UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.

New UCLA study finds people are unhappy about the cost of living in Southern California | KABC-TV

The Luskin School of Public affairs asked people to rank categories from 10 to 100.… The lowest rated category was cost of living at 42. The price of housing, mortgage or rent was the most important factor in the cost of living. Fifty-seven percent of people say they, or a close friend or family member, has considered moving because of the rising housing cost. That number jumped 10 percent since last year. (Video download)

Google’s algorithms discriminate against women and people of color | The Conversation Opinion

Social media researcher and UCLA professor Safiya Noble has written most extensively on this topic. In her book Algorithms of Oppression, she points out that Google suggests racist and sexist search results are the user’s fault since they simply reflect our own cultural assumptions and previous search histories. Noble also illustrates how Google’s algorithms skew their results in ways that prioritize advertisers and the white affluent audiences they are often trying to attract…. For years, searches for variations on “Black women” led to racist and sexist suggestions. Now Google simply no longer autocompletes with anything at all. For instance, now when I type “Why are Black women so” into Google’s search bar — the search that is on the cover of Noble’s book — it does not autocomplete at all.

Is the immediate playback of events changing children’s memories? | New York Times

“Emotion is often aroused when we have heightened moments of meaning,” said Dr. Daniel Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author, most recently, of “Aware.”

For principals, biggest task is creating a school culture without the threat of gun violence | EdSource Opinion

(Commentary written by UCLA’s John Rogers) Today, the fear and impact of shootings in the nation’s schools has become all too real. That reality is evident in a new nationally representative survey of 505 high school principals conducted by the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, which I direct. In the survey, high school principals from California to Connecticut said the threat of gun violence “has captured the most attention,” represents the “largest stress,” and poses the “gravest concerns.” In the words of one principal, “it’s probably the first thing I think of every morning and every night. You know, God forbid, but, what if.”

In the vaccine fight, measles is winning | The Hill Opinion

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Jonathan Fielding) In the great debate over vaccinations, the clear winner has been the measles. While we bring this issue to the political stage, measles spreads. There have already been more U.S. measles cases in 2019 than in any of the last five years, and it’s only April. We are well on the way to the largest number of cases since the disease was officially eradicated 20 years ago, and based on the numbers, the human cost is predictable. We need to start treating the measles outbreak as the public-health emergency that it is. Without returning the rate of vaccination to pre-2000 levels, we are putting both adults and children at grave and needless risk of illness, disability and even death.

After DACA, future of thousands of Dreamers remains unclear | San Francisco Chronicle

Graduating Dreamers will fare better in places like California, where immigrant-friendly communities are more accepting of undocumented immigrants and where state law allows Dreamers to qualify for in-state tuition. But the fact that their opportunities are limited will discourage many students from pursuing higher education or getting professional jobs, according to Margaret Peters, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They’re much more likely to get a job in a more informal economy where people aren’t really going to ask them about their papers,” Peters said. “It’s wasting all this human capital that is out there.”

Winter is coming, but good news: We can now harvest energy from snow | Fast Company

Researchers at UCLA have developed a first-of-its-kind breakthrough by building a small silicone sensor-generator that can harvest electricity directly from snow–dubbed a “snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator” or “Snow TENG.” It could lead to a new wave of wearable electronics, more efficient solar panels, and even entire buildings that can produce energy during winter weather with a simple coat of paint…. “We know snow is willing to give up electrons, [so] we thought why not bring another material with the opposite charge to extract these electrons to create electricity,” says Maher El-Kady, assistant researcher at UCLA.

Metro says its contractor painted over 110 Freeway mural dedicated to 1984 Olympics | Los Angeles Daily News

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority took the blame Tuesday for painting over a downtown Los Angeles mural dedicated to the 1984 Olympic Games. In a written statement, Metro said contractors used gray paint to cover the wall just beneath the 4th Street bridge over the 110 Freeway. The mural, titled “Hitting the Wall,” adorned that section of the freeway for more than 35 years…. [UCLA’s Judy] Baca [who painted the mural] said she was not contacted by either Caltrans or Metro prior to the mural being painted over. She said restoring the mural this time would be even more difficult.

Silicon Valley is split over California’s controversial housing bill | CityLab

As of 2016, at least, East Palo Alto hadn’t experienced as much gentrification as might be expected, according to a case study by UC Berkeley and UCLA researchers. That is partly because the city has taken steps to protect existing residents and support affordable housing development, the report found, enacting zoning measures and density bonuses that compel affordable construction for Californians on the lower end of the income spectrum. And between 1990 and 2013 (the period that the research covers), the city actually opened its doors to additional low-income households, rather than pushing them out.

Even Bernie Sanders recognizes the high cost of open borders | Los Angeles Daily News Opinion

In November, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research held a seminar to raise awareness of how the rule change might cause people to “disenroll” in public benefits of this type. Researchers calculated what they termed the “chilling effect population,” the number of people who would be at risk of believing, “due to confusion, fear and misinformation,” that they should stop participating in a program for which they remain eligible. They estimated that at least 15 percent and possibly up to 35 percent of the “chilling effect population” would disenroll.

LGBT workers should be protected from discrimination. Let’s hope the Supreme Court agrees | CNN Opinion

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Jocelyn Samuels) Until the Equality Act becomes the law, the Court’s decision in the pending cases will govern the protections that LGBT people receive in the workplace and likely elsewhere, such as in education, housing and healthcare. The question before the Court is whether it will take away rights that lower courts have held are provided to LGBT people under current federal law. If the Court eliminates those rights, it will increase the risks of discrimination against LGBT people — a result especially damaging for the 4.1 million LGBT people who live in states without any state-level protections and who will therefore have no recourse at all for the discrimination they endure.

California faces a sexually transmitted disease crisis. Why aren’t we confronting it? | CALmatters Opinion

(Commentary written by UCLA’s Jeffrey Klausner) Failure to respond to California’s sexually transmitted disease crisis will have serious and direct health consequences for Californians, ranging from infertility and blindness at the individual level, to facilitating the development of multi-drug resistant and untreatable gonorrhea infections similar to cases already occurring outside the United States. If we, as Californians, don’t demand urgent action to stop this crisis in its tracks, we will doom the current generation of young adults to a legacy of ill health they did not deserve.

Grants roundup: UCLA gets $20 million for a renovation | The Chronicle of Philanthropy

The University of California at Los Angeles is getting $20 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation, in part to renovate UCLA Medical Plaza, an outpatient care center in Los Angeles.

Toddlers’ obesity rates dropped when food voucher program became more nutritious | Nola

Significant changes that made a federal food voucher program more nutritious for low-income families and children resulted in reducing the risk of obesity among 4-year-old children who had been part of the program since infancy, according to a new study.… Her team and researchers with the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health worked with Los Angeles-based health program PHFE WIC, to examine health and population data from more than 180,000 children in the WIC program in Los Angeles County.

Researchers are using psychedelics to treat mental illness | The Conversation

Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine had shown psilocybin [a psychedelic substance] could reliably induce mystical states leading to positive changes in personality such as openness and sociability. Psychotherapists at UCLA harnessed these effects to reduce anxiety and depression in people with terminal cancer.