The Downtown Ithaca Alliance and the Collegetown Neighborhood Council have enlisted DesignConnect, a student organization, to work on Ithaca-area design and urban planning projects this semester. Students are slated to be at the forefront of planning expansions to the Six Mile Creek walk.

Steven Zhang '12 argues for a revised approach to foreign aid in developing nations. 

Construction is underway on the Collegetown Terrace Apartments after the project’s developers received final approval for the project’s first phase on March 22 from the City of Ithaca Planning & Development Board.

A conceptual design for a three-story extension to the John Snaith House at 140 College Avenue won tentative support from members of the City of Ithaca Planning and Development Board on March 22.

Novarr redesigned much of his original 2009 proposal to minimize the impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

When developmental and environmental psychologist Gary Evans, an Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Ecology, moved to the woods of Ithaca from his California home, he had two focuses in mind: the Human Ecology school and his children. He found a challenge by his students to look at poverty and education.

People talk a lot about the development ‘puzzle’ in reducing global poverty. The analogy refers to the fact that there are lots of different pieces necessary to building economies in the developing world. These pieces may be anything from the support of good governance to the distribution of malaria nets. For a while, it had been hoped that official development aid – loans or grants from rich countries to poor ones – could fund all these various puzzle pieces. However, decades of development aid have produced surprisingly small effects, and it is becoming clear that this aid on its own is not working.

It’s about time the world’s largest democracy got some attention around these parts.

Last month’s $50 million gift from a philanthropic fund largely controlled by mega-industrialist Ratan Tata ’62 will go a long way towards strengthening Cornell’s academic and human ties with India, and the half of the gift allocated to endow scholarships for Indians in need will do much to increase the economic diversity of the international student body. “Any person ... any study,” indeed.

It’s true that Cornell has been involved with India on issues like health and agriculture for more than 50 years. Last year, President David Skorton even visited. But of late, Old Uncle Ezra’s wandering eye has more often explored his infatuation with the world’s largest unfree state, China.

The Tisch family’s $35 million donation to enhance University faculty came at the right time for the Big Red.

Recruitment and retention of talented faculty has become an increasingly serious and immediate issue at Cornell. The school’s professors aren’t getting any younger, and the cost of hiring new faculty isn’t getting any lower.

Comforting perhaps is that this problem is nothing new. In March 2007, then-Provost Biddy Martin spent most of her first Academic State of the University address focusing on the impending retirement of University faculty and the need to up the ante in faculty recruitment. Martin projected then that fully one-third of the University’s faculty would retire by 2022, making current efforts to hire new and talented professors an absolute necessity.

On May 30, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation announced a final resolution for the Ithaca Gun Factory Site, closing a long and precarious chapter in the City of Ithaca’s history. However, many Ithacans feel the future of the site may still be up in the air.

The DEC — in cooperation with Mayor Carolyn Peterson, the City of Ithaca, developers Frost Travis, owner Wally Diehl and a previous pledge by the state — has authored a plan to dissolve the old Ithaca Gun Factory, which has been left stagnating above the rushing waters of Ithaca Falls for the past 125 years.