Media Coverage
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Axios
AI: Trust & Responsibility
Last week, Axios hosted an Expert Voices roundtable discussion in San Francisco featuring local leaders across government, the tech industry and AI startups. One of the featured experts was Linda MacDonald Glenn, founding director & faculty, UC Santa Cruz Center for Applied Values and Ethics in Advanced Technologies.
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Los Angeles Times
As heat waves warm the Pacific Ocean, effects on marine life remain murky
Heather Welch, a marine spatial ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, and other researchers have created statistical models designed to predict where animals will go when things heat up. “So one of the tricky things with heat wave impacts is you have to be lucky and actually have direct observations during the events,” she said.
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Financial Times
Joe Biden and Donald Trump plan rival Michigan trips in scrap for union votes
Labour historian Dana Frank, a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, said it was significant that Biden had intervened in this dispute, particularly given he stayed neutral in strikes by writers and actors and also undercut a planned strike by railway workers last year. "He didn’t choose to intervene in any of the Los…
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The Hill
Six months later, our call to slow AI development is more crucial than ever
Anthony Aguirre, the executive director and secretary of the board at the Future of Life Institute and the Faggin Presidential Professor for the Physics of Information at the University of California, Santa Cruz, penned this op-ed warning of the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence.
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San Francisco Chronicle
Review: In-depth look at California's rising sea levels finds grim threats and glimmers of hope
The author of this book speaks with UC Santa Cruz’s Gary Griggs, who laments that much of the problem is that in California, “everybody wants to live on the sand.”
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Voice of America
In Costa Rica, Natural Farms Provide Refuge for Birds
Natalia Ocampo-Penuela is a University of California, Santa Cruz environmental scientist who was not involved in the study. She said the findings may seem to make sense without research. But she added that it is very rare to have detailed data over a long time from tropical areas to show that diversified farming can support…
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Ars Technica
Autopsy of a star reveals what was eviscerated by a monster black hole
“ASASSN-14li is exciting because one of the hardest things with tidal disruptions is being able to measure the mass of the unlucky star, as we have done here,” said astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of UC Santa Cruz, one of the authors of the study.
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Essence
'Creating Characters That Look Like Us': The Video Game Company Bringing Type 4 Hair Into Gaming
Since they were invented, video games have received constant upgrades, be it in graphics, new worlds, or expanded options for play. But one thing has been largely missing: “[o]ptions are still pretty limited for creating characters of color, particularly for creating Black characters. And a huge component is a lack of Black hairstyles and textures,”…
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Los Angeles Times
Opinion: Oceans are heating up. Who will protect the turtles, whales and fish crossing borders into cooler waters?
Heather Welch, a marine spatial ecologist at UC Santa Cruz who develops climate-ready tools to manage biodiversity and fisheries, penned this op-ed highlighting the dangers and complexities of marine heatwaves.
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Mercury News
$7 million project begins to rebuild historic Northern California wharf wrecked in huge winter storms
It was arguably the most dramatic image from the powerful storms that battered Northern California’s coastline in January: The Capitola Wharf, an 855-foot-long landmark that dates back to 1857, torn in half by pounding waves. “Maybe it will do fine for 10 or 20 or 30 years,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of Earth sciences…
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Audubon
Birds of a Feather Do Indeed Flock Together, According to New Research
When former University of California, Santa Cruz graduate students Alexis Chaine and Daizaburo Shizuka started banding birds on their campus arboretum, they hoped to explore crown plumage variation among various visiting sparrows. Soon after, they noticed that the birds they banded, among them Golden-crowned Sparrows, consistently returned to the same section of the arboretum. This…
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New York Times
Architecture's Second Looks, and Second Acts
Kresge College is included in this list of buildings, sites, streets, design movements and architects that have received updates this year. The 1973 U.C. Santa Cruz dormitory complex by the postmodernist architects Charles Moore and William Turnbull Jr. and the landscape architect Dan Kiley — a self-styled Mediterranean village tucked in a redwood grove —…