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.
‘Threatening the future’: The high stakes of deepening school segregation | New York Times
A new report from U.C.L.A. and Penn State outlines the changes in school segregation since the landmark Supreme Court ruling named after Oliver Brown, a black father who sued to enroll his daughter, Linda, in an all-white elementary school blocks from their home in Topeka, Kan…. Today, the decreasing white share of the public school population across the country may lead some to believe that schools are becoming more integrated. But the reverse is true, according to the report. The percentage of intensely segregated schools, defined as those where less than 10 percent of the student body is white, tripled between 1988 and 2016, from 6 to 18 percent…. The authors of the report, Professor Frankenberg, [and UCLA’s] Jongyeon Ee, Jennifer Ayscue and Gary Orfield, suggest several policy remedies, such as using magnet programs and busing to draw students voluntarily to schools outside their neighborhoods and districts.
Uber drivers strike before owners’ big payday | The New Republic
A recent study illustrated the toll that Uber and Lyft have taken on their Los Angeles workforce, who are overwhelmingly men of color. Lucero Herrera, a researcher at UCLA’s Labor Center and one of the report’s authors, told The New Republic that she has spoken to many Uber drivers in the city who live out of their cars and have amassed large amounts of debt working for the company, essentially locking themselves into their jobs…. “Organizing in a sector that doesn’t have a physical space where the drivers can interact with each other is very hard,” said Herrera. “It’s pretty remarkable they’ve built this network across the world.”
Scientists can finally explain the ‘bubble cascade’ in a pint of Guinness | Food & Wine
Meanwhile, Guinness isn’t the only alcoholic beverage that recently had this kind of phenomenon explained. Earlier this year, a researcher at UCLA [Andrea Bertozzi] unveiled her groundbreaking explanation into why wine has “legs.”
Will smoggy L.A. have ‘zero bad air’ in 2025? Don’t hold your breath | Los Angeles Times
“Claiming that the air will be healthy when there are no days below 80 parts per billion is misleading,” said Suzanne Paulson, a professor of atmospheric chemistry who directs the Center for Clean Air at UCLA.
Beating Trump in 2020: What the electability conversation misses | Fortune
One common explanation for this drop, cited by Clinton and others, is voter-identification laws, though political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Michael Tesler note in their book, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,” that voter identification laws did not correlate much with black turnout. Rather, they argue that Obama’s “extraordinary black support was concentrated among African-Americans with a strong sense of solidarity with other blacks,” and that Hillary Clinton did not enjoy such support, despite having high favorable ratings — but far lower percentages of very favorable ratings and therefore enthusiasm — among African-Americans…. Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist, noted that voters have a hard time judging how other people will vote. “From a survey research point of view, it is harder to ask people to make judgments about what they think other people are going to do in the future. So—asking people how they will vote is one thing; asking people how they think everyone will vote is a different thing—and that is by definition harder for people to estimate,” she told Fortune.
Napping your way to success | The Epoch Times
Dr. Alon Avidan, a neurology professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and director of UCLA’s Sleep Disorders Center, says napping is a natural response to that dip in alertness that typically occurs a few hours after lunch. “In other cultures, napping is socially acceptable. It has been a strategy to get rid of that temporary sensation of fatigue and sleepiness,” Avidan said. “If you go to Spain, Italy, and Portugal in the early afternoon, you’re lucky to find a shop open. Here in the U.S., of course, we have abandoned that idea and instead rely on working through using a cup of coffee.”
Michael Pollan: Not so fast on psychedelic mushrooms | New York Times Opinion
Scientists at places such as Johns Hopkins, New York University, U.C.L.A.-Harbor Medical Center and Imperial College in London, have conducted small but rigorous studies that suggest a single psilocybin trip guided by trained professionals has the potential to relieve “existential distress” in cancer patients; break addictions to cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine; and bring relief to people struggling with depression. Psychiatry’s current drugs for treating these disorders are limited in their effectiveness, often addictive, address only symptoms and come with serious side effects, so the prospect of psychedelic medicine is raising hopes of a badly needed revolution in mental health care.
How would a recession shape the 2020 presidential race? | Fortune
Lynn Vavreck, professor of American politics and public policy at UCLA and author of “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns,” says past elections show that messaging does best if it meets certain criteria when challenging someone who’s linked to a good economy…. “That’s why you often see people building their whole campaign around things that are very broad and thematic,” Vavreck says. She points to the example of the 1976 Jimmy Carter presidential campaign, which the Democrat built around the theme of being an outsider who would return trust to Washington. Gerald Ford, the incumbent Republican president, was stuck with a label of being a Washington insider, given that he had spent decades in politics.
So far, Donald Trump’s trade war has not derailed the global economy | The Economist
A recent study by Pablo Fajgelbaum of the University of California, Los Angeles, Pinelopi Goldberg of the World Bank, Patrick Kennedy of the University of California, Berkeley and Amit Khandelwal of Columbia University totted up all such effects for the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in 2018. The bulk of these fell on imports from China. They found that the welfare losses to producers and consumers from higher prices came to 0.4% of GDP, but when the gains to others were included, the economy-wide net cost was just 0.04% of GDP.
Rudi Gernreich: More than the Monokini | Jewish Journal
In addition to clothing borrowed from the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and private lenders, the curators obtained artifacts from the UCLA Special Collections, including personal papers and photographs.
Three LAPD officers and watch commander on leave with infection of unknown origin | Los Angeles Daily News
Three officers and a watch commander at the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley station were placed on medical leave over the weekend after coming down with some kind of infection. Officers at the Reseda facility and police union officials are certain the disease is MRSA — a bacterial infection that can show up as abscesses on the skin — and also have said that the infection first showed up after a homeless man was brought to the station. Medical experts said it’s not possible to determine where an outbreak started, or how it spread, without deeper analysis. “With the level of information we have, without doing additional molecular testing, it’s really hard to say for sure where it came from,” said Dr. Zachary Rubin, an assistant clinical professor of infectious diseases at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
Is there AI doctor in the house? | Live Mint
UCLA researchers have developed a new AI system to help radiologists improve their ability to diagnose prostate cancer, according to an April 16 press note. The system, called FocalNet, helps identify and predict the aggressiveness of the disease evaluating magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans, and it does so with nearly the same level of accuracy as experienced radiologists. In tests, FocalNet was 80.5% accurate in reading MRIs, while radiologists with at least 10 years of experience were 83.9% accurate, according to UCLA researchers.
Was Joe Biden a climate change pioneer in Congress? History says yes | Polifact
“I think Biden’s 1986 bill was the first introduced in Congress on this issue,” said Sean Hecht, an environmental law professor at UCLA. “He gets credit for that.”
MaltinFest brings the famed critic’s favorite films to the Egyptian Theater | LA Weekly
Venerated institutions such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the UCLA Film and Television Archive are contributing to the fest. (Also: Deadline)
Unusual mid-May rain in the forecast for the Bay Area | San Francisco Chronicle
The forecast is uncertain next week, but many meteorologists are saying long-range models indicate an active pattern with wet conditions continuing through mid-May. “Some fairly unusual mid-May precipitation expected across a big chunk of the Western U.S., including California!” tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Unsettled pattern may continue for 10+ days.”
Gore climate group warns pets endangered by global warming | The Washington Times
Climate concerns and pets have been addressed before, most significantly in a recent UCLA study gauging the “environmental impact” of pet food, plus a Forbes analysis which warns of the increasing carbon “paw print” of the world’s pets.
What’s behind a rise in conscience complaints for health care workers? | NPR
Former Director of the Office for Civil Rights Jocelyn Samuels takes issue with that characterization. She was Severino’s predecessor from 2014 to 2017. “It is wholly inaccurate to say that we abdicated our responsibility to enforce these laws,” she says. Samuels, who now directs the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, notes the average of one complaint a year filed under the provider conscience laws wasn’t just in the Obama administration — there were only 10 complaints in the decade from 2005 to 2015. “I think that the number of complaints that were filed during the Bush and Obama administrations is some indication about the relative scope of the problem of religious refusals,” she says.
Go behind the scenes a taping of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ | Entertainment Weekly
Ever since season 1, it’s been the job of David Saltzberg — a physics professor at UCLA — to assist the “Big Bang” writers and prop department so that Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Raj sound and behave like actual brainiacs. “My role is to ground the show in reality,” says Saltzberg.