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Welcome Welcome to the October 2013 issue of the Social Sciences eNews! Make a Difference Invest in tomorrow's leaders today. Learn how!Follow us on 
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Thank you! Social sciences reached its fundraising goal Thanks to your kindness and generosity, the School of Social Sciences surpassed its fundraising goal October 30! Stay tuned to find out when you can expect to see social sciences' senior leadership Trekked out for the day. Social scientists collaborate to understand financial crisis and regulation Nation Science Foundation-funded study calls on expertise from anthropology, sociology, economics and logic & philosophy of science
APSA honors UCI Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor Howard Gillman honored for scholarly writing, service
Interviews with soc sci's top profs What's your most significant research accomplishment and how has it made a difference?
UCI anthropologist's instrument collection on display at Musical Instrument Museum Collection includes 125 instruments from a half dozen countries
Education's impact on health and fertility UCI economist studies potential links between staying in school longer and better health, fewer teen pregnancies
Fletcher receives grant from National Science Foundation Funding will support the graduate student's dissertation on notions of similarity
SPOTLIGHT EVENT: Aphasia: Hope is a four letter word Documentary screening and Q&A with UCI aphasia study participant kicks off 2013-14 Social Sciences Expert Series Nov 18
SPOTLIGHT EVENT: Charting a Course for the Affordable Care Act: Lessons from Health Economics Novemeber 5, 5:30-7:00 p.m., UCI Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium
SPOTLIGHT EVENT: The New Science of Pleasure: Consumer Choice Behavior and the Measurement of Well-Being Novemeber 4, 3:30-5:00 p.m., Social Sciences Plaza A, Room 2112
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Five years after the 2008 crisis nearly brought down the global financial system, we still lack a clear understanding of what happened and how we might avoid similar situations in the future. In an innovative new project funded by the National Science Foundation, four professors in the School of Social Sciences are working together to find answers.
"Most efforts to understand the crisis and the work of regulators have come from one discipline," says Nina Bandelj, sociologist and one of the lead researchers on the team. "We're bringing together training and experience from anthropology, economics, sociology, history and philosophy of science to address issues like how regulators may know a crisis is brewing and how financial models, data and questions change in times of crisis."
Working with Bandelj, who is also co-author of Economy and State: A Sociological Perspective and co-director of the UCI Center for Organizational Research, are Julia Elyachar, anthropology associate professor, author of Markets of Dispossession: Economic Development, NGOs, and the State in Cairo, and director of the UCI Center for Global Peace & Conflict Studies; Gary Richardson, economics professor and historian; and James Weatherall, logic & philosophy of science assistant professor and author of The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable.
UC Irvine Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor Howard Gillman received two awards at a recent meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago. Both were bestowed by APSA's Law & Courts Section.
Gillman accepted the 2013 Teaching & Mentoring Award, along with Mark Graber of the University of Maryland and Keith Whittington of Princeton University, for their books American Constitutionalism: Vols. I and II (Oxford University Press). The publications were cited for their innovative emphasis on constitutionalism and American political development and for highlighting how the public and political actors, institutions and parties shape American constitutional government.
Gillman was also presented with the 2012 Service Award – an honor delayed when last year's conference in New Orleans was cancelled because of Hurricane Isaac – for his longstanding committee work and organizational assistance to APSA's Law & Courts Section.
A kayagum from Korea. A tanbur from Turkey. Tube zithers from the Philippines. These are a few of the 125 instruments currently on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, courtesy of UCI's Robert Garfias, anthropology professor and world renowned ethnomusicologist.
Earlier this year, he contributed his entire collection of musical instruments to the museum, along with access to photographs and more than 64,000 feet of ethnographic film he has collected over his 51-year academic career.
Can a high school education help you live longer? New research by UCI economist Damon Clark says no, contrary to popular belief.
"There's a lot of research out there suggesting a positive correlation between education and health; people who go to school longer report being healthier and many national health objectives include targets for high school completion rates," Clark says. "But current research fails to associate education as the cause of better health."
Working with Heather Royer, Santa Barbara economics assistant professor, Clark obtained data from Great Britain's administrative records, covering a time period when laws changed requiring students to stay in school one year longer. The pair performed a regression analysis to determine whether an additional year of schooling contributed directly to better health outcomes, regardless of current population trends. They found that while the policy led to sharp increases in completed years of education and earnings, better health – judged by measuring mortality rates – was not affected.
The findings, published in the October issue of the American Economic Review, got Clark looking at another angle – education and fertility rates.
Samuel Fletcher, logic & philosophy of science graduate student, has received a $11,700 grant from the National Science Foundation to support his doctoral dissertation research on notions of similarity.
"Notions of similarity play an important role in science for understanding concepts such as approximation and idealization and the relationships between different theories," he says. "I'm interested in how they work in the context of Einstein's general theory of relativity, our best current scientific theory of space, time, and gravitation."
The study will help to reveal how notions of similarity constrain what we can know and what our theories take to be possible.
Funding for the research began in September and will run through August 2014.
Before it happened, Carl McIntyre was an actor. Not exactly a Hollywood phenom, but a successful actor with a couple of silver screen roles and a steady stream of television, stage and commercial gigs to his credit. But on the evening of September 15, 2005, while rocking his little boy to sleep, Carl's right arm and leg suddenly grew numb and then went completely dead. A large blood clot had dislodged from Carl's heart, traveling up to his brain and wedging itself inside a major artery, cutting off the blood supply and depriving most of his left hemisphere of oxygen. This is a stroke and Carl's was massive. In one instant, in his prime at age 44 with a wife and three young children, Carl acquired severe aphasia, loss of language ability due to brain injury.
This talk features Dana Goldman, professor and Leonard D. Schaeffer Director's Chair at the University of Southern California. Until Fall 2009, he held RAND's Distinguished Chair in Health Economics and directed RAND's program in economics, finance, and organization. He is also an adjunct professor of health services and radiology at UCLA. Goldman is a nationally-recognized health economist influential in both academic and policy circles. He is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters, including articles in some of the most prestigious medical, economic, health policy, and statistics journals. He is a health policy advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, and is a frequent speaker on health care issues. He serves on several editorial boards including Health Affairs and the American Journal of Managed Care. He is also a founding editor of the Forum for Health Economics and Policy, an online journal devoted to health economics and health policy. Goldman's work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Business Week, U.S. News and World Report, The Economist, NBC Nightly News, CNN, National Public Radio, and other media.
This talk features Daniel McFadden, E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Presidential Professor of Health Economics, University of Southern California, and Nobel Laureate in Economics. Economists since the days of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham have traditionally viewed consumers as driven by relentless and consistent pursuit of self-interest, with their choices in the marketplace providing all the measurements needed to reveal their preferences and assess their well-being. This theory of consumer choice is empirically successful, and provides the foundation for most economic policy. However, the traditional view is now being challenged by evidence from cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and neurology. This talk will begin by surveying the origins of neoclassical consumer choice theory and recent developments. Following this, McFadden will review the newer evidence on consumer behavior, and what this implies for the measurement of consumer choice behavior and well-being.
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