A Sampling of Clips for Aug. 11, 2010

* UCSD faculty and staff may obtain a copy of an article by e-mailing the University Communications Office

How to Debate Ahmadinejad
Foreign Policy, Aug. 10 -- Last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly challenged U.S. President Barack Obama to a face-to-face televised debate on solving the world's problems. For understandable reasons, the White House quickly dismissed the invitation, just as President George W. Bush did with a similar offer in 2006. But Ahmadinejad's gambit is a tantalizing opportunity to imagine how Obama's rhetorical abilities might stand up in a direct competition with his Iranian counterpart. (Written by Babak Rahimi, who is on the UC San Diego faculty) More

Russia Fires Cause "Brown Cloud," May Hit Arctic
Reuters, Aug. 11 -- Smoke from forest fires smothering Moscow adds to health problems of "brown clouds" from Asia to the Amazon and Russian soot may stoke global warming by hastening a thaw of Arctic ice, environmental experts say. "Health effects of such clouds are huge," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, chair of a United Nations Environment Program study of "brown clouds" blamed for dimming sunlight in cities such as Beijing or New Delhi and hitting crop growth in Asia. Ramanathan is on the UC San Diego faculty. More

Similar story in
The Independent, U.K.

Temperature Increases Damage Rice Yields
Nature, Aug. 10 -- Rising global temperatures are slashing rice production in many parts of Asia, including India and the Philippines, UC San Diego scientists have found. Over 0.5 billion of the world’s poorest people depend on rice as their staple food. But as temperatures have warmed over the past 25 years, growth rates of rice yields have fallen by 10-20% in Asia, which produces the lion’s share of the world’s rice. More

Similar story in
Forbes

A Sidewalk Disappearing Act
MIT Technology Review, Aug. 11 -- In 2008, responding to privacy concerns, Google started to blur the faces of people caught by car-mounted cameras and shown in its Google Street View mapping service. Researchers at UC San Diego believe they have now come up with a better solution--software that automatically removes any trace that a person was in a scene. More

Similar story in
PC World

Book Review: 'Dismantling the Empire' by Chalmers Johnson
Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11 -- Chalmers Johnson, now 79 and professor emeritus at UC San Diego, was for many years one of our most distinguished scholars on China and Japan  — head of UC Berkeley's important Center for Chinese Studies and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, which he still serves as president. For some years, he was a consultant on China and Maoism to the Central Intelligence Agency. More recently, he has turned his focus as an eloquent public intellectual to his dismay over U.S. foreign policy during the post-Cold War period and, particularly, to the dangerous consequences of American interventions in the Islamic world. More

The BP Cover-Up
Mother Jones, Aug. 10 -- Though it won't be understood for weeks, the Deepwater Horizon is different from any other spill in human history. The extreme technology used to drill at unprecedented depths lacks the extreme safety equipment and protocols needed to stave off disaster. BP, gambling at the border of controllable engineering, has lost spectacularly in its bid to be the deepest and cheapest driller of them all. (Quotes Lisa Levin, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) More

Similar story in
The New Republic

Why Rainn Wilson Hates LACMA (and Other 'Cell Phone Stories')
Los Angeles Times, Aug. 4 -- Rainn Wilson wants to tell you all the reasons why he hates the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And the museum is happy to help him do it. It’s all part of a project named "Cell Phone Stories," which was launched in May and ends Sept. 6, and conceived by artist and UC San Diego faculty member Steve Fagin at the request of LACMA director Michael Govan. More

Student Survives Congo Attack
San Diego Union-Tribune, Aug. 10 -- A UC San Diego graduate preparing to enter the university’s medical school is safe in the African country of Burundi after surviving a violent robbery Saturday in the Democratic Republic of Congo, his father said Tuesday. Espoir Kyubwa, 23, was preparing to come home after four weeks visiting relatives in his native Congo when a public bus he was riding on was attacked by uniformed men Saturday evening, said Delphin Kyubwa, the young man’s father. More

It's Not Monkey Business
American Libraries Magazine, Aug. 9 -- If by vocation or avocation you’ve come to cherish children’s literature, you’ve no doubt encountered some skepticism about this particular passion. For too many people, children’s books simply don’t merit serious consideration. As Seth Lerer aptly observes in his award-winning Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, “For a long time, what was not literature was the ephemeral, the popular, the feminine, the childish.” Lerer is dean of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego. More

Coming Soon to a Classroom Near You: Robot Teachers?
eSchool News, Aug. 11 -- Many researchers and robotics experts agree that robot teachers are no longer the stuff of science fiction—they’re part of a new workforce designed to lend a helping hand to classroom teachers … whose jobs aren’t in jeopardy any time soon, experts say. Javier Movellan, founder of the UC San Diego Machine Perception Lab, and his team developed RUBI, a robot who works with preschooler. More

USD Says 'Icing' Causes NFL Kickers to Choke
San Diego Union-Tribune, Aug. 10 -- A new study by the University of San Diego says that kickers are less likely to make a field goal in a high pressure situation if the opposing team's coach calls a time out just as they're about to tee things up. The technique is called "icing." The study was done in collaboration with UC San Diego. More

UCSD Surgeons Remove Part of a Patient’s Stomach Through the Mouth
KPBS, Aug. 10 — Surgeons at UC San Diego have performed what they say is the nation's first stomach reduction surgery through the mouth. It's part of an effort to take minimally invasive surgery to another level. In the one-hour procedure, surgeons made five small incisions in the patient's abdomen. Then they removed 80 percent of the patient's stomach through the patient's mouth. More

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