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Monday, 12 October 2009
1. Two Americans with California ties win the Nobel in economics
Elinor Ostrom, originally of Los Angeles, and UC Berkeley professor Oliver Williamson share the award for outside-the-box research on the outside-the-market economy.
Los Angeles Times
October 12, 2009
Two Americans have won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences today for their research in the way economic decisions and transactions are made outside of the market.
Elinor Ostrom, a Los Angeles native who teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., became the first woman to win the prize for economics since it was established 40 years ago.
She shares the $1.4-million award with OLIVER E. WILLIAMSON, A PROFESSOR AT UC BERKELEY.
Ostrom and Williamson were cited for their work beginning in the early 1970s that expanded economics beyond the traditional analysis of market prices. Specifically, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the pair established "economic governance" as a field of research that had "greatly enhanced our understanding of non-market institutions...."
Williamson, who was born in Superior, Wis., and received a PhD in economics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1963, "proposed a theory to clarify why some transactions take place inside firms and not in markets." The committee said his research offered insights into conflict resolutions at businesses and other organizations.
He "has argued that markets and hierarchical organizations, such as firms, represent alternative governance structures which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest," the Nobel panel said. "The drawback of markets is that they often entail haggling and disagreement. The drawback of firms is that authority, which mitigates contention, can be abused."
Williamson and Ostrom will be honored Dec. 10 in Stockholm. The economics prize was launched in 1969 by the Swedish central bank in honor of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist who established the awards for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature in his will in 1896.
[Similar stories appeared in the following sources: KGO Radio, NPR's "Planet Money", AP Newswire, Voice of America, Chicago Tribune, Reuters, New York Times, Times Online (UK), Wall Street Journal MarketWatch, Kansas City Star, Inside Higher Ed, BBC News, and many more.] Full Story
2. UC Berkeley tightens personal data security with data-masking tool
Computer World
October 12, 2009
To better safeguard the personal data of its students, the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY (UC BERKELEY) has adopted a specialized data-masking technique in its application development work that effectively can hide data in plain sight by mixing it up.
Data such as students' first and last names can be switched around to camouflage the real names, and sensitive information such as student identification numbers also undergoes a gentle jumbling so what appears to the eye is not the true number. It's done with a tool called datamasker from dataguise. STEVE MCCABE, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION IN UC BERKELEY'S RESIDENTIAL AND STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM, says the advantage in using the dataguise tool is it significantly reduces security risks around personal, sensitive data.
"Student IDs paired with names becomes restricted data here," says McCabe, describing some of the data-privacy rules that the university must follow. But the challenge has been how to enforce restrictions in a software-development environment where constant work by several developers is ongoing to support UC Berkeley's home-grown Web-based applications for SQL Server, such as the housing and assignment system....
UC Berkeley, like many universities, has suffered consequential data breaches. In May, UC Berkeley acknowledged a data breach in which it said hackers broke into its health-services databases, compromising health-related information on about 160,000 individuals. Full Story
3. UC Berkeley students stage library sit-in
San Francisco Chronicle
October 11, 2009
Several hundred UC BERKELEY STUDENTS took over the anthropology library for 24 hours this weekend to protest UC-wide budget cuts, in particular Saturday closures of small campus libraries that students use for studying and research.
Organizers said nearly 300 students - along with dozens of supportive staff and faculty members - showed up at the anthropology library shortly before 5 p.m. Friday, when the facility was scheduled to close for the weekend.
Instead, students flooded the room and set up camp - arranging their books and laptops on long tables and setting out food and pillows and blankets. About 80 students spent the night in the library, some studying almost all night, others curled up to sleep in corners and between high bookcases. On Saturday, students continued to study and hold teach-ins to talk about campus budget issues until 5 p.m., the library's usual closing time.
"We want to bring attention to the larger issue, and make a point that it is not simply a budget crisis that has led us here, it's a mismanagement of money," said CALLIE MAIDHOF, A GRADUATE STUDENT IN ANTHROPOLOGY who helped organize the library sit-in.
UC is facing one of the worst financial crises in its history, attempting to close a budget gap of more than $750 million. Administrators have called for unpaid furloughs and layoffs, and the regents are also expected to raise next year's tuition to $10,302, a 45 percent increase over last year's tuition.
UC Berkeley administrators closed all but two of the campus' 20 or so libraries on Saturdays this year to save money.
University officials said Saturday that they understand - and share - students' frustrations with the library closures and other budget cuts. Full Story
4. Proposal would reduce UC diversity
San Francisco Chronicle
October 12, 2009
A plan proposed by The Chronicle in a Sept. 18 editorial to find new revenues for the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA could mean only the rich and well-connected would be able to attend the state's best public universities. The Chronicle chastised University of California students and faculty for protesting a proposed 44 percent student fee increase and faculty/staff furloughs to offset state budget cuts. The editorial said, "We need new thinking, not outbursts."
The editorial proposed a three-tier tuition system, where students attending UC's most prestigious and most popular campuses (BERKELEY and UCLA) would pay the highest fees, less to attend Davis, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, and the least to attend Merced, Riverside and Irvine campuses.
The creators of the California Master Plan for Higher Education envisioned a system of higher education guaranteeing an inexpensive, quality college education for any high school graduate, ranging from the community colleges and the California State University system, to the University of California. The Master Plan mandated that top California high school graduates receive priority admission to any UC undergraduate campus. A three-tier tuition system such as The Chronicle proposed would bestow elite status upon Berkeley and UCLA, while relegating other UC schools to second- or third-class status. A student attending Berkeley or UCLA should not have to pay more than other UC students....
The University of California has become the world's most prestigious university system. It's important that UC continue to give California residents first priority in admission, including black and Latino California students, who have been historically underrepresented at UC campuses.
[Similar coverage appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and on CBS News.]
5. Bay Area cities lag in making housing quake-safe
San Francisco Chronicle
October 12, 2009
In the 20 years since the Loma Prieta earthquake, some of the Bay Area's most dangerous schools, roadways and buildings have been shored up. And while hospitals have a long way to go, most have plans to undergo retrofitting.
But when it comes to housing - where people spend most of their time - many Bay Area cities have done little to prepare for a major temblor that scientists say has a 62 percent chance of striking the region in the next 30 years.
Only a handful of cities have provided even basic information or minimal incentives to help owners retrofit their properties. And although most experts agree that mandatory programs are the only way to ensure widespread retrofits, such mandates are just now being considered....
"We have been retrofitting public infrastructure, but in the Bay Area and California, we have done a miserable job of retrofitting where we live," said PETER YANEV, A SEISMIC ENGINEER AND AUTHOR WHO SITS ON ENGINEERING ADVISORY COUNCILS AT UC BERKELEY and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "In San Francisco, there are hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are not retrofitted, and they are a risk to people's lives."
Other experts say it makes some sense that officials largely have ignored the potential danger presented by shaky housing. Government mandates instead have focused on critical institutions as well as unreinforced brick buildings, which cause the most deaths in earthquakes worldwide... Full Story
6. Newhouse: An American tragedy in Oakland
San Jose Mercury News
October 12, 2009
Chauncey Bailey was a muckraker. That's not all he was, but it was his public image, and it cost him his life.
Muckraking is the equivalent of knighthood in journalism — the diligent, investigative, raking-the-muck probing that rights societal wrongs. And Bailey had ascended to muckraking knight in the Oakland community.
Then he was slain in 2007. Bailey's death was the most prominent killing of an American journalist since the 1976 car-bombing death of The Arizona Republic's Don Bolles....
Speaking of winning awards, ZACHARY STAUFFER, 30, of Oakland, was honored this year by the Fargo (N.D.) Film Festival for producing the Best Short Documentary, "A Day Late in Oakland," about Bailey, who was the Oakland Post editor when he was killed while investigating financial improprieties involving Your Black Muslim Bakery.
Stauffer's 261/2-minute documentary, which was HIS MASTER'S THESIS AT UC BERKELEY, will be shown at the Oakland International Film Festival today at 5 p.m. at the Jack London Theater and Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. at Merritt College.
Stauffer majored in history at Boston College with a filmmaking minor, intending to merge both fields of study into the role of documentarian. After moving to Oakland, he worked for a year at the East Bay Conservation Corps, helping Oakland kids acquire job skills along with their high school diplomas....
The yearlong project took Stauffer from Oakland to New York, where he interviewed former East Bay Express reporter Chris Thompson. Finally, after attaining his master's degree, Stauffer evaluated what he had learned mostly from his investigation.
"Questions of responsibility of the media was the thing that eventually rose to the surface for me," he said, "the culpability across the board of politicians in Oakland who were eager to have a photo op with bakery members and media who, somewhat frequently, would write puff pieces about the organization...."
Stauffer now is based in Berkeley, working for KQED-Channel 9's "Frontline." His next project: a documentary on the credit card industry to be televised in November.... Full Story
7. Meet 4.4 million year old Ardi
TheTicker.com
October 12, 2009
Researchers claim that Ardi, a 4.4 million years old hominid, could move like a quadreped and walk upright, albeit slowly.
On Oct. 1st, paleontologists unveiled the fossil skeleton of Ardi, the newest missing link between humans and chimpanzees. Ardi, short for ardipithecus ramidus, was first discovered in 1992 on a barren region in the Awash River of Ethiopia.
Approximately 4.4 million years old, Ardi predates Lucy, the famous hominid found in 1974 and previously thought to have been the oldest ancestor to humans, by over 1.2 million years.
DR. TIM D. WHITE OF UC-BERKELEY, who led a team of international scientists in the discovery of Ardi, told The New York Times that Ardi is very crucial to understanding human evolution and that she will shed light on “the initial stage of [human] evolutionary adaptation.” The discovery has surprised scientists, as Ardi refutes the hypothesis that bipedalism was an adaptation for grassy terrain....
Dr. White and his colleagues are hopeful of making the next discovery, as there remain more sites to be dug up throughout Africa. Full Story
8. Need some job luck? Be a suck-up
Detroit News
October 12, 2009
The state jobless numbers come out Wednesday, and chances are good that Michigan will continue to top the August rate of 15.2 percent unemployment that made us the worst job market in the nation.
If you're out of a job, it could be a long while until you find someone willing to give you a new one. And if you've got a job, chances are you want to keep your boss completely happy.
So should you be networking? Posting your resume at online job boards? Practicing your penmanship for that "Will Work For Food" sign?
Nah. According to UC BERKELEY BUSINESS PROFESSOR JENNIFER CHATMAN, the one best thing you can do if you really want to land or hang on to a job is: suck up....
A research project that Chatman calls "one of my more depressing studies" found that job-seekers who made an effort to ingratiate themselves with their interviewers were 20 percent more likely to get the job....
"What we found was that the higher the level of sucking up, the more likely the person got the job offer," Chatman says. "It didn't really matter how real it was."
In fact, she says, the more obviously obsequious the sucking up was, the better it worked.
"You'd think there would be a point where it would be so drippingly transparent that it feels inauthentic and disgusting, and the recipient would see what the person was trying to do," she says. "But we never found that tipping point where it was too much...." Full Story
9. The Death of One Historian Leads Another to Dorothea Lange
City Brights: An SFGate.com blog
October 11, 2009
In 1932, the photographer DOROTHEA LANGE and her husband, the famed Western illustrator Maynard Dixon, spent the summer on a two thousand acre ranch along the shores of Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe. It was an idyllic period, not only because the couple got to spend time with their children, who had been living in boarding schools, but because photographer Imogene Cunningham, her husband Roi Partridge, and their children were also there.
For months, the two families lived in a timbered hunting lodge that had been loaned to them by the daughter of E.J. "Lucky" Baldwin, who had made his fortune in the Nevada silver mines. They clambered on granite boulders, swam in the cold clear water, cooked and ate fish they had caught, and cleansed themselves in a sweat lodge that Dixon built. It was a magical interlude during the Great Depression, and a reflection of a particularly Western bohemian lifestyle.
On Monday, dozens of descendants of Lange, Dixon, Cunningham, Partridge, and Lange's second husband, the UC BERKELEY ECONOMICS PROFESSOR PAUL TAYLOR, will gather in Berkeley to celebrate the publication of a major new biography of Lange. The book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, is the culmination of eight years of work by Linda Gordon, the Florence Kelley Professor of History at NYU and one of the country's preeminent historians....
Gordon will be reading from the book on Tuesday Oct. 13 at 6 p.m. at Book Passage in the Ferry Building and on Wednesday Oct. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Kepler's in Menlo Park.... Full Story