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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008
NEWS 3A
Ryan McGeeney/KANSAN
CAMPUS
Lou McKown, Downingtown, Penn., senior, left, and Gavin Strunk, Wichita senior, push a stripped 1974 VW Super Beetle toward a tow truck on Nov. 24. As members of a mechanical engineering project called the Ecohawks, McKown and Strunk are taking steps toward transforming the vehicle into a fuel-neutral hybrid vehicle that will use an interchangeable engine block concept to reach a fuel efficiency standard of 500 miles per gallon.
Class works to build 500 mpg car
BY RYAN MCGEENEY
rmcgeeney@kansan.com
A few days before the student body vacated Lawrence for the Thanksgiving holiday, Chris Depcik, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, stood staring at the bare-bones remainder of a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle.
The bug, stripped of its engine, transmission and most of its interior, was covered in a fresh coat of primer. The car is the ongoing project of a small group of mechanical engineering students, known as the EcoHawks, working to design a car that can achieve a fuel efficiency of 500 miles per gallon.
"This is my either brilliant or extremely stupid idea," Depcik said.
The Ecohawks concept began in February, when Depcik started recruiting students in the School of Engineering. Initially conceived as a competition-oriented undertaking, Depcik said he adapted the idea so students could have more real-world application in engine design.
Depcik's course, Design Project Option E, was developed after an initial meeting of about 15 or 20 students. He pitched the idea of turning an existing vehicle into a hybrid and the students agreed unanimously. Depcik wrote a course outline and curriculum and submitted it to the school's administration for approval.
Depcik and his students first laid eyes on the vehicle, donated by Dave Bach, owner of Das Autohaus repair shop, in September. Gavin Strunk, Wichita senior, made the initial contact with Bach.
"Dave had this little jewel just sitting on the lot." Strunk said.
Lou McKown, Downingtown Penn, senior, and EcoHawk support team captain, said that the key to achieving the project's goals, which included a fuel-neutral
engine in addition to fuel efficiency, was modular engine design.
"With interchangeable engine blocks, a vehicle can be suited to a geographic region and its native natural resources," McKown said.
Instead of being locked into a particular fuel — ethanol or biodiesel, for example — engines suited to those fuels could be switched out to respond to changing economic forces or environmental concerns.
On the evening of Nov. 24, Depcik, McKown, Strunk and Bach pushed the Super Beetle hull — without its engine — out of the Das Autohua garage and onto a
tow truck bed. After months in the basic deconstruction stages, the vehicle was being moved to the multi-disciplinary development facility at the Lawrence Municipal Airport.
The vehicle's development isn't tied to the semester schedule, or anyone's graduation date. Students are developing a manual with each step forward, so that future classes can learn from their predecessors' failures and successes.
In addition to the project's ongoing nature, Depcik said that the course's other founding idea was wide-spread involvement. While
many mechanical engineering projects require a grasp of technical mathematics and engineering concepts not typically attained until students near the end of their undergraduate careers, Depcik said that the EcoHawks concept provided a way for even freshmen and sophomores to experience real-world applications of classroom material.
"It's not meant to be a gearhead project," Depcik said. "I don't care if you've never seen a vehicle. I want you, as a student, to be involved."
—Edited by Ramsey Cox
HEALTH
HIV testing offered for World AIDS Day
BY JOE PREINER jpreiner@kansan.com
World AIDS Day, observed globally every year on Dec. 1, is a worldwide event that celebrates the many lives that have been saved by HIV prevention and treatment.
The day will be observed on campus Monday from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on the fourth floor of the Kansas Union. Student Health Services, the Douglas County AIDS Project and the LGBT Resource Center are sponsoring this year's event.
Ken Sarber, health educator for Student Health Services, said the three groups involved with World AIDS Day at the University will be providing HIV education as well as testing services. He said free oral testing would be provided at the event.
Stacey Burton, education outreach coordinator for DCAP, said the prevalence of AIDS in Kansas was relatively low, with about 3,000 cases reported to date. She said, however, that Kansas fell well below the national testing average for the disease. Burton said the statistic was troubling because the majority of new AIDS cases, anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent, came from people who were unaware they were infected.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are about 33 million people living with HIV globally, and one in every five people were unaware of their infection. Elena Ivanov, executive director of DCAP, said AIDS was a disease that touched more lives than people realized.
"People think the disease is something that happens to others and not to them," Ivanov said. "They don't realize that when
one person is infected, all are affected."
Ivanov said one of the best ways to avoid the HIV virus was to get tested regularly, although less than 40 percent of people 18 years old and older had ever been tested. The lack of testing has contributed to about 56,300 new infections each year, the CDC estimates. Ivanov said that although the HIV virus is relatively new and was unknown just 27 years ago, it has already caused an estimated 25 million deaths worldwide.
Burton said many misconceptions about HIV contributed to the continued rise of the disease. She said having sex or sharing needles with an infected person were not the only ways to contract the disease and that it could also be transmitted orally. Burton said it was important for people to take an active role in their own AIDS education.
"We need to take a look at what and who we go home with," Burton said. "Knowing is a huge part of prevention. We need to be safe and we need to be aware."
INTERNATIONAL
Edited by Rachel Burchfield
Ryan Campbell, Olathe senior and executive director of KU Queers and Allies, said informing people about the realities of the disease was the first step in battling the disease and the misconceptions surrounding it. Campbell said when AIDS came onto the scene in the 1980s it was known as the "gay cancer." While it mainly affected the gay community back then, Campbell said today's most affected group was heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 24. He said getting the truth about the disease into the hands of uninformed people would go a long way in changing the stigma surrounding AIDS.
Attacks in Mumbai, India, end
BY RAVI NESSMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MUMBAI, India — The only gunman captured after a 60-hour terrorist siege of Mumbai said he belonged to a Pakistani militant group with links to the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, a senior police officer said Sunday.
The gunman was one of 10 who paralyzed the city in an attack that killed at least 174 people and revealed the weakness of India's security apparatus. India's top law enforcement official resigned, bowing to growing criticism that the attackers appeared better trained, better coordinated and better armed than police.
The announcement blaming militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, threatened to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan. However, Indian officials have been cautious about accusing Pakistan's government of complicity.
A U.S. counterterrorism official had said some "signatures of the attack" were consistent with Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed, another group that has operated in Kashmir. Both are reported to be linked to al-Qaida.
Lashkar, long seen as a creation of the Pakistani intelligence service to help fight India in disputed Kashmir, was banned in Pakistan in 2002 under pressure from the U.S., a year after Washington and Britain listed it a terrorist group. It is since believed to have emerged under another name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, though that group has denied links to the Mumbai attack.
As more details of the response to the attack emerged, a picture formed of woefully unprepared security forces. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to strengthen maritime and air security and look into creating a new federal investigative agency — even as some analysts doubled fundamental change was possible.
Authorities were still removing bodies from the bullet and grenade scarred Taj Mahal hotel, a day after commandos finally ended the violence that began Wednesday night.
"These guys could do it next week again in Mumbai and our responses would be exactly the same," said Ajai Sahni, head of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management who has close ties to India's police and intelligence.
Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said the only known surviving gunman, Ajmal Qasab, told police he was trained at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistan.
"Lashkar-e-Taiba is behind the terrorist acts in the city," he said.
A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Zardari's spokesman dismissed the claim.
"We have demanded evidence of the complicity of any Pakistani group. No evidence has yet been provided," said spokesman Farhatullah Babar.
The gunmen continued their rampage outside the station. They eventually ambushed a police van, killed five officers inside — including the city's counterterrorism chief — and hijacked the vehicle as two wounded officers lay bleeding in the back seat.
In the first wave of the attacks, two young gunmen armed with assault rifles blithely ignored more than 60 police officers patrolling the city's main train station and sprayed bullets into the crowd.
Bapu Thombre, assistant commissioner with the Mumbai railway police, said the police were armed mainly with batons or World War I-era rifles and spread out across the station.
"The way Mumbai police handled the situation, they were not combat ready," said Jimmy Katrak, a security consultant. "You don't need the Indian army to neutralize eight to nine people."
"They are not trained to respond to major attacks," he said.
Constable Arun ladhav, one of the wounded policemen, said the men laughed when they noticed the dead officers wore bulletproof vests.
With no SWAT team in this city of 18 million, authorities called in the only unit in the country trained to deal with such crises. But the National Security Guards,
which largely devotes its resources to protecting top officials, is based outside of New Delhi and it took the commandos nearly 10 hours to reach the scene.
That gave the gunmen time to consolidate control over two luxury hotels and a Jewish center, said Sahni.
As the siege at dragged on, local police improperly strapped on ill-fitting bulletproof vests. Few had two-way radios to communicate.
At the Jewish center, commandos rappelled from a helicopter onto the roof and slowly descended the narrow, five-story building in a 10-hour shooting and grenade battle with the two gunmen inside.
Security forces announced they had killed four gunmen and ended the siege at the mammoth Taj Mahal hotel on Thursday night, only to have fighting erupt there again the next day. Only on Saturday morning did they actually kill the last remaining gunmen.
Even the commandos lacked the proper equipment, including night vision goggles and thermal sensors that would have allowed them to locate the hostages and gunmen inside the buildings, Sahni said.
From his home in Israel, Assaf Hefetz, a former Israeli police commissioner who created the country's police anti-terror unit three decades ago, watched the slow-motion operation in disbelief.
"You have to come from the roof and all the windows and all the doors and create other entrances by demolition charges," he said.
The commandos should have swarmed the building in a massive, coordinated attack that would have overwhelmed the gunmen and ended the standoff in seconds, he said.
The slow pace of the operations made it appear that the commandos' main goal was to stay safe, Hefetz said. J. K. Dutt, director-general of the commando unit, defended their tactics.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
R. R. Patil, the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra state where Mumbai is located, said the government was "taking all action to ensure that this will never take place again."
A resident of Mumbai, India, attends a candle light ceremony and a protest on Sunday after attacks on the city killed more than 174. The death toll was revised down Sunday from 195 after authorities said some bodies were counted twice, but they said it could rise again as areas of the Jaj Mahal Hotel were still being searched. Among the dead were 18 foreigners, including six Americans. Nine gunmen were killed.
THIS WEEK ON CAMPUS December 1,2008 Student Senate
Alternative Spring Break with Lutheran Campus Ministry
Everyone is invited to come and learn about this opportunity to join in community service and to sightsee in the Big Apple.
Informational meeting:
Wednesday, Dec. 3 at 8:00 p.m.
Lutheran Campus Ministry
18 East 13th St.
Interested? Email: juliejh@ku.edu
Hope for Haiti Concert
Raising Awareness for Hurricane Victims
Kansas Ballroom in the Union (5th Floor)
December 10th @7:30
Bands performing:
3
The Sailor Sequence Aaron Lee
Martin Sleep Dreamer Free Admission - Dontations Accepted
10