Allegations of Monkey Business

From the Winston-Salem Journal 2/23/13: 

Wake Forest University Health Sciences is suing to end a joint venture with the University of California at Los Angeles involving the primate colony in southern Forsyth County, and UCLA is accusing Wake Forest of financially mismanaging the research center. The colony contains 475 vervet monkeys, many of which came from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. They contain family trees that have been tracked for eight generations by researchers.The Wake Forest group said it is willing to shut down the primate center in the Friedberg community if UCLA doesn’t agree to continue to pay half of the operating costs. Wake Forest paid $2 million to build the center. Wake Forest filed the lawsuit Dec. 7 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. The legal case began showing up on the online Pacer legal-documentation system Feb. 6 when UCLA filed a petition for dismissal of the lawsuit. The group wants UCLA to pay $330,287 – half the cost of the colony’s operating budget for fiscal 2012, which ended June 30, 2012 – as well as damages exceeding $10,000, plus interest. It has requested a jury trial and that the case be transferred to N.C. Superior Court... 

Full story at http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/article_80a1acbe-7d20-11e2-9686-001a4bcf6878.html

All I know about this matter is what I read in the papers.  Can we just counsel both sides to play nice?

UC Consequences of the DC Chicken Race

Like so many political debates, the standoff in the nation's capital over federal spending has been somewhat of an abstraction for months on end. That could change, though, starting next week. With just about everyone now agreeing that the March 1 deadline for avoiding automatic spending cuts -- sequestration -- will be missed, the real question seems to be how long before those cuts are felt and where will they hit hardest. In the Sacramento region, the impacts could be numerous: less money for community policing programs that rely on federal cash, $42 million less in research funding at UC Davis (and as much as $335 million less for the entire University of California system), and a share of the national cuts to low-income schools and programs like Head Start...

Full article at: http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=231795

Yours truly can't verify the figures above.  But chicken races don't necessarily end happily:

Bear with us

With the massive 405 Project now two-thirds complete, officials have unveiled a staggered endgame schedule which calls for major portions of the project to wrap up this year while work on one troublesome segment continues into 2014. The delay involves the project’s middle segment—chiefly in the area around Montana Avenue and Church Lane—where utility relocations and the necessity of shifting Sepulveda Boulevard have proved vastly more time-consuming than expected. Overall, unforeseen utility relocation issues have not only eaten up valuable time but also have driven up the cost of building the project, according to a briefing presented this week to Metro’s Construction Committee...

Full story at http://zev.lacounty.gov/405-report/mapping-the-end-of-the-road-on-the-405

I guess they never heard the song:

UCLA Reports Battery Technology Advance

From KCET ...We told you that researchers at Ric Kamen's lab at UCLA had found a way to make a non-toxic, highly efficient energy storage medium out of pure carbon using absurdly simple technology. Today, we can report that the same team may well have found a way to make that process scale up to mass-production levels...  The recap: Graphene, a very simple carbon polymer, can be used as the basic component of a "supercapacitor" -- an electrical power storage device that charges far more rapidly than chemical batteries. Unlike other supercapacitors, though, graphene's sturcture also offers a high "energy density," -- it can hold a lot of electrons, meaning that it could conceivably rival or outperform batteries in the amount of charge it can hold. Kaner Lab researcher Maher El-Kady found a way to create sheets of graphene a single carbon atom thick by covering a plastic surface with graphite oxide solution and bombarding it with precisely controlled laser light.  English translation: He painted a DVD with a liquid carbon solution and stuck it into a standard-issue DVD burner. The result: Absurdly cheap graphene sheets one atom thick, which held a surprising amount of charge without further modification.

That work was reported a year ago; we mentioned it due to the video virally making the rounds this week. Late Tuesday, UCLA announced that El-Kady and Kaner have a new article in press, in the upcoming issue of Nature Communications, describing a method by which El-Kady's earlier, slightly homebrewed fabricating process shown in the video can be made more efficient, raising the possibility of mass production. As the authors say in their article abstract, More than 100 micro-supercapacitors can be produced on a single disc in 30 min or less...

Full story at http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/science/more-good-news-on-those-carbon-supercapacitors.html

The UCLA announcement is at:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-develop-new-technique-243553.aspx

The video mentioned above can be seen below:

Finally, some common sense about juries and why it matters to UCLA

Editorial: Anyone who works for UCLA, or any local public entity, and has been called for jury duty knows that the jury pool in LA County is not a random sample of the population.  Apart from the fact that only citizens serve on juries (but anyone can be tried), public sector institutions are likely to have liberal policies for jury duty and jury leave, unlike many private employers.  Those called who show up (many don't) are often excused for hardship reasons, or excused from lengthy trials, because of the economic hardship of missing work.  Yours truly's last experience was being in a pool of 50 potential jurors for what was going to be a lengthy trial (a man accused of murder who insisted on representing himself).  The fifty were chosen because their employers provided unlimited jury leave (whatever that means for faculty) and were disproportionately public employees.  In fact, of the 50, four were from UCLA.  Does 8% of the LA County population work for UCLA?  Whatever defendants are getting, it is not a jury of their peers.

Now comes word from the San Francisco Chronicle:

A defendant's right to be tried by a jury of 12 people in criminal cases has been enshrined in California's Constitution since statehood. But judges say the state can no longer afford it. With court funding evaporating, the California Judges Association is endorsing a state constitutional amendment that would shrink juries from 12 to eight members for misdemeanors, crimes punishable by up to a year in jail...

Full story at http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/State-judges-make-case-for-smaller-juries-4299277.php

The judges were bolder than I was back in 2004.  They want to cut to 8 (which would cut the need for jurors by one third) and include certain criminal trials.  I proposed 9 (which would cut the need by one fourth) and only for civil trials:

Smaller Juries

July 8, 2004

 

Re "Jury Service No-Shows Get the Word," July 2: The notion that there must be 12 people on a jury was inherited from British tradition in 1776. In over two centuries since that time, private industry has learned to economize on the labor it uses and to tailor the amount of labor needed to the task to be performed. Jury size could be reduced, with fewer than 12 jurors used for minor civil matters and crimes. If the average jury consisted of nine people, the need for jurors would be cut by one-fourth. Rather than complain that citizens dislike conscription, the judiciary needs to move into the 21st century.

Daniel J.B. Mitchell
Los Angeles

Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/08/opinion/le-primary8.3

Tobacco Tax Initiative for UC & CSU Student Aid Advances

Earlier posts on this blog in late December noted that an initiative had been filed to impose a tobacco tax with revenue largely earmarked for student aid at UC and CSU.  Unlike many initiatives filed by amateurs that go nowhere, this one was filed by a law firm noted for election work.  So there must be some serious funding behind it.  Whether there is enough serious money to fund a signature-gathering campaign is unclear.  In addition, a tobacco tax would attract well-funded opposition from tobacco firms.  (Remember that a  tobacco tax initiative for cancer research was narrowly defeated last June.)

In any event, the state attorney general has now assigned a title to the initiative.  You can find it at:
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/12-0018%20(tax_to_fund_higher_education).pdf

Our earlier posts on this initiative are at:
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/12/proponents-of-tobacco-tax-for-uccsu.html
and
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/12/tobacco-tax-for-uccsu-student-aid.html

Meanwhile,  those who puff away or take a drag on a cigarette are a tax target:

UC-Irvine Gets Some Good Press

Warm welcome to University of California Irvine

By Anat Maor, Jerusalem Post, 2-17-13

When I first arrived at the University of California in Irvine, I didn’t know a single person there. To tell you the truth, I was feeling apprehensive about my new role as a professor in Israel studies here, especially given the reputation of the school. This was the same university which saw confrontations between student protesters and Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in 2010, which culminated in arrests and the Zionist Organization of America branding UCI as “a campus that permitted bigotry.” Yet after just one month I have already started to feel at home in Irvine. How did this happen? Contrary to expectations, I have had many positive experiences here...

Furthermore, I have been very active in a group called “Olive Tree,” which brings Israeli and Palestinian students together for dialogue, and every summer they go to visit the Middle East. I have developed a close personal connection with the vice president of this group. To conclude, although I have only been teaching at UCI for a few short weeks I can already see that I am going to have a great time here...

Full story at http://blogs.jpost.com/content/warm-welcome-university-california-irvine