No foreseen parking; River Street 
John T. BennettAdministration Beat 

When Appalachian State University officials received approval for a six story, 750 space parking deck to be built on Rivers Street, they had hoped construction would begin in January. 

That was before Hurricane Floyd dealt a devastating blow to eastern North Carolina, leaving half the state a disaster area.  The aftermath of the powerful storm has created a logjam of state construction projects that must be reviewed by the state’s Department of Insurance before being started. 

Mired somewhere in the bureaucratic red tape is the Appalachian State plan for the Rivers Street parking deck. 

Vice Chancellor for Business Affairs Jane Helm said the deck would be built, but the construction process will be delayed until the state sets a date for contractors to begin bidding on the project.  A bid date for the project cannot be set until after the overloaded Department of Insurance has reviewed the project. 

Due to the heavy volume of projects in line for review, Helm said the Department of Insurance is unable to provide ASU officials so much as an approximate date bidding can begin. 

While the immediate future of the project is engulfed in a cloud of uncertainty, the Rivers Street parking deck is expected to produce dividends for ASU upon its completion. 

Immediately, the deck’s 750 spaces will provide much needed parking spaces on a campus where limited parking resources are available to faculty, students and visitors. 

Administration officials consider the Rivers Street parking deck “a very high priority when you look at the demand for parking around campus,” according to Helm.   

The deck is expected to be open to both faculty and students, though no final decision has been made. 

“Any increase in spaces is good news for everyone, we won’t have any trouble getting cars into those (750) spaces, I guarantee that,” said Appalachian State University Director of Parking Services Barry Sauls. 

Under state law, the North Carolina General Assembly does not allocate any state funds to University of North Carolina System institutions for parking-related projects.  Also, as is the case with all UNC System capital construction projects, the precedent is to avoid using student tuition or fees for campus structures. Parking projects must be financed with revenue generated by the university that is undertaking the project. 

Appalachian State will fund the construction of the Rivers Street parking deck by using monies brought into the parking fund via vehicle registration and citations.  

Sauls said over a typical fiscal year, the Department of Parking nets approximately $600,000 in vehicle registration fees and another $450,000 through parking citations. 

The amount of capital available in the fund will determine if a proposed skywalk will be built over Rivers Street, connecting the Rivers Street deck with the east side of the ASU campus. 

Helm said the construction of the skywalk, “is still uncertain,” adding that administration officials must first determine if the university can afford to finance that piece of the Rivers Street proposal. 

Once erected and operational, Helm hopes the Rivers Street parking deck will pump additional revenue into the parking fund that is needed to finance other parking-related projects the university plans to launch in the next 10 years. 
 

Dr. James Barnes' Door is Always open 
Tiffany Fant Multicultural Beat 

He is not foreign to being the only African-American in his department, because he was the first full time black faculty at Ohio University and is currently the only black professor in the political science department. 

This man of many firsts is none other than James Barnes. 

Barnes, who has his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University, said that he finds his area of expertise “inherently interesting.”  When asked why he chose political science as a career he said “politics intrigue me ... I’m curious how societies go about making decisions.” 

Barnes has been here for four years, but before here he was a professor for 32 years at Ohio University. Appalachian has a Minority Faculty Fellowship, which Barnes received, and it is used to attract minority professors to this university. 

Barnes said that his job requires “two personalities.”  He explained that he has the responsibility of being his true self as well as being a representative of all black people. “At times it is difficult to know which personality you are at times ... because you carry that blackness with you at all times,” said Barnes. 

“I think I have learned how to balance the two,” said Barnes. He does this by incorporating his blackness as well as his true self into his teaching. 

Because Barnes is one of the few minority faculty members at Appalachian, he noticed some of the issues that black faculty have to face. He said the major issue is “the classic problem of being torn to participate in two worlds.” 

All faculty have the responsibility of creating publications, as well as being a spokesperson if you are the only one of a race in your department. A change that Barnes would like to see made would be to increase minority professor numbers. The increased numbers would help to eliminate the stereotypical view of minorities that some may have. “My door is always open,” said Barnes. 
 

SGA elections begin via internet, pipeline 
Caitlyn Payne SGA Beat 

The 2000 Student Government Association elections process has started. Nomination forms for the elections were turned in last Friday, beginning the election process. 

The official campaigning period for this year’s elections begins on March 20. The voting period will begin on March 27, at 12:01 a.m. and end on Friday, March 31 at 9 p.m.  

The elections will be run differently this year. All voting will be done online via Campus Pipeline.  

Students will be able to vote for the candidate of their choice on an internet voting site.  

The site will have a ballot with the candidates that are running.  

The system will have a security check to make sure students and faculty only vote one time.  
 

Freshman dies in accident 
Leslie Hitchcock Editor-in-chief 
An Appalachian State University freshman from Mechanicsville, Va., was injured in an automobile accident on Feb. 24 and died in Johnson City Hospital in Johnson City, Tenn. 

Christa Maria DiSisto was a passenger in a 2000 Nissan four door vehicle, which was driven by Paul Alexander Grimm of Union Hall, Va. 

The vehicle was traveling south on Highway 105 when it ran off the right side of the road, according to the incident report taken by N.C. Highway Patrolman R.L. Anderson.  The car then corrected itself and crossed the center line, overturned and flipped several times. The vehicle came to rest right side up. 

Four of the passengers were thrown from the vehicle. A fifth passenger remained in the vehicle and sustained minor injuries. DiSisto was in the rear middle seat of the vehicle. 

Anderson is continuing investigation of the accident. 
 

Scientists  fail to destroy our universe; Lil' Bang 
Nathan McKenney Science Beat 

In an experiment which some scientists feared would bring an end to the universe as we know it, physicists at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, created a state of matter that has not existed since the first minutes after the “Big Bang.” 

The Big Bang refers to the generally accepted theory that the universe began with an explosion of particles that cooled quickly to form matter as we know it. 

In seven experiments conducted in CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron, lead atoms were slammed into gold and other lead atoms at nearly the speed of light. 

The collisions caused temperatures greater than 2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. 

The extreme heat loosened the bindings that hold the atoms together. This created a new state of matter called “quark-gluon plasma.” 

Quarks are the smallest known particles of matter. Before these experiments they had only been observed in a bound state. Gluons hold quarks together. Held together in this bound state, the quarks are the basic building blocks that make up protons, neutrons and electrons. 

The particles cool very quickly after the impact. As they cool, the gluons bind the quarks back together. 

In nature, the quarks began to bind together in the first 1/100,000 of a second after the explosion of the Big Bang. 

In lab, the process happens so quickly, the quarks have not actually been observed in the new state of matter. Instead, by observing the particles afterward, their recent states can be deduced. 

The experiments started in 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland where CERN is located. The findings were officially presented on Feb. 10. 

Some scientists doubt the evidence collected at CERN. However, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York is powerful enough to allow scientists to observe the quarks while they are in the new state of matter. 

Experiments are set to begin there this summer. 

Before the experiments, Discover magazine and ABC News reported that some people worried the collisions could create a black hole or start a cataclysmic explosion, which would destroy the universe. Other physicists cited the frequent high-energy collisions between cosmic rays and Earth’s atmosphere as ample evidence the world would not end. 

For more information on the processes and technology involved in the experiments, visit www.cern.ch. 
 

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