Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

F. David Aberdeen, former Burns Park Elementary principal, obituary

original from annarbor.com, hyperlinks mine

F. David Aberdeen

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Aberdeen, F. David

Age 79, died September 23 2009. Born on July 10, 1930 in Detroit, MI the only child of Albert Frank Aberdeen and Leona Winifred Cozzens Aberdeen. In 1961, David married Virginia Ray Ackley of Oakdale California. They were married 36 years when she predeceased him in 1997. Together they had two sons, David Hall and John Stuart. David spent his first 8 years in Detroit before moving to Portage Lake, where he graduated from Pinckney High School in 1948. He attended Albion College in his freshman year before transferring to the University of Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952 and then earned a Masters degree in education from the University of Michigan in 1954. He began his long public school career in Chicago, where he taught elementary school for five years, as well as night classes in English as a Second Language. He then returned to Ann Arbor where he would spend the rest of his professional career working for the Ann Arbor Public Schools. He worked first as an elementary school teacher and later as an administrator, at different times serving as Deputy Superintendent and principal of Thurston and Burns Park elementary schools. An early advocate of equal opportunity for all students, he spent a year with the Mott Foundation in Flint, after which he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969. After retiring from Burns Park in 1988, he continued to work for the Ann Arbor Administrators Association until earlier this year. He also served on the board of the Pinckey Community Schools Alumni Association, chairing the scholarship committee. He chose the perfect profession as it allowed him to express his lifelong passion for teaching and learning. In 1988 the Michigan State Senate passed a concurrent resolution (No. 672) offering tribute to honor David's contributions to public education. Along with his family, his other great loves were music, literature and the arts. Possessing an uncanny ability to remember the lyrics to any song he was unbeatable at "Name that Tune". His love of words was reflected in his unique writings, his large collection of books and his ability to quote from almost any poem, book or movie. David was never a stranger in any group - if he met you, he was your friend. He is survived by his two sons, David Hall Aberdeen of San Francisco California, and John Stuart Aberdeen of Arlington Massachusetts, and a host of friends, colleagues and former students. A memorial will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, October 3rd, in the Ballroom of the Michigan League, 911 N. University Avenue in Ann Arbor. David was a lifelong advocate of public education and to honor him donations in his memory may be made to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation (http://aapsef.org/)

It's just dirt

From Concentrate: "The politics of dirt in downtown Ann Arbor"

The hole is for the Library Lot underground parking deck next to the Ann Arbor District Library. The city has started on some of the work to build a 677-car parking garage underneath a surface parking lot on Fourth Street and to replace some of the surrounding infrastructure, such as sewer and water lines.

But the big hole for all of those cars is coming later this year. That means an acre of earth four stories deep has to go somewhere.

Some suggestions:

http://www.clean-fill-wanted.com/ -  The quality site serving as a venue to link those supplying fill dirt with those that need fill dirt.

http://www.dirtfill.com/ - DirtFill.com is brought to you by Cut & Fill Inc, established in 1986 in Mpls-St Paul to connect those with excess fill and those who need it. Our telephone and online services have saved thousands of clients millions of dollars.

http://www.freedirt.com/ - FreeDirt.com provides you with the tools to acquire or sell (or dispose) of soil quickly and effectively with No Membership Fees. Unnecessary time spent researching and coordinating your soil needs elsewhere can now be spent on your primary business objectives.

Also: try Craigslist; sign "Free fill dirt"; take out an ad in some newspaper.

Saturday Morning Physics 2009-2010 letter

Here's the annual letter for Saturday Morning Physics at Michigan, published in its entirety because I am lazy.

----

Greetings Saturday Morning Physics Community Members,

 

September marks the start of a new academic year, the return of Michigan Football, and the beginning of a new and exciting year of Saturday Morning Physics (SMP)! We are proud to be starting our 14th year of SMP on October 3rd and are very grateful to our speakers and our audience for their time and enthusiasm, which has made SMP so successful.

 

The lectures are held in 170 Dennison on the U-M central campus (Ann Arbor) from 10:30 to 11:30 am on Saturday mornings and are preceded by refreshments and followed by question-and-answer sessions. Parking is available at the Church Street structure at a cost of $2.00 per vehicle.

Since 1995, the easily understood, informal lectures of Saturday Morning Physics have provided their audiences with an enjoyable understanding of physics and a broad reach into recent discoveries in modern science. The lectures have been supported by the generous contributions of individual donors. The Fall series is sponsored by gifts made by friends of the program, and in part, through endowments made in honor of Dr. M. Lois Tiffany and Mrs. Hideko Tomozawa. In order to continue professional videotaping of the series, we depend on contributions from individuals. We invite each of you to become a sponsor of these lectures with a tax-deductible donation.Please make a contribution so that we can continue this great program.

We are continuing to provide an opportunity for you to contribute by reserving a pair of seats of your choice; $350.00 will hold your chosen seats for the entire Fall series and $550.00 for both the Fall and Winter series. A donation of $2,900 underwrites the cost of producing an entire SMP lecture and will enable us to offer more talks each semester. For more information and to choose your seats or sponsor a lecture, please see a Physics staff member at the entrance to 170 Dennison before or after any of the lectures, or send us an e-mail atumsmp@umich.edu.

 

DATES:  October 3, 10, 17, 24, 31; November 7, 14, 21

 

October 3
Professor Dante Amidei, U-M Physics
Mirrors, Anti-Matter, and the Left-Handed World

Can you know whether you are looking at the world or its mirror reflection? Does any fundamental physical process break that symmetry to distinguish “right” from “left”? This simple question has a deep connection with the interactions of elementary particles and the nature of anti-matter. Professor Amidei will discuss some examples of right/left asymmetry in nature, explain how radioactivity shows the world to be intrinsically left-handed, and end with a puzzling new observation through the looking glass of high energy proton-antiproton collisions.

 

October 10
Philip Gingerich, Professor of Geological Sciences and Director of Museum of Paleontology

How Fast is Evolution?

Charles Darwin wrote that natural selection will always act very slowly, over long intervals of time, and generally on a very few inhabitants of a region at the same time. What did he know 150 years ago about rates? And what do we know now?

 

October 17

Professor William Fink (Director, Museum of Zoology)

The Museum of Zoology: A Priceless Collection of Life

Can mice predict the future climate of Michigan? How long can a bass remember something that tastes really bad? Is changing sex a good thing? Can a scientist find happiness in Tahiti? These and other questions will be answered by Professor Fink as he provides some highlights of research and teaching in the Museum of Zoology, a center of biodiversity sciences at the University of Michigan. Some of the most treasured specimens from the research collections will be on hand.

 

October 24

Professor John D. Speth, U-M Museum of Anthropology

Protein, Fat, or Politics? Big-Game Hunting in Human Evolution
Ever since publication of The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin’s classic treatise on human evolution, paleoanthropologists have assumed that the protein provided by big-game hunting played a pivotal role in transforming a small-brained quadrupedal ape into the brainy bipeds that we are today. Surprising new discoveries, however, are beginning to cast doubt on the traditional “man the hunter” view, and suggest instead that the importance of hunting lay more in the realm of politics than nutrition.

 

October 31

Professor Keith Riles, U-M Physics

Light of The Living Dead: The Remarkable Radiation from Neutron Stars

A neutron star is a stellar corpse remaining from the cataclysmic explosion (supernova) that marks the death of a giant star. These tiny but massive remnants are roughly 100 trillion times denser than ordinary matter and, as a result, produce radiation that is equally extraordinary. Neutron star radio wave pulses rival in precision the best atomic clocks on Earth, while their X-ray and gamma ray bursts can flash brighter than ten trillion suns. In the future these "living dead" stars are expected to yield our first signal for that most ghostly of radiation known as gravitational waves.

 

November 7

Professor Anthony Bloch, U-M Mathematics
Dynamics of Spinning, Rolling, and Skating

Professor Bloch will discuss the classical motion of rigid bodies and general mechanical systems. He will describe the role of symmetry and the conservation of angular momentum and energy. For bodies, which roll or skate the general principle, the Lagrange-D'Alembert principle, must be used to obtain the dynamics. In such cases, angular momentum is not necessarily conserved and one obtains rich and sometimes surprising dynamics. Professor Bloch will give examples of rotating bodies that spontaneously change their direction of motion and that can proceed uphill without the application of outside force.

 

November 14
Professor Jim Allen, U-M Physics

The Science of Music
Professor Allen will take a holistic look at the relationship between science and music -- the phenomena of traveling and standing waves, and how they manifest in the working of musical instruments, the human voice, human hearing, and human perception of sound.

 

November 21

Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Physics, Kenyon College
Sparks and Wiggles
Professor Thomas Greenslade has made a career of examining the beautiful apparatus that our scientific ancestors used to study physics. He will talk about the apparatus used to demonstrate the phenomena of Electrostatics ("Sparks") and Oscillations and Waves ("Wiggles") in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The path from shocking and illuminating discoveries to modern physics will be explored, and he will look at a connection between physics and art.

 

We can’t wait to begin the season and to see all of you! Please feel free to join the Saturday Morning Physics group on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ann-Arbor-MI/Saturday-Morning-Physics-University-of-Michigan/125161239487.

 

Sincerely,

Carol E. Rabuck

Marketing, Communications, & Development

Saturday Morning Physics Administrator

University of Michigan Department of Physics
2484B Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040
PH: 734.763.2588

Physics Website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/physics

SMP Website: http://www.saturdaymorningphysics.org

will the construction on Packard be done for student move in?

What just happened: I rode into town on the #5, including the portion of it which is under construction on Packard near campus.    

The back story: City streets are always under construction in the summer time.  Some times construction projects unexpectedly run late.  When students move in, every single street near campus - including that stretch of campus near Packard - is jammed full of returning students.  The students are coming (EEEK).

How I found out what I found out:  I searched through the City web site for "packard construction" and got reports of project status from 2006 and 2008.  I then searched for "packard construction 2009" and got an announcement of a meeting at the DDA back in January announcing the project and naming Elizabeth Rolla, PE as project manager.  I called the number listed and got voice mail; I called back, spoke to an admin who tried to reach a few people, and who then said that she had spoken to someone (unnamed) in "management" who recommended that I leave a message.  I'm waiting for a call back.

What I don't know: What the U of Michigan knows about the project; if the project is on time, late, or almost done; how I'm supposed to get project updates; who the contractor is; what the cost of that project is; when the RFP was issued; what all of the bids were; the difference between the high bid and the low bid; what contingency plans are in place for student move-in if the roads are still being worked on.

danah boyd to speak at the U of Michigan John Seely Brown symposium, October 13, 2009

from the JSB Symposium web site at the U of Michigan School of Information:

This year's JSB Symposium featuring danah boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her talk will be on "Youth-Generated Culture: Growing Up in an Era of Social Media." 

Note new location: The presentation will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13 in the Blau Auditorium of the Ross School of Business, Tappan and Monroe Streets, on the U-M Central Campus. 

This provocative, free talk is for anyone interested in understanding social media -- whether users, educators, business leaders, service providers, or technology developers. danah boyd observes that many of today's youth embrace a wide array of social media. Whether on social network sites, texting, or blogging, youth leverage the power of social media to create, communicate, share, and learn.

Looking forward to the talk.

a2geeks: weekly events for week of 8/3/09 via @dugsong

Thanks to Dug Song for this events listing - posted as he emailed it out to the a2geeks list.

Monthly events piled up again on Wednesday. Have a great week!

Wednesday:

- Weekly CITI donuts, 10 AM at CITI: http://www.citi.umich.edu
- Weekly LA2M meeting, noon at Conor O'Neill's.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10523192702
- Weekly CoffeeHouseCoders hackathon, 9 PM at Espresso Royale on State
St. (through the summer). http://coffeehousecoders.org
- Monthly SPARK Mingle & Match networking session, 5 PM at SPARK
Central. http://www.annarborusaevents.org/EventDetails.aspx?e=10005
- Monthly Ann Arbor Computer Society, 6 PM at SRT Solutions.
http://www.computersociety.org
- Monthly ARBSEC security meeting, 6 PM at Bar Louie. http://arbsec.org

Thursday:

- Weekly a2b3 lunch, 11:30 AM - resuming now that @eaccents reopens
this week? http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a2b3
- Monthly Michigan Python Users Group, 7 PM at SRT Solutions.
http://groups.google.com/group/michipug
- "Green Energy for the Homeowner", 7 PM at AADL Downtown.
http://www.aadl.org/events/list?id=5332

Friday:

- "Money, Scope, & Time: Aligning expectations between you & your
client", 7:30 AM at Workantile Exchange.
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4047914/
- Weekly Beer:30 mixer, 4:30 PM at the Tech Brewery (BYOB, or RSVP to
info@techbrewery.org). http://techbrewery.org

Still a few bugs to work out

notes on the AnnArbor.com launch; first Sunday edition on the streets.
We were at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market a week ago, and market manager Molly Notarianni had a sample left of an item that a vendor was gearing up to sell for next year: a tub with a praying mantis ootheca which, when left inside, would hatch little bitty mantids for your garden. Well, today was the day that they hatched - this video is someone else's kids enjoying their mantid hatch.

Several people, including my mother-in-law, report problems with home delivery; If you had a problem with home delivery of @annarborcom call 734-926-4555 or toll free 888-922-2472 or email subscriberservices@annarbor.com.

The URL printed in the paper http://annarbor.com/subscriptions for "Manage your account at" goes to an error page.

Some people who used to get papers delivered to porches are getting them on the sidewalk, which makes it hard for mobility impaired people to read the paper.

A few people from out of town have asked how they can get a copy of the paper; I don't see anything on the printed page (p4 of v1n1) that talks about mail subscriptions or single copies by mail.

whoosh: site launch for AnnArbor.com

Some notes, before I quit for the night, from the launch of AnnArbor.com .

We went live at 8pm Thursday.  I took a nap after coming home from work, got up at about 830pm, and went online looking at the comments; most of that evening was spent answering comments, dealing with details, being helpful and present and attentive.  As much as possible, I tried to be like Caterina and George were like at the launch of Flickr.  (I wish I had a better quote for this; here's the one I could find from Pinhead's Progress in 2006)

They wanted to make Flickr so that users were facing each other, instead of facing the website.

To encourage this, George Oates and Caterina spent almost 24/7 greeting each person who came in to the original chat client when it launched. They had an app called "the newbie spotter" which would tell them who was new and what their interest was (you filled this in on your user profile) so Caterina or George would then introduce them to other users: "I see you like ... Black Metal. User GeorgM in Berlin also likes Black Metal."

Flickr is like a party with a good host. Someone there to take your coat, get you a drink, and introduce you around. By setting up this culture of meeting people, they made Flickr a distinctive, friendly, and ultimately successful site.

Friday am up again at 7am, another round of comment moderation; in at work at 9am after dropping my little one at preschool.  Most of the morning spent in the comment stream looking at all of the little things people were eager to catch and point out at launch.  (Miami University, not University of Miami of Ohio; more than one typo; a few links that went to the wrong web sites; other similar sorts of detail that you'd rather get right before people notice; flippedmovie.com is not the movie being filmed.)

When it was clear that things were not going to rattle apart and that there actually was something there that was starting to make sense, it got easier.  I sat out on the patio in front of the office, got my laptop out, and talked to some folks who came by.  Cory Knobel stopped by, and we talked about his PhD research and about complex systems in general and what sort of stories you are prepared to tell to make sense of things, especially when they break.  Kathy Griswold was also by to relate stories of clearing sight lines at sidewalk crossings and mid-block crosswalks, and the level of detail you need to be prepared to attend to to figure out just who owns which corner of which street and is responsible for maintenance.  I referred her to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Library for help in tracking down some of the publications she was having a hard time finding.

There were a welcome deluge of detailed, thoughtful comments on the site design and usability; as Cory noted, you will always have a usability evaluation, if only from the people who you want as your readers.  I'll be sorting through a bunch of that next week and helping capture feedback at enough detail that it can be turned into things that can change.

The big process failure so far is handling things from our "community news" section; some good stuff came in there, but I don't see that we are bird dogging it in the same way as we are comments.  Fixable but ultimately frustrating, especially when breaking news comes in and we are late to react.

The best commentary on the process comes from @common_squirrel

Jolly Pumpkin on its way to Ann Arbor

The Jolly Pumpkin has a sign up at 311 S Main St, where Pepperz used to be, in downtown Ann Arbor. Barbara Tozier snapped a photo of the sign, a photo which has been making its rounds of the beer-loving community around town.

Permits were approved for the space on July 21, 2009 for electrical work; ELEC09-0838 goes to contractor Top Line Electric LLC. Mechanical work on MECH09-1259 goes to Koch & White Heating & Cooling.

Jolly Pumpkin's Ron Jeffries was interviewed on Kalamabrew in January 2009 about his expansion plans.

Nickel Plate 765 steaming through Ann Arbor on its way to Owosso for Trainfestival 2009

The Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society brought Nickel Plate 765, a steam engine, through Ann Arbor on its way to Owosso for Trainfestival 2009.

Of the engine they write:

This is the historic steam locomotive no. 765: a high-stepping, fourteen wheeled magnificent machine that stands 15 feet tall, weighs 404 tons, and goes over 60 miles an hour; restored to the way it looked and sounded when it was built by the Lima Locomotive Works in 1944.

I heard about the trip on Twitter, and followed the handful of railfans, the curious, and trainspotters who were chasing it as it headed up the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks. You can follow the engine there as @nickelplate765. I managed to get close enough to hear the whistle blow, and very much enjoyed this video captured by Chris Goosman. If I read this right it should be heading back down through Ann Arbor from Owosso on its return trip - look for it!

As part of this year’s largest celebration in railroading, no. 765 will operate a special excursion from Owosso to Alma, Michigan and return on July 26th. From July 23rd to July 25th, the locomotive will be on live steam display with eight other steam locomotives from around the country! For more information or to purchase your tickets, visit www.trainfestival2009.com or call 989-725-9464.