Podcasts about berkeley institute

In Berkeley Talks episode 213, Timothy Tangherlini, a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of Scandinavian and director of the Folklore Graduate Program, discusses the vital role that storytelling plays in many cultures around the world, and how it can influence belief, for good and for bad. “Stories give a basis and a justification for people to take real life action,” Tangherlini said at an Alumni and Parents Weekend at Homecoming event on campus in October. “They can be retrospective justification, but they can also be motivating justification.” A computational folklorist, who's also a professor in the School of Information and associate director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Tangherlini works at the intersection of informal culture, storytelling and AI. He uses a combination of methods from the study of folklore and machine learning to describe storytelling networks and classify stories. “This is where we start to unravel narrative at internet scale,” he said. “One of the things that's kind of interesting, if we start to think about conspiracy theories, is you've all heard little bits of these in different places. But what a conspiracy theory is able to do is to take simple threat narratives and link them together to form complex representations of threatening groups and their interconnections.” Tangherlini went on to address specific conspiracy theories, from #stopthesteal to Pizzagate, and explored the potential of using storytelling to change the conversation. “Can we use the structure of the storytelling to … question exclusionary ideas about who belongs and turn them into more inclusive ideas in the storytelling itself?” he asked. “Can we question ideas of what is threatening? Can I develop ways to steer conversations to more inclusive and less destructive strategies?”This Oct. 18 event was hosted by Berkeley's Division of Arts and Humanities.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.UC Berkeley photo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Research released in June by the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans revealed that younger voters had a broad, decisive impact on the 2020 presidential election and on congressional elections in 2018 and 2022 – with the same being expected this year. In the latest episode of The UCI Podcast, we'll speak with Kylie Jones, Khushi Patel and Evelyn Rodriguez – three UC Irvine undergraduates who are passionate about participating in the political process. They'll tell us why voting is important to them, offer their thoughts on voter turnout and share key issues that younger voters are focusing on in this election cycle. “Believe (Instrumental),” the music for this episode, was provided by NEFFEX via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

Today we're in Melbourne, Australia and chatting with our guest Mr. Utkarsh Naran, the Founder and CEO of IgnitedNeurons. Utkarsh is on a mission to help managers become future leaders for the world. He is a learning consultant and an accomplished coach on the path to achieving ICF-PCC accreditation, having over 1,000 hours of coaching experience. With a career spanning 17 years across healthcare, leadership, and e-learning, Utkarsh has led numerous cross-domain teams in both tech startups and large-scale client projects for Fortune 500 companies.  His career started as a 

As part of KQED's Youth Takeover Week, we'll hear from young voters and what they care about most. From the war in Gaza to climate change, student debt and how they might vote in November. In addition to hearing from young Bay Area voters, Scott talks with Erin Heys, policy director and senior researcher for the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans and Saa'un Bell with Power California, which focuses on young people of color and LGBTQ voters throughout the state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, part of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, examines the evolving generational dynamics of millennials and Gen Z. The institute serves as a hub for exploring the aspirations and challenges of young people, offering unique perspectives on their impact in the workplace and across cultural and political landscapes. Joining us on the podcast are Sarah Swanbeck, the institute's executive director, and Erin Heys, its policy director. Together, they delve into how today's generational shifts are influencing everything from labor markets to climate change policies, emphasizing the pivotal role of these younger cohorts in crafting our future.

Guests Karthik Ram | James Howison Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this captivating episode of Sustain, host Richard welcomes returning guest, Karthik Ram, Senior Research Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and his colleague James Howison, an Associate Professor from the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin. Today, they delve into their recent research report, “‘Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities,” commissioned for the Australian Research Data Commons. They discuss their eight key recommendations about sustaining open source for the long haul, including ways to recognize software contribution, implement web analytics, and offer low friction ways for researchers to link software. Karthik and James also touch on the future of software citations in academic recognition systems, and the importance of universities valuing diverse academic outputs. Don't miss this fascinating conversation! Press download now! [00:01:36] Richard brings up a paper written by Karthik and James. Karthik explains the report titled, “Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities,” produced for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). He describes the process of creating the report and the report's relevance beyond Australia. [00:06:24] Richard asks how this is related to open source, and James relates the recommendations, focusing on citing software in publications and creating software bill of materials for research papers. [00:08:02] James and Karthik discuss recommendations, focusing on citing software in publications and creating software bill of materials for research papers. [00:12:02] Richard endorses the use of SBOMs for citing all software used in research, aiming to counter the issue of only popular projects getting noticed, but he questions how SBOMs account for the varying importance of different software dependencies. Karthik clarifies the SBOMs are not meant to create equal value citations for all software but to understand the scientific infrastructure that supports research. [00:15:28] Richard suggests that SBOMs could be useful in industrial contexts for security purposes and infrastructure visibility. Karthik agrees, stating that SBOMs have a broader application and were originally created for security reasons to track vulnerabilities. [00:17:41] James introduces the third recommendation to create software use infrascope as an observatory based on software mentions publications. He discusses the challenge of identifying software mentions in publications and the work done towards building comprehensive view of software in academia. [00:22:34] Karthik introduces the fourth recommendation to create detailed use cases for research tools aimed at different skill levels, addressing the challenge researchers face when selecting software tools. [00:24:29] Richard highlights the necessity of allocating time in research planning for writing documentation and tutorials, which James agrees is crucial for making software tools more accessible to researchers. [00:26:30] James discusses the fifth recommendation, which is to support existing technology for software archiving, such as Zenodo or Software Heritage, rather than creating new repositories at the institutional level. [00:28:28] Karthik talks about sixth recommendation and supporting communities of practice like hackathons and other collaborative spaces, which have shown to have a positive impact on research productivity. James describes the need for third spaces that are neither too local nor too public. Where researchers can comfortably ask questions and share insights within a focused community. [00:31:08] James introduces the seventh recommendation which is about implementing web analytics to gain insights into software usage, as citations alone do not reflect the full impact of research software. [00:33:48] James acknowledges the need for infrastructure to enhance insight from SBOMs and mentions the necessity of funding to maintain services that provide such data. [00:35:53] Richard highlights the eighth recommendation, which suggests providing an easy way for researchers to link to software alongside data submissions. James directs listeners to the Softcite GitHub organization and mentions the upcoming blog post about their report on the URSSI Blog. [00:36:16] Karthik and James tell us where you can find out more about their work and find them on the web. Quotes [00:08:40] “Absolutely every piece of software that you use in your whole stack should be cited, but I've had some issues with that in publications.” [00:09:04] “What we identified was that different fields have different norms for what rises to the level of contribution for actually being mentioned formally in the publication.” [00:14:40] “The researchers are experts in scientific explanation and they're going to pick packages to mention that pertain to understanding the research that's done in the paper, whereas the SBOM is going to give us insight into the software infrastructure that made the research possible.” Spotlight [00:38:26] Richard's spotlight is iNaturalist. [00:39:00] Karthik's spotlight is Kyle Niemeyer at Oregon State. [00:39:34] James's spotlight is Eva Brown and her Council Data Project. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@richlitt) Karthik Ram Website (https://ram.berkeley.edu/) Karthik Ram LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthik-ram-93334954/) Karthik Ram X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/_inundata) James Howison X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/jameshowison) James Howison-University of Texas, Austin (https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/people/people-details?PersonID=175) Research Software Visibility Infrastructure Priorities Report by Dr. Karthik Ram and Dr. James Howison (Zenodo) (https://zenodo.org/records/10060255) Sustain Podcast-2 Episodes featuring Daniel Stenburg (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/stenberg) Sustain Podcast-Episode 187: Karthik Ram on Research Software Sustainability (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/guests/ram) Depsy (http://depsy.org/) Softcite dataset (https://github.com/howisonlab/softcite-dataset) Softcite software mention recognition service (https://github.com/softcite/software-mentions) Softcite-GitHub (https://github.com/softcite/) SoMeSci-Software Mentions in Science (https://data.gesis.org/somesci/) Mapping the Impact of Research Software in Science (https://github.com/chanzuckerberg/software-impact-hackathon-2023) The Scientific Community Image Forum (Frequently Asked Questions) (https://forum.image.sc/t/frequently-asked-questions/18729) HackyHour (https://hackyhour.github.io/) Sustain Podcast-Episode 95: Marko Saric of Plausible Analytics, the most popular Open Source analytics platform (https://podcast.sustainoss.org/95) URSSI Blog (https://urssi.us/blog/) Ecosyste.ms (https://ecosyste.ms/) Incentives and integration in scientific software production by James Howison and James D. Herbsleb (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2441776.2441828) Python Package Citation Generator-GitHub (https://github.com/RichardLitt/dependency-cite) iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/) Kyle Niemeyer (https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/people/kyle-niemeyer) Eva Brown GitHub (https://evamaxfield.github.io/) Council Data Project (https://councildataproject.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guests: James Howison and Karthik Ram.

Ron Hassner is the co-director of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, holds the Berkeley's Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies and holds a Chancellor's Chair in political science at U.C. Berkeley.

In recent years, indigenous Land Back movements have been gaining momentum across the country. However, the effort to make reparations for the past can come with a lot of strings attached. To understand the complicated reality of landback actions today, we head to an island near the town of Eureka in Humboldt County, where a landback movement succeeded far ahead of its time. Izzy Bloom/TCR A recent survey from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies shows who's one step closer to representing the Golden State in the U-S Senate, and whose chances are slim. Guy Marzorati/KQED News

This episode was recorded on September 23, 2023.   Bilal Muhammad is a Vice Principal based in Toronto. He is a Senior Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Islamic Studies. He worked as a researcher for the University of Toronto's Department of Historical Studies. He was an Editor for "The Clear Quran for Kids". Bilal Muhammad translated and wrote several books, including the interfaith work "The Good Shepherd: Jesus Christ in Islam", the self-help book "All the Perfumes of Arabia", the herbal remedy book "The Muhammadan Cure: The Modern Science of Prophetic Medicine", and others. Find more from Bilal: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mr.bilal.muhammad The Good Shepherd: Jesus Christ in Islam: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Shepherd-Jesus-Christ-Islam/dp/B09NH641BQ/ The Berkeley Institute for Islamic Studies: http://www.bliis.org/   Connect with me: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tammy.m.peterson/ Faceboook: https://www.facebook.com/MrsTammyMPeterson

We're back, after a long and restful break, with a brand new season of Technically Human! In our first episode of the season, I am joined by a guest cohost, Dr. Morgan Ames, for a conversation with Janet Haven, Executive Director of Data and Society. We talk about the movement to root data and AI practices in human values, the future of automation, and the pressing needs—and challenges—of data governance. Janet Haven is the executive director of Data & Society. She has worked at the intersection of technology policy, governance, and accountability for more than twenty years, both domestically and internationally. Janet is a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises President Biden and the National AI Initiative Office on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence. She also acts as an advisor to the Trust and Safety Foundation, and has brought her expertise in non-profit governance to bear through varied board memberships. She writes and speaks regularly on matters related to technology and society, federal AI research and development, and AI governance and policy. Before joining D&S, Janet spent more than a decade at the Open Society Foundations. There, she oversaw funding strategies and worldwide grant-making related to technology, human rights, and governance, and played a substantial role in shaping the emerging international field focused on technology and accountability. Data & Society is an independent nonprofit research organization rooted in the belief that empirical evidence should directly inform the development and governance of new technologies — and that these technologies can and must be grounded in equity and human dignity. Recognizing that the concentrated, profit-driven power of corporations and tech platforms will not steer us toward a just future, our work foregrounds the power of the people and communities most impacted by technological change. Their work studies the social implications of data, automation, and AI, producing original research to ground informed public debate about emerging technology. Dr. Morgan Ames is an adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG), the Center for Science, Technology, Society and Policy (CTSP), and the Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS).

Learning Forward Podcast Season 10 Episode 17, produced by the students at My Good School, where passion meets education. The Program is brought to you by the students and interns who spread the joy of learning, focusing on reading, writing and speaking. Entrepreneurship is a leading world phenomenon from when we were told to follow others. Today we can leave our mark by collaborating, connecting and creating. It is to discover our joy and spread it beyond. In our podcast, we have Mrs Swati Gauba in conversation with Anvesha and Unnati of My Good School. Swati is a digital marketing consultant at DigitalDote.com. She has spent the better part of her career helping big corporates, SMEs and startups with digital marketing and content strategies, ensuring the marketing dollar goes further. Swati also has experience running her fashion technology startup (Hoppingo.com), where she led editorial, sales strategy, business development, strategic alliances and partnerships. She is one of the top 8 women from South and Southeast Asia that participated in the Female Foundry program by Dentsu Aegis Network in Singapore in 2016. A certified Trainer & Coach on the Science of Happiness designed by Berkeley Institute of Well Being, California and executed by Happiitude India. She has specialised in Happiness Education for Kids. She runs a program, Kids Preneurship, that trains kids to have an entrepreneurial and growth mindset. We speak about your life, Kidspreneurship and the love for entrepreneurship. There was a lot to learn and there is now to reinforce. Entrepreneurship is not business, it is a mindset of problem-solving, logical reasoning and quick thinking. Comment below and let us know if you like our podcast. If you want to be a part of similar podcasts, join us. Enjoy our shows on www.DilJeeto.com. You will love the stories our students, teachers, and passionate educators share. Please find out more about My Good School at www.SchoolEducation.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningforward/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningforward/support

On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental law at Berkeley and the co-director for the Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Diversity. Doremus has a interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Plant Physiology from Cornell in addition to her JD. For Doremus, one of the benefits of an interdisciplinary educational experience is that it has helped her to better understand what questions different disciplines are able to address and what questions they may not have thought to ask. In our approach to answering conservation questions, we need to reevaluate what our goals are in order to decide how to achieve them. At the start of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, crucial questions, including fundamental questions concerning the nature of a species, and our risk tolerance and willingness to commit social resources to conservation, were either not understood or were seen as better addressed later. A further contemporary challenge is that the ESA was not framed to protect the proportion of species that are at risk today. One consequence of the Anthropocene is an increasingly number of species under protection, which means greater limits on individual and commercial activity. Doremus believes that congressional intervention will become more common as the number of ESA controversies increases (6:44-23:34). Due to the tendency of politics to act as a set of competing performances, Congress is not the place we should start the conversation about reconsidering our conservation approach. Rather it should begin in academia, where crucial interdisciplinary discussions can happen. Academics can generate an updated consensus of the public's opinion on biological conservation (23:35-46:27). Even if conservation goals were agreed upon, there would still be many questions about how to achieve those goals. To what extent should humanity take the role of the world's gardeners? Who gets to decide what the garden looks like? How much control should we have over species in order to achieve our conservation goals? What are the obligations of the public to pay for the conservation that it wants? These are all complex political and scientific questions that will have to be answered in order to make legitimate progress in conserving the biological world (46:28-1:02:10).

Dr. Kathryn Huff, Ph.D. ( https://www.energy.gov/ne/person/dr-kathryn-huff ) is Assistant Secretary, Office of Nuclear Energy, U.S. Department of Energy, where she leads their strategic mission to advance nuclear energy science and technology to meet U.S. energy, environmental, and economic needs, both realizing the potential of advanced technology, and leveraging the unique role of the government in spurring innovation. Prior to her current role, Dr. Huff served as a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary and also led the office as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. Before joining the Department of Energy, Dr. Huff was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she led the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group. She was also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Dr. Huff was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Her research focused on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles. Dr. Huff is an active member of the American Nuclear Society, a past Chair of the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Policy Division as well as the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division, and recipient of both the Young Member Excellence and Mary Jane Oestmann Professional Women's Achievement awards. Through leadership within Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Hacker Within, and the Journal of Open Source Software she also advocates for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing. Dr. Huff's book "Effective Computation in Physics: Field Guide to Research with Python" can be found on all major book sellers. Support the show

Marisa and Scott discuss a new poll on California's U.S. Senate race from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and what they learned from the first hearing of the legislature's special session on oil prices. Then, Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, joins to discuss her childhood in Mexico, her journey into union leadership, the future of the UFW and her reaction to the mass shooting of farmworkers in Half Moon Bay.

Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Laureate, professor of physics at UC Berkeley and director of Berkeley Institute for Data Science joins Accenture's Arnab Chakraborty to discuss the field of AI advancing within organizations from practice to high performance. Hear how talent, culture and responsible design are all important factors to becoming a high performer. Listen now.

Happiness in the workplace is still an underrated topic, even though workplace culture is changing today. With the changing work scenarios and demands of employees are altering. Money, growth, and success can help put a smile on your employees' faces. But, it's not the only way to keep them cheerful. Neha Pant Tiwari discusses in this podcast about employee happiness being the key to a successful organization in today's world. She further discusses, how do employees shift their thinking about happiness at work? And how can employers make employees work lives feel more satisfying—like something that meaningfully contributes to their health and wellness? Neha is a Youth Mentor & Happiness Coach certified by the Berkeley Institute of Well-Being and a certified NLP practitioner. She is the founder of Your Success Story, based out of Pune. Neha is passionate about happiness, well-being, and youth empowerment. Armed with an MBA(Marketing) from SIMS and MBA(HR) from ICFAI, she has impacted around 22k lives through her venture Your Success Story. She also wishes for these virtues not to be positioned as a luxury but as bare necessities of life, which drives her vision and mission for life! Her recent awards include - The most inspiring Indian award by IESECCI and 40 over 40 by shethe peopletv.  

Proponents are calling Governor Gavin Newsom's veto of a bill that would have allowed supervised drug injection sites in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles a tragic, “missed opportunity” to prevent overdose deaths.  Reporter: Kevin Stark, KQED A new report finds that most early childcare workers in California make far less than a living wage and that many earn less than they did before the pandemic. The report from UC Berkeley found that providers running small, daycare centers out of their homes make between $16- 30 thousand a year. Reporter: Amanda Stupi, KQED  Once a reliable stronghold for Republicans, Orange County has become a contested battleground for congressional races in recent election cycles -- and this year is no different.  Reporter: Marisa Lagos, KQED California voters think the state is headed in the wrong direction -- according to a new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. 52% of voters say California is on the wrong track, but Governor Gavin Newsom's approval ratings are on the rise.  Reporter: Guy Marzorati, KQED A judge has sentenced a Bay Area man to more than a decade in prison for obstructing a probe into the 2020 murder of a federal officer in Oakland, and child pornography charges. Reporter: Alex Hall, KQED  

A draft of California's first-in-the-nation roadmap for ending the sale of all new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 has been released. The new plan requires an increase in the sales of electric vehicles starting in 2024. Reporter: Kevin Stark, KQED If you're in the market for a new electric vehicle here in California right now, you're definitely not alone. With gas prices soaring to record levels, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many prospective car buyers say an EV is the way to go. But are there anywhere near enough electric vehicles at California car dealerships? Reporter: Robin Estrin, KCRW California's Reparations Task Force studying reparations for Black Californians continues meeting on Thursday at San Francisco's historic Third Baptist Church. During Wednesday's meeting, the topic was discrimination in education. Reporter: Annelise Finney, KQED California voters say housing affordability and homelessness are the most important issues for the state to address this year. That's according to a new survey from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.  Reporter: Guy Marzorati, KQED  People who have experienced homelessness need to be given a seat at the table when it comes to making policy decisions about Los Angeles' homeless crisis. That's one of the recommendations to come out of a new report commissioned by the Committee for a Greater LA. Reporter: Ethan Ward, KPCC   People with certain psychiatric disorders face a heightened risk of breakthrough COVID-19 infections. That's according to a new study from UC San Francisco. Reporter: April Dembosky, KQED

President Joe Biden's job approval numbers are underwater in California, according to the latest poll co-sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times.

Todays guest,  Talu Eckhoff who is certified Unitive Life Coach, Certified Happiness Coach by Berkeley Institute of Well-Being & Workplace Happiness Specialist by Happiittude.Currently based in Hamburg, Germany having previously lived in many countries across the globe. Talu's journey & experiences have constantly confirmed her love to work with people. She has a strong desire to make a difference and connect others to their true happy self, and unlock greatness, so they can choose happiness because being Happy Matters!Today, shares shares her own story and tells us how you explore more on your happiness.To find out more about Talu go to:Website - www.happy-matters.comInstagram - www.Instagram.com/happymatterscoachingFacebook - www.facebook.com/happymatterscoachingLinkedIn - www.LinkedIn.com/talu-sehra-eckhoff-3861193Oh and don't forget leave a comment and most importantly subscribe to the show!Also if you're a business or startup that is need of growth taking it to the next level I've co-founded the Peak Wealth Network - The Mastermind Group. Build your network, create strong daily habits, get high value feedback, collaboration opportunities and inspirational guest speakers. Challenge yourself and others in a supportive growth mindset environment.You do not have to grow your business on your own we can support each other. Scale your business surrounded with like minded people. Growth focused, networking and knowledge based designed to grow exponentially within six months.Book In A Call! - Connect CallConnect/Follow Us - Peak Wealth Network - The Mastermind GroupTweet Me! - @ChetHiraniInstagram! - @ChetHiraniFacebook! - https://www.facebook.com/NotYourOrdinaryCoachConnect/Follow Me! - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chethirani/Find Me! - https://notyourordinarycoach.comEmail Me! - GetInTouch@NotYourOrdinaryCoach.comFind out more of what I do - Get over the excuses and get over the the perfectionism phase, that's probably holding you back. Know your worth and take it the next level. Here's a link to my Free 5 States Of OptimisationInterested to get in on this success?  Work With Chet

Good news for Governor Gavin Newsom: A new poll out today from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies finds 60% of likely voters oppose the recall. We take a brief look at local headlines and weather before Felton Pruitt speaks to SYRCL's Communications and Engagement Director, Betsy Brunnner about their Cannabis Impact Survey Results.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board has unanimously approved a vaccine requirement for all eligible students 12 and older if they want to attend classes in-person.  Latinos make up about a third of registered voters in California. And the campaigns for and against the recall are running TV and radio ads in Spanish hoping to win them over.  Reporter: Scott Shafer, KQED  With California's recall election wrapping up next Tuesday, a new poll has good news for Governor Gavin Newsom. The poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies finds 60% of likely voters oppose the recall effort. Reporter: Katie Orr, KQED Governor Newsom and Republican frontrunner Larry Elder were both in Fresno on Thursday making their respective recall campaign pitches to voters.  Reporter: Alex Hall, The California Report Managing California's water supply requires an enormous amount of energy. Now, new research suggests making the state's water system more efficient is also a climate solution.  Reporter: Ezra David Romero, KQED

A new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies shows 47 percent of likely California voters are in favor of replacing Gov. Gavin Newsom. POLITICO's Jeremy White reports. Plus, Democrats press Biden to extend the eviction ban. And Senators reach a deal to provide funding for the Capitol Police and National Guard. Jeremy B. White co-writes the California Playbook for POLITICO. Jeremy Siegel is a host for POLITICO Dispatch. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of POLITICO audio. Jenny Ament is the senior producer of POLITICO audio. Raghu Manavalan is a senior editor for POLITICO audio. Read more: Poll: Newsom 'in jeopardy' of being recalled if Democrats remain apathetic

A new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies shows that 47 percent of likely California voters are in favor of replacing Gov. Gavin Newsom. POLITICO's Jeremy White reports. Plus, Democrats press Biden to extend the eviction ban. And Senators reach a deal to provide funding for the Capitol Police and National Guard. Jeremy B. White co-writes the California Playbook for POLITICO. Jeremy Siegel is a host for POLITICO Dispatch. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of POLITICO audio. Jenny Ament is the senior producer of POLITICO audio. Raghu Manavalan is a senior editor for POLITICO audio. Read more: Poll: Newsom 'in jeopardy' of being recalled if Democrats remain apathetic

Some of the last businesses that are expected to open during the pandemic are performing arts venues. But many argue they're a lifeline of the community and driver of local economies, and can reopen safely with help. Guest: Rachel S. Moore, President and CEO, L.A. Music Center A new poll shows that Senator Dianne Feinstein's approval rating has sunk to the lowest level of her career. Her approval rating among California voters has always been a net positive, but that's not the case anymore, according to the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. Reporter: Guy Marzorati, KQED A state lawmaker is trying to reconcile the competing values of public and secular university hospitals and Catholic hospitals when the institutions collaborate on patient care. It could open the door to abortions at Catholic hospitals. Reporter: April Dembosky, KQED Julie Su, who leads the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, has been nominated to serve as Deputy Secretary of Labor. But she may face tough questions about the struggles of the Employment Development Department. Reporter: Katie Orr, KQED There's some relief on the way for renters, as state officials figure out how to distribute billions of dollars in federal aid. But some tenant advocates say the most vulnerable could be left out altogether. Reporter, Molly Solomon, KQED On Thursday morning, the California Public Utilities Commission will take up an issue that’s critical for people living in wildfire-prone parts of the state. The agency could require backup for landline phones. Reporter: Lily Jamali, The California Report

2020 has been a challenging year for many including solo entrepreneurs who have had to dig deeper into their energy reserves to keep going. The final few weeks of this year give us an opportunity to pause and reflect on how to end this tough year on a good note and welcome the new one. Running a business as a solopreneur or small business owner can be a roller coaster of high and low times in general. So, we also discuss how to mindfully infuse joy and happiness into your day to day life and business to make the best of your journey. "Happiness matters."Talu Sehra-Eckhoff will share her insights on this topic with you. Talu is a certified Unitive Life Coach and Certified Happiness Coach by Berkeley Institute of Well-Being. Currently based in Hamburg, Germany having previously lived in many countries across the globe, Talu's journey and experiences have constantly confirmed her love to work with people. She has a strong desire to make a difference and connect others to their true happy self, and unlock greatness, so they can choose happiness because being Happy Matters! What You Will LearnHow to assess the past year, where you are now and your happiness level How to make sure to end the year on a positive note despite the challenges How to adopt some practices that will allow you to bring joy into your life and happiness, no matter what the outside circumstances might be Find Talu Onlinehttps://www.true-awareness.com/ (Website) https://www.linkedin.com/company/true-awareness/ (Linkedin) https://www.facebook.com/happymatterscoaching (Facebook) Share Your Love! Do you enjoy listening to this podcast show? Leave on your review on your favorite app – https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tandem-nomads-empowering-expat-partners-tips-inspiration/id1056812170?mt=2 (iTunes), http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tandem-nomads (Stitcher), https://open.spotify.com/show/4mWuNrYGnmK6yuVHt1CEwx?si=QqgfqVkESK2IEnnlzwA9hg (Spotify), https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90YW5kZW1ub21hZHMuY29tL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdA%3D%3D (Google Play)   Share Your Thoughts! Connect with the Tandem Nomads community and share your comments! https://www.facebook.com/groups/tandemnomads/ (CLICK HERE)

Wildfires Burning in Napa and Sonoma Counties Hit Santa Rosa Wildfires burning in Napa and Sonoma counties north of San Francisco have reached the city of Santa Rosa where homes in a residential neighborhood on the city’s eastern edge have been destroyed. Newsom Signs Law to Expand Access to Mental Health and Addiction Treatment Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law on Friday that gives California some of the most expansive standards in the country for providing access to mental health care. Reporter: April Dembosky, KQED  Californians Worried about Integrity of Presidential Votes A lot of Californians are worried about the integrity of their presidential votes, according to a new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. Reporter: Guy Marzorati, KQED  The Rematch Heating up in California's 21st District  One of the most vulnerable House Democrats in California this year is Representative TJ Cox, who narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Congressman David Valadao two years ago in California’s 21st district.  Reporter: Alex Hall, KQED  Venture Capitalists Consider Gig Economy Potential of Homecooked Meals Because of a state law on the books, a homecooked meal might do more than feed you and your family. It could also make you a little extra money. But now venture capitalists are wondering if they too can profit from the law by turning home cooks into the next gig economy workforce. Reporter: Sam Harnett, KQED 

Federal Judge Blocks Trump Administration from Ending Census Early A federal judge in San Jose has barred the Trump Administration from putting a halt to counting for the 2020 U.S. Census a month early. Judge Lucy Koh issued a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from doing so. Biden's Massive Lead Against Trump Continues in California Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden continues to hold a huge lead with state voters over President Trump in California. That's according to a new Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll. Reporter: Scott Shafer, KQED Some Progressive Democrats Say Feinstein Not Equipped to Lead Supreme Court Fight As the nation waits to see who President Trump will name to the US Supreme Court seat left empty by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some are wondering whether Senator Dianne Feinstein is the right person to lead the fight against the confirmation. Guest: Marisa Lagos, KQED 

Kamala Harris Makes History as Joe Biden's Running Mate Joe Biden has picked California Senator Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate. It’s the first time ever that a woman of color will be on a major party presidential ticket and the first time that a California Democrat will also be at the top of such a ticket. Guest: Scott Shafer, KQED Californians Support of Black Lives Matter Movement Grows Harris’ nomination comes as Californians are increasingly concerned about race relations in the state — and supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s according to a new survey out this week from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.  Reporter: Guy Marzorati, KQED Companies Seek More Diversity on Corporate Boards In the wake of calls to recognize and fight systemic racism in American institutions, there’s growing evidence companies want to do more to add people of color to corporate boards of directors. Reporter: Lily Jamali, KQED Kaiser Is Investing $63 Million in Contact Tracing Health care giant Kaiser Permanente is now getting in the game of contact tracing. It is investing $63 million dollars in the effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.  Reporter: April Dembosky, KQED Charter School Law May Escalate Tensions at LAUSD A new state law just took effect that was supposed to de-escalate tensions over charter schools. The LA Unified School Board narrowly approved a plan to carry out the new law. But there’s concern this new policy might actually escalate tensions in the district with the most charter schools in California. KPCC's Reporter: Kyle Stokes, KPCC Android Phones Now Come With Earthquake Alert Millions of Android smartphones users in California will now receive automatic alerts from an earthquake early warning system. Bay Area tech giant Google announced that earthquake warnings are now fully integrated with its operating system. Reporter: Kevin Stark, KQED

Dr. Lauren Ponisio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Oregon. The United States is home to thousands of different species of native bees that are important for agriculture and natural ecosystems. Lauren’s research revolves around preserving and restoring bee populations in agriculture areas and other natural habitats. She is interested in understanding the distribution and health of different populations of native bees. When she’s not working, you can often find Lauren in her garden. She has been an avid gardener since childhood, and she currently has a thriving garden with lots of vegetables and plants to attract bees and other pollinators. She received her B.S. degree in biology with honors in ecology and evolution, as well as her M.S. degree in biology, from Stanford University. Lauren was awarded her Ph.D. from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducted postdoctoral research at UC, Berkeley afterwards, and she served on the faculty University of California, Riverside before recently accepting her current position at the University of Oregon. Lauren received graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. She was also named among the Global Food Initiative’s "30 Under 30" in Food Systems in 2016. In our interview, Lauren shares more about her life and science.

Bryan talks with Jonathan Waterman about his new breathtaking hardcover published by National Geographic, Atlas of the National Parks, his passion for the parks, as well as the role humans play in their survival. Jon also shares his list of favorite off-the-beaten-path parks you should visit. Jon Waterman is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and former park ranger. This is the latest resource for Everybody’s National Parks trip-planning to national parks. DISCUSSION INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING: [1:49] Books by Jonathan Waterman: Running Dry and In the Shadow of Denali: Life And Death On Alaska's Mt. McKinley [2:20] Beyond a guidebook: National Geographic’s role in creating the National Park System (NPS) [6:15] Climate change chips away at natural wonders large and small: Tidewater glaciers, Everglades National Park, pileated woodpecker, Burmese python, cheatgrass [8:03] Landscape fragility study: University of California, Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity [10:45] Dire NPS budget cuts for 2020? [11:29] Staying on the beaten path (Part I): loop roads and popular trails at Yosemite National Park, Zion National Park, Glacier Bay National Park [13:52] Limited Access and park privatization: weapons in the fight of loving the parks to death? [16:36] Considering lesser-known park areas: Cades Cove vs Cataloochee, Great Smokey Mountain National Park, College Canyon, Zion National Park, [17:55] Opting out of the Grand Circle: Leaving Grand Canyon National Park, Arches National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park for less-visited parks Crater Lake National Park, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, Gates of the Arctic National Park, North Cascades National Park, Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park, Michigan’s Isle Royal National Park, Dry Tortugas National Park in the Gulf of Mexico, and Utah’s Canyonlands National Park [23:06] Staying on the beaten path (Part II): Visiting Wonder Lake in Denali National Park and Preserve like a tourist...and why that’s okay; National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions [25:07] The city parks: Shenandoah National Park, Saguaro National Park, Petrified Forest National Park [26:30] Park science [28:30] Summits and ceremonial scarves: John shares a favorite Denali memory JOHN WATERMAN CONTACT: Website Instagram Facebook Twitter For complete show notes and blog post, visit everybodysnationalparks.com. We have covered parks including: Biscayne, Crater Lake, Everglades, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Olympic, Rock Creek, Saguaro, Shenandoah, Virgin Islands, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Zion. We also have special conversations with a diverse group of national park champions. (Ep. 13) Acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns took time out of his busy schedule to discuss the creation and legacy of the National Park Service and celebrate the tenth anniversary of his series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. (Ep. 14) Author Becky Lomax chatted with Danielle and Bryan about her guidebook and offered travel tips to lesser-known parks. (Ep. 19.5) Ranger Shelton Johnson introduced listeners to the Buffalo Soldiers of Yosemite National Park Actions: Subscribe to our podcast from our website https://www.everybodysnationalparks.com/ Tell your friends about Everybody’s National Parks Send us your national park stories, recommendations, comments, or questions to Hello at everybodysnps.com. Support us on Patreon Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook Please tag us from the parks you are visiting at #everybodysnationalparks

Jean Slatter and I continue our discussion on how you too can Hire the Heavens to start experiencing miraculous changes in your life and to also co-create your most unrealized dreams. Jean Slatter is a Higher Guidance Life Coach specializing in receiving intuitive information to help clients optimize their potential and realize their dreams and goals through integrated wellbeing of mind, body and spirit. Jean works one on one coaching clients by connecting with their Higher Guidance. Jean’s unique intuitive ability has helped many on their path of personal and spiritual discovery as they move toward a greater awareness and understanding of life’s events. Jean is a Certified Traditional Naturopath and has had a private practice since 1992. She earned her Doctor of Naturopathy from the Clayton School of Naturopathy and Ph.D. in Nutritional Therapy from the American Holistic College of Nutrition. She is a certified Nutritional Consultant through the American Association of Nutritional Consultants and is certified as an Acupressurist through the Berkeley Institute of Acupressure. She is also certified in herbology through the Tree of Light Institute. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/simone-salmon/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/simone-salmon/support

51% of Californians that responded to a Berkeley Institute of Graduate Studies survey say that the housing crunch is so bad that we need the State to fix it.

Brown v. Board of Education was hailed as a landmark decision for civil rights. But decades later, many consider school integration a failure. UC Berkeley professor Rucker C. Johnson's new book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works shows the exact opposite is true. The book looks at decades of studies to show that students of all races who attended integrated schools fared better than those who did not. In this interview with Goldman School of Public Policy Dean Henry E. Brady, which took place on Jan. 9, 2019, Johnson explains how he and his team analyzed the impact of not just integration, but school funding policies and the Head Start program.This lecture was recorded by UCTV, the UC Public Policy Channel.The Goldman School of Public Policy, with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans, also produces a podcast, “Talk Policy To Me.”Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

NIMBYism, geographical limitation and weaponized policies have led California to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem? California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get here? Why has the development of solutions shifted from a city level to a state level?UC Berkeley MPP student Spencer Bowen speaks with Ophelia Basgal and Elizabeth Kneebone from the Terner Center and California Assembly member, David Chiu. Here are five intersecting causes of California’s housing crisis that they help identify: Limited land and diverse geography Production not keeping pace with booming job market Housing is expensive to build and new methods are limited Cities wield their power to slow down or vote down projects that they don’t like Proposition 13 and the California Environmental Quality Act have been weaponized to limit housing production Talk Policy To Me is a podcast built by students at the Goldman School of Public Policy in partnership with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans.Read more and listen to other Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy's website.Read the transcript and listen on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Fake news, whether truly phony or merely unpalatable, has become an inescapable trope for modern media consumers. But apart from its propagandist provenance, misinformation and disinformation in our media diets is a genuine threat. Sociologist Nick Adams, in this Social Science Bites podcast, offers hope that a tool he’s developed can improve the media literacy of the populace. That tool, known as Public Editor, allows trained volunteers to do one of seven assessment tasks within 15 minutes of looking at passages from a news article. Several volunteers will answer a series of questions based on the passage that’s meant to elicit information about the passage’s logical accuracy and critical thinking, and a ‘credibility score’ to be posted on the article results. Public Editor, Adams tells interview David Edmonds, will display “article labels that will show and point out for a news reader, as they are reading, inferential mistakes, argumentative fallacies, psychological biases.” And because this will all be done within 30 minutes of the article arriving at Public Editor – and hence before readers can allow their biases to cement around what they’ve read -- “this is going to change how people read the news and raise their media literacy.” While there will be naysayers, Adams defends Public Editor’s intent and structure. “This whole endeavor is about building legitimacy, building trust, through a social process. We’ve codified that social process, and substantiated it, in code, in software, in a way that’s totally transparent.” Adams’ wider interests dovetail with Public Editor – his interest in social science technology and on social issues. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California Berkeley, where he founded the Computational Text Analysis Working Group at the university’s D-Lab and the interdisciplinary Text Across Domains initiative at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is currently the CEO of Thusly, Inc, which developed TagWorks, a web-based content analysis software for researchers. “Right now,” he tells Edmonds, “we have more words to analyze than we’ve ever had in the history of history. That’s because we’re generating so many every single day but also because we’re digitizing ancient records going back millennia. As a social scientist,” he adds, “I’m really excited to get my hands on that data and get rich information out of it.” Explaining that “rich data” can – but doesn’t have to be – “big data,” Adams drew an example from his own work. “So I might be looking at something like trying to understand police and protester interactions by looking at the Occupy movement. And I can look at 8,000 news articles, which is not very much – it’s not even going to tax your laptop to process that amount of data. But when you start to put sociological concepts into the data as labels that you can count and then put into time series, multi-level models, you’re starting to talk about very rich data that afford you the ability to understand social processes like we couldn’t before.”

Young voter turnout is lower than overall voter turnout. But, as we approach the 2018 midterm elections, UC Berkeley public policy student Sarah Edwards speaks with Buffy Wicks, Sarah Anzia, and others to find that there are reasons to be optimistic about young voter engagement: Millennials are opinion leaders -- and have helped transform the social, cultural and political landscape in the last decade Young people are a tech-savvy cohort who can and are deploying technology to get out the vote While hot-button issues for young voters have been notably muted or absent, increasing concern around college loan debt and social safety nets are poised to drive interest and engagement higher Wondering how to get more involved and have better conversations about voter engagement? Here’s a few ideas from our team: Vote! Attend community meetings in your local community Join our mailing list at Berkeley Institute for Young Americans

Jessica Forde, Yuvi Panda and Chris Holdgraf join Melanie and Mark to discuss Project Jupyter from it’s interactive notebook origin story to the various open source modular projects it’s grown into supporting data research and applications. We dive specifically into JupyterHub using Kubernetes to enable a multi-user server. We also talk about Binder, an interactive development environment that makes work easily reproducible. Jessica Forde Jessica Forde is a Project Jupyter Maintainer with a background in reinforcement learning and Bayesian statistics. At Project Jupyter, she works primarily on JupyterHub, Binder, and JuptyerLab to improve access to scientific computing and scientific research. Her previous open source projects include datamicroscopes, a DARPA-funded Bayesian nonparametrics library in Python, and density, a wireless device data tool at Columbia University. Jessica has also worked as a machine learning researcher and data scientist in a variety of applications including healthcare, energy, and human capital. Yuvi Panda Yuvi Panda is the Project Jupyter Technical Operations Architect in the UC Berkeley Data Sciences Division. He works on making it easy for people who don’t traditionally consider themselves “programmers” to do things with code. He builds tools (e.g., Quarry, PAWS, etc.) to sidestep the list of historical accidents that constitute the “command line tax” that people have to pay before doing productive things with computing. Chris Holdgraf Chris Holdgraf is a is a Project Jupyter Maintainer and Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a Community Architect at the Data Science Education Program at UC Berkeley. His background is in cognitive and computational neuroscience, where he used predictive models to understand the auditory system in the human brain. He’s interested in the boundary between technology, open-source software, and scientific workflows, as well as creating new pathways for this kind of work in science and the academy. He’s a core member of Project Jupyter, specifically working with JupyterHub and Binder, two open-source projects that make it easier for researchers and educators to do their work in the cloud. He works on these core tools, along with research and educational projects that use these tools at Berkeley and in the broader open science community. Cool things of the week Dragonball hosted on GC / powered by Spanner blog and GDC presentation at Developer Day Cloud Text-to-Speech API powered by DeepMind WaveNet blog and docs Now you can deploy to Kubernetes Engine from Gitlab blog Interview Jupyter site JupyterHub github Binder site and docs JupyterLab site Kubernetes site github Jupyter Notebook github LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) site and binder Paul Romer, World Bank Chief Economist blog and jupyter notebook The Scientific Paper is Obsolete article Large Scale Teaching Infrastructure with Kubernetes - Yuvi Panda, Berkeley University video Data 8: The Foundations of Data Science site Zero to JupyterHub site JupyterHub Deploy Docker github Jupyter Gitter channels Jupyter Pop-Up, May 15th site JupyterCon, Aug 21-24 site Question of the week How did Google’s predictions do during March Madness? How to build a realt time prediction model: Architecting live NCAA predictions Final Four halftime - fed data from first half to create prediction on second half and created a 30 second spot that ran on CBS before game play sample prediction ad Kaggle Competition site Where can you find us next? Melanie is speaking about AI at Techtonica today, and April 14th will be participating in a panel on Diversity and Inclusion at the Harker Research Symposium

Podcast introduction: Talk Policy To Me brings you personal stories and creative solutions from the next generation of public policy leaders. Brought to you by UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans

TOPICThe Shared-Use Strategy of Transportation IN THIS EPISODE[02:33] Introduction of Susan Shaheen. [02:56] Susan explains what shared-mobility services are. [03:46] Susan describes the societal and individual benefits of shared-mobility services. [05:48] Susan shares if car-sharing services are being universally accessed or if they are more concentrated in certain areas. [07:10] Is anyone currently making car-sharing services available to other parts of the population? [07:42] How is the Zipcar model—individuals sharing a car—expanding, and what is the market acceptance? [10:38] Susan shares the benefits of shared-mobility services to municipalities and society. [12:34] Are these shared-mobility services putting cab companies and their drivers out of business, and is there any data about these services driving down wages for those drivers? [14:35] Are all communities being served by shared-mobility services? [16:30] Are shared-mobility services impacting the need for public transportation, as well as the investments that would result in the reduction of vehicle-miles traveled? [20:29] Susan shares where people can learn more about her work. [21:31] Susan shares one change that would lead to smarter, more sustainable, and more equitable communities. [22:17] Susan describes the action that listeners can take to help build a more equitable and sustainable future. [22:34] Susan explains what our communities look like 30 years from now. GUESTSusan’s interest in environmentally- and socially-beneficial technology applications led her to focus her doctoral research on carsharing, linked to public transit in the mid-1990s. Today, she is an internationally recognized expert in mobility and the sharing economy and co-directs the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. She is also an adjunct professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. She has authored 57 journal articles, over 100 reports and proceedings articles, four book chapters, and co-edited one book. Her research projects on carsharing, smart parking, and older mobility have received national awards. ORGANIZATIONThe Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) was formed in 2006 to combine the research forces of six campus groups at UC Berkeley: the University of California Transportation Center, the University of California Energy Institute, the Institute of Transportation Studies, the Energy and Resources Group, the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Since TSRC was founded, it has been a leading center in conducting timely research on real-world solutions for a more sustainable transportation future. In addition to performing research informed by a diverse array of perspectives, TSRC also engages in education and outreach to promote its core values of sustainability and equity, to ensure that we are able to meet the transportation needs of the present without compromising future generations. TSRC conducts research on a wide array of transportation-related issues, addressing the needs of individuals as well as the public. Research efforts are primarily concentrated in six main areas: Advanced vehicles and fuels, Energy and infrastructure, Goods movement, Innovative mobility, Mobility for special populations, and Transportation and energy systems analysis. TSRC uses a wide range of analysis and evaluation tools, including questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, automated data collection systems, and simulation models to collect data and perform analysis and interpretation of the data. The center then develops impartial findings and recommendations for key issues of interest to policymakers to aid in decision-making. TSRC has assisted in developing and implementing major California and federal regulations and initiatives regarding sustainable transportation. These include

This interview takes us to the heart of a new age of scientific discovery. The ability to read DNA has changed how we view ourselves. Genomics is literally changing our understanding of humanity's place in nature.   Professor Dawn Field of the University of Oxford, and Dr Neil Davies, Senior Fellow, Berkeley Institute for Data Science are the authors of Biocode -The New Age of Genomics.   In conversation with Craig Barfoot, they take us on a dazzling ride through new fields of scientific discovery.   We visit Moorea where Neil Davies and his colleagues have taken on the massive task of mapping the genome of an entire ecosystem, creating a library of genetic markers and physical identifiers for every species of plant, animal and fungi on the island, the database of which will be publicly available as a resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists around the world. They help us view the fast developing science of genomics. The structure of DNA was identified in 1953, and the whole human genome was mapped by 2003. Since then the new field of genomics has mushroomed and is now operating on an industrial scale. Genomes can now be sequenced rapidly and increasingly cheaply.  Currently used in crime detection, in paternity suits and to identify susceptibility to medical conditions - the potential for misuse is alarming, but it also opens up unprecedented possibilities. One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is a discussion about human beings as ecosystems.  Sequencing technology has made the invisible world of microbes visible - biodiversity genomics is revealing whole new worlds within us and without. The findings are transformational.  Our bodies are home to millions of bacteria - in fact we have more bacteria in us than human cells - these species help us to function as human beings.  We have seen microbes as the enemy, and have been fighting them with penicillin since the middle of the last century - but what we now find is that only 200 species of microbes are pathogens out of millions of bacterial species.  When we understand this ecosystem better it will revolutionise healthcare.  "The genome is the foundation of our bodies, like trees in a forest, but there are lots of other flora and fauna that make up the whole ecosystem of the forest."    Photo:  Libertas Academica

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Uh Huh [inaudible]. Speaker 4: [00:00:30] We'll come to spectrum the science and technology show on Katie l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week [00:01:00] on spectrum present part two of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for data science bids is only four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. They are today's guest Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley for Nana Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler [00:01:30] Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the iPod iPhone project while he was a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead the project today. In part two they talk about teaching data science. Brad Swift conducts the interview Speaker 5: on the teaching side of things. Does data science just fold into the domains in the fields and some faculty embrace it, others don't. How does the teaching of data science move [00:02:00] forward at an undergraduate level? Yeah, there there've been some really interesting institutional experiments in the last year or two here at Berkeley. Thinking about last semester, fall of 2013 stat one 57 which was reproducible collaborative data science pitched at statistics majors simply because you have to start with the size that can fit in a classroom [00:02:30] and training students in the practices of scientific collaboration around open source production of software tools or to look at what was Josh Bloom's course, so that's astro four 50 it's listed as special topics in astrophysics just because Josh happens to be a professor in the astronomy department and so you have to list it somewhere. The course is actually called Python for science Speaker 6: [00:03:00] and it's a course that Josh has run for the last, I think this is, this was its fourth iteration and that course is a completely interdisciplinary course that it's open to students in any field. The examples really do not privilege and the homework sets do not privilege astronomy in any way and we see students. I liked her a fair bit in that course as a guest lecture and we see students from all departments participating. This last semester it was packed to the gills. We actually had problems because we couldn't find a room large enough to accommodate. So word of mouth is working. In terms of students finding these [00:03:30] courses, Speaker 5: it's happening. I wouldn't say it's working in part because it's very difficult to get visibility across this campus landscape. I am sure there are innovations going on that even the pis and bids aren't aware of and one of the things we want to do is stimulate more innovation in places like the the professional schools. We'll be training students who need to be able to use these tools as well. What do they have in mind or there [00:04:00] are other formats of instruction beyond traditional semester courses. What would intensive training stretched out over a much shorter time look like? What gaps are there in the undergraduate or graduate curriculum that can effectively be filled in that way? The Python bootcamp is another example of this that's been going on for Speaker 6: for about four years. Josh and I teach a a bootcamp on also python for data science that is immediately before the beginning of the fall semester. Literally the weekend before [00:04:30] and it's kind of, it's a prerequisite for the semester long course, but it's three days of intensive hands-on scientific bite on basically programming and data analysis and computing for three days. We typically try to get a large auditorium and we got 150 to 200 people. A combination of undergrads, Grad Students, postdocs, folks from LVL campus faculty and also a few folks from industry. We always leave, leave a few slots available for people from outside the university to come and that one a has been very popular at [00:05:00] tends to, it's intense to have very good attendance be, it serves as an on ramp for the course because we advertise the in the semester course during the bootcamp and that one has been fairly successful so far and I think it has worked well. Speaker 6: We see issues with it too. That would be that we would like to address three days is probably not enough. Um, it means because it's a single environment, it means that we have to have examples that are a little bit above that can accommodate everyone, but it means they're not particularly interesting for any one group. It would be, I think it would be great to have [00:05:30] things of this nature that might be a little bit better focused at the life sciences and the social sciences that the physical sciences, so that the examples are more relevant for a given community that may be better targeted at the undergraduate and the graduate level so that you can kind of select a little bit in tune the requirements or the methodological base a little bit better to the audience. But so far we've had to kind of bootstrapping with what we have. Speaker 6: There's another interesting course on campus offered by the ice school by Raymond Lecture at the high school called working with open data [00:06:00] that is very much aimed at folks who are the constituency of the high school that have an intersection of technical background with a broader interdisciplinary kind of skills that are the hallmark of the high school and they work with openly available data sets that are existing on the Internet to create basically interesting analysis projects out of them and that's of course that that I've seen come up with some very, very successful and compelling projects at the end of the semester Speaker 7: about the teaching and preparation in universities. In [00:06:30] the course of doing interviews on spectrum, a number of people have said that really the only way to tackle sciences interdisciplinary, the big issues of science is with an interdisciplinary approach, but that that's not being taught in universities as the way to do science. Sarah way to break that down using data science as a vehicle. Speaker 5: I can speak about that as a science and technology studies scholar. The practice of interdisciplinarity, what makes it actually work is one of the [00:07:00] the most challenging social questions that can be asked of contemporary science and adding into that the fact that scientists get trained inside this existing institution that we've inherited from let's roughly say the Middle Ages with a set of disciplines that have been in their current form since roughly the late 19th century. That is the interface where I expect in the next oh two to five decades major transformations in research universities. [00:07:30] We don't yet know what an institution or research institution will look like that does not take disciplines as it sort of zero order ground level approximation to the way to encapsulate truth. But we do see, and I think bids is like data science in general and an example of this. We do see continual pressure to open up the existing disciplines and figure out how to do connections across them. It's [00:08:00] not been particularly easy for Berkeley to do that in part because of the structure of academic planning at our institution and in part because we have such disciplinary strengths here, but I think the invitation for the future that that word keeps coming back invitation. The invitation for the future for us is to understand what we mean by practicing interdisciplinarity and then figure out how to hack the institution so that it learns how to do it better. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:08:30] you're listening to structure fun. K A, l ex Berkeley Fasten Kirsten and Fernando Perez are our guests. They're part of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science for Bids [inaudible] Oh, Speaker 6: it seems that data science has an almost unlimited [00:09:00] application. Are there, are you feeling limits? I don't know about limits specifically because I think in principle almost any discipline can have some of its information and whatever the concepts and constructs of that discipline can probably be represented in a way that is amicable to quantitative analysis of some sort. In that regard, probably almost any discipline can have a data science aspect to it. I think it's important not to sort of [00:09:30] over fetishize it so that we don't lose sight of the fact that there's other aspects of intellectual work in all disciplines that are still important. That theory still has a role. That model building still has a role that, uh, knowing what questions to ask, it's still important that hypotheses still matter. I'm not so sure that it's so much an issue of drawing arbitrary limits around it, but rather of being knowledgeable and critical users of the tools and the approaches that are offered. Speaker 6: Because in terms of domain [00:10:00] applications, I actually recently saw at the strata conference, which is one of these more industry oriented big data conferences that took place a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley. It's in Santa Clara. One of the best talks that I saw at the conference was an analysis half the poem, if I told him that Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso After Picasso painted this very famous portrait of her. And that poem has a very, very repetitive rhythmic structure. It has very few words and it's a long poem with a very peculiar linguistic structure. And [00:10:30] this hardest, I, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's an artist who works kind of at the intersection of digital arts in, in linguistics wrote basically a custom one off visual analysis and visualization tool to work on the structure of this poem to visualize it, to turn it into music. Speaker 6: And it was a beautiful talk. It was a beautiful and very interesting talk and this was kind of the exact opposite of this was tiny data. This was one poem and in fact during the Q and a they asked him and he said, well I've tried to use the tool [00:11:00] on a few other things and there's a few songs in hip hop that it works well with, but it's almost, it's almost custom made for this one poem, right? So this was sort of tiny data, completely non generalizable and yet I thought it was fascinating and beautiful talk. So that's kind of an example that I would have never have thought of as as data science. Any examples of misapplication? Speaker 5: I think we can admit that data science is a buzzword that is [00:11:30] exactly through, it's almost indefinable nature creates space for people to do methodologically problematic and in many cases also uninteresting work. Just throwing data into an analysis without asking is this the right analysis will get you stupid or misleading answers. It's the garbage in out principle. So yeah, like any intellectual tool in the toolkit, [00:12:00] there are misleading conclusions that can be drawn and one of the powers that Berkeley brings to this effort in data science is a focus on the methodology, the intelligent development of methodology along with just building things that look like tools on their own. I think that's going to be the place with the sweet spot for universities because of the emphasis on rigor and stringency and reasoning [00:12:30] along with just getting out results that look good and are attractive Speaker 7: with data science. Are there infrastructure challenges that are worth talking about either in industry or at an academic institution? Because I know that computing power now through Amazon, Google organizations like that are enormous and so industry is sort of giving up the idea of having their own [00:13:00] computational capacity and they're using cloud virtual universities I would think are following suit. Speaker 6: Yes, there is work being done already on campus in that regard. We've had some intersection with those teams. The university right now, uh, we've had since last year a new CIO on campus, Larry Conrad, who's been spearheading an effort to sort of reimagine what the research computing infrastructure for campus should look like. [00:13:30] Considering these questions precisely of what is happening in industry, what are the models that are successfully being used at other institutions to provide larger scales off competitional resources across all disciplines and beyond the disciplines that have been traditionally the ones that have super computers. Well, there's a long history of departments, again, like physics, like competition, fluid dynamics, teams like quantum chemistry teams that have had either their own clusters or that have large budgets who have access to the supercomputing centers at [00:14:00] the doe labs and things of that nature. But as we've been saying today, all of a sudden those needs are exploding across all disciplines and the usage patterns are changing and that often what is the bottleneck is maybe not the amount of raw compute power, but the ability to operate over a very large data sets, so maybe storage is the issue or maybe throughput biologists often end up buying computers that look really weird. Speaker 6: Too many supercomputing centers because they, the actual things that they need are skewed in a different way and so there are certainly [00:14:30] challenges in that regard when we do know that Berkeley is right now at least in the midst of making a very concerted and serious attempt at at least taking a step forward on this problem. Speaker 7: A lot of data is derived from personal information. Are there privacy concerns that you have [inaudible] Speaker 5: they're all quite definitely in so many different ways that the input of experts who have thought about questions of consent, of privacy, [00:15:00] of the challenges around keeping de identified data d identified when it is possible through analytics to understand what patterns are emerging from them that is going to be so key. Especially to working with social data. And so one of the still open questions for all of us working with data that is about people is how to develop the practices that will do the protections necessary [00:15:30] in order to avoid the kinds of catastrophic misuses and violations of privacy that many of us do. Fear will be coming our way as so much data becomes available so fast with so many invitations to just make use of it and worry about the consequences later. That's not the responsible way forward. And I would like to see bids and Berkeley take on that challenge as part of its very deliberate agenda. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] Okay. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about institutional reactions to bids. Oh, Speaker 7: are there any impediments that you've run into within the bids process [00:16:30] of getting up and running? Cause it's been going since, uh, Speaker 5: it's not been going on that long as it, it's only December of 2013. Pretty recent, but I'm sure there's gotta be some institutional pushback or no, it's, it's been incredible actually how much support the institution has given. What bids is though, is a laboratory for the kind of collaboration that we're trying to instantiate. And so you have 13 brilliant Co-pi eyes each with their own vision and figuring out where [00:17:00] the intersection is and how to get the different sets of expertise and investments where they, where those intersections lie and how to get them aligned. I mean, that's, that's one of the fascinating challenges in front of beds as a laboratory in the small, for the process at large that we're trying to do Speaker 7: on the tools and programming side. How would you break up what languages are providing, what kind of capability, [00:17:30] and are there new languages that are ascendent and other languages that are languages that are losing their grip? I'm sort of curious. It's a, it's another trivia questions that I think might have some interest for people. No, I think there's, there's clearly an ascendance. I think naturally the expansion of the surface of people interested in these problems Speaker 6: is naturally driving the growth and importance of high level languages that are immediately usable by domain scientists. We're not full time programmers [00:18:00] and professional programmers. Traditionally a lot of the high end computing had been done in languages like c, c plus plus for trend and some Java that are languages that tend to be more the purview of, of people who do lots of software development. And a lot of that did happen in departments like physics and chemistry and computer science, but not so much in other disciplines. And so we're seeing the rise of open source languages like Python and r that are immediately applicable and easy to use for data analysis where a few commands [00:18:30] can load a file, compute some statistics on it, produce a few visualizations, and you can do that in five lines of code, not having to write a hundred or 500 lines of c plus plus. Speaker 6: Right. And so the languages like that are, they're not new. Both I think are came out in the late eighties early nineties python came out in 1991 but they're seeing a huge amount of growth in recent years for this reason. There's also a growth of either new tools to extend these languages [00:19:00] or new languages as well. Tools for example, that connect these languages to databases or extensions to these languages to couple them to databases in better ways so that people don't have to only write raw sequel, which SQL is not the classic language for interacting with databases, so extensions to couple existing languages to database back ends. A lot of work is being done in that direction and there are some novel languages. For example, there's a team at MIT that about two years ago started [00:19:30] a project for a new language called Julia that is aimed at numerical computing, but it's sort of re-imagining. Speaker 6: What would you do if you wanted to create a language like python with the strengths of language like python or Ruby or r, but if you were doing that today with the lessons of the last 20 years, that would be good for numerical computing, but it would be easy to use for domain scientists. That would be high level, that would be interactive, that would feel like a scripting tool, but that would also give you very high performance. [00:20:00] If you had the the last 20 years of lessons and the advances in some of the underlying technology and improved compiler machinery that we have today, how would you go about that problem? And I think the Giulia team at MIT is making rapid progress and it has caught the intention of people in the statistics community of people in the numerical analysis and algorithms community. Some prominent people have become very interested in how to become active participants in its development. Speaker 6: So we're seeing both mature tools like python and are growing in their strength and and their importance. At the latest Strada Conference, [00:20:30] for example, there was a an analysis of kind of the the abstracts submitted that had r and python in their names versus things like excel or sequel or Java and Python and are clearly dominating that space, but also these, these kinds of more novels, sort of research level languages that whose futures still not clear because they're very, very young, but at least they're exploring sort of the frontier of what will we do in the next five or 10 years. And is this an area that's ripe for a commercial software creators who develop [00:21:00] a tool that would be specific to data science and sort of the same way that Mat lab is kind of specific now it's kind of a generic tool for mathematics. Obviously my answer here is extremely biased, but I'm, I sort of think that the space for a, the window to create a proprietary data science language is closed already. Speaker 6: I think the community simply would not adopt a new one. There are some existing successful ones such as mat lab, IDL, which is smaller than Madlib. It is widely used in the astronomy and astrophysics. [00:21:30] And Physics Communities Mathematica, which is a project that came out of the mathematics and physics world and that is very, very sophisticated and interesting. Maple, which is also a mathematics language. Those are successful existing proprietary languages. I think the mood has changed to these are products that came out in the eighties and the nineties. I think the, the window for that, uh, as a purely proprietary offer has closed. I think what we're going to see is the continued growth and the rise potential. You have new entrants that are fundamentally [00:22:00] open source, but yet that maintain, as I said earlier, a healthy dialogue with industry because it doesn't mean, for example, in the art world there are companies that build very successful commercial products around are there is a product called r studio that is a development environment for analysis in our, and that's a company, there's a company called I think revolution analytics. Speaker 6: I think they built some sort of sort of large scale backend high-performance version of our, I don't know the details, I don't use it, but I've seen their website. I think they're a large company that builds kind of our for the enterprise. So I think [00:22:30] that's what we're going to see moving forward at the base. People want the base technology, the base language to be open source. And I think for us as universities and for me as a scientist, I think that's a Tenet I'm not willing to compromise on because I do not want a result that I obtain or result that I published or a tool that I educate my students with to have a black box that I'm legally prevented from opening and to tell my student, well, this is a result about nature, but you can't understand how it was achieved because you are legally prevented from opening the box. [00:23:00] I think that is fundamentally unacceptable. But what is, I think a perfectly sensible way forward, is to have these base layers that are open on top of which domain specific tools can be created by industry that add value for specific problems, for specific domains that may be add performance, whatever. Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having us here. Thanks much. Speaker 8: [inaudible]Speaker 9: [00:23:30] all spectrums. Past shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k Speaker 1: a l x Speaker 8: spectrum Speaker 1: Rick Curtis Skin. I will present a few of the science and technology events [00:24:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 10: Counter culture, labs and pseudo room present gravitational waves, results and implications with Bicep to collaborator Jamie Tolan at the pseudo room, hackerspace to one 41 Broadway in Oakland on Sunday, April 27th at 7:00 PM recently, scientists from the Bicep to experiment recorded their data findings demonstrating [00:24:30] evidence of gravitational waves that may imply cosmic inflation. The bicep to experiment is an international collaboration of research and technology from many institutions including a team at Stanford University work. Jamie Tolan works. Jamie will discuss the results of the bicep two experiment and its scientific contribution to current theories that attempt to explain the why, what and how of our universe. The event will be free. Speaker 1: On April 30th UCLA professor [00:25:00] of geography, Jared diamond will give this year's Horace m Albright Lecture in conversation. Diamond is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, guns, germs and steel and this lecture he will discuss his newest book, the world until yesterday, what we can learn from traditional societies. The book is about how traditional peoples differ from members of modern industrial societies and their reactions to danger. He will then produce B in a question answer session with the audience doors open at 6:00 PM [00:25:30] the event is free and open to the public on a first come first served basis will be held Wednesday, April 30th from seven to 8:30 PM in the International House Auditorium at two two nine nine Piedmont Avenue Berkeley. Speaker 10: The theme of Mays science at the theater is science remix. Joined Berkeley lab scientists at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California on May 1st at 7:00 PM they'll discuss how discovery [00:26:00] happens. Help you show what science means to you and reveal why science can be as personal as you want it to be. Light refreshments will be served, but bring your imagination and participate at this free event. Speaker 1: A feature spectrum is to present new stories about science that we find particularly interesting. Rick Carnesi joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 10: Nature News reported on April 13th that a team of scientists from [00:26:30] Caltech have estimated that Mars's atmosphere was probably never thick enough to keep temperatures on the planet surface above freezing for very long. Edwin kite now at Princeton used from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catalog more than 300 craters and an 84,000 square kilometer area near the planets equator. The sizes of the creators were compared to computer models with varying atmospheres. Dance [00:27:00] or atmospheres would have broken up small objects as they do on earth, but the high frequency of smaller craters on Mars suggest the upper limit of atmospheric pressure on Mars was only one or two bar. This most likely means a temperatures on Mars have typically been below freezing. Did the team notes that their findings do allow the possibility of scenarios of Mars having a slightly thicker atmosphere at times. Do you perhaps to volcanic activity or gas is released by the large impact events and these could have [00:27:30] made Mars warmer for decades or centuries at a time, allowing water to flow. Then Speaker 1: science daily reports one of the first social science experiments to rest on. Big Data has been published in plus one. A chair of investigators from Simon Fraser University analyzed when humans start to experience and age-related decline in cognitive motor skills. The researchers analyze the digital performances of over 3000 starcraft two players, age 16 to 44 starcraft two is a ruthless intergalactic computer [00:28:00] game that players often undertake to win serious money. Their performance records, which can be easily accessed, represent thousands of hours worth of strategic real time. Cognitive based moves performed at various skill levels using complex statistical modeling. Researchers distilled meaning from this colossal compilation of information about how players responded to their opponents and more importantly, how long they took to react after around 24 years of age, players show slowing and a measure of cognitive speed that is known to be important for performance. [00:28:30] Explains Joe Thompson lead author of the study. This cognitive performance decline is present even at higher levels of skill, but there's a silver lining in this earlier than expected slippery slope into old age. Thompson says older players, those slower seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the games interface more efficiently. The younger players enabling them to retain their skill despite cognitive motor speed losses. These findings says Thompson suggests that our cognitive motor capabilities are not stable across our adulthood, but are constantly [00:29:00] in flux and that our day to day performance is a result of the constant interplay between change and adaptation. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 11: and music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview was edited by Rene Rau. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email [00:29:30] address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same tone. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Uh Huh [inaudible]. Speaker 4: [00:00:30] We'll come to spectrum the science and technology show on Katie l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week [00:01:00] on spectrum present part two of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for data science bids is only four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. They are today's guest Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley for Nana Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler [00:01:30] Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the iPod iPhone project while he was a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead the project today. In part two they talk about teaching data science. Brad Swift conducts the interview Speaker 5: on the teaching side of things. Does data science just fold into the domains in the fields and some faculty embrace it, others don't. How does the teaching of data science move [00:02:00] forward at an undergraduate level? Yeah, there there've been some really interesting institutional experiments in the last year or two here at Berkeley. Thinking about last semester, fall of 2013 stat one 57 which was reproducible collaborative data science pitched at statistics majors simply because you have to start with the size that can fit in a classroom [00:02:30] and training students in the practices of scientific collaboration around open source production of software tools or to look at what was Josh Bloom's course, so that's astro four 50 it's listed as special topics in astrophysics just because Josh happens to be a professor in the astronomy department and so you have to list it somewhere. The course is actually called Python for science Speaker 6: [00:03:00] and it's a course that Josh has run for the last, I think this is, this was its fourth iteration and that course is a completely interdisciplinary course that it's open to students in any field. The examples really do not privilege and the homework sets do not privilege astronomy in any way and we see students. I liked her a fair bit in that course as a guest lecture and we see students from all departments participating. This last semester it was packed to the gills. We actually had problems because we couldn't find a room large enough to accommodate. So word of mouth is working. In terms of students finding these [00:03:30] courses, Speaker 5: it's happening. I wouldn't say it's working in part because it's very difficult to get visibility across this campus landscape. I am sure there are innovations going on that even the pis and bids aren't aware of and one of the things we want to do is stimulate more innovation in places like the the professional schools. We'll be training students who need to be able to use these tools as well. What do they have in mind or there [00:04:00] are other formats of instruction beyond traditional semester courses. What would intensive training stretched out over a much shorter time look like? What gaps are there in the undergraduate or graduate curriculum that can effectively be filled in that way? The Python bootcamp is another example of this that's been going on for Speaker 6: for about four years. Josh and I teach a a bootcamp on also python for data science that is immediately before the beginning of the fall semester. Literally the weekend before [00:04:30] and it's kind of, it's a prerequisite for the semester long course, but it's three days of intensive hands-on scientific bite on basically programming and data analysis and computing for three days. We typically try to get a large auditorium and we got 150 to 200 people. A combination of undergrads, Grad Students, postdocs, folks from LVL campus faculty and also a few folks from industry. We always leave, leave a few slots available for people from outside the university to come and that one a has been very popular at [00:05:00] tends to, it's intense to have very good attendance be, it serves as an on ramp for the course because we advertise the in the semester course during the bootcamp and that one has been fairly successful so far and I think it has worked well. Speaker 6: We see issues with it too. That would be that we would like to address three days is probably not enough. Um, it means because it's a single environment, it means that we have to have examples that are a little bit above that can accommodate everyone, but it means they're not particularly interesting for any one group. It would be, I think it would be great to have [00:05:30] things of this nature that might be a little bit better focused at the life sciences and the social sciences that the physical sciences, so that the examples are more relevant for a given community that may be better targeted at the undergraduate and the graduate level so that you can kind of select a little bit in tune the requirements or the methodological base a little bit better to the audience. But so far we've had to kind of bootstrapping with what we have. Speaker 6: There's another interesting course on campus offered by the ice school by Raymond Lecture at the high school called working with open data [00:06:00] that is very much aimed at folks who are the constituency of the high school that have an intersection of technical background with a broader interdisciplinary kind of skills that are the hallmark of the high school and they work with openly available data sets that are existing on the Internet to create basically interesting analysis projects out of them and that's of course that that I've seen come up with some very, very successful and compelling projects at the end of the semester Speaker 7: about the teaching and preparation in universities. In [00:06:30] the course of doing interviews on spectrum, a number of people have said that really the only way to tackle sciences interdisciplinary, the big issues of science is with an interdisciplinary approach, but that that's not being taught in universities as the way to do science. Sarah way to break that down using data science as a vehicle. Speaker 5: I can speak about that as a science and technology studies scholar. The practice of interdisciplinarity, what makes it actually work is one of the [00:07:00] the most challenging social questions that can be asked of contemporary science and adding into that the fact that scientists get trained inside this existing institution that we've inherited from let's roughly say the Middle Ages with a set of disciplines that have been in their current form since roughly the late 19th century. That is the interface where I expect in the next oh two to five decades major transformations in research universities. [00:07:30] We don't yet know what an institution or research institution will look like that does not take disciplines as it sort of zero order ground level approximation to the way to encapsulate truth. But we do see, and I think bids is like data science in general and an example of this. We do see continual pressure to open up the existing disciplines and figure out how to do connections across them. It's [00:08:00] not been particularly easy for Berkeley to do that in part because of the structure of academic planning at our institution and in part because we have such disciplinary strengths here, but I think the invitation for the future that that word keeps coming back invitation. The invitation for the future for us is to understand what we mean by practicing interdisciplinarity and then figure out how to hack the institution so that it learns how to do it better. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:08:30] you're listening to structure fun. K A, l ex Berkeley Fasten Kirsten and Fernando Perez are our guests. They're part of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science for Bids [inaudible] Oh, Speaker 6: it seems that data science has an almost unlimited [00:09:00] application. Are there, are you feeling limits? I don't know about limits specifically because I think in principle almost any discipline can have some of its information and whatever the concepts and constructs of that discipline can probably be represented in a way that is amicable to quantitative analysis of some sort. In that regard, probably almost any discipline can have a data science aspect to it. I think it's important not to sort of [00:09:30] over fetishize it so that we don't lose sight of the fact that there's other aspects of intellectual work in all disciplines that are still important. That theory still has a role. That model building still has a role that, uh, knowing what questions to ask, it's still important that hypotheses still matter. I'm not so sure that it's so much an issue of drawing arbitrary limits around it, but rather of being knowledgeable and critical users of the tools and the approaches that are offered. Speaker 6: Because in terms of domain [00:10:00] applications, I actually recently saw at the strata conference, which is one of these more industry oriented big data conferences that took place a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley. It's in Santa Clara. One of the best talks that I saw at the conference was an analysis half the poem, if I told him that Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso After Picasso painted this very famous portrait of her. And that poem has a very, very repetitive rhythmic structure. It has very few words and it's a long poem with a very peculiar linguistic structure. And [00:10:30] this hardest, I, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's an artist who works kind of at the intersection of digital arts in, in linguistics wrote basically a custom one off visual analysis and visualization tool to work on the structure of this poem to visualize it, to turn it into music. Speaker 6: And it was a beautiful talk. It was a beautiful and very interesting talk and this was kind of the exact opposite of this was tiny data. This was one poem and in fact during the Q and a they asked him and he said, well I've tried to use the tool [00:11:00] on a few other things and there's a few songs in hip hop that it works well with, but it's almost, it's almost custom made for this one poem, right? So this was sort of tiny data, completely non generalizable and yet I thought it was fascinating and beautiful talk. So that's kind of an example that I would have never have thought of as as data science. Any examples of misapplication? Speaker 5: I think we can admit that data science is a buzzword that is [00:11:30] exactly through, it's almost indefinable nature creates space for people to do methodologically problematic and in many cases also uninteresting work. Just throwing data into an analysis without asking is this the right analysis will get you stupid or misleading answers. It's the garbage in out principle. So yeah, like any intellectual tool in the toolkit, [00:12:00] there are misleading conclusions that can be drawn and one of the powers that Berkeley brings to this effort in data science is a focus on the methodology, the intelligent development of methodology along with just building things that look like tools on their own. I think that's going to be the place with the sweet spot for universities because of the emphasis on rigor and stringency and reasoning [00:12:30] along with just getting out results that look good and are attractive Speaker 7: with data science. Are there infrastructure challenges that are worth talking about either in industry or at an academic institution? Because I know that computing power now through Amazon, Google organizations like that are enormous and so industry is sort of giving up the idea of having their own [00:13:00] computational capacity and they're using cloud virtual universities I would think are following suit. Speaker 6: Yes, there is work being done already on campus in that regard. We've had some intersection with those teams. The university right now, uh, we've had since last year a new CIO on campus, Larry Conrad, who's been spearheading an effort to sort of reimagine what the research computing infrastructure for campus should look like. [00:13:30] Considering these questions precisely of what is happening in industry, what are the models that are successfully being used at other institutions to provide larger scales off competitional resources across all disciplines and beyond the disciplines that have been traditionally the ones that have super computers. Well, there's a long history of departments, again, like physics, like competition, fluid dynamics, teams like quantum chemistry teams that have had either their own clusters or that have large budgets who have access to the supercomputing centers at [00:14:00] the doe labs and things of that nature. But as we've been saying today, all of a sudden those needs are exploding across all disciplines and the usage patterns are changing and that often what is the bottleneck is maybe not the amount of raw compute power, but the ability to operate over a very large data sets, so maybe storage is the issue or maybe throughput biologists often end up buying computers that look really weird. Speaker 6: Too many supercomputing centers because they, the actual things that they need are skewed in a different way and so there are certainly [00:14:30] challenges in that regard when we do know that Berkeley is right now at least in the midst of making a very concerted and serious attempt at at least taking a step forward on this problem. Speaker 7: A lot of data is derived from personal information. Are there privacy concerns that you have [inaudible] Speaker 5: they're all quite definitely in so many different ways that the input of experts who have thought about questions of consent, of privacy, [00:15:00] of the challenges around keeping de identified data d identified when it is possible through analytics to understand what patterns are emerging from them that is going to be so key. Especially to working with social data. And so one of the still open questions for all of us working with data that is about people is how to develop the practices that will do the protections necessary [00:15:30] in order to avoid the kinds of catastrophic misuses and violations of privacy that many of us do. Fear will be coming our way as so much data becomes available so fast with so many invitations to just make use of it and worry about the consequences later. That's not the responsible way forward. And I would like to see bids and Berkeley take on that challenge as part of its very deliberate agenda. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] Okay. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about institutional reactions to bids. Oh, Speaker 7: are there any impediments that you've run into within the bids process [00:16:30] of getting up and running? Cause it's been going since, uh, Speaker 5: it's not been going on that long as it, it's only December of 2013. Pretty recent, but I'm sure there's gotta be some institutional pushback or no, it's, it's been incredible actually how much support the institution has given. What bids is though, is a laboratory for the kind of collaboration that we're trying to instantiate. And so you have 13 brilliant Co-pi eyes each with their own vision and figuring out where [00:17:00] the intersection is and how to get the different sets of expertise and investments where they, where those intersections lie and how to get them aligned. I mean, that's, that's one of the fascinating challenges in front of beds as a laboratory in the small, for the process at large that we're trying to do Speaker 7: on the tools and programming side. How would you break up what languages are providing, what kind of capability, [00:17:30] and are there new languages that are ascendent and other languages that are languages that are losing their grip? I'm sort of curious. It's a, it's another trivia questions that I think might have some interest for people. No, I think there's, there's clearly an ascendance. I think naturally the expansion of the surface of people interested in these problems Speaker 6: is naturally driving the growth and importance of high level languages that are immediately usable by domain scientists. We're not full time programmers [00:18:00] and professional programmers. Traditionally a lot of the high end computing had been done in languages like c, c plus plus for trend and some Java that are languages that tend to be more the purview of, of people who do lots of software development. And a lot of that did happen in departments like physics and chemistry and computer science, but not so much in other disciplines. And so we're seeing the rise of open source languages like Python and r that are immediately applicable and easy to use for data analysis where a few commands [00:18:30] can load a file, compute some statistics on it, produce a few visualizations, and you can do that in five lines of code, not having to write a hundred or 500 lines of c plus plus. Speaker 6: Right. And so the languages like that are, they're not new. Both I think are came out in the late eighties early nineties python came out in 1991 but they're seeing a huge amount of growth in recent years for this reason. There's also a growth of either new tools to extend these languages [00:19:00] or new languages as well. Tools for example, that connect these languages to databases or extensions to these languages to couple them to databases in better ways so that people don't have to only write raw sequel, which SQL is not the classic language for interacting with databases, so extensions to couple existing languages to database back ends. A lot of work is being done in that direction and there are some novel languages. For example, there's a team at MIT that about two years ago started [00:19:30] a project for a new language called Julia that is aimed at numerical computing, but it's sort of re-imagining. Speaker 6: What would you do if you wanted to create a language like python with the strengths of language like python or Ruby or r, but if you were doing that today with the lessons of the last 20 years, that would be good for numerical computing, but it would be easy to use for domain scientists. That would be high level, that would be interactive, that would feel like a scripting tool, but that would also give you very high performance. [00:20:00] If you had the the last 20 years of lessons and the advances in some of the underlying technology and improved compiler machinery that we have today, how would you go about that problem? And I think the Giulia team at MIT is making rapid progress and it has caught the intention of people in the statistics community of people in the numerical analysis and algorithms community. Some prominent people have become very interested in how to become active participants in its development. Speaker 6: So we're seeing both mature tools like python and are growing in their strength and and their importance. At the latest Strada Conference, [00:20:30] for example, there was a an analysis of kind of the the abstracts submitted that had r and python in their names versus things like excel or sequel or Java and Python and are clearly dominating that space, but also these, these kinds of more novels, sort of research level languages that whose futures still not clear because they're very, very young, but at least they're exploring sort of the frontier of what will we do in the next five or 10 years. And is this an area that's ripe for a commercial software creators who develop [00:21:00] a tool that would be specific to data science and sort of the same way that Mat lab is kind of specific now it's kind of a generic tool for mathematics. Obviously my answer here is extremely biased, but I'm, I sort of think that the space for a, the window to create a proprietary data science language is closed already. Speaker 6: I think the community simply would not adopt a new one. There are some existing successful ones such as mat lab, IDL, which is smaller than Madlib. It is widely used in the astronomy and astrophysics. [00:21:30] And Physics Communities Mathematica, which is a project that came out of the mathematics and physics world and that is very, very sophisticated and interesting. Maple, which is also a mathematics language. Those are successful existing proprietary languages. I think the mood has changed to these are products that came out in the eighties and the nineties. I think the, the window for that, uh, as a purely proprietary offer has closed. I think what we're going to see is the continued growth and the rise potential. You have new entrants that are fundamentally [00:22:00] open source, but yet that maintain, as I said earlier, a healthy dialogue with industry because it doesn't mean, for example, in the art world there are companies that build very successful commercial products around are there is a product called r studio that is a development environment for analysis in our, and that's a company, there's a company called I think revolution analytics. Speaker 6: I think they built some sort of sort of large scale backend high-performance version of our, I don't know the details, I don't use it, but I've seen their website. I think they're a large company that builds kind of our for the enterprise. So I think [00:22:30] that's what we're going to see moving forward at the base. People want the base technology, the base language to be open source. And I think for us as universities and for me as a scientist, I think that's a Tenet I'm not willing to compromise on because I do not want a result that I obtain or result that I published or a tool that I educate my students with to have a black box that I'm legally prevented from opening and to tell my student, well, this is a result about nature, but you can't understand how it was achieved because you are legally prevented from opening the box. [00:23:00] I think that is fundamentally unacceptable. But what is, I think a perfectly sensible way forward, is to have these base layers that are open on top of which domain specific tools can be created by industry that add value for specific problems, for specific domains that may be add performance, whatever. Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having us here. Thanks much. Speaker 8: [inaudible]Speaker 9: [00:23:30] all spectrums. Past shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k Speaker 1: a l x Speaker 8: spectrum Speaker 1: Rick Curtis Skin. I will present a few of the science and technology events [00:24:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 10: Counter culture, labs and pseudo room present gravitational waves, results and implications with Bicep to collaborator Jamie Tolan at the pseudo room, hackerspace to one 41 Broadway in Oakland on Sunday, April 27th at 7:00 PM recently, scientists from the Bicep to experiment recorded their data findings demonstrating [00:24:30] evidence of gravitational waves that may imply cosmic inflation. The bicep to experiment is an international collaboration of research and technology from many institutions including a team at Stanford University work. Jamie Tolan works. Jamie will discuss the results of the bicep two experiment and its scientific contribution to current theories that attempt to explain the why, what and how of our universe. The event will be free. Speaker 1: On April 30th UCLA professor [00:25:00] of geography, Jared diamond will give this year's Horace m Albright Lecture in conversation. Diamond is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, guns, germs and steel and this lecture he will discuss his newest book, the world until yesterday, what we can learn from traditional societies. The book is about how traditional peoples differ from members of modern industrial societies and their reactions to danger. He will then produce B in a question answer session with the audience doors open at 6:00 PM [00:25:30] the event is free and open to the public on a first come first served basis will be held Wednesday, April 30th from seven to 8:30 PM in the International House Auditorium at two two nine nine Piedmont Avenue Berkeley. Speaker 10: The theme of Mays science at the theater is science remix. Joined Berkeley lab scientists at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California on May 1st at 7:00 PM they'll discuss how discovery [00:26:00] happens. Help you show what science means to you and reveal why science can be as personal as you want it to be. Light refreshments will be served, but bring your imagination and participate at this free event. Speaker 1: A feature spectrum is to present new stories about science that we find particularly interesting. Rick Carnesi joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 10: Nature News reported on April 13th that a team of scientists from [00:26:30] Caltech have estimated that Mars's atmosphere was probably never thick enough to keep temperatures on the planet surface above freezing for very long. Edwin kite now at Princeton used from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catalog more than 300 craters and an 84,000 square kilometer area near the planets equator. The sizes of the creators were compared to computer models with varying atmospheres. Dance [00:27:00] or atmospheres would have broken up small objects as they do on earth, but the high frequency of smaller craters on Mars suggest the upper limit of atmospheric pressure on Mars was only one or two bar. This most likely means a temperatures on Mars have typically been below freezing. Did the team notes that their findings do allow the possibility of scenarios of Mars having a slightly thicker atmosphere at times. Do you perhaps to volcanic activity or gas is released by the large impact events and these could have [00:27:30] made Mars warmer for decades or centuries at a time, allowing water to flow. Then Speaker 1: science daily reports one of the first social science experiments to rest on. Big Data has been published in plus one. A chair of investigators from Simon Fraser University analyzed when humans start to experience and age-related decline in cognitive motor skills. The researchers analyze the digital performances of over 3000 starcraft two players, age 16 to 44 starcraft two is a ruthless intergalactic computer [00:28:00] game that players often undertake to win serious money. Their performance records, which can be easily accessed, represent thousands of hours worth of strategic real time. Cognitive based moves performed at various skill levels using complex statistical modeling. Researchers distilled meaning from this colossal compilation of information about how players responded to their opponents and more importantly, how long they took to react after around 24 years of age, players show slowing and a measure of cognitive speed that is known to be important for performance. [00:28:30] Explains Joe Thompson lead author of the study. This cognitive performance decline is present even at higher levels of skill, but there's a silver lining in this earlier than expected slippery slope into old age. Thompson says older players, those slower seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the games interface more efficiently. The younger players enabling them to retain their skill despite cognitive motor speed losses. These findings says Thompson suggests that our cognitive motor capabilities are not stable across our adulthood, but are constantly [00:29:00] in flux and that our day to day performance is a result of the constant interplay between change and adaptation. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 11: and music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview was edited by Rene Rau. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email [00:29:30] address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same tone. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum we present part one of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science or bids is only [00:01:00] four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez and they are our guests. Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the ipython project while a graduate student in 2001 [00:01:30] and continues to lead the project here is part one, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us and I wanted to get from both of you a little bit of a short summary about the work you're doing now that you just sort of your activity that predates your interest in data science. Speaker 4: Data Science is kind of an Ale defined term I think and it's still an open question precisely what it is, but in a certain sense all of my research has been probably under the umbrella [00:02:00] of what we call today data science since the start. I did my phd in particle physics but it was computational in particle physics and I was doing data analysis in that case of models that were competitionally created. So I've sort of been doing this really since I was a graduate student. What has changed over time is the breadth of disciplines that are interested in these kinds of problems in these kinds of tools and that have these kinds of questions. In physics. This has been kind of a common way of working on writing for a long time. Sort of the deep intersection [00:02:30] between computational tools and large data sets, whether they were created by models or collected experimentally is something that has a long history in physics. Speaker 4: How long the first computers were created to solve differential equations, to plot the trajectories of ballistic missiles. I was one of the very first tasks that's computers were created for so almost since the dawn of coats and so it's really only recently though that the size of the data sets has really jumped. Yes, the size has grown very, [00:03:00] very large in the last couple of decades, especially in the last decade, but I think it's important to not get too hung up on the issue of size because I think when we talk about data science, I like to define it rather in the context of data that is large for the traditional framework tools and conceptual kind of structure of a given discipline rather than it's raw absolute size because yes, in physics for example, we have some of the largest data sets in existence, things like what the LHC creates [00:03:30] for the Higgs Boson. Those data sets are just absolute, absurdly large, but in a given discipline, five megabytes of data might be a lot depending on what it is that you're trying to ask. And so I think it's more, it's much, much more important to think of data that has grown larger than a given discipline was used in manipulating and that therefore poses interesting challenges for that given domain rather than being completely focused on the raw size of the data. Speaker 1: I approached this from an angle that's actually complimentary to Fernando in part because [00:04:00] my job as the interim director of the social sciences data laboratory is not to do data science but to provide the infrastructure, the setting for researchers across the social sciences here who are doing that for themselves. And exactly in the social sciences you see a nice exemplification of the challenge of larger sizes of data than were previously used and new kinds of data as well. So the social sciences are starting to pick up say on [00:04:30] sensor data that has been placed in environmental settings in order to monitor human behavior. And social scientists can then use that in order to design tests around it or to develop ways of interpreting it to answer research questions that are not necessarily anticipated by the folks who put the sensors in place or accessing data that comes out of human interactions online, which is created for entirely different purposes [00:05:00] but makes it possible for social scientists to understand things about human social networks. Speaker 1: So the challenges of building capacity for disciplines to move into new scales of data sets and new kinds of data sets. So one of the ones that I've been seeing as I've been building up d lab and that we've jointly been seeing as we tried to help scope out what the task of the Berkeley Institute for data science is going to be. How about the emergence [00:05:30] of data science? Do you have a sense of the timeline when you started to take note of its feasibility for social sciences? Irrespective of physics, which has a longer history. One of the places that's been driving the conversations in social sciences, actually the funding regime in that the existing beautifully curated data sets that we have from the post World War Two period survey data, principally administrative data on top of that, [00:06:00] those are extremely expensive to produce and to curate and maintain. Speaker 1: And as the social sciences in the last only five to 10 years have been weighing the portfolio of data sources that are supported by funding agencies. We've been forced to confront the fact that the maintenance of the post World War Two regime of surveying may not be feasible into the future and that we're going to have to be shifting to other kinds of data that are generated [00:06:30] for other purposes and repurposing and reusing it, finding new ways to, to cut it and slice it in order to answer new kinds of questions that weren't also accessible to the old surveys. So one way to approach it is through the infrastructure that's needed to generate the data that we're looking at. Another way is simply to look at the infrastructure on campus. One of the launching impetuses for the social sciences data laboratory was in fact the budget cuts of 2009 [00:07:00] here on campus. When we acknowledged that if we were going to support cutting edge methodologically innovative social science on this campus, that we were going to need to find ways to repurpose existing assets and redirect them towards whatever this new frontier in social science is going to be. Speaker 5: You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez, our guests. [00:07:30] They are part of the Berkeley Institute for data science known as big [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Fernando, you sort of gave us a generalized definition of data science. Do you want to give it another go just in case you evoke something else? Sure. I want to leave that question slightly on answer because I feel that to some extent, one of the challenges we have as an intellectual effort that we're trying to tackle at the Brooklyn [00:08:00] instead for data science is precisely working on what this field is. Right. I don't want to presuppose that we have a final answer on this question, but at least we, we do know that we have some elements to frame the question and I think it's mostly about an intersection. It's about an intersection of things that were being done already on their own, but that were being done often in isolation. So it's the intersection of methodological work whereby that, I mean things like statistical theory, applied mathematics, computer science, [00:08:30] algorithm development, all of the computational and theoretical mathematical machinery that has been done traditionally, the questions arising from domain disciplines that may have models that may have data sets, that may have sensors that may have a telescope or that may have a gene sequencing array and where are they have their own theoretical models of their organisms or galaxies or whatever it is and where that data can be inscribed and the fact that tools need to be built. Speaker 4: Does data doesn't get analyzed by blackboards? Those data gets analyzed by software, but this is software that is deeply woven [00:09:00] into the fabric of these other two spaces, right? It's software that has to be written with the knowledge of the questions and the discipline and the domain and also with the knowledge of the methodology, the theory. It's that intersection of this triad of things of concrete representation in computational machinery, abstract ideas and methodologies and domain questions that in many ways creates something new when the work has to be done simultaneously with enough depth and enough rigor on all [00:09:30] of these three directions and precisely that intersection is where now the bottleneck is proving to be because you can have the ideas, you can have the questions, you can have the data, you can have the the fear m's, but if you can't put it all together into working concrete tools that you can use efficiently and with a reasonably rapid turnaround, you will not be able to move forward. You will not be able to answer the questions you want to answer about your given discipline and so that embodiment of that intersection is I think where the challenge is opposed. Maybe there is something new called [00:10:00] data science. I'd actually like to suggest that Speaker 1: the indefinable character of data science is actually not a negative because it's an intersection in a way that we're all still very much struggling. How to define it. I won't underplay that exactly in that it's an intersection. It points to the fact that it's not an intellectual thing that we're trying to get our heads around. It's a platform for activity for doing kinds of research that are either enabled or hindered by the [00:10:30] existing institutional and social structures that the research is getting done in, and so if you think of it less as a kind of concept or an intellectual construct and more of a space where people come together, either a physical space or a methodological sharing space, you realize that the indefinable ness is a way of inviting people in rather than drawing clear boundaries around it and saying, we know what this is. It is x and not Speaker 4: why [00:11:00] Berkeley Institute for data science is that where it comes in this invitation, this collection of people and the intersection. That's sort of the goal of it. Speaker 1: That's what we've been asked to build it as not as uh, an institute in the traditional sense of there are folks inside and outside, but in the sense of a meeting point and a crossing site for folks across campus. That's [00:11:30] something that's been put in front of us by the two foundations who have invested in a significant sum of money in us. That's the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred p Sloan Foundation. And it's also become an inspiring vision for those of us who have been engaged in the process over the last year and a half of envisioning what it might be. It's an attempt to address the doing of data science as an intersectional area within a research university that has existing structures [00:12:00] and silos and boundaries within it. Speaker 4: And to some extent you try to deconstruct the silos and leverage the work done by one group, share it with another, you know, the concrete mechanisms are things that we're still very much working on it and we will see how it unfolds. There's even a physical element that reflects this idea of being at a crossroads, which is that the university was willing to commit to [inaudible] the physical space of one room in the main doe library, which is not only physically [00:12:30] at the center of the university and that is very important because it does mean that it is quite literally at the crossroads. It is one central point where many of us walk by frequently, so it's a space that is inviting in that sense too to encounters, to stopping by to having easy collaboration rather than being in some far edge corner of the campus. Speaker 4: But also intellectually the library is traditionally the store of the cultural and scientific memory of an institution. And so building this space in the library is a way of signaling [00:13:00] to our community that it is meant to be a point of encounter and how specifically those encounters will be embodied and what concrete mechanisms of sharing tools, sharing coach, showing data, having lecture series, having joint projects. We're in the process of imagining all of that and we're absolutely certain that we'll make some mistakes along the way, but that is very much the intent is to have something which is by design about as openly and as explicitly collaborative as we can make it and I think [00:13:30] in that sense we are picking up on many of the lessons that Catherine and her team at the d lab have already learned because the d lab has been in operation here in Barrows Hall for about a year and has already done many things in that direction and that at least I personally see them as things in the spirit of what bids is attempting to do at the scale of the entire institution. D Lab has been kind of blazing that trail already for the last year in the context of the social sciences and to the point where their impact has actually spread beyond the social sciences because so many of the things that they were doing or were [00:14:00] found to have very thirsty customers for the particular brand of lemonade that they were selling here at the lab. And their impact has already spread beyond the social sciences. But we hope to take a lot of these lessons and build them with a broader scope. Speaker 1: And in the same way BYD sits at the center of other existing organizations, entities, programs on campus, which are also deeply engaged in data science. And some of them are research centers, others of them are the data science masters program in the School of information where [00:14:30] there is a strong and deliberate attempt to think through how in a intelligent way to train people for outside the university doing data science. So all of these centers of excellence on campus have the potential to get networked in, in a much more synergistic way with the existence of bids with is not encompassing by any means. All of the great work that's getting done in teaching research around data science on this campus Speaker 6: [00:15:00] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about challenges in Berkeley Institute for Data Science Phase Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: and it seems that that eScience does happen best in teams and multidisciplinary [00:15:30] teams or is that not really the case? Speaker 1: I think we've been working on that assumption in part because it seems too much to ask of any individual to do all the things at once. At the same time, we do have many specimens of individuals who cross the boundaries of the three areas that Fernando was sketching out as domain area expertise, hacking skills and methodological competence. [00:16:00] And it's interesting to think through the intersectional individuals as well. But that said, the default assumption I think is going to have to be that teamwork collaboration and actually all of the social engineering to make that possible is going to be necessary for data science to flourish. And again, that's one of the challenges of working in a research university setting where teamwork is sometimes prized and sometimes deprecated. Speaker 4: That goes back to the incentive people building tools don't necessarily get much attention, [00:16:30] prestige from that. How do you defeat that on an institutional level within the institute or just the community? Ask us in five years if we had any success. That's one of the central challenges that we have and it's not only here at Berkeley, this is actually, there's kind of an ongoing worldwide conversation happening about this every few days. There's another article where this issue keeps being brought up again and again and it's raising in volume. The business of creating tools is becoming actually an increasing [00:17:00] part of the job of people doing science. And so for example, even young faculty who are on the tenure track are finding themselves kind of pushed against the wall because they're finding themselves writing a lot of tools and building a lot of software and having to do it collaboratively and having to engage others and picking up all of these skills and this being an important central part of their work. Speaker 4: But they feel that if their tenure committee is only going to look at their publication record and [00:17:30] 80% of their actual time went into building these things, they are effectively being shortchanged for their effort. And this is a difficult conversation. What are we going to do about it? We have a bunch of ideas. We are going to try many things. I think it's a conversation that has to happen at many levels. Some agencies are beginning, the NSF recently changed the terms of its biosketch requirements for example. And now the section that used to be called relevant publications is called relevant publications and other research outcomes. And in parentheses they explained such as software [00:18:00] projects, et cetera. So this is beginning to change the community that cure rates. For example, large data sets. That's a community that has very similar concerns. It turns out that working on a rich and complex data set may be a Labor that requires years of intensive work and that'd be maybe for a full time endeavor for someone. Speaker 4: And yet those people may end up actually getting little credit for it because maybe they weren't the ones who did use that data set to answer a specific question. But if they're left in the dust, no one will do that job. Right. And so [00:18:30] we need to acknowledge that these tasks are actually becoming a central part of the intellectual effort of research. And maybe one point that is worth mentioning in this context of incentives and careers is that we as the institution of academic science in a broad sense, are facing the challenge today that these career paths and these kinds of intersectional problems and data science are right now extremely highly valued by industry. [00:19:00] What we're seeing today with this problem is genuinely of a different scale and different enough to merit attention and consideration in its own right. Because what's happening is the people who have this intersection of skills and talents and competencies are extraordinarily well regarded by the industry right now, especially here in the bay area. Speaker 4: I know the companies that are trying to hire and I know that people were going there and the good ones can effectively name their price if they can name their price to go into contexts that are not [00:19:30] boring. A lot of the problems that industry has right now with data are actually genuinely interesting problems and they often have datasets that we in academia actually have no access to because it turns out that these days the amount of data that is being generated by web activity, by Apps, by personal devices that create an upload data is actually spectacular. And some of those data sets are really rich and complex and material for interesting work. And Industry also has the resources, the computational resources, the backend, the engineering expertise [00:20:00] to do interesting work on those problems. And so we as an academic institution are facing the challenge that we are making it very difficult for these people to find a space at the university. Yet they are critical to the success of modern data driven research and discovery and yet across the street they are being courted by an industry that isn't just offering them money to do boring work. It's actually offering them respect, yes, compensation, but also respect and intellectual space and a community that values their work and that's something [00:20:30] that is genuinely an issue for us to consider. Speaker 4: Is there a way to cross pollinate between the academic side and industry and work together on building a toolkit? Absolutely. We've had great success in that regard in the last decade with the space that I'm most embedded in, which is the space of open source scientific computing tools in python. We have a licensing model for most of the tools in our space that [00:21:00] is open source but allows for a very easy industry we use and what we find is that that has enabled a very healthy two way dialogue between industry and academia in this context. Yes, industry users, our tools, and they often use them in a proprietary context, but they use them for their own problems and for building their own domain specific products and whatever, but when they want to contribute to the base tool, the base layer if you will, it's much [00:21:30] easier for them. Speaker 4: They simply make the improvements out in the open or they just donate resources. They donate money. Microsoft research last year made $100,000 donation to the python project, which was strictly a donation. This was not a grant to develop any specific feature. This was a blanket, hey, we use your tools and they help what we build and so we would like to support you and we've had a very productive relationship with them in the past, but it's by, not by no means the only one you're at Berkeley. The amp lab was two co-directors are actually part of the team [00:22:00] that is working on bids, a young story and Mike Franklin, the AMPLab has a very large set of tools for data analytics at scale that is now widely used at Twitter and Facebook and many other places. They have industry oriented conferences around their tools. Now they have an annual conference they run twice per year. Large bootcamps, large fractions of their attendees come from industry because industry is using all of these tools and the am Platt has currently more of its funding [00:22:30] comes from industry than it comes from sources like the NSF. And so I think there are, there are actually very, very clear and unambiguous examples of models where the open source work that is coming out of our research universities can have a highly productive and valuable dialogue with the industry. Speaker 3: It seems like long term he would have a real uphill battle to create enough competent people with data trained to [00:23:00] quench both industry and academia so that there would be a, a calming of the flow out of academia. Speaker 4: As we've said a couple of times in our discussions, this is a problem. Uh, it's a very, very challenging set of problems that we've signed up for it, but we feel that it's a problem worth failing on in the sense that we, we know the challenges is, is a steep one. But at the same time, the questions are important enough to be worth making the effort. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:23:30] don't miss part two of this interview in two weeks and on the next edition of spectrum spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for the link is tiny url.com/kalx specter. Now, if you're the science and technology events happen, Speaker 3: I mean locally over the next two weeks, [00:24:00] enabling a sustainable energy infrastructure is the title of David Color's presentation. On Wednesday, April 9th David Color is the faculty director of [inaudible] for Energy and the chair of computer science at UC Berkeley. He was selected in scientific American top 50 researchers and technology review 10 technologies that will change the world. His research addresses networks of small embedded wireless devices, planetary scale Internet services, parallel computer architecture, [00:24:30] parallel programming languages, and high-performance communications. This event is free and will be held in Satara Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium. Wednesday, April 9th at noon. Cal Day is April 12th 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM 357 events for details. Go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu a lunar eclipse Monday April 14th at 11:00 PM [00:25:00] look through astronomical telescopes at the Lawrence Hall of science to observe the first total lunar eclipse for the bay area since 2011 this is for the night owls among us UC students, staff and faculty are admitted. Speaker 3: Free. General admissions is $10 drought and deluge how applied hydro informatics are becoming standard operating data for all Californians is the title of Joshua Vere's presentation. On Wednesday, [00:25:30] April 16th Joshua veers joined the citrus leadership as the director at UC Merced said in August, 2013 prior to this, Dr Veers has been serving in a research capacity at UC Davis for 10 years since receiving his phd in ecology. This event is free and will be held in Soutar Dye Hall and Beneteau Auditorium Wednesday, April 16th at noon. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting here are to. [00:26:00] This story relates to today's interview on big data. On Tuesday, April 1st a workshop titled Big Data Values and governance was held at UC Berkeley. The workshop was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for law and technology. The day long workshop examined policy and governance questions raised by the use of large and complex data sets and sophisticated analytics to [00:26:30] fuel decision making across all sectors of the economy, academia and government for panels. Speaker 3: Each an hour and a half long framed the issues of values and governance. A webcast. This workshop will be available from the ice school webpage by today or early next week. That's ice school.berkeley.edu vast gene expression map yields neurological and environmental stress insights. Dan Kraits [00:27:00] writing for the Lawrence Berkeley Lab News Center reports a consortium of scientists led by Susan Cell Knicker of Berkeley's labs. Life Sciences Division has conducted the largest survey yet of how information and code it in an animal genome is processed in different organs, stages of development and environmental conditions. Their findings paint a new picture of how genes function in the nervous system and in response to environmental stress. The scientists [00:27:30] studied the fruit fly, an important model organism in genetics research in all organisms. The information encoded in genomes is transcribed into RNA molecules that are either translated into proteins or utilized to perform functions in the cell. The collection of RNA molecules expressed in a cell is known as its transcriptome, which can be thought of as the readout of the genome. Speaker 3: While the genome is essentially [00:28:00] the same in every cell in our bodies, the transcriptome is different in each cell type and consistently changing cells in cardiac tissue are radically different from those in the gut or the brain. For example, Ben Brown of Berkeley Labs said, our study indicates that the total information output of an animal transcriptome is heavily weighted by the needs of the developing nervous system. The scientists also discovered a much broader [00:28:30] response to stress than previously recognized exposure to heavy metals like cadmium resulted in the activation of known stress response pathways that prevent damage to DNA and proteins. It also revealed several new genes of completely unknown function. Speaker 7: You can [inaudible]. Hmm. Speaker 3: The music or during the show [00:29:00] was [inaudible] Speaker 5: produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview with [inaudible] Rao about the show. Please send them to us spectrum [00:29:30] dot kalx@yahoo.com same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum we present part one of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science or bids is only [00:01:00] four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez and they are our guests. Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the ipython project while a graduate student in 2001 [00:01:30] and continues to lead the project here is part one, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us and I wanted to get from both of you a little bit of a short summary about the work you're doing now that you just sort of your activity that predates your interest in data science. Speaker 4: Data Science is kind of an Ale defined term I think and it's still an open question precisely what it is, but in a certain sense all of my research has been probably under the umbrella [00:02:00] of what we call today data science since the start. I did my phd in particle physics but it was computational in particle physics and I was doing data analysis in that case of models that were competitionally created. So I've sort of been doing this really since I was a graduate student. What has changed over time is the breadth of disciplines that are interested in these kinds of problems in these kinds of tools and that have these kinds of questions. In physics. This has been kind of a common way of working on writing for a long time. Sort of the deep intersection [00:02:30] between computational tools and large data sets, whether they were created by models or collected experimentally is something that has a long history in physics. Speaker 4: How long the first computers were created to solve differential equations, to plot the trajectories of ballistic missiles. I was one of the very first tasks that's computers were created for so almost since the dawn of coats and so it's really only recently though that the size of the data sets has really jumped. Yes, the size has grown very, [00:03:00] very large in the last couple of decades, especially in the last decade, but I think it's important to not get too hung up on the issue of size because I think when we talk about data science, I like to define it rather in the context of data that is large for the traditional framework tools and conceptual kind of structure of a given discipline rather than it's raw absolute size because yes, in physics for example, we have some of the largest data sets in existence, things like what the LHC creates [00:03:30] for the Higgs Boson. Those data sets are just absolute, absurdly large, but in a given discipline, five megabytes of data might be a lot depending on what it is that you're trying to ask. And so I think it's more, it's much, much more important to think of data that has grown larger than a given discipline was used in manipulating and that therefore poses interesting challenges for that given domain rather than being completely focused on the raw size of the data. Speaker 1: I approached this from an angle that's actually complimentary to Fernando in part because [00:04:00] my job as the interim director of the social sciences data laboratory is not to do data science but to provide the infrastructure, the setting for researchers across the social sciences here who are doing that for themselves. And exactly in the social sciences you see a nice exemplification of the challenge of larger sizes of data than were previously used and new kinds of data as well. So the social sciences are starting to pick up say on [00:04:30] sensor data that has been placed in environmental settings in order to monitor human behavior. And social scientists can then use that in order to design tests around it or to develop ways of interpreting it to answer research questions that are not necessarily anticipated by the folks who put the sensors in place or accessing data that comes out of human interactions online, which is created for entirely different purposes [00:05:00] but makes it possible for social scientists to understand things about human social networks. Speaker 1: So the challenges of building capacity for disciplines to move into new scales of data sets and new kinds of data sets. So one of the ones that I've been seeing as I've been building up d lab and that we've jointly been seeing as we tried to help scope out what the task of the Berkeley Institute for data science is going to be. How about the emergence [00:05:30] of data science? Do you have a sense of the timeline when you started to take note of its feasibility for social sciences? Irrespective of physics, which has a longer history. One of the places that's been driving the conversations in social sciences, actually the funding regime in that the existing beautifully curated data sets that we have from the post World War Two period survey data, principally administrative data on top of that, [00:06:00] those are extremely expensive to produce and to curate and maintain. Speaker 1: And as the social sciences in the last only five to 10 years have been weighing the portfolio of data sources that are supported by funding agencies. We've been forced to confront the fact that the maintenance of the post World War Two regime of surveying may not be feasible into the future and that we're going to have to be shifting to other kinds of data that are generated [00:06:30] for other purposes and repurposing and reusing it, finding new ways to, to cut it and slice it in order to answer new kinds of questions that weren't also accessible to the old surveys. So one way to approach it is through the infrastructure that's needed to generate the data that we're looking at. Another way is simply to look at the infrastructure on campus. One of the launching impetuses for the social sciences data laboratory was in fact the budget cuts of 2009 [00:07:00] here on campus. When we acknowledged that if we were going to support cutting edge methodologically innovative social science on this campus, that we were going to need to find ways to repurpose existing assets and redirect them towards whatever this new frontier in social science is going to be. Speaker 5: You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez, our guests. [00:07:30] They are part of the Berkeley Institute for data science known as big [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Fernando, you sort of gave us a generalized definition of data science. Do you want to give it another go just in case you evoke something else? Sure. I want to leave that question slightly on answer because I feel that to some extent, one of the challenges we have as an intellectual effort that we're trying to tackle at the Brooklyn [00:08:00] instead for data science is precisely working on what this field is. Right. I don't want to presuppose that we have a final answer on this question, but at least we, we do know that we have some elements to frame the question and I think it's mostly about an intersection. It's about an intersection of things that were being done already on their own, but that were being done often in isolation. So it's the intersection of methodological work whereby that, I mean things like statistical theory, applied mathematics, computer science, [00:08:30] algorithm development, all of the computational and theoretical mathematical machinery that has been done traditionally, the questions arising from domain disciplines that may have models that may have data sets, that may have sensors that may have a telescope or that may have a gene sequencing array and where are they have their own theoretical models of their organisms or galaxies or whatever it is and where that data can be inscribed and the fact that tools need to be built. Speaker 4: Does data doesn't get analyzed by blackboards? Those data gets analyzed by software, but this is software that is deeply woven [00:09:00] into the fabric of these other two spaces, right? It's software that has to be written with the knowledge of the questions and the discipline and the domain and also with the knowledge of the methodology, the theory. It's that intersection of this triad of things of concrete representation in computational machinery, abstract ideas and methodologies and domain questions that in many ways creates something new when the work has to be done simultaneously with enough depth and enough rigor on all [00:09:30] of these three directions and precisely that intersection is where now the bottleneck is proving to be because you can have the ideas, you can have the questions, you can have the data, you can have the the fear m's, but if you can't put it all together into working concrete tools that you can use efficiently and with a reasonably rapid turnaround, you will not be able to move forward. You will not be able to answer the questions you want to answer about your given discipline and so that embodiment of that intersection is I think where the challenge is opposed. Maybe there is something new called [00:10:00] data science. I'd actually like to suggest that Speaker 1: the indefinable character of data science is actually not a negative because it's an intersection in a way that we're all still very much struggling. How to define it. I won't underplay that exactly in that it's an intersection. It points to the fact that it's not an intellectual thing that we're trying to get our heads around. It's a platform for activity for doing kinds of research that are either enabled or hindered by the [00:10:30] existing institutional and social structures that the research is getting done in, and so if you think of it less as a kind of concept or an intellectual construct and more of a space where people come together, either a physical space or a methodological sharing space, you realize that the indefinable ness is a way of inviting people in rather than drawing clear boundaries around it and saying, we know what this is. It is x and not Speaker 4: why [00:11:00] Berkeley Institute for data science is that where it comes in this invitation, this collection of people and the intersection. That's sort of the goal of it. Speaker 1: That's what we've been asked to build it as not as uh, an institute in the traditional sense of there are folks inside and outside, but in the sense of a meeting point and a crossing site for folks across campus. That's [00:11:30] something that's been put in front of us by the two foundations who have invested in a significant sum of money in us. That's the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred p Sloan Foundation. And it's also become an inspiring vision for those of us who have been engaged in the process over the last year and a half of envisioning what it might be. It's an attempt to address the doing of data science as an intersectional area within a research university that has existing structures [00:12:00] and silos and boundaries within it. Speaker 4: And to some extent you try to deconstruct the silos and leverage the work done by one group, share it with another, you know, the concrete mechanisms are things that we're still very much working on it and we will see how it unfolds. There's even a physical element that reflects this idea of being at a crossroads, which is that the university was willing to commit to [inaudible] the physical space of one room in the main doe library, which is not only physically [00:12:30] at the center of the university and that is very important because it does mean that it is quite literally at the crossroads. It is one central point where many of us walk by frequently, so it's a space that is inviting in that sense too to encounters, to stopping by to having easy collaboration rather than being in some far edge corner of the campus. Speaker 4: But also intellectually the library is traditionally the store of the cultural and scientific memory of an institution. And so building this space in the library is a way of signaling [00:13:00] to our community that it is meant to be a point of encounter and how specifically those encounters will be embodied and what concrete mechanisms of sharing tools, sharing coach, showing data, having lecture series, having joint projects. We're in the process of imagining all of that and we're absolutely certain that we'll make some mistakes along the way, but that is very much the intent is to have something which is by design about as openly and as explicitly collaborative as we can make it and I think [00:13:30] in that sense we are picking up on many of the lessons that Catherine and her team at the d lab have already learned because the d lab has been in operation here in Barrows Hall for about a year and has already done many things in that direction and that at least I personally see them as things in the spirit of what bids is attempting to do at the scale of the entire institution. D Lab has been kind of blazing that trail already for the last year in the context of the social sciences and to the point where their impact has actually spread beyond the social sciences because so many of the things that they were doing or were [00:14:00] found to have very thirsty customers for the particular brand of lemonade that they were selling here at the lab. And their impact has already spread beyond the social sciences. But we hope to take a lot of these lessons and build them with a broader scope. Speaker 1: And in the same way BYD sits at the center of other existing organizations, entities, programs on campus, which are also deeply engaged in data science. And some of them are research centers, others of them are the data science masters program in the School of information where [00:14:30] there is a strong and deliberate attempt to think through how in a intelligent way to train people for outside the university doing data science. So all of these centers of excellence on campus have the potential to get networked in, in a much more synergistic way with the existence of bids with is not encompassing by any means. All of the great work that's getting done in teaching research around data science on this campus Speaker 6: [00:15:00] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about challenges in Berkeley Institute for Data Science Phase Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: and it seems that that eScience does happen best in teams and multidisciplinary [00:15:30] teams or is that not really the case? Speaker 1: I think we've been working on that assumption in part because it seems too much to ask of any individual to do all the things at once. At the same time, we do have many specimens of individuals who cross the boundaries of the three areas that Fernando was sketching out as domain area expertise, hacking skills and methodological competence. [00:16:00] And it's interesting to think through the intersectional individuals as well. But that said, the default assumption I think is going to have to be that teamwork collaboration and actually all of the social engineering to make that possible is going to be necessary for data science to flourish. And again, that's one of the challenges of working in a research university setting where teamwork is sometimes prized and sometimes deprecated. Speaker 4: That goes back to the incentive people building tools don't necessarily get much attention, [00:16:30] prestige from that. How do you defeat that on an institutional level within the institute or just the community? Ask us in five years if we had any success. That's one of the central challenges that we have and it's not only here at Berkeley, this is actually, there's kind of an ongoing worldwide conversation happening about this every few days. There's another article where this issue keeps being brought up again and again and it's raising in volume. The business of creating tools is becoming actually an increasing [00:17:00] part of the job of people doing science. And so for example, even young faculty who are on the tenure track are finding themselves kind of pushed against the wall because they're finding themselves writing a lot of tools and building a lot of software and having to do it collaboratively and having to engage others and picking up all of these skills and this being an important central part of their work. Speaker 4: But they feel that if their tenure committee is only going to look at their publication record and [00:17:30] 80% of their actual time went into building these things, they are effectively being shortchanged for their effort. And this is a difficult conversation. What are we going to do about it? We have a bunch of ideas. We are going to try many things. I think it's a conversation that has to happen at many levels. Some agencies are beginning, the NSF recently changed the terms of its biosketch requirements for example. And now the section that used to be called relevant publications is called relevant publications and other research outcomes. And in parentheses they explained such as software [00:18:00] projects, et cetera. So this is beginning to change the community that cure rates. For example, large data sets. That's a community that has very similar concerns. It turns out that working on a rich and complex data set may be a Labor that requires years of intensive work and that'd be maybe for a full time endeavor for someone. Speaker 4: And yet those people may end up actually getting little credit for it because maybe they weren't the ones who did use that data set to answer a specific question. But if they're left in the dust, no one will do that job. Right. And so [00:18:30] we need to acknowledge that these tasks are actually becoming a central part of the intellectual effort of research. And maybe one point that is worth mentioning in this context of incentives and careers is that we as the institution of academic science in a broad sense, are facing the challenge today that these career paths and these kinds of intersectional problems and data science are right now extremely highly valued by industry. [00:19:00] What we're seeing today with this problem is genuinely of a different scale and different enough to merit attention and consideration in its own right. Because what's happening is the people who have this intersection of skills and talents and competencies are extraordinarily well regarded by the industry right now, especially here in the bay area. Speaker 4: I know the companies that are trying to hire and I know that people were going there and the good ones can effectively name their price if they can name their price to go into contexts that are not [00:19:30] boring. A lot of the problems that industry has right now with data are actually genuinely interesting problems and they often have datasets that we in academia actually have no access to because it turns out that these days the amount of data that is being generated by web activity, by Apps, by personal devices that create an upload data is actually spectacular. And some of those data sets are really rich and complex and material for interesting work. And Industry also has the resources, the computational resources, the backend, the engineering expertise [00:20:00] to do interesting work on those problems. And so we as an academic institution are facing the challenge that we are making it very difficult for these people to find a space at the university. Yet they are critical to the success of modern data driven research and discovery and yet across the street they are being courted by an industry that isn't just offering them money to do boring work. It's actually offering them respect, yes, compensation, but also respect and intellectual space and a community that values their work and that's something [00:20:30] that is genuinely an issue for us to consider. Speaker 4: Is there a way to cross pollinate between the academic side and industry and work together on building a toolkit? Absolutely. We've had great success in that regard in the last decade with the space that I'm most embedded in, which is the space of open source scientific computing tools in python. We have a licensing model for most of the tools in our space that [00:21:00] is open source but allows for a very easy industry we use and what we find is that that has enabled a very healthy two way dialogue between industry and academia in this context. Yes, industry users, our tools, and they often use them in a proprietary context, but they use them for their own problems and for building their own domain specific products and whatever, but when they want to contribute to the base tool, the base layer if you will, it's much [00:21:30] easier for them. Speaker 4: They simply make the improvements out in the open or they just donate resources. They donate money. Microsoft research last year made $100,000 donation to the python project, which was strictly a donation. This was not a grant to develop any specific feature. This was a blanket, hey, we use your tools and they help what we build and so we would like to support you and we've had a very productive relationship with them in the past, but it's by, not by no means the only one you're at Berkeley. The amp lab was two co-directors are actually part of the team [00:22:00] that is working on bids, a young story and Mike Franklin, the AMPLab has a very large set of tools for data analytics at scale that is now widely used at Twitter and Facebook and many other places. They have industry oriented conferences around their tools. Now they have an annual conference they run twice per year. Large bootcamps, large fractions of their attendees come from industry because industry is using all of these tools and the am Platt has currently more of its funding [00:22:30] comes from industry than it comes from sources like the NSF. And so I think there are, there are actually very, very clear and unambiguous examples of models where the open source work that is coming out of our research universities can have a highly productive and valuable dialogue with the industry. Speaker 3: It seems like long term he would have a real uphill battle to create enough competent people with data trained to [00:23:00] quench both industry and academia so that there would be a, a calming of the flow out of academia. Speaker 4: As we've said a couple of times in our discussions, this is a problem. Uh, it's a very, very challenging set of problems that we've signed up for it, but we feel that it's a problem worth failing on in the sense that we, we know the challenges is, is a steep one. But at the same time, the questions are important enough to be worth making the effort. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:23:30] don't miss part two of this interview in two weeks and on the next edition of spectrum spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for the link is tiny url.com/kalx specter. Now, if you're the science and technology events happen, Speaker 3: I mean locally over the next two weeks, [00:24:00] enabling a sustainable energy infrastructure is the title of David Color's presentation. On Wednesday, April 9th David Color is the faculty director of [inaudible] for Energy and the chair of computer science at UC Berkeley. He was selected in scientific American top 50 researchers and technology review 10 technologies that will change the world. His research addresses networks of small embedded wireless devices, planetary scale Internet services, parallel computer architecture, [00:24:30] parallel programming languages, and high-performance communications. This event is free and will be held in Satara Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium. Wednesday, April 9th at noon. Cal Day is April 12th 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM 357 events for details. Go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu a lunar eclipse Monday April 14th at 11:00 PM [00:25:00] look through astronomical telescopes at the Lawrence Hall of science to observe the first total lunar eclipse for the bay area since 2011 this is for the night owls among us UC students, staff and faculty are admitted. Speaker 3: Free. General admissions is $10 drought and deluge how applied hydro informatics are becoming standard operating data for all Californians is the title of Joshua Vere's presentation. On Wednesday, [00:25:30] April 16th Joshua veers joined the citrus leadership as the director at UC Merced said in August, 2013 prior to this, Dr Veers has been serving in a research capacity at UC Davis for 10 years since receiving his phd in ecology. This event is free and will be held in Soutar Dye Hall and Beneteau Auditorium Wednesday, April 16th at noon. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting here are to. [00:26:00] This story relates to today's interview on big data. On Tuesday, April 1st a workshop titled Big Data Values and governance was held at UC Berkeley. The workshop was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for law and technology. The day long workshop examined policy and governance questions raised by the use of large and complex data sets and sophisticated analytics to [00:26:30] fuel decision making across all sectors of the economy, academia and government for panels. Speaker 3: Each an hour and a half long framed the issues of values and governance. A webcast. This workshop will be available from the ice school webpage by today or early next week. That's ice school.berkeley.edu vast gene expression map yields neurological and environmental stress insights. Dan Kraits [00:27:00] writing for the Lawrence Berkeley Lab News Center reports a consortium of scientists led by Susan Cell Knicker of Berkeley's labs. Life Sciences Division has conducted the largest survey yet of how information and code it in an animal genome is processed in different organs, stages of development and environmental conditions. Their findings paint a new picture of how genes function in the nervous system and in response to environmental stress. The scientists [00:27:30] studied the fruit fly, an important model organism in genetics research in all organisms. The information encoded in genomes is transcribed into RNA molecules that are either translated into proteins or utilized to perform functions in the cell. The collection of RNA molecules expressed in a cell is known as its transcriptome, which can be thought of as the readout of the genome. Speaker 3: While the genome is essentially [00:28:00] the same in every cell in our bodies, the transcriptome is different in each cell type and consistently changing cells in cardiac tissue are radically different from those in the gut or the brain. For example, Ben Brown of Berkeley Labs said, our study indicates that the total information output of an animal transcriptome is heavily weighted by the needs of the developing nervous system. The scientists also discovered a much broader [00:28:30] response to stress than previously recognized exposure to heavy metals like cadmium resulted in the activation of known stress response pathways that prevent damage to DNA and proteins. It also revealed several new genes of completely unknown function. Speaker 7: You can [inaudible]. Hmm. Speaker 3: The music or during the show [00:29:00] was [inaudible] Speaker 5: produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview with [inaudible] Rao about the show. Please send them to us spectrum [00:29:30] dot kalx@yahoo.com same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood Speaker 4: or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. Speaker 4: Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. Speaker 4: One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 7: We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? Speaker 4: Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. Speaker 4: Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. Speaker 7: So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking Speaker 7: and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. Speaker 7: Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. Speaker 4: I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 6: [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? Speaker 4: Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. Speaker 7: I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? Speaker 4: Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. Speaker 7: So offshore. Let's Speaker 4: talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. Speaker 4: Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. Speaker 4: By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. Speaker 2: [00:22:00] Mm Mm Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 3: If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 10: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 7: Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register online@mathworks.com click on [00:23:30] events. Speaker 3: Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland Speaker 7: Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. Speaker 7: For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. Speaker 7: The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. Speaker 3: NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Speaker 9: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood Speaker 4: or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. Speaker 4: Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. Speaker 4: One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 7: We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? Speaker 4: Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. Speaker 4: Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. Speaker 7: So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking Speaker 7: and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. Speaker 7: Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. Speaker 4: I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 6: [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? Speaker 4: Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. Speaker 7: I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? Speaker 4: Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. Speaker 7: So offshore. Let's Speaker 4: talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. Speaker 4: Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. Speaker 4: By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. Speaker 2: [00:22:00] Mm Mm Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 3: If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 10: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 7: Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register online@mathworks.com click on [00:23:30] events. Speaker 3: Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland Speaker 7: Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. Speaker 7: For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. Speaker 7: The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. Speaker 3: NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Speaker 9: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Global climate models by Inez Fung, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, University of California, Berkeley

James Hansen, renowned climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies gives a compelling, lecture regarding the implications of today's actions on earth's future. Sponsors: Berkeley Institute of the Environment, Energy and Resources Group, Department of Geography, Progressive Perspectives, Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, Sierra Club

James Hansen, renowned climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies gives a compelling, lecture regarding the implications of today's actions on earth's future. Sponsors: Berkeley Institute of the Environment, Energy and Resources Group, Department of Geography, Progressive Perspectives, Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, Sierra Club

Biofuels: Threats and Opportunities It is possible to make biofuels that reduce carbon emissions, but only if we ensure that they do not lead to additional land clearing. When land is cleared for agriculture, carbon that is locked up in the plants and soil is released through burning and decomposition. The carbon is released as carbon dioxide, which is an important greenhouse gas, and causes further global warming. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food crop–based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a “biofuel carbon debt” by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels. Depending on future biofuel production, the effects of this clearing could be significant for climate change: globally, there is almost three times as much carbon locked up in the plants and soils of the Earth as there is in the air and 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions come from land use change. Global demand for food is expected to double in the next 50 years and is unlikely to be met entirely from yield increases, thus requiring significant land clearing. If existing cropland is insufficient to meet imminent food demands, then any dedicated biofuel crop production will necessarily create demand for additional cropland to be cleared. Several forms of biofuels do not cause land clearing, including biofuels made from algae, from waste biomass, or from biomass grown on degraded and abandoned agricultural lands planted with perennials. Present Generation of Biofuels: Reducing or Enhancing Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Previous studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gasses because growing the crops for biofuels sequesters takes carbon out of the air that burning only puts back, while gasoline takes carbon out of the ground and puts it into the air. These analyses have typically not taken into consideration carbon emissions that result from farmers worldwide converting forest or grassland to produce biofuels, or that result from farmers worldwide responding to higher prices and converting forest and grassland into new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Our revised analysis suggests that greenhouse gas emissions from the land use changes described above, for most biofuels that use productive land, are likely to substantially increase over the next 30 years. Even advanced biofuels from biomass, if produced on good cropland, could have adverse greenhouse gas effects. At the same time, diverting productive land raises crop prices and reduces consumption among the 2.8 billion people who live on less than $2 per day. Simply avoiding biofuels produced from new land conversion – as proposed by a draft European Union law -- does not avoid these global warming emissions because the world’s farmers will replace existing crops or cropland used for biofuels by expanding into other lands. The key to avoiding greenhouse gas emissions and hunger from land use change is to use feedstocks that do not divert the existing productive capacity of land – whether that production stores carbon (as in forest and grassland) or generates food or wood products. Waste products, including municipal and slash forest waste from private lands, agricultural residues and cover crops provide promising opportunities. There may also be opportunities to use highly unproductive grasslands where biomass crops can be grown productively, but those opportunities must be explored carefully. Biofuels and a Low-Carbon Economy The low-carbon fuel standard is a concept and legal requirement in California and an expanding number of states that targets the amount of greenhouse gases produced per unit of energy delivered to the vehicle, or carbon intensity. In January 2007, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Executive Order S-1-07 (http://gov.ca.gov/executive-order/5172/), which called for a 10-percent reduction in the carbon intensity of his state’s transportation fuels by 2020. A research team in which Dr. Kammen participated developed a technical analysis (http://www.energy.ca.gov/low_carbon_fuel_standard/UC-1000-2007-002-PT1.PDF) of low-carbon fuels that could be used to meet that mandate. That analysis employs a life-cycle, ‘cradle to grave’ analysis of different fuel types, taking into consideration the ecological footprint of all activities included in the production, transport, storage, and use of the fuel. Under a low-carbon fuel standard, fuel providers would track the “global warming intensity” (GWI) of their products and express it as a standardized unit of measure--the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent per amount of fuel delivered to the vehicle (gCO2e/MJ). This value measures vehicle emissions as well as other trade-offs, such as land-use changes that may result from biofuel production. For example, an analysis of ethanol shows that not all biofuels are created equal. While ethanol derived from corn but distilled in a coal-powered refinery is in fact worse on average than gasoline, some cellulosic-based biofuels -- largely those with little or no impact on agricultural or pristine lands have the potential for a dramatically lower GWI. Equipped with detailed measurements that relate directly to the objectives of a low-carbon fuel standard, policy makers are in a position to set standards for a state or nation, and then regulate the value down over time. The standard applies to the mix of fuels sold in a region, so aggressively pursuing cleaner fuels permits some percentage of more traditional, dirtier fuels to remain, a flexibility that can enhance the ability to introduce and enforce a new standard. The most important conclusions from this analysis are that biofuels can play a role in sustainable energy future, but the opportunities for truly low-carbon biofuels may be far more limited than initially thought. Second, a low-carbon economy requires a holistic approach to energy sources – both clean supply options and demand management – where consistent metrics for actual carbon emissions and impacts are utilized to evaluate options. Third, land-use impacts of biofuel choices have global, not just local, impact, and a wider range of options, including, plug-in hybrid vehicles, dramatically improved land-use practices including sprawl management and curtailment, and greatly increased and improved public transport all have major roles to play. Biofuels and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Better Path Forward The recent controversy over biofuels notwithstanding, the US has the potential to meet the legislated 21 billion gallon biofuel goal with biofuels that, on average, exceed the targeted reduction in greenhouse gas release, but only if feedstocks are produced properly and biofuel facilities meet their energy demands with biomass. A diversity of alternative feedstocks can offer great GHG benefits. The largest GHG benefits will come from dedicated perennial crops grown with low inputs of fertilizer on degraded lands, and especially from those crops that increase carbon storage in soil (e.g., switchgrass, mixed species prairie, and Miscanthus). These may offer 100% or perhaps greater reductions in GHG relative to gasoline. Agricultural and forestry residues, and dedicated woody crops, including hybrid poplar and traditional pulp-like operations, should achieve 50% GHG reductions. In contrast, if biofuel production leads to direct or indirect land clearing, the resultant carbon debt can negate for decades or longer any greenhouse gas benefits a biofuel could otherwise provide. Current legislation, which is outcome based, has anticipated this problem by mandating GHG standards for current and next generation biofuels. Biographies Dr. Joseph E. Fargione is the Regional Science Director for The Nature Conservancy’s Central US Region. He received his doctorate in Ecology from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Prior to the joining The Nature Conservancy, he held positions as Assistant Research Faculty at the University of New Mexico (Biology Department), Assistant Professor at Purdue University (Departments of Biology and Forestry and Natural Resources), and Research Associate at the University of Minnesota (Departments of Applied Economics and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior). His work has focused on the benefits of biodiversity and the causes and consequences of its loss. Most recently, he has studied the effect of increasing demand for biofuels on land use, wildlife, and carbon emissions. He has authored 18 papers published in leading scientific journals, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, and Ecology Letters, and he was a coordinating lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment chapter titled “Biodiversity and the regulation of ecosystem services”. His recent paper in Science, “Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt” was covered in many national media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, and Time Magazine. Timothy Searchinger is a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is also a Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute. Trained as a lawyer, Dr. Searchinger now works primarily on interdisciplinary environmental issues related to agriculture. Timothy Searchinger previously worked at the Environmental Defense Fund, where he co-founded the Center for Conservation Incentives, and supervised work on agricultural incentive and wetland protection programs. He was also a deputy General Counsel to Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania and a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He is a graduate, summa cum laude, of Amherst College and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Timothy Searchinger first proposed the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program to USDA and worked closely with state officials to develop programs that have now restored one million acres of riparian buffers and wetlands to protect important rivers and bays. Searchinger received a National Wetlands Protection Award from the Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 for a book about the functions of seasonal wetlands of which he was principal author. His most recent writings focus on the greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels, and agricultural conservation strategies to clean-up nutrient runoff. He is also presently writing a book on the effects of agriculture on the environment and ways to reduce them. Dr. Daniel M. Kammen, Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG), in the Goldman School of Public Policy and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the founding Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) and Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Previously in his career, Dr. Kammen was an Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and also played a key role in developing the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) Program at Princeton as STEP Chair from 1997 - 1999. In July of 1998 Kammen joined ERG as an Associate Professor of Energy and Society. Dr. Kammen received his undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell University (1984), and his masters and doctorate in physics from Harvard University (1986 & 1988) for work on theoretical solid state physics and computational biophysics. First at Caltech and then as a Lecturer in Physics and in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Dr. Kammen developed a number of projects focused on renewable energy technologies and environmental resource management. Dr. Kammen's research interests include: the science, engineering, and policy of renewable energy systems; health and environmental impacts of energy generation and use; rural resource management, including issues of gender and ethnicity; international R&D policy, climate change; and energy forecasting and risk analysis. He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed journal publications, a book on environmental, technological, and health risks, and numerous reports on renewable energy and development. He has also been a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. G. David Tilman is Regents' Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and has served on editorial boards of nine scholarly journals, including Science. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Max Plank Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. He has received the Ecological Society of America’s Cooper Award and its MacArthur Award, the Botanical Society of America’s Centennial Award, the Princeton Environmental Prize and was named a J. S. Guggenheim Fellow. He has written two books, edited three books, and published more than 200 papers in the peer-reviewed literature, including more than 30 papers in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The Institute for Scientific Information recently designated him as the world’s most highly cited environmental scientist of the decade. Dr. Tilman’s recent research explores how managed and natural ecosystems can sustainably meet human needs for food, energy and ecosystem services. A long-term focus of his research is on the causes, consequence and conservation of biological diversity, including using biodiversity as a tool for biofuel production and climate stabilization through carbon sequestration. His work on renewable energy examines the full environmental, energetic and economic costs and benefits of alternative biofuels and modes of their production.