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Thursday, 15 October 2009
1. Executive Education: The Art of Social Entrepreneurship
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
Since JEROME ENGEL JOINED UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS in 1991, the entrepreneurship expert has seen social entrepreneurship evolve into an increasingly attractive prospect for students. These kind of ventures aim to pair profits with societal impact. Lately, says Mr. Engel, who now chairs the NEW VENTURE CREATION AND VENTURE CAPITAL PROGRAM at the school, the school has seen more students participating in social entrepreneurship competitions and enrolling in classes on the topic. Mr. Engel spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Diana Middleton about why social entrepreneurship is snagging the attention of M.B.A. students – and what schools can do to help them do it well. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: How did social entrepreneurship take off at the school?
A: It all started about 10 years ago. A student asked me about social enterprise, and I said, "The non-profit center is down the hallway." But what the student wanted was a for-profit business that also had a social mission. From there, the leadership and initiative came from the students....
Q: Aside from classes, what are other ways Berkeley students get involved?
A: In partnership with several other schools, we also offer the Global Social Venture Competition. Students come together with real socially-minded projects they are going to pursue and compete to find a way to make it profitable. Students also have to prove and measure the social contribution.
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
2. Executive Education: M.B.A.s Seek Social Change
Enterprises with a Cause Gain Ground on Campus
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
During his M.B.A. STUDIES AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, JEFF DENBY told everyone his ultimate career goal: to start an underwear company.
Soon, professors and classmates at the HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS began to call him "the underwear guy."
But Mr. Denby—who had formerly worked in industrial design and went to business school interested in supply-chain management—decided early in his program that he wanted to create a company that was about more than just boxers or briefs. In his view, it was critical to create a product that was environmentally friendly and sustainable—and whose sales could help support good causes....
For his part, Mr. Denby, who graduated in May 2008, has long wanted to use his business skills for good. Before Mr. Denby co-launched PACT Organic Underwear as an online-only company in August, he researched all aspects of manufacturing and distribution to make sure his products would be legitimately sustainable, from the labor he employed to the inks used in the garment dye. Then he decided to pair each intricate pattern used on the underwear with a themed charity. For example, 10% of the proceeds from one blue pattern inspired by a Japanese woodcut, go to a marine conservation group.
Mr. Denby says his entrepreneurial spirit was fostered by Berkeley's curriculum. In one social entrepreneurship-focused course, guest speakers would make weekly appearances to discuss their for-profit business models. Mr. Denby also enrolled in a start-up workshop where he thought carefully about what charities to target, he says....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
3. Californians want reform but favor few reforms
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
October 14, 2009
Sacramento — When it comes to reforming the way they govern themselves, Californians are like the guy who hires a personal trainer but refuses to exercise or forgo that extra dessert.
New Field Poll figures released Wednesday at a constitutional change conference show that voters think the state needs fundamental reform.
However, they appear reluctant to make the kinds of reforms that have been widely discussed, such as reducing the two-thirds voting threshold to pass a state budget or raise taxes, modifying or eliminating term limits and altering the state tax system....
The poll was commissioned for a sold-out daylong conference called "Getting to Reform: Avenues to Constitutional Change in California," sponsored by UC BERKELEY'S INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENTAL STUDIES, Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West and Sacramento State's Center for California Studies.
The event grew out of a growing movement statewide to change the way California governs itself in the wake of policy paralysis in the Legislature and the ongoing recession....
[This story also appeared in the Oakland Tribune] Full Story
4. Insecure bosses likelier to bully, study says
San Francisco Chronicle
October 15, 2009
Bosses who feel incompetent are more likely to bully subordinates, according to a study being published in the journal Psychological Science.
In a paper titled "When the Boss Feels Inadequate," PSYCHOLOGISTS SERENA CHEN OF UC BERKELEY and Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California argue that leaders who are in over their heads tend to resort to browbeating to protect their egos.
"If people feel incompetent and they happen to be in a high-powered position, that's when the aggression kicks in," Fast said. "Power has its downsides. It elevates the standards by which people are judged and can make them less secure to the degree they feel inadequate."
In four psychological experiments performed on 410 volunteers, mostly drawn from real workplaces, the authors showed how boosting the self-esteem of an insecure boss should lessen overbearing behavior....
[Other stories on this topic appeared in the Toronto Star and New Scientist] Full Story
5. 2009 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering Awarded
Sixteen researchers will receive an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years
Dr. Dobb's Journal
October 15, 2009
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has named 16 promising scientific researchers as the 2009 recipients of Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. Each Fellow will receive an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years....
The 2009 Fellows were nominated by presidents of 50 universities that participate in the Packard Fellowship program. The 99 nominations were reviewed by the Fellowship Advisory Panel, a group of nationally recognized scientists, which then recommended 16 Fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.
The complete list of recipients of the 2009 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering is as follows:
...HOLGER MUELLER
DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Physics; to introduce new tools, such as atom interferometers, to the experimental study of gravity and the standard model of particle physics.... Full Story
6. Smog Tougher on the Obese
Atlanta Journal Constitution
October 15, 2009
Air pollution appears to hit the obese hardest, causing significant increases in blood pressure, a new study finds....
"For those who are obese, exposure to air pollution further exacerbated systolic blood pressure and pulse pressure," said lead researcher Srimathi Kannan, an assistant professor at the School of Public Health and Health Sciences of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst....
MICHAEL JERRETT, AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES AT THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, said the study "is linking into the broader debates about underlying causes of death in our society."...
Jerrett noted that air pollution is only one environmental factor that contributes to worsening health. In addition, the poor are often exposed to more air pollution because of the neighborhoods they live in, he added.
"What comes along with the social deprivation is a cascade of other lifestyle and occupational factors that may also make the person more susceptible to air pollution's effects," he said.
Those factors can include poor nutrition, stress, traffic and industrial noise, Jerrett explained. "These can be heightening their sensitivity to air pollution," he said. "So many of these susceptibility factors cluster together in the same neighborhood, in the same person." Full Story
7. New Effort For Diabetics To Preserve Their Vision
KPIX Online
October 15, 2009
Berkeley (CBS 5) ― Diabetes is the main cause of blindness in adults. But if you are uninsured or low income, getting an eye exam and paying for it may be impossible. Thanks to a professor at UC BERKELEY, there is a solution.
Shawne Kirkland of Oakland has diabetes. And, she's uninsured.
Because of that, Shawne qualifies for an unusual eye exam at the Lifelong Medical Health Center in Berkeley....
The exam involves a digital camera that takes high-resolution pictures of the patient's retina. Then, using license free, web-based software, the pictures are sent electronically to optometrists, many at Berkeley, who scan the retina for the number one cause of blindness in adults: diabetic retinopathy.
DR. JORGE CUADROS OF UC BERKELEY and the California Optometric Association explained: "When the blood sugar rises from diabetes, uncontrolled diabetes, then the small blood vessels inside the eye begin to break down and you have a lot of bleeding, scarring and tissue death, and that's generally what causes the blindness."
Dr. Cuadros is the driving force behind project, called EYEPACS.
He said annual eye exams are crucial for anyone with diabetes. However, a growing number of Californians are uninsured or under extreme economic pressure.... Full Story
8. Energy-Proportional Computing and Climate Change
Reuters
October 14, 2009
The importance of doing nothing well will play a big role in the conservation of energy and the fight against climate change.
According to a 2007 study by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, an energy-efficient computer server consumes 50 percent of its peak power when idle. The article pushed for energy-proportional computing, in other words, to consume more power as you compute more.
This may sound intuitive, but it is not how designers of many computers and more importantly, computer networks implement their systems today. The relevance to climate change becomes apparent when one considers that computers contribute the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as aviation according to a report published by the Climate Group, and overall percentage from computers will grow by 2020 if business as usual continues.Engineers will have to undertake both monotonous and revolutionary projects to arrive at energy-proportional computing. The largest consumers of energy in the IT space (e.g., Google and Microsoft) are working to solve this problem at brisk pace, but even Google's servers sit idly 30 to 40 percent of the time, according to PROFESSOR RANDY KATZ OF THE UNIVERSITY CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. A group he is spearheading at Berkeley called LoCal is attempting to define and implement the steps to progress this herculean effort....
Unleashing computer scientists on the energy infrastructure in the United States could yield swift changes in how energy is distributed and consumed. Developments in this field could induce the changes in personal habits related to energy consumption that policymakers have struggled with for decades. Full Story
9. “Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War”
Groundbreaking Journalist Mark Danner on Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and Torture
Democracy Now [Radio Program airing nationwide]
October 14, 2009
Award-winning journalist, WRITER AND PROFESSOR MARK DANNER has just released a new collection of dispatches about Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the use of torture in the US war on terror. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. We speak to Danner about torture in the so-called war on terror and his career of chronicling US-backed human rights abuses abroad.
Guest:
Mark Danner, Journalist, writer and professor. He was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. HE IS ALSO PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and professor of foreign affairs, politics and humanities at Bard College. He is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth and The Short Way to War. His latest book, just published by Nation Books, is a collection of his award-winning dispatches about Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the so-called war on terror. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War.
[Link to audio and transcript] Full Story
10. Agriculture critic's appearance angers university alumni
The planned lecture on sustainable farming by Michael Pollan at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is changed to a panel discussion after the head of Harris Ranch Co. threatens to pull his financial support.
Los Angeles Times
October 15, 2009
When officials at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo scheduled a free lecture by bestselling author [and UC BERKELEY JOURNALISM PROFESSOR] MICHAEL POLLAN, they envisioned a lively talk about sustainable food, along with Pollan's customary critiques of agribusiness.
What they didn't expect was a wave of denunciations from angry farming and ranching alumni who rank Pollan as a force only slightly less damaging to agriculture than the Mediterranean fruit fly.
Threatening to pull his donations, the head of one of California's biggest ranching operations succeeded in turning today's planned lecture into a panel discussion involving Pollan, a meat-science expert, and a major grower of organic lettuce.
Pollan assented but said in an interview that the incident raised troubling questions about academic freedom.
"It's an open threat to the university," he said. "The issue is really about whether the school is free to explore diverse ideas about farms and farming."...
For David E. Wood, chairman of Harris Ranch Beef Co., Pollan's solo lecture would have provided the author of such books as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" a soapbox for "anti- agricultural views."...
[An Associated Press story on this topic appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and Sacramento Bee. Another story appeared in the San Luis Obispo Tribune] Full Story
11. Dow is up, tough times still ahead
KGO TV
October 14, 2009
Oakland, CA (KGO) -- There was celebration on Wednesday on Wall Street. An important gauge of the economy, the Dow, closed above the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year. It is great news, but tough times still lie ahead....
SYLVIA ALLEGRETTO, PH.D., AN ECONOMIST AT U.C. BERKELEY'S INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT, predicts a long wait for job recovery.
"The recession of 2001 was over in November of 2001, but we didn't start to create positive job growth well into mid-2003, so if that's the situation we're in, it's going to be a very long time before any numbers on Wall Street translate into jobs on Main Street," says Allegretto....
[Link to video] Full Story
12. Opinion Shop Blog: A look at the Bay Area jobs future
San Francisco Chronicle Online
October 14, 2009
In the second of The Chronicle's symposia on the effect of joblessness on the Bay Area, panelists cautioned us that all is not doom and gloom but that the state and the region's employers need to invest more in retraining.
The Bay Area has weathered serious, economy shifting, downturns before -- the decline of the defense industry in the 1980s and the dot-com bust in the '90s -- and rebounded. "The amazing thing about California is how resilient it is," said CLAIR BROWN, A UC BERKELEY ECONOMIST [who] focuses on technology in her research. Yet large employers worry that as Baby Boomers retire, there will not be the young folks with the skills to take over. Brown says that is because large firms quit offering training and retraining. "Companies have created this crisis themselves."...
A few highlights of the symposium:
-- While big employers bemoan the abysmal math and work skills of potential employees here, the two areas in the country with the highest skill level are: No. 1 San Jose and, No. 2 San Francisco, according to UC BERKELEY ECONOMIST ENRICO MORETTI.
-- Future jobs will require training and retraining of workers just as state budget cuts are undermining capacity at community colleges, state universities and the University of California to train workers. "State government is affecting employment in a very bad way," said John Grubb of the Bay Area Council.... Full Story
13. Media Decoder Blog: The Times’ Bay Area Edition to Start Friday
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
October 15, 2009
The New York Times will publish its first San Francisco Bay Area edition on Friday, and a couple of prominent California journalists will contribute to it, the paper said on Thursday....
At first, most of the editing and reporting will be done by Times staff journalists, but the plan calls for turning the bulk of that work over to a local operation after a few months. A nonprofit consortium that includes KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco and the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, has been in talks with The Times about taking over the added work.... Full Story
14. Best of the Web Today: 'We're Going to Let You Die'
Who said it? Hint: It wasn't Sarah Palin.
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
October 14, 2009
...NewsBusters.org has a timely reminder that proponents of "health-care reform" don't necessarily sympathize with that aspiration. NewsBusters links to another Morgen Richmond YouTube clip, this one of a speech that [UC BERKELEY PUBLIC POLICY PROFESSOR] ROBERT REICH, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, delivered on the subject in 2007:
I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. ...
"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.
"And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause] ...
As noted in our transcription, Reich's Berkeley, Calif., audience applauded the idea of taxing the young, killing the old, and stifling lifesaving innovations. One suspects that these ideas would not be greeted as warmly in most other American locales, which is why elected politicians who are actually trying to sell such ideas cloak them in euphemisms about "universal care," "reform," "cost cutting" and so forth....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
15. Letters to the Editor
Los Angeles Times
October 14, 2009
...Engineering cost of UC courses
Re “Some majors at UC may cost more,” Oct. 12
...It is rather arbitrary that engineering programs and business programs exist at all in what are otherwise liberal arts university programs -- programs designed to provide a universal education.
Those students who have chosen to focus on a course of study that deviates from the traditional approach by endeavoring to gain more "practical" or vocational or professional skills should be willing to pay what that education costs.
Why should those students who read used books and listen to lectures in old lecture halls, as I did when I WAS A COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDENT AT UC BERKELEY a decade ago, have to pay as much as -- and thereby subsidize the education of -- students who use state-of-the-art lab equipment or take classes in brand-new buildings with professors who come from the corporate world and demand much higher salaries than their tweed-jacket-wearing counterparts in the humanities departments?
AARON ZISSER
Washington... Full Story
16. Op-Ed: State Universities' Tradition of Attrition
Inside Higher Ed
October 15, 2009
Among all the issues in higher education today, retention once again captures our attention. Most influential is the publication of Crossing the Finish Line, a study of completing college at America’s public universities, written by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson. It’s reinforced by the June 2009 report, "Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t)," by Frederick M. Hess, Mark Schneider, Kevin Carey, and Andrew P. Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute. The two studies have rekindled our concern about the percentage of undergraduates who fail to complete their bachelor degrees....
What about the large state universities that started to emerge between World Wars I and II -- and which are central to the 21st century studies? My hunch is that the extension of modest admissions requirements combined with relatively low tuition charges created intolerable overcrowding that was not relieved until the campus construction boom of the 1960s. In 1936 the University of Wisconsin offered an introductory economics course in a lecture hall that was filled with 800 students. After World War II, ACADEMIC OFFICIALS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY stated matter-of-factly that they preferred undergraduates to have a lecture course with 500 students and an esteemed professor, rather than have a small class with a lesser academic star.... Full Story
17. The heart of Latin art
It's not just folk, it's fusion. Exhibitions nationwide spotlight a bold and visionary tradition.
Christian Science Monitor
October 15, 2009
Santa Ana, Calif. -- Latin American art is hot. Just ask the enthusiastic patrons of the Bowers Museum. Tucked away 30 minutes south of Los Angeles, this medium-sized art center has managed to make a name for itself bringing shows that say something about where the public's cultural heart is headed. And these days, increasingly, that is toward creativity from south of the US border....
"There appears to be an unprecedented number of major shows about Latin American artists right now," says Ramon Cernuda, owner of Cernuda Arte in Coral Gables, Fla. Latin American art is showing from coast to coast: Florida's Naples Museum of Art ("Latin American Painting Now"); Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Conn., ("Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul," "Ancestors of the Passage"); UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, ART MUSEUM (Fernando Botero's controversial Abu Ghraib works); Indianapolis Museum of Art ("Sacred Spain: Art & Belief in the Spanish World"); and The Menil Collection in Houston ("Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood")....
As cultures grow increasingly global, artists are reaching across boundaries to frame the global human experience for all nations. Witness Colombian Fernando Botero's response to news of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. "This generation will understand the Abu Ghraib reference," says BERKELEY CURATOR LUCINDA BARNES, "but this art transcends this moment and place to become timeless works for all people...." ... Full Story