GAUCHO GOSSIP

Washington state police have located Neil
Baker, the ex-UCSB staff engineer who allegedly
threatened to kill his former coworkers. Baker is
believed to be the author of two threats posted on the community
forum Craigslist.org; the anonymous writer stated that he could
have done more damage than Goleta Postal Facility mass killer
Jennifer San Marco. Until police located Baker, who now lives in
Washington, UCSB administrators had ordered the campus engineering
building to be locked to all but authorized personnel. The extra
security measures ceased on January 31.

Associated Students (AS) Legislative Council, a
UCSB student government group, ultimately decided against pursuing
a resolution that would have frozen funding to the Daily
Nexus, the campus newspaper. The council had voted at a
January 17 meeting to punish the paper monetarily for running ads
for Conquest Student Housing because some students found them
offensive, given campus protests against the company. AS President
Jared Goldschen later vetoed the resolution, as he believed the
council lacked the authority to withhold the money. At the January
24 meeting, any consideration of overriding the veto was absent
from the agenda. Also, last week UCSB hired former S.B.
News-Press editor Jerry Roberts as its publications
director.

UCSB researchers announced on January 30 that they have
developed significant new laser technology that
could affect such fields as high definition video and medical
procedures. Professor Shuji Nakamura led engineering professors
Steven DenBaars and James Speck and graduate students Matthew
Schmidt and Kwang Choong Kim in achieving laser operations in
nonpolar gallium nitride semiconductors and constructing the first
ever blue-violet laser diodes. In the past, Nakamura had developed
new light sources that work with previously unutilized color
wavelengths. A demonstration of the new technology is scheduled at
UCSB in early February.

The UCSB office of admissions has reportedly received
48,728 undergraduate applications for fall 2007,
the most in the history of the university. The university also
reported that 40,894 of those applicants are students entering
college for the first time, which is 1,066 more first-year students
than applied last year. UCSB’s target enrollment for the 2007-2008
school year is 4,200 first-year students.

At the behest of Representative Lois Capps, the House of
Representatives passed a resolution officially recognizing
last year’s remarkable NCAA national championship run by the
UCSB men’s soccer team. Along with Representative
Elton Gallegly, Capps congratulated the Gauchos for their upset
victory over rival – and perennial soccer powerhouse – UCLA in St.
Louis last December. The 2-1 victory landed the university its
second national intercollegiate sports title in school history.