VOLUME 48, ISSUE 16
JUST GETTING STARTED
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2014
WWW.UCSDGUARDIAN.ORG
UC SYSTEM REGENTS APPROVE THE FIVE PERCENT TUITION HIKES
Tuition Set to Rise, Following UC Board of Regents Vote
SAN DIEGO
City Council Passes Water Recycling Program The city hopes the program will generate over 15 million gallons of water per day over the next eight years.
PHOTOS BY MEGAN LEE/GUARDIAN
BY Andrew Huang
Triton men’s water polo looks ahead to hosting and taking on the NCAA Championship Bracket after taking the top spot and another title at the WWPA Tournament over the weekend.
Senior Staff Writer
SPORTS, PAGE 12
ALL IN ORDER
DAVID ROSE KEEPS THE PEACE
TUITION ON THE UP AND UP: At its meeting last week, the University of California Board of Regents voted to approve a tuition plan that could raise fees by up to 5 percent for each of the next five years — assuming the state declines to increase funding to the UC System. Above, students protest the hikes last week. We break down the increaes in FEATURES, page 6. PHOTO BY CORY WONG /GUARDIAN
FEATURES, Page 7
CARRY ON, CARRY ON WEAPONS CONCEALMENT opinion, page 4
FORECAST
MONDAY H 76 L 56
TUESDAY H 75 L 55
WEDNESDAY THURSDAY H 78 L 54
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VERBATIM
Keep a cashbox at hand throughout the entire Thanksgiving weekend and remind your friends and family that they should be less Scrooge-y this holiday season.”
- The Guru
How-to-Guru OPINION, PAGE 4
INSIDE Average Cat..................... 2 Lights and Sirens............. 3 Letter to the Editor........... 5 Crossword..................... 10 Calendar........................ 11
BY TINA BUTOIU associate NEWS Editor
T
he UC Board of Regents met from Nov. 18 to 20 and discussed and approved a set of motions and appointments, including the 5-percent annual tuition increase over the next five years. Aside from the tuition increase, the regents allowed, at UC President Napolitano’s request, Dr. Regis B. Kelly to hold a senior management advisor position to Napolitano for innovation and entrepreneurship. Kelly, the current director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UC San Francisco, will receive an annual base salary of $403,000, which will not come from state funds. According to the UC Regents Committee on Compensation, Kelly will help the University of California capitalize on its research. “The development of these alternative revenue sources has become increasingly important given the current financial realities facing the University,” the Committee’s report stated. “To accomplish these goals, he will bridge academia and commercial industries with entrepreneurial ventures.”
Another appointment made by the UC Regents, also requested by Napolitano, was that of Patrice Knight as AVP Chief Procurement Officer, UC Health, Office of the President. Neither tuition nor state funds will fund Knight’s $410,000 base salary, nor the estimated $61,500 to $102,500 relocation compensation. Prior to her appointment to the position, Knight worked at IBM for more than 30 years, where she held vice president-level positions in Procurement, Global Supply, Supply Chain and Strategic Sourcing. The statement regarding the appointment discussed how Knight’s position would enable the UC Health System to reduce operating costs. “This appointment is a key position for UC Health’s efforts to better control costs and manage the overall enterprise more efficiently. The purchasing activity of UC medical centers amounts to $2.4 billion annually,” the report concluded. “Patrice Knight’s charge will be to develop programs and processes to achieve a target of $150 million in savings over three years.” Five-percent tuition increases were also approved for
See TUITION, page 3
STUDENT LIFE
Students and Alumnus Develop New Earplugs Hush earplugs allow certain sounds to be filtered out and can connect to smartphones. BY Jacky To
Senior staff writer Two current UCSD students, along with a UCSD alumnus, launched a Kickstarter campaign on Nov. 12 to raise $100,000 to begin manufacturing Hush earplugs. The Hush earplug is a “smart” earplug design, which allows its users to choose which sounds they want to block out and which sounds to allow in. The founders of Hush designed the earplugs primarily for people who want to block out noise while they sleep while still being able to hear their alarm clock in the morning. “The vision for Hush is to provide people a way to sleep in the context of the increasingly noisy world around them”, mechanical engineer and UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering alumnus
Daniel “Ewok” Lee said. Users can connect the earplugs wirelessly to their smartphones and use Hush’s app to filter which alarms and alerts they want to allow to wake them up. Users can also choose which noise-maskers they want to hear. At first, when they built the prototype for the Hush earplugs, they ran into a design issue that made it uncomfortable for people to wear the earplugs while sleeping on their side. After many tests and iterations, they eventually developed a design for the earplug to avoid this problem. “Testing and having real people sleep with it for entire nights was insightful to learn how to continuously improve our design,” Lee said. Lee founded Hush with Daniel “Chesong” Lee, Hush’s software engineer, who is attending UCSD parttime, and Daniel Synn, Hush’s designer
and a structural engineer — who is taking a year off from school to dedicate his time to the company. The three cited the noisiness of their college environment as one of the reasons that prompted them to develop the idea for Hush. “I couldn’t use earplugs because I always had this anxiety that I wouldn’t wake up to my alarm clock,” Lee said. “That’s when I thought, ‘Why not just put a speaker on the inside of the earplug so that I could still hear the things I needed?’ Plus, when it sounded, I wouldn’t have to disturb anyone else.” In addition to the negative aspects of their college experience, the three founders explained that their positive experiences at UCSD were also contributing factors to their determination to build their own company. “Hush actually started as a See EARPLUGS, page 3
The San Diego City Council met on Tuesday, Nov. 18 and unanimously approved the Pure Water San Diego program — a 20-year water recycling project expected to purify up to 15 million additional gallons of drinkable water daily by 2023. Under the new program, wastewater would first be sent to an Advanced Water Purification Facility, where it will undergo several purification processes like membrane filtration and advanced oxidation. Afterward, wastewater will be blended with imported water in an environmental buffer — the San Vicente Reservoir, in this case — before finally being sent to a regular drinking water plant for distribution. The reclaimed water would be monitored at all stages of purification. Eventually, the Pure Water program would bypass the natural reservoir, sending water straight to the final treatment plant for direct potable reuse. San Diego is currently using funds from Proposition 50 and Proposition 84 to research additional protective barriers for this DPR method. Although the short-term goal is to provide 15 million gallons per day by 2023, the city’s long-term hope is that more advanced facilities will increase output to 83 million gallons of purified water by 2035, accounting for over one-third of the city’s total supply. The program may eliminate the need for expensive upgrades to the existing Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant, which currently cleans sewage that is pumped into the Pacific Ocean. Pure Water San Diego is funded by a variety of grants with an estimated total price tag of $3.5 billion. The city is currently providing free tours of the advanced treatment plant. According to the City of San Diego Public Utilities Department currently imports up to 85 percent of its water. With recurring droughts and depleted reserves, the city had been working with other organizations to find ways to maximize water usage since 2004. In January 2004, City Council authorized a water-reuse study to comprehensively research all opportunities for recycling water, and a second study was conducted in 2009. The compiled data culminated into the Pure Water San Diego program. A demonstration project at Miramar was also implemented in 2007 to test its feasibility. Operating a study-scale facility, the city found that the process efficiently provided water that met or exceeded all federal and state -safety standards. Since 2008, Orange County has already been using a similar purification process as well. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer See WATER, page 3