The Southwest Indiana STEM (SwISTEM) program for science, technology, engineering, and math at the University of Southern Indiana will begin its Equipment Lending Service for the 2012-13 academic year on August 14, 2012.

Educators in southwest Indiana are eligible to participate in the free service that delivers laboratory-grade equipment and hands-on mathematics learning tools to organizations involved in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education of pre-K through grade 12.

In 2007, USI was selected as a lead institution in the development and implementation of the new Indiana STEM (I-STEM) Resource Network. USI has primary responsibility for STEM-related efforts for the entire southwestern Indiana region. The focus of SwISTEM is on improvement of STEM-related education through curriculum assistance, resource provision, outreach activities, and professional development for educators in 12 counties within the region.

Source: USI.edu

Mesker Park Zoo & Botanic Garden is pleased to announce that a new animal species has been added to their collection. A male and female takin are now on exhibit in the Asian area of the Zoo, and can be found in the large centrally located yard. With horns like a wildebeest, a nose like a moose, and a body like a bison, it is easy to see why this animal was apparently the inspiration behind the character “Beast” from Disney’s movie Beauty and the Beast. Two coats of fur keep takin protected from the cold in their native habitat of the Himalayas. Tale, the male is four years old and came from the St. Louis Zoo. Two year old female Dawa arrived from the Los Angeles Zoo. According to Amos Morris, Zoo Director, “We are always excited to add a new species of animal to our collection at the Zoo, especially one with so much conservation significance.”

Mesker Park Zoo & Botanic Garden is open 365 days a year from 9 AM – 5 PM, entry gate closes at 4 PM. Admission for adults is $8.50 and children ages 3-12 are $7.50. Children 2 and under are free. In recognition of their support, Vanderburgh County residents receive $1 discount. Please visit www.meskerparkzoo.com for information regarding yearly memberships or other Zoo services.

The Louisville Courier Journal learned through documents obtained through the Open Door Laws that the KFC YUM Center has depleted a reserve fund of $3 Million established for repairs and maintenance down to $4,000 since April to make regular payments. The need to take such actions is reported to be caused by a shortfall in tax revenues earmarked to pay off the state of the art arena in Downtown Louisville that opened two years ago this fall.

Louisville sources have disclosed that the downtown TIF (tax increment financing) district that was expected to return over $14 Million only produced slightly over $6 Million making the raid on the reserve account necessary. The Ford Center is also depending on a steady predictable cash stream from a downtown TIF district to cover much of the debt service for the Ford Center.

Link to full article:

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120806/BUSINESS/308060111/-3M-arena-renovation-money-raided-debt-payment?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|News&nclick_check=1

I turned down several opportunities to move to Benton Harbor during my Whirlpool career, but I was never faced with move, or look for another job option. Whirlpool knows the importance of keeping as many of these highly qualified designers and engineers as possible and the present economy gives Whirlpool the edge. For most part, the closing of the design center was evitable, however the economy just moves the time table up a few years. The Company knows too well, these are not the jobs you hire the present college grads for, these are the jobs of experience, along with qualifications and it is the Evansville refrigeration history just like our furniture history, that is the most important to business.

This move will take around $15,000,000 dollars out of this fragile local economy and unless something starts to happen soon, we will start to notice the impact on Eastland Mall just like it has already hit Lawndale, North park and about twenty other strip businesses. The 200 million dollar low-ball sewer charge renovation will not help either! I am always astounded when a city Mayor and other leaders express surprise that a business is leaving Evansville. If you want to know who is next to leave, get in your automobile drive around the near North side or Westside and look at the broken sidewalks, weeds in the parking lot, building in need of repairs, etc.. A large national company like Whirlpool will not involve themselves in local politics, but over the past thirty years many of the small companies that left the city have cited the lack of interest and help from the City of Evansville.

Whirlpool, closes another remarkable chapter about the city of Evansville! We underwent a similar transition in the 50- 60’s with the lost of Chrysler, Servel, International Harvester, Arkla, and all of the smaller companies that supplied these manufacturing giants, plus the loss of the “furniture capitol of the world!” So, now we say, “lets move on, ” but now, we have a whole nation feeling the same unemployment and financial pain. And our competition, is not a competitor at all, for we have open our borders and trade laws and we are competing as a third-rate former world power and borrowing trillions. So, even as we seek to compete with others, the market speaks not in dollars, but in yuan’s!

Have you seen the latest jobs report? Major buzzkill: creeping unemployment, anemic growth, and the recovery’s totally stalled.

But not here: The District is booming! “Washington may have the healthiest economy of any major metropolitan area in the country,” says New York Times D.C. bureau chief David Leonhardt in Sunday’s Gray Lady. “You can actually see the prosperity”!

Yes we can! Construction cranes dominate the downtown skyline, and your average homeless guy can barely grab a stretch of sidewalk before yet another boutique store pops up to bounce his bedroll.

True, if you venture outside the Death Star’s orbit to visit the colonies for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you’ll see a lot of boarded-up storefronts. You might even feel a twinge of shame when Matt Drudge feeds you headlines like “D.C. Leads List of Most Shopaholic Cities in America.”

Whatever: Guilt is for losers! The main lesson the rest of the country should take from the capital’s prosperity is, per Leonhardt, that “education matters.”

D.C.’s “high-skill” economy boasts more college degrees than any other major metropolitan area in America. “If you wanted to imagine what the economy might look like if the country were much better educated,” Leonhardt writes, “you can look at Washington.”

Hey, you people out there in flyover country: We’re eating your lunch because we’re “smarter” than you! Hit the books, rubes: We built this!

Even so, I found it a bit unsettling last fall to read that “Beltway Earnings Make U.S. Capital Richer Than Silicon Valley,” as the Bloomberg News headline put it. After all, Silicon Valley “creates” wealth, while we — smart as we are — mostly shuffle it around.

Key factors identified in the Bloomberg report include massive defense contracts, “federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000,” “the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers,” and record-high lobbying expenditures. “Wall Street has moved to K Street,” comments Barbara Lang, head of the DC Chamber of Commerce.

The District is “not exactly the nation’s entrepreneurial capital,” the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein observes. “Other than goods and services sold to government, only 12 percent of the region’s output is sold to people and businesses outside the region, a number that has fallen in recent years.”

To be fair, Leonhardt acknowledges that some of the District’s prosperity comes from leeching off “economic value created by someone else.” But what Leonhardt concedes in one paragraph, he takes away in the next: One of the main reasons “Washington’s good times are not all — or even mostly — about rent-seeking,” he argues, is that D.C. gobbled up “more stimulus dollars per capita than any state.” Come again?

D.C.’s boomtimes show that “a Keynesian response to an economic crisis really can make a difference,” Leonhardt insists. Yes, and if everyone got more than their fair share of the fixed pie of federal boodle, then all the municipalities could be above average.

Leonhardt has a point about the economic value of education. But it’s one thing to use brainpower to build new products. and another thing entirely when it’s employed to redistribute wealth that other smart people have created. D.C.’s burgeoning Mensa Mecca is built on the latter impulse: Take me down to Parasite City, where the kids are smart and the girls are pretty.

Amtrak takes me home a couple of times a year along the Northeast Corridor, and I’m always puzzled by that big sign that shows up just outside New Jersey’s capital: “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.” Makes what, exactly?

But I’d support putting up a similar sign over the approach to Washington’s Union Station: “The Country Makes, D.C. Takes.” We could probably get stimulus dollars for that.

Source: Examiner Opinion, Gene Healy