VOLUME 48, ISSUE 14
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2014
USED WITH PERMISSION FROM FOCUS FEATURES
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING
Stephen Hawking has gained renown for his scientific theories. We spoke with actor Eddie Redmayne and producer/ screenwriter Anthony McCarten about portraying Hawking’s personal life. weekend, PAGE 6
JANET'S PLAN
Tuition Increases unfair OpinION, Page 4
SUPRISE FOR SOCCER Tritons head to ncaa tournament sPORTS, Page 12
FORECAST
THURSDAY H 68 L 60
SATURDAY H 69 L 57
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FRIDAY
H 67 L 58
SUNDAY
H 72 L 53
VERBATIM
Follow all these steps, and you will almost certainly wake up with a splitting headache, stomachache, nausea and light sensitivity. ”
- The Guru
How-to Guru OPINION, PAGE 4
INSIDE Briefs............................... 2 A Couple of Derps............ 2 Restaurant Review........... 8 Sudoku.......................... 10 Women’s Volleyball........ 12
WWW.UCSDGUARDIAN.ORG
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
A.S. COUNCIL
Council Passes Annual Budget, Increases Student Org Funding BY tina butoiu
$3.2 million Total budget
Associate news editor
$22,500
$550,000
Total funding allocated for Sun God Festival
Total A.S. Council Student activity fee funds remaining collected quarterly after all allocations
Total A.S. Pancake Breakfast spending
$2.36 million $10,000 Total expenditure after referendum allocation
$51.35 29%
A.S. Council President annual stipend.
$909
of fees returned to financial aid
$5,250
Annual stipend for Vice Presidents.
NUMBER CRUNCHING: A.S. Council’s 2014–15 budget, passed Nov. 5, reflects a higher total expenditure than in 2013-2014 as the total number of undergraduate students paying fees increased by over 100. This year’s budget also includes a $53,000 increase in unallocated funding for student organizations over last year’s budget. We break down the numbers further in an editorial on this year’s budget, OPINION, page 4.
A
.S. Council unanimously passed the 2014–15 budget of more than $3.18 million at the Wednesday, Nov. 5 council meeting after approximately five hours of de bate and discussion of the proposed budget items. Vice President Finance and Resources Igor Geyn told the UCSD Guardian that this year’s budget is different from past budgets because it is more reflective of what is actually being spent. “This year, A.S. Council is making a conscious effort to be more transparent with and accountable for our budget allocations,” Geyn said. “For example, the allocations for the Office of External Affairs are reflective of the actual costs that the Office has been incurring for years, and many of the line items for the individual offices are more in line with actual expenditures for past years. Additionally, this budget is very conscious of student priorities in the allocations, and this is a product of a careful and methodical proposal review process.” Some of the funds denied to A.S. offices included stipendiary positions requested by the directors of the offices. One of them was ASUCSD MOVES Director Kyle Heiskala’s request for a stipend to be given to the MOVES associate director. Another was Associate Vice President Student Advocacy Ryan Huyler’s petition for the creation of a stipendiary technical advocate position. The Office of Academic Affairs also took a cut from its A.S. Grants fund.
Geyn said he would handle potential disputes resulting from the passage of the budget by discussing concerns and explaining the logistics behind the individual budget items. “Though we may have debates on the floor, I believe that everyone understands the realities of the financial situation A.S. Council currently finds itself in,” Geyn said. “That being said, my office and I have offered ourselves as a resource to secure additional sources of funding for the offices that feel their budgets have taken a critical hit. Additionally, I believe that encouraging collaboration and coordinated projects has the capacity to maximize the funds that A.S. Council is able to allocate.” An increase in undergraduate enrollment this year provided an increase in student activity fees for the budget. However, according to Geyn, higher enrollment results in higher operational costs for A.S. functions. “What ended up happening [this year] is that most of the offices ended up having to get a boost in funding because of that increased need in programming, operating expenses and things of that nature,” said Geyn. One of the predominant parts of the budget debate was the issue of mandated reserves. Over the past few years, reserves have decreased. Geyn disSee BUDGET, page 3
UC SYSTEM
UC-Owned Observatory Will Maintain Funding Lick Observatory in San Jose had previously been expected to become self-sufficient by 2018. BY Jacky to
staff writer The UC Office of the President announced that it has rescinded its plan to cut funding for California’s Lick Observatory in a letter to UC Observatories Interim Director Claire Max on Oct. 29. UCOP will no longer require that Lick become selfsustaining by 2018 and find an entity other than UCO to manage it. Though UCOP will continue funding it, Science Magazine reported on Nov. 7 that the observatory still faces pressure to find other sources of funding as its $1.5 million annual budget is not nearly enough. Additionally, their staff has decreased from 24 in 2011 down to 14 currently,
including those leaving amid the uncertainty and others retiring earlier than they might have otherwise. UC Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth argues that Lick’s financial woes are indicative of a broader funding crisis for the UC observatory program. An advisory committee recently concluded that the program needs approximately $7.7 million from UCOP in 2016. This year, it is receiving $5 million. Lick Observatory, opened in 1888, is located atop Mt. Hamilton overlooking the city of San Jose and is the first permanent mountaintop observatory. The observatory has helped to prove and confirm some of science’s most historic theories, including Einstein’s theory of relativity and confirming the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Today, Lick’s primary use is to search for supernovae and planets in other solar systems. It also serves as a testing ground for astronomy students and new technology. The aforementioned stipulations were stated in a budget letter from UCOP to then UCO Interim Director Sandra Faber on Sept. 16, 2013. UCOP indicated then that knowledgeable groups had recommended these stipulations and that other observatories had multiple, diverse funding streams. UCO leaders at the time had also indicated to UCOP that they could not operate Lick viably without a very significant increase in its funding from UCOP. In addition, UC astronomers See LICK, page 3
UCSD Researchers Collect Cosmic Microwave Data UCSD developers have a hand in working on additions to the Huan Tran Telescope in Chile. BY Brynna bolt
Staff Writer A report published on Oct. 20 in the Astrophysical Journal describes the recent findings of POLARBEAR, a project that UCSD researchers collaborated on. The data collected provides the most precise and sensitive measurements of cosmic microwave background polarization to date. Researchers have built a new kind of instrument, involving cryogenic bolometers attached to the focus of the Huan Tran Telescope, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. These cryogenic receivers are designed to measure the very faint variations in CMB polarization created through gravitational lensing. The partial polarization that POLARBEAR is studying occurs when light, as an electromagnetic wave, has more of its electric field oscillating in one direction than in another. The CBM that POLARBEAR detects has been shown to be partially polarized and bent in a pattern known as B-mode patterns, as it passes through the gravitational fields of large clusters of mass. POLARBEAR has been one of the first projects to successfully isolate any specific B-mode pattern in the sky. The findings reported on Oct. 21 were made within the telescope’s first season of observation, a window of time lasting from 2012 into early 2013. The instrument is currently in its third season of observation, and experiments are currently ongoing. These results do not conflict or coincide with earlier BICEP2 research, according to Dr. Kam Arnold, an assistant research scientist involved with the project. The two experiments measure different signals at different angular scales. POLARBEAR measures B-mode patterns at a much finer resolution; the patterns represent a variation on the sky of about onetenth of a degree, whereas BICEP2’s scales represents a variation of about one degree. Furthermore, this finer resolution avoids the contamination of B-mode measurements by cosmic dust, an occurrence that has recently cast doubt over the previous BICEP2 findings. The dry air of the Atacama Desert and height of the telescope’s location at 17,000 feet farther negate the interference of cosmic dust. “In the paper, we presented an estimate of the contribution of dust to our B-mode measurement,” Arnold told the UCSD Guardian. “To quantify the confidence with which we measured cosmic B-modes, we removed the estimated contamination due to dust and saw that we still observed B-modes with 97.2 percentconfidence.” See POLARBEAR, page 3