"The Draft 2012 HHS Environmental Justice Strategy (PDF - 557KB) introduces the vision of "a nation that equitably promotes healthy community environments and protects the health of all people."

Details, with links to each section of the draft, are available on the HHS Environmental Justice Strategy website.

"HHS recognizes that disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards with negative health effects persist in minority and low-income populations and Indian tribes and that coordinated Federal action is needed to eliminate these disparities. The 2012 HHS Strategy is intended to provide clear direction of goals, strategies and actions to address environmental justice in minority and low-income populations and Indian tribes.

"The 2012 HHS Strategy is organized into four interrelated strategic elements as follows:

• Policy Development and Dissemination;
• Education and Training;
• Research and Data Collection, Analysis and Utilization; and
• Services.

Last week was Open Access Week. Here's a highly entertaining 3 minute video on why this is so important. Especially if you publish your research, or if you think you may in the future, please take a look:

As of today, the UC-eLinks menu will include a link to OskiCat. Previously, if the article or other item you sought was not online, your next choice was to open the Melvyl all-UC library catalog to see if and where the item was available. Now, above that Melvyl link, appears a link to OskiCat. This makes it much easier to see if an item is available at UCB. Everything you need is NOT online!

The other links on the UC-eLinks menu - those under "Request It" and "Get Help" - remain the same.

The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded at the 21st First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, on September 29, at Harvard University. Ceremony videos and more are available at improbable.com/ig/2011, and complete details on the winners, with links to their published works, videos, etc., may be found at improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2011.

Here is a brief summary of this year's winners:

• PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."
• CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
• MEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things - but worse decisions about other kinds of things? when they have a strong urge to urinate.
• PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.
• LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.
• BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.
• PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.
• MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
• PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank. [NOTE: be sure to see the video on the web site noted above.]
• PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him. [NOTE: be very sure to see the video on the web site noted above.]

"Open Access - the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results - has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. Open Access has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship."

Open access is supported at UC Berkeley by the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII). BRII subsidizes fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication.

Check out the display case in the Public Health Library for information on Open Access Week.
Also posted are selected open access articles written by UCB School of Public Health researchers.