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Wednesday, 22 September 2010
1. Personal Exoskeletons for Paraplegics
A mobile device helps patients with spinal cord injuries walk.
Technology Review
September 22, 2010
Exoskeletons--wearable, motorized machines that can assist a person's movements--have largely been confined to movies or military use, but recent advances might soon bring the devices to the homes of people with paralysis.
So far, exoskeletons have been used to augment the strength of soldiers or to help hospitalized stroke patients relearn how to walk. Now RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, have demonstrated an exoskeleton that is portable and lets paraplegics walk in a relatively natural gait with minimal training. That could be an improvement for people with spinal-cord injuries who spend a lot of time in wheelchairs, which can cause sores or bone deterioration.
Existing medical exoskeletons for patients who have lost function in their lower extremities have either not been equipped with power sources or have been designed for tethered use in rehabilitation facilities, to correct and condition a patient's gait.
In contrast, the Berkeley exoskeleton combines "the freedom of not being tethered with a natural gait," says KATHERINE STRAUSSER, PHD CANDIDATE AND ONE OF THE LEAD RESEARCHERS OF THE BERKELEY PROJECT. Last week at the 2010 ASME Dynamic System and Control Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Strausser presented experimental results from four paraplegics who used the exoskeleton. ...
The Berkeley program was successful. The four paraplegics described in Strausser's talk, three of whom had been in wheelchairs for years, were able to walk with the device after only two hours of training. "It's very easy to walk in," says Strausser. "It moves your leg exactly like you would in your normal gait." To begin a step, the exoskeleton requires a user to press a button on a remote control; the team is working on a more intuitive interface. ... Full Story
2. UCSF wins $15.4M grant in step toward 'smart cells'
San Francisco Business Times
September 21, 2010
UCSF will use a $15.4 million, five-year National Institutes of Health grant to set up one of two new national centers that could lay the foundation for developing “smart cells” designed to carry out specific tasks in the body.
Wendell Lim, a University of California, San Francisco, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, will lead the UCSF arm of the National Centers for Systems Biology.
Lim’s team will work with a second, separately funded center at UC San Diego.
Working together, the two centers will try to better understand how cells use biological circuits to sense and adjust to their surroundings and how cells respond to stress like toxins and metabolic imbalances. That could lead to scientists engineering so-called smart cells to handle specific tasks, like attacking disease.
The UCSF team includes Chao Tang, Nevan Krogan, Han Li, Chris Voigt and Alma Burlingame as well as JASPER RINE OF UC BERKELEY. Full Story
3. Blog: Don't Wait Another Minute: Confirm Goodwin Liu
Huffington Post
September 22, 2010
Commentators and journalists have been focusing recently on the pace of confirmations to federal judicial positions -- and for good reason. Procedural roadblocks have become routine even for nominees with bipartisan support -- resulting in a dramatic slowdown in judicial confirmations. ...
The Senate can make some important progress on judges before Senators leave town. The first step is to confirm GOODWIN LIU to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Professor Liu is exceptionally qualified, possesses a brilliant legal mind, and has demonstrated his commitment to public service. He was unanimously rated "well-qualified" by the ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary and has bipartisan support. As PROFESSOR OF LAW AND ASSOCIATE DEAN AT U.C. BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW, he has focused on constitutional law and education law and policy; he is one of the nation's leading experts on educational equity. Early in his career, Professor Liu helped launch the AmeriCorps National Service Program and then led efforts to build community service programs at colleges and universities nationwide at the Corporation for National Service. He has served as a Board member of numerous public service and public interest organizations, including the National Women's Law Center.
If confirmed, Professor Liu would increase the diversity of the federal bench by becoming the only active Asian-American judge on the Ninth Circuit, where more Asian-Americans reside than in any other circuit....
The time for the Senate to act on the nomination of Professor Liu is now. Tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on his nomination once again so that he can receive a vote before the full Senate. Send a message to your Senators today and urge them to support swift approval of Goodwin Liu's nomination. Don't wait; our nation needs Goodwin Liu on the bench now. Full Story
4. Factbox: Potential Candidates to Replace Summers
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
September 21, 2010
Washington — White House economic adviser Larry Summers is stepping down from his job at the end of the year to return to his position as a professor at Harvard University, the administration said on Tuesday.
Following are economists that have been mentioned as potential replacements for Summers as director of the White House National Economic Council.
LAURA TYSON
A member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an outside panel of economic experts advising Obama. Tyson is a former top economic adviser to former President Bill Clinton. SHE IS ALSO A PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS....
[Other stories mentioning Professor Tyson as a possible candidate appeared in the Wall Street Journal (link by subscription only), Financial Times (UK), and Newsweek] Full Story
5. Stem Cells, Obesity Finding Lead Nobel Predictions
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
September 21, 2010
Washington — Researchers who discovered stem cells and the appetite hormone leptin, who proposed that dark energy is helping the universe expand and who developed "gene chips" are named in the 2010 Thomson Reuters predictions to win Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry.
Thomson Reuters expert David Pendlebury's forecast is made using the company's "Web of Knowledge" data on how often a researcher's published papers are used and cited -- used as a basis for further research -- by other scientists. Every year at least one of the picks from one of his annual lists has won a Nobel prize....
For the physics prize, to be announced on Tuesday, October 5, Pendlebury points to SAUL PERLMUTTER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Brian Schmidt of Australian National University for discoveries of about how the universe is expanding and how dark energy might permeate the whole universe and affect this.... Full Story
6. Op-Ed: Bridging the achievement gap
The formula to help young African Americans succeed in school is not pie-in-the-sky.
Los Angeles Times
September 22, 2010
The first weeks of the school year invariably bring fresh evidence of the achievement gap that separates black and Latino students from their white classmates. Worst off, by far, are African American males.
A new study from the Schott Foundation for Public Education sets out the sorry statistics. Across the country, fewer than half of all black males graduate from high school, compared with 78% of white males. In Los Angeles, the situation is similarly grim: Just 41% of black males graduate, compared with 58% of white males....
These disparities aren't new — the Schott report could have been published a generation ago. What is new and noteworthy is solid evidence that this gap can be bridged, with well-tested approaches that don't require massive changes in public education and don't depend on superhero teachers and administrators....
Good preschools, smaller elementary school classes, a focus on reading, altering attitudes about intelligence, linking schools to their communities and paying attention to character-building — there's nothing pie-in-the-sky in this agenda. If these crib-to-college reforms shift the public conversation away from "you can't educate these kids" fatalism and toward investing in what's been shown to work, the biggest achievement gap may finally start to shrink. Full Story
7. Defeat of DREAM Act a setback for immigrant students
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
September 21, 2010
San Francisco -- Tuesday's defeat of a defense appropriations bill in the U.S. Senate also dashed the hopes of many Bay Area students who were relying on an amendment in the bill that would have advanced the DREAM Act.
Dozens of those students had gathered in San Francisco to rally for the bill's passage. The DREAM Act would have offered a path to citizenship for thousands of college-bound or military-bound students whose families brought them to the United States illegally when they were young....
"There would be a lot of potential, a lot of talent that would be able to be utilized," said UC BERKELEY UNDERGRADUATE JULIAN RIVERA, 20, a political science student whose family brought him to California from Mexico when he was 14....
[This story also appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune] Full Story
8. Protesters: DREAM Act deferred, not denied
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
September 21, 2010
San Bernardino - Hours after the DREAM Act suffered defeat in the Senate, a group of students and activists rallied in front of City Hall on Tuesday to support the immigration reform measure....
"This does not mean it is over," said Fontana resident GLADYS CASTRO, A UC BERKELEY STUDENT who came to the United States when she was 8. "It means we have to stand up and pass the DREAM Act as a stand-alone bill."... Full Story
9. Sound Economy Blog: Larry Summers' legacy: Reassure, not reform
Seattle Times
September 22, 2010
The departure of Larry Summers as President Obama's chief economic adviser will provoke no tears on this blog, but more about that later. Before we bury Summers, let us praise him.
We may forget now, but, to paraphrase Wellington on the Battle of Waterloo, the Great Panic and the months after it were a near run thing. The financial collapse was so large, contagious and complex that the global economy might have ended up in a depression that made 1930 look like a mild downturn. ...
As with Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama was eager to convey continuity and stability. Wall Street loves Rubin and Summers. And by "Wall Street," I mean the world capital markets whose destruction could have brought on so much more pain than we now see. To hear UC BERKELEY ECONOMIST BRAD DELONG tell it, Summers is also best at the essential functions as presidential adviser.... Full Story
10. Capital Hill Blog: Obama Administration Has Been An ‘Academic Exercise’
Investor's Business Daily Online
September 22, 2010
A day after President Obama declared that his administration is not “some academic exercise,” Lawrence Summers announced plans to step down as director of the president’s National Economic Council and return to Harvard University. CHRISTINA ROMER Just left her post as head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to go back to the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.
The current administration has suffered from a historic lack of private-sector experience, from Obama on down. There’s almost no one on the White House payroll who's actually ever had to meet a payroll.
That lack of real-world experience helps explain why the White House thought that a big expansion of long-term federal spending and sweeping and unknown regulatory changes for finance, the environment and health care, would be good for the private sector....
At the current anemic pace, the U.S. won’t recoup all the 8.36 million jobs lost during the recession until September 2017. Short term, unemployment seems headed back up to 10%.
As for Summers and Romer, they can return to their tenured positions, where no one expects results... Full Story
11. Robert Reich's Blog: Who should get the tax cut? The rich, or everyone else?
Smart politics and good economics both suggest that the Democrats make this the central issue of the midterm elections.
Christian Science Monitor Online
September 22, 2010
Who deserves a tax cut more: the top 2 percent — whose wages and benefits are higher than ever, and among whose ranks are the CEOs and Wall Street mavens whose antics have sliced jobs and wages and nearly destroyed the American economy — or the rest of us?
Not a bad issue for Democrats to run on this fall, or in 2012.
Republicans are hell bent on demanding an extension of the Bush tax cut for their patrons at the top, or else they’ll pull the plug on tax cuts for the middle class. This is a gift for the Democrats.
But before this can be a defining election issue in the midterms, Democrats have to bring it to a vote. And they’ve got to do it in the next few weeks, not wait until a lame-duck session after Election Day.... Full Story
12. Long-term unemployed aim to become a political force
People who have exhausted their jobless benefits are pressing policymakers for more aid and joining together to call attention to their cause.
Los Angeles Times
September 22, 2010
After his wife of 23 years pulls out of the driveway every morning to head to college, Scott Mathewson sits down at the computer in his apartment and talks to his unemployment group.
Mathewson, a San Jose electrician who has been out of work for more than two years, spends most days in an online chat room he created to lobby for another round of unemployment benefits. In this election year, he and other jobless workers are trying to turn the nation's 14.9 million unemployed into a political force....
Few legislators or candidates this political season are championing efforts to extend unemployment benefits because of growing concerns over the size of the federal budget deficit. There's no powerful entity in Washington representing the jobless or the millions of Americans just getting by on part-time jobs. Many unemployed people are so strapped for cash that they've lost their Internet and phone service. Others spend so much time job hunting that they have little energy for political action.
"The jobless are not a lobbying group. There's no national association of the unemployed," said former Labor Secretary ROBERT REICH, A PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT UC BERKELEY. "Most people who have lost a job think of themselves as very much alone."...
[Professor Reich was also quoted in another unemployment-related story in the Los Angeles Times] Full Story
13. Israel R&D Goes to China
Infinity Group Exports Intellectual Property, Feeding Beijing's High-Tech Hunger
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
September 21, 2010
Suzhou, China—An Israeli private-equity firm is hoping to profit by melding Israel's research-and-development skills with China's manufacturing prowess, playing to China's hunger for foreign technology.
The firm, Infinity Group, buys intellectual property from Israeli high-tech companies, often ones that can't make money from their inventions at home because Israel's market is small and production costs are high. Infinity then sells or licenses the IP rights to a Chinese company in which Infinity invests. The Chinese company develops ways to use the technology, drawing on the nation's manufacturing expertise, creating new products and applications that can feed into China's huge share of the global supply chain while tapping into the country's vast domestic market....
Bringing Israeli know-how to China reminds UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, PROFESSOR ANNALEE SAXENIAN of the 1980s and 1990s, when Silicon Valley researchers conceived of technology for things like computer peripherals and commercialized it in Taiwan. "They took over the whole ecosystem of Silicon Valley," says Prof. Saxenian, who specializes in regional technology clusters. "This is a new take on that."...
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
14. How student fees boost college sports amid rising budgets
USA Today
September 22, 2010
Linda Randall says her daughter, Randi-Lyn, a student at Radford University in southwestern Virginia, is not a "die-hard" follower of the Highlanders sports teams.
Even so, by the time Randi-Lyn graduates in 2012, her parents probably will have paid an average of nearly $1,000 a year in fees to the school's athletics department. They just didn't know it from the school's billing statements or website....
The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 this year began requiring schools to annually report to the Education Department separate figures for tuition and required fees. (They had been allowed to report a combined figure.)
Starting in July 2011, schools with the largest percentage increases in price over the previous three years will be listed by the department and required to report the reasons for the increases and what will be done to cut costs....
A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY FACULTY GROUP seeking ways to reduce the campus' financial support of athletics acknowledged in a recent report that besides having a "significant" impact on the school's $250 million in annual academic fundraising, Cal's wide-ranging and successful sports program "adds to campus spirit and unity, provides free advertising for the campus, helps in branding, and provides a link and outreach to alumni."...
In May, the University of California system voted to force greater disclosure of how its schools use money from a fee that can fund certain programs, including athletics. Each campus will have to maintain a website that says how the spending of that money compares with the spending recommended by the campus' student-fee advisory committee.... Full Story
15. University of California Debt Reflects Budget Woes
San Francisco Chronicle
September 20, 2010
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, which slashed half a billion dollars from its 2010 budget through job cuts and furloughs, is offering $520 million in taxable Build America Bonds today as borrowing costs for issuers in the state rose to a one-month high.
The extra yield investors demand to hold general-obligation debt from California issuers instead of top-rated tax-exempts was 110 basis points yesterday, the highest since Aug. 18, according to Bloomberg Fair Market Value data. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point. Tomorrow's issue carries ratings of Aa2 from Moody's Investors Service and AA- from Standard & Poor's, the third- and fourth-highest, respectively....
Proceeds from the offering will be used to fund seven construction and renovation projects across six campuses, including those in BERKELEY and Los Angeles.... Full Story
16. Dimensions vanish in quantum gravity
New Scientist
September 22, 2010
Forget Flatland, the two-dimensional world imagined in the 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott. On tiny scales, 3D space may give way to mere lines.
So say researchers working on theories of quantum gravity, which aim to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity. They have recently noticed that several different quantum gravity theories all predict the same strange behaviour at small scales: fields and particles start to behave as if space is one-dimensional.
The observation could help unite these disparate ideas. "There are some strange coincidences here that might be pointing toward something important," says Steven Carlip at the University of California, Davis....
It was hard to make sense of such a strange result at first. Now, as Carlip notes, it seems that a reduction in dimensions pops up in many theories of quantum gravity (see "Different theories, same ingredient"). A technique called renormalisation group analysis suggests the same sort of reduction in spectral dimension might occur at tiny scales, says Carlip, as does a theory that radically alters the rules of general relativity, published last year by PETR HORAVA OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.
Finding that very different approaches have something in common is exciting, as it suggests we may have stumbled upon an underlying property of quantum gravity, says Leonardo Modesto of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "People have emerged from quite different corners of the community and started saying, 'let's understand this result'," adds Loll.... Full Story
17. Science Scope Blog: The future of electronics inspired by geckos?
Smart Planet
September 22, 2010
Our clothes might soon get a little smarter thanks to the superhero qualities geckos take for granted.
Geckos have amazingly sticky feet.
When geckos climb on surfaces, their feet stick to the wall. But they can remove their feet just as easily by controlling the amount of contact area with the surface.
Knowing that, Northwestern University researchers created a reversible way of printing electronics onto a number of surfaces including clothes and plastic...
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY BIOLOGIST ROBERT FULL is also fascinated by gecko feet. He designed a robot called Spinybot, which was designed to walk up glass in a similar way geckos do.... Full Story
18. The Never Land of Zeta Psi: excavating a frat house
Berkeleyside
September 22, 2010
[UC BERKELEY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR] LAURIE WILKIE's archaeological journey began with a dig, as you’d expect. But rather than occurring in some exotic spot, the dig that led to the just-published Lost Boys of Zeta Psi was just outside the windows of the university’s ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH FACILITY at 2251 College Avenue.
A construction crew was excavating for the foundations of the law school’s extension in 1995 and Wilkie looked out her window and saw a cache of bottles uncovered by the backhoe. Then the youngest member of the anthropology department and its resident historic archaeologist, Wilkie went to investigate.
In addition to the bottles, that first dig produced ceramics, jars, inkwells, animal bones, buttons, pipe pieces, beer steins, cans, and a variety of household trash dating back to 1923. The civilization that Wilkie was uncovering was Zeta Psi, the first fraternity established west of the Rockies, in 1870.
As Wilkie told WENDY EDELSTEIN AT UC BERKELEY’S NEWSCENTER, her subsequent researches into Zeta Psi confounded modern notions of fraternity life....
The literary analogy that Wilkie’s title makes clear is to the Lost Boys in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The Lost Boys lead a life of perpetual boyhood in Never Land, but decide to follow Wendy Darling back to London, where they grow up and become conventional bankers and middle managers. Wilkie’s “lost boys” of Zeta Psi became bankers, railroad tycoons, trustees of the University of California, and, in one instance, governor of California. Full Story
19. Pot Talk: Cal Student Groups to Host Prop 19 Debate
NBC Bay Area Online
September 22, 2010
STUDENTS AT UC BERKELEY will host a debate Wednesday night on Proposition 19, the California ballot measure that would legalize and tax marijuana for recreational use for adults.
The non-partisan campus group STUDENTS FOR LIBERTY is hosting the debate, along with Students for Sensible Drug Policy. The discussion will bring together other student groups, including CAL DEMOCRATS and BERKELEY COLLEGE REPUBLICANS.
The debate is open to the public and admission is free. It's being held at Evans Hall on the Cal campus starting at 7 p.m. Check out their Facebook page for more details. Full Story
20. Op-Ed: 10 Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions
Chronicle of Higher Education (*requires registration)
September 22, 2010
Legacy preferences, which provide a leg up in college admissions to applicants who are the offspring of alumni, are employed at almost three-quarters of selective research universities and virtually all elite liberal-arts colleges. Yet legacy preferences have received relatively little public attention, especially when compared with race-based affirmative-action programs, which have given rise to hundreds of books and law-review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice.
The secrecy surrounding legacy preferences has perpetuated a number of myths....
...It is intriguing to note that, among the top 10 universities in the world in 2008, according to the widely cited Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, are four (Caltech, the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cambridge) that do not employ legacy preferences....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
21. Fire forces UC Berkeley students out of co-op residence
Oakland Tribune
September 22, 2010
Berkeley -- A fire forced UC BERKELEY STUDENTS out of their CO-OP RESIDENCE Tuesday night....
Firefighters were dispatched to the scene but residents used fire extinguishers to put out the flames before they arrived.
The building is a co-op residence. Co-ops are not administered by the University of California.
The cause of the fire is under investigation. No injuries were reported. Full Story
22. 'Undercovers' puts minority leads in the TV spotlight
New series from 'Lost' creator features two main characters who happen to be black
Today Show Online
September 21, 2010
Voters may have overwhelmingly elected a black man as president in 2008, but broadcast TV decision makers still don’t fully believe mainstream audiences will embrace a drama series with a black lead unless coupled with a white actor or as part of a large, multiracial ensemble cast. And don't even consider two black leads carrying a drama series on a major network.
“Lost” creator J.J. Abrams may change that perception with his anticipated new show on NBC, “Undercovers,” which debuts Sept. 22. ...
“I think Hollywood is little behind when it comes to what our society accepts and what they put on the screen,” said LINDA WILLIAMS, PROFESSOR OF FILM AND MEDIA AT UC BERKELEY and author of "Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson." “The industry hasn’t been very adventuresome in casting. It hasn’t been proven people won’t watch a show because of the color of the leads. You have to let the show speak for itself.”... Full Story
23. Don't Miss This: A Fall Free for All
Berkeley Daily Planet
September 21, 2010
Those of you avid lovers of music, dance and drama will be in absolute Seventh Heaven on Sunday, September 26th when CAL PERFORMANCES presents its "Fall Free for All" program, starting at 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. These programs, too numerous to mention, will take place at Zellerbach Hall, Hertz Hall, Wheeler Auditorium and Lower Sproul Plaza.
The very popular Kronos Quartet will get things off to a rousing start in Zellerbach Hall at 11 a.m.
Then, at 1 p.m. the Adler Fellows of the San Francisco Opera Company will entertain at Hertz Hall.
At 2 p.m. the U.C. Jazz Ensemble will liven things up in Lower Sproul Plaza. The Word for Word Theatre Company presents "Frankie the Rooster" at 2 p.m. in Wheeler Hall.
The Mark Morris Dance Group will kick up a storm in Zellerbach Hall at 3 p.m. (with audience participation!). Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir will lift spirits at 5 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall. Again, these are just a few of the outstanding programs taking place on the U. C. campus on September 26th .... Full Story
24. Two Berkeleyans Win Big in Bay Area Contests: Singer Angela Arnold and Environmentalist Mark Liolios
Berkeley Daily Planet
September 21, 2010
Soprano ANGELA ARNOLD of Berkeley has won the competition to sing the National Anthem at Opera at the Ballpark, San Francisco Opera’s free simulcast of Verdi’s Aida, Friday, September 24, 8pm at AT&T Park in San Francisco. ANGELA IS THE CIRCULATION AND STACKS SUPERVISOR AT UC BERKELEY'S HARGROVE MUSIC LIBRARY and a professional soloist – you can hear her with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Chorale! You can see her winning video here [at KDFC].... Full Story