May 19, 2008


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CAMPUS NEWS

RIT to salute 3,500 grads at 123rd Commencement
In recognition of 41 years of service to RIT, Provost Stanley McKenzie delivers the keynote address during Academic Convocation at 10 a.m. May 23 in Gordon Field House and Activities Center.

Imagine RIT festival draws thousands to campus
The 'right brain' and 'left brain' converged May 3 at RIT as up to 20,000 visitors attended RIT's first Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival.

RIT's 'Big Shot' lights up the the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal along Schoen Place in Pittsford was the subject of RIT's 24th Big Shot, which is described as a "painting with light" photograph.

RIT film students show off their best work
RIT's School of Film and Animation presents its annual Student Honors Show May 25 at the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, 900 East Ave., Rochester.

NTID develops online sign language video dictionary
RIT's National Technical Institute for the Deaf has developed the American Sign Language Video Dictionary and Inflection Guide--the first and only product illustrating how thousands of signs change, or inflect, to show different meanings.

More News & Events

For additional updates, visit the Dateline: RIT Web site and Dateline: RIT Facebook Group.


LATEST PODCASTS

Dateline: RIT - The Podcast (May 8, 2008)
A retrospective on the 2008 Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival.
Listen to audio (03:51) | Read transcript

Studio 86 'On the Road': Imagine RIT (Part 1)
In the first of a two-part series, Vienna Carvalho and Mike Saffran of RIT University News roam the 2008 Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival with stops at the RIT Formula racecar, the "Mobilized Robotic Hotdog Assembler" and other exhibits.
Listen to audio (20:00)

Studio 86 'On the Road': Imagine RIT (Part 2)
In the second of a two-part series, Vienna Carvalho and Mike Saffran of RIT University News keep roaming the 2008 Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival with stops at the RIT Baja car and a performance by the band Em Dash, along with chats with RIT President Bill Destler and festival chairman Barry Culhane and others.
Listen to audio (20:00)


RIT IN THE NEWS

Highlights of media coverage of RIT news and RIT people in the news. For more RIT In the News, visit the University News Web site.

Click "Text" or scroll down to read story | Click "View Clip" to go to media outlet's Web site

Selected stories (May 1-15, 2008):

ROCHESTER, N.Y., May 14 (UPI) -- A U.S. archeologist plans to use National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite imagery to study ancient Mexico.

Professor Bill Middleton of the Rochester Institute of Technology said he plans to use multi- and hyperspectral data to build the most accurate and most detailed landscape map extant of the southern state of Oaxaca, where the Zapotec people formed the first state-level and urban society in Mexico.

'If you ask someone off the street about Mexican archeology, they'll say Aztec, Maya. Sometimes they'll also say Inca, which is the wrong continent, but you'll almost never hear anyone talk about the Zapotecs,' said Middleton. 'They had the first writing system, the first state society, the first cities. And they controlled a fairly large territory at their zenith (250 B.C. to A.D. 750).'

Satellite imagery covering more than 11,583 square miles from the Earth Observing 1 and Landsat satellites obtained over three years will help Middleton and colleagues David Messinger, Justin Kwon and John Kerekes identify the natural resources found at archeological sites.

The new landscape map will also show how development has changed the region since the first survey was conducted 30 years ago.

© 2008 United Press International

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Pittsford, N.Y. - A photograph is usually composed by a single photographer and a subject. On Thursday, May 8, however, more than 600 volunteers led by faculty and students from Rochester Institute of Technology were needed to create a single photographic image.
The image was part of an annual RIT project called the Big Shot, which has often been described as a "painting with light" photograph.

The hundreds of volunteers helped create a nighttime photograph of a section of the Erie Canal in Pittsford. They illuminated parts of Schoen Place and the Sam Patch, a replica of a 19th century boat with models dressed in period costume posed along the deck.

William and Dawn Tower-Dubois opened the shutters of their two Nikon D3 digital cameras located across the canal for about 30 seconds while the volunteers "painted" the subject area with light by aiming and moving light across the scene. All exterior lights in the area were turned off to avoid overexposure while all interior lights were left on to provide illumination from inside.

William and Dawn are on the faculty at RIT and have been part of all 23 previous Big Shots which have included color or black and white images of various subjects including the Genesse Country Village Museum in Mumford, and last year's Big Shot in the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The first Big Shot was taken in December 1987 of Highland Hospital in downtown Rochester. For that photograph, Dawn used a single 4 x 5 camera loaded with black and white negative film.

"This year is a little different," said Dawn. "This is our first all digital Big Shot."

Even though Dawn and William have used digital cameras on previous Big Shots, this is the first time that they have not also shot with film. "We try to use the latest technology and digital cameras are just much easier to carry and use," said William.

Leah Peres, 17, said that she has participated in the Big Shot in one form or another since she was a baby. Leah's father, Michael Peres, has been one of the organizers of the event since it began.

"No one would believe how we make these pictures if they weren't here to see them being created." said Michael as he ran down the Erie Canal checking to make sure that all of the volunteers were in the correct positions. "Each picture has its own unique set of issues that we wrestle with. This year, it's the fact that the canal is not a stationary body of water which makes it difficult to keep the Sam Patch from moving and blurring in the picture," he said.

This year's Big Shot was the third one for Roger Delthony, 67, and Ruth Delthony, 66, of Greece. They brought flashlights to help light up Schoen Place.

"We love the canal so we were happy to hear that they would be photographing it this year," said Ruth.

"It's fun to see the event happen and I am always amazed at how the organizers pull it off every year," said Roger.

Victoria Schmitt, president of Corn Hill Navigation, said that she was thrilled to be part of a community-wide event that brings greater visibility to the canal. "RIT has selected sites all over the globe for its Big Shot photographs and the Erie Canal is a world-famous site right in our own backyard," she said.

Amber Sommer, Arianna Valentini, Bill McCarthy and Mark Fairchilds were just some of the students who volunteered their time to help with this year's picture by bringing hand-held electronic flashes.

"Our photography professor told us about the event and we are looking forward to seeing what the final image is going to look like," said Amber, a freshman at RIT.

Nikon Inc. sponsored this year's Big Shot project and provided participants with a memento print of the final photograph. A location for next year's picture has not yet been announced.

Copyright © 2008 GateHouse Media Inc.

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An indispensable tool in modern life, debt happens for many reasons.

As the economic struggle of the Depression and rationing of World War II fades from the collective consciousness, Americans feel more confident taking on debt and optimistic about their ability to pay it all back and start saving one day in the future.

Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation, studied the financial practices of Americans across generations to discover what influences spending in specific age groups. The research professor and director of the Center for Consumer Financial Services at Rochester Institute of Technology also examined the different attitudes toward debt to find out why people owe so much more today than they did 40 years ago.

"You really can't overgeneralize," Manning says. "You have to look at people in particular life cycles to find out why they spent more on those particular items than did a previous generation."

Experts explain that debt starts from youth and continues on through life, often into those not-so-golden years.

College

"Borrowing to pay for college has become the primary way that most students pay for college," says Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at Demos and author of "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead."

Parents unable to save the staggering amount of money needed to fund their children's undergraduate degrees have a few choices. They can go into debt by getting a plus loan or by taking out a second mortgage - or they can put the burden on their children.

"If you look at the way we used to do it, we had pressures on states to keep tuitions low and affordable for middle-income households, and for lower-income households we had grant aid that covered about three-fourths of the cost of going to college," Draut says.

"Now the majority of aid is debt-based aid and the grants cover about a third of the cost of school."

According to the College Board's "Trends in College Pricing 2007," average tuition costs for the 2007-08 academic year are $23,712 at a private school and $6,185 for a public school. Add in room and board and the totals come to $32,307 and $13,589, respectively.

The borrowing doesn't stop there for college students. Undergraduates make easy targets for credit-card companies that often give out swag for signing up for a card.

"Young people are starting off graduation not only in debt, but it also shows that that competitive pressure that they experienced in high school is what they see as the norm when they go to college," Manning says.

"As we start to see the competitive consumption start at an earlier and earlier age, it's not surprising that it then continues in older age groups," he says.

Young singles

Getting established in the world costs money - lots of money. In a cruel twist, people fresh out of school often don't have a lot of it.

Some lucky people can fall back on their parents for help, but not everyone has that option or wants to take it.

"It's unfortunate but people have always judged others on superficial stuff. So you have to have nice clothes, a nice car, a nice apartment," says Lewis Mandell, professor of finance and managerial economics at the University of Buffalo.

A recession may mean that college graduates won't be able to waltz into a cushy corporate job that offers ample pay for a worker bee living in the big city.

"Earnings have been really flat for young people with college degrees," Draut says.

"Incomes are not really keeping up with costs, but one particular difference is that you're talking about a starting salary and a lot of debt that has to be repaid," she says.

With tight budgets and soaring living expenses, young people end up on a tightrope between paydays and too often credit cards are their only safety net.

"There is not a lot of cushion left at the end of every month, which makes young people very vulnerable to amassing large amounts of credit-card debt when the car breaks down or when they need to go to the dentist," Draut says.

But if college graduates are feeling bruised by harsh economic realities, those without degrees feel it even more.

"The potential for a young worker without a college degree has plummeted within a generation," Draut says. "They make a lot less than they used to and all of the benefits that we used to think of coming with your first real job have disappeared."

Young families

For young people already struggling with living expenses and stagnating wages, adding a baby can stretch finances to the breaking point.

According to Draut, couples with children are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy.

"This is a time when you've got loans that have to be repaid," she says. You have earnings that are starting lower and growing slower, and then you add a new baby into the mix - which has always been an added expense. It's nothing new for this generation.

"What's new is that those student loans, those credit cards, don't go away overnight."

This life stage also ushers in new housing needs. Whereas a studio or one-bedroom apartment may have been sufficient a couple of years earlier, with the addition of a spouse and a child, space becomes an issue - as does the school district.

"You get married in the late 20s now in the states and you have a kid and then you want, of course, to live in a nice house in a neighborhood with a good school. The American way of life virtually compels most people to take on a lot of consumer debt and it doesn't really give you an opportunity to get rid of it," Mandell says.

Home values in good neighborhoods force many young families to confront difficult choices. The best jobs are in metropolitan areas, but those areas don't come cheap, Draut says.

"A starter-home market has disappeared for a lot of high-cost areas," she says.

Mature families

Typically, mature families have reached a certain level of security. But Manning found that families in this age group spend more and save less than did previous generations.

"One of the most striking findings of my study was the elasticity of demand for people who have children - there's never a good reason to not indulge our children these days," Manning says. "Instead of saving money for their children to go to college, parents are spending that money while the kids are in high school."

Indulging the short-term whims of teenagers can further perpetuate the debt cycle, obligating children to take on loans for college as well as diverting money from retirement savings.

Debt in this stage can be particularly precarious, especially if savings are spare. Many parents take on debt to fund children's education - for instance, by taking out a second mortgage - which puts them in the uncomfortable position of either entering retirement with debt or using money that would otherwise be saved for retirement to service the debt.

If parents put off saving for retirement until the kids are out of the house and out of school, they may not have enough time to accumulate adequate funds.

"It just means that people aren't going to be able to retire, and that's fine for people who enjoy their work and are in good health. But for people who aren't in such good health, that's one of the costs of debt that's going to really come back and bite them," Mandell says.

Empty nesters

In his study, "Living with debt," Manning found that older people weren't necessarily shifting their spending into a lower gear.

"By the time we see older people, they are used to living on debt and don't want to cut back on their standard of living. So they're maintaining. While their savings rate may go up, they're spending more - maybe on helping their children.

"It was remarkable how many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are helping a child or maybe a grandchild," Manning says.

With the kids out of the house and the accompanying pipeline into the wallet of mom and dad removed, empty nesters should be sitting pretty.

Using data from the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve, Tansel Yilmazer, assistant professor in the Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing at Purdue University, found that debt does decline with time.

"In general, the probability of carrying debt decreased with age," she says.

However, some experts think this could be changing, or shifting with the changing demographic. People are having children later in life and reaching the empty-nest phase later as well. As acceptance of debt has increased, the older population is increasingly indebted.

"Some of them, of course, are maybe opting to work longer periods of time. That certainly is a trend that may be part of the changing life cycle stages," Mandell says.

But he adds that attitudes toward debt at this stage are also changing.

"Also I think that the thinking that '60 is the new 40' is really encouraging older people who might in previous generations have been a little bit more sedate in their lifestyles. Now you look on TV and see a 60-year-old doing helicopter skiing and sailing boats across the Atlantic single-handedly. So I think the notion of settling into an empty-nest sedate lifestyle is going against the grain."

Retirees

Retirement is on shaky ground. No longer assured of pensions, today's retirees are easing into their golden years with less savings and more debt. If acceptance of debt and lack of savings are symptoms of the debt epidemic, this stage of life is where the ravages of the disease really flare up.

Throughout their lives, people are spending what they used to save, Manning says. "And so the real crisis is being deferred to retirement."

"We're seeing retirees leaving the workforce now with as much as $60,000 in unsecured debt," says David Jones, president of the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies.

The cycle of debt has a domino effect. As today's young people take on more debt for education, they will spend the money they should have been saving for their retirements to pay off that debt.

Today's retirees are also affected by skyrocketing education costs.

"A bigger percentage of retirees today still owe on their mortgages and that's not isolated from what's happening to young people around college. A lot of people are taking out second or third mortgages to help pay for college," Draut says.

"That's moved mortgage payments to the retirement years which used to be much more uncommon than it is today."

For older Americans in good health, that leaves only one option - work. Those that find themselves in debt and in poor health will struggle.

"There are going to be very bad endings for a lot of people," Mandell says.

He points out expected cuts in Social Security and diminished pensions. "The one thing that may save them is that, with the shrinking labor force, if they are valuable to their employer, they might get the opportunity to work until they're 92," he says.

"This may not be what people had originally hoped for."

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

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Rochester Institute of Technology is entertaining the possibility of adding an architectural degree program to its academic portfolio.

The idea is in an embryonic stage right now, but has circulated in the professional architectural community for quite some time and surfaced last year when William Destler took office as RIT's president.

The Rochester chapter of the American Institute of Architects approached Destler, who they believed would be an advocate for the concept because he last worked as provost at the University of Maryland, which has a strong architectural school.

'Having a school of architecture in Rochester would play off the marriage of the arts and technology industries here, thus offering students the gamut of opportunities worldwide,' said AIA President Richard Pospula.

Destler commissioned Dr. Katherine Mayberry, vice president of academic affairs, with starting a task force to identify and investigate the untapped pastures of the industry.

Discussions are up in the air as to what to offer, but Destler said RIT might have a niche in a five-year master's degree program for green architecture that would also complement efforts at RIT's Golisano Institute of Sustainability.

RIT already has a number of programs that would also fit in an architectural degree such as mechanical, electrical and civil engineering.

The challenges would be getting approval from the state and the endorsement of the National Architectural Accrediting Board Inc.

An individual with a degree from a NAAB accredited institution will have a shorter time in obtaining a license, which typically takes three years.

RIT officials are optimistic about the future, but have not set a target for if and when it could put a curriculum in place.

Copyright © 2008 Rochester Democrat & Chronicle

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ROCHESTER, New York: While Scarlett O'Hara stayed cool at home, Dorothy Gale took a year out to go skipping down a digital yellow brick road in a Hollywood film lab.

The recently reunited Technicolor duo could well be spending much of the rest of the millennium killing time with Lassie, Annie Oakley, Tarzan and a canned colony of heroes and villains from the silent-film era.

Thousands of pre-1951 movies captured on volatile nitrate film are kept in frigid, low-humidity vaults in a modest cinderblock building owned by the George Eastman House museum on the piney outskirts of Rochester. Cold storage saves them from rotting away within a lifetime or, worse yet, burning up.

In most cases, these are original camera negatives from the first half-century of motion pictures, classics such as 'The Wizard of Oz' with Judy Garland as Dorothy, 'Gone With the Wind' featuring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, the silent era's top-grossing 'Big Parade,' 'The Phantom of the Opera' starring Lon Chaney, and Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 'The Ten Commandments.'

While even the best-kept vintage reels are starting to buckle with age, a beloved movie's master negative is a sacred object that would cost untold millions to replace.

Much of that value lies in its power to produce the finest-quality copies, be it on 35mm film, Blu-ray DVD or some dazzling format that pops up in, say, the early 26th century.

'I really hope that 500 years from now people can still look at this because it's wonderful stuff,' Deborah Stoiber, vault manager at Eastman's Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, said during an inspection of one of 12 dark vaults kept refrigerated year-round at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) and 30 percent humidity.

On the shelves of this climate-controlled celluloid nursing home are prized Technicolor films such as 'Meet Me in St. Louis' and 'Little Women'; silent gems starring Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo; a Lumiere brothers' chronicle of U.S. President William McKinley's inauguration parade in 1897; and 'Olympia,' a Nazi propaganda feature on the 1936 Berlin Olympics shot by Adolf Hitler's filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.

The magical way in which a chilly, dry setting retards shrinking, fading or 'nitric melt' inevitably raises concern about the long-term survival of other vulnerable pieces of the world's film heritage, from safety-based acetate stock adopted in the 1950s to television recordings to flimsy digital-video cassettes.

'Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored properly, rivals paper and well-made paper as a storage medium for image and sound,' said Patrick Loughney, motion-picture curator at Eastman, the world's oldest museum of photography and film.

Its out-of-the-way bunker is one of just a handful of nitrate repositories run by major film archives around the country. It isn't listed in phone books or open to the public. Nor does the plain, single-story building draw the eye on a road where the occasional home is backed by woods or farmland.

On the shelves are 6,600 titles, or 22,836 reels the oldest surviving negatives or prints dating to the dawn of moving pictures in 1893. The Rochester Institute of Technology's Image Permanence Institute estimates that climate control can preserve films still in pristine shape for another 800 to 900 years.

Considering how a nitrate fire blinded Alfredo, the projectionist in 'Cinema Paradiso,' each vault is rigged with sprinklers and blowout doors.

Loughney explained that nitrate burns very fast and can't be put out with water, but can still be protected. 'If properly stored and handled, then it's no more dangerous that any other kind of hazardous substance, like gasoline,' he said.

That knowledge came the hard way. Made primarily from sulfuric acid and cotton, nitrocellulose was blamed for disastrous warehouse and theater fires, chiefly in the two decades after Rochester-based Eastman Kodak Co. adapted it from flexible roll film it pioneered in 1889.

Nitrate film was heavily recycled for its high silver content. But the main reason some 90 percent of U.S. holdings has vanished is neglect. In severe cases of exposure to heat, damp and temperature swings, scenes become obscured by a psychedelic collage of bubbles, swirls and flashes of light.

Library of Congress vaults contain half of the estimated 300 million feet (90 million meters) of nitrate film in U.S. storage. The Film & Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, is next with about 80 million feet (24 million meters).

Among Eastman's 28 million feet (8.5 million meters) are DeMille's silent-film collection, an early Lumiere film featuring monks walking up a hill in Indochina in 1894 and Garbo in 'Flesh and the Devil,' made in 1926. Stoiber's personal favorite is 'When Flowerland Awakens in Japan,' a stenciled short film from 1912.

"It doesn't matter if it's 'Wizard of Oz' or an obscure newsreel that's incomplete and unidentified, they're all treated the same way - as a historic artifact," she said.

A California native who keeps a winter coat at the office, Stoiber gets through examining the entire collection every few years. One telltale sign a film is starting to decompose: "It smells like wet dog."

Gently unwinding the cyan negative of "Gone With the Wind" through her fingers, she pointed to a splice and said: "See this warping, how it curls a little? That's an early, early stage of deterioration" in a celebrated 69-year-old movie "not very well stored in the first 50 years of its life."

The chilled-vault solution began gaining traction among film custodians in the 1970s and storage centers have sprouted in the last 20 years, most recently at UCLA and the Library of Congress.

One unavoidable trade-off that shortens a popular film's life expectancy is when its corporate owner, encountering the latest technology, borrows it back for reformatting. "Wizard of Oz" returned in March after undergoing a special-edition DVD makeover, just as "Gone With the Wind" did from 2002 to 2004.

Interest in nitrate films has ballooned of late "because in the age of video, the DVD and the Internet, a corporate liability that was expensive to store got converted back into a corporate asset," Loughney said.

Similarly, film preservation has entered a golden age, bolstered by private foundation funds that also flow toward repairing far less familiar or "orphan" movies. Enter Eastman's vaunted team of specialists, fueled since 1996 by newcomers trained at its pioneering film-preservation school.

One of Daniel Wagner's yearlong projects as a preservation officer at Eastman is using digital technology to remove dust and scratches and restore missing chunks of "Attack of the Indians," an 8-minute film shot in 1911 by Native American filmmaker James Youngdeer.

Only four of Youngdeer's 120 movies are known to survive, and this one - scanned back onto 35mm film - will someday show up in screenings around the world, starting at Eastman's Dryden Theater.

"When I started my career 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that films like this would never be recovered," Loughney said.

Finding old movies sometimes involves global detective work, with long-lost negatives turning up in places such as Russia and China where they didn't get thrown away so often. Old or new, however, many titles await expert intervention.

"We have a lot of films that won't be got to in my lifetime, but that's OK," Loughney said. "We keep them alive for another 50 years before somebody else raises the money. The most effective preservation strategy is cold storage because it buys you time."
___

On the Net:

http://www.eastmanhouse.org

http://www.cinema.ucla.edu

http://www.log.org

http://www.moma.org

Copyright © 2008 the International Herald Tribune

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Amit Batabyal . Guest essayist

The federal government levies an excise tax on gasoline of 18.4 cents per gallon. The revenue from this tax is used to build and maintain roads and bridges.

Recently, U.S. presidential hopefuls Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton proposed a gas tax holiday for this summer to provide relief to Americans buffeted by declining home prices and high food and gas prices.

Given the deleterious impact of high gas prices and the fact that this is an election year, it is important to determine whether the Clinton/McCain proposal makes economic sense.

If the tax holiday were put in place, the additional demand would cause the pre-tax price of gas to rise to the same point as before. So the tax holiday would do little or nothing for consumers, but it would enrich the oil companies. Plus, the McCain plan doesn't say how the lost tax revenues would be made up.

Clinton's proposal is only marginally better. She would impose a windfall profits tax on the big oil companies. Even if one could levy such a tax, one would essentially be using tax dollars to subsidize excessive driving.

Kudos to Sen. Barack Obama for resisting this political pandering. He opposes the tax holiday.

We need to realize that although it does make sense to use taxes to formulate energy policy, one must set such taxes sensibly. Specifically, we ought to raise taxes on things we want to discourage - gas consumption - and lower taxes on things we want to encourage - like solar and wind energy technologies. A gas tax holiday may seem to be a good short-term fix, but it really is no a fix at all. In addition, such an idea diverts our attention from the bitter medicine we must swallow if we are to get anywhere near a sound national energy policy.

Batabyal is Arthur J. Gosnell professor of economics at Rochester Institute of Technology, but these ideas are his own.

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William A. Johnson Jr. . Guest essayist

The Commission of Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness has submitted recommendations to Gov. David Paterson that will lead to sweeping changes in the way counties, cities, towns and villages function.

Since our creation 12 months ago, the commission has heard inspiring ideas and heartfelt concerns statewide. Local officials were urged to identify innovative governance approaches, which has led to the consideration of more than 200 new reform initiatives.

Fifteen commissioners and a lean six-person staff have worked arduously to produce a document that is reasonable and achievable. Time will tell how successful we are. Governors as far back as Theodore Roosevelt and Al Smith, and as recently as Mario Cuomo and George Pataki, named reform panels with meager results. Far too much is at stake for this latest effort to fail. The governor and Legislature must begin to enact provisions this session, to set the stage for local governments to embrace voluntary actions that produce significant cost savings and efficiencies.

Our fiscal situation is bleak. USA Today recently reported that 63,000 new state and local government jobs were filled nationwide during the first three months of 2008, while 286,000 private-sector jobs were lost. Stateline.org reported that 23 states faced budget deficits totaling $26 billion. Paterson predicts a three-year, $20 billion deficit for our state alone, with few revenue sources to cover it. The debt level is $53 billion, and projected to rise by billions.

Clearly, some things must change! In New York, 3,159 general and special-purpose governments (counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts and fire districts) spent more than $131.5 billion in 2005 (the last year reports were available), and that number easily exceeds $150 billion today. Another 1,900 special districts eat away at our economic competitiveness.

This is clearly too much government, too much spending, too much debt. We long ago ceased to live within our means. We can't afford to maintain an antiquated, bloated system with an insatiable appetite. Indiana, Maine and New Jersey are taking steps to reduce support for small, inefficient governments and encourage consolidation of local services. They understand the nexus between high taxes and large numbers of governmental units. Our state must follow the same course.

The commission charted a pragmatic course, which relies on state and local cooperation, not forced state mandates. In areas where laws, regulations and constitutional restrictions make such cooperation difficult or impossible, we recommend changes. Where localities are willing to consolidate or share services, we recommend financial and technical incentives. The 200 ideas emanating from the Local Initiatives process need to be strongly supported to fruition. Properly nurtured, they will spark real reform in this state, which reluctant municipalities will be encouraged to replicate.

Only in one case have we recommended extraordinary power for any official empowering the education commissioner to order the consolidation of school districts, based on objective standards of review, public hearings and Board of Regents approval. We have made significant progress in reducing the number of districts by 92.5 percent since 1930 (from 9,118 to 685). Yet in 2005, 107 districts had fewer than 500 pupils each, and another 110 had 500 to 1,000 students. This presents a real opportunity to achieve greater efficiency.

None of these changes will be possible without citizens' support. For too long they have been persuaded that any reduction in government structures is antithetical to their best interests. Yet these same citizens demand lower taxes. We must prove the nexus between higher taxes and large numbers of governments. We must demonstrate that efficient government can improve their lives.

We must mount a public education campaign that generates a groundswell of support for reform. That will not come easily, because the protectors of the status quo have already served notice that they intend to defeat these proposals. Hopefully they can be persuaded to place the well-being of the community ahead of their own pecuniary interests. They must understand that the instability of their employers affects their own economic security.

Our real work has just begun. We must fan out across our local communities to mobilize citizens, business and religious leaders, civic and fraternal organizations to rally behind a movement that will not only modernize our structures, but will establish a framework for economic renewal.

Johnson is distinguished professor of public policy, Rochester Institute of Technology; and former Rochester mayor.

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Henrietta, N.Y. - The hot dogs that Remek Kocz and his family were about to eat were no ordinary hot dogs. They were products of the Robotic Hot Dog Assembly booth at Rochester Institute of Technology's first ever Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival held this past Saturday across the RIT campus.

The booth was one of more than 400 interactive exhibits and displays to show what, as RIT President Bill Destler describes, can be accomplished when "the right and left brain collide." Topics of the exhibits included new ideas for products and services, the creative arts, research and design projects and unique performing arts.

Jonathan Reding, 20, president of RIT's Society of Manufacturing Engineers, was overseeing the hot dog assembly exhibit with other members of the Society. "From the time the festival started at 10 a.m, the line of people waiting to see this exhibit has not stopped," said Reding. "As each person steps up to the exhibit, they can choose on a touch-screen if they want ketchup or mustard on their hot dog. A robotic arm will then assemble their bun and hot dog and put it on a plate ,together with a juice-box and pudding," Reding said.

By 4 p.m., Reding estimated that the robot had served more than 400 hot dogs. "Next year, we hope to be able to let people choose what flavor of pudding and juice box they want as well," he said.

Another popular exhibit was the interactive "Eye Tracker" booth by the Imaging Science and Psychology departments. Attendees put on a pair of computer-controlled glasses that contained two small cameras - one that looked at their pupil and the other that followed what they looked at while walking. The audience could then see these images on a television monitor.

Humza Quinn, 12, was one of the attendees who got a chance to try out the glasses. "It was really cool and fun," he said. "A green dot followed what I looked at and everyone could watch what I was doing."

Jon Purington, a second-year student at RIT, said this experiment will help engineers program robots to walk. "Right now, robots generally navigate by using wheels or tracks like a tank," said Purington. "Hopefully, with the information we gather from this device, we can accurately reproduce a human-like walk in robots."

Other exhibits included technology aimed at making human lives easier. There was a display that featured video software to help in learning sign language, a display that converted rare books into digital form, a software program to help users get out of debt and people could even try out a Segway Personal Transporter.

"It was all very impressive," said Kocz while eating his robot-assembled hot dog. "My family is having a great time."

More than 10,000 people and 400 volunteers attended the festival which also featured a carnival-like atmosphere with rides, games and food.

"The festival's mission goes beyond showcasing the thriving RIT campus," said Destler. "Young Americans walk to the beat of their own drummer and their desire to be different is an innate American characteristic. Channeling that passion in constructive ways will foster the United States' leadership in technical innovation and creative ideas for new products and services," he said.

Copyright © 2008 GateHouse Media Inc.

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HENRIETTA - The Robotic Hot Dog Assembly booth had one of the longest lines Saturday at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The booth was one of about 400 at RIT's Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival. The campus was filled with creative works by RIT students during a first-time event to showcase student works.

Jonathan Reding, 20, a second-year student at RIT, was overseeing the hot dog assembly exhibit. He and other members of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers concocted the contraption, using a modular tubing frame, an air cylinder and other materials, including, of course, a hot dog cooker.

"It picks up a plate, puts a bun on the plate, puts the hot dog on the bun, and adds the condiments," said Reding, of Collins, Erie County. He and friends made the device last year, but tweaked it this year to, for example, make it mobile. They were planning to cook 400 hot dogs.

There was more, much more: Other exhibits showcased musical performances, Kung Fu, poetry readings, caricature portraits, electric bikes, Tae Kwon Do and a "pumpkin cannon."

The festival will become an annual event, said Bob Finnerty, RIT's chief communications officer.

"This is a celebration of the sciences, technology and the arts," he said. "A lot of people think that RIT is just a technological school, but we're a heck of a lot more than that. We want this to be a part of the array of Rochester's festivals."

Thousands of people turned out Saturday. Next year's festival already is scheduled for May 9.

In the swimming pool area, fourth-year student Joe Lancellotti and fifth-year student Ryan Parslow showed off a concrete canoe. The students are members of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

"The secret is to use the lightest materials," said Lancellotti. That meant removing sand and cement from concrete, they said, using fiberglass mesh to hold the canoe together, and filling it in with plastic foam, glass and recycled plastic.

At the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, Brian Silkey, 21, was demonstrating a Video Juggling Coach exhibit. Using a video camera and a computer, the machine traces the pattern of variously colored juggling balls as a teaching tool for jugglers.

"It gives them pointers, to show them if they're holding a ball too long, or throwing it too high in the air," said Silkey, a junior from Syracuse majoring in micro-electronic engineering.

Paula Liucci of Brockport was there with her children, Daniel and Victoria; her parents, Ron and Ilene Weiss; and Liucci's niece, Kaitlyn, all of Brockport.

"It's impressive," Liucci said of the number and variety of exhibits.

Copyright © 2008 Rochester Democrat & Chronicle

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ROCHESTER - Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management's dismay at his feat.

"My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it," Mr. Sasson said. "But it was filmless photography, so management's reaction was, 'that's cute - but don't tell anyone about it.' "

Since then, of course, Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it.

"The shift in research focus has been just tremendous," said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Or, as Mr. Sasson put it, "Getting a digital idea accepted has sure gotten a lot easier."

Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak's research labs. "When I joined, I knew my salary came from film sales," said Dr. Majid Rabbani, an electrical engineer who joined Kodak in 1983. "But I knew that I would eventually produce paychecks for others."

Kodak is by no means thriving. Digital products are nowhere near filling the profit vacuum left by evaporating sales of film. Its work force is about a fifth of the size it was two decades ago, and it continues to lose money. Its share price remains depressed.

But, finally, digital products are flowing from the labs. Kodak recently introduced a pocket-size television, which is selling in Japan for about $285. It has software that lets owners of multiplexes track what is showing on each screen. It has a tiny sensor small enough to fit into a cellphone, yet acute enough to capture images in low light.

The company now has digital techniques that can remove scratches and otherwise enhance old movies. It has found more efficient ways to make O.L.E.D.'s - organic light-emitting diodes - for displays in cameras, cellphones and televisions.

This month, Kodak will introduce Stream, a continuous inkjet printer that can churn out customized items like bill inserts at extremely high speeds. It is working on ways to capture and project three-dimensional movies.

And, of course, it continues to prompt consumers to take pictures with Kodak cameras, store them at Kodak sites online, display them in Kodak digital picture frames and print them on Kodak printers that use Kodak inks and papers.

"They want to be the World Bank of Imaging, to offer a Kodak-branded solution for anything you might want to do with images," said Matthew Troy, an analyst with Citigroup Investment Research, who recently upgraded Kodak to hold from sell.

Paradoxically, many of the new products are based on work Kodak began, but abandoned, years ago. The precursor technology to Stream, for example, pushed ink through a single nozzle. Stream has thousands of holes and uses a method called air deflection to separate drops of ink and control the speed and order in which they are deposited on a page.

"I remember wandering through the labs in 2003, and seeing the theoretical model that could become Stream," said Philip J. Faraci, Kodak's president. "The technology was half-baked, but it was a real breakthrough."

Other digital technologies languished as well, said Bill Lloyd, the chief technology officer. "I've been here five years, and I'm still learning about all the things they already have," he said. "It seems Kodak had developed antibodies against anything that might compete with film."

It took what many analysts say was a near-death experience to change that. Kodak, a film titan in the 20th century, entered the next one in danger of being mowed down by the digital juggernaut. Electronics companies like Sony were siphoning away the photography market, while giants like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox had a lock on printers.

"This was a supertanker that came close to capsizing," said Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, which long ago sold its Kodak shares.

But in 2003 Kodak hired Antonio Perez away from Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Perez, now the chief executive, has sprinkled Hewlett alumni - including Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Faraci - throughout the executive suite.

Together, they have turned Kodak inside out. They exited a mainstay business, health imaging, and took the company back into inkjet printing. And they mined the patent archives for intellectual property, a step that is yielding well above $250 million a year in licensing fees. One recent example: Kodak is licensing out a method to embed a chemical signature in materials that enables manufacturers and retailers to scan for counterfeit products.

"When it comes to intellectual property, they're finally acting like a for-profit corporation instead of a university," said Ulysses A. Yannas, a broker at Buckman, Buckman & Reid who has been buying Kodak shares.

The Hewlett alumni introduced an expensive consumer printer that runs on inexpensive ink - tantamount to heresy in an industry that has always sold cheap hardware in hopes of making money on high-margin inks and toners. "We were entering an entrenched market, so we went after the biggest dissatisfier for consumers, the cost of ink," said Steven A. Billow, a manager in the inkjet systems division

And, perhaps most traumatic for a company that was known as the Great Yellow Father in Rochester, they eliminated jobs. Kodak, which employed 145,300 people 20 years ago, ended 2007 with 26,900 employees.

Last year, $6.4 billion of its $10.3 billion in revenue came from digital products, but it earned only $179 million from them. And on Thursday, Kodak announced a first-quarter loss of $114 million on revenue of $2.09 billion. It was an improvement over the first quarter of 2007, when it lost $175 million on revenue of $2.08 billion. And Kodak's revenue from digital products rose 10 percent, to $1.366 billion.

Mr. Perez told analysts he had "full confidence" that 2008 would be a good year for Kodak, but investors did not share it. Its shares fell 67 cents on Thursday, to $17.22. After peaking at $94.25 in February 1997, they have steadily trended down.

Analysts remain wary. "The stuff that comes out of the Kodak labs is impressive, but it does not give them a leg up on Hewlett or Xerox," said Shannon S. Cross, an analyst at Cross Research who rates Kodak a sell. Nor is she impressed with Kodak's consumer printer. "Consumers buy on the cost of hardware, not of total ownership," she said.

The Fujifilm Corporation, the Japanese company that was Kodak's main film rival, is not out of the picture, either. It recently moved its chemistry and electronics labs next door to each other. "If they work as a single team at the same location, R.& D. productivity is significantly enhanced," Shinpei Ikenoue, the head of research at Fujifilm, said in an e-mail message.

Still, analysts no longer predict Kodak's demise. "Kodak still has the most color specialists," Ms. Cross said.

There are a lot fewer of them, though. The research ranks have been cut in half, to about 1,000 people. "We watched a lot of chemists get downsized out of jobs," said Dr. Margaret J. Helber, an organic chemist who joined Kodak 18 years ago. "The rest of us soldiered on for several years, not knowing if we would remain relevant in the transformed Kodak."

They did, but in radically altered jobs. For one thing, researchers who rarely interacted are now expected to collaborate.

"This used to be a closed society, where some researchers kept their records in locked safes," said Dr. John D. Baloga, director of analytical science and a Kodak employee for 31 years. "Some of them were crushed when the secrecy went away."

Researchers also must now work with the business managers. Amit Singhal, a computer scientist who joined Kodak in 1998, said he had biweekly meetings with the business units. "I never used to see them at all," he said.

Indeed, until recently, functions like finance, marketing and research all reported up through their own hierarchies, ultimately to the chief executive. Today, everyone involved in creating, selling and servicing inkjet printers is grouped together, as are those dealing with cameras, sensors or other products.

"Finally, we have a structure that promotes commercialization of research," Mr. Faraci said.

The research chiefs do hold quarterly meetings to uncover technologies that can cross product boundaries. Marketing, operations and customer service chiefs meet regularly as well, to discuss which products and services can be bundled together for sale, or to see whether economies of scale can be achieved. But day to day, researchers and marketers deal more with each other than with their functional peers.

"Researchers invent something, demonstrate its feasibility, talk about commercializing it," said Julie Gerstenberger, vice president for external alliances. "But these days, it's all in collaboration with the business side."

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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For Harry Brix, director of procurement at Syosset, N.Y.-based Paradigm Group, a supplier of janitorial and sanitary products, green manufacturing is very chic. Brix says green strategies emerged in the 1970s, but interest waned, only to surface again in the '90s, and wane again.

Many believe this time it's here to stay--namely Nabil Nasr, Ph.D., director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

"There is very serious interest from industry surrounding green manufacturing," says Nasr. "We are starting to see the shift in philosophy, acceptance, and emphasis."

But an interest in green manufacturing doesn't necessarily translate into a commitment to making the necessary changes, as documented in a recent survey of manufacturers conducted by U.K.-based Lanner Group, a business process analysis organization. The survey found only 9 percent of respondents prioritized reduction of their carbon footprint in 2007. When asked why, 72 percent of the respondents said they had other priorities to address first, 15 percent said the process is too costly, and 8 percent said they didn't know how to do it.

Such a mind-set disturbs Nasr.

"There is a belief among some manufacturers that green manufacturing costs money," he says, "so they wait until they have extra money to cover the expenses. This is absolutely wrong!"

In fact, says Nasr, with proper training in information technology and usage, manufacturers can identify tremendous opportunities without incurring any costs. "These initiatives offer competitive market advantages," he says.

Ralph Bianculli, president and CEO of Paradigm Group, agrees. "Historically, one problem with green products is they're quite a bit more expensive than traditional products, so it was difficult to create a market for them," he recalls. "More recently, though, manufacturers that have invested money in greener production processes have been able to cut the cost of their green products."

One strategy, says Bianculli, is retooling near the end of the manufacturing line. "This allows recapturing some of the product and recycling some of its content," he explains.

Nasr sees other opportunities for technology in transitioning to green manufacturing.

"It's necessary to take a system-wide view," he explains. "Green manufacturing cuts across every aspect of manufacturing, including information decisions, process technologies, energy consumption, material selection, and material flow. A lot of the decisions manufacturers make are related to cost, function, and quality. Now they are adding another dimension, which is sustainability."

There are a number of technologies that can prove useful, Nasr adds, and they vary across industries. Some sectors are interested in technologies that eliminate lead, and those that recover material from the product during processing. In the automotive industry, the focus is on technology that can reduce emissions, as well as finding replacement materials that improve conservation efforts.

According to Lanner Group, another useful tool is simulation technology. In fact, 90 percent of Lanner's survey respondents say if its potential is maximized, simulation technology can facilitate greener manufacturing.

Simulation has application in new plant design/layout, capital equipment evaluation/justification, new process design, resource planning, and material delivery logistics.

"Using simulation to improve business processes is as close to guaranteeing an outcome as is possible," states David Jones, CEO of Lanner. "It can provide visibility and clarity, and eliminate unforeseen costs that are common in new projects. Effective use of simulation technology can map processes so that environmental initiatives can be aligned with cost savings."

© 2008 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

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Researchers are upgrading lithium ion and green-alternative batteries for increasingly power-hungry mobile devices.

Mobile electronics are getting sleeker, thinner, and more powerful, but superbright laptop screens and Internet browsing on phones don't come without costs. Each of these features increases the drain on a device's battery--and what's the point of carrying around a powerful laptop or phone if its battery lasts only a couple of hours?

Green battery technology might have the answer. Alternative battery sources like fuel cells and solar cells not only reduce our environmental footprint but also can last much longer and charge faster. For example, a fuel cell prototype developed by Vancouver-based Angstrom Power gives a MotoSLVR phone twice the talk time of a lithium ion battery and can fully charge in 10 minutes. Jerry Hallmark, manager of Motorola's Energy System Technologies, says Motorola is looking to fuel cells and other alternative technologies to pave the way for battery performance boosts.

"Developments in lithium ion technology have, to date, provided only incremental increases in powering capacity," Hallmark says.

That doesn't mean that traditional lithium ion batteries will disappear anytime soon. Ryne Raffaelle, a physics professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, says, Lithium ion technologies currently store significantly more energy per unit volume and unit mass than do these battery alternatives. Furthermore, fuel cells, unlike traditional batteries, actually consume reactant that must be bought and replenished.

One factor that could extend the use of lithium ion is nanotechnology. At Stanford University, Professor Yi Cui has developed silicon nanowires that can multiply battery capacity as much as 10 times without adding weight by allowing more lithium ions to fit into the same size battery.

But lithium ion batteries and green batteries don't necessarily have to compete head-to-head. Raffaelle says that powerful solutions could result from combining these technologies. Solar cells, for example, could power a personal electrolyzer--a device that generates hydrogen fuel for fuel cells. And Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO of battery start-up Boston-Power, says that solar cells built into a cell phone could keep its lithium ion battery charged.

Copyright © 2008 Ziff Davis Media Inc.

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William W. Destler and Dennis Richardson . Guest Essayists

The 2008-09 New York state budget was an unprecedented success for Rochester and Monroe County in terms of significant additional resources for critically important initiatives in the region. The additional funding coming to our area - more than $100 million - was primarily driven by the collective efforts of our legislative delegation, who stood tall on the region's behalf to fight for these investments.

Another key factor that contributed to this exceptionally successful year was that, for the first time, our community came together with a defined set of legislative priorities and a unified approach to our delegation, the legislative leadership and the governor. Initiated and led by the Rochester Business Alliance, the Community Coalition included representatives of business, government, labor, education, the nonprofit sector and the clergy, all of who rallied around a comprehensive and synergistic agenda.

The synergy among the coalition's priorities was indicative of a thoughtful process (the central criteria of which were economic development and job creation) that garnered the attention and support of our delegation and their leaders in Albany. Indeed, more than once in our discussions in Albany, we were complimented on the cohesiveness of our efforts this year. Critical linkages were clearly evident and persuasive. These include Hillside Work Scholarship Connection and the challenges facing the city of Rochester; the importance of a vibrant center city to the potential companies and work force who will be drawn to the region by the presence of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at RIT and the University of Rochester's Clinical Translational Sciences Institute; and the important role of the Rochester Area Colleges' Center of Excellence in Math and Science in preparing the teachers of the future for our area students.

These investments in our region are essential to our future prosperity. To that point, much has been made of the economic success that has been achieved in the Albany area, notably through the growth of the nanotechnology industry. What cannot be overlooked is the fact that the state of New York invested nearly $1 billion in the Nanotechnology Center at State University of New York at Albany and other incentives to attract companies to the area. The cost of doing business in New York and tax rates notwithstanding, Albany's success shows that if you build sensible projects, business and industry will follow. Imagine what our region could also accomplish with that kind of investment.

Thanks to our legislative delegation, we have an opportunity to begin to demonstrate how we can leverage such resources.

As partners in the RBA's Community Coalition, we applaud and thank our delegation for their successful efforts on our behalf and on behalf of the entire region, which included nearly $1 million for Hillside's program, $12 million toward the Golisano Institute and critical additional funding for other Coalition priorities for the University of Rochester, the Center for Excellence in Math and Science, Midtown Plaza and aid to the city.

This kind of collaboration can and must continue for the sake of our region's economic resurgence. In a global economy, we need to make our region and our state as competitive as possible. Certainly, we need to address the cost of doing business and find ways to streamline burdensome regulations. But there also needs to be a judicious balance between addressing these kinds of issues and investing in our future. We look forward to continuing to work with the partners in the Community Coalition to build on this year's successful effort.

Destler is president, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Richardson is president, Hillside Family of Agencies.

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Summary: Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain's decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world -- but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

On June 22, 1897, about 400 million people around the world -- one-fourth of humanity -- got the day off. It was the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The 11 premiers of Britain's self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of 50,000 soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, and Gurkhas from Nepal. It was, as one historian wrote, "a Roman moment."

In London, eight-year-old Arnold Toynbee was perched on his uncle's shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that, watching the grandeur of the day, it felt as if the sun were "standing still in the midst of Heaven." "I remember the atmosphere," he wrote. "It was: 'Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.'"

But of course, history did happen to Britain. The question for the superpower of the current age is, Will history happen to the United States as well? Is it already happening? No analogy is exact, but the British Empire in its heyday is the closest any nation in the modern age has come to the United States' position today. In considering whether and how the forces of change will affect the United States, it is worth paying close attention to the experience of Britain.

There are many contemporary echoes. The United States' recent military interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq all have parallels in British military interventions decades ago. The basic strategic dilemma of being the only truly global player on the world stage is strikingly similar. But there are also fundamental differences between Britain then and the United States now. For Britain, as it tried to maintain its superpower status, the largest challenge was economic rather than political. For the United States, it is the other way around.

Through shrewd strategic choices and some sophisticated diplomacy, Britain was able to maintain and even extend its influence for decades. In the end, however, it could not alter the fact that its power position -- its economic and technological dynamism -- was fast eroding. Britain declined gracefully -- but inexorably. The United States today faces a problem that is quite different. The U.S. economy (despite its current crisis) remains fundamentally vigorous when compared with others. American society is vibrant. It is the United States' political system that is dysfunctional, unable to make the relatively simple reforms that would place the country on extremely solid footing for the future. Washington seems largely unaware of the new world rising around it -- and shows few signs of being able to reorient U.S. policy for this new age.

Story continues at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501facomment87303/fareed-zakaria/the-future-of-american-power.html

FAREED ZAKARIA is Editor of Newsweek International. This essay is adapted from his book The Post-American World (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., © 2008 by Fareed Zakaria).

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations Inc.

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An interview with RIT President Bill Destler and PAETEC ASG President Jack Baron

When Bill Destler was named president of Rochester Institute of Technology in March 2007, he summarized his vision for the Rochester, NY school this way: "Take advantage of your unfair advantages."

What he saw when he began looking around the campus, he recalled recently, was a lot of faculty with corporate experience and a lot of students doing applied work. That's when the nugget of an idea came to him: developing a program whereby corporate sponsors could hire the school to do research and development.

But unlike most such university programs around the country, this one has a few twists: First, the sponsoring company can keep the intellectual property developed in the course of the R&D work. Second, the pricing scheme is quite simple: $20,000 per quarter for every student and faculty member assigned to the research project. And, third, the legal fodder to set up the structure--forms, agreements, and contracts--are freely available on a public Web site.

In October 2007, shortly after he assumed the top post, Destler put together a small working group to establish the model he had in mind. In January 2008 the program launched as "Corporate R&D at RIT" and two months later had its first corporate sponsor: Rochester-based telecommunications firm PAETEC.

Recently, Destler and Jack Baron, president of PAETEC's Advanced Solutions Group, spoke to Campus Technology about the program.

Campus Technology What was the genesis for the partnership?

RIT President Bill Destler: RIT has been looking to try to take a leadership position in defining a new way for corporations and academic institutions to work together on research and development projects. We came up with this idea--what we're calling "Corporate R&D at RIT"--which I presented for the first time at an RIT board of trustees meeting. Arunas [A. Chesonis, PAETEC chairman and CEO] was at the meeting and said, "Sign us up!"

CT: Why was a new structure necessary?

Destler: For many reasons. For one, the attempts by university faculty researchers and researchers at companies to work together on topics of mutual interest have been stymied for many years in this country in large measure because the lawyers can never agree on the contract.

Almost inevitably the stumbling block is on who will own what. Companies aren't interested in spending their corporate cash funding research and development and then having to turn around and pay more money to license the technology they funded in the first place from the very university they worked with.

It occurred to me that universities need to remember that they are tax-exempt public service organizations. We have a certain duty to try to perform services for both the private and public sectors, and that we might do well to offer a more flexible approach to the question of who would own what as a result of joint research and dev efforts.

Story continues at http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61148

Copyright 2008 1105 Media Inc.

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