Prehistory (Greek words προ = before and ιστορία = history) is a term often used to describe the period before written history became available. Paul Tournal originally coined the term Pré-historique in describing the finds he had made in the caves of southern France, and the term was used in French since the 1830s to describe the time before writing, then introduced into English by Daniel Wilson in 1851.

The term became less meaningful in the 20th century as the boundary between history (strictly the written record) and other disciplines became less rigid and defined. Indeed today most historians rely on evidence from multiple sources, and the notion of limiting historical study to a 5000-year span (out of possibly millions of years of human existence) of only those few world cultures that left written records is no longer taken seriously. For example historians study the Celts, African civilizations, and North American civilizations, whose histories were, until recently, mainly oral--"prehistoric".

Prehistory can be said to date back to the beginning of the universe itself, although the term is most often used to describe periods when there was life on Earth; dinosaurs can be described as prehistoric animals and cavemen are described as prehistoric people.

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UC Davis News: General Interest

UC Davis Business School Dean to Step Down
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, and an influential ambassador to the Northern California business community, has announced her intention to step down from her administrative post next July. Biggart, who has served as dean since July 2003, will then complete a yearlong sabbatical before returning to full-time teaching and research. Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef praised Biggart as "an accomplished academic with an interest in the sociology of business. Nicole is a natural as dean. She's taken the school into a new era, from securing a $10 million gift for a new education building to establishing a campus in the Bay Area and continuing to build the Graduate School of Management's reputation as an innovative, collaborative and excellent business school. And she is a true campus citizen, always looking for opportunities to leverage the strengths of UC Davis in broader service to the region." A national search for a new dean will begin immediately, with the goal of having Biggart's successor on board for the 2009-10 academic year. As dean, Biggart's accomplishments include the launch of an annual survey of California women business leaders, which focused attention on the fact that only one in 10 top corporate executives and directors are women. She also oversaw the start of construction of Maurice J. Gallagher Jr. Hall, a new campus home for the Graduate School of Management. The new building, on schedule to open its doors in September 2009, will help anchor UC Davis' new gateway entry. Under Biggart, the school also developed a successful San Francisco Working Professional MBA Program, allowing UC Davis' entry into one of the nation's most competitive MBA markets. Next month, the school will officially dedicate a new teaching suite for the program in the Bishop Ranch Business Park in San Ramon. Additionally, the school launched a technology management minor degree program for science and engineering undergraduates. Biggart said she began her term as dean "with several aspirations, and I am pleased that we have achieved substantial progress toward these goals in the past five years. The Graduate School of Management is well-positioned to explore new opportunities and to develop further. The faculty is widely recognized for their research and teaching skills and is among the best in the country as measured by rankings, research productivity and reputation. The school's staff is entrepreneurial, dedicated and willing to take on new challenges. And our students are among the best in the world." Under Biggart's leadership, the Graduate School of Management has played a major role in promoting a culture of entrepreneurship at UC Davis. She was instrumental in establishing the school's Center for Entrepreneurship, which has educated MBA students and hundreds of scientists and engineers (from UC Davis and from research institutions nationwide) about the commercialization process. In addition, the school has continued to earn national and international recognition. The Financial Times ranked the school No. 1 in the world in the field of organizational behavior, Biggart's specialty. Recruiters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal placed the school among the top 30 regional business schools in the U.S. The Aspen Institute's Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey ranked the UC Davis MBA program among the top 30 worldwide for integrating issues of social and environmental stewardship into curricula and research. And, for the 13th consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report ranked the Graduate School of Management among the top 50 business schools in the nation. "I am deeply proud of the Graduate School of Management and UC Davis," Biggart said. "I feel that with all the momentum we are experiencing here on campus that this is the right time to step down and return to my teaching and research." Biggart was among the first faculty members to join the then-Graduate School of Administration faculty in 1981, the year the school opened. She is an expert in organizational theory and management of innovation, with research interests in economic and organizational sociology, firm networks, industrial change and social bases of technology adoption. In 2002, she was awarded the Jerome J. and Elsie Suran Chair in Technology Management. She became dean on July 1, 2003. Today, she is active and deeply engaged in the Northern California business community. She serves on the editorial board of Comstock's business magazine. She serves on the board of the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance. She is a member of the Business Development/Entrepreneurship Action Team of Partnership for Prosperity, a diverse group of stakeholders that is building a business plan for the Sacramento region that leverages its unique strengths and market opportunities. Biggart also represents UC Davis on the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored, public-policy advocacy organization for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. The author of seven books or book-length reports, Biggart has also written more than 30 articles and chapters and numerous books reviews, and is a frequent presenter at international meetings. She has held leadership positions in the Academy of Management, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and the American Sociological Association, and has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals. Her work has been published in many of her field's top scholarly publications. Biggart received her bachelor's degree from Simmons College in Boston, Mass., a master's degree from UC Davis, and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a native of Brooklyn, N.Y.
University, Developer Sign Ground Lease for West Village
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700
The University of California, Davis, has taken a major step toward the development of the first phase of West Village -- a combination of faculty, staff and student housing, a community college center, and a mixed-use area to be built just west of the main campus. UC Davis and its development partner, West Village Community Partnership LLC, last week signed a ground lease for the project, clearing the way for the design and construction phase of the project. UC Davis will start construction this fall on the project's off-site infrastructure, including water and sewer connections to campus systems, a storm water drainage system and entry road improvements. West Village Community Partnership, a joint venture of Urban Villages of Denver and Carmel Partners of San Francisco, is then expected to break ground in spring of 2009. Faculty/staff housing and student housing could be available as early as fall 2010. Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef applauded the announcement. "After years of planning, we are excited to be moving on to the design and construction phase of the project with our private development partners," Vanderhoef said. "We are confident that West Village Community Partnership will be delivering an exceptional neighborhood not only for our university community, but for our region, as well." Ron Zeff, CEO of Carmel Partners, said: "This successful milestone represents our continued collaborative approach with the university to address UC Davis' long-term housing needs. West Village Community Partnership can now focus our full energies and resources to design and construct the West Village neighborhood that incorporates the values, and reflects the aspirations, of the university and the Davis community." As currently planned, the 130-acre Phase 1 includes 343 single-family homes for faculty and staff, apartment housing for up to 1,980 students and a village square surrounded by ground-floor commercial space and the Los Rios Community College District's new Davis Center. In all, the plan for West Village comprises two phases for a combined 475 new homes for faculty and staff, and housing for 3,000 students. Many of the faculty and staff homes will include small cottages, like those at the 37-unit Aggie Village project adjacent to campus. Cottages will increase the population density and provide more student-housing options. When the final phase is completed, planners estimate that West Village will be home to about 4,350 people -- including 500 faculty and staff members and their families, plus students. The plan calls for a generous open-space network that offers integrated bike and pedestrian connections to the campus. UNITRANS will provide frequent bus service to the neighborhood. The faculty-staff housing component is a principal reason for the project. University officials believe West Village will assist in recruiting and retaining top talent by enabling them to live locally and participate fully in the life of the campus and community. West Village will make this possible by adding to the Davis housing supply and selling the homes at below-market prices for the Davis area. The homes will also have certain resale price limitations to maintain affordability over time.
Reckless Spending, Not Illness or Job Loss, Causes Most Bankruptcy
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Simple overspending has driven most personal bankruptcies in recent years, a change from previous decades when illness and unemployment were major factors, concludes a new study from the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management. "The reasons people file for personal bankruptcy indeed have shifted during the past couple of decades," says Ning Zhu, the study's author and an associate professor of management at UC Davis. "Although our research supports the notion that adverse life events, like losing one's health or job, contribute to personal bankruptcy filings, excessive consumption contributes more to the recent increase in personal bankruptcy filing." According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, 2,039,214 personal bankruptcies were filed in 2005, up nearly five-fold from the 412,510 bankruptcies filed in 1985. Indeed, personal bankruptcies jumped from 0.3 percent to 1.8 percent of all U.S. households during the same period. The UC Davis study looked at all personal bankruptcy filings in Delaware in 2003, because the state was among the first to make its bankruptcy filings available through the Public Access to Court Electronic Record system and its demographics closely resemble those nationwide. The year 2003 was chosen because it allowed the study to follow cases to their conclusion, and permitted observation of filing patterns before 2005. (Filings may have been accelerated in the months leading up to October 2005, when the federal Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act took effect, by households wanting to avoid the new act's stricter requirements.) So that he could compare bankrupt households with solvent ones, Zhu also collected information from the Federal Reserve Board's national Survey of Consumer Finance about households that had never declared bankruptcy. Overall, Zhu concluded that debt accounted for more than 50 percent of recent bankruptcies, while medical problems caused just 5 percent and unemployment led to only 13 percent. Zhu found that bankrupt households have bigger mortgages, car loans and credit card balances than solvent ones, but make less than half as much money. Among bankrupt homeowners, mortgages were 3.21 times higher than annual household income, versus 1.73 times for solvent households. Auto loans were double the annual income for bankrupt households, versus 0.4 times for solvent households. And bankrupt households carried credit card balances that almost equaled their annual household income, while the average credit card balance for solvent households was 6 percent of annual income. In addition, bankrupt households had a median annual income of $25,738, versus $43,341 for solvent ones. (The median is the midpoint in a set of values; a median income of $25,738 for bankrupt households means that half of the bankrupt households in the study made higher salaries and half made less). Interestingly, more than 5 percent of bankrupt households owned at least one luxury automobile (average age of the car was 7 years), compared with 8 percent of solvent households (average age was 8 years). The study also suggests that some Americans deliberately spend beyond their means with the intention of using the bankruptcy system to erase some or all of their debt, and recommends reforms to discourage such abuse. "Our results emphasize that bankruptcy law reform should aim to address the issue," Zhu writes. "Current means test focusing on income, rather than consumption patterns or adverse events, may not set the best criteria for sorting out the households who truly need bankruptcy protection from those that consume beyond their means to take advantage of the system." The research has been presented at Boston College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UCLA and Yale, and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Legal Studies, a publication of the University of Chicago Law School. The working paper is online at: http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/Zhu/PersonalBankruptcy. Zhu earned his doctorate in finance from Yale in 2003. He specializes in individual behavior in financial markets, bankruptcy and distress, and investments.

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