Author: carianne-king

It’s easy to miss the graffiti on the side of the Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea statue. You have to be pretty close to even see it—a jagged black box with lines fanning off the top that brings Chinese characters to mind.

Still, it’s there, and it’s been there since 2004, when a tagger spraypainted what Charlottesville spokesperson Ric Barrick describes as a "peace sign" onto the granite just below a crouching Sacagawea. Regardless of any social or artistic criticisms the statue has received, it seems odd that the mark still remains on one of Charlottesville’s most visible historical monuments. So what’s it still doing there?

It’s not so much a problem of budget or bureaucracy. Barrick says there had actually been a previous attempt to remove the graffiti shortly after it was reported in 2004, though a variety of chemical solutions were unsuccessful. City maintenance workers faced a challenge: How to remove paint from the statue’s porous granite surface without marring it for good?

"We have taken every measure that we can without damaging the statue," says Mike Svetz, the director of the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department. The city went as far as sandblasting in 2005, according to Barrick, without luck.

The city hasn’t given up hope. Svetz says that property maintenance crews will try removing the graffiti again this fall with a new batch of chemical solutions and more sandblasting if necessary.

While it’s apparent that the city wants to see its statue restored, this isn’t the first time that graffiti has struck this monument, or its confederate cousin, Robert E. Lee, whose figure adorns Lee Park. Even though these sites are the occasional victims of vandalism, the political commentary behind these acts is not always well established. As with the Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea statue, Barrick says that the city "did not locate the person who damaged the statue and cannot determine why or if it was targeted."

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Forgive the pun: In the local news business these days, there’s no shortage of leads on LEED. Briefly, that’s a national certification program for green—i.e., sustainable—buildings that’s setting the standards for a growing number of local projects. One recent example: Developers with the Belvedere project, an upcoming 700-unit, mixed-use neighborhood off Rio Road, told us that it’s the first in Central Virginia to be accepted into the LEED pilot program for neighborhood development. Five other local, large-scale LEED projects—the Peabody School addition, the Waldorf School, the Charlottesville Transit Service’s main office as well as its operations center, and the Monticello Visitor’s Center—are in various stages of planning and building. And Doug Lowe, a local green builder, completed a house for his family in Crozet that earned the LEED for Homes certification, a relatively new arm of the program.
 

Doug Lowe is a local LEEDer, and more and more building projects are adhering to the national standards exemplified in his Crozet house.

With all the buzz, now seems like a good time to learn a little about LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. No longer just a hippie niche movement, green building has been gaining enough national interest that it’s likely sustainable standards will become the norm for most homes in the future. So what is this bandwagon called LEED? To start, it’s a set of building guidelines managed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) that, if met by developers, can earn their new buildings certification at varying levels: bronze, silver, gold or platinum.

It’s also a way to think about making green adaptations to existing homes. The USGBC’s website ( www.usgbc.org) explains that the LEED system analyzes performance in five areas: "sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality." Basic renovations, then, include making sure your heating or cooling system is running efficiently, installing Energy Star appliances and buying low-flow shower heads.

On a broader scale, the LEED Neighborhood Development program (that’s the one Belvedere is part of) aims to integrate LEED standards into entire communities. The program pairs LEED’s green certification standards with the community development ideals of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Ashley Katz, a communications coordinator with the USGBC, explains that "the basic idea is to look at the whole neighborhood, instead of just the building, and find ways to link them together in a more sustainable way." Designers of Belvedere, for example, will build community by making the neighborhood more walkable and providing extra bike lanes and paths that will give its residents easier access to built-in businesses. This would ensure that there’s "less urban sprawl and more communities that are knit together," Katz said. "It’s just a healthier, safer way to build a community."

The Belvedere project will be completed in 2011. In the meantime, you can learn more about LEED’s growing local prominence at the website for the USGBC’s Charlottesville chapter: www.jrgbc.org.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

On August 7, UVA announced the creation of a new officer, the emergency preparedness director. The new position will oversee all of the University’s emergency response plans and assess its readiness in the wake of natural, epidemic or terrorist emergencies. Marge Sidebottom, the director of emergency preparedness for the UVA health system since 1993, will begin serving in her University-wide capacity on September 1.

Ready, set, go: Marge Sidebottom, UVA’s new emergency preparedness director, aims to make you "an asset, not a liability," in the event of an emergency.

Sidebottom will be a communicator and a collaborator among fire, police, rescue and health services in both the UVA and greater Charlottesville communities. "One of my goals is to help everybody recognize how to respond in emergency situations—to ensure that the response is planned and knowledgeable so everyone can be an asset, not a liability," she says. Sidebottom has been involved with another of UVA’s recent security improvements: a text message emergency alert system.

That system had been in the works for almost a year before the Virginia Tech shootings. After April 16, though, UVA accelerated its program and completed it this summer.

It works like this: Students, staff and faculty members register their cell phones with UVA’s security site. During an emergency, the alert system sends text messages describing the event. In addition, UVA will install a dozen LCD screens in high-traffic areas—such as Newcomb Dining Hall, Memorial Gym and UVA’s libraries—that will post notifications during emergency situations and student advertisements during regular times.

William Ashby, an associate dean of students, says the new system’s benefits are threefold. "We wanted to be able to communicate more efficiently, in a way that is more sustainable [than flyering] and frankly, more aesthetically pleasing," he says.

Currently, 6,577 students, staff and faculty members have signed up for the alert system since its debut in May, though Ashby expects at least 10,000 subscribers by the end of next month. Although most of the registered phones belong to incoming freshmen, Ashby expects that more upperclassmen, who received invitations to the sign-up website in May, will register at the beginning of the school year.

One of the advantages of the system overall is that it has the potential to increase communication by word of mouth, so that those notified via cell phones might better spread the word to the rest of UVA’s estimated 33,000 students, staff and faculty.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

On July 24, Dr. Jae Lee, a bioinformatics statistician, and Dr. Dan Theodorescu, an oncologist, announced a breakthrough algorithm (calculation method) that will predict success rates for cancer patients considering treatment options. C-VILLE spoke with Dr. Lee about this research and how it might change cancer therapy.

Dr. Jae Lee and a colleague at UVA have figured out a better way to design cancer treatments, possibly saving the lives of critically sick patients.

C-VILLE: What does this mean for cancer patients?

Dr. Jae Lee: Usually doctors prescribe some combination of chemotherapeutic treatment, but often doctors don’t always know which combination is best for each patient. It’s really like a coin toss or comes down to individual preferences, or—I have to say—bias. We want to use this [algorithm] so that we can nearly tailor those combinations to each individual patient.

Also, we want to test with patients in critical stages. Usually patients who haven’t responded to the first treatment of chemotherapy come into more critical stages of cancer, and usually, the survival rate at that stage really plummets. With all the FDA-approved compounds, our technology can determine the best combination for that patient, and there’ll be much better hope for those in critical stages.

Can you explain the algorithm?

It’s based on several big databases, the first one being the National Cancer Institute (NCI) drug-screening database. They’ve been doing drug-screening experiments on a panel of 60 cancer cell lines, consisting of nine cancer types. They treat each cell with a varying concentration of different compounds to see if the cancer cell doesn’t grow or dies. The second one is called gene-expression profiling. You’ve heard about the Human Genome Project. Thanks to that, we’ve nearly mapped out all human genes, about 40,000.

The question is: How can we predict the chemosensitivity of individual patients? We are trying to make a translation between the two systems, and we now know of the 100,000 compounds which of the 60 cell lines are sensitive, and which are not. Since we have all that information for each compound, we can connect the genome information from the patient. Using this type of Rosetta Stone, we can translate the information from the invitro system to the invivo system.   

Does it take a long time to determine which works the best?

That’s really the advantage about our kind of technology. NCI already has screened the 68 FDA-approved compounds, so the only thing we need is the expression profiling from each patient’s tumor. So if the patient comes in, like almost for a regular visit, and the doctor gets the biopsy samples from the patient, then that’s it. Instead of running the traditional lab testing, we will run genomic-expression profiling.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.