A Sampling of Clips for August 2, 2011

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

How Much Do Solar Panels Boost Home Sale Prices?
Forbes, Aug. 1  -- Add a new steel front door to your house and you’ll likely recoup the investment if you have to sell. But what about a solar power system? A group of California economists looked at that question in a recent study and found that on average, homeowners in California who install photovoltaic solar panels to power their homes can recover nearly all the investment costs if they move–and that’s on top of the annual energy savings. The solar study has big implications for state and federal policy. “Are subsidies necessary if the value is already there?” asks Joshua Graff Zivin, one of the co-authors and an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “It doesn’t mean there is no role, but we don’t see the government in the business of subsidizing people to remodel their kitchens,” he says. More

Don’t Copycat an Unpopular Boss’s Behavior, Study Reminds
MSNBC, Aug. 1 -- Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but mindless mimicry can also make you look like a jerk. That’s the gist of a new study by University of California, San Diego researchers on empathetic body language that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. In social situations, people tend to mirror one another as an unconscious show of rapport. Find yourself on a successful first date, for example, and you will often lean in at the same times during conversation. And though most mirroring is done unintentionally, some adopt it as a subtle psychological strategy for closing sales and acing big job interviews. That said, clueless copycatting may be costly. Piotr Winkielman and Liam Kavanagh of the UC San Diego psychology department and Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland of the school’s philosophy department examined ways in which mimicking the wrong person suggests low social IQ. More

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Gordon Puts Flash into Data Intensive Supercomputing
Bio IT World, Aug. 2, 2011—A new supercomputer at the University of California San Diego Supercomputer Center named Gordon, featuring a quarter of a petabyte of flash memory (hence the name) and which has been dubbed “the world’s largest thumb drive,” earned raves from Larry Smarr in a wide-ranging talk about the future management of life sciences data. Smarr has spent ten years building the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)—a joint program between the UCSD and UC Irvine . Speaking at CHI’s XGen Congress, Smarr urged organizations and universities to radically retool their approaches to computing infrastructure to facilitate collaboration, data sharing, telecommunication, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. More

Momentum Builds to Limit CSU Salaries
SignOnSanDiego, Aug. 1 -- The decision to pay San Diego State University’s new president $400,000 annually — 33 percent more than his predecessor earned — has sparked a backlash that could lead to limits on the autonomy of the California State University system. Gov. Jerry Brown, who publicly chided CSU trustees for “ever-increasing pay packages” even before they voted to approve the salary of SDSU President Elliot Hirshman, continues to speak out. And at least three legislators are proposing limits on such pay. (Mentions potential impact of controversy on UC San Diego.) More

Obesity in the Young Driving Surge in Global Type 2 Diabetes
San Diego Union-Tribune, Aug. 2 -- Diabetes is no longer a problem primarily of overweight, insulin-resistant Americans. In just two decades, the number of people in the world with diabetes has rocketed from 30 million to 285 million, with the latter number projected to increase another 60 percent by 2030.  We asked Dr. Jerrold Olefsky, a professor of medicine and longtime diabetes researcher at the University of California San Diego, to talk about why the disease has gone global and what can be done. More

UC System Feeds the Diversity Beast
North County Times, Column, Aug. 1 -- Responding to a recent $150 million reduction in funding for the University of California system, UC's vice president for budget and capital resources, Patrick Lenz, insisted that the state's campuses and offices have already "cut to the bone." Not exactly. Despite "draconian" cuts that professional education bureaucrats are paid to lament, campuses throughout the UC system obviously have enough dough to fund and even expand a gargantuan diversity establishment.  As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute notes, diversity-related positions not only have "been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing." A prime example is a new vice chancellor position for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UC San Diego. More

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