October 20, 2016

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the California Aggie

SERVING THE UC DAVIS CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY SINCE 1915

VOLUME 135, ISSUE 5 | THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2016

DAVIS: THE INCREDIBLE GREEN MACHINE City of Davis receives Silver Beacon Award in sustainability

This year, Davis has proven once again that it is a leader in sustainability. The City of Davis received a 2016 Silver Beacon Award for energy efficiency and sustainability by the California Institute for Local Government, an accomplishment that was years in the making. “This award highlights the comprehensive approach to addressing climate change, and it consists of five different categories, ranging from energy efficiency, to greenhouse gas reductions, as well as supporting policies and programs that promote sustainability,” said Karalee Browne, Beacon program manager. Throughout the past year, the City of Davis has adopted over 60 programs and policies in 10 different areas of sustainability in order to become a more energyefficient area. “I think Davis has had a long history of creating a community where its residents treasure natural resources, try to promote

economic stability, and really create a place where its residents want to work, play, and feel that they are environmentally responsible,” Browne said. Mitch Sears, sustainability manager for the City of Davis, attributes this success to the community as a whole. “The award is a culmination of decades of work on sustainability related issues,” Sears said. “It’s a recognition for what Davis has been pursuing for a number of years. And it is essentially the compilation of all the work that the city and the community have done over time that has created a leader in the sustainability community’s movement.” Davis has seen many successes in terms of energy efficiency. As the first city to designate bike lanes for bicyclers back in the 1950s, Davis has emerged as an innovator at the forefront of alternative transportation. With investments in the Greenbelt, parks and America’s first protected bikeonly traffic signal, Davis has proved it is committed to making bicycling a viable alternative transportation.

UC DAVIS STUDENT SERVICES OFFERS FREE ATTORNEY CONSULTATION FOR UNDERGRADUATES

BY GILLIAN ALLEN features@theaggie.org

Besides innovations geared towards biking, Davis is also preparing for emerging trends in transportation. “We’re looking at ways to improve transportation systems additionally by looking at what’s called ‘transportation demand modeling,’ and working on emerging issues like autonomous vehicles,” Sears said. Davis also received a platinum award for reducing agency greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent. This, in particular, is a huge accomplishment for Davis, Sears said. “Back in the 1970s the city was one of the first, if not the first, communities to adopt a climate specific energy code,” Sears said. “So essentially, what we were saying at the time, was that houses and other buildings that were built needed to have insulation and things that made them more efficient based on the Central Valley climate.” This energy code eventually put Davis on the map for energy efficiency. The climate specific energy code was adopted by the state of California (Title 24) and has

When students think of ASUCD, images of the ASUCD Coffee House (CoHo) or student senate most likely come to mind. However, unbeknownst to most, there is another useful service that ASUCD provides for undergraduates: free legal consultation with an attorney available within Student Services. Kathy Wilton, the manager of Student Services Office on the third floor of the Memorial Union, has worked for ASUCD for almost 35 years and knows the ins and outs of the legal-consultation process for undergraduate students. Wilton oversees the logistics of the legal services by helping students make appointments and keeping everything confidential. If students need consultation, Wilton gives their information to the anonymous attorney specifically designated to help UC Davis students. From there, the student can speak to the attorney for up to 15 minutes free of charge. “We take every case seriously, and everything is confidential,” Wilton said. “We try to be sensitive to the fact that people are concerned about these things that they come to us with and they wouldn’t be asking for legal advice if it wasn’t a serious issue to them.” Students can utilize the attorney’s expertise for issues about landlords and housing, bike accidents and even roommate problems. Wilton noted that students should not feel apprehensive about seeking advice because the attorney has also helped students deal with tabooed issues, such as DUIs, disorderly conduct and public intoxication. In the past, students have called after their first consultations to schedule follow-up appointments. Sometimes, the attorney will go on to represent students in court if they need it, and will usually do so at a discounted price. “This resource is to give students free access to speaking with an attorney for whatever issue they might have,” said Dana Calvo, fourth-year managerial economics and cinema and digital media double major and senior staff assistant. “While being a student, it [...] would cost a lot to get one legal question answered by an attorney, so we want to help students have this opportunity.” Cheng Hsia, fourth-year managerial economics major, has fortunately not gotten into any sort of legal trouble during his time at UC Davis. He said that if he had, however, this resource would have definitely helped. Even a brief 15-minute discussion could impact someone’s life. “Sometimes college students get in trouble, and it might become a legal situation,” Hsia said. “It’s a good resource to take advantage

SUSTAINABILITY on 2

LEGAL on 4

AMY HOANG / AGGIE

BY SAMANTHA SOLOMON city@theaggie.org

Legal advice at a fair price

BRIAN LANDRY / AGGIE

JENNIFER KUTZLEB / COURTESY

Hold your horses, bike polo is in town

Tech dirty to me: Microdosing

Davis Bike Polo expands, players find sense of community in club

Professionals in Silicon Valley taking off-label, psychedelic drugs to improve cognition, links to UC Davis

BY ALLYSON TSUJI features@theaggie.org

BY MERAL BASIT science@theaggie.org

As one of the largest bike towns in the nation, Davis is no stranger to bike-related activities, including the up-and-coming sport of bike polo. The game of polo is similar to hockey - the ball is passed around by a piece of equipment instead of hands, with the objective of scoring a goal on the opposite end of the court. In modern bike polo, played on a hard-surface court, the players use mallets to hit the ball while riding bicycles rather than horses. “The club [...] is really welcoming of people at all levels,” said Edward Henn, Davis Bike Polo club member. “I love bikes and I love riding bikes [...] but [I had] no polo experience. [The members] are really encouraging.” Davis Bike Polo was established in 2011, but according to Jennifer Kutzleb, club representative and UC Davis Department of Sociology doctoral student, the grass version of the sport has been in practice since the 1800s. At that time, the game was much more similar to horse polo. “It was kind of like a poor man’s polo, [for] people who couldn’t afford horses,” Kutzleb said. “We [still] sit atop something, but other than that we don’t share that much in common with horse polo.” The modern hardcourt version of the sport originated in Seattle, Wash., in the early 2000s. The idea arose from bike messengers who spent

their time in between deliveries playing early renditions of the game. Davis Bike Polo meets three times a week in West Manor Park, located in West Davis. Players of all ages, genders and experiences are welcome at the polo hardcourt, which resembles a tennis court. “The first time I heard about [the club] was on Picnic Day,” Henn said. “I saw [the club] in Downtown Davis; they did an exhibition. It just looked like a whole lot of fun.” Bike polo requires strength as well as technique: players maneuver both their bikes and their mallets to score goals. “I really like that it’s very technical,” said Tricia Wong, member of Davis Bike Polo. “I spent a large part of the last year just trying to get better. It’s not one of those sports that you can just learn really quick.” Davis Bike Polo prides itself on its inclusivity, since the sport is generally dominated by men. Once a month, as a way of recognizing other genders in the sport, the club hosts Women Trans Femme (WTF) nights, in which individuals who identify as such get to socialize and play the game. “I feel like I’ve gained so much self-confidence,” Kutzleb said. “I spend a lot of time working on academic[s]. It was just so much fun to be athletic. [The sport] has been really cool for [my] self-development.” The club is part of a continental organization called the North American Hardcourt Bike Polo

Lisa* is an undergraduate biochemistry and molecular biology major at UC Davis who has been regularly taking off-label modafinil, a cognition-enhancing drug normally prescribed for people with narcolepsy, for roughly six months. The reason: microdosing, or the experimental act of administering drugs in such a low dosage that one reaps benefits without suffering the fullbodied effects. Lisa was first introduced to modafinil when she started her internship this summer at a small financial technology company in San Francisco, where she said cognition-enhancing supplements were taken commonly and talked about openly. “It wasn’t a taboo thing,” Lisa said. “I worked on a team of four in a company with around 25 people. I’d say out of the 25, 15 to 20 [of my colleagues] took something beyond caffeine [...] ranging on the scale from little powders you can get from GNC just to be more awake, to stuff like Adderall and Ritalin.” Although self-medicating was pervasive at the company, Lisa said that she felt no external pressure to take cognitive-enhancing drugs and that she took them for experimental reasons. “The idea of biohacking is what appeals most to me. Rather than finding a solution to my problems, it’s more like finding a new way to become a better version of myself,” Lisa said. Aside from the mostly internal reasons for

POLO on 4

R e d u ce . R e u se . R e c yc l e Th e Aggie .

self-experimentation, taking cognitive supplements has become a prestigious way to show dedication to one’s work. “It was like bragging wars over who had the most dedication to their job,” Lisa said. “I think that’s why Silicon Valley tends to have this reputation of being the heart of experimentation and innovation, and people feel the pressure to keep up that reputation.” When Lisa first started taking modafinil, she kept detailed journals of when she took the tablet, drank coffee, exercised and how her energy fluctuated throughout the day. She also took daily online cognitive-battery tests in an effort to quantify the fluctuations in her cognition. Although she kept careful notes, other people at her internship documented their off-label drug trials even more rigorously, according to Lisa. “Some people take self-experimentation to a whole other level,” Lisa said. “They’ll collect their urine daily, they’ll test their feces. I went to [the chief technology officer’s (CTO)] house for a drink after work, and in his refrigerator he had a part where he kept his bodily fluids to take into a lab to test.” Although the CTO was not taking cognitionenhancing drugs for the duration of Lisa’s internship, he had done so in the past. Among the fields in Silicon Valley to be affected by cognition-enhancing drugs, the computer science industry is anecdotally considered a hot spot. Natasha Coulter, an undergraduate program advisor for computer science at UC MICRODOSE on 9


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October 20, 2016 by The California Aggie - Issuu