Culture

Sex Talk
October 30, 2009 4:29 PM

It has been widely reported in various news outlets that women are more verbose than men. One commonly cited popular statistic held that women spoke an average of 20,000 words a day versus a mere 7,000 for men. While those figures have since been discredited, a number of rigorous studies purport to show the differences between how, and how much, men and women talk.

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Culture, Data Points, California Magazine
Trolleyology
October 27, 2009 4:31 PM

1. A philosophical study of moral choices as demonstrated by the "trolley problem": An out-of-control trolley hurtling down its track will kill the five people in its path. A switch, however, will redirect the trolley to another track where only one person would be hit. Is it permissible to hit the switch? Now imagine five people are in the path of the trolley and there is no switch. A heavy man is walking along a bridge above the track. Pushing the heavy man onto the track would stop the trolley, saving the five lives but killing the man. Is it permissible to push him?

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Academese, Culture, California Magazine
NL
October 26, 2009 12:00 AM

Gerard Debreu, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1983, was the first professor at Cal to be awarded the prestigious "Nobel Laureate" parking space. The idea for the perq can be traced to Berkeley’s only Laureate in Literature, Czeslaw Milosz, who jokingly requested it after Chancellor Ira Heyman asked Milosz if the university could do something special to show its appreciation.

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Culture, NL, California Magazine