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Research Notes

Solar solution to safer water
Robert Metcalf

Thinking small
Cynthia Colinge

India’s families feel tech effect
Mridula Udayagiri

Grassroots justice
Ernest Uwazie

Putting schools to the test
Ken Futernick

PR pitch for life
Kimo Ah Yun

Solar solution to safer water

Cardboard and aluminum foil. Unlikely tools for curbing water-borne diseases—until you factor in sunshine and biology professor Robert Metcalf.

For 25 years, Metcalf has been touting the benefits of solar cooking as a cheap, sustainable fuel source for developing countries. But a series of laboratory findings by the microbiologist reveal it can also be a simple technique for killing harmful bacteria in drinking water.

When it comes to contaminated water, the usual advice from world health organizations has been “boil it.” Metcalf says that’s utterly impractical advice for the 2.5 billion people in the world, especially in Africa, who depend on traditional fuel such as wood or charcoal.

“They don’t have enough fuel to use it for boiling,” he says. What fuel they have is wood they’ve spent hours gathering or up to a quarter of their income to buy. Not only does Metcalf suggest that they use the sun for fuel instead, but contradicts conventional wisdom: “You don’t really need to boil it,” he says.

Just as milk doesn’t need to be boiled to be pasteurized, Metcalf’s work shows pasteurization of water can be accomplished by heating to 149 degrees Fahrenheit. And it’s a temperature that is easily reached with a solar cooker. “Most microbes in water are bacteria or viruses,” Metcalf says. “Water boils at 212 degrees, but heating it to only 149 degrees (65 degrees Celsius) will kill disease-causing microbes in water.”

About a dozen students have contributed to Metcalf’s pasteurization research. “We’re the world’s experts on this. It’s world-class stuff we’re doing,” he says. They also helped develop a simple, reusable device—a wax-based water pasteurization indicator or WAPI—that allows people in parts of the world where thermometers aren’t readily available to verify pasteurization temperatures have been reached.

For the last four summers, Metcalf has been taking his water act on the road to East Africa. This year, he and Sac State alum Christine Polinelli of the Australian Department of Health worked with the Sacramento-based non-profit Solar Cookers International to launch Sunny Solutions, a program in the Nyakach region of western Kenya that teaches people how to test their water and, if it shows signs of E. coli, how to solar-pasteurize it. A portion of their effort was funded by a Sac State research and creative activity grant.

“Out in the middle of nowhere we’re teaching serious microbiology that they can apply and understand. Through the method of teaching we use, they learn how a tiny microbe can become billions quickly and cause disease. It’s thrilling to be able to do that,” he says.

The information can help them make decisions about chlorinating water sources like wells or using solar cookers to pasteurize water. While in Tanzania and Kenya, Metcalf and Polinelli even solar-pasteurized their own drinking water.

One added bonus for the Sunny Solutions program is that once people see what the solar cooker can do for water purification, they see what it can do for cooking.

Metcalf says that most of the world’s 1.2 billion people who don’t have safe water also use even-scarcer fuel wood for cooking. Cooking using traditional fuel requires about two pounds per person per day, which ends up as ash. Wood fires also create tremendous indoor air pollution, equivalent to smoking three packs of cigarettes per day. In many fuel-scarce countries like Kenya, solar cooking and solar water pasteurization is possible 200- 300 days per year.

“The potential for spread and the sustainability of the project are enormous,” Metcalf says. “The reason so many of us get into science is there are things we discover which can improve the human condition. Here’s something that can.”

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Thinking small

In the 1980s Madonna was hot, Time magazine heralded the personal computer as its “Man of the Year,” the World Wide Web didn’t exist, and Cynthia Colinge was finishing her master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Sac State.

Today Madonna is back, personal computers are everywhere, more than half of Americans use the web on a regular basis, and Colinge is still on campus. But now professor Colinge is combining her love of teaching and research at the leading edge of technology.

“It’s pretty much an ideal situation. My job gives me the ability to do both,” she says.

In fall and spring, Colinge is in the classroom teaching students and guiding their research on campus. In summers, more often than not, she’s doing research for organizations like Intel, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, and Army and Navy research laboratories. She spent this summer in Washington, D.C., working at a Navy lab to make microchips smaller and faster and developing projects for the “all-electric Navy.”

Her work with semiconductors has generated more than 40 articles in scholarly journals and international acclaim.

Much of her research focuses on getting speed and power out of microchips—those tiny wafers of silicon that are the brains of most electronic devices, from CD players to the most sophisticated computers.

“The big push,” she says, turning a piece of silicon over in her hands, “is to put more devices on the wafer—more and more and more. ...At some point, you reach a limit where you can’t make it any smaller. So, what you do is you start stacking the devices on top of each other.”

Stacking, however, causes its own problems. The flow of electrons through microchips creates heat which can destroy the chip, and stacking makes them even hotter.

“And how do you put them together?” she asks, shrugging. The answers may lie in optics, using light—incredibly fast pulses of light—to do the work rather than electrons.

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India’s families feel tech effect

Much like the technology industry turned the South Bay into Silicon Valley, it’s changing the structure of family life in India, says sociology professor Mridula Udayagiri.

In her hometown of Bangalore, a technology center in southern India, the software industry is a continual presence, especially as more women enter the field. Udayagiri predicts they will make up 50 percent of India’s programmers in a few years.

And it’s in the technology sector where Udayagiri sees a contradiction to stereotypes about the international division of labor. Usually, she says, the image is of women working in sweatshops, women in subordinate position. But female programmers work autonomously, find a lot of meaning in work and consider themselves professionals.

“It shows women in a different role than seen in popular media,” she says.

But the change comes with challenges. India is exactly 12 hours behind the United States, so when Americans are waking up, Indian workers at home with their families end up back on the telephone talking to their U.S. counterparts. “It transforms the family,” Udayagiri says. “Extended family or husbands do more to take care of children.”

Those role reversals come into play even more in the frequent travel the job requires. Major players such as Intel, Motorola and Hewlett Packard have their workers constantly on the move between Bangalore and the United States.

She says women can handle going back and forth between very different types of locations partly because of built-in familiarity.

With the software industry’s “McDonald-ized” work spaces, the setup and the technology are the same wherever programmers go.

The drawback, particularly for women, comes at the end of the work day. Many times they become restricted in their mobility because they’re afraid to go out at night. And because they often don’t drive, they can become dependent on their male colleagues who do.

Africa is about as far from Sacramento as you can get, but it’s close to the heart of Ernest Uwazie, professor of criminal justice and director of Sac State’s Center for African Peace & Conflict Resolution.

Uwazie studies justice systems in Africa, and the relationship between traditional justice and the Western-based systems inherited through Africa’s colonial experience.

“It’s apparent now that the systems in place have some severe deficiencies and that some of the principles involved may not be culturally adaptable,” Uwazie said. “As a result, the formal legal system is found by average Africans to be too complex, too costly, too time-consuming, alien, ineffective, unresponsive and somewhat corrupt.”

Over the last several years, Uwazie has helped develop experimental pilot programs in Nigeria and Ghana that use more culturally indigenous concepts of justice.

“The courts need to be there but there should also be mechanisms in place that provide alternative means to resolve disputes,” Uwazie said. “This is in everyone’s best interest, the people and the courts. It helps create a much more manageable system.”

Uwazie is involved in a number of other related projects, including grant-sponsored conferences, workshops and U.S.-Africa tour programs for educators at the high school and university levels. His center also hosts an annual conflict resolution workshop on campus.

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Putting schools to the test

California’s efforts to improve public education come down to one thing: qualified teachers, says Sac State teacher education professor Ken Futernick.

“The state has put a number of structures in place, including smaller class sizes, support and training for new teachers, and a rich set of educational standards. But none of these matter if we don’t have qualified teachers in the schools,” he says.

To identify where the state’s quality teachers are—and aren’t—Futernick developed the Teacher Qualification Index, an indicator that measures teacher preparedness in every public school in the state. The index is based on the percentage of fully credentialed teachers in each school as well as the number of beginning teachers. If more than 20 percent of teachers at a school are in their first or second year of teaching, the school’s rating goes down.

Futernick recently released new numbers for 2002-03.

“Of course we want beginning teachers,” Futernick explains, “but when too many are placed in a school, they do not receive the critical support and mentoring that will enable them to be successful and survive their first years in the profession.”

The data is available on a website where users can conduct searches by county, TQI rating, poverty level, percentage of English language learners and academic performance rating. The index also looks at the distribution of credentialed teachers.

The initial index, released in spring 2003, showed that low-income and non-native English speakers are the least likely to attend a school with a high TQI rating.

A low TQI rating can also indicate a school that may have trouble keeping teachers. Futernick says that while plenty of teachers choose to work in “challenging schools,” inadequate working conditions cause many to leave the profession or transfer out of the schools that need them most.

When the website went up in March 2003 it received hundreds of thousands of hits and it still gets thousands each month. The site also features articles, case studies and success stories.

“Although the TQI identifies ‘problem’ districts, its purpose is to enable them to do better,” Futernick says. “It allows us to look at districts that have succeeded in attracting qualified teachers to typically hard-to-staff schools and gives us a glimpse of what these districts have done to solve the problem.”

Details: www.edfordemocracy.org/tqi

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PR pitch for life

Kimo Ah Yun wants your body. Not necessarily all of it—just the parts that can make a huge difference in someone’s life.

He wants you to agree to be an organ donor.

“A lot of people probably think it’s a good idea to donate their organs, but they aren’t motivated to check the box on their driver’s license,” he says.

The communication studies professor is serious about the challenge before him: At any one time there are about 80,000 Americans on the organ donor lists and between 7,000 and 8,000 will die because an organ cannot be found in time. The key, as Ah Yun sees it, is developing powerful messages that move potential donors to voluntarily sign up to donate.

His research is aimed at developing that message.

He looked into barriers to donating, the information potential donors received, what they thought of it and if there were there differences among specific groups. In particular, he wanted to know which type of arguments work best: expert testimony, stories or statistical data.

Ah Yun’s first study surprised him. He found significant differences in how people of different ages and ethnicities perceived the types of evidence. He followed up with a more detailed study that showed clear relationships between the type of evidence used and its effectiveness with different ethnic groups. For Caucasians, statistical information and narratives had about equal impact. Asians were most often moved by narrative alone. And African Americans and Hispanics showed a strong preference for statistics.

That preference doesn’t reflect lack of concern for people who need organs, but does reflect trust issues between Hispanics and African Americans on one hand and authority on the other, he said.

“It’s really the idea of distrusting the evidence that other people may give them,” says Ah Yun. “They want statistics so they can go and find out if those statistics are true.”

That tendency, however, makes Ah Yun’s task more difficult.

“Can we build a super-narrative that works for most people?” he asks, one that would make a case for many different people. Ah Yun thinks it’s possible and he has made it his next goal.

He already has evidence that a greater understanding of the need for organ donors increases sign-ups: Each survey he sent out included information on how to become a donor along with the necessary forms.

“There are about 200 to 300 people from the study who ended up becoming organ donors,” he says. “It’s a good start.”

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