A unique system of low-energy cooling, lighting control, high-efficiency glazing, and photo-voltaics in the remodeling of Salazar Hall on the Sonoma State University campus has earned the building project a national award for energy efficiency.
Energy User News honored the former campus library remodeling project at its 2003 Energy Efficient Building Awards ceremony held recently during the World Energy Engineering Congress of the Association of Energy Engineers.
The awards recognize innovations in building management and energy efficiency in either retrofits or new construction throughout North America that provide unique building solutions and also achieve significant energy and cost savings. The Salazar project was judged in the educational facilities category.
"The judges look for projects that go beyond what is required by the State," says Energy User News editor Kevin Hanlin, "not just those that picked the low-hanging fruit."
The remodel of Salazar Hall made the former university library one of the most energy efficient public buildings in northern California. It has one of the largest solar panel grids in the region covering 9,500 square feet with 1200 panels.
The building uses 42% less energy than required by the State's Title 24 Building Standards. Such energy savings are enough to power 80 residences.
Campus project engineer Keith Marchando has been given much of the credit for the innovative mix of design features in the building. Marchando worked with the architects and engineers to develop a unique application utilizing the proven technology of direct and indirect evaporative cooling, powering the fans and pumps with solar energy.
In the past year, this system has provided conditioned air to 120,000 sq. ft of classroom and office building space with almost no mechanical cooling required, reducing by 70% the cost of operations as compared to a traditional efficient mechanical cooling system.
The Salazar project is currently being studied by the Lawrence Livermore Lab in Berkeley which has been documenting the performance of the building since January.
The $20 million dollar project includes a denser occupancy of offices, classrooms and high-tech laboratories than its original use. Indoor air quality in the building is so improved with 100% fresh air constantly circulating through the building that Marchando hopes it can prove that there will be savings in reduced sick time taken by employees who work there. Industry experts believe that improved air quality in buildings can save up to $400 per year per employee in untapped sick leave.
While photo-voltaics are the most obvious of the energy conservation measures in this project, the evaporative cooling application is a truly innovative measure. The two-stage cooling application adds approximately $350,000 to the project, but Sonoma State engineers report the design reduces peak load by almost 400 tons on the hottest days.
Campus architect Bruce Walker says the project will pay back the investment in the mechanical equipment in five years or less of energy savings. "This project was not conceived to simply reduce utility costs, but to provide a valuable opportunity for Sonoma State University to explore the viability of alternative energy," Walker says.
By avoiding the purchase of fossil fuel-generated electricity, SSU's solar powered system spares the environment from thousands of tons of harmful emissions such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide. Over the 25-year life of the system, it is estimated that these emissions reductions are equivalent to planting 24 acres of trees or removing 400 cars from California highways.
Earlier this year, the project won the 2003 Technology Award for Institutional Buildings from both the local and regional American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers. The project is currently under consideration for this prestigious award at the national level next year.
CAPTION: Campus engineer Keith Marchando with solar array on roof of Salazar Hall.
In an effort to raise campus consciousness about the issues of hunger andhomelessness, Sonoma State's student volunteer organization, Join Us Making Progress, is sponsoring a Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week beginning today.
Students, staff and faculty will be given the opportunity to find out how they can make a difference in the lives of those without basic needs and provisions. A series of events throughout the week will educate the SSU campus about the current state of homelessness and hunger in America and what they can do to remedy the situation.
UPCOMING ACTIVITIES
ALL WEEK
Warm Clothing Drive - Donation bins will be located around campus and dormitory laundry rooms all week starting today
TUESDAY
Campus Wide Fast - Students will be given the opportunity to fast for onemeal and reflect on how hunger affects 840 million people every day. Hunger 101, an educational simulation about hunger and it's effects, is set for noon-1:30 p.m.
WEDNESDAY
Soup Kitchen - Trip to San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church to serve dinner at Glide's soup kitchen, 1:30-7:30 p.m. Transportation will be provided.
THURSDAY
A Night Without a Home (National Awareness Sleep-Out) - Participants are invited to spend the night in the Stevenson Quad to experience what it is like to be homeless for a night. 6-10 p.m. in Stevenson Quad, or the Commons if it rains.
FRIDAY
Prepare and serve dinner at a local homeless shelter.
For further information, call the JUMP office, (707) 664-4277.
Faced with the daunting task of raising athletic scholarship funds to a minimum of $250,000 by the 2005-06 academic year, the Sonoma State University Department of Intercollegiate Athletics came up with a unique plan. Racehorses.
It was only last week that the idea to sell 100 shares at $1,000 in each of two colts, of which half of each sold share is used as a tax-deductible donation to the Sonoma State University Student-Athlete Scholarship Fund. The horses will be owned by a corporation to be called Seawolf Stables.
Several days after an article was published in the local daily newspaper, reservations for shares in the two horses have already been sold out, leaving a waiting list of over 100 people and the department in the process of acquiring a third horse.
The idea was hatched by Russ Gardiner, SSU's volunteer assistant athletic director for marketing and development.
The two horses, Seawolf and Sonoma Slew, were selected by Tom Bachman, owner of Pegasus Ranch in Petaluma. Bachman is responsible for the care and training of the colts. Seawolf, named for the school's mascot, is the offspring of Swiss Yodeler and My Thellie. Sonoma Slew, is the grandson of the great Seattle Slew and is the offspring of Slewledo and Distant Love.
The anticipated first race for the horses will be at the Sonoma County Fair in July of 2004. They will race in the future at Bay Meadows, Golden Gate Fields and other California tracks.
The horses are available for viewing from 5-7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov.16 at SSU in conjunction with Swirl & Swish, a wine/food tasting and auction event hosted by the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics and the Wine Business program of the School of Business and Economics.
For further information, contact SSU Athletic Director, Bill Fusco, (707) 664-2639. For information on the Seawolf Stables and purchasing shares, phone (707) 664-2521.
NOTE: Digital photos of the horses are available upon request.
ABOVE, Seawolf, a Thoroughbred who will race with Sonoma Slew for the SSU athletic scholarship fund. (Photo by Sandy Destiny)
Dismayed by the lack of connections between Sonoma County youth and senior citizens, Nedda Bakhshi has taken the old idea of pen pals to new places.
Bakhshi, a senior in Sonoma State University's gerontology program, created a program this fall semester called "Side-By-Side" as a new way for students and seniors to connect and share life experiences through letter writing and quarterly parties.
The Side-By-Side program is designed to bring generations together in a world where many seniors and young people do not interact on a regular basis.
In order to forge stronger ties between the two groups, Bakhshi arranged the twenty-seven students of Diane Nelson's seventh-grade class at Petaluma Middle School into "families" of five to six students.
These "families" exchange letters with seniors from the Petaluma Senior Center once a month. After three months of exchanging letters, there will be a party where the seventh-grade "families" and their senior pen pal will finally be able to meet.
The seniors take part in teaching the students about the ways they lived years ago. One woman writes about growing up as one of twelve siblings on an Illinois farm. "We had no electricity or running water so we used gas lights. We used a large well and it was the best water in the country. My dad baked bread every two days. We brought all of our vegetables out of the garden."
Her letter not only teaches the Petaluma seventh graders about farm life many years ago, but also emphasizes connections to land and family. Though she has only one hand and suffers from emphysema, she sent them a two-page typewritten letter about her life.
The students shared stories of their families, grades, favorite sports and career aspirations. "For soccer I travel to Hawaii and Sacramento and a lot of other places. My dream is to play for Santa Clara University," writes Sarah, a member of the "family" corresponding with her senior friend.
The Persian-born student was part of a similar program several years ago writing to terminally ill adults.
"We live in such a youth-oriented society that we unconsciously tend to segregate an enormous part of our history - our elders, " says Bakhshi.
"Through faults of our own society I believe we lose so much if we leave our elders aside. They have lived an entire life and can teach us lessons that may take us our entire lifetimes to learn."
In addition, she adds, "spending time with elders can teach our younger generations patience, common etiquette and most importantly respect."
Targets Latino Community Issues, Nov. 22
"Communities as Places of Learning," a conference organized by the Sonoma State University Latino Consortium, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22 at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa.
This event will bring together members of non-profit and government agencies, local Latino neighborhood leaders and community members, as well as members of the SSU community.
They will engage in planning collaborative actions that benefit Sonoma County's Latino communities, and create three to six feasible service-learning projects to help resolve present and emerging community problems.
Many North Bay names have joined the Conference as partner organizations, including: The City of Santa Rosa, Family Action, St. Joseph's Health Network, Petaluma City Schools, and the Latino Commission on Drugs and Alcohol.
The Sonoma State University Latino Consortium for Families and Youth was created to enhance services to local Latino neighborhoods by building service-learning relationships between the University, K-12 schools and local community groups.
Based on the growing needs for these types of services, Dr. Elisa Velasquez, of the SSU psychology department, organized a roundtable discussion with eight Latino professors and a number of community members to discuss the issues of how to provide more culturally-sensitive services to Latino families.
They organized themselves into the Consortium, which has since grown into a multi-organizational collaborative.
For more information on the conference, contact Amra Stafford, (707) 664-3202.
Masculinity in "You Throw Like a Girl" on Nov. 18
Former professional athlete Don McPherson will present "You Throw Like a Girl" on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Cooperage at Sonoma State University.
The event is an interactive discussion that takes on the anti-female bias in American culture that makes doing something like a girl an insult. Such statements, he says, teach boys not only to "shut off their behavior and emotions of the moment, but to view girls as being less than."
During this free event, McPherson will challenge the beliefs boys and men hold about themselves and narrow definitions of masculinity. He connects those beliefs with the anti-female attitudes, alcohol use and abuse, and homophobia that he feels damage our society and perpetuate sexism and misogyny.
His goal is for men and women to work together to prevent sexual violence so that both genders can move forward together into a more equitable and respectful future.
McPherson is the founder and executive director of the Sports Leadership Institute at Adelphi University. He played professional football for seven years and has been active for more than 16 years in community, educational and social programs addressing substance abuse and violence.
For more information about this event, contact Kris Montgomery, (707) 664-2845.
The event is sponsored by SSU Athletics, the Women's Resource Center, Student Advocates for Education (SAFE), Residential Life, Verdot Village Council, the Vice President for Student Affairs, the Women's and Gender Studies Department, Associated Students Inc., California Office of Traffic Safety, The National Collegiate Athletic Association, SSU Greek Life, the Inter-Fraternity Council, and the Panhellenic Council.
Robert Hogg and his spider-bot."Turn right. Now climb. Easy does it."
Robert Hogg lurks over the controls that command a robot to travel and avoid obstacles. But his robot is not part of a virtual game. It is "Urbie," an urban robot designed for mobile military reconnaissance in city terrain, to travel up several flights of stairs.
Urbie's features may assist police, emergency and rescue personnel in hazardous and hostile situations.
Hogg discusses new developments in robotics in a lecture at 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 10 in Darwin 108 as part of the weekly "What Physicists Do" lecture series at Sonoma State University.
Hogg's boyhood passion for robots led him to an internship and then a career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. In more than ten years at JPL, Hogg has already worked on some of the latest robotic vehicles to explore our own planet and beyond.
Recently, Hogg and a team of students created the "spider-bot," a miniature robot resembling the "itsy bitsy spider" in the popular nursery rhyme. But instead of crawling "up the water spout" as the rhyme goes, the spider-bot has greater ambitions, as does its creator.
The micro robot is designed to be part of a network of autonomous robots that one day may chart terrain on Mars, or crawl into tight spaces to make repairs on the International Space Station.
For a free poster describing all thirteen lectures in the series, see
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/wpd/, send e-mail to gayle.walker@sonoma.edu, or call (707) 664-2119.
Students intending to enroll at Sonoma State University for the Fall 2004 are strongly advised to submit their applications for admission no later than Nov. 30, 2003, says SSU president Ruben Arminana.
Academically qualified students who apply for admission before Nov. 30 increase their chances of being admitted to the SSU campus. After that, students run the risk of not being admitted.
Because of the state's budget crisis and deep cuts to education, SSU will be forced to limit the number of students admitted next year. Many other California State University campuses will also stop accepting applications earlier than in past years.
In previous years some CSU campuses accepted applications for as long as nine months. This window will be shorter for the entering class of fall 2004. Campuses will stop accepting applications when they reach their target enrollments.
In 2004-05 the system must maintain enrollment at the 2003-04 levels to comply with the State's 2003-04 budget language stipulating that the CSU and the University of California will not receive funding for enrollment growth next year.
CSU Chancellor Chancellor Charles Reed said that even with the severe budget cuts and enrollment limits, the CSU continues to be a leader in high-quality, accessible, student-focused education. "The CSU graduates 77,000 students each year who pay the lowest fees of comparable universities nationwide," he said. "They then enter the workforce and contribute greatly to California's economy."
Fall 2004 applicants are encouraged to apply electronically by logging in to www.csumentor.edu. By working online, students can see if they have missed responding to a question and insuring that their applications are complete when submitted.
More than 80 percent of CSU applicants have used the online applications system. Although most students are expected to apply electronically, campuses will make accommodations for those who have no access to the Internet.
Students in need of assistance with their electronic applications may call for technical support at 1-800-GOTOXAP. (1-800-468-6927). The service is open Monday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
