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The Regents of the University of California
 

TRANSPORTATION SERVICES

For 20 years, UCLA commuter vans have been taking tens of thousands to work and school, saving more than 15 million gallons of gasoline and keeping 106,769 tons of carbon dioxide from polluting our air. Transportation Services, which keeps this network of 131 university-owned vanpools running to serve more than 1,500 daily commuters in 85-plus communities, hosted a celebratory “VANniversary” breakfast Dec. 9 at Covel Commons. Actor/environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. served as master of ceremonies. Among those honored were drivers with two decades at the wheel (See story on page 3). Vans began to roll at UCLA when the campus served as a host site for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. Since then, the program’s contributions to the environment have been widely hailed. It is a three-time winner of the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s Clean Air Award, and it won the MTA Corporate Diamond Award this year.

NEUROPSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE

A new study released last month examined the arrest rates of drug offenders diverted to treatment during the first six months of the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, approved by voters in 2000 as Proposition 36. Drug offenders diverted to treatment were 48% more likely to be arrested for a drug offense within a year of admission than offenders entering treatment through other criminal justice programs such as drug court. They were 65% more likely to be arrested than a group of treatment patients with no criminal justice ties. The study was done by a team from the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at the Neuropsychiatric Institute. One contributing factor, the researchers noted, was that Proposition 36 beneficiaries were more likely to receive outpatient rather than more intensive residential care.

UCLA COLLEGE

If you’ve ever been tempted to drop a friend who tended to freeload, then you have experienced a key to one of the biggest mysteries facing social scientists, suggests a study by UCLA anthropologists. The study, according to an article published in Nature by Professor Robert Boyd and graduate student Karthik Panchanathan, is the first to show that cooperation in the context of the public good can be sustained when freeloaders are punished through social exclusion. Their findings may help explain the evolutionary roots of altruism and anger in the face of uncooperative behavior.