West Philadelphia : In The News

TechCrunch takes a closer look at startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures' current crop of companies.

The current class includes students and alumni from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and MIT. Startup founders have past work experience at Google, Yahoo, Intel, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

Five of the companies were selected together by DreamIt and Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation, as part of its Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program (MEAP). This program provides an extra $350,000 on top of the funding DreamIt offers for minority-led startups. The current group includes owners who are African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Indian.

Original source: TechCrunch
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Newsweek's The Daily Beast writes about Simon Hauger, the teacher who brought together West Philly students to win a hybrid electric car competition and recently started a new sustainability workshop at the Navy Yard.

The boutique school follows the “project-based learning” model made popular by San Diego’s High Tech High and others around the country, where conventional classes are replaced with long, interdisciplinary exercises to solve real-world problems, like designing a solar charging station or writing energy-efficiency legislation. More engaged students, the thinking goes, learn deeply and retain knowledge longer. And the teens can supplement their project learning with classes at nearby Drexel University.

Original source: The Daily Beast
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Voice of America reports on Philadelphia plans to open 48 computer centers in homeless shelters, recreation centers and libraries in order to give more people access to the Internet.

The United Nations recently declared Internet access to be a human right. But in the United States, as in many other countries, millions of people do not have access to the wealth of information found online. In Philadelphia, communities are responding to narrow the digital divide.

Source: Voice of America
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Last week we told you about the four suburban Philadelphia communities named to Money magazine's 100 Best Places to Live in America list. The New Republic looks at those same four hotspots as evidence of a shift in the way we live in post-recession America.

But Money is still wedded to the notion that our best places are “small towns,” without acknowledging the regional metropolitan economies--with distinctive economic clusters and amenities, unified housing and labor markets, and modern transportation networks--that determine their economic prosperity and popular appeal.

The magazine does implicitly recognize these metropolitan connections. Take the four new communities in this year’s list within in the resilient Philadelphia metro: West Goshen “gives residents a rural feel, yet good access to jobs,” given its proximity to Philadelphia; Horsham “lies with easy commuting distance of Philadelphia,” Ardmore is “just a few minutes from the city by rail,” and commuters from West Norriton “appreciate that it is 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia.”

It is time to acknowledge that these “small towns,” really suburbs and exurbs, are part of highly-connected and seamlessly-integrated metropolitan economies. The notion promoted by these kinds of “best places” lists--that “small towns” or “small cities” are self-sufficient islands--is fundamentally misguided. Families and firms choose these communities precisely because they benefit from the assets, attributes, and advantages of their broader metros.

Original source: The New Republic
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The brother of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel joins Penn faculty, according to The Associated Press.


The Ivy League institution in Philadelphia announced Friday that Ezekiel Emanuel will hold dual posts in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School for business.

Source: The Associated Press
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Walk Score ranks Philadelphia fifth in its listing of the most walkable cities in America.

Philadelphia's most walkable neighborhoods are Center City West, Center City East, University City. Philadelphia's least walkable neighborhoods are Byberry, Torresdale, Fox Chase.

Source: Walk Score
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Philadelphia Science Leadership Academy principal Chris Lehmann is among those educators calling for a redefinition of how technology is used in education, according to TMCNet.

As Chris Lehmann closed the recent International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference, he implored the audience at his keynote address here to redraw the educational technology battle lines.

"No one is arguing we shouldn't use technology in education anymore," said Mr. Lehmann, the founding principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy, a public high school devoted to inquiry-based, project-driven learning. "The question is how." The call for redefining debate echoed throughout the formal sessions at the conference last month and at informal events at nearby hotels, restaurants, and bars, and even in casual conversations among the more than 20,000 estimated attendees. And, perhaps more important, it was expressed in data released by Project Tomorrow, the Software and Information Industry Association, and technology company CDW-G.

Source: TMCNet
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Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement has fast become a model for uplifting urban teens and will compete in a national competition this month, according to CNN.

Alana Gooden never thought she would live to see her 18th birthday.

Her brother died in a car accident when she was 12 years old and the emotional impact lingered in the family for years.

By the time Gooden had reached her junior year in high school, her world came crashing down. After a falling out with her mother, she moved in with a friend and her family in poverty-stricken North Philly.

After relentless urging by her creative writing teacher, Cait Minor, she joined the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement (PYPM) near the end of her junior year in 2010.

Source: CNN
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More than 500 people came to the Piazza at Schmidts in Northern Liberties for Saturday's Vendy Awards, reports the Associated Press.

Eight of the city's most popular food carts and trucks competed Saturday at the Vendy Awards, an offshoot of the popular New York City cook-off that started in 2005. Online voters chose the eight finalists and a panel of chefs and foodies at Saturday's sold-out and sweltering event chose the Caribbean and American soul food of Gigi and Big R's as the winner.

The 10-year-old curbside culinary business is operated by Elukene Rene ("Big R"), originally from Haiti, and Thomas Bacon ("Gigi"), from Philadelphia, and operates on the Drexel University campus.

Original source: Associated Press
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The Chicago Tribune marvels at Philly's outdoor art scene through a pair of tours showcasing the groundbreaking work of the Mural Arts program..

On my latest trip there, Philadelphia again stole my heart. But this time, instead of falling for Philly's red-bricked history, I fell for its outside art. Nicknamed the City of Murals, Philadelphia has more than 3,000 outdoor murals. The nonprofit City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (MAP) collection includes 1,700 painted walls.

Although founded to help eradicate graffiti in 1984, under Executive Director Jane Golden, MAP now connects artists with communities by creating art in public spaces. When travelers pay for a guided tour from MAP, it helps support Mural Arts' education and youth development, including the Restorative Justice Program, which teaches inmates, ex-offenders and juvenile delinquents how to paint murals.

Source: The Chicago Tribune
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Viridity Energy partners with Saft and Envitech on the first trackside energy storage system in North America, recycling energy from braking SEPTA trains and trolleys, according to the New York Times.

Subway trains need a lot of electricity to get going, turning electricity into kinetic energy, the energy of movement. When they pull into a station, many of them can do the opposite: generate electricity from their momentum. They turn their motors into generators to slow the train, producing current.

But in many systems, some of that energy goes to waste because of a bottleneck: the third rail, which carries current to the train, cannot handle as much energy as the train is generating during deceleration. Too much current pushes up the voltage, and when the voltage gets too high, the electricity is dissipated by running it through a piece of metal that converts it into heat.

But in Philadelphia, on the Market-Frankford line of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, a new company called Viridity Energy will install batteries to capture a lot of that electricity and hold it while the train is in the station. Then it can deliver the power when the train starts up again or store it for a time of day when it is needed more.

Source: The New York Times
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A Philly newcomer and CNN correspondent writes about where to go and what to see here, including a shout out to Philly Beer Week.

Philly is one of the nation's oldest cities, which means you can walk a lot of places. The majority of the time, walking is the best bet, considering parking can be a nightmare. Pay your meter, otherwise get a ticket or towed. (There's even a reality show about the Parking Authority, and they mean business.) Check out the art on the walls with a walking tour of the Mural Mile to get a distinctive look at the city's charm.

Source: CNN
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Philadelphia's Office of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy boss says underserved neighborhoods will improve with cultural infusion, in an essay Steuer writes in The Huffington Post.

The new Census numbers for Philadelphia are in, and the city managed to actually record a population increase, the first in 50 years. And while the increase was tiny -- 8,456 residents, which represents a .6% increase to 1,536,006 - the reversal of the decades-long decline is huge.

Virtually all the neighborhoods that have seen huge population increases during this ten-year period have also seen large increases in the number of arts organizations and artists living and operating in them.

Source: The Huffington Post
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Actor and rapper Will Smith provided 30 computers to West Philly High School, according to ABC News.

Will Smith is donating replacements for 30 stolen computers to a high school in West Philadelphia, where he was born and raised.

The Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation and the Charlie Mack Cares philanthropic organizations are giving 29 Apple laptops and one desktop to West Philadelphia High School.

Source: ABC News
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Surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania fix a patient's sleep apnea with a procedure involving robots, according to NPR.

At 32, it just didn't make sense that Daniel Sheiner was exhausted literally from the moment he woke up. "It didn't get any better over the course of the day, and I knew that was not normal," Sheiner says.

A sleep study confirmed Sheiner had one of the worst cases of apnea his doctors had ever seen. After trying a number of different treatments, his doctors finally tried a surgery using robots to treat his stubborn apnea � with positive results.



Source: NPR
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