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Monday, 12 May 2008
1. Raj Patel's 'Starved' offers food for thought
San Francisco Chronicle
May 10, 2008
When the price of rice spiked, RAJ PATEL himself became a valuable commodity.
The author of a timely new book, "Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System," and a VISITING SCHOLAR AT THE CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES AT UC BERKELEY, Patel is in demand for comment on the global food crisis.
The alarm sounded in earnest last month, when the executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program announced that soaring global food prices could unleash "a silent tsunami" that could plunge 100 million people into hunger and poverty.
Food riots had already erupted in many nations in response to price hikes and shortages that some experts call the unintended consequences of globalization.
Patel, 35, believes the crisis is the result of "simultaneous calamities." He lists them crisply: "Oil is high. There's an increased demand for meat. Biofuels are a problem. Climate change and bad harvests have something to do with it."
While Patel fields requests for interviews from CNN, Newsweek, BBC World and other news outlets, his publisher, Melville House, is readying a second printing of the book.... Full Story
2. Local Professors Offer Solutions to World Hunger
KCBS Radio
May 10, 2008
San Francisco (KCBS) -- An estimated billion people in the world go hungry every day, and now a group of local professors has a plan to end global hunger and poverty through agricultural development.
The best steps to end hunger involve working closely with local farmers, according to a GROUP OF PROFESSORS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY....
“Increasing food security is a worldwide problem,” said ANDY GUTIERREZ, A BERKELEY PROFESSOR OF ECOSYSTEMS SCIENCES, who explained this is a much different situation than the poor who go hungry right here in our own country....
He says the solution lies in good science and sustainable agriculture – working one-on-one with farmers to contend with their challenges.
Participatory plant breeding has been successful in East Africa and Honduras, according to PROFESSOR OF NATURAL RESOURCES LOUIS FORTMAN.
“In the case of Honduras, they’ve bred maize and bean varieties, corn and bean varieties, which are adapted to the high altitude conditions where they live. And in Kenya, they’ve bred bean varieties that are resistant to a terrible, terrible disease called Root Rot.”...
[Link to audio] Full Story
3. Three Cal pre-med students to traverse India in a motorized rickshaw
Contra Costa Times
May 11, 2008
Berkeley — Forget what you've seen on television, this truly may be the Amazing Race.
THREE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY PRE-MED STUDENTS will spend the first two weeks of June traveling about 2,400 miles across India — in a three-wheeled motorized rickshaw, known colloquially as an autorickshaw. It's not the leg-powered wooden kind that looks like a big tricycle. The one they will use looks more like a tall, narrow golf cart with room for three. It maxes out at about 35 mph.
BRIAN WONG, 22, SONNY SABHLOK AND ALLEN RODRIGUEZ, both 21, have entered the Rickshaw Run and hope to guide their donated autorickshaw, India's version of the taxi cab, about 150 miles a day from Kathmandu, Nepal to Pondicherry, a small town on the southern coast of India....
It will be three determined guys (only one of whom has even been to India before) and their autorickshaw against deadly roads, chickens, oxen, herds of goats, monkeys, water buffalo, elephants, cows, pigs, bald eagles and masses and masses of people everywhere. It's also the beginning of monsoon season and oh yes, temperatures reaching into the 120s....
There are no requirements for entering the Rickshaw Run except every team must raise at least $2,000 for charity. Money will go to Mercy Corps India, which provides health and economic support to those below India's poverty line ($13 a day), which is about 300 million people. They also provide schooling, aid for those with AIDS/HIV, and work to improve sanitation measures.....
The Berkeley men are one of four teams from the United States among 70 competing from across the globe....
[This story also appeared in the Oakland Tribune] Full Story
4. Study: Sick Leave Measure Would Benefit Public Health
KPBS [San Diego]
May 12, 2008
A new study says a measure in the Assembly that would require California employers to provide sick leave would be beneficial for public health. The report comes from UC BERKELEY'S CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION. KPBS Reporter Kenny Goldberg has more.
Under the Assembly bill, California would become the first state to mandate employers to provide paid sick leave. Workers could earn up to nine sick days a year. UC BERKELEY RESEARCHER KOREY CAPOZZA says the measure would be good for public health. For example, she says nursing homes in New York that offered sick leave tended to have a much lower risk of a respiratory illness outbreak.
Capozza: So there's some indication that with paid sick leave, workers are less likely to come to work and to bring those bugs into the workplace and infect patients and clients and other workers.... Full Story
5. Bloated bodies litter Myanmar, forgotten after the cyclone
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
May 11, 2008
On the Pyapon River, Myanmar (AP) -- As the bloated bodies rise and fall with the current, women scrub clothes along the river bank, villagers bathe to cool themselves and a lone child sits on a dock staring aimlessly into the water.
But with little aid getting through to desperate cyclone survivors, the dead have largely been forgotten -- left to decay where the brackish waters carried them or waiting to be pulled out to sea by the rising tides....
''What's often overlooked is the fact that people do want to find the dead and give them a proper burial, and it's important,'' said ERIC STOVER, lead author of a critical report published last year about Myanmar's broken health system.
''What happens with those relatives or those who survive, they can also go into this kind of limbo world thinking their (family members) are dead but not actually knowing until they have the funeral.''...
STOVER, FROM THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, said the military is often best at helping identify bodies in massive natural disasters because they are trained to do so for war. But he said his contacts who have visited the worst-hit areas say they have seen no soldiers helping to remove corpses.
''There may be cases were neighbors came back and because of the tidal surge, the bodies were dispersed,'' he said. ''It's gonna be difficult. That's the real crisis here.''
[This story also appeared in more than 150 sources worldwide, including the International Herald Tribune, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle] Full Story
6. Army Corps says Condition of many levees a mystery
ew York Times Online (*requires registration)
May 12, 2008
St. Louis (AP) -- Across America, earthen flood levees protect big cities and small towns, wealthy suburbs and rich farmland. But the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees levees, lacks an inventory of thousands of them and has no idea of their condition, the corps' chief levee expert told The Associated Press....
''We have to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who's watching over them, what populations and properties are behind them,'' Eric Halpin, the corps' special assistant for dam and levee safety, said in an interview last month. ''What is the risk posed to the public?''
Critics are troubled that the government doesn't know the answer.
ROBERT BEA, A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY LEVEE EXPERT, said many levees are old, with rusting infrastructure and built to protect against relatively common floods -- not the big ones like the Great Flood of 1993, when 1,100 levees were broken or had water spill over their tops.
''Once they do get an inventory,'' Bea said, ''I think we're not going to like what we find.''...
[This story appeared in more than 100 sources nationwide, including the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Contra Costa Times] Full Story
7. Berkeley Researchers Turn Cell Phones Into Medical Imagers
KCBS Radio
May 11, 2008
Berkeley, Calif. (KCBS) -- ENGINEERS AT U.C. BERKELEY have come up with an innovative new use for cell phones that may save countless lives. The hand held devices can now be turned into medical imaging devices.
These high-tech machines are often too costly to use in remote areas of the world, in addition to being hard to maintain. But Berkeley researchers have harnessed the machine’s power into a cell phone.
”We took advantage of the fact that cellular phones are ubiquitous, everywhere you go,” said CAL PROFESSOR BORIS RUBINSKI. “The phone works in the very traditional mode of sending text messages and receiving images.”...
Rubinski says he hopes this will pave the way for more high-tech handheld medical devices.
[Link to audio] Full Story
8. IBM, ISB sign pact for collaborative research
Economic Times of India
May 12, 2008
Bangalore--IBM India and the Indian School of Business (ISB) on Monday announced the signing of the first open collaborative research agreement in Asia aimed at improving the competitiveness of the services sector in the region.
This research would support companies to redesign their project management structure, reduce attrition, and also help the high performance groups to move up the value chain, a release said.
The research will be led by the centre for global logistics and manufacturing strategies (GLAMS) at the ISB and the Indian Research University and UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY for research in development economies.
ISB is the first B-School in Asia to work with IBM on this collaborative research. To begin with, the study will focus on Indian companies and later extend to Asian companies....
An important benefit of this research is that its results will be openly available for use by any and all universities, companies, and institutions.... Full Story
9. A Southland traffic break
Some quicker commutes are a silver lining to gas prices, weak economy.
Los Angeles Times
May 12, 2008
Three days each week, at the tail end of the morning rush hour, Jonathan Ball drives from Pasadena to his job in Camarillo -- a journey of 57 to 64 miles, depending on his route.
Over the last few months, he has seen his speed often increase and his time on the road lessen, convincing him that traffic may be easing its grip on parts of Southern California....
Other drivers say their commutes are still bad, but that the roads are more lightly traveled at midday and evenings -- the times of day that people make discretionary trips.
The Freeway Performance Measurement System, a computer database overseen by UC BERKELEY and Caltrans, provides several examples....
Traffic typically eases when a declining economy puts people out of work. In the Silicon Valley, for example, "in 2000, the 680 Freeway was one of the top two or three congested freeways here," said PRAVIN VARAIYA, A PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE AT UC BERKELEY who helps oversee the freeway performance database.
"When you look at it now, there's no congestion. Something like the dot-com boom and bust were huge."... Full Story
10. Brentwood the poster child for housing bust
San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2008
Roger Abraham stands in his driveway, one hand holding the newspaper, the other sweeping across the homes on Brentwood's Solitude Street. "This one," he points, "this one, this one."
All empty.
This farming community on the eastern edge of the Bay Area absorbed an outsize portion of the region's growth during the prolonged housing and development boom, adding 40,000 residents in the past 16 years as subdivisions and strip malls overtook agricultural land. It regularly ranked among the state's fastest-growing cities. Now, Brentwood is suffering disproportionately from the bust....
During the boom, home builders swarmed the small cities on Contra Costa County's outskirts, seeking out cheap bare land and eager planning departments, said ELIZABETH DEAKIN, PROFESSOR OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING AT UC BERKELEY.
"It's an easy target for developers," she said. "They can get in there and get things built without a lot of people asking questions."... Full Story
11. Op-Ed: Symposium 1968: Lillian B. Rubin
Dissent Magazine
Spring 2008
It’s impossible to look back on the sixties without thinking, What a time that was! Politics and culture intermingled in a heady mix, the personal was political and the political personal; every act—whether demonstrating against the Vietnam War, smoking dope, having sex, or listening to rock and roll—had meaning beyond itself. The civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the women’s liberation movement, and the counterculture were all demanding changes that would alter the social landscape forever. Peace, freedom, equality, justice were the watchwords of the time. Yet, even among the young male revolutionaries of the New Left, equality didn’t mean the women with whom they worked, studied, and slept.
Indeed, men’s contempt for women, their refusal to take their female comrades-in-arms seriously, was legendary....
Forty years later the parallels between then and now in sexual relations among the young are striking....
Still, whatever issues remain in private and domestic life—and there are many—feminism’s successes are visible in every corner of public life, from bus drivers to CEOs to television anchors to doctors, lawyers, and college professors....
A woman is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination to be president of the United States. And if nominated, she could win. Full Story
12. Obituary: Hugh Bradner, UC's inventor of wetsuit, dies
San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2008
HUGH BRADNER, A UC PHYSICIST whose love of the ocean and curiosity about everything in it led him to revolutionize diving by inventing the neoprene wetsuit, has died at his home in San Diego at the age of 92.
Dr. Bradner died May 5 of the effects of pneumonia, according to his daughter, BARI CORNET. Dr. Bradner's wife, Marjorie, died April 10. They had met during World War II, when both were working at the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. Dr. Bradner was one of the first employees of the nascent atomic bomb experiment, and his wife was the secretary of Robert Oppenheimer, the project's mastermind....
After the war, Dr. Bradner joined the faculty of UC Berkeley and taught physics. He also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on high-energy physics, and in his spare time he started noodling around with ideas on how to improve the lot of divers, who spent much of their time in a cold and clammy clime.
"All his life, he had been interested in diving," CORNET, WHO IS A FACULTY MEMBER OF UC BERKELEY'S SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, said the other day. In the early part of World War II, Dr. Bradner had talked to Navy frogmen about the problems of being immersed in cold water for long periods of time. "He was looking at the notion that you didn't have to stay dry to stay warm," Cornet said....
Cornet said, however, that her father never patented the invention and the wetsuit business venture foundered. The wetsuit was eventually adopted by divers and surfers all over the world. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times examined a half-century dispute about who was the real inventor of the wetsuit - the other two contenders for the title were two California-based firms that have made a fair amount of money from wetsuits....
Full Story
13. Op-Ed: Measure for Measure
Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science
Boston Globe
May 11, 2008
It's not such a good time to be a literary scholar.
For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education, a prime forum for cultural self-examination, and a favorite major for students seeking deeper understanding of the human experience.
But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them....
Contemporary literary theory, for instance, is deeply rooted in the "blank slate" theory of the mind - the idea that the human mind is overwhelmingly shaped by social and cultural influences, rather than by biology. But this theory has perished in the sciences, killed off by advances in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields....
But if ideas like "the beauty myth" or "the death of the author" arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world's top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as BERKELEY'S FREDERICK CREWS points out, is that "our bogus experiments succeed every time." And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail.... Full Story
14. Eating disorders rising among college students
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
May 10, 2008
Naomi Brown, a staff psychologist at Stanford University, was stunned by the number of students with anorexia and bulimia that she encountered when she began working at the student health center a decade ago....
In her office in the Vaden Health Center, she now routinely provides support to students who are fearful of their destructive eating habits. Or she strives to connect with emotionally numbed young adults in denial that their gaunt figures reveal an often-fatal psychiatric disturbance....
A TEAM OF EXPERTS AT UC BERKELEY also treats students with eating disorders, said KIM LAPEAN, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER FOR UNIVERSITY HEALTH SERVICES, the student health center. A Web site provides online support.
"It definitely exists, we definitely do outreach," LaPean said. She believes, however, that eating disorders are less common at UC Berkeley than at another elite university she once worked at.
"I really don't see as much of a culture of being thin to fit in at Berkeley as I have in other universities," LaPean added.... Full Story
15. Road map to student aid
Colleges Are Inconsistent In How They Spell Out Costs
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
May 11, 2008
One of the many challenges of sending a child through school now sits in a pile on Joseph Han's desk.
Han, a Garden Grove legal assistant, is the father of an honors student at Pacifica High School in Orange County who was accepted at a litany of great universities - the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, UCLA, Pomona College and UC-San Diego, to name a few.
Because he applied for financial aid, each university sent Han a page-long "financial aid notification" that explains how much it would cost for his daughter, Stephanie, to attend the school. Each also explains how the campus and government might help defray that cost, and the amount they expect the Hans to pay.
But when the Hans sat down to examine the letters for a side-by-side comparison, they were stumped. Each one seemed to use different terms, making it hard to compare costs of the different schools.
"There is no uniform financial aid letter," said Lynn O'Shaughnessy, San Diego-based author of "The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price." "They can be confusing - sometimes intentionally - to make the awards look better."...
The reason: The total cost of attendance should include tuition and fees, room and board, transportation, books, supplies and an estimated budget for personal expenses. Almost every school estimates those costs, but only some include these estimates on financial aid award letters, O'Shaughnessy said.... Full Story
16. Colleges Putting Their Own Spin on YouTube
Washington Post
May 12, 2008
One of the first things that pops up if you check YouTube to find out about a public school in Western Maryland is a video that starts: FROSTBURG STATE UNIVERSITY. ITS GREAT!!! An edgy new-wavy punkish Electric Six song cranks in, and the camera lurches as people down shots, chug beer and do keg stands. One guy climbs unsteadily out a window, grins at the camera, then drops through the dark to the ground far below.
Not exactly the image the school wants to broadcast....
Now Frostburg, like a growing number of schools, is trying to elbow its own messages onto such sites as YouTube to promote themselves, create a virtual community and drown out embarrassing clips....
But like a parent trying to seem cool, sometimes the efforts are painful to watch. "The last thing someone on YouTube wants to see is a provost explaining the academic offerings at an institution," Hawkins said....
So schools are feeling their way as they try to grab control. Some, such as Old Dominion University, set up YouTube channels. Some, such as BERKELEY, put classes on YouTube. Some, such as the University of Virginia, are posting slick promotional spots on iTunesU.... Full Story
17. Letters to the Editor
Los Angeles Times
May 10, 2008
A warped view of Berkeley
Re "Student's slaying reveals two worlds in Berkeley," May 5
Your article's opening -- "the world-class university and multimillion-dollar hillside homes with sweeping views versus the poor and working-class bungalows and apartments of the flatlands" -- makes a gross generalization about Berkeley.
My husband and I own one of those "working-class bungalows" worth more than $750,000 and have worked incredibly hard to send both our sons to excellent schools (one currently studies engineering at UCLA.) Our sons are not in any way "who they are" because of their Berkeley flatland address, and frankly, their address is a fine one.
The violence and crime you report has nothing to do with growing up in the Berkeley flatlands, and it has everything to do with one disturbed and now allegedly criminal young man and the culmination of whatever led to this crime.
Deborah Fortune Walton
Berkeley Full Story
18. Cal, Stanford women capture NCAA tourney openers
Golden Bears, Cardinal in hunt for championship berth in West Regional golf
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
May 10, 2008
Eighth-ranked Cal (17-5, 6-2 Pac-10) defeated Army (26-8, 5-0 Patriot League) in the first round of the 2008 NCAA Division I women's tennis tournament at the Hellman Tennis Complex in Berkeley on Friday.
The Bears have now advanced to, at least, the second round of the NCAA Tournament 24 straight seasons.... Full Story