Award-winning novelist and UCLA professor Alain Mabanckou (photo via UCLA website)
In 2006, Alain Mabanckou won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most important literary prizes for his novel Mémoires de porc-épic (Memories of a Porcupine).
In this feature profile for UCLA College Report, Mabanckou talks about his influences (including American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis), his past career as a French lawyer and the value for a writer of living far from home.
Categories: Academia · Entertainment · Profile
Two-dimensional simulation of burglary hotspots developed by UCLA professor P. Jeffrey Brantingham
In one of my favorite movies, Minority Report, Tom Cruise and his trusty precogs can eliminate crimes by predicting them in advance and arresting criminals before the crimes take place.
It makes for a great science fiction story, but what if it were possible in real life to predict where crimes are likely to take place so that police can allocate resources accordingly.
UCLA anthropologist P. Jeffrey Brantingham and colleagues in the mathematics department are working with the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments to identify patterns in crime data that could enable predictions of where future crimes are likely to occur so that the police can interupt the patterns and thereby prevent the crime.
Get the amazing full story online at UCLA Spotlight.
Categories: Academia · Crime · Journalism
Tagged: anthropology, Crime, crime prevention, mathematics, Minority Report, Tom Cruise
California's snow-covered Sierra Mountains (photo by Scott1956)
Southern California gets almost all its water from snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada, Sierra Madre and San Gabriel mountains.
If climate change causes higher temperatures and smaller snowpacks, could Los Angeles and San Diego’s water supply run dry?
Scientists at UCLA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are joining forces to investigate the situation.
Find out more in this feature story for UCLA College Report magazine.
Categories: Academia · Environment · Journalism · Technology
Tagged: climate change, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, Los Angeles, mountains, San Diego, snow, Southern California, UCLA
Bryant Magazine, Technology Issue (Spring 2007)
Bryant University, a business and liberal arts school based in Smithfield, Rhode Island, uses its eponymous magazine to communicate with some 40,000 alumni.
In Spring 2007, Bryant decided to devote an issue of Bryant Magazine to examining the business impact of emerging technologies including wikis, VoIP, hardware virtualization and affordable home robots.
Working with communications firm Lipman Hearne, I interviewed a variety of Bryant sources and then wrote both of the magazine’s major feature articles.
Categories: Academia · Business · Communications · Education · Journalism · Technology
Tagged: alumni magazine, Bryant University, Lipman Hearne, Rhode Island, robots, Smithfield, VoIP, wiki
UCLA graduate student Awet Weldemichael (photo courtesy of UCLA)
Awet Weldemichael survived the Eritrean war of independence in a Sudanese refugee camp.
He then made in through the massive famine that swept across Northeast Africa in the 1980s.
Eventually he found his way to UCLA, where he learned the Indonesian and Portuguese languages in an effort to compare the independence struggles in his own homeland and the independence movement in East Timor.
Read his remarkable story in this December 2005 feature article for UCLA College Report.
Categories: Academia · Education · Journalism · Profile
Tagged: East Timor, Eritrea, independence, Indonesian, Portuguese, Sudan, UCLA College Report
