LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Shhh, Bill Clinton was in town. And Sean Penn tagged along. But a loud silence surrounded the visit by former US President Clinton, who gave a “private” keynote speech (no journalists invited) to participants in what IMD business school labelled an “Inspire for Excellence” regional symposium Sunday 20 May at 17:00.
Clinton’s topic, at a forum focusing on why sustainability is important, was Embracing Common Humanity”.
Seats started at CHF550 and all proceeds are to go to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that he founded in 2005. Its members are organizations from the private and public sectors, and civil society who want to maximize their efforts to create a cleaner environment, alleviate poverty, and increase access to health care and education.
Police in Vaud were prepared for the visit but also for the unplanned, according to 24 Heures, which cites Vaud gendarmerie head Olivier Botteron as saying that when working with the US Secret Service, the program changes constantly. The newspaper says that Penn, who is devoting himself to helping rebuild Haiti, popped up from the Cannes Film Festival in southern France.
Online database will help researchers, government planners prepare for natural disasters
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss national weather service, MeteoSwiss, and the University of Bern have brought online more than 125,000 historical data on weather, climate and natural disasters housed in a database called Euro-Climhist, the first such DB, unique in the world, according to Bern. Euro-Climhist is designed to become a European-wide database. It was presented 3 May in Bern.
The Centre Oeschger at the university with support from the Swiss GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) Office has been gathering a wealth of information from sources such as public and private chronicles, books kept by public institutions such as hospitals that date back to the Middle Ages.
The result is a database that covers 1550-1864, when Switzerland began official weather recordings.
The centre “has been working intensely in recent years to systematically collect the data, run quality control checks and safeguard digitally these documents,” says MeteoSwiss points out in a press release.
Floods such as those in 2005 that caused CHF3 billion in damage provide information that, compared to similar disasters in the past, can help governments plan to better protect their populations, but such data can also be useful in evaluating the safety of nuclear power plants. Risk experts, climatology researchers but also insurance companies calculate risks based on the long-term picture of the frequency of extreme natural disasters.
Accurate and regular reporting of data became accessible only with the arrival of measuring instruments in the second half of the 19th century
Findings could help development of new drugs for epilepsy, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – “Water isn’t just a neutral environment; it can also interact with the molecules and change their structure” EPFL researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Physical Chemistry note in a statement about new findings that could lead to progress in drugs for a number of disorders and diseases. “Like a key inserted into a lock, the molecules in drugs bind with and act upon biomolecules. The more precisely we know these molecules’ three-dimensional structure, the better we will understand how their active components work. Biomolecules often exist in aqueous environments; this is the case in the human body.”
The group has shown how the natural antibiotic gramicidin’s 3D structure changes “depending on the number of water molecules surrounding it.”
Their findings were published in the journal Science 19 April.
EPFL in a press release explains the impact the research will have, in concrete terms: “This research, led by senior scientist Oleg Boyarkine, his colleague Natalia Nagornova and professor Thomas Rizzo, will have a considerable impact not only in fundamental research, but also in the pharmaceutical arena. ‘Understanding how drug molecules change shape when they are dissolved in water is a crucial point. This discovery will make it possible to design new, more effective drugs using computers,” the chemist explains. The challenge was to conduct the experiments as accurately and precisely as possible. ‘Even though precise knowledge of the structure of a large molecule is only really possible through theoretical calculations, thanks to spectroscopy and ultra-low temperatures, we can now validate the theory.’”
Renovated Musée d'Orsay in Paris during filming for Google's Art Project
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Olympic Museum in Lausanne has provided the Google Art Project with 104 artworks by 33 artists, from its collection.
The museum is one of 155 worldwide to share part of their collection online and it is the first in Switzerland to do so.
Art Project now includes Hans Erni’s 1983 “Basketball” sculpture and paintings series, Dennis Openheim’s “Olympic Centennial Newton Discovering Gravity” and a series of Rosa Serra’s elegant black sports figures sculptures.
The project started a year ago, with 17 museums and 1,000 artworks, but as Google points out, it was “almost all paintings from Western masters.
Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.”
The collection houses an extraordinary variety, and some of the partner sampler pages are fun, such as a moving (in every sense) video visit to the White House in the US.
The expanded gallery, which Google presented in Paris Tuesday 3 April, has several new features. Among them:
- Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View trolley took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
- 46 artworks are available with Gogle’s gigapixel photo-capturing technology, “photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.”
- A bonus for students and teachers in particular is a new My Gallery feature that lets viewers make their own collections, add comments to each painting and share the whole collection.
How to use Google Art Project video
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – It takes a black hole to: measure another black hole, it turns out. Researchers at the EPFL polytechnic in Lausanne have been using, for the past two years, what they call “supermassive black holes acting as gravitational lenses” to measure, for the first time, other black holes.
Scientists at the university’s laboratory of astrophysics, using ESA and Nasa’s Hubble telescope, in 2010 discovered a quasar, a galaxy with a black hole at its centre. Since then, they have identified several of these rare cases from among a total of 20,000 quasar, a find they believe will lead to a better understanding of how black holes are formed.
The EPFL in a statement says, “The case was special for two reasons: it showed both the presence of the supermassive black hole as well as another galaxy in the background, very distant and in almost perfect alignment. The light coming from this distant galaxy, strongly bent by its passage near the black hole, made it possible to measure the mass of a quasar for the first time.”
Laboratory physicist Frédéric Courbin says, “For the first time, we have a reliable method for measuring the mass of these objects, which are too luminous to be observed with traditional techniques,” Courbin explains. “We can thus better understand why some galaxies have a black hole and others don’t, what their incredible energy is made up of, how the matter is distributed and how it evolves. The gravitational lensing effect has already taught us much about the distribution of matter in galaxy clusters and galaxies themselves. Here the effect is produced by very special objects, whose mass has been impossible to measure up to this point.”
How the “cosmic magnifying glass” works
EPFL explains how it works:
“This magnification phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, is caused by massive objects in the universe such as stars, galaxies, and planets. When the light from a very distant galaxy passes near one of these objects on its voyage to Earth, it is bent by the gravitational pull of the object. The image of the galaxy therefore appears severely distorted when it reaches us. There are either multiple images of the galaxy, or, if it’s in almost perfect alignment with the massive object, the image appears in the shape of a circular arc, known as an Einstein Ring. The size of the ring allows us to determine the mass of the object situated in the middle, which is acting like a lens. In the cases discovered by the EPFL scientists, the object in the foreground is a quasar, or a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. It would be impossible to “weigh” the quasar without this gravitational lensing effect.”
The results of their findings were published 21 March in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Philipp Hildebrand, press conference after he resigned as Swiss central bank chairman
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Philipp Hildebrand, who resigned as chairman of the Swiss National Bank 9 January, has been named a senior visiting fellow by the University of Oxford in the UK.
The Financial Times notes that “Hildebrand, who attended the prestigious institution for his doctorate on European integration, will join the new Blavatnik School of Government, which is admitting its first students this autumn.” The school, the FT notes, is in temporary quarters, but “land has been acquired in the Jericho district, where Swiss star architects Herzog & de Meuron are planning a showcase building for the school.”
Hildebrand left the bank after Christoph Blocher, a right-wing UDC party leader, suggested he had behaved inappropriately or possibly illegally. Hildebrand’s name was later cleared, but Blocher is now under investigation for suspicion of breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws.
The Blavatnik School is funded by a $75 million gift from Leonard Blavatnik, the largest gifts to the university in recent times.
Getting a real Lift, 22-24 February
by Ellen Wallace
JP Rangaswami presenting at Lift 2012 (photo, Ivo Naepflin for Lift)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The number of conversations in Geneva centred around our digital lives, past, present and future, is up this week thanks to the annual Lift Conference, which opened Wednesday 22 February and ends Friday.
The conference itself pulls in several hundred people from the worlds of business, academia and international organizations, with presentations that address geek concerns and broader philosophical questions
Devices and domesticity, potentially uncomfortable bedfellows
One of my favourites on the opening day schedule was Victoria Broadbent of UCL in London asking if our individual personalized digital devices are destroying our Victorian myths of domesticity, a great example of how good speakers ask the question we’ve had all along without being aware of it.
She pointed to the changing use and design of space in the home, with more integrated and less specialized rooms. Downton Abbey staff and family would have been very puzzled by today’s lofts, not to mention the devices they would find there. “Homes have become relational spaces in which the main activities support the social cohesion of the household. The arrival of personal digital devices in this context is disturbing.”
So that’s what’s going on at home.
The mental twinning of urban space and books that behave like cities
Those of us trying to grasp or imagine the book of tomorrow that is part of the electronic world are offered a Thursday afternoon workshop that talks about “technology driven visions in the effervescent book industry”. This is an elegant description for an industry that is wildly turbulent, not always for the better, and which has authors and publishers scrambling to understand the impact of technology on content and its creation.
Frederic Kaplan and Laurent Bolli, from bookapp.com, the workshop leaders, leave chapter headings in their wake as they take us through a world where books have signage, dedicated neighbourhoods and urban services such as guides and tours.
Outside the conference: more conversations
Hugh Quennec, Geneva Servette Hockey Club
The scores of talks at the conference give speakers and people attending a chance to meet with other groups. I attended a workshop nearby on how to better use videos at work, offered by So Money, a local video production agency, and 23 Video, who have worked with Lift and who are in town from Denmark in part to kick off their new partnership with So Money.
On display was 23 Video‘s answer to what they call the “last orphan child of the web”, video – you can easily create and manage other online content through your own web sites and photos sites but affordable video sites that you can make your own are a new idea. The company offers a video management solution for a fixed monthly fee of $675 that gives unlimited uploads, downloads, user numbers, works with all platforms, distribution options through all channels and a rich set of analytics tools.
Hugh Quennec, part-owner of the Geneva Servette Hockey Club and Olivier Riethauser, communications and community relations manager at the club, talked about their success in using video to create a sense of community that goes well beyond the hockey rink.
My own notes from the workshop included these tips to move beyond boring corporate videos: Know your target audience, offer a helping hand, get them to leave a trace. Content is not about selling: it’s about entertaining. That said, great content provides solutions to real-world problems and it must be worthy of attention and immediately useful to the audience. Don’t preach, though: content is about the conversation.
In fact, just about everything digital is about conversation, and Lift is about joining the talk.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A doctoral student at EPFL in Lausanne has found the key to an important aspect of earthquakes: the cause of the varying intensity, that can make the difference between a minor and major earthquake. The findings by David Kammer, published 20 February in the journal Tribology Letters, provides new material for researchers in the fields of mechanics and geosciences, who are seeking a better understanding of how earthquakes work.
Kammer has created a “digital model that explains what happens at the interface between two materials when they slide against each other; like a book on a table, rubber soles on linoleum, or – more to the point – tectonic plates,” an EPFL statement notes. “Earthquakes occur at the point where two tectonic plates meet. Between each period of sliding, forces accumulate between them up to the point where the friction resistance is released, leading to movement. This displacement of the Earth’s crust triggers a shock-wave that is transmitted to the surface of the planet.”
The researcher says he “wanted to understand the dynamics of the point at which the plates suddenly begin to slide against each other – in particular, the way it starts and is subsequently transmitted between the two solid bodies in contact. I discovered that the accumulation of energy at the breaking-point of the interface determines the acceleration of the sliding.”
Movements can be smooth and regular or can involved stopping and starting, a “stick-slip” phenomenon, and it is the latter that causes surface shock waves.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – What the world learned about Switzerland last week: the little nation known for its tidiness now intends to clean up space. One of the hottest-selling news agency stories last week, picked up in Toronto and Delhi and Los Angeles, was the result of an EPFL press release entitled “Cleaning up Earth’s orbit: A Swiss satellite to tackle space debris”, which is about the CleanSpaceOne project that will begin by cleaning up the debris from two EPFL student space projects.
Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL and Jacques Melly, president of the Valais cantonal council, sign an agreement of understanding 10 January to set up a branch of the polytechnic in Valais
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Canton Vaud’s federal polytechnic institute, EPFL and canton Valais signed an agreement of intention Tuesday 10 January in Sion to establish a branch of the school in canton Valais, most likely in Sion but working closely with a number of existing services throughout the canton.
A formal agreement and plans will be developed later in the year, but EPFL President Patrick Aebischer is quoted by Le Nouvelliste as saying the new campus should be up and running by 2015.
The new branch of EPFL will have have 11 research and training chairs, the canton and EPFL announced at a press conference Tuesday.
Valais will have a teaching campus that focuses on energy, health and chemistry, according to Le Nouvelliste, with seven chairs in energy and the rest in bio-technology and bio-engineering, while Le Temps reports that four chairs will be in energy and the others in biotechnology and medical engineering.
EPFL has not yet issued a press release confirming details but Valais, for its part, says the focus will be on energy, health (with a focus on rehabilitation) and nutrition and the new school should help attract international companies. Nutrition studies would centre around work to produce components for vitamins and medicines.
A masters degree in energy is being planned.
EPFL is based in Lausanne but has a small campus in Neuchatel for nanotechnology.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Some 350 students unexpectedly had a free hour, but out in the chilly November air Wednesday morning after an industrial vacuum cleaner caught fire at a school in Payerne, canton Vaud.
The machine filled the Derrière la Tour secondary school with smoke at 08:30 and students were ordered to leave. An hour later the building had been aired and they were allowed back in, but investigators are checking to see what caused the fire.
Winners include 16-year-old Vaud musical prodigy Mélodie Zhao
Mélodie Zhao, Leenaards Foundation scholarship winner
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Leenaards Foundation has given CHF500,000 in prizes and scholarships to encourage artists in the region. One of the winners is 16-year-old Mélodie Zhao of Saint Prex, who last summer became the youngest ever person to receive a master’s degree in music from the Geneva Conservatory.
She will use her CHF50,000 scholarship to pursue private studies with Pascal Devoyon and other renowned professors around the world. Zhao began playing piano at age 3, gave her first concert at age 5 and began performing with orchestras at age 9. She will join post-graduate piano classes at the University of Arts in Berlin and post-grad classes in orchestra conducting, in Geneva in addition to training with mentors such as Devoyon.
The foundation was created in 1980 by a Belgian couple, Antoine and Rosy Leenaards, who made their fortune then retired to Switzerland. Their only son and heir died at age 58 and the couple created the foundation in his memory with CHF230,000. By the time Antoine died 15 years later he left a fortune worth CHF325 million to the foundation, which annually gives awards to encourage the cultural life of the region.
Three prizes worth CHF30,000 each, in recognition of a career, were given Tuesday evening to:Jacqueline Veuve, filmmaker, André Corboz, architectural and urban historian, and Jean Scheurer, painter.
Eight scholarships worth CHF50,000 each were awarded to young people at a crucial point at the start of their careers, to help them continue developing. This year’s winners, in addition to Zhao:
Antoinette Dennefeld, mezzo-soprano, Douna Loup, writer, Sylvie Neeman Romascano, writer and editor, Mélodie Zhao, pianist, Frédéric Cordier, artist, Guy-François Leuenberger, pianist-composer, Michael Rampa, painter and Adrien Rovero, industrial designer.
Zhao is young, but she has already made a name for herself; her most recent concert at Victoria Hall in Geneva 12 October in commemoration of the 200th birthday of Liszt, was sold out and she has recently completed a new recording, her second: Douze Etudes d’exécution transcendante de Liszt (Claves label). Her first recording at age 13: the 24 Etudes de Chopin. The Leenaards Foundation notes that her new “interprétation is recognized for its perfect virtuosity and profound musicality”.
Background, “Prodigy M Zhao gives rare Chopin complete Etudes concert”, GenevaLunch 28 February 2010
Tunnel-FET technology set to take over from field effect
Tactile screens also on the way
Adrian Ionescu of the EPFL nanoelectronic devices lab
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Computers, cell phones and other electronic devices could be using 100 times less energy starting in just six years, an EPFL researcher in Lausanne writes in a special issue of Nature devoted to transistors, published Tuesday 22 November.
The key: moving from today’s field effect technology to tunnel-FET technology.
Adrian Ionescu is head of the Guardian Angels mega research project, a finalist for a European Union one billion grant. The project aims to design ultra-miniaturized, zero-power electronic personal assistants for a variety of applications, including healthcare.
Tunnel-FET technology is one of the first major stages in the project’s roadmap.
“For research and industry, the power consumption of transistors is a key issue. The next revolution will likely come from tunnel-FET, a technology that takes advantage of a phenomenon referred to as ‘quantum tunneling’, the Lausanne polytechnic institutes says in a statement issued Tuesday. Ionescu’s article focuses on work at the EPFL and in IBM laboratories in Zurich and the CEA-Leti in France, all of which are taking part in Guardian Angels.
Field effect technology, used in today’s transistors, is fast approaching its limits, especially for power consumption, according to the EPFL. With field effect, voltage induces an electron channel that activates the transistor.
Today’s computers have a billion transistors in the central processing unit, the CPU, alone: small switches that turn on and off to provide binary instructions, the 0s and 1s that tell our devices to send e-mails, watch videos and so much more.
Tunnel-FET technology is based on a “fundamentally different principle”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The first Confucius Institute in Switzerland opened in October at the University of Geneva but last week courses officially opened in the master’s degree students, accompanied by a meeting between Ji Baocheng, president of the University of Renmin, China, and Pierre Willa, head, International Relations Office, University of Geneva.
The Confucius Institute of University of Geneva is working in partnership with Renmin University in Beijing and Hanban; the University of Geneva is supporting research projects and organizing workshops and conferences. It will also act as a teaching and research centre on contemporary China, says the university.
The new Institute is one of more than 350 in 104 countries.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Peugeot-Citroën Thursday became the 11th major firm to join the Innovation Square on the EPFL campus, the first company from the car industry to bring in a large research and development budget, according to the universiy. The square opened in August 2010.
The group said in a press release 3 November that “The mission of this innovative structure is to foster a long-term vision for PSA Peugeot Citroën’s products and services.” The new unit is called StellaLab@EPFL.
The polytechnic made world headlines 28 September when it announced that new research with Nissan is studying the brain-computer interface and looking at the option of a computer-piloted car. Then 28 October it announced that, working with a French company, it had solved a major problem for compressed air cars by reducing charging time.
“EPFL conducts a great deal of research that is of interest to the auto industry, in a wide range of different fields,” it says in a 3 November press release. “For example, the Materials Sciences and Engineering Institute works to create light, sturdy composites; several robotics-oriented laboratories are designing and producing all sorts of mechanisms to help with driving and move toward ever-increasing comfort and safety for users and their environment; and there are a large number of projects that aim to replace fossil fuels in the transportation systems of the future, both by storing energy in various forms (new electric batteries, hydrogen, and even compressed air) and by using it with greater efficiency.”
Wearing your heart on your sleeve to take on a new meaning
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A tiny new device could soon provide real-time heart monitoring that might help prevent some of the 70-100,000 deaths annually from sudden onset heart attacks. The new tool has yet to be tested in real-life conditions, but cardiologists are enthusiastic about its potential, says EPFL, which developed the medical tool. It is one of several “wireless body sensor networks” (WBSN) tools being developed at the polytechnic university in Lausanne, as part of the huge Guardian Angels project, selected as one of six finalist mega-research projects by the European Union (winner to be announced in 2012).
The project is also looking at similar monitoring systems for other health problems, such as the immediate impact of diet on obese patients.
The device consumes very little electricity and is made up of high-precision body sensors applied to the skin, a ZigBee radio module and a chip that’s optimized for analyzing and processing biological signals.It monitors the heart and detects anomalies, immediately alerting the patient’s cell phone in the case of a problem. Medical personnel are immediately alerted by e-mail and message.
“This system collects very reliable and precise data, it’s equipped with a very effective noise filtering system, and it has batteries that can last for 3-4 weeks at a time,” notes EPFL professor David Atienza, head of EPFL’s Embedded Systems Lab. “Above all it provides an automatic analysis and immediate transmission of data in compressed format to the doctor, preventing him or her from having to work through hours of recorded data.”
Member of British House of Lords Michael Bates
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Students at the International School of Geneva are having an eventful week before breaking up Friday for a holiday week: an inspiring visit from Lord Michael Bates of the British Parliament Wednesday is being followed by the inauguration of a major building project for a new primary school in Founex which opened in September.
Bates, whose Walk for Truce is taking him on foot some 4,800km around the world, is determined to get nations to act on a UN resolution signed in October 2011, namely to use the 2012 London Olympics to take one active step each to promote peace.
The resolution has been signed before each Olympics Game, since 1993, when the practice was revived by the International Olympic Committee.
The British member of the House of Lords would like to see it become more than a handsome gesture, he says.
He met with middle school students, ages 9-12, from the campus at La Grande Boissière to give them pointers on how they can help encourage their governments to take concrete steps.
Bates notes on his Walk for Truce web site that 193 nations come together to sign:
“a Resolution declaring their commitment to observe to “pursue initiatives for peace and reconciliation in the spirit of the Ancient Games”—in the past everyone has signed it but no one has ever implemented it. We think that is a missed opportunity. We want to see the Resolution brought into reality. I have decided to walk over 3000 miles in the hope that we can persuade all signatories to the Truce to do just one thing to implement it. Not only would this bring the flame of hope into conflict zones around the world it would mean that we would rediscover the central purpose of the Ancient Games which was to provide for a pause in the endless cycle of violence through the observance of the Sacred Truce. If they could do it 3000 years ago, then surely we can do it now.”
The International School, which has grown to 4,300 students from 125 countries with the addition of a new primary school this year, Thursday celebrates the official inauguration of the school at the La Chataigneraie campus. The campus now has 1,400 students and will gradually add another 300 students in Founex, which will have a significant impact on the recent shortage of places in international schools in the region.
Young Swiss professionals best in Europe at WorldSkills 2011
LONDON, ENGLAND – Switzerland is the top European country and third in the world for professional skills training, based on gold and silver medals won at the WorldSkills competition which just closed in London 10 October. Fifty-three nations took part in the competition, which runs every two years and is open to professional workers under age 22.
The Swiss Federal Department of the Economy notes in a statement that the awards support Switzerland’s approach to professional training and education, with its emphasis on internships in order to master skills.
Two out of three Swiss teenagers opt for professional training programmes, rather than university studies.
Young workers from 53 countries competed at WorldSkills 2011
Switzerland entered young people from 60 professions who had competed at the regional and national level.
Nearly 1,000 young workers from around the world competed to show their talents in a wide range of professional skills, from automobile painting to carpentry and IT. Switzerland won 6 gold, 5 silver and 6 bronze medals.
Swiss team and their professional skills
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Philippe Gugler, the vice-rector of the University of Fribourg has resigned, the university announced 3 October, in the wake of an investigation into plagiarism. Gugler was the subject of an inquiry that began in August after he was accused of laxity in checking the originality of papers where he was listed as co-author.
Eight pages out of 1,800 published during his nine years with the university did not cite the original sources, says the university.
Hiking near the Jungfraujoch (baby gets a backpack ride), August 2011
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – WWF, the environmental organization, and Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain, Migros, are joining forces to help children learn more about and appreciate the Swiss Alps. Mountainmania is a seven-week online quiz programme that kicks off 13 September, designed to teach children more about the Alps.
The two organizations are ready to hand out 50,000 diplomas to “mountain champions” who correctly complete the quiz.
“We need to take care of our Alps,” says WWF chief executive Hans-Peter Fricker. “We’ll only be able to do this if we instill a love for the mountains in children, starting as early as possible.”
Migros will be featuring its bio brands during this period, aiming to increase their sales by 10 percent during the seven weeks. The mountainmania albums that are sold will contribute CHF1 per album to WWF Alpine projects that include restoring areas of the Rhone and Rhine rivers to natural habitats for trout and beavers, and helping encourage the natural return of large carnivores to their Alpine habitats.
Zurich, one of three Swiss cities that will benefit from new jobs
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – The QS World University Rankings 2011-2012, published independently since 2010 and considered one of the main global education ranking systems, show EPFL in Lausanne slipping from slot no. 32 to 35, but ETHZ in Zurich holding its no. 18 place, just behind McGill in Canada and ahead of Duke in the US.
EPFL has gone up slightly with Leiden and remained at the same level with the Shanghai rankings in recent years, while since ETHZ has held steady with QS and Shanghai but gone up with Leiden. EPFL offers 20 programmes and ETHZ 44.
Swiss state universities that are given a world ranking: The University of Geneva is ranked 71, Basel University 137, Bern 162, Zurich 101.
The QS system was originally published jointly by universities by Quacquarelli Symonds, a UK-based company, jointly with Times Higher Education (THE), but the two split in 2010 to use different methodologies for determining rankings. The new QS system should not be confused with the older THE-QS World University Rankings.
THE publishes its new rankings in October.
Other major rankings systems, most of which show some national bias: Shanghai Jiao Tong, The CHE Ranking, The Leiden Ranking, CHE EUSID, Newsweek, several Financial Times specialty rankings, and the Karriere Hochschulranking.
The Swiss education department publishes a useful web site in four languages (including English) with a searchable data base of all the rankings for comparative purposes.
Highlights of the new QS rankings include:
- Cambridge is number 1 but close behind are Harvard, MIT, Yale and Oxford for the top five
- The top 10 are all US or UK universities
- Chinese mainland universities are inching up, with two of them, Peking and Tsinghua, in the top 50
School is starting: watch out for little people crossing the road!
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Cantons Geneva and Vaud are back in school today, 29 August, and police are reminding motorists to slow down near schools.
School buses at Ecolint, the popular name for the campuses of the International School of Geneva, will start the year Thursday 1 September with a difference: the school has been working with EPFL in Lausanne to come up with the most efficient, environmentally-friendly system for its fleet of school buses in the two cantons.
“Our student population is increasing rapidly,” said Michel Chinal, responsible for the project shortly before his retirement in June. He noted that the rising number of parents picking up and dropping off their children is creating traffic problems in the village of Founex, just outside Geneva. The bus service offered by the school is too slow. The Founex campus, La Chataigneraie, will be adding nearly 300 students with its new primary school opening this week.
“Parents often say that they would like to sign their children up, but the bus ride is too long,” according to Chinal. The school transports nearly 300 students in an area bounded by Morges in Vaud, neighbouring France and Geneva.
The solution was to work with mathematicians in EPFL’s Discrete Optimization Group.
EPFL chemist Rainer Beck, whose child attends the school, offered to optimize the service and he asked his mathematical colleague Friedrich Eisenbrand to tackle the problem.
Eisenbrand notes that “coming up with a simple arithmetic algorithm is not difficult. But that’s not an efficient approach; due to the enormous number of possible itineraries, the calculations are painfully slow. We needed to develop an algorithm that quickly rejected most routes, so that the computation could be completed before the end of the Universe.”
Risenbrand and PhD student Adrian Bock came up with a solution for this complex problem. Using a few clever techniques, says EPFL, the calculations only take half a day to complete.
Chateau de Coppet, home to the International Menuhin Music Academy (source: IMMA)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The International Menuhim Music Academy (IMMA), newly based in Coppet, Tuesday 23 August named Maestro Maxim Vengerov, “the greatest violinist of his generation”, its new music counselor.
The IMMA was founded 30 years ago in Gstaad by Yehudi Menuhin, widely considered the finest violinist of the 20th century. It has 16 students from throughout the world and its mission is to offer a three-year scholarship every year to a number of violin and other string instrument virtuosos the opportunity to perfect their education by working with maestros and professors.
Gstaad remains the centre for IMMA’s week-long “Rencontres Musicales” every summer, where students and teachers work and offer performances that are open to the public.
The students, who are selected based only on talent, follow individualized programmes, including master classes at the IMMA. Their academic musical studies are designed to lead to a Master of Advanced Studies, MAS, and the academy is currently working towards its programme being recognized by the HES SO and expects to offer the MAS by 2012.
Students have a second part to their education, public concerts, as part of the newly renamed Menuhin Academy Soloists chamber orchestra.
Tuition is free for the students, who live with families in the area (see Editor’s Notepad: appeal to local families).
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss safety council, BPA, is putting up 1,400 posters around the country and police are increasing their presence near schools and crosswalks to remind drivers to stop for children on foot and on bicycles.
School starts Monday 22 September in canton Vaud and in most of Valais, with Geneva starting a week later, 29 August. Children headed back to school 15 August in the Goms Valley in Valais.
The number of serious accidents involving children 5-14 while between school and home was down in 2010, but with 180 critically injured or killed on Swiss roads last year, police are reminding drivers of their obligation to stop at a crosswalk if a pedestrian (including cyclists) is present.
Police in Vaud will be using mobile radars near schools for two weeks to remind drivers to slow down and to raise their awareness of the speed at which they are driving. They will also be handing out windshield cleaning cloths as a reminder to make sure your visibility is good.
They’ll be starting their 2011 visits to school classes to educate children about road safety. Police in Vaud made 1,348 visits to classrooms during the last school year.
Safety campaign poster for the 2011-12 school year: "Thank you for stopping for me" / Always come to a full stop
The TCS (Touring Club Suisse) offers a pointer to drivers: don’t use your hand or headlights to wave a child into an intersection because they’re more likely to run into the road without first checking traffic from both directions.
A final but critical reminder to drivers, say police, is to make sure all children under 12 or 1.5 metres in height are in child safety seats.
Children riding in a car without a seatbelt attached are three times as likely to be injured and 30 times as likely to be killed, according to Swiss statistics.
A 50kph crash, with no seatbelt, is the equivalent of a fall from the third storey of a building.
EPFL in Lausanne: foreigners pay just a bit more than Swiss students in fees
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Swiss universities have the legal right to limit the number of foreign students in specific disciplines and they may charge higher fees than those for Swiss students, to reflect the real cost of providing the education.
A report to this effect was delivered to the Swiss Universities Rectors Conference (Crus) earlier in the year, Matthias Stauffacher, the group’s director general, confirmed Tuesday 2 August.
Swiss university students pay annual fees that are well below the cost of their education, between CHF500 and 1,300 a semester for basic fees for undergraduate students. St Gallen, which is the only Swiss university that currently has a quota for foreign students, 25 percent (it offers several programmes in English), charges foreign students less than CHF300 a year extra for foreign students.
Crus brochure, “Studying in Switzerland, Universities 2011″
Will also create more secondary school places
ISLL, new international school, opens in Morges, September 2011
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Two schools, one new and one expanding, will significantly ease the pressure on the local English language and bilingual primary school offer starting in September. The continually growing international population in the Lake Geneva region has resulted in a worsening of what was already a shortage of places in schools where English is one of the teaching languages.
Morges school finds a home, thanks to regional development agency and town of Morges
The LLIS (Lake Leman International School) opens at La Gottaz in Morges 12 September, with kindergarten starting at age 3 to grade 5 (ages 9-11) opening during the first year, as well as a multi-lingual crèche or daycare centre for children from age 3 months. The school is planning to open a secondary school for the 2012-2013 academic year, with International Baccalaureate (IB) preparation.
It can take several years for a school to receive IB accreditation, but the new school, opening in its first year with seven classes, is basing its education programme on the IB, particularly for language learning, it says.
Finding a location for the school, especially given high rents in the Lake Geneva region, was not easy, but the Vaud Economic Development Agency and the town of Morges worked with the school, which is in a commercial complex next to the BAM regional train line and the A1 autoroute exit for Morges Ouest.
Anna Kaeser, who has several years experience in education in the UK and Switzerland, is the director of the school and a group of investors is working with management to ensure the financial viability of the school.
International schools also attract local Swiss famililes in part because they often offer a full-day programme, unlike Swiss state schools. The new LLIS will be open from 08:00 to 17:00, including the lunch hour, with a lunch service. The Cap Canaille crèche is located in the same building and is open from 06:30 to 18:30, five days a week, year round.
La Chataigneraie, part of the Int’l School of Geneva, adds 500 new students this September
New primary school at La Chataignerai, Founex
The oldest international schools in the world and a founding school of the IB programme, the International School of Geneva, has had waiting lists for several years.
This September it increases its intake dramatically at La Chataigneraie, its canton Vaud campus in Founex, thanks to a major construction programme. The school, with four campuses, had more than 4,000 students in September 2010.
Atrium in the centre of the new primary school creates light and airy space
The La Chataigneraie campus has built a new primary school that will house 642 students, and it added another storey to the old primary school, which is being turned over to the secondary school. Seven new classes are currently planned in the primary school and three in the secondary school, “but more classes may be added in the primary school if demand warrants it,” Catherine Merigay of the development office told GenevaLunch.
Total additional capacity is 500 students, potentially bringing the campus’s population to about 1,700 students.
La Chat, as it is popularly known, has been able to get rid of a number of portacabins and it is offering a “reception”, or kindergarten class for the first time, for children age 4 and up, starting in September.
Portacabins are disappearing thanks to an additional storey on La Chat's old primary school, now handed over to the secondary school
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – EPFL chose the right week to talk about a new field project, part of a larger study of how environment influences flood rates in mountain valleys.
Ticino and parts of Valais, including Zermatt, are worriedly watching rising waters from heavy summer storms.
The two-year-old project to better understand the hydrology of the Alps in order to reduce risks is run by EPFL’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory (Eflum). It has set up 25 ground weather stations in a 20 km2 area that covers a large part of the Val Ferret watershed. The goal is to improve methods for predicting natural disasters to better warn populations in risk zones. “Mathematical models exist, but they still don’t take into account all the data that are needed to establish reliable predictions, such as the influence of air temperature, the formation of thermal winds or the impact of precipitation,” says Marc Parlange, the EPFL professor who heads the lab.
The field project this summer has involved setting up several new tools: two weather stations on 10m towers, a weather balloon that will be regularly deployed, and three Lidars, laser-based instruments which will be used to take continuous wind data over a height of nearly 2 km.
Water and wind input are two key aspects being studied this summer. Val Ferrat was chosen because it was the rare valley to meet a specific set of requirements, says Raphaël Mutzner, the PhD student responsible for hydrologic modeling.
There were not many options, he points out.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Energy research has been selected as the topic for the 2011-12 Swiss National Research Programme (NRP), overseen by the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SSER). The call for papers opened 8 July, with a deadline of 21 September for applications.
One to three new NRPs are selected for funding after proposals are reviewed, and the Swiss National Science Foundation is then responsible for implementing them.
The SSER says the NRPs “are the Swiss government’s research promotion tool intended to support research projects dealing with contemporary issues of national importance and which have the potential to make a scientifically sound and innovative contribution within a practical period of time to a solution to urgent societal or economic problems.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND = The Swiss Network for International Studies has awarded funds to eight major university projects out of 18 applications in its annual call for proposals in the field of pluri-disciplinary international studies.
The awards are given for up to two years, with a CHF300,000 ceiling. They are awarded to projects that are based at a Swiss university.
Five projects are going ahead; three have been conditionally approved, with the final decision to be made after modifications are presented. The five that are now funded:
- Large-scale land acquisitions in Southeast Asia: Rural transformations between global agendas and peoples’ right to food
- A multi-scale approach to land governance in complex cultural, environmental and institutional contexts. Development of a comparative GIS methodology linking land use, land cover and land tenure from the cases of Bolivia and the Lao PDR
- Mobile Access to Knowledge: Culture and Safety in Africa. Documenting and assessing the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety
- Mountlennium: Reaching Millennium Development Goals through Regional Mountain Governance
- Individual Preferences for International Environmental Cooperation
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland’s switch to the Bologna system of academic titles has shown its worth, Bern says. A study carried out to examine the use of the Bachelors and Masters degrees but also the continuing use in parallel of some Swiss diplomas, notably in engineering, has shown that the Bologna system provides clear indications of where and what studies the student has completed.
The government notes, in a statement issued 4 July, that the Swiss diploma titles will gradually be phased out, however.
