UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.
Easter Island’s famous moai statues slowly fading away | CBS News’ “60 Minutes”
“These objects in the middle of what looks like a barren landscape — they speak to you. They draw you in. They make you want to know more. I think that that’s the power of them.” Jo Anne Van Tilburg is a UCLA professor of archaeology. She has been coming here for nearly 40 years, working with local researchers and artists, excavating and cataloging the statues, trying to understand the mysteries, and what she calls, the magic of the moai.
‘Going out with no regrets’: One last viral performance from UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi | Washington Post
When she completed the final, bouncy moves in another gymnastics floor routine that helped bring joy and exuberance back to a sport rocked by scandal, UCLA’s Katelyn Ohashi jauntily dropped the mic. It was a gesture that capped the final performance of a college career marked by viral videos of performances she designed to empower women and fight body shaming, powerful athletic displays that helped land repeated national TV appearances. The gymnast nicknamed “the Perfect 10” was in a tie for seventh at the NCAA championships on Friday in Fort Worth, and UCLA, the defending champion, finished third behind Oklahoma and LSU on Saturday…. That future holds plans for activism around issues such as body image, mental health and domestic violence. “I’ve been waiting for my platform to get to this point,” she told the magazine, noting that she shares a blog called ‘Behind the Madness’ with a friend. “I’ve always been sharing this stuff — I just have a lot more ears now.” (Also: Marie Claire, USA Today, CNN)
Can virtual reality boost positive feelings in patients with depression? | Stat
Michelle Craske is asking patients to dive into coral reefs, ride on bullet trains rushing past pine trees, and cheer on soccer teams from the stands — at least virtually — in a bid to tackle a symptom long sidelined in depression treatment. The University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatry researcher and her colleagues are testing whether virtual reality can curb anhedonia, a symptom of depression and other serious mental health conditions that’s marked by a lack of interest or ability to feel pleasure. They’re putting patients into pleasant scenarios — like a stroll through a sun-soaked forest while piano music plays — and coaching them to pay close attention to the positive parts…. “Most treatments, up until now, have done an OK job at reducing negative [symptoms of depression], but a very poor job at helping patients become more positive,” said Craske.
Nipsey Hussle was hailed as a hero. But to California officials, he was still a gangster | New York Times
“Gangs are the great exception” to the trend away from incarceration, said Jorja Leap, a gang expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even with significant questions about how gangs, gang membership and gang-related crimes are defined, such crimes carry enhanced punishments and a person tagged as having gang affiliations can find the label impossible to shake. “If someone like Nipsey Hussle is viewed as always a gang member,” Dr. Leap said, “what is happening to the average guy who has a low-level job, who’s trying to make it, and that’s his past? Or the average gal, because it’s men and women alike.”
The city that apps built, or destroyed | The Atlantic
The most comprehensive academic study of the effects of IPOs on local housing prices, which studied every IPO between 1993 and 2017, found that prices within 10 miles of a company’s headquarters rose just 1.8% in the run-up to and aftermath of the public debuts relative to surrounding areas. Now, conditions are a bit unprecedented, in the sense that so many companies from such a small part of the region are about to go public. And even 2 percent change in a huge area is kind of a shocker to an economist. “We thought of [the effect] as something big,” Barney Hartman-Glaser, the IPO study’s co-author and a UCLA economist, told me. “Something bigger and, given our methodology, we wouldn’t have believed it.”
Herb Alpert reflects on over 30 years of arts philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy
[Herb Alpert] has been a consistent and articulate proponent of the arts at a time in which the field is under siege…. “I can’t put myself in other people’s brains. I just do what I can as an individual,” he said, which is to support arts organizations and artists. “The real artists are the truth seekers, they tell us what’s really going on. It’s crucially important to support freedom of expression and freedom of imagination.”
Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump to avoid a lengthy court fight | Los Angeles Times
Some legal experts said Trump’s intent, “corrupt” or otherwise, may be impossible to discern because he was never compelled to explain his actions under oath. “Whatever truth it would have induced him to tell, whatever force it might have had on Donald Trump not to break the law by being under penalty of perjury, the American people literally will never hear now,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh who teaches constitutional law at UCLA.
How single-family garages can ease California’s housing crisis | CityLab Perspective
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Donald Shoup) Many single-family neighborhoods have garages that can provide a new supply of small, well-located, and high-quality apartments within walking distance of stores and public transit. Converted garages can house boomerang children, grandparents, caretakers, guests, or friends. Or they can generate rental income to make home ownership more affordable…. Critics can’t say that a converted garage will be out of scale, cast shadows, or otherwise threaten the neighborhood’s character, because it’s already there. Garage apartments create horizontal, distributed, and almost invisible density, instead of vertical, concentrated, and obvious density.
There’s a gold-standard treatment for opioid addiction. What keeps treatment centers from using it? | Pacific Standard
“That’s the tragedy of detox,” says Brian Hurley, an assistant professor of addiction medicine at the University of California–Los Angeles. “Detox sets people up to overdose unless people are participating in some ongoing relapse prevention or recovery maintenance” — that is, ongoing dosing with methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone.
She sold fruit as a sidewalk vendor. Now she has her own shop across the street | Los Angeles Times
Victor Narro, a project director at the UCLA Labor Center, said vendors have an “entrepreneurial spirit” but choose to expand in other ways, such as opening food trucks, which require less capital. However, if they have more access to resources from local governments, vendors have a better chance of starting a traditional business. “I just think the opportunity needs to be there,” Narro said.
How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever | Washington Post
While parents of one of those teens sued a school principal in 1983 for allowing her son to play, teachers now organize students into D&D after-school groups and summer camps. Some therapists use D&D to teach autistic kids social skills. And when a UCLA researcher adapted the game for a third-grade class, the students improved in areas including math, reading comprehension and conflict management.
‘Two-tiered caste system’: The world of white-collar contracting in Silicon Valley | KQED-FM
Contract workers are often cheaper than employees, they can be hired and fired more easily, and investors generally like to see lower employee headcounts. Silicon Valley has not only been part of this trend, but on the vanguard of it, said Chris Tilly, a UCLA professor who studies labor markets, inequality and public policy. “Silicon Valley and the tech sector is definitely way out in front of most sectors when it comes to contracting,” Tilly said.
Storytelling and public health: the power of emotion in science | Medical Xpress
As a pediatrician and writer for such hit TV shows as “China Beach,” “ER,” and “Law & Order: SVU,” Dr. Neal Baer used creative storytelling to share important public health information with millions of people…. “Most people are not data-driven,” said Baer, a Harvard-trained pediatrician and adjunct professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “They are driven by emotional stories. Only then, can we provide the data, give them context, give them evidence. But they need to be moved by the story first.”
The strange tale of the great trans-Saharan ostrich heist of 1911 | Atlas Obscura
Russell Thornton and his team then made their way to Paris for a secret meeting with a feather trader named “Hassin.” According to Sarah Stein, a scholar of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Hassin” was likely Isach Hassan, a prominent Jewish feather merchant whose family had traded in ostrich plumes for generations.
Downtown to establish delivery-only parking | Santa Monica Daily Press
Juan Matute, a DTSM board member and deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said cities are looking at different ways to manage the impacts of delivery services and ridesharing, including increasing turnover at the curb and reducing the amount of time drivers need to park. Matute said he would consider the DTSM pilot successful if the spaces are used primarily by delivery drivers who respect the time limit. “If they’re staying for a few minutes 80 percent of the time, that’s a success, but other drivers may see the spaces and make the calculation that they can just use them for 30 minutes without getting a ticket,” he said. “I’m interested in the percentage of the time that they’re not working as intended.”