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Director of Public Works for Utilities Ned Williams announces retirement
Jun 13th
The City of Boulder’s Director of Public Works for Utilities Ned Williams announced that he will retire as of Oct. 28, 2011. The City of Boulder will initiate a hiring process to fill this key position in the organization.
Williams joined the city organization in 1980. From 1980 to 1990, Williams worked as the coordinator of projects and as a project manager with the Transportation and Utilities divisions of the Public Works Department. He was an assistant director from 1990 to 2001 and has been the Director of Public Works for Utilities since 2001.
Prior to working for the City of Boulder, Williams was a project engineer at Shive-Hattery & Associates in Davenport, Iowa, and a design/project engineer at HNTB in Kansas City, Mo.
Williams has a bachelor’s of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a licensed professional engineer and is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Public Works Association, the American Water Works Association and the Water Environment Federation. Williams is also a past officer in local chapters and professional societies. Williams has authored, published and presented technical papers for regional and national conferences.
”I’ve been fortunate to work with many knowledgeable and experienced members of the public and city staff during my time with the city,” said Williams. “Together, we’ve been able to develop, implement and advance several key programs that are very important to the health and safety of the community; rebuild major components of our infrastructure, secure a healthy and positive financial status in each utility, implement a conservation-focused billing system using water budgets, and achieve significant results in water conservation.”
“The city’s water, wastewater and stormwater and flood management utilities are well managed and I thank Ned for all he has done for the city,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “The director of Public Works for Utilities is a challenging position and we will proceed with a national hiring search. Executive Director of Public Works Maureen Rait will be working with me to hire the next director. I value inclusive hiring processes and will appreciate the involvement of key stakeholders, including the Water Resources Advisory Board and staff.”
“I’ve enjoyed working with Ned and will continue to rely on his expertise during this transition,” said Rait. “In addition to filling this key position, over the next four months, Ned and I will work with City Council, the Water Resources Advisory Board and staff on several flood studies, the consideration of a critical facilities ordinance, and a water utility master plan.”
A hiring decision involving the city’s next director of Public Works for Utilities is anticipated to be made during September.
MAJORITY OF CU-BOULDER STUDENTS REPORT POSITIVE CAMPUS EXPERIENCE, ACCORDING TO SOCIAL CLIMATE SURVEY
Jun 1st
In an extensive survey of the University of Colorado Boulder’s nearly 30,000 students, overwhelming majorities of respondents had an approving view of the campus’s social climate — the extent to which CU-Boulder makes students feel welcome, valued and supported. Around four in five respondents reported feeling intellectually stimulated often or very often. A similar proportion said they felt welcome and accepted, and nearly nine in ten said they felt comfortable in their classes.
The survey, done in fall 2010, was the latest edition of CU-Boulder’s Social Climate Survey, conducted about every four years since 1994 by the university’s Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis, or PBA. The online survey was sent to 29,926 degree-seeking undergraduate and graduate students, and completed by 7,777, or 26 percent.
The favorable view of CU-Boulder’s social climate was generally shared by all subgroups studied — men and women, undergraduate and graduate students, students in all of the university’s schools and colleges, politically liberal and conservative students, students in fraternities and sororities, students who are the first in their family to attend college, gay and straight students, students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, students of different races and ethnicities, students with physical or psychological disabilities, nontraditional-age students, students who entered as freshmen and transfers, international students, students affiliated with the military, and students with different religious affiliations, including Catholics, other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and nonbelievers. Membership in these self-identified subgroups was determined using survey responses provided by the students.
Overall, students described the campus as friendly and welcoming, with 80 percent of both undergraduate and graduate students reporting feeling welcome and accepted either often or very often. Eighty-eight percent said they feel comfortable in their classes, and 80 percent reported feeling intellectually stimulated. Large majorities described CU-Boulder as “accepting of diverse perspectives” in the classroom, 81 percent, and outside the classroom, 63 percent.
On a broad measure of feeling welcome and comfortable on campus and in the Boulder community, students who self-identified in diverse subgroups generally reported a positive experience — averaging about 4 on the 5-point scale. Although the positive assessment of the campus’s social climate was shared across all subgroups, two subgroups of at least 100 respondents did rate it slightly lower — around 3.5 — African-American students and students who characterized themselves as having a psychological or psychiatric disability such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Their ratings were, however, still above the scale midpoint of 3.0. There was also a tendency for slightly less positive evaluations of the campus social climate by GLBT students, nontraditional-age students, students of lower socioeconomic status, very liberal students, very conservative students, students not affiliated with a fraternity or sorority, transfer students, and students affiliated with the Buddhist and Muslim faiths. Their ratings were, nevertheless, well above the neutral point on the scale.
Comprising 149 scaled questions, plus another six open-ended questions, the survey collected a massive amount of information — over a million responses to the ratings, and nearly 23,000 written comments, amounting to half a million words. The thousands of student comments include praise for particular classes that addressed diversity issues, suggestions to increase enrollment of international students and to make tuition more affordable for low-income students, reports of uncomfortable situations involving derogatory comments about women or gays or people of color, descriptions of personal experiences with religious or political prejudice, and accounts of situations that led to better understanding between people of different backgrounds. One student wrote, “Thanks for continuing to educate people on these issues, I feel like a much bigger and better person since I came to CU.”
Differences in survey results across 2001, 2006 and 2010 indicate an overall trend of small but consistent and wide-ranging improvements in the social climate on the CU-Boulder campus. For example, students’ level of comfort taking part in campus social life was higher in 2010, as were the average levels of feeling welcome, accepted, supported and intellectually stimulated at CU-Boulder. In all three surveys, African-American undergraduate students perceived the climate at CU-Boulder somewhat less favorably than did undergraduates of other races/ethnicities. Compared with 2001 and 2006, however, African-American undergraduates in 2010 reported feeling more welcome on the Boulder campus and more comfortable participating in campus social life and life on the Hill. Other students also reported feeling more welcome and comfortable in 2010.
A campus advisory board representing a wide range of campus units helped guide the survey and data analysis, including the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, equity and community engagement, the associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education, faculty, and representatives from student government, Disability Services, the GLBT Resource Center, Religious Campus Organizations, Wardenburg Health Center, the Office of Orientation, the Center for Multicultural Affairs and the Women’s Resource Center.
The survey’s findings are used primarily to evaluate, revise and develop programs and policies that promote student success by helping all students feel like valued members of the university community. PBA and members of the survey’s advisory board have been working together to distribute the results and encourage their use throughout the university community.
“For several years, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement has worked with several campus community committees to assess and maintain the social climate for all students, especially as it impacts learning in and outside the classroom, as well as staff and faculty,” said Alphonse Keasley, assistant vice chancellor for diversity and equity. “The results of the latest survey will be most instructive in the ways that various Chancellor Advisory Committees can continue to recommend diversity and inclusion needs to ODECE and senior level administrators that are central to the campus’s mission and purpose.”
The results will also be used by academic affairs. “The Office of Undergraduate Education will be using specific results of this campus climate survey to fine tune or modify specific programs which have a significant focus on improving the welcoming climate we want for our students,” said Michael Grant, associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education. “For example, our McNeil, Daniels, Ethnic Living and Learning and Academic Excellence programs, among others, all work with students who may find understanding and fitting into a research university environment a particular challenge for it is often a really new and different cultural environment. This is also the case for many international students.”
ANCIENT BIPEDAL HOMINID DUBBED ‘NUTCRACKER MAN’ PREFERRED GRASS TO NUTS, NEW STUDY FINDS
May 2nd
An ancient, bipedal hominid sporting a set of powerful jaws and huge molars that earned it the nickname “Nutcracker Man” likely didn’t crack nuts at all, preferring instead to slurp up vast quantities of grasses and sedges, says a new study.
The hominid, known as Paranthropus boisei, ranged across the African landscape more than 1 million years ago and lived side-by-side with direct ancestors of humans, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, a study co-author. It was long assumed Paranthropus boisei favored nuts, seeds and hard fruit because of its huge jaws, powerful jaw muscles and the biggest and flattest molars of any known hominid in the anthropological record, he said.
In the last several years, research on the wear marks of teeth from Paranthropus boisei by other research teams has indicated it likely was eating items like soft fruit and grasses, said Sponheimer. That evidence, combined with the new study that measured the carbon isotopes embedded in fossil teeth to infer diet, indicates the rugged jaw and large, flat tooth structure may have been just the ticket for Paranthropus boisei to mow down and swallow huge amounts of grasses or sedges at a single sitting, he said.
“Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree,” said Sponheimer.
Published in the May 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by University of Utah Professor Thure Cerling. Other authors included Emma Mbua, Frances Kirera, Fredrick Manthi and Meave Leakey from the National Museums of Kenya, Fredrick Grine from Stony Brook University in New York and Kevin Uno from the University of Utah.
“Fortunately for us, the work of several research groups over the last several years has begun to soften prevailing notions of early hominid diets,” said Sponheimer. “If we had presented our new results at a scientific meeting 20 years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room.”
For the new study, the researchers removed tiny amounts of enamel from 22 Paranthropus boisei teeth collected in central and northern Kenya, each of which contained carbon isotopes absorbed from the types of food eaten during the lifetime of each individual. In tropical environments, virtually all trees and bushes — including fruits and leaves — use the so-called C3 photosynthetic pathway to convert sunlight into energy, while savannah grasses and some sedges use the C4 photosynthetic pathway.
The isotope analysis indicated Paranthropus boisei individuals were much bigger fans of C4 grasses and sedges than C3 trees, shrubs and bushes. The results indicated the collective diet of the 22 individuals averaged about 77 percent grasses and sedges for a period lasting at least 500,000 years, said Sponheimer.
The research team also compared the carbon isotope ratios of Paranthropus teeth with the teeth of other grazing mammals living at the same time and in the same area, including ancestral zebras, hippos, warthogs and pigs. The results indicated those mammals were eating primarily C4 grasses, virtually identical to Paranthropus boisei. “They were eating at the same table,” said Cerling.
Paranthropus was part of a line of close human relatives known as australopithecines that includes the famous 3-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil Lucy, seen by some as the matriarch of modern humans. Roughly 2.5 million years ago, the australopithecines are thought to have split into the genus Homo — which produced modern Homo sapiens — and the genus Paranthropus, that dead-ended, said Sponheimer.
“One key result is that this hominid had a diet fundamentally different from that of all living apes, and, by extension, favored very different environments,” he said. “And having a good idea of where these ancient creatures lived and what they ate helps us understand why some early hominids left descendants and others did not.”
The first skull of a Paranthropus boisei individual was discovered by co-author Meave Leakey’s in-laws, Mary and Louis Leaky, in 1959 in Tanzania.
In 2006, a team led by Sponheimer found that a cousin of Paranthropus boisei known as Paranthropus robustus had a far more diverse diet than once believed, clouding the notion that it was driven to extinction by its picky eating habits. Published in Science magazine, the study showed that Paranthropus robustus had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals.
So what led to the end of the line for Paranthropus? It could well have been direct competition with Homo — which was becoming skilled in extensive bone and stone technology — or it could have been a variety of other issues, including a slower reproductive rate for Paranthropus than for Homo, he said.
The new study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the CU-Boulder Dean’s Fund for Excellence.
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