(Photo by: Raychel Johnson) President Wight learns about Scott Nagaos undergraduate research project on frog skin disease.

On Thursday morning at Capitol Hill, purple Wildcat ice cream was given to members of the Utah Legislature by Weber State University alumni groups and undergraduate students presenting research projects.

The WSU Day at the Capitol underwent its 10thyear with 21 different undergraduate research posters and 19 projects. Many students were at the Capitol presenting for their first time. WSU President Charles Wight, also a first-timer, went around to each research poster to learn more. He said the variety of subjects represented was incredible and that most of the students at the event are finishing up and going on to medical school or graduate school.

Oh, its amazing, said Wight, surrounded by a sea of purple ties and jackets worn by WSU alumni supporters and students. It really shows what Weber State students can accomplish as part of their undergraduate education.

The emeritus alumni have been part of the WSU Day at the Capitol since its beginning. In previous years, they would journey up to the Capitol to speak with Utah lawmakers and remind the legislature about WSU issues. Now, for the fourth year in a row, the alumni group has invited undergraduate students to present their research projects in the rotunda of the Capitol building and hopefully gain the attention of the Utah legislative body.

Wight met with the emeritus alumni last night to discuss where WSU sits on the legislative agenda and what messages to give to legislatures in order to support WSU in the 2013 legislative session.

I think we have great support from our local legislatures, and a lot of them are in leadership positions, Wight said. There is a lot of uncertainty now about not only the state budget, but the federal budget, and so its hard to be really predictive about whats going to happen as the final outcome, but I know we have great support.

The planning class in the geography department assisted students with their undergraduate research project. Brad McIlrath, a WSU student, helped with the project titled Ogden WSU Intermodal Hub Site Plan. The project highlighted a new plan for a WSU center in downtown Ogden where there will be a testing center and dorm-style housing. The project also highlighted a new bus route or streetcar that would travel from WSUs Ogden campus to downtown.

Although a lack of funding prevents this plan from actually occurring, McIlrath said that, as economic development increases, public transit and mass transit becomes extremely important. He also said presenting the project would help him prepare for a job in the future.

Its going to be valuable in that aspect, and I think its going to be even more valuable in trying to help Ogden City revitalize its downtown area, McIlrath said. This is what Weber State is doing, and this is applicable to real life.

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Undergrad presentations seek legislative attention

Interview by John A. Byrne

(Poets&Quants) -- If Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard were to advise his McKinsey-bound son on where to get his MBA, Hubbard says there are only four or five programs that he would recommend. He declines to mention the schools by name, but you can rest assured that Columbia would be on the list along with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. That leaves a lot of very good schools off the list.

Hubbard, dean of Columbia's business school since July 2004, is an economist by training. He joined Columbia in 1988, after beginning his teaching career at Northwestern. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush and a top economic advisor to Mitt Romney during his recent presidential campaign.

In a wide-ranging interview with Poets&Quants, Hubbard discusses, among other things, the anxiety in MBA programs, whether Warren Buffett will become a donor, and Columbia's MBA application plunge last year, vastly exceeding downturns at other elite business schools.

Last year, applications to Columbia's MBA program fell by 19%, more than at any other top business school. How are things looking this year?

We are fortunate that our applications are up 9% year-over-year. What was weird about our drop is that it came along all at once. I told the faculty I felt like Wile E. Coyote, where he ran off the cliff and didn't know it yet. We had a couple of years where applications had plateaued and then all of a sudden crashed. But fortunately we are back up.

Your decline was generally attributed to Wall Street's troubles and the fact that Columbia's fortunes are so closely tied to Wall Street. Agree?

Wharton had a similar pattern. And if you were to do a trend line, we are both on that line. Harvard is above it. Harvard is the one school at the top where if you did a trend line pre-crisis and looked at applications, it's above it.

Do you think the decline is related to the belief that the value of the MBA degree has declined?

No. I think the value of the degree is still very high if you can go to a good school. If you go to any top business school, you will gain a skill set and mindset to make you a very good business leader. If you have in mind only an analytical job track, you might want to question the ROI. I think it's really hard to defend, at least in money terms, the value of an MBA beyond the top business schools.

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Columbia B-school's Glenn Hubbard: Is an MBA worth it?

Interview by John A. Byrne

(Poets&Quants) -- If Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard were to advise his McKinsey-bound son on where to get his MBA, Hubbard says there are only four or five programs that he would recommend. He declines to mention the schools by name, but you can rest assured that Columbia would be on the list along with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. That leaves a lot of very good schools off the list.

Hubbard, dean of Columbia's business school since July 2004, is an economist by training. He joined Columbia in 1988, after beginning his teaching career at Northwestern. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush and a top economic advisor to Mitt Romney during his recent presidential campaign.

In a wide-ranging interview with Poets&Quants, Hubbard discusses, among other things, the anxiety in MBA programs, whether Warren Buffett will become a donor, and Columbia's MBA application plunge last year, vastly exceeding downturns at other elite business schools.

Last year, applications to Columbia's MBA program fell by 19%, more than at any other top business school. How are things looking this year?

We are fortunate that our applications are up 9% year-over-year. What was weird about our drop is that it came along all at once. I told the faculty I felt like Wile E. Coyote, where he ran off the cliff and didn't know it yet. We had a couple of years where applications had plateaued and then all of a sudden crashed. But fortunately we are back up.

Your decline was generally attributed to Wall Street's troubles and the fact that Columbia's fortunes are so closely tied to Wall Street. Agree?

Wharton had a similar pattern. And if you were to do a trend line, we are both on that line. Harvard is above it. Harvard is the one school at the top where if you did a trend line pre-crisis and looked at applications, it's above it.

Do you think the decline is related to the belief that the value of the MBA degree has declined?

No. I think the value of the degree is still very high if you can go to a good school. If you go to any top business school, you will gain a skill set and mindset to make you a very good business leader. If you have in mind only an analytical job track, you might want to question the ROI. I think it's really hard to defend, at least in money terms, the value of an MBA beyond the top business schools.

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Whether an MBA is really worth it

District 11 will close Wasson High School, as well as Bates and Lincoln elementary schools. Students and alumni, including Rich "Goose" Gossage, fought hard to keep Wasson High School open.

Tonight, District 11 superintendent Dr. Nicholas Gledich said, "This has been one of the most difficult processes I've ever had to consider as a superintendent."

We'll have reaction tonight on KRDO Newschannel 13 at 10.

Here is the entire statement from District 11:

DISTRICT 11 SUPERINTENDENT STATEMENT Posted: February 6th, 2013 8:29 PM

Tonight the School District 11 Board of Education voted on the recommendations brought forward by staff as a result of the Optimization of Utilization Plan. The final vote this evening was in favor of the following:

* Consolidate from five to four comprehensive high schools, close Wasson High School and integrate students into Coronado, Doherty, Mitchell, and Palmer. * Open an Early College, Career, and Alternative Education Center at the Wasson location; consolidate current alternative, career pathway, and adult and family education programs. o This consideration provides a single location for D11 alternative programs: Tesla, Bijou, Night School, Digital, Achieve K-12, Homebound and Home School, Adult and Family Education, and Career Pathway programs (including auto, hospitality, medical, and ProStart). * Resolve the Monroe Elementary School detached boundary. There is no impact on students. * Close Bates Elementary School and Lincoln Elementary School; integrate students into Jackson, Edison, Audubon, and Fremont Elementary Schools

As a result of this vote, many District 11 students, families, and employees will face some significant change next school year. During the Board's comments tonight, board members remarked on what a difficult challenge it is to close schools, but that they have to be wise stewards of taxpayer funds, while also working to ensure District 11 provides the best quality education for all students. I echo their thoughts tonight, as this has been one of the most difficult processes I've ever had to consider as a superintendent.

Board members also discussed the Optimization of Utilization procedure that was used to gather public input, and remarked on the inclusivity and opportunity given for public feedback. Both the Board of Education and I are grateful for all of the community members who took the time to give us feedback and ask questions during this process. The feedback was used as part of the criteria to form the recommendations and will be incorporated in how we will move forward to implement the plan and address needs. Thank you for your help in that process, it was very valuable to both the Board and me.

In light of the vote this evening, I know the coming months may be filled with many questions from our D11 families as to what happens next. I have directed all district staff to work closely together over the next few months to communicate needs and ideas, ensuring a smooth transition for all impacted students and families. Through diligent attention to details, sensitivity to those impacted by changes, and effort to prepare students for a world yet to be imagined, I know District 11 will become even stronger and continue to provide the highest quality education to all students.

Excerpt from:
District 11 votes to close Wasson

Two teenage Kilgore sisters are dead and their brother is seriously injured after a single-vehicle wreck Sunday night in Rusk County.

Mergimtare Bojkaj, 17, died at East Texas Medical Center in Kilgore and Liridane Bojkaj, 14, was pronounced dead on the scene, said Trooper Jean Dark with the Texas Department of Safety. Their brother, Murteza Bojkaj, 19, is at Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler.

Dark said the vehicle, a 2001 Honda CRV was driven by Hava Shala, 33. Also in the front seat was Bennie Shala, 37. The three Bojkaj teens were in the back seat. The boy and younger girl were ejected from the car, while the older sister was partially ejected.

The wreck occurred about 10 p.m. on U.S. 259, just north of Henderson. The Texas Department of Public Safety worked at the scene assisted by the Rusk County Sheriffs Department.

Our preliminary investigation leads us to believe that the driver swerved to avoid something in the road, driving the vehicle into the median, Dark said. In the median, the vehicle rolled over and the three teens were all ejected, either fully or partially, from the vehicle.

Mergimtare Bojkaj was a junior at Kilgore High School. Her brother was a 2011 alumni and the younger sister was an eighth grader at Maude Laird Middle School, said Greg Brown, Kilgore High School principal.

She was a very sweet and well-liked young lady, Brown said. She was kind of quiet, a good student who never caused a bit of trouble.

The Bojkajs were a close-knit family, he said. They had owned two restaurants; first Napolis in Kilgore, then Sals Pizza Cafe in Henderson. Merg, as she was called by her friends, worked in both establishments.

The Kilgore High School campuses had five counselors available Monday to talk with students. .

This has been a very hard day for our school, Brown said. Everybody grieves differently, of course, but several students who were particularly close friends of hers (Merg) were so upset that they had to go home.

Read the rest here:
Wreck kills teen sisters

During the first half of the 20th century, pediatricians generally believed that children's eye problems were largely self-corrective that a child would grow out of his or her crossed eyes or poor vision. But they were wrong.

Unless a vision problem is detected and corrected early, the child will have vision problems in that eye for the rest of his or her life. Subsequent studies have shown that 2% to 5% of preschool children have vision problems, many of them not apparent.

In the late 1940s, a small group of physicians began to recognize this problem. One of them was Dr. Leonard Apt, a pediatrician who spent most of his career at UCLA. "During my pediatric training, I would request a consultation for a baby who was having a vision problem and the ophthalmologists would ask, 'How do you get information from a baby?'" he said. "That's when I realized I could adapt my pediatric techniques to ophthalmology."

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2013

Apt stepped aside from his pediatric work and learned ophthalmology, becoming the first person to have a fellowship in pediatric ophthalmology at the National Institutes of Health and the first physician to be board-certified in both pediatrics and ophthalmology. At UCLA, he established the first division of pediatric ophthalmology at a U.S. medical school and was one of the five founders of the Jules Stein Eye Institute.

Apt died Friday at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center after a brief illness, the university announced. He was 90.

Innovations pioneered by Apt saved the eyesight of hundreds of thousands if not millions of children. "He was truly one of a kind," said his colleague Dr. Sherwin Isenberg of UCLA.

Apt is probably best known for the Apt test, developed while he was a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School in the early 1950s. When a pregnant woman exhibits vaginal bleeding or a newborn infant has bloody stools or vomitus, it is crucial to determine whether the blood belongs to mother or child.

Apt developed a simple test to distinguish between the two types of blood, focusing on hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying portion of blood. Fetal hemoglobin has a slightly different composition than that of adult hemoglobin and is substantially more resistant to degradation by a base, such as sodium hydroxide.

The Apt test involves isolating hemoglobin from a small amount of blood, then exposing it to sodium hydroxide and examining it under a microscope. If the hemoglobin then appears pinkish, it is from the fetus; if it is yellowish-brown, it is from the mother. The Apt test "was a major breakthrough," Isenberg said. It is still widely used, but it is being supplanted by a newer test that determines proportions of fetal and maternal blood.

Read the original here:
Leonard Apt dies; UCLA pediatric ophthalmologist was 90

''Reinvent Yourself!'' That's the title of one issue of the Alumni Magazine of one of the best business schools in the world, the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. I was fortunate to have been closely associated with the professors of this business school, which year in and year out appears among the top five to ten business schools in the world in listings of the The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and other business publications. The good news is that many of the top professors of IESE will be teaching in an Advanced Management Program (AMP) that is specifically tailored to the needs of top executives who will be at the forefront of the ASEAN Economic Community that will come to its own in the next twenty years. The message that the IESE professors are sending about reinventing oneself is especially relevant to Filipino entrepreneurs and corporate executives who will still be actively involved in business in the next ten to twenty years during which the Philippines will finally be one of the fastest growing economies in the Asia Pacific region, thanks to its educated, young and growing population.

If you are a businessman in your forties and have been operating in the Philippine business environment over the last ten to fifteen years, during which our country still had the reputation of being the ''sick man of Asia,'' you could have developed a mind-set and business practices that will be most probably unsuited to the ''breakout nation'' or ''tiger economy'' that the Philippines is expected to be in the next decade or so. One of the professors of IESE with whom I worked, Mike Rosenberg, said something especially relevant to the circumstances that Filipino businessmen are facing today: ''Too many companies pretend that tomorrow is going to be the same as today. But we know that tomorrow will be different.'' For example, it would be unwise for business people in their forties to assume that the trend towards the demise of most manufacturing activities that resulted from failed industrialization polices of the last century and the increasing service-orientation of the Philippine economy are a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, manufacturing is making a strong comeback in the Philippines because of the acute labor shortages being experienced by Northeast Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and even China, thanks to its one-child policy. Ask PEZA Director Lilia de Lima, the longest staying and most valuable government official in the field of industrialization. After literally dozens of trips to Japan, she has been receiving scores of requests for more space in our export processing and other industrial zones. That is why she is asking developers of industrial zones to expand their operations and to be much more active in helping TESDA and other private technical schools to increase significantly the pool of electro-mechanical workers and other skilled technicians that will be in great demand.

IESE professors like Mike Rosenberg, Carlos Cavalle, Bruno Cassiman, and Pankaj Ghemawat are experts in helping experienced business people to reinvent themselves. They are constantly issuing the following reminder: ''Necessity is the mother of invention and reinvention, and it was necessity that drove Apple to reinvent itself from a struggling computer concern to become the world's coolest brand. The companies that have successfully reinvented themselves - Dell, Apple, Cisco, IBM, 3M, Philips - have done so because they haven't let the grass grow beneath their feet, whereas the tens of thousands of businesses that failed to read the writing on the wall are both gone and forgotten. Revolutions tend to be led by visionary individuals, and the same is true when it comes to innovative companies, witness Steve Jobs at Apple and John Chambers at Cisco, for example.''

Reinvention applies both to the company and to the individual. I would like to see many Filipino professionals in such traditional fields as law, medicine, engineering, accounting and architecture, for example, venturing into the sunrise industries of agribusiness, tourism, knowledge process outsourcing, fashion and furniture, entertainment and health care. As the IESE professors advised their students and alumni: ''The pace of change means that individuals, too, have to be prepared to make a radical shift at least once in their career. Career makeovers are commonplace among politicians. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger both started out as actors; Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, trained as a physicist while Margaret Thatcher was a chemist. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, studied architecture before going on to a course in political science It is hardly surprising that the United States, where individualism and the idea of starting anew is built into the national DNA, is the cradle of reinvention. The lawyer John Grisham became a best-selling novelist, disgraced junk-bond dealer Michael Milken remade himself as a respected philanthropist, and when HIV forced Magic Johnson to quit basketball he went on to become an even more successful entrepreneur. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there is no second act in American lives--but he couldn't have been more wrong.''

An outstanding example of reinvention is Evgeny Kaganer, a Russian professor who teaches technology to MBA students at IESE. According to him, he has changed his career path several times: ''The question is, did I do it because I'm that kind of person or because of the circumstances I found myself in?... I finished medical school but I started working in financial services in my third year. I knew that I would not become a practising physician. A large number of people in the Soviet Union suddenly found they could no longer do what they'd been doing, and a lot were unable to make the transition.'' He does not claim that it is easy to prepare individuals for change. It is a matter of opening the eyes of people to the vast opportunities they can find in the business environment: ''Our approach at IESE is to point out different options. We try to make people understand that uncertainty exists. When you come to a business school where there are people from many different cultures and no single culture dominates, that forces you to reassess the norms you carry with you from home. We can't teach this but we can create an environment where people learn that diversity and uncertainty exist and about the different ways in which they can handle issues. I think business schools are doing a better job on this front than medical or law schools, maybe because we don't have such specialized content to teach, so we focus more on soft skills.''

Owners of business (especially family enterprises), CEOs and senior executives of large and medium-scale corporations and budding entrepreneurs are invited to seriously consider taking the Advanced Management Program (AMP) being offered by the University of Asia and the Pacific in tandem with IESE professors The first offering is already ongoing with some twenty top executives coming from the Philippines and Indonesia. Coming from diverse sectors like construction and real estate, investment banking, infrastructures, agribusiness, garments, entertainment, insurance, executive search, management consulting, retailing, tourism and energy, the participants for the next six months will be taking a close look at themselves and their organizations as well as the business environment in the whole Southeast Asian region with the objective of reinventing themselves and their organizations to take full advantage of the transformation of the Philippine economy from the ''sick man of Asia'' to the new Asian tiger. The next offering will be in September 2013. Those interested may get in touch with email address amp@uap.asia or 63 2 637 0912, loc. 207. For comments, my email address is bernardo.villegas@uap.asia.

Originally posted here:
Reinvent Yourself