Israeli PM wins primary, offers settler grants (AP)

JERUSALEM ? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won the leadership race of his Likud Party over his ultranationalist rival early Wednesday, hours after his government approved new incentives to entice people to move to West Bank settlements.

While Netanyahu was expected to win the leadership race decisively, a relatively strong showing by his ultranationalist rival, Moshe Feiglin suggested that many Likud voters consider the prime minister too soft on peacemaking with the Palestinians.

Likud spokesman Yigal Movermacher said early Wednesday that Netanyahu won over 75 percent of the vote.

"Likud will continue leading the country responsibly. We face great challenges that no other country in the world faces and I believe we will overcome them together in the way of the Likud," Netanyahu said in his victory speech.

Upon taking office in 2009, Netanyahu reluctantly embraced the concept of an independent Palestinian state, antagonizing hard-line Likud loyalists who believe Israel should hold on to the West Bank for religious and security reasons.

The new housing subsidies offered to West Bank settlers appeared to be aimed at appeasing those hard-liners.

The Israeli move threatened international efforts to revive Mideast peace talks, just as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was visiting the region, and drew angry condemnations from the Palestinians, who accused Netanyahu of undermining prospects for a Palestinian state.

"They are adding obstacles at a time when everyone is intensifying efforts to try to resume peace talks," said Palestinian government spokesman Ghassan Khatib.

A round of low-level peace negotiations hosted by Jordan ground to a halt last week, in large part because of continued Palestinian objections to Israeli settlement construction.

Those discussions, meant to finalize an agenda for full-fledged peace negotiations, are sponsored by the "Quartet" of international Mideast mediators ? the U.S., European Union, United Nations and Russia. U.N. chief Ban visited Jordan Tuesday en route to Israel and the Palestinian Authority in an effort to keep the dialogue moving.

"We must all do our part to break this impasse," Ban said. "In the short term, it is essential that provocations stop as called for by the Quartet and that the parties build confidence and sustain these nascent talks."

The Palestinians claim the West Bank and east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as parts of a future state and say that continued Israeli settlement is a sign of bad faith.

They have demanded a halt in settlement construction before resuming peace talks. The alternative, they warn, is a single state in which Arabs will eventually outnumber Jews.

"I think with every additional settlement activity, the feasibility of having two states is diminished," said Khatib, the Palestinian spokesman.

This week's decision approved housing subsidies and loans for 557 communities deemed "national priority areas."

An announcement in English made no mention that West Bank settlements were included in the order. But attached to the original Hebrew announcement was a full list that included 70 settlements, most of them deep inside the West Bank in areas that Israel would likely have to evacuate to make way for a Palestinian state.

The incentives, according to the Prime Minister's office, are "meant to encourage positive migration to these communities."

In the past month's dialogue in Jordan, Israel has indicated that it wants to turn its West Bank separation barrier into the border with a future Palestine, according to two Palestinian officials. About three quarters of the settlements qualifying for the new subsidies lie on territory that would be turned over to the Palestinians under that scenario.

In a separate move, the government on Monday appointed a committee to examine land ownership issues in the West Bank.

The panel will review a 2005 government report that found several dozen outposts were built not only without state approval, but on privately held Palestinian land.

Officials said the report needs to be reviewed because its author, state prosecutor Talia Sasson, later entered politics with a dovish political party, raising questions about her objectivity.

A court-ordered evacuation of Migron, the largest unauthorized outpost, set for next month, would not be affected by the formation of the new committee, officials said.

The panel's makeup aroused suspicions it would legalize at least some of the more than 100 outposts built without government authorization, including dozens Sasson says were erected on privately held Palestinian land.

The committee's head, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Edmond Levy, spoke out against Israel's withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

___

Federman can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/joseffederman

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120201/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

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Monetary policy: The Fed's communications problem | The Economist

Jan 31st 2012, 17:20 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

LET'S take a break from patting the Fed on the back to talk about some of the potential difficulties inherent in the Fed's current communications strategy. At the Financial Times?old ECB hand Lorenzo Bini Smaghi writes:

The first relates to the time horizon over which the Fed is supposed to achieve price stability, namely the long-run. This differs from most other central banks in advanced economies, where price stability is targeted over a horizon of two to three years...

Monetary policy produces its effects with lags of one to three years. This is the period over which the central bank should be held accountable. Focusing over this time horizon also helps market participants. For instance, it?s not too difficult to anticipate a monetary policy tightening if a central bank publishes forecasts that show inflation rising above the stated objective for the next two to three years.

But if the objective of price stability is defined over the longer term, communication becomes more complex. In particular, the link between the inflation forecasts and the policy decision is unclear...

Here are the Fed's latest economic projections:

If you read the fine print at the bottom of the forecast, you see that each participant's projections build in what they assume to be an appropriate monetary policy. In other words, this is what the Fed thinks is appropriate given its ability to manipulate the economy. Now, we can combine these projections with the participants' view of the future rate changes deemed necessary to achieve the above forecast. And the median participant's judgment is that a federal funds rate target below 1% in 2014 is what it will take. A meaningful minority of members believe that low rates beyond 2014 will be necessary.

According to the Fed's projections, it hits its target?2% inflation?over the long term. Mr Bini Smaghi's point is that it doesn't make much sense to judge current Fed actions against a long-run inflation projection. In this case, the situation is particularly weird, since many Fed members are indicating that hitting the long-term target will require future central bankers to behave in ways they may not wish to behave.?

As I've written before, the commitment to allow higher inflation in the future is one of the key methods through which the central bank can have a positive effect on an economy stuck at the zero lower bound. The Fed's efforts to clarify and push out the date at which it is likely to raise rates strikes me as a means to try and commit itself to higher inflation in the future. But the Fed's communications efforts in this regard run up against a serious obstacle in the form of the Fed's long-term inflation forecast, which is 2%. The Fed can't force future central banks to keep to any policy path. If the Fed were to project a long-run inflation rate above 2% then, as Mr Bini Smaghi says, markets might suppose that monetary tightening lay ahead, whatever the fine print says.

This is not an unsolvable problem but is, I think, one of the tight spots in which the Fed finds itself as it transitions from a framework that wasn't very good at boosting the economy at the ZLB to one that might be. One way to get around the problem would be to change the target, to 3% inflation or to something else, like a price or nominal GDP level, that implies future inflation above currently acceptable levels. The Fed may get there eventually, but probably not soon enough to have a meaningful impact on this recovery.?

An alternative might be to bring the point at which future inflation is tolerated a bit closer to the present. That is, the Fed doesn't necessarily run into problems of inconsistency if it projects inflation above 2% 1 or 2 years from now?a timeframe over which markets readily understand this?group of policymakers to have control?while maintaining the long-run 2% goal. Achieving that would require the Fed to give itself a framework within which it's acceptable to have inflation above 2% (and even to try to generate inflation above 2%), and as I wrote last week, I thought the Fed took a big step in that direction at its latest meeting. But one then has to choose to act within that framework. I suspect that what that will take is a near-term projection of inflation above 2% combined with action?asset purchases?designed to demonstrate that, yes, the Fed is actually trying to create a little catch-up inflation. At the last press conference, Ben Bernanke all but admitted that that would be a sensible thing to do. Now we just need to excise the "all but".

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/01/monetary-policy-4?fsrc=gn_ep

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PHOTO: Who Is Scarlett Johansson's New Man?

So much for Hollywood men! Following her divorce from Ryan Reynolds and a short-lived relationship with Sean Penn, tabloids romantically linked Scarlett Johansson to actors Justin Bartha, Kieran Culkin and Joseph Gordon-Levitt -- but the 27-year-old We Bought a Zoo actress has reportedly been dating a non-celebrity for a while now.

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/scarlett-johansson-dating-nate-naylor/1-a-423982?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Ascarlett-johansson-dating-nate-naylor-423982

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New Cornell Campus to Cultivate High-Tech Industry in New York City [Slide Show]

Features | Technology

A collaboration with an Israeli University will incubate start-ups from an East River island with a colorful past


cornell, tech, israel, new yorkTECH TRANSFORMATION: Cornell and Technion plan to build their 18.6-hectare NYC Tech Campus on the site of Goldwater Memorial Hospital (pictured), which operates on Roosevelt Island, a 52-hectare sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Image: Courtesy of Larry Greenemeier

For years New York City?based universities have been opening satellite campuses worldwide, whether it is New York University's sites in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv or Columbia University's Global Centers in Beijing and Nairobi. Technion?Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is returning the favor in a big way, partnering with Ithaca, N.Y.?based Cornell University to build a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island.

The purpose of this high-tech venture is to turn the 52-hectare sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens into a techno island of sorts, an incubator for start-ups akin to what Stanford University has done in Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (M.I.T.) role in the Boston area.

By 2027 Cornell and Technion plan to have built more than half of their 18.6-hectare NYC Tech Campus on the site of Roosevelt Island's Goldwater Memorial Hospital, just south of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. Coursework aimed at cultivating health care, social media and green energy entrepreneurs could begin on site as early as 2017. Cornell and Technion hope to attract 2,500 students and 280 professors learning, teaching and living on the island within two decades.

NYC Tech will offer a dual masters from both Cornell and Technion in applied science. The program will be tailored to students who already have an undergraduate degree in a technology-related discipline?such as computer science or engineering?and add to that the business and entrepreneurial skills needed to develop and commercialize new technologies. Students will have mentors from New York?based businesses and work on projects with real-world applications, says Daniel Huttenlocher, Cornell dean of computing and information science.

The ultimate goal is to initiate student- and faculty-led start-ups that will remain in New York City. The NYCTech Campus plans to establish a $150 million revolving financing fund that will be solely devoted to start-up businesses in the city,.

Cornell alumni have a strong track record in forming successful tech companies but few have remained on the east coast. Irwin Mark Jacobs, who graduated from Cornell in 1956 with an electrical engineering degree, co-founded San Diego-based telecommunications company Qualcomm in 1985. PeopleSoft, Inc., which made human-resource management software before being bought by Oracle in 2005 for $10.3 billion, was co-founded in 1987 in Walnut Creek, Calif., by Cornell alumnus David Duffield.

Huttenlocher attributes some of Cornell's challenge of retaining its homegrown talent to its relatively isolated and rural location. E Ink Corp. (makers of the Amazon Kindle's electronic paper displays) and Harmonix Music Systems (makers of Guitar Hero and other popular video games) emerged out of M.I.T.'s Media Lab but stayed nearby in Cambridge. Carnegie Mellon University has likewise benefited from spin offs Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (makers of computer vision software) and RedZone Robotics remaining near Pittsburgh.

The challenges NYC Tech graduates will face in New York City are less about isolation than they are about setting up shop given the city's pricey real estate, which is where the $150 million financing fund may come into play. One of Technion's roles will be to lend its experience getting start-ups off the ground near its Haifa campus.

Columbia has since 1982 had a program to help turn entrepreneurial ideas into start-ups through that university's Technology Ventures office, but Huttenlocher says Cornell and Technion are taking a new approach. NYC Tech's applied science program will be organized around three interdisciplinary themes relevant to industries operating in and around the city. One will emphasize the development of technology to promote healthier living, which is of interest to the city's health care institutions and insurance companies. Another theme will focus on ways to make media more interactive?perhaps along the lines of "social TV" or "two-way" programming?that might appeal to the city's more traditional broadcast media companies as well as advertising and marketing firms. The third theme, so-called "smart" technologies, will develop on retrofits for city buildings to make them greener and more energy efficient.

"Each of these three areas brings together technology and non-technology fields such as social science, design, public health and the study of human behavior," Huttenlocher says, adding that, as times change, the NYC Tech curriculum will adapt. "The themes themselves might look different in a few years, but the fundamental approach of the campus will not change."

Cornell wants to initiate classes and labs like those that will be offered at NYC Tech during the 2012?13 school year in rented space in Manhattan. Huttenlocher says they have not yet chosen a location but that the NYC Tech coursework will begin even before Goldwater Memorial is razed and the foundation for the new campus is poured.

Change is nothing new to Roosevelt Island, whose population has swelled to 14,000 in recent years. Native Americans used it as a hunting ground and fishing hole before 17th-century Dutch settlers bought the island to raise hogs. For the past 180 years it has been home to a mental hospital, penitentiary, smallpox hospital, almshouse, nursing school and government rent-subsidized apartment buildings.

The aging Goldwater facilities, which opened in 1939, do not meet NYC Tech's needs for a modern workspace. For example, plans call for the campus to include a solar array that will generate 1.8 megawatts at daily peak and a 400-well geothermal field, which uses the constant temperature of the earth to cool buildings in the summer and heat them in the winter.,

The campus is also expected to include newly constructed classrooms and computer labs as well as open workspaces where students and faculty can design and build projects. Local companies may also have access to some of the space so that mentors can work with students on campus. NYC Tech will also include housing for students and faculty.

View a slide show of the site of New York City's New Cornell High-Tech Campus

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=56524b66a8fcc32c3d3c8082399dba8a

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Scientists puzzled by region outside solar system (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? A glimpse beyond our solar system reveals the neighborhood just outside the sun's influence is different and stranger than expected, scientists reported Tuesday.

One oddity is the amount of oxygen. There are more oxygen atoms floating freely in the solar system than in the immediate interstellar space, or the vast region between stars.

Scientists were unsure why, but they said it's possible some of the life-supporting element could be hidden in dust or ice.

"We discovered this big puzzle ? that the matter just outside of our solar system doesn't look like the material inside," said David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

The discovery came from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft, which launched in 2008 to study the chaotic boundary where the solar wind from the sun clashes with cold gases from interstellar space.

Circling 200,000 miles above Earth, the Ibex spacecraft spots particles streaming into the solar system. A protective bubble surrounding around the sun and planets prevents dangerous cosmic radiation from seeping through, but neutral particles can pass freely, allowing Ibex to map their distribution.

The presence of less oxygen outside the solar system should not have any bearing on the search for Earth-like planets, scientists involved in the exoplanet hunt said.

There's plenty of oxygen in all the stars in the galaxy and in the material out of which stars and planets form, Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley said in an email.

While Ibex probes the edge of the solar system from Earth orbit, NASA's long-running, nuclear-powered twin Voyager spacecraft are at the fringes. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft have been exploring the solar system boundary since 2004.

Scientists have said it'll be months or years before Voyager 1 exits the solar system and becomes the first manmade probe to cross into interstellar space.

___

Follow Alicia Chang's coverage at http://www.twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120131/ap_on_sc/us_sci_solar_system_probe

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Cancer sequencing initiative discovers mutations tied to aggressive childhood brain tumors

Cancer sequencing initiative discovers mutations tied to aggressive childhood brain tumors

Monday, January 30, 2012

Researchers studying a rare, lethal childhood tumor of the brainstem discovered that nearly 80 percent of the tumors have mutations in genes not previously tied to cancer. Early evidence suggests the alterations play a unique role in other aggressive pediatric brain tumors as well.

The findings from the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital ? Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project (PCGP) offer important insight into a poorly understood tumor that kills more than 90 percent of patients within two years. The tumor, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), is found almost exclusively in children and accounts for 10 to 15 percent of pediatric tumors of the brain and central nervous system.

"We are hopeful that identifying these mutations will lead us to new selective therapeutic targets, which are particularly important since this tumor cannot be treated surgically and still lacks effective therapies," said Suzanne Baker, Ph.D., co-leader of the St. Jude Neurobiology and Brain Tumor Program and a member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology. She is a corresponding author of the study published in the January 29 online edition of the scientific journal Nature Genetics.

DIPG is an extremely invasive tumor that occurs in the brainstem, which is at the base of the skull and controls such vital functions as breathing and heart rate. DIPG cannot be cured by surgery and is accurately diagnosed by non-invasive imaging. As a result, DIPG is rarely biopsied in the U.S. and little is known about it.

Cancer occurs when normal gene activity is disrupted, allowing for the unchecked cell growth and spread that makes cancer so lethal. In this study, investigators found 78 percent of the DIPG tumors had alterations in one of two genes that carry instructions for making proteins that play similar roles in packaging DNA inside cells. Both belong to the histone H3 family of proteins. DNA must be wrapped around histones so that it is compact enough to fit into the nucleus. The packaging of DNA by histones influences which genes are switched on or off, as well as the repair of mutations in DNA and the stability of DNA. Disruption of any of these processes can contribute to cancer.

Researchers said that the mutations seem unique to aggressive childhood brain tumors.

"It is amazing to see that this particular tumor type appears to be characterized by a molecular 'smoking gun' and that these mutations are unique to fast-growing pediatric cancers in the brain," said Richard K. Wilson, Ph.D., director of The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and one of the study's corresponding authors. "This is exactly the type of result one hopes to find when studying the genomes of cancer patients."

The results are the latest from the PCGP, an ambitious three-year effort to sequence the complete normal and cancer genomes of 600 children with some of the most poorly understood and aggressive pediatric cancers. The human genome includes the complete set of instructions needed to assemble and sustain human life. The goal is to identify differences that explain why cancer develops, spreads and kills. Researchers believe the findings will provide the foundation for new tools to diagnose, treat or prevent the disease.

For this study, researchers sequenced the complete normal and cancer genomes of seven patients with DIPG. "The mutations were found at such high frequency in the cancer genomes of those seven patients that we immediately checked for the same alterations in a larger group of DIPGs," Baker said. When researchers sequenced all 16 of the related genes that make closely related variants of histone H3 proteins in an additional 43 DIPGs, they found many of the tumors contained the same mistakes in only two of these genes.

Of the 50 DIPG tumors included in this study, 60 percent had a single alteration in the makeup of the H3F3A gene. When the mutated gene was translated into a protein, the point mutation led to the substitution of methionine for lysine as the 27th amino acid in this variant of histone H3 protein. Another 18 percent of the DIPG patients carried the same mistake in a different gene, HIST1H3B.

Researchers are now working to understand how mutations in H3F3A and HIST1H3B impact cell function and contribute to cancer. Earlier research provides some clues. The lysine that is mutated is normally targeted by enzymes that attach other molecules to histone H3, influencing how it interacts with other proteins that regulate gene expression, Baker said. Mutations in the enzymes that target histone H3 have been identified in other cancers, but this is the first report showing a specific alteration of histones in cancer.

H3F3A and HIST1H3B were also mutated in other aggressive childhood brain tumors, glioblastoma, that develop outside the brain stem. Of 36 such tumors included in this study, 36 percent carried one of three distinct point mutations in the genes. The alterations included another single change in the makeup of H3F3A not found in DIPGs.

The histone H3 genes, however, were not mutated in any of the 252 other childhood tumors researchers checked for this study. The list included the brain tumors known as low-grade gliomas, medulloblastomas and ependymomas plus other cancers outside the brain and nervous system. The H3 changes have not been reported in any other cancers, including adult glioblastoma. "This suggests these particular mutations give a very important selective advantage, particularly in the developing brainstem and to a lesser degree in the developing brain, which leads to a terribly aggressive brain tumor in children, but not in adults," Baker said.

"This discovery would not have been possible without the unbiased approach taken by the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project," Baker said. "The mutations had not been reported in any other tumor, so we would not have searched for them in DIPGs. Yet the alterations clearly play an important role in generating this particular tumor."

###

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital: http://www.stjude.org

Thanks to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/117168/Cancer_sequencing_initiative_discovers_mutations_tied_to_aggressive_childhood_brain_tumors

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Pep Boys agrees to be acquired for about $791M

(AP) ? The Pep Boys ? Manny, Moe & Jack, an auto parts chain founded more than 90 years ago, has agreed to be taken private by the investment firm The Gores Group for about $791 million.

The $15 per share offer is a 24 percent premium to Pep Boys' closing price Friday of $12.08. News of the acquisition sent the Philadelphia company's shares up $2.82, or 23.3 percent, to $14.90 in morning trading on Monday.

Pep Boys brand recognition as well as its moderate pricing appealed to The Gores Group, said Lee Bird, managing director of operations and consumer practice leader at The Gores Group.

"We are excited to help Pep Boys build on this vision," he said in a statement.

The auto parts company began in 1921 with the Naval buddies and original Pep Boys: Emanuel "Manny" Rosenfeld, Maurice "Moe" Strauss, Moe Radavitz and Graham "Jack" Jackson. Their first store opened in Philadelphia under the name Pep Auto Supplies, according to the company's web site. Its name was changed around 1923 after Strauss noticed during a trip to California that many successful businesses there used first names.

Radavitz and Jackson both left the company early on. When Pep Boys went public in 1946, Rosenfeld served as its first corporate president. He held the post until his death in 1959. Strauss served as president from 1960 to 1973 and remained a board member until he died in 1982.

Pep Boys currently has more than 700 locations in 35 states and Puerto Rico.

Last month Pep Boys reported that its fiscal third-quarter net income rose nearly 23 percent on stronger tire sales and improving service sales. At the time President and CEO Mike Odell said that the improved business was due in part to new marketing, lower gas prices and pent-up demand.

Auto parts suppliers have done relatively well during the recession and prolonged economic downturn, as many consumers have held on to their cars longer and sought out repairs instead of purchasing new cars. The average age of a car or truck in the U.S. hit a record 10.8 years last year as job security and other economic worries weighed on consumers' minds.

That's up from the old record of 10.6 years in 2010, and it and continues a trend that dates to 1995, when the average age of a car was 8.4 years, according to a study of state vehicle registration data released earlier this month by the Southfield, Mich.-based Polk automotive research firm.

Pep Boys has faced competition though from companies including AutoZone Inc., Advance Auto Parts Inc. and O'Reilly Automotive Inc.

The Gores Group deal for Pep Boys is worth about $791 million, based on the company's almost 53 million shares outstanding. The companies put the total enterprise value of the deal at approximately $1 billion.

The agreement includes a provision, which allows Pep Boys to seek and receive alternative offers for a period of 45 days.

Gores Group said that it has fully committed financing for the buyout, which is not subject to a financing condition.

Pep Boys said that Odell, as well as other senior managers, are expected to remain in their positions once the acquisitions closes.

Pep Boys' board unanimously approved the acquisition, which still needs approval from the company's shareholders. Pep Boys said it has suspended its quarterly dividend in anticipation of the deal.

The transaction is expected to close in the fiscal second quarter. Once the acquisition is complete, Pep Boys stock will no longer trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-01-30-Pep%20Boys-Acquisition/id-bb64099e0fbc4151aa86f916dc8ca61f

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New Cornell Campus to Cultivate High-Tech Industry in New York City [Slide Show]

Features | Technology

A collaboration with an Israeli University will incubate start-ups from an East-River island with a colorful past


cornell, tech, israel, new yorkTECH TRANSFORMATION: Cornell and Technion plan to build their 18.6-hectare NYC Tech campus on the site of Goldwater Memorial Hospital (pictured), which operates on Roosevelt Island, 52-hectare sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Image: Courtesy of Larry Greenemeier

For years New York City?based universities have been opening satellite campuses worldwide, whether it is New York University's sites in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv or Columbia University's Global Centers in Beijing and Nairobi. Technion?Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is returning the favor in a big way, partnering with Ithaca, N.Y.?based Cornell University to build a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island.

The purpose of this high-tech venture is to turn the 52-hectare sliver of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens into a techno island of sorts, an incubator for start-ups akin to what Stanford University has done in Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (M.I.T.) role in the Boston area.

By 2027 Cornell and Technion plan to have buily more than half of their 18.6-hectare NYC Tech Campus on the site of Roosevelt Island's Goldwater Memorial Hospital, just south of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. Coursework aimed at cultivating health care, social media and green energy entrepreneurs could begin on site as early as 2017. Cornell and Technion hope to attract 2,500 students and 280 professors learning, teaching and living on the island within two decades.

NYC Tech will offer a dual masters from both Cornell and Technion in applied science. The program will be tailored to students who already have an undergraduate degree in a technology-related discipline?such as computer science or engineering?and add to that the business and entrepreneurial skills needed to develop and commercialize new technologies. Students will have mentors from New York?based businesses and work on projects with real-world applications, says Daniel Huttenlocher, Cornell dean of computing and information science.

The ultimate goal is to initiate student- and faculty-led start-ups that will remain in New York City. *The NYCTech Campus plans to establish a $150 million revolving financing fund that will be solely devoted to start-up businesses in the city,.

Cornell alumni have a strong track record in forming successful tech companies but few have remained on the east coast. Irwin Mark Jacobs, who graduated from Cornell in 1956 with an electrical engineering degree, co-founded San Diego-based telecommunications company Qualcomm in 1985. PeopleSoft, Inc., which made human-resource management software before being bought by Oracle in 2005 for $10.3 billion, was co-founded in 1987 in Walnut Creek, Calif., by Cornell alumnus David Duffield.

Huttenlocher attributes some of Cornell's challenge of retaining its homegrown talent to its relatively isolated and rural location. E Ink Corp. (makers of the Amazon Kindle's electronic paper displays) and Harmonix Music Systems (makers of Guitar Hero and other popular video games) emerged out of M.I.T.'s Media Lab but stayed nearby in Cambridge. Carnegie Mellon University has likewise benefited from spin offs Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (makers of computer vision software) and RedZone Robotics remaining near Pittsburgh.

The challenges NYC Tech graduates will face in New York City are less about isolation than they are about setting up shop given the city's pricey real estate, which is where the $150 million financing fund may come into play. One of Technion's roles will be to lend its experience getting start-ups off the ground near its Haifa campus.

Columbia has since 1982 had a program to help turn entrepreneurial ideas into start-ups through that university's Technology Ventures office, but Huttenlocher says Cornell and Technion are taking a new approach. NYC Tech's applied science program will be organized around three interdisciplinary themes relevant to industries operating in and around the city. One will emphasize the development of technology to promote healthier living, which is of interest to the city's health care institutions and insurance companies. Another theme will focus on ways to make media more interactive?perhaps along the lines of "social TV" or "two-way" programming?that might appeal to the city's more traditional broadcast media companies as well as advertising and marketing firms. The third theme, so-called "smart" technologies, will develop on retrofits for city buildings to make them greener and more energy efficient.

"Each of these three areas brings together technology and non-technology fields such as social science, design, public health and the study of human behavior," Huttenlocher says, adding that, as times change, the NYC Tech curriculum will adapt. "The themes themselves might look different in a few years, but the fundamental approach of the campus will not change."

Cornell wants to initiate classes and labs like those that will be offered at NYC Tech during the 2012?13 school year in rented space in Manhattan. Huttenlocher says they have not yet chosen a location but that the NYC Tech coursework will begin even before Goldwater Memorial is razed and the foundation for the new campus is poured.

Change is nothing new to Roosevelt Island, whose population has swelled to 14,000 in recent years. Native Americans used it as a hunting ground and fishing hole before 17th-century Dutch settlers bought the island to raise hogs. For the past 180 years it has been home to a mental hospital, penitentiary, smallpox hospital, almshouse, nursing school and government rent-subsidized apartment buildings.

The aging Goldwater facilities, which opened in 1939, do not meet NYC Tech's needs for a modern workspace. For example, plans call for the campus to include a solar array that will generate 1.8 megawatts at daily peak and a 400-well geothermal field, which uses the constant temperature of the earth to cool buildings in the summer and heat them in the winter.,

The campus is also expected to include newly constructed classrooms and computer labs as well as open workspaces where students and faculty can design and build projects. Local companies may also have access to some of the space so that mentors can work with students on campus. NYC Tech will also include housing for students and faculty.

View a slide show of the site of New York City's New Cornell High-Tech Campus

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=c6db952092b561b83d55532a50947aab

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Greece should give up budget control: Germany (Reuters)

BERLIN (Reuters) ? Greece must surrender control of its budget policy to outside institutions if it cannot implement reforms attached to euro zone rescue measures, the German economy minister was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Philipp Roesler became the first German cabinet member to openly endorse a proposal for Greece to surrender budget control after Reuters quoted a European source on Friday as saying Berlin wants Athens to give up budget control.

"We need more leadership and monitoring when it comes to implementing the reform course," Roesler, also vice chancellor, told Bild newspaper, according to an advance of an interview to be published on Monday.

"If the Greeks aren't able to succeed themselves with this, then there must be stronger leadership and monitoring from abroad, for example through the EU," added Roesler, chairman of the Free Democrats (FDP) who share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Reuters reported on Friday that Germany wants Greece to give up control of budget policy to European institutions as part of discussions over a second rescue package.

Greece, which has repeatedly failed to meet the fiscal targets set out by its international lenders, is in talks to finalise a second 130 billion-euro ($172 billion) package.

With many Greeks blaming Germans for the austerity medicine their country has been forced to swallow, officials in Athens dismissed the idea of relinquishing budget control as out of the question.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said on Sunday Greece was perfectly capable of making good on its promises.

"Anyone who puts a nation before the dilemma of 'economic assistance or national dignity' ignores some key historical lessons," he said in a statement before heading to Brussels for a European Union summit on Monday.

The Financial Times reported on Saturday that it had obtained a copy of the proposal showing Germany wants a new euro zone "budget commissioner" to have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they are not in line with targets set by international lenders.

"Given the disappointing compliance so far, Greece has to accept shifting budgetary sovereignty to the European level for a certain period of time," the document said.

Under the plan, Athens would only be allowed to carry out normal state spending after servicing its debt, the paper said.

Crushed by 350 billion euros ($462 billion) of debt and running out of cash quickly, Greece is scrambling to appease the "troika" of its official lenders - the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - and stitch up a deal with private creditors simultaneously.

Greece needs to strike a deal with creditors in the next couple of days to unlock its next aid package in order to avoid a chaotic default.

A government source in Berlin said Germany's proposal was aimed not just at Greece but also at other struggling euro zone members that receive aid and are unable to make good on their obligations.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-country bloc, said it wanted the Greek government to maintain autonomy.

(Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120129/bs_nm/us_eurozone_germany_greece

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