UC-Davis

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Another of our periodic email cautionary notes

Byuclafaculty

From time to time, we have provided reminders about email problems.  One problem – which we have noted – is that at a public university, your emails may be subject to public documents requests. Another problem is that hackers may try to get into your email account through “phishing,” probably to use it to send out scam messages to your contacts.  Such an event seems to have occurred at UC-Davis: Hackers compromised the email accounts of three UC Davis doctors last month, potentially gaining access to personal or medical information on as many as 1,800 patients, the university announced Monday… …

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Yesterday’s news

Byuclafaculty

Christmas day tends to be a slow news day.  However, for those who didn’t see it, the LA Times carried a front page story about UC’s online offerings which allow cross-campus credits.  You can find the article at: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-uc-online-20131222,0,6798231.story Blog readers will be familiar with these offerings.  We noted in a prior post that UCLA seems to be a taker rather than a giver in this endeavor.  That is, other campuses’ online courses are available to UCLA students.  But UCLA is not offering courses to the other campuses.  Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, and Riverside seem to be the offerers.   Now, how…

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Unsolicited Thanksgiving Advice for Murphy Hall

Byuclafaculty

Dear Murphy:  The Judge Cunningham affair is a real turkey for you.*  You might want to spend your Thanksgiving weekend finding out what happened.  A good place to start might be by asking why campus police would be bothering with a minor off-campus traffic infraction unrelated to UCLA.   Katehi apologizing It’s not a question of having jurisdiction, so let’s not get entangled with legalities of whether it was technically OK to stop the judge.  It’s a question of priorities and common sense.   Remember the Pepper Spray Cop affair at UC-Davis and how the chancellor there spent months apologizing, investigating, testifying,…

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Privatized Strawberries at Davis

Byuclafaculty

Please pay as you enter Strawberry growers are literally being cheated out of the fruits of their labors by the University of California, according to a lawsuit filed against the Board of Regents by the California Strawberry Commission. UC Davis is ending its strawberry breeding program and replacing it with a private company created by its two long-time strawberry researchers. The two plan to sell strawberry varieties, including those they developed over the past 30 years at UC Davis backed by annual payments of $350,000 by the strawberry commission. Filed in Alameda County Superior Court, the commission’s eight-page lawsuit wants to…

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Davis and Merced Get Drones, But We Have Snodgrass

Byuclafaculty

The website California’s Capitol reports that UC-Davis and UC-Merced have applied to the FAA to have drones. http://www.californiascapitol.com/2013/10/californias-drone-applicants/ and https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/faa_coa_list-2012.pdf. Obviously, the rest of us will be falling behind in this technology.  But at least we have Prof. Snodgrass who drones on and on, as former UC president Yudof once reminded us in his soliloquy on online higher ed:

What can we say? Or Sing?

Byuclafaculty

UC Davis will pay $38,055 in a workers’ compensation settlement to John Pike, the former university police lieutenant who was internationally scorned in November 2011 for pepper-spraying students at close range during an Occupy-style tuition protest on campus. According to paperwork filed with the state’s Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, the damages cover injuries to Pike’s “psyche.”… Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/10/23/5846956/uc-davis-pays-claim-to-pepper.html This story may not be music to your ears but consider:

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Listen to the Second Half of the Regents Meeting of 9-17-2013

Byuclafaculty

Our earlier post had the Regents audio for the first part of the meeting of 9-17-13.  There was then a closed session.  The audio link below picks up the meeting again when the public component resumed.  We also noted in the previous post that there was a inadvertent hot mike at the beginning of the meeting in a supposedly closed session which transmitted sensitive material online.  We have not archived that portion.  However, when the meeting reopened in a public session, apparently some Regents were not sensitive to what was going out.  The audio begins with one Regent telling another…

The High Cost of Pepper

Byuclafaculty

UC Davis officials are making an expensive investment toward improving the college’s image. The university hired Luanne Lawrence, formerly of the University of South Carolina, as associate chancellor for strategic communications earlier this year. She will make an annual salary of $260,000, more than any other campus communications chief in the University of California system…Lawrence steps into her role as the university tries to put a public relations nightmare behind it: the 2011 incident in which campus police officers used pepper spray against students during a protest largely focused on tuition hikes… Full story at http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/05/5624083/ucd-pays-top-dollar-for-communications.html Things are definitely getting…

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Rank Order or Rank Odor

Byuclafaculty

From today’s Sacramento Bee: On the surface, it might seem self-serving for UC Davis School of Medicine to rip into the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings that rate it below the nation’s elite primary care schools. One might suspect it was sour grapes by a medical school unhappy with its rankings.The school poured four years of research and almost $10,000 of its own grant funding into a stinging academic critique of the news magazine’s ranking methodology.”These findings raise questions regarding the ranking’s validity and usefulness,” said the paper, published this month in the journal Academic Medicine. A primary…

More Pepper?

Byuclafaculty

Remember the pepper spray affair at UC-Davis?  The LA Times has a report on a lawsuit brought by the Times and the Sacramento Bee demanding that the names of all police officers listed in an official study of the affair be made public. That study was released with most names redacted.  A lower court ruled that the names had to be made public but that decision was appealed.  Now an appeals court indicates that the names cannot be withheld.  However, this may not be the end of the pepper story since a further appeal to the state supreme court by…