From the beginning, it was an ambitious idea. Computer automation would remove the taint of human emotion or prejudice from everyday life. Algorithms—the series of instructions that tell computers what to do—would make important decisions about everything from hiring to health care.
The reality, as Ziad Obermeyer discovered, is not quite that simple.
Posted on August 12, 2020 - 12:27pm
Posted on August 5, 2020 - 9:53am
Posted on August 5, 2020 - 9:52am
Almost two decades after graduating, a group of 2002 UC Berkeley alums received an email from their old music professor. Would they like to get together again—at least, virtually—to create a video that might give people comfort during the pandemic? Nineteen of them responded with an enthusiastic “yes!”
It was April, and Marika Kuzma, professor of music emerita and director of the University Chorus and Chamber Chorus from 1990 until 2016, knew that the coronavirus would continue to prevent choirs from congregating—perhaps indefinitely.
Posted on July 22, 2020 - 2:56pm
ON SUNDAY MORNINGS IN THE EARLY ’70s, Freada Kapor Klein could be found sitting on her living room floor talking on the phone to strangers.
Look up! While you were stirring up a tweetstorm on your phone, real (non)human drama was unfolding among the original tweeters—that’s right, the birds. Cooper’s hawks are in hot pursuit of pigeons through the Berkeley canopy. A consortium of bushtits gather on the sidewalk, and a black phoebe lands pensively on your fence post.
Posted on July 16, 2020 - 9:48am
Ray Durham, a law student at UC Berkeley, had a decision to make: break the law and risk his life, or abandon a protest about proving that it matters.
Posted on July 7, 2020 - 12:20pm
In June 2019, University of California Police Department officers arrived at a playground near the UC Village, a campus housing complex for students with children and families. The officers had been called by two boys, both African American, who reported that an unfamiliar woman had been taking pictures of them.
Posted on July 6, 2020 - 12:21pm
THEY COME AT DAY’S END TO SCAMPER up the steps carved in the south face of the rock and sit and watch the sun set. Or they come earlier in the day, often bearing crash pads, to climb on the slightly overhanging face in the grotto-like area on the back side, called “The Pit.” Sometimes they come as a class, to geologize, or to learn about the mortar rocks where, for thousands of years, the Ohlone ground acorns into mash.
Throughout her childhood in Oakland, California, Bettye Kearse was told that she was descended from President James Madison and his slave, Coreen. “Always remember,” her family told her, “you’re a Madison.
Posted on June 25, 2020 - 3:27pm
Our editors have curated a list of entertainment to indulge in this summer. Here are their top picks of TV series, novels, digital collections, and more, all produced by UC Berkeley faculty and alumni.
IT ALL STARTED WITH A MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS.
On Saturday, a crowd of about three thousand met at Grove Park in South Berkeley to march down Martin Luther King Jr. Way to Berkeley Police headquarters and City Hall. The march, organized by UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union (BSU), was one of several concurrent demonstrations in Berkeley protesting police brutality and systemic racism, following weeks of nationwide protests inspired by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police.
Posted on June 19, 2020 - 10:33am
I arrived at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1980 set on earning my PhD in astrophysics, and left five years later with an English degree and a burning passion for writing and reporting. What happened? John Bishop happened. One brilliant teacher, kind and absurdly generous, lit an internal flare inside of me that illuminated my imagination from within, with arc-welder intensity.
Posted on June 16, 2020 - 4:35pm
“The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago,” the author Rebecca Solnit, M.A. ’84, wrote of the pandemic in the Guardian in early April. In a crisis, Solnit wrote, “Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges.”
