Via Curbed LA: Architect Rob Wellington Quigley's award-winning Beverly Hills work is now on the market. The wood and concrete estate is situated on almost three acres of property within North Beverly Park, the guard-gated community that Sylvester Stallone also calls home. Quigley's compound comprises an astronomical 13,081 square feet of indoor space, part of which is occupied by seven bedrooms and twelve bathrooms. Angular motifs, clean lines, and plentiful wood-framed windows make the building a compelling and refreshing place to call home. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the mansion also has a screening room, three indoor fireplaces, and a 1,000 square-foot gym, sauna, and massage room. The main structure is accompanied by a two-story guest house and a separate pool house with a guest apartment, which is conveniently located by the pool, spa, and basketball court.

While this property has won one merit award from the American Institute of Architects, its architect has received over 60. Quigley has been a leader in sustainable residential and commercial design and has created several LEED-certified buildings.

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Over the last 20 years, a big trend in psychology has been a focus on how the world helps you learn. A hundred years ago the behaviorists (like B. F. Skinner) assumed that everything was learned, from your knowledge of skills like riding a bicycle to your knowledge about how to use language. By the 1950s, though, psychologists assumed that many things like language were so complex that they probably could not be learned completely from scratch. Instead, linguists like Noam Chomsky suggested that a lot of the mechanisms for using language are built into the brain from birth.

More recently, the pendulum of research has begun to swing back toward learning. The idea is that the brain is able to pick up on information about how frequently you encounter things to learn. Jenny Saffran, Richard Aslin and their colleagues have demonstrated that babies learn a lot about the sounds of language that make up words by keeping track of the patterns of sounds that occur in sequence. Tom Landauer and Susan Dumais found that you can learn a lot about what words have similar meanings by using the patterns of words that occur together in the same conversations. Over time, you are much more likely to hear about doctors and nurses being talked about in the same conversation than to hear about doctors and lettuce.

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This is a watershed moment for the American labor movement. Drastically weakened by decades of a corporate offensive against workers in the private sector, the labor movement is now being frontally attacked at its last stronghold: public-sector unions. If the current assault on labor -- now being spearheaded by Governor Scott Walker's push to eliminate the bargaining rights of public-sector workers in Wisconsin -- succeeds, it will leave the United States as the only wealthy democratic country with little more than a shadow of a union movement. In a recent statement, Governor Walker accurately, if somewhat grandiloquently, described the stakes: "This is our moment. This is our time to change the course of history."

Public employees, just 17 percent of union members nationwide in 1973, now comprise half of all union members in the United States. The rise of public-sector unions has coincided -- and partially counter-balanced -- a disastrous decline of private-sector unions, which now represent just 6.9 percent of all workers in the private sector, compared to 24 percent in 1973 and roughly one-third in 1960. In sharp contrast, public-employee unions now represent 36 percent of all public-sector workers -- a figure that goes a long way towards explaining why the right wing has now targeted government workers in an attempt to destroy what is left of the labor movement.

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10/10/10 stands for so many things: Some people are choosing to get married, some are choosing to celebrate being cancer-free or the lives of those they lost to cancer (October is Breast Cancer Awareness month), some people are deciding for whom to cast their vote for governor and other state or local candidates, and still others are joining forces to demand non-genetically modified foods be available today and in the future. Interestingly, all of these represent decisions -- choices -- that we as individuals make, but have impact on the global level. When we make these seemingly individual choices (or when we fail to make choices) we affect the future health of our partners, our children, our pets; the prevalence of cancer and other diseases, allergies and syndromes; the future of the U.S. health care system and the food production system (and their inextricable link); our (U.S.) relationship with our global partners (i.e. other countries).

Amidst all these decisions and choices we have to make, one stands out on 10/10/10 that may not have the awareness of breast cancer, or political candidates, or the financial and health care crisis in the U.S. But it should, because GM foods (genetically modified) act as a thread that pulls all of these and many other issues together for us all, thus it should demand our attention.

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