Berkeleyan

News Briefs

26 January 2006

Hellman Family Faculty Fund applications due March 13

The Hellman Family Faculty Fund is accepting applications; the deadline is Monday, March 13. The fund provides research support for assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research. This year, $400,000 will be available for awards. Individuals may apply for an overhead-free grant of up to $50,000. Awards will be announced in May.

For information and the application, see the website of the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare (vpaafw.chance.berkeley.edu/hellman.html) or call Cathy Romanski at 642-7759.

Philanthropist Ken Behring to pump for clean water

Ken Behring, the East Bay developer and former Seattle Seahawks owner, will engage in conversation with College of Engineering Dean Richard Newton on Wednesday, Feb. 1. Behring's organization, WaterLeaders Foundation, is dedicated to delivering water-purification technologies to schools in China, Mexico, and Africa, focusing on small water-treatment systems that utilize ultra-filtration, distillation, and reverse osmosis.

The conversation with Dean Newton, which will start at 4 p.m. in Sibley Auditorium, is part of COE's "View From the Top" lecture series.

1906 quake commemorative lectures continue

The fourth and fifth installments of a seven-lecture series commemorating the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are planned for February. On Wednesday, Feb. 1, at 7:30 p.m. in Sibley Auditorium, Mary Lou Zoback, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, will speak on "The 1906 Earthquake: Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten, and Future Directions."

On Wednesday, Feb. 15, at the same time and location, Eric Elsesser, founding principal of Forell/Elsesser Engineers, will speak on "Improving Seismic Safety and Performance of Buildings."

The lecture series is jointly sponsored by the 1906 Alliances of Stanford and Berkeley. More information is at seismo.berkeley.edu/1906/quake06lectures.html.

Faculty applications for summer research apprenticeships

The Townsend Center for the Humanities invites proposals for summer research apprenticeships under the Geballe Research Opportunities for Undergraduates Program (GROUP). The deadline is Tuesday, Feb. 21.

Submit proposals to: GROUP Apprenticeships (Attn: Director Candace Slater), Townsend Center for the Humanities, 220 Stephens Hall, MC 2340.

For information, see townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/groupapprenticeapplication.shtml or contact Teresa Stojkov (tstojkov@berkeley.edu).

For the record.

That was the Library's 10-millionth acquisition featured on page 3 of last week's issue (our headline undersold the milestone by the omission of three zeros). The Library's 10 featured "treasures" include not only those we mentioned but the following: a signed letter from Friar Junipero Serra, founder of the first of California's missions (from the Bancroft Library); the Bernard-Murray Tibetan collection (from the Bancroft and East Asian libraries); and the second Biblia Rabbinica, a 16th-century edition of the Hebrew Bible (from the Bancroft Library's Judaica collection).

In that same issue, in an article about the accuracy of online information (see Letter to the Editor), we misquoted SIMS professor Geoffrey Nunberg as saying that among the familiar concepts that Wikipedia does a "surprisingly good" job of explaining is "the square of pi." That was a transcription error compounded by an editorial revision: Nunberg had originally specified "chi square," which, Wikipedia informs us, is "one of the theoretical probability distributions most widely used in inferential statistics."