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Way back in 1986—when it was still Morning in America and women wore padded shoulders and men slathered on so much hair gel their coiffures looked molded in aspic—a citizen referendum passed in California that foreshadowed the current Era of Open Data. Ever since, Proposition 65 has required companies with more than 10 employees to […]
Time has borne out the veracity of the Biblical observation that poor will always be with us—and so, too, are well-meaning efforts to feed the famished. But success in getting food to the hungry has been spotty at best. Now, a group of idealistic Cal students is bringing high tech to bear on the problem, […]
At first glance, Rebecca Hui seems all over the place, literally and figuratively. She’s trailed cows around Ahmedabad, searched for dogs in Moscow, and hunted for cigarette butts in the alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The UC Berkeley senior double-majoring in business and urban studies has traveled around the world researching her unconventional project, “The Secret […]
Editors’ note: Minutes after the announcement that a Missouri grand jury would not indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for shooting unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, Brown’s family released a statement urging that police be required to wear body cameras to record their interactions. The Obama administration and some law enforcement officials have also endorsed the idea. […]
The implications of the Target data breach keep expanding, and none of them are heartening. To (painfully) refresh your memory, data from 40 million credit and debit cards recently was filched from company systems over a 19 day period. The bad news for the retail giant’s customers broke just before Christmas, and in the last […]
When Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura and fellow researchers released analyses of Kepler spacecraft data late last year, it made headlines around the world. No surprise there: The findings led to the conclusion that the number of inhabitable Earth-like planets in the galaxy could top 40 billion. The Milky Way seemed somehow transformed from a […]
Oakland is a city of fascinating, bewildering, and uncomfortably stark contrasts. On the one hand, news coverage about it is often exclusively focused on violence and homicide. On the other, it’s increasingly being applauded as a burgeoning food and art Mecca. The reality is, Oakland is both of those places—and so, so much more. It’s […]
Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the frenzy of holiday obligations, the frazzled nature of strained relationships, the crush of year-end job demands? As 2013 comes to a close, you’re in good company if you label what you’re experiencing “burnout.”
Winter Break is coming, along with relatives who will almost certainly ask questions just like that. Well, we went nosing around Pixar Studios and talked to three Berkeley alums whose answers may surprise you. Sociology isn’t the easiest major to explain to practical-minded grandparents, and Gillian Libbert says she picked it because, “It sounds corny, […]
It turns out the secret to health and longevity isn’t that complicated: Run if you can, walk if you can’t. Also more is better than less, and faster is better than slower. Those are the ineluctable conclusions of the world’s longest-running study on the health benefits of running and walking—a tracking of 160,000 runners and […]
It used to be that running a college newspaper was a simple business: The editorial staff reported stories, the advertising staff sold ads, and the paper was printed and distributed around campus. Fast-forward to 2013, and things are very different. The same economic forces that have wreaked havoc on the newspaper industry—estimates of industry-wide job […]
Nothing seems to capture the nation’s collective odium these days quite like a self-entitled techie. That may be the lesson of this week’s local news cycle. It began on Monday morning, when a group of anti-gentrification activists blockaded a Google bus in San Francisco’s Mission district to protest the tech industry’s unregulated use of municipal […]
Clusters of Cal students burst into cheers outside Moffitt Library on Tuesday as they watched a fluffy blonde terrier perform “high-five” tricks and a bulldog roll over, her tongue—and belly—sticking out. For a few minutes, at least, the frenzy of finals had dissipated. Said senior Emiko Minatoya-Shields: “I’m pretty sure you could just sob into their necks […]
All hell was breaking loose over UC Berkeley’s abysmal graduation rates for football and men’s basketball players as California magazine was doing final edits on the Winter 2013 issue. That magazine was to include an in-depth interview with the authors of a paper on the Cal Athletics program, which, in singling out graduation rates and the commercialization […]
Things have been feeling pretty desiccated here in the Golden State, but the return of the rains has been inevitable. And they could come as a deluge. At that point—when Corte Madera Creek swamps Marin, the Russian River jumps its banks and transforms Guerneville into a brimming slough, and much of the San Joaquin Valley […]
The news hit just like it sounded—with a Kabam. UC Berkeley has struck an $18 million deal with the internet video game maker, granting it naming rights to the gridiron at Memorial Stadium for the next 15 years. No doubt hip mobile game players and tech finance wizards recognize “Kabam” as the name of the […]
As some 500,000 of you may have noticed, two weeks ago we ran a web article that attracted a little more attention than we’re used to. Maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised. The email that Berkeley lecturer Alexander Coward wrote to his students to justify why he would be teaching his math courses despite […]
With government funding more scarce, corporations have stepped in to underwrite an increasing amount of research in academia—as we’ve reported, industry now accounts for about 10 percent of funding for research at UC Berkeley, double the percentage it was two decades ago. But what about the iconoclastic researchers—the ones whose work is either irrelevant to, […]
Rebecca Solnit has been described as a “cultural historian,” which is probably as good a handle as any, given her investigative ambit. The author of 14 books and numerous awards—including the National Book Critics Circle Award—she has written on art, music, gender politics, peripatetic tourism and urban trends. Pervading all her work, however, is an […]
