academic and careers

How to Cook Beans that are Tender, Creamy, and Nearly Perfect

The best way I know to cook beans, and the one I always return to. A version of the much-loved Tuscan bean recipe - fagioli al fiasco. Traditionally, beans were baked overnight in a Chianti bottle placed near the embers of that night's fire. While not exactly authentic (no fire here), I do a riff on the general idea, using a low-temperature oven and enamel-lined pot.

Continue reading How to Cook Beans that are Tender, Creamy, and Nearly Perfect on 101 Cookbooks



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academic and careers

Sunshine Pad Thai (Vegetarian)

The pad thai recipe you're looking for! Try this simple trick to make a turmeric noodle version.

Continue reading Sunshine Pad Thai (Vegetarian) on 101 Cookbooks




academic and careers

Homemade Refried Beans

If you've only ever had refried beans from a can, this should be the next recipe you cook. Homemade refried beans are a game-changer. Use just the right amount of olive oil to cook well-minced onions along with the beans and plenty of their broth. Smoked paprika adds a hint of smoky depth you can't quite put a finger on, my secret ingredient is a finishing splash of freshly squeezed lemon juice. I think it's the element that helps keep the beans from seeming too heavy, and the acidity counters the starchiness of the beans.

Continue reading Homemade Refried Beans on 101 Cookbooks



  • 100+ Vegetarian Recipes
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academic and careers

Analysis and applications: The mathematical work of Elias Stein

Just a short note that the memorial article “Analysis and applications: The mathematical work of Elias Stein” has just been published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.  This article was a collective effort led by Charlie Fefferman, Alex Ionescu, Steve Wainger and myself to describe the various mathematical contributions of Elias Stein, who […]




academic and careers

Course announcement: Math 247B, Classical Fourier Analysis

Next quarter, starting March 30, I will be teaching “Math 247B: Classical Fourier Analysis” here at UCLA.  (The course should more accurately be named “Modern real-variable harmonic analysis”, but we have not gotten around to implementing such a name change.) This class (a continuation of Math 247A from previous quarter, taught by my colleague, Monica […]



  • 247B - Classical Fourier Analysis
  • math.CA

academic and careers

Abel prize awarded to Furstenberg and Margulis

Just a short post to note that this year’s Abel prize has been awarded jointly to Hillel Furstenberg and Grigory Margulis for “for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics”.  I was not involved in the decision making process of the Abel committee this year, but […]




academic and careers

2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus outbreak: mathematics of epidemics, and what it can and cannot tell us (Nicolas Jewell)

At the most recent MSRI board of trustees meeting on Mar 7 (conducted online, naturally), Nicolas Jewell (a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Berkeley, also affiliated with the Berkeley School of Public Health and the London School of Health and Tropical Disease), gave a presentation on the current coronavirus epidemic entitled “2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus […]




academic and careers

Polymath proposal: clearinghouse for crowdsourcing COVID-19 data and data cleaning requests

After some discussion with the applied math research groups here at UCLA (in particular the groups led by Andrea Bertozzi and Deanna Needell), one of the members of these groups, Chris Strohmeier, has produced a proposal for a Polymath project to crowdsource in a single repository (a) a collection of public data sets relating to […]




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247B, Notes 1: Restriction theory

This set of notes focuses on the restriction problem in Fourier analysis. Introduced by Elias Stein in the 1970s, the restriction problem is a key model problem for understanding more general oscillatory integral operators, and which has turned out to be connected to many questions in geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, number theory, and […]




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Mathematics Seminars List

My student, Jaume de Dios, has set up a web site to collect upcoming mathematics seminars from any institution that are open online.  (For instance, it has a talk that I will be giving in an hour.)   There is a form for adding further talks to the site; please feel free to contribute (or make […]




academic and careers

John Conway

I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with finite simple groups on occasion, but have not studied his work on moonshine and the monster group.  But I have certainly encountered his […]




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247B, Notes 2: Decoupling theory

The square root cancellation heuristic, briefly mentioned in the preceding set of notes, predicts that if a collection of complex numbers have phases that are sufficiently “independent” of each other, then similarly, if are a collection of functions in a Lebesgue space that oscillate “independently” of each other, then we expect We have already seen […]




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247B, Notes 3: pseudodifferential operators

In contrast to previous notes, in this set of notes we shall focus exclusively on Fourier analysis in the one-dimensional setting for simplicity of notation, although all of the results here have natural extensions to higher dimensions. Depending on the physical context, one can view the physical domain as representing either space or time; we […]




academic and careers

SETI@home hibernation

On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.




academic and careers

Nebula: science goals

If we don't find ET, our secondary goal is to quantify the sensitivity of the search. Read about
some ideas about how we can do this in the Nebula blog.




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New SETI Perspectives: "How did life begin on Earth and elsewhere?"

Richard Lawn has posted a new SETI Perspective entitled How did life begin on Earth and elsewhere?.




academic and careers

SETI@home and COVID-19

SETI@home will stop distributing tasks soon, but we encourage you to continue donate computing power to science research - in particular, research on the COVID-19 virus. The best way to do this is to join Science United and check the "Biology and Medicine" box.




academic and careers

Jim_S has passed away.

We are saddened to report that former moderator and long-term friend of SETI@home Jim Scott passed away unexpectedly this morning. Angela has started a thread where people can post their memories of Jim and offer condolences.




academic and careers

Final data is in the splitter queue.

As promised, we've stopped the process that puts new data into the queue today. Data distribution will continue until the files shown on the status pages are done. We'll be accepting results and resending results that didn't validate for a while.




academic and careers

Nebula progress and non-progress

The last data has been sent out, but our work on Nebula - the final phase of data analysis - is picking up steam. However, not all ideas are good ideas. Read about Multiplet scoring: back to the drawing board.




academic and careers

French (near) homonyms – "calembours pourris"

[h/t Stephan Hurtubise]  




academic and careers

The sound and sense of Tocharian

Readers of Language Log will certainly be aware of Tocharian, but when I began my international research project on the Tarim Basin mummies in 1991, very few people — only a tiny handful of esoteric researchers — had ever heard of the Tocharians and their language since they went extinct more than a millennium ago, […]




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"This laptop is loaded to bear"

Ewan Spence, "Apple Leak Reveals Radical New MacBook Pro", Forbes 5/4/2020: Apple may finally be getting round to updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel's tenth generation processors. The good news is that the MacOS powered laptop going to get a bucketload of extra power.[…] This laptop is loaded to bear in terms of memory […]




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Perils of topic modeling

Today's xkcd illustrates why topic modeling can be tricky, for people as well as for machines: The mouseover title: "As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat." […]



  • Linguistics in the comics

academic and careers

European slaves in the year 1000

Valerie Hansen has a new book just out: THE YEAR 1000: When Explorers Connected the World — and Globalization Began.  New York:  Scribner, 2020. A NYT review of Hansen's landmark volume is copied below, but let's first look at some interesting language notes concerning the background of the word for "slave" (Chapter 4 is on […]



  • Etymology
  • Language and business
  • Language and history
  • Language and travel

academic and careers

Zoom fatigue

There are dozens of articles Out There on "Zoom fatigue", with a wide range of ideas about causes and cures. Gianpiero Petriglieri offered the BBC a couple of hypotheses about why "Zoom calls drain your energy": Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat, says Petriglieri. Video chats mean we need […]



  • Psychology of language

academic and careers

"Be careful of the truth"

Two years on, and still my favourite Chinese mistranslation…. pic.twitter.com/0EHeQjybeB — Antiokhos in the East (@AntiokhosE) May 6, 2020   How did it happen? There's no problem with "xiǎoxīn 小心"; it just means "be careful [of]; pay heed to". The problem comes with the second half of the warning, where luòshí 落石 ("falling rocks") is […]



  • Lost in translation
  • Signs

academic and careers

Error types

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman neumerals" [sic] I was going to ask for your favorite (quasi-)scientific error examples, but then I realized that this just an inventory of testing-result types, so that things like p-hacking, file-drawer phenomena, confirmation bias, etc., are in a different space.



  • Linguistics in the comics

academic and careers

Autres temps, autres mœurs




academic and careers

Garden path of the week

This headline puzzled me: I interpreted it as Doctors are showing a buried CDC report to top White House officials And I wondered, what was that report? and why did the CDC bury it? And who are the doctors digging it up? What the headline actually meant, of course, was Documents show that top White […]




academic and careers

Matthew Pottinger's speech in Mandarin

Something extraordinary happened on May 4, 2020.  Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger delivered an extremely impressive speech in virtually flawless Mandarin.  Here it is: Here's the transcript of Pottinger's speech (pdf), the formal English title of which is "Reflections on China's May Fourth Movement: an American Perspective — Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger to […]




academic and careers

Communication formats

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "DOWNSIDES: Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol." My own pet peeve, speaking of how normal humans choose to communicate, is people who send an […]



  • Linguistics in the comics




academic and careers

Is AI rejecting your job application? Here’s how to avoid being digitally denied – and impress once in human hands

We’ve all heard the statistic that employers only spend a few seconds reviewing your résumé. Now, thanks to technology, artificially intelligent algorithms scan it even quicker. With more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies and over 70% of large employers using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to help manage their recruitment and hiring processes, making your way […]

The post Is AI rejecting your job application? Here’s how to avoid being digitally denied – and impress once in human hands appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.





academic and careers

Race, Gender, and LGBTQ+ wage gaps are real – and they end up costing us all

White males make up the largest sector of the U.S. workforce and have, on average, always made the highest salaries. If we compare their salaries to those of women, ethnic minorities, the differently-abled, and LGBTQ+ persons, we see a large disparity between the wages of similarly-qualified candidates in the same fields. The gap is glaring, […]

The post Race, Gender, and LGBTQ+ wage gaps are real – and they end up costing us all appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.




academic and careers

Your Job Search Questions, Answered by Career Professionals

by Christina Schmidt Keep reading if this sounds familiar: You’ve been applying to tons of jobs, and you’re getting no callbacks. No email responses. No invites for an interview. Your LinkedIn profile is showing no activity. You did your research. You prepared. What happened? First off, I understand your pain! As a dual specialist career […]

The post Your Job Search Questions, Answered by Career Professionals appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.





academic and careers

Is the “age wage gap” just the “gender wage gap” by another name?

DiversityJobs recently analyzed race, gender, and LGBTQ+ wage gaps. We now dive into ageism in the workplace along with age-related wage gaps and find that – compared with similarly-qualified men – women experience pay disparity that increases with age. Retirement is tricky these days. You might be ready to retire at 65 and have the […]

The post Is the “age wage gap” just the “gender wage gap” by another name? appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.




academic and careers

Did you know there are millions of searches every month for ‘jobs’ on Google?

 Naturally, people use search terms that match their interests and experience, with phrases like ‘engineering jobs’ or ‘jobs in finance.’ And it’s no surprise that people often add geographical factors to narrow the results, such as ‘in Dallas,’ ‘near me,’ or ‘remote.’ What’s intriguing is that job seekers also use terms that identify their […]

The post Did you know there are millions of searches every month for ‘jobs’ on Google? appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.




academic and careers

Learning Disability Week 2017

Michael McEwan speaks to Chris Creegan, Chief Executive of the Scottish Commission for Learning Disability (SCLD) about Learning Disability Week 2017.

The theme for this year is: 'Looking back, thinking forward', which will celebrate achievements, ask searching questions about what needs to happen going forward, and engage the general public on the subject, in the hope of changing attitudes. Chris also gives us some information on SCLD - its ambitions, and current and future focus.

What's on over Learning Disability Week.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Hate crime: causes, motivations and effective interventions

Reports of hate crime in Scotland have increased and research indicates that the trauma experienced by victims of hate crime can be more enduring and harmful than non-hate related offending and that it has detrimental effects on communities as well as individuals. There is a clear role for criminal justice social work in this area in working with perpetrators.

Rania Hamad, City of Edinburgh Council spoke to us about her research on the topic. It aims to:

  • define 'hate crime' and highlight the complexities around definitions
  • provide an understanding of the scope and nature of hate crime in Scotland and Edinburgh
  • explore the causes of hate crime, including individual and wider structural causation
  • outline the 'characteristics' of hate crime perpetrators including a discussion around risk assessment
  • explore what can be learned from hate crime interventions
  • explore 'best practice' for practitioners in this area of work
  • highlight gaps in current knowledgeRead: Hate crime: causes, motivations and effective interventions for criminal justice social work.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Parents with learning disabilities

As part of Learning Disability Week 2017, we held a roundtable discussion on the topic of parents with learning disabilities to coincide with the launch of our new Iriss Insight on the topic. The discussion highlights how best we can support families where one or both parents have learning disabilities, raises awareness of the key issues, and promotes debate and progress.

It involved Bianca Wood, People First Scotland; Gillian McIntyre, University of Strathclyde; Andy Miller, Policy and Implementation Officer at Scottish Commission for Learning Disability (SCLD); Amanda Muir, Development Manager at Equal Say; and David Barr, Assistant Director at Aberlour.

Bianca is chairperson of the People First (Scotland) Parents' Group, a self-advocacy group of parents with learning disabilities.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme (AILIP)

Sarah Mitchell Programme Director for the Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme and Susan Kelso AHP Lead for Early Intervention (Scottish Government) spoke to Iriss.fm about the programme and the LifeCurve Survey.

The Active and Independent Living Improvement Programme (AILIP) was officially launched on April 26th by Shona Robison MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport. The vision for Scotland as outlined in the Health and Social care Delivery Plan is to have a Scotland with high quality services that have a focus on prevention, early intervention and supported self management.

The AILIP will be a key contributor to delivering that vision.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Secure care in Scotland

The second of two episodes to celebrate the Festival of Residential Child Care 2017.

Debbie Nolan, Centre for Youth & Criminal Justice (CYCJ) introduces Alison Gough, secure care national adviser, also of CYCJ. She asks her about the key messages emerging from the Secure Care National Project, which were published in the 2016 CYCJ report: Secure care in Scotland: looking ahead.

Deborah, Lesley and Sharon, who all work in secure care, share their perspectives, experiences, hopes and priorities for the future for young people in, and on the edges of, secure care and the sector.

Discussion points:

Public and professional perceptions of secure care and whether these chime with practice experience The implications for secure care practitioners helping young people who have been involved in seriously harming others, alongside those who have been exploited and are very vulnerable to further harm Priorities for the planned strategic board for secure care, next steps, and the involvement of practitioners.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Between a rock and a hard place

The first of two episodes to celebrate the Festival of Residential Child Care 2017.

In this episode Debbie Nolan and Kristina Moodie (Centre for Youth & Criminal Justice) introduce the rationale behind, and findings of their 2016 research 'Between a rock and a hard place': responses to offending in residential childcare.

This enabled discussion with Sheila, Duncan, David and David, all of whom are residential childcare workers, on how far these findings aligned with their experiences of practice.

Key themes discussed:

Complexity in responding to offending in residential child care Supports to staff in doing so The dilemmas and tensions faced The recommendations made in the research to change practice.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free




academic and careers

Hidden disabilities: Ryan Fleming

Michael McEwan speaks to Ryan Fleming about growing up with a 'hidden disability'.

Ryan is on the autistic spectrum and tells us about the challenging, as well as positive experiences he has faced from childhood right through to adulthood.

He talks about how he sees the world, how he interacts in social situations, his support network and his hopes for the future.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Something Elated by Broke For Free