The rest of Los Angeles may seem as congested as ever, but traffic at UCLA is the lightest it’s ever been since the university began measuring more than 20 years ago.

The 2011 commuting report marks the eighth consecutive year that UCLA’s vehicle count dropped. With an average of 102,000 trips daily, the number of vehicle trips into and out of UCLA in 2011 was more than 3 percent lower than in 2010 and almost 20 percent lower than the campus’s peak in 2003.

“Vehicle counts are lower now than they were in 1990, when the cordon count first began,” according to UCLA Transportation’s newly released State of the Commute annual report.

UCLA Transportation offers incentives to encourage UCLA’s approximately 41,000 students and 26,000 employees to use alternative transportation, including a 50 percent subsidy for transit passes, discounted parking for carpoolers and a partially subsidized vanpool. The department also offers a variety of other benefits through the Bruin Commuter Club, which is open to all alternative-mode commuters, from bikers and walkers to bus-riders and carpoolers.

UCLA is approaching its goal of convincing half of its employees to switch to alternative transit, and only 52.9 percent currently drive to work alone, compared with nearly 72 percent of Los Angeles County drivers. Only 25 percent of students drive alone.

UCLA’s 50 percent goal is part of the campus’s Climate Action Plan.

via UCLA Newsroom

//Photo - UCLA on Facebook

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An excerpt from the interview:

Q: You’re a self-professed “NPR groupie.” What do you listen to?

A: Morning Edition is kind of on every day. I’m a big fan of Weekend Edition Saturday, as well as a lot of the music programs. I’m a follower of most all of the programs, so I didn’t walk into the job saying, “What’s that show? I never heard of that before.” What’s been fun is meeting all these personalities I’ve listened to over the years.

Q: From Big Bird to a big undertaking. What prompted you to take this job?

A: I felt like I had one more big thing left to do, and I only wanted to go to an organization that would have an even greater impact than the one I was in. NPR is one of those places. It’s a very powerful brand that has high emotional value—mostly positive, some a little negative—and a fan base that is very dedicated. I’ve done a lot of work running a global media company, taking them through this digital transition, which is affecting all media. So I just decided, let’s take a shot at this. I’m not naïve about it. But I’m excited about the challenge.

Rocked by controversy in 2011, including the resignation of its chief executive, NPR launched a search for a new president and CEO. They found public television veteran Gary Knell ’75, who was tapped to lead the venerable public radio operation in October. The former CEO of Sesame Workshop, Knell helped turn Sesame Street into a more global brand, ushering the iconic children’s TV program into the digital age. Similar change is in the air for NPR’s 26 million-plus listeners with Knell at the helm.

Read more of the interview – UCLA Magazine – New Head of NPR

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A condensed version of the article, if this interests you read the full article.

Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process landed on “a pretty damn good method for language learning that you can do in limited amounts of spare time.” Here’s the four-step method that you can use.

 

Stage 1: Learn the correct pronunciation of the language.
Time: 1-2 weeks

Starting with pronunciation first does a few things—because I’m first and foremost learning how to hear that language’s sounds, my listening comprehension gets an immediate boost before I even start traditional language learning.

 

Stage 2: Vocabulary and grammar acquisition, no English allowed.
Time: About 3 months.

This stage takes advantage of a few valuable tricks: First, I’m using Anki, a wonderful, free flashcard program that runs on smartphones and every computer platform. Second, I use a modified version of Middlebury College’s famous language pledge—No English allowed! By skipping the English, I’m practicing thinking in the language directly, and not translating every time I try to think of a word. Third, I’m using frequency lists to guide my vocabulary acquisition. These lists show the most common words in a given language, and learning those words first will be the best use of your time—after 1000 words, you’ll know 70% of the words in any average text, and 2,000 words provides you with 80% text coverage.

 

Stage 3: Listening, writing and reading work.
Time: This stage overlaps quite a bit with stage 2 and 4. Once you’re comfortable reading or writing anything, usually a month or two into stage 2, you can start stage 3

Once I have a decent vocabulary and familiarity with grammar, I start writing essays, watching TV shows and reading books, and talking (at least to myself!) about the stuff I see and do.

 

Stage 4: Speech

At the point where I can more or less talk (haltingly, but without too many grammar or vocab holes) and write about most familiar things, I find some place to immerse in the language and speak all the time (literally).

// Photo – Spree2010

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Local farmer Megan Paska has witnessed beekeeping as it morphed from an illegal (and possibly crazy) habit to a sustainable, community-supported skill. Mirroring beekeeping’s own ascendance, she found more than just a living: “This is the first time in my life when I’ve just felt absolutely on the right path.”

thisismadebyhand.com
brooklynhomesteader.com
growingchefs.org
rooftopfarms.org
sonoio.org/
crewcuts.com

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The Los Angeles Times has put together this great page of upcoming TV shows. Called the Fall TV Previews it lists every new show with a description and trailer.

I’ve already found four I want to watch – Elementary, Next Caller, Arrow, & Vegas.

Every May, the television networks unveil their fall schedules to advertisers in New York City and screen previews of their new series. Not everything here will premiere in the fall. Some shows will air mid-season, by which point a few of these hopefuls may already have been canceled.

Fall TV Previews

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The Economist published a barometer of world business according to 1,500 senior executives. It’s a complicated graph but very interesting because it shows North America will once again lead the world out of trouble.

Read it as follows, “Balance of respondents expecting:”

• global business conditions to improve (let side)
• their companies to have more employees in a year’s time (right)

On both sides North America leads the way with improving business conditions and new hirings.

“In North America more executives are bullish than bearish for the first time in a year. On jobs, the balance of firms expecting to hire over the next year has increased in all regions.”

via The Economist – Daily Graph

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In a move that some called historic, the country’s oldest African American civil rights group voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage…saying it opposed any policy or legislative initiative that “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

The vote marks a national turning point on the issue of gay marriage. President Obama announced this month that he supports gay marriage. A Gallup Poll last year found, for the first time in the poll’s history, that a majority of Americans supported the legalization of gay marriage, 53% to 45%.

“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the 103-year-old NAACP said in a statement.

“The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Still, it may be a long time before the entire community joins in support.

Many African Americans oppose same-sex marriage…

***

read the full article - learn how African Americans are key voters in discriminatory laws – L.A. Times

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Patagonia founder and owner, Yvon Chouinard, and The Surfer’s Journal founders and owners, Steve and Debee Pezman, talk about being surfers for life.

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When Poe’s 1908 collection of short stories, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, was reprinted in 1919, a copy of the “deluxe” edition would cost you 5 guineas (in today’s money, that’s about 300 USA Fun Tickets).

The book was printed on handmade paper, bound in vellum, and lettered in gold. But its cost was mainly due to new illustrations: 24 full-page drawings by young Irish illustrator Harry Clarke, whose ink illustrations brought Poe’s characters to life with mesmerizing detail. Each copy was signed by Clarke, and according to rare book sellers, the edition topped Christmas lists in 1919.

These drawings invite dissection by the reader…

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“Shake the Dickens out of it”

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What kind of grade would he (Barack Obama) have gotten for such T.S. Eliot analysis…a reading that was admittedly done without perusing the footnotes? We checked in with some current members of the Columbia English department.

Matthew Hart, who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone culture with an emphasis on modernist poetry, was not terribly blown away, as he wrote in an e-mail.

Considered as homework, I’d give the future President a B-minus…the allusion is forced and the connection specious. You get this a lot when students try too hard. Still, I think that’s the point here. This isn’t so much literary criticism as flirtation.

The best part is at the end…this is what the letter’s really about. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to use The Waste Land as a come-on. He gets a B+ for that.

Would a female professor grade Obama’s efforts any differently? We polled his colleague Sarah Cole, who just finished teaching a course on The Waste Land.

In these brief musings, President Obama shows himself to be a sensitive reader of Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land.

It is a poem of local brilliance and intensities, to which Obama responds with appropriate personal intensity.

I would praise it for its insights and sensitivity, would encourage the president to develop his ideas…

There you have it. Obama might not have done groundbreaking literary analysis, but his undergraduate prose managed to convince at least a couple of discerning women of his “insight and sensitivity”.

via NY Mag

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// Thx – Mother Nature Network

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The space wars are heating up. As it stands right now, the Russians have the biggest for-hire space program, but their fleet is aging. The new players on the market, like Space X, are competing for the future of that market.

Which will look something like this. Every country rich enough to afford it, and big companies, will be sending probes, satellites, and people into space. They will pay a private company to do so and eventually the market will be the opposite of what it is now, where governments dominate and private industry supports.

Here is an example of that:

A Japanese rocket has lifted off with a South Korean satellite in Japan’s first commercial launch of a foreign probe into space.

The HII-A rocket lifted off from a remote southwestern Japan island carrying the South Korean probe and three Japanese satellites.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a private company in charge of HII-A rocket production since 2007, is hoping to compete with the U.S., Russia and Europe as a launch-vehicle provider. This was its first contract to launch a foreign probe.

The Korean satellite, KOMPSAT-3, was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute to monitor the environment. The rocket also carried Japan’s Shizuku satellite to monitor climate change and two smaller Japanese probes.

via UT San Diego

HII-A Launch Vehicle

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Don’t get scared – the shouting is called a “hoot” and the thumb/pinky salute is called a “shaka” - and that was the theme for the 2012 San Diego Surf Film Festival, Hoots and Shakas.

Amy and I attended the festival and had a blast (you can see us at 0:37 in the video). We met all sorts of people, including the maker of this video Michael Emery (his company).

It was multiple days of stoke in the water (check out the seal waving to Michael) and in Bird’s Surf Shed watching surf films.

Enjoy the video – Steve

\w/

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Child mortality in Africa has plummeted, belying the continent’s “hopeless” reputation.

The chart below shows the change over the most recent five years in the number of deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births.

Sixteen of the 20 have seen falls, but the more impressive finding is the size of the decline in 12: more than the 4.4% annual fall needed for the world to achieve its millennium development goal of cutting by two-thirds the child-mortality rate between 1990 and 2015.

The top performers, Senegal and Rwanda, now have rates the same as India. It took India 25 years to reduce its rate from around 120 child deaths per 1,000 births to 72 now. It took Rwanda and Senegal only about five years.

Michael Clemens of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, DC, calls this “the biggest, best story in development”.

 

via Economist Daily Chart

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Happy Birthday! Share with someone on their birthday.

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If you watch movies and TV shows streaming from Netflix on your PC or Mac you may have noticed that we have updated our Web video player. We’ve refreshed the look of the existing features and added some new functionality.

Some of the new features include:

• You can view season/episode information and change to the next episode when watching a TV show
• The size of the controls now scales, making it easier to use the player on large screens, for example if you connect your computer to your TV
• Similarly, the player will scale down to smaller windows, which is useful if you want to watch something while working in another window.
• Pausing the video now shows more information about the title

In our new player, we’ve consolidated controls into one line. We’re also using icons instead of words (see image below).

Perhaps the biggest change is to the ‘Back to Browse’ option, which used to sit at the bottom right of the old control bar. We’ve moved this up to the top of the screen and to the left. It’s now an arrow icon and text will explain its functionality when you hover over the arrow with your mouse.

via Netflix Blog

And, more detail from Janko Roettgers:

Additional episodes of a TV show can be previewed right from within the player, even in full-screen mode.

The player makes way for additional information, lightbox-style, when paused for a few seconds.

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Don't forget your safe viewing glasses.

// Photos from the National Parks – Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, & glasses

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