Susanna Salter didn't  put her name on the ballot during the 1887 mayoral election in Argonia, Kansas.  A group of men who wanted to humiliate both her and the causes she allied herself with did it for her.  At issue were two new things that happened in the Quaker town, writes Gil Troy for The Daily Beast:  women’s suffrage and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  Women had been granted the right to vote in local elections in Kansas four years earlier, he writes.  Voters were shocked to see her name at the top of the ballot, Troy writes—including Salter’s husband Lewis Allison Salter.  Pro-temperance voters rushed to the Salter home, "interrupting Susanna Salter hanging the wash,” he writes.  They proposed turning the prank on itself, and with the help of WCTU members, she was elected with a two-thirds majority.  That made her the first female mayor of a U.S. city.  After winning the election, Salter banned hard cider from the town and served her one-year term (despite mail from across the country either decrying her election or celebrating it).  When she stepped down after her term, more mail accused her of giving up—even though she never intended to be mayor in the first place.  A few years later, the Salter family moved to Oklahoma.  America’s first woman mayor lived to see a lot more change:  she died in 1961 at the age of 101.  Kat Eschner  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/130-years-ago-men-against-womens-suffrage-put-susanna-salters-name-ballot-180962727/

Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta are among the list of prefixes used to denote the quantity of something, such as a byte or bit in computing and telecommunications.  Sometimes called prefix multipliers, these prefixes are also used in electronics and physics.  Each multiplier consists of a one-letter abbreviation and the prefix it stands for.  Find table of prefixes and multipliers at http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/Kilo-mega-giga-tera-peta-and-all-that

Word Origin and History for meta-  word- forming element meaning:  1.  "after, behind," 2.  "changed, altered," 3.   "higher, beyond;" from Greek meta (prep.) "in the midst of, in common with, by means of, in pursuit or quest of.  Third sense, "higher than, transcending, overarching, dealing with the most fundamental matters of," is due to misinterpretation of metaphysics as science of that which transcends the physical."  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/meta-

Lessons for Leaders from a book review of The Accidental Admiral by James Stavridis   Speak and write with simplicity and precision, and don’t accept imprecision from those around you.  Casualness in speech and writing can lead to huge disconnects.  This is particularly true with e-mail, which--when you hit Send--becomes etched in stone . . .  Prepare thoroughly for key events.  Make sure you understand which events truly matter.  Don’t let the chaff floating around in the wind distract you from what is really important to your job . . .  Leaders need to look ahead several months or even a year or two at a time; pick out the events that really matter; and spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources ensuring that they are fully prepared.   Be your own spokesperson.  When things go wrong, it is much easier to find reasons why you should say nothing than to step up to your responsibilities . . .  Carve out time to think.  Write down your thoughts.  Share them with others whose opinions you respect.  Don’t lunge at the ball.  Too many decisions are made in haste, under pressure, based on emotional reaction, or with incomplete facts.  Take the time to gather the information you need.  Don’t be driven by anyone else’s timeline unless absolutely required (i.e., by law).  Details matter, but think big thoughts.  Balance the time spent on absorbing and understanding details and that spent sitting back from the thicket of the day to day and trying to think through new ideas, concepts, and necessities for your family, your organization, and the nation.  Look at the new law or regulation for yourself.  Don’t rely on summaries or a staff member’s or lawyer’s opinion as to what the law says.  Get it and read it yourself.  Organize yourself.   Don’t turn over personal organization to assistants, no matter how good they are.  Much of the value of getting organized . . .  Carve out time to read.  Take a balanced approach:  fiction, nonfiction, professional journals, and so on.  Make mentorship a priority.  Listen, learn, educate, and lead . . .  Walk around and listen to your team.  And show up early for meetings.  https://logosconsulting.net/leadership-lessons-accidental-admiral-2/

Adm. James Stavridis and his co-author, R. Manning Ancell, have surveyed over two hundred active and retired four-star military officers about their reading habits and favorite books, asking each for a list of titles that strongly influenced their leadership skills and provided them with special insights that helped propel them to success in spite of the many demanding challenges they faced.  The Leader's Bookshelf synthesizes their responses to identify the top fifty books that can help virtually anyone become a better leader.  Each of the works--novels, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, management publications--are summarized and the key leadership lessons extracted and presented.  Highlighting the value of reading in both a philosophical and a practical sense, The Leader's Bookshelf provides sound advice on how to build an extensive library, lists other books worth reading to improve leadership skills, and analyzes how leaders use what they read to achieve their goals.  Published March 15th 2017 by US Naval Institute Press  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31862791-the-leader-s-bookshelf        

A diploma mill (also known as a degree mill) is a company or organization that claims to be a higher education institution but which offers illegitimate academic degrees and diplomas for a fee.  These degrees may claim to give credit for relevant life experience, but should not be confused with legitimate prior learning assessment programs.  They may also claim to evaluate work history or require submission of a thesis or dissertation for evaluation to give an appearance of authenticity.  Diploma mills are frequently supported by accreditation mills, set up for the purpose of providing an appearance of authenticity.  The term may also be used pejoratively to describe an accredited institution with low academic admission standards and a low job placement rate.  An individual may or may not be aware that the degree they have obtained is not wholly legitimate.  In either case, legal issues can arise if the qualification is used in résumés.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mill  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unaccredited_institutions_of_higher_education

There’s a plant called capparis spinosa.  When the plant creates a bud--this starts every year in the spring--this bud is going to be a flower.  However, if you pick the bud before it becomes a flower, that’s a caper.  In fact, properly we should call it a caper bud; the whole plant is a caper plant and it has various parts, but what we all call a caper is a caper bud.  If you leave the bud on the plant, then a couple of weeks later it opens up and has a flower--a beautiful purple and white flower.  If you let the flower fall off, it's replaced a little bit later in the season by a fruit.  That fruit is called the caper berry.  They usually come in three sizes:  small, medium and large.  The downside with the larger ones is these are closer to springing open and becoming flowers.  They are not quite as tight in texture, they're not quite as firm, they have a flower inside them waiting to break out.  However, they have developed to the most gorgeous flavor.  David Rosengarten   https://www.splendidtable.org/story/you-cook-with-capers-but-do-you-know-what-they-really-are

The University of Delaware’s Special Collections Library has received the largest and most valuable donation in its history.  The Mark Samuels Lasner collection of British literature and art, worth an estimated $10 million, was officially donated to the library in February 2017.  Samuels Lasner, legally blind and sometimes labeled the “foremost blind book collector in the world,” began collecting at a young age.  His collection, built over 40 years, focuses on British literature and art between 1850 and 1900, with a particular emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and writers and illustrators from the 1890s.  In total, the collection includes over 9,500 books, letters, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art.  Lasner has long been attracted to association copies.  Notable signatures on items in the collection include those of Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Max Beerbohm, William Morris, Henry James, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Aubrey Beardsley.  Nearly 1,000 items alone relate to Max Beerbohm.  Nate Pedersen  https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2017/02/mark-samuels-lasner-donates-10m-collection-to-university-of-delaware.phtml

Harry Huskey, a pioneering computer scientist who worked on early computing systems and later helped universities around the world establish computer centers and computer science programs, died on April 9, 2017 at his home in Santa Cruz.  He was 101.  A professor emeritus of computer science at UC Santa Cruz, Huskey began his career teaching mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.  There, he worked on the famed ENIAC project in the 1940s.  ENIAC was the first large-scale electronic computer, containing 18,000 vacuum tubes, and Huskey was among the last surviving members of the ENIAC team.  In 1947, Huskey spent a year in England, where he worked with Alan Turing on a prototype of Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer.  He joined the staff of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in 1948 and was responsible for the design and construction of the National Bureau of Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), the fastest computer of its time.  Huskey later served as a consultant to the Bendix Computer Division of Bendix Corporation, where he was primarily responsible for the design of the Bendix G15 computer.  Designed for use by a single person, the G15 has been called the first "personal computer," although it was the size of a refrigerator, with an equally large tape unit for additional storage.  Huskey had a G15 installed in his home in Berkeley in 1955 and later kept it in his Santa Cruz garage before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1988.  Tim Stephens  http://news.ucsc.edu/2017/04/harry-huskey-in-memoriam.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1696  April 21, 2017  On this date in 1960, Brasília, Brazil's capital, was officially inaugurated.  On this date in 1933, Easley Blackwood, Jr., American pianist, composer, and educator, was born.