The links to the stories summarized on this page are time sensitive, so stories might no longer be online at that URL. We also include links to the original source publication itself.
Monday, 24 August 2009
1. College Feels Like Home for One Cal Student
KCBS
August 24, 2009
College Feels Like Home for One Cal Student
Berkeley, Calif. (KCBS) - This year's freshman class is settling into the dormitories at UC BERKELEY, where school starts Wednesday.
For one of the new students, his dorm room has an old, familiar feel to it.
A Led Zeppelin poster has been hung on the wall in AARON EIDELSON's first college dorm room - the same band his father listened to when he was a freshman in 1976, living in the same room, Norton 414. Remarkably, Cal freshman Aaron Eidelson is moving in to his father's old dorm room, just as two of his older brothers did before him.
"I'm just extremely excited to be continuing the tradition," said the incoming freshman. "I remember having a lot of fun visiting my brothers here."
Dad Jon Eidelson said it was comforting to keep bringing his sons back to his old freshman room. "It is nice, we have a lot of memories here. My wife and I met in this dorm."
Jon lived in 414 and Gayle lived in 606. They married their junior year. Thirty years later, UC Berkeley officials are only too happy to let each new Eidelson child have dad's old room ....
[Link to audio. Another story on this topic aired on KPIX--link to video unavailable] Full Story
2. Road to college Q&A
Oakland Tribune
August 23, 2009
FRANK WORRELL IS A PROFESSOR AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY PROGRAM IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AT UC BERKELEY. His research interests include academic talent development, at-risk youths, ethnic and racial identity, and psychosocial development.
...Q: What are the most important factors related to succeeding in college?
A: One of the most important is self-efficacy — that is, believing that you belong and can succeed in college. A second factor is self-regulation. Although students spend less time in classes, the workload in college is greater than in high school, and the onus is on the student to complete work and turn it in. There are seldom opportunities for extra credit. A third factor is persistence. When work is difficult, it is important to keep trying and not give up. Although it is not always obvious, other students are experiencing difficulties similar to yours. A fourth factor: being willing to ask for help when needed. Take advantage of professors' office hours, go to the review sessions with the teaching assistants, team with students to form study groups, and visit the academic assistance centers.
Q: What do many students and families wish they had known sooner?
A: Students and families often wish they had known about the "A to G" requirements and availability of financial aid. Students, in particular, often wish they knew more about active learning strategies and forming and using study groups well. These are useful skills to develop in middle and high school....
[This interview also appeared in the Contra Costa Times] Full Story
3. Asian Americans' Rising Suicide Rates -- Three Students Take their Lives
New America Media
August 13, 2009
Three Chinese-American students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have killed themselves in the last three months. Two died by helium asphyxiation and the cause of death of the third student, though deemed a suicide, is yet to be determined. Their stories have been covered in the Chinese language media, but remain virtually unreported in the mainstream.
These suicides are anything but isolated incidents. Popular opinion may project Asians and Asian Americans as super achievers, scoring high on the SAT, dominating prestigious colleges and working as high-paid professionals, but the dark side of that narrative is that they are much more likely than the average American to commit suicide, according to a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)....
At UC BERKELEY, more than half of the members of the Vietnamese Student Association I belonged to in the mid-1980s majored in computer science or electrical engineering. A few told me they didn’t want to become engineers. These fields were highly competitive and difficult....
I remember, too, an incident during my freshman year at Berkeley when a studious Chinese student living in my dorm tried to jump from the Campanile, the tallest structure on campus. He wanted to kill himself because, according to the gossip, he had never gotten a B before, until vector calculus or some such difficult class overwhelmed him. It took hours before he was talked down. After that incident, authorities put up metal bars to stop future jumpers....
Asian Americans have excelled higher education in the last few decades. Less than 5 percent of the country’s population, Asian Americans typically make up 10 to 30 percent of the best colleges. What’s barely explored, sadly, is the darker narrative, that subterraneous stream that runs parallel to this shining path to academic success: stress, disappointment, depression, and, when failing to make the grade, a profound if not deadly identity crisis. Full Story
4. Five universities team up to push for the lion's share of research dollars
They say Canada needs an elite group of postsecondary institutions focusing on research and graduate education
Globe & Mail
August 24, 2009
The leaders of five top universities have unleashed a raging debate on the nation's campuses, arguing that Canada needs an elite group of postsecondary institutions focusing on research and graduate education....
ROBERT BIRGENEAU, a former head of the University of Toronto and now CHANCELLOR AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, said if Canadian governments covered the full cost of research, it would not be long before a few leading institutions emerged.
The California system, which limits the role of state campuses and gives preferential funding to Berkeley and UCLA, is often used as an example that could be applied in Canada.
But Dr. Birgeneau does not hold out much hope of that, despite what he believes are significant advantages.
"It would really require a culture change and the federal government to impose itself in educational matters," he said. "It would be next to impossible at the provincial level, in my experience, because of the nature of provincial politics." Full Story
5. Op-Ed: The war for Afghanistan's women
It's not worth risking U.S. lives unless we raise the status of Afghan women.
Los Angeles Times
August 23, 2009
There are two wars going on in Afghanistan. One is to defeat the Taliban, and that war is not going well. The other is to liberate women, and that war has hardly begun. If the first war is won but the second is lost, Afghanistan will turn into a failed state -- a caldron of violence and misery, home to extremism and totally outside the Western orbit of influence.
Last week's election, however imperfect, is welcome, but it means little as long as women remain enslaved in this patriarchal, tradition-bound culture. In most of the country, a woman needs her husband's permission to leave her home. Domestic violence is tragically common. ...
Currently, Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, and -- as is the case everywhere women's rights are nonexistent or in decline -- the birthrate is high. Afghan women have an average of about seven children, and the population has been doubling about every 20 years. Today it is 34 million. According to U.N. estimates, by 2050 it could reach a staggering 90 million. That rapid population growth and the demographics that go with it drive most of Afghanistan's worst problems....
This feudal, fundamentalist, warrior society will never join the 21st century -- or even the 16th century -- unless we win the war to liberate women. Unless women are given the freedom to choose whether or when to have a child, by 2050 there will be millions more angry men age 15 to 25 in Afghanistan. If only a tiny percentage are potential insurgents or suicide bombers, no Western army, however large and however strongly backed at home, has the slightest chance of prevailing. Full Story
6. Conference Focuses On Deficits, Stimulus
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
August 24, 2009
Jackson Hole, Wyo. -- Central bankers don't make decisions on taxes and government spending, but fiscal policy was a major focus of this year's Federal Reserve conference here....
Large long-term deficits could cause "serious economic disruptions," said ECONOMIST ALAN AUERBACH OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, who co-wrote a paper presented here with William Gale of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank largely populated by Democrats.
Over the next decade, they estimated in a paper written earlier this year, the U.S. budget deficit will add up to $10 trillion, and possibly more. Credit markets, they added, have begun to signal a risk of U.S. government default, something unheard of a few years ago.
The economists gave the Obama administration's stimulus plan a mixed report card. While stimulus was needed, they said, it came too late and wasn't optimally designed. For instance, some of the administration's spending programs haven't been implemented quickly....
[A blog on this topic also appeared in the Wall Street Journal--link by subscription only] Full Story
7. Op-Ed: A Public Option That Works
New York Times (*requires registration)
August 22, 2009
Two burning questions are at the center of America’s health care debate. First, should employers be required to pay for their employees’ health insurance? And second, should there be a “public option” that competes with private insurance?
Answers might be found in San Francisco, where ambitious health care legislation went into effect early last year. San Francisco and Massachusetts now offer the only near-universal health care programs in the United States.
The early results are in. Today, almost all residents in the city have affordable access to a comprehensive health care delivery system through the Healthy San Francisco program. Covered services include the use of a so-called “medical home” that coordinates care at approved clinics and hospitals within San Francisco, with both public and private facilities. Although not formally insurance, the program is tantamount to a public option of comprehensive health insurance, with the caveat that services are covered only in the city of San Francisco....
To pay for this, San Francisco put into effect an employer-health-spending requirement, akin to the “pay or play” employer insurance mandates being considered in Congress. Businesses with 100 or more employees must spend $1.85 an hour toward health care for each employee. Businesses with 20 to 99 employees pay $1.23 an hour, and businesses with 19 or fewer employees are exempt....
The San Francisco experiment has demonstrated that requiring a shared-responsibility model — in which employers pay to help achieve universal coverage — has not led to the kind of job losses many fear. The public option has also passed the market test, while not crowding out private options. The positive changes in San Francisco provide a glimpse of what the future might look like if Washington passes substantial health reform this year.
[This story also appeared in the International Herald Tribune] Full Story
8. Editorial: Deadline to revolutionize taxes is looming
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
August 22, 2009
The future of California, from education to public safety to the overall economy, may well hinge on the success or failure of an advisory group figuring out how to modernize the state's taxes: the Commission on the 21st Century Economy.
To succeed, the commission will need to present the governor and lawmakers with a plan that has broad support from liberal and conservative members in time for the special legislative session this fall on tax reform....
Liberals, appointed by Democratic leaders, include UC BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW DEAN CHRISTOPHER EDLEY and Santa Cruz County Treasurer Fred Keeley. They oppose a flat income tax, which would transfer the burden to middle- and lower-income residents, and they make a credible case that volatility can be controlled by socking away money in rich years. Keeley also wants a tax on petroleum-based fuels.... Full Story
9. Calls to tax junk food gain ground
A surcharge on cigarettes has helped curb smoking, but will the same tactic work to fight obesity?
Los Angeles Times
August 23, 2009
"Sin taxes" on cigarettes have turned out to be the most effective weapon in the campaign to reduce smoking....
With increasing vigor, public health experts and think tanks are calling for extra taxes on foods and drinks that are heavy in calories and light on nutrition....
The flip side of taxing junk food is subsidizing healthful foods. The Department of Agriculture has calculated that cutting prices of fruits and vegetables by 10% would increase consumption by 6% to 7%....
California public schools began removing soda from vending machines in 2004, but it's unclear whether students are any thinner -- especially because the machines still sell sports drinks that contain almost as much sugar, said GAIL WOODWARD-LOPEZ, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR WEIGHT AND HEALTH.... Full Story
10. Cleaning up at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach
The friendly rivals are attracting, testing and funding cutting-edge technology to reduce emissions and fuel consumption.
Los Angeles Times
August 23, 2009
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are so busy that they move more cargo than the next five largest U.S. ports combined. They're so efficient that they process more international trade in one month than most North American harbors handle in an entire year.
Now the friendly rivals are leading the way into unexpected waters: attracting, testing and funding cutting-edge technology to reduce emissions and fuel consumption at the ports....
The ports are becoming "very important contributors for a new kind of innovation," said DAVID ROLAND-HOLST, [ADJUNCT PROFESSOR] AT THE UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR ENERGY, RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY.
"The next knowledge-intensive technology sector is going to be energy efficiency," Roland-Holst said. "They can help revolutionize traditional practices around the world while addressing climate change, the most momentous environmental issue of our time."... Full Story
11. Quest: New Nuclear
KQED Radio
August 24, 2009
In California, nuclear power has long been a subject that's "radioactive." But recent polls suggest that Californians may finally be warming up to the idea and a new study suggests that a clean energy future may not happen without it. Craig Miller reports on the prospects for a "nuclear revival" in the Golden State.
[UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR DAN KAMMEN is interviewed on this program. Link to audio] Full Story
12. Last California Auto Plant Awaits Its Fate
NPR
August 21, 2009
During the boom years of the U.S. car business, California was dotted with auto plants. Now the sole survivor may be on the verge of closing.
The New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, was a unique joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, but the partnership is now history, and thousands of jobs are on the line in Fremont, which can't afford to lose them....
It is a point of pride among members of the United Auto Workers that their plant, which can produce abut 400,000 vehicles a year, is known for its high-quality cars. NUMMI began as an experiment tying unionized U.S. workers with Japanese management practices.
"It was a big question for both sides," says HARLEY SHAIKEN, A LABOR EXPERT AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. "The result was NUMMI, and the result was an extraordinary success story."...
NUMMI is Toyota's only unionized shop in the U.S., a fact that could affect the decision. Shaiken says, however, there is another reason why Toyota may decide to leave Fremont.
"Toyota has significant excess capacity in North America, including several plants that build similar vehicles: a truck plant that is brand new in San Antonio, Texas, a car plant in Canada," he says. "So there is the possibility that the car and truck production at NUMMI could be relocated to those other plants."...
[Link to audio] Full Story
13. Science Fair Blog: Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking
USA Today Online
August 21, 2009
Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrank 15% in the decade before 2006, confirms a study of winds on the largest planet in the solar system.
In the current issue of the Icarus journal, A TEAM LED BY XYLAR ASAY-DAVIS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, estimated Jovian winds using data from the Galileo, Cassini, and the Hubble Space Telescope missions from 1996 to 2006, on the Great Red Spot.
"The change in area is real and not an observational artifact," conclude the authors, echoing a 2002 observation. One of Jupiter's best-known features, the Great Red Spot covers as much as 216,000 square miles on the King of Planets.... Full Story
14. Wired Campus Blog: Internet Seen Leveling Opportunities for Scientists
Chronicle of Higher Education Online (*requires registration)
August 24, 2009
The Internet has proved itself to be a democratizing force for a range of human endeavors, such as the simple act of selling a car or the complex task of shaming a repressive government. Could it also be leveling the playing field in scientific research?
A study led by WAVERLY W. DING, AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, suggests that it is.
For their research, Ms. Ding and colleagues at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis compared user data involving Bitnet, an Internet forerunner established by Yale University and the City University of New York, and the Domain Name System, which is the naming protocol currently used to identify addresses on the Internet.
Their findings, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, are based on a random sample of 3,771 life scientists from 430 U.S. institutions over a 25-year period. The study's conclusion is that in all three groups that were examined -- female scientists, young scientists, and scientists at lower-ranked institutions -- researchers showed greater increases in publishing productivity attributable to their use of the Internet than did researchers outside their group.... Full Story
15. F.T.C. to Assess Business of News
New York Times (*requires registration)
August 24, 2009
Just about everyone, from the general public to news executives, has an opinion about the future of journalism. Now, the Federal Trade Commission is stepping into the debate.
The commission is planning two days of workshops in December — titled “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” — to examine the state of the news industry....
Though some may be uncomfortable with government oversight of any aspect of journalism, the F.T.C. seems to be “attempting to play a facilitating and public educational role in gathering together various disciplines and perspectives to talk about the crisis in mainstream journalism,” said NEIL HENRY, A PROFESSOR AND DEAN AT THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. “The government’s willingness to raise the profile of this issue, and to help explain why it is important for a national conversation, I think in general is welcome.”
That being said, the industry may still have to fend for itself for solutions to its major problems.
“That, in the end, will be the work of journalists, business thinkers, entrepreneurs, engineers, technologists and the people ourselves,” Mr. Henry said....
[This story also appeared in the International Herald Tribune] Full Story
16. Books about the news business and blogging
San Francisco Chronicle
August 23, 2009
Losing the News
The Future of News That Feeds Democracy
By Alex S. Jones
(Oxford University Press; 234 Pages; $24.95)
Say Everything
How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters
By Scott Rosenberg
(Crown; 404 pages; $26)
Two very different books are important to understand the tumultuous and disorienting changes racing through the news business.
One, "Losing the News," is an impassioned call to action to preserve the best of traditional newspaper journalism. The other, "Say Everything," is a snappy, insider's history of a new form of communication, blogging.
Alex S. Jones, a courtly member of the fourth generation of a newspaper-owning family in Greeneville, Tenn., fears the future news landscape: "The world that looms will be one of abundant free speech, but may have a dearth of reliable, traditional news."
For Scott Rosenberg, who left the "tired old media world" of newspapers for Salon.com before embracing blogging, Jones misses the point, failing to see the wondrous possibilities of blogging. Bloggers can effortlessly link, to one another and to original source material. They can publish when they want, unencumbered by the unforgiving dictates of a news cycle. They can learn from readers by encouraging their comments.... Full Story
17. Iran's powerful Larijani brothers spell potential trouble for Ahmadinejad
Los Angeles Times Online
August 23, 2009
Cairo (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't have to look to the street protests or angry Web sites to get a sense of challenges ahead for his disputed second term. There's enough potential heat coming from right inside the country's leadership.
And these days, that trouble has a name: the brothers Larijani....
The Larijanis represent Iran's elite conservatives with a power base among the hard-line clerics in Qom, the center of Islamic learning in Iran.
There are five brothers, sons of the late Ayatollah Hashem Amoli, a respected Islamic scholar. MOHAMMAD JAVAD LARIJANI STUDIED PHYSICS AT BERKELEY and works in the judiciary; Baquer is a physician who heads the Tehran Medical University and the fifth, Fazel, was a cultural attache in Canada....
[This story appeared in dozens of sources around the world] Full Story
18. Musicals in full swing at Oakland's Woodminster Amphitheater
Oakland Tribune
August 23, 2009
'Brigadoon," the romantic Lerner and Loewe classic about a mysterious Scottish village that appears only one day every one hundred years, runs Sept. 4-13 and concludes the Woodminster Summer Musical season at the Woodminster Amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park.
Producers Associates, founded in 1967 by James and Harriet Schlader, mount these delightful musical theater performances each year in the landmark outdoor amphitheater venue that was built with Works Projects Administration labor back in the 1930s....
Documentation of the wealth of projects, such as Woodminster, that are to be found throughout the United States, is now underway, with local SCHOLAR ... AT UC BERKELEY GRAY BRECHIN leading the effort. These important contributions to civic life left by the New Deal include many of California's bridges, post offices, courthouses, playgrounds and parks. To learn more, visit www.livngnewdeal.berkeley.edu.... Full Story
19. 10 facts about California's missions
Los Angeles Times
August 21, 2009
Zorro was born at a California mission.
Figuratively speaking, that is. Author Johnston McCulley's first story about the black-masked crusader, published in 1919, was titled "The Curse of Capistrano" and set at Mission San Juan Capistrano. The first Zorro movie followed soon after.
This revelation (on Page 71) is just one among many sacred and secular nuggets to be found in "The California Missions: History, Art, and Preservation" (Getty Publications, 276 pages, hardcover, $39.95), a new coffee table book that's both scholarly and, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, "sumptuous." It has 170 color illustrations, 100 more in black-and-white, enough to give your fourth-grader a substantial advantage when time comes for that build-a-mission-with-Popsicle-sticks assignment....
Of course the missions story is tricky to tell, given the countless souls the friars intended to save, the tens of thousands of Native American lives lost, and the romantic fondness so many people have for the look of those old buildings. In their quest of photos, sketches and paintings, authors Edna E. Kimbro (who died in 2005), Julia G. Costello and Tevvy Ball, working for the Getty Conservation Institute, used sources as diverse as the UC BERKELEY'S BANCROFT LIBRARY to the National Gallery of Art, where a trove of startling watercolors and drawings turned up.... Full Story
20. Weekend Edition: Orchids
'Inflatable Love Dolls Of The Floral Kingdom'
NPR
August 22, 2009
You might know something about the birds and the bees, but did you know the bees have been having a fling with the orchids? The vivid, vibrant little flowers give what amount to come-hither looks to bees. Some even emit an aroma — a kind of Givenchy for male bees — that tricks the bees into thinking that the orchid is a female bee who finds them irresistible.
[UC BERKELEY JOURNALISM PROFESSOR] MICHAEL POLLAN, author of In Defense of Food, has written about the scandalous affair in September's National Geographic magazine. He tells NPR's Scott Simon that orchids "practice some very weird sex — even by the standards of the animal world."
The Ophrys orchid, otherwise known as the "prostitute orchid," has actually evolved to look like a female bee, viewed from the rear, with her head stuck in a green flower. The male bee starts to "pseudo-copulate," but soon realizes it's not working. Aroused, he breaks off for a more suitable mate and frantically tries again with another bloom. His exertions aren't all in vain; he does succeed in pollinating the flower....
"These are the inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom," Pollan says, but "we shouldn't laugh at them, because we, too, have been implicated in the whole thing."
"We pollinate orchids too, of course, in the orchid industry. And we're responsible for hundreds of thousands of new sexual combinations that would have been literally inconceivable without us. So I hate to say it, but we're as much orchid dupes now as the bees."
[Link to audio] Full Story
21. Figured out
We don’t understand the math, but can we get the mathematicians?
Boston Globe
August 23, 2009
“Figure,” as a noun, has multiple meanings. It can be a number: “I’ll write up those figures for you.” A person: “an eminent figure in the field.” A shape: “the figure of a triangle.” Those meanings intersect in Mariana Cook’s new book, “Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World.” It consists of 92 black-and-white portraits of just what its title says: figures who, at the highest level of their profession, work with figures.
The idea of a collection of portraits of mathematicians seems on the face of it as irrational as the square root of two. Intellectually opaque, the practice of higher mathematics is visually null. It can be understood, at least by a few people, but that doesn’t mean it can be seen. Mathematics is like theology or poetry that way. Mathematics is a kind of poetry, actually. But poets have a long history of being photogenic. Mathematicians most emphatically do not. There has yet to be a mathematician maudit, or a Byronic mathematician (other, that is, than Byron’s daughter, Ada)....
Four sitters wear sweater vests, and two wear socks with sandals. But two others wear leather jackets - and one (French, bien sur) sports a pair of quite nifty socks. There’s only one pipe smoker, one bow-tie wearer, and one turtleneck wearer. Canceling out the latter, perhaps, is the turtle that can be seen crawling across a table in the portrait of KENNETH RIBET OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY.... Full Story