Yours truly has been traveling out of town until yesterday. So he hadn’t visited the site of the UCLA Grand Hotel for awhile. He did go by yesterday around 3:30 pm and took the photos above. All he saw was folks leaving. In fact, the gate was wide open (see the top two photos) to let the cars exit. Must have been coffee break time.
From time to time, yours truly receives email messages – particularly from people with Yahoo or gmail accounts – that result from someone guessing their passwords. The culprit then concocts a story about being stranded in Outer Slobovia and needing money. If you get one of these messages, don’t send money and do let the account holder know his/her account has been hacked. The moral is to have a password that is hard to guess. But then comes this word: Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia, uncovered a startling fact. The launch code for all U.S. Minuteman…
Inside Higher Ed today points to an article in the Princeton University student newspaper in which it is reported that faculty there are interested in having their own MOOC rather than relying on Coursera (with which Princeton has an affiliation). Members of the faculty discussed the possibility of creating a University-specific alternative to Coursera, as well as the proposed creation of a new committee to oversee the continuation of online courses, on Monday at the December faculty meeting. Philosophy professor Gideon Rosen noted that the University is free to explore options outside of Coursera in order to avoid conflicts of…
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, UCLA Health System and long-term care provider Select Medical announced today a partnership to open a 138-bed acute-care rehabilitation hospital in Century City in 2015. The aim “is to develop a world-class regional rehabilitation center providing highly specialized care, advanced treatment and leading-edge technologies to treat individuals with spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, strokes, amputations, neurological disorders, and musculoskeletal and orthopedic conditions,” a statement said… The new facility will be operated by Select Medical, a provider of long- term acute care services with hospital and outpatient locations in 44 states, including at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation…
The San Diego (405) Freeway will undergo full directional closures in West Los Angeles this week to accommodate roadway widening work that is part of the ongoing Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project. All southbound lanes will be closed between Sunset and Wilshire boulevards from midnight to 5 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Metro. All northbound lanes will be closed between Santa Monica Boulevard and Moraga Drive from midnight to 5 a.m. Thursday, according to Metro. Lanes will begin to close at 10 p.m. and ramps will close as early as 7 p.m. in advance of all three closures, according to…
Vannevar Bush From: The Endless Frontier: Reaping what Bush Sowed? by Paula Stephan (pp. 33-34)* NBER working paper 19687 (Nov. 2013) Excerpt: Overexpansion of research facilities In recent years, universities have gone on a building binge, constructing a substantial amount of new research space which led to a 30 percent increase in net assignable square feet for research between 2001 and 2011. Most of this increase is for facilities in the biological, biomedical and health sciences—a response of universities to the doubling of the NIH. Some of this space has been paid for by private philanthropy. At MIT, for…
People keep noticing Berkeley’s White Elephant money-draining stadium – one of the grand capital projects that the Regents routinely approve based on pretty slides and business plans offered by the campuses. Peter Schrag in the San Francisco Chronicle today ties the low graduation rates of Berkeley athletes with the stadium: …Fueling the… issue is the chronic matter of cost – what the university kicks in to the sports program – and what someone called “its gold plated” spending. Brian Barsky, a Berkeley computer science professor and vocal critic of the athletics program, says between 2003 and 2011, athletics “drained campus…
We have been offering unsolicited advice to Murphy Hall about what to do about the traffic stop “problem” that arose a week ago. Before the lawyers get hold of this matter and make it complicated (think, for example, about the Japanese Garden affair), how about just starting with an apology to Judge Cunningham? It’s been done before and we offer a modest proposal below:
Devoted blog readers will recall our unsolicited advice of last Wednesday to the folks in Murphy Hall. We suggested that they spend their Thanksgiving weekend trying to figure out what happened when a UCLA police car stopped a motorist in Westwood for driving without a seatbelt buckled. According to the Huffington Post, African-American Judge Superior Court Judge David Cunningham exited L.A. Fitness Gym around 10 am on Wednesday. [“Start” on the map above.] Presumably, he pulled out of the garage you can see above in his Mercedes – beltless – and proceeded north on Gayley. According to the press release…
Westwood went into decline after a visitor was killed in a shooting between rival gang members in 1988. Since that time, various efforts have been made at reviving the area which still features empty stores up and down Westwood Blvd. Warren Olney on KCRW’s “Which Way LA?” did a segment on “Will Westwood Every Be Hip Again?” on Nov. 26, 2013. The program notes the empty stores and the decline of Westwood as a popular destination since the late 1980s. Yours truly had trouble downloading or playing the segment so we provide an alternative link to it below. (function(d, s,…
