The Challenge of Slums: Global Health in the Urban Century - Panel 1
Over 1 billion people are living in slums worldwide, and more people are moving in each day, reaching 2 billion by 2030. Urban and slum health is a critical research need and opportunity in the coming decade, concerning those in public health but also everyone interested in economic development and social justice. Please join us to explore this complex issue from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Keynote speaker: Malawian demographer Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu, founder and director of AFIDEP, the new African Institute for Development Policy in Nairobi, Kenya
Special guest moderator: Sally Stansfield, Executive Secretary of the World Health Organizations Health Metrics Network
Special guest: Dhaval S. Patel, Vice President & Health Systems Director, Marie Stopes International
September 24, 2008
Transmission Challenges -- Central station renewable energy sources, such as wind and thermal, are most promising and easiest to develop in remote places. Ensuring that there is sufficient electric transmission capacity to deliver this power to market and deciding who should pay for the transmission lines are major challenge now facing many state and federal regulators. Deregulation and Its Role in Promoting Renewable Energy -- Wholesale competition drives energy service providers to purchase the lowest-cost option, which will not always be renewable. This requires government to impose standards on the energy service providers to encourage renewable power development. Retail competition has been held out as a great way to promote renewable power, since many customers may choose a renewable option, even if it costs a little more. We will consider the pros and cons of retail competition, and assess its promise to advance renewable power.
UC Berkeley post-doc Lucy O'Brien explains how study of the fruit fly gut sheds light on the role stem cells play in adjusting the size of our intestines.
Full story at http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/10/27/intestinal-stem-cells-respond-to-food-by-supersizing-the-gut/.
Video by Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley media relations
The Philomathia Foundation Symposium at Berkeley: Pathways to a Sustainable Energy Future
The Role of the Research University in Climate and Energy Solutions
Graham Fleming, Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley
For more information, visit http://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/energy/symposium/philomathia2010
CONFERENCE ON AMBIGUITY, UNCERTAINTY, AND CLIMATE CHANGE
http://calclimate.wordpress.com
Session 8 - Directions for Climate Policy Decisions
Over the past decade, there has been considerable progress in the economic theory of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion, involving decisions where the decision maker does not know, or is uncertain about, the probabilities attached to various potential outcomes. This is an appropriate characterization of the current understanding of many facets of climate change science: the uncertainty is pervasive and profound, with many unknowns, and unknown unknowns, that cannot be characterized in terms of a conventional probability distribution. The conference explores the application of developments in the economic theory of ambiguity to climate change policy, including both mitigation policy (the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation policy (coping with the consequences of climate change). Some, but not all, of the fog of uncertainty will gradually dissipate over time, but meanwhile policy decisions have to be made now, whether for mitigation or adaptation. Climate change policy analysis needs to reflect not only the prevailing uncertainty and ambiguity, but also the anticipated future resolution of uncertainty and ambiguity. The challenge is to incorporate risk and risk aversion, ambiguity and ambiguity aversion, and learning, more adequately into the formulation of a framework for decision making on climate change policy. This is the central focus of the conference.
To explore this issue, the conference brings some leading researchers on the economic theory of uncertainty and ambiguity and the economics of climate change together with some leading climate scientists and modelers. Some of the invitees have been asked to make formal presentations or provide formal comments; others invitees are expected to contribute to the discussion from the floor.
Donna Haraway presented her lecture as the 2003-2004 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.