UC Blog
County-based members appointed to Program Council
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that we have appointed two new members to serve on Program Council: Rose Hayden-Smith and Steve Orloff. The Program Council coordinates divisionwide planning and delivery of programs and provides recommendations for allocation of resources. The new members will continue providing a county-based perspective to Program Council once the Regional Directors end their duties on June 30. Orloff and Hayden-Smith will join Program Council in July 2010 on two- and three-year staggered terms respectively, to ensure continuity of county-based input.
Using an online survey tool, we solicited nominations of county-based Cooperative Extension academics from specialists and county-based personnel. Program Council evaluated the nominations and made recommendations to the Executive Working Group.
Rose Hayden-Smith is Ventura County Director and a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow. Hayden-Smith develops programs for youth and adult extenders in agricultural literacy, garden-based learning, and youth and community gardening. Her national advocacy work focuses on encouraging national efforts to promote school, home and community efforts; and public policy related to food systems, gardening, education and urban agriculture.
Steve Orloff is Siskiyou County Director and a Farm Advisor. Orloff conducts research and educational programs on alfalfa, small grains, irrigated pasture and non-crop weed control; with emphasis on variety adaptation, pest management, irrigation and general production practices.
I want to thank those of you who provided such thoughtful recommendations; your feedback is always an essential part of our Division's work.
Sincerely,
Daniel M. Dooley,
Vice President
View or leave comments for the Executive Working Group
This announcement is also posted and archived on the ANR Update pages.
Be kind to honey bees
A national roundup of honey bee happenings on the website Tonic.com touched on the UC Davis Honey Bee Haven, a bee-friendly garden set to open to the public Sept. 11.
Tonic reports on good things that happen, dwelling on stories that "inspire, bring hope or simply put a smile on your face." And what could be more inspirational than a lovely flowering garden made possible by a generous donor that daily brings delight and joy to the world, Häagen Dazs ice cream?The Honey Bee Haven is designed to encourage public awareness of the modern-day plight of the honey bee, which Tonic reporter Liz Corcoran described even though it is perplexing and sad. In recent years, bees have been subject to a mysterious decline called Colony Collapse Disorder. Factors that scientists suspect cause CCD include pests, pesticides, malnutrition and stress from transport.
Häagen Dazs - recognizing that fruit, nut and honey ice cream ingredients are dependent on bees - launched the Häagen Dazs Loves Honeybees campaign and donated half a million dollars to Penn State and UC Davis for honeybee research and awareness programs.
Here are some ways to be kind to bees shared in the Tonic story:
- Adopt a beehive, offered by the British Beekeeping Association for about $50 a year
- Support reinstatement of the Boy Scout beekeeping merit badge, which was discontinued in 1995
- Plant sunflowers, hollyhocks, foxgloves and flowering herbs, and if you have room, fruit trees, buddleia and hebe
- Forego the use of herbicides and pesticides.
An artist's rendering of the Honey Bee Haven.
Merced 4-H junk drawer robotics: A great idea goes national
After UC Cooperative Extension 4-H advisor Richard Mahacek’s young son had the opportunity to tinker with robotics, he told his dad, “We need to do this in 4-H.”That was more than a decade ago, but Mahacek never forgot his son’s enthusiasm. After researching and testing ready-made programs and kits, Mahacek decided only a brand new custom program would meet local 4-H needs.
“Some kits were expensive, others were hard to get,” Mahacek said. “Others didn’t challenge kids to innovate and explore, but only to follow instructions.”
Mahacek had a completely new concept in mind. The result was a program Mahacek calls junk drawer robotics, heavy on rubber bands, Popsicle sticks, medicine dispensers and bamboo skewers – the kinds of things people already have around the house. By adding some toy motors and plastic gears, Mahacek says, there is no telling what youngsters can invent. The robotics program develops skills that go beyond science and engineering. The children learn communications, teamwork and critical thinking.
“Junk drawer robotics is hands-on as well as heads-on,” Mahacek said. “We’re getting kids to be innovative, to come up with ideas themselves. When they come up with their own designs, and then build them, they have internalized the concepts much more than if they are just following directions.”
Since 4-H was launched nearly 100 years ago, the program has been about science. 4-H is offered to the community by Cooperative Extension programs across the nation, created by Congress with the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to channel scientific advances from agricultural colleges to the people who can use them. 4-H is the component of Cooperative Extension that targets youth.
“The idea was, go to youth, have them experiment with new farming ideas, and show their dads and moms that the new ways offered improvements,” Mahacek said.
4-H expanded over the years into many aspects of agricultural science and in recent decades cast its net still wider, providing urban youth opportunities to benefit from 4-H’s “learn by doing” activities.
Many 4-H projects are presented using peer-reviewed curriculum materials published and distributed by the National 4-H Council. As part of its 4-H Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, the Council put out a call in 2009 offering funding for the development of robotics curriculum. The timing was perfect for Mahacek.
After he spent a few years developing a junk drawer robotics project, Mahacek was promoted to director of UC Cooperative Extension in Merced County. Time limitations pushed junk drawer robotics to the back burner.
The National 4-H Council injected new life into the program by providing funding to complete a comprehensive three-track national 4-H robotics curriculum including coordinated development, pilot testing and evaluation. The lead institution on the overall development is the University of Nebraska, working with 4-H staff from many states including a sub-award to the University of California and Mahacek to develop a national curriculum for Junk Drawer Robotics. In addition to Junk Drawer Robotics, two other robotics curricula are part of the national project. In Virtual Robotics, 4-H members will build virtual robots on computers. The program is currently under cooperative development with the non-profit organization Global Challenge, which aims to provide students the tools and confidence to solve global problems together. The third track, Robotics Platforms, is a more traditional robotics curriculum that uses existing commercial building kits for materials. It is being created by the 4-H programs at the University of Nebraska, University of Idaho and Montana State University.
In Merced County, Junk Drawer Robotics is being pilot tested in after-school programs. Mahacek turned to the UC Merced engineering program to identify youthful engineering students to teach children about robotics concepts during after-school care programs at three elementary schools in Delhi, three middle schools in Merced, and one middle school in Planada.
In both Kern and Santa Cruz counties, Junk Drawer Robotics is being tested in traditional 4-H club settings, with 4-H teen members presenting to their younger peers along with adult coaching. The curriculum will also have Web-based support and resources linked with the other Virtual Robotics and Robotics Platforms tracks.
The complete Junk Drawer Robotics curriculum is expected to be available for distribution in late fall 2010.
http://news.ucanr.org/newsstorymain.cfm?story=1298
Don't skip fruits and veggies to prevent ADHD
A recent, well-publicized report that connected attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to pesticide residues on fruit and veggies has the director of UC Davis' Food Safe Program concerned. Carl Winter was quoted in an Orange County Register blog as saying the research shouldn't deter parents from feeding their children fruits and vegetables.
“The most important thing consumers can do is eat fruits and vegetables,” he was quoted. “There’s not, at this stage, the evidence that this causes ADHD. There seems to be a correlation, but not a cause-and-effect relationship. We need to take these things seriously, but at the same time we don’t want to unnecessarily scare consumers into avoiding fruits and vegetables.”
Winter said food contamination with bacteria should be of greater concern.“No matter what food you have, you don’t know who touched it before you got it, and for that reason you should do what you can to take care of it,” Winter said.
A free, downloadable UC publication, Safe Handling of Fruits and Vegetables, gives consumers the information they need to minimize the threat of bacterial contamination of food.
The Register blog post, written by Landon Hall, gave a brief outline of the ADHD study. Researchers analyzed urine samples from 1,139 children age 8 to 15. They found that kids with the highest levels of malathion metabolites in their urine were associated with a 55 percent higher risk of having ADHD. About 10 percent of the children in the study pool had the disorder, slightly above the national average.
Carl Winter
Effort under way to find home for water archive
UC ANR may extend another request for proposals to find a new home for the Water Resource Center Archives, now housed at UC Berkeley, according to an article this week in the Contra Costa Times.
ANR announced last October plans to move the archive in order to achieve budget savings.
"We don't believe we have the expertise to continue to manage a library," ANR associate vice president Barbara Allen-Diaz told reporter Mike Taugher. "I believe in these kinds of archives. I will do my best to find it a home."
The Times story gave examples of archives in the collection:
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Promotional materials for the "Reber Plan" to build a dam across the Golden Gate
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Old speeches about the peripheral canal
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Original photographs of the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct
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Photos of the aftermath of the deadly 1928 collapse of St. Francis Dam near Los Angeles
In all, the archive contains more than 200,000 technical reports, 1,500 specialized newsletters, 5,000 maps and videos, 200 manuscript collections, 25,000 black-and-white photographs and 45,000 coastal aerial photographs.
"We specialize in collecting information nobody else has," the article quoted archive director Linda Vida. "These are the kinds of things you can't find at a regular library."
The archive is used by academics, authors, consultants, engineers, government officials, lawyers, students and water districts.
UPDATE, May 25, 2010: The San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial today about ANR efforts to move the Water Resources Center Archives. The editorial was written by Daniel Holmes, a consulting geographer and librarian. Holmes has posted an open letter on the Web encouraging people to write to UC leaders about the water archive.
A LA aquaduct construction photo from the archive.