News briefs

International webcast to feature experts on global warming

Portland State will be participating in an international webcast being held for the academic design community to discuss the implications of global warming and how the crisis can be addressed.

The 2010 Imperative: Global Emergency Teach-In will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 294. The teach-in is specifically geared toward students and faculty in architecture, planning, engineering, landscape architecture and industrial design, but others are invited to attend.

The interactive webcast will include speakers from across the world, including Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Over 50,000 students and professionals will participate in the live webcast from New York City and will conclude with a live discussion and question-and-answer session.

The teach-in by Architecture 2030, hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences, aims to bring together the academic design community to work on innovative mitigation and adaptation strategies and measures to combat rapid climate change.

The 2010 Imperative is a strategy for transforming design education to address global warming. Architecture 2030 believes that all buildings need to immediately reduce their fossil fuel consumption and all new buildings need to be “carbon neutral” by 2030.

For more information on the 2010 Imperative and the live webcast, visit www.2010imperative.org.

-Julia Person

Bernstine gets second in celebrity spelling bee

Portland State President Daniel Bernstine participated in the annual Wells Fargo Celebrity Spelling Bee and came in second to Oregonian columnist Jonathan Nicholas after Bernstine misspelled the word “onomatopoeia.”

Bernstein received a standing ovation for correctly spelling “eleemosynary,” but it was not enough to take the competition–Nicholas won with the correct spelling of “cannelloni.”

The spelling bee, now in its seventh year, was held on Jan. 25 at the Portland Art Museum.

Schoolhouse Supplies, Portland’s free store for teachers, received $171,000 in fundraising dollars from the event. Other local celebrity participants included Portland Mayor Tom Potter, Ed Bartels of The Portland Tribune, Stephanie Stricklen of NewsChannel 8, KPAM radio’s Pay Boyle, Steve Patterson of the Portland Trail Blazers and Portland Monthly contributing writer Nichole Vogel.

-Steve Haske

New Jersey offers civil unions

Hundreds of gay couples were granted the same legal rights, if not the title, as married couples Monday as New Jersey became the third state to offer civil unions.

More than a dozen other couples applied for licenses for ceremonies later in the week.

The civil unions, which offer the legal benefits but not the title of marriage, were granted automatically to the hundreds of gay New Jersey couples who had previously been joined in civil unions or married in other states or nations.

Couples who had not been joined previously could apply for licenses but must wait 72 hours before they can hold civil union ceremonies, the same waiting period for weddings.

New Jersey lawmakers hastily created civil unions in December, less than two months after a state Supreme Court decision held that gay couples had a right to the same benefits as married couples.

-Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press

Realtors association in Bend looks to go green

The Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service is hoping to go green this year.

Details still need to be worked out, but the Central Oregon Association of Realtors hopes to add a check-off box to its listing forms this year to indicate homes built to environmentally friendly “green” standards, COAR Executive Director Geneese Zinsli said.

The MLS is the central repository for information on the housing markets in Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson counties.

Most homes for sale in the three counties are listed on the service, along with homes that are pending sale or have recently sold.

Building a green check-off field into a home’s listing would let real estate brokers and their clients search instantly for environmentally friendly housing, just as they can search for homes of a certain size or price now.

It also would let appraisers search the listings for comparable homes built to environmentally green standards, giving them a greater ability to determine whether the standards give homes a pricing edge in the local market.

Some components of an environmentally friendly home include sealed ductwork and tightly sealed doors and windows, effective, controlled ventilation systems, energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs, efficient water heaters, dishwashers, and refrigerators, and hard floors wherever possible to reduce molds and allergens.

-David Fisher, Associated Press

JetBlue tries to rectify snowstorm meltdown

The six-day siege of angry and disgruntled travelers at JetBlue’s Kennedy airport terminal appeared to ease on Monday as service desks functioned more smoothly and customer calm prevailed despite flight cancellations.

The beleaguered company said it was canceling almost a quarter of its flights on Monday but planned to restore full operations on Tuesday, a week after a Valentine’s Day snowstorm created a travel meltdown that virtually paralyzed JetBlue.

The service breakdown “was absolutely painful to watch,” said David G. Neeleman, the company’s founder and chief executive, on Monday.

He said the storm problems led to other problems, including an overwhelmed reservations system and many of the company’s pilots and flight crews being stuck away from where they were needed. The company didn’t have a system in place to track the stranded crews and reroute them, something JetBlue is working to rectify, Neeleman said.

-Deepti Hajela, Associated Press