Saturday, March 10, 2012

News for the week of: March 4th - 11th by Thomas Little


Planning News

"New Jersey Isn’t Capitalizing on Demand for Walkable Places"
http://www.njfuture.org/2012/03/05/new-jersey-walkable-places/

News Clip:"New Jersey is widely perceived as consisting mainly of suburbs serving these two cities, even if many of its small towns do not fit the low-density, single-use stereotype of a “suburb.” The distinction, however, between city and suburb as the defining paradigm for describing the built environment is giving way to a new dichotomy: walkable urbanism versus drivable sub-urbanism. New Jersey is well positioned to take advantage of this change."

"Upper-Class Drivers More Likely to Break Rules of the Road"
http://radar.planetizen.com/node/31157?prev=http%3A%2F%2Fradar.planetizen.com%2Flist

News Clip:"According to new research from the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, upper-class individuals are more likely to break the law while driving, compared to lower-class individuals. In both naturalistic and laboratory methods, upper-class individuals were also more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, take valued goods from others, lie in a negotiation, cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, and endorse unethical behavior at work."


News Clip:"Inviting residents to participate in map-making gives them a voice in the spatial planning process. It also provides insights into how they use their cities – where they live, where they work, where they cycle."


News Clip:"The Bicycle as a symbol of progress, of renewal, of promising times ahead. This is not a new concept. Indeed it has been around since the invention of the bicycle. Many bicycle posters at end of the 19th century featured promising themes like liberation, progress, freedom."


News Clip:"The group began with the proper assumption that the U.S. school system is in need of a drastic fix of some sort. But rather than hiring better teachers or rejiggering standardized testing, they opted to challenge the system's very infrastructure. The result is what you see above: A bunch of schools perched throughout the Manhattan skyline like eagle nests, drawing eyes upward with flashy, schoolbus-yellow paint jobs."

Public Policy News

"Santorum and Higher Ed"
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/09/santorums-views-and-history-higher-education
News Clip:"Santorum seemingly opposes not only federal support for colleges and universities but some of the underpinnings and goals of the American higher education system. He railed against colleges and universities as “indoctrination mills” lost to Satan. Then he derided President Obama’s push for more Americans to pursue higher education: “What a snob.”"


News Clip:"Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students."


News Clip:"The AARP report, which examined the retail prices of the 514 brand name and generic drugs most widely used by Medicare recipients, said that the price of generic drugs fell by nearly 31 percent from 2005 to 2009. But at the same time that brand-name drug prices grew by nearly 41 percent and specialty drugs rose more than 48 percent. The rate of inflation, by contrast, grew by just over 13 percent over the same period."


News Clip:"Doctors who have easy comput
er access to results of X-rays, CT scans and MRIs are 40 to 70 percent more likely to order those kinds of tests than doctors without electronic access, according to a study to be published in the March issue of the journal Health Affairs."


News Clip:"NEWARK — Work has begun on an education-centered community featuring three charter schools and affordable housing for teachers in the city’s decayed downtown, with much of the design work done by the noted architect Richard Meier."

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