Streak of days without inch of snow finally over

A relatively meager snowfall created huge headaches for commuters on Friday. CBS's Courtney Gousman capture this video on the Kennedy Expy. around 7:30 a.m. (Source: CBS Chicago)

By Peter Nickeas




Tribune reporter

10:59 a.m. CST, January 25, 2013

More than an inch of snow fell on Chicago today, finally ending a streak that began 335 days ago.

At 9:30 a.m., 1.1 inches of snow was recorded at O'Hare International Airport since midnight. That's the first day an inch or more of snow has fallen there since last February. The previous record was a stretch of 310 days set in 1940.

This morning's light snow also marks the latest it has gone during a winter before an inch of snow has fallen over a day.

Besides ending record streaks, the snow played havoc with the morning rush hour.

Snow started falling in the Chicago area around 4:45 a.m. Within half an hour, Illinois state police were reporting slick conditions on roads and had already responded to six minor accidents. Shortly after 6 a.m., a nine-car crash was reported near North Avenue on the Kennedy Expressway, but there were no reports of serious injuries.

By 7:15 a.m., state police said they had responded to about two dozen crashes on area expressways.

The snow was expected to end this morning.

“Something like this wouldn’t be newsworthy if it wasn’t for the fact it hasn’t snowed all year,” said Gino Izzi, another meteorologist for the weather service.

Still, the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation deployed almost 200 of its 284 plow trucks to clear streets of snow and apply salt to the roads.

"We’re going to be monitoring the weather but at this point we’re looking at snowfall at least through the rush hour," said Anne Sheahan, spokeswoman for Streets and Sanitation.

The next bout of snow is not expected until next week.

"We don’t have much of a chance of snow for the next five or six days," Izzi said.

pnickeas@tribune.com
Twitter: @peternickeas

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Al Shabaab says enemies closed its Twitter account

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Al Shabaab on Friday said its Christian enemies had closed its Twitter account, which the Somali militant group used to parade hostages, mock rivals and claim responsibility for bombings and assassinations.

The group’s official Twitter account, which has thousands of followers, was offline on Friday with a message saying “Sorry, that user is suspended”.

It was not immediately clear why the account, which was created in 2011 under the HSM PRESS Twitter handle, was suspended. The account was still unavailable as of 1233 GMT.

On Wednesday the al Qaeda-aligned rebels used the social media site to threaten to kill several Kenyan hostages and on January 17 announced the execution of a captive French agent after a French commando mission to rescue him failed.

“The enemies have shut down our Twitter account,” al Shabaab‘s most senior media officer, who refused to be named, told Reuters.

“They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians’ mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online).”

Al Shabaab wants to impose their strict version of sharia, or Islamic law, across Somalia. However, it has lost significant territory in the southern and central parts of the country in the face of an offensive by African Union troops.

Twitter said it does not comment on individual accounts and the Kenyan government denied it had filed any request for the account to be taken down.

“It’s an emphatic no. We would not try to negotiate or have anything to do with the Al Shabaab. We didn’t even know the account was suspended,” said government spokesman Muthui Kariuki.

Al Shabaab posted on the account on Wednesday a link to a video of two Kenyan civil servants held hostage in Somalia, telling the Kenyan government their lives were in danger unless it released all Muslims held on “so-called terrorism charges” in the country.

“Kenyan government has three weeks, starting midnight 24/01/2013 to respond to the demands of HSM if the prisoners are to remain alive,” the group said.

Despite the closure of the Twitter account, al Shabaab said it would continue to “display the loss and grief of Christians no matter what means we use,” al Shabaab’s spokesman said.

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‘Dallas’ returns with J.R. Ewing’s final schemes

NEW YORK (AP) — J.R. Ewing wouldn’t hesitate to cheat his fellow man. He also famously cheated death.

In the second-season finale of “Dallas” back in 1980, he was shot by an unknown assailant in his office and left for dead. But he recovered nicely, and the cliffhanger question that gripped the nation (Who shot J.R.?) was answered that November in an episode seen by 80 million viewers.

This time, J.R. won’t get off so easy. During the second season of TNT’s rebooted “Dallas,” J.R. cashes in his chips and goes to his reward … wherever that may be.

Meanwhile, viewers, however braced they are for J.R.’s demise, will have to reckon with the loss of arguably TV’s greatest villain, and bid farewell to the actor who portrayed him so indelibly and also cheated death for years. Larry Hagman, who died of cancer at 81 the day after Thanksgiving, was diagnosed in 1992 with cirrhosis of the liver from a life of heavy drinking and, three years later, when a malignant tumor was discovered on his liver, successfully underwent a transplant.

This double loss would be a burden for any show to bear. “Dallas,” returning at 9 p.m. EST Monday, comes fully loaded.

“I think viewers want closure,” said Linda Gray, who plays J.R.’s long-suffering ex-wife, Sue Ellen. “They want to mourn Larry Hagman and J.R. Ewing. They want to know they can grieve the fact he won’t be around.”

But all that comes later. With its two-hour season premiere, “Dallas” carries on in familiar fashion, with the expected two-timing, squabbles, a kidnapping revealed, a stolen identity and assorted other mischief.

And never fear: J.R., though visibly frail, continues his reign as a scheming oilman and rascally Ewing patriarch.

“I came over to deliver some muffins to the pretty little secretaries,” he announces on making an unannounced visit to Ewing Energies headquarters before he laments, “Who could have guessed so many would turn out to be MEN? Where’s the sport in THAT?”

In another scene, J.R. shares sly counsel with his son, John Ross, on double-crossing other members of the family: “Love, hate, jealousy: Mix ‘em up and they make a mean martini. And when we take over Ewing Energies, you’ll slake your thirst — with a twist!”

The new “Dallas,” which debuted last June, is stocked with a troupe of young regulars (including Josh Henderson, who plays John Ross), as well as veterans of the original CBS series, notably Gray and Patrick Duffy as J.R.’s ever-upright brother, Bobby. J.R. will appear in a minimum of five or as many as seven of the season’s episodes before he meets his fate.

After that, can “Dallas” survive the dual deaths of its central character and legendary star?

“Larry being gone doesn’t eliminate the influence of the character of J.R.,” Duffy pointed out. Who knows what land mines J.R. will have left behind? “We can find business deals he did or schemes he started that now are coming home to roost, and they can turn up for years to come.”

“Whatever will happen on the show, we will be talking about J.R. Ewing and he will have done things that have a ripple effect,” Gray agreed. “He will always be there.”

“There’s a lot of driving forces on the show — not just J.R.,” added “Dallas” executive producer Cynthia Cidre, who, interviewed by phone a couple of weeks ago, was parked outside a posh Dallas social club where the wake for J.R. was about to be filmed.

She said this season she tried to use Hagman sparingly.

“He was the most delightful man and a total professional,” she said, “but he wasn’t well and we didn’t want to overtax him.”

Now, with his passing, “we want to give J.R., and Larry, the proper send-off.”

But she insisted there had been no contingency plan for how to plot J.R.’s demise in the event Hagman died in mid-season.

“We didn’t have a Plan B, on purpose,” said Cidre. “We just knew that we had Larry, so let’s use him, let’s enjoy him, and if something happens, we’ll scramble and fix it. I had great faith in the writers’ room. We knew the day might come and what we would do then: Figure it out.”

That day came in late November when she got a call from Duffy. “He told me, ‘Larry’s in the hospital and it isn’t good. He’s saying goodbye.’ In 24 hours we had fixed one of the scripts. We had two more scripts that had to be adjusted, and then this episode we’re shooting now, the Goodbye Episode.”

Roughly 85 percent of the season’s story line remains intact, she said, supplemented by the death of J.R. and the mystery surrounding it: Who Killed J.R.?

“The mystery has all the machinations of a great J.R. business deal, as opposed to a whodunit,” said Duffy. “Cynthia constructed a really interesting plot, of which I know Bobby’s portion” — including whodunit — “but I don’t know other stuff.”

“We all know, up to a point,” Gray said. “But they’ve got secret pages that we’ve not seen.”

“I hope that we have come up with something really wonderful and enticing,” said Cidre, “and by the time you’re done watching episode 208, which I call the Funeral Episode, I hope you’re saying, ‘Omigod, I didn’t see that coming, and I can’t wait to watch the rest of the season.’”

The mystery, she said, will continue through episode 15, “with a giant, delightful, delicious climax in the season finale.”

To get there, shooting continues until April on the Dallas set, where, even two months after Hagman’s passing, “I’m lonely because my best friend isn’t there to play with,” Duffy said. “I was with him from 1978 until his final hours in the hospital. But I have no regrets. Every day I think of him and smile.”

“I keep expecting him to walk in the door,” Gray said. “He’s so missed. But his presence is everywhere!”

___

Online:

http://www.tntdrama.com

___

Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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Burnt circuit boards snag Japan's 787 probe

The chairman of the NTSB said the seriousness of two recent Boeing Dreamliner battery incidents "cannot be understated." (Source: CBS)

A device seen as key to explaining why a Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliner jet made an emergency landing in Japan last week is burnt and unlikely to provide safety inspectors with data they need, said a person with knowledge of the ongoing investigation.

Circuit boards that control and monitor the performance of the plane's lithium-ion battery unit were charred and may be of little use to the teams investigating why the battery effectively melted, forcing safety investigators to scramble for possible clues from other components in the plane's electronics, said the person, who didn't want to be named as the probe is ongoing.

Aviation authorities in Japan face a painstaking reconstruction that may take months before they can unravel what caused one of the batteries to overheat, triggering warnings in the plane's cockpit.

That relatively inexpensive circuit boards may be keeping $10 billion worth of futuristic aircraft idle underscores how dependent the Boeing jet is on advanced electronics rather than more traditional, but less fuel-efficient, parts, experts said.

"The circuit board (system) is badly damaged. We'll see how much we can learn from examining it, but we'll also have to look at other recording devices on the aircraft to try and find out what happened," the person with direct knowledge of the investigation told Reuters.

BATTERY "BRAIN"

The circuit boards, known as the battery monitoring unit, are the "brains" of the battery, experts said. About the size of a laptop computer, the boards monitor functions of the lithium-ion battery's eight cells and feed this information to the charger. That effectively makes the boards responsible for preventing a battery from overcharging.

One key question for safety investigators is how the battery's eight individual cells became volatile even though the overall voltage to the battery was steady and didn't exceed the 32-volt capacity, officials have said. That data is not recorded in the Dreamliner's "black box" flight-data recorder.

U.S, Japanese and Boeing representatives have this week been at the Kyoto headquarters of GS Yuasa Corp, which makes batteries for the 787, looking at everything from manufacturing quality to technical standards.

The main battery from the All Nippon Airways flight is still at the GS Yuasa plant, where it is being cleaned and disassembled for further checks. Once they are done, Japanese safety officials plan to take the damaged circuit boards to the manufacturer, Fujisawa-based Kanto Aircraft Instrument, for a detailed inspection.

All 50 of Boeing's Dreamliners in service were grounded last week after the ANA-operated flight's emergency landing on a domestic flight. That followed an auxiliary battery fire in a Japan Airlines Co. Ltd 787 parked at Boston Airport.

"There is a possibility that a fire destroyed the elements that caused the problem and if so, it will become difficult to investigate the cause," said Hideaki Horie, project professor at the Institute of Industrial Science at Tokyo University.

Horie said Boeing should re-think the design of the battery safety and data recovery system even while it investigates what caused the recent Dreamliner incidents.

The 787 uses two lithium-ion batteries, which are about twice as large as a car battery. The batteries weigh less than a conventional battery and provide more power. They are Boeing's first step toward hybrid power systems like those used by automakers General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp .
 

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Girl: 'My sister's on fire'

3 children were injured, 1 critically after a fire started inside their apartment. (WGN - Chicago)

A 4-year-old girl was in critical condition this morning after she was pulled from a burning bed in her South Side home by neighbors who heard the desperate screams of her older sister, officials said.

"She came downstairs and was knocking on everyone's door," said Sandra Gray. "She was screaming, 'My sister's on fire.' "

Gray said she and her husband and a neighbor ran up the stairs of the four-flat and saw the bottom of a bunk bed on fire. "All I saw was that the bed was on fire and the baby was burned," Gray said. "You could see the bed on fire."

She said the older sister, 16, tried to pull the girl from the bed and burned her hands. Gray's husband and the neighbor finally put the fire out with water as firefighters and paramedics arrived, she said.

Gray said the girl was conscious but badly burned.

Clyde Harden, who rushed up with Gray, said he grabbed hold of the little girl and helped put out the fire. “I believe that she was sheltered by God already,” he told reporters on the scene. “Somebody was there for her.”

The girls, along with a 10-year-old brother, were taken to Comer Children's Hospital. The young girl was listed in critical condition and the other two were in good condition, according to fire officials.

The 4-year-old remained in critical condition today with burns to more than 50 percent of her body, according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

The girl was on a breathing tube, she said. “She’s intubated."

Gray said the teenager told her the children were alone in their apartment in the 1000 block of West 76th Street Wednesday evening. The 16-year-old said she was in a back bedroom doing her homework when the boy ran to her room around 7:15 p.m.

"The 10-year-old ran back there to tell her [their sister] was on fire," Gray said.

Though an official cause has not been determined, authorities are looking into the possibility that someone inside the home had been playing with a lighter or matches, Langford said.

Police News Affairs Officer Jose Estrada said the blaze does not appear to be suspicious. “It looks like it may have been accidentally started,’’ he said.

csadovi@tribune.com

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Samsung’s iPad mini rival, the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, revealed in leaked images

While Samsung (005930) has had tremendous success over the past year with its Galaxy brand of smartphones, the company hasn’t been able to generated the same amount of buzz for its Galaxy tablet line just yet. But now SamMobile points us to the first leaked pictures of Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 8.0 that the company hopes will become its flagship tablet in 2013. The pictures, posted on Italian website DDAY, show an 8-inch white tablet that looks like a large Galaxy S III and features thicker side bezels than Apple’s (AAPL) recently released iPad mini. The pictures also show off the new tablet display’s 16:10 aspect ratio with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, which packs more pixels per inch than the iPad mini display and its 1,024 x 768 resolution. We’ll get our first official glimpse of the Galaxy Note 8.0 when Samsung shows it off at Mobile World Congress next month.

[More from BGR: The ultimate humiliation: Dell now getting advice from the ‘Dell Dude’ on how to fix company]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Charlie Brown voice actor pleads not guilty to threats, stalking

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – The former child actor who was the voice of Charlie Brown in the 1960s “Peanuts” animated television specials pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges he threatened his girlfriend and a surgeon who carried out her breast enhancement surgery.

Peter Robbins, 56, from Oceanside, California, pleaded not guilty in San Diego Superior Court to two counts of stalking and 10 counts of criminal threats. If convicted, he could face up to nine years in prison, Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth McClutchey said.

Robbins was arrested on Sunday on outstanding warrants by U.S. Customs officers at the San Ysidro port of entry as he returned to San Diego from Mexico. He remains in jail.

McClutchey said on December 31 Robbins threatened Dr. Lori Saltz, the plastic surgeon he paid to perform breast enhancement surgery on his girlfriend, Shawna Kern.

The prosecution also alleged Robbins left several threatening phone messages for Kern, saying in one, “You better hide Shawna, I’m coming for you … and I’m going to kill you.”

Robbins allegedly threatened to kill a police sergeant who arrested him on January 13 after he refused to pay a restaurant bill at the San Diego hotel where he was staying.

Robbins was released on $ 50,000 bond the following day and given a January 28 court date.

McClutchey urged Judge David Szumowski to keep Robbins’ bail set at $ 550,000 because Kern and Saltz believed Robbins was a “desperate man” and “had nothing to lose.”

Defense attorney Marc Kohnen said the bail was excessive because Robbins had no criminal record and had never been in trouble with the law.

Robbins was 9 years old in 1965 when he became the voice of the world-weary yet optimistic title character of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the first of many animated TV specials based on the popular “Peanuts” comic strip by Charles Schulz.

With its jazz-inflected music score and a storyline involving Charlie Brown’s search for the true meaning of Christmas in a season corrupted by commercialism, it became a holiday TV classic.

The actor went on to voice Charlie Brown in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” “You’re In Love, Charlie Brown” and “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” which aired in the 1960s. He was replaced in later versions of the animated specials.

(Reporting by Marty Graham; Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Steve Gorman and Gunna Dickson)

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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

(Photos: Reuters/ASAP, Provided by Princeton University)

---

The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

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U. of I. launching Chicago tech center

Plans to launch a University of Illinois-affiliated technology research center in Chicago will be unveiled Thursday — the latest regional effort to stem an exodus of high-tech brainpower and entrepreneurship to the coasts.

A private, not-for-profit company, to be called UI Labs, is expected to open offices in or near the Loop to foster collaboration between the region's scientists and engineers from academia, industry and government.

The project, expected to be financed by private donations, corporate partnerships and federal grants, will be outlined for U. of I. trustees Thursday. The goal is to raise $20 million for first-year operations.

The aim is build a research and engineering powerhouse that will attract a range of industries to Chicago, along the lines of what the former Bell Labs did for the East Coast. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will offer up its vast tech resources, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and its Blue Waters supercomputer. It is anticipated other local universities and national research centers will participate.

"I was in India last week, talking with firms that were thinking of coming to Illinois to engage with university scientists," said U. of I. President Robert Easter. "And they say, 'We have a presence in Chicago or we're thinking of having a presence in Chicago, and it would be much more convenient if we could work with you there.'"

Or as project adviser James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, put it, the U. of I. is among the top five universities in the nation in such high-tech fields as computer science and engineering, "but it's down there in the cornfields."

"All the pieces are there, but some of the things Chicago is lacking are things Urbana-Champaign has," he said.

The idea is to marry the two, helping Chicago attain the sort of direct scientific underpinnings that long have fostered tech hotbeds in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

"This is an opportunity to essentially build some of the glue and connective tissue … and that's needed to keep students from leaving and, frankly, to grow some companies in Chicago," said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of innovation and networks for the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation, which focuses on entrepreneurship.

Chicago faces intense competition nationwide, as many cities aim for technological prowess and growth. The start of the year brought the launch of a Cornell NYC Tech campus, for instance, a graduate program in applied sciences that will turn out high-level scientists in New York City.

In Illinois, the challenge is retaining talent. One telling statistic: 32 percent of computer science graduates from the U. of I. in Urbana-Champaign get jobs in California, said Larry Schook, the university's vice president for research.

Among U. of I. grads who made their names out West are Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; software entrepreneur Thomas Siebel, a major U. of I. donor; and Ray Ozzie, who recently retired as chief software architect for Microsoft Inc.

The goal of this project, supported by Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is to retain the next generation of Illinois-trained innovators.

The University of Illinois will have an affiliation agreement with the lab that would outline the flow of personnel, resources and services between them. The goal is to attract 250 faculty fellows during the first three years. Additionally, more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students are expected to participate in UI Labs training and entrepreneurial programs during the first five years.

"Some students and researchers prefer the city to a smaller community … so this could increase the quality of the faculty," said Bruce Rauner, a prominent Chicago venture capitalist who has worked on the development of this plan. "This can drive better research."

The intent is to develop a "junior year abroad program" as well, with the aim of attracting top students from overseas.

The UI Labs project will start within the next month or so, Schook said, with the naming of board members and a director search.

"We'd love to have … the smartest tech students in the world come to participate and stay here to create companies," Schook said.

Rauner, who made his fortune as co-founder of private equity firm GTCR and heads venture firm R8 Capital Partners, said he intends to participate in fundraising and to donate millions personally. Ultimately, to bring the center to world-class status, it may be necessary to raise a $300 million endowment, he said.

The University of Illinois has programs aimed at linking businesses to applicable academic research, including the University of Illinois at Chicago's Innovation Center and research parks at Chicago and Urbana. While those attempt to match faculty research with companies that could use it, the UI Labs model would aim for even deeper collaborative brainstorming, Easter said.

"A company struggling with a problem related to its technology could come in and sit with faculty who do theoretical work to see if those principles could lead to a solution," he said. "Out of that will come innovation, and that will drive economic growth."

kbergen@tribune.com

Twitter @kathy_bergen

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