InBerkeley

Overheard today on the Twitterstream:

wirehead: thinks that Berkeley is an excellent example of how naively making it hard to drive solves nothing.

mikeblaustein: I’m sitting in a Berkeley coffee shop as three male jewish intellectuals discuss jdate tactics. So THATS me in 40 years, right?

berzerkeley: inspired by @rachelannyes I am working on the logistics of using the Berkeley Adult School’s parking lot for a Sunday Farmers Market.

erik_o: Berkeley meter maid cited me as I was putting coins in the meter. Said I wasn’t fast enough. Lost a little more love for my hometown today.

Berkeley Tweets

Photo: Kafziel, Wikimedia Commons

If you’re looking for a non-traditional and perhaps intellectually stimulating way to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, perhaps a civil engineering lecture will fit the bill?

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, will be giving what has become an annual lecture in memory of the terrorist attacks at 3:30 pm on Friday, 9/11 in 502 Davis Hall.

He’ll be discussing his controversial structural study, first made public in 2006, that concluded that if the Twin Towers had been built to standard building codes, they may not have collapsed.

As he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in a 2006  article (premium access required):

“‘From the day that I stood there and watched it collapse” on television… ‘I was thinking that this is impossible. That there’s something strange here.’”

Events, Science, UC Berkeley, University 9/11, Architecture, Events, UC Berkeley

Photo from Rael Fratello Architects

Wow. UC Berkeley architecture professor Ronald Rael has some novel ideas for the reuse of the east span of the Bay Bridge. Looks great.

Architecture

We’re very spoiled in Berkeley when it comes to food. We have an abundance of food choices and greater food consciousness that perhaps anywhere else on earth.  Easy access to healthy foods, combined with a climate that encourages outdoor activity, results in a population that is relatively fit compared to the rest of the United States. Severely overweight people here tend to stand out like sore thumbs, but you don’t have to travel very far, especially almost anywhere between the coasts, to realize Berkeley is the exception rather than the rule.

In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, concludes that success in controlling health care costs won’t come about until we are able to change the way people eat, and that, in turn will require us to reform the food system — agribusiness — itself.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

Pollan feels that reforming the food industry will be even more difficiult than reforming health care, but that if the health insurance industry is forced to cover all these unhealthy people, they will quickly realize where their interests lie, and “the relationship between the health insurance industry and the food industry will undergo a sea change”:

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before.

General

Inside Higher Ed has a fascinating report on how Robert Reich, professor of public policy at Berkeley and a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, found an innovative way to keep enrollment in his popular course on Wealth and Poverty up, despite the University of California’s budget cuts.

The cuts meant that Reich’s course could only have six teaching assistants, rather than his usual nine. That meant that he could only handle 300 students, instead of last year’s 440. But Reich wanted to deliver his course to as many students as possible. What to do? Reich’s answer: split the course in two. Have one course with all the support and breakout sessions enabled by TAs. Have another course that’s the Lite version, in terms of student/faculty interaction:

In one class, worth four units, students would have the traditional lectures with Reich and break-out discussion groups with TA’s. In a second class, worth only two units, students would attend the Reich lectures without the additional break-out sessions or the same level of coursework. Students in the lecture-only class will still receive exams, which will be graded by less expensive readers, but they won’t write essays graded by TA’s.

It’s clearly not ideal, but Reich’s innovative thinking is one of the small efforts that should help the university through its current budgetary woes.

Photo from House Committee on Education and Labor on Flickr

University