SEXUAL BOUNDARIES

Around UC Davis residence halls, on Unitrans buses and in bars and apartments in town, students are giving these provocative posters a long look. These two, and two others, were developed as part of the "Voices Not Victims" campaign sponsored by the UC Davis Campus Violence Prevention Program and designed by Oakland advocacy advertising firm Slingshot Productions. Far more than a simple rape awareness project, the campaign asks students to think about sexual communication and establish comfort zones with their partners.

The project, funded with a portion of a $540,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice's Violence Against Women Office, began with a survey of students and focus groups to find out their feelings on sexual consent, personal responsibility and sexual assault on campus. What the surveyors found was that sexual communication was far from a black-and-white issue among young adults. Women felt that the terms rape and sexual assault didn't always describe their experiences with coerced or forced sex. And men believed that women needed to be clearer about their boundaries in the beginning of a sexual encounter. With the survey in mind, Slingshot director Granate Sosnoff created posters that reflected young people's interest in intimate relationships but also their confusion about them.

Ms. magazine featured the ads and other rape awareness spots that Slingshot has produced in the "Applause" section of its April/May issue. The University of Texas has ordered posters for its campus rape awareness program, and the Ohio Catholic schools want the images. And Jennifer Beeman, director of the violence prevention office, has received a request from the Ford Foundation's office in Africa for the posters and permission to translate them into Swahili, a language spoken in eastern and central Africa.

"This campaign was really specifically intended to start conversation, and it really has—in a very positive way," Beeman said.

For more details, see voicesnotvictims.org.

UP CHUCK AND AWAY!

Lucky graduate students from the College of Engineering will get to ride in this NASA jet, nicknamed the "Vomit Comet," later this year. The NASA KC-135 makes a series of steep climbs and dives to simulate weightlessness for up to 25 seconds at a time. But the students won't just float around turning green—they'll be hard at work. The flight experiments are part of a research project by Zuhair Munir, interim dean of engineering, and Ben Shaw, associate professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering. With a grant from NASA, they are studying the use of combustion in electric fields to make nanomaterials, which have special properties because of their small particle size.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

Davis wouldn't be Davis without its double-deckers. But the six classic buses, built in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were almost phased out by Unitrans about 15 years ago because of maintenance issues. Fortunately shop supervisor Wally Mellor—and the dedicated crew he has hand-assembled since then—stepped up, says Jim McElroy, general manager of Unitrans. "We were down to one functioning bus. It was do or die for the double-deckers. These people stepped to the plate and brought the buses back from oblivion." This team of mechanics spent about two years to convert one of the 24,000-pound vehicles to a natural gas fuel system—making time between their usual duties of keeping the about 40-bus Unitrans fleet rolling. A second bus will eventually get a natural gas engine; two others will get new diesel engines and two will remain "as close to original condition as possible," McElroy says. "Hopefully, that will extend their life and keep them a part of our operations for many years to come."