InBerkeley

Photo: UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley’s Oliver Williamson has shared this year’s Nobel prize for economics* with Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University. Williamson was awarded the prize “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm”.

Williamson is the fifth Berkeley economist to win the prize, and the university’s 21st Nobelist. The eight Nobelists currently on the faculty are unique in the university in that they get the greatest award of all: a reserved parking place on the campus.

The best quick analysis of Williamson’s contribution to economics is at Marginal Revolution. Read the whole thing, but the intro gives some of the flavor:

In Adam Smith there is the pin factory and the market and from that beginning we trace the long literature in economics focused on the twin questions, What price to set?  How much to produce?  Following Coase, Williamson asks different questions, Why a pin factory?  Why are the 18 steps to make a pin performed by a single firm rather than two or more?  Why are there many firms instead of one large firm?  Why does the pin factory not vertically integrate upwards to buy the steel factory and downwards to buy the retail hardware shop?

For those who believe in the wisdom of crowds, both Williamson and Ostrom were 50:1 in the betting at Ladbrokes on this year’s prize.

Update You can also read a good analysis by Paul Krugman. And one by Steve (Freakonomics) Levitt. Also Ed Glaeser.

Update 2 The headline I should have written.

* For any pedantic readers, the economics prize is not one of the traditional Nobel prizes. It’s awarded by the Swedish central bank in memory of Alfred Nobel, rather than by the Nobel Foundation. The official name is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

UC Berkeley

OK so Berkeley is not exactly chic on the street. Love it though we may, we do not usually think to turn to the city’s thoroughfares and gathering spots for sartorial inspiration.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t stylish people out there. You just have to know where to look, and the Cal campus is – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not — a good place to start

A group of undergraduates recently launched a fashion magazine and a blog to explore “fashion as more than just cloth on a body”. It’s called Bare (Bear/Bare, get it?) and the students “aim to represent creativity and inspiration, ingenuity, and passion. Passion for art, passion for the aesthetic, and passion for one’s own tastes, biases, and self-expression.”

The blog might dissect the look of a student who is photographed on campus, suggest ways to put together an outfit, or report on the retro fashions on TV series True Blood.

So far it’s all lookin’ good. Check out Bare’s website here.

Blogs, Fashion, UC Berkeley

If you’re the type to be easily outraged, Berkeley certainly provides plenty of fodder. If you’re on one side of Berkeley’s distinct political spectrum, the new downtown plan is cause for clamor. On the other side, shake your head in despair at the city council’s decision to adhere to UN treaties.

Today’s news brings something at which I suspect everyone in Berkeley can be outraged. The University of California Berkeley has agreed to pay consultants Bain & Co $3 million over two years to advise on new ways to save money.

The Bain engagement is part of a project to “reduce costs and streamline operations” the university is dubbing Operational Excellence. Here’s what chancellor Robert Birgeneau had to say:

We chose to engage an outside consulting firm after assessing several other options and realizing that we need this support to complete the evaluation. This particular firm, Bain & Company, brings significant experience in examining complex organizations and has recently completed a similar process at the University of North Carolina and will soon do so at Cornell.

Their fresh, objective view, combined with their knowledge of best practices in operations across higher education and other sectors, will serve us well. A working group of campus leaders and key staff will work with the Bain team to carry out the data-gathering and assessment of options…

Undertaking a project of this scope and scale is a full-time endeavor for a full team of professionals and experts. We simply do not have the internal capacity to divert our faculty from their core academic mission to manage a program of this size. More importantly, we recognize that “self-diagnosis” is not always impartial, that fresh ideas from outside our campus may have a role in helping us improve, and that the limited availability of internal resources to spend several months full time on this project would delay both the assessment and any subsequent implementation of opportunities.

I’ve known a lot of Bainies over the years, and they are uniformly bright, diligent and professional. Organizations that face truly complex strategic problems — say, integrating a big acquisition, or developing a new approach to supply chains — would understandably look at Bain, as well as rivals like McKinsey and BCG.

But even with that knowledge, my first reaction was that $3 million for consultants at such a crucial moment for the university is an outrage. How can the university spend money on overpaid consultants when its most precious resource — faculty and staff — are on furlough and seeing cuts all around them? What political consultants call “the optics” are all wrong. I can guarantee that it will have few supporters in the university community.

But $3 million is barely enough to pay Cal’s head football coach for one year (not that I think that’s a good idea). In the context of an organization that spends about $1.8 billion a year, setting aside $3 million for two years is not particularly significant.

If Birgeneau and his administrative colleagues are going to preserve Berkeley as a world center of academic excellence, they are going to need to be equally world-class at finding efficiencies and true savings. There isn’t at present a fantasy world where the state boosts the University of California budget, even though that would be an eminently sensible thing to do. The shortfall can’t be made up by foundation grants, individual donations or commercial wheezes. The increases in tuition are already stretching many families to the breaking point. So savings will have to be found.

Bain & Co aren’t a charity, and it will make a very healthy margin on its work for Berkeley. It would be great if someone would do the necessary work at cost, but I don’t see that happening either. I’ll eagerly follow project Operational Excellence, with only a small knot in my stomach at the thought of what the consultants are being paid. The stakes for one of the world’s great universities are far higher than $3 million.

UC Berkeley

The Cal Recreational Sports Development Fund is the fundraising program for Cal Recreational Sports that helps provide camp scholarships to children of families living in the East Bay who face economic challenges.

The department receives only limited state and campus funding — we suspect more limited than ever this year — and relies on donors and fundraising to fund its Camp Scholarship Program.

On Sunday, October 11, Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto’s 9th annual Crabby Chef Seafood Festival takes place at its restaurant on Fourth Street, and a portion of the proceeds are being donated to the Cal Recreational Sports Development Fund. The program features an “Iron Chef” style culinary competition between local restaurants to choose the “Crabby Chef” champion, outdoor food booths selling cooked crab, crab cakes, clam chowder and other seafood and musical entertainment provided by Freight & Salvage.

The festival runs from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto is located at 1919 Fourth Street in Berkeley, just off of I-80 and University Ave.

Events, Sports, UC Berkeley, restaurants Fundraising

Alan Mutter (above) reports that journalists didn’t kvetch at Googleplex. Personally I don’t believe it, but he was there and I wasn’t:

They said a conference about the future of journalism couldn’t take place without the usual qvetching [sic] about the golden, olden days of journalism, with publishers grieving shriveled margins and editors caviling about the bloggers challenging their previously unassailable wisdom.

But we did it. The two-day Media Technology Summit sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley adjourned today without sliding into the Bermuda Triangle of denial, anger and depression that ordinarily characterizes such shindigs.

Read more about the summit on Mutter’s blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

[Photo: MediaBistro.com]

Berkeley Tweets, Journalism, UC Berkeley Alan Mutter

I hesitate to suggest you go to hear Michael Pollan speak tonight in Berkeley, not because he isn’t smart and entertaining, but because last time I went up to the campus to hear him hold forth, the place was so packed many of us were relegated to an ante-room and had to settle for watching him on small screens.

Still, that was a free shindig and tonight’s event requires one to buy a ticket, so Pollan’s enormous fan-base may not come out in such full force — even if he is on home turf.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author and J-School prof will be talking about his philosophy—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — in Cal Performances’ Strickly Speaking Series, tonight at 8pm at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. Tickets cost $16–$30, (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org.

[Photo: Ken Light.]

Celebrity, Events, Food, Journalism, People, UC Berkeley Michael Pollan

InBerkeley will always greet newcomers to the Berkeley blog world. So The Berkeley Blog is welcome (there’s also the much longer-running Berkeley Blog by Sylvia Paull — I guess the addition of “The” makes a difference).

The Berkeley Blog is subtitled “provocative thinking from UC Berkeley”. It’s early days, but the content on the site now is pretty thin. I hope as more content flows in, it will look livelier. It seems to have launched with one post per topic.

What’s slightly odd to me is that The Berkeley Blog hasn’t seized the opportunity to bring in the feeds of some of the excellent, well-established UC Berkeley bloggers, like Brad DeLong and Robert Reich. Perhaps that’s all to come.

UC Berkeley

The New York Times’ Economix blog has an interesting analysis of economic diversity at the nation’s top universities. Here’s the key table:

UCLA and UC Berkeley come out first and second, with a vastly higher proportion of Pell Grant recipients than any other leading university. Read the Times’ analysis for some thoughts as to why the two UC campuses are way ahead of others.

UC Berkeley

The announcement by philanthropist Warren Hellman (left) that he is pledging $5 million to kick-start  a new online Bay Area news service in conjunction with KQED, UC’s journalism school and possibly the New York Times has prompted a variety of responses.

Robert Gammon in The East Bay Express probably came out most strongly against the initiative, saying it represented a threat to Bay Area journalism as well as to the long-term fortunes of journalism students in the area.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his position as an adjunct professor at the J-School, Silicon Valley new-media consultant Alan Mutter passed no comment on the development and merely reported it on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Susan Mernit, who is about to launch hyperlocal blog called Oakland Local, was ambivalent on her own blog, but concluded that, “As much as I worry that Hellman’s project will suck $$  from my own little project and other wonderful smaller sites I see emerging, the Hellman project feels  more like a replacement for something we’ve lost — the big (bloated?) newsrooms of the corporate papers — not the local sites that are close to their community.”

All the major news media have reported the initiative whose website can be found here and its Facebook page, launched just today, has already attracted about 240, mostly encouraging, followers.

Journalism, Non-profits, People, UC Berkeley, University Bay Area News Project

If you want to catch up on the protests yesterday at the university, zunguzungu does the best job I’ve seen. There’s a great juxtaposition, as well, of a photo from yesterday and a photo of Mario Savio speaking from the same spot in 1964.

UC Berkeley

InBerkeley correspondent Mark Haas beamed in these photos of the walkouts happening today on campus.

He says a UCBPD cop estimated there were about 2,000-2,500 protesters. The demonstrations were concentrated at Sproul Plaza. “The rest of the campus looked completely normal. Students told me most classes were in session today,” Haas reports.

Events, UC Berkeley, University UC Berkeley walkouts

Cynthia Gorney captures the dilemma of being a journalist embedded on campus in the midst of the UC walkout today in a post for Oakland North:

As journalists who are also UC students and teachers, we wrestled with the appropriate reaction to today’s events. Some wanted to join the walkout. Some did not.  As our publication is supported by UC Berkeley, along with a grant from the Ford Foundation, we all agreed that it would be odd for our site to pretend nothing unusual is underway today at the campus that plays such a major role in East Bay life–but that we have a direct conflict of interest in trying to report on the walkout in any conventional way.

It looks like there will be updates throughout the day on the hyperlocal site, which is run by students and teachers at Berkeley’s Journalism School. So worth checking back in.

Blogs, Hyperlocal, UC Berkeley

The Daily Clog has posted Your Guide to Walkout Festivities to help you navigate the various budget protest and walkout events taking place on campus over the next  24 hours or so.   They warn you should expect to encounter a lot of picket lines and rallies if you’re planning on being anywhere in the vicinity of campus tomorrow.

Events kick off tonight at 7 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium for a Save the University teach-in, where several big-name faculty members, including Robert Reich and Ananya Roy, will explain the situation and the reasons for all the fuss.

You’ll also find several links to other Daily Californian articles on the walkout.

Education, Events, Government, Issues, Politics, UC Berkeley

A clue to the evolution of modern human culture, an ancient battle that led to the rise of Germany and an examination of media coverage of the war in Iraq are just a few of the topics in this fall’s “Enduring Value of Humanities” Lecture Series, offered by UC Berkeley Extension.

Starting tomorrow at 6:30 p.m., this series of four evening lectures by distinguished academics offers new insights from the past across a range of subjects. Lectures cost $10 each. From human evolution and ancient Roman history to the changing face of journalism and the future of California, these lectures offer new perspectives on the economic, political, and cultural challenges the world faces today.

Tomorrow’s lecture, “How a Battle 2,000 Years Ago Changed Your Life,” explores how by halting Roman expansion into Northern Europe in AD 9 Germany permanently divided Europe into a Roman south and a German north, and the repercussions of that event in our daily life now.

For more information or to sign up for these events, please visit the UC Berkeley Extension web site.

Education, Events, UC Berkeley

Two UCB researchers out searching for birds (Allison Shultz photo)

Another bit of sobering news of the “climate change is already happening” variety comes this week from a group of UC Berkeley researchers.

The team spent six years tracking the breeding ranges of 53 bird species in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and compared their data to surveys done between 1911 and 1929. They found that more than 90% of the species had shifted their ranges due to changes in temperature and/or precipitation. To read more about the research, check out this article in Science News.

While the team’s findings are certainly important — one unaffiliated expert calls it a “landmark paper” in the story linked above — it’s their methods that seem worth mentioning here.

The research depended on the historical information that is housed at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UCB. Like, say the Cal Academy of Sciences across the Bay in SF, the MVZ has an extensive collection of specimens that scientists can use in all kinds of research.

Unlike the Cal Academy, the MVZ is not geared toward showing those things off to the public, so it’s easy to forget it’s even there. It takes research like this to remind us how great and important it is that someone’s keeping track of all that old stuff, even if most of us will never see it.

Environment, Science, UC Berkeley

Two researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, are among 10 recipients being recognized for their environmental achievements with the 15th annual Heinz Awards, announced today by the Heinz Family Foundation.

Ashok Gadgil, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering and faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Kirk Smith, UC Berkeley professor of environmental health sciences, will each receive $100,000 for the strides they have made toward a more sustainable and cleaner environment.

Gadgil, 58, who also holds a position as deputy director in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, was recognized for his work as a researcher, inventor and humanitarian. The foundation cited Gadgil’s efforts to understand airflow and pollutant transport in buildings, which helps to reduce health risks, improve energy efficiency and enhance the quality of life in developing countries.

Smith, 62, was recognized for his research exposing the relationships among air pollution, household fuel use, climate and health. The foundation noted that he was the first to recognize and quantify the magnitude of the pollution exposure resulting from cooking indoors with solid fuels, such as wood and other biomass. About half of the world’s population uses such fuels daily, and the health impacts – ranging from pneumonia, tuberculosis, cataracts and chronic lung diseases – are disproportionately felt by the poorest women and children in developing countries.

On Oct. 28, each recipient will receive a $100,000 unrestricted award along with a medallion at a private ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Additional information about Teresa Heinz, the Heinz Family Foundation and each of the recipients is available online at www.heinzawards.net.

(Photos by Peg Skorpinski.)

Environment, People, UC Berkeley

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