By Kara Manke. As programs manager for Bike Bakersfield, a nonprofit bicycle advocacy coalition in Southern California, Asha Chandy hears scary stories all the time about bike collisions and near misses. “One guy told me that he was almost sideswiped by a huge semitruck on a street, even though he was in the bicycle lane,” Chandy says. “The truck was just so close to him that he actually felt the

By Mark Cianca and Yvonne Tevis. Diversity and Inclusion Get the Spotlight The UC IT community is focusing on diversity from all angles. A new “Diversifying the IT Culture” track boasted 16 sessions at our big annual UC Tech Conference. A systemwide group, UC Women in Technology, was formed and held its first webinar, “The First Woman Man: Gender labels and workplace expectations,” presented by UC Merced CIO

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Winter Break Poll! According to our poll results about 25% of you enjoyed the winter break at home. Some of the most exotic places people visited were New Zealand, Iran, Sweden, Germany, Death Valley National Park, and Ohio. Traditional holiday food meant turkey, gravy, ham, and mashed potatoes for 20% of respondents while others enjoyed stuffed cabbage, Puerto Rican rice, sushi, tamales

By Rose Rocchio. Do you want to modernize your communications, ease off on the email? Learn how UCLA’s Zenith App Platform (ZAP) can help you build “an app for that.” Using ZAP, UC organizations can create the mobile environment that works best for them and their audiences – without doing any coding themselves! And ZAP’s embedded messaging platform means you can communicate on demand with your audience, pushing out messages

By Bill Buchanan. Meet Floppy and Cow, a couple of characters at UC Davis. One has an uncanny ability to misuse technology, sometimes in spectacular fashion. The other understands how tech works. Together, they debuted this past fall in five short video comedies of woe and redemption that illustrate basic tech skills and/or good tech habits. Information and Educational Technology at UC Davis first posted them on its Facebook, Twitter,

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By Holly Ober. Let’s say you’re doing research that requires millions of geotagged tweets. Or perhaps you’re a journalist who wants to map murders in Chicago from 2001 to the present. You need to find large spatio-temporal datasets — but where? While there are hundreds of publicly available datasets, locating them can take months of searching. When potential sources are found, they rarely provide enough information for a researcher to

Save the date for the ninth biannual UC Cyber Security Summit, which will be held at the UC Berkeley campus on April 15, 2020. The Summit is UC’s semiannual meeting that brings together people from across the university to discuss and learn about cybersecurity and cyber-risk management.  Now is a good time to save the date and obtain your travel approvals.  This information below can help you prepare your travel

By Yvonne Tevis. This is the story of how three UC employees – from three separate campuses – got what they wanted because they worked together. What did they want? As process improvement people, they wanted tools. Specifically, a tool that slashes the time spent mapping processes. Their collaboration began casually over lunch in fall 2019. Sri Ramya Bachu Venkata, a project manager at UC Berkeley, was enthusiastically telling Halina

By Paul Jamason. We always need the right tool for the job. But sometimes we don’t know what that tool is. Thankfully, along came the sold-out Fall 2019 EdTech Showcase on September 20, which highlighted the numerous ETS instructional tools available to faculty at the start of the academic year. Over 70 UC San Diego faculty, teaching assistants, and department coordinators attended. This was the first year the showcase was