SCUP Links Magazine: The inbox for SCUP’s weekly environmental scanning

The hires will be made in two ways, said Barbara J. Wilson, executive vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. Some new hires will fill traditional roles in academic departments. Others will be hired in clusters.

The "cluster hires," Ms. Wilson said, will be sorted into the six areas that have been identified by the university's "Visioning Future Excellence at Illinois" project, an effort begun by the chancellor to map out the university's needs for the future. The review focused on two questions: "What are society's most pressing issues?" and "What distinctive and signature role can Illinois play in addressing those issues in the next 20 to 50 years?"

After receiving input from professors, staff members, students, and community leaders, Ms. Wilson said, the focus areas were narrowed to: energy and the environment, health and wellness, social equality and cultural understanding, information and technology, economic development, and education.

"The cluster hires will be distributed across campus, and some may even be cross-department hires," Ms. Wilson said. "They will be the best people we can bring to campus to take what we're currently doing to the next level in those areas."

Lisa H. Macklin, former SCUP board member, Comprehensive Facilities Planning, Inc., shares this related link from the Columbus (OH) Dispatch.

Here is the original report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street.

This is more than a worthwhile read.

Oh, boy, so much change coming at us.

As they ran across the Avenue des Champs Élysées and thumped their feet on 176 special tiles laid on a 25-meter stretch, the athletes generated electricity.

These special “energy harvesting tiles” were developed by London-based Pavegen Systems. The power thus generated can be used to run low-voltage equipment such as streetlights and vending machines. The concept is the brainchild of Laurence Kemball-Cook, who founded Pavegen in 2009 to commercialize it. “The Paris Marathon is the first of many such projects that will enable us to realize our goal of taking this technology to retail sites, transport hubs, office blocks and infrastructure spaces,” he says.

“Any investment had to speak to the university—forward-looking, open to light, and defining the campus as a place,” says Robert Bogomolny, president of the University of Baltimore. “The only thing I wouldn’t do was contextualism,” he adds, referring to brick-faced structures built in Baltimore in the last decade. The Behnisch–Ayers Saint Gross team earned the commission for the Angelos Center after a 2008 open competition whose shortlist also included Foster + Partners, Dominique Perrault Architecture, Moshe Safdie and Associates, and SmithGroup.

Register now for the June 13 one-day SCUP regional conference at Columbus State Community College: 

The Affordable Student Housing Challenge:
Meeting Student Housing Needs at Community Colleges and Two-Year Regional Campuses

That is potentially troubling news for graduate schools, which have relied on robust increases in foreign-student numbers, particularly in disciplines like engineering and the sciences, to offset weakening domestic enrollments. Even with the surge in students from abroad, total first-time enrollments in American graduate programs have decreased for the past two years.

Interesting.

Perhapsthe author, Matt Reed, could explain his theory in a Planning for Higher Education article?

Interesting, especially if you know little about 3-D printing.

Get the article by April 25 in the Planning for Higher Ed Mojo.

Watch the Planning Interview video with the author.

Listen to or download (mp3) the Planning Interview podcast (audio, coming soon)

Asked about this curious claim, the University spokesperson’s first response was to literally laugh out loud. There is no motor. The project is actually a success story for the university, and for Maine. This was the first mid-sized turbine installed by a university in the state, has a 600 kilowatt capacity, and has produced 680,000 kwh worth of clean electricity in its first year. That’s $100,000 off the University of Maine at Preque Isle’s utility bill, and 572 tons of CO2 not burnedinto the atmosphere.

Now this is what an industry looks like when it goes into free-fall.

Market research firm IDC reported yesterday that worldwide personal computers had their sharpest drop ever for a single quarter, plummeting nearly 14 percent compared to the first three months of 2012. Among the big players, only one company, Lenovo, shipped as many units as last year. The carnage was worst for HP, which saw its PC sales tumble 23 percent, and ACER, which suffered a 31.3 drop. But as AllThingsD notes, not even Apple escaped unscathed. Its Mac sales slowed 7.5 percent in North America, its top market. 

If private colleges and universities formed a nationwide consortium, they could build a "percentage plan" of their own without the constraints imposed by state legislatures. Just as within large state systems, private institutions run the gamut nationally from prestigious research universities to more locally oriented bodies. If they joined together, they could collectively offer guaranteed admission, need-based financial aid, and support programs to the valedictorian and salutatorian of every one of the 29,705 public high schools in the United States.

“It’s a category that’s really well suited to the cloud when you think about the kind of scale of data that exists in a lot of these projects,” he says. “You know, some of them range to terabytes of information.”

Not only are the files complex, but records of who has edited, and when, and how add another level that Box helps sort out. And, points out Levie, because the files are so big, they’ve instituted a feature where users can see the renderings before downloading them, to make sure they’re looking at the right ones.

“I think when you can bring these tools to the masses, it really opens up innovation in an incredible way,” says Levie.

Gehry concurs. “I’ve dedicated a whole pile of my life — time and effort — on this topic,” he says, because most of the architecture around the world he hardly considers architecture. “It’s just buildings. And I have this hope that if we have the right tools out there that people with talent can prevail, and can show how you can build wonderful buildings for the same cost.”

One board member ia quoted as saying, ""People here don't think they have a boss."