Proposal for Using a Studio Format to Enhance Institutional Advancement

Universities today need to become quicker on their toes. They must continually scan the environment and seize emerging opportunities – and institutional advancement must lead this effort. An unfortunate number of institutional advancement operations are ill equipped for the task at hand. Many suffer from high staff turnover and overly hierarchical systems that refl ect excessive fragmentation and compartmentalization. They inadvertently perpetuate stifl ing and unnecessary bureaucracy. Organizing advancement efforts around the metaphor of the design studio or creative workshop promises to (a) pool talent, (b) cultivate collaboration, and (c) align diverse but related interests in order to promote fruitful advancement. By shifting the way personnel and leaders conceptualize their work, institutional advancement can overcome a number of challenges that currently hinder its efforts. The Institutional Advancement Atelier described in this paper can improve advancement ’ s overall productivity and its ability to see and harness opportunities in a quickly changing environment – and increase employee satisfaction in the process

The Urban Hierarchies of China and the United States

In the year 2012, China had 177 urban agglomerations (referred to as high-density built-up areas, or “shiqu” in Chinese) with populations of over 750 thousand inhabitants. These 177 areas are the commonly known major “cities” of China. Of these cities, Chongqing had the largest population numbering almost 17.7 million inhabitants. Shanghai followed at almost 13.5 million, and then Beijing at almost 12.2 million. Of special interest in this chapter is the fact that even though Chongqing has more inhabitants than Shanghai which has more inhabitants than Beijing, we will show that Beijing is the most “dominant” of the cities in China and occupies the top place in the urban system. By comparison, the United States in the year of 2012 had 69 urban agglomerations (referred to in the U.S. as metropolitan statistical areas) with populations of 750 thousand or more. The New York-Northeastern New Jersey-Long Island area has the largest population at over 18.9 million, followed by Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana at over 12.8 million, and Chicago-Joliet-Naperville at almost 9.5 million. It turns out that these three largest metro areas in the U.S. are also the three most “dominant” of all the U.S. metro areas in the same order as the size of their populations. Our analysis will demonstrate that these giant cities usually rank at the top layer of the country’s urban system

Resources for Systems Genetics.

A key characteristic of systems genetics is its reliance on populations that vary to a greater or lesser degree in genetic complexity-from highly admixed populations such as the Collaborative Cross and Diversity Outcross to relatively simple crosses such as sets of consomic strains and reduced complexity crosses. This protocol is intended to help investigators make more informed decisions about choices of resources given different types of questions. We consider factors such as costs, availability, and ease of breeding for common scenarios. In general, we recommend using complementary resources and minimizing depth of resampling of any given genome or strain