GREEN MACHINES
During the coming year, dozens of UC Davis employees will be tooling around Davis in these tiny two-seater electric Nissan Hyperminis. It’s all part of a research project being conducted by UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies to help industry and policy-makers plan the transportation future.
Drivers will use these zero-emission “city electric vehicles,” or CEVs, for work trips around the UC Davis campus and city of Davis. Drivers will then assess the cars on criteria like interior space; speed and range; charging convenience; usefulness compared with other options such as walking, cycling or driving a conventional vehicle; and safety. UC Davis researchers will also assess whether vehicles like these stimulate discussions in the community about such issues as air quality, climate change and energy supplies, and the role individuals and communities can play in resolving them.
“We want to know how users like the cars. We also want to listen to the conversations the vehicles prompt,” said Ken Kurani, a research engineer at the Institute of Transportation Studies and one of the study’s lead investigators. “What do people say about the cars? Do they imagine they would want such a vehicle? What do they imagine such vehicles do to their own travel, their town and their world?”
 NAMESAKES: TOOMEY FIELD
From 1919 through the early 1920s, the UC Berkeley football team was untouchable. Appropriately named the “Wonder Team,” the stellar Cal lineup made it to the Rose Bowl two years in a row and held a winning streak of 18 consecutive games. “The avalanche hit in 1920,” said halfback Irving “Crip” Toomey, so called because of a high school football injury. The left-footer set a record that year that still stands, making 10 out of 11 drop kicks. One of the Wonder Team’s star players, Toomey also scored seven touchdowns in one memorable game that year, leading the Bears to an astounding 127-0 victory over the St. Mary’s College Gaels. Coach Andy Smith’s Wonder Team swept nine games that season, scoring 510 points to its opponents’ 14. Toomey went on to become athletic director and football and basketball coach for UC Davis in 1928 and was instrumental in setting up the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate boxing matches, but he was always remembered for his role on the Wonder Team. Although the team set countless records that remain unbroken and brought glory to the UC Berkeley campus, Toomey was modest about his contributions. “Our team was made up of men who really liked to play football, and that’s exactly what we did.”
CHOCOHOLICS REJOICE!
 Like apples, chocolates may be good for keeping the doctor away. So suggest the results of research conducted by Carl Keen, professor of nutrition and internal medicine. Keen found that eating chocolate may confer important cardiovascular benefits, perhaps resulting in a reduced risk for blood clots. Tests on more than 100 volunteers who ate either small amounts of chocolate or who consumed flavonoid-rich cocoa beverages, indicated that the flavonoids in chocolate—compounds that naturally occur in many fruits and vegetables, but are particularly plentiful in cocoa beans—confer helpful effects similar to those produced by low doses of aspirin. Public health officials often suggest that individuals over the age of 40 take a baby aspirin a day to reduce their risk for stroke and heart attacks. In the United States, it is estimated that millions of individuals take aspirin on a daily basis for its cardio-protective effects.
Scientists have also found that the flavonoids in chocolate may augment the natural oxidant defense systems in the body, which may reduce the risk for certain diseases.
Nutrition experts caution that chocolate—rich in sugar and fats—should not be viewed as a substitute for fruit and vegetables. Similarly, flavonoid-rich foods should not be viewed as a substitute for low-dose aspirin. Nevertheless—said Keen at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September—he is sufficiently impressed by the collective results on flavonoid-rich foods that he often consumes such foods, including chocolate, before long plane flights to help reduce the risk for blood-clotting problems associated with such travel.
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This 19th century theater poster advertises one retelling of the Uncle Tom story; it is part of an extensive collection of posters and books relating to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Department of Special Collections in Shields Library. |
VINDICATING UNCLE TOM
This may be the year that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous character, Uncle Tom, finally redeems his reputation after getting a bad rap for nearly 150 years, says a UC Davis expert on African American culture.
Since it was published in 1851, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has spurred not just abolitionist passions but caricatures of Uncle Tom and other slaves.
Patricia Turner, professor of African American and African studies, says the characterizations and the plot in the original novel differ dramatically from their popular-culture depictions. “Almost immediately there were stage shows, musicals, comedies and eventually movies about it,” she said. “And few match the novel.” In the novel, Uncle Tom allows himself to be beaten to death rather than tell the white masters the location of two runaway female slaves who have been sexually abused.
“But the slur of ‘Uncle Tom’ is still leveled at blacks by other blacks as a derogatory term for someone who has acted selfishly or is a sell-out,” said Turner, a scholar of 19th and 20th century black culture and folklore and author of Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Influences on Culture (1994).
She was a guest speaker this fall at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Connecticut in honor of the book’s 150th anniversary. Turner will also participate next spring in a conference at UC Davis that will focus on how the novel has been used by artists—like Spike Lee in his film Bamboozled—as a springboard for their own creativity.
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