2007 November December New Media
Foiling The Geckos
The Internet can bring education and jobs to the world’s poor farmers. And with some ingenuity, the obstacles—political, cultural, and practical—can be overcome. Designing computers for the world’s poor farmers isn’t easy. Rodents chew the wires. Geckos crawl into the computers’ vents and are pureed by the fans. In humid rainforests, there’s moisture damage. In the […]
City Lights
Did pre-war Shanghai’s unique brew of hard-headed ambition and romantic idealism create modern China? Plus: Berkeley’s East Asian Library finally has a home of its own. Dear Editor, I come from an old-fashioned family. My marriage was arranged for me…. I was fourteen when engaged. I tried to get to know her but had no success […]
Eastern Starr
Berkeley’s East Asian Library finally has a home of its own. With the opening of the Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies this fall, Berkeley’s massive East Asian Library collections will be reunited for the first time in decades. Numbering more than 900,000 volumes, Berkeley’s collection is one of the three largest in the country, […]
See Through Walls
The new Berkeley Art Museum will combine old-fashioned ideas about public space with radical new ones about urban design and the future of art. The last time I walked through the Berkeley Art Museum, I saw a ghost. She hovered in the corner of an upstairs gallery, wispy and sly, her hair disheveled, her body fading […]
Belittled, Bothered, and Bewildered
Azar Nafisi decries one-sided debate. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the United States in September, he was widely mocked for his ill-fitting suits and grandiose statements denying the Holocaust and the persecution of women and gays in Iran.There was a dispiriting lack of reasoned, thoughtful debate about his visit, says Iranian author Azar Nafisi, nor […]
Republic of Longing
When you don’t get what you want, imagine it. There is a small fountain Azar Nafisi visits in her mind where as a 5-year-old, she would fill a cup her father had bought for that purpose, and drink. On the way to the fountain, and on the way home again, winding through the streets of suburban […]
The Play And Life And Life Only
The names don’t roll off the tongue like the fabled Chicago Cubs double play combination of Tinkers to Evers to Chance, but for 80,000 football fans in Memorial Stadium, and for generations long since departed and those yet to come, the names Moen to Rodgers to Garner to Rodgers to Ford to Moen signal retribution, […]
Tiny but Mighty
Making a meal of the olive fruit fly Karen sime holds out a glass vial. Inside, dozens of Psyttalia ponerophaga, delicate, amber-colored wasps from Pakistan, float in alcohol. Each is only the size of this capital M, but powerful solutions come in small packages. Sime, a researcher in environmental science, believes P. ponerophaga could help safeguard […]
Where There’s Smoke There’s Opportunity
Westerners who grew up listening to Smokey the Bear’s pithy sermons on saving forests and now regularly choke through smoky summers are still adjusting to the idea that fire is a fact of life. But, says one Berkeley researcher, not necessarily a devastating one. For the past century, firefighters have risked their lives to keep […]
Life’s a Bowl of Noodles
I am sitting elbow on table, chin in palm, staring at what looks like a saucer of pink noodles floating in water. I poke one of the noodles with a plastic pipette. It twitches, then returns to its normal state: unmoving and seemingly lifeless. Could this marine Top Ramen, called nematostella, really have nearly all […]
It’s MySpace, Not Yours
If you think your teenagers are using online social networking sites to flirt with dirty old men and learn how to make bombs, take a deep breath. The biggest threat for teens online isn’t sexual predators or militia nutbags, it’s marketers, scammers, and phishers, says Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley’s School of Information […]
Driving a Tank Through It
Macho men blast overcompensation theory According to Rush Limbaugh, the work of sociology professor Robb Willer is another volley in the “emasculation” of America’s “normal, red-blooded guys.” The accused shrugs. “He misinterpreted the research, unfortunately,” says Willer, who began studying “masculine overcompensation” (the idea that men react to perceived challenges to their masculinity with exaggerated macho […]
Glad You Asked
Q: Why do songs “get stuck” in your head—and how can you get them out? And why are the songs that get stuck in your head always the annoying ones you don’t even like? —Julia Williamson, Berkeley A: Our memory system is bombarded with inputs—people, food, places, actions, events, and, yes, songs. It preferentially remembers […]
Reading The Air
Biochemistry professor Allen Goldstein hadn’t intended to investigate the drug trade, he was just trying to build a machine that would let him measure air pollution. The instrument he’d been designing was one that could pluck compounds out of the air and analyze them on the fly. Other machines already existed that could suck in […]
Next Up: You, in 3D
A Berkeley undergraduate named Charles stands in the middle of a three-meter cube. He moves slowly, watching a ghostly projection of himself move on a screen in front of him. The colors are murky, and his dark pants have completely disappeared, leaving empty space between his shirt and his shoes. Still, what’s up on the […]
All The World’s a Cyber Stage
Marianne Weems is artistic director of the New York–based Builders Association, the Obie Award–winning multimedia performance company known for breaking down the boundaries between stage and audience as they explore the impact of technology on human interaction. A performer with eclectic tastes, Weems has worked with Susan Sontag, musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, and […]
Changed and Unchanged Serbia
Beautiful and historic Belgrade shows its pride, but not its secrets. At the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers, on a high promontory at the Balkans’ edge, lies the city of Belgrade with its great fortress, Kalemegdan. When visiting, it is most instructive to take a walk out to the tip of the city, to […]
Branding: How Univision and Other Corporations Invented The “Hispanic” Market
Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, ethnic political grievance served as the dominant narrative for the Mexican American experience. In the 1980s, however, a new competing narrative arose out of the corporate sector’s growing interest in the so-called Hispanic market. [Wrote Earl Shorris in Latinos,] “With information provided by the 1980 U.S. Census […]
Plus: Branding: How Univision and Other Corporations Invented The “Hispanic” Market.
On June 30, 1993, Carlos A. Fernandez, a lawyer and activist from San Francisco, California, testified before the House on behalf of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans, an organization whose goal was “to promote a positive awareness of interracial and multiethnic identity.” Fernandez proposed that Directive No. 15, the federal government’s guidelines for categorizing Americans […]
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