Spinnaker [Distributed: Wednesday, December 6, 2006]

Construction of the campus skate park is expected to be completed in the spring and could impact the way that many University of North Florida students commute across campus.

The Safety Advisory Council is considering proposing a ban of skating in the core of campus once the skate park is completed, said council member Julie Williams, assistant director of marketing and publications.

The council is considering proposing the ban because of the number of near misses involving pedestrians and skateboarders and incidents of damaged property from skateboarding, Williams said.

"Our No. 1 complaint is near-misses by people walking," said council chair Dr. Cindy Nyquist-Battie, professor of public health.

According to UPD data, 79 citations relating to skating have been written since January.

Williams said when skaters are confronted about their skating they don't know the university's policy.

According to the policy, "skateboards, bicycles and scooters may not be operated within 10 feet of a doorway or stairway, under covered walkways, on ramps, in the garages or other property." They may also not "be operated in a manner that has the potential to cause harm to the operator of member so the University community or damage to University property or other property."

"I think it [the policy] is being abused," Nyquist-Battie said. "Either by people [who] aren't aware or aren't adhering to the policy, and it really is a safety issue."

The University Police Department is trying to enforce the policy with education more than with citations, said UPD Chief Mark Foxworth.

"Two or three people a week contact me personally about skating issues," he said.

During the peak hours of 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., some UPD officers are specifically assigned to regulate skating on campus, Foxworth said. They contact 25 to 30 skaters every day, he said.

"We don't dislike skateboarders," Foxworth said. "We just wish people would be more careful and respectful."

Construction on the 10,000 square foot skate park is scheduled to begin within the next 10 days, said Everett Malcolm, associate vice president of student affairs. It is scheduled to be completed in March, he said.

The park will be open to the campus community only, during the daylight hours, Malcolm said. It will be fenced and closed during the nights because there will be no lighting, he said.

Other details such as a possible attendant and specific hours of operation are still under discussion, Malcolm said,

Student Government provided $250,000 in funding for the construction of the park, said student body president Justin Damiano, a senior business economics major. The university provided $170,000 in funding as well, said Shari Shuman, vice president of administration and finance, bringing the total to approximately $420,000.

"The skate park represents two things," Damiano said. "One, that student have the power to make change happen on campus, and that our university takes the voice of students seriously. Two, that commitments from administration are valuable."

Campus-wide tech update coming in spring

Technology is in the air at the University of North Florida. Literally.

The campus is currently undergoing a technological makeover that will include additional wireless Internet access points and updated equipment in classrooms.

"By the Spring term, all classrooms [not in portables] will have baseline technology," said Kathy Hughes, the director of networking and user services within Information Technology Services. "What this means is that projectors, projector screens, podiums with PC access and a document camera will be available in every class."

Another facet of the university's plan to modernize campus equipment is the Model Technology Classroom Project.

The program will bring advanced tools to Rooms 1102 and 1201 in the Social Sciences Building. Software programs that allow instructors to display students' workstations to their classes will be present in each room. Room 1205 will have enhanced controls built into podiums for faculty and a Classroom Response System.

Professors in the Fine Arts Center will see an addition to their teaching repertoires with technology that will enable them to instantly capture and stream student presentations.

The equipment, which will be used predominantly in speech classes, will replace the use of VHS tapes in documenting presentations.

The university is also seeking to expand wireless capabilities on campus with the Model Technology Classroom Project. Two rooms in Building 39, 2045 and 2047, will be given an increased number of wireless access points, Hughes said.

The university is also looking to enhance wireless access in other areas with high concentrations of laptop-users so students can log onto the Internet and use Library Database collections.

"When more people are getting online wirelessly in a certain area, it takes longer to access the Internet," Hughes said. "With more access points, more students that need wireless service for classes will be able to use the Internet."

In addition to promoting technological advances in the classroom, UNF has decided to update its existing e-mail service for students and faculty. The school is transitioning from Horde to WebAccess, a more accessible e-mail account.

"WebAccess is a more full-featured e-mail and file-service environment than Horde," Hughes said. "We are actively encouraging students to make the move to WebAccess as soon as possible."

The change to WebAccess started early this fall as the university alerted students to the impending change.

Students and faculty still using Horde by Dec. 20 will have their incoming e-mail forwarded to their new WebAccess accounts, Hughes said. Horde webmail will be officially terminated Jan. 20.

Corey Trent, a junior finance major and the chief justice of the Student Government, said the reason behind the technological advances is the university is trying to increase student participation in the classroom.

"UNF is striving to update technology and implement this new technology to promote student and teacher interaction," Trent said.

During a recent meeting of the University Technology Committee, the possibility of a proctored test lab being brought to campus was discussed, Trent said. A fiscal request of $475,000 was presented for the construction of the lab and technology updates.

"The proctored test lab was presented as a designated area for teachers to administer online tests," Trent said. "As professors move away from normal paper tests, it's going to become necessary for a lab like this to exist."

UPD steps up drug arrests

The number of drug arrests on the University of North Florida campus was five times higher in 2005 than two years before, up from 13 in 2003 to 65 in 2005.

As of Dec. 1, UPD has responded to more than 60 drug cases including the 14 arrests made in a major bust in April, said Chief Mark Foxworth. While the numbers indicate a rise in the number of arrests, Foxworth said he does not believe they illustrate an increase in drugs on campus.

"I don't think there has been an increase of drugs on campus but an increase of awareness and an increase of people not wanting to tolerate it," Foxworth said.

The number of drug referrals sent to the Student Conduct Office has also gone up, as have the number of alcohol arrests and alcohol referrals, he said. Foxworth also attributes these increases to individuals in the campus community not tolerating drug and alcohol violations and reporting them.

While drugs are present at UNF, they are not as prevalent compared to many other universities, Foxworth said.

"We have a very responsible [university] population," he said.

There were more than 10,000 drug arrests in Duval County in 2005, a number that has more than doubled since 1990, according to data from the FDLE. Florida follows California with the highest number of drug abuse violations in the nation, according to the FBI's Crime in the United States 2005 Report.

Excluding miscellaneous arrests, drugs accounted for 31 percent of arrests in Jacksonville last year, according to FDLE data.

"Anyone in their right mind is going to tell you there's a drug problem in the nation, and unfortunately, that's no different for Jacksonville," said Susan Pelter, spokeswoman for Mayor John Peyton's office.

"For a city this size, you're always going to have drug problems," said Ken Jefferson, the public information officer for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office.

There were 195 cocaine-related deaths in Jacksonville last year, more than triple the number of such deaths from 1991, according to Florida Medical Examiners. Crack, a derivative of cocaine, is being trafficked throughout the city as well. Ecstasy is particularly popular in the city, especially among teenagers and young adults, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency's State Fact Sheet for Florida.

"What's on the horizon is crystal meth," according to Jefferson. Crystal meth users are able to manufacture the drug in their own homes, using hazardous chemicals.

"The drugs in Jacksonville don't mirror the drugs on campus," Foxworth said.

While cocaine and other drugs are a problem in Jacksonville, marijuana and prescription drugs such as Xanax are most often found on campus, Foxworth said. Jefferson believes there is a serious social cost paid by all residents, not just the drug-abusers.

"There's a cost to everybody. No one wants to move into a house in a community where there are drugs,"Jefferson said.

JSO reported drugs as the direct cause of nearly 20 percent of Jacksonville's murders from 2000 to 2005.

Switch grass may provide alternative energy source

If there were such a thing as a Comeback Plant of the Year award - maybe Comeback of the Century - a top contender would have to be switch grass, a dominant part of the tallgrass prairie that once blanketed much of North America.

That vast sea of grasses, so thick and high that pioneers said it could swallow a rider on horseback, all but disappeared as sodbusters ripped it away to make room for lush and productive cropland.

What was an obstacle to progress 150 years ago is suddenly getting a fresh, hard look as a major source of fuel. Our energy-starved nation is scrambling to come up with alternatives to limited supplies of expensive oil and natural gas, and there's a growing buzz about switch grass even though most Americans would need a botanical guide to identify it.

Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., the world's largest producer of ethanol made from corn, in November unveiled plans to ramp up research into switch grass as another source to make ethanol and other biofuels for cars, homes and industry.

In Washington, the Democrats soon to take over as heads of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees have put development of switch grass as a fuel source high on their priority list.

This is a "natural evolution of an industry that could be massive," said Patricia Woertz, CEO of Decatur-based ADM.

Also known as tall panic grass, switch grass doesn't look much like the grasses that cover today's lawns. It is a lanky plant, with stems up to eight or nine feet high and a root system just as deep, topped with lacy seed-bearing panicles. It grows in thick, jungle-like tangles.

It also is especially good at storing energy from the sun. "A living solar battery," is what Canadian switch-grass researcher Roger Samson calls it.

The U.S. Agriculture Department calls switch grass "perhaps our most valuable native grass." Oak Ridge National Laboratory has identified it as the model plant species for fuel, better than corn, which is all the rage right now as the prime ingredient of ethanol. President Bush highlighted the energy potential of switch grass in his State of the Union address this year.

So, like a once-treasured toy rediscovered after years in the attic, switch grass is now the focus of talk about its revival - this time as a cash crop - on tens of millions of acres in the Midwest, South and Great Plains.

"This could very well be the future," said Stephen Gardner, one of dozens of southeastern Iowa farmers who for years have supplied switch grass for an electric generating experiment in Chillicothe that has shown encouraging results.

The notion of converting vegetation into fuel may seem odd in a nation that runs on oil, gas and coal. But fossil fuels themselves are the detritus of ancient plants, buried in the Earth for millions of years.

They are also a finite resource, while fuel crops can be grown again and again.

"Nature figured out long ago how to store chemical energy in plants," explained Robert Brown, director of the office of bio-renewable programs at Iowa State University.

Energy can be squeezed from most any plant, and there are a lot of them under study these days as potential fuel sources. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is leading the way in research on giant miscanthus, a grass native to Asia. It can grow to 13 feet with bamboo-like stems ripe for burning.

The trick today is to target the plants that can be most efficiently grown and tapped for fuel. For now, the renewable fuel of choice in the U.S. is corn-based ethanol. It is essentially alcohol made from the starches in grain. Humans have been fermenting and drinking it since prehistoric times.

Corn is abundant, and it has a clout-heavy lobby of farmers and agribusiness promoting it for ethanol, which is largely blended with gasoline. But corn has limitations as a raw material for fuel. Divert a lot of corn to ethanol production and food prices are bound to rise. Corn is also a resource hog, requiring good soil and lots of water, fertilizer and herbicide, heightening environmental concerns.

One prominent researcher contends it takes more fossil energy to grow and transform corn starch into ethanol than the new fuel can yield, suggesting the process is a waste. Other experts disagree, but if there is an energy benefit to making ethanol this way, it is not huge.

The hope for switch grass is that it may bypass a lot of those problems while providing more bang for the energy buck in an ecologically friendly and low maintenance way.

The explanation harkens back to the prairies of old. Near treeless vistas of undulating grass once stretched from the Gulf of Mexico up into Canada, providing a feasting ground for birds and other wildlife and packing the soils with nutrients. The grasses once covered 60 percent of what is now Illinois, which calls itself the Prairie State.

Ironically, the fertile soil of the prairie was also its undoing. The farmers who eventually chopped it away liked to boast that the prairie topsoil was so deep and rich it could grease the axles of their wagons.

There were lots of different grasses in the Midwest prairie, but switch grass was one of the three predominant varieties. It didn't need much water to thrive, it adapted to a wide range of latitudes and soils, and it sucked in a lot of carbon dioxide from the air as fuel to grow on.

Prairie fires burned so hot that they would create their own cyclones, a testament to the energy the grasses stored away.

Those are some of the traits that are kindling interest in switch grass as the nation scrambles to grow its way into energy self-sufficiency. David Bransby, a grasslands expert at Auburn University in Alabama suggests a few more.

Switch grass requires no herbicides and little fertilizer, can take hold on poor quality land not suitable for most crops, and it is a perennial, meaning it doesn't have to be replanted like corn after each harvest. Stands of good quality switch grass can last 10 years or more.

Switch grass also has ecological benefits, Bransby said. Its deep roots bind soil and block erosion. They also pump a lot of carbon in the ground, essentially recycling carbon-based greenhouse gases emitted when the plant is burned as fuel.

"If we really put our minds to it, we can use this to help replace the oil we import from the Middle East very easily in the next 20 years," Bransby said.

Writing recently in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by S. Raghu of the Illinois Natural History Survey warned that wholesale plantings of switch grass, miscanthus or other grasses grown for fuel could have an ecological downside.

The grasses are attracting interest as biofuel crops because they grow rapidly, need little water and appear resistant to most pests and diseases. But those are also traits that help invasive species wreak havoc on ecosystems and agriculture.

The U.S. spends more than $100 billion annually trying to beat back the ravages of invasive species like kudzu, so Raghu and his colleagues urged caution as the pressure to develop new crops for fuel intensifies.

"We're not saying every one of these is a nightmare waiting to happen, but we've made mistakes in past," he said. "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

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Staff member lands extra role in 'Bobby'

The executive secretary in the University of North Florida's International Center landed a role as an extra in the movie "Bobby."

Jennie Jarvis, 27, appeared in the film, written and directed by Emilio Estevez, about the June 6, 1968 assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Specifically she was in the scenes at the Democratic National Convention. Jarvis said she participated in a cocktail reception before Kennedy's speech, listened during the speech, and then reacted with the crowd after the assassination took place.

Through this film, Jarvis got to work on the set with actors Elijah Wood, Sharon Stone, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Joshua Jackson and Lindsay Lohan. She can be seen next to Stone, Wood and Lohan in the movie trailer, and she said audiences may also be able to see Jackson push against her in the crowd and Wood lean back on her as he is separated from Lohan.

According to Jarvis, the best thing about her experience as an extra in "Bobby" was how passionate everyone was about the film.

"It's a great story where people really cared what it was about," she said.

Jarvis was cast in "Bobby" through a large extra agency in California called Central Casting. She said she registered herself for its database and for a booking service, which calls different productions to help find roles for extras in movie and television productions.

Besides her role in "Bobby," this company helped Jarvis land extra roles in other films including this year's "Accepted." Jarvis said working on the film was a lot of fun as well, and she loved the improvisation and humorous lines in the movie, especially from the main character Justin Long. There, she acted in a rock concert with actors Long and Blake Lively, and she is directly visible in the film during those scenes.

Jarvis described being an extra as a fun but difficult and stressful job.

"The thing about being an extra is that it's a lot of sitting around and doing nothing," she said.

Although Jarvis had a lot of experiences as an extra in Los Angeles, she said acting was not her main goal. She was an independent film director, but she also became an extra to make some additional money.

While in Los Angeles, Jarvis started her own production company. She specialized in family-friendly short films, and she also taught seminars on acting, directing, screen writing and general movie making.

She's directed over a dozen short films, and sent one to a film festival. She said it is being shown online in the United States and the United Kingdom, and her most recent film is now in the editing process.

She still has her hands in theater in this area as well. Jarvis works with the Atlantic Beach Experimental Theater, and she said she also wanted to get involved with other groups like Players by the Sea.

"I still want to do something in the arts, but for now I'm happy to be in Jacksonville."

Product chemicals showing up in humans

They're found in floor waxes and shampoos, fast-food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags. They coat pizza boxes, carpets and frying pans.

And they're in people.

They're perfluorochemicals. While you may not recognize the word, you probably know the brand names: Teflon, Stainmaster, Gore-Tex.

You are exposed to these compounds every day, and there is mounting concern they may cause a variety of health problems. A panel of scientists selected by the Environmental Protection Agency concluded this year that a perfluorochemical used in nonstick cookware is a likely cancer-causing agent.

As is the case with many of the 82,000 chemicals in commercial use today, health officials aren't sure what levels of perfluorochemicals in the body can cause health problems. Researchers aren't even sure of the main source of human exposure: household products, manufacturing plants or both.

They know only that perfluorochemicals remain in the environment and the body for a long time.

"These compounds are used in an unbelievable number of products that we come in contact with every day," said Kurunthachalam Kannan, a scientist at the New York State Department of Health, in Albany, who has extensively researched the compounds.

Researchers have found that U.S. residents have the world's highest levels of perfluorochemicals in their bodies. Kannan says it takes the body at least eight years to rid itself of the chemicals.

That's one reason 3M agreed six years ago to stop making and using perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, to make Scotchgard. The company's own research found that the compound was showing up in low doses in people and wildlife worldwide.

Today, a different chemical is used in the popular stain and water repellent.

"We didn't want to be a contributing source of these materials in the environment," said Bill Nelson, a 3M spokesman. He said the company's decision does not mean there is evidence that the chemicals cause harm.

In January, DuPont and other companies volunteered to phase out perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, used in Teflon nonstick cookware and some microwave popcorn bags.

But there's evidence that neither compound breaks down in the environment. That means people could be exposed for an untold amount of time.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram tested the blood of 12 people for the presence of PFOS and PFOA, along with dozens of other toxic chemicals. The study found PFOS in all 12 participants and PFOA in six.

The concentrations were tiny - parts per billion. One part per billion is equivalent to one kernel of corn in a 45-foot silo filled to the brim. Yet one study published last year in the peer-reviewed journal "Toxicological Sciences" found that PFOA hurt the livers of laboratory rats at low levels.

The highest level of PFOA found in any of the Star-Telegram study participants was five parts per billion.

The chemical that makes nonstick cookware slick is in the national spotlight now.

DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., is North America's only producer of PFOA and faces numerous lawsuits tied to the compound.

In 2004, DuPont agreed to pay up to $343 million to settle a class-action suit filed by Ohio and West Virginia residents who said their water supplies had been contaminated with PFOA from DuPont's plant in Parkersburg, W.Va.

A similar federal lawsuit was filed in April by New Jersey residents who contend a DuPont plant in Salem County, N.J., contaminated drinking water supplies, and the company knew of the contamination for years. The PFOA levels in those cases are much higher than what would be expected from products.

DuPont faces a federal class-action lawsuit brought by residents in 20 states and the District of Columbia, who say the company failed to make public the possible health risks associated with use of its nonstick pots and pans. The lawsuit, filed in May in Iowa, alleges that DuPont knew its Teflon cookware releases toxic gases when heated.

DuPont denies the allegations.

Last year, the EPA fined DuPont $10.25 million - the largest civil penalty in the agency's 36-year history - for failing to report it had learned as early as 1981 that PFOA could pass from a woman's blood to her fetus.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore said in February that blood samples from the umbilical cords of 298 newborns had trace levels of the compound.

"We're not only looking at the levels, but we're also trying to understand whether there are potential health effects or biological markers, biological changes that might be indicative of a biological effect," said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who helped lead the study.

Dr. Leo Trasande, a pediatrician and environmental health specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said, "We know relatively little about PFOA. But what we know raises strong concerns about their human health effects, especially their effects on children."

Under mounting public pressure, DuPont and seven other companies worldwide agreed in January to stop manufacturing and using PFOA by 2015.

"The fact that it's out there in the blood of the population raises questions that need to be answered," said David Boothe, global business manager for DuPont Fluoroproducts.

But the company vigorously defends the use of the chemical and products that contain it, saying it is "not toxic by the yardsticks that the government usually measures these things."

A number of independent health studies dispute that.

The EPA's science advisory board that recommended PFOA be considered a likely carcinogen has also proposed the agency study PFOA's potential to cause liver, testicular, pancreatic and breast cancers and whether it affects the hormones or nervous or immune systems.

DuPont rejects the panel's review because it is based primarily on animal testing.

"We think the weight of evidence and science says, look, the things that are happening in rats don't happen in people," Boothe said.

He also said the EPA has ignored company studies that did not find health problems in workers "exposed to thousands of times higher levels than in the general population."

"So DuPont's position on this is, to date, there are no known health effects from exposure to PFOA," Boothe said.

But the company's worker studies "have many limitations, such that definitive conclusions about PFOA cannot be made at this time," Charles Auer, director of the EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention & Toxics, wrote in an e-mail response to written questions.

There's nothing wrong with using animal studies to gauge health effects of chemicals, said Linda Birnbaum, an EPA toxicologist.

"People are animals," she said. "If you find a similar kind of response in a couple of species of animals or if you find that a chemical is targeting multiple kinds of tissues, why would we think that humans would be completely resistant or different?"

Researchers know that PFOA is widespread in the environment, but how did it get there?

DuPont has spent millions of dollars on studies it says show that the compound is not coming off nonstick pots and pans.

Independent researchers say small levels do come off the pans but not enough to explain the widespread exposures that have been measured.

Today, the focus has shifted to food wrappers, carpet and other household products. Kannan believes that perfluorochemicals are released as a gas off those items.

"They are constantly leaching from the surfaces they are applied to," he said. "The indoor air is filled with these compounds."

They can also be released from manufacturing plants. That's one reason that the EPA pledged in January to add PFOA to a program that tracks industrial emissions of toxic chemicals.

The voluntary withdrawal will help slow the spread of PFOA. But the deadline is not until 2015, which the EPA has classified as an "aspirational goal," not a mandate.

That concerns some researchers who want to see regulatory action taken now, even if a lot more research is needed to determine precise human health effects.

"I think you want to take regulatory action at a point before there are effects in humans," said Goldman, of Johns Hopkins. "The point is to try and prevent that."

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NEWS

Skate park coming to campus

Campus-wide tech update coming in spring

UPD steps up drug arrests

Switch grass may provide alternative energy source

Staff member lands extra role in 'Bobby'

Product chemicals showing up in humans

Photo exhibit showcases 97 student works

News in Brief

SG sponsors 'Finals Frenzy' events

Reception scheduled for business graduates

Poems to be read in front of Fine Arts Center

Fraternity to collect donations for children

Open discussion of shuttle system scheduled

Final exam schedules available online