The Myer Siegel Department store at 1025 Westwood Boulevard was one of the major businesses that moved into Westwood Village in the 1930s. There were several branches of this company in the LA area; this branch was built in 1937. The same location is shown below in a recent photo from Google maps.
The photo shows UCLA Chancellor Franklin Murphy, basketball coach John Wooden, and donor Edwin Pauley at the groundbreaking ceremony for Pauley Pavillion, probably around 1964. (The official opening was in 1965.) Pauley – whose wealth came from oil – was a prominent Democrat. However, the fundraising drive for the structure (which Pauley matched) was headed by H.R. Haldeman of Watergate fame. Pauley, a Regent, played a major role in the dismissal of UC President Clark Kerr due to student protests, primarily at UC-Berkeley. Speaking of firing, we haven’t featured sports on this blog. But there is so much news surrounding…
Today’s LA Daily News carries a story about a former UCLA student who is compiling records on UCLA students who died in World War II. The story is at http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_22893921/ucla-war-dead-come-alive-research-project
Inside Higher Ed today has a lengthy article on debate within political science over what to do about the U.S. Senate vote to ban NSF support for most research in the field. …A number of political scientists are calling for a new approach to lobbying, and for the discipline to become more engaged in … politics. Why, they are asking, was a field devoted to the study of government unable to win support for keeping a mere $13 million in the budget? Could a different lobbying or public relations strategy have changed things — and might it change things going…
Even after UCLA’s Westwood campus opened, this 1929 photo indicates that there was still ongoing construction, at least in the vicinity of Powell.
A supercomputer in downtown Oakland has identified the most ancient light in the universe, assembling an image that reveals that the universe is older, and slower, than we thought. The powerful Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory computer, housed in a former Wells Fargo Bank vault near the Paramount Theatre, analyzed data sent by NASA from Europe’s Planck space telescope. It compiled a portrait of an infant cosmos that was hot, small and crowded — and traced our creation back 13.8 billion years, about 100 million years older than previous estimates. Its analysis also revealed a rate of expansion that is slower than seen…
Awhile back, we posted about a plan by the Westwood Business Improvement District to remove eighteen trees. The proposal had sparked controversy. Now LAObserved has posted a photo showing that the trees in question have indeed been cut down. No additional information is given with the photo. So it looks as if that’s it for the lumber: The earlier posts can be found at:http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-westwood-tree-issue-continues.htmlandhttp://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-tree-may-or-may-not-grow-in-westwood.html
No, we’re not warning about computer viruses. Inside Higher Ed yesterday had a brief note about a study indicating that students who are using laptops in class for non-class purposes – email, browsing of websites, etc. – not only are distracting themselves but also the neighboring students. Some instructors forbid laptop use in class but the reason has typically been to avoid the negative effect on the direct user. Now it appears there is a negative externality involved for non-users. The Inside Higher Ed piece is at:http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/03/14/danger-secondhand-laptop-browsing-students A news release on the study is at:http://news.yorku.ca/2013/03/13/multitasking-on-laptop-impedes-classroom-learning-york-u-study-shows/ The release refers to some…
Online fraudsters put spam-type “comments” on our blogsite regularly. We delete them as we find them. Some explicitly claim to offer porn. Some just offer websites and invite you to click on them. Don’t click on them! You are more likely to get something harmful to your computer than anything else. A typical comment of this type will have a message that may say something like “What a great post!” But it generally won’t have anything specifically relevant to the posting. If you find such a comment that is more than a day old, we may have missed it when…
A Japanese-American group in 1960 presents UCLA with a check for $1,000 to purchase books on Japanese Buddhism.
