We’re in Berkeley for Parents Weekend, watching Cal and UCLA battle it out on the gridiron. One of the halftime highlights at Cal football games is card stunts. I know, welcome to the 1920s, right? Everyone held up their cards, which were either blue or gold. The cards on the opposite side of the stadium from us spelled out “Memorial Stadium” but we couldn’t see what our own cards spelled. “I hope they say ‘UCLA Sucks,’” I said to my wife standing next to me, but unfortunately loud enough for a nearby husband-and-wife team of Bruin fans to hear me. “Did you really just say that?” the woman asked. “We’re helping.” Meaning that they were holding up their cards to support the card stunt and didn’t deserve to be insulted. When you venture into enemy territory, you have to expect some derision. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: UC Berkeley
Cal 43, UCLA 17
We’re up here in Berkeley for Parents Weekend. I was saying since we arrived that this looks like a winnable game for Cal and couldn’t find one person — student or parent — to agree with me. Cal was 1-4, UCLA was 4-1. Cal fans are conditioned for disappointment. I’m a USC guy and USC fans were the same way in the pre-Pete Carroll era. Fans showed up for games not to cheer on the team but to bemoan another disappointing performance. This is a nice wakeup call for the Bruins. Despite their record and ranking coming into the game, they’re not very good. Read more →
The World’s Greatest University
It’s move-in weekend at UC Berkeley, the world’s greatest university . . . Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is teaching an undergraduate seminar on physics and music this year. How many schools even have Nobel Laureates on the faculty? Of those that do, how many of them teach small classes for freshmen and sophomores? Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, are coasting on their reputations. When’s the last time you heard of an enterpreneur from Dartmouth or Brown or Yale? Stanford is great in engineering and business but limited in other areas. Also, top professors at private schools would rather piss on a spark plug than traffic with undergrads. That said, the University of Southern California football season starts Sept. 1 against Hawaii. The Men of Troy! FIGHT ON FOR OLD ‘SC! OUR MEN FIGHT ON TO VICTORY! Read more →
Ruby on Rails for Rubes
The biggest headache in software development is that most programmers can’t program and don’t want to learn anything. I recently finished up a MOOC called Software Engineering for SaaS, offered by UC Berkeley through Coursera. For a modest investment of a few hours a week for five weeks, I learned some Ruby on Rails — a well-designed platform and a lot of fun to work with — as well as tools like GitHub, Cucumber, RSpec, SimpleCov and Heroku. Over 50,000 students from 150 countries signed up for the class. According to a final email from the professors, about 10,000 students attempted at least one assignment or quiz. Or to look at another way, 80 percent of the students gave up without even trying. Approximately 2,000 students, or 4 percent, completed all four of the assignments and the three quizzes. One of the enrollees who gave up without trying is a… Read more →
Intelligence in the Cloud
IBM Watson, the Jeopardy champion, runs on 90 IBM Power 750 servers, with eight 3.5 GHz cores per server. Currently on Amazon EC2, eight extra large compute instances will cost you $2.40/hour. If you want to run 90 of them, you’re looking at a shade over $200/hour. This brings up a couple of questions: For what tasks could artificial intelligence be as good or better as a highly trained person at $200/hour? What would this mean for society? Thanks to David Patterson at UC Berkeley for bringing this to my attention. Read more →
World Record Paper Airplane Throw
Footnote: The “pilot” (the guy throwing the plane) is Joe Ayoob, who replaced Aaron Rodgers as the quarterback at Cal in 2005. Read more →
Underrepresented Minorities in the UC
The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.” Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t. Ethnicity 2011 Fall African American/Black 130 Mexican American/Chicano 325 Other Hispanic/Latino 150 Native American/Alaskan Native 33 Pacific Islander 11 Chinese 936 Filipino 108 Japanese 68 Korean 250 Other Asian 45 South Asian 324 Vietnamese 142 Read more →
Don’t Check Asian
Asian kids are putting a different race on their college applications to boost their chances of getting into the top schools. Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white. — Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’ – Yahoo! News That’s a rather modest strategy. Identifying yourself as white does give you a little bit of a boost but to really improve the odds, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and check the Black or Hispanic box. Or Eskimo. Eskimos are kind of Asian-looking. Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have… Read more →
Engineering is Serious Business, Says Engineering Major
The dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering expressed support today for a recommendation from a student group that the college create a recruitment and retention plan for women and underrepresented minority students. — California Watch It sounds like the dean might be up for lowering the engineering standards to meet diversity metrics. Bad idea. Engineering is serious business. Also: Preferential treatment by a public institution based on race, sex or ethnicity is prohibited by California law. I’ve got a better and more legal idea: How about if the women and “underrepresented” minority students suck it up and meet the same academic standards as everyone else? Or apply to a different school? If they can’t meet the standards at Berkeley, they might do fine at a less demanding institution like Stanford or UCLA. I’ve attended engineering school myself. We had diversity admits. After one semester, maybe two, they weren’t there… Read more →
Soccer Takes Over Sproul
Bye-Bye, Bevatron
If you drive up the hill to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one thing you can’t help noticing is the large (approx. 125,000 sq.ft.) circular pit where the Bevatron is in its final stages of demolition. The Bevatron, as its name suggests, was used to make beverages. For example, the Bevatron could take enormous quantities of tequila, triple sec and lime juice, smash them together at the speed of light, and produce an excellent batch of margaritas. Wait, what? I’m now being informed that the Bevatron was in fact a particle accelerator put into operation in 1954 and used in the work of multiple Nobel Prize-winning physicists. Bye-bye, Bevatron. Read more →
Diversity Bake Sale Sparks Controversy
Despite massive outcries of protest from campus organizations, the Berkeley College Republicans are adamant in going ahead with their controversial bake sale. The sale — intended as a satirical response to the affirmative action-like SB 185 currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature — will involve baked goods that are priced by race and sex. Under the pricing structure, white students would have to pay $2.00 for a pastry, for example, while Latinos would pay $1.00 and Native Americans would pay $0.25. Women would receive a blanket 25 cent discount. — The Daily Californian I love it! “Massive outcries of protest”! “Controversial bake sale”! The lack of perspective is staggering. It’s okay to favor kids of one race over another in college admissions, just don’t try it with something truly important like the price of a cupcake . . . Read more →
A Dream that No One Has
From today’s Cal vs. Presbyterian preview in The Daily Californian: CeeJay Harris is one of three Californians on the Presbyterian roster. He didn’t dream of playing football as a Blue Hose because that’s not a dream that anyone has . . . Read more →
Look Out for the Blue Hose
My boy texted me this afternoon that one of the starting cornerbacks for the Cal Golden Bears is in a class with him. In a masterpiece of scheduling, the Cal football team plays the Presbyterian Blue Hose this coming Saturday because apparently Bryn Mawr was unavailable. (Presbyterian College is a church-affiliated college of 1,200 students located in Clinton, S.C.) I texted back, “Tell him to look out b/c Presby is coming off a big win vs North Greenville. NORTH GREENVILLE!” Read more →
Move-In Weekend
It’s Sunday night. We moved the boy in yesterday, had dinner with him tonight, and tomorrow morning, we’re going home without him. I’ve had some emotional ups and downs this weekend as I cross the gulf between youth and old age. I almost cried five or six times. I feel great about Berkeley. It’s a college town all the way. Men, women and children are decked out in Cal gear for miles around. We live in Irvine, which also has a UC campus, but it’s not the same atmosphere at all. “That’s because no one wants to go to UC Irvine,” the boy said. I feel good that he already knows some people. His best friend from high school is his dorm roommate. We met a couple of other high school classmates, one at a pizza place and one in the parking lot of the guest house. We met friends… Read more →
What Happened to the Hippies? Where Are They?
On behalf of UC Berkeley we are sending this message to Cal families to update you on recent news regarding the 2011-12 tuition . . . A 9.6 PERCENT TUITION INCREASE!? I THOUGHT YOU WERE A BUNCH OF GODDAMN HIPPIES WHO DON’T CARE ABOUT MONEY! Read more →
Northwood 2011 College Decisions
Unlike highly recruited athletes, kids who are highly recruited academically don’t get to go on TV and turn over hats so everyone knows what college they’re going to. Northwood doesn’t have highly recruited athletes, so there’s a Facebook site where they can check in and state their college choice. Also unlike athletes, who are evaluated on a 5-star scale, Northwood students are evaluated on a 3-star scale, according to the commencement program that I have right here in front of me: *** = Highest honors (4.3 GPA or above) ** = High honors (4.0 or above, but below 4.3) * = Honors (Not sure; close to a 4.0 but not quite there) It looks like Cal got the best recruiting class this year with three 3-star prospects and no one lower than 2 stars. USC and Stanford each got one 3-star recruit, as did Harvard and Yale. To the kids… Read more →
All Politics is Local
California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a state spending plan today (June 16) that would have deepened the cut in financial support for the University of California by another $150 million for the coming fiscal year. — University of California – UC Newsroom In principle, I like cuts in public education funding, but since I have a kid entering the University of California in the fall, I applaud Gov. Brown’s commitment to high-quality yet affordable education via the UC system. Read more →
Prom Night
The Irvine high schools — Northwood and University — have prom tonight. Our boy goes to Northwood but he’s attending the Uni prom with a girl from that fine institution. I met her. She seems nice. She’s going to Stanford in the fall. Our boy is going to Cal. Opposites attract. Today is also the girl’s birthday, so the boy is paying for dinner. “Did you see a birth certificate or a drivers license verifying that today is really her birthday?” I ask him. “Not to suggest that women are looking to take advantage of a man if he lets his guard down, but did you see the birth certificate or drivers license?” Woodbridge and Irvine High — the weak links in the Irvine chain of education — may have prom tonight too, I don’t know. Nobody cares about those schools. Read more →
Four Months Left
We went to a Cal reception for incoming freshmen. Move-in day is mid-August. That’s four months from now. The reality of what’s happening here is starting to grab me by the throat . . . Read more →