The study, published last week by a group of four researchers, including two from the Haas School of Business, showed that admissions officers and hiring managers are prone to correspondence bias — ignoring situational context and judging applicants on the same criteria despite differing circumstances.

The study comprised four parts and examined job-hiring decisions and graduate school acceptances in a theoretical experiment and analyzed admissions data from 30,000 applicants at four selective MBA programs.

It found that students who attended schools where grades were inflated were up to 31 percent more likely to be admitted to MBA programs compared to students of similar aptitude at schools where GPAs were not inflated.

“We found that decision-makers routinely fail to take into account the influence of the situation on candidates’ performance, whether that’s GPA or job opportunities,” said Samuel Swift, one of the study’s co-authors and a Haas postdoctoral fellow.

Among other institutions of similar prestige, UC Berkeley reportedly has one of the most stringent grading policies, enforcing GPA caps in its most competitive schools and majors. Such caps may put students at a disadvantage in comparison to similarly qualified students from other institutions where average GPA is higher, according to Don Moore, another co-author and a Haas associate professor.

The problem, according to Moore, is not that students with inflated GPAs have an automatic advantage but that admissions officers lack the information necessary to make fair decisions.

“Admissions officers ought to insist on getting useful contextual information,” Moore said. “It’s not enough to know that a student has a GPA of 3.5. You want to to know class rank, and you want to know what the average GPA of students at that institution is.”

Even so, Moore said, correspondence bias may continue to affect decision-makers even when they are given adequate information.

“The results suggest pessimism,” Moore said. “Even when we gave (test subjects) all the necessary information, they still made this error.”

In March, UC Berkeley considered adding class rank and average class grades to students’ transcripts to better contextualize the school’s grading policies.

Michelle Lam, a UC Berkeley senior, plans to attend medical school and expressed concerns about being at a disadvantage to students from comparable schools with more inflated GPAs.

“I’d probably be annoyed if other students from schools with inflation have a leg up,” Lam said.

Swift said that the admissions process does not rely solely on GPA, but he acknowledged the importance of putting applicants on equal footing.

“It’s still just one ingredient in the process, but it needs to be an ingredient that’s used well,” he said.

The study also found that similar instances of correspondence bias exist in executives’ hiring and promotional decisions, suggesting that professionals working in easier business conditions are more likely to be viewed favorably by superiors than workers performing similarly in more difficult conditions.

“Most people don’t think they are biased,” Moore said. “The truth is that people make this mistake even when they think they’re not.”

Contact Simon Greenhill and Somin Park at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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A new application developed by UC Berkeley researchers will harness mobile phones — thousands of mini-computers that often lie idle — for use as the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar supercomputer.

The new app, developed for the Android operating system by the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is based on its original Linux-based app for PCs. The mobile app became available Monday and is free.

“Consumers have already bought these computers,” said David Anderson, a Berkeley researcher who directed BOINC. “They’re paying for the electricity; they’re paying for the maintenance. We’re creating a framework where scientists can get access to (that computing power).”

In 2002, BOINC researchers thought to tap the power of idle PC processors and offered the capacity to researchers for free. According to Anderson, BOINC has already harnessed computing power roughly equivalent to that of the largest supercomputer in the world, which is worth more than $100 million.

Anderson said that today’s mobile devices are catching up to desktops and estimated that they are already 20 percent as powerful as the average desktop.

“The power of mobile devices … has increased by a huge factor in the last couple of years — to the point where the power of your phone, even though it’s really small, has a good percentage of the processing power of a big desktop computer,” Anderson said.

The app runs only when the mobile device is plugged in and connected to a Wi-Fi network, avoiding possible risks like overdrawing the battery or slowing the system. It includes a simple user interface that shows the user what projects the app is working on and is available on both the Google Play store and on the Amazon app store.

BOINC’s mobile platform has already been used by research groups like the Scripps Research Institute. There are currently six projects that use BOINC’s mobile app, with 20 or more expected in the next few weeks.

The mobile platform was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Lisa-Joy Zgorski, a spokesperson for the NSF, said that BOINC was an easy way for individuals to contribute to important research at next to no cost to them.

Because BOINC runs behind the scenes on mobile devices, many potential users raised concerns about privacy. BOINC, however, uses complex encryption coding and allows users to download and inspect the app’s code for malware or other security threats.

“Whoever is in control here has a lot of power,” said UC Berkeley fourth-year molecular and cell biology major Salil Babbar. “I want to know about security protocols, who could have access to what I’m looking at.”

Contact Simon Greenhill at sgreenhill@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @simondgreenhill.

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Nathaniel Solley/Staff

Imagine living in a world where paper-thin computer screens cover walls instead of paint. They would respond to your very presence in a room, attuned to and controllable by your every movement — even your facial expressions.

Engineers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken the latest step toward that by developing a thin, pliable plastic material called “e-skin” that is interactive like a touch screen but more flexible than the rigid glass or silicon currently used in smartphones and computers.

The team of researchers, led by UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Ali Javey, created a working stamp-sized prototype that responds to touch by emitting light. The work was published in the academic journal Nature Materials on Sunday.

E-skin is not a synthetic replacement for human skin, despite what the name may suggest, Javey said. E-skin will primarily be used in electronics and aims only to mimic human skin in computer displays by responding similarly to touch, temperature and light.

“From the engineering point of view, human skin is an interface that provides us with information,” Javey said.

When pressure is applied to e-skin, its surface lights up with organic light-emitting diodes, an advanced form of LEDs. The intensity of the light varies with the intensity of pressure exerted on the skin, said Chuan Wang, a professor at Michigan State University who co-authored the publication and worked on the research as a UC Berkeley postgraduate.

According to Wang, prior to using OLEDs, the only way to measure the pressure being applied to a surface was to measure electrical currents, which required extensive equipment. Integrating light sensors into e-skin has simplified the process of detecting pressure by eliminating the need for electrical boards or a computer.

The researchers are now working to have e-skin respond to light and temperature as well.

But there are still significant challenges to overcome before the use of plastic as a platform for electrical systems can advance.

“Existing equipment is designed to only process rigid substrates, like silicon,” Javey said. “For plastic substrates, we have to develop new equipment in order to build complex electrical structures.”

Researchers believe e-skin could be used in large-scale applications in the future. It may ultimately be possible to cheaply print e-skin on regular printers using metallic ink and thin plastic.

Dae-Hyeong Kim, a professor of bioengineering at Seoul National University who does research on similar materials to e-skin, said Javey’s material is significant because it reacts by emitting light — a more natural way of interacting with humans than traditional electronic sensors.

“The recent work from Professor Javey’s group has a great meaning in that it realized the interactive mode of artificial electronic skin,” he said.

Contact Stephanie Petrillo at spetrillo@dailycal.org.

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NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Courtesy

Earth looked like a speck in the universe — a tiny pixel in vast space — in a photo taken from the perspective of a lens hovering 898 million miles away.

The rare photo was taken in the afternoon on Friday, July 19, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. In return, UC Berkeley winked back at Saturn by taking a picture of the ringed planet from Evans Hall on campus by operating the powerful Keck I telescope.

The NASA Cassini imaging science team, headed by researcher Carolyn Porco, pointed the Cassini spacecraft camera at Earth. The team waited until Saturn was in eclipse with the sun to block out the sunlight and obtain a resolved photo. The image will be of both Earth and our moon next to Saturn and its ring system.

“The idea of the image is to highlight how fragile and beautiful the Earth is within the vast, cold darkness of the universe,” said UC Berkeley professor Geoffrey Marcy, a renowned researcher in his field who also works with NASA.

In recognition of this event, Marcy and his research team remotely operated the Keck I telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii from Evans Hall on UC Berkeley campus. At approximately 10 p.m. on July 19, the team pointed the telescope’s camera at Saturn.

After about 35 minutes of calibration, the team successfully took a photo of Saturn as the Cassini spacecraft was taking a picture of Earth, according to UC Berkeley researcher Howard Isaacson, who is part of the team that operated Keck I from Evans Hall.

“The pictures were very striking,” Isaacson said.

The NASA team hoped to recreate a similar photo — famously known as the “Pale Blue Dot” — taken from Saturn of Earth in 1990 by the Voyager spacecraft. However, the photo taken from Cassini is the first planned photo from the same vantage point, as the Voyager image was an accidental masterpiece, according to Isaacson.

Rather than depicting Earth as a brightly shining planet centered in the middle of a dark background — the picture people most commonly see — Cassini portrayed the planet as a delicate dot in the distance, reflecting how small the earth is compared to the scope of the universe.

Marcy, an expert on planet discovery outside the solar system who devotes part of his research to search for alien spacecrafts, said the goal of both the UC Berkeley and NASA projects was to appreciate the marvel of human technological advancement in understanding the complexities of the universe.

“Venturing down from the trees in the East African savanna just a geological eye-blink ago, we humans are now venturing across our solar system, toward what opportunities we cannot tell and toward what future we do not know.”

Contact Mark Tan at mtan@dailycal.org

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A study conducted by UC Berkeley and Harvard University researchers found that the probability of low-income children rising to higher income brackets as adults varies significantly across different metropolitan areas within the United States, with the San Francisco Bay Area among the most upwardly mobile regions.

San Francisco Bay Area children born to the bottom fifth of earners have an 11.2 percent chance of rising to the top fifth of earners during adulthood — one of the highest rates in the nation.

In addition to San Francisco, metropolitan commuter regions within California and several regions in the Northeast and West — such as New York, Boston, Seattle and Salt Lake City — displayed exceptionally high levels of upward mobility. In contrast, cities in the Southeast and Midwest, such as Atlanta, Cincinnati and Memphis, Tenn., showed some of the lowest levels of social mobility.

Professors Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard and professors Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley collected anonymous records from more than 40 million individuals born during the 1980s and 1990s.

The study cited factors that may have contributed to the connection between upward mobility and geographic location as the existence of a large middle class, limited geographic segregation of races and social classes, high quality of education, a large number of two-parent households and active engagement with community or religious services.

Hendren, an economics professor who co-headed the study, points to the Bay Area’s low degree of economic and racial geographic segregation and relatively large middle class as possible reasons for the trend, but he warned that correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

“We can identify the broad factors correlated, but I think each city has its own particular constraints,” Hendren said. “But cities that have lower mobility should learn from cities with high mobility.”

According to Hendren, one of the main factors of low social mobility is the geographic segregation between classes, especially the segregation of the poor from the middle class.

Jo Ferlatte, supervisor at the Multi-Service Center of the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, believes mixed-income communities facilitate higher-quality education for low-income students but added that in Berkeley, it may be harder for those students to stay in those communities in the long run due to the city’s unusually high housing costs.

“When there are mixed-income communities, it challenges government and education systems to become more efficacious in their educating, because the higher-income people will challenge the education system to provide for their children,” Ferlatte said. “It’s generally acknowledged that they have more lobbying power. Affluent areas get better education — you can see that around the country.”

Hendren says that the data set is the first of its kind and that although it is too soon to explain the exact cause of the findings, the chronological depth of the study will prove valuable to future researchers.

“In the past, the public discourse has been centered on static income discussion because of data limitations,” Hendren said. “Now, we’re also talking about how income changes from generations.”

Contact Madeleine Pauker at mpauker@dailycal.org.

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The new magnet can operate at higher magnetic fields and at a wider temperature range than conventional high-field magnets can, because it is made out of niobium tin rather than niobium titanium. Because more data points can be collected using the new technology, scientists aim to use the new magnet with the Large Hadron Collider in order to make more detailed observations of particle behavior.

“The goal of the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program is to enable more powerful colliders,” said GianLuca Sabbi, who is affiliated with the Berkeley lab and coordinated the project. “Higher field and larger bore will translate in stronger beam focusing and more proton collisions. This is a key element of the upgrade plan to increase the LHC integrated luminosity by 10 times.”

Although niobium tin is often used in superconducting magnets, the material is not commonly used in accelerators, because it is naturally brittle and can easily snap when bent into the coil shapes necessary for accelerators. Niobium tin also cannot withstand the disruptive and high energy activities of particle collision.

The breakthrough in this project was implementing the material for use in accelerators, specifically with the LHC. Researchers developed a technology that adopts a thick, aluminum-based support structure pretensioned at room temperature to increase the malleability and durability of the material rather than directly using the material.

The construction of this technology was a collaborative effort among Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in partnership with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The new U.S. magnets will be implemented in CERN’s LHC in the future.

Niobium tin has a 60 to 70 percent higher critical field than niobium titanium, which was also part of the project.

“This study proved that the technology works,” said Eric Prebys of Fermilab, who has been the director of LARP for the past five years. “The next step is to build a prototype. The actual magnet is only about 1 meter long. For it to be implemented in the LHC, it needs to be much longer.”

Researchers said their main goal in the future is to build a prototype for the magnet. The program is currently transitioning from the research and development phases to the construction of the new focusing system for LHC.

But the HQ02a’s usage is not only restricted to the LHC. According to Sabbi, all types of accelerators can benefit from this magnet technology, including those used in the medical and industrial fields. It can also enhance machines such as MRI scanners, which apply superconducting magnets.

Contact Mark Tan at mtan@dailycal.org

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Yi Zhong/File

Scientists at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published research last Wednesday showing that a deficiency in vitamin D can accelerate premature bone aging by increasing the risk of fracture.

By examining bone structure and toughness, researchers concluded that a lack of vitamin D causes bones to prematurely age, as they are more brittle. The results of the research may lead to adapted treatment options for individuals with cases of vitamin D deficiency.

The body produces vitamin D when directly exposed to the sun, which is needed for bone growth and remodeling. Vitamin D can also be found in certain foods, such as fatty fish, beef liver, cheese and egg yolk.

The results of the research were published in an article entitled “Vitamin D Deficiency Induces Early Signs of Aging in Human Bone, Increasing the Risk of Fracture.” The research was conducted by scientists at UC Berkeley and scientists from the department of osteology and biomechanics at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.

Robert Ritchie, a professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley and a faculty senior scientist at the Berkeley lab, headed the Berkeley portion of the collaboration, while Bjorn Busse headed the German portion.

“We were able to show that biomechanical properties do not only change through a reduction of bone mass but also that the remaining bone shows effects of aging with losses of its quality and fracture resistance,” Busse wrote in an email.

The research team discovered that vitamin D deficiency increases the proneness to cracks from 22 to 31 percent. According to Ritchie, one in four men and two in four women over the age of 50 will experience a bone fracture in their remaining lifetime.

The risk of bone fracture — which can be fatal — increases dramatically as people age, especially in menopausal women.

Ritchie was able to discover bones deficient in vitamin D resembled bones of the elderly through his unique access to an extensive collection of bone sections taken from living and deceased persons.

“We were able to use our past experience in high resolution 3D to visualize the crack and were able to clearly observe the differences in interactions of the crack and microstructure,” said Hrishikesh Bale, who worked closely with Ritchie in the research, in an email.

Bale said that the research was conducted in the hope of eventually finding a treatment for affected bones and preventing fractures among older people.

According to Ritchie, the research was interdisciplinary in approach and utilized both engineering and medical knowledge.

“This kind of work represents a boundary between the physical and biological sciences,” Ritchie said. “There’s a lot to be gained by engineers getting involved in medicine.”

Contact Lydia Tuan at ltuan@dailycal.org.

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The prestigious awards aim to recognize the top 100 technology innovations that have useful applications in academia, industry and other fields. The eight awards received this year are a record high for the Berkeley lab and are the most presented to any organization this year. Berkeley lab has received a total of 70 R&D 100 awards since the award’s establishment in 1963.

“We at the lab have been working very hard in the past few years to increase our technology transfer from basic research to industry,” said Horst Simon, deputy lab director. “The high number of awards is a strong indication that these efforts have turned out to be very successful.”

The winning projects awarded to the lab spanned many fields of study, including energy technology, imaging and materials science.

On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System is a software service developed by Chin Guok and a group of collaborators, and universities and research sites are using it to gain fast access to critical data.

OSCARS allows users to dynamically set up a connection to guarantee that data reach their destination.

“When we first tried to do this manually, it could take as long as several months, many phone calls and lots of email between people at different networks to create such a connection,” Guok said. “Using OSCARS, a person can set this up today in about five minutes.”

Gao Liu led a team of scientists from the lab in creating the Conductive Polymer Binder, a plastic glue that keeps electrode materials together in rechargeable batteries and increases storage capacity by 30 percent. According to Liu, the most challenging aspect of the project was coordinating a team of people from interdisciplinary backgrounds to effectively use everyone’s expertise. Car and consumer technology companies are already working with the team to bring the technology to commercial industries.

Delia Milliron, a scientist at the Berkeley lab, and her team invented the Universal Smart Window Coating, a window coating that allows users to have more control over the amount of heat and light coming from the sun. In contrast to existing technologies, the coating can block thermal heat while still allowing natural light. According to Guillermo Garcia, a member of the team, the goals of the invention are to reduce energy consumption and add comfort.

Another noteworthy project was the Bacteriophage Power Generator, which generates electricity by using innocuous viruses that convert mechanical energy.

Other award-winning projects include a chemical screening system used to accurately establish the composition of thousands of samples, an imaging tool for investigating matters at a nanoscopic scale, an MRI machine and a fuel cell.

Contact Grace Wu at newsdesk@dailycal.org

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Victor M. Ortega/Courtesy

A recent study by UC Berkeley biologists suggests that electrostatically charged insects attract spider webs when they are close, making it easier to be snared by the web.

The research, published online Thursday at Scientific Reports, sheds light on how electrostatic charges affect spider webs in relation to flying insects, which gain a positive charge by flapping their wings and attract spider webs. This attraction results in a larger area for a web to cover and catch potential prey.

Robert Dudley, a campus professor of integrative biology who has done research in insect flight and is one of the lead researchers of the study, explains that any flying object, from small insects to helicopters, gains a positive charge by flying through the air due to friction with the air.

In the laboratory experiment, dead insects were positively charged and dropped on a neutrally charged web that was laid horizontally. With the use of high-speed cameras, researchers observed the spider web bending toward the falling insect before the insect actually touched the web.

When insects carrying no charge were dropped, the web did not bend toward the insect.

“The web would stretch towards the insect, which is very clever,” Dudley said. “It enhances the likelihood of catching an insect.”

Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow who first made the observation, said that the next step is to put the experiment to practice in the field to see how the web interacts with live insects.

Ortega-Jimenez, who is finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said it will be interesting to see how this relationship will play out, because spider webs tend to be negatively charged in the wild, making the attraction between web and insect stronger.

“If webs are charged, insects have to spend more effort flapping their wings when they are flying,” Ortega-Jimenez said. “How long will it take to get started on the research? I don’t know. It depends on the insects.”

Ortega-Jimenez said that he first observed the web’s attraction to a positive charge when he was trying to teach his daughter about electrostatic charges, using a toy that works as an electrostatic generator that allows one to attract and pick up small objects, such as paper.

“We were outside of our apartment, and we put the wand close to a giant spider web, and there was a strong attraction between the web and the wand,” Ortega-Jimenez said. “It kept on getting closer until the web touched the wand.”

Although the study is new, Dudley and Ortega-Jimenez are surprised by the attention the research has received.

“People don’t like spiders,” Dudley said. “I think they are impressed by the evil practices of spiders in capturing insects.”

Contact Jose Hernandez at jhernandez@dailycal.org.

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Although once a proponent of electric cars, Zehner suggests in his article published in Spectrum that electric cars may even have greater environmental consequences in their entire life cycles than gasoline-powered cars do.

Currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Science, Technology and Society Center, Zehner says proponents often overlook the indirect processes that go into the manufacturing of these vehicles — including the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of batteries — that contribute to environmental damage.

“Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars begins to look more and more like shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another,” Zehner said.

According to Zehner, the numerous studies on the efficiency of electric vehicles detract attention from other alternatives, such as walking and cycling. He argues that policymakers should shift the focus from electric vehicles to these cleaner modes of transport.

“Communities hold bake sales to fund bike racks,” Zehner said. “Meanwhile, the highway infrastructure is bathed in billions of public funds year after year.”

Despite his argument, other campus members still view electric cars as beneficial to the environment.

“We have to switch to electric vehicles,” said Ethan Elkind, climate policy associate of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “There is simply no other way to avoid worst impacts of climate change without electrifying vehicles.”

Although it would not be easy, Zehner argues that it would be possible to maintain current standards of living without switching to electric vehicles.

“Numerous regions throughout the world have prioritized infrastructure for walking and biking,” he said. “And many of them have higher standards of living than the United States.”

Min Ju Lee, team lead of CalSol, a student-run organization that designs and builds solar cars at UC Berkeley, agrees with Zehner’s argument that the source of electricity is not all clean. However, electric vehicles still remain a very complex issue.

“There are so many things to consider,” Lee said. “There is no clear-cut line as to where you can stop.”

According to Zehner, the future of electric cars depends on how long people are willing to believe in the electric car “illusion.”

Tristan Lall, another member of CalSol and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, says that the public has already begun to accept electric vehicles and that they are here to stay.

“The definition of an electric car is already broadening as the public comes to accept vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt, and (it) may eventually encompass fuel cell-powered vehicles with similar configurations,” Lall said.

Contact Somin Park at sominpark@dailycal.org.

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