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Friday, 21 August 2009
1. Study finds S.F. health plan didn't hurt jobs
San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2009
San Francisco's first-of-its-kind universal health care program and its mandate that employers provide health care has not resulted in feared job losses, according to a new study by a UC BERKELEY RESEARCHER.
Crunching quarterly data from the U.S. Labor Department, the researcher found that since the inception of Healthy San Francisco's employer mandate in 2008, the city's growth rate across all employment sectors was similar to or better than other Bay Area counties. While San Francisco saw its employment rate shrink due to the struggling economy, it actually shrank less than other counties....
"The San Francisco experiment is working, and it's working well," said KEN JACOBS, CHAIR OF THE UNIVERSITY'S CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION. "There's no evidence of any impact of the ordinance on employment in San Francisco."...
[Bay City News also issued a story on this topic] Full Story
2. 'Public Option' -- From Obscurity to Central Issue
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
August 21, 2009
Washington (AP) -- The idea of a government medical plan to compete with private insurance has become a litmus test in the health care debate. It could easily have been nothing more than a forgotten proposal gathering dust on some professor's bookshelf....
Political scientist [and FORMER UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR] JACOB HACKER had proposed a plan in 2001 that he called ''Medicare Plus.'' Employers could choose either to offer private insurance or pay a payroll tax to finance coverage for their employees through a health plan modeled on Medicare. Early in 2007, as the presidential campaign was gearing up, Hacker retooled his proposal. It quickly caught on with core Democratic constituencies.....
On the other side of the country, a BERKELEY HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR had already come up with the idea of a head-to-head competition in which individuals would choose between a government plan and private plans. HELEN HALPIN proposed such a scheme in 2002 for California, and the following year she retooled it as a national proposal.
Called the CHOICE Option, Halpin's plan amounted to a referendum on whether government coverage or a private plan is better. It's close to the spirit of what Democrats are now proposing.
''May the best model win,'' Halpin said. ''Depending on the preferences of the population, the system could evolve to single payer, but it would be a totally voluntary transition.'' Her bet: The government plan wins....
[This story appeared in more than 100 sources nationwide, including the Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and San Francisco Chronicle] Full Story
3. Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall
New York Times (*requires registration)
August 21, 2009
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent....
But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. ...
...The best-known data on the rich comes from an analysis of Internal Revenue Service returns by Thomas Piketty and EMMANUEL SAEZ, two economists. Their work shows that in the late 1970s, the cutoff to qualify for the highest-earning one ten-thousandth of households was roughly $2 million, in inflation-adjusted, pretax terms. By 2007, it had jumped to $11.5 million....
The I.R.S. has not yet released its data for 2008 or 2009. But MR. SAEZ, A PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, said he believed that the rich had become poorer. Asked to speculate where the cutoff for the top one ten-thousandth of households was now, he said from $6 million to $8 million.
For the number to return to $11 million quickly, he said, would probably require a large financial bubble.... Full Story
4. Marketplace: Big stakes in Bernanke's reappointment
NPR
August 21, 2009
Professor and former Labor Secretary ROBERT REICH talks with Steve Chiotakis about why Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is considered controversial, and how his potential reappointment may affect the economy.
Steve Chiotakis: Of course Bernanke's been in the spotlight since President George W. Bush tapped him to lead the Fed four years ago. He still has more than five months left in his term. And whether he should be reappointed is a question President Barack Obama and his economic advisers have been thinking about for some time. Former Labor Secretary and UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY PROFESSOR ROBERT REICH joins us this morning to talk about the process and what it could mean for our nation's economy....
Chiotakis: Ben Bernanke's term doesn't end til January, so why are we hearing about this debate now?
Reich: That's a good question. I think mainly because financial markets hate uncertainty. And the longer the president waits, the more uncertainty there's going to be. Also, now that the economy is showing faint signs of bottoming out, more attention is going to be paid to the Fed's exit strategy. You know, the when and how it withdraws all that credit medicine. And the president will want to get beyond the issue of Bernanke's appointment so nobody thinks the timing of the exit is influenced by politics....
[Link to audio] Full Story
5. Will the Hard-Core Starbucks Customer Pay More? The Chain Plans to Find Out
New York Times (*requires registration)
August 21, 2009
San Francisco — As the recession wears on and fewer people are splurging at Starbucks, the coffee chain’s response is to raise prices. On Thursday, Starbucks stores in several cities started charging up to 30 cents more for some specialty beverages, though the company is charging less for some basic drinks....
Raising prices in the middle of a big downturn in consumer spending might not be such a crazy idea, said J. MIGUEL VILLAS-BOAS, A MARKETING PROFESSOR who studies pricing and consumer choice at the HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. Though it is paradoxical, it is a strategy premium companies often take, he said.
“Given that McDonald’s is capturing some of the consumers less interested in the premium that Starbucks offers, then the consumers left out for Starbucks are the consumers willing to pay more, so Starbucks says, ‘Let’s charge them,’ ” he said.... Full Story
6. Language freedom law heads to Schwarzenegger
San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2009
Sacramento -- California would protect the freedom of a person to speak any language he or she chooses in a business establishment under a measure approved by the state Legislature on Thursday.
The bill, authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, is the lawmaker's response to a controversial proposal by the LPGA last fall requiring golfers to speak "effective English." The organization scuttled the proposal after loud objections by Yee and others, and the Democrat says this legislation will ensure it does not happen again....
The protections may be the first of their kind in the country, said JESSE CHOPER, THE EARL WARREN PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC LAW AT UC BERKELEY'S BOALT HALL. He said the protection is "not off the wall by any means" and said language can be a source of discrimination that people have limited control over.... Full Story
7. Why Private Cloud Will Make IT Think Like Wal-Mart
CIO
August 20, 2009
Public. Private. Hybrid. Cloudburst. Much of the discussion about cloud computing focuses on deployment options and choices, with a surprisingly large number of enterprises inclining toward internal private clouds—that is, a cloud-capable infrastructure residing within a company's own data center. A just-published survey by Evans Data supports this trend, indicating that 30 percent of developers (sample = 500) are currently working on projects that will run in private clouds (Important: the article notes that this is probably skewed, as the survey participants are self-selected). This seems quite high to me, given that the number of actual private clouds is pretty darn small. However, one can design and build an app in a public cloud environment with the ultimate goal of hosting the app in a private cloud. In any case, the survey reinforces an anecdotal sense that enterprises are very attracted to the concept of building and operating their own cloud.
...IT Operations will come under significant pressure to always have sufficient compute resources available. This doesn't get discussed much, but expect it to be a hot topic in the future regarding private clouds. Of course, this is a challenge for all cloud providers, as they all promise what the UC BERKELEY RAD LAB REPORT calls "the illusion of infinite resources." Amazon is characterized as having trouble with this issue, so it's not unique to private clouds; however, this problem may be more acute for private clouds, since this skill is, today, not that prepared....
[This story also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle] Full Story
8. Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! to oppose Google book project
Agence France Presse
August 21, 2009
Washington — Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! are planning to join a coalition of library associations and non-profit groups in opposing Google's ambitious book scanning project, US newspapers reported on Friday.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal said the technology heavyweights have agreed to form what is tentatively being called the Open Book Alliance to challenge Google's class action settlement with authors and publishers....
The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the SAMUELSON LAW, TECHNOLOGY AND PUBLIC POLICY CLINIC OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY recently wrote to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt expressing concerns about privacy aspects of the deal.
"Given the long and troubling history of government and third party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search," they said.... Full Story
9. UC offers to return Japanese remains
San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2009
University of California officials have sent letters to Japanese authorities offering to return a collection of skulls and bones from World War II to Japan, a UC BERKELEY SPOKESMAN said Thursday....
The Chronicle reported Sunday that the skulls and bones of several Japanese who committed suicide during the U.S. invasion of Saipan in 1944 are being kept in an underground vault at the PHOEBE A. HEARST MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE UC BERKELEY CAMPUS....
The skulls and bones were kept in the former Navy doctor's private collection until 1974, when he donated them to the university museum.
Correspondence was sent Tuesday to the Japanese ambassador in Washington, the Japanese consul general in San Francisco, the Japanese consul general in Saipan and Japan's War Victims Relief Bureau, said UC BERKELEY SPOKESMAN DAN MOGULOF.... Full Story
10. University of California chief warns unions not to fight furloughs
Sacramento Bee
August 21, 2009
When University of California President Mark Yudof announced a massive furlough plan last month, the idea was that almost all UC employees would have their salaries reduced this year by taking some days off without pay.
But a third of UC's 180,000 employees haven't faced the furloughs yet. They're represented by about a dozen labor unions that are fighting Yudof's plan.
Speaking Thursday to the Sacramento Press Club, Yudof said UC's unionized workers received 4 percent raises this year, while non-union employees are taking pay cuts ranging from 4 to 10 percent.
He said the university would lay off some workers if the labor unions don't agree to the furlough....
The union representing janitors, hospital technicians and lab workers says UC should solve its budget problem by borrowing, restructuring debt and cutting executive pay – rather than furloughing employees.
"We're trying to keep what little we got," said ARNOLD MEZA, A UC BERKELEY CUSTODIAN, adding that the pay raise this year makes up for a pay cut in the past.... Full Story
11. City Brights Blog: A Call for Civility in UC Protests
San Francisco Chronicle Online
August 21, 2009
Early Thursday morning, a car exploded outside the house of UC President Mark Yudof. Within minutes, police from Oakland and UC BERKELEY were on the scene, checking out the damage and opening an investigation to determine if the car fire was a deliberate attack or a mere accident.
One reason police even considered whether the car fire might have been set deliberately is that the president of the university has been attacked and harassed a number of times in the past few months. As the economy tightens and Yudof has been forced to make deep cuts to the UC system, tensions have risen. Students are angry about fee increases, staff workers are mad about salary cuts and mandatory furloughs, and professors are concerned that hiring and salary freezes will have a negative impact on the quality of UC's education....
Dissent and difference of opinion are a center of our democracy. But harassing a man the state hired to try and help the UC system get out of its budget mess is not okay. In fact, it's counterproductive. Yudof, the UC system, and California have big issues to resolve. (On Thursday, at a speech in Sacramento, Yudof warned that next year would also bring serious budget cuts). Every interest group has the right to have its opinion heard. But using scare tactics to intimidate Yudof will only backfire. It is important to create an environment in which groups come together to try and resolve issues. An atmosphere filled with mistrust and tension will not help UC get itself out of its budget woes. Full Story
12. Law Blog: Berkeley Law Dean Reiterates: Yoo’s Job is Safe
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
August 21, 2009
JOHN YOO is unlikely to lose his teaching job at BERKELEY LAW. THE DEAN OF THE LAW SCHOOL, CHRISTOPHER EDLEY, has made that clear, most recently in an email to faculty members, in which he reiterated his position, that despite recent student protests over Yoo’s return to the Berkeley campus, his position was safe. Yoo has come under attack for controversial memos he wrote while in the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel that were widely viewed as allowing U.S. officials to torture detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
As summarized by Kevin Jon Heller in a post at Opinio Juris:
As [Edley] points out, University of California policy permits the termination of a tenured faculty member only for “[c]ommission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty.” Yoo has not been convicted of anything, nor is it likely that he ever will be. Rightly or wrongly, that’s the end of the matter . ...
[Link by subscription only. A debate on this topic appeared in the New York Times Online] Full Story
13. UC to give honorary degrees to wartime students of Japanese descent
Sacramento Bee
August 21, 2009
Hundreds of Japanese and Japanese American students at the University of California put their education on hold during World War II.
They vacated their studies, in some cases indefinitely, when the government sent more than 120,000 people to war relocation camps and an unknown number of others, like Kay Ogasawara, fled states along the Pacific Coast to work as migrant farmers.
Ogasawara, now 87, is among the former UC students who may be eligible for an honorary degree. The UC Board of Regents announced in July that it would make an exception to the university system's 37-year moratorium on honorary degrees to recognize these students....
SHE WAS A FRESHMAN NURSING STUDENT AT UC BERKELEY in 1941. She said she was overwhelmed by Berkeley's size after graduating among a class of eight from her high school in Carlin, Nev. She was thinking about dropping out.... Full Story
14. At Singularity U., big brains meet the future
CNet
August 20, 2009
Mountain View, Calif.--Sitting in a classroom, listening to students explain their approach to an assignment to develop an initiative to impact the lives of a billion people over ten years, one could be forgiven for taking it all with a grain of salt.
After all, student projects like this are usually peppered with holes, naive assumptions, and unrealistic goals.
But here at Singularity University, things are a little different. This group project, which aims to flip the car sharing movement on its head and bring affordable transportation to the masses, started less than two weeks ago but has already won a prize and attracted venture capital interest.
That's because Singularity University is no run-of-the-mill academic institution, and its students are not the usual breed of dreamers with good intentions. Founded by leading futurist and "The Singularity is Near" author Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, the nine-week course examines exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing. As well, the 40 students in the program are focusing on future studies and forecasting, and finance and entrepreneurship.
Those chosen for the program are truly the cream of the crop. After all, they have regular access to superstar teachers like GEORGE SMOOT, A PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; DAN KAMMEN, CO-DIRECTOR OF THE BERKELEY INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames' chief scientist. And speakers include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe.... Full Story
15. Greenspace Blog: Eco-friendly universities
UCLA, Santa Cruz and Berkeley going greener
Los Angeles Times Online
August 21, 2009
These days "cool school" doesn't just mean that a university has laid-back drinking policies. A "cool school" is one that recycles waste, provides transit and saves energy, according to the Sierra Club's report card for eco-friendly universities, released Thursday.
With about two-thirds of applicants reportedly taking eco-friendliness into account when choosing a college, three California schools that were among Sierra Club's top 10 have something to brag about. UC Santa Cruz, UC BERKELEY and UCLA ranked seventh, eighth and ninth in the report, respectively.... Full Story
16. Local bloggers meet at Berkeley J-School (YouTube video)
San Francisco Chronicle Online
August 20, 2009
Last night, Wednesday, August 19th at 6 PM (well, I got there ay 6:38 PM) PAUL GRABOWICZ, THE ASSOCIATE DEAN AND NEW MEDIA PROGRAM DIRECTOR AT THE UC BERKELEY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, hosted the second meetup of local bloggers in the school's library. It was a great event.
The idea of these meetings is, as the email put it, ...
"so people can get together to socialize, share ideas, solve common problems and explore ways we might collaborate.
We also want to find out what kind of training people might be interested in through the UC BERKELEY J-SCHOOL'S KNIGHT DIGITAL MEDIA CENTER"...
The meetings drew about 25 people, including such luminaries as Scott Rosenberg, who wrote the book "Say Anything" about the history of blogging (and which I'm reading now), Mark Haas who's partner in business is the legendary Dave Winer (also featured in Scott's book), Dave Cohn of Spot.us which raises money for stories that journalists and bloggers want to cover, and Martha Ross who has a blog called Crazy In Suburbia, and George Kelly from the blog "All About George"....
I agree with Paul Grabowicz who said that he felt as if he was at the ground level beginning of something big. Media is going through a massive upheaval as more sites come online, ad revenues are spread around, and large media companies are being cut down to size, and all of this is really fun to be a part of for me....
[Link to video] Full Story
17. Talk of the Nation: Sizing Up Sustainable Food
NPR
August 21, 2009
These days some shoppers are looking at more than the price of their groceries; they're also considering "food miles" — how far the grapes or pork chops traveled to get to the store. But some experts say eating food grown locally isn't necessarily the best way to go green at the grocery store.
Guests:
...MICHAEL POLLAN, author, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, Berkeley, Calif....
[Link to audio forthcoming] Full Story
18. Book Bench Blog: Literary Smackdown: Sommers vs. Romulus
New Yorker
August 20, 2009
What do right-wing feminists enjoy? Fighting! What about? Apparently, whether or not Romulus, the guy credited with co-founding Rome after being suckled by a big she-wolf, actually existed. An article that ran in June in the Chronicle of Higher Education has spawned a lengthy debate—a response, a rebuttal, and twenty thousand words worth of comments.
In the ring: Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has made a living critiquing academic feminism since the culture wars of the nineteen-nineties, and NANCY K. D. LEMON, A LECTURER IN DOMESTIC-VIOLENCE LAW AT U.C. BERKELEY’S LAW SCHOOL.
The fight didn’t begin over Romulus—it was about the question of whether feminist scholars are, in Sommers’s words, “impervious to reasoned criticism” (she thinks they take things way too personally, and, consumed with effrontery, are unable to correct themselves). As a case in point, she cited what she says is Lemon’s failure to correct “inaccuracies” in the textbook she edits, “Domestic Violence Law.” Sommers knows that Lemon has failed, because she publicly criticized her (so, like, why didn’t Lemon get right on that?). ...
I would like to ask Christina Hoff Sommers a question and have her really answer it: What the hell do the question of whether either Romulus or the rule of thumb are “real” have to do, today, with the critical fact under discussion: that men continue to rape, beat and kill women and children as if they owned them? Nancy Lemon is trying to do something to change that by working to get the legal system to respond to the idea that women have a right to health and safety—what are you doing?... Full Story
19. Author celebrates East Bay’s Jewish past and present
J Weekly
August 20, 2009
Frederick Isaac’s newly published book, “Jews of Oakland and Berkeley,” starts its tale in the 1860s. It ends last December.
Isaac deliberately wanted to bring his history of East Bay Jewish life as close as possible to the present day. “I intended the end to be now,” says writer, who lives in Oakland. “Because 15 years from now, this is going to be history.”...
“It’s interesting how many things that are not synagogue- and federation-related have flourished here,” Isaac says. “The [Contra Costa Jewish Film Festival] and the music festival, for example. I have five pages on [U.C.] BERKELEY.”
Those pages cover the campus Hillel and Lehrhaus Judaica (both housed in the same building), and influential U.C. PROFESSORS LIKE BIBLE SCHOLAR ROBERT ALTER....
"Jews of Oakland and Berkeley” by Frederick Isaac (127 pages, Arcadia Publishing, $21.99) Full Story
20. Major Insights Into Evolution of Life Reported
U.S. News & World Report
August 20, 2009
Humans might not be walking the face of the Earth were it not for the ancient fusing of two prokaryotes—tiny life forms that do not have a cellular nucleus. UCLA molecular biologist James A. Lake reports important new insights about prokaryotes and the evolution of life in the Aug. 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature....
Lake is interested in learning how every organism is related.
"We all are interested in our ancestors," he said. "A friend at UC BERKELEY, ALAN WILSON, was the first person to collect DNA from large numbers of people around the world. He showed that we are all related to a woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. Some in the media called her Eve. He called her the Lucky Mother, the mother of us all.... Full Story
21. Fremont's Little Kabul eyes election with hope
San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2009
Sam Saleh's Little Kabul Market off Fremont's Thornton Avenue offers a little piece of Afghanistan to its patrons: sweets, meats, and kites, their strings laced with glass to make them weapons in traditional Afghan kite fighting.
As Afghans went to the polls Thursday to elect the next president of the troubled nation, Saleh and his customers reflected politically on their ancestral home as well, with hope and disappointment, divided loyalties and united goals for a peaceful future....
He expected incumbent President Hamid Karzai to win, but Saleh said he wished another candidate would pull off an upset - perhaps ASHRAF GHANI, the former Afghanistan finance minister and FORMER UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR seen by several Afghans in Fremont as a well-educated, less corrupt technocratic alternative to Karzai.... Full Story
22. 'Woodstock' gets Ang Lee serious about humor
San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2009
"Taking Woodstock" is set entirely in upstate New York. But the genesis for Ang Lee's latest film has Bay Area roots, with the conception happening, of all places, in the green room at KRON-TV....
After reading Tiber's "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life," something in Lee's mind clicked. His film "The Ice Storm" was about the hangover after Woodstock, so a more inspiring movie about the event seemed like a good endeavor. And Lee was looking to film a comedy with life-affirming qualities....
JAMES SCHAMUS, Lee's longtime collaborator, "Taking Woodstock" screenwriter and RECENT UC BERKELEY DOCTORAL RECIPIENT, says the shoot was a great deal of fun, and the filmmakers hope their enjoyment of the project translates on screen.
"Very few American films are actually about being happy, or wanting the audience to feel a connection with other people in a happy way," Schamus says. "Even comedies don't necessarily work that way. What was the last movie you saw that when the credits came up you said, 'I'm feeling kind of happy'?"...
Taking Woodstock (R) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters. Full Story