What does the phrase "emotional science" mean to you? For some, it implies psychology. For Greg Niemeyer, a tenured associate professor in UC Berkeley's department in New Media, "emotional science" means science that stimulates and engages. Read more...

Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

What  is it like being a professor of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)  at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business when the Occupy movement takes the campus by storm?

For one thing, it makes for some great teachable moments.

Professor  Kevin Sweeney, former executive of Patagonia, began talking about the  Occupy movement with his class on Oct. 5, when protesters began  camping out in San Francisco. But recently, they’ve had to look no  further than the school's own backyard, with Occupy Cal protesters making Sproul Plaza their home base.

From  Sweeney’s perspective, businesses and corporations should not be  surprised at all by the Occupy movement if they are practicing corporate social responsibility.  According to him, businesses should use NGOs and activists to read the  tides of change. Sweeney likes to use a surfing analogy to prove his point.

“When you surf, you reach a point in the wave where you either ride  that wave or you just get hammered by it... You try to find the people there who know the break really well... and  they can say, ‘That bump out there, that’s a big hairy wave, we’ll get  trapped by that one.’...You want to find NGO activists who can look out on the  horizon and see which of those bumps are really going to be big  waves... When you do that, you’re not surprised by Occupy Wall Street.  This is a wave you can’t ignore,” said Sweeney.

And  it has been hard to ignore the action on the UC Berkeley campus. Two  weeks ago, protesters were  met by UC police in riot gear. Several protesters were jabbed with  batons as they attempted to block police from taking down tents that were erected on Sproul Plaza.

By: Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

On Wednesday, 20 students -- along with a civil rights group, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) -- will file a lawsuit against UC Berkeley administrators, the UC Police Department, and Alameda County Sheriff's officers. The lawsuit is demanding compensation for police brutality and false arrest, and the violation of students' First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, during a peaceful demonstration on Berkeley's campus on Nov. 9.

On that day, police were filmed shoving and beating protesters, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, on campus during a peaceful demonstration. Some of the students were arrested after the ordeal.

Students were shocked by the treatment they received from police. “A police officer jabbed me three or four times in the lower abdomen,” said Ashley Pinkerton, a UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict studies student. “Each time it was a jolt more than the pain because my adrenaline was rushing so much, so I didn’t really feel that stuff till much later.” Pinkerton found herself standing up against campus police after helping another student who she saw being “strangled” by officers.

Pinkerton has been a supporter of the Occupy movement and has attended the general assemblies in Oakland. She said she's now proud to support the Occupy movement at her school. “I think, overall, just being in something that is so collectively active, it gives you this really righteous feeling...you share something really intense."

Denise Tejada, Turnstyle News

UC Berkeley made international headlines after a video surfaced showing campus police pushing and beating students with batons. One professor, Math professor Nathan Ilten, saw those videos and was inspired to help bring awareness to the issue of police brutality on campus. He reached out to other fellow mathematicians to help put together a "teach-out" on UC Berkeley's campus.

Turnstyle filmed one of the six teach-outs at Berkeley, Professor Andrew Critch's “The Mathematics of Altruism and Civic Involvement.” The class included a review of the simple order-of-magnitude calculations and how they often show that altruistic behaviors -- like voting and civic engagement -- can have a huge expected impact on social issues.

Math Proffessors Hold Teach-Outs at UC Berkeley Campus from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

Rachel Krantz, Turnstyle News

As students and faculty strike on the Cal campus today, UC regents have announced they will be canceling a meeting scheduled for November 16 at the UCSF Mission Bay campus. The regents cited "a real danger of significant violence and vandalism” as their reason for canceling tomorrow’s meeting. University police told them "rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting." Whether or not these threats to the regents are real, it is true that Occupy Cal had called for a protest of Wednesday’s meeting. Activists say the regents are acting on behalf of the 1%, implementing budget cuts and fee hikes for university students. Occupy Cal points out four board members in particular as part of the problem: Monica Lozano, Dick Blum, Leslie Tang Schilling and Paul Wachter. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

"It's telling that the regents don't want to face people who are calling on them to make the 1 percent pay for re-funding public education - including their own companies, like Bank of America and Wells Fargo," said UC Berkeley doctoral student Charlie Eaton, an organizer with the graduate student employees union, which has worked on the protests with a group called Refund California.

Lawmakers have cut hundreds of millions of dollars from UC's state allocation over the past few years, including $650 million this year alone. Another $100 million could be cut this winter if state revenues fall short as expected.

At the same time, the regents have consistently raised tuition and fees, tripling them in the last decade to $13,218, while cutting campus services.

Read Turnstyle News' Full Occupy Wall Street Coverage

Delanie Ricketts, Turnstyle News

I don’t believe all big business is bad business. While I identify with Occupy Wall Street protesters’ grievances with corporate America, I have a different vision of what needs to change. I see business as our most valuable ally in the quest for social justice. And in a bad economy, I see job opportunities for myself in that world too.

I didn’t always feel that way. I knew I wanted to study poverty ever since I moved to Jakarta, Indonesia in 5^th grade. As my family and I drove to our future home, my ten-year-old self was baffled by the endless string of shacks, pollution, and people living on less than a dollar a day. I thought to myself, “Is this where we’ll be living?” But as expats, of course, we lived in a very nice, manicured condo.

Nonetheless, right outside my window poverty stared me right in the face. Why was it that I could live a life of luxury while my neighbors could not? After moving back to the United States, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I saw myself working for an NGO to right the injustice and inequity I experienced in Jakarta. Once I enrolled as a student at the University of California Berkeley, this dream became complicated.

As part of my liberal arts major, I decided to take a business class. It was in this class that I started thinking differently about big business. I discovered, with readily available capital and power worldwide, corporations can be extremely valuable actors in the effort to end poverty, despite a focus on profits. Although many people, including some of my peers here at UC Berkeley, are skeptical of businesses that claim to be making a difference, I am optimistic. My optimism is fed by the huge amount of people I see already working towards making businesses become more socially responsible.

The second part of the California DREAM Act has reached Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, and students and activists are demanding that he sign it. A group of activists from the national organization By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), local educators, and middle school students held a press conference on September 1st at the UC Berkeley campus to spread the word about the upcoming deadline for passing the bill.

Yvette Falarca, a teacher at King Middle School in Berkeley, CA, brought some of her students with her. The students were there with the consent of their parents to speak out to the press about why the DREAM Act is important to them. Zaira Romero said, “I came to fight for my rights to go to college. Even though we’re not from here... We’re trying to tell them we want to be something in life.”

The first part of the CA DREAM Act, AB 130, which passed in July, allows undocumented college students in CA to receive private funding and scholarships. The second part, AB 131, would allow undocumented students to be eligible for state and government funding - the difference between going or not going for many students.

The group had planned the conference in that particular location because it was in front of the UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birjeneau’s office. Birjeneau came out and informed the activists that he would not be able to attend the press conference, but that he supports the issue. “I believe [the governor] will sign it,” said Birjeneau, who is also writing an op-ed for the Daily Cal in support of AB 131. “But we cannot forget about the Federal DREAM Act,” he said, reminding the group that they need to take their fight to the Federal level.

This story was originally published on L.A. Youth.

By Devin Ruiz

After taking a tour of UC Berkeley at the end of sophomore year, I fell in love with the school and knew it was where I wanted to be. Every student I met on my campus tour was wearing something “Cal” and telling me that this is the college I should go to. I was convinced.

The problem was that my GPA, while good, was nowhere near the 4.0 that I felt I would need to get in. I thought about working extra hard to raise my grades to give myself a slim chance to get accepted, but I had taken only one honors class and one AP class and wasn’t very involved in extracurriculars. Then I thought about going to a Cal State for undergrad and going to Berkeley for graduate school. But I knew that would feel like settling and I wouldn’t be happy. So I decided to go to a community college for two years and then try to transfer to Berkeley. I figured that community college would be a chance to start over and get better grades so that I could transfer to my dream school.

I went to a private, all-girls Catholic school where the majority of students were smart and had known their dreams schools, like Cal Tech and UC San Diego, since they started freshman year. It was difficult not to compare myself to other girls in my class. When I told my classmates I was going to a community college, I felt embarrassed. One classmate told me I wasn’t going to a “real college.”

Although I started to regret that I hadn’t tried to get better grades during my freshman and sophomore years, I was motivated to create a plan that would allow me to transfer to a UC in two years. I started by enrolling at Santa Monica College, the community college that has that highest transfer rate to the UCs. Then I promised myself that I would work as hard as possible to get at least a 3.7 GPA (a 3.0 is the minimum GPA needed to transfer to a UC, but I wanted to increase my chances of getting into more competitive schools like Berkeley). I would have to stop procrastinating and start studying a week before the test instead of an hour before.

Two weeks after I graduated, I started my first class. I was nervous that the coursework would be too difficult or that the professor’s way of teaching would be drastically different from what I was used to in high school. Since it was a remedial math class it was easy but I braced myself for a harder fall semester. To my surprise, my high school had taught me a lot. The books I read my freshman year of high school were repeated in my English 1 and 2 courses. I ended my first semester with a 4.0 and was very proud that my plan was working.

In 2008, President Barack Obama promised that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in the summer of 2011, and troops would be coming home from the Middle East. Summer's almost here. What will these new veterans do next? And are we ready to support them financially with open arms?

This is the third year that the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill will be available to veterans as an educational grant. The bill pays for a veteran’s tuition and fees, provides a housing allowance, and a stipend for books and supplies. Since the bill was made available in 2009, the amount of veterans taking advantage of it has increased by thousands.

According to the National Center for Veteran Analysis and Statistics (NCVAS), 34,393 veterans took advantage of the Post 9.11 G.I. Bill in 2009, and that number jumped to 221,900 veterans in 2010. Imagine how many new student veterans will claim this benefit for the next academic year.

What Veterans Are Facing

For veterans that have their sights set on a diploma, the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill is a godsend. However, taking advantage of this grant can be hell. Coming out of a rigid, no slack environment, where most decisions are made by someone of a higher rank - it’s now up to the veteran to:

a) choose a school

b) fill out applications

c) write the essays

d) take the SAT’s

e) retrieve your high school transcripts

f) take advantage of your veteran benefits... and the list goes on.

At San Francisco State University, the student veterans organization on campus has seen a 30 percent increase in numbers since 2009, according to Rogelio Manaois, the director of the Veteran Services Program at SFSU, and he expects more next year. J.P. Tremblay, Deputy Secretary at the California Department of Veterans Affairs said that on average, they see 30,000 vets come home each year, but he expects more this year.

At the UC Berkeley Veteran Center, Ron William’s door was open, and the flow of student veterans was steady. “If we could multiply Ron Williams by 300 it would be the best thing for us,” said Jose de Lara, 31, who served six years in the U.S. Navy, and is now pursuing philosophy. He said that having a mentor was the most important resource for someone making the transition from the service to school. Other veterans echoed him saying the veteran center where they could find a familiar community was essential to their success.

Unfortunately for De Lara and the other 300 + veterans at UC Berkeley, Williams serves student veterans as part of an unfunded mandate by the state of California, which requires every UC, CSU, and community college in the state of California to provide someone dedicated to retaining and recruiting student veterans. Williams serves this position on top of all his other responsibilities in the Transfer and Re-entry office at UC Berkeley. “It means that no college or university is getting any additional funds from the state to deliver these programs,” he said. Maintaining the program has been a challenge.

As a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate studying theoretical chemistry, Yael Elmatad studies phenomona like the quantum translation-rotation dynamics of confined molecules. And if your eyes start to glaze over just reading the end of that sentence, try to keep them open a few seconds more. Because it's the application of that kind of theoretical work that allows engineers to build things like robotic hands.

In this episode of Brains & Beakers, we're going to show you how to build one yourself. And, hey, why not -- we'll throw in some of the theory behind it too.

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