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.
Is there a way to predict who will become homeless? UCLA researchers say yes | Los Angeles Times
UCLA reported that it has improved the odds of identifying who will become homeless to 1 in 2. Buoyed by the results, L.A. County homeless officials are launching a $3-million pilot program to put the laboratory’s work to a real-world test. The departments of health, mental health, children and family services and public social services will comb a list of people compiled by UCLA and target them for preventive services. UCLA, which is conducting the research at no cost to the county, also will identify additional at-risk families, teenagers and young adults. Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab, said the researchers used predictive analytics to model hundreds of potential risk factors for homelessness. Chief among them were interactions with the county’s social services agencies. (Also: KCBS-TV, KPBS-FM)
Americans are flocking to Idaho, fleeing New Jersey | U.S. News & World Report
“Key factors like the Baby Boomer generation relocating upon reaching retirement age as well as states’ economic performances and housing costs drove these 2019 moving patterns,” Michael Stoll, an economist and professor in the University of California—Los Angeles Department of Public Policy, said in the press release. “United Van Lines’ study encompasses data consistent with the broader migration trends to western and southern regions that we’ve been seeing for several years now.” (Also: Fox Business)
Hollywood culture in 2010s marked gains in diversity for actors of color | Associated Press
Despite all this, says [UCLA’s] Darnell Hunt, an author of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, progress toward racial diversity in the film industry has been frustratingly slow, lagging well behind TV. Looking at the decade as a whole, Hunt notes despite some “notable progress” in the TV industry, there hasn’t been much progress in terms of people of color in executive suites, which are still dominated by white men. And in film, the situation is worse.
America’s love affair with driving takes a back seat | Wall Street Journal
For decades, the country’s driving pattern moved in sync with the economy. People drove more when times were good. They cut back when recessions cost them their jobs. Now, however, we’re driving less even though the economy has been expanding for more than a decade. “In the midst of a fairly substantial economic recovery between 2009 and 2017, we’re seeing a decline in person trip-making, which suggests that something pretty fundamental is going on here,” said Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles.
Watching an interstellar comet and hoping for a bang | New York Times
Can you see Comet Borisov with a telescope? It is going to be very tough. Comet Borisov is small — less than half a mile across — and it is getting fainter as it moves away from the sun. There are no records, so far, of someone seeing the comet with just their eyes through a telescope, said David Jewitt, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.… Also, the comet will be diving into the Southern Hemisphere, so it will be even harder for us to see north of the Equator, Dr. Jewitt said. But if you would really like to try, Dr. Jewitt suggests grabbing a large telescope that is at least a meter in diameter and then going somewhere far from any city lights, like the top of a mountain in a desert.
Max Yu, young theater graduate, wins $45,000 playwriting prize | New York Times
Max Yu is the first to admit: He’s not very good at entering contests. (Or at winning them.) It was one of his theater professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, who told him to submit “Nightwatch” — the play he spent his whole senior year writing — for the Relentless Award, which the American Playwriting Foundation grants to one playwright a year for work that has not yet been produced. The prize, created several years ago to honor the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, includes $45,000 and staged readings of the winning play at theaters across the country.
An afterlife so perilous, you needed a guidebook | New York Times
To the ancient Egyptians, creation and regeneration were solely the province of male gods. “Goddesses were believed to be protective vessels,” Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. In the engraving, “the pronoun ‘he’ was essential even for female deceased people because they needed to be like Osiris.”
California, climate change and the trauma of the last decade | Phys.org
“I think there is a general sense of crisis about everything right now, and that has a compounding effect,” said Alex Hall, director of the Center for Climate Science at UCLA.… Climate change simulations for California show more precipitation in wet years and deeper droughts in dry years, Hall said. And according to the models, he added, we are just now on the precipice of seeing those changes play out.
Eight science stories to watch for in 2020 | Los Angeles Times
A CIRM-funded treatment developed at UCLA has led to a cure for dozens of children who were born without a functioning immune system. All of this was made possible by CIRM’s initial allocation of $3 billion. Now that money has been spent, and voters will be asked to renew their commitment to stem cell science by approving a $5.5-billion ballot initiative in November 2020.
Democrats who flipped seats in 2018 have a 2020 playbook: Focus on drug costs | New York Times
“The Republican efforts at ‘repeal and replace’ ironically highlighted the protections in the A.C.A. that would be lost and generated more public support for the law than at any time since its passage,” said Mark A. Peterson, a professor at the Meyer and Renee Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Now more attention has turned to the other live issue that remains, that has largely always been present and that the A.C.A. has done little to forestall, and in some cases is perceived to have made even worse: out-of-pocket health care costs for individuals and families.”
Students want climate change lessons. Schools aren’t ready | Los Angeles Times
A statewide summit this month drew about 200 educators and academics to UCLA, and a slate of the state’s top educator leaders were on hand to explain what is being done at the university level to train teachers.
ISIS ‘caliphate’ crumbled in 2019, but terror group remains forceful threat, experts say | Fox News
“ISIS will be under pressure to commit a major, high-publicized attack with a very large number of casualties in order to demonstrate to its followers, potential recruits and to its enemies that the group is still relevant and powerful despite its loss of territory and death of its leader,” surmised Jeffrey Simon, a visiting political science lecturer at UCLA and author of “The Alphabet Bomber: A Lone Wolf Terrorist Ahead of His Time.” “And there are still many ISIS fighters at large, and they pose a threat of a resurgence in the coming years.”
A toll lane future is inevitable in California as traffic congestion worsens | Los Angeles Times
Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA, said those who can afford to pay the fees are able to avoid congestion for a reliable daily commute, while presumably lessening traffic for those who don’t pay and use the general lanes, he said. “What happens on the 405 every day is what happens at Best Buy and Target on Black Friday,” he said. “People who study congestion have known for a long time that the only thing [that will relieve congestion] is dynamic pricing.”
Why is Trump finding more protection than Nixon did? | New York Times Opinion
The Voteview project at UCLA, which calculates ideological scores for members of Congress, shows that on a scale of very liberal to very conservative, the median score for elected Democrats has increased by about 14 percent between 1974 and today while the median score for elected Republicans has nearly doubled.
Winter solstice will be immediately followed by wet weather in Southern California | Los Angeles Times
As Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, tweeted, “Indications of a more widespread (& cooler) pattern throughout California. No widespread storms, but looking refreshingly like winter.”
Is marijuana linked to psychosis, schizophrenia? | USA Today
"At the end of the day, you can’t make a causal statement," said Ziva Cooper, research director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative and a member of the National Academies panel. "You need to have some biological premise to show that this kind of exposure causes psychotic disorder."
Stroke symptoms: Sudden numbness in this body part could be a warning sign | International Business Times
“If someone has an ischemic stroke — the type in which a brain artery becomes blocked or restricted —the effects often can be reversed or drastically reduced if treatment is started within three hours,” WebMD quoted Dr. Doojin Kim, a neurologist at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. “But if they’re unsure or they wait to see if symptoms will go away, the window of opportunity for effective treatment can close.”
L.A.’s Asian-American activist newspaper from the ’70s is back in print | Los Angeles magazine
When a group of UCLA students met in 1969 with an idea to found a publication that would address issues facing the Asian American community, even the term “Asian American” was considered revolutionary. It had only just entered the lexicon, thanks to UCLA professor Yuji Ichioka, who had proposed the term as a way of collectively identifying what was described as an “inter-ethnic-pan-Asian self-defining political group” — and as an alternative for the offensive term that was commonly used at the time, “Oriental.”
After mosque shootings, New Zealand’s gun buyback runs into an obstacle: gun owners | Washington Post
Whatever the outcome, it's doubtful New Zealand's approach would be feasible in the United States, said Eugene Volokh, a conservative blogger and legal scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles. "The great majority of American rifles and handguns are semiautomatic. I can't imagine American gun owners going along with this, even to the modest level of compliance that New Zealand seems to have gotten," he said.
Need a hand with that? | Cosmos
A new artificial intelligence (AI) system has been created that can both perform complex tasks and explain its behaviour in multiple ways in real time. A new study published in the journal Science Robotics suggests this will encourage trust between AI and humans. Lead author Mark Edmonds, from the University of California Los Angeles, realised that a hallmark of humans as social animals is the ability to provide comprehensive explanations of their behaviour. Such explanations promote mutual understanding, which fosters trust between individuals and enables collaboration.
Fast fashion at the end of the world | The New Republic Column
Since the 1990s, when Los Angeles replaced New York as the center of the domestic apparel manufacturing industry, the city’s local revenue has reached $42 billion annually. In a 2016 report that Martinez and the UCLA Labor Center co-authored, they found a majority of respondents reported that their workplaces in the Los Angeles Fashion District, just blocks from City Hall, kept them in conditions with excessive dust and poor ventilation.
A third of the gender pay gap can be explained by schmoozing between men and their male bosses | Quartz
A new study offers a way to quantify the professional consequences of the old boys’ club phenomenon. It finds that men’s careers advance faster than those of their female counterparts when they have a male boss, a phenomenon that the researchers said could explain one-third of the gender pay gap. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was posted as a working paper on the National Bureau of Economic Research. Its authors, Zoë Cullen of Harvard Business School and Ricardo Perez-Truglia at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to answer the question of how the gender of someone’s boss may affect the employee’s career trajectory.
Treating chronic inflammation may reduce illness, save lives | Psych Central
Early diagnosis, prevention and treatment of severe chronic inflammation may reduce the risk of chronic disease and death worldwide, according to an international team of scientists from 22 institutions… “It’s also important to recognize that inflammation is a contributor not just to physical health problems, but also mental health problems such as anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, self-harm and suicide,” said senior author Dr. George Slavich, director of the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research. “This is a substantial public health crisis.”
Where are all the trans-friendly gynecologists? | HuffPost
There are other promising signs that some in the medical establishment are taking these issues more seriously. On July 1, the University of California, Los Angeles launched a LGBTQ healthcare fellowship for physicians trained in family medicine, internal medicine or internal medicine and pediatrics. According to UCLA Health’s website, the fellowship will “train future primary care physicians to be sensitive, comfortable, clinically knowledgeable and culturally competent in delivering healthcare to sexual and gender minority patient populations.” (UCLA’s George Yen is quoted.)
