Ka Leo Editor in Chief Bianca Bystrom Pino with the Pai Award

Ka Leo O Hawaiʻi, the student led newspaper for the University’s Mānoa campus, has won five awards in the past two months, including best student newspaper in the state.

The Hawaiʻi Publishers Association awarded Ka Leo first place for School Newspaper Excellence in its annual Paʻi Awards. Five college newspapers from around the state entered papers in that category. Windward Community College was awarded second place.

The judge said Ka Leo had “clean, crisp and consistent design; solid reporting and writing; broad coverage across a wide range of student, faculty and community interests. The fact that this newspaper publishes three times a week is a tremendous testimony to the commitment of students at the University of Hawaiʻi to do the hard work necessary to do good journalism.”

At the annual, national convention of the College Newspaper and Business and Advertising Managers in San Diego, Ka Leo won three, first place awards for best event promotion, best online display advertisement and best sales increase of a special issue. The paper was also awarded third place for its printed rate card. Student advertising sales executive Priya Singh took first place for best pitch project. Ka Leo topped rival schools such as the University of Texas at Austin, Pennsylvania State University, University of Kansas and Central Michigan University.

Ka Leo editors also have earned paid summer internships from the Hawaiʻi chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Outgoing Editor in Chief Marc Arakaki will work with Hawaiʻi News Now and Associate News Editor Alex Bitter will serve Honolulu magazine.

Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory

The Hawaiʻi Book Publishers Association announced the winners of the Hawaiʻi Book Publishers Association 2013 Ka Palapala Poʻokela book awards on Friday, May 10. University of Hawaiʻi Press titles were recognized with 7 of the 20 awards, including the top Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawaiʻi Book of the Year for Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory by Anwei Skinsnes Law with design by UH Press Production Editor Julie Matsuo-Chun.

In addition, the book tied as the winner of the Award of Excellence in the Hawaiian Language, Culture and History category and received an honorable mention in nonfiction.

Published with the support of the Native Hawaiian Center of Excellence at UH Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, the comprehensive work uses primary sources such as letters, petitions and oral history interviews to document the lives of individuals sent to the leprosy settlement at Kalaupapa.

The judges praised the volume as “a very important contribution to Hawaiian history” and recognized Anwei Law for “an exemplary job constructing an insightful narrative from these sources into a book that is beautifully realized by UH Press.”

Accolades also went to these UH Press titles and their authors:

• Ancestry of Experience: A Journey into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing by Leilani Holmes—Winner (tie) of the Award of Excellence in Hawaiian Language, Culture and History
• I Respectfully Dissent: A Biography of Edward H. Nakamura by Tom Coffman—Winner of the Award of Excellence in Nonfiction
• Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm by Donald R. Hodel—Winner of the Award of Excellence in Natural Science
• The ʻUkulele: A History by Jim Tranquada and John King—Winner of the Award of Excellence in Special-Interest Books

Read more about other UH Press nominees.

—A UH Mānoa news release

The Imagine Cup is sponsored by Microsoft and is considered the world’s premier student technology competition.

UH Hilo students Mike Purvis, Ryder Donahue, Kayton Summers and Wallace Hamada created an app called Help Me Help. The app allows users to share photos and information about hazards they may encounter in emergency situations like fires, floods or roadblocks.

“During disasters, people are often panicked and they might not be able to describe very well over the phone, the exact details of the situation,” said Purvis. “Virtually everyone has a smart phone these days and so that’s really why we want to tap into the camera for this purpose.”

Help Me Help is getting attention nationally and could have a real impact locally.

“We’ve already talked to a local civil defense representative and he said they are very interested in the application, they have ideas in the past that are similar to it,” said Donahue.

UH Hilo administrators and faculty are bursting with pride that a group of UH Hilo students created something to help their own community, and the world. Not bad for an idea that grew out of a senior project to design software that could track native and invasive plant species.

“We realized tracking that kind of information could be applied to a larger scale with more impact,” said Purvis. “So we decided to rewrite our entire idea for disaster response.”

The UH Hilo team will travel to St. Petersburg, Russia for the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in July.

In conjunction with the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo will host the James Oliver Horton Symposium on Abraham Lincoln on Saturday, May 25, 1:30 p.m. in UCB 100. A second day of the symposium will be held at UH Mānoa on Sunday, May 26, 1:30 p.m. at the Art Auditorium.

The symposium, named after James Oliver Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, will feature a trio of renowned guest speakers.

Symposium lecture series

• The President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School Paul Finkelman presents “How a Railroad Lawyer Became the Great Emancipator.” Having lectured throughout the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, Finkelman is the author of more than 30 books, along with various legal opinions which have been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Professor of History and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson Cyber Institute Orville Vernon Burton will speak on “Lincoln, Emancipation and Education.” Burton’s The Age of Lincoln won numerous awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer.
• University of Richmond President Edward L. Ayers will present “Where Did Freedom Come From?” Awarded the National Professor of the Year from the Carnegie Foundation, Ayers is the recipient of numerous awards including the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American History.

Tickets for either day/location of these limited seating events, including the reception, are $8 and available online or by calling the UH Hilo Conference Center at (808) 974-7555.

For more information about the symposium, visit the symposium website.

The college prides itself in providing affordable credit and non-credit educational opportunities in high quality programs, that are offered in stimulating learning environments, like the college’s brand new science building.

More than 9,500 students have graduated from Maui College in the last decade, with the number of graduates steadily increasing each year, from 581 in 2003, to more than 1,200 in 2012.

Students earned 569 degrees and certificates in the 2013 spring semester and 287 of them took part in the spring graduation ceremony at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center, including valedictorian Shelly Silva.

“One thing that I have learned is the greatest barrier to success is fear,” said Silva. “And I have overcome too many obstacles in my life to allow fear to hold me back any longer.”

Silva dropped out of high school at the age of 16, had her first child at 18 and struggled with addiction for 13 years. She eventually enrolled at Maui College, and three years later, delivered the valedictorian address. She credited her professors for much of her success.

“They have shared with us their knowledge, their passion, their creative energy, teaching us to always strive for excellence,” said Silva.

Every student has a unique past and each came to Maui College in search of a better future. Faculty and staff say the graduating class of 2013 has also shown a true commitment to serving their communities.

“I think our students understand that, know that, and are articulate and thoughtful about the ways in which they apply their education to all of the kinds of the needs and opportunities that exist within the county of Maui, state of Hawaiʻi, and for that matter, around the world,” said UH Maui Chancellor Clyde Sakamoto.

As with every commencement ceremony, proud friends and family mobbed the graduates when it was over. While taking pictures with her family, Cynthia Taibemal said she was especially pleased her daughters were there to see her graduate.

“I want them to be happy and proud and I want them to know that education is a very important thing,” said Taibemal.

Thanks to the education they received at Maui College, the graduates say they are ready, willing and able.

“Oh I am so happy,” said graduate Lorenzo Valdez. “I can’t wait till work. It all paid off and this is for my mom.”

Early career researcher Jelena Maricic investigates fundamental properties of neutrinos.

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Assistant Professor of Physics Jelena Maricic has received a prestigious Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy to search for a new type of elementary particle. This is the first such Department of Energy award for a UH Mānoa faculty member.

The award provides $750,000 in funding over five years that will enable Maricic’s Hawaiʻi team to deploy a very strong radioactive cerium source in the KamLAND detector in Japan to search for oscillations of normal neutrinos into elusive “sterile” neutrinos.

“Large, specialized detectors allow us to identify the three known types of neutrinos, but recent experiments hint at a completely new particle that mixes with these three but otherwise does not interact with matter,” Maricic said. “This is becoming one of the most important topics to be addressed in neutrino physics. The goal of our CeLAND project is to resolve these hints and determine the true nature of this fourth particle.”

Neutrino research

Neutrinos are the most ethereal of all elementary particles and interact only by weak forces. About 65 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through the human body each second without leaving a trace.

Sterile neutrinos, if proven to exist, would shed light on a new physics beyond the well-established standard model.

Along with CeLAND collaborators from Japan, France and the United States, Maricic plans to install a 2800 trillion Becquerel electron antineutrino source in the existing KamLAND detector. The CeLAND project will search for sterile neutrino oscillations in a phase space suggested by observed reactor antineutrino anomalies.

Maricic’s research group at UH Mānoa will design a tungsten shield to surround the cerium source, needed to separate a subtle neutrino signal from the overwhelming radioactive backgrounds.

—A UH Mānoa news release

This is the 46th home built by the college since the school launched its Model Home Program in 1965. The best part of the program, according to students and organizers: the annual ceremony where the house keys are officially turned over to the new homeowner.

“Oh it felt great,” said Fred Palea, the lucky Hawaiian Home Lands lessee right after he walked into his new home for the first time. “I am really ecstatic and excited about this house and it feels warm, welcoming, and I think our family is really going to enjoy this house.”

The three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,800-square-foot home includes a carport, solar water heating, a photovoltaic system, landscaping with native plants and an aquaponics garden.

It is all thanks to the hard work of more than 70 Hawaiʻi CC students from a wide range of programs offered at the college—drafting, carpentry, electrical, agriculture, welding and diesel mechanics.

“I have been working real hard for this day, waiting for it to come,” said Hawaiʻi CC carpentry student Jacob Ramos. “We learn everything on this house, everything from foundation to finish.”

“We never get to meet the family until today,” added Kiliona Young, a Hawaiʻi CC agriculture student. “But you know, they were just thoughts in our head. So all of the things we did, we were imagining this family, then today they get to turn it over and to be part of a big event like this, it was an honor.”

More than 2,700 students have participated in the Model Home Program over the years, gaining valuable on-the-job experience.

“The contractors that hire them, they always come back and they always comment to us, you know the students and how confident they are,” said Hawaiʻi CC carpentry professor Gene Harada. “And that’s what we are trying to do for them.”

Creating affordable housing is a key component of the program, a partnership between Hawaiʻi Community College and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The home designed and constructed by the students in 2013 would have cost close to $300,000 to build, but thanks to the Model Home Program, it cost $186,000, according to Harada.

“It’s a very good win-win for us,” said Darrell Young of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. “We act as the developer and the students act as our construction labor and it gives them an opportunity to have a trade.”

And every year, it gives a local family an opportunity to turn the dream of owning a home into a reality.

“I couldn’t dream that they could have done this but it’s excellent,” said Palea. “And I know we have good tradesmen that’s coming up in the future.”

Hawaiʻi CC students will begin work on home number 47 in the 2013 fall semester.

Hurricane Flossie near Big Island in August 2007. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

A study headed by a team of scientists at the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, shows that Hawaiʻi could see a two- or three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by the last quarter of this century. The study appeared in the May 5, 2013, online issue of Nature Climate Change.

To determine whether tropical cyclones will become more frequent in Hawaiʻi with climate change, lead author Hiroyuki Murakami and climate expert Professor Bin Wang joined forces with Akio Kitoh at the Meteorological Research Institute and the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The scientists compared in a state-of-the-art, high-resolution global climate model the recent history of tropical cyclones in the North Pacific with a future (2075–2099) scenario, under which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, resulting in temperatures about 2°C higher than today.

“In our study, we looked at all tropical cyclones, which range in intensity from tropical storms to full-blown category 5 hurricanes. From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaiʻi. Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region,” explained Murakami.

Surprisingly, even though fewer tropical cyclones will form in the eastern Pacific in Murakami’s future scenario, we can expect more of them to make their way to Hawaiʻi.

“Our finding that more tropical cyclones will approach Hawaiʻi as Earth continues to warm is fairly robust because we ran our experiments with different model versions and under varying conditions. The yearly number we project, however, still remains very low,” reassured Wang.

—Adapted from a UH Mānoa news release

STEP-UP students introduced to the new laboratory. (photo courtesy of the John A. Burns School of Medicine)

Assisted by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, the College of Micronesia opened a new biomedical research laboratory in the agriculture building on its national campus at Palikir, Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia.

The new research facility, which opened on April 30, is the fourth training laboratory established under the Pacific Short-Term Education Program for Underrepresented Persons (STEP-UP) program administered by UH Mānoa. Similar facilities were established at the American Samoa Community College, the Northern Marianas College and the College of the Marshall Islands.

“The research training program we are rolling out is unprecedented in most of our target communities across the Pacific, where biomedical research infrastructure and research training are largely nonexistent,” said George Hui, director of the Pacific STEP-UP program and a researcher in JABSOM’s Department of Tropical Medicine and Medical Microbiology. “It is essential to diversify the biomedical and healthcare workforce with research scientists who are culturally competent and responsive to the social needs of underrepresented persons.”

Four College of Micronesia undergraduates and four students from local public high schools across Micronesia were selected to take part in this year’s Pacific STEP-UP Summer Research program at the new facility.

“The range of research opportunities and the quality of research outcomes will be vastly improved through the establishment of this exceptional laboratory,” said College of Micronesia President Joseph M. Daisy. “We are grateful for the extraordinary generosity and donation of equipment by the STEP-UP Program, without which this new research lab would not be possible.”

The Pacific STEP-UP Program encompasses the State of Hawai’i; the US-affiliated (flagged) territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands; and the US-associated (non-flagged) territories that include the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Another Pacific STEP-UP research laboratory facility is planned for the Republic of Palau (Palau Community College) this year.

—A UH Mānoa news release

The University of Nebraska Press published Death Zones and Darling Spies, the memoirs of Beverly Deepe Keever, professor emerita at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Communication. Keever is the longest-serving American correspondent who covered the Vietnam War and she garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Death Zones and Darling Spies describes what it was like for Keever, a farm girl from Nebraska, to find herself halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation’s bloodiest and bitterest wars.

Keever arrived in Saigon as Vietnam’s war entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon apartment to jungles where Wild West–styled forts first dotted Vietnam’s borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from communist-led attacks.

In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their valor—and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from hide-and-seek guerrillas.

Keever’s trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide readers with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters, self-described as “darling spies,” helped her decode Vietnam’s shadow world and subterranean war.

Beverly Deepe Keever’s Newsweek press card issued by the South Vietnamese government.

A UH Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching honoree, Keever has also authored News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb and U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934–1996.