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Monday, 31 August 2009
1. 'Synthetic biology' holds promise, but doubts simmer
Synthetic Biologists Reengineer Living Things Today, Hope to Create Synthetic Life Tomorrow
USA Today
August 31, 2009
"Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today.
That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life.
"If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla. Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch."
That makes experts, including human genome pioneers Craig Venter of Rockville, Md., and JAY KEASLING OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, hopeful and cautious at the same time about the promise and peril of the field.
In July, a team led by Carole Lartigue of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., reported the field's latest advance in the journal Science: a way to genetically engineer bacteria, previously considered impossible. "Nobody else has done anything remotely like this before," Venter says.
The immediate application is engineering defanged vaccine strains for use against the bacteria family chosen for the study. But a lot of other ideas are cooking, from saving the planet from global warming to figuring out just how life started in the first place.... Full Story
2. Plasmons create smallest laser - again
Laser Focus World
August 31, 2009
Earlier this month researchers from Purdue, Cornell and Norfolk State universities reported demonstration of the smallest laser ever --, consisting of a nanoparticle just 44 nm across. Strictly speaking it was a spaser --, or surface plasmon laser. Now it's the turn OF RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. This week in an article in Nature the Berkeley researchers claim to have created the smallest semiconductor laser ever. Their new device can generate light in a space just 5 nm in size.
In a typical laser the cavity length must be at least as big as half the wavelength of the light--about 200 nm for visible light. Realizing a device that can break the diffraction limit is expected to pave the way for many new applications, like optical computers that use light instead of electrons to process information, biosensors and nanometer-sized photonic circuits....
But by separating a cadmium sulphide semiconductor nanowire from a metallic silver surface with a 5 nm thick insulating layer of magnesium fluoride, the Berkeley researchers have overcome this problem. Because it is non-metallic the insulating layer allows the SPPs to last longer. The so-called "hybrid plasmonic waveguide" can concentrate light into an area as much as 100 times smaller than a diffraction-limited spot.
According to PROFESSOR XIANG ZHANG, WHO LED THE RESEARCH TEAM, the impact of plasmonic lasers on optoelectronics integration is potentially significant because the optical fields of these devices rival the smallest commercial transistor gate sizes and thereby reconcile the length scales of electronics and optics. Full Story
3. UC Berkeley Police Efforts Led to Kidnap Arrest
UC Berkeley officers' suspicions led to arrest of suspect in kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard
ABC News
August, 29, 2009
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Two quick-thinking police employees at the University of California, Berkeley described Friday how they set in motion Jaycee Lee Dugard's release after nearly two decades of captivity when they encountered her alleged captor on campus.
Phillip Garrido, who was distributing bizarre religious material with two girls in tow, seemed incoherent and mentally unstable, Lisa Campbell said. The girls wore drab-colored dresses, were unusually subdued, had unnaturally pale complexions and appeared robotic and rehearsed when they spoke, she said.
Campbell also wondered why the girls weren't in school.
"There were some things about him and the kids that were really alarming, that just didn't settle right with me," said Campbell, who previously worked as a police officer in Chicago and a background investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department.
So she and colleague Ally Jacobs notified Garrido's parole officer, who was surprised to hear the parolee had two young daughters and ordered the suspect to report to his office.
On Wednesday, Garrido arrived to see the parole officer with his wife, the two girls and a woman who initially identified herself as Allissa. She turned out to be Dugard and investigators said Garrido confessed to kidnapping her from her South Lake Tahoe neighborhood in 1991 when she was 11.
Campbell, who manages special events for Berkeley campus police, said the 58-year-old Garrido and the two girls — ages 11 and 15 with blond hair and blue eyes — first came to her office Monday because he wanted to hold an event related to a group called God's Desire, saying it involved the government and was going to be "really big."
Campbell scheduled a Tuesday meeting with Garrido and notified Ally Jacobs, a campus police officer. Jacobs ran a record check on Garrido and discovered he was a registered sex offender who had been convicted of rape and kidnapping more than 30 years ago.
Jacobs, who sat in on Tuesday's meeting, said she was also increasingly suspicious when she met Garrido and his daughters.
Garrido gave them copies of a book he had written called "Origin of Schizophrenia Revealed." He told them about his rape and kidnapping convictions but said he had turned his life around.
When Jacobs asked the girls about school, she said they responded "like robots" that they were in 4th and 9th grades, were home-schooled by their mother and had a 29-year-old sister at home. When Jacobs asked the younger girl about a bump on her eye, "she immediately replied with this very rehearsed response, 'It's a birth defect.'"
"They seemed a little out of touch with reality and robotic," said Jacobs, 33. "I just got a weird uneasy feeling."
When the younger daughter stared at her, Jacobs said, "It was almost like she was looking into my soul. That's how her eyes were so penetrating. And she had this smile on her face."
Jacobs said she let Garrido and the girls leave after their roughly 15-minute meeting on Tuesday because she couldn't find any reason to detain him, but she called his parole officer to express her concerns.
Jacobs recalled that before Garrido left, he grabbed his older daughter and said, "'I'm so proud of my girls. They don't know any curse words. We raised them right. They don't know anything bad about the world.'"
[A similar story appear on Inside Higher Ed.] Full Story
4. UC's return of Japanese bones put on hold
San Francisco Chronicle
August 30, 2009
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum's collection of human remains from Saipan appears to have touched Japan's cultural, political and religious sensitivities concerning World War II, causing Japanese officials to balk at accepting UC Berkeley's offer to return the skulls and bones.
"The remains are not verified as ones of Japanese, so the Japanese government is asking for additional information," Tadayuki Mizutani, a first secretary at Japan's Embassy in Washington, said Friday.
But the museum's documentation on the remains is sketchy.
Although its card catalogs list some of the Saipan remains as "Japanese who committed suicide during the American invasion," UC ANTHROPOLOGISTS can only verify that the remains are of East Asian origin.
Japan isn't keen to repatriate the skulls and bones of non-Japanese.
Because of Japan's long history of Buddhism, a person's lineage is considered significant and human remains are treated with reverence. The dead are often cremated, and their ashes buried in a family grave.
PROFESSOR DUNCAN WILLIAMS, DIRECTOR OF UC BERKELEY'S CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES, said that Japan has good reason to tread carefully.
"This is a hot political issue in Japan for family members for whom deceased soldiers cannot be identified," he said. "This is not just any remains, but remains of those who passed away in World War II. The Japanese government and people are trying to ... come to closure with Japan's role in that war." Full Story
5. FAQ: BOINC software for volunteer grid computing
InfoWorld
August 31, 2009
Being middleware, BOINC isn't nearly as well known as some of the grid computing-based volunteer projects – like SETI@home [1] and Rosetta@home [2] -- that exploit it. But the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is pretty amazing software. Here's a closer look.
View slideshow of 12 cool grid computing projects that you can volunteer your spare PC processing cycles to. [3]
[ Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter [4] and InfoWorld Daily podcast [5]. ]
What is BOINC?
An open source software platform for volunteer and grid computing projects. The software runs in the background on any type of computer, exploiting otherwise idle computing resources. Scientists have used BOINC to create volunteer computing projects, universities use it to build virtual supercomputing centers and corporations use it for grid computing.
Where did BOINC come from?
DAVID ANDERSON [6], A RESEARCH SCIENTIST AT THE UC BERKELEY SPACE SCIENCES LABORATORY, founded the BOINC project in 2002. The National Science Foundation provides funding.... Full Story
6. Cheney assails Obama on Justice Dept. CIA probe
San Francisco Chronicle
August 31, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney lashed out at President Barack Obama and the attorney general Sunday, saying the Justice Department's recent decision to investigate whether CIA operatives broke the law in their interrogation of terrorism suspects was politically motivated and dangerous to U.S. national security.
"I just think it's an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say," Cheney said in an interview that aired on "Fox News Sunday."...
Cheney also said - as he has before - that the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved countless American lives and prevented terrorist attacks al-Qaida was trying to launch in the seven years after the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The techniques included waterboarding, which simulates drowning....
"The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it?" Cheney said. "Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions."
Cheney's comments appeared to be the first Bush-administration confirmation that a still-classified Justice Department report into the activities of the lawyers in its own Office of Legal Counsel will recommend that some of them be disbarred for their roles in approving the enhanced interrogation techniques.
That report by the Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to be released soon. All the lawyers in question have left the Justice Department, but one, Jay S. Bybee, is a federal judge. The others are JOHN YOO, A PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, and Steven Bradbury.... Full Story
7. Walk this way - urge 'sustainable development
San Francisco Chronicle
August 30, 2009
The real estate collapse has masked the existence of a severe housing shortage in California. While developers have oversupplied single-family detached homes with backyards, buyers looking for a home within walking distance of jobs, services, good schools, parks and public transit have few options in this state. Communities that have these "sustainable development" characteristics, such as neighborhoods in San Francisco, Pasadena and San Diego, are often among the most expensive in the state. They are also few and far between compared with the vast stretches of suburban homes covering the state....
In addition to being in demand, sustainable development represents a critical means of combatting climate change. Auto pollution represents the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and our auto-dependent development patterns are the direct cause. The Urban Land Institute's 2007 book, "Growing Cooler," concludes that even with future improvements in fuel efficiency, we will need to remove the roadblocks to sustainable development in order to fight climate change. And more compact, walkable neighborhoods create additional environmental benefits, such as preserving open space and agricultural land and reducing the air pollution that causes smog.
Local governments tend to restrict the type of housing, retail and jobs mixes that are central to sustainable development. Even with major transit stops in place, local restrictions stymie growth out of fear of increased traffic and a desire to preserve the "character of the neighborhood." But the reality is that these developments, when done right, often decrease traffic by allowing residents the option of walking more, and they typically become desirable places that boost nearby property values.
What can be done to make walkable communities commonplace? At a recent workshop with some of the state's leading sustainable developers and UCLA and Berkeley Law scholars, participants cited three key solutions:... Full Story
8. Bundled mortgages pose problems for housing program
Palm Beach Post
August 30, 2009
Seventy-year-old Barbara Harris can't help crying when she walks around her neighborhood. She says she hates seeing possessions piled up on front lawns - the remnants of foreclosure. Three times, the Harrises received foreclosure notices and thought they'd be next....
Homeowners with securitized mortgages could be disproportionately denied modifications under the federal Making Home Affordable program. Under the program, participating mortgage companies must modify loans for all qualified borrowers; the only exception is when a contract with investors prohibits the modification....
This conundrum hits those most in need; homeowners whose loans were securitized by banks are five times more likely to be severely delinquent on payments than other homeowners....
The names of investors who actually buy mortgage-backed securities aren't publicly available, but typically they can be foreign governments, 401(k)s, college endowments and pension funds. In any given security, "there could be literally anywhere from one to commonly several dozen institutional investors, and those institutional investors will be representing literally thousands of pensioners and individual investors," says Bill Frey, head of Greenwich Financial Services.
Servicers like Wells Fargo rely on agreements with investors for guidance on when modifications are allowed. These pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) are regularly cited as the reason a servicer can't change a loan.
In reality, however, the contracts themselves generally don't limit modifications. In a study due out this month, RESEARCHERS AT UC BERKELEY'S LAW SCHOOL looked at the contracts covering three-quarters of the subprime loans that were securitized in 2006. The researchers found that only 8 percent prohibited modifications outright. About a third of the loans were in contracts that said nothing about modification, and the rest set some limits but generally gave the servicers a lot to leeway to modify, particularly for homeowners that had defaulted or would likely default soon. Full Story
9. A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style
New York Times
August 31, 2009
The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.
Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors....
The judge, Arthur M. Schack, 64, fashions himself a judicial Don Quixote, tilting at the phalanxes of bankers, foreclosure facilitators and lawyers who file motions by the bale. While national debate focuses on bank bailouts and federal aid for homeowners that has been slow in coming, the hard reckonings of the foreclosure crisis are being made in courts like his, and Justice Schack’s sympathies are clear....
His opinions, too, have been greeted by a cry of affront from a bank official or two, who say this judge stands in the way of what is rightfully theirs. HSBC bank appealed a recent ruling, saying he had set a “dangerous precedent” by acting as “both judge and jury,” throwing out cases even when homeowners had not responded to foreclosure motions....
Little drama attends the release of his decisions. Beaten-down homeowners rarely show up to contest foreclosure actions, and the judge scrutinizes the banks’ papers in his chambers. But at legal conferences, judges and lawyers have wondered aloud why more judges do not hold banks to tougher standards.
“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said KATHERINE M. PORTER, A VISITING PROFESSOR AT THE SCHOOL OF LAW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”... Full Story
10. Experts: Kidnap victim faces difficult recovery
San Francisco Chronicle
August 30, 2009
She should have been in high school and going on first dates, maybe leaving home for college, finding her first apartment, falling in love - growing up.
But Jaycee Lee Dugard, now 29, spent her formative years in captivity. Kidnapped at age 11 in South Lake Tahoe, she gave birth to two daughters when she was just a teenager, and likely lived with the near-constant threat of fear and abuse for 18 years.
She was found Wednesday in Antioch, and Thursday saw her mother for the first time since June 1991. But her recovery has barely started, say experts in child psychiatry and post-traumatic stress.
How well she progresses, along with her two children, depends on the quality of professional help she receives, and the strength of her support network.
"Someone asked me if I think she'll ever have a normal life. I'm not sure 'normal' is the word," said PAULA FASS, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT UC BERKELEY AND AUTHOR of the book "Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America." "But let's hope she can still live decently and reconnect with that earlier life. The challenge will be to try to integrate these two parts of her life - before she was taken, and her children now - in a way that can be meaningful."... Full Story
11. How we’re losing our privacy online
Christian Science Monitor
August, 31, 2009
From personal photos circulated inadvertently on Facebook to ‘Web bugs’ that monitor our buying habits, the Internet is exposing the private us to the public more than any technology in history. Here’s why you should care – and how to avoid it.
...The infiltration of Heyman’s account is the most egregious form of an invasion of personal privacy that is becoming one of the most pressing issues of the Digital Age. As we live more of our lives online, entrusting our most private information to social networks and other Web-based entities, the Internet is becoming our primary means of communication, as well as our filing cabinet; our shoebox to store photos, videos, and letters; and our safe-deposit box of valuable documents.
But the question looms: How safe or discreet is this material?
Not very, according to a growing number of experts. As we slip further into the Internet era, they argue that we are every day surrendering more of the private us to the public domain. Much of it is innocuous. We send a friend an edgy joke by e-mail, which gets passed around until, at some point, our sense of humor ends up getting deconstructed by half the population of Moldova....
Yet experts worry about ones that are far more common, even if less insidious. Consider “behavioral advertising.” It occurs when information about the online activities of people is gathered surreptitiously in order to target ads at them. One chief culprit is Web bugs, tags that track users as they move from website to website. They help compile a profile of what a person’s likes and dislikes are, which can then be sold to companies. A study at the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY released in June showed that all of the top 50 most-visited websites had between 1 and 100 Web bugs embedded in them when checked over one month. Google alone had placed a Web bug on 92 of the top 100 sites.... Full Story
12. Ford to work with opposing union members
Business Standard
August 30, 2009
Ford Motor Co, seeking labour concessions granted to the US rivals, is working to bridge a gap with the United Auto Workers amid union resistance to a second round of 2009 givebacks, people familiar with the talks said.
Ford’s labour chief, Joe Hinrichs, was told by UAW officials when bargaining began on August 25 that members would reject further concessions, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the sessions are private. Senior negotiators held a daylong meeting yesterday, a third person said.
“Their differences are significant and difficult, but they’re talking,” said HARLEY SHAIKEN, LABOUR PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. “A long discussion means you have something to talk about; stalemates tend to be short.” Full Story
13. More questions than answers on Google Books
CNET News
August 31, 2009
Google's Dan Clancy had patiently answered question after question regarding Google's' Book Search settlement with publishers and authors until late in the afternoon last Friday, when he was finally left speechless.
Louis Trager, a reporter from Washington Internet Daily, asked Clancy what kind of message was sent when Google decided to "copy first and answer questions later". The question--for which there's no safe answer, if you're in Clancy's shoes--perhaps underscored the core of the opposition to the settlement, reached in October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission.
If the class action settlement is approved, Google stands to gain control of a priceless asset. JASON SCHULTZ, ACTING DIRECTOR OF UC BERKELEY'S SAMUELSON LAW, TECHNOLOGY, AND PUBLIC POLICY CLINIC, called it "the largest copyright-licensing deal in U.S. history": the right to display the contents of out-of-print books that are still covered by copyright protection....
"The value of the book as data is greater than value of the book itself," said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive and perhaps the most vocal critic of the settlement. And who will control access to a valuable group of books? A for-profit corporation, which, by the way, paid just US$125 million for the license to that information. It paid US$1.65 billion for YouTube.
Google likes to say that anyone can cut deals with the Book Rights Registry, the nonprofit organization set up after the settlement to handle payments to right holders, to get similar access to out-of-print yet in-copyright books. The thing is, the number of organizations that can afford to duplicate Google's efforts is limited.
Clancy declined to say how much Google has spent on scanning books, but the Internet Archive spends about US$30 for each book scanned. If Google's costs are similar, that's US$300 million and counting; there are about 23 million books in the WorldCat database. Microsoft folded its book-scanning project, once it realized that Google was aggressively going after that market, said TOM LEONARD, THE HEAD LIBRARIAN AT UC BERKELEY, which had been part of a book-scanning partnership with Microsoft....
The thing is, it's a fair question: Google has the financial resources and collective intelligence to do nearly anything it wants in the world. Where will Google turn its information vacuum next? Will it ask permission first?
[Similar stories also appeared in PC World, Media Bistro, Resource Shelf, MIS Asia, Forbes, and the San Francisco Chronicle.] Full Story
14. Gene-synthesis industry at odds over how to screen DNA orders
Low standards could mean that hazardous genes get through screening more easily
Nature
August 31, 2009
A standards war is brewing in the gene-synthesis industry. At stake is the way that the industry screens orders for hazardous toxins and genes, such as pieces of deadly viruses and bacteria. Two competing groups of companies are now proposing different sets of screening standards, and the results could be crucial for global biosecurity.
"If you have a company that persists with a lower standard, you can drag the industry down to a lower level," says lawyer STEPHEN MAURER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, who is studying how the industry is developing responsible practices. "Now we have a standards war that is a race to the bottom."
For more than a year a European consortium of companies called the International Association of Synthetic Biology (IASB) based in Heidelberg, Germany, has been drawing up a code of conduct that includes gene-screening standards. Then, at a meeting in San Francisco last month, two of the leading companies — DNA2.0 of Menlo Park, California, and Geneart of Regensburg, Germany — announced that they had formulated a code of conduct that differs in one key respect from the IASB recommendations.
Both codes involve an automated step, in which the genes in a customer's order are compared against those from organisms on lists such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 'select agents' list. This step uses computer programs such as the US National Center for Biotechnology Information's Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), which searches for similarities between gene sequences....
He also says that discussions on governance of gene synthesis have been going on among policy experts and governments for many years, with no definitive conclusion. "We decided to standardize everything, make it consistent, and move on," he says.
Other companies have not yet decided where they stand on the issue. In November, the IASB will convene a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss adopting its code of conduct. But already, some companies are intrigued by the DNA2.0/Geneart proposal....
Maurer says he hopes that government officials in the United States, the country most concerned about biosecurity, will step in and communicate with industry about its preferred standard. So far, many branches of the government have been involved in working on potential regulations, but none has offered opinions on concrete issues such as screening standards.... Full Story
15. The high cost of incarceration
Across U.S., urban communities devastated
The Charlotte Post
August 31, 2009
In communities around the country, black people are missing. Neighborhoods languish. Dreams deferred rot in distant warehouses we call prisons. The similarities between the correctional system and slavery are eerie: Families ripped apart. Traditions lost or never made. The shipment of flesh, the pipeline that nearly guarantees black children go from the cradle to the prison; the insane profits made by warehousing human beings; the burden borne forever by those labeled as “convicts.”
Today, a brutal recession which dictates the need to cut budgets and proof that mass incarceration does not reduce crime is changing conversations in legislative halls around the country. Some politicians, who in the past have only paid attention to fearful constituents who want to make sure people who commit crimes are locked up, are beginning to consider alternatives to imprisonment. Meanwhile prison reform advocates are wondering if a black president and a black attorney general means a quicker end to the disparity in incarceration between blacks and whites.
Prison “was never a tool to fight crime. It is an instrument to manage deprived and dishonored populations, which is quite a different task,” says LOIC WACQUANT, A RENOWNED ETHNOGRAPHER AND SOCIAL THEORIST WHO TEACHES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. Through e-mail, Wacquant warns that the journey between slavery and mass incarceration must include two other “peculiar” institutions created to define and confine blacks: “Jim Crow and the urban ghetto.” Now, he says, “in the post-civil rights era, the penal system has gradually been recast to mean black—and increasingly, Latino.”
“The explosive prison growth of the past 30 years didn’t happen by accident, and it wasn’t driven primarily by crime rates or broad social and economic forces beyond the reach of state government,” according to a report by the Pew Center on the States titled, “One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections.” The report states, “It was the direct result of sentencing, release and other correctional policies that determine who goes to prison and how long they stay.”... Full Story
16. Assessment Denied: the National Research Council's Sins of Omission
Chronicle of Higher Education
August 31, 2009
For almost three years, research universities and doctoral programs across the country have pulled out all the stops to participate in the Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States, conducted by the National Research Council of the National Academies. With its much-delayed release due this fall, the report affects the reputations and relative standings of universities across the nation, and stands as the authoritative source on the quality of American doctoral programs.
The NRC has apparently gone to great lengths in its effort to assess doctoral programs. It surveyed institutions, programs, faculty members, and doctoral students on a wide range of issues, including faculty diversity, productivity, research focus, educational background, and advising load; doctoral-student admission criteria, financial support, health benefits, completion rates by race/ethnicity and gender, time to degree, and training and mentoring received; and faculty perceptions of the quality of doctoral programs at other universities in their disciplinary fields. The council even included questions regarding postdoctoral positions and the way they are defined in local settings....
For such thoroughness and high rates of participation among subject institutions and programs, the National Research Council is to be lauded, particularly as it offers an alternative to the oft-criticized U.S. News & World Report "Best Graduate Schools" rankings.
But something is missing from this influential report: a diverse range of fields that accurately reflects the breadth of academe and its research-doctorate recipients. Our analysis of Ph.D. fields that will be included and excluded from the NRC's assessment, viewed in light of demographic patterns of recent degrees granted, suggests that the selection deemed worthy of assessment may suffer from a form of implicit bias....
What accounts, then, for this seemingly odd pattern of doctorates awarded to people in various demographic groups by fields included and excluded in the current NRC assessment? The exempted fields—including education, business, social work, psychological counseling, library science, home economics, and subfields of the health and agricultural sciences—share a professional and applied orientation as opposed to a basic research one. Many also emphasize public scholarship, a tradition that favors the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement....
To be sure, the National Research Council is to be commended for guarding against commercialization of its doctoral-program assessments and for its commitment to detailed quality assessment, methodology, and disciplinary taxonomy. And it is moving in the right direction by including nursing, public health, communications, and emerging, cutting-edge fields such as biotechnology, nanoscience, and race, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies. But the exclusion of other fields that produce large numbers of research doctorates seems insular and retrograde. We urge the NRC and others to consider those issues and to design future assessments that are truly comprehensive and reflective of the diversity of academe. Full Story
17. Free the H-1Bs, Free the Economy
Washington Post
August 30, 2009
I have a suggestion for our President on how to boost economic growth without spending a penny: Free the H-1B's.
More than a million doctors, engineers, scientists, researchers, and other skilled workers and their families in the U.S. are stuck in ?immigration limbo." They entered the country legally and have contributed disproportionately to our nation?s competitiveness. They paid our high taxes and have been model citizens. All they want to do is to share the American dream and help us grow our economy.
They could be starting companies, buying houses, building community centers, and splurging like Americans. But because we don?t have enough permanent-resident visas (green cards) for them, they?re stuck in the same old jobs they had maybe a decade ago when they entered this country. They are getting really frustrated and many are returning to their home countries to become unwilling competitors. And they are taking our economic recovery with them.... Full Story
18. Sunday Perspective: The Other War in Afghanistan that must be won
Contra Costa Times
August 30, 2009
HERE 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....
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....
A stable, modern and functioning Afghanistan is the West's goal. But it is not worth risking the death of one more American or British soldier fighting there unless there is a bold, achievable plan to educate women, enhance their autonomy and meet their need for family planning.
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 ages 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
19. Opinion: UC system shouldn't have to fund labor institute
San Jose Mercury News
August 30, 2009
Under duress from California labor unions and union-backed politicians, the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM is funding a labor institute at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses that trains union organizers and produces biased studies to support the union political agenda. The story of why UC is funding this program at the expense of academic programs emerges in 140 pages of university documents obtained through a Public Records Act request....
With dozens of union officials on its advisory committee, the labor institute churned out biased studies and released them to the public shortly before votes on union issues at the state Legislature and at local governments. It also trained union leaders on how to be more effective in union organizing and political activism....
"I think if we give them more than $1 million or so in cash, we'd be doing a disservice to the rest of the University," said an e-mail from Debora Obley, associate vice president in the UC Budget Office. In a later e-mail, she remained dismayed about diverting limited funds from other programs to the labor institute....
Finally, UC PRESIDENT MARK YUDOF included $4 million for the labor institute in his proposed budget approved by the UC Board of Regents. This amount could have protected more than 6,000 resident undergraduate students from the fall 2009 semester fee increase of $662....
The University of California has inflicted "cruel and unusual punishment" by choosing to raise student fees and slash enrollment while surrendering to political pressure to fund political advocacy disguised as scholarship.
Meanwhile, California unions are able to collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in mandatory dues.
It's time for unions to bankroll their labor institute. Full Story
20. Resort Pays You For Getting Pregnant
FOX News 28, KAYU Spokane
August 30, 2009
Looking to get some cash back? Just get pregnant at a Caribbean resort.
The Westin Resort on Aruba is offering a new package in which couples who get pregnant at the hotel between Sept. 1 and Dec. 19 will receive a $300 "conception credit" toward a future stay, according to USA Today ....
The idea of a "procreation vacation" isn't new....
But before you drop several hundred dollars or more on a vacation, experts say you can do something very simple to increase your chances of conceiving -- reduce stress. Studies have shown that stress can prevent pregnancy by increasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can reduce sperm count and affect ovulation. These hormones can in turn affect the production of the reproduction hormone gonadotropin releasing hormone.
"Stress had already been shown to affect all those other more traditional players in the sex hormone cascade but no one had looked at GnIH yet," UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY RESEARCHER ELIZABETH KIRBY TOLD THE BALTIMORE SUN . "So, our research basically adds a new piece to the puzzle of sex and reproduction -- a new hormone known to suppress reproduction is also now known to increase in response to stress." Full Story
21. Where the Wild Things Are and Aren't
City Brights, an SFGate.com blog
August 29, 2009
We're ready for a good Rumpus, in town hall meetings across America, at the Burningman Festival starting Monday, in theaters for Ang Lee's new film on Woodstock, and reading Dave Eggers' ingenious first-person take on Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" in this week's New Yorker.
Also this week, many of us returned to a place where the rumpus doesn't rule: the classroom. At UC BERKELEY, known for its rumpuses, classes started this week amid unprecedented turmoil over budget cuts and furloughs. Staff and faculty emails have been dominated by irritable exchanges about the effects of the cutbacks so I was prepared for a similar downturn in student morale. But on the first day back at school, I walked into a classroom filled with eager faces and appreciation for a place where we could focus on one thing: learning.
I'm fascinated by advances in technology and new media, but the classroom, like the courtroom, hasn't really changed all that much. There's still a group of students and a teacher exchanging ideas, just as they did 100 years ago at Park Elementary School in Mill Valley.... Full Story