Ucsd

UC San Diego had a season-high point-total in routing the University of Redlands, 115-80, in Friday night's first round of the La Jolla Classic at UCSD. UCSD will meet Southern California College, an 86-67 winner over Willamette University in the other opening-round game, in the championship at 8 tonight at UCSD. UCSD (6-4) took a 60-39 lead at halftime, then cruised behind five players in double-figure scoring. Rick Batt and John Spence led the way with 20 points.

Thanks to a "very unusual combination of circumstances" and a quick set of calculations, a UC San Diego scientist successfully fought a $400 traffic ticket with a four-page research paper. Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at UCSD, successfully appealed his failure-to-stop ticket using a physics and math argument that ultimately swayed a San Diego judge. In the paper, titled "The Proof of Innocence," Krioukov offered a series of equations and graphs to show that it was physically impossible for him to have broken the law, as an officer claimed.

A rare Bosendorfer piano, one of a series of only 15, has been donated to UC San Diego by a La Jollan who wishes to remain anonymous. The piano's value is estimated at $30,000. It was designed and constructed by the highly regarded Bosendorfer piano company of Austria in the early 1960s. The piano has been played in public only once, during a 1960 concert in New York City's Town Hall.

We are taught to believe that ideology is the enemy of free thought. But that's not right. Ideology is a mere checklist of principles and priorities. The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts. So, for instance, David Horowitz is a stock villain on U.S. campuses because he deviates from the standard formula of coddling the usual victims and lionizing the usual heroes.

SAN DIEGO--In a game that was halted by darkness after nine innings Tuesday afternoon, UC San Diego and the University of San Diego played to a 8-8 tie at Olsen Field at UCSD. UCSD scored a run in the seventh, two in the eighth and one in the ninth on Dan DiMascio's two-out triple to complete a comeback against their crosstown Division 1 rivals. UCSD competes in Division 3.

Lisa Michie pitched a three-hit shutout in the first game as San Diego State swept a nonconference doubleheader from UC San Diego Tuesday at UCSD. SDSU (16-25) won the first game, 10-0, and the second, 5-3. Stacy Sullivan had three hits in the second game. Patty Campbell was the loser in both games for UCSD (7-6).

Last year the UC San Diego drama department sorted through more than 300 applicants from the United States and abroad to fill a mere 20 openings in its graduate program. Not bad for a professional theater training program that is little more than 10 years old. The department is one of 11 training organizations nationwide that belong to the prestigious League of Professional Training Programs.

Scott Rommel scored the first three goals to help lead UC San Diego to a 5-0 victory over College of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minn.) in a first-round match of the NCAA Division III West Regional men's soccer playoffs Friday at UCSD. UCSD (13-5-2), ranked No. 13 in the nation, will play No. 8 Cal State San Bernardino at 1 p.m. today in the regional final at Warren Field on the UCSD campus. San Bernardino (13-2-3) defeated La Verne, 1-0, Friday in the other first-round match at UCSD.

Tim Vallez of UC San Diego won a five-mile men's cross-country race at UCSD Friday with a time of 28 minutes 26 seconds. Vallez helped the Tritons beat Chapman College in the men's competition, 15-50. In the women's five-kilometer race, Denise McFayden finished first in 19:44.1 to help UCSD win a triangular. In the women's competition, UCSD had 20 points, Cal State San Bernardino 37 and Chapman 80.

UC San Diego took a 47-27 lead at halftime, then had to hold on to beat Trinity University (Texas), 80-76, in a nonconference men's basketball game Tuesday night at Triton Pavilion. The Tritons (7-5), who never trailed, were led by Greg Kamansky, with 18 points. Brian Backens added 14 for UCSD. Doug Hafer of Trinity (5-6) led all players with 21 points.

High school students in Compton were upset in February when they heard that a group of UC San Diego students had mocked their hometown by holding a "Compton Cookout" party and inviting guests to come as "ghetto chicks" and gangsters. "We weren't going to let them have the power to use our name. We weren't going to let it slide," recalled Compton High School senior Ernesto Villasenor, who will attend Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York in the fall. Villasenor and other Compton High students sent an impassioned letter expressing their anger about the incident to UC San Diego, where it was read aloud by a Compton graduate at a campus protest.

Blake Cole, 19, of Redondo Beach emerged from the surf Saturday morning, longboard under his arm, and professed himself satisfied. "Having fun and doing science," he said. "That's what it's all about." Indeed, the essence of the Physics of Surfing, a 1-unit course for freshmen at UC San Diego, is to mix physical exertion and intellectual rigor.

San Diego is a sleeper in the art world, always overshadowed by that rather larger cultural engine 120 miles to the north. If institutional and commercial infrastructure has often been the city's weakness, its community of artists has consistently been its strength. Much of the credit goes to UC San Diego, whose visual arts department was founded in the late 1960s as a conceptual enterprise in itself and emerged over subsequent decades as a haven for experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and impassioned irreverence.

It took two years of planning, a month of construction and then just four 30-second bursts of shaking. And from that shaking, academics and building-industry specialists hope to add to their knowledge about how to prepare California, and the nation, to withstand the killer earthquakes thought to be slouching toward us.

Regents of the University of California on Monday approved the appointment of North Carolina State University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, 56, as the new leader of UC San Diego, effective in August. UC President Robert C. Dynes, who was chancellor of UC San Diego until he took his current job last fall, praised Fox, a chemist, as a gifted academic and dynamic campus leader.

"Just relax, dear." The words are enough to incite even the mildest woman struggling with infertility into a fire-spitting rage. But those other purveyors of unsolicited childbearing advice may be onto something. A growing body of scientific evidence is beginning to support the notion that stress indeed may play a role in the quest for a baby.

Administrators from the University of Tokyo and UC San Diego signed an agreement Friday for scientific, educational and cultural exchanges between the two institutions. The agreement calls for joint research, exchange of faculty and graduate students, sharing of information in fields of mutual interest, and sponsorship of visiting scholars for lectures and conferences.

The fastest supercomputer in the academic community--able to perform 1 trillion calculations per second--will be installed at San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, the center said Wednesday. IBM will build the teraflop-class computer for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, or NPACI, a group of 37 research institutions led by UCSD.

After five years in gestation, Kiki Smith's first permanent outdoor sculpture was installed recently on the campus of UC San Diego, without a hitch. Students and faculty passing between the Basic Science and Medical Teaching buildings where the sculpture stands were taking great notice of the new addition, Smith observed a few days before the work's official dedication on Oct. 24.