Russ McCutcheon

Light rail builder outlaws sponsored trips to Asia for board members

Oct. 13, 2011 by Ben Baeder

SOUTH GATE The planning agency in charge of building the light rail through South Gate, Downey and other southeast cities banned its board members from taking sponsored trips to China or other countries.

The Orangeline Development Authority (OLDA) at its meeting at South Gate City Hall on Wednesday rejected a last-minute effort by board member and Cerritos City Councilman Bruce Barrows to let outside companies, agencies or governments pay for OLDA members to visit high-speed rail projects in other countries.

The item was not on OLDAs agenda, but the board voted to allow Barrows to discuss the matter because Cerritos Mayor Carol Chen is hosting a trip to Asia in November before the next OLDA meeting.

An public agency is required by law to tell the public what will be discussed at meetings at least 72 hours before the meeting unless the item in question is an emergency, according to the states open-meeting laws, known as the Brown Act.

Barrows said foreign investors and the Chinese government have expressed interest in investing in the Orangeline project.

I had a meeting with some Chinese, he said. They’re the ones that brought it up. There’s a series of meetings they would like us to engage in in Beijing.  I want to see what another government would bring to us as far as an investment opportunity.

Huntington Park Councilman Andy Molina was the only board member to vote against taking the matter up for discussion.

He and Downey Mayor Luis Marquez led the charge against the Barrows proposal.

Molina was irritated, and he said OLDA had already decided at a past meeting that such trips exposed the agency to allegations of favoritism.

The agency is getting down to the brass tacks of station placement.

Next month, a route analyis the main document that would guide the construction of a light rail line from Los Angeles to Santa Ana is due to be released.

Molina didnt want any board members or OLDA executive director Michael Kodama out of the country.

Not only do I not want any of us going on any sponsored trips, I want to make sure our executive director is not included on the trip, because we need him here, Molina said.

Marquez said the trips could end up leading to  unsolicited bids, meaning builders and investors could end up trying to influence the board to use their companies.

While the Orangeline has always been pitched as a high-speed, magnetic levitation train, Kodama and the board are backing away from committing to the mag/lev technology, saying they instead want to consider all types of train technologies.

Wednesdays vote was linked to a new direction taken by OLDA, which has had a hard time getting anything started since the light-rail line was proposed in 2002. The board is now open to any technology and is focused on letting cities decide which type of development will work best in each community.

We are going out of our way to be technology neutral, Marquez said.

If someone wants to go on his or her own dime and say they are on the OLDA board, thats fine with me. But I dont want anybody coming in here and paying for us to take trips, he said.

Tags: Andy Molina, Carol Chen, Cerritos, China, Downey, Huntington Park, Luis Marquez, Michael Kodama, OLDA, Orangeline

Our Cat Needs to See a Vet, but Hates the Cat Carrier

CatChannel and CAT FANCY cat behaviorist Marilyn Krieger, CCBC, explains how to get a cat to like cat carriers so he can take trips to the vet.

SAN ANTONIO — The usual autumn price drop at the gas pump has stalled out with prices now averaging $3.24 a gallon, 60 cents higher than one year ago. Motorists are paying record high prices for this time of year.

Motorists hunting for relatively cheap fuel are finding it, however, on the northeast side of the city. At Internet 35 and Judson Road, regular was going for $3.11 gallon at the Exxon and $3.09 at the Sams Club.

Although prices are down 20 cents in the past month, they are still too high for Dan Simpsons liking. Filling up Wednesday for $3.19 per gallon at the Murphy USA at Loop 410 and Rigsby, he said his dollar just doesnt take him as far as it used to.

I usually take trips to different places, he said. I dont take trips any more.

The fall season is typically when gas prices do just that, but lately the drop has hit the brakes. The Energy Department attributes that to increased global demand and increased US exports of finished petroleum products like gasoline.

As Octobers go, this is a costly one at the pump. Last year at this time, regular was $2.61 a gallon, and two years ago it was $3.45 a gallon. Its even higher than 2008s $2.80 per gallon.

Diesel is now at an average $3.67 a gallon, a steep price if youre in the towing business like Roger Hernandez.

Were spending pretty much $2,000 every three days or so, he said.

And its no less a challenge for folks like Muriel Marcum of Stockdale. She spends $170 a month just to run basic errands like doctor visits and picking up groceries.

Its tough, she said.

Imagine what life would be like if you did not have a bank account and a credit or debit card. It would be much harder to pay your bills, take trips on airlines, which normally require a credit or debit card, and receive payments, just to start. The shocking thing is that more than one-quarter of all American households are unbanked or underbanked and that this number is rising, not falling, largely because of ill-thought-out financial regulation and policies.

The term unbanked refers to people who have neither checking nor savings accounts. Underbanked refers to people who have either a checking or savings account but rely on alternative services such as non-bank money orders and check cashing, payday loans, pawn shops, refund anticipation loans, etc., at least once a year. These alternative sources usually are much more costly than banking services. Banking services to lower-income people have become increasingly expensive directly because of unthinking government regulators.

Last week, headlines were filled with such items as Bank of America to charge $5 debit card fee. Other banks are testing or planning monthly debit card fees and/or checking account fees. These new fees are a direct response to an amendment by Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, to the Dodd-Frank Act, which limits debit card transaction fees to 21 cents per transaction. In many cases, that does not cover the bank’s cost.

President Obama again showed that he doesn’t understand economic and financial policy by attacking the banks for responding to the price-control legislation that he signed into law. He accused the banks of using the new financial regulations as an excuse to impose the new fees on consumers. The president, not assisted by the ever-present teleprompter, babbled, You can stop it because it – if you – if you say to the banks, ‘You don’t have some inherent right just to – you know, get a certain amount of profit .’ Karl Marx probably would have said the same thing, but in a more articulate way.

Assume you are running a business, whatever kind of business you can imagine, and suddenly the government imposes price controls on some of your products and greatly increases the cost of regulation on you and your competitors. You could do nothing and just suffer the loss of income, which probably would discourage you from trying to expand this particular business and hire new workers, or you could try to find ways around the cost of the new regulations and pass those costs on to your customers.

Politicians have been trying to impose price controls at least since the Roman Emperor Diocletian tried it in AD 301. It failed then, as it has every time since then over the past 2,000 years. Rent controls, which are price controls, ultimately result in slums and housing shortages. Those older than 40 years of age probably remember Jimmy Carter’s idiotic price controls on gasoline, which led to people waiting in lines for hours to get a small amount of gas. But the Obama administration and many in Congress (mainly, but not all, Democrats) seem to learn nothing from history or economic theory.

The biggest single increased cost driver for banks and other financial institutions is the avalanche of new government regulations. Who bears the cost of all these new regulations? The consumer. If banks try to absorb all of these costs, their profits will fall, which means their owners (stockholders) will move their capital elsewhere to more profitable industries, and thus banks will have less capital to protect themselves from loan losses and bad times and to hire new workers. It is low-income consumers who suffer the most. Regulatory costs to financial institutions are largely fixed in that the cost per account is roughly the same whether the account has $3,000 in it or $300,000. If the regulatory cost per account is $300, that means the cost for the $3,000 account is 10 percent, while the regulatory cost for the $300,000 account is just one-tenth of 1 percent.

In fact, many of the anti-money-laundering regulations, such as Know Your Customer, often have a higher cost per account for low-income people than for higher-income people. The reason is that many lower-income people are newer to the work force and have less detailed financial histories than higher-income, more established, folks, so the actual cost of due diligence is higher for lower-income people, making them less attractive customers.

As lower-income people are driven out of the banks because of ill-founded government regulation, they are forced to seek alternatives, including the use of cash, which easily can be stolen, lost or destroyed. Enlightened members of a legislative body or enlightened regulators would understand how ill-founded regulations impose great misery and risk on those least able to endure them. But the term enlightened and the president, Congress and the financial regulatory bureaucracy are rarely found in the same sentence.

What Congress should do is impose strict and independent cost-benefit requirements on all government regulatory agencies while at the same time giving those who suffer from ill-founded regulations the right to challenge those regulations – and the right to have their costs covered if they win.

The president’s team seems to be baffled by his fall in the polls. Could one reason be that almost every time he speaks, he shows an appalling economic ignorance? Perhaps he should speak less and use the time to read more of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek.

Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

DeonTay McManus committed to West Virginia in June, but was up front in his intentions to take trips to other schools.

Now the time has come for the Dunbar senior wide receiver to start taking his five official visits.

“We’re setting them up this week,” Dunbar coach Lawrence Smith said Tuesday. “He is a solid commitment to West Virginia. The coaches are fine” with McManus taking visits elsewhere.

Smith said McManus plans to make trips to Alabama, Auburn, Miami, Oregon and West Virginia.

McManus, a four-star prospect and Rivals.coms No. 165 player nationally, has helped the No. 7 Poets to a 5-1 record this season. In the classroom, Smith said McManus’ GPA is up to a 2.8, putting him in good position to meet NCAA qualifying standards.

“He’s going to be ready to go,” said Smith, who added that McManus is under consideration for the Under Armour All-America Game in January.

Newswise — Physics News Highlights of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) contains summaries of interesting research from the AIP journals, notices of upcoming meetings, and other information from the AIP Member Societies. Copies of papers are available to journalists upon request.

TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE:

1. A new mathematical model explains patterns of human movement by considering the costs: People decide to take trips for a dauntingly complex mix of reasons, but out of the individual chaos of dry-cleaning pick-ups, pizza dinners, and European vacations, a new mathematical model has emerged. It finds hidden patterns in human beingsâ?? collective excursions near, not-so-near, and far from home.
2. X-ray camera makes A-grade particle detector: Combining an off-the-shelf X-ray camera with a thin piece of carbon foil yields a device that can detect high-energy organic atoms and heavy molecules better than the typical devices used for these jobs, with potential benefits ranging from the science of cancer treatment to star chemistry.
3. Point defects in super-chilled diamonds may offer stable candidates for quantum computing bits: Scientists test how the energy levels of electrons trapped in a defect in the diamond matrix shift with changing temperatures.
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1. A new mathematical model explains patterns of human movement by considering the costs

Using previously published data on the time-stamped locations of 100,000 anonymous cell-phone users, a researcher from Duke University has identified three distinct patterns of human mobility for short, medium, and long distance trips. In 2008, a separate research team that was not involved in the current study published a paper in which they had plotted data on cell-phone usersâ?? movements, and then fitted the data with a single, downward-sloping curve. The curve captured an intuitive relationship: the longer a trip, the less likely it was to occur. Nicola Scafetta, however, thought deeper patterns might be hidden by the simple curve. In the AIPâ??s journal Chaos, Scafetta proposes a finer-resolution analysis of the cell-phone data. He divided the data set up into three separate sections, one each for short (from 1 to 10 km), medium (from 10 to 300 km), and long (above 300 km) distance trips. He then fit each chunk of data with a separate curve. Surprisingly, the exponents from the three separate curve fits were simple numbers â?? 1, 2 and 3 â?? that illustrated a different relationship between distance and trip frequency for each zone. For all three zones, the likelihood of a trip decreases with increased distance, but the rate of decrease is faster in the higher-numbered zones. Scafetta offers a physical and statistical explanation for this pattern. In zone one, people are running short-distance errands within an urban area, and may just consider one cost mechanism, like the time or the fuel cost of the trips, when deciding where and when to go. In the more distant zone two people are, for example, taking day-trips to nearby towns of specific interest. These trips might require travelers to consider both time and fuel costs in their decisions. And in zone three, people take multi-day trips and may consider time and fuel costs, as well as additional overnight lodging costs. The increase in the number of considered costs for each zone could help explain the increase in the curve-fit exponent for each zone. Scafetta also rescaled the model and found that it could be used to interpret data gathered on the movements of volunteers who walked to their destinations, either in zone one (within 200 m) or zone two (from 200 to 1000 m). The critical benefit of the alternative fitting method, Scafetta writes, is that it suggests clear physical and geographical mechanisms to explain the observations. Accurate models of human displacement have applications in traffic forecasting, urban planning, and in the study of social networks and the spread of diseases.

Article: â??Understanding the complexity of the LÃvy-walk nature of human mobility with a multi-scale cost/benefit modelâ? is accepted for publication in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science.

Authors: Nicola Scafetta (1).

(1) ACRIM and Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

2. X-ray camera makes A-grade particle detector

In the particle identification business, two pieces of information are vital: energy and spatial location. By measuring its energy you can work out the mass of your mystery particle. From its spatial location on the surface of a detector, you can work out where the particle came from â?? and therefore how big the event was that produced the particle in the first place. For the range of energies close to one million electron volts (1 MeV) â?? a popular energy range to probe, with uses in a variety of fields from cancer treatment research to astrochemistry â?? there are currently two leading methods of detecting particles. But both are limited in the types of molecules they can detect, and both sacrifice one type of information â?? spatial location or energy measurements â?? for the other. Now a group of nuclear physicists and molecular scientists from the Università Paris Sud and Hamamatsu Photonics have demonstrated a new type of detector that can do both of these jobs at the same time. Their device uses the CCD image sensor chip in a particular off-the-shelf X-ray camera. In the study, described in a paper accepted to the AIPâ??s Review of Scientific Instruments, the experimenters accelerated charged atoms (or ions) of carbon at various energies above 1 MeV, then â??caughtâ? those atoms with the camera. A single ion impact with the camera produced a bright spot on the image sensor. They also accelerated molecules containing carbon and hydrogen. Unfortunately, these bigger particles overwhelmed the CCD chip, wiping out the details. To avoid saturating the sensor, the researchers came up with the solution of putting a piece of thin carbon foil in front of it. The foil breaks up the projectile molecules that collide with it and sends them, like shrapnel, to the sensor to be counted. The foil also allowed them to separate different types of molecules from one another when the moleculesâ?? signatures would otherwise have overlapped. The researchers say they hope their new detector will open the door to a new class of tools in the study of complex molecules using high-energy accelerators.

Article: â??Detection of atomic and molecular MeV projectiles using an X-ray CCD cameraâ? is accepted for publication in the Review of Scientific Instruments.

Authors: M. Chabot (1), G. Martinet (1), K. BÃroff (2), T. Pino (2), S. Bouneau (1), B. Genolini (1), X. Grave (1), K. Nguyen (1), C. le Gailliard (1), P. Rosier (1), G. FÃraud (2), H. Friha (2), and B. Villier (3).

(1) Institut de Physique NuclÃaire dâ??Orsay, Università Paris Sud, France
(2) Institut des Sciences MolÃculaires dâ??Orsay, Università Paris Sud, France
(3) Hamamatsu Photonics, France

3. Point defects in super-chilled diamonds may offer stable candidates for quantum computing bits

Diamond, natureâ??s hardest known substance, is essential for our modern mechanical world â?? drills, cutters, and grinding wheels exploit the durability of diamonds to power a variety of industries. But diamonds have properties that may also make them excellent materials to enable the next generation of solid-state quantum computers and electrical and magnetic sensors. To further explore diamondsâ?? quantum computing potential, researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China tested the properties of a common defect found in diamond: the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center. Consisting of a nitrogen atom impurity paired with a â??holeâ?? where a carbon atom is absent from the matrix structure, the NV center has the potential to store information because of the predictable way in which electrons confined in the center interact with electromagnetic waves. The research team probed the energy level properties of the trapped electrons by cooling the diamonds to an extremely chilly 5.6 degrees Kelvin and then measuring the magnetic resonance and fluorescent emission spectra. The team also measured the same spectra at gradually warmer increments, up to 295 degrees Kelvin. The results, as reported in the AIPâ??s journal Applied Physics Letters, show that at temperatures below 100 Kelvin the electronsâ?? transition energies, or the energies required to get from one energy level to the next, were stable. Shifting transition energies could make quantum mechanical manipulations tricky, so cooler temperatures may aid the study and development of diamonds for quantum computation and ultra-sensitive detectors, the authors write.

Article: â??Temperature dependent energy level shifts of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamondâ? is accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters.

Authors: X.-D. Chen (1), C.-H. Dong (1), F.-W. Sun (1), C.-L. Zou (1), J.-M. Cui (1), Z.-F. Han (1), and G.-C Guo (1).

(1) Key Lab of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

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Upcoming Conferences of Interest

- OSA Annual Meeting and Exhibit: The Frontiers in Optics meeting will be held October 16 – 20, 2011, in San Jose, Calif.
http://www.frontiersinoptics.com/
- AVS Symposium: The AVS 58th International Symposium and Exhibition will be held October 30 – November 4, 2011, at the Nashville Convention Center, in Nashville, Tenn.
http://www2.avs.org/symposium/AVS58/pages/greetings.html
- ASA Meeting: The 162nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held October 31 – November 4, 2011, in San Diego, Calif.
http://www.acousticalsociety.org
- APS/DFD Meeting: The American Physical Society/Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting will be held November 20 – 22, 2011, in Baltimore, Md.
http://www.aps.org/units/dfd/meetings/meeting.cfm?name=DFD11

Physics Today: October Articles
http://www.physicstoday.org

1. Binary black hole mergers: Solving the equations of general relativity presents unique challenges. Nowadays many of those have been met, and new numerical simulations are revealing surprising astrophysical phenomena.
2. Science controversies past and present: Reactions to the science of global warming have followed a similar course to those of other inconvenient truths from physics.
3. Communicating the science of climate change: It is urgent that climate scientists improve the ways they convey their findings to a poorly informed and often indifferent public.

To receive Physics News Highlights by email, please contact Catherine Meyers at cmeyers@aip.org.

About AIP
The American Institute of Physics is an organization of 10 physical science societies, representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the worlds largest publishers of scientific information in physics. AIP pursues innovation in electronic publishing of scholarly journals and offers full-solution publishing services for its Member Societies. AIP publishes 13 journals; two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series. AIP also delivers valuable resources and expertise in education and student services, science communication, government relations, career services for science and engineering professionals, statistical research, industrial outreach, and the history of physics and other sciences.

Free? Disney World? Whoever heard of such a thing?

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With three-day weekends scheduled in the next several months in both DeKalb and Gwinnett County Schools, families will take trips to Disney World. It takes planning and plenty of cold hard cash. But while Disney has the reputation of being an expensive destination, once you get there youll find events and activities that are absolutely free. You just need to know where to look. Here are my top five:

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1) Chip and Dale’s campfire sing-along at Fort Wilderness. If you’re staying on Disney property, you can take their free transportation out to the campgrounds, but if not, just drive to the gate and tell them you’re there for the campfire. Feel free to bring your own marshmallows and sticks, or you can buy them there for a couple of dollars. There’s a campfire nightly with songs and an appearance by Chip and Dale, followed by a movie outdoors on a big screen. This is the only character experience that I know of that you can get to without paying either park admission or having a dining reservation for a character meal. It starts around 7 pm in the fall and winter and a little later, around 8 pm, in the summer. If you get there early, wander over to the barn and visit the horses that are used in the parades at the parks.

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2) Not in the actual park but want to see the fireworks? Many of the Disney hotels have firework views, but your best bet is to go to one of the “monorail” resorts (The Polynesian, the Grand Floridian, or the Contemporary) and head out to their beach or a balcony. From there, as long as you snag a spot where you can see the castle, you’ll have ideal, unobstructed views of the nightly fireworks. All these resorts pipe in the music for the shows, as well, so you’ll get the full experience.

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3) Head over to Downtown Disney. This is a great place to spend a few hours on arrival or departure day. There are  great restaurants and shops and lots of fun things to do. Try the dancing water fountains in several spots along the sidewalk (great for splashing around in on a hot day or just fun for the overtired folks in your crowd who need a tension easer!) or try the Lego store, which has an outdoor play area with over 3000 bricks to build with, a small playground, and huge, oversized Lego sculptures that make for great photo opportunities. Don’t miss the sea monster poking his head out of the lake! There are also often street performers and musicians doing shows in the evenings and on weekends. On occasion, you might have a character meet and greet going on at Downtown Disney (more so during the holidays), but don’t rely on it. All these activities are free, but if you don’t mind spending a little money, there’s also a movie theater (complete with table service), Disney Quest (an arcade on a grand scale!), and Cirque du Soleil. Downtown Disney offers free parking.

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4) Similar to Downtown Disney is the Disney Boardwalk. Set up as a New England seaside town, the Boardwalk area is beautiful, especially at night when it’s lit up. There are street performers, live music, and plenty of shops and restaurants, but not as much for the kids to do there. You can get a free three-hour parking pass from the attendant if you’re not using Disney transportation.

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5) Take a boat ride. There are several options to choose from here. Hop on at Downtown Disney and sail through the area and then continue on to Port Orleans, then loop back around, or hop off and wander around the New Orleans-themed resort before heading back. If you disembark at Port Orleans, there are many fun, resort-specific activities, including catch-and-release fishing. You can rent a cane pole for around $4 for a half-hour or $9 for the day.  Another boat option is the friendship boats that sail around Crescent Lake between Epcot and Hollywood Studios, with stops at the Swan and Dolphin, the Yacht/Beach Club, and the Boardwalk. These are deluxe resorts worth hopping off and checking out. There are two boats that sail around the lake in front of the Magic Kingdom. One loop goes past the Magic Kingdom, the Contemporary, Wilderness Lodge, and Fort Wilderness, and the other visits the Polynesian, the Grand Floridian, and the Magic Kingdom. Again, any of these resorts are worth disembarking and wandering around, but the Grand Floridian during the holidays is a must see. The lobby features an enormous gingerbread house with a gift shop inside, and the smell alone is worth stopping by to check out. There is no cost for any of these boat rides, and no reservation required – just hop aboard.

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There are a few other important things to remember while inside the parks if you’re trying to be the frugal mouse fan. Iced water is free at all the quick-service restaurants, any time. You can bring your own food and drink into the parks, just no oversized coolers. If you’ll be there at night, you can bring your own glow sticks and light-up toys to avoid paying inflated prices when the parade starts and the vendors come out (Walgreens has Disney themed ones at the moment!). 

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About this column: This weeks great deals Related Topics: Disney World, Frugal Family, and frugalfam Enjoy your trip, and be sure to let us know about any other money-saving tips you may have for Disney theme parks. Tell us in the comments.

Two outgoing Erie School Board members have booked flights and hotel rooms to attend a four-day educational conference in New Orleans on Nov. 15 — more than a week after the boards final regular meeting for the year, on Nov. 7.

The Erie School District is paying for the trips, for Jeanine McCreary, who lost re-election in the May primary, and Gary Horton, who did not seek re-election this year. Neither is returning to the board in 2012.

Each trip will cost taxpayers at least $2,206, including airfare and lodging, for a total of $4,412, with the meal expenses to come later, according to School Board records.

After the Nov. 7 meeting, the Erie School Boards next session is on Dec. 7, its annual reorganization meeting. The board conducts no regular business at a reorganization meeting, at which new members take office.

McCreary and Horton are scheduled to take the trips several months after the School Board failed to approve a resolution to curb board travel. The board started to discuss the moratorium following an Erie Times-News report in February on board travel costs.

Horton said the trip is worthwhile. He and McCreary will attend the 39th annual conference of the National Alliance of Black School Educators. The focus is improving education for black students

Im all for spending the taxpayers dollars wisely, Horton said. This is a good investment of their tax dollars, to see our district tap into something like that.

Go to Sundays Erie Times-News and GoErie.com for more coverage.

When Kristina Zauere was 11 years old, her father decided to take up tennis. He soon grew fond of the game and introduced it to Kristina, who had never played before. It would prove to be a fateful decision.

My dad has always been for an active lifestyle, Zauere said. Wed take ski trips as a family when I was a kid. Then one day, he started playing tennis with his brother, and he wanted my sister and I to play, too. Somehow it just went to a different level competitively. I never wanted to stop playing after that.

Zauere, who grew up in Latvia, proved to be a natural, and began traveling around Europe for tournaments and competitions.

It was more about finding a hobby for me, she said. My father definitely wanted me to experience traveling, competing and assuming leadership through the sport.

There was definitely a breaking point when I was 15, and we went to Scandinavia I think it was Denmark for a tournament. That was the first international tournament I won, and it turned out to be one of my most successful years as a player. At that point I realized that I really liked this sport and wanted to keep on competing.

Following her stellar youth career in and around her native Latvia, she won the U-18 Singles Championship and the Vilnius Open (Lithuania) Zauere was ready for a new challenge.

Id always wanted to come to America I wouldnt have had the option to play college sports in Latvia. I knew there was a possibility to get a scholarship and a good education doing something I liked, so I started sending out applications, Zauere said.

I was drawn to Gonzaga since it was a smaller school, and they offered me a good scholarship and a great education. I talked to Coach [D.J.] Gurule, who was really welcoming and nice. It just fit.

She hit the ground running as a freshman in 2008-09. Zauere earned All-West Coast Conference second-team honors that year.

It was in doubles, which she played sparingly growing up, Zauere has displayed an uncanny knack for that realm.

Id played doubles in European competitions before coming to Gonzaga, but it was more for fun, she said. When Id take trips to tournaments, if I lost in singles but wasnt scheduled to go home for a few days, Id play doubles to make the most of my time. It was a fun way to meet new people from different countries, but I never really knew how to play doubles before I got to Gonzaga. Its definitely a different style of game.

It was during the past two seasons, when Zauere paired with teammate Claire Dodge, that she began to thrive. The pair went 14-6 in 2009-10 and won a team-high 17 games in 2010-11.

The most important thing in doubles is trust supporting each other and finding the right combination between two people, Zauere said. Claires been my best friend throughout college, so it was really easy for us to understand each other. We definitely enjoyed playing together, and thats what I loved the most. We had fun theres so many highlights that stand out from our games.

We played one match where a ball went over both of our heads, and we were running back, and I just nodded to her I didnt even have to say anything and she knew I was going to get it, said Dodge, who graduated lost spring. It was so funny. We were just dying laughing after that because we ended up winning the point. We just had so much fun together every time we played.

We were playing this one match against Eastern when we were down 2-7, and we made a pinky promise that we werent going to lose any more games, Dodge said, chuckling. We won that set 9-7. It was insane. We were beside ourselves after. The pinky promise never let us down.

Sometimes if you take it too seriously, it becomes rough on your game, Zauere said. When its your friend, and you both are passionate about the sport and you want to win, it works out perfectly.

Shes like my sister, Dodge said. Shes awesome because she doesnt take things personally. I might be too assertive or speak my mind sometimes, but she knew that about me. We just jived, and we could say anything to each other.

Zauere effuses selflessness during conversation. She says that after years of focusing on her individual career in Europe where there were no tennis teams becoming part of the Gonzaga program has helped make her collegiate experience a memorable one.

Coach Gurule always says that when youre on the court, you shouldnt only think about yourself, you should think about how you can make others better, Zauere said. Our whole team is so close that we want to see each other succeed.

Maddie Pollis likes having something to strive for.

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Her brother goes to the Ivy League’s Brown University, and her mother graduated from the prestigious Vassar College, a school she has such a good relationship with that the family would take trips there when Maddie was a kid.

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So although she’s only 17 and a senior at Cleveland Heights High School, Maddie has chosen to get a jump on the competition. She learned earlier this month that she is a semi-finalist for the National Merit Scholarship, an honor she earned for receiving an outstanding score on the 2010 Preliminary SAT. Less than 1 percent of all high school seniors earned a spot in the competition, and about 90 percent of those who have will move onto the final round.

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Maddie said she learned from her guidance counselor a few weeks ago that she made it into the semi-final round of the competition, which means she’s now in the running for one of 2,500 scholarship awards worth $2,500 each.

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“Honestly, I had forgotten about it until my counselor told me,” she said. “I was surprised, but I was really happy.”

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Students who win the award must perform well on their SATs and have to earn high marks in their high school classes. Maddie said she’s always excelled as a student, partly because of the standards set by the rest of her family.

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“A lot of my family members have accomplished a lot of things,” she said. “It kind of pushes me to do better.”

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The excellent marks haven’t come easily. Maddie has little time to do homework and study because of an intense schedule that has her in as many as seven different choirs at Heights High at any given time. Right now she’s preparing to play the lead role in the musical The Sound of Music, and played Belle in last year’s performance of Beauty and the Beast.

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It’s not uncommon for Maddie to be at rehearsals until 10 pm or later after having put in a full school day. She said she always gets her schoolwork done, however, and being busy actually helps her.

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“Oddly enough I seem to be more productive when I’m busy,” she said. “During rehearsals I’m always on top of all my assignments and homework. But when I have time to procrastinate when the play’s over, it’s harder to stay on top of things.”

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Her activities also offer her a chance to experience as much as possible before she has to take on the actual responsibilities of adulthood, she said.

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“I feel like high school and college are your only chances to learn everything you want to learn and be involved in all the activities you want to be involved in before you have to deal with the real world,” she said. “I guess I want to make the most of all the opportunities I have in high school.”

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After high school, she hopes to follow in the footsteps of her mother and attend Vassar College, where she’d like to study musical theater.