Password Hint

From time to time, yours truly receives email messages - particularly from people with Yahoo or gmail accounts - that result from someone guessing their passwords.  The culprit then concocts a story about being stranded in Outer Slobovia and needing money.  If you get one of these messages, don't send money and do let the account holder know his/her account has been hacked.  The moral is to have a password that is hard to guess.

But then comes this word:

Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia, uncovered a startling fact. The launch code for all U.S. Minuteman nuclear missiles for 20 years used the same code: 00000000. Bellovin discovered this after finding a 2004 paper by Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos...

Full story at http://mashable.com/2013/12/04/us-nukes-launch-code/

So what can you say?  (Or sing?)

Bad Dream for Princeton Prez: Faculty May Want to Milk Their Own MOOC

Inside Higher Ed today points to an article in the Princeton University student newspaper in which it is reported that faculty there are interested in having their own MOOC rather than relying on Coursera (with which Princeton has an affiliation).

Members of the faculty discussed the possibility of creating a University-specific alternative to Coursera, as well as the proposed creation of a new committee to oversee the continuation of online courses, on Monday at the December faculty meeting. Philosophy professor Gideon Rosen noted that the University is free to explore options outside of Coursera in order to avoid conflicts of intellectual property, such as whether the material is owned by Coursera, the University or the professors teaching the courses...

"I must say that developing our own proprietary platform gives me nightmares,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 replied. Eisgruber currently sits on Coursera’s board of advisers...

Full article from Daily Princetonian at http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2013/12/faculty-consider-alternative-to-coursera-new-committee-on-teaching-and-learning/

Inside Higher Ed article at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/12/04/princeton-u-considers-homegrown-mooc-platform

Perhaps this advice would be helpful:

We're sure there are no risks or they wouldn't go ahead. Right?

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, UCLA Health System and long-term care provider Select Medical announced today a partnership to open a 138-bed acute-care rehabilitation hospital in Century City in 2015. The aim "is to develop a world-class regional rehabilitation center providing highly specialized care, advanced treatment and leading-edge technologies to treat individuals with spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, strokes, amputations, neurological disorders, and musculoskeletal and orthopedic conditions," a statement said...

The new facility will be operated by Select Medical, a provider of long- term acute care services with hospital and outpatient locations in 44 states, including at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey...

Earlier this year, a feasibility study found that seismic retrofitting would enable the former Century City Hospital to meet seismic safety standards and licensure requirements to be operated as a rehabilitation hospital, the statement said. The building's current owner has begun infrastructure and modernization work to bring the building up to standards. The preparation work will be completed in 2015 and allow occupancy until 2030, according to the statement.

Full story at http://centurycity.patch.com/groups/business-news/p/138bed-rehabilitation-hospital-to-open-in-century-city-in-2015
 
UCLA media release at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/cedars-sinai-ucla-health-system-249585.aspx
 
Not to be negative or anything but we’ve heard that there are some dangers in unlimited growth (if you don’t chicken out before it gets out of hand):

Three Open-and-Shut Events on the Late Night 405 Near UCLA

The San Diego (405) Freeway will undergo full directional closures in West Los Angeles this week to accommodate roadway widening work that is part of the ongoing Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project.  All southbound lanes will be closed between Sunset and Wilshire boulevards from midnight to 5 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Metro.  All northbound lanes will be closed between Santa Monica Boulevard and Moraga Drive from midnight to 5 a.m. Thursday, according to Metro.  Lanes will begin to close at 10 p.m. and ramps will close as early as 7 p.m. in advance of all three closures, according to officials...

Source: http://santamonica.patch.com/groups/around-town/p/more-i405-closures-fpr-road-widening

We're Not Alone in Pointing to the Risks of Open-Ended Capital Projects

Vannevar Bush

From: The Endless Frontier: Reaping what Bush Sowed?  

by Paula Stephan (pp. 33-34)*

NBER working paper 19687 (Nov. 2013) Excerpt:

Overexpansion of research facilities

In recent years, universities have gone on a building binge, constructing a substantial amount of new research space which led to a 30 percent increase in net assignable square feet for research between 2001 and 2011. Most of this increase is for facilities in the biological, biomedical and health sciences—a response of universities to the doubling of the NIH. Some of this space has been paid for by private philanthropy. At MIT, for example, David Koch contributed $50 million to the construction of an institute for cancer research that bears his. But in a number of instances, campuses did not have the funds to construct the new buildings but instead did so by floating bonds, assuming that the debt would be recovered through increased grant activity engendered by better facilities housing more research-active faculty. A 2003 survey of medical schools by the AAMC found that the average annual debt service for buildings in 2003 was $3.5 million; it grew to $6.9 million in 2008. The brakes were applied to the NIH budget beginning in 2004 and in constant dollars the NIH budget shrank by about 4.4 percent between 2004 and 2009. It has continued to decline since, with the exception of ARRA. Success rates for NIH grants, as we have seen, declined, and universities found that revenues from grants did not live up to their expectations. The situation is not likely to improve in the near future given sequestration. This means that the only way a university can hope to cover the costs of these buildings is to outcompete over other academic institutions in bringing in grants. But, as Princeton’s President Shirley Tilghman notes, “this just can’t be true for every academic medical center. It does not compute.” Moreover, given that very top institutions have continued to maintain their share of NIH funding, the pain is most likely to be felt by institutions that historically have not received top funding. Somebody, especially at lower-tiered institutions, is going to have to pay for this substantial expansion and it is unlikely to be the federal government. It is more likely to come through a reallocation of resources within the university...

Full article at www.nber.org/papers/w19687.pdf

 

Note that while for a time, UC may be one of the more protected upper-tier institutions, continued squeeze on the federal budget will ultimately not insulate us.  And someone will have to pay off bonds floated on the hopes of continued revenue. Anyone in UCOP or at the Regents paying attention?

*The Bush referred to in the title is not George H.W. and not George W.  It is Vannevar Bush, FDR’s science advisor, who wrote a report entitled “The Endless Frontier” in 1945.  His photo is above.

Lessons from Berkeley's White Elephant Stadium for UCLA, the Regents, and UC?

People keep noticing Berkeley's White Elephant money-draining stadium - one of the grand capital projects that the Regents routinely approve based on pretty slides and business plans offered by the campuses.  Peter Schrag in the San Francisco Chronicle today ties the low graduation rates of Berkeley athletes with the stadium:

...Fueling the... issue is the chronic matter of cost – what the university kicks in to the sports program – and what someone called “its gold plated” spending. Brian Barsky, a Berkeley computer science professor and vocal critic of the athletics program, says between 2003 and 2011, athletics “drained campus coffers of more than $88 million that could have been used instead to support the university’s core mission.” Cummins and Hextrum talk about “accumulating deficits over nearly 20 years totaling some $170 million at a time when the campus faced substantial staff layoffs and furloughs.” [Sandy Barbour, Berkeley’s director of athletics,] claims those numbers are flat wrong. With the exception of one year, she said, there have been no deficits. But there’s no question that its football and basketball coaches, like other big time coaches, earn 10 times as much as the average full professor, or that Barbour gets paid more than the chancellor, or that the sports program isn’t self-supporting. More important still is the huge debt UC Berkeley faces for the cost of the recent rebuilding of Memorial Stadium and the construction of the adjacent “Student-Athlete High Performance Center” – all together totaling more than $450 million, some of it to be paid by 100-year “century” bonds. All told, including interest, those facilities will eventually cost $1.25 billion. Paying it off depends on football. And given the dismal records of the past two seasons and the disappointing sales of expensive long-term rights to seats in the stadium – originally priced at $225,000 apiece – that were supposed to help retire the bonds, a strategy since supplemented by a “more diversified approach,” that’s hardly a sure thing. What is a sure thing is that Berkeley has mortgaged itself in perpetuity to the success of its football team.

Full column at www.sacbee.com/2013/12/01/5953595/peter-schrag-has-uc-berkeley-mortgaged.html

There are lessons to be learned here by UCLA [the Grand Hotel], the Regents, and all the campuses.  But will there be lessons taken?  So far, however, there is little sign of such learning.  If Gov. Brown is as concerned as he says he is about dealing with UC budget affairs, he might consider attending meetings of the Regents' Committee on Grounds and Buildings and maybe putting some state auditors to work on analyzing what has been approved over the past few years.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/01/5953595/peter-schrag-has-uc-berkeley-mortgaged.html#mi_rss=Opinion#storylink=cpy

Unsolicited Suggestion for the Traffic Stop

We have been offering unsolicited advice to Murphy Hall about what to do about the traffic stop "problem" that arose a week ago.  Before the lawyers get hold of this matter and make it complicated (think, for example, about the Japanese Garden affair), how about just starting with an apology to Judge Cunningham?  It's been done before and we offer a modest proposal below: