Set against the backdrop of a home football game against Washington State this past weekend, Party Safe @ Cal sponsored Sober Weekend, a challenge held out to UC Berkeley students to commit to staying sober for the weekend.

The Tang Center program, which is part of Collegiate Alcohol Awareness week, urged students to pledge that they would not drink during the weekend, regardless of Saturday being a game day.

Karen Hughes, coordinator of the Party Safe @ Cal program said she feels the program is important in deconstructing the belief that alcohol is essential at college football games.

“The alcohol beverage industry has spent millions building an association between the two-largely to target/educate young males,” said Hughes.

Hughes said the program is an opportunity for indivduals to change habits.

“I think of Sober Weekend as a “cousin” to The Great American Smoke-Out and TV Turn-Off Week,” Hughes said. “This is a chance for individuals to mindfully change a behavior/habit for a finite period in order to see if in a new light. This can lead to longer term change.”

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eScholarship launched a redesigned Web site today, with numerous digital publishing services available to the university community and a research platform for scholars across the globe.

The new eScholarship, previously known as UC’s eScholarship Repository, offers a publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs and individual scholars associated with the university to have direct control over the creation and distribution of their scholarship.

eScholarship, which started in 2002 as a collaborative effort between the Berkeley Electronic Press and the California Digital Library, currently consists of more than 30,000 publications. Its purpose is to offer the university community an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing channels and to support the widespread distribution of UC research.

“Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher,” said Catherine Mitchell, director of the publishing group at the California Digital Library. “There is significant need across the University of California campuses for a sustainable infrastructure to support the publication and dissemination of research.”

Books published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined digital/print publication service provided by UC Publishing Services, a joint program of UC Press and the California Digital Library.

The site redesign has been focusing heavily on improving the quality of access to eScholarship publications. The new site is optimized for Google searches, PDFs can be viewed in their without downloading and research can be shared easily through social networking sites and RSS feeds.

The families of three UC Berkeley alums being held in Iran sent a 2,500-signature petition to that nation’s UN representative on Thursday asking for their immediate release.

Josh Fattal, 27, Shane Bauer, 27 and Sarah Shourd, 31 have been imprisoned for the past 11 weeks for crossing into Iranian territory. The three were vacationing in Iraqi Kurdistan and hiking in the Zagros Mountains at the time, according to the families of the hikers.

The three had been held without contact from any outsiders until Sept. 29a when they were visited by Swiss ambassadors. The ambassadors reported that the three were in good health.
On Sept. 22, Democratic senators introduced a resolution pressing the Iranian government to allow access to the Swiss. The Unites States does not have any direct diplomatic relations with Iran, and has been relying on the Swiss as a go-between.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sept. 18 that the three alumni deserved to be punished. The Iranian government claims they were found in an area known for illegal smuggling, not hiking.

The campus’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology kicked off the “99 Bottles of Beer: Global Brewing Traditions 2500 B.C. to the Present” exhibit last weekend, pleasing many food crazed faculty members who have been brainstorming exhibition ideas for more than a year.

“We have a long-standing interest by a number of staff members in the Anthropology of Food (Department) on the subject of food in human culture,” said museum curator Ira Jacknis, in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News.

This weekend’s events will include a Beer Fair and Symposium with speakers such as Fritz Maytag, from San Francisco’s Anchor Brewery, Charles Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch endowed professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at UC Davis and beer chef Bruce Paton.

The exhibit showcases some 130 beer-related items, most from the museum’s collections and many on first-time display pieces.

The Free the Hikers campaign, which is led by the families of the three hikers being detained in Iran, is accepting donations to offset its expenses and further work toward bringing the hikers home.

Hikers Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, graduates of UC Berkeley, have been detained at the Iranian capital, Tehran, since July 31, after accidentally crossing an unmarked border during a hiking trip in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Donations can be made online at the campaign’s website.

Almost a week after the Sept. 24 UC-wide walkout to protest the budget cuts, roughly 200 students, union workers and teachers reassembled Wednesday on Lower Sproul Plaza to discuss the future of the movement.

The three-hour meeting unveiled a plan to hold a conference at UC Berkeley on Oct. 24. Organizers hope the event will assemble supporters from across California’s public education system, including teachers and students in grades K-12, community colleges and the state university system.

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A daily roundup of the biggest headlines in Bay Area and national news.

The UC undergraduate campuses will host a University of California Day on Oct. 1 on CollegeWeekLive.com, and online site which offers a virtual trade show of booths for about 200 colleges, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Since the site’s premiere in 2007, the site has risen in popularity with high school students, who can also use the site to have live Web chats with college counselors and admissions representatives. UC Day will include live chats with representatives from campuses from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Click here to read more…)

The effects, both physical and social, of the H1N1 swine flu are being felt at universities nationwide.

How to prevent its spread
-Wash your hands
-Cover your cough
-If you are sick and not taking fever-reducing medication, stay at home until at least 24 hours after you are free of fever
-Stay at least six feet away from anyone who is sick

Symptoms
-Fever
-Cough
-Fatigue
-Less frequently: runny nose, sore throat, nausea or vomiting
or diarrhea

Other resources:
CDC
University Health Services
UHS Advice Nurse: (510) 643-7197, Monday-Friday, 8 am-4:30 p.m.

Source: UHS

A student at UC Berkeley has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. In response, the City of Berkeley Public Health Department has sent out notices to more than 200 people who may have been exposed in class or through other contact with the student.

Here is the text of the e-mail sent to potentially exposed individuals (via  UCBLJ): (Click here to read more…)

Sather Gate is making its return to Sproul Plaza after months of restorative work to the campus icon.

Pieces of the bronze gate are being put in place starting today. The campus plans to have the gate back in full form before Cal Day on April 18.

Contractors removed the gate in October for a $1.5 million restoration project of the century-old gate built in 1910.

Capital Projects spokesperson Christine Shaff said there were few surprises in the project and the contractors kept the schedule. About 5 percent of the bronze had to be replaced, but Shaff said the new pieces will be indistinguishable from the old.