Growth in Ohio cities slowed during ’13 (The Columbus Dispatch) Ohio’s six biggest metropolitan areas are expected to experience slower economic growth this year and will lag the national average. Some feel the slow growth is due to government shutdown and sequestration, while others argue that consumer confidence is holding the economy back.
Heinz expanding Ohio plant (CTV News) Heinz is planning a $28-million expansion at its Massillon processing plant and will retain 450 existing positions while adding 250 manufacturing jobs.
Jury Awards Apple $290 Million in Samsung Patent Case (IndustryWeek) A U.S. federal jury ordered Samsung to pay $290 million in damages to Apple in a partial retrial of the blockbuster patent case involving the two smartphone giants.
Made In IBM Labs: Testing Cloud Invention To Prevent Natural Disaster Outages (The Wall Street Journal) IBM and Marist College are testing a cloud networking innovation that uses software-defined networking technology to help prevent disruptions in voice and data communications services caused by natural disasters.
MOOCs Are Largely Reaching Privileged Learners, Survey Finds (The Chronicle of Higher Education) According to a survey of MOOC students from the University of Pennsylvania, more than 80 percent of respondents already had a two- or four-year degree, and 44 percent had some graduate education. MOOCs are not reaching students in developing countries and students without a higher education.
No Apparent Progress on Budget Stalemate (American Institute of Physics) The provisional budget expires on January 15th, but appropriators have been unable to make progress on drafting a new budget for 2014 until they know what the total amount they have to appropriate is. Without that figure they are unable to draft budgets and many fear that another government shutdown could be looming, along with further sequester measures.
Survey finds low confidence in northern Ohio economy (The Youngstown Vindicator) A recent economic survey by Huntington Bank shows consumer confidence in the northern Ohio economy has suffered over the past year, while the real-estate market has picked up steam.
UC San Diego Deploying 2 PFLOPS System Supporting High-Performance Virtualization (Campus Technology) The University of California, San Diego is deploying Comet, a virtualized petascale supercomputer to address general research areas such as social sciences and genomics. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin is building Wrangler, a data analysis and management system for the national open science community.
