Podcasts about uc merced

******Support the channel******Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenterPayPal: paypal.me/thedissenterPayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuyPayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9lPayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpzPayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9mPayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ******Follow me on******Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/The Dissenter Goodreads list: https://shorturl.at/7BMoBFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/Twitter: https://x.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Cody Moser is a PhD candidate and Fletcher Jones Fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced, and a 2024 Junior Fellow at The Institute for Humane Studies. He works on questions examining the relationship between structure and adaptation in social, biological, economic, and neural systems from a complex systems perspective. To do this, he utilizes methods from network theory, agent-based modeling, and large-scale corpus analysis. In this episode, we first discuss collective intelligence. We then delve into cultural innovation, and talk about different structures of social networks and which of them facilitate cultural innovation. We also talk about factors that play a role in cultural innovation; inequality, and genius effects; and cumulative cultural evolution. Finally, we talk about infant-directed speech, and music and the diversity of songs.--A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, LUCY, MANVIR SINGH, PETRA WEIMANN, CAROLA FEEST, MAURO JÚNIOR, 航 豊川, TONY BARRETT, NIKOLAI VISHNEVSKY, STEVEN GANGESTAD, TED FARRIS, AND ROBINROSWELL!A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, NICK GOLDEN, CHRISTINE GLASS, IGOR NIKIFOROVSKI, PER KRAULIS, AND BENJAMIN GELBART!AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!

With state capital support on the decline and infrastructure aging out of usefulness, higher education leaders are under pressure to find new ways to fund capital projects—without compromising mission, control, or long-term sustainability. In this episode of Changing Higher Ed®, Dr. Drumm McNaughton explores creative capital funding strategies institutions are using to meet urgent facility and housing demands. His guest, Brent Miller—Higher Education Market Sector Leader at HED—shares how colleges and universities across the country are structuring public-private partnerships (P3s), securing transformational donor gifts, and leveraging local bond initiatives to move large-scale capital plans forward. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, CFOs, trustees, and VPs of facilities navigating deferred maintenance, campus growth, or strategic repositioning. Brent brings 30+ years of architectural and capital planning experience to the conversation, offering insights from some of the most innovative projects in higher ed capital development. Topics Covered: Why traditional state funding is no longer enough—and what institutions are doing about it How public-private partnerships (P3s) work, and which types of projects they're best suited for Case studies from USC, UC Irvine, University of Michigan, UC Merced, and more Donor and corporate partnership models that align with institutional missions How local bond initiatives are changing the future of community colleges What boards and presidents need to know about aligning capital projects with strategy and risk Real-World Examples Discussed: USC's Iovine and Young Academy, funded by a $70M gift from Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre UC Irvine's interdisciplinary health sciences building—merging donor intent and design University of Michigan's Ford Robotics Building, a co-developed corporate-academic research hub UC Merced 2020, a $1.3B P3 that doubled the university's physical capacity Cal State San Marcos' early mixed-use P3 development for housing and retail A facilities deal struck to replace plant equipment at cost and pay via utility savings General Motors University as an early model of industry-aligned higher ed Three Key Takeaways for Leadership: Ensure capital alignment with strategy: Every capital initiative should support the university's mission, enrollment trajectory, and long-term vision. Build in lifecycle costs: Deferred maintenance and energy savings must be part of the upfront planning—not afterthoughts. Communicate across stakeholders: From boards and donors to students and local communities, transparency is essential to success. This episode provides both a strategic framework and actionable insight into how today's institutions can overcome capital constraints through innovation, collaboration, and long-range thinking. Recommended For: Presidents, provosts, CFOs, trustees, board chairs, and facilities executives leading campus master planning, housing expansion, or long-term capital strategy. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/capital-funding-strategies-higher-education/ #HigherEdLeadership #PublicPrivatePartnerships #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast

00:08 — Abdullahi Halakhe is Senior Advocate for East and Southern Africa at Refugees International. 00:33 — Charlie Eaton is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. His latest book is Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. He is also the author of the Progressive Disclosure newsletter on Substack. The post Two Years of War in Sudan; Plus, Harvard Stands up to the Trump Administration appeared first on KPFA.

Danny Royer is the Farm Coordinator at UC Merced. From smart farms to reimagining supply chains, we'll hear how Danny blends innovation with the art of growing food. He and Monte explore farming that looks at scaling back costs with sustainable practices as well as inspiring the next generation through real-world experience. Instagram: @esf_ucm https://www.instagram.com/esf_ucm?igsh=aml5Z3pmZmlyMXJ1 Danny was born and raised in Merced, California. Merced is located in the heart of California's Central Valley and is surrounded by production agriculture. Not having family ties to agriculture though, Danny found his passion for farming and agriculture through 4-H, FFA and on his best friend's farm just outside of Merced. He started his career in farming by irrigating pistachios in Madera at age 16 and eventually found himself working summers on a construction crew for Merced Irrigation District. After high school Danny took his passion for Agriculture to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. While he was there he continued to focus on broadening his work experience by taking on jobs at the Cal Poly Foundation Dairy and the Cal Poly Farm Shop. Danny Graduated from Cal Poly in 2008 with a degree in Agricultural Systems Management and minor in Agricultural Business. Cal Poly had prepared him for life after graduation, but Danny attributes his summer internships and combined work experiences to preparing him for the grind that would become the next eight years of his career. After graduating Danny worked in management and leadership positions for some of the largest farms and food production companies in California. After years of operational roles Danny transitioned into a new role as the VP of Technology for world renowned Bowles Farming Company. It was ag tech that allowed Danny to start driving change in operations and redefining company cultures. Danny's vast and extensive agriculture operations experience combined with the onslaught of ag tech allowed him to shift his strategy to incorporate ag tech solutions. After years of implementations and improvement iterations though, Danny was ready for something more. Along with being a serial agriculturalist and technologist, Danny is an active member in his Community of Merced. He serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Community Foundation of Merced County and actively engages in community events and initiatives. Lastly and definitely most importantly to Danny, he is very much a family man. Danny is married with three children, who are the light of his life and his mission to create sustainable food systems is driven by a desire to see a more balanced and sustainable world for his family. Got questions you want answered? Send them our way and we'll do our best to research and find answers. Know someone you think would be great on the AgEmerge stage or podcast? Send your questions or suggestions to kim@asn.farm we'd love to hear from you.

#213:  Soil scientist Jennifer Pett-Ridge joins Linley to talk about the opportunities organic agricultural presents to the planet's need to drawdown and sequester carbon, with the caveat that instead of just storing carbon, we are actively using it to grow healthy foods.Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an adjunct professor at UC Merced. She specializes in soil microbial communities, plant-soil interaction and carbon sequestration.To watch a video version of this podcast with access to the full transcript and links relevant to our conversation, please visit:https://realorganicproject.org/jennifer-pett-ridge-carbon-cycling-on-organic-farms-213The Real Organic Podcast is hosted by Dave Chapman and Linley Dixon, engineered by Brandon StCyr, and edited and produced by Jenny Prince.The Real Organic Project is a farmer-led movement working towards certifying 1,000 farms across the United States this year. Our add-on food label distinguishes soil-grown fruits and vegetables from hydroponically-raised produce, and pasture-raised meat, milk, and eggs from products harvested from animals in horrific confinement (CAFOs - confined animal feeding operations).To find a Real Organic farm near you, please visit:https://www.realorganicproject.org/directoryWe believe that the organic standards, with their focus on soil health, biodiversity, and animal welfare were written as they should be, but that the current lack of enforcement of those standards is jeopardizing the ability for small farms who adhere to the law to stay in business. The lack of enforcement is also jeopardizing the overall health of the customers who support the organic movement; customers who are not getting what they pay for at market but still paying a premium price. And the lack of enforcement is jeopardizing the very cycles (water, air, nutrients) that Earth relies upon to provide us all with a place to live, by pushing extractive, chemical agriculture to the forefront.If you like what you hear and are feeling inspired, we would love for you to join our movement by becoming one of our 1,000  Real Friends:https://www.realorganicproject.org/real-organic-friends/To read our weekly newsletter (which might just be the most forwarded newsletter on the internet!) and get firsthand news about what's happening with organic food, farming and policy, please subscribe here:https://www.realorganicproject.org/email/

A look at the iconic symbol at UC Merced. Series: "UC Landmarks" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 40499]

In this episode of the AgCulture Podcast, Martin Chavez, a 2024 Nuffield International Farming Scholar and Farmer Relations Director at Pacific Farm Management, takes a closer look at the labor challenges facing California's specialty crops. He also shares valuable global perspectives on innovative workforce solutions in agriculture. Discover more about labor-intensive farming, immigration policies, and strategies for building a sustainable workforce. Don't miss this insightful conversation—listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify! This episode was sponsored by: Bankbarn Meet the guest: Martin Chavez, 2024 Nuffield International Farming Scholar and Farmer Relations Director at Pacific Farm Management, brings extensive expertise in addressing labor challenges in agriculture. A graduate in Economics from UC Merced, Martin's career spans advocacy, workforce management, and innovative solutions for farm labor shortages. His global research delves into workforce strategies to combat agricultural labor shortages. Connect with our guest on Social Media: LinkedIn (00:00) Introduction (03:00) Evolution of farm labor (06:00) Immigration challenges (11:00) Labor cost comparisons (18:00) Role of technology (22:00) Global insights on labor (27:35) Final Questions Join Paul as he shares his experiences in the agricultural industry, his travels and encounters with important figures around the world. Available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe at the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AgCulture WebSite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and keep an eye out for future episodes, bringing insights and stories from the vibrant world of agriculture.

Empowering Women in AgriFood Tech: A Conversation with Amy Wu of From Farms to Incubators - In this episode of the Leading Voices in Food podcast, host Norbert Wilson speaks with Amy Wu, the creator and content director of From Farms to Incubators. Amy shares her inspiring journey in highlighting and supporting women, particularly women of color, in the agri-food tech industry. Learn about the origins of her groundbreaking documentary and book, her vision for a vibrant community of women innovators, and the crucial role of education, mentorship, and policy in advancing women's roles in this sector. Interview Summary I have a great set of questions for you. So, the first thing, could you just tell our listeners a little bit more about From Farms to Incubators? Sure. From Farms to Incubators is a special initiative and project that tells the stories of women in this fast-growing field known as ag tech, sometimes interchangeably used as Agri food tech as well. The mission of it is really to get more women involved in ag tech through storytelling, through resources, and also through education and training. I also would describe it as a multimedia content platform. I actually came to this as a journalist and as a storyteller that uses storytelling to amplify the voices of women leaders and entrepreneurs in this field. It's also a documentary and a book and also a website where we archive their stories and their biographies as well. Thanks for that overview, and you just talked about the book and the documentary From Farms to Incubators: women innovators revolutionizing how our food is grown, which uses storytelling to highlight women innovators and how women innovators in the Agri food tech are doing their best. But there's also a movement and the community and this multimedia platform. Why did you expand from the book and documentary into this larger network? That's a really good question. Briefly, as some context, I kind of fell into this project. It was a bit of serendipity. I was a reporter in Salinas, California, which is the vegetable salad bowl of the world. Ag is a huge industry, a 10 billion industry. And I was covering government and agriculture. And I observed that there were not a lot of women at the helm of the table, whether it be at farms or also in this growing field of ag tech as well. So it started off as a documentary. I got a grant from the International Center for Journalists, and then ultimately I got another grant from the International Media Women's Foundation to do a short documentary to profile three women who are entrepreneurs in ag tech. It was great. It was at the time in 2016, which now was ages ago, I guess. It was really hard to find women in ag, in this field of ag tech, women creating the innovations to tackle some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, especially under climate change. So, it could have ended there because the documentary turned out to be very, very well received. It's screened at hundreds of places, and I would have panels and discussions and the women would look at each other like, 'my gosh, I didn't know there were other women doing this too. Can you connect us? We'd love to convene further.' And then educators, community leaders, agribusinesses, investors just didn't know they existed as well. So, what happened was the stories kind of multiplied and multiplied as the more that I collected them. And then I decided to put it into a book profiling about 30 women in this growing field. And to answer your question, Norbert, why is it continuing is that I saw a real need for women to have a community, women in agriculture and innovation and food systems to have a community to connect with one another, to potentially build friendship, build collaboration, build partnership, creating a collective vision sometimes and a place for them. I didn't plan on it. So, I guess the storytelling connects them. We've also have resources like a database that connects them and the goal is really so that they can have a community where they can build more. They can either build out their own startups. They can build their careers, build their professions. And then it kind of grew more legs. Now we're also extending into the area of education and training to try to get younger women, young people, youth. To see that agriculture, hey, may not be traditionally sexy. I mean, tractors and overalls are still what a lot of people think about it, but there are so many other opportunities in the food system for young people as well, especially since we all have to eat. So, how are farmers going to be producing the food for 10 billion people in 2050, right? Who's going to produce the food? How are we going to do it? Especially under the auspices of climate change, the weather's getting crazier and crazier. That's sort of why it has expanded from the stories all the way to what it is today. This is a great story and I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the women and their innovations. And if I may, I would like for you to actually even explain a little bit about what you mean by the ag food tech or Agri food tech as you're talking about these women. Broadly defined, is any kind of innovation that makes it easier, frankly, for farmers to do their work, to grow more efficiently, and to also increase [00:06:00] their yield. I can give some examples of what innovation is. Blockchain addresses food safety, really. It traces everything from the seed to all the way on the shelf, right? So if there's any safety issues, it's used to trace back, where did that seed come from? Where was it grown? What field was it in? And that really helps everybody in the food systems a lot more, right? We have sensors connected with drones. I forgot to mention robotics as well, which is a fast-growing area of ag tech. Everything from self-driving tractors to laser scarecrows to another level of robots that are picking specific kinds of fruits and vegetables that's tackling labor challenges. I don't foresee that ag tech necessarily is a replacement by the way of people. It's actually offering more opportunities because we need people who are very knowledgeable that kind of innovation. And then you also asked a bit about the stories of the women in ag tech, for example, in the film and in the book and so forth. Soil sampling is a fast-growing area of ag tech. There's the story that I have in the book and also in the movie of two young women who are Stanford PhD graduates. Who created a soil testing kit that makes it easy for farmers to just test their soil for diseases, for pests, and soil testing is traditionally, you know, very, very expensive for most farmers actually. Not easy for farmers to get access to it and to get the data, but the soil testing kit that they created makes it a lot easier for farmers, small farmers even, to access it. And why is that important is because the more knowledge, the more data that, and analytics that farmers can get, the more that they can make smart decisions about how much to fertilize, how much to irrigate. And that connects with the yield and their success. You know, another company that I can think about, another amazing woman. I just like her story, the story of AgTools and the story of Martha Montoya, who was actually an award-winning cartoonist. And she doesn't come from agriculture at all, and that's actually something that I want to highlight is a lot of these women are not farmers and don't come from agriculture. But she was a award winning cartoonist. I believe she was also a librarian and she fell into the food industry, and saw a need for having more data, offering more data and analytics to farmers. She created a system a little bit like a Bloomberg for farmers, where they can get real time data immediately on their phones, on their watches, so that they can get second by second data to make decisions on specific crops. Those are a couple of the stories that are in the book, but really what I want to highlight is that all of the innovation that they are creating addresses some of the biggest challenges that farmers are facing, whether it be labor issues,lack of water, some areas of our country are becoming more wet, others are becoming more dry, drones that are actually doing the irrigation now or drones taking photos to give more data to farmers as well on what is their land look like. You know, it could also be human resources related as well to manage staff. So mobile apps to manage staff on cattle farms. I mean, how big are the cattle farms sometimes, you know, 50,000 acres. So, it's really to save money and to create efficiency for farmers. If farmers are able to do their work more efficiently, they're able to generate greater profits, but it also allows for food prices not to rise. This has really big implications. Thank you for sharing those stories. And I love hearing about some of the individuals, but here's the question. I mean, why focus on women? What's important about what women contribute to this? And also, why are you also considering race as an important lens in this sector? Well, I would say, why not women? Because women have already been contributing to the global food system, whether in the production end or the decision makers at the head of the dinner table for thousands of thousands of years, arguably. So what I discovered is that their stories, their contributions, existing contributions were not being celebrated and were not being amplified. And I actually discovered that a lot of the women that I connected with were a bit shy about even telling their story and sharing it like kind of like, 'what is my contribution?' And I'm like, 'well, why aren't you sharing your story more?' So the goal of it really is to document and celebrate their contributions, but also to inspire. As I said, young women, next generation, all of us have daughters, nieces, granddaughters, you know, and then future generations to consider opportunities in a field where we need people. We need people who are smart and you don't have to be from a generation of farmers. You could be in science, engineering, technology, and math. You could just be passionate about it and you could be in the field. So that's the first aspect of it. And in terms of the lens of gender and race, there are not enough women in terms of just the startups in ag tech right now, only 2 percent of the billions of dollars being invested in ag tech startups. Only 2 percent are going into women led companies. It is very, very little. It is a problem that is deep rooted. And it starts with [00:12:00] funding. One problem is where is the funding coming from. Venture capitalists, traditional avenues of funding, where it is traditionally male dominated. So, there are many studies that show that investors will invest in companies where they connect with those who are leading the companies, right? So similar gender, similar backgrounds, similar stories. So, we're really looking to have a paradigm shift and move the needle of sorts and say that if there are more investors, there are more board members who are from a diversity backgrounds, then there will be more funding for women and those who are traditionally not leading agriculture, not in the leadership positions, not in the decision-making roles, right? There is a problem. There is a, what is a grass ceiling, not just glass ceiling, but grass ceiling. I hear you. I hear you. Now this is really fascinating. I know from colleagues who are in agriculture that there is this demand for more agricultural workers throughout the Agri food system. And if there is a demand, we're saying that our colleges that produce the potential workers aren't meeting those demands. One of the ways we can see that change is by having more women and more people of color join in. And so, this is a critical thing. And I would imagine also the experiences that people bring may be a critical part of coming up with new innovations. Diversity can do that. This is exciting that you're exploring this. I love what you're saying Norbert. I know I wanted to touch upon that about what you just noted is that it's also to create a pipeline, right? Education training is just so critical. And it makes me so happy to see that there are more and more programs at universities and colleges that are addressing programs in food systems, in agriculture, and increasingly in ag tech. So, whether it be courses or programs or certificates or eventually minors and majors, developing the pipeline of talent is really important and having mentors and mentees, which is something that now we're working on. This fall we'll have launched a menteeship program for women and for young people interested in ag tech and the first collaborator is the UC Merced in California. So, thanks for bringing that up. We have a couple of young people ready at the starting gates. Really excited. I will say just on a personal note, I was active in 4 H for most of my youth and that's the way I got involved in agriculture. So, touching or reaching out to folks in their youth is critical to get them excited and help them to make the connection so that they can do that work further. I'm glad to hear this work. In your view, what are some of the ongoing challenges and opportunities that women face in the ag tech sector or the Agri food sector? What are some of the things you're observing? Well, a continued challenge is having a place at the table, meaning at the leadership and decision-making level. And actually, as I noted earlier, the access to funding and not just the money, but the access to resources, meaning could be legal operational. Just how to get their startups or get their ideas out there. One example that I'm seeing that's again positive is that there's a growing number of incubators and accelerators specifically in food tech or ag tech that are is actually looking for candidates who are women or who are from underrepresented communities. The first thing is that they have a great innovation, of course, but the next thing that the incubators and accelerators are looking for is to have a diversity of perspectives. And to have representation, so seeing a lot more of that, whether it be. Individual accelerators, or even once at the university, right? Universities and colleges and the governmental level. The other challenge is access to farmers and connecting them with the farmers themselves. Cause farmers are very, very busy and that's highlighted and bolded. Increasingly just dealing with this chess game that's very hard to play with the weather, but also with their own resources. It's expensive being a farmer, equipment, labor. They don't often have the time, frankly, to beta test some of the innovations coming out. So how best to connect innovators with the farmers and to have them communicate with each other: like this is the innovation. This is how it's going to help your problem. Educating the farmers and allowing them to see that this is how it's going to address the problem that I have. So, the two are still kind of separate and access to each other is still, I would say, a major challenge. But right now, some of the solutions are, as I've noted, networking at conferences and convenings. Also, under the grant programs sometimes under the National Science Foundation or USDA, they are allowing more collaborative initiatives where you have educators, where you have policy, where you have the innovators, where you have the young people. Increasingly, seeing more and more of those kinds of projects and initiatives happen. So hopefully everybody will have a seat at the table and that would help women out a lot in the field as well. Awesome. Thank you for sharing those. And I love the fact that you're looking at not just identifying issues, but also trying to find ways of connecting folks to help overcome those challenges that women and women of color are facing in the marketplace. And it's the connections that are really critical. I appreciate you highlighting that. So, what is your ideal vision? Oh, one more thing I forgot to note is that in terms of connecting, there's also a database - a women in Agri food tech database, and I, and at least four or five other women in the field have been working on for at least four or five years now. We now have more than a thousand members. It's an open-source database where you can click on a form, put your name there and information takes a few minutes and then you're added to this database where the women can be connected to each other as well. So that's another resource. Yeah. And I mean, even just having peer mentors, not just mentors who are above you and they've like solved all the problems, but having people to go along with you as you're developing and as they are developing can be a critical part. I know as an academic, that's important for me and has been important for me. And I can imagine the same is true in this space as well. So, I'm so grateful to hear about this work. Yeah. What is your ideal vision for women in Agri food tech in the next, say, five years? And how will the digital network for from farms to incubators play a role in achieving that goal or those goals? So, my dream - it always starts, I think, in the dreaming phase and then connecting that with also resources along the way. But if I could wave my magic wand, I would say that. We would have a lot more women in leadership and thought decision making positions in ag tech to the point where maybe we won't even need something like From Farms to Incubators anymore because they'll be already equal. The stories will be out there. So, it might be questionable as to why we have a special subgroup or network for this now. How to get to that vision, I think is the three components of increasingly having more stories, and the women tell their stories at public outreach. You know, it could be at conferences, it could be in their own communities, sharing their story out to the community of farmers, of local government, of schools, local schools and colleges and universities, gardening clubs. The second component is education and training, building a pipeline. A vision that I have is actually having a campus. A virtual, and also in-person campus where women, especially from women in underprivileged communities will have the opportunity to have training and to be connected with mentors and the rock stars in the ag tech and Agri food tech field. Where they will also be able to have a project and initiative and test it out and have something to add to their portfolio. To have classes and people who are teaching those courses as well, ultimately. And then also to just build up a hub of resources. Like I mentioned the database. I mentioned that we'd like to extend it to having resources where folks can easily access internships, fellowships, granteeships, where they can be connected to funding. If they need help with legal, HR, just all components of everything that's needed to have a successful organization. And it doesn't have to just be their own startup. It could be a job database of where we have larger organizations and companies that are building up their own ag innovation or food innovation center as well. So that is the vision. It's a big vision. It's a big dream. So we're going to have to kind of break it down into components. But I think taking it step by step is the way to go kind of like climbing Everest or doing a long distance swim. Yes, I can see where you're trying to go in this vision and I'm interested to know what, if any role policy could play and help advance that vision. Yeah, so what role could policy play in advancing this vision? Currently, when it comes to diversity inclusion in the ag tech field or even in agriculture, there is somewhat a lack of policy in a way. But then also with individual organizations and corporations, obviously, there is the movement of diversity inclusion. But also, I think it's very much with the hiring practices with HR. I think it's up to individual organizations, whether they be small, larger ones, governmental, to look at their own hiring practices. To look at who they are, how are they crafting the language when they look for a job, when they look at their leadership team, are there ways to further diversify it and when it comes to, gender, ethnicities, people who come from a rural area, urban. I mean, we all come with, from a diversity of perspectives and stories. I think a lot of it will come down to hiring practices and advancing this vision and with the individuals who are already working at those organizations to be more thoughtful and conscious about giving those who don't have a place at the table, a place and a voice at the table, giving everybody a chance. Because we have some amazingly talented and knowledgeable people who just traditionally in agriculture don't have families and generations who come from an ag background. But they do come with so much that they could offer. I would say that those are a couple of examples of that as well. And maybe, more discussion about policy is really needed on a larger level when it comes to farmers, when it comes to government leaders, when it comes to innovation leaders as well. And when it comes to educators and schools. I think the more the merrier when it comes to bringing folks at the table to open it up for discussion on solutions. I appreciate this. And, this idea of not just welcoming people so that they get in the door, but also creating change. Environments and spaces where people are actually welcomed once they're there. That it becomes a place where folks can be themselves and bring all of who they are to the work that they're doing. This is critical. Yes, absolutely. I want to touch upon that. My own story is I don't have an agricultural background myself. But when I first , landed in a place like Salinas, very much sort of an outsider because I'm not from there anyway, but also not in agriculture and then being a woman and being, you know, a Chinese American woman too, you know, I, I did feel that there was a challenge to kind of break into certain circles and to be welcome. Even despite my passion and enthusiasm, there was a little bit like, 'what is she? Why? Why? What? She, she doesn't know anything.' But I felt like it was the people who in the beginning, it was just a couple of people who were like, 'Hey, this is somebody who really wants to tell the story of what we're doing. Give her a chance.' You know, having advocates, frontline advocates made a huge difference. So that's what I'm hoping for, more frontline advocates. Amy, I want to pick up on a personal story out of this. I did my graduate training out at UC Davis, at University of California, Davis. And I worked on dairy policy, which I do not have a dairy background. And it was great to have a mentor who actually helped me. Who introduced me to a number of folks and working through extension and the California Department of Food and Ag. Folks made space for me, and they understood that I was interested in this particular policy and trying to understand what it meant. And I actually got to learn so much. It was because people just said, okay, we'll give you a try. And I did the best I could. I'm grateful for that. Creating these spaces is not hard. It's not impossible. It can be done. I'm really appreciative of your efforts to keep furthering that story. I love that story. And indeed Norbert it's like what you said, creating the space and even, even in the beginning and just having a couple of folks just to make space. And then I think the space is going to grow from there. I fully agree. I've got one last question for you. And it's, sort of related to the vision, but just also thinking long term. What impact do you hope your work will ultimately have on society. I hope that my work will create a bit of a shift ultimately. I mean, that's a rather large goal, but it's not just myself. As this project has grown and extended and expanded. It's really a joint team effort. I mean, along this journey, I've met folks who are mission aligned. And they also see the value in this, and they believe in something similar. Whether it be that they contribute their story, whether it be that they help write the stories, whether it be that they come be a guest speaker, and they share their career, and then they end up connecting with the younger person, every person counts in this. In making a shift. And it might take generations to completely have a paradigm shift, but I think that just moving the needle a bit is ultimately the goal, certainly. And in terms of the bigger picture of things, I'm hoping that it will continue to spark a discussion and ongoing conversation about the importance and the value of bringing different voices and people who traditionally were not given a space at the table when it comes to the food systems and agriculture. But who brings so much talent, so much to the table already. How we can make greater space for them as well, and how we can incorporate their talent and create a better food system for everybody. We all eat and we're looking at 10 billion people in 2050. So, looking at the people who are making those contributions and telling their stories and especially for those who traditionally have not had their voices told, I think is really, really important. I just keep the fire going, I guess. BIO Amy Wu is an award-winning writer for the women's Ag and Agtech movement. She is the creator and chief content director of From Farms to Incubators, a multimedia platform that uses documentary, video, photography, and the written word to tell the stories of women leaders and innovators in Agtech. It has a mission of highlighting women in food, farming, and farmtech, especially women of color. From Farms to Incubators includes a documentary and a book that spotlights women leaders in Ag and Agtech. The documentary and stories have been screened and presented at SXSW and Techonomy. The initiative was awarded grants from the International Center for Journalists and International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund. Amy was named on Worth magazine's “Groundbreakers 2020 list of 50 Women Changing the World” list. Since 2018 she has served as the communications manager at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley NY where she runs the website, digital newsletter, and social media. Prior to starting From Farms to Incubators, Amy spent over two decades as an investigative reporter at media outlets including the USA Today Network where she reported on agriculture and Agtech for The Salinas Californian. She's also worked at Time magazine, The Deal and contributed to The New York Times, The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She earned her bachelor's degree in history from New York University, and master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.  

On today's episode, Kristin Platts looks into a partnership with UC Merced that focuses on the areas of artificial intelligence and climate change and a new mentorship program helping women launch careers in ag tech.

Javier Servin AKA Foo Howser is a dude that loves the rich and diverse history of California and wants to get others excited about it as well. His passion for California history was sparked by watching Huell Howser and by the amazing history teachers he had growing up. He earned a B.A. in History from UC Merced, where he wrote his thesis on the life and rebellion of Estanislao of the Lakisamni Yokuts of the San Joaquin Valley. He earned an M.A. in Moving Image Archive Studies form UCLA and currently works as an archivist in Hollywood. He is a first-generation Mexican immigrant and has the vaccine scar to prove it. Social Media:  @californiography   Website: FooHowser.com___________________Music CreditsIntroLike it Loud, Dyalla, YouTube Audio LibraryStingerScarlet Fire (Sting), Otis McDonald, YouTube Audio LibraryOutroIndecision, Dyalla, YouTube Audio Library__________________My SGV Podcast:www.mysgv.netinfo@sgvmasterkey.com

On this week's MyAgLife in Citrus episode, UC Merced's Tapan Parthak explains how the CalAgroClimate online tool can inform citrus growers' climate related management decisions in the short and long term.

The more fellow adoptees I speak with, the more I see a broader view of healing. On one side there's the logic of getting answers to questions we've been asking ourselves forever. On the other side there's the mystery of what happens often when we are with others. Tapping into both sides help us heal. Listen in as Kit describes four of his key healing moments. They might well spark some ideas in you.Kit Myers is an assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He was previously a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Merced. His teaching interests include the study of race as a social, relational, and intersectional category of difference and power. His forthcoming book, The Violence of Love: Race, Adoption, and Family in the United States, with University of California Press (2024), uses interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis to argue that while adoption is imbued with love, violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. The book comparatively examines the transracial and transnational adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families to understand how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures against others that not. Myers has also published journal articles in Adoption Quarterly, Critical Discourse Studies, Adoption & Culture, and Amerasia. He serves as on the executive committee for the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, San Diego in ethnic studies and his B.S. in ethnic studies and journalism from the University of Oregon.https://www.linkedin.com/in/kit-myers-21463417/ Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.

Kit Myers, 42, is a transracial Hong Kong adoptee and assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. In this interview, we talk about Myers' search for his birth mother and feelings he's had of having a 'ghostly' or ambiguous kinship with someone he doesn't know. We also talk about his upcoming imprint, " Violence of Love, Race, Adoption and Family in the United States."

The board of regents meeting at UC Merced was put on hold after a disruption by protesters as California's lieutenant governor is critical of how the UC and CSU systems are handling pro-Palestinian campus protests.  Guest Co-Host: Terry Slatic See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Comprehensive coverage of the day's news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. Slovak PM in critical condition after being shot several times, police say attack politically motivated. US approves more than $1 billion in new aid to Israel. Biden and Trump to hold presidential debates this summer. Inflation numbers continue to cool says new report. UC Merced protesters call for Board of Regents to disinvest from Israel. Family of Antioch man killed by police settles with city for $7.5 million. Alameda County DA Pamela Price's recall election will be on November ballot. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – May 15, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

The White House pushed back on reports that it is offering "sensitive intelligence" to Israel on the whereabouts of Hamas leaders and Pro-Palestinian Protestors set up at UC Merced.   Guest Co-Host: Terry Slatic See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

State regulators have approved a controversial proposal that will add a monthly charge of $24 to many Californian's electricity bills. But in exchange, utility customers should see reductions in charges per kilowatt hour of electricity used.  As college campus protests continue over Israel's War in Gaza, students at UC Merced are asking the university to refrain from what they say is over-policing.  Reporter: Rachel Livinal, KVPR It's finally warming up in California. As more bugs come out in the heat, so do bats to feed on them. And one bat species is emerging from hibernation with a new distinction -- the pallid bat is now the official state bat of California. Reporter: Alix Soliman, KQED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, but it's hard. Inside Higher Ed's Josh Moody and UC Merced's Charlie Eaton explain. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! vox.com/givepodcasts Please take a second to help us learn more about you! vox.com/podcastsurvey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Paul Smaldino about agent-based models of social dynamics. They discuss why modeling in social sciences are important, quantitative and qualitative data, models and how we define them, and decomposition with complexity science. They also discuss modeling with multivariate questions, importance of theory, modeling with COVID19, modeling in politics, and many more topics. Paul Smaldino is an Associate Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences and faculty in the Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate program at UC Merced, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Analytic Political Engagement and the Center for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His primary interests are how behaviors emerge and evolve in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures, as well as how those pressures can themselves evolve. He also has broad interests related to cultural evolution, cooperation, and complex systems. He is the author of the book, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution.Website: https://smaldino.com/wp/Twitter: @psmaldino Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe

Bodies are Telling is a two part exploration of the often complex relationship between the body and the self, told by Jimanekia Eborn through an intimate, personal reflection of her own journey to self-discovery. What are the psychological effects of growing up in a body that is constantly objectified? How do outside influences and expectations impact the way we perceive ourselves? What does it mean to reconnect to our body and heal after experiencing sexual assault? This started out as a podcast discussing bodies that have been impacted by shame and guilt. But it turned into a candid sharing of deep truths; an examination of personal trauma and what it's like to come out on the other side. While also calling in others' journeys and ideals around their own bodies, this is a story that, sadly, many will listen to and be able to connect with, but, hopefully, it is also a story that many can discover a place of understanding, realisation, and, ultimatley, hope. TW: This series mentions sexual assault and eating disorders. More about Jimanekia: Jimanekia Eborn is a Queer, Sexual Assault & Trauma Expert, Trauma Media Consultant, and Comprehensive Sex Educator. She is the host of Trauma Queen - a podcast for survivors of assault and our allies. The podcast focuses on uplifting voices in all communities and exploring our collective journey to healing. Jimanekia is the Founder of Tending The Garden- a nonprofit in service of sexual assault survivors who have been marginalized, offering retreats, online summits, community and education. She is also the co-founder of Cintima, bringing increased representation to the field of Intimacy Coordination in the film industry. In 2021, Jimanekia joined Lenora Claire Consulting as a SA & trauma expert for film & television productions. Jimanekia has been working in mental health for over a decade with youth, adolescents, and adults. She has led trauma-informed comprehensive sex and sex toy workshops at multiple universities including Columbia University, Georgetown University, Colorado College and Rhodes College. She has been the keynote speaker at Princeton Women's History Month 2021, UCSB Women of Color Conference 2019, UNCC & UC Merced's Take Back the Night Events 2022. Jimanekia has been a featured panelist at the MAC Belfast, Soho House, San Diego University, Converge Con and GirlSchool LA. Her work as a sex educator has been featured in Marie Claire, Playboy, Cosmo, Mind Body Green, Well + Good, Nylon, and many more. Contributors: Jordiana Diana: Website: https://earthtojordi.com Eugene Hsiang: @eutothegene Sonalee Rashatwar: @thefatsextherapist, https://www.sonaleer.com/, https://twitter.com/SonaleeR Social media: Website: https://traumaqueen.love/ Instagram: @jimanekia Twitter: @Jimanekia Facebook: Jimanekia Eborn   Bodies are Telling was written by Jimanekia Eborn. Production by Lucy Carr and James Deacon. Sound design and mixing by Ben Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies are Telling is a two part exploration of the often complex relationship between the body and the self, told by Jimanekia Eborn through an intimate, personal reflection of her own journey to self-discovery. What are the psychological effects of growing up in a body that is constantly objectified? How do outside influences and expectations impact the way we perceive ourselves? What does it mean to reconnect to our body and heal after experiencing sexual assault? This started out as a podcast discussing bodies that have been impacted by shame and guilt. But it turned into a candid sharing of deep truths; an examination of personal trauma and what it's like to come out on the other side. While also calling in others' journeys and ideals around their own bodies, this is a story that, sadly, many will listen to and be able to connect with, but, hopefully, it is also a story that many can discover a place of understanding, realisation, and, ultimatley, hope. TW: This series mentions sexual assault and eating disorders. More about Jimanekia: Jimanekia Eborn is a Queer, Sexual Assault & Trauma Expert, Trauma Media Consultant, and Comprehensive Sex Educator. She is the host of Trauma Queen - a podcast for survivors of assault and our allies. The podcast focuses on uplifting voices in all communities and exploring our collective journey to healing. Jimanekia is the Founder of Tending The Garden- a nonprofit in service of sexual assault survivors who have been marginalized, offering retreats, online summits, community and education. She is also the co-founder of Cintima, bringing increased representation to the field of Intimacy Coordination in the film industry. In 2021, Jimanekia joined Lenora Claire Consulting as a SA & trauma expert for film & television productions. Jimanekia has been working in mental health for over a decade with youth, adolescents, and adults. She has led trauma-informed comprehensive sex and sex toy workshops at multiple universities including Columbia University, Georgetown University, Colorado College and Rhodes College. She has been the keynote speaker at Princeton Women's History Month 2021, UCSB Women of Color Conference 2019, UNCC & UC Merced's Take Back the Night Events 2022. Jimanekia has been a featured panelist at the MAC Belfast, Soho House, San Diego University, Converge Con and GirlSchool LA. Her work as a sex educator has been featured in Marie Claire, Playboy, Cosmo, Mind Body Green, Well + Good, Nylon, and many more. Contributors: Jordiana Diana: Website: https://earthtojordi.com Eugene Hsiang: @eutothegene Sonalee Rashatwar: @thefatsextherapist, https://www.sonaleer.com/, https://twitter.com/SonaleeR Social media: Website: https://traumaqueen.love/ Instagram: @jimanekia Twitter: @Jimanekia Facebook: Jimanekia Eborn   Bodies are Telling was written by Jimanekia Eborn. Production by Lucy Carr and James Deacon. Sound design and mixing by Ben Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bodies are Telling is a two-part exploration of the often complex relationship between the body and the self, told by Jimanekia Eborn through an intimate, personal reflection of her own journey to self-discovery. What are the psychological effects of growing up in a body that is constantly objectified? How do outside influences and expectations impact the way we perceive ourselves? What does it mean to reconnect to our body and heal after experiencing sexual assault? This started out as a podcast discussing bodies that have been impacted by shame and guilt. But it turned into a candid sharing of deep truths; an examination of personal trauma and what it's like to come out on the other side. While also calling in others' journeys and ideals around their own bodies, this is a story that, sadly, many will listen to and be able to connect with, but, hopefully, it is also a story that many can discover a place of understanding, realisation, and, ultimately, hope. TW: This series mentions sexual assault and eating disorders. More about Jimanekia: Jimanekia Eborn is a Queer, Sexual Assault & Trauma Expert, Trauma Media Consultant, and Comprehensive Sex Educator. She is the host of Trauma Queen - a podcast for survivors of assault and our allies. The podcast focuses on uplifting voices in all communities and exploring our collective journey to healing. Jimanekia is the Founder of Tending The Garden- a nonprofit in service of sexual assault survivors who have been marginalized, offering retreats, online summits, community and education. She is also the co-founder of Cintima, bringing increased representation to the field of Intimacy Coordination in the film industry. In 2021, Jimanekia joined Lenora Claire Consulting as a SA & trauma expert for film & television productions. Jimanekia has been working in mental health for over a decade with youth, adolescents, and adults. She has led trauma-informed comprehensive sex and sex toy workshops at multiple universities including Columbia University, Georgetown University, Colorado College and Rhodes College. She has been the keynote speaker at Princeton Women's History Month 2021, UCSB Women of Color Conference 2019, UNCC & UC Merced's Take Back the Night Events 2022. Jimanekia has been a featured panelist at the MAC Belfast, Soho House, San Diego University, Converge Con and GirlSchool LA. Her work as a sex educator has been featured in Marie Claire, Playboy, Cosmo, Mind Body Green, Well + Good, Nylon, and many more. Contributors: Jordiana Diana: Website: https://earthtojordi.com Eugene Hsiang: @eutothegene Sonalee Rashatwar: @thefatsextherapist, https://www.sonaleer.com/, https://twitter.com/SonaleeR Social media: Website: https://traumaqueen.love/ Instagram: @jimanekia Twitter: @Jimanekia Facebook: Jimanekia Eborn   Bodies are Telling was written by Jimanekia Eborn. Production by Lucy Carr and James Deacon. Sound design and mixing by Ben Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

  For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Cody Moser, co-author of a recent paper, Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality. Moser is an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced, where he is completing his doctorate. A previous guest on the podcast, Moser immediately digs deep into the abstruse and technical model that shows that more is not automatically better when it comes to innovation and discovery. First, he contrasts his results with the Tasmanian cultural evolution model outlined by Joe Henrich nearly 20 years ago. In short, Henrich showed that very small populations tend to lose cultural traits and skills over time. Going through a population bottleneck has a memetic as well as genetic effect. The converse scenario is one where a large population is able to retain and even accumulate more cultural traits and skills. Moser's main finding is that some fragmentation of these large populations may in fact foster innovation. On the evolutionary psychological scale, massive groups may tend toward conformity, and disrupting information flows may foster independence of thought. A significant immediate implication is that scholarly thought might benefit from separating into competing schools and departments where distinct groups can develop solutions collectively but retain enough independence to resist being drawn into broader irrational herd behavior. Moser's results have broader implications for how businesses and corporations should operate, and perhaps quantify why nimble startups often outpace and defeat massive organizations despite the latter having almost infinite resources. Groupthink is powerful. Though small populations will be hit by skill loss with the death of keystone individuals, large populations may ossify, “locking in” regnant ideologies.  Razib also probes Moser about the rise of agent-based modeling and simulations in social science over the last 20 years, and how they have allowed scholars to circumvent the limitations of relying purely on college students to act as experiment subjects.

Jim talks with Cody Moser about the ideas and findings in his and Paul Smaldino's paper "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality." They discuss transient diversity, group performance vs the agent level, taking an agent-based modeling approach, Derex & Boyd's group potion-mixing experiment, no free lunch theorem, random network structures, an inverse correlation between network connectivity & performance, effects of sharing intermediate results, Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, measuring inequality with the Gini coefficient, higher performance in less equal networks, connected caveman networks, ring networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, randomly allocating lifetime endowed academic chairs to 25-year-olds, institutional design, generative entrenchment, implications for internet platform design, the parochial pyramid, tribalism at the Dunbar number, and much more. Episode Transcript "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality," by Cody Moser & Paul Smaldino Saving Twitter—A Roundtable (Jim Rutt, Bo Winegard, & Cody Moser) "Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups," by Maxime Derex & Robert Boyd The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper Cody Moser is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences. His research examines the origins of individual and institutional behavior where he uses approaches from complex systems and evolutionary dynamics to study collective problem-solving, systems collapse, cultural evolution, and innovation. Before coming to UC Merced, he studied primatology where he worked with capuchin monkeys, dwarf and mouse lemurs, lorises, and aye-ayes. He obtained a B.S. in Anthropology with minors in statistics and biology from Florida State University, a Master's in Anthropology from Texas A&M University, and worked for two years with The Music Lab in the Harvard Department of Psychology. He is interested in the history and philosophy of science and has written for a number of popular science venues on the applications of research from his field. His favorite animal is the ring-tailed lemur, his favorite room on campus is SE2 224, and his dream job is to be a graduate student.

Bryanna Grebe's journey from an aspiring pediatric dentist to a Technical Winemaker at Laffort is a tale of unexpected passion. Growing up in Atwater, California, she initially pursued molecular biology at UC Merced, aiming to improve healthcare in her community. However, a twist of fate led her to an internship at E. & J. Gallo, where she discovered the art and science of winemaking. Today, she stands as a dedicated Technical Winemaker, working with different wineries and blending her scientific expertise with a newfound love for crafting exceptional wines.   Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:  Bryanna Grebe shares her personal journey, revealing the intricate path to becoming a technical winemaker Explore the nuances of technical winemaking and how it sets apart from other roles in the industry Bryanna offers advice to those who discover their passion for wine after pursuing other careers, reflecting on her own experience and the wisdom she'd share with her past self Delve into the challenges faced by winemakers, specifically in the Pét-Nat category Explore the fine line between letting the wine ‘make itself' and intervention Bryanna shares her expertise on dealing with volatile acidity, offering insights into analyzing microbes, running necessary tests, and potential solutions Discuss the significance of humility in winemaking, exploring scenarios where asking for help is crucial, along with the unpredictable nature of the industry Uncover the unique role of technical winemakers in larger wineries, highlighting their significance in the winemaking process Bryanna shares her enthusiasm for winemaking, discussing whether she leans towards proactive measures or solving issues and the thrill of shaping the future of the industry Explore the vision for the future of the wine industry, focusing on accessibility, low-alcohol wines, and making wine a daily beverage for everyone   In this episode with Bryanna Grebe Bryanna Grebe of Laffort uncovers the fascinating journey she took from considering a career in dentistry to becoming an expert in the intricate world of winemaking. Bryanna shares her insights into the diverse roles within winemaking and explains the nuances of being a technical winemaker, as compared to a generalist.  In today's episode of the Legends Behind the Craft podcast, Drew Thomas Hendricks is joined by Bryanna Grebe, Technical Winemaker at Laffort. We delve into the challenges of the Pét-Nat category, the balance between intervention and natural winemaking, and even explore strategies for managing Volatile Acidity in winemaking. Bryanna tells us why humility in the wine industry is important, and the value of asking for help when things go awry. She shares her excitement for the future of the industry, envisioning a more accessible and inclusive wine culture.   Sponsor for this episode… This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead. Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search. At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That's why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors. Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves. So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today! To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.

On today's show, we'll revisit the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic by looking at two alternative supply chains for masks during the fallout from the Trump administration's failure to prepare. We'll be speaking with the ProPublica reporter David McSwane about his book Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick. The book details the shadowy supply chain of brokers looking to profit from the pandemic – to the tune of millions of dollars. We'll also hear from Mai-Linh Hong, co-editor and co-author of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice, about a mutual aid organization that created a different supply chain for homemade masks based on community, care and connection over profit.  Like this program? Please show us the love. Click here: http://bit.ly/3LYyl0R and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks! Featuring: J. David McSwane, award-winning ProPublica investigative reporter and author of Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick  Mai-Ling Hong, UC Merced assistant professor of literature, co-editor and co-author of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice    Making Contact Staff: Host: Lucy Kang Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang Executive Director: Jina Chung Interim Senior Producer: Jessica Partnow Engineer: Jeff Emtman Music Credit: Blue Dot Session  -  Order of Entrance    Learn More:  Making Contact Dr. Mai-Linh Hong J. David McSwane Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice

Admit It sits down with Dr. Lisa Perry at the University of California - Merced to learn about the one stop model and its impact on student enrollment and retention. UC Merced's Students First Center has experienced student success at its campus, listen to learn how.

“In Indian Country, everybody seems to know somebody who's gone missing or been murdered,” begins LA Times reporter Hannah Wiley's reporting on the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in California. The Sovereign Bodies Institute reports that at least 183 indigenous women and girls have disappeared or were murdered in California, a figure it says could be many times higher owing to incomplete data. Their disappearances are part of the legacy of anti-Indigenous violence, experts say, and perpetuate cycles of generational trauma. We hear how Northern California's Yurok Tribe is addressing the crisis and trying to achieve justice for those who have disappeared in their own community and nationwide. Guests: Hannah Wiley, politics reporter, Los Angeles Times Honorable Abby Abinanti, chief judge, the Yurok Tribal Court Blythe K. George, associate professor of sociology, UC Merced; member of the Yurok Tribe Chief Greg O'Rourke, chief of police, Yurok Tribal Police

Laura Hamilton is a sociologist at UC Merced and the author of multiple books including Broke, Who is Paying for the Party, and Parenting by Degree.  Laura is interested in how socio-economic status influences who goes to college, how students perform, their job prospects, and their marriage market.  This discussion should be very provocative. Get full access to What Happens Next in 6 Minutes with Larry Bernstein at www.whathappensnextin6minutes.com/subscribe

There are maps, and there are territories, and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know what we should measure, and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn't even always have a metric. And even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can occlude the other factors that determine health, or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which Homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively: What should we count to wisely operate a nation-state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of   political economy? And how can we escape the seductive but false clarity of systems that rain information but do not enhance collective wisdom?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we'll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week on the show we talk to SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino at UC Merced and University of Utah Professor of Philosophy  C. Thi Nguyen. In this episode we talk about   value capture and legibility, viewpoint diversity, issues that plague big governments, and expert identification problems…and map the challenges “ahead of us” as SFI continues as the hub of a five-year international research collaboration into emergent political economies. (Find links to all previous episodes in this sub-series in the notes below.)Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.If you'd like some HD virtual backgrounds of the SFI campus to use on video calls and a chance to win a signed copy of one of our books from the SFI Press, help us improve our science communication by completing a survey about our various scicomm channels. Thanks for your time!Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited!  The application deadline has been extended to March 1st.OR apply to the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.OR the Complex ity GAINS UK program for PhD students.(OR check our open listings for a staff or research job!)Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentioned & Related Links:Transparency Is Surveillanceby C. Thi NguyenThe Seductions of Clarityby C. Thi NguyenThe Natural Selection of Bad Scienceby Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreathMaintaining transient diversity is a general principle for improving collective problem solvingby Paul Smaldino, Cody Moser, Alejandro Pérez Velilla, Mikkel WerlingThe Division of Cognitive Laborby Philip KitcherThe Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciencesby Eugene WignerOn Crashing The Barrier of Meaning in A.I.by Melanie MitchellSeeing Like A Stateby James C. ScottJim RuttSlowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Scienceby Johan Chu and James EvansThe Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrativeby Wendy Carlin and Samuel BowlesPeter TurchinIn The Country of The Blindby Michael Flynn82 - David Krakauer on Emergent Political Economies and A Science of Possibility (EPE 01)83 - Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World (EPE 02)84 - Ricardo Hausmann & J. Doyne Farmer on Evolving Technologies & Market Ecologies (EPE 03)91 - Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)97 - Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society (EPE 05)

A first-of-its kind building has opened in Davis to provide shelter and services for those considered at-risk or experiencing homelessness. A new Study by UC Merced is revealing the chronic health issues farmworkers are experiencing and the challenges they face in accessing healthcare. CapRadio's Nick Brunner and Andrew Garcia preview their top live music events in Sacramento for February.   Paul's Place

On this week's Tech Thursday episode, Vicky Boyd looks into UC Merced's new smart farm, its progress and where it can fit in with research and educational goals.    Supporting the People who Support Agriculture Thank you to our sponsors who make it possible to get you your daily news. Please feel free to visit their websites. The California Walnut Board - https://walnuts.org/ PhycoTerra® - https://phycoterra.com/ Verdesian - https://vlsci.com/ BeeHero - https://www.beehero.io/

Over the next 10 days, we'll share one episode from our First-Gen Virtual Summit 2022. Today's episode is 1 of 10. It's the opening keynote from Brian O'Bruba, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement at UC Merced. His keynote centers on ways schools and employers can best engage and prepare first-gen students for career success. Visit Aspira Consulting's website for information about our culturally relevant Career Readiness Programs Check out our YouTube channel for career and leadership tips Click HERE to receive no BS career and leadership tips in your in-box.

The picket line outside UC Berkeley campus, November 14, 2022. Image by Ian Castro courtesy of UAW. On today's show: 0:08 – Javier Puente (@puentevaldivia), Chair of Latin American and Latiné Studies at Smith College, and author of The Rural State, about sociopolitical conflict in the Peruvian Andes. He joins us from Lima to discuss the latest on the Peru protests. 0:45 – Mark Woodall, physics graduate student at UC Merced and one of the 15 union negotiators who signed onto a statement urging members to reject the tentative agreement. He is a member of the UAW 2865 bargaining team representing Academic Student Employees. The post Protests in Peru; Plus UC academic workers unions are divided on tentative agreement appeared first on KPFA.

How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of “baby talk” from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent paper on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cultural evolutionist at UC Merced. Moser first discusses what cultural evolution today means in the context of American anthropology, and how it relates to the new field of evolutionary psychology. He observes that some of the conceptual ideas that underpin modern cultural evolution actually have roots in naturalistic frameworks dating back decades, though out of fashion in American cultural anthropology since just after World War II. Razib and Moser compare and contrast the descriptive and interpretive methods of most cultural anthropology, and the formalistic evolutionary paradigm of cultural evolution. Then Moser gets to the meat of the paper on which he was the second author. He points out that humans have noted the similarities across cultures for decades, with evolutionary psychologists concluding this is a human universal. But it takes evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to understand how this phenomenon emerges naturally out of the common biological heritage of our species. Moser outlines the structural conditions that result in the universality of baby talk across cultures, and what benefits this universality might confer upon us as a species.  

Michael J. Spivey is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California Merced. He earned his BA in Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz and his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Michael moved to UC Merced to help build a department of cognitive and information sciences. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters on the embodiment of cognition and interactions between language, vision, memory, syntax, semantics, and motor movement. His most recent book, published in 2020, is "Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness." (MIT Press) In this conversation, KMO and Michael discuss: 03:20 – The book's title and table of contents; externalism and egregore 07:30 – The role of the prefrontal cortex in our conception of self 11:30 – Non-scientific view of interactions between brain parts 12:50 – Mental representations of the world and the tricks they can play on us 15:35 – Letting go of oneself 17:25 – The value of familiar environments 18:45 – The futility of widely used time-management tricks 19:40 – Extending our mind past our skin 25:20 – The skipped question of emergent group intentions and desires 26:15 – Connecting to other bodies and life forms; emergence, again 28:25 – Murmurations and being in charge of a flock 28:45 – Boundaries between objects 35:20 – Perceiving objects as extensions of ourselves 37:02 – Virtual reality and tracking the direction of gaze 43:15 – AI and dogs 44:55 – Computer-generated imagery; deep fakes and their antidotes 49:35 – Extending your sense of self to the planetary scale 53:55 – Apocalyptic predictions, prepping, and the future of civilization 55:47 – Going beyond our planet and contacting life elsewhere 58:20 – Anti-natalism, suffering, and feeling one with the universe 1:02:28 – Michael's closing points; practical advice in the book Michael (The Guest): Michael's page at ucmerced.edu Who You Are at MIT Press KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

Today we are joined by Dr. Roger Bales. Dr. Bales is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering and a founding faculty member at UC Merced, and has been active in water- and climate-related research for over 35 years. His scholarship includes over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings, and more presentations, book chapters, and reports. Currently, his work focuses on California's efforts to build the knowledge base and implement policies that adapt our water supplies, critical ecosystems and economy to the impacts of climate warming. He works with leaders in state agencies, elected officials, federal land managers, water leaders, non-governmental organizations, and other key decision makers on developing climate solutions for California. He is a fellow in the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a professor at UC Merced since 2003, an Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley since 2013. Previously, he was a Professor of hydrology at the University of Arizona from 1984 to 2003. He has served as Director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, and the UC Water Security and Sustainability Research Initiative. He is currently co-director of the UC Center for Ecosystem Climate Solutions. You can follow Dr. Bales and his work via his Twitter @rbalesuc and his website rogerbales.com.Show Notes:Dr. Roger Bales | Official WebsiteRoger Bales | TwitterUS Drought Monitor | University of Nebraska at LincolnAbout | University of California at MercedCalifornia Almond Industry Facts | Almond Board of CaliforniaSolar Aquagrid | Official WebsiteLow-cost solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity for 145 countries by Jacobson, Von Krauland et al | Royal Society of Chemistry Energy & Environmental Science2022 California Ballet Proposition Guide | California Secretary of StateThe Chronicles Group | Official WebsiteSierra Nevada Research Institute | Official WebsiteCalifornia's Watershed Healing Proposal | The Chronicles Group Youtube

Right after visiting the University of California, Davis and California State University, Maritime we have students giving you their personal experience and advise on the importance of visiting a campus whether on line or in person, what to ask, what to look for and what to do.

Today, I am interviewing Alejandra Vazquez, a psychology and sociology graduate of UC Merced and an employee at Fresno State. I gained so so much insight from speaking with Ale and I hope you do as well. Enjoy! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/andrea-lee61/support

On this week's Tech Thursday episode, we hear about a new tool for detecting powdery mildew on strawberry. Additionally, UC Merced's Catherine Keske describes the Internet of Things (IoT), a project using sensors and autonomous robots to more easily transmit vital crop information to growers and ultimately increase yields.   Supporting the People who Support Agriculture Thank you to our sponsors who make it possible to get you your daily news. Please feel free to visit their websites. The California Walnut Board – https://walnuts.org/ PhycoTerra®  –https://phycoterra.com/ Verdesian - https://vlsci.com/

Southern California water purchases across the Sacramento Valley. The history of lowrider culture across the state and challenging anti-cruising ordinances. Author Stacey Vanek Smith's book “Machiavelli for Women.” Today's Guests Jay Lund, Director for UC Davis Watershed Sciences, and Josue Medellin-Azuara, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Merced, discuss Southern California water purchases across the Sacramento Valley. Denise Sandoval, professor of Chicano/a studies at California State University, Northridge, discusses the history and culture of lowrider cruising during a time of community leadership challenging anti-cruising ordinances across California. CapRadio Host Donna Apidone interviews author Stacey Vanek Smith about their new book “Machiavelli for Women.” 

Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA) Inspired by Marc Gobé's book, Citizen Brand:  10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency's proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers.  Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations. Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé's book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies. At his agency's inception, Robin worked with Walmart's sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment. In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn't know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation's post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him. Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with: Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues.  A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging. With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California's 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system's existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall. Robin can be found on his agency's website at citizengroup.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin. ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you. ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm's superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well? ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands. That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they're not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition. So I started Citizen Brand, and we've been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable. ROB: Let's pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you've done together, of what this looks like in action. ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart's sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn't necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood. That's been the model. I've also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers. So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that's the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen. ROB: That's early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we're starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You're probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It's like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization. So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it's in public markets or whether it's regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it's true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there's a lot more to work on? ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it's not just environmental, by the way; it's social impact, fundamentally. ROB: Yeah, which now we have acronyms around, again. But there's a material difference, I think, between – you can check a box, you can have an ESG statement, you can have committees. It's something else entirely, I think, to not just have a committee and to actually execute. How do you think about ensuring that those committees, that those initiatives have meat to them and are not just window dressing or greenwashing or whatever else we want to call it? ROBIN: So much of it is susceptible to greenwashing, and perception is a whole other thing in reality between half-empty and half-full. Walmart took a lot of spears early on, but people have seen the credibility that has come from meaningful adoption of practices. And it's happening across the corporate world, albeit not fast enough. I'll give you a case in point. There was a vote taken yesterday on compulsory board diversity – in other words, more women, more people of color on boards – struck down because, ironically, it was perceived as discriminatory. [laughs] Here in California, where we lead, we've gone in recent years from like 17% to some 30% women on corporate boards. That's a good gain, but it ain't anywhere near 50%. We're a country that doesn't like regulation. It's something I struggle with a lot because we can talk a good game about law and order, but law and order requires rules of the road, and it requires a well-governed society to be a healthy, functional society. In the meantime, corporations run the roost. The common good is crippled under the weight of corporate good, which quickly can curdle into corporate bad. I'm talking about Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Plastic – something I'm very concerned about. That implicates Big Beverage, the Coca-Colas of the world, the plastic, the fossil fuel industry, that has a responsibility to take care of the crap they put out there. Not to mention the downstream health effects. So, you need to look at it all, and we don't have claim to the answers writ large, but we take on initiatives where there's bounds and outcomes that we can point to. ROB: Right. Sounds like you've got a lot of work to do, is what it sounds like. ROBIN: There's no shortage of work for all of us to do. ROB: That's right. ROBIN: I guess it may sound kind of schoolmarm-ish, but I really believe that – we talk about the experience economy and this and that economy; what we need right now is the responsibility economy. It's time for grownups to be grown up. ROB: Robin, you did mention the genesis of the firm. Let's talk for a moment, though, about the pre-genesis of the firm. How did you decide to start in the first place? You've mentioned the inspiration, you've mentioned the book, but what made you jump off the cliff and start Citizen Group in the first place, coming from where you were? It's not always the easiest way to live. ROBIN: No, it was a reckoning, but it was a convergence that I'm really grateful for. My story was I came up as a copywriter, a writer. Came out of journalism, music. Went into advertising and had the privilege to work at some excellent shops – Hal Riney here in San Francisco and ChiatDay. As a writer and creative director, learning the potency of storytelling, visually and verbally, in short form commercials, and even pre-internet, before we had branded content – but it was still getting you to read the printed page, telling a story on television. I had done a lot of work since the 1980s when I was in New York at ChiatDay with Amnesty International, a leading human rights organization. I got exposed to Amnesty's work because of the rock events they were putting on at the time – the likes of Springsteen and Sting and Peter Gabriel doing world tours, promoting this concept of human rights. As a twenty-something, I didn't know from human rights that we have human rights, and there's 30 of them that are articulated in the International (sic., Universal) Declaration of Human Rights created after World War II. It really struck me. I continued to do work on behalf of Amnesty and other NGOs, and I realized that two economies were operating. There was the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around. Half a million for a 30-second spot was not an uncommon thing at that time. And you might have $15k to put against creating a PSA on behalf of a nonprofit org. Really two different economies. And what was more important just didn't follow in terms of where we place our value. The Citizen Brand book really said there's a convergence going on here. Like I said, I had no idea that a few years later, the rise of social media would accelerate it to such a degree that companies had to walk their talk. They couldn't simply put on a corporate mirage and pretend everything was okay; people were going to look more closely at their practices and interrogate, in a healthy way. And that created the impetus for what we see more of today. ROB: You've been doing this thing for a little while. What are some of the lessons you've learned in the process of building the firm? What are some things you might go back and tell yourself to do differently if you had that chance to talk to yourself? ROBIN: Lessons learned. I might've applied more focus to social impact earlier, even though I've been doing it for a while now. I think about years – I won't say wasted. They were not wasted. Great experiences, and learning the craft of advertising is part of my skillset. But having the lightbulb go off sooner in terms of applying more of my working years to making a difference in terms of social outcome is something that if I could rewind the clock, I would put more years in that quadrant than the fun and games I had when I was youthful and indiscreet. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] You wouldn't have been as youthful and indiscreet if you had done otherwise. But I hear you. There's those corners we turn where we realize in some way or another – we get more serious; we discover a path that we can run well on, and we certainly wish we had found it sooner, had started that impact sooner, because we get so much better as we keep going. So I completely understand that. As we mentioned at the top, you are a man of many talents and many thoughts and many ideas. Something that I wasn't really aware of that you mentioned was the Solar AquaGrid. Tell us about that. I don't think those words naturally go together in most people's minds, so unpack this for us. What's going on here? It's intriguing but momentarily confusing, and I think it'll all make sense through your words. ROBIN: Yeah. One of my closest friends and dearest collaborators, Jordan Harris, we've done a lot of work together for Rock the Boat and other social causes in relation to promoting the rise of EVs, the EV revolution. It was his genesis – we both travel up and down the state, from Northern California to Southern California, seeing these open aqueducts that convey our water, and year on year, the increasing drought we have here in California. It got him scratching his head because he lives part of his time in France, where the canals are tree-shaded. They're tree-lined and shaded canals, whereas here our canals are open and exposed, and we couldn't help but think: how much water are we losing each year in terms of evaporative loss? Because heat rises. ROB: How much? ROBIN: Well, we commissioned a study. We started a project first at Citizen to commission a study. We sought out the best researchers we could find, and they're based in UC Merced, which is the home of University of California- UC Solar and UC Water. We commissioned a study that said up to 63 billion gallons of water could be saved annually if all 4,000 miles of California's canal system, aqueduct system, were covered with solar canopies. And many other compounding advantages, because when you cover the canals, you're producing obviously clean energy, renewable energy that can be used locally by the communities. We're going to need a lot more renewable energy on tap if we are going to shift towards an EV-driven economy. And then there's the avoided land costs, because rather than taking working lands, farmlands, to put solar farms, solar arrays, why not have these existing aqueducts, these existing utility corridors do double duty for us? The more we got into it, we discovered that there can be reduced maintenance costs because the solar shade over the open canals, the open rivers, reduces aquatic weed growth. So there's less dredging up of the algae underneath. And it has waterfall implications, rather than dumping more chemicals into the water. Long story not so short, one thing led to another and we started to examine holistically all of the potential advantages of such deployments. We developed a company, a spinoff that is called Solar AquaGrid, where we're consulting with the state and working directly with irrigation districts – most notably with Turlock Irrigation District in the Central Valley – planning the first demonstration project. We were successful in getting state funds to do pilot. So we expect to break ground in the fall. I'm quite excited about that because now we can really put these premises to the test. The whole idea is to study in order to scale, because you only gain the advantages of this idea, a big idea, a rather obvious idea – we weren't the first to come up with it – but now we're on a path where we are very fortunate to be able to study and build on the findings. ROB: California is a big state, lots of people, lots of opinions; are there any particular groups you're concerned about having concerns about this? Are there impacts on wildlife? Are there impacts on other things that people would worry about? It probably can be mitigated, probably a net positive, but what's the group that's going to fret about these? ROBIN: We talk about that a lot. We are inviting naysayers to come with their questions because the whole purpose is to interrogate this proposition and learn, where are there holes? We want to be mindful not to replace one problem and create others. That's not our intention. We set Solar AquaGrid up as a for-benefit company that is predicated on public, private, academic cooperation. To that end, you raised the issue of wildlife; we have enlisted Audubon Society as a research partner because we do want to learn, what are the effects, the unforeseen potential consequences of covering large swaths of the canal? So we're going to learn all this. If you want to do another podcast in about – call it 24 or 36 months, we'll have more to talk about. ROB: That'll be fascinating. The next thing that comes to my mind also is, you talked about France, you talked about their waterways. You get into some interesting questions. They have waterways. They're tree-shaded, so you could cover them with solar panels, but the trees are going to make not as much solar. Is it potentially beneficial enough to where you take down trees to put the solar over it? Because the trees are there, they keep it shaded somewhat, but it's still uncovered. It's still evaporative. ROBIN: Beautiful. There's beauty in complexity. These are the questions in terms of net positives and net losses regarding, in that case, biodiversity. By the way, we here in the U.S. are not the first to deploy solar arrays over canals. It was first done in Gujrat, India, where there are projects we've actually gone to school on and have learned from those past deployments – both what to do and what not to do. ROB: That's fascinating. We have a business partner whose primary office is directly in Gujrat, so I am familiar with it. I have looked at it. In their case, they chose to set up there because what I've learned is that India's all one time zone, and Gujrat is the farthest west you can get, just about, so you get the best overlap with the U.S. if you're there. So that was interesting. We ended up alongside an outsource team, and then we started asking why they were there, and that turns out to be the why. ROBIN: I did not know that. That's cool. ROB: I imagine the same thing applies to – I think China's also on one time, so who knows where that leads. But speaking to your journey, speaking to Citizen Group, speaking to the type of work that you do – we've talked about some things already that you're looking forward to, but what's coming up for Citizen Group? What's coming up for the type of work you do that is exciting for you? What else is next, beyond what we've already spoken about? ROBIN: It's the range of projects, the diversity of them, that makes it fun. Challenging and fun. There's so many ways to make impact, and there's new ideas to think about every day. But one of the projects that has been exciting this spring is in the area of – it goes by another acronym, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The sports apparel retailer Lids has developed an initiative to recognize and honor the history of the early Black leagues: the Negro Baseball League, the original Harlem Globetrotters, what was called the Black Fives; before there was the NBA, there were the Black Fives. These were leagues and teams in the era of racial segregation. These are the players that invented the modern game. In fact, the name of the campaign that we've developed is called “They Gave Us Game.” It's been a blast because I'm a sports fan, particularly basketball, and going back, the whole tree of influences in terms of – much like music, how every generation is influenced by the generation previous, and how the moves and skills developed in one era that proved successful and now you can see in the game of our players today. That's been fun. So they've come up with this apparel collection called They Gave Us Game. We've also been working in the area of services for those among us who are aging. Which is all of us, right? But there are more Americans that are living longer, and as a result, there's more services available that most of us don't necessarily recognize the variety of caregiving and expert services. So we've been working with a group called Leading Age to create a campaign called Keep Leading Life that showcases the range of services available to people. ROB: Got it. We'll look forward to those things as well. Robin, when people want to find and connect with you and Citizen Group, where should they go to find you? ROBIN: We have a website. It's called citizengroup.com. ROB: That's a good website. That's easy to remember. Very appropriate. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for all the work you're doing for all of us, and for sharing a little bit about it along the way. Grateful to hear your journey. ROBIN: Thanks for your interest. It was fun talking to you. ROB: Excellent. Have a wonderful day. Take care. ROBIN: Take care. Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education. Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. He studies the role of social ties, organizations, and politics in the interplay between financiers, other elites, and subordinate social groups. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, The Review of Financial Studies, Socius, Sociology Compass, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Best of Insight 2022. Book “Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World's Largest Sex Trafficker.” Missing indigenous women crisis in Northern California's Lost Coast. Sacramento County is a hot spot for new HIV infections in the United States. Today's Guests Prosecutor Maggy Krell discusses her new book, “Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World's Largest Sex Trafficker,” which explains the misunderstandings of human trafficking and how social media and the internet make it more difficult to track and prosecute. Dr. Blythe George, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced, member of the Yurok Tribe and research partner for the “I will see you again in a good way” project on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit peoples, discusses a missing women crisis in Northern California's Lost Coast. Jacob Bradley-Rowe, Executive Director of the non-profit Sunburst Projects, discusses new grant funding for HIV and STD testing in Sacramento County, which is one of 40 hot spots for new HIV infections in the United States.

Join us for an illuminating conversation with Dr. Kit Myers, Hong Kong transracial adoptee, father of two daughters, police abolition activist, and an old adoptee camp counselor friend. Kit would have been your favorite P.E. teacher, but he opted to immerse himself in academic studies, coming out on the other side as current Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced. We discuss Kit's process in becoming a professor, teaching his daughters about valuing love, anger and their mixed Hmong and Chinese American identities, the influence that fetal microchimerism had on his desire to continue his birth family search, and his research on the inherent love and violence infused in the the act and industry of adoption. You can find Kit on Twitter @MyersKit and follow his police abolition work at #AbolitionMay.  Kit Myers BioKit was adopted from Hong Kong to Oregon when he was three years old. He enjoys family time, nature, being active, and eating delicious food. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Kit received his doctorate and master's degrees from the University of California, San Diego in ethnic studies and his bachelor's degree in ethnic studies and journalism from the University of Oregon. Prior to his current position, he was a chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at UC Merced. His research examines love and violence in adoption, family, and kinship formations specifically in the ways that they intersect with race, gender, sexuality, immigration, citizenship, nation, and indigenous sovereignty. Kit has published articles in Adoption Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Adoption & Culture, and Critical Discourse Studies as well as co-edited a special issue on adoption and pedagogy. He serves as an executive committee member of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture and served on the steering committee for the Society of Adoptee Professionals of Color in Adoption. He has also worked with the Adoption Museum Project and three summers at a camp for transnational and transracial adoptees. Kit is also passionate about police abolition, publishing online articles and working with faculty to get cops off campus. You can visit his website (ucmerced.academia.edu/KitMyers) for more information on his research. Co-Hosts: Nari Baker & Robyn ParkMusic: Mike Marlatt & Paul GulledgeEditing: Federico aka mixinghacksArtwork: Dalhe KimListen on: iTunes & SpotifyFollow us Instagram: @laboroflovepodcastDonate on Venmo: @laboroflovepodcast

Thanks for listening!  Please support the Rob Skinner Podcast on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/robskinner. I recently sat down with John and Jan Oakes to talk about their planting a new church in Merced, California.  Merced is the home of a new University of California that is predicted to become the largest of the UC campuses.  Find out more about this new planting on the Rob Skinner Podcast!

The first episode of Season 3 is here!! In this premiere episode, I am interviewing Yvonne Hernandez - a Salvadorian-American college graduate from UC Merced and a current congressional intern. Yvonne has had such an interesting trajectory- from Compton to Capitol Hill - In this episode, Yvonne will talk about the challenges, lessons, and transitions in her journey that led to her becoming the empathetic, patient, and determined woman that she is today. Tune in to our conversation and get ready to laugh, cry, and learn. Also, make sure to stick around till the end to hear a life update on Yvonne that you won't want to miss!

Help the UC Campuses see YOU through your college app statements known as PIQ's. We don't get one but two college representatives from the famous University of California system. They bring their perspectives, experiences and wisdom on what a student do and not to do on their statements on the UC college application. But also remind students how GPA's and courses play a big part but just as important is what you do outside of the classroom, how you explain why you couldn't and why you did. They emphasize using your voice so they can hear you and yes even see you. Now it is time to listen to them....

Today on the Dough Roller Money Podcast we are talking to Ish Verduzco! He's the author of How Successful People Get Ish Done, and the host of the Getting Ish Done podcast.  In his early-to-mid 20s Ish became interested in personal development and started writing and researching his first book How Successful People Get Ish Done. With the creation and rise of NFT's in the last 2 years, Ish is currently in the process of creating an NFT playbook for those who want to start investing with NFTs. This year, Ish was named one of Hispanic Executive's 30 under 30 for 2021, and he gave the 2020 commencement speech at his alma mater, UC Merced. He currently hosts the podcast Getting Ish Done, and is only going up from there! In this episode Rob and Ish talk about the world of investing and NFTs. Ish shares how he began his journey in NTFs and how he has approached this space so far. He tells us his opinion on how he thinks crypto and NFTs can be used in the future and what we can expect from it's evolution. We are also able to get a glimpse into how he created his book and how making it into an NFTs is revolutionary.  If you want an insider's look into the world of NFTs this episode is for you!      Calls to Action:    Follow Dough Roller on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dough-roller/ Follow Dough Roller on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doughrollermoney/ Follow Dough Roller on Twitter: https://twitter.com/doughroller Check out the Dough Roller website and blog: https://www.doughroller.net/   Timestamps:   00:00 - Introduction to Ish Verduzco 01:43 - Ish talks about his background and an overview of his career 05:13 - He share about his framework and how it's worked for him overtime 08:38 - Ish's advice on how to tackle his framework 11:57 - He shares about his approach to investing and how he got started 14:58 - He explains how he has invested his 401K 15:53 - What Ish's crypto and NFT portfolio currently looks like 16:47 - In his on words Ish explains what an NFT is and his approach to the space18:38 - Ish breaks down how his book is also an NFT and why this is so special 25:39 - He shares about the NFTs he has purchased as investments and how he estimates their value 31:15 - How he goes to purchase NFTs and where he likes to keep them once purchased 33:23 - Ish shares his view on the longevity of NFTs and what can NFTs actually solve for us 41:04 - How Ish thinks the future will look like if decentralized finance becomes the norm 44:57 - Ish share where he invests his crypto and his reasoning behind it 47:55 - How Ish thinks crypto and NFTs will perform in the future when the economy run out of money 49:58 - Where to follow Ish and all of his endeavors  Mentioned in the Episode:   Buy Ish's book: https://www.ishverduzco.com/book  Visit Ish's Website: https://www.ishverduzco.com/  Listen to Ish's Podcast: https://www.ishverduzco.com/podcast  Follow Ish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishverduzco/  Follow Ish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ishverduzco/  Follow Ish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ishverduzco  

On Episode 11 of the TID Water & Power Podcast we sit down with TID's Josh Weimer to discuss the Project Nexus, the District's solar panels over canals project.In February, TID announced Project Nexus, a pilot project to install 5 megawatts of solar panel canopies over our existing irrigation canals – the first project of its kind in the nation. The $20 million project, which is funded by the California Department of Water Resources, will not only benefit TID, but if successful, could become a template with potential to be replicated elsewhere in the state to help California achieve its water and energy goals.On this episode we discuss discuss the benefits of Project Nexus, how TID became the agency to pilot the project, and how the District plans on implementing this unique project. Let's get social!Facebook: @TurlockIDInstagram: @TurlockIDTwitter: @TurlockIDLinkedIn: /company/turlockidFind out more about TID at https://www.TID.org/podcast.