SoCal Minds

Timely policy proposals in wake of gay teen suicide cases

From UCLA, ALOUD & Pomona

As outrage grows over the bullying of gay teens that has ended, just in recent weeks, with the highly publicized suicides of a Rutgers freshman, an Indiana high schooler and a Houston middle schooler, perhaps students, parents, educators and policy-makers finally will confront the ugly clime and actions that brutalize not just homosexuals but also any and too many youngsters shunned as 'others.' And for timely suggestions on the topic, researchers in Westwood have just issued proposals to keep safer lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered kids, with co-author Sheila James Kuehl bringing her own unique expertise to the work as the first openly gay or lesbian to be elected to the California Legislature. The Bruin researchers say that, while the publicized cases of bullying and suicides may be extreme, taunting and harassment of LGBT kids is too sadly common and even encouraged by adults, including teachers and principles. The courts, however, in examining how horrific the conditions for harassed youngsters can be, have shown little tolerance for bias in schools. Besides providing a model code and anti-bias legislation, the researchers emphasize points worth noting: fostering a tolerant, compassionate atmosphere in the schools benefits everyone there, not just LGBT kids; teaching kids in grades K-12 about tough issues involving sexuality needs to be done with sensitivity and keen age-awareness; LGBT teens may face further social complications due to race and gender; and, finally, those extra-curricular activities play a huge, crucial role in young lives. Translation: the jocks and athletics must be brought into the 21st century, too. 

In Westwood, ideas on how to keep safe LGBT kids in grades K-12

What does science say on why kids grow up straight, gay or bisexual?

It's a debate eternal, though a body of knowledge continues to build: Is being gay a matter of nature or nuture? Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, in a free, public chat (reservations required), will discuss with Trojan neroscientist Larry Swanson, the state of science on the topic of what makes children grow up to be straight, bisexual or gay. Among the topics that they will tackle will be the latest advances in sexuality and orientation studies in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and more.

Click here for more info, to RSVP for chat with neuroscientist Simon LeVay

Online, too, a quest to preserve some civility in posted comments

Lest anyone think that incivility rears its ugly head in rare instance only, researchers in Pomona have worked with the corporate giant Yahoo to develop software to detect and deal with nattering nabobs of stupidity who post hostile comments online. There's an art, of course, to discerning robust, worthy debate and discussion and the nefarious, slamming of web trolls. But with the torrent of material that goes up and down online all through the 24/7/365 cyber cycle, the people who care about allowing the web to be something other than a bathroom wall need machine help or so it seems.

In Pomona, a search for ways to keep online comments from going far off track

Click here to read fuller Scientific American report on 'sentiment sensing' software

Collegians dig in to help kids grow, eat greener, healthier

From Cal Poly Pomona & Pomona

As any parent can attest, what big sis and brother do has a profound effect on younger siblings. So it will be interesting to see whether some environmental, social justice, health and nutrition ideas cultivated by collegians in both a public and private campus in Pomona take root among younger students after some digging in and exposure. Specifically, can junior and senior high kids really get the idea of growing and eating their own better foods by learning from collegians such as senior Lissette Fitoria (shown at right) about community gardens and healthy diets? Will they see both the benefits of giving up greasy cheeseburgers and the great taste of fresh onions, lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, chives, peaches, pomegranates, fennel, kale, squash, cabbage, grapes, guavas and strawberries? The Broncos' push to teach younger kids about growing and good eating comes as part of an academic endeavor, while for the private school Sagehens, a push to create a summer food and farming internship for area high schoolers was both a volunteer and grant- and school-supported project that underscored ideas on food, environmental and social justice for preps.

Gardens aim to help seed smarter eating, living ideas for junior, senior high schoolers

Summer high school internships aim to cultivate connections between food, ecology, social justice

A look at how academic 'other half' vacations, returns

From Pomona & Cal Poly Pomona

Oh, the lush life of academia: According to popular lore, it's not just summertime when the living is easy for those who teach in colleges and universities. But out in Pomona, a professor makes an argument that the 'life of the mind' comes with far fewer respites and cruises than most would imagine and the school riffs off that notion to give all the rest of us working stiffs a reading on what faculty do with their summer 'vacations,' such as donning mosquito protection, as did Prof. Nina Karnovksy (shown at left) for her Arctic ornithological research. Still, the lure of making a living in an intellectual fashion clearly has powerful pull, as illustrated, too, out in Pomona, where a number of Broncos have returned to what must be a pretty OK corral. The school posts a nice read on a selection of one-time students like Leslie Butler (shown at right) who have gone on to become faculty.

Do professors really get vacations and respites from lives of the mind?

Hey, professor, how long have you really been hangin' around this place? 

Chew on this: eating 'whole' foods burns more calories

From Pomona

'Whole foods' take a whole lot more body energy to digest than do comparable meals of heavily processed eats, researchers in Pomona have found, providing, they say, a potential pretty direct caloric explanation for an explosion in obesity rates in the U.S. They based their findings on experiments in which subjects ate either cheddar on multigrain bread in one version of a cheese sandwich or if they gulped down processed cheese on white bread; both meals had comparable calorie, protein, carbohydrate and fat make up. The processed chow, however, took half as much energy for test subjects six hours later to digest than did the whole food options. The theory: those fewer calories expended add up over time, contributing to weight gain by those with more sedentary digestive systems and who cram down lots and lots of processed foods.

Could the ease in which 'processed' foods get digested contribute to obesity?

Campuses take on Haiti relief, volcanoes, mercy

From UCSB, Pomona & Loyola Marymount

Across the region, campuses have taken on disaster release, the calamitous potential power of nature and a quality that may be far too strained in public life:

• In Santa Barbara, the UC system's response to the disastrous Haitian earthquake and its nightmarish, unending aftermath will be headquartered at the Center for Black Studies Research, which says that it is, after expertise in big metropolitan enclaves in Miami and Boston, one of the premier sites with scholarly knowledge about Haiti. Concerned parties from throughout the UC system conducted a system on this campus in the spring and set up a reconstruction organization and plans to work with academic counterparts, as well as government, nonprofit and community groups in Haiti to provide the university's top-flight expertise in key areas such as agriculture, arts and culture, education, economics, education, engineering and architecture.

In Santa Barbara, a headquarters for UC system's Haiti reconstruction efforts

Click here for more info on UC Haiti relief

• In Pomona, there's talk about the timely release of a scholarly tome that takes on mountains that blow up beneath us. Richard Hazlett, a geology and environmental analsis prof, got out his new text, 'Volcanoes: Global Perspectives,' just in time for huge swaths of the planet to be plunged into an air travel mess caused by the eruption of that wickedly named Icelandic volcano. For Hazlett, whose childhood fascination was piqued by tales of Vesuvius and Pompeii, an initial experience with a summer volcanic eruption in Hawaii since has been followed with eyewitness volcanology scholarship in Galanggung for a grey volcano, Kilauea for a red one and sightings in Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Aleutians, Italy, Kamchatka, Iceland and mainland Alaska. His book also discusses legendary explosions in Krakatoa and Santorini. The prof says he's not a thrill-seeker and concedes that to scrutinize the awe-inspiring power of volcano means taking risks.

From Pomona, a timely glimpse into global awe of volcanoes, eruptions

• In Westchester, a prof and his academic partner in Iowa have decided to delve into the fascinating question about a key happening at a crucial intersection of religion, philosophy and politics. When resources get scarce, the public's scared and policy making gets particularly rough in areas such as punishment for juveniles, amnesty for immigrants, reparation for much harmed people such as slaves or truth telling and reconciliation after large scale chaos and killing in a society, must the quality of mercy be strained, the profs ask? Besides considering this topic in classes they conduct, they're hard at work on a book, tentatively titled, 'The Death of Mercy,' which examines its role in public life.

In Westchester, seeing role for mercy at the intersection of politics, religion and philosophy

A higher-ed peoloton offers a look-see at SoCal minds

From Oxy

Phew, it's summer and an ostensible pause in the seasons of anxiety for collegiate aspirants. But some work never ends, and, for some fun-seeking college counselors, a work-vacation offers an opportunity to see up-close what's on SoCal Minds via a rolling, 400-mile tour of regional campuses. The folks over in Eagle Rock are hosting a stop on the bicyclist look-see, a grownups' peloton aimed at getting a personal-professional view of what's new at spots like the Claremont collective, the universities of Redlands and LaVerne, Oxy, Caltech. LMU and USC. So what, in hyper-conscious fashion, should the schools know about what the 19 visiting pros from 13 states have to say about them as they undergo their seventh annual cycling whistle-stop tour of schools? Because this is the age of blogging, the East Coast Gray Lady offers a big forum for the observations of group members...

College counselors cycling 400 miles in tour of area campuses 

Click here for NYT 'Choice' blog, with dispatches from biking counselors

Rocks, baby books, recordings: Oh, the stories they tell

From the Autry, UCLA & Pomona

Oh, the things that get collected, and, oh, my, what they tell us about ourselves:

• In Griffith Park, curators have combined the best of modernity and the recent past to give online audiences an earful. This may be the summer of Wagner and his Ring cycle with that masterwork dominating the cultural scene with its Los Angeles Opera performances and all the associated attention from seemingly every institution in town. But hearken back to a time when Los Angeles pioneer Charles Lummis still was around and inviting all kinds of swells to his Highland Park home and it is now possible to catch an online listen to an opera performance from the turn of the century. The wax cylinder recording is part of a cyber exhibit spotlighting some of the more than 900 captured rarities, most Native American or California Latino folk songs.

In Griffith Park, divas, Native American and Hispanic folk artists sing out from the past

Click here for Autry's online Opera Collection spotlight

• In Westwood, curators at the Bruin biomedical library looked twice at a 2003 donation from Barbara Rootenberg, an antiquarian bookseller with a specialty in the history of medicine. Included in her gift was the first of what would become a major collection of baby books, those parental ledgers, often only partially filled out, that were supposed to let moms and dads take note of and even to collect bits from key developmental moments of their growing little darlings' lives. The tomes, which the folks in Westwood found few collecting, and, thus, were able fast to amass more than 1,000 key volumes with relatively little fuss, already have given researchers important historical insights into everything from public health to advertising, marketing , art and sociology.

In Westwood, going ga-ga over historical bits contained in baby books

• In Pomona, researchers have combed piles of loose rocks hoping to unearth more surprising history about the heretofore unknown sophistication of Chumash Indian civilization on the Channel Islands, a legacy that now, perhaps, has a slightly more precarious existence even with the protections offered because the area is a federal park. The anthropologists always fear that campers and tourists unwittingly may disturb important archeological sites, if only because they root around and drag stuff off, sometimes just to show park rangers and to ask if the objects they find have any significance. Alas, that can destroy key evidence as to what experts are learning already about the Chumash and particularly their lives on Santa Cruz Island. A Pomona prof says the Native people, in the pre-Colombian era, played a huge role as regional, water-borne merchants. They became exceptionally savvy in their exchanges and those rocks on the isle, a flint-like substance called chert, became important for a reason: They were employed as drills and other tools, so the Chumash could work olivella shells from island beaches into an early currency; Santa Cruz, thus, was once an island mint -- and some of the Native people amassed real wealth as they measured it in days of yore, the prof says.

From Pomona, new finds about the trading, wealth of Channel Island Chumash

A spotlight on campus comedy, vocalism, avant-garde art

From Loyola Marymount, Pepperdine & Pomona

Pack together a bunch of lively, smart, talented young people for the purpose of learning and who knows how entertaining it all can turn out to be?

• Who, for example, would have figured that Westchester can be a barrel of laughs? There's something hilarious about the Lions because a team of them have gotten to the finals of a televised, internet-based national comedy competition. They'll battle against students from Emerson College, the University of Florida and Xavier University after besting competitors from USC, USF and UC Berkeley.

• Meantime, in shades of the popular television show 'Glee,' singers and pianists from across the country are flocking to Malibu to participate in a month-long program, 'Breaking the Song Barrier,' which is what organizers have dubbed this year's version of the annual 'Song Fest' vocal training program. Participants will put on a number of concerts, and, yes, it's a mostly classical not a pop-oriented gig.

• Finally, the folks in Claremont have posted a magazine piece previewing a fall exhibit that tries to track back on what went down so It Happened at Pomona in the 1960s and '70s when a sleepy suburban campus suddenly became a cauldron of creativity for then young conceptual, light and space and performance artists. They went on to be now recognized art stars, including James Turrell, Peter Shelton, Chris Burden, Michael Asher, Judy Chicago, Ed Moses, Allen Ruppersberg, William Wegman and Wolfgang Stoerchle. A Getty grant underwrites the exploration how this scene flourished and vanished. It has something to do with an artist taking clothes off in a display too risque for the conservative community of the day.   

A focus on college 'hook-ups,' abused women GIs

From Pomona & ALOUD

Just how divergent are the paths for young people in America today -- or are they more similar than is apparent -- will be illustrated in two, free, open and public conversations that will occur in Claremont and in downtown on Tuesday. At the suburban college at 4:15 in the afternoon, a panel of academic experts will talk, mostly with students, about the 'hook up culture' and why young people today don't date. They'll investigate how and why contemporary social mores have shifted so it is seen as acceptable, if maybe not desirable, to drink, socialize, satisfy one's sexual drives but not necessarily to get any deeper into relationships of duration, affection or substance. At the Central Library at 7 in the evening, journalist Helen Benedict (shown at left), the author of 10 tomes, will talk about the shocking, abusive experiences of young women who serve in the U.S. military, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Isolated by the reality that they make up only about a tenth of the nation's fighting forces, young female soldiers are reporting scandalous numbers of rapes and sexual assaults, which have only grown as their numbers have increased in the military; some statistics show that as many as 71% of those women veterans seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder said they were raped while in the military. Space is limited for Benedict's chat with author-moderator Deanne Stillman and reservations are required.

At Pomona, a panel discussion on 'The Hook-Up Culture: Why We Don't Date'

Click here for more info, to RSVP for talk on 'Private War of Women Serving in Iraq'

Bah, which schools are happy, stressful, got buzz?

From Claremont McKenna, Pomona & UCLA

What's with the zeitgeist in Claremont? Or maybe the question should be, What's with the American fascination about ratings, rankings and lists -- aside from the media manufactured attention grabbing that these gigs generate? Just in time for the academics to boast about or belittle the various annual ratings and rankings by certain publications, there are a couple of cyber lists that are worth a mention for Friday water-cooler fodder. Says the Daily Beast, based on criteria that barely eke beyond the risible, Southern California campuses, especially those out in Claremont, are among the Happiest, while others are the most Stressed Out. Let's cut to the chase: Claremont McKenna tops the bliss list, followed by Harvard, Pomona, Harvey Mudd and Scripps, with Caltech (8), Oxy (12), UCLA (13), UCI (16), Pitzer (22), UCSB (28) and USC (31) following. On the other hand, the high anxiety crowd is said to be topped by Stanford, Columbia and MIT, with Caltech (9), USC (18), UCLA (30) and UCSB (41) following. Not quite sure of what to make of another set of measures that are said to tap the 'buzz' detectable online, in social media and other ways about schools, though Pomona shows up No. 6 on this list, which also mentions Oxy (45), Claremont McKenna (66), Harvey Mudd (80), Pitzer (92) and Scripps (93), allegedly following the tops of Wellsely, Williams, Colorado College and Oberlin; among the universities, UCLA hits this list at No. 14. And while deciding what to make about the U.S. News & World Report and other such list-mania that's popping up, well, a good dose of perspective from the Bruins on the topic, put together by the always readable Claudia Luther. By the way, we're not linking here to every school's post on this topic, just a sample few.

In Claremont, just one of the kvelling reports on the Happiness list 

From Pomona, a favorable nod from monitor of the 'net 'buzz' about schools

Click here to see the 'Beast' list of Happy schools

Click here for the 'Beast' list of Stressful campuses

Bruins put magazine, publications' school ratings in perspective