Brown tide rising
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Portland State University Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013 | vol. 67 no. 41
Women Symposium honors leaders SFC budget ax poised Many SFC-funded areas may see budgets, wages drop Andrew Lawrence Vanguard Staff
Months of meetings and planning— and in some cases, pleading—wrapped up last week as the Associated Students of Portland State University’s student fee committee proposed just how much money it feels student groups and programs should receive next year. Presented at a meeting of ASPSU’s executive committee on Wednesday, the final budget allocations reflected projected declining enrollment. The projection amounted to cuts— or at least flat funding—for many groups, because more groups were asking for money from a pot of funds that is starting a downward slide. “Usually we can allow groups to grow; this year we can’t even give them all the same,” said SFC Chair Nick Rowe. Revenue from the $216 per 12-credit-hours students pay each quarter to support student organizations was down 1.7 percent to $13.86 million this fiscal year, which runs from July to the end of May, and a new studentfee-funded organization, the Veterans’ Resource Center, was formed. Keeping the amount students pay to support these programs from increasing was a major goal, Rowe said. “Basically what that means is, the
See sfc on page 3
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Guest Speaker chhunny sok is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide who now works to restore education in her native Cambodia. She hopes to gain more support for the Golden Leaf Education Foundation to enhance education opportunities in Cambodia.
Former Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts, others discuss their efforts around the globe Matthew Ellis Vanguard Staff
The second annual Peace through Women Symposium was held in the Smith Memorial Student Union ballroom on Saturday. The event, which drew 150 attendees, featured presentations from
Oregon women leaders such as former Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts and Jennifer Gallardo, an Oregon midwife who helped found a birthing center in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. In addition to powerful speakers, the symposium offered a chance for attendees to mingle and discuss the afternoon’s theme, articulated by Kari Anne McDonald, Portland State graduate student and member of the Women’s Resource Center, which cosponsored the event. “Bringing peace to the world
should be our most important goal, but bringing peace to women is an essential part of that goal,” McDonald said. In addition to the Women’s Resource Center, the symposium was sponsored by Portland Rotaract and the Pearl Rotary Club. Both groups are branches of Rotary International that, as McDonald explained, strive to bring peace through the empowerment and enlightenment of women. McDonald, a past president of Portland Rotaract, organized last year’s symposium, which she said
focused on education issues for women across the world. Saturday’s event, however, had a broader focus. “I’m really passionate about ending violence against women,” she said. “And through that, you can see that there are other issues that can begin to be addressed, even if it doesn’t look like you are directly addressing them.” Gallardo’s emotional presentation about her efforts in Haiti spearheaded the afternoon, and helped illustrate exactly how women around the See women on page 2
World’s tallest barometer measures up at PSU Atrium of university’s Engineering Building now hosts 40-foot-plus instrument Erik Mutzke Vanguard Staff
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Tom Bennett, an instrument lab technician with the civil and environmental engineering department, opens the case housing the barometer in the Engineering Building.
Portland State’s Engineering Building is now home to the world’s tallest barometer. The barometer, made of recycled glass tubing and protected by metal trusses, hugs the building’s staircase and rises out of the basement to the second floor, where it measures the atmospheric pressure in the glass atrium of the building.
Its fluid column reaches a record height of 40.5 feet. Tom Bennett, a civil engineering technician at the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, conceived the idea in 2011 in the aftermath of two key events: the remodeling of the old chemistry lab, which began in 2009, and the civil engineering department’s creation of a new fluids lab in 2011. “The glass piping that was used for the barometer was part of the chemistry lab’s drain pipes,” Bennett said. “When the labs got remodeled, I had access to these long, expensive glass pipes, two inches in diameter and 10 feet long. At the same time, in the new
fluids lab, we were using a six-foottall water barometer for demonstrations. This is when the idea entered my mind,” he said. Why the world’s tallest barometer? “If you want to make a really accurate barometer, you make it as tall as possible,” he said. A taller barometer allows for the more precise detection of pressure differences. “This may be the ideal way to measure the accuracy of an electronic barometer,” Bennett said. Barometers are devices that measure atmospheric pressure. In the See BAROMETER on page 4