January 15th, 2013 at 3:15 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
By Ted Nesi
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s 11 higher-education institutions are combining forces to launch a new College and University Research Collaborative that will help state leaders understand what ails the local economy and what could help fix it.
• Related: Two must-read articles about economic development and RI (Jan. 15)
December 3rd, 2012 at 1:48 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Gentlemen of Providence, did you get stopped by a photographer sometime over the last month who admired your good taste in apparel? You may now be famous.
Rhode Island’s capital provides the pictures for GQ’s latest Street Style feature. “If you’re looking for outerwear inspiration, look no further than Providence, where we hit the streets to see how the city’s cold-weather experts tackle the winter chill,” the anonymous GQ caption-writer says.
The pictures were snapped by Grant Heinlein, a Kansas City native who’s now a sophomore at RISD studying graphic design. He said a friend who attends Yale and freelances for GQ approached him about doing the feature.
“Being a college town, with RISD and Brown students being very well dressed, we thought it’d be a good opportunity,” Heinlein told WPRI.com. “I took the photos over the last month leading up to the post, weather permitting.”
The photos were taken downtown and near the two campuses. “I’m not usually the best with asking random people to photograph them, but with a project like this, it’s inevitable that some of the guys know GQ, and are clearly into fashion and therefore won’t have an issue with me taking their photograph for the site,” he said.
August 9th, 2012 at 1:04 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Venture for America isn’t the only new alternative to corporate life that’s making waves on College Hill.
Upstart, an organization that debuted Wednesday, describes itself as “a new approach to funding and mentorship.” It lets recent college graduates raise money online for whatever they want to do next, in exchange for “a small share” of their future incomes. Reuters calls it “part social network, part crowdfunding service in the style of Kickstarter.”
The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence is one of five schools where Upstart is launching next month, along with Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington. (A disclaimer on its website notes: “Upstart is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Rhode Island School of Design.”)
“There’s this overwhelming desire to not follow the traditional path of bolting yourself to a desk and climbing the corporate ladder,” Upstart founder and CEO Dave Girouard, who led Google’s online apps division for eight years, told Reuters. (Or, as Upstart’s website puts it: “The startup is you.” ) He’s raised $1.75 million in seed funding to get Upstart started up.
July 19th, 2012 at 11:36 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
By Ted Nesi
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The Rhode Island School of Design has agreed to more than double its voluntary payments to the city in exchange for a semi-exclusive right to parking spaces around its campus, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras announced Thursday.
Update: Taveras spokesman David Ortiz sends along the following list of parking spaces to which RISD will now get “semi-exclusive access”:
[T]he spots include six parking spaces on Fulton Street where parking is currently prohibited; four parking spaces on Westminster Street where parking is currently prohibited; four parking spaces on Meeting Street; 16 parking spaces on the east side of South Water Street; 20 nonexclusive parking spaces on the west side of South Water Street; four parking spaces on Middle Street; five parking spaces on Washington Street; six parking spaces on Benefit Street between Waterman and Meeting Streets; and five exclusive parking spaces on Benefit Street between College Hill and Waterman Street (the Benefit Street spots are mid-block to preserve on-street parking to accommodate the Court House and local businesses).
June 18th, 2012 at 5:24 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
The Rhode Island School of Design’s leader is taking a side gig.
RISD President John Maeda will join the board of directors of privately held Sonos Inc., the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based manufacturer of home audio systems, as part of a new $135 million financing round for the company, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Maeda, who ran the MIT Media Lab before taking the top job at RISD in 2008, is known for his work at the intersection of design and technology. Sonos spokesman Eric Nielsen confirmed Maeda’s appointment to the board in an email to WPRI.com.
He’s not the only local college leader to serve as a corporate director. Outgoing Brown University President Ruth Simmons served on the board at Goldman Sachs and remains on the board at Texas Instruments. Bryant University President Ron Machtley has been on the board at Amica Mutual Insurance Co.
This post has been updated.
April 30th, 2012 at 9:56 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
Read all about it - a productive 24 hours for the mayor, with a balanced budget now suddenly within reach.
March 29th, 2012 at 2:20 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Here’s an interesting chart city officials gave out on Thursday afternoon at a hearing on a bill to force tax-exempt institutions to pay 25% of the tax bill they’d owe if their property was taxable. It shows the latest assessments of property owned by the seven largest, led by Brown University and Lifespan hospital group:
• Related: Moody’s: Cities must balance tax-exempts’ cash, contributions (Feb. 15)
February 15th, 2012 at 1:14 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Moody’s Investors Service thinks Providence and other cities could reap significant rewards from pushing local tax-exempt institutions to fork over more money. But they should guard against killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTS, “represent a potential revenue boon for local governments with high concentrations of tax-exempt properties in their tax bases, many of which are in the Northeast,” Moody’s analysts wrote in a research note Tuesday that singled out Boston as a successful example.
“Though far from immanent, greater PILOT revenue comes with long-term risks for some local governments should PILOTs grow so large that they impair not-for-profits’ ability to create jobs and stimulate the economy, or encourage them to move elsewhere,” Moody’s said, adding: “In general, local governments are still far from that tipping point.”
“Efforts by local governments to bolster PILOTs appear to be shaping into a trend,” according to Moody’s. In addition to Providence and Boston, Scranton, Pa.; Worcester, Mass.; Framingham, Mass.; and Newton, Mass., have all sought larger voluntary payments recently.
February 15th, 2012 at 12:15 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is set to announce later Wednesday a new agreement with Johnson & Wales University to increase the school’s voluntary contribution to the city budget. It would be the first deal the mayor has finalized with one of the large tax-exempts he’s targeting for $7.1 million.
One of the big questions will be, how is the agreement structured and how much more is JWU going to pay? All four private colleges in Providence – Brown, JWU, PC and RISD – already began making yearly payments to Providence under a 2003 deal struck with then-Mayor David Cicilline.
In JWU’s case, the 2003 deal calls for the school to pay Providence a total of $6.34 million from 2004 through 2023. This year’s payment is $308,890 and next year’s is slated to be $313,523. For comparison purposes, the other payments this year are $1.2 million from Brown; $264,262 from PC; and $175,784 from RISD.
The mayor is also expected to meet with Brown President Ruth Simmons on Wednesday to renew their talks.
Update: Still waiting for a more detailed description of the structure of the agreement, but here’s how the mayor’s office described what JWU will pay in a statement Wednesday:
The agreement at least triples JWU’s annual contributions to Providence, increasing the university’s annual payment from $308,890 this year under an existing 2003 memorandum of understanding to at least $958,000 each year with the potential for as much as $1.45 million annually.
In all, JWU will directly contribute an additional contribution of as much as $11.4 million to the City of Providence over the next 10 years, bringing the university’s total contribution to as much as $14.5 million over 10 years.
The agreement is structured with an upfront contribution from the university of as much as $5 million in accelerated payments to the city.
• Related: Taveras hammers retirees, tax-exempts in grim State of the City (Feb. 13)
February 9th, 2012 at 6:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Is Providence biting the hands that feed its residents?
Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and his aides certainly don’t see it that way. But the seven tax-exempt institutions they’re targeting for a bigger contribution to Providence’s budget employ one in five workers there, making each of them one of its main employers, city documents show.
The gang of seven are Brown University, Lifespan (Rhode Island and The Miriam hospitals), Care New England (Women & Infants and Butler hospitals), CharterCARE (Roger Williams Medical Center and St. Joseph Health Services), Providence College, Johnson & Wales University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Those seven tax-exempts employed 20,837 workers in Providence in 2011, which was 19.5% of total city employment, according to R.I. Economic Development Corporation data city auditors prepared for bondholders. Brown is the city’s No. 1 employer with 5,162 workers, or 4.83% of total city employment.
August 30th, 2011 at 10:13 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
Quirky's Kaufman, left, with Zien
A Rhode Island School of Design grad student’s invention will get some national publicity this evening when it costars in a new Sundance Channel reality show.
Jake Zien’s invention – Pivot Power, a flexible power-strip – will be featured in tonight’s hour-long premiere of “Quirky,” about the product-development company of the same name. The show chronicles how Quirky founder and CEO Ben Kaufman brings amateur inventors’ creations to market.
Wired described the $30 Pivot Power as a “clever solution to power-cord overload” – its six adjustable outlets allow big adapters to fit in each one – but said “the broke, Rhode Island School of Design student had no resources to bring his invention to market.”
Zien, who created Pivot Power as a class project, has sold about 75,000 of them since it went on sale last year. He’s earned $21,297 from his invention as of Tuesday.
“Quirky” airs at 10 p.m. tonight on Sundance.
(photo: Sundance Channel)
May 27th, 2011 at 2:24 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
RISD students are, as ever, a unique bunch:
EVERYTHING about S. Russell Groves is just so, from his style of dress to his choice of words; nothing is superfluous. A modernist who worked for Richard Meier and Peter Marino before starting his own architecture and design firm in 1995, Mr. Groves does not seem like the sort of person who would amass anything in quantity.
As it happens, he does have what he calls a “weird fetish” for cutlery. It began when he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design and was given an assignment to rethink flatware.
“I became interested in how you can apply modernist principles to flatware,” he said.
Who hasn’t?
(via The New York Times)
April 25th, 2011 at 2:42 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify,” Jerry Seinfeld once said. “Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city – you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.”
That may sound sacrilegious in these salad days for local sports fans, with the Celtics moving on to the second round, the Bruins on a three-game streak against the hated Habs, and the Sox righting the ship after a shaky start. But The Boston Globe’s Leon Neyfakh reports that Seinfeld was onto something:
[T]he link between losing [games] and loyalty is less puzzling to experts in the growing field of fan studies, a burgeoning effort in the academy whose practitioners are interested in how sports fans think and why they feel as intensely as they do about their favorite teams. …
Having a winning record, these researchers have found, is just a small part of what makes franchises like the Sox, or the Celtics, or the Bruins, the objects of intense dedication. Instead, their findings point to a variety of factors that contribute to fanship, including our instinct for tribal affiliation, our desire to participate in tradition, and our hunger for compelling characters and dramatic story lines.
Fandom, it turns out, is a surprisingly clear window into our brains, and into how loyalty in general works.
One of the academics featured in The Globe story hails from right in our own backyard: Daniel Cavicchi, an American Studies professor who’s been teaching at RISD for the past 15 years and has a Ph.D. from Brown. (His first book was “Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans.”)
Cavicchi also writes a blog covering the same topics, amusingly named “The Ardent Audience” – check it out. I liked his posts about how iPods are changing listening culture and how fans used to rush the field more.
(photo: Rene Schwietzke/Flickr)
December 7th, 2010 at 8:00 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
Or is it?
The blog Very Small Array put together this map of the United States last Friday by replacing the states’ names with the top suggestion offered by Google’s Autocomplete feature when you type each one in. Here’s what it found:
Seems to me a number of these are driven by students frantically trying to figure out their homework. (“Shoot! What was the Missouri Compromise?” Same deal for Massachusetts Bay Colony.)
According to the map, the first Autocomplete suggestion for “Rhode Island” is Rhode Island School of Design. But when I went to Google and typed in “Rhode Island” myself, the top suggestions were “Rhode Island College,” “Rhode Island DMV” and “Rhode Island Hospital.”
That’s probably because of Google’s new personalized results, which it unveiled about a year ago. What I saw may be the top three Autocomplete suggestions for people in Rhode Island when they type in the state’s name, whereas people nationwide are most likely looking for RISD. Just a guess, though.
August 20th, 2010 at 1:13 pm by Ted Nesi under General Talk
James Franco (via Wikipedia)
The actor James Franco – the bad guy in the “Spider-Man” movies – is headed to the Rhode Island School of Design this fall to study art. That is, when he’s not two hours away working on his Ph.D. at Yale, The New York Times reports:
James Franco … is at 32 a famous actor and celebrity movie star of considerable self-made means. But he also has an interest in art dating back to childhood. He studied painting in high school and has apparently at times considered being an artist.
These ambitions have perhaps been diminished by Mr. Franco’s determined multitasking, which has received quite a bit of attention in the press.
He has combined a movie career with activities as a screenwriter, director and producer, simultaneously attending graduate school in writing, filmmaking and poetry at four separate schools. A book of his short stories is due out this fall, at which point he will begin work on a doctorate in literature at Yale and also study at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Between him and Emma Watson, College Hill is going to be a hot spot for celebrity sightings.
(hat tip to the AP’s Michelle Smith)