UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
Would you help a stranger? UCLA to study why people are kind or not | Washington Post
“The very fact that we can live cheek and jowl next to each other is remarkable in itself,” said [UCLA’s Daniel Fessler]. “With the world more connected than ever before, kindness has never been more important.” The Bedari Kindness Institute opened last month in a UCLA social sciences building with a $20 million gift from the Bedari Foundation to fund research on what provokes kindness and how that can empower everyday people. It will also offer classes and workshops on the topic. Research has already been done at UCLA about how kindness can reduce heart disease, depression and a person’s risk for developing cancer, said Darnell Hunt, dean of the university’s social sciences division and administrator of the new program. Researchers have begun to study the effects of kindness on depressed students.
Worst winds of the season batter California, bringing prospect of more blackouts, fires and evacuations | Los Angeles Times
“The magnitude of the wind gusts really are going to be a concern,” said Daniel Swain, climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “The actual winds that people experience really will be quite extreme in a lot of places, really everywhere except for the wind-sheltered parts of downtown L.A. and central L.A.”
Automation is likely to eliminate nearly half our jobs in the next 25 years. Here’s what to do | Los Angeles Times Opinion
(Commentary written by UCLA’s Ramesh Srinivasan) Today’s new technologies are not designed to make workers’ lives easier, less dangerous or more engaging. Their purpose is to enrich corporate coffers by eliminating many workers and squeezing more out of those who remain. Amazon, for example, is famous for its high-tech warehouses. Many functions have been automated, and the workers who remain are heavily monitored with new technology that can track everything from how many breaks they take to how many boxes they scan an hour. The technology can also generate warnings and even terminations for those deemed not sufficiently productive. In return for working in such rigid and grueling situations, one analysis found, Amazon warehouse workers make a median wage of $28,466 a year, while the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, makes $8,961,187 an hour.
Air quality during and after wildfires | Phys.org
Dr. Eric Kleerup, a pulmonologist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, explains how wildfires affect air quality and what precautions people can take to limit exposure to smoke and other fire-generated toxins in the air.
5 advocates and crusaders who helped define corporate rights | “PBS NewsHour”
In “We the Corporations,” this month’s book club pick, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler chronicles the long history of the corporate rights movement. Winkler argues that in fact the fight for corporate personhood goes back to the very founding of the United States. Below, he details five people who had particular impact in the corporate rights movement, from the man who declared that corporations should be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures, to another who argued they should have the same rights as former slaves.
50 years ago today, the first internet message was dispatched from UCLA | Los Angeles magazine
The world wide web wouldn’t be possible without ARPANET, a government-funded research effort launched at UCLA in 1969. Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the university and one of the “fathers of the internet,” takes us back to 3420 Boelter Hall and the day interconnectivity changed forever.
General Motors sides with Trump in emissions fight, splitting the industry | New York Times
Ann Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California Los Angeles, said the Trump administration had been clear from the outset that it was not interested in tightening the standards. “If you’re intervening on the side of the Trump administration to limit California’s authority, you’re siding with much less stringent standards,” she said. “I don’t think you can have it both ways.” The move “emboldens an administration that has already rejected any sort of settlement with California,” she added.
Are infamous Diablo winds responsible for recent wildfires? | San Francisco Chronicle
“If the rains begin later or it’s warmer, it means the winds have more potential to cause extreme wildfire behavior,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “This year and last year we’ve seen examples of this. Had the same wind we’re seeing now occurred after an early-season rain, the consequences would not have been the same.” (Also: Bay Area News Group, Sacramento Bee; UCLA’s Jon Keeley interviewed on KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”)
The legacy of Prop. 187 | KCRW-FM’s “Greater LA”
“Early on, there was not a lot of information about Prop. 187, and as the Wilson campaign itself got closer, he leaned into this issue and he’s the one that brought more attention to it — both good and bad,” said UCLA’s Matt Barreto. (Approx. 04:50 mark)
The internet turns 50 today | MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taxpayer funds went into the internet. The web itself was a nonprofit initiative, but what happened is all of us started contributing content, that great democratize in action that I talk about in ‘Beyond the Valley,’ my new book,” said UCLA’s Ramesh Srinivasan. (Approx. 02:15)
Behind the scenes of China’s multibillion-dollar film studios | Bloomberg
China’s film industry has exploded since the 1990s, when commercial films such as “The Dream Factory” (1997) and “Sorry Baby” (1999) signaled “the rise of a new group of multinational entertainment companies in China that began to wrestle the market away from the old state-owned film studios,” writes UCLA professor Michael Berry in the forthcoming book “Once Upon a Time in Shanghai,” (Daylight, $45), a photographic chronicle of China’s booming film industry that will appear on shelves on Nov. 12.
‘You promised you wouldn’t kill me’ | New York Times Opinion
(Commentary written by UCLA’s Kimberlé Crenshaw) It’s true that more men of all races are killed by the police than are women. But black women make up less than 10 percent of the population and 33 percent of all women killed by the police. Data released by the Fatal Interactions with Police research project indicates that from May 2013 to January 2015, more than 57 percent of black women were unarmed when killed. And they are “the only race-gender group to have a majority of its members killed while unarmed.”
People taking blood thinners may risk danger by mixing with OTC meds | Reuters
“New OTC products are constantly being adopted by patients,” Dr. Derjung Tarn of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and colleagues write in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. “This study demonstrates that patients have limited knowledge about potential serious interactions between OTC products and apixaban.”
In-school suspensions the answer to school discipline? Not necessarily, experts say | EdSource
“The goal should be to get to the root of the problem and get kids back in class as soon as possible. What’s counterproductive is if kids are sent to sit in a room with someone who’s just there to babysit and they’re not getting any support,” said Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, which analyzes racial inequities in public education. “That could just trigger further problems.… If you’re just replacing one with the other, in-school suspensions can be as bad or worse as out-of-school suspensions.”
Some evidence for the importance of teaching black culture to black students | Hechinger Report
I talked with Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California Los Angeles and an expert in the education of black students in the United States. Noguera agreed that the Oakland class is a promising model because of the extra instruction and support that the students received, not because black male students were learning separately from the rest of the student body. He worried that the quality might slip as it is copied in other communities and warned that “not every black male student needs this sort of class.”
