A Rush to Best-Seller Status
A superintendent from Michigan was so taken by what he learned in a fellow superintendent’s recent book, he raced to the AASA Conference Bookstore to buy all available copies to take back home.

The purchaser, Patrick Twomey, superintendent in Macomb, Mich., told Jan Harris that he intended use her book, Leadership, According to Solomon, as a group discussion resource with his district cabinet.

Irons, superintendent in Dade County, Ga., was one of four superintendents on an AASA conference panel Thursday that provided first-hand advice on what it takes to successfully publish a book.

She donates all proceeds from her book sales to Childhaven, an orphanage in Cullman, Ala., where Harris previously served as a superintendent.

A Cadaver Confrontation at the Conference
Those who spent time in the AASA conference exhibit hall may have confronted a virtual cadaver, anatomically correct down to the last organ. It lied ready for a mess-free dissection on vendor Anatomage’s table-like screen device.

Conference participants gathered around the interactive device, swiping with their fingers to see inside the cadaver and even trace points of cancer that developed in the body.

Four cadavers are available on the device, which were created through imaging of a person’s frozen body at the time of death.

One onlooking superintendent chuckled and remarked, “I might’ve done better in anatomy with this.”

If They Have a Statue, It Must Be Selfie-Worthy
While on the way to the convention center Friday morning, a couple of AASA conference participants were stopped outside of the Staples Center to take photos of all the statues of sports stars who have graced Los Angeles with their presence – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wayne Gretzky and Jerry West among others.

When they got to the statue of the longtime broadcaster of ice hockey’s Los Angeles Kings, Bob Miller, they shrugged and got in close for a selfie while admitting they had no idea who he was.

Six Legs Gotta Be Better Than Two
Exhibit Hall participants had to do a double take when they spotted the six-legged robot scuttling around the table of Milestone C’s booth.

STEMI, which looks like a mechanical hybrid of a crab and spider, is part of the firm’s STEM curriculum, which provides students with technical skills applicable to the workforce.

“It’s very eye-catching and cool and exciting for the students, but the point is to use this as a vehicle to show the students what a real robotics company–or a real aerospace company, software company— [and] the process they may go through over seven, eight, nine years designing an actual product,” Milestone C representative Cemocan Yesil said. “And what our programs do is emulate that for the students over the course of a semester.”

(Compiled by Jay P. Goldman, editor of AASA’s Conference Daily Online, with contributions from Cindy Liu and Juli Valentine.)