Earthquakes in Your Backyard

James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz; James Clifford, Associate Professor of English, Ohio State University; William Ferris, Former Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Stanley Katz, Former President of the American Council of Learned Societies and Professor in Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Catharine Stimpson, University Professor and former Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University; M. Belinda Tucker, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Faculty Associate, Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA The academy has been under considerable pressure recently, both fiscally and fueled by new pressures on knowledge formation, and on pedagogical, and organizational form. The university as such has come into question, both within and without. This understandably has prompted both anxiety and critical responses among faculty, students, research and administrative staff. At the same time, there has been much less focus on the university we might be for, that which we might work together to promote, whether in the tradition of Bishop Newman's or Jan Pelikan's reflections on "the idea of the university" or in Jacques Derrida's critical conception of the university without condition. The distinguished panel will lead a discussion of "the university we are for". Please join us in the second of a series on what should be a dynamic discussion of a set of issues crucial to the contemporary academy.

Statistical Analysis of Categorical Data

Read the full story: http://bit.ly/1MJQ82P High-speed video of hand-made models of winged seeds, showing how a single-winged seed (left) autorotates like a helicopter, which slows its descent, while double-winged seeds do not. The longer a seed remains airborne, the greater chance of wind dispersal. The whirling, winged seeds of today’s conifers are an engineering wonder and, as University of California, Berkeley, scientists show, a result of about 270 million years of evolution by trees experimenting with the best way to disperse their seeds. Whirling, or helicoptering, keeps a seed aloft longer, increasing the chance that a gust of wind will carry a seed to a clearing where it can sprout and grow unimpeded by competitors. “Winged seeds may have contributed to the success of these conifers,” said paleobotanist Cindy Looy, an assistant professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology (BiGCB) and a curator with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Phil Ebiner; footage by Robert Stevenson, Dennis Evangelista and Cindy Looy http://www.berkeley.edu http://www.facebook.com/UCBerkeley http://twitter.com/UCBerkeley ...