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Thursday, 12 June 2008
1. Chilean president to speak at UC Berkeley
San Francisco Chronicle
June 12, 2008
Faced with a mounting energy crisis in her petroleum-starved country, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet will visit UC BERKELEY today in search of green energy technologies, part of a visit to California to rekindle a four-decade partnership between the South American nation and the Golden State.
Bachelet will start the day in Sacramento meeting with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and addressing the state Legislature. She will tour a vineyard at UC Davis and members of her Cabinet will sign several agreements with state officials to develop joint programs in seed production and viticulture, academic exchange and university development, as well as a broader Chile-California Partnership for the 21st Century. The pact will expand on a student exchange program that flourished in the 1960s, according to Chilean Ambassador to the United States Mariano Fernandez....
"Berkeley has been a hub of energy research for decades," said DAN KAMMEN, DIRECTOR OF UC BERKELEY'S RENEWABLE AND APPROPRIATE ENERGY LABORATORY. "It's a natural place for her to have that dialogue."...
"She's investing in her country by seeking to engage the best universities of the world," said HARLEY SHAIKEN, DIRECTOR OF UC BERKELEY'S CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, who helped orchestrate Bachelet's visit to Berkeley. "We want to ensure this isn't just an exciting moment but the beginning of a relationship that benefits Chile and the state of California."...
In a talk titled "The Transformation of Chile," President Michelle Bachelet will discuss the challenges Chile faces and what the new Chile-California agreement means for her country. Today at 5 p.m. at Chevron Auditorium, International House, UC Berkeley. Introduction by CHANCELLOR ROBERT BIRGENEAU, moderated by Professor Harley Shaiken.
The event is free. Tickets will be available at the auditorium before the event.... Full Story
2. Cal professor wins Shaw Prize
East Bay Business Times
June 11, 2008
UC-BERKELEY ASTROPHYCISIST REINHARD GENZEL has been awarded the 2008 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, which carries an award of $1 million.
Genzel is a professor of physics at University of California Berkeley and director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
Genzel received the award for his work demonstrating that the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole at its centre, according to the Web site of the Shaw Prize Foundation....
Genzel is not the first UC-Berkeley astrophysicists to receive the Shaw Prize in Astronomy. SAUL PERLMUTTER, UC-BERKELEY PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS and staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shared the award in 2006; and GEOFFREY MARCY, UC-BERKELEY PROFESSOR OF ASTRONOMY, shared the award in 2005.
[Other stories on this topic appeared in dozens of sources worldwide, including the Xinhua (via Red Orbit) and the Chronicle of Higher Education] Full Story
3. UCR graduation speaker quits, citing labor dispute
Press-Enterprise
June 12, 2008
A former senior White House and U.S. Department of Labor official who was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at one of UC Riverside's commencement ceremonies this weekend has pulled out over an ongoing labor dispute.
MARIA ECHAVESTE, A LECTURER IN RESIDENCE AT UC BERKELEY'S BOALT HALL SCHOOL OF LAW, was supposed to address graduates from the psychology, sociology, religious studies and women's studies departments Saturday....
Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton canceled a speech that he was scheduled to give to graduating students at UCLA. And former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez pulled out of a commencement speech at UC Davis.
They, too, cited the ongoing dispute between the university and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.... Full Story
4. All Things Considered: Blood Donation Rules Roil California Campuses
NPR
June 11, 2008
Since the early days of the AIDS crisis, federal policy has banned gay men from giving blood, in order to prevent the spread of HIV. Gay activists say the policy is outdated, discriminatory and needs to be stopped.
Campuses in Northern California are taking two very different tacks to wage their protests.
In January, San Jose State University banned blood drives; at UC BERKELEY, gay men are recruiting donors in their place....
[Link to audio] Full Story
5. Leahy criticizes Supreme Court rulings
UPI
June 11, 2008
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., criticized the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, accusing it of protecting corporations rather than ordinary citizens.
Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at a committee hearing that the nation's highest court has sided with industry and corporate interests at the expense of workers and consumers, Legal Newsline reported....
U.C. BERKELEY LAW SCHOOL PROFESSOR JESSE CHOPER said there is "some basis" for Leahy's remarks.
Since U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired in 2005 and Samuel Alito was appointed, there has been a tendency on the court to be more "conservative" in their rulings, Choper said.
Whether it's for good or ill that the high court has been ruing on the side of businesses is "in the eye of the beholder," he said. Full Story
6. Energy-scavenging cellphones: Don't hold your breath
EE Times
June 11, 2008
Anaheim, Calif. — Does humanity's future hold the prospect of the energy-scavenging cellphone? This question was posed by attendees at two different venues during the Design Automation Conference here Wednesday (June 11): at wireless multimedia device panel, and another during a keynote by Sanjay Jha, chief operationg officer at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies
...JAN RABAEY, PROFESSOR AT BERKELEY WIRELESS RESEARCH CENTER AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIF., who chaired the panel, suggested that incorporating solar cells in a cell phone might do the trick. But then estimating a solar panel's potential output of 1 milliwatt per square centimeters for a handset exposed to the sun, Rabaey concluded, "That much energy won't drive a cell phone any time soon."
Rabaey also mentioned work done by Marin Soljacic, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, who is working on magnetic resonance as a promising means of electricity transfer. (see: Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity ). Rabaey posed a future in which every household includes a basket, equipped with a magnetic coil. While the family sleeps, the coil recharges the phones.
But dismissing this scenario, Rabaey reiterated that today, there isn't a real energy harvesting technology fit for cell phones.... Full Story
7. SETI Researchers Gather At ASTRON For Search Beyond Beyond
Space Daily
June 12, 2008
Dwingeloo, Holland - ASTRON will welcome about 25 researchers from around the world to a workshop held in Dwingeloo this week focusing on the potential role of LOFAR in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
The workshop is organised by Professor Michael Garrett, General Director of ASTRON and professor of radio techniques in astronomy at Leiden University. During the workshop, the researchers will discuss ways in which LOFAR can be used to search for extraterrestrial life.
There are about 100 thousand million stars in the galaxy and most of these are expected to harbour planetary systems; some of these planets might actually be suitable for life....
One of the researchers attending the workshop is PROFESSOR DAN WERTHIMER, THE SETI@HOME PROJECT SCIENTIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERKELEY in the United States. "SETI searches are still only scratching the surface, we need to use as many different telescopes, techniques and strategies as possible, in order to maximize our chances of success."... Full Story
8. Commentary: The exploitation of Aids
The Aids scare was one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years
The Guardian [UK]
June 12 2008
Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret....
And it isn't the case that the heterosexual pandemic failed to materialise because officialdom's omnipresent pro-condom propaganda was a success. According to JAMES CHIN, A CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and author of the new book The Aids Pandemic, it was always a "glorious myth" that there would be an "HIV epidemic in general populations". That myth was the product of "misunderstanding or deliberate distortions of HIV epidemiology" by Unaids and other Aids activists, says Chin....
The relentless politicisation and moralisation of Aids has not only distorted public understanding of the disease and generated unnecessary fear and angst – it has also potentially cost lives. James Chin estimates that UNAIDS wastes around $1bn a year in activities such as "raising awareness" about Aids and preventing the emergence of the disease in communities that are at little risk. How many lives could that kind of money save, if it were used to develop drugs and deliver them to infected or at-risk communities? It is time people treated Aids as a normal disease, rather than as an opportunity for spreading their own moral agendas. Full Story
9. Blog: Rats! Animal activists keep up the harassment, says UC Berkeley
Contra Costa Times Online
June 11, 2008
Three months ago, the Oakland Tribune ran a story about UC-BERKELEY’s hope to get a restraining order against animal rights activists accused of harassing university animal lab researchers, at their homes.
Since that March story, the weekly attacks on more than a dozen researcher’s homes have continued. “It really hasn’t changed. They are there once a weekend,” said UNIVERSITY SPOKESMAN ROBERT SANDERS Wednesday....
The group, which calls itself Stop UC Berkeley Vivisection, began showing up at the homes of UC-Berkeley researchers in the East Bay on weekends last fall.
UC Berkeley clearly wants to put an end to the harassment, but it’s not easy.
“We don’t have enough to go to court with a restraining order and since they wear masks it’s hard to identify who they are,” Sanders said Wednesday....
The activists usually show up with bullhorns late at night, and call the researchers murderers and torturers. They have broken flowerpots and used chalk to write demeaning messages on sidewalks outside the homes, police said. Cars have also been vandalized. Earlier this month, Sanders tells us, someone threw a rock through a researcher’s home window and the window of a nearby neighbor during the day. No one was injured.
San Francisco FBI Special Agent Joseph Schadler has said the FBI is working with police, and has sent agents to UC-Santa Cruz following an attempted home invasion of a biomedical researcher there in February. He could not say whether the events in the East Bay and Santa Cruz are related.
[A similar blog appeared in the Los Angeles Times] Full Story
10. How-to guide to a cheaper commute
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
June 12, 2008
...Regular gas reached yet another record high in the Bay Area over the last month, hitting $4.45 a gallon, according to AAA. Even if you vary your commute just one day a week, it can make a difference as prices skyrocket....
High gas prices are encouraging people to try alternatives, but they aren't the last word, experts said....
"Fuel cost is having an impact on how people get to work, but unless there is a good reliable alternative available to them, it's a trigger, but nothing else," said SUSAN SHAHEEN, RESEARCH DIRECTOR OF UC BERKELEY'S TRANSPORTATION SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH CENTER.
[This story also appeared in the Oakland Tribune] Full Story
11. Letters to the Editor: Response Rates in Surveys
Chronicle of Higher Education (*requires registration)
June 13, 2008
To the Editor:
In Sara Lipka's "In Tight Employment Market, Career Services Gain Clout" (The Chronicle, May 16), one authority asserts that a survey of recent college graduates must achieve a response rate of over 90 percent to be credible. Another source is satisfied with a 70 percent response rate.
In fact, there is no magic target for an acceptable response rate. Such generalizations assume too much about the relationship between response rates and measurement validity, and they ignore the relevant empirical findings....
To be sure, a high response rate may be valuable for other reasons — as in surveys of relatively small populations like recent graduates. But a high response rate is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure accurate results.
DAVID RADWIN, PRINCIPAL ANALYST
OFFICE OF STUDENT RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CALIF.
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
12. Blog: How to Find a Death Trap: A Guide for Apartment-Hunters
ScienceBlogs
June 12, 2008
Earthquake engineer Kit Miyamoto has posted a journal of his trip to Sichuan. If you don't mind a little bit of construction jargon it's a good discussion of the details of what kinds of buildings collapse, and what kinds are safe, as well as the logistical difficulties of the immediate post-earthquake recovery. The lesson to be learned from the Sichuan earthquake is the same as the lesson of basically every major earthquake in the past several decades: If you build bad buildings, they will fall down and kill people.
...The real problems are social, political, and economic: We have lots of old buildings and can't just replace them all immediately; good buildings cost more (though investments in seismic safety definitely pay off when the Big One hits); building codes aren't always enforced the way they should be.
But instead of discussing these thorny policy problems in detail, I'm going to spend the rest of this post explaining how relatively wealthy Americans can avoid buying or renting a piece of rubble in waiting. It is a delusion common to my social class that urging people in decent financial situations to make wise individual consumer choices is exactly the same as pushing for institutional change.... Full Story
13. State vows to ensure moth spraying is safe
San Francisco Chronicle
June 12, 2008
California environmental officials pledge to thoroughly screen pesticides for risks to human health before the chemicals are aerially sprayed to eradicate a crop-eating moth in seven counties, including in the San Francisco Bay Area....
About the light brown apple moth
-- In February 2007, a retired UC BERKELEY SCIENTIST identifies the light brown apple moth, a type of leaf-roller.
-- The U.S. Department of Agriculture, saying millions of dollars in plants are at risk, gives the California Department of Food and Agriculture $74.5 million to conduct a spraying program using a pheromone pesticide....
-- By February, independent scientists are questioning the economic threat of the moth and the government's eradication program. Some say the moth is just another leaf-roller.... Full Story
14. New plant species discovered in Mount Diablo foothills
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
June 12, 2008
A retired carpenter with a keen eye for the details of nature has discovered two new wildflower species on the publicly owned Lime Ridge Open Space in the Mount Diablo foothills a few miles from downtown Walnut Creek.
David Gowen, an amateur botanist from Oakland, found the two small annual plants with tiny, white flowers during his many trips to Lime Ridge to look for rare plants....
Gowen embarked on his botanical route of discovery some 10 years ago at a time when he was looking around for a less physically demanding activity than his hobbies of hang gliding, skiing and bird watching. "The plants move slower," the former triathlete said, grinning. "As I get older, they're easier to keep up with."
He found his new calling when he listened to a lecture by a plant expert who urged people who weren't scientists to find their own adventure looking for unusual species. BARBARA ERTTER, THEN THE CURATOR OF WESTERN NORTHERN AMERICAN FLORA AT UC BERKELEY'S JEPSON HERBARIUM, had urged the audience members to scour Mount Diablo to look for the Mount Diablo buckwheat, a rare plant that had not been seen for 60 years. Some thought the plant was extinct.... Full Story
15. Playing mind games
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
June 12, 2008
Ryan Withers had so much fun at his therapist's office that his older brother got jealous. Robert wanted to play the video games, too.
The 12-year-old Ryan was having trouble paying attention to the home-school tasks his mother, Cindy Withers of San Jose, set for him. Determined to avoid drugs such as Ritalin, Withers opted for brain-training instead....
In the 1960s and '70s, brain training appealed to parapsychologists and drug experimenters - and that hippie-dippy image has been hard to shed. Scientists back then lacked a detailed understanding of brain activity.
Now, RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY read minds with brain scans. In Pittsburgh, Pa., monkeys learn to control a mechanical arm with their minds, reaching for snacks without lifting their own fingers. In light of modern advances, brain training doesn't seem so wacky.... Full Story
16. U.S. Widens Princeton Bias Probe
Inquiry Is Focusing On the Admissions Of Asian-Americans
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
June 12, 2008
Princeton University said the Education Department broadened its investigation of possible discrimination against Asian-American applicants.
In 2006, federal officials began investigating a claim from a student that Princeton rejected him because of his race and national origin. The student, 19-year-old Jian Li, initially enrolled at Yale University and is now at Harvard. Princeton says it didn't discriminate against Mr. Li....
The inquiry comes as many Asian-Americans families complain that the nation's elite universities set a higher bar for their children than for other students, effectively setting caps on the number of admissions granted to a high-achieving minority group.
The treatment of Asian-American applicants by top universities has a long and bitter history. In 1992, THE LAW SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool. Two years earlier, a federal government investigation found inequities at Harvard but didn't bring charges....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
17. George Lakoff's 'The Political Mind'
San Francisco Chronicle
June 12, 2008
A supporter once told Adlai Stevenson, "Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you."
"Madam, that is not enough," retorted the former Illinois governor and Democratic presidential candidate. "I need a majority."
The comment apparently betrayed a pessimistic view of the capacity of the voting public. But a new book by [UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR] GEORGE LAKOFF suggests that Stevenson's salty rejoinder came from a mistaken understanding of how the voter's brain really works.
In "The Political Mind," the eminent cognitive science scholar argues that voters form political opinions based on how effectively issues are framed....
7 p.m. Sat. Cody's Books, 2201 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. (510) 559-9500, www.codysbooks.com. Free. Full Story
18. Op-Ed: Obama Is Right, Words Matter
Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2008
"Don't tell me words don't matter!" Sen. Barack Obama thundered at a Wisconsin Democratic Party dinner in February. He should have remembered that at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference last week.
There, Mr. Obama defended the outrageous promise he made last July to meet, during his first year as president and without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea....
When it comes to America's adversaries, Mr. Obama doesn't have a comprehensive strategy to match Reagan's. Mr. Obama believes in talking and in meeting, in the hope that his charm will sweep despots off their feet like college students in Madison, Cambridge and BERKELEY....
[Link by subscription only] Full Story