Crossing Jonathan

From the LA Times:

UCLA law student Jonathan Hale and about 150 volunteers have painted unauthorized crosswalks at dangerous Los Angeles intersections, saying residents cannot wait for city action.

Advocates say traffic deaths rose 56% from 2015 to 2025 as the city’s Vision Zero effort faltered; officials say they maintain or add more than 1,000 crosswalks annually.

Hale, arrested while painting in Westwood before his case was dismissed, wants the city to legalize the work and recommit to Vision Zero. LADOT says it has met its commitments to him...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-16/risking-arrest-he-paints-illicit-crosswalks-in-la-we-cant-wait.

Straws in the Wind - Part 503

From the Cornell Daily Sun: Cornell’s annual drone and laser light show, scheduled to kick off homecoming weekend on Oct. 16, [was] canceled due to the City of Ithaca’s temporary moratorium on student event permitting, according to the Homecoming schedule website and a University spokesperson’s email to The Sun. The Ithaca Common Council passed a temporary moratorium on special event permits to Cornell and affiliated student organizations on Oct. 7. The moratorium, in effect until Nov. 5, impacts events with amplified sounds and music. “We canceled this year’s drone and laser light show to respect the City of Ithaca’s moratorium on permits for student events,” a University spokesperson wrote to The Sun. 

The event was slated for 8 p.m. on Friday at Schoellkopf Stadium, with attendance being free and open to the general public and DJ Chris Washburn opening the event. The decision comes amid national uproar following a Sept. 14 lawsuit in which a former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, alleged that she was sexually assaulted and gang raped after being coerced into consuming drugs at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024...

Full story at https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2026/10/cornell-cancels-homecoming-drone-and-laser-light-show-due-to-moratorium-on-student-events.

Cautionary Note for UC Emeriti/Retirees

If you are a resident of LA County eligible for Medicare, you may have received a mailer advertising the UCLA Medicare Advantage Plan. NOTE THAT UCLA MEDICARE ADVANTAGE IS NOT AMONG THE OFFERINGS OF THE UC RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S HEALTH INSURANCE OPTIONS. If you are eligible for UC retiree health insurance, there is a Medicare Advantage option included, but it is NOT the UCLA Medicare Advantage Plan. Were you to enroll in the UCLA Medicare Advantage Plan, bad things will happen. Yes, it is confusing that the UCLA plan pops up in your mailbox at around the time that UC has its open enrollment period. But just ignore it.

Remote

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington met as Ph.D. students, when they were randomly assigned desks a few feet away from each other in a basement office at Harvard University. They started chatting and soon learned they shared an interest in improving work — both for workers and companies. The collaboration that ensued continued at Princeton University, where they both completed postdocs.

Their latest joint project is a book on the benefits of working together — face to face, in real time. In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, which will be published later this month, describes the benefits of in-person collaboration and the drawbacks of remote work...

Many workers, including in higher ed, say they prefer to work remotely at least part time. Why do you think there’s such a gap between what people say they want and what might be good for them?

I think that the costs of remote work are very subtle, often. From a productivity perspective, the quality of work is harder to see than the quantity. At a more personal level, the costs can also be subtle. You don’t recognize that you’re not having these face-to-face interactions with colleagues, and so you’re not developing stronger relationships with them. It’s kind of hard to see that counterfactual, whereas it’s relatively easy to see the counterfactual of “I would have to be commuting and now I’m not and I really don’t like commuting.” ...The things that you’re potentially losing by not going into the office are these much mushier concepts — maybe you would have come up with a better idea if you were in person and you had a serendipitous collision with your colleague. But you don’t know that that would have happened.

Colleges and universities differ from other types of workplaces in many ways. Are there lessons from your research that would apply specifically to an academic setting?

It’s been interesting to see how resonant some of our findings have been with other academics. One of our papers looks at how much feedback software engineers get on their code, and we find that people who are distant from their colleagues, even by just a short walk, end up getting 20 percent fewer comments on their work. That hits young people harder, and also hits women harder because it looks like they’re less comfortable asking for advice when they have to do that digitally. A lot of young female academics, particularly, have come up to us and talked about the connection they see between that study and their own experience. I think the transition to being a professor from being a grad student is a tough one in the best of circumstances. In those contexts where it’s no one’s job to mentor you, it’s extra important to have this in-person reinforcement...

How can employers in higher ed persuade employees of the benefits of working in person?

Aspects of the data could be compelling. There is a study where they basically have teams of people or pairs of people try to come up with new ideas for products for a company, and the experiment randomizes them so that half of them are in Zoom meetings and half of them are in-person meetings. The people in in-person meetings come up with 14 percent more ideas. Their ideas are also rated as more creative. One hypothesis is that when people are on Zoom meetings, they’re always looking at the camera to kind of signal that engagement. But then you don’t get the eyes wandering, and that means you don’t get your mind wandering as much. There’s also a lot of other things that are happening in person that don’t translate totally to Zoom, like at a neurological level — your brains kind of light up in sync with the people you’re working with in person in a way that is not fully replicated online.

Faculty members enjoy the autonomy to work how and when they like. Does your research offer insights into whether there is a minimum number of hours to create these benefits of working in-person?

The office is not about having butts in seats, and everyone in their own office or cubicle or whatever the arrangement is. That could really imply some notion of core hours, where if most meetings with students, meetings with other faculty, happen between say 10 and 2, those could be the hours that faculty are implicitly expected to come in for... The emphasis should be on this idea of getting brains in sync.

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-case-against-remote-work.

Straw in the Wind - Part 502

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: ...The ed-tech marketplace is filled with tools that promise to either help students cheat or to detect AI cheating. It’s an accelerating arms race, pitting the newest AI technologies that mimic human behaviors against those that discern what is authentically human. The depth and layers of surveillance are “really sort of shocking,” said Marc Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi. He spends many hours staying on top of these tools and how they are advertised to instructors and to students.

“Imagine setting up your system where half your time is going to be watching a sped-up process-tracking report to see if a student is copy and pasting something here, or going into an AI-detection report and wondering if 38 percent of this is AI-generated versus 15, and what level becomes a point where you bring a student up,” he said. “It’s too much, and people check out.”

The latest AI-detection tool, Pangram, has won attention for its accuracy in spotting AI writing. Yet surveillance seems to be a losing proposition. Watkins noted that a student could purchase Pangram alongside a generative-AI program such as Claude Code, then have it repeatedly rework an AI-written essay 100 times over until it passes cleanly through the detector.

The students who win the cheating game “would be the ones who had the most resources and also had the most knowledge about how these systems work,” he said. “Our assessment strategy would basically only really detect and punish those students who didn’t have that access.” ...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-new-nanny-state.

Parallel Blogs / Subscribing / Song

We have been putting out this blog since 2009 under the heading "UCLA Faculty Association" using the link:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/

The blog site was originally created by the then-executive director of the Faculty Association. As such, yours truly does not have control of the site; he is simply a blogger on it. So when technical issues arise, that can be a problem. Given that issue, we have been adding a parallel site with the same blog entries since July 23rd:

https://danmitchellsblogcontinues.blogspot.com/

We will be running the two in parallel for the indefinite future. Possibly, at some point we will switch to the new link.

If you read the blog using the Facebook page of Yousee Elayemeriti, you can continue to do so:

https://www.facebook.com/yousee.elayemeriti

===

Want to subscribe?

You can't subscribe directly. But you can subscribe indirectly to this blog via a service called Blogtrottr. Go to blogtrottr.com and fill in the URL for the blog:

https://danmitchellsblogcontinues.blogspot.com/ 

or

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/

and put in your email address. 

You will then receive an email at the email address you provided asking you to confirm. After you confirm, you will receive an email notification of new postings whenever they appear. If there are, say, three postings on a particular day, you will receive three notifications (one for each one). 

Note and full disclosure: There are ads on these notifications. 

==

And here's a little song, based on the information above, composed by Gemini:

"Sharp and Clever Pen":

Or https://archive.org/details/sharp-and-clever-pen

Verse 1

I scroll the screen looking for some light

A voice that cuts right through the noise

They talk about the taxes and the spin

But Dan Mitchell has a different kind of truth

He talks about the spending and the waste

The parallel blogs that keep us truly free

Independent channels are the only way to go

To find the analysis the mainstream never shows

--

Chorus

Get real economic facts!

Escape the corporate tracks!

Subscribe and find the key!

To keep your mind free!

Get real economic facts!

Escape the corporate tracks!

Subscribe and find the key!

To keep your mind free!

--

Verse 2

He analyzes policy with a sharp and clever pen

Decentralized and honest, standing on his own ground

You don't need their filters and you don't need their spin

Just some liberty and facts to help you really win

Bookmark the connection and let the truth begin to flow

A parallel alternative to the status quo we know

Fiscal sense and freedom are waiting on the page

The perfect antidote for a confusing modern age

--

Chorus

Get real economic facts!

Escape the corporate tracks!

Subscribe and find the key!

To keep your mind free!

Get real economic facts!

Escape the corporate tracks!

Subscribe and find the key!

To keep your mind free!

--

Outro

Yeah, find the facts for yourself

Dan Mitchell's blog is out there waiting

Just click and subscribe and see the difference

Get free and stay informed always.   

Olympics

From Chancellor Frenk: In less than two years, the Olympic and Paralympic Games will return to Los Angeles for the first time since 1984 — and UCLA will once again have the extraordinary honor of welcoming the world to our campus as the home of the Olympic and Paralympic Village. Today, we are launching https://2028.ucla.edu/, UCLA’s central digital hub for our journey to the Summer Games. The site will celebrate our history as the home of Olympians and Paralympians and share inspiring stories of Bruin athletes. It will also provide updates on anticipated campus impacts...

Full statement at https://chancellor.ucla.edu/messages/uclas-olympic-and-paralympic-journey.