George Steinbrenner is dead at 80 from a heart attack. As a survivor of 4 heart attacks myself and finally a heart transplant, I feel a special kinship for "The Boss" and his family. A figure of controversy, at the very least, I come to praise George not to bury him. My appreciation for Steinbrenner as a sports owner has nothing to do with his personality, his warmth - or lack of same - or any personal qualities he may or may not have exhibited in life. I praise him for two reasons.

First, George Steinbrenner stood taller than all other sports owners (with the possible exception, for a few years, of Ted Turner) in his fidelity to the Cardinal Rule of Team Ownership which is: Do All You Can To Win! Sport is unique among business enterprises. Its goal is not profit alone. It's winning. Unlike any other commercial activity, in sport there is a scoreboard. A definitive, final score is posted daily for each and every contest. In other businesses while many claim to be "winners" only sport can celebrate the real "winner" by pointing to a conclusive victory, a league championship, a national or even a world title. So unlike other businesses, in sport there are no pretenders. You wear the ring, or you don't. Steinbrenner was truly a man of the ring.

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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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