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The Case Against Income Tax Exemption for Nonprofits

 

Related:

Artificial Intelligence Standards

U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute

The White House: ENSURING A NATIONAL POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

STDMi: OMB A119 & the NTAA: How ANSI accredited standards become federal law

ANSI Response to NIST “A Plan for Global Engagement on AI Standards”

On April 29, 2024 NIST released a draft plan for global engagement on AI standards.

Comments are due by June 2. More information is available here.

 

Request for Information Related to NIST’s Assignments

Under Sections 4.1, 4.5 and 11 of the Executive Order Concerning Artificial Intelligence 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology seeks information to assist in carrying out several of its responsibilities under the Executive order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence issued on October 30, 2023. Among other things, the E.O. directs NIST to undertake an initiative for evaluating and auditing capabilities relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and to develop a variety of guidelines, including for conducting AI red-teaming tests to enable deployment of safe, secure, and trustworthy systems.

Regulations.GOV Filing: NIST-2023-0009-0001_content

Browse Posted Comments (72 as of February 2, 2024 | 12:00 EST)

Standards Michigan Public Comment

Attention Is All You Need | Authors: Ashish Vaswani et al. (2017).  This groundbreaking paper introduced the Transformer architecture, replacing recurrent layers with self-attention mechanisms to enable parallelizable, efficient sequence modeling. It laid the foundational blueprint for all subsequent LLMs, revolutionizing natural language processing by capturing long-range dependencies without sequential processing.
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding | Authors: Jacob Devlin et al. (2018). BERT pioneered bidirectional pre-training via masked language modeling, allowing models to understand context from both directions. As an encoder-only Transformer, it achieved state-of-the-art results on 11 NLP tasks and established the pre-training/fine-tuning paradigm that underpins bidirectional LLMs like those in search and classification.
Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models | Authors: Jordan Hoffmann et al. (2022).  Known as the Chinchilla paper, it revealed that optimal LLM performance requires balanced scaling of model size and data volume (e.g., 70B parameters trained on 1.4T tokens outperform larger models with less data). This shifted research toward data-efficient training, influencing efficient LLM development.

Unleashing American Innovation

Federal Agency Conformity Assessment

Time & Frequency Services

Technical Requirements for Weighing & Measuring Devices

Why You Need Standards

Summer Internship Research Fellowship

A Study of Children’s Password Practices

Human Factors Using Elevators in Emergency Evacuation

Cloud Computing Paradigm

What is time?

Readings / Radio Controlled Clocks

Standard Reference Material

2029 National Electrical Code Panel 2

Electrical Safety Stack

 

2023 CMP-2 Public Input Report – 823 Pages

PDF Page 8: “Demonstrated Load” (STDMi proposal)

PDF Page 570: Outlets for educational occupancies (STDMi comment)

PDF Page 52: Demand factors for schools (Definition of schools/colleges should correlate with ICC and ASHRAE occupancies — our historical claim and proposals).

PDF Page 539: “Meeting rooms” should recognize school occupancies according to ICC.

2023 CMP-2 Public Comment Report

PDF Page 70: Looks like an upward rounding “error” on the lighting power density table.

PDF Page 171: Bi-directional GFCI comment from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories

Related:

NFPA and Mike Holt Enterprises Collaborate on 2026 NEC Changes Book

Schneider Electric: Changes to 2026 NEC

 

The University of Michigan has supported the voice of the United States education facility industry since 1993 — the second longest tenure of any voice in the United States.  That voice has survived several organizational changes but remains intact and will continue its Safer-Simpler-Lower Cost-Longer Lasting advocacy on Code Panel 3 in the 2029 Edition.

Today, during our customary “Open Door” teleconference we will examine the technical concepts under the purview of Code Panel 1; among them:

Article 206 Signaling Circuits

Article 300 General Requirements for Wiring Methods and Materials

Article 590 Temporary Installations

Chapter 7 Specific Conditions for Information Technology

Chapter 9 Conductor Properties Tables

Public Input on the 2029 Edition will be received until April 9, 2026.

 

Campus Child Day Care

“The concentration of a small child at play
is analogous to the concentration of the artist at work.”

 

§
Page 522/523: 305.2 Group E, day care facilities for five or fewer children.
Page 624: Group E Security
Page 1440: Storm Shelters
§

Today at the usual hour we review a selection of global building codes and standards that guide best practice for safety, accessibility, and functionality for day care facilities; with special interest in the possibilities for co-locating square footage into the (typically) lavish unused space in higher education facilities. 

Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

International Building Code

    • Governs overall building construction, fire safety, occupancy classification, and egress requirements for daycare centers.

International Fire Code

    • Regulates fire prevention measures, emergency exits, fire alarms, sprinkler systems, and evacuation protocols for daycare centers.

National Fire Protection Association

    • NFPA 101 – Life Safety Code: Addresses occupancy classification, means of egress, fire safety, and emergency planning.
    • NFPA 5000 – Building Construction and Safety Code: Provides fire protection and structural safety guidelines.

Americans with Disabilities Act

    • Requires daycare centers to be accessible for children and parents with disabilities, covering entrances, bathrooms, play areas, and signage.

European Norms – CEN Standards

    • EN 1176 – Playground Equipment and Safety Requirements: Covers safety standards for daycare playgrounds and outdoor spaces.
    • EN 16890 – Safety Requirements for Mattresses in Children’s Products.

British Standards (BS) for Early Years Facilities

    • BS 8300: Accessibility requirements for childcare facilities.
    • BS 9999: Fire safety guidance for daycare and educational buildings.

Australian Building Code & National Construction Code

    • Covers fire safety, structural integrity, ventilation, and child safety measures for daycare centers.

ISO 45001 – Occupational Health and Safety Management

    • Establishes safety requirements for employees working in daycare facilities, ensuring a safe environment for both children and staff.

Canadian Building Code & Fire Code (NBC & NFC)

    • Provides structural, fire safety, and child safety guidelines for daycare centers in Canada.

“Kindergarten” 1885 Johann Sperl

Preschool Children in the Dome

Playgrounds

Kindergarten

Nursing Standards

Florence Nightengale: The Lady with the Lamp

Today we review the codes and standards that apply to the instructional and research facilities that support nursing science and practice.  There is no single organization with a best practice catalog as there are in other disciplines we follow.  Best practice is inspired by the inherited wisdom of practitioners, faculty and students who work alongside other members of healthcare provider teams.

Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

Nightengale

Healthcare Facilities Code

Group A Model Building Codes

Design Dilemma: Nurses’ Stations

Design and Implementation of a Nursing Robot for Old or Paralyzed Person

H.R. 305: One School, One Nurse Act

 

Nursing Policy Research

Standards Wisconsin

Child Day Care

Group B Proposed Changes to the 2024 Editions Complete Monograph (2650 pages)

For today’s session note the proposals listed below:

ADM1-25 Part I (p. 61)

G39-25 Part I (p. 522)

G40-25 Part I (p. 527)

G39-25 Part II (p. 535)

G144-25 (p. 740)

EB7-25 (p. 1438)

Z1-25 (p. 2582)

2025 ICC Leadership Week + Hearings Committee Action Hearings – Group B #1 | April 26 – May 6 | Orlando, Florida

Link to April Committee Action Hearing Videos

2024 Complete Change Monograph (2658 Pages)

 

“Kindergarten” c. 1885 | Johann Sperl

Safety and sustainability for any facility begins with an understanding of who shall occupy the built environment and how.  University settings, with mixed-use phenomenon arising spontaneously and temporarily, often present challenges.   Educational communities are a convergent settings for families; day care facilities among them.  First principles regarding occupancy classifications for day care facilities appear in Section 308 of the International Building Code, Institutional Group I; linked below:

2018 International Building Code Section 308 Institutional Group I-4 (Superseded in some jurisdictions)

The ICC Institutional Group I-4 classification includes buildings and structures occupied by more than five persons of any age who received custodial care for fewer than 24 hours per day by persons other than parents or guardian, relatives by blood, marriage or adoption, and in a place other than the home of the person cared far.  This group includes both adult and child day care.

We maintain focus on child day care.  Many educational communities operate child day care enterprises for both academic study and/or as auxiliary (university employee benefit) enterprises.

Princeton University Child Care Center

Each of the International Code Council code development groups fetch back to a shared understanding of the nature of the facility; character of its occupants and prospective usage patterns.

The 2024 revision of the International Building code is in production now.   Ahead of the formal, market release of the Group A tranche of titles you can sample the safety concepts in play during this revision with an examination of the documents linked below:

2019 GROUP B PROPOSED CHANGES TO THE I-CODES ALBUQUERQUE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS

2019 REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ACTION HEARINGS ON THE 2018 EDITIONS OF THE GROUP B INTERNATIONAL CODES

Search on the terms “day care” and “daycare” in the link at the top of this page to get a sample of the prevailing concepts; use of such facilities as storm shelters, for example.

“The Country School” | Winslow Homer

We encourage our safety and sustainability colleagues to participate directly in the ICC Code Development process.   We slice horizontally through the disciplinary silos (“incumbent verticals”) created by hundreds of consensus product developers every week and we can say, upon considerable authority that the ICC consensus product development environment is one of the best in the world.  Privately developed standards (for use by public agencies) is a far better way to discover and promulgate leading practice than originating technical specifics from legislative bodies.   CLICK HERE to get started.  Contact Kimberly Paarlberg (kpaarlberg@iccsafe.org) for more information.

There are competitor consensus products in this space — Chapter 18 Day-Care Occupancies in NFPA 5000 Building Construction and Safety Code, for example; a title we maintain the standing agenda of our Model Building Code teleconferences.   It is developed from a different pool of expertise under a different due process regime.   See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.

 

Issue: [18-166]

Category: Architectural, Healthcare Facilities, Facility Asset Management

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Jim Harvey, Richard Robben

Recent concepts in play in transcripts:

  • Tempered water for public hand-washing facilities
  • Walking surfaces
  • Exit signage for non-resident, non-English speaking children
  • Fire rating of corridors 
  • Bathing privacy concepts
  • Water heater controls and monitoring; mixing valves

LEARN MORE:

cdpACCESS Hearing Video Streaming Service

 

Potato Latkes & Sufganiyot

Financial Position $1.417B (Page 16)  | Campus Master Plan 2025-2035  | Revenue Bonds

Traditional Hanukkah foods (Spoon University) are often fried or cooked in oil, symbolizing the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days in the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Latkes (Potato Pancakes): Grated potatoes mixed with onions, eggs, and flour, then fried until crispy. They are often served with applesauce or sour cream.

Sufganiyot (Jelly-filled Doughnuts): Deep-fried doughnuts filled with jelly or custard and dusted with powdered sugar. They represent the oil that miraculously burned for eight days.

Brisket: Slow-cooked beef brisket is a popular main course for Hanukkah dinners.

Applesauce: Often served as a topping for latkes or as a side dish.

Matzo Ball Soup: While traditionally associated with Passover, some families also serve matzo ball soup during Hanukkah. It consists of light, fluffy dumplings made from matzo meal in a chicken broth.

Kugel: A baked casserole dish that can be sweet or savory, made with noodles, potatoes, or other ingredients.

Chocolate Gelt: Chocolate coins wrapped in gold or silver foil, often used in the game of dreidel.

Dreidel Cookies: Cookies shaped like the spinning top used in the traditional Hanukkah game of dreidel.

Cheese: In reference to the story of Judith, who is said to have fed cheese to an enemy general to make him thirsty and then gave him wine to make him drunk.


Sufganiyot in a Minute

Florida

Abiit sed non oblitus | Houghton County Michigan

Michigan Upper Peninsula

One-hundred-twenty-five years ago, hardy and hard-working Finnish Lutheran immigrants founded a school in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Their lives were marked by a gritty quality captured in the Finnish term, sisu – grit and perseverance in the face of adversity.  Citing financial difficulties related to demographic changes, the Board of Trustees announced that the Class of 2023 was Finlandia’s final graduating class.

“The Board of Trustees and University President Timothy Pinnow stated the extremely difficult decision is the result of an intensive analysis of Finlandia’s operations after exploring all potentially feasible strategic alternatives, including the rigorous search for new partnerships and reorganization of the institution’s finances. With financial challenges impacting liberal arts colleges throughout the country, Finlandia is no exception….

The combination of demographic changes, with fewer high school graduates available, a steep decrease in interest in going to college among those graduates, a dwindling endowment, and an unbearable debt load have made Finlandia no longer viable…

…Finlandia University has finalized eight Teach-Out Agreements with Adrian College, Bay College, Michigan Technological University, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Northern Michigan University, University of Dubuque, Waldorf University, and Wartburg College. Several non-partnering institutions have also made commitments to supporting FinnU students in incredible ways…”

Board of Trustees vote to dissolve University wind up affairs in orderly manner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“History of the Finns in Michigan” 2001 | Armas K. E. Holmio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Season of Light Illumination”

University of Michigan Design Guideline 265100 (Interior)

University of Michigan Design Guideline 256500 (Exterior)

 

 

IES Standards in Public Review

Relevant Titles & Open Consultations

Rightsizing Electrical Power Systems

Psychological and Visual Perception of Campus Lightscapes Based on Lightscape Walking Evaluation: 

A Case Study of Chongqing University in China

 

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