Education Section

Saying that “our health care costs will paralyze the university unless we take action,” University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman said that employees and retirees will be asked to pay a greater share of their health care costs starting in 2010. She gave no other details about the plan, saying that the leadership of various employee groups were being informed today, with information to be released to faculty and staff on Friday morning. Coleman made the announcement during opening remarks at Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting.

The cost-sharing changes – which will be available in detail on UM’s Benefits Stewardship website Friday – will also be discussed at a series of forums to be held later this month, Coleman said. No changes in benefits are planned. [Full Story]

At last Wednesday’s administrative briefing for Washtenaw County commissioners, the group was reminded about a VIP reception to be held before their March 18 board meeting. The special guest? Stedman Graham.

“Stedman – is that Oprah’s boyfriend?” asked commissioner Ken Schwartz.

“Yes,” county administrator Bob Guenzel replied. “But don’t call him that.”

Aside from the Oprah Winfrey connection, Graham is a management consultant, best-selling author, motivational speaker and founder of the nonprofit AAD Education, Health and Sports, which works to develop the leadership skills of disadvantaged youth. He’ll be in Ann Arbor to highlight the county’s efforts to end illiteracy, and will be speaking at five different events on March 18-19. [Full Story]

Oftentimes here at The Chronicle we cover wildly different events within the span of a few hours. And equally often, it ends up that seemingly different things – like classical music and a language competition – have all sorts of connections we never imagined.

And so it was on Saturday, when we observed first a master class taught by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at Hill Auditorium, followed by a statewide Japanese Quiz Bowl at the University of Michigan Modern Languages Building, just behind Hill. Both events were attended by several hundred people, and both had communication at their core.

But only one of them talked about vomit, and that’s where we’ll begin. [Full Story]

A few months ago we wrote about developing an online citizen survey here at The Chronicle, and wrote confidently: “We’ll launch the survey on Jan. 1, 2009.”

Happy New Year.

With input from several readers on topics and wording, we’ve put together a final draft. Here’s the survey link for readers who’d like to get started right now. For others, here’s a couple of notes about how it’s set up. [Full Story]

Several Chronicle readers who live in the neighborhood surrounding Michigan Stadium alerted us to emails they received today about sound tests planned for Friday afternoon and early evening. In his email, Jim Kosteva, director of community relations for the University of Michigan, states that from 3:30 to 7:00 p.m. on March 13, approximately five tests will be conducted that will sound like a “cannon shot.”

Reached by phone this afternoon, Kosteva said the tests will generate about 140 decibels of sound from a device positioned at the north end of the stadium in front of the scoreboard, facing into the stadium. [Full Story]

At planning commission’s working session on Tuesday night, held in the 6th floor conference room of the Larcom Building, representatives of the University of Michigan described a request for permanent closure of Monroe Street, between Oakland and State streets. Previously, The Chronicle covered the proposed Monroe Street closure as part of UM’s early December 2008 meeting with neighbors, which is now required under the city of Ann Arbor’s citizen participation ordinance.

Sue Gott, university planner, and Jim Kosteva, director of community relations, made the presentation to the commission’s working session for the permanent street closure, which would not come before the commission as a formal request until April 21 at the soonest, according to Connie Pulcipher, senior planner with the city of Ann Arbor, who attended the working session. [Full Story]

In the midst of all the sturm und drang surrounding the future of Shaman Drum Bookshop, I went to Nicaragua.

Dianne, my wife, had been teaching for the last month in Catarina, a town in the mountains south of Managua. She volunteered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, a small congregation in Ann Arbor of which we are both members. ECI is collaborating with the Iglesia Bautista Remanente, a Baptist church in Catarina, on projects that “will bridge the divide between wealth and impoverished countries by providing capital, employment and opportunities for cultural exchange.”

Joe Summers, our minister, is an old friend of mine – we worked together in the bookshop years ago – and ECI is an openhearted, diverse community that is serious about creating a better world. Although I’ve been mostly engaged with Buddhism in my adult life, I was attracted to this church because of the willingness of Joe and the congregation to struggle together around difficult issues. And I still enjoy a good sermon.

I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with Dianne about the state of the bookshop given that our telephone and internet connections were short and infrequent. The experience teaching in Catarina was transformative and very positive for her, but living conditions were difficult. She asked me to come. I traded my frequent flyer miles for a ticket to Nicaragua. [Full Story]

Students outnumbered parents at Tuesday night’s budget forum for the Ann Arbor Public Schools, but only (we suspect) because it fulfilled a civics class requirement. At any rate, the 20 or so people who showed up at the Scarlett Middle School media center all got a lesson in the intricacies of public school funding, and a look at how AAPS plans to deal with an anticipated $6 million deficit in its next fiscal year, with the deficit projected to grow to $12 million by 2011-12.

Approaches include possibly floating a countywide millage as early as this fall, increasing student enrollment through online offerings, and lobbying state legislators for additional dollars and to reform the way schools are funded. [Full Story]

It’s Wiki Wednesday again, an occasional series in which The Chronicle reminds readers of the online encyclopedia, ArborWiki, to which they can contribute their knowledge of the community. In the inaugural edition of our Wiki Wednesday series, we suggested adding to some ArborWiki entries consisting of name lists. One of those name lists was a historical record of people who have served on Ann Arbor city council.

Following that link reveals a whole host of additions, since last week, some dating back to the 1950s. Other additions are more recent. [Full Story]

(Ann Arbor City Council March 2, 1896) Council’s meeting over a century ago apparently began with a departure from the usual form to which The Chronicle has become accustomed over the last few months. The mayor of  Ann Arbor began with an address, of which we publish here the first two paragraphs.  [Full Story]

A brutally cold wind buffets the group huddled around a sugar maple at the Washtenaw County Farm Park. They’re looking at a small metal device that’s been gently hammered into a hole drilled in the tree. Faye Stoner, a park naturalist for the county, sounds doubtful. “It’s probably too cold,” she says.

But wait – a kid in the group cries out: “It dripped … it dripped!” And sure enough, a globule slowly rolls off the end of the spout.

The maple sap is rising, and two dozen very cold people are learning about what Stoner calls “a gift from nature.” [Full Story]

Last Tuesday evening at the University of Michigan Indoor Track building, runners were spinning  through at least two different workouts: (i) 400-300-200-meter ladder repeats with 30-second recoveries between rungs, and a 4-minute recovery between the four total set, and (ii) run at your goal 5K goal pace until you just can’t maintain it any longer.

If you were a member of the Michigan All Stars, a youth track club that competes in Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) events, you did the ladder repeats. And if you were a member of the Ann Arbor Track Club, you did the run-til-you-drop drill.

The occasion actually gave The Chronicle the chance to renew a previously-made acquaintance involving another kind of drill – the kind of giant drill that’s used to bore for soil samples. [Full Story]

Today is Wednesday. Wiki Wednesday.

What’s a Wiki? It’s like an online encyclopedia – to which anyone can make a contribution. The phrase “Wiki Wednesday” is not original with us. It’s used commonly throughout the world as a day for Wiki-philes in a specific community to work together on a Wiki.

Alert: The key word here is work. By the end of the article, you’ll be invited to do some work.

Our Wiki Wednesdays will focus on an online encyclopedia for the greater Ann Arbor area called ArborWiki, which currently comprises 2,771 entries. Those articles  have accumulated over the course of the last three years since its launch in fall of 2005. [Full Story]

University of Michigan Board of Regents (Feb. 19, 2009): At their most recent monthly meeting, UM regents got a detailed report about the community benefits provided by its health system, and heard from several students lobbying the university to establish a sustainability office.

Most items on the agenda – including approval of over $13 million in construction projects – received little or no discussion among regents or UM’s executive officers. [Full Story]

On Thursday morning, when The Chronicle used a front-door exploit on Arbor Networks’ State Street offices (i.e., went to visit the company), Jose Nazario made his computer screen display a steady vertical scroll of numerical strings separated with periods, one string per line, each in formats like 99.999.999.999.

The strings were recognizable as IP addresses (the numerical identification of a machine connected to the internet), but they were flying past fast enough that it wasn’t possible to visually track an individual number from the bottom of the screen to the top. That’s not surprising at  6.1 million lines per hour.

But who,  exactly, is Jose Nazario, and what’s he doing with screen-upon-screen full of IP addresses?

Is this actually the work of some mysterious cabal? Why yes, it actually is – even if “mysterious” overstates the case a little, given that the work, underway a couple of months prior, was announced on Feb. 12. [Full Story]

February 12, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, British naturalist and author of a pretty famous book, “On the Origin of Species,” published when Darwin was 50.

In cities around the country and the world, groups of likeminded people will come together in dark wooden bars, buzzing coffee houses, and swanky little wine bars to celebrate Darwin Day. They will toast Charles Darwin, bemoan the state of science and reason around the world, and toast the Brit who first published the dangerous ideas of evolution and natural selection: Patrick Matthew. [Full Story]

When Jane Ferris led her class of first-graders through their math lesson on Monday, they counted underwear and socks – not their own, but a batch donated at a sock hop held Friday at their school, Eberwhite Elementary.

Once tallied, the items will be added to donations from around the county, part of the Education Project for Homeless Youth‘s Sock Drop Drive to provide basic clothing for kids whose families can’t afford it on their own.

Peri Stone-Palmquist, coordinator for the Education Project, said this is the first time they’ve done this type of clothing drive, and that the economy is a factor: A lot more people are asking for basic clothing, while local thrift shops don’t have as much, because of the higher demand. And, she added, “who wants to get underwear at a thrift shop?” [Full Story]

The stage in Huron High School’s theater is stark, as is the play that students are rehearsing: A community coming to grips with the murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, 11 years ago.

“The Laramie Project,” which opens Friday, was a choice that several students in the Huron Players theater group advocated for, says director BJ Wallingford, and one that he’s personally wanted to do for years. The play is not without controversy – it’s one that is frequently protested by the ultra-conservative Westboro Baptist Church, and were it not for efforts by the Ann Arbor Police Department, protesters would have descended on Huron High as well. More on that later.

At a rehearsal on Monday, actors went through their paces and the technical crew worked out glitches in lighting and audio in the school’s new theater, which opened last fall. The play itself is powerful, a challenge for both actors and the audience in confronting people with attitudes and beliefs that often differ fundamentally from their own. [Full Story]

Bright fuchsia cards printed with the Ann Arbor Police Department seal have been threaded through the spokes of the wheels on nine bicycles locked to the hoops at the 4th & Washington parking structure. The cards weren’t placed there as decoration, but as a warning: these bicycles face possible impoundment starting Feb. 5.

What’s the problem with people locking their bikes to the hoops provided for exactly that purpose? As the notices say, “Your bicycle may be impounded as provided by city ordinance when it has remained unattended on public property for a period of more than 48 hours after a written notice has been affixed to the bicycle.” The notices reflected that they were written on Feb. 3 and indicated a possible impoundment date of Feb. 5. [Full Story]

The Chronicle arrived midway through Thursday’s day-long Local Food Summit 2009, and found evidence of the morning’s work plastered all over the walls of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens conference room: Colorful sticky notes on butcher paper, categorized by topics like “Food policy/legislation,” “Resources for young/new farmers,” “Distribution,” “Heritage” and “Community Self Reliance.”

Each note listed a resource, idea or goal, and together represented hundreds of ways to strengthen and expand this region’s local food system. About 120 people had gathered to focus on that topic, and organizers hope the momentum from Thursday’s event will transform the way our community thinks about food, and in turn transform the health of residents and our local economy. [Full Story]

Edwin Olson, assistant professor in the University of Michigan’s Computer Science and Engineering department, didn’t know beforehand about the A2Geeks Make TV Movie Night, but when he saw robots in the atrium of the CSE building, he figured it was something he might be interested in and stopped to chat. Olson directs the Autonomy, Perception, Robotics, Intelligence, and Learning (APRIL) lab on the third floor of the building.

Movie night was not an A2Geeks event per se. As Dug Song put it, the organization, which he helped form in November 2008, is meant more to support other existing groups than to run its own events. And on Thursday, the existing group getting some geek love from A2Geeks was GoTech. [Full Story]

Horns for the Holidays still has a trickle of donations coming in – apparently, a lot of people clean out their closets after the new year, and sometimes they uncover an old instrument that’s gathering dust. Four such instruments – a violin, viola trumpet and flute – had been dropped off at the Ann Arbor School of the Performing Arts, and last week The Chronicle headed over there to meet with the man who started this project 12 years ago, Ken Kozora. [Full Story]

On Monday evening at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn addressed the 300-400 people who had packed into the space, answered written questions and signed copies of their new book, “Race Course: Against White Supremacy.”

Ayers had gained renewed notoriety during the presidential campaign, through the speculation about a connection between Ayers and then presidential hopeful Barack Obama. When Republican candidate for vice-president Sarah Palin spoke of Obama “palling around with terrorists,” Ayers was the guy she meant – Ayers was a member of the radical 1960s group the Weather Underground. (Ayers rejected the label “terrorist” on Monday.)

Although it was Ayers and Dohrn who headlined the event, the story that The Chronicle found was in the people who attended, many of whom were linked in somewhat unpredictable ways. [Full Story]

University of Michigan Board of Regents (Jan. 22, 2009): The bulk of Thursday’s hour-long meeting of the UM Board of Regents was devoted to a presentation on the university’s research efforts, but the board also approved a multimillion-dollar building project for its basketball program, granted an honorary degree for Google’s co-founder, paid tribute to a former regent who passed away late last year, and plowed through a list of other agenda items with minimal discussion. [Full Story]

Administrative briefing and appointments caucus (Jan. 14, 2009): A staff briefing attended by all but two of the 11 Washtenaw County commissioners on Wednesday evening went quickly, previewing a relatively light agenda for the Jan. 21 meeting – the first full board meeting to be led by the new chair, Rolland Sizemore Jr. Taking up a bit more time was a caucus immediately following the briefing, where commissioners made an initial pass at divvying up committee duties for the year. [Full Story]

Overnight from Monday to Tuesday at the new UM Ross School of Business building, plant and custodial staff, along with employees of Aramark, which provides food services in the building, implemented a disinfection protocol for norovirus.

As of early Tuesday afternoon, there were no cases of norovirus yet confirmed among the 20-30 people who had become ill over the past week since the newly constructed building first opened on Jan. 5.  Further, according the Jennifer Nord, of UM Occupational Safety and Environmental Health (OSEH), the last date of onset for a new case of illness was on Jan. 10. People who have become sick have been requested to provide stool samples for analysis by the Michigan Department of Community Health in Lansing. As yet no samples have been provided for testing.

Nord and David Peters of OSEH, in a conference call (arranged by Pamela Koczman, manager in occupational safety and community health at UM), confirmed that the decision to act aggressively by starting the cleaning protocol last night was made based on: (i) the symptoms shown in cases reported, (ii) the quick spread, and (iii) the commonness of norovirus as the cause of such cases. [Full Story]

He’d performed on stage at Rackham Auditorium the previous night, but on Monday afternoon Arnold Steinhardt sat quietly in the audience, this time at Huron High School, listening to the school’s symphony orchestra rehearse Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78.

“Sounds great!” he said when the last note fell silent – and then he asked to hear more.

For two hours, Steinhardt – lead violinist for the renowned Guarneri String Quartet – shared his insights, gave advice and even played a bit on a violin borrowed from one of the students. It was an up-close exchange that came about simply because one of his fans in the orchestra asked him to come. [Full Story]

When The Chronicle covered a dress rehearsal of Pioneer Theatre Guild’s “Miss Saigon” last fall, many people we met backstage urged us to check out their annual FutureStars show too, and we marked our calendars. That date rolled around this weekend, when FutureStars 2009 kicked off with a total of four shows on Friday and Saturday, leading up to the blowout finale next Saturday, Jan. 17. [confirm date]

FutureStars is modeled after the pop culture phenomenon American Idol, minus the Simon Cowell acerbity. It’s a talent show, primarily of singers but with some dance performances tossed into the mix, too. In fact, one of the crowd favorites from Friday’s students-only show was a 6-foot-4 break dancer, Robert Axelrod from Huron High School. He’s advancing to the finals. [Full Story]

Ann Arbor City Council Sunday caucus (Jan. 4, 2009): Sunday night’s regular caucus focused on development issues: (i) a proposed PUD, City Place, to be built along Fifth Avenue, and (ii) redevelopment proposals for the city-owned property at 415 W. Washington. The caucus was bookended by remarks from representatives from two of the design teams for the 415 W. Washington, Peter Allen and Peter Pollack. [Full Story]

When The Chronicle arrived at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum Saturday morning, Ig Justyna was on the roof adjusting a directional antenna – when they say “hands on,” they aren’t kidding.

Justyna was the main organizer of Saturday’s link-up with the International Space Station, giving kids a chance to ask questions of the flight commander, Mike Fincke, via radio connection as the station made a pass over the continental United States. And it gave kids a look at just what amateur radio operators can do.

It was not an easy thing to pull off. [Full Story]