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Volume 54, Number 19   January 29, 2007         

    Announcements    News    Events   Newsmakers

Newsmakers

Google quizzes
In a Jan. 3 CBS 5 story, John Sullivan, professor of management, commented on a unique job quiz that Google uses to screen applicants. "It used to be, 'Hey you must be good because you went to Harvard. Well, they went back and looked at the performance of people and they were surprised -- 'Oh my gosh, some of our best people didn't go to Harvard, don't have good grades' -- and realized, 'We've been making a big mistake,' " Sullivan said.

Clarity is key for family businesses
Michael Meeks, assistant professor of management and director of the Family Business Center, contributed advice to a Jan. 3 San Francisco Chronicle small business advice column on how family businesses should be structured. Meeks suggested that families think carefully about how they divide ownership among family members and document any decisions. "It's amazing how, unless you write things down, five years from now Joe and Jane will recount these initial meetings very differently," he said.

Schools divided by class
"It's a silent [class] war that nobody wants to talk about," Shawn Ginwright, associate professor of Africana studies, said in a Jan. 8 article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education. Ginwright was referring to Oprah Winfrey's recent comments that inner city American children value school less than African children. "Her comments represent a very naïve, limited, static and restrictive understanding of the real circumstances and challenges faced by the Black poor," he said. "It's an endorsement of a system that has worked for the Black middle class. But the fact is there are millions of Blacks in chocolate cities that have not made it and the system continues to ban them and keep them from making it."

Fragile crabs?
Research on porcelain crabs by Jonathon Stillman, assistant professor of biology, was featured in a Jan. 25 Contra Costa Times story on how global warming is affecting some California animal species. Stillman is testing porcelain crabs species in the Monterey area to see how they react to warmer temperatures. "The intertidal species around here are definitely potentially experiencing some temperatures that are close to what their thermal limits are," Stillman said. "If it gets just a little hotter on the hottest days, or if those days start occurring more regularly or in longer stretches like we had this summer -- and both of those things are predicted as a consequence of global warming -- then these animals are really going to start feeling it," he said.

The value of play
The Jan. 26 edition of the Stockton Record featured a story on the value of play groups for isolated rural families. "There are things that [children] learn from each other that they cannot learn from adults," said Pamela Wolfberg, assistant professor of special education at San Francisco State University and director of Project Mosaic, which offers play groups for autistic children.

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