Davisville Bill Buchanan

Long before he flew four missions on the space shuttle, Steve Robinson was the first DJ of a now-vanished Davis commercial radio station, KYLO, in the late 1970s. Decades later, he’s a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and director of its Center for Space Flight Research — and he will soon return to local radio as occasional fill-in host for Rod Moseanko, host of the station’s Silver Nine Volt Heart. (The photo shows Steve, left, and Rod in the KDRT studio May 11.)

Today on Davisville we enjoy a serious conversation about space flight, plus hear Steve’s memories of KYLO — including what happened when he told listeners he was running out of records to play  — and learn what brought him to KDRT. After he returned Davis in 2012, Robinson said, “I was looking for some good radio,” and found it with Rod’s show. “I thought, ‘this kind of radio is still alive. It was very exciting to me.’ ”

The Capitol Corridor trains that connect Davis with the Bay Area and Sacramento are evolving as the service recovers from the pandemic. The corridor is adding passenger cars and resuming a full weekday schedule this year, experimenting with a tap-on/tap-off payment system to eventually replace tickets, and proceeding with plans to change access in Davis so that passengers board from an expanded center platform reached via an underpass (or perhaps an overpass) from the parking lot and Olive Drive.

Longer term, the service plans to shift to hydrogen or possibly electric power for its trains. We talk about all this, as well as this year's ridership trends and efforts to improve their timekeeping, on Davisville with Rob Padgette, managing director of the service. Today’s program updates our conversation about the corridor from early 2022.

In this illustration from a city report, the Davis station is center left. The underpass to the tracks is shown in red from the station side, in blue from Olive Drive.

In Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways to be Happy, author Dan Brook says happiness is worth pursuing despite all the awful things happening across the globe. He bases this on research and on what he has learned during his decades as an instructor and sociologist (he earned master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology from UC Davis in the 1990s).

So how do you become happier? You probably have to work at it. His suggestions range from “getting more experiences,” and feeling gratitude, to “being around people who make you happy” and converting the fear of missing out into the joy of missing out.

“I’m happy not because I ignore the problems of the world, but in spite of them,” he says. Work to fix what’s wrong, but “being miserable does not help solve those problems.” He elaborates on his ideas during today’s Davisville.

In winter 2023 we talked with Andy Jones and Margaret Merrill of UC Davis about ChatGPT, a new artificial-intelligence app that was setting off alarms for its advanced ability to "write" reports and articles. On today’s Davisville they report that among the faculty they work with, the sense of panic present then has now eased “quite a bit.” People know more about the limits of chatbots, and are asking more about how and where to use the tools in teaching, instead of just fearing them as a plagiarism machine.

We talk about handling chatbot hallucinations, resisting the biases that chatbots suck into their text databases, and hear a few examples of how UC Davis instructors are using the tools in their classrooms.

Too many AI tools are arriving too quickly to keep up with them all. You have to keep up, but not with every twist and turn. “Rather than always trying to figure out what is in store for us from the next AI engine,” Jones advises, look for ways to “connect meaningfully with one another.” The human connection is essential.

(This image wasn’t created by a chatbot, but the caption error illustrates the hallucinations the bots can create.)

Today’s Davisville is a story about the new — and about getting started in Davis, as well as art, life after the pandemic, ambition, and the weird. We talk with Toni Rizzo and Harry Greer, who along with Stephanie Peel have started the Secret Spot, an arts gallery and music lounge business that opened this month in a former house at 117 D St. downtown. #ConstructiveDiscomfort #RookieRoom #ArtMania! #LockdownArt #DavisSound #ArtAsTherapy #PsychicScream #HelpingOthers The photo shows, from left, Toni, Harry and Stephanie

Finding information and news about Davis is harder than it should be. The Enterprise still prints and posts local stories, but lacks the scope and heft it had before the rise of internet technology decimated newspapers as a business. Other paid sources of news and information have also retreated, turning what used to be a town commons for communication into a series of walled gardens, with information about local events and news scattered across a variety of formats, outlets, and channels. If the information is present at all.

Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access (the parent of KDRT), thinks DMA could work with the community to create a new source of information and news about Davis, and eventually Yolo County. The venture has the working title of civic information hub. The idea is in its very early stages, and we talk about it today on Davisville.