Community Briefs

Regent Ward Connerly lobbies Republicans

Ward Connerly, who helped steer California’s anti-affirmative
action initiative to victory, lobbied Republican congressional
leaders Wednesday to support his new effort to ban racial
preferences at the federal level.

"There is no public policy that is in more need of
rehabilitation right now than affirmative action,” Connerly said
in introducing Washington-based supporters of his new organization,
the American Civil Rights Institute. Connerly, a member of the
University of California Regents and a Sacramento consultant, met
Wednesday morning with Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., who plans to
reintroduce legislation to eliminate race and gender preferences at
the federal level. A similar bill by Canady stalled in the last
Congress.

Connerly also had meetings scheduled with House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, R-Ga., and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.

”Hopefully we’ll get some assessment from them as to how strong
their spines are (on the issue) and play it from there,” he
said.

Connerly said preferences have fostered the nation’s race
problem.

”Diversity is not an excuse to discriminate,” he said.

The California ballot initiative approved in November, known as
Proposition 209, prohibits racial and gender preferences in public
hiring, contracting and education, putting an end to many state
affirmative action programs.

A federal judge has barred its enforcement, pending a legal
challenge.

Spectrograph helps observatory get ahead

A miniature forest of robotically controlled optical fibers has
sprouted from the end of the 120-inch Shane Telescope at Lick
Observatory near San Jose, letting astronomers capture and analyze
faint rays of light from dozens of distant stars or galaxies at the
same time.

Named the multi-object spectrograph (MOS), the device is the
fruit of a collaboration between researchers at the UC Santa Cruz,
which operates Lick Observatory, and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL). After more than a decade of design, manufacture,
tests, and refinements, MOS became available for routine use last
fall.

Principal designer Jean Brodie, associate professor of astronomy
and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, says MOS has expanded the
research horizon at Lick Observatory for speed, accuracy and field
of view.

These attributes, says Brodie, make MOS unique in the world.

"MOS is fast, accurate, and efficient," she says. "It offers all
kinds of observational flexibility. This system doesn’t try to
compete with 10-meter class telescopes, but it is a perfect
complement to them because it is optimized to perform entirely
different kinds of science."

For instance, MOS is ideal for surveying the properties of large
numbers of scattered objects, such as stars in swarms called
globular clusters or groups of galaxies. It’s not as efficient to
use larger telescopes to study many such objects, says Brodie,
because the telescopes cover tiny patches of sky ­ 75 times
smaller in the case of the W. M. Keck Telescopes. Further, a
multi-object spectrograph dramatically cuts the prohibitive time it
takes to observe numerous objects individually.

Brodie and her MOS collaborators plan to use the instrument to
study clusters of galaxies that emit x-rays, stars in "open
clusters," regions in the Milky Way where stars form, supernova
remnants, and globular clusters around our sister galaxy, M31, in
Andromeda. The latter study promises to shed light on the
structure, evolution, and chemical history of this grand spiral
galaxy.

Astrophysicists Charles Hailey and William Craig, both now at
Columbia University, are Brodie’s primary collaborators on MOS.
They oversaw an engineering team at LLNL that designed the
fiber-optic positioning system and rebuilt an off-the-shelf robot
to deploy the fibers.

Compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports.