41–50 of 58 posts
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I’m not sure about that. Amazon turned Seattle into a truly big city, which it wasn’t before.
Eh, Microsoft and Boeing?
I'm going to be a Visiting Professor there in 2019, and I'll be teaching a deep learning course. One interesting thing about Cornell Tech is that the faculty all work in an open office space, and I think that's to embrace start up culture. Faculty have "huddle" rooms for meetings. At my home institution, I spend 20 hours per week in meetings. Faculty do have dedicated huddle rooms, though.
Why embrace the bad parts of startup culture (open plans)? Seems cargo cultish: open plans exist as a cost control measure, and make it easier to grow/shrink. Academia has endowments and tends to have a more stable labor force.
Graduate students & postdocs—who make up the majority of research labor—come and go, on the order of months-to-years, making open plans actually somewhat reasonable.
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I agree with your general cynicism :-) Cornell Tech was established a few years back as an interdisciplinary grad school on Roosevelt Island that brings together a lot of STEM disciplines (as well as business. Cornell Med School is also in NYC. It's an increasingly common pattern; see MIT's recent announcement of an AI school. Stanford tried pretty hard to get this campus but, among other things, it's probably fair t…
Stanford dropped out before submitting their bid because Cornell got a big donation that Stanford wasn't able to match. Stanford was actually the clear favorite before that happened.
But there were also other reasons Stanford withdrew, including the weirdness of how real estate works in NYC.
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Why embrace the bad parts of startup culture (open plans)? Seems cargo cultish: open plans exist as a cost control measure, and make it easier to grow/shrink. Academia has endowments and tends to have a more stable labor force.
"More stable labor force": you are thinking of faculty, who make up a small percentage of research labor at universities. Graduate students & postdocs—who make up the majority of research labor—come and go, on the order of months-to-years, making open plans actually somewhat reasonable.
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"More stable labor force": you are thinking of faculty, who make up a small percentage of research labor at universities. Graduate students & postdocs—who make up the majority of research labor—come and go, on the order of months-to-years, making open plans actually somewhat reasonable.
Yet the comment here was that it's faculty who have the open floor plan. Why are they using the agile aspect of startups for the most stable asset in academia?
Faculty additionally have huddles where they can take meetings.
The article is nothing but empty PR for Cornell. It would be like washingtonpost writing an ad for Georgetown by claiming Georgetown made DC area attractive to amazon. My suspicion ( and it's only a suspicion ) is that bezos wanted a headquarters in the DC area to buy good will amongst the politicians in DC and to be closer to the lobbyists and of course politicians.
If cornell and georgetown decided to move to wyoming, I doubt amazon is going to follow along. Now if the politicians, lobbyists and "influencers" in DC and NYC decided to move to wyoming, I'm betting amazon would be right on their coat tails.
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Stanford dropped out before submitting their bid because Cornell got a big donation that Stanford wasn't able to match. Stanford was actually the clear favorite before that happened.
Yes -- that big donation was exactly the thumb GP is talking about. :) It came from / was organized by Bloomberg, who seems to have had a strong preference for a NY school. But there were also other reasons Stanford withdrew, including the weirdness of how real estate works in NYC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stanford dropped out before submitting their bid because Cornell got a big donation that Stanford wasn't able to match. Stanford was actually the clear favorite before that happened.
Yes -- that big donation was exactly the thumb GP is talking about. :) It came from / was organized by Bloomberg, who seems to have had a strong preference for a NY school. But there were also other reasons Stanford withdrew, including the weirdness of how real estate works in NYC.
First, Bloomberg himself didn't choose the winner; he was detached from the competitive process. Bloomberg launched the competition and also later donated money to the winner (Cornell), but those were separate events.
Second, Bloomberg himself appeared in a promotional video that was campaigning for Stanford. I don't know where the idea that Bloomberg had a strong preference for an upstate NY school comes from (especially since the other finalist - Columbia University - was already based in New York City).