Rick Steele is a mild-mannered control engineer for the Advanced Light Source by day, but once a year or so, he becomes an epic backpacker, going on two-week trips in the mountains carrying all his food and provisions on his back. Along the way, he captures stunning photos. This month, he will be making slideshow presentations at REI stores around the Bay Area, sharing dozens of his photos and talking about his backpacking trips through King's Canyon National Park, located roughly between Yosemite and Death Valley.
Steele has made about a half-dozen trips in the past 10 years, concentrating on the area between the middle and south forks of the King's River and hiking anywhere from 30 to 80 miles over two weeks. Two of his favorite places are Marion Lake (picture) and Triple Falls. The next presentation will be at the Berkeley REI on San Pablo Avenue on July 8 at 7 p.m. In following weeks, he will be at REI stores in Corte Madera, Saratoga and San Francisco. He will share stories of encounters with bears and the history of the University of California connection with the area.
Suffering from BBQ overload syndrome? Come clear your head at the first event of the 2009 Berkeley Lab summer lecture series tomorrow. First up is Bob Schoenlein, Deputy Director for Science at the Advanced Light Source, who will talk about using lasers and x-rays to reveal the motion of atoms and electrons. The event takes place at the Building 66 auditorium at noon. More>
In Memoriam: Open House Celebration of Aloke ChatterjeeThe family of Aloke Chatterjee, former senior scientist and deputy director of the Life Sciences Division who gave this laboratory 36 years of exemplary service before retiring in 2006, is hosting an open house in celebration of his life on July 26. All are welcome to join. Chatterjee, an internationally known radiation biophysicist, passed away peacefully on June 20 at his home in Clayton, CA at the age of 68. The open house will take place from 12 to 4 p.m. at Endeavor Hall, located at 6008 Center St., Clayton, CA 94517. Condolences to Chatterjee's family can be addressed to his wife Cathy Chatterjee at 223 Mountaire Parkway, Clayton, CA 94517. In lieu of flowers, the family notes that contributions may be made in Aloke's memory to World Vision, P.O. Box 70030, Tacoma, WA 98481-0030.
In The News: Introducing Episode 1 of the Green HPC Podcast Series[inside HPC] In the inaugural episode of the Green HPC podcast series we will examine the issues that datacenter managers and system designers are facing with high-performance computing systems of all sizes today. In this episode we hear from Wu-chun Feng of the Green500, Wilf Pinfold of Intel, Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Dan Reed of Microsoft Research. We'll hear from these leaders in HPC and technology how the conversation about energy in HPC has evolved. More>
The California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) advises taxpayers to plan ahead for changes to their personal income tax rates and exemption credits for the 2009 calendar year. The personal income tax rate will increase .25% and the dependent exemption credit will be reduced by $210 per dependent. The FTB is advising taxpayers to review their exemptions on Form DE4 "Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate." Forms are available here and may be submitted to Payroll, Mailstop 90G. Taxpayers may need to increase their wage withholding now to avoid owing taxes next April. The revised rates will be effective on July 17 for bi-weekly employees and on the July 31 paycheck for monthly employees.
Construction Update: Cooling Tower Work at Building 62 TodayUnited Anco will be installing scaffold around the Building 62 Cooling Towers today. This is to facilitate cooling tower fan motor replacement work to support Buildings 62, 66 and 72. Lee Road, the lower road adjacent to the cooling towers, will be shut down for periods during this work, expected to last a week, and up to five parking spaces will be taken in the T-2 Lot for the crane. Drivers are urged to use caution when traversing this area, and pedestrians should use marked crosswalks and directional signs. The project should be complete by July 13, 5 p.m.
In The News: New Tool Compares Scholars' Research Strengths[Chronicle of Higher Education] Just as anxious novelists can check their sales rankings on Amazon 24 times a day, academic researchers have a host of online tools for monitoring their citation stats—and those of their rivals—including Google Scholar, Reuters Thomson's citation indices, and Springer's AuthorMapper. Now status-conscious researchers (and their department chairs and deans) have a new tool to obsess over. This week the scholarly publisher Elsevier unveiled SciVal Spotlight, an online service that attempts to uncover universities' strengths and weaknesses in no fewer than 80,000 areas of research. More>
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