Current Understanding Guideline

Exhaust the creative possibilities within this defined framework.

Expand on the connectedness with relevance, exactitude and excellence.

Think GENERATIVE!

CONVERGENCE LIVE! 2006

Beginning with the End in Mind (Plan your work, work your plan. Fail to plan, plan to fail).

Telecommunications Capabilities at Cobo Hall?

Convergence LIVE! (Intention determines alignment and alignment dictates design and configuration executables)

Educational Edutainment Elements?

Interactive Digital Connectivity and Innovative Remote-site Activities?








Let the discussions begin!

Something to CONVERGE our efforts on!

City district ranks last in graduations

Only 21.7% finish Detroit schools in 4 years, study says

BY CHASTITY PRATT
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

June 21, 2006

How the numbers were calculated

The study used a process called the Cumulative Promotion Index to come up with high school graduation rates. The data from the 2002-2003 school year, the most recent available, was collected from the U.S. Department of Education. The method looks at graduating from high school as a cumulative process rather than as a single event, multiplying the percentage of kids who make it through ninth grade, 10th grade and 11th grade and those who go on to get diplomas, to get a total percentage. The research was led by Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. Here's how it works:

Fewer than one in four high school students in Detroit graduate on time, according to a new report released Tuesday that compares the 50 largest U.S. school districts and ranks the city's public schools last in the nation.

Only 21.7% of the Detroit district's students graduate in four years, the Diplomas Count report said. In it, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center in Bethesda, Md., used a formula based on the number of students at the beginning of the year in each class -- ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th -- and the number of students who moved on to the next class the following year or graduated. The magazine Education Week published the report Tuesday.

Detroit Public Schools officials were quick to refute the figure, however, saying that the report does not take into account the large number of students it loses to suburban districts, charter schools or alternative programs, such as those for the General Equivalency Development certificate. At the same time, they noted various efforts -- including online community college courses -- to help retain students.

School officials said the report was based on a formula using data from the 2002-03 school year whereby researchers estimated the likelihood that a ninth-grader would complete high school in four years, earning a traditional diploma.

"To our knowledge, they were not calculating graduation rates. They are really looking at probability rates, which is quite different," said Juanita Clay Chambers, the district's chief academic officer.

Even so, the report suggested Detroit's public schools are in much worse shape than other districts at the bottom of the rankings, including New York City, which has a 38.9% graduation rate. Fairfax County, Va., was at the top, with an 82.5% rate. By comparison, the report's methodology showed 70% of students graduating on time nationwide and 66% in Michigan.

Part of Detroit's problem, according to the report, is that it suffers from low parental involvement as students grow older and a high transitory rate that leads students to attend several schools before graduation. It also has a small but significant number of students who end up in alternative programs to get a GED.

"They may graduate, but they don't graduate from Detroit," said Tyrone Winfrey, a school board member and chair of the board's academic affairs committee.

Kurt Metzger, research director for the United Way for Southeast Michigan, said the report is "low balling" the graduation rate because it doesn't count students who take longer than four years to graduate, or those who get a GED or transfer to another district.

Any move for change that would improve the numbers can't come fast enough for Devon McWright, 16, who attended Chadsey High School before enrolling this week in the Life Skills Center alternative charter high school. Violence and other social issues lead students to switch schools or drop out, Devon said.

"Everybody gets caught up in competing and trying to impress people, then they have the gang violence and the teachers -- they don't respond well to the kids," he said.

His mom, Andrea McWright, said Detroit schools need to work with parents to keep students from going to charters and other districts.

"There are dedicated parents, but when parents go up to the schools, they don't get any feedback," she said. "Then you have to take your child out of the public schools."

Contact CHASTITY PRATT at 313-223-4537. Gannett News Service and Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

DIVE, DIVE, DIVE!!!!!!!!!!!

Report: High Schools Fail To Meet Needs Of Tech-Driven World

Roughly only a quarter of U.S. high schools require students to take computer science courses, due in part to a misperception that computers are for video games and surfing the Internet, says a new report.

By K.C. Jones
TechWeb.com

Jun 12, 2006 12:10 PM

Only 26 percent of U.S. schools require students to take computer science courses, according to a report released last week.

Most cite lack of time in students' schedules, according to the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Though computer use pervades almost every aspect of life, the misperception that computers are for video games and surfing the Internet also prevents greater class enrollment, according to the report released last week.

"We all need to go beyond thinking this is just about the computer as a tool to help us learn other subjects—it's really about programming, hardware design, networks, graphics, and a myriad number of other elements," Anita Verno, professor at Bergen Community College and curriculum chair of CSTA, said in a prepared statement.

The New Educational Imperative: Improving High School Computer Science outlines steps for successfully implementing computer science education. It also describes how to identify intended curriculum outcomes to help make a case for the importance of preparing high school students for a technology-driven society and workforce.

"The United States cannot ignore the fact that there will be a shortage of qualified candidates for the 1.5 million computer and information technology jobs by 2012," co-author of the report and CSTA President Chris Stephenson said in a prepared statement. "This report provides a call to action for a variety of audiences to help others acknowledge computer science as the fundamental field that it is."

The report, backed by the National Science Foundation, compares the state of computer science education in American high schools to those abroad. It outlines best practices of successful programs in Canada, Israel, Scotland, South Africa and the United States. It also outlines a national curriculum framework and implementation plan. CSTA was launched last year by the Association for Computing Machinery. It provides policymakers, educators and business leaders with comprehensive strategies to promote computer science education. A CSTA task force worked with researchers and policymakers from around the world to produce the report.

CSTA issued a statement saying the report should serve as a "wakeup call to the United States on how far behind it has fallen in treating computer science education as a core knowledge requirement for all educated citizens."

Something for Governance

LEONARD PITTS JR.: A billionaire sets example for all

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

June 20, 2006

In the first place, I never knew Bill Gates was a Spider-Man fan. But his stated reason for transitioning out of day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft two years from now to devote his energies to charity work ("... with great wealth comes great responsibility...") comes suspiciously close to the creed by which the Webslinger has lived since 1962: "With great power comes great responsibility."

In the second place: wow.

Gates' announcement last week that he will henceforth work full time with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- founded with his wife in 2000 to confront global health and education issues -- has the feel of a potentially seismic shift. Working part time, as it were, Gates has already given or pledged more than $100 million to fight childhood AIDS, $1 billion to fund scholarships for minority students, $750 million to buy vaccines against diphtheria, measles, polio. His work has changed lives and saved them and has earned Gates and his wife -- along with Bono, lead singer of the group U2 -- the distinction of being named Time magazine's 2005 Persons of the Year.

It boggles the mind to think what Gates might achieve now that good works will be his full-time priority.

I will leave it to the people in the business section to analyze what his departure portends for the company he cofounded and the marketplace it dominates. I am more intrigued by the bar he raises, the example he sets. Not simply for Gates' fellow multi-billionaires, but also for thousandaires and hundredaires like you and me.

And here, I should probably mention my mid-life crisis. I will be 50 next year, which makes me two years younger than the world's richest man. So far, I can report that I've had no desire to take a girlfriend half my age or to blow the kids' college fund on a little red sports car. But I do find myself pondering, with an intensity I haven't felt since my 20s, this project we call The Rest of My Life.

I mean, if life's first act is about growing up, coming of age, learning the lessons that shape you, and the second is about acquiring things, getting ahead, building a career, shouldn't the third be about something bigger than one's own aspirations and comforts? Shouldn't it be about doing something, leaving something, creating something that makes life better for somebody else?

Yeah, I think it should.

Which is why I've always been a little envious of people who can write billion-dollar checks. Not for the luxuries and frivolities that kind of money can buy, though that would be fun. What attracts me more, though, is the idea of the burdens you could lift, the conditions you could improve, the educations you could give, the diseases you could eradicate, the enlightenment you could bring, the lives you could change.

Standing on the doorstep of 50, though, has a way of disabusing a man of his illusions. I am never going to be point guard for the Lakers, never going to be lead singer of the Temptations, and I'm never going to write a billion-dollar check. Not one that clears the bank, at any rate. Not unless they give me a really, really big raise.

Maybe the lesson of Bill Gates' example -- for hundredaires and thousandaires, at least -- lies less in Spider-Man's maxim than in this one: Do what you can, where you are, now.

Maybe that's why the Quran says: "Whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind."

Maybe it's why the Talmud says, "Whosoever saves one life, saves the world entire."

Maybe it's why the Bible says, "Love one another."

I can't write a billion-dollar check. But I can paint a fence, mentor a child, maybe even endow a small scholarship. Bill Gates has me thinking with fresh energy about those and other things I can do -- the responsibility I have -- to change my corner of the world.

As midlife crises go, that's not a bad one to have.

LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Write to him at lpitts@herald.com.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

Michigan's 60% to 70% High School Graduation

Not bad..........for Free-Throws

Oh those pesky numbers…… http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2006/06/22/index.html?levelId=1000

State of Michigan (60% to 70% Graduation Rate) http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2006/mi_SGB06.pdf

"SCIENCE LIVE" at Wayne State

Wayne State library, info science program wins distance learning award: The Wayne State University Library and Information Science program has been selected as the winner of the Excellence in Distance Education award in Sonic Foundry's 2006 Rich Media Impact Awards at the EduComm conference in Orlando, Fla. ECHO, for Enhancing Courses Held Online, is the LIS program's online distance learning instructional project that was developed by implementing Mediasite technology with the goal of providing distance students with access to course content "live" and "on-demand." The course's instructional benefits include the use of polls to reinforce learning concepts, question and answer for live discussions, and links to collateral material. "The LIS Program at Wayne State University is proving that Mediasite truly is a revolutionary communications medium," said Rimas Buinevicius, Sonic Foundry's chairman and CEO. "We're delighted to honor how the Wayne State LIS Program is transforming the way they not only communicate, but also compete in today's marketplace." Sonic Foundry recognized 22 organizations across eight categories for their innovative ways of using rich media within their organizations. Nominations were received from members of the Mediasite user community. Finalists were selected for demonstrating how rich media has transformed their organizations through measurable improvements in accessibility, cost savings, efficiency and productivity.

EYES on DESIGN 2006 for the Future 2007

EyesOn Design, billed as "the world's only car show to focus on the emotion and character of automotive design," will showcase some great examples of automotive artistry on Father's Day, June 18 at the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores.

This year, the event will spotlight 15 categories and 212 vehicles. Each category corresponds with a different art trend that has been reflected in vehicle design styles. Among them will be cars in categories such as Renaissance, art deco, modernism/futurism and pop art.

Tickets for the car show, $20. $100 tickets include the show, plus brunch. For more details, visit www.eyeson.org. To buy tickets, call (313) 824-4710 or visit www.acteva.com/go/eyeson. EyesOn Design is a benefit for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology (DIO) and the primary source of revenue for the DIO's research, education and support group programs.

PART of the Combination to the Vault of Our Digital Dreams

AGENDA

Review: LDMI CORE Business

*Disruptive Technologies (IPTV)

*Strategic Planning and Implementation (Pilot Programs)

NEW Business Opportunities

*K-12 Education (PBS Documentation June 14, 2006)

Strategic Program Development

*Convergence LIVE! Student-driven, project-based Digital World Café (Pilot Program) / October 2006



Next Steps

1. Discussion regarding LDMI corporate supported funding for K-12 Educational Pilot Program.

2. Discusion regarding technological support and facilitiation for Convergence LIVE! at Cobo Hall in October 2006.

3.

4.

5.

Next Meeting / Date, time and place?

Agenda Items
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

FEAR NOT We Are Not Alone...and in some pretty Great Digital Company!

June 14, 2006

Embracing Digital Era, PBS Hires John Boland of KQED to Fill New Post

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

Staking its future in the digital media world, the Public Broadcasting Service has created a new post of chief content officer and named a public broadcasting executive with extensive digital experience to fill the job.

John Boland, 57, is currently the executive vice president and chief content officer at KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco, which operates the PBS and National Public Radio stations in Northern California. KQED was one of the first PBS stations to have multiple digital channels to make its shows available at different times, and it was also one of the first to offer its shows on demand, through its Web site and in podcasts.

At PBS Mr. Boland, who starts in September, will oversee television programming, new media, education and promotion. As part of a restructuring, PBS will close its small Los Angeles office. Jacoba Atlas, one of PBS's chief programming executives, who is based there, will leave PBS at the end of this month. John Wilson, who with Ms. Atlas had been overseeing PBS programming and is based at PBS's headquarters in Arlington, Va., will now report to Mr. Boland.

Ms. Atlas said in an interview that she did not know what she would do next, and called it "a privilege to have been able to deal with content that is as exceptional" as that of PBS.

Mr. Boland's appointment is one of the first strategic moves by Paula A. Kerger, who took over as PBS's president and chief executive officer in March. In recent weeks she has announced an agreement to make available more PBS shows through free video-on-demand services, as well as a new partnership to offer hundreds of hours of PBS programs to schools, through Discovery Education's digital learning services.

In an interview Ms. Kerger cited "Quest," KQED's ambitious new science, nature and environment initiative, as an example of what PBS can aspire to. Under Mr. Boland's direction, KQED raised $7.5 million to pay for the first three years of "Quest," which will begin in the fall. The station's most expensive local undertaking ever, it will include weekly television and radio shows, a content-rich Web site with games and nature center tours that can be downloaded to personal portable devices, educational lesson plans that meet California teacher standards and community organization and museum tie-ins. All the broadcast material will be archived and available on demand after it is first shown.

The new digital world is "made to order" for PBS programming, Mr. Boland said in an interview. "We have content that has a very long shelf life and very long value because it was so well researched," he said. Because PBS programming doesn't rely on advertising for support, he added, it doesn't matter whether a viewer sees it when it is first broadcast or an educator accesses it 10 years later.

But PBS, a consortium of 348 local public stations, has to figure out how to make the transition from a program service that is still primarily used in a linear fashion, he said. Viewers, Mr. Boland said, "are still watching 'Nova' on Tuesday night and watching 'The NewsHour' at 6, and we need to continue to serve that majority of the public," while experimenting with all the new distribution outlets.

PBS and its stations must also find the money to finance the transition and experimentation.

Financing has been a continuing challenge at public television for the last decade, as corporate underwriters have cut back support of programming, colleges and universities have started forcing the stations they run to pick up overhead costs, and lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried to cut government financing, often successfully.

Mr. Boland, a former newspaper reporter who has been at KQED since 1995, said that Ms. Kerger, previously the No. 2 executive at the parent company of WNET and WLIW in New York, came to PBS with "more experience in fund-raising than any of her predecessors." PBS has started a new foundation to raise money, and Mr. Boland said he hoped that would be one source of financing for new digital initiatives.

Ms. Kerger said Mr. Boland would also be reassessing PBS's programming, not to make wholesale changes, but to think about new directions. "I would like him to think hard about how do we make our iconic work even better and bring new stuff onto the schedule," she said. PBS is already looking for new science programming, and Ms. Kerger said she would "love for us to think about the arts again."

Scientific Method and Quality

From the scientific method, you are deriving the fundamental tenets of ISO or any of the 'quality ensuring' formulae of the past twenty years.

May I suggest that you install flow-charting to further refine behavioral and procedural constraints...they really do require rigor and defy divergence. Results then turn out to be only as good as those persons involved...back to rigor.

Convergence LIVE! DIGITAL "World Cafe" Exploratorium 2006

CREATIVITY

AND

ORGANIC LEADERSHIP

A "SMARTER" conversation for K-12 Education

1. Define the Issues.

2. What are the different points of view on this issue?

3. Are the arguments sound?

* Are the reasons true?

* Do the reasons support the conclusion?

4. What are the consequences?

5. What is the conclusion?


Methodology (Scientific Method)

1. Identify an event or relationship between events to be investigated.

2. Gather information about event (or events).

3. Develop a hypothesis or theory to explain what is happening.

4. Test the theory or hypothesis throught experimentation.

5. Evaluate the theory of hypothesis.

21st Century Template for Development!

With an Eye Toward Development

As Land Use Professionals Offer Guidance, Expertise and Admiration, Designing High Schoolers Devise Plans for Fictional Blighted Area

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 11, 2006; C01

The students at Fairfax County's Robinson High School, tasked with creating a redevelopment plan for a mock neighborhood, were stumped. Where could they put office towers without upsetting neighbors? How could they meet the city's demands for affordable housing, yet still make money?

Luckily, they had an expert standing at their shoulders to lend advice: Patrick Saavedra, part of the development team that is building MetroWest, a controversial high-rise project near the Vienna Metro station. Now the students knew what developers experience every day, he told them.

"You're going through the same things we go through," Saavedra said. "These things can take four, five years."

Saavedra's visit was part of an unusual initiative in the Washington area: Local developers are going to high schools in Fairfax, Montgomery and Arlington counties to advise students on land use issues as the students compete over several weeks to produce redevelopment plans for a fictional blighted area. The program is the creation of the District-based Urban Land Institute, a national research and networking organization for developers, architects and planners.

For developers, the program, dubbed Urban Plan, is a chance to counter stereotypes of themselves as rapacious interlopers and to discuss land use in a setting other than the often-tense zoning meetings where they usually encounter the public. Getting to interact with the next generation of potential neighborhood critics -- and potential clients -- doesn't hurt either, said Saavedra, an architect with the Lessard Group of Vienna, which designed the 2,250-home MetroWest project.

"If you have students get engaged early in these ideas . . . they'll understand that density does make sense in certain places. They'll appreciate these things as adults much easier," he said. "It's people being misinformed that makes them reject proposals. They've haven't gone through an exercise like this."

The organizers of Urban Plan are aware that having developers in the classroom could raise hackles in a region so conflicted over growth, and they insist that the program is motivated by more than wanting to smooth the way for future projects. At its heart, they say, is a desire to get young people to think more about the "built environment" in which they live, to understand what trade-offs go into shaping it and to realize that they can have a say in what it looks like.

"The last thing we want is parents saying, 'You're trying to force pro-development [views] down our children's throats,' " said Meghan Welsch, an Urban Land staffer who coordinates the program in the Washington area. "It's really not about that. It's a civic engagement lesson, to create a more elevated level of discourse."

Urban Plan started five years ago in high schools in California, where it was designed by the institute and researchers at the University of California. It has since spread across the country, to New York, Atlanta and Chicago, among other places. It debuted in the Washington area three years ago in Arlington, and this school year it was used in a total of 13 classrooms: at Robinson, Arlington's Washington-Lee High School and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

The institute, which has about 100 developer volunteers enlisted, hopes to recruit more so that it can expand into additional schools, including some in the District.

The sessions don't have overt markings of indoctrination. Government or economics teachers interested in Urban Plan spend several classes introducing students to the redevelopment project's guidelines, which include financial constraints and community demands. Students then break into five-person development teams, with each member assuming a role such as financial analyst or city liaison, and they then use Legos and laptop computers to produce a redesign for the blighted "Elmwood" neighborhood.

Students must decide how best to mix housing, shops, offices, parks and parking, while attaining a profit of at least 15 percent. Challenges include deciding whether to keep a homeless shelter or pay $1 million to move it off-site, whether to include a big-box store and whether to raze run-down historic buildings. Developers visit the classrooms to advise students and then, on the final day, serve as a "city council" to select a winner.

Watching high school students wrestle with some of the same questions as they do fascinates some developers. In an Advanced Placement government class at Washington-Lee, Jay Parker, whose firm designed the mixed-use Market Common complex in Clarendon, commiserated with students about the difficulty of incorporating adequate parking into their plans and later raved about the students' insights.

"When they started talking about 'absorption rates,' I was just swept away," he said, referring to the rate at which properties can be leased or sold. "I've worked with planning commissions that have less background than they do."

The developers also marvel at how much the students' plans are shaped by their own environment. At inner-suburban schools such as Washington-Lee and Bethesda-Chevy Chase, students are more likely to create mixed-use developments modeled on urbanized areas in their midst, such as Ballston. At farther-out Robinson, near George Mason University, students are more likely to include a big-box store such as Target, prioritize auto access and segregate housing from commercial development.

For all their interest in the project, however, most students interviewed said they had little interest in getting into the development business. Washington-Lee senior Emily Huston joked that she wouldn't be able to make necessary compromises on plans "because I develop really strong opinions, and I'd just want it my way."

But the students said they appreciated learning more about how development happens, particularly since they are surrounded by so much of it. "We have so much firsthand experience with [development], and now we get to apply what we've seen," said Chris Borer, a senior in an AP government class at Robinson.

And the students had no illusions about potential benefits to developers. "They know we'll be customers in the future, and they'll be appealing to us," said one of Borer's team partners, Chris Hill. "They're focusing on us now because they'll need us later."

When it came time for their final presentations last week, the students played the parts of developers convincingly -- many dressed up for the occasion, and they responded deftly to tough questions from the "councilors."

Challenged by Andrew Rosenberger of Madison Homes about the unusually high profit margins sought by his group, Hill said with a straight face that his team was taking extra profits so that it could cover any cost overruns that might arise later. "We don't want that money coming from the city," he said. "We want it to come from us."

It was a brazen answer, but it worked: The council picked his team's plan, which, in this case, meant not millions in profit but $25 bookstore gift certificates for each member of the team.

Convergence LIVE! Focus Element?

Detroit a hidden 'Cars' costar

Artist's career got rolling in Motor City

BY MARK PHELAN
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

June 9, 2006

"Cars" artist Jay Shuster was born in Pontiac. "I was into cars in a big way growing up," he says.
The animated movie "Cars," which opens today, "is kind of a thank-you note to Detroit," says Pontiac-born Jay Shuster, a 35-year-old sketch artist who helped create the appearance and personality of the movie's animated cars.

"I can't think of a better place to grow up and be inspired," said the former Birmingham resident and graduate of the College of Creative Studies in Detroit.

Adoration for the automobile drips from every frame of "Cars" like oil from the crankcase of a Nash Rambler.

Shuster's father, Stuart, worked in General Motors Corp.'s design department for 43 years, first as a designer. He now is retired but still recruiting new talent to the automaker.

Director John Lasseter's father was the parts manager of a Chevrolet dealership in California. Lasseter directed other modern animated classics like "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo." He now runs the combined animation operations of Pixar, which made those movies, and Walt Disney.

The 1973 Shuster Christmas card features the family posed in Stuart's prized '69 Chevy Corvair convertible, which he still drives in the Woodward Dream Cruise.

"He's worked for every vice president of design in the history of General Motors," the younger Shuster said proudly.

"I was into cars in a big way growing up," Shuster said. "I used to look forward every year to Family Day at the GM Tech Center" in Warren, where GM designs and engineers cars and trucks.

"Cars" is the story of cocky young race car Lightning McQueen, who takes a wrong turn into the dusty town of Radiator Springs and learns the value of friendship and long scenic drives.

It's also a 1-hour, 46-minute-long hug for the people who design and build cars.

Fast, shiny cars like cocky Lightning McQueen, who meets Sally Carrera, the shy and sexy Porsche.

Rusty, faithful ones that always start when the key turns like Mater the tow truck and Fillmore, the spaced-out psychedelic Volkswagen Microbus.

Cantankerous classics like Doc Hudson, the 1951 Hudson Hornet that bedeviled Ford and GM on the racetrack and still has a few laps on his odometer.

"There were a lot of gearheads at Pixar before work started on this movie," Shuster said. "You don't start a four-year project if it's not something you care about. Our prime directive was to make a movie for car lovers and everybody else."

The team's research included meetings with Detroiters including Ford design chief J Mays and classic car collector Richard Kughn, trips to the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit, days at the races and visits to vintage car shows.

While he was at the College of Creative Studies, Shuster worked at Roush Racing in Livonia, designing graphics for the company's race cars.

His love for cars twined with a fascination with animation at 6, when he saw "Star Wars." After graduating from college in 1993 with a degree in industrial and product design, he landed a job in California designing pod racers and the aliens who drove them in the second trilogy of "Star Wars" films.

"It was the perfect project to me, coming from working on graphics for race cars," he said.

A year and a half after his hitch in "Star Wars," Shuster joined Pixar to work on "Cars."

Everybody working in animation "wants to get in here, but I was perfectly suited to it," he said.

"The artwork dripped off the tip of my pen designing cars. My experience at Roush played tremendously well into developing graphics for race cars in the movie."

He returns to the Tech Center in Warren next week to give GM's design staff -- his father will be in the audience -- a presentation on how he and three other artists developed the look and character for dozens of cars in the movie.

"It paralleled the design process at GM," from the initial sketches to small sculpted clay models to deadlines for when designs had to be finished and ready for production, he said.

"I see a lot of parallels with my father's career and mine," Shuster said. "Detroit is a hard town to leave."

Contact MARK PHELAN at 313-222-6731 or phelan@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

We want to thank ...
The credits at the end of "Cars" notes the help of many Detroiters, thanking "those who inspired us in the world of the automobile." On the list:

J Mays --
Ford Motor Co. design vice president and chief creative officer.

Richard and Linda Kughn --
Collectors of classic cars and founders of the Meadowbrook and Cranbrook Concours d'Elegance.

Jim Fets --
Leading automotive photographer.

Dutch Mandel --
Editor and associate publisher of AutoWeek magazine.

Jay Wetzel --
Retired General Motors Corp. vice president of engineering and design. First chief engineer of Saturn.
Patrick Schiavone --
Ford designer.

The North American International Auto Show, held every January in Detroit.

Rationale

*Art & Science / Local Artist makes good in an imaginative way. Automotive Design and Digital Computing Technology converges and contributes to new industry (CGI Film & Digital Animation).

Digital Artistic focus elements (Original Art) would also make a compelling visual backdrop at Convergence LIVE!

I know Stu Shuster ("Eyes on the Classics" / Also could provide seque to participation in that program in 2007)

John Lassiter (Principal founder of Pixar) is also a former colleague from my pioneering days in innovative digital developmental efforts.

Jim

Some Additional Intelligence to Work From

FAST TRACK Analysis / ALL ABOARD!

Michigan Future Report
http://www.michiganfuture.org/Reports/NewAgendaFinalReportComplete.pdf

Breakthrough-Electronics THINKING! SPEAKER?

In a distant time now long ago I used to postulate on Stanford Ovshinsky and his breakthrough discoveries regarding 3rd Wave computing. I often wondered aloud and to myself if he/we would ever witness those mindful meanderings. Witness!

ECD, Ovshinsky announce revolution in electronics: "This is something that's going to change the world. We wanted you to know about it." With those words, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, president and chief scientist at Energy Conversion Devices Inc. closed a 90-minute press conference and company tour disclosing a new electronic device they said would lead to significantly faster, cheaper and more versatile computing. Called the Ovonic Quantum Control, the device operates something like the transistor that fueled the first electronics revolution.

However, it has the capacity to carry much higher currents of electricity, meaning its operations will be faster. It's also cheaper and easier to manufacture and doesn't require a silicon substrate. The device is also far smaller than a transistor, and produces less heat. It is also capable of more flexible operations than transistors, meaning computers can move beyond ones and zeros. The size and flexibility advantages also mean much greater storage density -- for example, storage media that can have 16 states of storage between simply "on" and "off."

Ovshinsky disclosed the discovery last month at a European scientific conference. Tuesday's event at ECD headquarters in Rochester Hills was the first United States disclosure. Like most of the inventions in Ovshinsky's 50-year career, this one involves using small electric currents to create rapid changes between disordered states and crystalline states in elements of group VI of the periodic table, also known as calcogenides, such as selenium or tellurium. Ovshinsky's already used these materials to revolutionize battery and computer memory technology, but not electronics. "This is a region of quantum mechanics that has never been discovered ... or that we've been able to control," he said of the new device. "It's completely unique." It actually creates high-energy plasma in a solid state. Ovshinsky and other ECD scientists also said the devices could be made inexpensively in large, constant quantities, much as ECD's United Solar subsidiary makes a continuous roll of solar panels a mere half-micron thick in lengths up to nine miles at one production runs. It also allows logic and memory to be embedded in the same device, making computers simpler and faster.

Ovshinsky said it could literally make "supercomputers possible in a very small size," as well as computers that "think" more like animal brains. But he said he couldn't predict when products containing the new device might appear, pointing out that it took decades for batteries using his technologies to emerge, and six years for his computer memory technologies to move from licensing to devices. And Ovshinsky also said he wanted the devices built in Michigan. "Let's make this area the center for the revitalization of the American economy," he said. More at www.ovonic.com.

Stanford R. Ovshinsky, ECD Ovonics' President and Chief Scientist and Technologist, Announces a Fundamentally New Device with Potential to Open a Whole New Field of Semiconducting Control Devices

Rochester Hills, Mich., June 6, 2006 — Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
(ECD Ovonics) (NASDAQ:ENER) is pleased to announce that Stanford R. Ovshinsky, its President, Chief Scientist and Technologist, at a press conference held today at 10:30 a.m., discussed a fundamentally new device, called the Ovonic Quantum Control, which has the potential to open a whole new field of semiconducting control devices.

The Ovonic Quantum Control, based on Stan Ovshinsky's invention of a unique proprietary all thin-film control device, is based on new physics and has multifunctionality beyond that of transistors. Its nanostructure size, great speed and very high current carrying capacity together with unusual modulation including gain, provide advantages over transistors.

Its multifunctional operational modes include the ability to be turned on by using a small pulse applied to a third terminal in either a latching or non-latching manner. This Ovonic device can scale to sizes smaller than a transistor. These unusual extra degrees of freedom make possible new generations of devices not based upon conventional crystalline physics.

"We believe the functionality of the Ovonic Quantum Control device will enable it to replace transistors and result in new circuitry. It will also be used in the Ovonic Cognitive processor, positioning it to augment and increase performance of today's computers and potentially become the preferred computational system, either binary or nonbinary. It can also be used in combination with the Ovonic phase change memory, Ovonic threshold switch and the Ovonic cognitive computer device. Therefore all thin-film computers would be made possible." Stan Ovshinsky said.

Mr. Ovshinsky was invited by the E*PCOS 06 Program Committee to present an invited talk on May 29, 2006 at the first joint Innovative Mass Storage Technologies — European Phase Change Ovonic Science (IMST2006-E*PCOS 06) conference in Grenoble, France. Mr. David A. Strand, ECD Ovonics' Vice President, Information Technology, represented Stan Ovshinsky at the E*PCOS 06 conference and delivered the invited talk.

This Ovonic Quantum Control device has the potential of low cost through all thin-film fabrication, including using Ovonic roll to roll processes. Ovshinsky's continuous web, triple junction, roll to roll Ovonic photovoltaic processor already makes 9 miles of thin-film, semiconducting photovoltaics in a single run.

Stan Ovshinsky and Dr. Iris Ovshinsky founded ECD Ovonics in January 1960 to work in energy and information, the twin pillars of the global economy. His premise is that information is encoded energy and both require new science, materials, mechanisms, inventions and technology to bring forth the industries that are needed to open new areas to meet the needs of our global economy. He created the field of amorphous and disordered materials in the middle 1950s and continues his leadership in the field.

About ECD Ovonics
ECD Ovonics is the leader in the synthesis of new materials and the development of advanced production technology and innovative products. It has invented, pioneered and developed its proprietary, enabling technologies in the fields of energy and information leading to new products and production processes based on amorphous, disordered and related materials.

The Company's portfolio of alternative energy solutions includes Ovonic thin-film amorphous solar cells, modules, panels and systems for generating solar electric power; Ovonic NiMH batteries; Ovonic hydride storage materials capable of storing hydrogen in the solid state for use as a feedstock for fuel cells or internal combustion engines or as an enhancement or replacement for any type of hydrocarbon fuel; and Ovonic fuel cell technology. ECD Ovonics' proprietary advanced information technologies include Ovonic phase-change electrical memory, Ovonic phase-change optical memory and the Ovonic Threshold Switch. ECD Ovonics designs and builds manufacturing machinery that incorporates its proprietary production processes, maintains ongoing research and development programs to continually improve its products and develops new applications for its technologies. ECD Ovonics holds the basic patents in its fields. More information on ECD Ovonics is found on www.ovonic.com.


# # #


This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are based on assumptions which ECD Ovonics, as of the date of this release, believes to be reasonable and appropriate. ECD Ovonics cautions, however, that the actual facts and conditions that may exist in the future could vary materially from the assumed facts and conditions upon which such forward-looking statements are based. The risk factors identified in the ECD Ovonics filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its automatic shelf registration statement and related preliminary prospectus supplement, the company's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and the company's most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q could impact any forward-looking statements contained in this release.

Contacts:
Ghazaleh Koefod – Investor Relations
Dick Thompson – Media Relations
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
248-293-0440

New bio of Ovshinsky: A new biography of Energy Conversion Devices founder and chief scientist Stanford Ovshinsky has been written by George Howard, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

"Stan Ovshinsky and the Hydrogen Economy: Creating a Better World" is the biography of a man and his nearly 50-year mission to create an environmentally clean and renewable energy loop.

The book says Ovshinsky believes the world can get off oil very quickly and save itself from Mideast entanglements. Howard's book reveals a portrait of a dedicated, relentless man.

Devoted to his wife Iris, his employees, and his mission to create a total hydrogen loop -- solar cells, solid hydrogen storage, nickel metal hydride batteries and fuel cells powered by hydrogen -- Stan overcame overwhelming odds in his quest.

Without the benefit of a formal higher education, he and Iris discovered new, "impossible" technologies that other scientists dismissed. The book is available at www.stanov.com and www.amazon.com. Also planned for late summer of this year is a coast-to-coast road trip in a car converted to run on hydrogen. Converted by Ovshinsky's Energy Conversion Devices Inc. of Rochester Hills, the hydrogen-powered Toyota Prius will be driven by a team from Inovateus Development LLC of South Bend, Ind. Sponsored by the Independent Welding Distributors Cooperative of Indianapolis and Mittler Supply of South Bend, the trip will demonstrate that the basis for a hydrogen distribution system is already in place across the United States. More at www.inovateus.com.

More THINKING from Mackinac for Convergence LIVE!

Friday, June 02, 2006

Business, Education Need To Work Together To Create High-Skill Economy

MACKINAC ISLAND - Business and higher education chimed in together Thursday to call for stronger ties between the working and the learning worlds to help Michigan compete in the newly arriving high skill - high wage economy.

Outside the standing-room-only presentation at the Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference, a member of the Michigan Education Association collected signatures on posters to win new converts to the Your Child Coalition.

With 60-plus names on the poster-size signup list, MEA spokesperson Margaret Trimer-Hartley said the campaign for new commitments was going "not too badly."

The coalition of business, education and family groups organized in 2004 to embolden connections between working, learning and a strong state economy.

The group took the conference's occasion to unveil its latest survey to draw attention to Michigan education.

The latest poll, conducted by Lansing's EPIC/MRA and by Your Child and The Detroit News, found that just slightly better than half of Michigan employers are satisfied with the quality of workers coming out of the state's high schools.

"We have got to be more engaged in this," said presentation panelist Judith Miller, president of Western Michigan University.

The study, she said, also showed that Michigan businesses unhappy with the quality of high school graduates in the hiring pool were also the least likely to hire credentialed people. "Very few are stepping forward," she said.

Michigan business place a higher value on education than parents have claimed in earlier Young Child studies, but "still have a long way to go to practice what they preach," Miller said. Businesses too seem unlikely to push employees higher up the education ladder, she added.

She urged businesses to expand partnerships with colleges and universities, to serve as mentors or tutors and to "make your home a place of learning."

Mike Schmidt, director of Education and Community Development, for Ford Motor Company, also urged businesses to play a greater role in education. "We as employers have to engage in the conversation," he said.

He called for fostering greater innovation and creativity that goes beyond core educational requirements. Business should look at what students should know, what teaching should be like and what high schools should look like.

Education should be academically rigorous, he said, and focus on critical thinking, teamwork, communications, self-direction and systems thinking. Students should learn how to select the technology they need for the task and at, understand the relevance between what they learn in class and what is necessary at work and should learn how to apply classroom lessons when they are on the job.

Ford is already putting those lessons to work in classrooms at Henry Ford Academy, Schmidt said. The academy enrolls 440 students in grades nine through 12 with classes within the historic buildings at Henry Ford Village.

Ford employees act as curriculum content advisers, welcome job shadowing and work with teachers and students. A new effort is now set to get spread the word about the program beyond the academy, he said.

CONSUMER POWER: The key speaker at the chamber's general session on Innovation: Job Creation and Michigan's Future cited manufacturing advances as crucial to the state's success, and note that in the global marketplace the U.S. is home to greatest consumers and also the greatest borrowers.

Women especially are driving some of the buying forces, said Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, to a morning presentation packed with the lobbyists, legislators and business leaders registered at the chamber's Mackinac Island policy conference.

"Demand driven innovation is the name of the game," she said, adding that the so-called "knowledge economy" has now been supplanted by the "conceptual economy."

Among the innovations she cited: the merger of manufacturing and services into "solutions providers", the fusion of knowledge and technology, the movement to high-value manufacturing, desktop manufacturing, production "slicing," nanoscale manipulation of matter and product design on high-performance computers.

"We say to out-compute is to out-compete," she said.

On Convergence, Emergence and Variations on a THEME!

FUNNY HOW THINGS HAPPEN WHEN "ALIGNMENT OF PURPOSE" MANIFEST'S ITSELF.

















The Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference

At lunchtime, there was an intriguing -- if oddly ad-hoc -- proposal for Cobo Center (which, as we all know, is badly in need of expansion and renovation). The proposal, which apparently was germinated by the Detroit Auto Dealers Association and a couple of Republican legislators, would see Cobo turned into a year-around alternative fuel technologies incubator and classroom. Cobo would be expanded in the process. Speaking at a luncheon for the "Coalition for Fueling Michigan's Future" were Lawrence Technological University chancellor Charles Chambers, Detroit city CIO Derrick Miller, former state school superintended Tom Watkins and Patrick Anderson, founder of Lansing's Anderson Economic Group.

Speaking in favor of the Cobo proposal at a press conference after the luncheon was U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Bloomfield Township, who said he would introduce legislation seeking a $50,000 federal grant for a feasibility study for the switchover. Also speaking in favor of was Michigan State House Speaker Craig DeRoche, R-Novi, who said he would seek a similar amount in state funding for the story. Miller, during the luncheon, said the proposal would probably result in Cobo Center being turned from city control over to a regional authority. At the press conference, DeRoche said the city of Detroit was so far just an observer of the project, but would hopefully be an interested participant.

After the luncheon, NextEnergy CEO James Croce said he wasn't consulted before the group made its announcement. But, he said, "I'm open-minded and optimistic." Also curiously absent from the proposal were people like Detroit Renaissance's Doug Rothwell, city economic development officials, or for that matter, Oakland and Macomb county economic development officials. But after the press conference, the chamber announced support for the "conceptual plan to expand and upgrade Cobo Center," including "an entrepreneurial and educational incubator for creating innovative technologies (and) a world class automotive research and development center to develop alternative energies." All this was kind of oddly presented, but like James Croce, let's be open-minded and optimistic and see where it goes.


GOP finds nothing funny about Bush impersonator


BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF and KATHLEEN GRAY
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

June 2, 2006

MACKINAC ISLAND -- What's an election year without a little campaign silliness?

A President George W. Bush impersonator entertained onlookers on the Grand Hotel porch Thursday during the Detroit Regional Chamber's policy conference.

He poked fun at Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos with assorted malapropisms, hokey jokes and an "endorsement" of DeVos. Plus, he bore a striking resemblance to the prez.

The brief show was courtesy of state Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer. Among the zingers was an allusion to DeVos' leading a 2000 school voucher ballot issue that was defeated and his family ties to the Amway Corp.

Acting as straight man, Brewer noted the president's penchant for giving nicknames to friends and staffers.

"Would you tell us what your nicknames are for Mr. DeVos?" Brewer asked.

"Well," said the imposter. "I like to refer to him as DeVoucher. And another good one for him is Pyramid."

None of which drew smiles from Republicans. DeVos campaign chairman David Brandon groused that, given the troubles of Michigan's economy under Gov. Jennifer Granholm, "we don't find anything funny about what's going on."

Police endorse DeVos

Meanwhile, DeVos racked up the very real endorsement of the Police Officers Association of Michigan. The 12,000-member POAM endorsed Granholm when she first ran for governor four years ago.

DeVos campaign chairman Brandon said the POAM realizes there are 1,500 fewer police officers than there were in September 2001. He added: "If there's anything that's important in terms of leadership of this state it's safety and security. They're clearly unhappy with the leadership we've had.

Chris DeWitt, spokesman for Granholm's re-election campaign, said the POAM is mistaken in its choice. He said the reason there are fewer police officers in Michigan is that Bush cut federal funds for community police forces.

DeWitt said DeVos' support for tax cuts would result in less state money for communities, and thus even fewer police officers.

New idea for Cobo

Alternative energy projects and charter schools could be the salvation of Detroit's Cobo Conference Center according to a coalition of business and political leaders.

U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, a Bloomfield Hills Republican, and state House Speaker Craig DeRoche, R-Novi, pledged to each seek $50,000 from their legislative colleagues to fund a feasibility study on how to turn the Cobo Center into a year-round facility to be used by schoolchildren, researchers and businesspeople.

"We want to create Cobo Center into a hub, creating enough space to keep the Auto Show here and a commercial center for advanced research and development," Knollenberg said.

Derrick Miller, chief information officer for Detroit, said the city -- with help from the Wayne County Port Authority -- could issue bonds to pay for an expansion of Cobo Hall to 1 million square feet. The rental or lease fees charged to companies and schools would be used to pay off the bonds.

A study would take six to nine months to complete, said Paul Welday, spokesman for the Coalition Fueling Michigan's Future.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.

TEN POINT TOSS-UP!

What are the synergies and convergence elements of the above, our conversations at Cobo Hall and http://www.sae.org/events/convergence/brochure.pdf

D.I.V.E. D.I.V.E. D.I.V.E!