Big donation to USC

Ming Hsieh, the chairman and CEO of South-Pasadena-based Cogent Inc., has donated $35 million to USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. Contribute that kind of dough and there's normally something named after you - in this case, the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. Hsieh, who was born and raised in northern China, is an electrical engineering alumnus (in high school, he took a bunch of old transistors and turned them into primitive radios and TVs). Forbes has his net worth at $1.4 billion. Cogent supplies fingerprint and other identification systems to the FBI, Federal Bureau of Prisons and Department of Homeland Security - and as you can imagine, post 9/11 business has been very good.