>> Coming up on "Need To Know" -- an update on downtown.
Also Rochester Institute of Technology and creativity.
Between now and graduation day "Need To Know" will look at some of the
things area colleges and universities have been doing this
academic year.
And spring break for area schoolchildren brings fair weather
fun.
[Captioning Made Possible By WXXI]
>> Rochester's news magazine since 1997, this is "Need To
Know."
>> And thanks for joining us.
I'm news director Julie Philipp.
As we approach the commencement season, we are beginning a
series of reports on what students and faculty have been doing
this year on area college and university campuses, but first,
we turn our attention to downtown Rochester.
And a number of developments this week.
On Monday, United States senator Chuck Schumer came to town.
The Democratic senator issued an ultimatum for Maggie brooks.
Carlet Cleare reports.
>> Use it or lose it.
>> Senator Chuck Schumer is talking about federal funding for
the proposed Renaissance Square project.
Schumer told Monroe county and project leaders this is the final
call.
>> We're giving the county one last chance.
Get this project moving.
>> This fall, the $19 million designated for the project could
be spent elsewhere.
Schumer says he'll work hard to protect the fund for one more
year, but there are strings attached.
>> These are four easy steps that have to be taken to help the
project.
First, move up the final decision date so we don't lose all the
money.
Second, keep design within realistic budget.
Third, determine how the facility will operate once it's built
and who's going to do it.
And fourth, insure the public is involved.
>> Monroe county executive Maggie brooks has set April of next
year as the deadline for deciding if Renaissance Square will
happen.
Schumer says that's too late to ensure fund retension and the
deadline has to be moved up to January or --
>> All federal funds for Renaissance Square should be
reprogrammed to another Rochester initiative.
>> Brooks released a written statement agreeing to Schumer's
demands.
For "Need To Know," I'm Carlet Cleare.
>> Schumer is not the only federal lawmaker talking about
this.
Democratic Congressman Louise slaughter says she will not
support renewal of the funds.
She has been a critic of the Renaissance Square project and
wants that money spent on other endeavors in Rochester.
A little less controversy in city council chambers Tuesday
night.
>> Number 153, all in favor, please say AYE.
>> AYE.
>> All those opposed nay?
Motion carries 7-0.
>> The council voted to buy midtown plaza in preparation for
the state-funded demolition, clearing way for Paetec
communications' new headquarters.
City council also voted to sell land.
The property on chestnut street is being sold for about $2
million to eastman savings and loan for that company's new
headquarters.
Area universities also have millions of dollars in development
projects underway.
They are increasingly being seen as economic drivers in this
community.
Their primary purpose, of course, continues to be higher
education.
But what does that look like in this high-tech world?
With commencement days just around the corner, we are going to
spend the next few weeks profiling a few of the things that
have been happening on campuses in the finger lakes region this
academic year.
We begin with Rochester Institute of Technology.
R.I.T. is getting ready for a new festival showcasing its
research programs.
We've decided to let graduate student Amanda Wade give you a
little background in this report.
>> Rose shulman and her design partner Steven garland are
taking an earthy approach to the event.
These students are testing their creative talents by designing
a free-standing structure of air-cleaning plant life.
>> Sustainability is just really important.
I think a lot of design is going the other way and we're making
a lot of land fills.
Just to get people thinking about other ways to act and live is
really important to me and my team.
>> Imagine R.I.T. will feature hundreds of exhibits.
Many on display across campus.
But the epicenter of the festival will be inside the Gordon
fieldhouse and activities center.
This space is reserved for the best of the best.
R.I.T. president says the festival is a great way to welcome
the public on campus, all while showcasing what makes R.I.T.
unique, programs that unite technology with the creative arts.
>> It's an opportunity, I think, to put a stake in the ground.
And we are going to identify ourselves with innovation and
creativity here.
This is the kind of thing we're going to be known for.
>> And Dr. Barry Culhane is known for being the chairman of the
imagine R.I.T. innovation and creativity festival, and he joins
us now in studio.
Nice to have you.
>> Nice to be here.
>> Since he started, they have been pushing the idea of
branding R.I.T. as the right side of the brain coming together
with the left side of the brain.
It sounds like he's been pretty successful at getting the
R.I.T. community to buy into that.
>> He really has.
He came to R.I.T. well prepared having seen the path that we're
on, which is onward and upward.
And he and his wife Rebecca, who's a cognitive psychologist,
came on campus and visited all these colleges, and they had a
wow experience.
They thought, this is a good campus, but now we realize it's a
great campus.
And it's filled with innovation and creativity.
And that's the brand that he's been giving us to use as we move
to the next level --
>> Bringing the arts with the technical side together, it's
something that's been happening but nobody's really looked at
it in the way that he has kind of termed it.
>> Yeah, coming to campus as the new president, he saw things
that some of us who work there don't see, and so he sees the
activities of the left brain, the photo, the design, all of the
art emphasis.
But he also sees the engineer and the business side of it and
all the right brain mathematical side of it and he sees how
both collide and collaborate and do work in teams to come up
with unique ideas and resolutions to problems.
And that's where he got the idea that we should showcase this
to the whole Rochester community and upstate New York.
>> Now his predecessor had been pushing towards having R.I.T.
as a category of one, and this is building on the plan to be a
category of one?
>> Yeah, he caught the idea that we really needed to be unique
in the field of higher education, and he understood the idea of
innovation and creativities was the way to do it.
It's there.
It's right in front of us, and it's something that will set us
apart for the future in all of higher education across the
world.
>> Now Dr. Simone was also well known and well liked for
getting out into the community.
Is this the biggest effort you've seen to bring the community
in to R.I.T.?
>> This is long overdue, and the biggest effort by far.
We expect 30,000 people there today.
It's going to be a very exciting day.
They'll be 400 exhibits and activities.
It's a family friendly event.
Bring your kids.
There will be free rides.
It's the -- it's rain or shine.
And of the 400 exhibits, only 40 are outside.
So if we do get a little drizzle, which we won't, we'll be able
to move everything in.
>> I want to back up just a minute.
30,000 goal.
It's not an accident that that number is out there.
What are the other concerns when it came to campus and areas
that you wanted to target was getting alumni more involved in
the campus, and this is sort of an effort to do that as well,
isn't it?
>> It is.
>> 30,000.
>> 30,000 is the number of Rochester alums of our 100,000 alums.
He's out traveling the country, been to 29 cities to talk to
alums everywhere.
So this is a chance to say to all the local alums and the
citizens of Rochester, come on down to R.I.T. because there are
some amazing things that you never really get just from
reading.
You have to experience it.
You have to be there.
It's interactive.
It will be like an Epcot center where people can travel around
to different areas and have this experience of wow, I had no
idea that was happening at R.I.T.
>> A lot of schools use their athletic teams to kind of bring
the alumni, students, community together.
R.I.T. doesn't have that, so this is an effort to kind of build
that sort of spirit that a team might bring to a school?
>> Absolutely.
It's the team of being innovative and creative.
It's the brand we have intellectually and in terms of pragmatic
research.
Students, faculty and staff are the people putting on this
entire event.
It's not like we're bringing in outside vendors in to show
different kinds of things.
This is all done by our R.I.T. community internally to show to
ourselves because many of us don't know all the different
things that are going on there.
>> So in a way, it's even better than having an athletic team
because you come in from the game and you have that spirit but
you don't know what's going on on the campus except for the
playing field in front of you.
So this is sort of a way to directly get into what they're
doing in the classrooms and we're going to talk about the
specifics in a minute about that.
But first, the magnitude of this, talk about, you're the
chairman.
What has this been like pulling this together?
>> Well, it has been very exciting.
I have said from day one that you have to have a high tolerance
for ambiguity to put this together, but we have will-do people
on our campus.
Our students, our faculty and staff have rallied around the
president on this innovation, creativity festival.
And in nine months, so many people are involved, we're going to
do hometown news stories --
>> Stop you for a minute.
What about the president has made him so successful at
getting people to rally around his ideas so quickly?
>> Well, he's very focused.
You know, he's an electrical engineer who has -- collects
banjos and plays banjos.
He loves R.I.T., honest to God.
He's come on campus and said this is really one of the greatest
opportunities that I could ever have.
And so they feel that enthusiasm.
They see his consistent vision.
He's already decided how we can make R.I.T. better over the
next five to 10 years, and this is clearly one of those ways by
embracing innovation and creativity.
>> Let's talk about.
There's about 400 exhibits, and how did you select the 400?
Students came forward and said we have this going?
Faculty came and said we have this to show you or -- how did
you do this?
>> Well, we started out by doing a general call for exhibits
through the web, really.
And as we evolved, we realized, you know, we've really got to
get the college representatives to show off what they think the
best of the best is in each of their colleges.
So once we turned them loose and they put together a committee
of faculty and staff and students, then they got very excited
about showing their pride in what they do innovative and
creative so they all created internally their plans on how to
show off their colleges.
And then we mapped on top of that several themes, including,
you know, imagine R.I.T.'s imagine green for sustainability.
And a number of other themes that fit across several colleges.
>> So you keep talking about the wow experience.
Have you had a wow experience when you're looking at these
exhibits?
>> Well, my wow experience has been every step of the way as
I've seen the lung, the biological lung that college of
engineering students have put together, as I look at the green
vehicles, the green car and the electric bicycle.
A car that costs under $5,000 gets 800 miles to the gallon.
I think I want to buy one.
That was a wow experience for me.
But I see the level of enthusiasm and the interaction among so
many of our students, faculty and staff and their desire to
show the public the wonderful work that they're doing.
It's very exciting.
>> Now I thought the music was in my earpiece.
That was your phone ringing.
That was sort of a wow experience.
>> Yeah.
>> Are the students as wow, do you think, as you or I might be
or is this just a different generation?
The majors they're taking these days comparing to when you
started at R.I.T. must just be incredibly different.
>> It really is.
I mean, we'll see on that day everything from glass blowing to
gaming and, you know, when I started, there wasn't a software
development game program and some of those students are going
out into jobs that will make a lot of people want to come to
R.I.T.
So you see the flexibility at R.I.T. growing, you know, right
along with software development and technology.
You also see that historical strand of art, the school of
American crafts and the many printing and photography majors.
What's been beautiful is that all of this now has come together
in a rather impressive cross disciplinary way.
And that makes it very unique from the days when I was in
college where there was liberal arts or a certain major, you're
seeing more and more of this cross disciplinary working,
engineering students working with graphic design to create some
sort of game software or something --
>> Which in a way replicates the real world these days, doesn't
it?
And I remember when we were looking at universities, the
research universities, that was their focus and if you were a
student that really wanted to get into the research end, that
would be where you'd go.
Then there was the teaching universities where less research
was done but perhaps you got more focus on the classroom.
Those days seem to be gone, that it's all part of the mix.
>> Yeah.
The research is just as important as a lot of the technology
and arts.
There will be poster displays of research.
Engineering students will actually show products that they have
developed.
You'll see all kinds of research that has applied implications
for business and the corporate world.
So we're melding with that.
>> We've got about 30 seconds left.
Fun things, too, for families.
You've got carnival rides, all that going on as well.
And it's may 3.
Saturday, may 3.
>> Saturday, may 3.
>> And parking at M.C.C. with shuttle buses.
Anything I'm missing?
>> No.
You've got to be there.
>> Thanks so much for joining us.
Barry Culhane, executive assistant to the president of
Rochester Institute of Technology and chairman of the imagine
R.I.T innovation and creativity festival coming up on may 3.
As I mentioned earlier, "Need To Know" will feature several
other campuses over the next several weeks in our occasional
series commencement.
We will take a look at some of the things students do before
graduating and entering the real world.
It's time now for "The Business Section with the Democrat
and Chronicle."
>> Democrat and Chronicle business reporter Matt Daneman is
back.
Good to see you.
>> A pleasure.
>> Starting off with unemployment.
Figures are out.
>> Yeah, march was the cruelest month for Rochester's economy.
Basically unemployment numbers for the Rochester area, 5.7%,
the same as they were in February.
That's not so bad, compared to march of 2007 when it was 4.5%.
The last couple months have just not been all that great for
the jobs picture.
You're looking at continual decreases, primarily
manufacturing.
Manufacturing is still the area where we're bleeding as is much
of the country in the northeast.
Some growth in education and construction, but not nearly as
much --
>> Little bright spots in there.
Education and where else?
>> And construction.
>> But not enough to offset the much larger losses?
And so compared to the state, how --
>> State's unemployment rate overall was 4.8%, so we're lagging
behind the state average.
Compared to upstate like Buffalo and Syracuse, we're kind of in
the same boat.
>> Another indicator of the economy, of course, housing
starts.
Those numbers not looking so great.
>> Not so hot either.
This is the happy show.
In 2007, housing starts on homes, you know, houses, on
DUPLEXES, something in the Rochester region.
Compare that to 2006 and you're talking almost twice that,
you're talking around 2,200.
So the numbers in the Rochester region just declining since
2004.
You've got factors in there such as 2004 is when eastman Kodak
started hacking at its work force.
Nobody is building nationwide because credit is tight and
people are afraid.
>> And signs of the recession that now they're saying we are
in.
Also impacting Xerox a little bit, their first quarter earnings
out.
>> Yeah, earnings were out this morning.
And Xerox is indicating that they're in a conference call with
investors that they're starting to see some impact of recession
woes or economic slowdown woes.
Companies looking at buy big pieces of equipment taking longer
to buy that equipment.
More companies are doing leases as opposed to buying.
So, you know, impact and ripple effect all over the place.
>> Let's talk about the earnings a little bit.
>> It's -- it would have been a really good quarter for Xerox
if it weren't for one big sort of white elephant in the middle
of the room.
They ended up losing $240 million in the first quarter
primarily because there's huge securities lawsuit settlement
that they announced back in march where they're going to pay
hundreds of millions of dollars, like $670 million to people
who supposedly lost money investing in Xerox for a four-year
span when the company was allegedly cooking its books.
>> Big one-time payoff has really hit.
What would it look like?
Are they looking at what it would look like if that sign were
not --
>> Yeah.
If this had never happened, they'd be up almost mirror image.
They'd be up about $240 million for the quarter and sitting
pretty good.
Their revenues quarter over quarter compared to the first
quarter of 2007 were up, like, 13%, pretty healthy growth.
>> Sort of mixed news.
>> Exactly.
>> There's talk of merging hospitals a little.
>> Yeah, something like 70 M.D.'s are going to be sort of
appealing to the finger lakes health agency, which is sort of the
state designated group that does health planning for the
Rochester region, sort of making the case that instead of
having three scattered hospitals, Thompson, Canandaigua,
instead of having these three small hospitals, there should be
one big central hospital.
If you have the -- the way the system is now, they don't have
the specialists and they don't have the bulk of patients where
they can get to specialists so everybody is scattered about.
If you had one regional, you could get to that kind of level of
treatment.
>> 30 seconds left.
RG&E.
>> So the parent company of RG&E is maybe going to be bought by
a Spanish company, but now that Spanish company is saying we're
getting hankie about the whole deal, supposedly because of New
York's regulatory hurdles and climate.
It is a very, very heavily regulated thing.
I mean, this is taking months and months.
And now they're saying we're not sure.
>> OK.
Thank you so much.
Matt Daneman is a business reporter for the Democrat and
Chronicle.
We're just about out of time, but before we go, let me mention
an upcoming opportunity for you to talk to New York governor
David Paterson.
He is bob Smith's guest next Wednesday at noon on 1370
connection on WXXI a.m. 1370.
Again, governor David Paterson is taking phone calls from
listeners next Wednesday on 1370 connection with bob Smith
beginning at noon on WXXI a.m. 1370.
I'm news director Julie Philipp, and I'll be back here next
week.
I leave you today in the hands of "Need To Know" videographer
marty Kaufman who headed out for spring fling at the Genesee
museum this week.
He caught some area schoolchildren and their families getting a
spring break lesson on the signs of the season.
>> Good afternoon.
My name is Linda, and I will be your guide this afternoon to
search for spring.
We're going to be listening.
I hear the chickaDee singing his love song.
Can you whistle?
[whistling]
>> I'm not a very good whistler.
>> I bet a little practice and you'd be calling them in.
We're also going to search for some wild flowers, see if he can
find some spring wild flowers.
We're going to, of course, look for salamanders.
I happen to know where quite a large one is hiding this
afternoon, so I'm going to head there first.
Do you hear the crow?
He is probably a Jefferson salamander.
He has a little bit of blue spots.
But this is about the size they get.
>> Whoa.
>> Some people thought they were baby alligators, but these are
amphibians.
>> There are no alligators here.
>> No, there aren't any alligators here.
And he's very cold.
Now if you would very gently like to touch him, one finger very
gently.
What does he feel like?
>> He feels like Jell-O.
He feels like Jell-O.
>> You're doing a great job of being very gentle.
You think he likes being out here in the sunshine?
>> No.
>> Yeah, he likes being -- he's often called a MOLE
salamander.
They like to be underground.
With the first warm spring rain, all the salamanders of this
kind in the woods go to a pond that we're going to see in a few
minutes.
So what we're going to do is -- now do you think I should lift
up the log and put the log on top of the salamander?
>> No, put it back, like, in the exact place otherwise he might
get squished.
>> What I'm going to do is put him right next to the log and
let him climb under because I don't want to squish him.
I never look under this log.
OK, we'll head on to the pond.
>> What did you get?
>> They think he's just a stick.
>> And it all depends on his habitat.
Sometimes they live in areas where there aren't any little
sticks and there are lots of stones, so they glue little stones
all over their body.
>> So they look like pebbles.
>> He will grow up to be a fly, about this big.
>> That's huge.
>> A larger fly.
Not like your house fly.
He's a little bit different.
>> He's huge.
He's going to be huge when he grows up.
>> This is the pond where we usually find the salamander's
eggs.
I don't know that we'll find them.
But this is the pond where all those salamanders usually come
to lay their eggs, even though we can't see them today.
Maybe later on you'll come back.
They usually get some green algae growing on them and make it
easier to spot.
We have a few other things I'd like to show you.
What are those?
Those are interesting, aren't they?
There's one over there.
These are may apples, and the plant looks like a little palm
tree when it comes up.
It's about this high and has a white flower.
So the may apples are just pushing through.
The other ones you can see right here, this is called trout
lily.
Because people thought it looked like a speckled trout
underneath the water.
You see they're all over here.
>> So we found spring, didn't we?
I think it's truly here.
Well, thank you for the walk with me.
>> What do you guys say?
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> You're very welcome.
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