“With some arrangement of the shoulder widths you could fit a three-lane road—which allows for a higher capacity, more cars—in the same area as the two-lane road,” said Ng. “The tradeoff is that the narrower lanes would result in a decrease in free-flow speed; that is, off-peak drivers won’t get to go as fast. In addition, accident rates might tend to be a little higher on roads with narrower lanes, but there is mixed evidence on that issue.” These things are all tradeoffs that have to be taken into account, according to Ng, adding that it’s important to have a careful cost-benefit analysis of all these issues before implementing this idea.

“The standard in the U.S. is that interstates have to have 12-foot lanes,” said Ng, who noted that such standards also specify lane and shoulder widths, sight distance, grade and other characteristics that require a lot of land and extensive infrastructure such as ramps and bridges.

However, there have been examples of narrowing lanes. It was done locally when back in 1995 a stretch of the 405 freeway near LAX was restriped into 11-foot lanes and shoulders were converted to create additional lanes.

Studying U.S. models, Ng and Small looked at older routes like the Arroyo Seco Parkway, formerly known as the Pasadena Freeway, where past downtown it’s no longer an interstate expressway, but rather a winding road; the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; and an extensive parkway system on Long Island in New York. Each features architecturally interesting structures, attractive landscaping and designs that fit into the surrounding landscape. They also provide ample capacity and are much cheaper than modern interstates.

“That’s how routes used to be,” she said. “They would fit more into the landscape; they didn’t raze down the mountains to build nice, straight freeways. We’re not just talking about narrower lanes here; our idea is to have what we call a lower environmental footprint, so we would have roads that conform more to the geography. They might not meet our strict interstate standards, but they would be more environmentally friendly.”

The authors are working on an upcoming follow-up paper continuing to address this issue, where they are extending the traditional economic model of road investment to incorporate the aforementioned tradeoffs between speed and capacity.

“We wrote this paper to encourage people to think of this as a possible alternative, especially since building freeways is very expensive,” she said. “It’s not going to be the best scenario in every situation, especially if traffic volumes are low in a city and congestion is not much of a problem. In that case, a freeway that offers a higher free-flow speed may be preferred. But in a city where congestion happens throughout the day, you might place a higher weight on the capacity allowed by more lanes than on the high speeds enjoyed by relatively few people during off-peak hours.”

A farewell event in honor of Robinson is in the planning stages and will be announced to the campus community as the information becomes available. There will also be a more complete story on his legacy at the university in a future issue of Inside CSULB.

–Rick Gloady

By Richard Manly

Art’s Mark Ruwedel recently saw the acquisition of 26 of his photographs by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. An important addition to the gallery’s holdings of contemporary landscape photographs, Ruwedel’s photos examine the barely visible grades of now defunct 19th-century railroad lines running across the western United States.

Ruwedel’s photos also were exhibited by the National Gallery of Canada during its fall biennial show.

A member of the university since 2002, Ruwedel photographs the sites of 19th- and 20th- century railway lines in the American and Canadian West using a large-format view camera. The collapsed tunnels, deteriorating trestles and eroding cuts and grades of more than 130 abandoned railroad lines are documented in photographs taken between 1994 and 2006.

The National Gallery of Washington, D.C. selected its photos from Ruwedel’s collections “Westward the Course of Empire,” published by the Yale Art Gallery in 2008, and “Dusk.” “Westward” inventories the residual landforms created by the scores of railroads built in the American and Canadian West since 1869. The grades and cuts depicted in Ruwedel’s photographs speak to a past triumph of technology over what was often perceived as hostile terrain, as well as to the desire and struggle to create wealth and power from the land. Long abandoned (and in some cases never completed), the railroads also evoke the futility of the enterprise, Ruwedel said.

Some of the “Westward” photos were selected for acquisition but were unavailable. “These were limited-edition prints and some had been sold,” Ruwedel said. “My representatives at Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica arranged for a few private collectors who had bought those pictures to donate them to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It’s a combination of purchase and donation.”

In his collection portraying abandoned desert homes titled “Dusk,” Ruwedel presents eight black and white images that capture the degraded, fringe spaces of the high desert in Southern California. The photographs describe a landscape of simultaneous development and decay. Photographed at dusk, the images record an atmosphere that is melancholic and sublime. “They were taken just after the sun set so they have an eerie look to them,” Ruwedel explained.

Travel played a big part in the photos’ creation.

“From 1994 to 2008, I walked and drove four-wheel-drive vehicles all over the American desert,” he said. “The abandoned railways seemed to be everywhere and you have to learn how to find them. But once you knew how, there was more to be found than you might imagine in this rich landscape. Some railways I just stumbled on because I knew what they look like. At other times, I used U.S. Geological Survey maps which mark abandoned railroad grades, then I would cross-reference them with historic maps to discover the name of the railroad that abandoned the pathway. If I didn’t know what railroad it was, it was useless to me.”

The Kettle Valley Railroad in British Columbia was one of his favorites. “It is a completely insane engineering feat that crosses three mountain chains on the scale of the northern Cascades. At one point, my wife and I drove across an abandoned trestle lined with planks,” he said. “I wouldn’t have done it except that I was just standing there looking at a dead end when I saw a full-sized pickup truck loaded with loggers cross the trestle from the opposite direction. I figured I weighed less than a truck full of loggers, so I did it. It was so scary that my wife closed her eyes on the way across. We stopped to catch our breath and a minute later, a bear walked in front of us. It was quite a day.”

Ruwedel was especially pleased by the National Gallery of Canada’s Biennial recent exhibit from November to February titled “Builders” because it was the first important museum to collect his work and currently has one of the two largest collections. “I lived in Canada for 20 years,” he said. “Exhibits like this are some of the fringe benefits of being a dual citizen.” “Builders” presented more than 100 recent and significant acquisitions by emerging and established artists instrumental in shaping perspectives in Canadian art today.

Ruwedel earned his MFA at Montreal’s Unviversite Concordia, where he then taught photography full time from 1984-2000 and for three years was chair of its Department of Photography. Among the museums which have acquired Ruwedel’s work are the Getty Museum, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Fonds Nationale d’Art Contemporain in Pairs and the National Gallery of Canada. He received his BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 1978. He received CSULB’s Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Achievement Award in 2010.

Ruwedel has been doing this kind of landscape photography for 20 years and sees the acquisition of these photos by the National Gallery in D.C. as a midway mark in his career. “These photos are all about the relation between history and landscape. History is inscribed there,” he said. “The detailed gelatin silver prints record the ruins of railway networks as well as evidence of industries that moved in after the decline of the railroad such as uranium-claim markers, mine entrances and bomb craters at abandoned army fields. I think I’m a ruin photographer, which is a noble enterprise.”

By Anne Ambrose

The ocean off Southern California is a known birthing ground for great white sharks. It also holds toxic chemical concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the insecticide DDT that were dumped into coastal waters decades ago, especially off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The legacy of those chemicals remains evident today as marine biologists from CSULB, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Southern California Marine Institute discovered that the tissues of young Southern California white sharks have some of the highest levels of contaminants among all shark species.

Moreover, the babies likely absorb the chemicals from their mothers, who acquire them through the food chain. Yet the chemicals seem to cause little physiological damage to the young sharks, the researchers found.

Their findings appeared in the April 30 edition of the online science journal PLOS ONE.

The researchers examined the remains of infant and juvenile white sharks incidentally caught in commercial fishing nets, said lead author Christopher Mull, now a Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He first became involved in the study while completing his master’s degree at CSULB’s Shark Lab, directed by Prof. Christopher G. Lowe, a co-author of the report and an internationally recognized shark and marine fisheries expert.

Other co-authors are CSULB master’s student Kady Lyons, CSULB master’s graduate Mary Blasius, Chuck Winkler of the Southern California Marine Institute, and John B. O’Sullivan of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Project White Shark research program.

White sharks are considered apex predators, at the top of the region’s marine food chain. “Young white sharks are likely exposed to DDT and PCBs when they feed on fish in Southern California. Adults, however, feed heavily on harbor seals, elephant seals and California sea lions that forage in Southern California and are known to have high levels of DDT and PCBs,” Mull said.

The young whites had the highest levels of DDT and second-highest levels of PCBs ever reported for a shark, Mull continued. “This was particularly alarming given their young age, some likely weeks to months old, and the fact that other shark species with comparable levels were often decades old. Even though we know Southern California is a DDT hotspot, we suspected that these levels couldn’t have been obtained solely by young sharks feeding, and that mothers were a likely source.”

To demonstrate their hypothesis, “We ran a simple computer model simulation where we fed a virtual newborn shark pup—assuming that it had zero contaminants at its time of birth—a meal of the most contaminated fish it could eat every day,” Lowe said. The results showed the simulated levels were nowhere near as high as what was found in necropsy results from incidentally caught sharks. “What this clearly demonstrates to us is that there is no way that these young sharks are acquiring these contaminants based on their own feeding, which means the only other way they can get them is from their mom.”

Mothers passing contaminants to children is a phenomenon common to many species including humans, but such transfers haven’t previously been studied in white sharks, which are pregnant for about 12 months and bear large, well-developed pups nourished from eggs.

Lowe said an interesting aspect of white shark pregnancy is that the developing embryos consume their egg yolks long before birth. The mothers continue to release unfertilized eggs rich in fats and oils (lipids) that the embryos eat while still in the uterus. Because the shark mothers acquired chemicals from eating contaminated fish and marine mammals, they pass these acquired contaminants to their offspring via the eggs, according to Lowe. “This is the first study that has really quantified this maternal offloading ability in a shark that’s analogous to a mammal,” he said.

The researchers also discovered promising findings among their data.

“While the evidence of maternal offloading and the elevated levels of DDT and PCBs in young white sharks is disconcerting, surprisingly, we found no evidence of physiological impairment from the contaminants,” Mull said. “Despite the high degree of exposure for white sharks as pups and adults, the population actually appears to be rebounding. Historically, white sharks were fished, and populations of their prey—seals and sea lions—declined. Now that both sharks and marine mammals are protected, there is evidence of a recovery from historic lows.”

“We compared the robustness, or the body girth of these sharks, which is just a measure of how fat they are at birth, to sharks that had low levels and high levels of contaminants, and there is no difference,” Lowe explained. “It doesn’t look like a shark that has high contaminant loads is weaker or more sickly than those with low levels. In addition, when we did the necropsies, we found no signs of internal cancers or lesions that are typically indicative of contaminant exposures, especially at the levels that we’ve seen.

“It’s possible that despite the fact that these sharks have these very high loads, that they have ways of dealing with these contaminant levels that other animals like mammals and birds clearly have not,” Lowe added. “Sharks have a unique immune system compared to other vertebrates and they may have some tricks for dealing with these high contaminant loads that higher vertebrates don’t. Nevertheless, it’s an issue we need to keep an eye on for the sake of future generations.”

The contaminant studies are one dimension of a decade-long collaboration between CSULB, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Southern California Marine Institute to better understand the life history and migrations of juvenile great white sharks in waters off Southern California and Baja California.

The research partners have also used electronic tracking tags to document shark migrations between waters off California and Mexico and to better identify coastal habitats used by young white sharks.

Idealism looms large in the lives of Lesson Plans. “These are people with their own sense of integrity,” she explained. “They have something to believe in, misguided though it can be at times. They are trying hard, even if they make mistakes.”

Greenberg’s own parenting experience helps her to relate to her characters. “Sometimes when I say goodbye to our kids in the morning, I find myself asking, ‘What will happen to them out there?’ I have no control over ‘out there.’ Like most parents, I want our kids to have great childhoods and to have the best opportunities. But I have never felt that confidence in my decisions that ideal parents are supposed to have. I constantly ask myself about what elementary school, what middle school and what high schools are best for them. Am I too involved? Not involved enough? But I accept that for me that sense of doubt is part of being a parent.”

Greenberg won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for 2003 from the University of Pittsburgh for Speed-Walk and Other Stories. A $15,000 prize accompanied the recognition. She received her B.A. in English from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland.

She feels the new novel will add to her classroom credibility. “After all, I do teach creative writing,” she said. “I try to teach that it is important to be active in the field. I feel writing makes me a better educator. I am engaged in the same work I am asking my students to do.”

It is the element of the unexpected that keeps Greenberg coming back to her laptop. “For me, the most fun about writing fiction is that I don’t know what will happen next,” she said. “That is what keeps me interested in the writing and, I hope, the readers interested in the story. Will they feel sorry for the characters? Worried? Will they be excited about what will happen next? That’s what’s fun for me.”

–Richard Manly

The University of Hawaii (UH) had a welcome return to the Big West, finishing third overall with its 116.9-point average over 13 sports. UH earned titles in women’s volleyball, softball and women’s water polo while also earning a second-place finish in women’s basketball.

In all, 2012-13 showed the depth of the conference as a record-breaking eight programs finished with 100.0 point or greater averages. Cal Poly was fourth with 112.0 points, thanks to a sweep in cross country and top-three finishes in both sides during the soccer and basketball seasons. UC Davis (104.4) was fifth with the top finish in men’s soccer, women’s golf and women’s track and field. Cal State Fullerton’s (104.3) titles in women’s soccer, men’s golf and baseball led the way to a sixth-place showing. UC Irvine’s women’s tennis title highlighted a 100.7-point average and Pacific’s final season in the league saw it earn women’s basketball and men’s golf championships on the way to an even 100.0 average.

Cal State Northridge, which earned a title in men’s soccer, finished with 92.7 points per sport, while UC Riverside rounded out the board with a 54.7 average.

–Chris Hargraves

Working in collaboration with the university’s senior leadership and academic councils, Dowell will oversee the quality of academic programs, faculty instruction and student learning, academic outreach and community partnerships, strategic planning and budgetary allocations in support of academic priorities. He also will work to increase student retention, promote student engagement and active learning, and ensure that students achieve their educational goals.

“I am honored to have another opportunity to serve this great university and work with our outstanding faculty and staff,” Dowell said. “I am proud of the highly valued degrees we award and committed to the success of all of our students.”

Dowell has authored or co-authored more than 130 scholarly publications, book chapters, presentations and technical reports. He has conducted international scholarly work and been an invited speaker in several other nations. As a faculty member, he specialized in applied social research and program evaluation. More recently he has published and lectured on student success, strategic planning, and enrollment planning in higher education, including international dimensions.

–Rick Gloady

Aug. 3
THE EMPERORS

The Emperors are a clear Long Beach favorite. They have performed in opening acts for the Rolling Stones, the Righteous Brothers and Steely Dan. Known for tight ensemble playing, strong vocals and an exciting stage show, the Emperors have put their mark on many high-energy covers such as the Who’s “Tommy” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” among others.

Aug. 17
STONE SOUL

Returning to Concerts in the Grove, Stone Soul brings you the finest classic soul and Motown, presented with the passion, artistry and skill that the original performers brought to the stage. No style of music enjoys wider appeal. Timeless hit songs by legendary artists such as Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops, the Temptations, James Brown and many more are sure to please people of all ages.

For additional concert information, call 562/985-7022 or e-mail Janet Gonzales.

The second workshop of the day is titled Medicare 101 and will be held from 2 to 3 p.m., also in the second floor conference room of the Barrett Center.

The seminar will provide attendees with receive easy-to-understand information about Medicare discuss how it works with your CalPERS retiree health plan. If you are considering retirement or are already Medicare eligible you can get the information needed for enrollment.

To attend either event, RSVP by Friday, July 12 by contacting Benefits Services at benefits@csulb.edu or 562/985-2381.