UCLA's Capstones Reviewed in Chronicle of Higher Ed

Every UCLA undergrad with a dollar bill can see a capstone. Indeed, that particular capstone can see him/her, or so it appears.  However, the Chronicle is reviewing capstone courses and their merits and demerits.

College Too Easy? UCLA Makes It Tougher
By Dan Berrett (excerpt): During a review of undergraduate programs at the University of California at {sic] Los Angeles, Judith L. Smith was struck by an uncomfortable realization: Too many majors demanded too little from students. Some students could graduate without ever taking a senior seminar or completing a substantial research project. The result, says Ms. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education, is that students could "be pedestrians and walk through the major."  Just as UCLA had done when it revised its general education requirements, the university saw that it needed to reboot its upper level undergraduate courses. The institution coalesced around the idea of capstones, which are cumulative projects that students complete near the end of college... [The article goes on to discuss capstone offerings in different departments and their pros and cons.]

Full story at
http://chronicle.com/article/College-Too-Easy-UCLA-Makes/133187/

Cheery Twitter Account

Here is a cheery Twitter account you can follow which features notes and photos of failed businesses and empty stores in Westwood, just south of campus.  (It does note new business openings as well.)
https://twitter.com/westwoodisdying

Taxes, Taxes: News on the Tax Front

The Sacramento Bee today is reporting various news on the tax front.  As readers of this blog will know, there are three tax measures on the ballot: the governor's plan which the Regents recently endorsed, the Molly Munger school tax (Prop 38), and a close-corporate loophole tax (Prop 39). Folk wisdom has it that where there are too many measures on the same subject, voters may reject all of them in confusion.

In part to overcome that confusion, the legislature passed a bill that effectively put the governor's plan as the first initiative on the ballot (Prop 30). In order to do it by majority (not supermajority) vote, the bill was ostensibly made into a budget enactment by including a nominal $1,000 appropriation. This action was challenged in court by Munger - who feels her tax is being disadvantaged - and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. - which is anti-tax.  Munger apparently dropped the challenge but the Jarvis group continued it.  There will be a hearing today, it is reported in the Bee.  See:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2012/07/california-legislature-submits-its-own-defense-of-ballot-reordering-bill.html

It is clear that Munger has the money to run a campaign for her tax. Apparently, the supporters of the close-corporate loophole tax have some money, too. They took a full-page ad out in the Bee:
Sac Bee Ad - 7-26-12 - Final

The state Democratic Party endorsed the governor's plan which is no surprise. It was less clear what it might do about the other two but it has now opposed the Munger tax and decided to be neutral on the third tax on corporate loopholes.  See:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2012/07/california-democratic-party-endorses-jerry-brown-tax-initiative.html

And there is also news related to the tobacco tax that narrowly lost on the ballot in June. A recount was requested and the result is to be reported today:
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2012/07/am-alert-yes-on-proposition-39-campaign-throws-down-gauntlet.html

What does it all mean? All we can say is that no one likes the tax man:

Don't Click

You may receive an email which starts with:


Dear Bruin OnLine E-mail user,

This is to inform all users that our server upgrade/maintenance is scheduled for August 30 2012. You may experience login problems during this period. We are having congestion due to various anonymous account registrations and on this note, we are deactivating some accounts that are no longer active and your account may be deactivated if no action is taken...


It gives you a link to click.  Don't do it.  It is spam and may be malicious.

Solar Power Breakthrough Reported at UCLA

The LA Times carries an article today on a new solar film being developed at UCLA: (excerpt)

One of the holy grails of solar cell technology may have been found, with researchers at UCLA announcing they have created a new organic polymer that produces electricity, is nearly transparent and is more durable and malleable than silicon. The applications are mind-boggling. Windows that produce electricity. Buildings wrapped in transparent solar cells. Laptops and phones – or even cars or planes – whose outer coverings act as chargers. It might even be sprayed on as a liquid. The promise of cheap and easy-to-apply site-generated solar electricity might now be a lot closer to reality. Of course, the idea of solar films and solar plastics is not new. The breakthrough to making a transparent film, however, came with isolating only one band of light in the spectrum.

“[A solar film] harvests light and turns it into electricity. In our case, we harvest only the infrared part,” says Professor Yang Yang at UCLA’s California Nanosystems Institute, who has headed up the research on the new photovoltaic polymer. Absorbing only the infrared light, he explains, means the material doesn’t have to be dark or black or blue, like most silicon photovoltaic panels. It can be clear. “We have developed a material that absorbs infrared and is all transparent to the visible light.”...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/environment/la-me-gs-ucla-transparent-solar-film-could-be-gamechanger-20120727,0,4271267.story

March on the Japanese Garden!

That's Fredric March. (Young folks can Google him.) Yesterday on this blog, we provided Winston Churchill's advice to UCLA on the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden, now that a court has blocked the sale.

Here is what Fredric advises along the same lines as Winston:

We Repeat Our Earlier Observation: Jaw Jaw Is Better Than War War on the Japanese Garden

Yesterday, this blog posted news that UCLA’s proposed sale of the Hannah Carter had been halted by a court decision.  A quote from the decision which sends the case for trial in the future:

Plaintiffs sufficiently establish a reasonable probability of prevailing on the merits of this action based on their characterization of the transaction as an enforceable contractual exchange of consideration between UCLA and Edward Carter. In exchange for conveyance of the residential parcel, Carter accepted UCLA’s promise to keep the Garden Parcel as the Hannah Carter Japanese Gardens in perpetuity. Plaintiffs also establish that UCLA has breached the 1982 Amendment by selling and dismantling the Gardens and taking steps to sell the Garden Parcel entirely, including obtaining a probate court judgment allowing them to sell the Garden Parcel. (pdf page 7 at link)

The full decision is at the link below for legal beagles.  But Winston Churchill’s advice from the headline to this post and from our May 12, 2012 post on this matter (see http://www.bartleby.com/73/1914.html and http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/05/winston-churchill-on-japanese-garden.html) might well be heeded by UCLA before getting into more expensive litigation.  

Looking for a compromise with the plaintiffs – rather than pursuing a legal battle which the court decision indicates UCLA is likely to lose – would be the appropriate path. As we noted in the hotel case (apparently to no avail), there are usually alternatives if only one takes a deep breath, pauses, and explores them. The search has to be genuine, of course, and not the supposed exploration for show that went on in the hotel affair.

Open publication - Free publishing - More japanese garden

Compromise is part of life. Try it, UCLA.  You might like it: