USG Institutions:
www.myajc.com
How one girl overcame abuse, abandonment to graduate with top honors
By Molly Bloom – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At school, Taniya Shockley was the smart kid, the one everybody wanted to work with, the girl teachers wanted to take home. At home, no one wanted her. The oldest of six children, Taniya was born in Decatur to a mother unable to take care of her. She lived with a series of people — a grandmother, family friends, an aunt — until she ended up in foster care in New Jersey where by her own account she was beaten, punched and berated. …eventually ending up back in Atlanta as a teenager, living in a house rented by a woman she barely knew with no food, no electricity and no way to get to school, she said. Then a neighbor’s daughter introduced her to pastor Gary Burke. Today, when she graduates in the top 10 percent at Atlanta’s Carver High School for Health Sciences and Research with a full ride to the University of West Georgia, Gary Burke and his wife Felisia — the couple Taniya now calls mom and dad — will be cheering her on.
www.bizjournals.com
Three firms named finalists to design Georgia Tech’s office space at Coda
David Allison
Editor, Atlanta Business Chronicle
Three firms have been named finalists to design 13 floors of office space at Coda at Georgia Tech. The finalists are ASD/SKY; Gensler; and Perkins Will. The firm that’s ultimately selected will provide interior design services for the office tower floors 4-16. Coda, formerly called the High Performance Computing Center (or HPC), is being developed by Portman Holdings for Georgia Tech and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. It will be a 750,000-square-foot mixed-use building at Technology Square at Spring and 4th streets in Midtown Atlanta.
www.onlineathens.com
Athens Regional to become new health care provider for UGA Athletic Association
By STAFF REPORTS
Athens Regional Medical Center was selected to become the new official health care provider of the University of Georgia Athletic Association, effective July 1, subject to completion of a binding contract. The selection of Athens Regional came after a UGAA healthcare committee, comprised of medical professionals and athletic administrators, reviewed proposals for medical care options.
www.businessinsider.com
These driverless car drones have been taught to drift
Adam Payne
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States have built tiny, self-driving vehicles designed to drift around dirt tracks at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour without crashing, Evan Ackerman at IEEE Spectrum reports. Drifting is a technique used by racing drivers. It involves the driver deliberately oversteering when entering a corner so that the vehicle’s wheels lose traction. This makes the car glide impressively around the corner at a high speed. The little electric vehicle on the right is able to drift but operates without a driver using software called AutoRally, which enables it to stay in control (withstanding most crashes and roll-overs) while driving aggressively.
Higher Education News:
www.insidehighered.com
Critique of Performance-Based Funding
The Century Foundation on Wednesday published a report that is critical of state policies that link funding of public colleges with measures of their performance, such as graduation rates and degree production numbers. Roughly 35 states are either developing or using some form of performance-based funding for higher education. The new report’s author, Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied such state-based formulas, argues that performance-based funding is rarely effective.
www.insidehighered.com
Pledging to Graduate on Time
The State University of New York at Buffalo has made big gains on its graduation rates, thanks in part to a “Finish in 4” pledge that features real commitments by students and the university alike.
By Paul Fain
A decade ago just 35 percent of students at the State University of New York at Buffalo graduated within four years. That number climbed to 55 percent last year, and the gain was accompanied by a rare narrowing of graduation-rate gaps for minority and low-income student populations. A key part of the university’s broad completion push is a pledge it introduced for students in 2012. And the so-called Finish in 4 program features serious commitments, by both students and the university. A. Scott Weber, senior vice provost for academic affairs at SUNY Buffalo, helped create the pledge. He describes it as a demonstration of “joint responsibilities to make progress to a degree.”