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Welcome to the October issue of the Social Sciences E-News
Upcoming Events
Social Sciences
in the Media
If you have a good idea for a feature story or would like to post an event to the School of Social Sciences website, please contact Heather Wuebker, hwuebker@uci.edu.
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Back to school
Social Sciences welcomes more than 1400 new students and 11 new faculty for fall ’08
As UC Irvine opens its doors this fall to its 43rd consecutive class of young scholars, the School of Social Sciences, the largest academic unit on campus, is happy to welcome more than 1,400 new students and 11 new faculty members to its rapidly growing community.
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New institute to explore how world’s poor use technology to spend, store money
Research funded by $1.7 million grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries.
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Building blocks of learning
HABLA program prepares toddlers for kindergarten and beyond
Four-year-old Lupe Velasquez grabs the Legos scattered across his kitchen table, slowly but confidently naming the colors of the individual blocks - green, yellow, red. “What color is this?” asks recent UC Irvine graduate Noemi Maldonado, pointing to an orange block. “It’s the same as a fruit you love to eat.” Lupe and Maldonado meet twice a week to read books and work on colors, shapes, vocabulary and memorization. Building verbal skills is one of the main goals of the HABLA program - an acronym for Home-based Activities and Building Language Acquisition - founded and directed by cognitive sciences professor Virginia Mann.
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Can robots learn to think for themselves?
UCI cognitive scientist awarded grant to find out
Meet CARL, short for Cognitive Anteater Robotics Laboratory. CARL is a robot, designed to think and act like a human being, thanks to the creative masterminds of Jeffrey Krichmar, UCI cognitive neuroscientist and Brian Cox, a former Hollywood animatronics engineer whose movie credits include, among others, Godzilla and Spielberg’s AI. CARL can move around on his own, nod his head, look at objects, and, when his curiosity gets the best of him, wander around a disco-like floor chasing moving lights. Soon, with funding from a newly awarded $300,000 National Science Foundation grant, he will give researchers an inside look at how our brains impact our behavior when we feel happy, scared, sad and surprised.
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SPOTLIGHT EVENT - Alumni Career Series: Careers in Financial Services
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
UC Irvine Student Center, Crescent Bay CD
This month’s event will feature alumni and community members working in the financial services industry. Panelists will talk with students about their personal career experiences, highlighting the paths that guided them to their current positions, and offering words of advice on how to get a start in the financial services sector.
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SPOTLIGHT EVENT - Hot Topics Election Debate
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
Donald Bren Hall 100
With only weeks to go until the 2008 Presidential election, most polls show Senators McCain and Obama in a statistical dead heat in the race to the White House. The Social Sciences Dean’s Ambassadors Council invites you to come listen as political scientists Mark Petracca and William Schonfeld debate which Senator will be elected the 44th President of the United States.
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SPOTLIGHT EVENT - Dinner Club: Nuclear Tensions, Behind the Scenes
Thursday, October 23, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
UCI University Club Library
Why do some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them? How do the nuclear trajectories of East Asia and the Middle East differ? What do answers to these and other questions say about North Korea and Iran? Please join political scientist Etel Solingen as she explores these timely - and critical - topics at the School of Social Sciences’ opening 2008-09 Dinner Club lecture.
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SPOTLIGHT EVENT - Students Making Peace? Report from UCI’s Olive Tree Initiative
Thursday, October 30, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100
The Olive Tree Initiative was founded in March of 2007 by a group of students who were inspired by the need to have a forum where they, along with other students, could discuss issues concerning the situation in Israel and Palestine in a constructive and respectful manner. They were also motivated by a desire to see for themselves the faces and hear the voices of people whose lives are impacted by this ongoing conflict on a day to day basis. To accomplish their goal of speaking with individuals living Israeli and Palestian lives, the students traveled to the region in September 2008. The ISPF invites you to come hear their story.
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SPOTLIGHT EVENT - Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition
Saturday, November 1-2, 2008 @ 9:15 am
Social Science Plaza B, Room 1208
The Mughal dynasty, while ousted from power in South Asia by the mid 19th century, continued to impact the vast region’'s social, economic and cultural traditions with its Indo-Muslim and Indo-Persian influences well into the 20th century. “Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition,” a two-day conference at UC Irvine, will examine these influences through featured talks by authors and scholars who specialize in the literary, historical, artistic and architectural traditions of South Asia. A highlight of the conference will be a formal Hyderabad banquet which will feature acclaimed sarode performer David Trasoff and tabla soloist Abhiman Kaushal.
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More Headlines
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Etel Solingen’s Nuclear Logics receives top book award in political science
Political scientist Etel Solingen takes on nuclear proliferation in her most recent book, Nuclear Logics, which received the American Political Science Association’s prestigious 2008 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the U.S. on government, politics, or international affairs.
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UCI receives $5.4 million to study large-scale computer networks
If your Facebook page - or “node” - disappeared, would your whole social network come crashing to a halt? A five-year, $5.4 million award to UC Irvine researchers will help them find out.
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Don’t trade in your pennies just yet
In a study published in the Sept. issue of the Journal of Economic Theory, Guillaume Rocheteau, a new economics associate professor at UCI, presents an economic model that shows there is still a purpose for paper money in our increasingly cashless-based society.
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UCI welcomes home its Olympic Anteaters
Anteater fans filled the university student center plaza on Tuesday, Sept. 9 to honor and welcome home the current and former UCI athletes and coaching staff who represented Team USA in this year’s summer Olympic Games.
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Two-day conference puts spotlight on digital money
Everyone knows money talks. Keith Hart ranks it right up there with language as a conduit for human communication. The professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of London’s Goldsmith’s College delivered the keynote address at “Everyday Digital Money: Innovation in Money Cultures and Technologies,” sponsored by UCI’s Department of Anthropology and Intel’s People and Practices Research Group.
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OC educators get pointers on teaching students about the Constitution
In observance of Constitution Day, the School of Social Sciences hosted a conference Saturday, Sept. 13 aimed at helping K-12 educators bring the founding document’s principles into their Orange County classrooms.
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