message to students, who were hard to come by in the audience, as most attendees were locals.

“There is no skill you can acquire that can’t be used to improve the world,” he said. “Not one person, one person can’t do much – but one small group can improve the world. If you study organic chemistry only to learn material to pass tests it can be pretty hard, but if you take [chemistry] for later it can be easier. You do the work but for a larger purpose. If you improve the world, you don’t have to improve yourself. If you do the first you will do the second.“

After a few questions from the audience, Kidder ended the session by joking that he was getting inarticulate, which sent the audience into their final murmured laughter. The author and the audience members then made their way out to the Mondavi Center’s lobby for a book-signing session.

As if the story of Dr. Farmer and Kidder’s experience researching and writing the book were not inspiration enough, he left the audience with a final thought.

“If you really love what you do, it can propel you in all sorts of interesting ways,” he said.

Students who read the book and attended the talk had mixed feelings about the writing but agreed that the message was powerful.

“To be completely honest, I thought the book was boring, but the message was good – we are all human beings,” said first-year political science and Spanish double major Jamila Cambridge. “It’s our job to not be so self-centered. It’s about bridging out.“

First-year communication major Tiana Brawley said the book was “a little dry” but Kidder’s talk was very funny.

“The book was factual but at the end you can’t help but feel for the movement,” she said. “I liked [Kidder] because he was personable. He came as a human being saying we can all do our share.“

POOJA KUMAR can be reached at campus@theaggie.org

Serial shoplifting

The UC Davis Bookstore referred an underclassman to Student Judicial Affairs for stealing. When confronted, the student admitted that he shoplifts when under stress. Because he has a history of theft from the Bookstore, the student agreed to Deferred Separation until graduation and counseling. Deferred Separation means that if the student were to get caught shoplifting again, he would probably be suspended or dismissed from the university and would not have a right to take the matter to a formal hearing. In addition, the student paid over $400 in fines for stealing over 20 items.

Graduate mudslinging

A graduate student in education was referred to Student Judicial Affairs for providing false information on an assignment. As part of teacher training, the student was assigned to evaluate a teaching assistant’s class. The student did not attend the class and wrote a false evaluation that defamed the teaching assistant. The student agreed to Deferred Separation until graduation.

Playing doctor

A professor referred a student to SJA for providing false information and forged documents for academic reasons. The student forged e-mails and doctor notes to get additional time on her assignments. Because of the personal circumstances of the student’s situation, she agreed to stress management counseling, academic advising, time management skill training and Deferred Separation until graduation. The student also agreed to complete a writing assignment after completing the counseling, advising and training.

The Campus Judicial Report is compiled by student members of the Campus Judicial Board. Additional information about SJA and the Campus Judicial Board may be found at sja.ucdavis.edu.

There‘s a good reason why dogs are often called “Man‘s Best Friend.“

According to recent studies, our loyal companions share more than just our dinner leftovers – namely, cancer.

“Dogs get almost all of the same cancers that humans get,“ said Katherine Skorupski, assistant professor of oncology in the veterinary medicine department in an interview with KQED. “The environment of our patients is the same as the humans, also their tumors are developing spontaneously – often times we don‘t know why they develop, which is what happens in people.“

The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has taken a special interest in the field of Comparative Oncology, which conducts comparative studies of humans and animals, often canines, to discern the causes and treatment of cancer.

Skorupski and Dr. Joseph Tuscano, an associate professor for the UC Davis Cancer Center, were two of several UC Davis research professionals interviewed for a KQED television feature titled “Fido Fights Cancer.“ The program aired Nov. 24 and highlighted some of the major advances in canine and human cancer research from UC Davis and several other prominent research facilities.

“I think that there is a unique relationship between the veterinary oncology program and the human oncology program,“ Tuscano said in the KQED interview. “Dogs live in the same environments as people and get cancer just like people. Concentrating investigational efforts on dogs first gives them access to new treatments and provides valuable information quickly on the efficacy of those treatments. It‘s a win-win proposition for both species.“

Animal testing is all but standard in the world of medicine, as most drugs and many major treatments are first tested on rats to determine the potential outcome on a human patient.

“In order to bring a drug to human patients, we have to test it in animals first,“ Toscano said. “And those animal ‘models‘ are typically rodent models.“

The problem that researchers have faced is that rats only share a fraction of the environmental conditions that humans share with canines, limiting the rats‘ value as test subjects.

“A drug that may work in a mouse, may not work that well in a human patient,“ Toscano said. “Instead of spending an enormous amount of money and time on rodent models, many of which don‘t work, why don‘t we use patients that not only themselves will benefit, but will better predict how those treatments will work in humans?“

Concerned pet owners might hesitate at the idea of their beloved dog being used for research purposes. Luckily, UC Davis medical professionals are highly sensitive to the needs of both pets and their human companions, and provide research and treatment procedures designed to maximize the canine‘s quality of life.

“We are always first and foremost concerned with quality of life, and so whenever we are coming up with a therapy, we always talk to the owners about the side effects, whatever they may be,“ said Michael Kent DVM, an assistant professor in radiation oncology. “We‘re only going to try things that we think have a chance of working with minimal side effects, and everything goes through a review committee first.

“So we work hard to make sure that whatever we do will benefit [the patients] as much as possible.“

For more information about how canines are being used to make breakthrough discoveries in the study and diagnosis of cancer, the KQED documentary can be found online at kqed.org/quest/television/fido-fights-cancer.

MICHELLE IMMEL can be reached at campus@theaggie.org