Ellen DeGeneres tweets makes UC Berkeley place to be - but for a sexy strip down?

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Yesterday's giant UC Berkeley student, worker, and teacher walkout protesting the planned tuition increase and the privatization of Cal was aided on Wednesday by the tweets of the always interesting Ellen DeGeneres of The Ellen Show, who's Twitter account has over 3 million followers (I'm one of them)

(Hey, it's Follow Friday! Follow me on Twitter!)

Ellen DeGeneres started with this:

Are you in Berkeley, California? Are you near Berkeley? Can you get to Berkeley by tomorrow? Then keep following my Tweets. 6:41 PM Sep 22nd from web

Then...

Tweet to UC Berkeley: Students, faculty, honored guests, keep studying my Tweets. There's gonna be a test today.11:30 AM Sep 23rd from web

And then...

People of Berkeley: Go to Sather Gate NOW. First 10 to whisper MUFFIN to Aaron get a Samsung Jack phone & are in the running 4 a huge prize.

Finally...

Followers in Berkeley, Californian the games over for today. Thanks for playing and keep watching my TWEETS.6:46 PM Sep 23rd from web

And today...

You saw my tweets to the UC Berkeley students yesterday -- today find out what I made them do! They had to bare it all. http://su.pr/2N2oUP

The person who stripped down in the ASUC Store got a prize.

Video:



Ok. Once again, Ellen's shown the power of Twitter, but in the process managed to give the impression that students were just hanging out with nothing better to do. In the video that appeared on the show there's no mention of the issue that was to take place the next day.

Plus, there's no tweet from Ellen expressing support for the protesters or the students - many of whom are followers of Ellen on Twitter - who are being squeezed by the cost to get an education.

What did Nicholette get for being in the buff in the ASUC? A $1,000 and a trip to see The Ellen Show. Man, for all that Ellen could have made a bigger statement by paying for her semester at Berkeley!

Samsung may not have wanted to get involved in a political statement as the sponsor of this tweet stunt, but given that students need money to buy their products, Samsung missed the boat here. Moreover, Ellen DeGeneres has enough juice to have talked them into something more productive than was done Wednesday.

Like what? Well she could have driven followers to the UC Student Walkout website for them to "get educated" on the issue and how it impacts students.

Promise Technology, RAID, Cloud Computing and UC Berkeley

 

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I happened on a number of blog posts about a company called "Promise Technology" and became more interested in these terms: "RAID" and "Cloud Computing" and because my grad school, Cal Berkeley is apparently at the center of the creation of this technology. Also, I think, particularly in the wake of the San Jose fiber-optic cable crime of yesterday, it's important to shed a light on the little-known areas of technology and how they impact us.

Promise Technology (according to its website) is "a global leader in the storage industry and as an innovator in RAID technology". OK, fine and dandy, but what's "RAID technology" and why is it important? First, when David Patterson, Garth Gibson and Randy Katz created RAID according to Wikepedia at Cal in 1987 and confirmed by Scientic Commons , it was called "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks" but some companies now call it "Redundant Array of Independent Disks". Ok, but why is it important?

It's important, and Cal Professor David Patterson's a Macher in this field. Patterson led the creation of RAID technology, increasing storage capacity dramatically and opening the door to the creation of the kind of web servers used today. But really it started as combining small disk drives into something called an "array" which is a way of arranging information so that each part can be gotten according to some specific code index -- in other words it's a way of "filing" information in a certain order then using that order to, say, make a calculation of something. We do this every day when we teach kids to count the number of items in a case, that number of items is an array of sorts. Programmers get computers to do that same act by writing arrays as in this case (ok, simple yes, but I want people to at least be exposed to these ideas.)

Thus, RAID is a storage technology that uses arrays and is widely used in the corporate world. Promise Technology is one of a number of companies that uses this Cal-created technology to store information or more to the point of what Promise does, is make hardware that "sees" an array of hard drives and stores, receives, and protects that data that's in them.

As an old Cal student and booster I hope you see this example of where our dollars public and private go at the university. At present, we need to change our spending priorties do that great California institutions like UC Berkeley get more money fro the State of California. California spends more money today on prisons than education; that wasn't the case when RAID technology was created. Cal's leadership and innovation in computer technology has helped transform the World around us for the better and caused the launch of a new industry and companies like Promise Technology.

Indeed, RAID served as a foundation for what we now call "Cloud Computing" which is using the Internet to, say, use a spreadsheet, rather than an old disk or CD that had a copy of, say, Microsoft Office and Excel on it. If you're thinking of Google Docs, you're on the right track.

So the next time you're poking around online and see some technical term you don't recognize, stop and research it rather than clicking by it. It will expand your understanding of the world and it may cause you to appreciate your public university more than you do.

Cal, Talk To The Damn Tree Protesters So We Can Move On!

Look, now Cal's being down right silly and arrogant. On Sunday, I understand that there was another rally -- I was resting from a busy week -- and that even Berkeley Councilmember Donna Sprng got involved. Now, UC Spokesperson Dan Mogulof seems to imply that the University doesn't want to talk to anyone.

Dan Mogulof, just do it. Let's stop this silly game, find something clever and political to say to get them to go home. Why not offer the protesters a chance to be part of the action of planning?

It's called a Citizen's Review Commitee.

Look, I know Cal can do better. The way Cal's behaving is not what I learned at the Department of City and Regional Planning, where I got my Master's Degree...at Cal.

Cal needs to grow up.