2013 Spring Growing Up
Rock-a-Bye Baby
Coming to grips with the nature of nurture I knew parenting would be trouble even before it began. Back when my wife, Beth, and I were just starting to think about having a child of our own, I asked my dad about baby sleep arrangements. Dad’s a psychotherapist specializing in the ways that early childhood experience […]
Song of Herself
Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on her Berkeley roots, parenting, and the writing life. Ursula K. Le Guin has said that her father, Alfred Kroeber, studied real cultures, while she made them up. Indeed, many of the writer’s most celebrated novels are set in intricately imagined realms, from the sci-fi universe of Ekumen to the fantasy […]
The Unretiring Chancellor
Robert Birgeneau looks ahead to teaching, research, and redesigning the public university. During his nine years in the job, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau oversaw a successful capital campaign, orchestrated a $320 million stadium renovation, stabilized the University’s budget, and implemented a plan for giving tuition breaks to middle-class students. His accomplishments occurred during what he describes as […]
In a Bind
Berkeley alumni are a prolific bunch. They all have something to say, and many are moved to put it in writing. What is unusual is to not only publish your own book but to print it yourself, bind it by hand, and cart it to the bookstores on your own. Add in that the author/publisher has a day job at Google, and we think you'll agree that Matt Werner '07 is unusual even for a Berkeley grad. We caught up with Matt via email to ask him a few questions about why, and how, he released his book—Oakland in Popular Memory, a collection of interviews with Oakland artists—the hard way.
Locked Up
Last fall, shortly before citizens voted down Proposition 34, the ballot measure that would have repealed the death penalty, preliminary findings from a new Berkeley research group revealed that more than 200 individuals have been wrongfully convicted in California since 1989—including three inmates on death row. The group, called the California Wrongful Convictions Project, is […]
Antiquity Goes Online
The Department of Classics launches an open-access journal. With the 2013 launch of an online classics monograph series, the study of the ancient world is now a little more digital—and democratic. Classics professor Donald Mastronarde and an editorial board of scholars started the website California Classical Studies, harnessing the Internet to bring research that many might […]
SIMCITY
A Berkeley professor brings urban development to life. Could visualizing the effects of local development proposals in a 3D simulation encourage citizens to become more engaged in determining how their cities and neighborhoods will grow? Denver, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City are three cities that are betting that it will. Each has recently contacted Berkeley professor […]
Time Enough
A contraption that can run forever seems like it should violate the laws of physics. But an international team of scientists, including Berkeley post doctorate Tongcang Li and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Xiang Zhang, have designed a device that can do just that: It’s a space-time crystal that will keep time forever. Technically speaking, the […]
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