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Thursday, 29 October 2009
1. Bay Bridge repairs will face extra scrutiny
San Francisco Chronicle
October 29, 2009
Before the Bay Bridge reopens to drivers - possibly this afternoon - teams of independent engineers and federal bridge experts will scrutinize the repairs Caltrans and a contractor are making to a failed structural fix to make sure the span is safe....
The failure of the Labor Day fix called into question whether Caltrans could be trusted to provide a safe and speedy solution....
C. WILLIAM IBBS, A PROFESSOR OF CIVIL ENGINEERING AT UC BERKELEY, said he has full confidence in Caltrans. But in retrospect, he added, "maybe (Caltrans) should have taken a little more time" in coming up with the initial design.
ABOLHASSAN ASTANEH-ASL, A PROFESSOR OF CIVIL ENGINEERING AT CAL, has long criticized Caltrans' handling of the Bay Bridge project and said the combination of heavy loads and high winds proved that the initial repair was flawed.
"They rushed the design," said Astaneh-Asl. He said Caltrans should have spent more time assessing how the eyebar cracked in the first place before devising a repair. "That's engineering 101."...
[Professor Ibbs also discussed this topic on KQED Radio's Forum with Michael Krasny (link to audio) and KGO TV (link to video). Professor Astaneh-Asl was also quoted in the New York Times & International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, Sacramento Bee, Los Angeles Times Online, and CNN Online. He was also interviewed on All Things Considered and KCBS Radio (link to audios)] Full Story
2. Marin Community Foundation pledges $10 million to fight global warming
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
October 28, 2009
The Marin Community Foundation has pledged $10 million over the next five years to reduce the impact of climate change.
The foundation, which manages the $1 billion in assets of the Leonard and Beryl H. Buck Trust, will provide about $6.5 million for projects that make schools and other public buildings more energy-efficient, about $2.5 million for projects that reduce automobile emissions - particularly in home-to-school transportation - and about $1 million for research into a plan to use West Marin ranches to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere....
In addition, the foundation plans to provide about $1 million to the Marin Carbon Project, a consortium of scientists, ranchers and nonprofit agencies seeking ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by improving the ability of West Marin ranch lands to retain the gas. The foundation has already provided $240,000 to the project.
"These grazing lands have a lot of potential to store carbon," said WHENDEE SILVER, A PROFESSOR OF ECOSYSTEM ECOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project. "One thing we're investigating is the use of composted green waste. By taking that green waste out of landfills and putting it on range lands, we think it will help the soil hold on to water, add nutrients and help the range lands hold on to that carbon."
Silver believes the project has the potential to cut up to two-thirds of the carbon used to produce energy in a metropolitan area. She chose West Marin as a testing ground because of its proximity to the Bay Area's urban landscape - and because so many organizations, including Marin Organic, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, the UC COOPERATIVE EXTENSION and the Marin County Department of Agriculture have agreed to participate.
"We have a very motivated group of people who are truly unique," Silver said. "There's not a group like this anywhere in the U.S. We're hoping it will be a model of people coming together on a local scale to solve regional and global problems."... Full Story
3. NewsHour: Cities Struggle With Access to Green Energy Sources
PBS
October 28, 2009
...Jim Lehrer: Next tonight, the problem of getting green energy to where it's needed. NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has our Science Unit report.
Spencer Michels, NewsHour Correspondent: David Nahai is trying to figure out how to get more electricity to Los Angeles. As general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, he's trying to help reach L.A.'s goal of using 35 percent renewable energy -- wind, solar and geothermal -- by the year 2020.
But it is not easy. Renewable energy usually is located far away from urban centers that need the power....
Spencer Michels: DAN KAMMEN, PROFESSOR OF ENERGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, has been studying transmission lines and renewable energy. He says the decision-making process has to go beyond the state of California.
Dan Kammen: The real issue for transmission is that it requires federal coordination and oversight. You can't do it state by state. You have to build out regional resources.
And so this is another place where the Obama administration's role is going to be vital. It's not just the amount of money, but it's also coordinating what happens around the country....
[Link to audio and video] Full Story
4. Forum with Michael Krasny: Bystander Mentality
KQED Radio
October 29, 2009
The Richmond community is reeling from the gang rape of a 15 year old girl. Many bystanders watched, and didn't intervene in the brutal crime. We talk about what the community and police are doing in response, and we discuss bystander mentality. What makes people stand idly by when atrocities are committed?
Guests:
...NEIL SMELSER, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF SOCIOLOGY AT UC BERKELEY and former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University...
[Link to audio] Full Story
5. Letters to the editor
San Francisco Chronicle
October 29, 2009
...Scale back athletics at UC Berkeley
Responding to criticism about the earnings level of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA administrators, a letter to the editor from the UC Office of the President ("Finding facts on pay of UC administrators," Oct. 7) unabashedly mounted the defense that the Cal football coach's multi-million-dollar annual compensation is more than four times as much as the highest paid administrator at UC. Was that supposed to be reassuring?
Indeed, the coach is the highest paid employee of the State of California. The letter cleverly focused on the source of funds for the coach in an attempt to take our eye off the ball. But all the revenues and donations to Cal intercollegiate athletics fall short by millions of dollars annually to cover excessive expenditures of this program, which is propped up from the campus' coffers with funds that could instead keep the library open on Saturdays, for example.
It is a myth that intercollegiate athletics earns money for the university; even the NCAA reports that increased spending on athletics does not increase alumni donations to the university, prompting its president to advise college presidents to reconsider their institutional spending on sports.
The UC Berkeley administrators should cease pouring money into intercollegiate athletics, which is overdue to put its house in order and scale back its operation.
BRIAN BARSKY
PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND VISION SCIENCE
UC BERKELEY
[A blog on this topic also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Online] Full Story
6. Technology: Slump Sinks Visa Program
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
October 29, 2009
A coveted visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier U.S. technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.
The program, known as H-1B, has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where many companies have come to depend on securing visas for computer programmers from India or engineers from China. Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of Sept. 25 -- nearly six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications -- only 46,700 petitions had been filed....
VIVEK WADHWA, A VISITING SCHOLAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY who has studied H-1B visas, said that trend has been compounded by what he sees as rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. "The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, 'Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?'" Mr. Wadhwa said....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
7. CIRM awards $250 million for stem cell research
San Francisco Business Times
October 28, 2009
California’s stem cell agency has approved $250 million in grants with the help of two other medical research agencies.
The grants go to 14 agencies, including Stanford University, which won $52 million, and the University of California, Los Angeles, which will receive $49 million....
To date, Stanford has been awarded $163 million in CIRM grants for 42 projects. UCSF has gotten $122 million for 32 projects, UC Davis $49 million for 15 projects, and UC BERKELEY $35 million for 10 projects. Full Story
8. China Real Time Report Blog: Chinese Law Reform on the PRC’s 60th Birthday
Wall Street Journal Online (*requires registration)
October 29, 2009
When it comes to legal reform in China, Western observers should adopt an attitude of cautious pessimism. Although political reform is needed to accelerate legal reform that would make government and the Party truly accountable, the Chinese leadership presently lacks the political will to press for energetic legal reform; in the meantime, too, Chinese legal culture can change only slowly....
Although sixty years have passed since the founding of the PRC, only thirty years have elapsed since meaningful law reform was undertaken, and much has been accomplished: The courts, the bar, legal education, and the very idea of a legal system, all cast aside during the Cultural Revolution, have become presences in Chinese society. There is interest within and outside the Party in accomplishing further, top-down legal reform, and pressure for bottom-up reform is likely to grow from an increasingly more vibrant Chinese civil society. How long China, and we, must wait, it is impossible to predict.
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
9. Boeing Doubles Bet on 787 Scheme That’s 2 Years Late
Bloomberg
October 29, 2009
(Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co.’s decision to put a new assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, instead of its historic Seattle hub, doubles its bets on a global supply strategy that is more than two years late delivering the plane....
Boeing chose less-unionized South Carolina in part because of frustration with labor strife in Seattle, where four strikes in the past 20 years by the machinists union delayed deliveries. Yet the move also puts further responsibility on a far-flung production network and asks more of relatively inexperienced workers, adding to the risks for the 787, Boeing’s most important project, with $150 billion in orders.
“It’s going to be a more complex supply chain, and we’ve seen Boeing’s recent problems with that,” said HARLEY SHAIKEN, A PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY who specializes in labor issues....
The company is the second-largest defense contractor and trails only Toulouse, France-based Airbus SAS in building commercial planes. The move has “huge implications” because Boeing is the biggest U.S. exporter and aerospace is a leading industry, professor Shaiken said.... Full Story
10. Blog: Smart People Butt-Dial
Huffington Post
October 29, 2009
If you feel naked without your cell phone, and not in a good way, I'm right there with you....
So I paid more than casual attention when, on Sept. 9, my colleagues at Environmental Working Group, where I work, produced a report called Limit Your Exposure To Cell Phone Radiation, that summarizes some recent, unsettling scientific findings correlating long-term cell phone use to head and neck tumors. Circumstantial, yes, but a lot to think about....
Since then, two more studies about the health dangers of cell phone radiation, the product of collaborations of academic scientists in five countries, have come out and the news isn't good....
Perhaps the dangers are minimal. I sure hope so. But an increasing number of scientists are voicing doubts. For example, JOEL MOSKOWITZ, PH.D., DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY CENTER FOR FAMILY AND COMMUNITY HEALTH and author of one of the new studies, told me, "We are going to see many more tumors in the long term than we would expect to see if mobile phones were not widely used throughout the world."
...Moskowitz says the physics of emissions are such that holding the phone 10 inches from your head instead of half an inch from your skull reduces radiation exposure by a factor of 400. For you math people, that's the square of 10 inches divided by half an inch. I didn't know it either. The square of the distance from ear to backside -- well, you do the numbers.... Full Story
11. Origins Blog: What Ever Happened to Kenyanthropus platyops?
Science Magazine Online
October 29, 2009
Human evolution research is not for the faint-hearted. Hominin fossils are rare and hard to find. And more often than not, no sooner do anthropologists announce a big discovery than other researchers argue that they have it wrong. The next chapter in such a scenario unfolded last week, when scientists attending a meeting* at the Royal Society in London resurrected a debate about a single, crucial hominid specimen: a 3.5-million-year-old cranium named Kenyanthropus platyops—“the flat-faced man of Kenya” (shown at left).
Discovered in 1998 by a team including paleontologists Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi and Fred Spoor of University College London, K. playtops suggests a greater degree of diversity in the human family tree than previously suspected: two species of hominids, not one, in the crucial period between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. That’s the time of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, whose lineage is thought by many to have given rise to our own genus, Homo.
But there was one nagging problem: The Kenyanthropus cranium, discovered west of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, was cracked and distorted, making it possible that some features that set it apart from A. afarensis—including its flat face and tall, vertically oriented cheek bones—could be artifacts. PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST TIM WHITE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, argued in a 2003 Perspectives in Science that K. platyops probably fell within the range of variation among known A. afarensis fossils and might simply represent an “early Kenyan variant” of that species.
In London, Spoor responded to such arguments with a new, detailed study....
But White, who was present and has long argued that there is no evidence for more than one lineage of hominids at this time, wasn’t convinced. When the talk was thrown open for discussion, White took the microphone and began firing questions at Spoor about the degree of variation of the cheekbone position among specimens of A. afarensis and other hominin species. “We took that into account,” Spoor responded, “and I just showed you a graph” about it. “I didn’t ask you whether you took it into account; I asked you what it was,” White said. Spoor, clearly frustrated, told the audience that he had no vested interest in this debate. At that point, the session chair interrupted and invited everyone to break for coffee, but Spoor and White continued to debate between themselves for the next half-hour.... Full Story
12. Get Ivy League smarts - free
Top universities are now posting lectures online. For a career boost, start downloading.
Money Magazine
October 29, 2009
(Money Magazine) -- Last autumn I took time off to go back to school. The timing turned out to be just right: My American economic history course at the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY got to the Great Depression in early October, around the time everyone became convinced we were about to have another one.
THE PROFESSOR, a former Treasury official named BRAD DELONG, had no shortage of opinions on what needed to be done about the current crisis. Hearing those arguments in the context of the Depression's grim history made the stakes especially vivid.
Okay, so I never actually went to Berkeley. My "time off" consisted of jogs over the Brooklyn Bridge listening to lectures I had downloaded from iTunes. I took no tests, wrote no papers, and got no credit. It was a shadow of the experience of taking a real course. But my virtual auditing still made me smarter on the job as my colleagues and I tried to figure out how to respond to the crisis. And it was free.
If you want to keep up to date in your field (or explore a new one), take a look at what universities are giving away on the web.... Full Story
13. iPod University
Newsweek
November 9, 2009
YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and raucous wedding processionals. But there's more to the site than pointless entertainment; there is a growing collection of university lectures available, including one by a Harvard Business School professor talking about consumer psychology in the recession, and Cambridge University historian David Starkey discussing the history of the British monarchy. Earlier this year YouTube launched a new home for education, YouTube EDU, which started as a volunteer project by company employees seeking a better way to aggregate educational content uploaded by U.S. colleges and universities. Last month the subsite went international, with 45 universities in Europe and Israel adding their content to the stream. "Around the world people can, from the comfort of their home, refresh their knowledge on a subject or explore other topics to better themselves intellectually," says YouTube EDU's Obadiah Greenberg. "I think that is rather profound."
One need not be a student to reap the benefits of higher education anymore. In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world's top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. ...
Whoever is using OER, the numbers keep growing. MIT's site now gets more than 1.2 million visitors a month. Oxford's iTunes material has surpassed a million uploads and has consistently had 10 podcasts in the global top 100. Oxford philosophy professor Marianne Talbot—whose "Romp Through the History of Philosophy" became a No. 1 iTunes U hit—and UC BERKELEY BIOLOGY PROFESSOR MARIAN DIAMOND have become Web darlings.... Full Story
14. Monster Classes Probe New Vein of Scholarship
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
October 29, 2009
Berkeley, Calif. (AP) -- Most college students put in a monster study session or two. MARINA LEVINA'S STUDENTS get to spend sessions studying monsters.
The course, ''Film Topics: Monster Movies,'' at the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, is one of a number around the country that mix scares and scholarship, using zombies, vampires and other ogres to study popular culture....
The class, an elective open to mass communication/media studies majors, has space for 50 students and fills up quickly. Students watch monster films and write about what the creatures represent. They also make their own monster films as a final project.
As Halloween approached, the class was studying zombies, looking at the horrors they have represented.
In the 1980s, for instance, zombies personified mindless consumerism. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the raging undead represent ''this post-apocalyptic nightmare where we lose control,'' Levina says....
''It's my favorite class, even though it is theory heavy,'' said AZETA HATEF, ONE OF LEVINA'S STUDENTS.
MAUREEN GRZAN was intrigued by a segment on female werewolves; it turns out they're not all hairy guys....
There's more than monsters to Levina, who teaches an introductory course on media studies as well as one on visual media. In class, she examines zombies as a proxy for viruses, drawing on her specialty in the critical study of science and technology....
[This story appeared in more than 100 sources nationwide, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle] Full Story