La investigación arquitectónica de calidad se abre camino en Venezuela. El vínculo lleva al sitio de la Trienal de Investigación de la Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, mi Alma Máter. 
Information on student engagement. It is done by the NSSE Institute for Effective Educational Practice of USA. At the end of the brochure there are some web sites very useful. You can tailor your own report with the Report Builder to hit the subject you want to measure. Economic students walked out a class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy Movement. It is normal that the students, who are going to live gloomy lives thanks to it, feel uneasy with the promotion of principles that have cause current global crisis. But that is not that clear.
The faculty chosen as a target was professor N. Gregory Mankiw, a New Keynesian economist that advised George Bush and has written some of the most important text books on the subject. University politics are always unpredictable. Not so long ago, Harvard Crimson celebrated the return of former president Larry Summers, previously fired for sexism, and one of the main responsible for laissez-faire fever. Now, a Keynesian gets the punch. In a previous post (The responsibility of Number One) I compared the reaction of the London School of Economics and Harvard in front of ethically controversial cases. It's in Spanish here.
In spite all the trouble this event may cause, it is encouraging that Harvard students think that "Harvard students will not do that anymore. We will use our education for good, and not for personal gain at the expense of millions." Here is the link to the news by the Universtity of Phoenix and here by Harvard Crimson.
As I said in the post before, reality is way ahead institutions at the moment. The outburst of social media is obliging universities to regulate its use in campus. Interestingly enough, the first reactions from students have been complaining about censorship.
Interesting lecture by architect Thom Mayne, at IAAC, Barcelona, yesterday. He talked about the “type of thinking” behind his works.
Through the lecture, he developed his point underlying certain “Non-Cartesian way of thinking” and also “thinking through things and not through words”. He illustrated his approach to thinking by celebrating things that are “always unique, never systematic”. In the case of the entrance to his extraordinary new building in China, the Giant Group Campus, the architect from Connecticut described it as “100% conceptual, completely useless, pure rhetorical”. Even, at a certain point, the 2005 Pritzker Prize resumed his whole life as a devotion to “not doing classical architecture”.
Ultimately, it sounded that Mayne, more than showing his way of thinking, showed the way he intensifies his beautiful forms by hiding the simple and extremely conventional way of thinking that lays behind his works. This slight contradiction, that does not devaluate a bit the immense quality of his work, is interesting for me, as I am working at the moment "How we think" by John Dewey in order to improve how we teach architecture. This contradiction just mentioned is assumed by Mayne himself: He emphasised that the “chassis” of his Cooper Union building in New York, was “incredibly simple”, and that this fact was completely hidden to the user through the concentration of the “encounters of different things” in its extremely sophisticated hall.
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