Dictionary of American Regional English
When the American Dialect Society (ADS) was founded in 1889, one of the major goals of its charter members was to do for the United States what Joseph Wright was doing for England in compiling his English Dialect Dictionary. But of course the task of making a dictionary of the dialects of the United States was going to be a lot bigger because of the size of this country. So the Society began by publishing word lists made by professors who jotted down unfamiliar terms or expressions as they visited places new to them. For decades, lists were published in the ADS journals Dialect Notes (1890-1939) and Publications of the American Dialect Society (1944-). But the First World War intervened, then came the Depression, and then the Second World War, and no systematic plan had been made to carry out this project. Finally Fred Cassidy, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, decided he had waited long enough. In the late 1940s, he and Audrey Duckert carried out a pilot project in Wisconsin, testing a questionnaire that had been based on all the word lists the Society had compiled over the years. It worked pretty well, so he refined the methods and the questionnaire and published the results in the Society’s journal in 1953. Still nothing happened. So in 1962 at the Society’s annual meeting he read a paper titled “The ADS Dictionary—How Soon?” The result was that he was appointed Chief Editor of the proposed dictionary. As Fred Cassidy had always expected, the DARE materials have been extremely useful to people such as librarians, teachers, historians, journalists, and playwrights. But they have also proved to be valuable in other fields as well: forensic linguists and detectives use DARE to help apprehend criminals; physicians use DARE to understand the folk and regional terms used by their patients for ailments and diseases; natural scientists use DARE to identify plants and animals based on regional and folk names; psychologists use DARE in conjunction with standardized vocabulary tests to diagnose aphasia; lawyers consult DARE with reference to questions of trademark and commercial use; and actors and dialect coaches use DARE’s audio collection to perfect their regional accents. http://dare.wisc.edu/?q=node/244

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.” Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. There are some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

Harvey Littleton, whose father was a leading glass scientist, suggested during the American Craftsmen's Council conference that "glass should be a medium for the individual artist." Dominic Labino, a research chemist, developed a formula for glass that could be melted at a low enough temperature to be practical, as well as, designing the first small, single-pot furnaces affordable for use by a single artist in a small studio environment. Littleton went on to lead two workshop/seminars on glass at The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, in 1962. It was at this workshop, using the technological advancements of Dominic Labino, that what is now called the American Studio Glass Movement was born. http://www.cmog.org/dynamic.aspx?id=5616

Toledo’s image as the Glass City of the U.S. was firmly established by the time of its founding in 1901, based on a spate of inventions across the glass industry—bottles, window glass, tableware, windshields and construction materials. Glass industrialist Edward Drummond Libbey spearheaded the initiative to improve the education of local craftsmen and designers by assembling a model glass collection, as well as promoting training, competitions and exhibitions of new work. In 1913, Libbey purchased the first of several significant glass collections. The group of 53 European Renaissance and Baroque glasses came from the estate of German publisher Julius Heinrich Wilhelm Campe. With this purchase, the Museum acquired the most important historic European glass collection in the United States at the time, and many of the rare objects remain the only examples of their kind in the country. By the early 1920s, Toledo’s glass collection ranked with the most important in the United States, that at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Libbey continued to acquire systematically formed collections of high repute from both abroad and from the U.S. His desire to document the history of American glass from the 17th century onward was at the time remarkably forward-looking. Until the beginning of the 20th century, American-made glass was generally viewed as inferior to its European counterparts in both design and execution and only recently deemed worthy of serious study and collecting. Today, Toledo’s American glass ranks among the principal collections in the field, including objects of exceptional quality and historical importance. Since the 1970s, works of art in glass continue to be added judiciously to the collection by purchase and through the generosity of donors. In recognition of the Toledo Museum of Art’s role as the cradle of the Studio Glass Movement, many artists and collectors have donated works of art.
http://www.toledomuseum.org/glass-pavilion/glass-at-tma

Baker O’Brien, a jeweler by training, is an established world-class glass artist. As the sole apprentice of legendary glassmaster Dominic Labino, she has been mixing, melting and blowing vividly colored glass for over 30 years. She uses strong, rich colors in bold simple forms for one of a kind glass pieces of distinction. She inherited Labino's studio after his death in 1987, and bought a large tract of land from the Labino estate in Grand Rapids, Ohio. http://www.labinostudio.com/about.htm http://www.labinostudio.com/images/americanstyle.pdf

Synesthetes can taste numbers, feel colors or have other sensations triggered by sensations. Studies of their brains could provide clues for neurological disorders. "We're using the synesthetic brain as a model for neural hyper-connectivity," says Steffie Tomson, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "What we're learning is that there are very specific delicate relationships between different regions of the brain that can cause it to function normally — or to tweak." Scientists have been aware of synesthesia for more than 100 years, but only in the last decade or so has it been considered more than a strange quirk. Recent advances in neuroimaging have allowed researchers to visualize what's going on inside a synesthete's brain when it makes its unconventional connections. The Internet has inspired the creation of online tests that have gathered data from tens of thousands of synesthetes throughout the world. And genetic sequencing has enabled scientists to come closer to pinpointing the genes that cause this condition. David Brang, a UC San Diego neuroscientist, says nature provides a strong hint that the brains of synesthetes may have some kind of cognitive advantage. The genes for synesthesia appear to be dominant, and family trees depict the trait marching through the bloodline. This high degree of heritability suggests the genetic mutation that causes synesthesia provides some significant evolutionary benefit.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-synesthesia-brain-20120220,0,6760571.story