For more information and credit card orders call CenterArts at 826-3928

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The programs encourage the teaching of more engineering concepts in K-12 North Coast schools, with a concentration on high schools. Teachers from a host of local schools participated in the first institute, designing and constructing simple machine displays to instruct children visiting the Discovery Museum about physics principles.

The museum is located at the corner of 3rd and F streets in Eureka and details are available at the Design Your Future Web site, or from Professor Beth Eschenbach of HSU’s Department of Environmental Resources Engineering at beth.eschenbach@humboldt.edu.

Teachers attending the first Design Your Future Teaching Institute studied the engineering design process by designing and constructing simple machine displays to convey physics principles to children visiting the Discovery Museum, directed by Jennifer Taylor.

In conjunction with North Coast Engineering Academies, Hoopa High School will offer the Humboldt State University course ENGR 215, Introduction to Design, for college credit this fall semester. Hoopa High School students will receive ENGR 215 course content online and complete course work at their Hoopa campus. This model is also used at CSU Sacramento and CSU Northridge. Fortuna High School plans to offer a similar course in Fall, 2009.

This co-curricular class is one way North Coast Engineering Academies is encouraging high school students to study the field. In addition, the academies will foster partnerships between engineers and K-12 teachers. From these partnerships, teachers will have more external support to teach engineering concepts.

The public is invited to the Discovery Museum unveiling on the corner of 3rd and F Streets in Eureka. Information about the Design Your Future Teaching Institute and the North Coast Engineering Academies is at http://www.humboldt.edu/~dyf and from HSU Professor Dr. Beth Eschenbach, Ph.D. at Beth.Eschenbach@humboldt.edu.

Huynh was about 5’ 4” tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had short black hair and dark eyes.

A multi-agency probe is under way as authorities seek witnesses who may have seen the victim jogging early Sunday morning. Investigators believe Huynh left Creekview Residence Hall between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. for his customary hour-long jog. He is believed to have been running alone and no one to date has been able to give a complete description of the route he took.

Police investigators obtained one statement suggesting Huynh was seen running west on Granite Avenue toward L.K. Wood Boulevard around 7:25 a.m. However, no conclusive information or evidence has emerged as to Huynh’s exact route or what happened to him in the 90 minutes between his departure from Creekview and his return to the residence hall at about 8:30 a.m., a key timeline disclosed from examination of electronic door records.

Huynh apparently suffered unspecified but serious injuries. The gravest appears to have been internal bleeding in the skull. Despite questioning by his roommates, the HSU senior gave no explanation for his injuries Sunday. When his condition worsened, roommates drove him to Mad River Community Hospital where Emergency Room staff began immediate treatment. Huynh was still unable to give a statement about events or his injuries. He lost consciousness, never to regain it, leaving investigators with little to go on. He was subsequently airlifted to Redding, where he died.

The same morning Huynh was injured, UPD recovered an abandoned and damaged bicycle near the base of the steep Creekview roadway, about 500 feet below Huynh’s residence hall room, first observed by Creekview staff at approximately the same time he was believed to have gone jogging. After collecting the bike, ascertaining the damage to it and picking up other physical evidence found at the scene, police now believe an unreported bicycling accident may have occurred at the base of Creekview hill. Investigators are actively probing if Huynh somehow sustained his injuries in connection with this evidence.

Investigators remain open to other explanations, ranging from an undiagnosed medical condition, causing Huynh to fall, to injuries suffered at another, still unknown location. The UPD investigative team is actively seeking witness information and the public’s help in reconstructing, to the extent possible, his route on Sunday morning. The authorities have issued a plea for assistance and information, specifically seeking contact with anyone who saw Huynh anywhere Sunday morning.

The deceased is described as having worn a long-sleeved green sweatshirt and green sweatpants without ornamentation. He was about 5’ 4” tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had short black hair and dark eyes.

“There is someone out there who saw him running, or maybe even gave him a lift home after he was injured,” said UPD Chief Thomas Dewey. “Any piece of information, no matter how seemingly small, might be the key to understanding exactly where Huynh went and how he was injured.”

UPD is leading the investigation, assisted by Department of Justice criminologists, the California Bureau of Investigation, California Highway Patrol, the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office, the Arcata and Redding Police Departments and the coroner’s offices in both Humboldt and Shasta Counties.

A multi-agency team will gather in Redding early next week for an autopsy, further examination of physical evidence and analysis of the deceased’s medical records.

Anyone with information is urged to call UPD at (707) 826-5555 or email the department at HSUPD@humboldt.edu

Summer 2008 CAIC students are joined by their HSU professors and mentors.

Justin Holz, a transfer student from Golden West College, Huntington Beach, was introduced for the first time this summer to his native Cherokee language through the Coalition for American Indians in Computing (CAIC—pronounced ‘cake’), a summer program hosted by Humboldt State University. Holz is a self-taught computer maven with his own “virtual” online business. He praises CAIC’s merger of cultural study and technological prowess. He plans to major in computer science at HSU.

A CAIC mentor and Humboldt State senior, Marcelino Guel, says, “Regardless of how young you are and how much your life has been influenced by pop culture, you can still retain your own native culture. When I was 11, I was an MTV kid, but our indigenous stories come from an oral tradition and they’re not just stories. They contain historical and moral and ethical values, the precepts you need to govern your life, which you can’t get from technology. But you can pass them on with technology and you can apply the language with computers and keep it vibrant.”

Among other things, this summer’s CAIC students were introduced to an open source software package conceived by Southern Oregon University named ACORNS—Acquisition of Restored Native Speech. The acronym is fitting because the acorn was sacred to the tribes of northern California and southern Oregon.

ACORNS is expressly designed to handle linguistic data. It enables both students and instructors to make and execute files that carry language lessons. “It’s a very well-written program,” Holz says. “I’ve tried to write my own programs, so I know how difficult that can be. It allowed me to begin learning my native [Cherokee] language.”

McKinleyville resident Melitta Jackson, who will be a senior this fall at Arcata High School, likes the fact that ACORNS not only allows Native American students to record their languages, but also to distribute them on Web sites so that others can become acquainted with different linguistic traditions. A former Hoopa student, Jackson is in the arts program at Arcata High. The CAIC Photoshop training she received will give her a head start when she starts fall classes.

Jackson lauds CAIC in broad terms. “I made so many connections, gained a valuable experience and made new friends from all over—mostly the West Coast, but also one girl from Mississippi,” she smiles. Students from New Mexico and Washington state also attended.

One of the program’s guest lecturers is Melodie George-Moore, a veteran K-12 teacher and HSU alum who instructs a high school class in the Hupa language at Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District. She sees the practical advantages of cultural preservation for young people who will live the whole of their adult lives in a 21st century that may confront them with new uncertainties. If health care becomes a scarce resource, she suggests, her Native American students may have to recover their tribal knowledge of native plants for medicinal purposes. “Just consider the growing immune resistance to antibiotics,” George-Moore points out. “Through language preservation, students can find native stories about medicinal uses for plants that might have been considered weeds before.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, CAIC is run by two computer science faculty, Professors Guy-Alain Amoussou and Ann Burroughs. Students explained the high importance they attach to culture and languages, and Amoussou and Burroughs decided to link that interest to information technology. They visited tribal offices to gain first-hand knowledge of how tribal enterprises make use of information technology. They realized that students could pick up a set of skills highly useful in many domains while satisfying their hunger for preserving their heritage.

CAIC is a summer experience for high school and community college students who are not attending Humboldt State. The program’s purpose is to encourage them to consider careers in computing, with an emphasis on cultural integration: retention of cultural identity while working in the information technology field. CAIC introduces them to the academic aspects of the profession: programming, networking, design, graphical information systems and problem solving. The training includes college preparation workshops on financial aid, scholarship applications, study and test-taking skills, stress management and Humboldt State’s Educational Opportunity Program.

Participants receive career planning, including tips about the information technology opportunities available in tribal communities. Youngsters learn the needs of tribal administrators for info-tech professionals.

“We are very interested in getting more students from our local community to participate next year,” Dr. Amoussou said. “We would like to partner with schools, tribal education directors, tribal enterprises and tribal and community leaders.”

CAIC students say they pick up valuable lessons about education from the project. Holz, who has two years of community college behind him and is some years older than his counterparts, found himself taking up the role of informal mentor, teaching while learning. He realized his mother had been right. “My mother is a teacher and she always says, ‘The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.’”

Holz underscored the strong interpersonal relationships CAIC fosters. “Through this program you really get an opportunity to know people better than you normally would because you have a common background. There are strengthened friendships here. Going the extra mile to learn about people is a nice thing.”

Guel, the HSU senior whose degree emphasis is American Indian education, echoes Holz’s sentiment. He compares the CAIC class to a miniature United Nations that brings together students from various tribal nations to focus on a common interest, cultural and language preservation via computer. “As a matter of fact,” he muses, “we are all in a way indigenous peoples around the world. Once upon a time, we all at one point had the same fire, drank the same water, resided on the same land and breathed the same air.”

“The survey was designed to identify issues impacting health and access to health care in the Redwood Coast Region with the purpose of providing information for planning and policy development aimed at improving health and health care in the region,” said Van Arsdale.

Included in the survey’s findings were important statistics relating to health care profiles of Northern California residents. One of the most significant results showed that of the 2,950 respondents, 21 percent of those under age 65 are uninsured.
The research brief also quotes a 2004 study by the California Medical Association, which found that as many as 80 percent of all Medi-Cal and uninsured patient visits to the emergency department could have been treated in a non-emergency care facility. This statistic is supported by the CCRP’s own finding that 44.9 percent of respondents with Medi-Cal insurance visited an emergency room in the prior year, compared to only 20.4 percent of people with private insurance.

Other results are:
• Respondents most likely to be uninsured were poor, unemployed or self-employed individuals who are under the age of 65, and are living in areas of Humboldt and Mendocino Counties with low population density.
• Only 58.4 percent of uninsured respondents reported having a general check-up in the past four years, versus 91.6 of those with private insurance and 89.5 percent of those with Medi-Cal.
• Uninsured respondents were significantly less likely than respondents with private insurance or Medi-Cal to have received recommended screening for breast cancer, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer or diabetes.
• Furthermore, respondents with Medi-Cal were significantly less likely than respondents with private insurance to have received recommended screening for breast cancer, colorectal cancer and diabetes, despite being equally likely to have had a general check-up within the past four years.
• With regards to personal perceptions of health, 46.8 percent of respondents with Medi-Cal reported poor or fair health compared to 10 percent of respondents with private insurance.

According to the CCRP, these data indicate clear disparities in health insurance and access to health care in the Redwood Coast region. The CCRP invites the public to engage in a dialogue about potential solutions and policy recommendations to address identified problems.
The full Insurance Research Brief, as well as other information about the center’s work, is online at http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccrp. Follow the “publications” link to “research briefs.”

For more information, the center may be contacted at (707) 826-3400.