On Monday, January 26, at noon, the ornate chandelier-framed chambers of the Illinois Senate will provide the setting for Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment trial. In a nod to decorum, senators were advised not to bring food to their desks, to turn off cell phones and iPods, and use their laptop computers only "in connection with the impeachment trial proceedings" rather than play solitaire as some often do. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-blagojevich-trial-updatejan25,0,4038325.story

Obama is the seventh president to have restated his oath of office. Four--Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan in 1985--restated their oaths publicly because in those years Jan. 20 fell on a Sunday, meaning only private ceremonies were held on those Inauguration Days. Chester Arthur took the oath for the first time at his home in New York in the wee hours of Sept. 20, 1881, following the death of James Garfield, who had been wounded by an assassin's bullet in July. He restated the oath at the U.S. Capitol two days later. Calvin Coolidge's repetition of the oath followed a similar course. He took it for the first time at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, while visiting his native Vermont, after being roused from sleep following the death of Warren Harding. Coolidge had a Bible on a nearby table while taking the oath but did not lay his hand on it, "as it is not the practice in Vermont or Massachusetts to use a Bible in connection with the administration of an oath," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203769.html

Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero, Yo-Yo Ma and Anthony McGill performed a new piece, “Air and Simple Gifts,” composed by John Williams at the inauguration. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along. The musicians wore earpieces to hear the playback. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/arts/music/23band.html

Constitution of the United States
http://supreme.justia.com/constitution/

The zoetrope was invented in 1834 by William Horner, who originally called it a Daedalum ("wheel of the Devil"). It was based on Plateau's phenakistoscope, but was more convenient since it did not require a viewing mirror and allowed more than one person to use it at the same time. Horner's invention strangely became forgotten for nearly thirty years until 1867, when it became patented in England by M. Bradley, and in America by William F. Lincoln. Lincoln renamed the Daedalum, giving it the name of "zoetrope," or "wheel of life." When the praxinoscope was invented by Emile Reynaud in 1877, interest in the zoetrope declined. The praxinoscope offered a clearer, brighter image to viewers than the zoetrope could. In 1889, George Eastman invented flexible photographic film, which allowed a lot of film to be held on one reel. Whereas zoetrope picture strips were limited to about 15 pictures per strip, devices using reels of the new flexible film could present longer animations to viewers. Finally, in 1895, modern cinema was born. http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit10.htm

NIDCD Panel Proposes New Benchmarks for Gauging Language Development in Children with Autism Source: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
A more standardized approach is needed to evaluate the language skills of young children with autism spectrum disorders, says a soon-to-be published article in the Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research. The authors, a panel of experts assembled by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), are advocating the new method so that researchers, clinicians, and other professionals are better able to compare the effectiveness of intervention strategies used for treating children with autism spectrum disorders. Current approaches are inconsistent, and the most widely used benchmark for these children has been the development of “functional speech,” an ambiguous term with no defined criteria. The term autism spectrum disorders refers to a range of related disorders that cause delays in many areas of childhood development, including skills for communicating and interacting socially. Current estimates are that one in 150 children in the United States will be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
In designing the new approach, panel members focused on the window of time during which a child develops spoken language, which can be broken down into three phases: the use of a single “first word” to describe an object or event, the combination of two or three words to communicate something, and the progression to complete sentences.
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The floor of the Hudson, from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Troy, N.Y., has been mapped in recent years by scientists who used sonar to scan every square foot of river deeper than six feet. So when officials began looking for the engine from the plane ditched in the Hudson on January 15—first with sonar, then with divers—they were not thrown off by the ridges and hillocks on the muddy river bottom. Or even a 70-foot-long shipwreck. On January 20, investigators’ sonar readings showed something new: a cone-shaped object at the end of what looked like a long skid mark, roughly in line with 52nd Street. The next day, divers took a look to confirm what it was, and on January 23, the last major piece of evidence from US Airways Flight 1549 was pulled to the surface and reunited with the rest of the aircraft’s remains on a New Jersey pier. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/nyregion/24river.html?em

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sui generis (soo-ee JEN-uhr-is) adjective: of its own kind, unique
From Latin sui (of its own) + generis (kind).
"Time: What's the best piece of advice that you've gotten from someone about being President?"
Obama: Well, precisely because it's sui generis, the only people that really know are the collection of ex-Presidents we have." The Interview; Time (New York); Dec 29, 2008.
A.Word.A.Day

January 24 is the birthday of Edith Wharton, (books by this author) born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City in 1862. She was from an aristocratic ship-owning and real estate family, connected to the cultured high society of New York. She took to writing early and wrote her first novel when she was 11 years old. Edith Wharton wrote novels about frustrated love, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence(1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. The Writer’s Almanac