On October 26 the GSPP community received official news from Dean Michael Nacht that he intends to step down after ten years as dean of our school. He will take a sabbatical for the academic year 2008-2009 and return in Fall 2009 to resume his full-time position at GSPP teaching and researching US national security policy and management of complex organizations. Dean Nacht writes: It has been a privilege and great pleasure to serve the School and UC Berkeley for the past decade, and I very much look forward to continuing as a member of the GSPP community. I'm sure...

We're now in the 5th inning of game four of the ALCS 2007 championship, there's no score, and I like most of what I'm seeing on the field-- Boston versus Cleveland is a truly worthy match. But the TV continually flashes the two teams logos: a red letter "B" -- and a red grinning "Indian" head. Cleveland's cartoon makes me wince every time. I thought some of the other readers of Policy Matters might want to learn more about this curious hold-over from the 1950's. Cleveland's baseball team went through a list of names over forty years before landing with...

An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1917 for supposedly aiding Russia during World War I. The mass killings were carried out by the Turkish government fairly conspicuously through deportation and concentration camps and documented by everyone from the New York Times to the German Army. Basically a holocaust before the Holocaust.

I would like to bring to everyone's attention the just found and published diaries of Robert Hooke, a polymath contemporary with Sir Isaac Newton who, as a scientist in residence at the Royal Academy, kept a detailed record of their proceedings. The entire manuscript has been made freely available to the world by the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom. The technology is amazing and is really worth trying out. It is hoped that analysis of this manuscript will provide rich information on some of the many scientific controversies of the time. The late 17th century...

The US Employment Non-Discrimination Act (or ENDA) has gone to Washington, again, this time incarnated as H.R. 2015: the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007. It reached the the House Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee in September, and was slated to go to the floor for a vote last week. Monday night Speaker Pelosi's office announced a decision to delay the bill as the authors revisit recent revisions that stripped the bill of gender identity protections. Pelosi announced “After discussions with congressional leaders and organizations supporting passage of ENDA, we have agreed to schedule mark-up of the bill in the...

Since the inception of the failed “Bowl Alliance” in 1996 and the subsequent “Bowl Championship Series (BCS)” which has had its share of problems, many sportswriters, commentators, and college football fans have argued that each season should end with an NFL-style playoff to determine a national champion. This debate revolves around the question of the role athletics play as divisions of universities. Many argue that a playoff will benefit “mid major” and smaller schools who – because of weak schedules – never have the chance to play for the title, even when they are undefeated (BYU 2001, Utah 2004, Boise...

By accepting a donation of about $130,000 in carbon offsets from the publicity-starved – and San Francisco based! – Planktos International, the Vatican this summer became the world’s first “carbon neutral” nation. The offsets will go toward planting trees in Hungary and will no doubt have a beneficial, but tiny and temporary, impact on the area’s economy. Hmmm… Not wholly unlike the effort’s impact upon climate change which, as we’ve recently been told, is unavoidable and will be, by any measure, catastrophic. However, as tempting as it is to… • deprecate Planktos’ flagrant PR-mongering • dismiss their primary business model...