Sunday, February 23, 2014

Undergraduate Research Conference at Berkeley

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Dear Student,
It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 4th Annual Berkeley Interdisciplinary Research Conference (BIRC). BIRC is dedicated to encouraging undergraduate participation in the broader academic community by promoting sophisticated undergraduate research, facilitating research-oriented cooperation, and building community through professional networking activities.

This year’s conference will feature the stellar work of undergraduate students who have completed research in psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, education and biology. We welcome undergraduate students from all universities in these particular fields to present their work and to attend the conference.

The abstract submission guidelines are as follows: 

-250 word count limit 

-The study does not have to be completed at time of submission OR time of presentation, but include the projected results and the progress of the study. (Be prepared to to present whatever data has been collected if study is not yet complete at time of conference)

Background: Indicate the purpose and objective of the research, the hypothesis that was tested or a description of the problem being analyzed or evaluated
 
Methods: Describe the study design, study population, data collection and methods of analysis used
 
Results: Present as clearly and detailed as possible the findings/outcome of the study, with specific results in summarized form.

Conclusions: Briefly discuss the data and main outcome of the study. Emphasize the significance of the study and the implications/impact the results might have

Important Deadlines:
• The conference will take place on Saturday, May 3rd at the Valley Life Sciences Building (VLSB)
• Abstracts are due on March 21, 2014. However, we recommend submitting your abstracts as soon as possible since space is limited (email your abstract to berkconf@gmail.com or through the conference website)
• The abstract word limit is 250

Friday, February 21, 2014

Union Summer Internships (PAID)

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It’s that time of year again!!  The 2014 AFL-CO Union Summer internship program will be looking to recruit the best and brightest activists from your college campuses in the next few weeks. The Union Summer internship runs 9 weeks and is a paid internship program that introduces students to the labor union movement.  The internship starts with a weeklong orientation and training where interns learn about the history and current state of the American labor movement. Interns will also learn union skill building firsthand. The interns are then assigned to work on various union organizing campaigns with AFL-CIO affiliates. 

The work of a U.S. intern could include (but not limited to):  working on state legislative battles, talking one-on-one with workers about their jobs, planning and participating in direct actions like marches, and assisting in building relationships with community, labor and religious organizations.  Participation in Union Summer is an ideal way for young people to learn about unions and a way for young activists to look into careers in the American Labor Movement.

Union Summer interns must be:
*      Flexible and willing to work long hours, nights & weekends on an unpredictable schedule
*      Adaptable in the face of new challenges and experiences
*      Able to work in teams and have excellent communication skills
*      Open to working with people of different races, ethnic backgrounds,
                religious & sexual orientations
*      Willing to immerse themselves in an intensive, learning-by-doing experience

**US Interns are paid $350 weekly (minus taxes)
**Accepted applicants must have housing in the cities where Union Summer sites have been designated.
**Union Summer sites:  (subject to change)
*      Goldsboro, N.C.
*      Houston
*      Los Angeles
*      New York City
*      Washington, D.C.
**2014 Union Summer internship dates:  June 16 – August 15, 2014
**Application Deadline:  April 15, 2014

We will be reaching out to you regarding the 2014 Union Summer internship program however, if your students are interested in applying now, please pass along this information to them and encourage them to apply online to www.aflcio.org/unionsummer.  I have attached the 2014 Union Summer flyer to this email. Thank you for your continued support of The AFL-CIO Union Summer internship program!

In Unity,
Ayketa Iverson                                                                                                 Patrick Scott
National AFL-CIO, Organizing Institute                                                    National AFL-CIO, Organizing Institute
2014 Union Summer                                                                                       2014 Union Summer
404-754-3186                                                                                                     678-576-4836
aiverson@aflcio.org                                                                                        pscott@aflcio.org           
www.aflcio.org/unionsummer                                                                  www.aflcio.org/unionsummer

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Paid Summer Internships at Public Policy Institute of California

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Six Richard J. Riordan Summer Internships opportunities are now posted on PPIC’s website.  For detailed position descriptions and application instructions, please visit http://www.ppic.org/main/opportunities.asp.  Several other PPIC positions are also posted on that page.

The Public Policy Institute of California informs and improves public policy through independent, objective, nonpartisan research.  PPIC is based in San Francisco and Sacramento, California. 
These internship projects provide an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students interested in a public policy career to work in a policy research environment. Intern projects are proposed by PPIC researchers and designed around a specific set of tasks and deliverables that can be accomplished within the term of the internship. Application deadline: March 9, 2014.

Direct links to the six projects:




Anneke Gaul

PUBLIC POLICY
INSTITUTE OF CALIFORNIA
500 Washington Street, Suite 600
San Francisco, CA 94111tl  415 291 4452
fax  415 291 4401
web  www.ppic.org

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Strategic Corporate Research Summer School

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The AFL-CIO and Cornell University are sponsoring a Strategic Corporate Research Summer School from June 8 to 13 in Ithaca, N.Y.

The course (credit or non-credit) is designed for undergraduates, graduate students and others who are interested in working as union researchers and campaigners.

The application deadline is May 2. The course is not free, but it looks like some scholarships are available.  

To find out more, go here: http://go.aflcio.org/Strategic-Corp-Research-School

Description from Website

Course description

Despite enormous challenges in organizing and bargaining in a rapidly changing global economy, this is a time of great opportunity for and innovation by U.S. unions, labor NGOs, and their allies. With a resurgence of action among working people, there has been a new level of inventiveness in campaigning, evident in recent union organizing and bargaining campaign victories such as:
  • The rising up of low-wage workers in the fast-food and retail industries, who took on the world's largest and most well-known transnational firms with the most basic demands: a living wage of $15 an hour, safe working conditions, and, for the fast-food workers, a union. They have struck by the thousands in cities across the U.S. and, in doing so, have changed the national discourse about corporate and government responsibility.
  • Rank-and-file community-based campaigns in a broad range of occupations and industries that either do not fit under the NLRB format or are specifically excluded under the NLRB, ranging from car-wash workers winning first contracts in Queens, Domestic Workers United gaining employee status in New York and California and collective bargaining rights in New York, and the Model Alliance taking on some of the most powerful players in the fashion industry to win protections for child models in New York State.
  • Ongoing efforts such as the UAW campaign to organize Nissan works in Canton, Mississippi, and Smyrna, Tennessee, and the joint effort between CWA in the U.S. and Verdi in Germany to organize T-Mobile employees and other Deutsche Telekom workers.
These victories came about because of a combination of grassroots rank-and-file mobilizing and leadership development, and escalating actions in the workplace and broader community—but fundamental to all these campaigns was careful strategic research.
Unfortunately, the U.S. labor movement today is facing a critical shortage of trained organizing, bargaining, and campaign staff with strategic research training who understand both corporate structure and finance and union campaign strategies. To help meet this need, the AFL-CIO asked the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations twelve years ago to develop a one-week intensive credit course on strategic corporate research for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates interested in working with the labor movement upon completion of their degrees.
The course will be available as either a non-credit course or as a 1.5-credit undergraduate course with an additional research and writing assignment. Those interested in pursuing strategic corporate research positions within unions are strongly advised to take the course for credit so that they will have the additional experience of researching an actual corporation, and have a completed strategic research report to show prospective union employers.
This course will be designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the nature and structure of corporate ownership, finance, and power in today's economy. Through lectures, readings, case studies, and research training and exercises the class will provide students with the tools to pose and answer basic questions on the operations, structure, and industrial relations strategies of corporate America. In particular this course will focus on how these company characteristics, structures, and practices impact the firm's labor relations policies and strategies and how unions can best respond to and capitalize on these characteristics in union comprehensive organizing and bargaining campaigns.
The course will also provide in-depth hands-on training in the online and library research tools required to conduct strategic corporate research. As part of this course students will work through a series of case studies dealing with diverse firms and industries, as well as have an opportunity to conduct in-depth research on an actual firm in the context of union organizing or bargaining.
Because of the limited time available while students are here on campus, they will be sent books and readings several weeks before the class takes place to give them an opportunity to complete the readings before they arrive. In addition to reading assignments, there will be short written exercises and class presentations to be completed while the class is in session. Students taking the course for credit will be required to conduct independent research and write a paper of twenty-five to thirty pages, summarizing comprehensive corporate research and analysis for a designated company. The final paper will be due six weeks after the class and will count for fifty percent of the grade for the course.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Diversity, Envy, and Social Comparison

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Nice example of research collaboration between faculty and undergraduate students at Sonoma State, on the one hand, and great example of a piece or work that could be extended, built-upon, and replicated by students here.



See also how this story was covered in Sonoma State website piece ("Looking Up and Seeing Green: New Study Shows Having Diverse Friends Takes the Sting Out of Envy") and read the actual study:
Stephanie McKee, Heather J. Smith, Aubrey Koch, Rhonda Balzarini, Marissa Georges, and Matthew Paolucci Callahan. "Looking up and Seeing Green: Women’s Everyday Experiences With Physical Appearance Comparisons." Psychology of Women Quarterly September 2013 37: 351-365 (PDF)

Friday, February 7, 2014

Do You Have a Sister or Niece Who Wants to Learn to Code?

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Girls Who Code: 2014 Summer Immersion Program

ELIGIBILITY

Candidates who meet all of the following eligibility requirements are encouraged to apply:
  • Applicants must:
    • Must be a current sophomore or junior in high school
    • Commit to attending the full 7-week long program in their respective location. The program runs Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm daily. Students unable to attend for the full duration of the program due to other commitments (e.g. other summer programs, vacation plans) are not eligible. No exceptions.
      • Boston, Miami, Mountain View, New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, San Jose, San Ramon, Seattle
    • Participants must commute to and from the program every day. Girls Who Code does not provide housing or transportation for participants.
  • We value a diverse classroom and strongly encourage applications from:
    • All ambitious girls interested in exploring opportunities in technology and computer science. Prior computer science experience is not required!
    • Girls from a various ethnic, racial, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. The program is free for all participants. Scholarship opportunities to cover transportation and food will be made available for students with limited financial resources.

Paid Summer Internship

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I'm a Mills alum and am now a researcher at UC Berkeley in the School of Public Health.  I help run a paid summer internship here for undergrads and would love to have some Mills women apply.  The application deadline is coming up, so if you know of any students who might be interested, particularly those with a GIS, biology, or biostatistics interest, please pass on the word.

 http://steer.berkeley.edu/

Topics for research projects could include, for example, one of the following:
    • Use of geographic information systems in assessing health outcomes
    • Biological consequences of chemical exposures in humans
    • Early life exposure to particulate and development of respiratory symptoms
    • Biomarkers in children exposed to biofuel in indoor air
Best,
Sadie (Margolin) Costello, Class of 2000

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Berkeley Colloquium Talk on Participatory Governance

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Monday 10 February
2-3:30 PM
402 Barrows Hall
Democracy in Motion: Participatory Blueprints and the New Spirit of Governance.

The presentation will discuss one of the chapters of a forthcoming book on the travels of participatory blueprints in our current moment, taking the example of participatory budgeting.   From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This talk examines what travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. The principal argument is that for the idea to travel it became detached from the administrative reforms and political project of which it was a part. Originally established by a leftist city government, Participatory Budgeting was part of an ambitious project of reforms of the municipal administration that also included significant transformations in administrative practices and structures. It succeeded, and became emblematic of a kind of successful leftism that was then adapted throughout Brazil and Latin America. In the late 1990s, however, it was adopted in a format that reduced it to procedures divorced from administration and political project. This talk describes the way this was taken up by actors from all ends of the political spectrum in its more reduced form.  

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, associate professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU, is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and participatory democracy. While much of his research and writing has been about Brazil, his most recent book, The Civic Imagination  (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. His most recent research, with Ernesto Ganuza, has been about the global travel and translation of blueprints of urban participation in the current era. An engaged scholar, Gianpaolo was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy.  At NYU he directs a new initiative, the Urban Democracy Lab.

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Counting Words in Social Science: Talk at Stanford

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The Data, Society, and Inference Seminar Series
is pleased to announce a talk by:                                                              
  
Matthew Taddy, Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistics
The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

Title: Counting Words in Social Science

Abstract: Social scientists are embracing the idea of using `text as data’ as a way to quantify, measure, and discover social concepts.  Professor Taddy will discuss a brief history of how this strategy has worked and evolved, and present the high dimensional multinomial logistic regression models that he uses as a basis for text analysis.  Illustrated with a series of applications — tweets about politicians, reviews on yelp.com, congressional speech — Professor Taddy will give the how and why of this approach.  The “how" touches on distributed computing and regularized estimation techniques.  The “why" considers questions of prediction, treatment effects estimation, and finally inference about the content of text itself.  Despite all being based on the same models, these goals each involve a different set of assumptions and challenges.

Monday, Feb 10, 2014
1:10 – 2:30 pm

Location: 
Stanford University
McClelland Building, Room M104 (map attached)
Graduate School of Business

Click here to coordinate carpooling to and from Stanford

Lunch is provided. Please RSVP to afrooz@stanford.edu by Friday, Feb 7

Monday, February 3, 2014

Summer Archaeology Expeditions

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ARCHAEOLOGY IN BELIZE, CENTRAL AMERICA

The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project announces its archaeological investigations for the summer of 2014!

In 2014 BVAR will continue investigations at the ancient Maya sites of Cahal Pech, Baking Pot and Lower Dover. These sites are among the largest prehistoric Maya sites in the upper Belize River Valley. Despite many years of investigations at Baking Pot, large portions of the monumental site core remain unexcavated and sections of the settlement area remain unexplored.  Lower Dover, in contrast, is a recently discovered site and investigations here are only just beginning. Excavations at Cahal Pech have revealed that this site is the location of some of the earliest Maya settlements in the Maya lowlands. 
During the 2014 season, BVAR will continue its research agenda with excavation in the monumental core of Baking Pot, with the purpose of understanding the nature and complexity of the polity’s decline. Research at Lower Dover will also focus on the monumental architecture in the site core in order to determine the sociopolitical development of this center.  The investigations at Cahal Pech will continue in the site core and periphery in an effort to further elucidate the status and complexity of this center spanning the Preclassic to Terminal Classic periods.   
Students will be involved in all aspects of these archaeological investigations, from the setting of excavation units to the production of site maps. The project also incorporates daily laboratory work where students participate in the processing and documentation of the cultural remains recovered from the site (including ceramic and lithic artifacts and human and animal remains). Weekly lectures will present an overview of Maya civilization and will provide introduction to other specific topics such as ceramic analysis, archaeological survey methods, human osteology, and ancient Maya ritual and ideology.

Dates:
Session I: June 2 to 27, 2014
Session II: July 7 to August 1, 2014

This Field Research opportunity is also available in two-week sessions:
Session I: June 2 to 13, 2014
Session II: July 7 to 18, 2014

Academic credit is available!

Registration fees for the project are $1100 U.S. per two-week session or $2100 for the one-month field school.  Fees include lodging, weekday meals, and transportation to and from the airport.  Academic credit, travel to and from Belize, and incidental expenses are the responsibility of the participant.

For applications and more information all interested parties should respond via e-mail to Myka Schwanke at: BVARarchaeology@gmail.com

Find us on the Web!  WWW.BVAR.ORG

UCB Colloquium, Today 2:00-3:30 PM Barrows 402

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The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution
Based on survey evidence and media coverage dating back to the 1980s, McCall argues in her new book that Americans have long been more critical of economic inequality than is commonly recognized, and that critical views are heightened when inequality is perceived as benefiting the rich at the expense of shared prosperity for most Americans. As a result, concerns about inequality are more likely to be expressed in support of opportunity enhancing policies in education and the labor market rather than in support of traditional redistributive policies. The "opportunity model" advanced in the book incorporates views about inequality as well as views about opportunity and redistribution, and raises questions about the "welfare state model" that nearly all research on American beliefs about inequality assumes. In the talk, McCall will also briefly discuss new collaborative projects that seek to test this model using survey experiments and cross-national, representative surveys. 

Leslie McCall is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. She studies public opinion about inequality and related economic and policy issues as well as trends in actual earnings and family income inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001). Her research has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.