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Thursday, 16 September 2010
1. Cal free-speech talk illuminates Constitution
San Francisco Chronicle
September 16, 2010
LEON LITWACK has spent more than 60 years at UC BERKELEY AS A STUDENT, A PROFESSOR AND AN ACTIVIST. For him, freedom of speech is not only a constitutional right and a revered campus tradition, it is essential to the preservation of a democratic society.
"The time to be concerned about students is not when they are exercising freedom of expression - picketing, demonstrating, disturbing the peace - but when they are quiet, when they despair of changing society, even of understanding it," LITWACK, 80, A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF AMERICAN HISTORY and a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in a speech Tuesday night about the Free Speech Movement that began on the Berkeley campus nearly 50 years ago.
The forum was UC Berkeley's way of fulfilling a federal law requiring all federally funded schools to provide educational programs related to the U.S. Constitution every year to mark the anniversary of the signing of the nation's founding document on Sept. 17. Congress enacted the law six years ago out of concern that Americans did not have adequate knowledge of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution....
"The rights you enjoy on this campus did not come easily," Litwack said during his speech at the Free Speech Movement Cafe in Moffitt Library before a wall of black-and-white photos of campus sit-ins in the mid-1960s. "They had to be won by unrelenting agitation, by disturbing the peace, and much of the credit belongs to a generation of UC students often denigrated for their excesses."... Full Story
2. Bay Area Biz Talk Blog: Cost cuts could choke innovation at U.C. Berkeley
San Francisco Business Times
September 15, 2010
Changing the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, to make it more like a business organization will make the school much worse at innovation and research, says a U.C. professor who has analyzed the process.
U.C. Berkeley has been struggling to find ways to save money as California cuts its budget, and it recently paid Bain & Co. $3 million to help it figure out how to save $75 million a year.
Chris Newfield, a U.C. Santa Barbara professor, says in a report that Bain’s recommendations are outdated and apply better to big businesses than to a university, which needs a looser, distributed management structure to do what it does -- innovate.
“A university is more like an open source software development community than it is like a production line,” Newfield says.
Aside from the fact that Cal will have to spend $50 million to $75 million in one-time costs over three years and then $5 million a year after that to save the $75 million a year, Newfield says the Bain recommendations need to be turned “upside down” or they’ll likely wreck the freedom that university departments, staff and faculty need to support research and teaching.... Full Story
3. Harvard Heads World University Ranking, U.S. Takes Top Spots
San Francisco Chronicle
September 16, 2010
Harvard, the world's richest university, was judged the best by the London-based Times Higher Education, as U.S. establishments took the top five places in the magazine's annual World University Rankings.
The California Institute of Technology took second spot, with third place going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stanford University and Princeton University were ranked fourth and fifth....
Cambridge and the University of Oxford share sixth place in the Times Higher Education table. The UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, Imperial College London and Yale University complete the top 10....
The Times Higher Education table is based on a survey of 13,388 academics worldwide and uses data from Thomson Reuters to measure 13 separate performance and reputation indicators covering teaching, citations, research, the mix of international students and industry income.
[Another story on this topic appeared in Inside Higher Ed] Full Story
4. Blog: Californians Say Science Education Should be a Priority for Schools
California Progress Report
September 15, 2010
Californians believe that science education should be a priority for the state’s schools and want it to be taught early and more often, according to new public opinion research released today by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning and its partners in the Strengthening Science Education in California Initiative. To strengthen science education, the public wants schools to have the labs and equipment they need, strongly supports providing teachers with specialized training and wants schools to spend more time teaching science. ...
The report, A Priority for California’s Future: Science for Students, is based on a telephone survey of 1004 adults in California, including cell phone and Spanish language interviews.* The authors believe the report to be the first published public opinion research specific to science education in California. ...
“Californians believe more time should be devoted to teaching science and want teachers to have the specialized training, support and resources they need to teach science well,” says RENA DORPH, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR RESEARCH EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S LAWRENCE HALL OF SCIENCE. “There is also strong public support for providing schools with the labs and equipment they need to fully engage students in a strong science program.”...
Partners in this initiative include the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, the University of California, Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, SRI International, Belden Russonello&Stewart, Stone’s Throw Communications and Inverness Research Associates. Funding for the initiative, including the public opinion research, was provided by the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. The full research report and summary materials, including cross tabulations of the data are available at www.cftl.org. Full Story
5. Low-Income Community-College Students Find Success at Selective 4-Year Colleges
Chronicle of Higher Education (*requires registration)
September 16, 2010
Low-income community-college students not only tend to excel academically but also often become student leaders after they transfer to a four-year college, according to a new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.
Those same students won over skeptical professors with their intellectual curiosity and appetite for extra work, the group said.
Those are some of the lessons learned three years after the foundation embarked on its Community College Transfer Initiative. The foundation is releasing a report today, titled "Partnerships That Promote Success: The Evaluation of the Community College Transfer Initiative," that highlights the various college programs and polices that contributed to student success. The report can be found at the foundation's Web site at www.jkcf.org....
The purpose of the foundation's transfer program is to promote sustainable ways to increase the number of high-achieving, community-college students from low-income families who transfer to the nation's selective four-year institutions.
To accomplish its goal the foundation has awarded grants totaling about $7-million to eight highly selective four-year institutions. They are Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern California.
These institutions agreed among themselves to enroll a total of 1,100 low-income community-college students. The report found that over a period of three years, they enrolled nearly 2,000 students instead, exceeding the goals of the foundation's program....
[Link by subscription only. Another story on this topic appeared in Inside Higher Ed] Full Story
6. The American economy: The great debt drag
America looks likely to avoid a second recession. But with households still overburdened by debt, years of slow growth lie ahead
Economist [UK]
September 16, 2010
Washington, DC — In three decades of selling cars in southern California, David Wilson has been through countless ups and downs. So when sales at his 16 dealerships, mostly around Los Angeles and Orange Counties, fell by a third in 2008, he naturally expected them to go up again. They still haven’t.
...Americans are not optimistic. Official statistics say that the economy has been growing for nearly 15 months, but so sluggishly that most people seem to think it is still in recession. ...
So if the economy is to grow much faster than its 2.5% trend, consumers must start borrowing and spending again. What is holding them back: are they reluctant to borrow, or are banks unwilling to lend?
ATIF MIAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago have found a close correlation at county level between car sales and household debt. The heavier the debt in a county at the start of the recession, the weaker sales have been since (see chart 2). Mr Sufi says large national banks have customers everywhere. So the sales gap suggests that debt-laden households are unable or loth to borrow.... Full Story
7. Book Review: Winner-Take-All Politics
Why do the rich get richer? These authors blame the Republicans.
Christian Science Monitor
September 16, 2010
Ever wonder how it came to this: Republicans and Democrats behaving like Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, ever more gridlocked and unable to address national problems in a rational, bipartisan way? Or why the middle class is treading water, at best, while the super-rich wax inexorably richer? Here’s another poser: Why would the Republican Party, which lost the last two elections in dramatic fashion, react by continuing to grow, as it has for decades, ever more conservative and obstructionist, rather than giving moderation a chance?
In their bicoastal narrative, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker, Yale professor of political science, and PAUL PIERSON, THE SAME AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, tackle these and other questions in a well-researched, albeit occasionally repetitive, analysis. They build their ideological edifice brick by brick, pointing out things that most Americans, including this reviewer, may not fully grasp – at least at the level of historical and economic detail that the two authors provide....
America, they insist, is turning into “Richistan.” A nation that threw off the tyranny of hereditary aristocracy in 1776 is in danger of falling prey to a new economic aristocracy that dictates laws, regulations, and tax rates from on high while insisting it is all being done in the interest of the nation.
Hacker and Pierson make a compelling case. If Marie Antoinette were alive, she might aver of today’s great economically challenged masses, “Let them nibble on passbook-savings-account interest” – if they can manage to save anything, that is. Full Story
8. Kaiser workers vote in bitter battle between two unions
Contra Costa Times (*requires registration)
September 15, 2010
Nearly 43,000 Kaiser Permanente workers are voting in a bitter showdown between two unions that is being closely watched in labor circles nationwide....
The Kaiser employees are members of the powerful Service Employees International Union -- United Healthcare Workers West.
They will decide whether to remain with SEIU or join a breakaway group, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, founded by longtime labor chief Sal Rosselli after he was ousted from SEIU....
"There have been a number of labor leaders who have supported (Rosselli) and other leaders who have supported SEIU," said KATIE QUAN, ASSOCIATE CHAIRWOMAN OF THE UC BERKELEY LABOR CENTER. "It's made people uncomfortable to be put in the position of having to take sides. There have been heated discussions inside local labor councils."...
"A lot is riding on this Kaiser vote," Quan said....
Regardless of the election outcome, some observers have voiced regrets about the effect of the bitter feud among longtime labor leaders.
"Splits do happen," said Quan of the Berkeley Labor Center. "This is a fact of life. However, at a time when labor is under such heavy attack in the political world, as well as in the budget and financial and economic world, it's just too bad that some important, strong actors are distracted from some of the bigger issues."
[This story also appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune] Full Story
9. J.P. Morgan Wrestles Web Snarl
Wall Street Journal (*requires registration)
September 15, 2010
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. struggled Wednesday to restore electronic access to its online banking service, marking the third consecutive day of Internet interruptions and public-relations problems for the nation's second-largest bank by assets....
"There is a brand and reputational risk here," said Jacob Jegher, an online banking analyst for financial-services consultancy Celent, citing a flurry of Twitter posts on Wednesday critical of the bank. 'There is a backlash going on in social circles that is out of control."
...UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY COMPUTER SCIENCE PROFESSOR DOUG TYGAR: "Between the inconvenience and the uncertainty I think they are facing a real customer problem."
Among the many mysteries of the outage: Why J.P. Morgan wasn't apparently able to roll back to a previous glitch-free software version quickly while the company worked out any problems on the troublesome version, a common safeguard when online systems go haywire....
"That makes me think there is more to the story," added Mr. Tygar, the University of California at Berkeley professor. And "if they have so much trouble with a software failure, what happens with an actual attack?"...
[Link by subscription only] Full Story
10. Buyers unravel the ethics behind the label
Financial Times [UK]
September 15 2010
If you ever buy an item of clothing from Tesco, the UK supermarket chain, you can be sure it will not contain any cotton from Uzbekistan. The company decided to boycott Uzbek cotton in 2006, following reports of forced and state-sanctioned child labour. That was the easy part. Eliminating the unwanted material from Tesco’s supply chain and proving that it was no longer used would take until the end of 2007....
Traceability has become an especially pressing issue for the clothing industry in recent years, as stories of worker exploitation have emerged from the developing world. However, some supply chain experts believe all retailers and their suppliers should be preparing for the sorts of challenges.... We are approaching a tipping point, they say, beyond which everyone will want to know the provenance of their products....
[Inset]: Consumers are doing it for themselves
If you do not make information about your supply chain publicly available, the chances are increasing that consumers will do it for you. They are being aided by technologies such as GoodGuide, an online database of qualified information about the health, environmental and social impact of 65,000 common products.
GoodGuide was founded in 2007 by DARA O’ROURKE, A PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND LABOUR POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.
It uses a team of scientists and technologists to vet products in four categories: food, toys, personal care, and household products. Each of these products is rated and ranked on numerous criteria ranging from the harmfulness of its ingredients to its manufacturer’s record on working conditions, diversity and reporting. The information is accessible via a website or an iPhone application, which can be used to scan the barcode of an item in the shop for instant feedback.... Full Story
11. Blog: ‘Artificial Skin’ Out of California is Over-Hyped
Singularity Hub
September 16, 2010
Even the coolest lab work is often years from practical applications. That’s what the media seemingly forgot in regards to recent developments in ‘artificial skin’. Researchers at UC BERKELEY and Stanford have independently created thin layer sensors that can detect small changes in pressure. Both UC Berkeley and Stanford had their work published in Nature Materials and the two approaches to advanced pressure sensors have been covered by the BBC, Reuters, IEEE Spectrum, ABC, and the Wall Street Journal. The thin layer materials have been hyped as having sensitivity close to that of human skin and there’s been talk that they could provide the means for artificial skin for prosthetics or robots. While the work in these two projects is interesting, it’s many years away from any marketable projects and there are major hurdles they would have to clear before they could be used in the field in any application. Pragmatism, however, has been pushed aside in the glee over watching sensors detect a butterfly corpse and creating neat pictures of artificial skin gloves. Check out the video below to see what I mean. These are cool pressure sensors, but they aren’t skin-like yet....
Both of these projects are remarkable feats in sensor technologies, but I object to categorizing these sensors as artificial skin, especially for prosthetics. Such an association glosses over the limitations we have in connecting mechanical sensors to our nervous system. Even though these sensors can mimic the sensitivity of human skin under the normal range of human pressures (0-15 kPa or so) how are we going to transmit that information to your brain? Our most advanced sensing prosthetics handle just a few points of touch, not the hundreds or thousands of points that you’d associate with a full hand like one imagined in the image.... Full Story
12. Pulse of the Bay Blog: Artists Tackle Chemical Trails Inside Body
Bay Citizen
September 15, 2010
Today The Bay Citizen will be publishing our Fall Arts calendar — with listings, courtesy of SFArts.org— but consider this a preview of a preview. Two of the recommended events, the Mill Valley Film Festival and 01SJ, the technology/arts biennial opening on September 16 in San Jose, share an unusual area of overlap.
One film emphasized in the Mill Valley press conference was a Swedish documentary called "Submission," directed by noted filmmaker Stefan Jarl. Jarl.... It's his look into the frightening impact of 20th and 21st Century chemicals into the human body. He analyzes his blood — and that of a pregnant woman in her 30's — and finds hundreds of chemicals. "I can't hide my shock," he writes on his web site....
But the variety of ways that these chemical traces--from food additives to drugs to flame retardants (?)--can impact both the adult and the unborn is not yet understood, which is the reason two Bay Area residents have created Alviso's Medicinal All-Salt. This art project, announced with a darkly funny web site, is done by Eyebeam Art and Technology Center fellow Jon Cohrs and UC BERKELEY WATER RESEARCHER MORGAN LEVY for the art-and-tech 01SJ festival.
The All-Salt is so named because it contains bits of every pharmecutical that you are probably taking right now—Advil, Prozac, Xanax, Claritin, Lipitor, the works. As the web site notes, this magical salt is taken from "the brackish waters of the Artesian Slough, which channels treated wastewater (known to contain a variety of pharmaceutical compounds) from the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant to the South San Francisco Bay." In other words, it's some of the stuff that "Submission" told you was in your blood — just deposited from waste water to salt and now available as a pill.
And for 01, visitors can see the magic of bioaccumulation in action, as Cohrs and Levy create their own small salt bed to harvest their All-Salt concoction. Cohrs said that the goal of this project was to "get people talking."... Full Story
13. Green Blog: From the Roof, to a Battery, to the Grid
New York Times Online (*requires registration)
September 15, 2010
In the garage of Peter Rive’s San Francisco home is a Tesla Motors lithium-ion battery pack. It is not connected to Mr. Rive’s electric Tesla Roadster sports car, but to the power grid.
The California Public Utilities Commission has awarded $1.8 million to Mr. Rive’s company, SolarCity, a residential photovoltaic panel installer, to research the feasibility of storing electricity generated by rooftop solar arrays in batteries....
SolarCity is teaming up Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric car company run by Mr. Rive’s cousin, Elon Musk, and THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, to study how to integrate solar arrays and off-the-shelf battery packs into the grid. SolarCity plans to put such systems in six homes.
“We think in the years ahead this will be the default way that solar is installed,” Mr. Rive said. “Getting the costs down, though, is not going to be an easy task.”... Full Story
14. Benavides Takes Reins of Peru Economy as Araoz Exits
San Francisco Chronicle
September 15, 2010
Peruvian President Alan Garcia named Ismael Benavides finance minister, charging the former banker with keeping Latin America's fastest-growing economy from overheating as investment surges....
Benavides is a senior adviser to Deerfield, Illinois-based CF Industries Holdings Inc., the world's second-largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer, and previously headed Banco Internacional del Peru, the country's fourth-largest bank, for 12 years from 1995 to 2007.
Benavides served as fisheries minister during the second term of President Fernando Belaunde in the early 1980s. HE HAS AN UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE IN ENGINEERING AND A MASTER'S IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY.... Full Story
15. Angie Chau: A Vietnamese American voice
San Francisco Chronicle
September 16, 2010
Though certainly not the only Vietnamese American writer out there, ANGIE CHAU says she noticed a sizable void when she started to write "Quiet as They Come."
"I didn't feel like there was much representation of people with stories like mine," she says. "There was some work from Asian American and Japanese American writers and so forth, but less from the Vietnamese community."
Chau, who was born in Vietnam and moved to San Francisco when she was 4, based her first book in part on her own experiences: "Quiet as They Come" is a collection of short stories involving 12 Vietnamese immigrants sharing a house in the Sunset....
"I would not claim to represent the Vietnamese culture as a whole," she says. "I feel like I can speak to my experiences, my individual experiences. But at the same time, I DID MAJOR IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES AS AN UNDERGRAD (AT UC BERKELEY), and when I do undertake my process of writing, a lot of it is based on deep research."...
7:30 tonight. Mrs. Dalloway's, 2904 College Ave., Berkeley. (510) 704-8222. www.mrsdalloways.com. Full Story
16. Pancho Villa and revolutionary Mexico on display at Stanford, UC Berkeley
San Jose Mercury News (*requires registration)
September 16, 2010
When Pancho Villa joined the political and social revolution against the dictatorship in Mexico that started in 1910, he knew whom to call.
Hollywood....
Stanford University will put this tidbit of history on Villa's revolutionary showmanship -- along with more on Mexico's bicentennial, which marks the 1810 war of independence -- on display Monday. With a concurrent exhibit at UC BERKELEY, "Celebrating Mexico: The Grito of Dolores and the Mexican Revolution 1810/1910/2010" will showcase the extensive Mexican collections at the universities.
...UC BERKELEY'S BANCROFT LIBRARY features original documents and books depicting the complicated politics of the first revolution and everyday Mexican culture at the time. Other original materials explore the "unfinished" issues that sparked the second revolution -- the rights of Indians and workers, land reform, equal education and the disparity between the rich and poor.
The university libraries have produced an 80-page catalog for sale featuring essays and reproductions of items in the exhibit. ...
[This story also appeared in the Contra Costa Times] Full Story
17. Don't miss
San Francisco Chronicle
September 16, 2010
...Portfolio and Talk: "The Appalachian Portfolio, 1959-1963: Photographs by Andrew Stern."
Opens tonight. 6 p.m. reception; 7 p.m. lecture. UC BERKELEY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM GALLERY, Hearst and Euclid streets, Berkeley. Free. (510) 642-3383. www.journalism.berkeley.edu. Full Story