Will the region be ready for the next big storm? To reduce the impact of falling trees, some towns are installing underground cables. "Green" methods are also being studied and utilized, including infiltration trenches, green roofs, and bump-outs, said Temple hydrogeologist Laura Toran. Infiltration trenches are installed "along the street where your curb would usually be, and you put both plants and gravel storage systems in there," explained Toran.
The charitable arm of the Blackstone Group will provide $3 million over five years to promote student entrepreneurship at Temple University and other Philadelphia institutions. The University City Science Center will provide the universities with resources and help connect them to each other and the region's business community. Blackstone's LaunchPad program promotes entrepreneurship to all the students at the universities where it operates, not just business students.
Can rail companies continue to inspect themselves? Bridge experts believe new regulations are needed to prevent accidents like the recent train derailment on a bridge in Paulsboro, N.J. A dispatcher advised the train engineer to ignore a red light at the bridge and begin crossing before the bridge collapsed. "There is something wrong with their system that they followed to do that," said Temple's William Miller, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
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The late jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck was nominated for a posthumous GRAMMY less than 24 hours after he passed away. Brubeck and his son, Chris, were nominated in the "Best Instrumental Composition" category for an orchestral work called "Music of Ansel Adams: America." The piece was performed by the Temple University Symphony Orchestra. Brubeck, who has won a GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award, has never won a GRAMMY in a regular category. (This Associated Press story was published in hundreds of outlets nationwide.)
In 2008, Dance Professor Philip Grosser, a member of the Boyer College of Music and Dance faculty for 27 years, suffered a stroke so severe that it left him unconscious all night on the floor beside his living-room sofa. When Grosser came to in the hospital, he couldn't talk. After many months of speech therapy, he was able to teach and choreograph again. The dances he's made since his stroke, he says, are "a little more emotionally out there, a little more raw." He has also published a coffee-table art book, called Nerve Networks.
Thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation, high school and college-age students will take part in a six-week program over the next three summers at Temple’s Urban Apps and Maps Studios to learn digital design and business skills, with a dozen of them working year-round to develop apps and maps that solve challenges of urban communities. According to Michele Masucci, interim vice provost for research at Temple, it was this community outreach component that caught the eye of Knight. "The issues to be solved come from community input," explains Masucci.
According to officials, approximately 10,000 Philadelphia residents are living in flood zones. “We’ve done a lot of serious damage to our systems,” notes Jeff Featherstone, a city planning professor at Temple University’s Ambler campus. In part 1 of the KYW Regional Affairs Council series, “Stormproofing the Delaware Valley,” he says mistakes were made more than 50 years ago by developers in the region. “We didn’t pay any attention to our creeks,” he said. “And now we are paying the price for that.”
A recent case highlights how the $1.8 billion armed response to Somali piracy, while successful in slashing hijackings, has also brought some of its own violence and death to the high seas. “There was certainly a tragedy here,” says Duncan Hollis, a law professor at Temple who has worked on maritime jurisdiction cases. The challenge is that fighting piracy doesn’t fall under the rules of true armed conflict, nor of traditional law enforcement, he says. “How do you get troops to modulate use of force?”
The Temple University Symphony Orchestra has a 40 percent chance of taking home a Grammy. It got two of the five nominations in the Best Instrumental Composition category, one for "Music of Ansel Adams: America" by Chris and Dave Brubeck, and, "Overture, Waltz and Rondo" written by Bill Cunliffe. The deeply locally connected recordings were released under the Boyer College of Music and Dance record label, BCM&D Records, and were commissioned by Boyer College.
