UCSD RECEIVES
RECORD
VOLUME 47, ISSUE 25
NUMBER OF APPLICANTS
Full coverage in Thursday’s issue.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2014
WWW.UCSDGUARDIAN.ORG
PUT TED TO BED
PHOTO COURTESY TEDXSANDIEGO
UCSD visual arts professor Benjamin Bratton criticized TED Talks for being shallow and ineffective at a TEDxSanDiego conference last month. Now, his TED talk has gone viral. FeATURES, PAGE 6
CURRENT CURRENCY bitcoin blows up online opinion, Page 4
FORECAST
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HITTING A HIGH NOTE: Two UCSD a cappella groups placed in the top three teams at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella West Quarterfinals last weekend at the Mandeville Auditorium. First place went to co-ed group The Beat (pictured). PHOTO BY ALWIN SZETO /GUARDIAN
UC SYSTEM
Winter Break Cut to Two Weeks
In response to complaints of conflicts with Jewish holidays, the UC system approved calendar changes, resulting in a later starting date and a shorter winter vacation for Fall Quarter 2014. BY Andrew Huang
staff writer
U
niversity of California Registrars have approved changes to the 2014–15 academic calendar in response to conflicts with the Jewish High Holy Days. All UCs operating on a quarter system will officially begin their fall quarter on Sept. 29 and start instruction on Thursday of Week 0, Oct. 2 — a week later than when Fall Quarter 2013 began. Additionally, this year’s winter vacation will be shortened to two weeks to compensate
for the loss of classroom time, beginning on Dec. 20 and ending on Jan. 4. According to a Jan. 14 Los Angeles Times article, the calendar change was enacted in accordance with the UC system’s “Policy for Addressing Religious Holiday Conflicts with Residence Hall ‘Move-In’ Days.” Implemented by former UC President Robert Dynes in 2007, it provides guidelines for addressing conflicts between campus move-in dates and major religious holidays, with particular focus on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. “Representatives of the Jewish community
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VERBATIM
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Most of my childhood chores involved turning cleaning tasks into a glorified game of Stratego.” - Kelvin Noronha THINKING CAPS
OPINION, PAGE 4
INSIDE Lights and Sirens ............ 3 Quick Takes .................... 4 Electric Bikes .................. 8 Crossword .................... 11 Sports........................... 12
See CALENDAR, page 3
CAMPUS
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY THURSDAY
and members of the California Legislature have expressed a desire for the university to avoid the conflicts that have arisen between fall residence hall move-in days and the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” Dynes said in a letter to the UC Chancellors. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement, respectively. Traditionally, it is a time of prayer, reflection and repentance. Based on a
Researchers Find Correlation UCSD Establishes New Between Stocks and Health Center for Veterinary Sciences The UCSD study investigated stock prices and how they impact investor psychology. BY Justine Liang
staff writer
There is a strong inverse correlation between daily stock returns and hospital admissions for psychological conditions — including anxiety, panic disorders or major depression — according to a recent publication presented by UCSD finance professors during the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. UCSD Rady School of Management professors Joseph Engelberg and Christopher Parsons explored how stock prices impact investor psychology in their paper, “Worrying about the stock market: Evidence from hospital admissions.” “A lot of behavioral finance is about how your mind affects markets, and very little talks about the other way around,” Engelberg said during an interview with Bloomberg News.
“We have evidence of causality coming from markets coming back to investor psychology, and that’s been a missing component in terms of empirical findings in a lot of prior research.” A way to examine real-time psychological well-being experienced by investors is to look at the rate at which patients from a large population are admitted to hospitals due to mental health conditions. “First, we obtain admission records for every California hospital for each day from 1983 until 2011,” Engelberg and Parsons said. According to data provided by California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, more than 11,000 residents are hospitalized each day on average. By taking portfolios of stock returns and performing time-series regressions, the researchers investigated how the stock market impacts investor psychology. Their data spans a bulk of three decades, in which they concluded that hospitalization rose when stock shares fell, and more people are hospitalized due to mental conditions. See STOCKS, page 3
The center will study transmittable animal diseases. BY Justine Liang
staff writer
The UCSD School of Medicine established a new Center for Veterinary Sciences and Comparative Medicine in Sorrento Valley last week, where scientists, physicians and veterinarians study animal diseases that are transmittable to humans. By examining diseases transmitted from animals to humans, otherwise known as zoonotic diseases, scientists can understand better the same diseases in humans. Animal care can be translated easily to human care. Associate professor of medicine at UCSD’s School of Medicine Joseph Vinetz is one of the inaugural faculty members at CVSCM. “I study animal models of different diseases such as leptospirosis in Peru, which is a disease endemic in the Amazon and affects over one million people a year with its 5 to 20 percent fatality rate,” Vinetz said. Leptospirosis is spread from bac-
teria in animal urine to humans. It is commonly due to contaminated water and leads to flu-like symptoms, eventually ending with liver damage and renal failure, according to the U.S. Center of Disease Control. CVSCM includes a faculty of 25 scientists, doctors and veterinarians from UCSD, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Research Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the San Diego Zoo and Sea World. “The importance of our research is the impact in public health, the interesting science and the advance experimental studies that can be gained,” Vinetz said. “By studying animals and animal models, we can gain insights to understand pathogenesis, diagnosis, vaccines and therapeutics. The founding director of CVSCM is Peter Ernst, Ph.D., professor of pathology at UCSD School of Medicine. The UC system has an See VETERINARY, page 3