Revered architect Pietro Belluschi’s last residence has been studied, copied and awarded.  But no one on the planet knows this Northwest Regional mid-century modern better than Pietro’s son, architect Anthony Belluschi, who now owns the famous hilltop house with his wife, Marti.   “Today’s need for economy makes us avoid pompously designed monuments, and in so doing we have found that much significance can be imparted to simple materials such as wood or brick, and much warmth and feeling may be achieved by the judicious use of such intangibles as space, light, texture and color . . . " - Pietro Belluschi, 1950  See how he applied this philosophy to the Menefee House in Yamhill, also built in 1948.  http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2013/11/pietro_belluschi_designed_uss.html  Anthony Belluschi received Restore Oregon’s 2013 DeMuro Award for preserving, restoring and expanding the meticulous engineered and crafted 1948 single-story home his father created at the end of a ridge in Portland's West Hills.  Revolutionary at the time, Pietro employed native wood and glass to frame the city skyline that he eventually helped shape with office towers, museums and churches.  After Pietro retired as dean of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Planning, he returned to Portland where his reputation for innovation and elegant buildings began.  The move was prompted by a tempting offer to buy this house from his original client, Mrs. D.C. Burkes.  It is incredibly poignant that Pietro spent his last years here, before passing away at 94 in 1994, and that his son and daughter-in-law refinished wood, replaced worn floors and made modifications that the family, modernists and architecture experts agree would have been approved by the exacting Pietro Belluschi.  Drawing from conversations the two had decades ago, Anthony conceived of ways to upgrade the kitchen, wiring, plumbing and insulation as well as improve the master bedroom and expand the house by 1,200 square feet.  Anthony converted an original breezeway with a trellis into an elongated gallery with a skylight that gracefully joins the old with the new.  The white-walled gallery has an original cedar side door that opens to the house’s existing master bedroom and library.  On the other side of the gallery is a concealed white door that leads to the new multipurpose media room with guest quarters and a loft space.  Shoji screens are a design link to the new Japanese-style gardens.  Changes took place over three years and in stages.  Janet Eastman  http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2014/01/son_awarded_for_storing_archit.html

PRESERVATION NEWS  * The first Sears Tower in Chicago, a 14-story structure built in 1905 reopened in November 2015.  Renamed Nichols Tower, it serves as a hub for job training, arts education, and other community programs.  * Window Preservation Alliance (WPA) is a network of professional window restorers from the U.S. and parts of Canada.  The WPA helps homeowners who want to preserve their old windows.  * MIT's Alpha Theta Chapter of Sigma Chi's brick row house, built in 1900, has been restored and received a 2015 Preservation Achievement Award from the Boston Preservation Alliance.  LDa Architecture & Interiors and Sea-Dar Construction restored the facade, the grand central staircase, and the interior common rooms.  They integrated new systems, and built a fifth-floor addition not visible from the street.  * Former Building A, an 1879 dormitory for retired sailors, reopened in September 2015 as an expansion of the Staten Island Museum.  Preservation Magazine  Spring 2016

Ohio libraries tout heavy use, economic value cited in study  Ohio likes its libraries more.  That’s the gist of a new study from the Ohio Library Council comparing library use in Ohio with that in other states.  The council has long known that Ohioans like their libraries—now it says it has the data to quantify the affection.  Ohioans average 7.5 library visits per year, the highest per-capita rate in the country and 51 percent above the national average, according to new research by Columbus-based analyst Howard Fleeter.  The 77 percent of Ohio residents holding a library card ranks behind only Minnesota and is well above the 55 percent national average.  Analyzing 2013 data from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, Fleeter also concluded that Ohio’s cost per library transaction of $2.88 ranks 41st highest in the nation, 68 cents below the national average.  “We’re delivering a very high level of service at a very low cost,” Fleeter said.  Jim Siegel  Read more at http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/04/16/ohio-libraries-tout-heavy-use-economic-value-cited-in-study.html

The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan.  It first appeared as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September 1915 before being published in book form in October that year by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.  It is the first of five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of sticky situations.  The novel formed the basis for a number of film adaptations, notably:  Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version; a 1959 colour remake; a 1978 version which is perhaps most faithful to the novel; and a 2008 version for British television.  A comic theatrical adaptation by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon for a cast of four actors premiered in 1995 at the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, North Yorkshire, before embarking on a tour of village halls across the north of England.  In 2005 Patrick Barlow rewrote the script, keeping the scenes, staging and small-scale feel, and in June 2005 this re-adaption premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse,  On 15 January 2008, the show made its US Broadway premiere at the American Airlines Theatre; it transferred to the Cort Theatre on 29 April 2008 and then moved to the Helen Hayes Theatre on 21 January 2009, where it ended its run on 10 January 2010.  It reopened on Stage One of New York's Off-Broadway venue New World Stages on 25 March 2010 and closed on 15 April 2010.  The Broadway production received six Tony Award nominations, winning two—Best Lighting Design and Best Sound Design with the London show winning an Olivier in 2007 and two Tony Awards in 2008.  The play also won the Drama Desk Award, Unique Theatrical Experience.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Nine_Steps

N-grams are strings of consecutive units from a longer text.  N-grams can be words, but they can also be phonemes or single characters; in principle, there’s no reason why they can’t be entire sentences or paragraphs (but in practice that undermines their application).  Let’s use the first sentence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for an example:  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Using words as our unit of measure, four, score, and, seven, and years are all n-grams of length 1 (they are 1-grams or unigrams).  Each additional word is also a 1-gram.  Four score, score and, and seven, and seven years are also n-grams, but of length 2 (2-grams or bigrams).  You can see how this works: four score and and score and seven are 3-grams; four score and seven is a 4-gram, and so on.  In computational linguistics, where this idea is used heavily, n-grams can help predict things, such as which word comes next.  In our example sentence, for instance, there are two 2-grams beginning with “and”—and seven, and dedicated.  Looking at the entire short address, more appear:  and so, and proper, and dead, and that.  As more text is analyzed, the list will grow and patterns will emerge.  Google’s Ngrams data is a good place to start when looking at n-grams. They’ve not only scanned and analyzed over 5 million books, but the database is publicly available with an-easy-to-use search feature.  Of course, as wonderful as this is, it’s got limitations.  The two that you’re most likely to run into are that it doesn’t include everything (only books and some periodicals) and it was last updated in 2012, with material that stops abruptly at 2008.  Very low frequency n-grams (found in fewer than 40 sources) were excluded, to make the size of the database manageable.  Christopher Daly  Read much more at

https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/n-grams-for-fun-and-profit/

phoneme  noun  the smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word  The sounds represented by “c” and “b” are different phonemes, as in the words “cat” and “bat.”

 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phoneme

morpheme  noun  a word or a part of a word that has a meaning and that contains no smaller part that has a meaning  The word “pins” contains two morphemes:  “pin” and the plural suffix “-s.”  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morpheme

April 18, 2016  Google Inc. can proceed with efforts to create a searchable library of the world’s books after the U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal from authors who said their copyrights were being violated.  The justices, without explanation, left intact a federal appeals court decision that said disputed aspects of the digital-library project are “fair use” of the copyrighted works.  Google has scanned more than 20 million mostly nonfiction books.  The Alphabet Inc. unit says its goal is to provide a virtual card catalog of books in all languages, letting people search and find excerpts so they can decide whether to acquire the full volume.  Google started the program in 2004, partnering with university libraries to copy and digitize their collections. In exchange, the universities received digital copies of their books.  The case is Authors Guild v. Google, 15-849.  Greg Stohr   http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-18/google-book-project-can-proceed-as-top-u-s-court-spurns-appeal

When a recipe calls for sliced onions, you have a choice of how to slice them—lengthwise or crosswise.  If you are cooking the onions, as for caramelizing them, slice them lengthwise, or from root to stem.  That way they will hold their shape better during the cooking.  Crosswise cut onions tend to fall apart when cooked.  When you are adding raw onions to a salad, slice them crosswise.  They’ll be easier to eat, and they look pretty too!  http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_slice_an_onion/

Feedback to ROSS and AI:  The Next Step in Legal Tech?; Can AI tools like ROSS' legal research platform revolutionize law for practitioners and consumers?  Seriously, this reminds me of a "Star Trek" episode http://www.tv.com/shows/star-trek-the-next-generation/the-arsenal-of-freedom-19008/ where a species of humanoids built such "smart" machines, that eventually the species was annihilated by their own technological creations.  While it's true that entire occupations have "gone extinct," I don't think lawyers (or librarians) will meet the same fate as our friends from the "Star Trek" universe. 

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced at 3p.m. ET on April 18th.  Winning stories, photographs and cartoons, along with bios and photos of all the winners are at http://www.pulitzer.org/article/2016-pulitzer-prizes

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1458  April 20, 2016  On this date in 1535, the sun dog phenomenon was observed over Stockholm and depicted in the famous painting Vädersolstavlan.  On this date in 1916, the Chicago Cubs played their first game at Weeghman Park (currently Wrigley Field), defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7–6 in 11 innings.