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<dc:rights>Copyright 2007, Gourt.com</dc:rights>
<dc:date>2008-08-30T01:09+34:00
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<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8741">
<title>Reckless Spending, Not Illness or Job Loss, Causes Most Bankruptcy</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8741</link>
<description><![CDATA[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.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8742">
<title>&#x22;Strip-down&#x22; Could Ease Subprime Mortgage Crisis</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8742</link>
<description><![CDATA[Nearly all debtors who file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13 are homeowners, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management and UC San Diego. 
Ning Zhu,  an associate professor of management at UC Davis, and Michelle White, a professor of economics at UC San Diego, report their findings in a working paper, "Saving Your Home in Chapter 13 Bankruptcy," available online at http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/Zhu/Chapter13.

The researchers argue that even more debtors would save their homes rather than default if Chapter 13 permitted filers who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth to "strip-down" their mortgage obligation using a formula tied to the home's current fair market value and mortgage principal. The study examined all bankruptcies filed in Delaware in 2006.

The authors argue that even more debtors would save their homes rather than default if Chapter 13 permitted filers who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth to "strip-down" the mortgage obligation using a formula tied to the home's current fair market value and mortgage principal.

"Overall, introducing strip-down could save an addition 109,000 homes from default each year," Zhu says. "While that's a small number relative to the volume of foreclosures that may occur in the next year or two, introducing strip-down nonetheless could make an important contribution to solving the subprime mortgage crisis by providing a mechanism for saving homes from foreclosure when debtors wish to save their homes, even when lenders are unwilling to renegotiate or to consent to a refinancing."

Zhu notes that foreclosures are costly not just to borrowers and lenders but to neighborhoods, because foreclosed homes tend to deteriorate and cause blight that pushes down housing prices and makes it difficult for other homeowners to refinance. This in turn leads to additional defaults by homeowners whose mortgages are "underwater" -- where the amount owed is higher than the value of the house. And as housing values drop, property tax revenues shrink, squeezing local government budgets.

]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8769">
<title>How Temporary Help Agencies Impact the Labor Market</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8769</link>
<description><![CDATA[Temporary help agencies place nearly 3 million Americans in jobs each day -- but the temp industry's very success may embolden some managers to view all workers as impermanent, jobs scholar Vicki Smith argues in her latest book, "The Good Temp."

"Labor Day is an opportunity to remind ourselves that we have a long way to go to address the risks and vulnerabilities that workers face in today's global economy," says Smith, a professor and chair of sociology at the University of California, Davis.

In the "The Good Temp," Smith and her co-author, Esther B. Neuwirth, trace how temporary employment relationships have become mainstream in recent decades, and in some ways have contributed to the unraveling of the worker-employer contract.

At the same time, the authors argue that temporary help agencies have also had positive impacts, including providing training to temps and offering opportunities that may lead to permanent jobs.

"The Good Temp" is based on field work carried out in a temporary help agency in Silicon Valley.

Understanding the temporary help industry, its rise and the "good temp" worker it produces is important to understanding today's economy, according to Smith. She notes that only about 30 percent of American workers today have one permanent, Monday-through-Friday, 40-hour-a-week job, and that the underemployment rate -- the proportion of workers who are over-qualified for their jobs or are working fewer hours than they prefer -- has reached nearly 10 percent.

"Compared with the World War II era, when it was a marginal labor practice, temporary employment is today an entrenched feature of jobs and labor markets," Smith says.

Smith's previous book is "Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy." She is a past chair of the American Sociological Association's Organizations, Occupations and Work Section and of the Society for the Study of Social Problems' Labor Studies Division. She earned her doctorate in sociology at UC Berkeley.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8648">
<title>Feats of Strength Begin a Lizard&#x27;s Day</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8648</link>
<description><![CDATA[Male Jamaican anole lizards begin and end the day with displays of reptilian strength -- push-ups, head bobs and extensions of a colorful neck flap, or dewlap -- to defend their territory, according to a new study.

"Anoles are highly visual species, so in that sense it is not surprising that they would use visual displays to mark territory," said Terry J. Ord, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis and at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. The lizards are the first animals known to mark dawn and dusk through visual displays, rather than the much better known chirping, tweeting, and other sounding off by birds, frogs, geckos and primates.

Ord studied four species of Jamaican forest lizard: Anolis lineatopus, Anolis sagrei, Anolis grahami, and Anolis opalinus. Females establish small territories allowing access to food and other resources, while males stake out larger territories allowing them access to several females. The males spend much of the day sitting on tree trunks and displaying head motions, push-ups, and dewlap extensions, all to warn other males away from their territory.

These displays of strength help avert actual physical confrontations between male lizards, which can be very fierce and destructive, Ord said.

Ord videotaped individual males at different times of day, from before dawn to dusk. In all four species, he found distinct peaks of activity at daybreak and for about two hours afterward, and again just before dark. Anoles leave their daytime perches at night to find safe shelter from nocturnal predators.

Scientists disagree on why birds chorus at dawn and dusk: competing ideas range from territorial defense to manifestations of circadian rhythms (the animal's internal clock). Ord said his work suggests male anoles use their morning displays primarily to mark territory.

"The dawn chorus may be a way of communicating having survived the night," Ord said. "If in the morning a bird doesn't hear its neighbor, or an anole doesn't see its neighbor, it may be an opportunity for the animal to expand its territory."

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society and National Science Foundation, and is published online by the journal American Naturalist.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8766">
<title>Memory Trick Shows Brain Organization</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8766</link>
<description><![CDATA[A simple memory trick has helped show UC Davis researchers how an area of the brain called the perirhinal cortex can contribute to forming memories. The finding expands our understanding of how those brain areas that form memories are organized.

The brain puts together different items -- the what, who, where and when -- to form a complete memory. It was previously thought that this association process occurred entirely in a brain structure called the hippocampus, but this appears not to be the case, said Charan Ranganath, a professor at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology who led the research.

"We want to know how the brain areas that encode memory are organized," Ranganath said. "If your memory is affected by aging or Alzheimer's disease, is there a way to learn that can capitalize on the brain structures that may still be working well?"

Ranganath, along with graduate student Andrew Logan Haskins, Andrew Yonelinas, a UC Davis psychology professor and associate director of the Center for Mind and Brain, and Joel Quamme, a former UC Davis graduate student now at Princeton University, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see which parts of the brain were active when volunteers memorized pairs of words such as "motor/bear" or "liver/tree." In this experiment, the volunteers either learned the pairs as separate words that could be fitted into a sentence, or as a new compound word, for example "motorbear," defined as a motorized stuffed toy.

"It's a sort of memory trick," Ranganath said.

When volunteers memorized word pairs as a compound word, the perirhinal cortex lit up, and this activity predicted whether the volunteers would be able to successfully remember the pairs in the future. The results suggest that the perirhinal cortex probably can form simple associations, such as between the parts of a complex object. This information is probably passed up to the hippocampus, which may create more complex memories, such as the place and time a specific object was seen.

The research, which was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, is published Aug. 28 in the journal Neuron.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8770">
<title>Robots Learn to Follow</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8770</link>
<description><![CDATA[Whether driving on the highway or walking down the street, we pick up on both deliberate signals and unconscious cues to predict what other people are going to do and act accordingly. But robots have trouble following each other around, for example, when a leader turns a corner and disappears from sight. Researchers at UC Davis have come up with a control system that allows a robot to pick up on cues that the leader is about to turn, predict where it is going and follow it.

"The following problem is a quite fundamental problem in robotics," said Sanjay Joshi, associate professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at UC Davis. Robots that are better at following could be easier for people to work with, he said. A hospital robot could follow a doctor around the wards.

Humans use signals and unconscious cues to build a model that predicts where other people are going. Behavioral studies show that people unconsciously turn their heads a fraction of a second before making a left or right turn. Joshi and his team of researchers developed a control system that could take such behavioral cues into account in making decisions about which way to move.

Joshi, graduate student Michael Chueh, and undergraduate students William Au Yeung and Calvin Lei tested the system using a small commercially available robot, the Evolution Robotics Scorpion. The robot's camera could identify a target on the lead robot, and the robot's onboard computer could combine the target information with behavioral cue information.

Rather than have the lead robot signal the follower directly, the research team sent "behavioral cues" to the follower via wireless link. Effectively, the cues told the robot, "the leader might be about to turn right" or "might be about to turn left."

To develop a decision on how to move, the follower robot was programmed to take into account the lead robot's behavioral cues and the follower's prediction of the lead robot's movement, based on the leader's current speed and direction. Robots that incorporated behavioral information into their decisions performed much better at following the leader around corners than others, the researchers found.

"We think that if we can embed these cues in control systems, we can make following more reliable," Joshi said.

A paper describing the work is published in the August 2008 issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8730">
<title>Jared Diamond to Open International Genetic Diversity Symposium</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8730</link>
<description><![CDATA[Evolutionary biologist and author Jared Diamond will present the opening keynote address for an international symposium on agricultural biodiversity, to be held Sept. 14-18 at the University of California, Davis.

The Harlan II International Symposium, the successor to a program held 11 years ago in Syria, is dedicated to the late crop evolutionist Jack R. Harlan. It will focus on the importance of using and conserving not just a diversity of species, but also genetic diversity within species.

In opening the symposium, Diamond will discuss whether environmental factors, rather than pure chance, led to the uneven distribution around the world of plant and animal species suitable for domestication and agricultural use. His public presentation on Sunday, Sept. 14, will begin at 6:15 p.m. in 123 Science Lecture Hall at UC Davis. Admission to the talk and the preceding reception will cost $50 per person.

Diamond maintains that the adoption of agriculture was "the most important event in the last 50,000 years of human history." As people developed the ability to cultivate crops and raise animals, they were able to produce a surplus of food, which fueled population growth and led to settled living, technology, social stratification and political centralization, he notes.

He points out that the societies with the greatest variety of plant species suitable for farming expanded earlier and farther than did societies in areas with the fewest farmable plant species -- and no animal species -- that were easily domesticated. For example, cultures in the Fertile Crescent, China, the Andes, and Meso-America -- the land between central Mexico and Nicaragua -- flourished, while cultures in areas such as Eastern North America and Highland New Guinea did not.

Diamond will question whether environmental factors in different regions predisposed wild animal and plant species in those areas to develop traits conducive to domestication.

A complete program for the Harlan II symposium is available online at: http://harlanii.ucdavis.edu/main/speakers_topics.htm. For fee information and a list of talks and tours, click on "registration" at the left of this page.

Among the speakers during the three-day symposium will be:

Monday, Sept. 15, 9 a.m. -- Robert Wayne, a UCLA biology professor and expert on canine genetics, will discuss what the analysis of the dog genome -- the entire collection of genes for the animal family that includes domestic dogs, wolves, foxes and coyotes -- tells about the evolutionary history of these animals and how the various species are related.

Monday, Sept. 15, 1:30 p.m. -- Doyle McKey, Universite de Montpellier II and the Center of Evolutionary and Functional Ecology, Montpellier, France, will discuss ecological approaches to crop domestication, using manioc, or cassava, as an example of how ecology can be integrated with genetics and ethnobiology -- the study of how people interact with the living environment -- to test plant-domestication scenarios.

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 9:30 a.m. -- Anthropologist Melinda Zeder, director of the archaeobiology program for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, will discuss her latest research on when and where in the world animals were first domesticated.

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 6 p.m. -- Keynote speaker Gary Nabhan, an ecologist and pioneer in the local-food movement from the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, will compare the crop diversity found by plant explorer N.I. Vavilov between 1916 and 1936, with the remaining diversity that Nabhan found in the same areas in nine countries on five continents three quarters of a century later. Nabhan says that an understanding of how biodiversity in local agricultural systems has changed may help predict how well farmers may be able to adapt to rapid climate change, globalization, water scarcity, and weed or pest invasions.

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 8 a.m. -- M. Kat Andersen, a plant ecologist in UC Davis' Department of Plant Sciences and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service, will discuss how Native Californians cultivated naturally occurring plants as sources of food even before the first Europeans arrived and how some of those practices are being applied in certain sectors of modern agriculture today.

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 9 a.m. -- Dennis Hedgecock, a fisheries ecologist at the University of Southern California, will discuss the importance of conserving genetic resources in aquaculture, which he says is now the fastest-growing sector of global food production. He will discuss the challenges in both conserving and utilizing the planet's imperiled aquatic biodiversity, when faced with the threat of overfishing, species introductions, interactions of wild and farmed stocks, ocean warming and ocean acidification.

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 11 a.m. -- Charles Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science at UC Davis, will discuss genetic resources of brewing yeast, which he says is the best example of the major advances that have been made in just a few decades in understanding the physiology, biochemistry and genetics of yeasts and other microorganisms.

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 11:30 a.m., -- James Lapsley, adjunct associate professor in the Department of Viticulture and Enology and chair of the Department of Science, Agriculture, and Natural Resources in UC Davis Extension, will talk about the introduction to California of Vitis vinifera, the grape species that includes most traditional European wine grapes. Lapsley is author of the book "Bottled Poetry," a history of California winemaking.

News media who would like to attend all or parts of the symposium free of charge should RSVP to Pat Bailey, News Service, (530) 752-9843, pjbailey@ucdavis.edu.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8765">
<title>Troubled Children Hurt Peers&#x27; Test Scores, Behavior</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8765</link>
<description><![CDATA[Troubled children hurt their classmates' math and reading scores and worsen their behavior, according to new research by economists at the University of California, Davis, and University of Pittsburgh.

The study, "Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone's Kids," was published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research and is available online at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14246.

Scott Carrell, an assistant professor of economics at UC Davis, and co-author Mark Hoekstra, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, cross-referenced standardized test results and school disciplinary records with court restraining order petitions filed in domestic violence cases for more than 40,000 students enrolled in public elementary schools in Florida's Alachua County for the years 1995 through 2003.

The researchers linked domestic violence cases to 4.6 percent of the elementary school students in their sample. These children scored nearly 4 percentile points lower on standardized reading and math scores than their peers whose parents were not involved in domestic violence cases. (A percentile score reflects the percentage of scores that fall below it; a student who scores in the 51st percentile on a test, for example, has scored higher than 51 percent of all students who took that test.) In addition, the children from households linked to domestic violence were 44 percent more likely to have been suspended from school and 28 percent more likely to have been disciplined for bad behavior. The impact was seen across genders, races and income levels.

Not only did children from troubled homes suffer, however: Test scores fell and behavior problems increased for their classmates as well.

Troubled boys caused the bulk of the disruption, and the largest effects were on other boys. Indeed, Carrell and Hoekstra estimate that adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 children reduces the standardized reading and math scores of other boys in the room by nearly two percentile points. And adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 students increases the likelihood that another boy in the class will commit a disciplinary infraction by 17 percent.

Troubled girls, in contrast, had only a small and statistically insignificant impact on the test scores or behavior of their classmates. The study did not investigate the reasons for the gender differences.

Across all students, having a troubled student in a class reduced classmates' combined test scores by nearly 1 percentile point and increased their likelihood of getting into disciplinary trouble at school by 6 percent.

The researchers conducted sophisticated statistical tests to ensure that they were observing only the impacts of a troubled child on classrooms, not the impact of broader socioeconomic issues in the community. They compared classes from the same grade in the same school over time; some years the classes had troubled students, some years they did not. They also compared how siblings performed when one student was in a class with troubled classmates and another student from the same family was in a class with fewer troubled students.

"Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy," Carrell and Hoekstra write. "First, they suggest that policies that change a child's exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his or her education outcomes. In addition, the results also help provide a more complete measure of the social costs of family conflict."

The research does not suggest that all disruptive schoolchildren come from families that experience domestic violence, nor are all children from domestic violence disruptive, Carrell emphasized.

"There are many reasons for disruptive classroom behavior; domestic violence is one particularly good indicator of a troubled child," Carrell said.]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8764">
<title>Private Support for UC Davis Tops $216 Million</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8764</link>
<description><![CDATA[More than 44,000 donors supported UC Davis with nearly $216.8 million in gifts, pledges and private grants last fiscal year, marking the sixth consecutive year that philanthropic support has grown and the first time that UC Davis has surpassed $200 million.

Almost half of the total -- $100 million -- came from a single philanthropic grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, directed to found a new nursing school in Sacramento. The foundation's philanthropic grant is the largest in the nation in support of nursing education.

In all, the nearly $216.8 million in support in 2007-08 represents a 114 percent jump compared with the previous fiscal year, when private support totaled more than $101 million. Even without the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant, giving increased 12 percent, year to year.

Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef expressed thanks for the generosity and pointed out how important philanthropic support is to UC Davis as the university enters its centennial year.

"We are grateful to each and every one of our donors who helps and believes in our mission at UC Davis," Vanderhoef said. "Their support and commitment provide new and better opportunities for our students and faculty as we look to address society's challenges of the next 100 years."

Vanderhoef noted that UC Davis has benefited from philanthropy since its founding, when members of the local chamber of commerce raised money to donate water rights for the proposed campus site. Many believe that gift made the difference in locating the university in what was then known as the town of Davisville.

"Even our early advocates understood that philanthropic support could provide an extra margin that can make all the difference," Vanderhoef said. "Philanthropy continues to be so very important to UC Davis. This year, the university has benefited in many ways, from unrestricted annual gifts that provide funding where it is always needed, to the magnificent grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to found a nursing school that is critically important to California and the nation."

Donors in 2007-08 included alumni, parents, faculty and friends, as well as corporations, foundations, and other organizations, according to Cheryl Brown Lohse, associate vice chancellor for University Development. In addition, UC Davis students made contributions, through a senior class gift effort.

Gifts and philanthropic grants provided a wide range of support for students, faculty and programs.

Consider the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's grant to establish the proposed Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. The grant was inspired by UC Davis and the foundation's shared vision: highly skilled and well-prepared nurses will lead our national health-care system in assuring patient safety, improving quality of care and health outcomes, guiding policy decisions and discovering knowledge to advance health.

In addition to that foundation's philanthropic grant, 18 donors made gifts of $1 million or more, including:


$10 million of an expected $12.5 million gift from the Louise Rossi Estate, benefitting the Department of Viticulture and Enology. The gift will support high priority research in many ways, including the purchase of equipment for the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science and the future establishment of endowed chairs to support faculty positions in winemaking and grape growing. This gift will also augment the previously established Rossi Prize endowment, which supports viticulture and enology students.
$10 million from alumnus Maurice J. Gallagher Jr. and his wife, Marcia, toward the construction of the new three-story, 40,000-square-foot home for the Graduate School of Management. In addition, it established an endowment to provide for faculty and student support, and program expansion and development. This is the largest gift UC Davis has ever received from an alumnus.
$1 million from the Bernard Osher Foundation to endow the Osher Reentry Scholarship Program. Last year, the Osher Foundation gave the campus $1 million to endow the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Davis.


Each of UC Davis' four colleges and five professional schools received private support. The Health System, which includes the proposed Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing as well as the School of Medicine, recorded the highest amount at $120.3 million. It was followed by the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, at $29.2 million, and the Graduate School of Management, at $12.1 million.

Of the philanthropic total, 26 percent was directed toward research, while department/faculty support and student support received a combined 58 percent. Campus improvement and other program support received the remaining 16 percent.

Of the nearly $216.8 million, donors committed a total of $31 million to invested funds -- or endowments -- to provide ongoing support for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, research and other university programs. Donors directed $23.1 million to endowment support through the UC Davis Foundation. The foundation, established in 1959, receives private gifts to benefit UC Davis, invests its endowed gift funds and other private assets, and advises university leaders in areas related to public trust and support. UC Davis alumna Pam Fair '80 currently chairs the foundation board of trustees, which also includes 40 other volunteer leaders.

More than 16,000 donors supported the Annual Fund in 2007-08, giving nearly $1.8 million. The chancellor allocates Annual Fund gifts to areas of greatest need, including student and faculty support.

UC Davis receives about 21 percent of its total budget from the state, and receives additional support from a variety of funding sources, including donors. UC Davis has crossed the $100 million threshold twice before, in the 2001-02 fiscal year, when the university raised $110 million, including a gift of $35 million from Robert and Margrit Mondavi, and last year, with $101 million.

"We are very grateful to all of our donors who have been so generous to UC Davis this year," said Beverly Sandeen, vice chancellor for University Relations, which includes University Development. "We are honored and inspired by these donors, who have seen what UC Davis can accomplish through philanthropic support."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8732">
<title>Biracial Asian Americans and Mental Health</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8732</link>
<description><![CDATA[A new study of Chinese-Caucasian, Filipino-Caucasian, Japanese-Caucasian and Vietnamese-Caucasian individuals concludes that biracial Asian Americans are twice as likely as monoracial Asian Americans to be diagnosed with a psychological disorder.

The study by researchers at the Asian American Center on Disparities Research at the University of California, Davis, was reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston.

"Up to 2.4 percent of the U.S. population self-identifies as mixed race, and most of these individuals describe themselves as biracial," said Nolan Zane, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at UC Davis. "We cannot underestimate the importance of understanding the social, psychological and experiential differences that may increase the likelihood of psychological disorders among this fast-growing segment of the population."

Zane and his co-investigator, UC Davis psychology graduate student Lauren Berger, found that 34 percent of biracial individuals in a national survey had been diagnosed with a psychological disorder, such as anxiety, depression or substance abuse, versus 17 percent of monoracial individuals. The higher rate held up even after the researchers controlled for differences between the groups in age, gender and life stress, among other factors.

The study included information from 125 biracial Asian Americans from across the U.S., including 55 Filipino-Caucasians, 33 Chinese-Caucasians, 23 Japanese-Caucasians and 14 Vietnamese-Caucasians.

The information was obtained from the 2002-2003 National Latino and Asian American Study, the largest nationally representative survey ever conducted of Asian Americans. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the landmark survey involved in-person interviews with more than 2,000 Asian Americans nationwide. The survey yielded a wealth of raw data for researchers to analyze for insights into Asian American mental health.

Zane and Berger did not look at the mental health of non-Asian Americans.

Future research should investigate the factors that explain the higher rate of diagnosed psychological disorders among biracial Asian Americans, Zane said. Possibilities include influences of ethnic identification and experiences of ethnic discrimination.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8738">
<title>Suicide among Asian Americans</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8738</link>
<description><![CDATA[Asian Americans whose families experience a high degree of interpersonal conflict have a three-fold greater risk of attempting suicide when compared with Asian Americans overall, according to a new study by University of California, Davis, researchers. The risk is tripled even among those who have never had a diagnosis of depression. The findings were reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston.

"Because of the great emphasis on harmony and family integration in many Asian cultures, family conflict is an important factor to consider when studying suicidal behaviors among Asian Americans," said Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology and Asian American studies at UC Davis and one of the study's authors. "Our study suggests that we need to more precisely determine the kinds of family conflicts that are associated with suicide risk among Asian Americans, and find means of preventing these family problems."

Sue's study is a new analysis of data from the 2002-2003 National Latino and Asian American Study, the largest nationally representative survey ever conducted of Asian Americans. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the landmark survey involved in-person interviews with more than 2,000 Asian Americans nationwide. Subjects were asked about income, marital status, age at time of immigration or number of generations their families have been in the United States, English language proficiency, family conflict, and suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, among other questions, yielding a wealth of raw data for researchers to examine for insights into Asian American mental health.

In the national survey, 2.7 percent of the Asian Americans interviewed reported having attempted suicide at some point during their lives; 9.1 percent of the total group reported having had suicidal thoughts.

Further mining the survey data, Sue and lead investigator Janice Cheng, a psychology graduate student, sorted out the suicide-prone individuals' answers to additional survey questions that asked about past diagnosis of depression and family income. The researchers compared the answers with those of interviewees who had not reported suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts.

The researchers found that among Asian Americans in the national survey, family conflict was a significant risk factor for suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts -- independent of depression, low income or gender.

"This is the first nationally representative investigation of family conflict and suicidal behaviors among Asian Americans," Sue said. "Our findings suggest that high family conflict has an independent and additive effect in predicting lifetime suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among Asian Americans."

Previous studies by other researchers have shown that certain subgroups of Asian Americans, including college students and Asian American women older than 65, have relatively high rates of suicide or suicide attempts compared with the rest of the nation. However, the UC Davis study was not designed to compare rates of suicide among different groups.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8739">
<title>Adults Easily Fooled by Children&#x27;s False Denials</title>
<link>http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8739</link>
<description><![CDATA[Adults are easily fooled when a child denies that an actual event took place, but do somewhat better at detecting when a child makes up information about something that never happened, according to new research from the University of California, Davis. The research, which has important implications for forensic child sexual abuse evaluations, was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychology Association in Boston.

"The large number of children coming into contact with the legal system -- mostly as a result of abuse cases -- has motivated intense scientific effort to understand children's true and false reports," said UC Davis psychology professor and study author Gail S. Goodman. "The seriousness of abuse charges and the frequency with which children's testimony provides central prosecutorial evidence makes children's eyewitness memory abilities important considerations. Arguably even more important, however, are adults' abilities to evaluate children's reports."

In an effort to determine if adults can discern children's true reports from false ones, Goodman and her co-investigators asked more than 100 adults to view videotapes of 3- and 5-year-olds being interviewed about "true" and "false" events. For true events, the children either accurately confirmed that the event had occurred or inaccurately denied that it had happened. For "false" events -- ones that the children had not experienced -- they either truthfully denied having experienced them or falsely reported that they had occurred.

Afterward, the adults were asked to evaluate each child's veracity.

The adults were relatively good at detecting accounts of events that never happened. But the adults were apt to mistakenly believe children's denials of actual events.

"The findings suggest that adults are better at detecting false reports than they are at detecting false denials," Goodman said. "While accurately detecting false reports protects innocent people from false allegations, the failure to detect false denials could mean that adults fail to protect children who falsely deny actual victimization."

Goodman's co-authors include Donna Shestowsky, acting professor of law at UC Davis, and doctoral students Stephanie Block, Jennifer Schaaf and Daisy Segovia.

Goodman was among the first researchers to undertake academic study of children's eyewitness accounts. She is the author of three books and more than 170 scientific articles in the field; some have been cited in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. She is the 2008 recipient of the American Psychological Association's Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contributions to Developmental Psychology.]]></description>
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