UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.
This UCLA professor teaches students about the science of dumplings and pie | Los Angeles Times
“We cover similar topics in my upper-level undergraduate cell biophysics class as I do in the Science & Food class,” says [UCLA’s Amy] Rowat, smiling. Every week, she brings in a guest to talk to her class — past visitors include baker Zoe Nathan of Huckleberry, farmer Barbara Spencer of Windrose Farms and Animal chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo — about topics such as emulsification and terroir. In-class experiments have included baking pies in toaster ovens. And every year there’s a “scientific bake-off,” where the students present their independent projects…. “Recipes for baking are like equations,” says Rowat, which neatly sums up the idea behind her class — to use the structures of ordinary life to teach sometimes advanced scientific concepts.
Michelle Obama, celebrities in tow, brings words of wisdom to students at UCLA | Los Angeles Times
Former First Lady Michelle Obama, who was told by her high school counselor that she wasn’t Ivy League material but went on to Princeton and Harvard anyway, urged thousands of students to follow her lead on Wednesday during a high-energy appearance at UCLA. It marked the first time that Obama chose to celebrate College Signing Day on the West Coast…. Reach Higher selected UCLA for the main event, in part, because the campus is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, Waldo said. (Also: ABC’s “Good Morning America”, KCBS-TV, KNBC-TV, KTLA-TV, KTTV-TV, City News Service)
An all-Latino cast? Hollywood passed, but “El Chicano” is coming | New York Times
Hollywood insiders said the resistance Carnahan and Bray faced remains, in many quarters, typical in the film industry. Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, said he had fielded numerous complaints from filmmakers whose projects were passed over because they refused to compromise their vision of casting solely actors of color, or whose movies got made only because they inserted gratuitous white characters. “There’s this age-old truism that if you’re going to have a successful film largely featuring people of color, the powers that be have to have a major white character to provide access to white audiences,” Hunt said. “Often there’s a concern, which I believe is misguided, that there isn’t an audience for diverse films.”
Trump steps up pressure on Fed to cut interest rates, but economists say it’s a bad idea | Los Angeles Times
“When there’s a lot of political pressure, then you usually see higher inflation and often slower growth,” said Lee Ohanian, a UCLA economics professor, referring to the experience of central banks in other countries.
‘The Big Bang Theory’ special to air immediately following the series finale | CBS News
In 2015 the first-ever UCLA scholarship was created by and named for a television series, The Big Bang Theory Scholarship Endowment, which supports undergraduate students in need of financial aid who are pursuing their higher education and majoring in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
L.A. quality of life survey | KTLA-TV
A survey from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs also found that traffic and education were among other top concerns.
For lower-paid workers, the robot overlords have arrived | Wall Street Journal
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software was used to fire people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, “sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive,” says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.
Twitter and Instagram are starting to imagine a world without ‘likes’ | Fortune
Likes are powerful little rewards. In the case of the 2016 UCLA study, researchers asked 32 teenagers to submit photos. They were then shown photos on a screen for 12 minutes, along with a number of likes, which they later learned were artificial. When the teens saw the photos they submitted had a high number of likes, researchers detected activity across wide regions of the brain, including the reward circuitry. When teens were asked to like photos, researchers also concluded they were influenced by the number of likes a photo already had.
Tech firm’s ‘Superpower Glass’ for autism not so super, experts say | Spectrum
Autistic children may not have trouble recognizing emotions. “Most kids do know how to do it; what they don’t understand is how to take the emotion from the context [they are in] and know what to do about it,” says Connie Kasari, professor of human development and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Southern California among nation’s 5 least affordable rental markets | Orange County Register
An annual UCLA quality-of-life survey of 1,406 residents released last week also found rising housing costs to be the single biggest factor undermining satisfaction with life in Los Angeles County.
Aging California seniors will need caregivers, and family is first up | CALmatters
By 2032 there will be more people age 65 and older than children younger than 15, said Kathryn Kietzman, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research specializing in older adults who depend on support to remain at home. The state is “woefully unprepared in terms of policies to support people as they age at home,” Kietzman said. She hopes Newsom’s plan will begin the conversation to address the issue. Kietzman said the biggest challenge in senior care will fall on middle-income families that don’t qualify for state assistance and who aren’t wealthy enough to pay for services at home or at a facility.
For aging California, is the future Florida? | CALmatters
The good news is that more than 70% of Californians over the age of 60 are homeowners, according to U.S. Census data. Those seniors are typically faring far better economically than older California renters. One UCLA study found that more than half of low-income senior renters spent more than 50% of their income on rent. “The biggest advantage [for senior homeowners] is having stable rent, especially if their house is paid off,” said Steven Wallace, associate director for health policy research at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Wallace adds that Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative that capped property taxes, enables many California seniors to age in place more easily.
Dirty air wreaks harm long before birth | Environmental Health News
The answers, [UCLA’s Beate Ritz] believed, could be found in the birth certificates of tens of thousands of Californian babies and in the state’s registries of congenital defects and childhood cancers. Ritz broke out each child’s vital statistics by address, then matched the addresses against local air pollution levels. The analyses took weeks to run on the computers of the 1990s, but got quicker as the technology gained power. Eventually, she found what she was looking for. She tells me how, gradually, she discovered one ailment after another was more prevalent in the children of mothers who had breathed dirty air while pregnant.
