Week 1: Introduction

Hi, my name is Kira Latham and this will be where I blog this quarter. I'm from Texas and I am planning on double majoring in political science and psychology at UCLA. As a political science major, so far in the cluster I have found Professor Kahn's lectures on public policy to be interesting. I have enjoyed learning about how different nations have come together to try to slow down the process of climate change due to anthropogenic causes. For example, learning about the Kyoto Protocol and the Montreal Protocol interested me because of the global involvement and collaboration to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and CFCs, respectively. As a psychology major, I also found the lectures on nudges, incentives, and behavioral economics to be interesting because of the natural human response.

(Molly Samuel/KQED)

Redwood Forest, CA

I have found two blogs (about environmental issues) in particular that interest me, and I will be monitoring them for the rest of the quarter.
The first blog I will follow is called "Dot Earth", and is under the New York Times. They are really good about posting regularly and they post about a broad variety of environmental issues happening in our world today. One article in particular that is interesting that they recently posted is about timber thieves in California's Redwood Forest.
The second blog I will follow is called ecogeek and posts about a variety of topics, but focuses a lot on transportation efficiency. One recent interesting post talks about the future potential of having planes fly in a V formation like birds do in order to increase efficiency.