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Wednesday, 18 June 2008
1. SU chancellor wins Carnegie Leadership award
Newsday
June 17, 2008
Syracuse, N.Y. -- Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor is one of two recipients of the 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award.
The award is given for commitment to academic excellence and visionary leadership in establishing new standards for U.S. higher education. It comes with a $500,000 grant to help fund the recipient's academic priorities....
ROBERT BIRGENEAU, CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, is the other recipient of this year's award. Full Story
2. World-Renowned Scientist of Iranian Heritage Honoured
Lotfi Asker Zadeh Receives Honorary Doctorate from Ryerson University
Payvand
June 18, 2008
When he was 10 years old, LOTFI ASKER ZADEH and his family were forced to leave his home country of Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union, relocating to Iran in the midst of religious prosecution. It was a period of upheaval and struggle for the bright boy.
This Tuesday, Zadeh, also known as the "father of fuzzy logic", received an Honorary Doctorate from Ryerson University. During a convocation ceremony for 2008 graduates in Engineering, Professor Lotfi Zadeh was given the award in a packed house at the Ryerson Theatre in downtown Toronto....
Zadeh was born in 1921 in Baku, Azerbaijan. After moving to Iran, he graduated from the American College in Tehran, and received his B.S degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran in 1942. He then migrated to the United States in 1944, obtaining his MSc degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946, followed by his PhD in 1949, both in electrical engineering. After teaching for a period at Columbia University in New York City, PROFESSOR ZADEH JOINED THE DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY IN 1959, SERVING AS ITS CHAIRMAN from 1963 to 1968....
Currently, Zadeh is a PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT BERKELEY and is also serving as the DIRECTOR OF THE BERKELEY INITIATIVE IN SOFT COMPUTING....
Zadeh, whose mother was Russian and father from Ardabil province in northern Iran, has a long list of accomplishments. He has already received 26 other honorary doctorates. He has single-authored over 200 papers and serves on the editorial boards of more than 67 journals. He is also a member of several National Academies of Sciences around the world; including Poland, Finland, South Korea, Bulgaria and Russia.... Full Story
3. UC Berkeley-hired arborists remove tree-sitters' gear
Oakland Tribune
June 18, 2008
Berkeley -- After tree sitters hurled buckets of human excrement at arborists who cut traverse lines and removed wooden platforms Tuesday, the raucous day came to a head when a tree sitter bit an arborist so hard he was sent to the hospital with an arm wound.
The woman was removed from the trees and arrested.
In preparation for a judge's decision today, arborists hired by UC BERKELEY on Tuesday climbed into the oaks and cut down ropes and traverse lines and removed buckets of human excrement that had been stockpiled by the tree sitters.
University officials had vowed not to remove any of the six to 12 tree sitters in the trees and they kept their word for much of Tuesday.
But about 5:40 p.m. an arborist trying to remove a line asked a female tree sitter to move away from him and his cherry picker. Instead, she moved closer and bit the man on the arm, said UNIVERSITY SPOKESMAN DAN MOGULOF....
[Stories on this topic have appeared in more than 150 sources nationwide, including Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, KGO TV (link to video), and KCBS Radio (link to audio)] Full Story
4. Morning Edition: Class Tests Carbon Trading, With Troubling Results
NPR
June 18, 2008
Some members of Congress recently tried and failed to pass a bill tackling global warming. In California, a landmark climate change law is already on the books, but before the year is out, state regulators may approve a "cap-and-trade" system.
It's a popular strategy for reducing emissions but a bit tough to understand. Here's how it works: Regulators set mandatory limits on various kinds of industrial emissions. Firms that need to exceed their limits, or "caps," can buy permits from firms with allowances to spare. Hence the phrase "cap-and-trade."
The concept was put to the test at the HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. There, PROFESSORS SEVERIN BORENSTEIN and JIM BUSHNELL teach a class called Energy and Environmental Markets, the crowning glory of which is a computer simulation of an electricity market.
Competing groups of classmates, each with different "portfolios" of power-generating plants, vie with each other to get the best price for their power during a three-week period....
He isn't just talking from the sheltered confines of the ivory tower. Borenstein and Bushnell have experience as electricity regulators in California. It's a fair bet that some of their students will go on to serve as carbon trading regulators....
[Link to audio] Full Story
5. Op-Ed: A Green Curriculum Involves Everyone on the Campus
Chronicle of Higher Education (*requires registration)
June 20, 2008
Recent graduates have a lot to learn about budgeting when they leave college.... In addition to those personal budgetary challenges, the lives of our graduates will be profoundly affected by impending national budget crises associated with the costs of war, a trade imbalance, Social Security, and health care. And as if those burdens were not enough, the graduates must concern themselves with a new category of budgeting, one that relates not to money but to carbon....
Institutions across the country are expanding course offerings on the science and policy of climate change. A number of colleges, including Oberlin, Harvard University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY now offer courses in campus sustainability in which students and faculty members engage with administrators and staff members to analyze, explore, and develop strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at their institutions....
The creativity and critical-thinking skills that emerge from training in the arts and humanities may play a particularly important role in helping students grapple with the meaning of a rapidly changing climate. Literature, religion, sculpture, photography, and language all provide windows for understanding the relationship between humans and their environment....
A key goal of a liberal-arts education in the 21st century must be to equip graduates with a diversity of intellectual tools and learning experiences needed to ensure the health of our planet. The challenge that our students face is daunting, but with the help of supportive institutions and faculty members, they have the opportunity to construct a world and a culture that are vast improvements on the ones they inherit. Full Story
6. U.S. researchers illuminate how stem cells may work
Xinhua [China]
June 16, 2008
Los Angeles, June 16 (Xinhua) -- RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN BERKELEY are a step closer to understanding how a series of molecular switches can turn on or off the regenerative power of stem cells that normally build new muscle tissue after ithas been damaged, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Monday.
The research, conducted on laboratory mice, is years away from practical therapies for human beings. Nevertheless, this latest work provides insight into how scientists are dissecting, step-by-step, the processes that govern how stem cells work.
A goal of such research is to find ways to intervene and control these molecular switches -- to improve healing and perhaps slow the effects of aging.
The research was carried out by IRINA CONBOY AND HER COLLEAGUES AT THE DEPARTMENT OF BIOENGINEERING. They are trying to solve one of the mysteries of aging: why muscle cells readily repair themselves when we are young, but are slower to do so as we grow older....
[Stories on this topic appeared in dozens of sources worldwide] Full Story
7. Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security
New York Times (*requires registration)
June 18, 2008
Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957....
Mr. Gates has stressed the importance of devoting resources to what he calls “ ‘soft power’, the elements of national power beyond the guns and steel of the military.”
Toward that end, he contacted ROBERT M. BERDAHL, the president of the Association of American Universities — which represents 60 of the top research universities in the country — in December to help design Minerva. A FORMER CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, and a past president of the University of Texas at Austin, Mr. Berdahl knew Mr. Gates from when the defense secretary served on the association’s board.
In January Mr. Berdahl and a small group of senior scholars and university administrators met in Washington with Defense Department officials. Also there was Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State University and the association’s chairman. He said the scholars helped refine the guidelines, advising that the research be open and unclassified.... Full Story