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Time is running out! The 5K Liver Wellness Walk & Fun Run on October 13th is quickly approaching. Thanks so much to everyone who has donated! I still haven’t made my goal yet, so I’m going to start getting annoying and emailing all of you and bringing it up in conversation constantly until I get more donations for the American Liver Foundation, which helps people with liver conditions, like my cousin, Jeff.

The liver does a whole lot for you. Your liver is responsible for

• Storing vitamins, glucose for energy, and making proteins
• Helping build muscles
• Stopping cuts from bleeding
• Killing germs, helping keep the body healthy
• Making bile to help digest foods
• Keeping pollutants or toxins from hurting the body
• Filtering medications, chemicals, and toxins from the body
• Removing waste products of food breakdown
  
  (http://www.llu.edu/llumc/transplant/liver-anatomy.html )

It’s amazing that one organ does all of that, right? So why is it that the heart symbolizes love? All it does is pump blood. Our liver is multi-tasking all day to protect us and keep us healthy and strong. Now that’s love. So, as an incentive, those who donate to my walk will receive an ‘I [Liver] You’ valentine, designed by me.

To donate

• Go to http://www.active.com/donate/walkitoff/walkitoffRHadad1
• See the Make a Contribution Section

To walk/run with me

• Go to http://www.active.com/donate/walkitoff/walkitoffRHadad1
• Click the Register for This Event button
• Select Team Member/Team Captain
• Select JeffBobNoPants as your team

Donate today! Forward this on to your friends and family!

I Liver You,

Roxana

P.S. If you want to tell the world how you feel, you can buy your very own ‘I [Liver] You’ t-shirt at https://www.cafepress.com/rhadad/products . I’ll be wearing one on the 13th!

Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting iVOTE! to the Northern Illinois Social Studies Roundtable Meeting “Thinking for Decision Making: Election 2008.” The roundtable is focused on social studies initiatives for K-8 that engage students in the democratic process. Wanna come? The meeting is from 12 pm to 3 pm and is at National-Louis University in Wheeling. Lunch will be served!

I’m working on building a web presence for Northwestern University’s Science Café Evanston, an outreach from Sigma Xi.

From Café Scientifique:

Cafe Scientifique is a place where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to explore the latest ideas in science and technology. Meetings take place in cafes, bars, restaurants and even theatres, but always outside a traditional academic context.

Cafe Scientifique is a forum for debating science issues, not a shop window for science. We are committed to promoting public engagement with science and to making science accountable.

Last week, we heard Professor Seth Stein from Northwestern’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences present “Giant Earthquakes in the Midwest: Hazard, Hype, and Hard Choices.” He talked about the 1990 scare about the earthquake that was predicted by an amateur seismologist to happen in the Midwest’s New Madrid Zone. (I remember being in 7th grade science class when it was supposed to happen, and being rather excited about being in a real life earthquake. I was disappointed to have no earthquake and therefore still had to turn in my homework on the atomic structure of iron.) Stein gave a great talk. Bottom line (for those of you who missed it): don’t buy earthquake insurance if you live in the Midwest because the likelihood of us getting an earthquake here is close to zilch.

The next Science Cafe is October 17th at the Celtic Knot. The talk is “The Science of Attraction: Life and Love in the 21st Century,” presented by Professor Eli Finkel, and Paul Eastwick, from Northwestern’s Department of Psychology. Hmmm … Should be more than interesting.

This morning you may have caught a clip of my IDNR Illinois Biodiversity Spider Study on the local NBC news. They did mention Northwestern University, but they didn’t mention the Collaboratory Project. The transcript is here.

I was kindly invited to set up a booth about iVOTE! ‘08 at the 2nd Annual Teacher Resource Fair at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, which was held yesterday. Aside from meeting wonderful and engaging teachers who are genuinely interested in motivating their students to become active citizens (including my own junior and senior year high school history teachers!), the other exhibitors I met were a wonderful array of organizations who all hope to help teachers do just that.

In case you’re dying to know more about my first job, you

can now read about it in the second volume of Working Nine to Five in Marianne Petit’s Participatory Book Series. All of the books in the series are a measly $3, which is a super deal, considering what a great job Marianne did.

I finally cleaned up some of the bugs on the site. Please let me know if you find any new ones.