 |
|
|
| Total Clips: 15 |
| Headline | Date | Outlet | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
Clinton's free-trade advocacy is hitting labor where it lives | 07/30/2007 | Los Angeles Times |
|
For Charles Gaines, crisis is clarity | 07/29/2007 | Los Angeles Times |
|
Lessons From The Loan Scandal | 07/29/2007 | New York Times |
|
Students in Residence: Behind Closed Doors | 07/29/2007 | New York Times |
|
To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work | 07/29/2007 | Wired News |
|
Love Will Follow | 07/28/2007 | Hartford Courant |
|
Undergrad research celebrated | 07/28/2007 | Pittsburgh Tribune-Review |
|
Cautionary tales of a catastrophe | 07/25/2007 | Oregonian |
|
Coordinating services will aid deaf, hard-of-hearing | 07/24/2007 | Democrat and Chronicle - Online |
|
Students start wardrobe site for visually impaired | 07/22/2007 | Courier Post - Online |
|
Drug war enforcement hits minorities hardest | 07/21/2007 | Chicago Tribune - Online |
|
What I learned while adding Windows XP to an Intel Mac | 07/20/2007 | City Newspaper |
|
Documentary about Paley sculpture wins award | 07/20/2007 | Democrat and Chronicle |
|
Kodak Board Appoints Zongrone as Vice President | 07/18/2007 | Yahoo! Finance |
|
Camp Geek turning heads | 07/16/2007 | Chicago Tribune |
|
Clinton's free-trade advocacy is hitting labor where it lives 07/30/2007 Los Angeles Times Wallsten, Peter |
Return to Top |
| Infobox (text included here)
To many labor unions and high-tech workers, the Indian giant Tata Consultancy Services is a serious threat -- a company that has helped move U.S. jobs to India while sending thousands of foreign workers on temporary visas to the United States. So when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) came to this struggling city to announce some good news, her choice of partners was something of a surprise. Joining Tata Consultancy's chief executive at a downtown hotel, Clinton announced that the company would open a software development office in Buffalo and form a research partnership with a local university. Tata told a newspaper that it might hire as many as 200 people. The 2003 announcement had clear benefits for the senator and the company: Tata received good press, and Clinton burnished her credentials as a champion for New York's depressed upstate region. But less noticed was how the event signaled that Clinton, who portrays herself as a fighter for American workers, had aligned herself with Indian American business leaders and Indian companies feared by the labor movement. Now, as Clinton runs for president, that signal is echoing loudly. Clinton is successfully wooing wealthy Indian Americans, many of them business leaders with close ties to their native country and an interest in protecting outsourcing laws and expanding access to worker visas. Her campaign has held three fundraisers in the Indian American community recently, one of which raised close to $3 million, its sponsor told an Indian news organization. But in Buffalo, the fruits of the Tata deal have been hard to find. The company, which called the arrangement Clinton's "brainchild," says "about 10" employees work here. Tata says most of the new employees were hired from around Buffalo. It declines to say whether any of the new jobs are held by foreigners, who make up 90% of Tata's 10,000-employee workforce in the United States. As for the research deal with the state university that Clinton announced, school administrators say that three attempts to win government grants with Tata for health-oriented research were unsuccessful and that no projects are imminent. The Tata deal underscores Clinton's bind as she attempts to lead a Democratic Party that is turning away from the free-trade policies of her husband's administration in the 1990s and is becoming more skeptical of trade deals and temporary-worker visas. Like many businesses and economists, Clinton says that the United States benefits by admitting high-tech workers from abroad. She backs proposals to increase the number of temporary visas for skilled foreigners. The Tata deal shows the difficulty of proving concrete benefits to U.S. workers from the visa system. Since 2003, the year its Buffalo office opened, Tata and its affiliates have sought permission to bring more than 1,600 foreign high-tech workers to the state, including at least 495 to the upstate region and 45 to Buffalo, according to government data. Tata has brought additional workers into the country under a second visa program whose numbers have not been disclosed. Some U.S. worker organizations say Clinton cannot claim to support American workers if she is also helping Indian outsourcing companies and proposing more worker visas. "It's just two-faced," said John Miano, founder of the Programmers Guild, one of several high-tech worker organizations that have sprung up as outsourcing has expanded. "We see her undermining U.S. workers and helping the offshoring business, and then she comes back to the U.S. and says, 'I'm concerned about your pain.' " Among Indian American activists, Clinton's work with Tata has been seen as a sign of her independence from outsourcing skeptics within her party -- and a break from the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who lambasted "Benedict Arnold CEOs" for shipping jobs overseas. The main lobbying organization for the Indian-American community, USINPAC, cites the Tata deal as one of Clinton's top three achievements as a senator -- and evidence of a turnabout, in its view, from her past criticism of outsourcing. "Even though she was against outsourcing at the beginning of her political career," the USINPAC website says, "she has since changed her position and now maintains that offshoring brings as much economic value to the United States as to the country where services are outsourced, especially India." Clinton regularly reinforces that view. When CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs, an outsourcing critic, pressed her on the Tata deal in 2004, Clinton responded: "Well, of course I know that they outsource jobs, that they've actually brought jobs to Buffalo. They've created 10 jobs in Buffalo and have told me and the Buffalo community that they intend to be a source of new jobs in the area, because, you know, outsourcing does work both ways." This month, she made a similar case to a conference of Indian workers in Silicon Valley, saying she supported an expansion of visas. "Foreign skilled workers contribute greatly to our U.S. technological development," she told the group via satellite. Clinton acknowledged the strains on American workers and called for more job-training programs. But her words seemed to distance her from those who would end outsourcing. Increased U.S. job losses, she said, could cause Americans to "seek more protection against what they view as unfair competition." The Tata deal, she said in a 2005 stop in India, exemplified the cooperation that will "help to prevent the kind of negative feelings that could be stirred up" by critics of the global marketplace. She called those critics "short-sighted." Today, on the campaign trail, Clinton often strikes a different tone. Addressing union audiences and Democratic crowds, she does not highlight her support for expanding foreign-worker visas. Instead, Clinton often laments a system that, as she told a government workers union last month, rewards companies for "moving our jobs overseas." "Outsourcing is a problem, and it's one that I've dealt with as a senator from New York," Clinton said during a Democratic candidates debate in June. She said she had tried "to stand against the tide of outsourcing." Clinton aides say the Tata deal is just one example of her broader efforts to help upstate New York. Whatever the results, said spokesman Philippe Reines, the effort showed Clinton helping to build a high-tech future for a region long focused on manufacturing. Buffalo's population has fallen by half over 50 years, as automotive and other manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Resentment is so high that voters last year nearly dumped a longtime Republican congressman for an anti-trade Democrat, who had made outsourcing his biggest issue. For Clinton, a newcomer to New York when she ran for the Senate in 2000, the upstate region was considered a challenge -- a traditionally conservative area that did not participate in the economic prosperity during her husband's presidency. So, as a candidate, she pledged to use tax credits and other incentives to create 200,000 jobs in the region. In 2002, Clinton took a group of Indian business executives on a tour of the region and to a meeting with administrators from the state university in Buffalo. The group included Tata Consultancy Services, an information technology consulting firm that is part of Tata Group, a conglomerate with interests in electricity, steel, aviation, cars and hotels. At the time, Tata Consultancy had two offices in the state -- both in New York City to service Wall Street clients. But a year after the tour, the company flew Clinton to join its chief executive, S. Ramadorai, in Buffalo for an announcement: It would open an office there. Tata also signed a memorandum of understanding with a university research center to pursue discoveries in genetics, drugs and other areas. In a news release, Tata said that deal "will eventually lead to opportunities for training, recruitment and job creation in Buffalo." "There was a sense of excitement on the part of the community," said Anthony M. Masiello, Buffalo's mayor at the time, "to have a company like Tata that would not traditionally look at coming to western New York." But soon the company faded from public view, said Andrew J. Rudnick, president and CEO of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership, an economic development group in which Tata was initially active. "They told us their business strategy had changed," he said. "The reality is that the number of people that Tata is employing here now doesn't seem to be significant." At the University at Buffalo, Bruce A. Holm, director of a research center pursuing projects with Tata, conceded that the partnership had not played out as hoped. But he said that progress was still possible. Tata officials say the company has hired 50 people from the Buffalo area in the last four years but most have left or have been transferred to other locations. They say the Buffalo operations remain important to the company and a part of the civic life of the city. But critics say that Tata has done more to undercut workers in upstate New York than it has helped -- and that Clinton is wrong to argue that exposing U.S. workers to competition from foreign workers is helping both groups. Since Tata arrived in Buffalo, "the reality is that it probably created many more jobs for workers overseas and displaced lots of American workers," said Ronil Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a prominent critic of outsourcing. A report released by two senators said that Tata was one of the biggest users of foreign-worker visas in the United States, employing more than 7,900 visa recipients last year. The large number of visas suggests that companies are circumventing laws designed to protect American workers, Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in their report. Clinton and many other lawmakers have called for cracking down on visa abuse. At the same time, she has backed an increase in the number of foreigners admitted to the U.S. each year under the main type of visa for high-tech workers. The cap is 65,000 each year; companies are seeking 115,000. And her campaign continues to telegraph -- sometimes in front of Indian American audiences -- that she sees benefits to a globalized world. Three weeks ago, her husband drew applause at a conference of 14,000 Indian Americans in Washington as he extolled the benefits of "open borders, easy travel, easy immigration." He said the outsourcing debate bothered him because it failed to acknowledge the contributions of Indians who settled in the U.S. The same day, he headlined a fundraiser at the conference for his wife's campaign. Labor union leaders, who haven't decided whom to endorse for president, say they have watched the Tata deal and Clinton's statements on outsourcing. "People do want to see from her some recognition that the outsourcing of these service jobs isn't a good thing for the U.S. economy," said Thea M. Lee, policy director of the AFL-CIO. "It's a little bit of an open question where Sen. Clinton's going to end up on outsourcing." peter.wallsten@latimes.com -- (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Visa activity -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced in March 2003 that the high-tech firm Tata Consultancy Services of India was opening an office in Buffalo, N.Y., and would bring jobs to the area. Clinton later said the deal showed that outsourcing firms could create jobs both in their home countries and in the United States. Tata says it has created about 10 jobs in Buffalo and, since 2003, hired 50 local workers. But over that same period, Tata sought H-1B visa certifications to import nearly 500 foreign computer programmers and other specialists to upstate New York. City H-1B visas* sought Schenectady... 101 Webster... 94 Albany... 87 Rochester... 83 Buffalo... 45 Waterford... 40 Olean... 31 Syracuse... 10 Pittsford ... 3 Orchard Park... 1 Total ... 495 -- *H-1B visas allow U.S. employers to hire high-skilled international workers for up to six years. Obtaining certification from the Department of Labor does not necessarily mean the company secured visas, but that is the only public indicator of where a company intends to deploy foreign workers. Whereas H-1B certification data is public, similar information is not available for L-1 visas, which accounted for more of Tata's workers in 2006, according to a U.S. Senate report. Source: Times analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Foreign Labor Certification PHOTO: S. RAMADORAI Excitement over his firm, Tata, has faded in Buffalo. PHOTOGRAPHER: Rajesh Nirgude Associated Press PHOTO: IN NEW DELHI: Clinton speaks at India Tomorrow 2005. Critics of the global marketplace are "short-sighted," she told Indians that year, and she praised the Tata deal as an example of cooperation. PHOTOGRAPHER: Manish Swarup Associated Press Copyright © 2007 Los Angeles Times |
|
|
For Charles Gaines, crisis is clarity 07/29/2007 Los Angeles Times Mizota, Sharon |
Return to Top |
| Profile
CHARLES GAINES is drawn to disaster. In recent years, the Los Angeles-based artist has created works that explore our perceptions of crime scenes, explosions and airplane crashes. His latest installation, on view through Sept. 1 at LAXART in Culver City, tackles a familiar Southland catastrophe: smog. "Greenhouse" is a microcosm of the city in an 8-by-12-foot wood and Plexiglas structure. A computer-controlled system of multicolored lights shines down on a satellite photo of the L.A. basin; each color represents a different airborne pollutant. If regional air pollution levels are low, the lights get brighter; if levels increase, they grow dim. Every 15 minutes, the computer receives data from a website that records local air quality and the structure fills with fog, diffusing the lights in a cloud of haze. While the installation is a high-tech dramatization of environmental degradation, it is also part of Gaines' ongoing investigation into how we comprehend all phenomena, not just moments of crisis. "My interest is not to necessarily be an agent in changing global warming," he says. "Although I would love for that to happen, my interest is to produce a certain kind of understanding of the role that ideology can play in limiting your thinking." For Gaines, cataclysmic events strain our powers of comprehension. And by rendering us speechless, they show us the limits of our ability to make sense of the world. Gaines is interested in the gap between visceral experience and the words and theories we use to describe it. One of his best-known works, 1997's "Airplanecrash Clock," depicts a catastrophe on a small scale. Hoisted above a model of a fictional metropolis (a mishmash of iconic buildings from different cities), a toy airplane on the end of a long pole descends at regular intervals into a trap door in the street. After each "crash," we hear screams, and the door flips over to reveal the plane's wreckage. The work turns tragedy into a repetitive, mechanical event, much like the repeated media footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. "The piece was done before 9/11, but it felt eerily prescient." says Shelly Bancroft, co-director of New York art center Triple Candie, where Gaines had a retrospective in 2004. By calling attention to the ways in which disasters are represented, Gaines asserts that our understanding of events is always a particular construction of language and images rather than objective truth. Diligence free of doubt AT 63, Gaines, who has been a faculty member at CalArts since 1989, is soft-spoken and dignified, exuding a confidence that reflects the determination with which he has pursued his artistic and intellectual interests. For more than 30 years, he has maintained an active exhibition and teaching career, even when his highly conceptual work wasn't always in step with art world trends. "By the time that I got to know Charles, the type of work that he was making sort of lost its appeal," says artist Edgar Arceneaux, a former student and collaborator of Gaines. "But he continued to make that work, and he continued to evolve." Now it seems the art world is paying attention again -- in June, Gaines was included for the first time in Italy's Venice Biennale (on view through Nov. 21). His installation there includes "Airplanecrash Clock" as well as the latest iterations of two ongoing series of drawings, "Explosion Drawings" and "History of Stars." The "Explosion Drawings" are highly detailed, large-scale graphite images of blasts resulting from bombs or crashes. Stripped of any sense of place or time, each drawing is accompanied by a smaller "appendix": a separate image of hand-lettered, alternating sentences about bombs, missiles and war from two or three sources unrelated to the explosion portrayed. "History of Stars" creates similar gaps between image and text by combining shots of the night sky with intermingled sentences from two books of personal significance to Gaines: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realist novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Orientalism," by post-colonial scholar Edward Said. In a 2006 statement, Gaines wrote, "By arbitrarily combining content and expression, I want to show that the truthfulness of any expression ... is an expression of political belief and not truth." This blend of conceptual approach and political investment was influenced by Gaines' early experiences with racism in the art world of the '70s. "I had to fight my way into graduate school," he recalls. Upon being rejected by the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, Gaines, who grew up in Newark, N.J., traveled to the school and made a personal appeal for admission. He was the first black student in the Institute's master of fine arts program, from which he graduated in 1967. "If you look at any black artist who's that educated, who's over 55 years old, you're looking at a person who bucked the odds at getting an education in the arts, someone who had a higher wall to climb, no question, because it was so racist in those days," he says. Failing to find a mentor in graduate school, he developed his conceptual approach to art-making largely through reading, including texts on Tantric Buddhist art. Some of his early drawings involved representing natural phenomena such as trees or the movement of dancers as grids of numbers. Gaines says that while his practice evolved independently of mainstream conceptual art, it was Sol Lewitt, a prominent figure in the movement, who first championed his work. Despite living outside major art centers (he taught at Cal State Fresno from 1968 to 1989), he showed extensively, most notably with New York dealer Leo Castelli, who also represented Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Gaines describes this early attention as a double-edged sword. Although he has always maintained that his work is politically motivated, it wasn't always recognized as such. For African American artists who gained mainstream visibility in the '80s, "political art" was narrowly defined as work that dealt explicitly with issues of race and identity. While Gaines was acutely aware of the challenges facing black artists, he refused to relinquish his interest in theoretical structures simply to follow trends. "The reason I was shown was because my work looked more like what was going on in conceptual practice than it did political art, which the art world just wouldn't permit at that time," he says, "At the very same time, because I wasn't doing that kind of political work, it limited the growth of my career." In the '80s and '90s, when the art world embraced younger African American artists such as Lorna Simpson and Fred Wilson who explicitly critiqued racism, Gaines was left out of the mix. "I haven't been engaging in the subject of race and racial identity. That's been the stereotype of African American production, and I really never did that," he says. As Gaines sees it, he falls between two generations: arriving on the scene just after the heady early days of conceptual art but in advance of a younger group of artists who wore their politics on their sleeves. Now that the art world has entered what Studio Museum in Harlem curator Thelma Golden has dubbed a "post-black" moment, Gaines' blend of theory and politics is closer to his students' attitudes toward race than the views of his own generation. "Race became less an issue of racism," he wrote in an e-mail, "and more an issue of how power is exercised." Above the racial divide GAINES' interest in these power dynamics spurred him to write his own critical texts. In 1993, he organized an exhibition at UC Irvine that examined work by contemporary African American artists and its reception in the mainstream press. Titled "Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism," his catalog essay identified a paradox facing African American artists. Although they received increased media attention in the late '80s and early '90s, it was often only as African Americans that their work was evaluated. "By talking about the work of minority artists, you're already separating them from everybody else," Gaines says. "And then in the way that you talk about them, you try to reinforce the reasons for their separation. Even if you are the most liberal and well-intentioned person in the world, you're still participating in marginalizing those artists." These insights, along with the longevity of his career and the singularity of his artistic vision, have made Gaines a role model for a new generation of artists and curators who came of age in the '90s. "For many years it felt like he was this figure that you have to reckon with," says Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston who has written about Gaines. "I think he shows a path. If you look at the work, it gives you an idea of strategy, of what one artist can do." At CalArts, Gaines typically structures his classes as open-ended seminars. "I try to set things so that my students are more like researchers than students," he says. He develops and refines many of the ideas for his artwork and writing in the classroom. "I identified with something [artist and UCLA professor] John Baldessari said many years ago, that there's a certain kind of studio practice where the teaching itself is part of it," he says. "I think for him it's not just about making art," says Sirmans. "It's about the process, and it's also about the interaction with artists, and I think that's always been a really important thing for him." This engagement with the larger context of art-making underscores the egalitarian impulse embedded in Gaines' art. "Any idea is a social idea," Gaines says. "If language is the area where we receive thoughts, then it always means that you can't have a thought without social impact." Language may always reflect ideology, but in those traumatic moments when speech fails us, we catch a glimpse of how we are empowered to shape it too. PHOTO: Charles Gaines PHOTOGRAPHER: Bryan Chan Los Angeles Times PHOTO: 'AIRPLANECRASH CLOCK': Gaines' 1997 work, at the Venice Biennale, is pertinent to a post-9/11 world. PHOTOGRAPHER: Sergio Martucci From Susanne Vielmetter PHOTO: 'GREENHOUSE': L.A.'s smog quotient, updated every 15 minutes, is indicated by fluctuating light levels and a layer of fog in a walk-in exhibit at LAXART. PHOTOGRAPHER: Bryan Chan Los Angeles Times Copyright © 2007 Los Angeles Times |
|
|
Lessons From The Loan Scandal 07/29/2007 New York Times Pappano, Laura |
Return to Top |
| ERIC SMOLITSKY, a senior at the University of Connecticut, is a sharp guy who is spending the summer doing stem cell research. But when it comes to student loans -- he will graduate $30,000 in debt and plans to borrow $200,000 more for medical school -- Mr. Smolitsky finds it annoyingly complicated. ''I haven't spent much time looking into it,'' he acknowledges. ''They say, 'Here is your financial aid package.' ''
Students in general have not thought much about how it all comes together (as long as the dollars are covered somehow). After all, they had a trusted adviser in the financial aid office. Such assumptions have been shaken by recent disclosures about financial aid officers receiving junkets, consulting fees and kickbacks courtesy of the loan industry, owning stock in loan companies and steering business through ''preferred lender'' lists. A report from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, released last month, details how a lender's place on the list at the University of Texas, Austin, had more to do with what ''treats'' were offered the financial aid director than what rates were offered students. ''Students and families had assumed that the advice they were getting on financial aid and loans from college officials was based on that person's experience and knowledge and on what would work best for that student,'' says Robert M. Shireman, president of the Institute for College Access and Success, in Berkeley, Calif. Mr. Shireman points out what is now obvious but was once unthinkable: colleges and financial aid officers can have ''competing interests.'' Legislation is pending in Congress, and the Department of Education has proposed rules governing the relationship between lender and college. Now new concerns have surfaced about whether lenders use fair criteria to assess applicants for private, or ''alternative,'' loans. According to the College Board, such loans accounted for 20 percent of educational borrowing for the 2005-6 school year, up from 4 percent a decade earlier. Ultimately, all this attention should benefit borrowers. But for now, students (and parents) scrambling to get loans for next year's tuition bills must navigate this intimidating and labyrinthine industry. ''My wife and I are both college-educated, and we sit there and say, 'How are kids supposed to do this?' '' says David Robinson, who lives in Lexington, Mass. A project manager at I.B.M., he is helping his son apply for student loans, find part-time work and otherwise cover the $41,500 it will cost him to attend Merrimack College in September. Despite money from a 529 college savings plan and scholarships for both academics and athletics (lacrosse), David Jr. will need $20,000 a year in loans. Mr. Robinson co-signed a private loan application at Sallie Mae but was stunned at the interest rate -- 10.25 percent plus a 3 percent fee at repayment. ''I think that's too expensive,'' says Mr. Robinson. ''I find this an extremely daunting, nerve-racking process. You don't know now what you are getting into.'' If the student loan scandal has made some wary, it has also provided a prod to get smart before borrowing. SAM IS YOUR BEST RICH UNCLE. ''You should never get a private student loan unless you have exhausted your government student loans,'' says Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid .org. Post-scandal, that fact is displayed prominently on lender home pages. Private loans, which carry variable rates, can come with double-digit interest (and no cap). Interest on federal loans, on the other hand, is set by Congress 5 percent for a Perkins (for the neediest students), a cap of 6.8 percent for a Stafford (for any income level) and 8.5 percent for a PLUS (for parents and graduate students). ''Why would anyone ever get a private loan?'' wonders Mr. Kantrowitz, author of ''FastWeb College Gold: The Step-by-Step Guide to Paying for College.'' The answer is that Perkins and Stafford loans have limits on how much can be borrowed, and despite plans in Congress to raise those limits, loan amounts can fall well short of college costs. As for undergraduate PLUS loans, parents might not qualify (unlike Stafford and Perkins loans, a PLUS requires a credit check, so a loan default, a credit card delinquency or a bankruptcy can sink an application). Or parents might not warm to decades paying off their child's debt. Mr. Robinson thought it would be good for his son to get a private loan as a way of investing in his own future. Also, he says, with three other children to raise and educate, ''I didn't want to totally be on the hook for it.'' For Rates, EXPECT THE WORST. Shopping for a mortgage? Flip to the newspaper's business section for a chart comparing rates. But in the student loan industry, which has grown fast and unchecked, rates for private loans are all over the map. Lenders have developed their own criteria for assessing borrowers with unknown future income, no collateral (like that house to foreclose on) and brief (if any) credit histories. In short, the greater the likelihood of default, the higher the interest rate. Credit score is the biggest factor in determining the rate, but every lender judges differently the risk that you won't pay back what you borrow. Lenders advertise catchy interest rates, Mr. Kantrowitz says, but note with an asterisk that they are available only to customers with the best credit history. His research shows fewer than 10 percent of student borrowers qualify for the best rates, and more than 75 percent get the worst. ''A good rule of thumb is to look at the worst rate and assume you will get a rate pretty close to that,'' he says. Lenders won't reveal the cutoff scores that qualify for one rate or another. But in general, a borrower in the 500s (on a scale of 300 to 850) ''could expect to get a fairly cool reception from any lender,'' whereas someone in the 700s is appealing, says Craig Watts, spokesman for the Fair Isaac Corporation, whose FICO formula is widely used to calculate scores. Mr. Watts says multiple lenders inquiring into a credit history can lower a score slightly, because it implies a propensity to seek credit. Borrowers with average to good scores aren't likely to be affected by comparison shopping. But students with short credit histories may see their scores dip temporarily. For students who lack a credit history, the lender MyRichUncle boasts on its Web site that it considers ''their merits as a student, including G.P.A., school and program of study.'' Raza Khan, the company president, says weighted formulas are used to assess borrowers. Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student lender, doesn't take academic markers into account. ''We don't believe an A student should get dramatically better treatment than an A-minus or B student or C student,'' says Tom Joyce, its spokesman. He says Sallie Mae ''has standard pricing that is available at all schools,'' though it will improve rates in ''a competitive situation where a lender has come in and dropped prices.'' Al M. Davis, Nelnet's managing director for private loans, says its underwriters consider a graduate student's field of study but not an undergraduate's except pre-med. They also ''look at the school's accreditation, at their historical performance related to job placement and their default history.'' NOT ALL COLLEGES ARE EQUAL IN LENDERS' EYES. Six students, including David Robinson Jr., agreed to shop online for their private loans last month and share the results for this article. Rates ranged widely: one student earning a master's degree in public administration at New York University applied to four lenders and was offered rates varying by six percentage points. Some students came back empty-handed. Cindy Grayson is halfway through an online master's program in criminal justice at Florida Metropolitan University, a profit-making accredited career college. She applied for $8,000 to supplement her government loans but was rejected by Bank of America and Sallie Mae. The Sallie Mae rejection, says Ms. Grayson, ''happened instantaneously.'' Ms. Grayson, 50, lives in a mobile home in a town of 3,200 in Arizona and has a foreclosure and bankruptcy in her past. She may not be an appealing private loan candidate but she is, in many ways, a typical one. She sees her online courses and her loans as a ticket to a better-paying job. ''I thought student loans were to help you,'' says Ms. Grayson, a substitute teacher who just landed a second job as a clerk in a sheriff's office. ''If you don't need it, you can have it. If you do need it, you can't have it.'' Students are told they are free to borrow from any lender. In practice, lenders provide private money only for colleges with which they have a ''relationship,'' as customer service representatives put it. As a result, Ms. Grayson was not able to apply to three other lenders as a student at F.M.U., whose federal student loan default rate is 10 percent. Another comparison shopper, Katherine McBrayer, who just graduated from Monroe High School in North Carolina, was denied by Charter One Bank and Wachovia. Education Finance Partners, Citibank and Nelnet would not accept an application for a private loan to attend the Utah College of Massage Therapy, a one-year accredited program with seven campuses (default rate: about 7 percent). ''I was irritated,'' says Teresa McBrayer, Katherine's mother. She says her daughter has a grade point average of 3.92 and excelled in calculus and chemistry but dreams of owning her own massage center. ''She didn't choose the triple-A four-star college,'' says Ms. McBrayer, who had wanted her daughter to be responsible for her own debt. She has since taken out a government PLUS loan. Mr. Davis of Nelnet offers two possibilities when asked to explain why his company refused to lend money for the Utah massage college: ''We don't have a current relationship with that school or we have elected not to lend to that particular school.'' Justin S. Draeger, spokesman for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, says his organization is troubled by such exclusions. ''We are very concerned about students who are treated differently based on the school they attend,'' he says. ''There are definitely some questions that need to be raised about the underwriting of these loans.'' As part of his continuing investigation, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York sent a letter to Congress last month complaining that ''a significant number of lenders'' weigh private loan applications and set rates depending on the college in question rather than the creditworthiness of the borrowers -- an approach he compared with redlining in the mortgage industry. YOU WILL BE CONFUSED. Trying to figure out rates for a private loan is like the admissions process itself: you won't know until you sit down and apply. Even then, the information comes in dizzyingly different forms. Lenders talk in terms of margin, the number of percentage points above or below a selected index, which for student loans could be the prime rate, the 91-day Treasury bill or the London interbank offered rate. Some lenders do the calculations; others let you do the math. The comparison shopper attending New York University applied for $8,000 from MyRichUncle. The lender offered $5,900 (through a partner, Doral Bank). The preapproval told her only that she would get prime plus 5 percentage points. She had to look up prime. The resulting rate, 13.25 percent, would be recalculated every quarter during the in-school deferral period and rounded up to the nearest .125 percent. There would also be an origination fee that would be ''disclosed in the initial Disclosure Statement for the first Advance.'' (In fact, the fee was hidden on the promissory note. The loan amount was given as $6,413 -- $5,900 plus a fee of $513.) Confused yet? True borrowing costs depend on the fine print: discounts, penalties, fees (which can counteract the benefit of a lower interest rate) and how often the loan is capitalized (when deferred interest is added to the principal -- so in effect you pay interest on interest.) Deanne Loonin, director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project of the National Consumer Law Center, says private lenders are required to inform borrowers of interest rate, total number of payments and total cost of repayment key information for comparing deals. But, she says, there is no rule about how soon in the process lenders must divulge that information. (Proposed Senate legislation aims to compel lenders to disclose loan costs earlier.) ''The truth is, there is little substantive regulations of the loans themselves,'' she says. ''There is really no sugar-coating the problem that if someone really wants to shop around now, it's not easy.'' the PREFERRED lIST is (STILL) where to start. Comparison shopping usually begins and ends on a college's preferred lender list. But what gets lenders top billing is still a mystery at many colleges: have they bought their way onto the list or do they represent a college's assessment of which loans serve its students best? Even with the credibility of financial aid offices damaged, experts say, don't ignore the list. But do ask questions. New rules are expected to call for at least three lenders to be listed, and for some explanation of how they were selected. A competition last year at the University of California shows the complexity of finding the best deal and how much influence a university can wield. According to Nancy Coolidge, coordinator of student financial support for the system's 10 campuses, administrators determined that students at some campuses were getting less desirable terms. At Santa Cruz, for example, students with the worst credit were paying up to 19.32 percent to Education Finance Partners and 14.25 percent to Sallie Mae with fees of up to 8 percent. The university decided to use the system's volume some 2,000 undergraduates borrowed $20 million in private loans last school year to improve rates. Six bidders vied for the coveted top spot on the lender list. Financial officers were seeking, among other criteria, lenders who would eliminate fees, would not demand default insurance and would capitalize loans just once. Administrators sorted through hundreds of pages of data. Citibank got the nod. Borrowers are now classed in four groups: credit worthy (scores of 671 or higher), credit ready (670 to 610), low credit (609 to 570) and poor credit (569 or less), and their rates range from 7.75 to 14.25 percent. Students in the two middle categories get 9.25 and 11.25 percent, respectively, if they have co-signers. CONSOLIDATION IS NO longer a NO-BRAINER. It used to be that you got federal loans at variable interest rates; once you graduated, you consolidated them into one neat, low-interest, fixed-rate loan. The value of consolidation has waned since federal rates became fixed last year. But the pressure to consolidate has heated up, with lenders urging students, ''Lower your monthly payments,'' which simply means stretching out the loan for more years and increasing the total interest. It makes sense to consolidate private loans if you can improve terms or better manage payments, Mr. Kantrowitz says. But consolidating is not automatically a better deal, and you may loserebates or pay penalties. Never consolidate federal and private loans together, because that wipes out some benefits of a government loan (such as loan forgiveness for certain types of public service). The Department of Education ombudsman for student aid, Debra Wiley, says her office is fielding more complaints this year -- about 300, compared with 125 last year and 50 the year before from students who say they were tricked or who were uncertain about consolidation forms they had signed. ''I know people are confused,'' she says. ''They think they are signing something to get more information when they are signing a consolidation application.'' Steven E. Brooks, the executive director of North Carolina's State Education Assistance Authority, a state agency that makes, services and guarantees government loans, says he has received 150 forms at once instructing the agency to transfer student loans to a commercial lender -- and then heard from upset students who hadn't intended to consolidate. In April, the University of Idaho allowed On Campus Student Loans of Helena, Mont., to hold a consolidation workshop at the same time and in the same campus building where university officials were offering exit loan-counseling for seniors. Elaine Ruscilli, a senior in psychology, dropped into the workshop to figure out how to structure repayment of her $40,000 in federal loans (and eat some free pizza). Mistaking the seals on documents and signs for Department of Education insignia, she signed forms, she says. Later she ''got that sinking feeling'' and demanded the company not consolidate her loans. It didn't. But other lenders are still trying. She got a check in the mail for $473.43 from Academic Loan Group hers if she consolidated. ''If you were desperate for money, you might be tempted to cash that,'' she says. Dan Davenport, director of admissions and financial aid at the University of Idaho, which lends government money directly to students, says students face a 1.5 percent charge for consolidating federally guaranteed loans with private lenders. ''Students are confused about what to do,'' says Mr. Davenport, who is pessimistic about proposed legislation. ''I am totally convinced that all of this will continue -- the false advertising, the illegal incentives, the misinformation -- until we redesign the loan programs. It's such big money and such easy money that everybody wants to get it.'' PICK A COLLEGE (AND MAJOR) YOU CAN AFFORD. Everyone knows college is expensive. But with so much energy focused on getting in, discussion about whether it's worth the cost is pushed to the background. Lewis Mandell, professor of finance and managerial economics at the University at Buffalo (of the State University of New York), says students who need loans should ask themselves if running into debt at a private college makes sense. ''If I could get the same education at a state institution, I need to ask, 'What is the differential? What am I paying for?' '' he says. ''It is one thing if Mom and Dad will send you to college; that's fine. But if you have to pay back $100,000 to $200,000, you should say to yourself, 'Is this degree really going to prepare me for the types of jobs that will be there for much of my career?' '' Robert D. Manning, director of the Center for Consumer Financial Services at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has students compare their expected earnings with expected payments on student loans and credit card debt -- he worries when more than 50 percent of starting salary is needed to repay debts. Mr. Manning says students often have an unrealistic expectation of starting income. ''We've actually had students decide they can't do their major,'' he says. Dawn Wooters followed her passion at the University of Tennessee, graduating in 1998 with a fine arts degree. ''I was thinking, 'This is what I would really love to do and the money wouldn't matter.' It's hard to admit that now,'' says Ms. Wooters, who couldn't live on painting watercolors. At 34, she is getting a second undergraduate degree, in nursing, at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta. Ms. Wooters graduated the first time without debt. She now works full time at a Hampton Inn and has already borrowed $13,000 in Stafford and $3,500 in private loans (which she got with her boyfriend co-signing, after she applied alone and was turned down). ''You never want to tell someone, 'Don't do what you love,' '' she says. ''But you need to have a realistic concept and a backup plan.'' At Debt's Door Six students applied online for a private loan of $8,000 June 1 to 6. Here are the preapproval decisions. Two students' FICO credit scores changed while applying; lenders are listed in the order students applied. INSTITUTION: Florida Metropolitan University (online through Brandon campus); profit-making; federal loan default rate, 10 percent. STUDENT: From Parker, Ariz.; seeking master's in criminal justice; G.P.A., 4.0; FICO score, 531 (rose to 536). DENIED: Bank of America, Sallie Mae. Would not LEND FOR THIS COLLEGE: Student Loan Xpress, Education Finance Partners, Nelnet. INSTITUTION: Kennesaw State University (Ga.); public; default rate, 4.4 percent. STUDENT: From Norcross, Ga.; seeking bachelor's in nursing; G.P.A., 3.89; FICO, 507. DENIED: Education Finance Partners, Citibank, Nelnet. INSTITUTION: Merrimack College (Mass.); private, nonprofit; default rate, 1.5 percent. STUDENT: From Lexington, Mass.; seeking bachelor's (undeclared major); G.P.A., 2.8. FICO, none. APPROVED: 10.25 percent from Sallie Mae with co-signer (FICO, 726), plus 3 percent fee at repayment. INSTITUTION: New York University; private, nonprofit; default rate, 1.7 percent. STUDENT: From New York City; seeking master's in public administration; G.P.A., 3.75; FICO, 652 (dropped to 647). APPROVED: 13.25 percent from MyRichUncle ($5,900 only), plus $513 origination fee; 12.25 percent from Sallie Mae, plus 4 percent fee at disbursement and 3 percent at repayment; 7.25 percent from Citibank; 10.46 percent from Education Finance Partners, plus $200 fee. INSTITUTION: Utah College of Massage Therapy (Las Vegas campus); profit-making; default rate, 6.7 percent. STUDENT: From Monroe, N.C.; seeking certificate of completion in massage therapy; G.P.A., 3.92; FICO, none. DENIED: Charter One Bank, Wachovia. WOULD NOT LEND FOR THIS COLLEGE: Education Finance Partners, Nelnet, Citibank. INSTITUTION: Yale; private, nonprofit; default rate, 0.9 percent. STUDENT: From Missoula, Mont.; seeking bachelor's in environmental studies; G.P.A., 3.3; FICO, 751. APPROVED: 8.25 percent from Citibank; 7.85 percent from Education Finance Partners (if co-signed); 7.86 percent from Student Loan Xpress. Drawing (Drawing by Frank Frisari) Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company |
|
|
Students in Residence: Behind Closed Doors 07/29/2007 New York Times Dederer, Claire |
Return to Top |
| The college dorm is a pretty intimidating setup, when you think about it. You're sharing a house with a few hundred of your peers. You know that at least some of them are destined to be your friends. These future allies are rattling around out there somewhere in this gigantic building. But how will they find you? How will they know that you're you, fascinating and smart and ready to bond?
You have one billboard available to you: your room door. Student doors are crowded, frenetic, typically plastered with a high-energy mishmash of goofy roommate photos, random quotes, celebrity pictures cut from magazines and notes from friends. One pair of roommates, in a kind of meta-commentary on the whole project, actually posted the word ''pastiche'' on their door last semester. The transformation begins at freshman orientation; resident advisers welcome new students with name tags, decorations and whiteboards -- for analog, real-world text-messaging, to keep track of one other and to advertise their own whereabouts, at all times. Cathy A. Small, professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, wrote about the cultural phenomenon in her 2005 book ''My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student.'' Dr. Small, who wrote under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, enrolled undercover to research an ethnography of student life. She noticed that the indigenous group communicated through their dorm doors. ''Students identify with an image of friendliness, sociability, freedom, friends and fun,'' Dr. Small said in a recent interview. ''The images you see on their doors reflect these values. The doors say, 'We're not doing things that are very serious, we're enjoying ourselves, we're with friends, not family.' In the photos on the doors, they're often not even posing in a traditional or normal way. Someone might be standing on one foot, or lying on someone else's stomach, or making a face. It sends a message of being a little out of control.'' The doors on these pages, spotted this past semester at seven campuses, are collages of visual irony: found objects, vintage images and unexpected juxtapositions. Dr. Small says it all fits in with the dominant themes. ''What's really being represented is this idea of spontaneity,'' she says. ''The student is saying, 'I so don't think about this, what you're seeing is practically a free association.''' Except, of course, the dorm room door isn't really an exercise in free association. It's a message, directed to those as-yet-unmet friends out there. It says: Here I am. You found me at last. Vance Brown, 20, Ohio Wesleyan I was an R.A. for the year. Especially on a diverse campus like O.W., door decoration can really express where you're from. Like one student from India wrote out all our names in Indian script. And it creates a friendly atmosphere. Like on my floor, where you have mostly freshmen coming in, they feel alone even though they're all in the same boat. Door decorations let them know you're there to talk to. You're not just there to knock on their door when they're too loud. The giveaway condoms is not something every R.A. does. It's optional. Better safe than sorry, right? I have to refill it frequently, every few days. Cristina Martin-Collabolletta, 18, Binghamton University (SUNY) Jackie and I are best friends. We were surprised that living together has worked out so well. Things like that usually don't. I don't think either of us would still be there if not for the other one. Ieshia West, 20, Kenyon COLLEGE (Ohio) I've had that room since sophomore year, when I moved into the house. It's a queer safe place on campus. I thought a lot about what I wanted to be on my door. The house is very open to people who might not know me personally. For those people, for friends, for faculty members, even for family, I wanted to make a statement about who I was, and not hold back. The biggest contradiction on the door is between the Tupac poster and the bumper stickers I have about being gay. I'm not very religious, but I can appreciate that someone who goes against the Bible -- like Tupac, someone who curses and calls women names -- I can appreciate him being able to say, ''Regardless of what I do, I am spiritual.'' My family put religion before their blood when I came out. If there is a god, then I'm not going to let other humans tell me what he thinks of me. I personally don't believe he will judge me based on my sexuality. Mary J. Blige is there because she's my favorite R&B singer. She doesn't change who she is, but she's grown into a true woman who knows how to love herself. It's good to have someone like Mary J. Blige to tell you that no matter what happens, you can still be this queen. Kendall Krawchuk, 19, Kenyon Last summer, I bought a 400-page ''Star Wars'' coloring book. I was, like, this is going to get me through college. And it did get me through the first year, it was very relaxing. I still have, like, 200 pages left. I can use it next year. The ''No Pants Zone'' sign is a warning system. My roommate and I don't have air conditioning, so we find it more comfortable to lounge in our underwear. Brenna Rosenstein, 22, Agnes Scott COLLEGE (Atlanta) Agnes Scott is an all-women's college. It's kind of silly, but that's why the door is covered with cute boys. Oh, my God, I love all Austen's work. ''Pride and Prejudice'' was the first one I read. I'm a bit of a fanatic. Of the filmed versions, definitely the A&E/BBC version is the best. Who doesn't love Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy? I put the flowers up because I love the outdoors. I'm from Asheville, N.C., and I really miss the changing of the seasons. I can't afford fresh bouquets, so this was my way to bring the outdoors in. Maja Tokic, 22, Agnes Scott My roommate and I both collect postcards. The ''pastiche'' card was from Starbucks -- we always go to the one that's far away from campus so we can waste more time. For some reason, my roommate really liked the word. She made me the human sparkler postcard. She likes to make me postcards. Breanna Kelly, 21, Agnes Scott Basically every girl at our school just about always puts up a little sign that says where they are. I wanted to make mine a little more interesting. I let people know not only where I am, but who I'm with. Normally I thumbtack two spots -- it'll say whether I'm on campus or off, with friends or with family. There's also a spot where I can say whether I want to be alone, or if it's O.K. to come look for me. I leave Post-It notes on the door so people can leave me a little note if they want. Sara Haj-Hussein, 22, Agnes Scott At Agnes Scott, each class has their own mascot. We picked the 007 Bond girls because our class was '07. We had green garters and guns. I actually work as an employee at Victoria's Secret. And my friend pinned condoms on everyone's doors for safe-sex week. I didn't really feel my door was provocative. My door was meant to be inviting. It was supposed to make you think, ''Hey, she's really into school spirit, she might be welcoming.'' Ashley Lundblad, 18, St. Olaf COLLEGE (Minnesota) I got my first nice digital camera for graduation, and I took my first photography class at St. Olaf's. I take pictures of the other girls all the time. They're always asking, ''When are you going to print them out, we want to see them.'' A lot of the pictures are on MySpace, too. We love to look at ourselves. Caitlin Yarsky, 22, R.I.T. I got bored one night and didn't want to do my real homework, so I drew that. It's a picture of me and my friends. We have pointy ears because we're Hobbits. I was a big ''Lord of the Rings'' nerd in high school. Julie Benchea, 19, Ohio State We thought it would be fun to have a bouncer on our door. Katherine Monter, 19, Ohio State A couple of the guys down the hall joined this MySpace group called Manlaw, so I joined Chicklaw, kind of as a joke. Chicklaw is the complete opposite of Manlaw. It's a bunch of stuff girls should know and girls should do together. So the printouts on the door are every rule from Chicklaw. For example: Tar-zhay is the correct way to pronounce Target. Gossip magazines should be recognized as proper literature. Chapstick counts as makeup. If another woman's fly is down, you must tell her immediately and discreetly. Talking about men in the bathroom is encouraged. The guys put Manlaw on their door. It's a bunch of stuff about, like, Nintendo. Katherine Parker, 21, R.I.T. I watch ''House'' every week with my friends. They always think the disease might be lupus. But it never is. John Theroux, 19, Rochester Institute of technology That is just the best drawing of Batman. Robin Hamdan, 20, Ohio State (On the cover) I put up the pictures of models because I wanted to model a little bit, and I like pretty things, I guess. I only put up closeups of faces because that's what modeling really is. I didn't want bodies because I don't like the idea of how hard it is to get that skinny body. As a sociology major, I've taken notice of how girls are having lots of problems with that, and I have myself. I have a few pictures of my friends up there along with the models, because they felt they deserved to be up there, too. Photos (Photograph by Sarah Braun for The New York Times) (Photograph by Gail Glover/Binghamton University) (Photograph by Katie O'Lone for The New York Times) (Photograph by Olivia White for The New York Times) (Photograph by Katharine Sidelnik for The New York Times) (Photograph by Whitney Deel for The New York Times) (Photograph by Emily Zeller for The New York Times) (Photograph by Dan Wandrey for The New York Times) Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company |
|
|
To Save Themselves, US Newspapers Put Readers to Work 07/29/2007 Wired News Jeff Howe |
Return to Top |
| It wasn't exactly a subtle gesture. One morning last December, Tom Callinan, editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, walked into his office to discover a package from his bosses at Gannett, the company that owns the Enquirer and 84 other dailies across the US. When he opened the box, he had to smile. It was a pair of Nike running shoes. The note from Gannett newspaper division president Sue Clark-Johnson was succinct: 'Since our work is far from over, I thought you might need a new pair for '07.' Callinan and all the other top editors who received shoes that week got the point: The nation's largest newspaper chain was in deep trouble, and the editors had better get ready to run fast. Callinan had been ready for seven years. Back in 1999, he was in the audience when Intel chair Andy Grove bluntly told the members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the Internet and new technologies were about to swamp their hulking cruise ship of an industry. They had a choice: Change course or go under. The $57 billion industry didn't change, but Callinan did. By day, he was the editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in upstate New York. By night he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, emerging two years later with a master's degree in new media. He decided newsroom culture would never change on its own. 'I learned a phrase in grad school: 'Dislodge the equilibrium.' I have a more plainspoken version. eHit 'em upside the head with a two-by-four.'' In case you missed the headlines , the ink-on-paper daily news business is in the middle of a long, painful, and seemingly irreversible decline. Newspaper circulation has dropped 30 percent since 1985 and fewer readers means lower ad rates. That translates into diminished profits, falling stock prices, and disgruntled investors. In the past year, true panic has begun to set in. Publishers have been making deep cuts in newsroom staffs, and some of the industry's gold-plated brands Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company have been sold off at fire-sale prices.
Gannett's execs were painfully aware of the crisis. Months before those running shoes were mailed, executives at Gannett's McLean, Virginia, headquarters were gathering for late-night brainstorming sessions, polishing up a hefty two-by-four of their own. Gannett had a new CEO, Craig Dubow. His mandate was simple: Drag a 19th-century industry into the 21st century and do it without busting the budget or alienating Wall Street. Two of the company's rising stars in new media, Michael Maness and Jennifer Carroll, were given free rein to question every assumption about how a newspaper gathers, writes, and distributes the news. By March 2006, the pieces were in place. The Web was to become the primary vehicle for news, with frequent, round-the-clock updates. The newsroom would be rechristened the Information Center, while traditional departments like Metro and Business would give way to the Digital and Community Conversation desks. Photographers would be trained to shoot video, which would be posted online. Investigations would no longer be conducted by a coven of professionals working in secret. Instead, they'd be crowdsourced farmed out to readers who'd join in the detective work. Gannett papers would also become repositories of local information, spilling over with data about everything from potholes to public officials' salaries. 'We must mix our content with professional journalism and amateur contributions,' read one of the PowerPoint slides prepared by Gannett execs. 'The future is pro-am.' In May, Maness and Carroll went on tour. For three months, the pair flew around the country visiting most of the 11 Gannett papers chosen to pilot the initiative, also dubbed the Information Center. Some newsroom denizens reacted with skepticism, others were flat-out hostile, and some were simply baffled. But most of Gannett's editors and reporters, Carroll says, expressed relief. 'They just wanted to do something to save their jobs,' she says. On July 12 last year, Maness and Carroll landed in Cincinnati. They wanted the Enquirer to reinvent how newspapers handle data and information. After two days of intense, sometimes fractious meetings, they headed back to Virginia. 'To be honest, we were discouraged,' Carroll recalls. Extreme change just didn't seem to be in the newsroom's DNA, she felt. Tom Callinan was about to prove her wrong. Shawnda Mitchell spends her days as an IT specialist for a local nonprofit organization that helps place children of low-income families in day care facilities. But in her spare moments, she works for The Cincinnati Enquirer, usually after work, when she slips out of her shoes and lounges on her bed with a laptop. Mitchell is a discussion leader for cincyMOMS.com, for which she gets paid $25 a week. 'I'd probably do it for free,' she says with a laugh. 'It's so addictive.' When cincyMOMS launched in late January, Mitchell was responsible for seeding its discussion areas with posts and moderating forums. After 12 weeks, the site a blend of forums and user-generated photos was receiving 40,000 pageviews a day, and demand for ad space was outstripping supply. Initially, cincyMOMS was projected to bring in $200,000 its first year; it made $386,000 in half that time. Gannett hopes the popularity of cincyMOMS is a sign that a long-lost demographic is coming back to the fold. Only 27 percent of young women read a daily newspaper, and the proportion in Cincinnati who read the Enquirer is even more anemic. Visitors to cincyMOMS may not be more inclined to pick up the print edition of the paper, but as they flock to the Web, advertisers are happy to follow. And more than half of the cincyMOMS advertisers are new to the Enquirer. Gannett execs are so excited about cincy MOMS they will have rolled out 39 more 'mom sites' across the country by the end of the summer. And after that, Gannett plans to create cincyMOMS-like destinations for the only demographic less inclined than young moms to pick up a newspaper: 18- to 24-year-olds. Newspapers have managed to compete with news delivery over radio, TV, and the Internet. Can they compete with MySpace? |
|
|
Love Will Follow 07/28/2007 Hartford Courant Buck, Rinker |
Return to Top |
| Jul. 28--When Neeraj Diwan and Khyati Sabharwal of Torrington completed their arranged marriage last fall, they struck it big in more ways than one.
As part of the elaborate negotiations conducted by the Diwan and Sabharwal families before the couple was married in New Delhi last October, the prospective bride and groom submitted detailed profiles, including the places, dates and times of their births, to a special Hindu priest, also called an "astrology cleric," at the family's old ashram in New Delhi. The priest then made a detailed calculation of 36 "compatibility points" to see whether the stars were correctly lined up to guarantee Neeraj and Khyati a union that would produce happiness and prosperity. "You need a minimum of 16 good compatibility points on the astrology test to get married," Diwan says. "And Khyati and I scored a 27. I knew right then that my parents had picked me the right partner and that things would go well." Khyati, who was a college student in New Delhi at the time, did not meet Neeraj, a flight engineer with the U.S. Air Force, until three days before their wedding, and followed Neeraj back to America last November. After eight months of marriage, they both say that they couldn't be happier. "In America, people fall in love first and then use the first two years of marriage to make sure they are compatible," Diwan says. "In India we make sure we'll be compatible first and then use marriage to fall in love. Maybe to a lot of people here it doesn't sound like it will work, but look at the divorce rate in America. But 99 percent of arranged marriages work." Experts say accurate statistics are hard to come by, but Neeraj and Khyati are among thousands of couples from South Asian and Arab countries who complete arranged marriages in the United States every year. The vast majority of these unions occur between an Americanized Indian or Pakistani man and a bride found back in Asia, where traditional values still hold sway. The adherence to traditional marriage arrangements in America is probably too small a trend to affect overall American marriage patterns, but it reflects changing cultural trends. "Arranged marriages and decision-making in arranged marriages raise fascinating issues about the institution of marriage itself at a time when globalization and technological change are having big impacts on cultural values," says Amit Batabyal, an Indian American who is a professor of economics at Rochester Institute of Technology and has written extensively on arranged marriages. Batabyal believes that the vast cultural differences between Eastern and Western marriage practices are actually closing. In India, for instance, the vast majority of families that still practice arranged marriages now give their children much more control in choosing their marriage partner, and genuine "love marriages" are increasingly common and condoned simply by following all the elaborate steps of an arranged marriage. In this way, Eastern customs are becoming more like those in the U.S. Meanwhile, Batabyal says, popular matchmaking services such as eHarmony.com borrow many features of the arranged marriage concept of Asia, especially the stress on establishing compatibility first, then allowing love to follow. "In India, because of changes in society and the location of Western companies there, the young are gaining more control and facets of love marriages are creeping into the system," Batabyal says. "In the West, there is a proliferation of websites that increasingly play the role of the traditional matchmaker in arranged marriages. So, there is a global convergence of marriage models." 'Find Me A Wife' Diwan and his family are members of a large ethnic group in the New Delhi area called Hindu-Punjabis. They immigrated to America in 1994 after his father, Satish, was sponsored for citizenship by an aunt living in New York. The family settled in Middletown, and while Satish worked two jobs at gas stations in Middletown and Cheshire, Neeraj and his older brother, Sameer, battled language problems at Middletown schools. The family insisted on following another Indian tradition, which is that an entire extended family -- parents, brothers, nieces and nephews, grandparents and even great-grandparents -- live in one house. Neeraj had always dreamed of becoming a pilot and, after attending Central Connecticut State University for a year, he joined the Air Force in 2000, quickly moving up through the ranks at Mountain Home Air Force base in Idaho before transferring to the active reserve to become a flight engineer at Westover Air Reserve Base near Springfield, Mass. Devoted to the Air Force, he felt that he had little time for dating, and he was also happy to follow Indian tradition. "In India, to have a girlfriend before you are married is looked down on," Neeraj said. "That tradition is starting to change, but I still respected it. Also, at first my English was so bad I didn't think I could date and find a wife anyway." Last June, when Neeraj was visiting home during a break from his Air Force flight engineer course, his father raised the subject of marriage. "When my father told me that he thought I was old enough, and established in a career, to get married, I did what every good Indian son does," Neeraj says. "I told him to find me a wife." The tradition of arranged marriages, which is also practiced in many Muslim countries, dates back several centuries and reflects a deep belief that individual freedom should be subsumed by obligations to family. Because most Indian brides move into the house shared by the extended family of her new husband -- households that can contain 20 or more people -- such issues as social compatibility, caste and economic expectations are considered vital, and must be resolved first. Advocates of arranged marriages say love will follow if the right match is made. An abiding respect for parents -- especially the authority of the father -- also figures in the tradition of arranged marriages. "Good marriages result from parents talking to other parents and making sure the fit is right," Neeraj says. "Our parents know us best and what our likes and dislikes are and will make sure that is found in the partner. For instance, family status and education are very important because they determine future happiness. In my case, I wanted someone who spoke excellent English because I knew she would move to America and help me run our liquor store." The Indian model of arranged marriage also discourages making a marriage decision based on sexual attraction and desire. "In the U.S., we live in the here and now and the question before marriage is: 'Do I want her physically now,"' says Batabyal. "In the Indian model, a lot is done to de-emphasize the physical aspects because 15 years from now, when sex is a less important component of the marriage, such issues as cultural and mental compatibility help keep the marriage together." First Step: The 'Bio File' The first step for the Diwans was circulating a complete "bio file" of Neeraj -- pictures, education records, family background, income, business ownership and skills -- at the family's old ashram and other temples in New Delhi. (His brother, Sameer, posted his bio file on a popular Indian matrimonial website this spring.) The bio files of hundreds of prospective brides and grooms are kept in a special room at the ashram that families can use for matrimonial searches. In August, Khyati's parents, Virender and Rekha Sabharwal, visited their ashram to look at bio files to find a husband for their niece. They liked Neeraj's profile so much that they decided to inquire about whether he would be willing to marry their daughter Khyati. After contacting the Diwans in Torrington, Kyati's parents sent her bio file to America, one of about 15 that Neeraj received and examined when he was home on weekends from his Air Force duty. Khyati's file stood out from the rest for several reasons. Her family ran a security guard business in Delhi, roughly similar to the businesses that the Diwans had run in the U.S., and both families were members of the same social caste, Khatri Arora. "It wasn't just that Khyati had great looks," Neeraj says. "I wanted an overall match that worked. The fact that she said she could speak fluent English and that she was educated were the most important, but I also like that her profile said that she was interested in traditional family values." During August and September last year, the Diwans spent about $300 a month on phone bills talking to Khyati's parents in New Delhi, continuing to make arrangements for the marriage and family visits to confirm details about the family businesses and income. Neeraj and Khyati also shared a phone call, because Neeraj wanted to confirm that her English was as fluent as described in her bio file. He was also concerned about another issue. "I also wanted to make sure that Khyati was not being pressured into this -- that was my American side coming out," Neeraj says. "In India there can be a lot of pressure on girls to marry because their parents want to improve their social standing. So I asked Khyati if she did want to marry me, and she said that she completely trusted her parents." Changing With The Times Khyati says that her father made it clear she could decline marriage to Neeraj, and that she was not pressured into the match. Experiences like that are increasingly common, Batabyal says, in a culture that is changing, especially in its attitudes about male control over women. "Some of the customs associated with arranged marriages -- deference by women to their fathers or husbands -- will recede," Batabyal says. "This is especially true as children come along and they become Americanized. It's a big issue and bodes for change in the Indian community. Rigidity tends to backfire and families know they must adjust." In September, Neeraj's mother traveled to India to share a traditional Indian tea with the Sabharwals in New Delhi, to meet the bride and her family. One of Khyati's uncles, a flight attendant with Air India, spent his layover in New York traveling up to Torrington to meet the Diwans and inspect their house and business, which was reported back to India. By the end of September, the entire Diwan family was flying to India, and Neeraj and Khyati finally met face to face at a "Rokka," or pre-engagement party in New Delhi, three days before they were married. Khyati was relieved because she felt at ease with Neeraj right away. "Neeraj was so handsome and nice and I immediately felt comfortable talking to him," Khyati says. "I thought, this is cool. My parents really got a good one for me." Adjusting to married life in the United States has been difficult for Khyati, especially because Neeraj is often away on Air Force missions that can last weeks. But she insists that she's happy and looking forward to starting a family with Neeraj. Both seem realistic about the effect that American life will have on their children. "My children will grow up and become Americans," says Neeraj. "They may not want arranged marriages like us. Fine. I will treat them the same way that my parents treated me: whatever makes you happy. While I prefer arranged marriage, I'll accept another person's will. That's very Hindu-Punjabi right there." Courant Senior Information Specialist Sandy Csizmar contributed research for this article. Contact Rinker Buck at rbuck@courant.com. Copyright © 2007 The Hartford Courant, Conn. |
|
|
Undergrad research celebrated 07/28/2007 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Heinrichs, Allison |
Return to Top |
| There weren't any vinegar and baking soda volcanoes or crystal radios at this science fair.
More than a hundred undergraduate students from across Western Pennsylvania gathered at Duquesne University on Friday for the 10th annual Summer Research Symposium -- the region's largest and most advanced science fair of its kind. "This is so much more than a typical science fair," said David Seybert, dean of Duquesne's Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. "We're celebrating the research of undergraduates who will form the future generation of researchers." The symposium brought together students from across the country who did research for 10 weeks this summer at Duquesne, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, St. Francis University in Cambria County and Washington & Jefferson College. Projects ranged from mathematically modeling black holes to finding ways to block breast cancer enzymes. Discoveries and data gathered by the undergraduates will be incorporated into the larger research projects being done by their advisers, usually professors at the universities. "Absolutely, without a doubt, what was done this summer will be part of continuing research," said Partha Basu, an associate professor at Duquesne. Basu advised Duquesne senior Lawrence Blume, 26, on a project investigating the effects of a form of arsenic called roxarsone, which is added to chicken feed to make broilers bigger and their flesh redder. Through laboratory tests in cells, Blume learned that roxarsone is taken into the cells differently than other forms of arsenic known to be toxic. Basu plans to study what effect that might have on people who eat the chickens. "The undergraduate research program taught me about research ethics, how to do research and how to conduct laboratory tests," said Blume, who plans to pursue a doctorate in pharmacology. While analyzing the light given off by bright young galaxies to learn about the metals that are in them, Gregory Hrinda unexpectedly got a lesson in scientific culture during his 10 weeks at the University of Pittsburgh. "I learned a lot about ... what goes on behind the scenes," said Hrinda, 20, a junior at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "The collaboration and information sharing that scientists do -- that's pretty important." For Robert Leonard, 21, a senior at West Virginia University, his summer research project at Duquesne put him on track for a career studying the universe. He created computer models of black holes, so that astronomers observing them with telescopes will know what to expect. "I never had a chance to do cosmology before," said Leonard. "Now that I'm involved in it, I think it's really cool." Copyright © 2007 Tribune-Review Publishing Co. |
|
|
Cautionary tales of a catastrophe 07/25/2007 Oregonian Hill, Richard |
Return to Top |
| SUMMARY: Native American oral histories clarify what science hasn't revealed of a 1700 quake
Nine p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 26, 1700. Tens of thousands of Native Americans along the Oregon coast and its estuaries huddle around fires on the winter night. Within seconds, their world convulses. The ground plunges and shakes for several terrifying minutes. Ocean water races into the low-lying areas along beaches that have abruptly dropped below sea level. A 30-foot tsunami triggered by the quake soon follows, slamming the coast and surging up rivers. The "Big One" --a magnitude 9 offshore earthquake and the tsunami --has wrenched the entire Northwest shoreline, bringing death and devastation. In recent years, scientists have described the earthquake and its accompanying tsunami, which swept to Japan and caused more deaths and damage. They warn that such events repeatedly have hammered the coast and will pummel it again. With the geologic details well-established, many researchers now are focusing on the Native peoples who experienced the catastrophe. Their oral histories and mythologies, passed down through generations, tell a cautionary tale to those who live along the Oregon coast now. "This wasn't just a big shift in the geology; it was a natural disaster that probably caused a massive amount of human suffering and loss of life," said Scott Byram, an archaeologist with the University of California at Berkeley. "We know entire villages were wiped out and others were extremely affected." Archaeological evidence from numerous coastal sites and native oral traditions are giving a clearer picture of what happened on the Oregon coast 300 years ago and during quake-tsunami events. In the summer issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, the journal of the Oregon Historical Society, Byram and three other scholars, all former University of Oregon graduate students, describe how Native peoples were affected by the disaster . One of the best examples of an ancient village that shows the effects of the 1700 earthquake is an archaeological site called Nilestun along the Coquille River near Bandon. "It was a thriving fishing village until 300 years ago," Byram said. "There's a wide range of tools and a lot of fish bones, but the evidence indicates that activity stopped as the village site was dropped and became submerged during high tide." Native stories also tell of geologic upheaval. An article by Jason Younker, a member of the Coquille Tribe, describes how his uncle took him several years ago to Sundown Mountain north of Brookings. His uncle told him of an oral tradition describing how tribal elders had urged their people to "weave long ropes" that would help them survive earthquakes and tsunamis, though few heeded the warning. Soon afterward, an offshore earthquake made "a big tide," with the water rushing up valleys and quickly sweeping villages away. Those who had listened had made long ropes that they used to tie their canoes to the treetops and survive the flood. Centuries-old oral traditions often clarify what science hasn't revealed, said Younker, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. "Some of these oral traditions carry a lot of validity, and I think there needs to be more attention paid to the few that have survived over the last 150 years. They have a message for us today." Patricia Whereat Phillips, a Coos tribal member, agrees. A few narratives emphasize how deeply the image of waves sweeping across the landscape is embedded in Coos culture, said Phillips, a linguist and tribal historian who lives in Sonoma, Calif. Phillips, a specialist in the ancient Coos language called Hanis and in tribal mythology, has studied written reports and early 20th-century recordings made with tribal members. She found that the stories tell of how the land drops and how floods came from the sea and washed people away. One story describes how one tsunami survivor stranded in a tree fell and broke her back. "These earthquakes and tsunamis are unusual in that they only happen every few hundred years," Phillips said. "So when these extraordinary events happen, they knock the survivors for a loop. Then the accounts are woven into stories and they get mythologized and passed down through the generations." The ocean was considered a powerful force that deserved respect, Phillips said. One myth describes how a tsunami was blamed on young men pretending that a salmon was one man's wife --a disrespectful act toward animals that provide food. The mythology that centers on tsunamis warned the survivors' descendants to treat the natural world with respect --a message that today's coastal residents and visitors might want to heed, she added. Rob Losey, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, said nearly every linguistic group from Vancouver Island to northern California --the entire length of the quake-prone Cascadia Subduction Zone where two tectonic plates collide --has stories about earthquakes and tsunamis. Perhaps tens of thousands of stories were lost when disease devastated Native populations, Losey said, but narrative accounts of the disasters persisted, suggesting "that these events were extremely big deals and there was some value in sharing those stories." Sometimes the stories give useful information, such as how people should evacuate their homes and head for higher ground after an earthquake that may generate a tsunami, he said. A study Losey and other Northwest researchers published two years ago found about 120 known Native stories that refer to shaking or tsunamis --about 40 of them with precise descriptions. Many of the geologic events are described in stories about the behavior of supernatural beings, often in the guise of animals. For example, a story from the Yurok people of northern California describes supernatural beings called Earthquake and Thunder running up and down the coast causing the ground to shake, sink and be flooded by the ocean. Other stories of the Hoh and Quileute tribes of the Olympic Peninsula describe an epic struggle between the supernatural beings Thunderbird and Whale. The monstrous bird seizes the huge orca and a battle ensues, with Thunderbird carrying Whale to its nest in the mountains. There, a final battle is fought, with "a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters." Besides the grim emotional impact on coastal survivors, Losey said, the catastrophes took a high economic toll, especially among tribes with permanent plank houses that provided shelter and storage. "These are high-investment structures, because they require a lot of wood --more wood than a modern two-story American house," Losey said. "And all that house was procured with stone tools. It was a big material loss." Canoes, baskets, nets and fish weirs also were crucial items that would have been lost, placing an additional strain on people coping with an earthquake or tsunami, Losey said. Despite the dramatic changes to their lives and landscapes, Native coastal residents proved resilient, researchers said. And even though many communities rebounded, residents made sure they cautioned their descendants about the next upheaval. Richard L. Hill: 503-221-8238; richardhill@news.oregonian.com Copyright © 2007 Oregonian Publishing Co. |
|
|
Coordinating services will aid deaf, hard-of-hearing 07/24/2007 Democrat and Chronicle - Online |
Return to Top |
| Coordinating services will aid deaf, hard-of-hearing
T. Alan Hurwitz Guest essayist (July 24, 2007) - On July 2, Gov. Spitzer signed legislation that for the first time will allow for the development of a comprehensive services system for deaf, deaf-blind and hard-of-hearing individuals throughout New York state. The creation of the New York State Interagency Coordinating Council for Services to Persons who are Deaf, Deaf-Blind or Hard of Hearing two days before the celebration of our country's independence was indeed serendipitous, and for the target population, it was indeed opportune. This law will improve their access to medical, housing, transportation, technology, personal care, family and day-program services. It will increase their independence and ability to advocate for the delivery of those comprehensive services. Until now, those services have been provided by a variety of state and private agencies. While well-intentioned, there has been a serious need for coordination and collaboration, as well as a centralized clearinghouse of information on available services. Additionally, this legislation calls for the collection and maintenance of data on the incidence of deafness, deaf-blindness and other hearing loss among state residents - enabling agencies and service providers to better meet the needs in their communities. We owe state Sen. Joseph Robach, R-Greece, and Assemblyman Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, a debt of gratitude for introducing and moving this bill forward and making sure it made it to the governor's desk. We thank Gov. Spitzer for advancing his goal of streamlining government services with the creation of this interagency council. We look forward to his leadership taking us further down the road of independence for all New Yorkers. Hurwitz is vice president, Rochester Institute of Technology, and CEO/dean, National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT. Copyright © 2007, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, All rights reserved. |
|
|
Students start wardrobe site for visually impaired 07/22/2007 Courier Post - Online |
Return to Top |
| Two Rochester Institute of Technology students are launching an online wardrobe site for blind and visually impaired people.
White Cane Label is a nonprofit effort to help blind people shop online and keep track of their clothes without the help of a sighted friend. The site's interface will be driven by sound and text instead of images. The retailers are relying 100 percent on designer donations for inventory, but will charge full price to stop sighted buyers from taking advantage of bargains. . |
|
|
Drug war enforcement hits minorities hardest 07/21/2007 Chicago Tribune - Online Darnell Little |
Return to Top |
| Drug arrests reveal racial gap
On Ohio Street, just north of Garfield Park, three drug dealers stood on a corner surrounded by litter, vacant lots and boarded-up houses, waiting for customers who strolled up on foot and pulled over in cars. Some passed right underneath a flashing police surveillance camera less than a block away. Only a few weeks earlier in this same West Side neighborhood, Chicago police had shut down a bustling open-air market selling fentanyl-laced heroin, arresting more than a dozen members of the Conservative Vice Lords street gang. A patrol cop later described the bust as an example of the mushroom effectpull one out and several more just pop up in its place. In the suburbs, police say drug dealing has an entirely different, more private face. 'There are some who work out of their apartment or residence, some who will just meet you wherever they feel safe in meeting you. Some people will do it out of their work,' said Lombard Police Chief Raymond Byrne. 'It's kind of the opposite of the city.' Twenty-five years after President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs, many law-enforcement officials and criminologists say drugs are now cheaper and more potent, and as easily available as ever. What the war did do was help drive the nation's prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hita dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs. According to federal data, blacks make up just 13 percent of the nation's illicit drug users, but they are 32 percent of those arrested for drug violations and 53 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug crimes. In Illinois, studies show that more than 70 percent of the state's illicit drug users are white, while 14 percent are black. But 65 percent of arrests for drug offenses are of African-Americans. And 66 percent of inmates in Illinois prisons for drug offenses are black, and Illinois' incarceration rate of blacks for drug possession is the highest in the country. The never-ending flow of drugs, and the disparity in punishment, are leading an increasing number of judges, attorneys and criminologists to the conclusion that the nation's efforts to fight drug use with the criminal justice system will not, by itself, get the job done. Tim Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, said more people in the criminal justice system now recognize that treatment and other options are far more effective in reducing drug use. 'There was a thought back in the 1980s that it was better to be tough on crime than to be said not to be tough on crime; that if you just lock these people away that somehow that's going to solve everything,' Evans said. 'Hasn't worked. And I believe now the pendulum is swinging away from lock 'em up and throw away the key back toward trying to find a rational way of solving this problem.' Impact of 'safe zone' laws And the more lawmakers try to fine-tune drug laws, the more pronounced the imbalance becomes. A Tribune analysis of recent 'safe zone' laws, increasing penalties for drug sales near schools, churches, parks and other public places, shows the laws blanket many densely populated minority neighborhoods, further boosting the punishment level for urban dealers. In explaining the disparity in incarceration, criminologists point to a basic difference in the way drugs are sold in cities and suburbs, one that makes African-Americans more vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment for drug possession and sales. Drug dealing in inner-cities happens largely in open-air markets controlled by street gangs, who run a sophisticated, organized crime enterprise that, police say, is responsible for the bulk of violent crime in urban areas. Police target these marketplaces because that's where most calls for police services originate. Open-air drug markets are rarer in white, middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where dope dealing typically occurs within social networks, in places that draw little police attention, criminologists say. 'Police go looking for this stuff in cities where they don't look for it in suburbs because it's not causing the same kind of violence,' said John Klofas, a criminologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology. 'And if you're only looking at this as punishment for drug use, then it's a complicated set of circumstances that in the end produces this outcome that is, in fact, quite unfair.' In Illinois, the racial disparity in drug arrests is driven mainly by Chicago. In 2005, Chicago police made 47,000 arrests for drug offenses, and 79 percent of those arrests were of African-Americans, according to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. 1 Copyright 2007, Chicago Tribune |
|
|
What I learned while adding Windows XP to an Intel Mac 07/20/2007 City Newspaper Steve Jacobs on Jul. 20th |
Return to Top |
| Since Apple announced its 'Intel Macs,' (Macintosh computers with an Intel CPU that would let you run both Windows and Mac operating systems), whole new markets have opened up for the Macintosh. And many people from all walks of life have been excited by the prospect of running two operating systems on one machine.
Why would you want to do this? First, it's a lot cheaper than buying separate Macintosh and PC computers. Why would you want two? Well, let's face it, each system has its own advantages. The Windows system has its ubiquity, more types of software, and most of the games. The Mac system has greater simplicity; works better with media for artists, musicians, and filmmakers; and CIO's at big companies are starting to see that the Mac's lower security issues mean less support costs. But you don't have to be a CIO to make the move. Take my home for an example.... My wife, Patti Durr, is a professor at NTID by trade and a filmmaker by avocation, having made several successful short films in the last few years. The Mac is preferable for her filmmaking. In her work life, she manages web sites for her courses that have integrated grading and homework systems. She creates others for the general public on topics like 'Deaf Artists' and 'The Deaf Experience in World War II' These websites are built using NTID's 'Idea Tools' software created by Simon Ting. Idea Tools is designed for Windows Internet Explorer and will not work reliably on the Mac. So Patti needs to use both kinds of operating systems. I also favor the Macintosh platform for creative tools, but as a professor of game design at RIT, I must be able to play PC-based games. My kids (Zo, 11, and Noah, 10) can use either operating system to do whatever they need to do, but Zo's preferred game, 'Zoo Tycoon,' runs only on the PC. (Well, it runs on our Nintendo DS, too, but the PC version is much better.) No pain, no gain Microsoft's ubiquity has made it the security hacker's platform of choice. The impact was brought home during the installation of Windows on the new 20' Intel iMac that I bought to be the center of our home video production studio. While I'm not a CIO (except, perhaps, in my own home), part of the pain became clear to me. After I unpacked the iMac and turned it on, the computer found the wireless network, did a system check, and informed me that there were nine upgrades, split about evenly between software upgrades and security patches I needed to download and install. This is not surprising on either platform. It's rare that the copy of the software that arrives with your machine is up-to-date. Hardware manufacturers install the most current version they have on a DVD, which is seldom the current one. Installing the Mac upgrades was a 30-minute process. I then needed to download and run Bootcamp, the Apple software that allows for the installation of Windows XP or Vista on Macs. Bootcamp partitions the hard drive (makes the computer think that its single hard drive is two), and creates special drivers for the Microsoft OS to recognize the Apple-built hardware. This took around 45 minutes and a couple of hardware shutdowns and restarts. Now I was ready to run the software update check on the Windows operating system. Where Apple had informed me that I needed to install 9 upgrades and security fixes, XP informed me that I needed to install 81 different downloads, the majority being security fixes. One was an installation of Internet Explorer 7, which then needed two security upgrades of its own, on top of the other 81. The final time check from opening the box of the computer to being able to start it up and choose OSX or Windows XP? Well over 4 hours. Not ideal, but worth it. Now, when starting up the computer, we can hold down the 'option' key on the Mac keyboard, get an image of two different hard drives, and select which OS we want to run (or which 'computer,' if it helps you to think of it that way.) We've got the best of both worlds on a single machine. We've got all the creative power and ease of use we want from the Mac and, when we need to, Patti can grade her students' work and revise her website, Zoe can manage her Zoos, and I've got all the games I need to teach without having bought two new machines. |
|
|
Documentary about Paley sculpture wins award 07/20/2007 Democrat and Chronicle Low, Stuart |
Return to Top |
| Documentary about Paley sculpture wins award
Stuart Low Staff writer (July 20, 2007) - A documentary about Rochester sculptor Albert Paley has won a CINE Golden Eagle Award for excellence in filmmaking. Albert Paley: In Search of the Sentinel was produced and directed by Tony Machi, co-owner of Machi & Machi Communications of Rochester. Narrated by actress Jane Alexander, it follows the creation and installation of The Sentinel, a massive steel-and-bronze sculpture at Rochester Institute of Technology. CINE is an internationally recognized organization devoted to discovering and promoting talent in film and video. WXXI-TV (Channel 21, cable channel 11) presented the Paley documentary in March. Copyright © 2007, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, All rights reserved. |
|
|
Kodak Board Appoints Zongrone as Vice President 07/18/2007 Yahoo! Finance |
Return to Top |
| ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK - News) announced today that its Board of Directors has elected Nicoletta A. Zongrone a Vice President of the company, effective immediately. Zongrone, age 48, is General Manager, Worldwide Kiosk Systems and Services, Consumer Digital Imaging Group, a position she was appointed to in November 2005. In this role, Zongrone leads an organization that includes research and development, product planning, marketing and manufacturing strategy, and business operations.
Zongrone joined Kodak as a chemist in 1981, and has held positions in research and development, manufacturing, product engineering, and in Kodak's Graphic Communications Group (formerly Graphics and Commercial Printing). Prior to her current position, she was Worldwide Operations Manager for the company's Consumer Output business (2004-2005), General Manager, Inkjet Media/Home Printing (2003-2004); and General Manager, Inkjet Media (2000-2003). Zongrone earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry with high honors from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1980, and completed RIT's Executive Development Program in 1993. She holds three U.S. patents for work on digital printing plates. Zongrone lives in Rochester, NY. For photos of Nicki Zongrone, please contact: Jackie Bray, Eastman Kodak Company, at 585-724-2681 or jackie.bray@kodak.com. |
|
|
Camp Geek turning heads 07/16/2007 Chicago Tribune Brennan, Anne |
Return to Top |
| Kids used to come home from summer camp with macaroni necklaces and cravings for s'mores. These days they bring home CDs and DVDs with 3-D animation, video gaming and robotics.
"It's fun learning new things," said Nick Heytow, 14, one of the campers who attended the weeklong iD Tech Camp in June at the Northwestern University campus in Evanston. "My friends think it's cool." ID Camp, with a chain of 49 camps nationwide, is one of many camp companies that cater to the tech-oriented, under-18 age group. Flash animation, 3-D animation, Web scripting, robotics, video gaming, digital photography and music programming attract a range of kids, from geeks to the average just-wanna-have-fun tween or teen. A goal of the camps, besides having a good time, is to spark interest in tech careers. "The level of commitment [by the kids] is amazing," said Jon Cancelino, director of the iD camp held at Northwestern. "They pick up on [the technology] right away." One 10-year-old iD camp grad made three video games and then started his own company -- and hired his sister, said Karen Thurm Safran, iD vice president of marketing. Parents also end up hiring their children to update company Web sites, she said. Anecdotes like these have parents with deep pockets shelling out almost $1,000 a week per student for either day or overnight camps. The camps, usually held on college campuses across the United States, offer state-of-the-art software and are taught by industry pros. Nationwide, the number of tech camps have increased 25 percent since 1998, according to the American Camp Association. "The key to any camp is whether it meets the needs of the campers. Campers who choose tech camps may not be comfortable in a traditional camp in the woods," said Gordie Kaplan, executive director of American Camp Association in Illinois. For kids who love technology, the camps offer experiences that most schools cannot. "The kids have an innate appetite for technology that schools don't have time to address," said Pete Findley, chief executive of Seattle-based Giant Campus, which runs Cybercamps for kids, with a local camp held at Loyola University Chicago. Keeping up with tween trends is the biggest challenge, said Findley. "They're born with a mouse in their hands. It's second nature. They come in with a good understanding and are looking for more," he said. It takes nine months of the year to prepare for the Cybercamp summer programs, Findley said. One popular course, music matchup, involves splicing music and laying it over another piece of music -- rap, Bach or whatever the kids like. "The kids wanted it," he said. Harry Kucharik, 13, who attended a Cybercamp last year at his parents' encouragement, said some of the new information was confusing at first, but "the counselors helped me understand." After learning Flash animation at the camp, he ended up with an "A" in a similar class at school. As for his friends, some thought the idea of the camp was cool, and others thought it was "nerdy," he said. Despite the high-tech gadgetry, all the kids need are a pencil, paper and a keyboard, Cancelino said. Creativity is the key ingredient for most of the tech courses. Emagination Computer Camps, based in Woburn, Mass., offers the 2.0 version of tech camps, a two-week camp where kids learn everything from Linux to advanced, action video games. It attracts kids who are "tech-centered and have a passion for computers," said Craig Whiting, executive director and owner of the company. "Our children tend to be very bright and less interested in sports and less well-developed socially. Our camps bring like-minded kids together, which promotes social growth," he said. Emagination holds overnight camps in July, with workshop favorites such as video-game design and 3-D animation, at Lake Forest Academy. (Other locations are in California, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.) A special video-game camp for kids ages 15 to 18 is geared to teens considering careers in gaming, Whiting said. "It's rewarding to see the development of kids who love technology," he said. "I'm amazed at the sophistication of what the kids produce." In between iPhone mania, many Apple stores host free computer workshops for kids ages 8 to 12. The workshops are 2 1/2 hours long. Subjects include Podcasts, music and movies. Kids able to travel beyond Illinois can find intellectual stimulation at the ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camps, offered in several cities, including Norman, Okla., Houston and New Orleans. The perks of these camps, geared for economically or socially disadvantaged students, are the chance to meet Bernard Harris, the first African American in space, a possible field trip to places such as NASA and free tuition. The Rochester Institute of Technology in New York offers Kids on Campus, a two-week program that lets kids take advantage of the institute's state-of-the-art labs and facilities. Preparing kids to compete globally in the technology industry and stop the flow of jobs overseas is a big topic in education, iD Camp's Cancelino said. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, the Indian software industry lobby, almost half the Fortune 500 companies use Indian-based software services. But the future might not be as bleak as some think, said Fred Hoch, president of Illinois Information Technology Association, a trade association in Chicago that aims to build the local information technology community. "Somewhere along the line everyone was made to believe all jobs would go offshore, but that's not the case," he said. "There's still huge growth and huge opportunities in Illinois. But it's still a struggle. We need to do everything we can to drive people into tech careers. It's going to take time." Programs such as tech camps help students get excited about math and science, Hoch said. And they are great opportunities for kids who aren't lucky enough to have a mother and father with PhDs in science, as Hoch did. "Tech camp was every night at the kitchen table," he said with a laugh. The tech camps should come with a warning to parents, though. Kids have higher expectations for their own tech gadgets once they come home, said iD Tech Camp's Thurm Safran. "The hardest thing is they go home and say, 'This video game sucks,'" she said. "They discern the games [and say], 'The character should have more depth.'" However, that's probably a risk most parents would take, especially if they're planning to ask their kids for help with their Web sites. Photo: Elliot Urban of Rockford (left) and Michael Garcia of Evanston build a robot at the iD Tech Camp at Northwestern University. Photo: ID Tech Camp instructor Stacey Stomres (left) helps Kirsten Johnson of Homewood with Web design and flash animation. Photos for the Tribune by William A. Rice Copyright © 2007 Chicago Tribune Company |
|
Dateline: RIT is produced by RIT University News Services. Address questions or comments to Michael Saffran, associate director, at mjsuns@rit.edu. For more RIT news, visit the RIT University News Services Web site at http://www.rit.edu/news and News & Events online at http://www.rit.edu/newsevents. Listen to RIT news - including newsmakers in their own voices - on "Dateline: RIT - The Podcast" at http://www.rit.edu/news/podcasts. Discuss RIT news on The Tiger Beat Blog at http://www.thetigerbeat.com/blog. To unsubscribe from this list, visit http://thetigerbeat.com/mailman/listinfo/dateline_thetigerbeat.com. |
|