Tag: universities

Saturdays Only For “People Of Color” At UC Berkeley Farm; Report

A community farm run by the University of California at Berkeley only allows “people of color” to participate on Saturdays, according to a new federal complaint.

The report to the Department of Education accuses the Gill Tract Community Farm of racial discrimination in violation of Title VI.

Run by the public university, the farm is a research, education, and extension project “focused on ecological farming and food justice,” according to its website. It welcomes the public to harvest food if they “help with weeding, planting, and watering.”

However, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which filed the complaint last week, said the program discriminates against white people.

“Saturdays are exclusively BIPOC,” a farm manager wrote in a series of text messages cited in the complaint. “Exceptions have only been made for events that are BIPOC-centered and with plenty of advance notice and planning.”

The manager also advocated for “upholding boundaries around that safe and sacred space,” according to the complaint.

University spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the New York Post he was unaware of the allegations. After reviewing the complaint, Mogulof said the university takes such matters “extremely seriously” and will investigate the situation.

“The anonymous texts attached to the complaint have no specific information about time or place. And, as you can see, the Gill Tract’s website and calendar make no mention whatsoever of any program or activity of the sort described in the complaint,” Mogulof said.

“Having said that … I will contact the appropriate people on campus in an effort to determine what the facts are,” he told the Post.

The complaint asks the university to publish a statement reminding the public that everyone is welcome at the farm. It also asks the university to require training for individuals who run the farm.

“While the farm purports to be a welcoming place, the staff running the farm seem to think that racial segregation should make a comeback,” Mountain States Legal Foundation stated on its website.

“… But neither the Constitution nor federal law permit public institutions like UC Berkeley to engage in racial segregation.”

Other universities also have incorporated racial issues into their agricultural programs in recent years.

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Portland Community College Offers New Class on UFOs

Portland Community College is offering a niche new area of study this spring: UFOs.

“From Film to Real Life? UFOs, UAPs, Government and the Media” is an online class listed for non-credit in a category of study called “cultural exploration.” (Other offerings include low-cost Hawaii travel, foreign films and a “waterfalls and wine” tour of the Columbia River Gorge.)

The class is the brainchild of longtime local television news producer Brian Anslinger, the executive producer of KRCW’s lifestyle show Everyday Northwest. Previously, Anslinger worked as assistant news director and executive producer at KATU-TV.

Part of his mission with the class is to help students decode the confusing landscape of UAP sightings and research. (UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the updated name for UFOs, unidentified flying objects. Anslinger accepts both.)

“Having been looking at this subject for a long time and different aspects of it, I thought, gosh, if you see what’s happening on Capitol Hill or read headlines, I don’t know how you make sense of what’s actually going on,” Anslinger says.

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Duke University researchers help transgender woman, 50, breastfeed her GRANDCHILD using experimental hormone drugs so she could feel what it’s like to be a real mom – but critics call it ‘frankly disturbing’

A trans woman has been helped to breastfeed her grandchild, in what is thought to be a world first.

The unidentified 50-year-old was helped to express up to 30ml of milk at a time, after a four week course of hormone treatment.

Researchers from Duke University reported the woman ‘lactated for a total of two weeks’ and was able to feed the four-month-old baby.

The motivation for inducing lactation was to create a ‘bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children’.

She was moved to tears by the experience, which she said had the added benefit of affirming her female gender and making her breasts larger.

The patient later stopped the course of treatment ‘due to logistical barriers’.

According to the researchers, who published their study in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine, the patient had said they had ‘a last-minute idea’ about breastfeeding their grandchild.

‘The patient first expressed the unique desire to breastfeed her expected grandchild at an appointment with her endocrinologist in the spring of 2022,’ they wrote.

‘She disclosed that this was a last-minute idea that came to her very close to her daughter’s due date.

‘At five weeks after initiating treatment changes for lactation induction, she reverted to her previous medication regimen.

‘She states that she stopped pursuing her personal goal to breastfeed due to logistical barriers, such as the need to take care of her grandchild while her daughter was pumping.’

‘Her primary motivation for inducing lactation was to experience the bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children.

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Harvard University removes human skin binding from book

Harvard University has removed the binding of human skin from a 19th Century book kept in its library.

Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s.

In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin.

But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.

Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s.

He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes.

Harvard University explained its decision to remove the binding, saying: “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history.”

It added it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.

The library is also “conducting additional biographical and provenance research into the anonymous female patient”, the university said.

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Scientists Close To Controlling All Genetic Material On Earth

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have developed a new method to create human artificial chromosomes (HACs) that could revolutionize gene therapy and other biotechnology applications. The study, published in Science, describes an approach that efficiently forms single-copy HACs, bypassing a common hurdle that has hindered progress in this field for decades.

Artificial chromosomes are lab-made structures designed to mimic the function of natural chromosomes, the packaged bundles of DNA found in the cells of humans and other organisms. These synthetic constructs have the potential to serve as vehicles for delivering therapeutic genes or as tools for studying chromosome biology. However, previous attempts to create HACs have been plagued by a major issue: the DNA segments used to build them often link together in unpredictable ways, forming long, tangled chains with rearranged sequences.

The Penn Medicine team, led by Dr. Ben Black, sought to overcome this challenge by completely overhauling the approach to HAC design and delivery. “The HAC we built is very attractive for eventual deployment in biotechnology applications, for instance, where large-scale genetic engineering of cells is desired,” Dr. Black explains in a media release. “A bonus is that they exist alongside natural chromosomes without having to alter the natural chromosomes in the cell.”

To test their idea, the scientists turned to a tried-and-true workhorse of molecular biology: yeast. They used a technique called transformation-associated recombination (TAR) cloning to assemble a whopping 750 kilobase DNA construct in yeast cells. For context, that’s about 25 times larger than the constructs used in previous HAC studies. The construct contained DNA from both human and bacterial sources, as well as sequences to help seed the formation of the centromere.

The next challenge was to deliver this hefty payload into human cells. The team accomplished this by fusing the engineered yeast cells with a human cell line, a process that had been optimized in previous studies. Remarkably, this fusion approach proved to be much more efficient than the traditional method of directly transferring naked DNA into cells.

The results were stunning. Not only did the engineered HACs form successfully, but they did so with much higher efficiency compared to standard methods. Furthermore, these designer chromosomes were able to replicate and segregate properly during cell division, a key requirement for their long-term stability and functionality.

“Instead of trying to inhibit multimerization, for example, we just bypassed the problem by increasing the size of the input DNA construct so that it naturally tended to remain in predictable single-copy form,” explained Dr. Black.

But the researchers didn’t stop there. They also devised a clever way to visualize the HACs in their native, uncompacted state. By gently lysing the cells and using a special centrifugation technique, they were able to isolate the HACs away from the rest of the cellular DNA. This allowed them to confirm that the HACs maintained their single-copy status and circular topology, without any unwanted rearrangements or additions.

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COMMIEFORNIA: UC Berkeley Parents Hire Private Security to Protect Children From Violent Crime Surge

Parents of students at University of California Berkeley have become so concerned about their offspring’s safety they have hired private security to secure the local vicinity.

SFGATE reports that parents were forced to take matters into their own hands amid a surge in violent crime around the UC Berkeley campus located outside of San Francisco:

Parents and community members of SafeBears, a nonprofit organization started in 2022, raised $40,000 at the end of 2023 to launch the pilot program, which started March 6 and concludes on Saturday, according to the group’s website.  Six security guards from Streetplus, a third-party contractor, are patrolling five routes around the campus and the university’s residence halls on foot and by bicycle from 6:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. daily.

The security guards are not armed and will not enter university property, the website says, but are trained in de-escalation and CPR. They also must earn a California “guard card” from the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, requiring them to clear a background check from the California Department of Justice and FBI.

While the program will not be continuing beyond this weekend, parents hope that they will be able to convince the university to take more action.

“While we will not be extending the length of our private safety pilot beyond March 23, we will certainly continue to push the administration at UC Berkeley to do more to protect students from violence,” Sagar Jethani, president of SafeBears, told SFGATE.

The move comes amid a surge in violent crime in the local area, which is notorious as one of the most left-wing places in the entire country.

According to the Berkeley Scanner, over the course of 2023 robberies increased by 29 percent, property crime by 58 percent and sex crimes remained around the same.

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The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

ON A HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.

As they started to explore the gardens, an inexplicable feeling of depression descended upon them, a melancholic atmosphere they described as “a dreamy haziness” and “eerie and unpleasant.” They began to encounter people clothed in strange attire. They saw “two men dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats,” and later a man whose “face was most repulsive, —its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.” Passing over a bridge, they found: “a lady was sitting. I supposed her to be sketching. She turned and looked full at us. Her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual.” Eventually, they found their way out of the gardens, and returned to their accommodation in a daze.

The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.

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Harvard Tramples the Truth

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.

What were the results during the spring of 2020? With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarized in a July 7, 2020, report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden.

Sweden was the only major Western country that rejected school closures and other lockdowns in favor of concentrating on the elderly, and the final verdict is now in. Led by an intelligent social democrat prime minister (a welder), Sweden had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries during the pandemic, and less than half that of the United States. Sweden’s Covid deaths were below average, and it avoided collateral mortality caused by lockdowns.

Yet on July 29, 2020, the Harvard-edited New England Journal of Medicine published an article by two Harvard professors on whether primary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden. It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new pharmaceutical drug. That’s not the path to truth.

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Academics embrace new ‘deficit framing’ concept to justify unprepared, underperforming, or immature students

ANALYSIS: In other words, there isn’t a problem with students entering college grossly unprepared. The problem is college is too challenging. Those that say otherwise are colonizing subjugators.

It is an open secret among college professors and university administrators that college students aren’t what they used to be.

They struggle with lengthy reading assignments and basic vocabulary. They don’t know rudimentary algebra. They can’t add or subtract fractions. They complain that deadlines, hard exams, and required attendance are impediments to their success.

Yet, although some professors view these deficits as problems to be fixed, many in academia have embraced bits of pedagogical fluff intertwined with fashionable DEI that suggest there is something demotivating if not bigoted about acknowledging deficits as deficits and holding students to basic academic or professional standards, while implying bad grades and a lack of maturity on the part of students are simple quirks educators just need to better accept.

One such fluffy concept is that of “deficit framing,” sometimes referred to as “deficit thinking” or a “deficit model lens.” As defined by education researcher Chelsea Heinbach in a 2021 interview, deficit thinking is “the belief that there is a prescribed ‘correct’ way of being — also known as the norm — and anyone who operates outside of that norm is operating at a deficit.”

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Dept. of Justice pays out nearly $1 million to public university to track spread of ‘Mis-, Dis- and Mal-Information’

As the presidential election approaches, the Biden administration is expanding its controversial initiative to control information and censor Americans by funding a new project that tracks the spread of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users.

A public university in South Carolina is getting nearly $1 million from the government to map the spread of MDM in real time and create an online dashboard with an MDM tracker.

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is doling out the funds to researchers at Clemson University to meet its reported mission of “improving knowledge and understanding of crime and justice issues through science.” The NIJ claims it provides objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the decision-making of the criminal and juvenile justice communities to reduce crime and advance justice.

The government is giving Clemson researchers a bunch of taxpayer dollars to identify information and opinions it does not like by conducting the “first real-time mapping of the spread of MDM campaigns around contentious public events,” according to the grant announcement.

The venture has been named “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns” and researchers assure their work will not be biased even though a leftist administration is funding the work, and most academics are themselves on the left politically.

The research is essential, the Biden administration asserts, to avert “violent extremism.” This is the explanation offered in the DOJ’s grant document: “Nationally publicized political events often become focal points of MDM, which are exploited by various individuals and groups to launch disinformation campaigns and trigger spontaneous or crowd-sourced diffusion of disinformation and violent extremism.”

Clemson researchers will use the public funds to develop specialized algorithms to identify the creation of MDM campaigns and capture event-level characteristics of real-life events that trigger MDM, the grant announcement explains.

The academics will also help determine what characteristics of high-profile events are more likely to trigger online MDM campaigns and what are the common characteristics of organizations and other actors engaged in MDM campaigns.

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