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news
THe North shore weekend
4/26 – 4/27/14
NEWS DIGEST REVIEW Highland Park
Michael Belsky — Highland Park’s mayor from 2003-2011 — has helped to establish a Center for Municipal Finance at the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. The purpose of the center will be to produce a forum for discussion and research on major financial issues facing state and local government. “Issues such as privatization, pension reform, government consolidation, and new revenue generation are all options to deal with fiscal stress. The Harris School is a great home to launch this type of effort,” says Belsky, who holds a master’s degree from Harris. Secure Futures, which focuses on risk management, moved its office to Northfield from Chicago. “It was time to move where our clients live,” says Secure Futures’ CEO Reginald Rabjohns, who consulted with President William Ieuter, a Winnetka resident, on the move. With the new location, the company — whose roots trace back to State Mutual Life, which opened in Chicago in 1850 — also launched a new website at www.securefutesil.com.
PREVIEW Highland Park
Midge Hechtman, a teacher with Ravinia
Lake Forest
Online bidding for silent auction items — such as four VIP tickets to a Los Angeles taping of Conan O’Brien’s TV show — is one way of participating in the 41st annual Congé fundraiser, Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart’s largest campaign to support ongoing academic and student financial aid programs. Online bids can be made as the silent auction takes place at the event, which begins with cocktails at 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 26, at the Glen View Club. Dinner and the program, including a live auction with a paddle raise for scholarship funds, begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for the event are $200 each and can be purchased on the Bid Pal website. For the latest list of silent auction items, visit www.bidpal.net/Congé.
Winnetka
Winnetka’s spring cleanup will be held Monday, April 28 – Thursday, May 1. Scheduled pickups are Monday, April 28: north of Tower Road; Tuesday, April 29:
joe dator/the new yorker collection/www.cartoonbank.com
Northfield
Nursery School, is departing after 36 years at the close of the 2014 school year. On May 4, students, parents, alumni and other community members will be thanking and celebrating her years of service at Sunset Woods Park in Highland Park. The free event will take place from 2-4 p.m. In addition to teaching, she is a marathon runner and has completed the Chicago Marathon eight times. She also enjoys reading and gardening. Hechtman has three adult children and three grandsons.
Tower Road to Pine Street; Wednesday, April 30: Pine Street to Willow Road; Thursday, May 1: south of Willow Road. Public Works employees will remove from the parkway anything that two men can reasonably lift into a truck. Banned
electronics, construction materials/debris, yard waste, logs, dirt, stone, and liquids such as paint will not be picked up. Items should be placed on residential parkways the evening before the scheduled pickup, or no later than 7 a.m. the day of the pickup. ■
Standout Student
Cable is wired for success in math and more ■ by angelika labno
In sixth grade, Dylan Cable wanted to learn more about computer science. After coming across Stanford University videos online, he became absorbed in watching lectures, reading textbooks and even doing homework assignments in courses such as programming methodology and natural language processing. Years later, he achieved a perfect score on the AP Computer Science A Test — one of 18 students out of 26,000 in the world to achieve the feat. Cable’s journey has come full circle — he plans to attend Stanford in the fall. The New Trier High School senior is a distinguished mathematician in the state. He was named North Suburban Math League All-Conference for the past three years. Cable qualified for both the USA Junior Mathematics Olympiad and USA Mathematics Olympiad under the American Math Competition (AMC) and consistently scored high on AMC tests. Under his leadership, the New Trier math team won the individual Illinois State Math Competition two out of the past three years. If that weren’t enough, in his last year at New Trier, Cable took five mathematics and computer science courses at Northwestern University. “Among a group of well prepared and highly motivated students from around the world, Dylan stood out as one of the best,” said NU Math Professor John Alongi of Cable’s performance in Math 321 MENU Real Analysis, an advanced study in math and its applications across a range of disciplines.
Cable was fascinated with puzzles and riddles at a young age, but in eighth grade, his interest in math spiked on a different level while he attended the University of Chicago’s Young Scholars Program. He developed a working relationship with Dr. Paul Sally, a math professor and director of undergraduate studies for 30 years. Every other Saturday for the following five years, the duo spent three hours on a given topic. “The biggest difference between that kind of math and what you do in school is that in school, you’re given a question and the procedure for how to do it,” explained Cable. “At U of C, it’s much more about exploring and asking questions.” A program that shaped Cable was the Summer Program for Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC) at University of California-Berkeley, a selective program for 20 of the nation’s top math and science students. The program focuses on probability, statistics, economics and other math topics, but it is also balanced with teaching everyday skills. “One of the main goals is to encourage students to be more altruistic, think about how you’re spending your time and how it impacts the world at large — not just you and your immediate surroundings,” said Cable. “That’s something I’m going to try to pursue and set my goals according to those principles.” Cable is undecided as to what he will study, but he is interested in cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, or, “new and exciting fields that are developing the frontier of knowledge,” as he puts eloquently. A real-life application that
Dylan Cable
Cable is currently working on uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Cable is developing a system that will monitor tweets about football player injuries and consolidate the injury information into a phone app. “To look at what someone posts on Twitter and extract information from it is what humans are good at, so you need to train a computer to do it,” he said. “If a tweet reads, ‘He hit the floor hard, and it looks ugly,’ a
photography by joel lerner computer wouldn’t be able to tell that the player got injured. The human language is really ambiguous.” Whatever Cable ends up tackling, he is adamant about doing it for the greater good. “I’m not concerned about making money or a position of power — that’s not what keeps me motivated or gets me excited. I’m lucky to be talented in technical areas, and there are a lot of problems in the world that need attention.” ■