text
stringlengths 513
125k
| id
stringlengths 47
47
| metadata
dict | input_text
stringlengths 292
832
| target_text
stringlengths 1
20.9k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
What does Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse mean for the financial system?
A big lender to American startups goes under
| Washington, DC
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. That is how Silicon Valley Bank (svb), the 16th-largest lender in America, with about $200bn in assets, went bust. Its financial position deteriorated over several years. But just two days elapsed between the San Francisco-based bank’s announcement on March 8th that it was seeking to raise $2.5bn to plug a hole in its balance-sheet, and the declaration by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which regulates American bank deposits, that svb had failed.
svb’s share price plunged by 60% after the capital raise was revealed. Greg Becker, its chief executive, urged clients to “support us as we have supported you”. Unpersuaded, some venture capitalists told portfolio companies to run. Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund manager, suggested that the government should bail out the bank. By the morning of March 10th its shares had slid another 70% or so in pre-market trading, before a halt was called. cnbc, a television network, reported that svb’s capital-raising efforts had failed and that the bank was seeking to sell itself to a larger institution. Then came the announcement from the regulators.
These events raise two questions. The first is how svb got into this position. The second is whether its troubles are simply an anomaly, or a harbinger of doom for financial institutions writ large.
Start with the first. svb is a bank for startups. It opened accounts for them, often before larger lenders would bother. It also lent to them, which other banks are reluctant to do because few startups have assets for collateral. As Silicon Valley boomed over the past five years, so did svb. Its clients were flush with cash. They needed to store money more than to borrow.
Thus svb’s deposits more than quadrupled—from $44bn at the end of 2017 to $189bn at the end of 2021—while its loan book grew only from $23bn to $66bn. Since banks make money on the spread between the interest rate they pay on deposits (often nothing) and the rate they are paid by borrowers, having a far larger deposit base than loan book is a problem. svb needed to acquire other interest-bearing assets. By the end of 2021, the bank had made $128bn of investments, mostly into mortgage bonds and Treasuries.
Then the world changed. Interest rates soared as inflation became entrenched. This killed off the bonanza in venture capital and caused bond prices to plummet, leaving svb uniquely exposed. Its deposits had swollen when interest rates were low and its clients were flush with cash. Since the bank made investments during this time, it purchased bonds at their peak price. As venture-capital fundraising dried up, svb’s clients ran down their deposits: they fell from $189bn at the end of 2021 to $173bn at the end of 2022. svb was forced to sell off its entire liquid bond portfolio at lower prices than it paid. The losses it took on these sales, some $1.8bn, left a hole it tried to plug with the capital raise. When it went under the bank held some $91bn of investments, valued at their cost at the end of last year.
Were svb’s troubles an anomaly? The bank appears to have been uniquely susceptible to a run. Federal insurance, put in place after a series of panics that felled the American economy in the 1930s, covers deposits up to $250,000. This protects all the cash that most individuals would stash in a bank account. But it is unlikely to cover the funds a company would keep. svb is a bank not just for companies, but a narrow subsection of them that have suffered tougher times than most. Some 93% of its deposits were uninsured. Its customers, unlike those at most banks, had a real incentive to run—and they responded to it.
That said, nearly all banks are sitting on unrealised losses in their bond portfolios. If svb is the bank most likely to have been put in the position of having to stock up on bonds at their peak price, it is probably not the only one struggling with the whiplash in prices. Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, says she is monitoring several banks in light of the events in Silicon Valley. Thankfully, loan books make up a much larger share of assets at most other institutions. And with rates rising, they are earning more.
The question now is whether there will be a bail-out and, if so, how big it would need to be to make depositors whole. svb “is the lifeblood of the tech ecosystem,” notes Ro Khanna, a congressman from California’s 17th district, which includes some of the valley. “They can’t let the bank fail. Whether that means that it should be acquired by another company…or get assistance from or even a statement from the Treasury department so that the depositors feel secure—I will leave that to the experts.”
Intervention would be unpopular. But short of stiffing depositors it may be the only option, since svb clearly did not hold enough to cover the losses it was being forced to take on assets. Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, has said that so long as the state steps in, there is no reason to worry that svb will harm other parts of the financial system. Lots of people will be hoping that it does, and that he is right. ■
|
<urn:uuid:a14aa2d3-9699-4a07-af8b-f8169aa95e23>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943845.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20230322145537-20230322175537-00496.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9806355834007263,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.640625,
"token_count": 1181,
"url": "https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/03/10/what-does-silicon-valley-banks-collapse-mean-for-the-financial-system"
}
|
What does Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse mean for the financial system?
A big lender to American startups goes under
| Washington, DC
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. That is how Silicon Valley Bank (svb), the 16th-largest lender in America, with about $200bn in assets, went bust. Its financial position deteriorated over several years. But just two days elapsed between the San Francisco-based bank’s announcement on March 8th that it was seeking to raise $2.5bn to plug a hole in its balance-sheet, and the declaration by the Federal Deposit
|
Insurance Corporation, which regulates American bank deposits, that svb had failed.
svb’s share price plunged by 60% after the capital raise was revealed. Greg Becker, its chief executive, urged clients to “support us as we have supported you”. Unpersuaded, some venture capitalists told portfolio companies to run. Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund manager, suggested that the government should bail out the bank. By the morning of March 10th its shares had slid another 70% or so in pre-market trading, before a halt was called. cnbc, a television network, reported that svb’s capital-raising efforts had failed and that the bank was seeking to sell itself to a larger institution. Then came the announcement from the regulators.
These events raise two questions. The first is how svb got into this position. The second is whether its troubles are simply an anomaly, or a harbinger of doom for financial institutions writ large.
Start with the first. svb is a bank for startups. It opened accounts for them, often before larger lenders would bother. It also lent to them, which other banks are reluctant to do because few startups have assets for collateral. As Silicon Valley boomed over the past five years, so did svb. Its clients were flush with cash. They needed to store money more than to borrow.
Thus svb’s deposits more than quadrupled—from $44bn at the end of 2017 to $189bn at the end of 2021—while its loan book grew only from $23bn to $66bn. Since banks make money on the spread between the interest rate they pay on deposits (often nothing) and the rate they are paid by borrowers, having a far larger deposit base than loan book is a problem. svb needed to acquire other interest-bearing assets. By the end of 2021, the bank had made $128bn of investments, mostly into mortgage bonds and Treasuries.
Then the world changed. Interest rates soared as inflation became entrenched. This killed off the bonanza in venture capital and caused bond prices to plummet, leaving svb uniquely exposed. Its deposits had swollen when interest rates were low and its clients were flush with cash. Since the bank made investments during this time, it purchased bonds at their peak price. As venture-capital fundraising dried up, svb’s clients ran down their deposits: they fell from $189bn at the end of 2021 to $173bn at the end of 2022. svb was forced to sell off its entire liquid bond portfolio at lower prices than it paid. The losses it took on these sales, some $1.8bn, left a hole it tried to plug with the capital raise. When it went under the bank held some $91bn of investments, valued at their cost at the end of last year.
Were svb’s troubles an anomaly? The bank appears to have been uniquely susceptible to a run. Federal insurance, put in place after a series of panics that felled the American economy in the 1930s, covers deposits up to $250,000. This protects all the cash that most individuals would stash in a bank account. But it is unlikely to cover the funds a company would keep. svb is a bank not just for companies, but a narrow subsection of them that have suffered tougher times than most. Some 93% of its deposits were uninsured. Its customers, unlike those at most banks, had a real incentive to run—and they responded to it.
That said, nearly all banks are sitting on unrealised losses in their bond portfolios. If svb is the bank most likely to have been put in the position of having to stock up on bonds at their peak price, it is probably not the only one struggling with the whiplash in prices. Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, says she is monitoring several banks in light of the events in Silicon Valley. Thankfully, loan books make up a much larger share of assets at most other institutions. And with rates rising, they are earning more.
The question now is whether there will be a bail-out and, if so, how big it would need to be to make depositors whole. svb “is the lifeblood of the tech ecosystem,” notes Ro Khanna, a congressman from California’s 17th district, which includes some of the valley. “They can’t let the bank fail. Whether that means that it should be acquired by another company…or get assistance from or even a statement from the Treasury department so that the depositors feel secure—I will leave that to the experts.”
Intervention would be unpopular. But short of stiffing depositors it may be the only option, since svb clearly did not hold enough to cover the losses it was being forced to take on assets. Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, has said that so long as the state steps in, there is no reason to worry that svb will harm other parts of the financial system. Lots of people will be hoping that it does, and that he is right. ■
|
The crew of the MV Blythe Star had no reason to suspect the 44-metre freighter would join the hundreds of other ships that had disappeared into the depths off Australia's treacherous south-east coast.
It was a fine day, just under 50 years ago, and the water was calm. Then the Blythe Star suddenly listed to starboard and keeled over just off Tasmania's south-west cape.
The 10 crew members made it onto an inflatable raft.
But after nine days on the raft and a subsequent three-day, cross-country trek, only seven survived.
The resting place of the Blythe Star itself remained a mystery until this year — when the cargo ship was found 10 kilometres off Tasmania's south-west coast.
Maritime archaeologists had a hunch about its location; then the CSIRO's Research Vessel (RV) Investigator, en route to study an underwater landslide, confirmed its location.
There are 660 documented shipwrecks along the Victorian coastline, but fewer than half have been found and identified.
The successful rediscovery of the MV Blythe Star has given Victorian archaeologists and historians renewed hope for the more than 300 vessels that remain lost.
Searching the depths
Heritage Victoria senior maritime archaeologist Danielle Wilkinson said historic records proved the ships existed, albeit hidden in the depths.
But the Investigator's suite of scientific wizardry allows historians to find those in the deepest waters.
"Beforehand most of our discoveries were undertaken by divers, and that's limited by depth," Ms Wilkinson said.
"Recreational diving lets you dive to about 30 metres, technical diving to 70 to 80m. Any deeper and you are getting to the limit of what's safe.
"The Investigator can search — using technology — much, much deeper environments … where divers cannot safely access.
"That's why they were able to find one of our shipwrecks, the SS Iron Crown, in 700m of water in Bass Strait."
The Iron Crown was a freighter sunk by a Japanese submarine during World War II.
The Investigator confirmed its location in 2017.
"Sometimes we have a rough idea where these ships go down based on historic record," Ms Wilkinson said.
"What you can then do is provide the CSIRO with rough coordinates and they go to those areas and run their surveying equipment.
"If they see an anomaly — something on the seabed that doesn't look natural — they can then send a camera or ROV [remote operated vehicle] down for a visual, which is what we call ground truthing, to see if it is indeed a shipwreck."
Mapping the ocean floor
The main purpose of RV Investigator's sonar sensors is to map the floor of the ocean, which in turn allows the CSIRO to find bathymetric features such as underwater mountains (sea mounts) and continental shelf slopes. These features are habitats for a rich array of marine life which can be studied by scientists on board.
Ben Arthur is a marine ecologist with the CSIRO but discovering shipwrecks has become an exciting "side hustle".
"My role on Investigator is largely to deliver marine science. Part of that is to understand the sea floor," Dr Arthur explained.
"There's sophisticated technology on board and as well as revealing natural features it can also uncover man-made objects including shipwrecks."
Dr Arthur said the equipment used to map the ocean floor had some similarities to what anglers would call a "fish finder", centring on acoustic systems.
"It sends down beams of sound from the vessel, which travel through the water and hit the sea floor, and what is on the floor bounces back," he said.
"In essence, it's a more powerful version of the systems anglers might have on their 'tinny'.
"It sounds simple but you can imagine what that's like in waters that are many thousands of metres deep. It's quite complicated."
The past preserved under water
If they find something of interest with the sonar, the scientists can deploy a camera system for video identification.
"That's critical in the case of shipwrecks because we can see what it looks like and do things like read the name of the vessel on the side of the hull if it's still there, which is really the best way of confirming what we have found," Dr Arthur said.
Ms Wilkinson said, once wrecks were discovered, a lot could be learned without disturbing them, including details of their construction and even well-preserved artefacts on board.
"Material on board shipwrecks actually preserves quite well under water, particularly underneath the sediment compared with on land," she said.
"[That includes] a lot of fragile materials such as fabrics, lace or leather — so we get a much richer artefact assemblage on shipwreck sites than we do on land sites.
"It's also our role at Heritage Victoria to protect these shipwrecks for the future."
Ghosts of the deep
The 330 missing ships, compiled as part of Heritage Victoria's shipwreck recovery program, covers the breadth of the state's nautical history.
It ranges from tall sailing ships constructed from timber to relatively modern steamships.
One of the smallest is the long boat that was used by survivors of a larger ship, the Sydney Cove, which sank off Tasmania in 1797.
They sailed to Victoria and then walked 800 miles (1,287km) all they way to Sydney.
At the other end of the spectrum is the HMS Sappho, a much larger vessel, which was tasked with relocating Commander Moresby and his entire family (and possessions) to Australia.
Ms Wilkinson said, while many of Victoria's lost shipwrecks would be too deep to find for all but the most powerful scanning equipment, much could still be discovered closer to the shore.
"We only have two maritime archaeologists so Heritage Victoria relies heavily on marine industries such as fishing and the public for discoveries," she said.
|
<urn:uuid:b925ac19-9fbb-4460-a3b8-2f7cbc50e829>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-50",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100016.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20231128214805-20231129004805-00352.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9683060050010681,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.203125,
"token_count": 1250,
"url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-11/shipwrecks-sounded-out-by-csiro-research-vessel-investigator/102452012?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MNF+Subscriber+eNewsletter+%7C+Sept+2023"
}
|
The crew of the MV Blythe Star had no reason to suspect the 44-metre freighter would join the hundreds of other ships that had disappeared into the depths off Australia's treacherous south-east coast.
It was a fine day, just under 50 years ago, and the water was calm. Then the Blythe Star suddenly listed to starboard and keeled over just off Tasmania's south-west cape.
The 10 crew members made it onto an inflatable raft.
But after nine days on the raft and a subsequent three-day, cross-country trek, only seven survived.
The resting place of the
|
Blythe Star itself remained a mystery until this year — when the cargo ship was found 10 kilometres off Tasmania's south-west coast.
Maritime archaeologists had a hunch about its location; then the CSIRO's Research Vessel (RV) Investigator, en route to study an underwater landslide, confirmed its location.
There are 660 documented shipwrecks along the Victorian coastline, but fewer than half have been found and identified.
The successful rediscovery of the MV Blythe Star has given Victorian archaeologists and historians renewed hope for the more than 300 vessels that remain lost.
Searching the depths
Heritage Victoria senior maritime archaeologist Danielle Wilkinson said historic records proved the ships existed, albeit hidden in the depths.
But the Investigator's suite of scientific wizardry allows historians to find those in the deepest waters.
"Beforehand most of our discoveries were undertaken by divers, and that's limited by depth," Ms Wilkinson said.
"Recreational diving lets you dive to about 30 metres, technical diving to 70 to 80m. Any deeper and you are getting to the limit of what's safe.
"The Investigator can search — using technology — much, much deeper environments … where divers cannot safely access.
"That's why they were able to find one of our shipwrecks, the SS Iron Crown, in 700m of water in Bass Strait."
The Iron Crown was a freighter sunk by a Japanese submarine during World War II.
The Investigator confirmed its location in 2017.
"Sometimes we have a rough idea where these ships go down based on historic record," Ms Wilkinson said.
"What you can then do is provide the CSIRO with rough coordinates and they go to those areas and run their surveying equipment.
"If they see an anomaly — something on the seabed that doesn't look natural — they can then send a camera or ROV [remote operated vehicle] down for a visual, which is what we call ground truthing, to see if it is indeed a shipwreck."
Mapping the ocean floor
The main purpose of RV Investigator's sonar sensors is to map the floor of the ocean, which in turn allows the CSIRO to find bathymetric features such as underwater mountains (sea mounts) and continental shelf slopes. These features are habitats for a rich array of marine life which can be studied by scientists on board.
Ben Arthur is a marine ecologist with the CSIRO but discovering shipwrecks has become an exciting "side hustle".
"My role on Investigator is largely to deliver marine science. Part of that is to understand the sea floor," Dr Arthur explained.
"There's sophisticated technology on board and as well as revealing natural features it can also uncover man-made objects including shipwrecks."
Dr Arthur said the equipment used to map the ocean floor had some similarities to what anglers would call a "fish finder", centring on acoustic systems.
"It sends down beams of sound from the vessel, which travel through the water and hit the sea floor, and what is on the floor bounces back," he said.
"In essence, it's a more powerful version of the systems anglers might have on their 'tinny'.
"It sounds simple but you can imagine what that's like in waters that are many thousands of metres deep. It's quite complicated."
The past preserved under water
If they find something of interest with the sonar, the scientists can deploy a camera system for video identification.
"That's critical in the case of shipwrecks because we can see what it looks like and do things like read the name of the vessel on the side of the hull if it's still there, which is really the best way of confirming what we have found," Dr Arthur said.
Ms Wilkinson said, once wrecks were discovered, a lot could be learned without disturbing them, including details of their construction and even well-preserved artefacts on board.
"Material on board shipwrecks actually preserves quite well under water, particularly underneath the sediment compared with on land," she said.
"[That includes] a lot of fragile materials such as fabrics, lace or leather — so we get a much richer artefact assemblage on shipwreck sites than we do on land sites.
"It's also our role at Heritage Victoria to protect these shipwrecks for the future."
Ghosts of the deep
The 330 missing ships, compiled as part of Heritage Victoria's shipwreck recovery program, covers the breadth of the state's nautical history.
It ranges from tall sailing ships constructed from timber to relatively modern steamships.
One of the smallest is the long boat that was used by survivors of a larger ship, the Sydney Cove, which sank off Tasmania in 1797.
They sailed to Victoria and then walked 800 miles (1,287km) all they way to Sydney.
At the other end of the spectrum is the HMS Sappho, a much larger vessel, which was tasked with relocating Commander Moresby and his entire family (and possessions) to Australia.
Ms Wilkinson said, while many of Victoria's lost shipwrecks would be too deep to find for all but the most powerful scanning equipment, much could still be discovered closer to the shore.
"We only have two maritime archaeologists so Heritage Victoria relies heavily on marine industries such as fishing and the public for discoveries," she said.
|
Wasatch County’s runoff overflow is the Great Salt Lake’s gain
As the largest snowpack ever recorded in Utah threatens to overflow reservoirs in Wasatch County, the Great Salt Lake needs more water to survive. That has local water managers thinking outside the box.
In normal times, most water that flows through the Jordanelle and Deer Creek reservoirs moves on to Utah Lake, then to consumers on the Wasatch Front.
But these are not normal times according to Jared Hansen. He’s the manager of the Central Utah Project, which oversees water flow at those reservoirs.
“It’s been an epic winter,” Hansen said.
For Central Utah Project staff, this means there’s far more water flowing in and far fewer options for where to store it than usual.
As snow melts and gushes into Heber Valley waterways, Hansen said the runoff would quickly overflow reservoirs if water managers took no action. That’s the main reason they expelled 50 million gallons of water out of Deer Creek Reservoir Tuesday and will continue to do so daily for the foreseeable future.
“The worst thing that can ever happen is to have the reservoir full when the water hits, and so then you just end up passing that entire flood as the water comes down,” Hansen said. “So, that's the last thing I ever want to have, is we end up with losing control of the river.”
He added that amount of water flowing out of Heber Valley reservoirs each day — 50 million gallons — is enough to supply 150 homes in Utah County for a year.
There’s more to the mass discharge than flood prevention.
Down river, Hansen said he believes Utah Lake will “come very close to filling, if not filling” up this spring. That’s unlike the Great Salt Lake, which reached a record-low level in 2022.
So, the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, river masters and other officials from the Salt Lake Valley, state and federal offices decided to try something new with those 50 million gallons a day from Wasatch County.
They’re sending it straight to the Great Salt Lake. That path includes the Provo River in Provo Canyon, then an overflow drainage facility that dumps into the Jordan River. It’s not what that facility is designed for, but it’s working.
“With the Great Salt Lake being as low as it was, we knew with the record-breaking snowpack we can deliver this water through some pipes around Utah Lake and get that water to the Great Salt Lake a little sooner and a little more efficiently," Hansen said.
Central Utah Water plans to stop releasing water precisely when the runoff ends and simultaneously leave the reservoirs full.
The snowpack will also benefit Strawberry Reservoir, which dropped to low levels last year. Hansen expects it to fill more than 90%, a recovery that is rare for one single year.
|
<urn:uuid:af9359d3-9728-4627-8156-c1f0fdab1e8f>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510498.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20230929054611-20230929084611-00524.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9389878511428833,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.5625,
"token_count": 610,
"url": "https://www.kpcw.org/wasatch-county/2023-04-28/wasatch-countys-runoff-overflow-is-the-great-salt-lakes-gain"
}
|
Wasatch County’s runoff overflow is the Great Salt Lake’s gain
As the largest snowpack ever recorded in Utah threatens to overflow reservoirs in Wasatch County, the Great Salt Lake needs more water to survive. That has local water managers thinking outside the box.
In normal times, most water that flows through the Jordanelle and Deer Creek reservoirs moves on to Utah Lake, then to consumers on the Wasatch Front.
But these are not normal times according to Jared Hansen. He’s the manager of the Central Utah Project, which oversees water flow at those reservoirs.
“It’s been an epic winter,” Hansen said.
For Central Utah Project
|
staff, this means there’s far more water flowing in and far fewer options for where to store it than usual.
As snow melts and gushes into Heber Valley waterways, Hansen said the runoff would quickly overflow reservoirs if water managers took no action. That’s the main reason they expelled 50 million gallons of water out of Deer Creek Reservoir Tuesday and will continue to do so daily for the foreseeable future.
“The worst thing that can ever happen is to have the reservoir full when the water hits, and so then you just end up passing that entire flood as the water comes down,” Hansen said. “So, that's the last thing I ever want to have, is we end up with losing control of the river.”
He added that amount of water flowing out of Heber Valley reservoirs each day — 50 million gallons — is enough to supply 150 homes in Utah County for a year.
There’s more to the mass discharge than flood prevention.
Down river, Hansen said he believes Utah Lake will “come very close to filling, if not filling” up this spring. That’s unlike the Great Salt Lake, which reached a record-low level in 2022.
So, the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, river masters and other officials from the Salt Lake Valley, state and federal offices decided to try something new with those 50 million gallons a day from Wasatch County.
They’re sending it straight to the Great Salt Lake. That path includes the Provo River in Provo Canyon, then an overflow drainage facility that dumps into the Jordan River. It’s not what that facility is designed for, but it’s working.
“With the Great Salt Lake being as low as it was, we knew with the record-breaking snowpack we can deliver this water through some pipes around Utah Lake and get that water to the Great Salt Lake a little sooner and a little more efficiently," Hansen said.
Central Utah Water plans to stop releasing water precisely when the runoff ends and simultaneously leave the reservoirs full.
The snowpack will also benefit Strawberry Reservoir, which dropped to low levels last year. Hansen expects it to fill more than 90%, a recovery that is rare for one single year.
|
Air quality concern could become the new normal
Historic air pollution has made this a hazy summer.
Why it matters: More bad air days could bring a shift in how the general public thinks about air quality.
Zoom in: Our air quality was bad before smoke from Canadian wildfires brought low visibility and a distinct smell last month.
- The American Lung Association's 2023 "State of the Air" report found that Detroit had more of the most harmful types of air pollution — particle pollution and high ozone — compared with other U.S. cities.
- Metro Detroit was ranked the 12th most polluted metro by annual particulate matter.
Yes, but: Detroit was also one of just two cities that improved enough to move off the list of 25 cities with the worst ozone pollution and now meets the EPA threshold under federal ozone standards.
Catch up quick: The air quality alert for high ozone and smoke June 29 and 30 made history: It was the first time in Michigan's history that air quality warnings were issued due to two pollutants in the same area.
- That was days after IQAir’s real-time Air Quality Index ranked Detroit as the city with the worst air quality in the world.
- We were under an Air Quality Alert again due to elevated ozone levels on Monday.
Between the lines: Ozone pollution has been a recurring problem over the decades due to the city's density and industrialization, but it's becoming a bigger problem across the state because of climate change, Ken Fletcher, director of advocacy of the American Lung Association in Michigan, tells Axios.
What they're saying: "If this continues — and I'm concerned that it will — this could become the new normal, which is very problematic," Fletcher says.
- "It's really going to impact people with asthma, COPD, the elderly and their ability to go outside. People who work outside are going to have to seriously start protecting themselves."
- "Moving forward, just as we look to see if its raining that day, I think we'll need to look and see, 'What is the air quality index?'"
More Detroit stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Detroit.
|
<urn:uuid:2954cf6e-7ae2-4eaa-aeb3-0ed98dce30c6>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511220.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20231003192425-20231003222425-00206.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9710618257522583,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.84375,
"token_count": 464,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/detroit/2023/07/13/air-quality-concern-new-normal-detroit-wildfires"
}
|
Air quality concern could become the new normal
Historic air pollution has made this a hazy summer.
Why it matters: More bad air days could bring a shift in how the general public thinks about air quality.
Zoom in: Our air quality was bad before smoke from Canadian wildfires brought low visibility and a distinct smell last month.
- The American Lung Association's 2023 "State of the Air" report found that Detroit had more of the most harmful types of air pollution — particle pollution and high ozone — compared with other U.S. cities.
- Metro Detroit was ranked the 12th most polluted metro
|
by annual particulate matter.
Yes, but: Detroit was also one of just two cities that improved enough to move off the list of 25 cities with the worst ozone pollution and now meets the EPA threshold under federal ozone standards.
Catch up quick: The air quality alert for high ozone and smoke June 29 and 30 made history: It was the first time in Michigan's history that air quality warnings were issued due to two pollutants in the same area.
- That was days after IQAir’s real-time Air Quality Index ranked Detroit as the city with the worst air quality in the world.
- We were under an Air Quality Alert again due to elevated ozone levels on Monday.
Between the lines: Ozone pollution has been a recurring problem over the decades due to the city's density and industrialization, but it's becoming a bigger problem across the state because of climate change, Ken Fletcher, director of advocacy of the American Lung Association in Michigan, tells Axios.
What they're saying: "If this continues — and I'm concerned that it will — this could become the new normal, which is very problematic," Fletcher says.
- "It's really going to impact people with asthma, COPD, the elderly and their ability to go outside. People who work outside are going to have to seriously start protecting themselves."
- "Moving forward, just as we look to see if its raining that day, I think we'll need to look and see, 'What is the air quality index?'"
More Detroit stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Detroit.
|
Look inside: D.C.'s first bamboo building
Just across from Frederick Douglass’ historic Anacostia home sits a small house with a modern design. You wouldn’t guess it, but this house made history in its own right, as it’s made of bamboo.
Why it matters: The Grass House, built in 2019 by Anacostia-based architecture and development company BLDUS, is the first code-compliant bamboo building on the East Coast. As the planet continues to feel the impacts of climate change, finding environmentally friendly building solutions could solve some big problems.
State of play: BLDUS utilizes materials like bamboo and sheep's wool to create homes that are more energy efficient (which means lower utility bills) and environmentally friendly.
Company co-founder Jack Becker tells Axios that bamboo, in the form of BamCore structural plywood panels, is faster to use and comparable in price to status quo materials.
- Unlike other insulation materials, sheep's wool doesn’t absorb water, BLDUS co-founder Andrew Linn tells Axios, eliminating mold and mildew and leading to healthier homes.
Yes, but: Bamboo and other similar materials haven’t been widely embraced in the construction industry partially because traditional materials are easier to find at major suppliers such as Home Depot and Lowe's.
Zoom in: Since Grass House, which is used as BLDUS' office, the company has built one other bamboo structure in D.C. and has two more scheduled to be completed this year.
- Their past projects have also used construction materials such as cork, bark, and willow.
BLDUS co-founder Andrew Linn likens the move toward eco-friendly materials in the construction industry to the farm-to-table movement – he calls it farm-to-shelter.
What’s next: BLDUS wants to use bamboo in larger-scale, multi-family projects, including in public housing.
More Washington D.C. stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Washington D.C..
|
<urn:uuid:e9130a46-7ff2-4491-98ec-9a391d72a09a>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943589.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321002050-20230321032050-00190.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9446808099746704,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.5625,
"token_count": 452,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/02/08/look-inside-dc-first-bamboo-building-house"
}
|
Look inside: D.C.'s first bamboo building
Just across from Frederick Douglass’ historic Anacostia home sits a small house with a modern design. You wouldn’t guess it, but this house made history in its own right, as it’s made of bamboo.
Why it matters: The Grass House, built in 2019 by Anacostia-based architecture and development company BLDUS, is the first code-compliant bamboo building on the East Coast. As the planet continues to feel the impacts of climate change, finding environmentally friendly building solutions could solve some big problems.
State of play: BLD
|
US utilizes materials like bamboo and sheep's wool to create homes that are more energy efficient (which means lower utility bills) and environmentally friendly.
Company co-founder Jack Becker tells Axios that bamboo, in the form of BamCore structural plywood panels, is faster to use and comparable in price to status quo materials.
- Unlike other insulation materials, sheep's wool doesn’t absorb water, BLDUS co-founder Andrew Linn tells Axios, eliminating mold and mildew and leading to healthier homes.
Yes, but: Bamboo and other similar materials haven’t been widely embraced in the construction industry partially because traditional materials are easier to find at major suppliers such as Home Depot and Lowe's.
Zoom in: Since Grass House, which is used as BLDUS' office, the company has built one other bamboo structure in D.C. and has two more scheduled to be completed this year.
- Their past projects have also used construction materials such as cork, bark, and willow.
BLDUS co-founder Andrew Linn likens the move toward eco-friendly materials in the construction industry to the farm-to-table movement – he calls it farm-to-shelter.
What’s next: BLDUS wants to use bamboo in larger-scale, multi-family projects, including in public housing.
More Washington D.C. stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Washington D.C..
|
Editorial: The science of reading works. California should require it
Strange that it took a lawsuit to show California a better way to teach students to read. And now that a Stanford University study has confirmed the value of the so-called science of reading in a handful of schools, it’s time for the state to get serious about making this the required standard for literacy instruction.
The lawsuit, filed in 2017 by the pro bono law firm Public Counsel, claimed that California schools were failing in their constitutional duty to children by promoting them without the basic reading skills. It pointed to a Los Angeles school where only 10% of the students were at grade level in literacy. And it noted that there was a well-evidenced method of teaching reading that most schools weren’t following. It’s based on building multiple skills, but most notably adding more phonics instruction.
We need legislation to require that every school — or at least all schools with low and stagnant grades — bring the science of reading to its classrooms.
The state settled the suit in 2020, agreeing to provide 75 low-performing elementary schools with about $642,000 over three years, with that money to be devoted to improving to improve reading outcomes. Schools had leeway about how they spent the money, but all turned to the science of reading in literacy instruction, according to Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel.
Stanford’s independent examination of that change found considerably improved scores, with significantly higher numbers of third-graders reading at grade level. Science of reading also is the literacy curriculum used by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Primary Promise program, which has shown measurable improvements in reading proficiency. Sadly, the program is being cut back.
Mathematics scores improved a little, too, in the schools using science of reading. That shouldn’t be a big surprise: Most subjects are taught at least partly through reading.
Giving residents censorship rights over librarians and the public crosses a clear line that should never be breached.
It’s an impressive-sounding moniker, the science of reading. But many successful teachers call it common sense and have been using it informally for years. It involves more direct instruction by the teacher, a significant dose of phonics, or sounding out words from letters, as well as building vocabulary, encouraging students to read aloud and helping them comprehend what they’re reading.
In contrast, the two other principal methods of literacy education followed the theory that reading comes naturally to children, who just need to be exposed to engaging literature and figure out words by guessing them from the pictures and other context. While this actually does work for 30% of students, it leaves the futures of the other 70% in peril.
Opponents of science of reading complain that phonics is too mechanical. But it doesn’t have to be if combined with vocabulary and enjoyable literature. Besides, what’s worse, a couple of years of sounding out words to build fluency and comprehension, or a lifetime of illiteracy?
Consider La Salle Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles. Its most recent scores show only a quarter of students reading at or above grade level. That’s awful, far lower than the 46.7% of LAUSD students who read proficiently, which also isn’t an acceptable number. But in 2017, when the lawsuit was filed, only 10% of La Salle third-grade students read at grade level. And this improvement after several years of using science of reading has occurred despite the pandemic and remote learning, which has hurt reading scores across the nation.
Of course, it’s not enough just to change the curriculum, the Stanford researchers concluded. Teachers need training; hiring reading coaches helps, too. Some schools used part of their funding from the settlement to engage parents in their children’s reading. These changes also appear to have helped.
Aside from promoting and protecting students’ physical and mental well-being, there is nothing more important than to help them learn to read. Perhaps the Local Control Funding Formula, which hands a tremendous amount of spending authority to school districts, should be rejiggered to put more of the money meant to help struggling students toward reading.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond says the evidence supports science of reading, and he favors training teachers in it. But he is skittish about requiring schools to adopt it.
That’s too bad. Schools need a sense of urgency to ensure that California students are improving academically right now, especially those in marginalized groups and from low-income families.
A cure for the common opinion
Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
|
<urn:uuid:7e309338-a802-4c7e-a114-4c84e857c623>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473401.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221070402-20240221100402-00246.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9610546231269836,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.984375,
"token_count": 979,
"url": "https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-19/la-ed-the-science-of-reading-works-right-here-right-now-so-lets-use-it"
}
|
Editorial: The science of reading works. California should require it
Strange that it took a lawsuit to show California a better way to teach students to read. And now that a Stanford University study has confirmed the value of the so-called science of reading in a handful of schools, it’s time for the state to get serious about making this the required standard for literacy instruction.
The lawsuit, filed in 2017 by the pro bono law firm Public Counsel, claimed that California schools were failing in their constitutional duty to children by promoting them without the basic reading skills. It pointed to a Los Angeles school where only 1
|
0% of the students were at grade level in literacy. And it noted that there was a well-evidenced method of teaching reading that most schools weren’t following. It’s based on building multiple skills, but most notably adding more phonics instruction.
We need legislation to require that every school — or at least all schools with low and stagnant grades — bring the science of reading to its classrooms.
The state settled the suit in 2020, agreeing to provide 75 low-performing elementary schools with about $642,000 over three years, with that money to be devoted to improving to improve reading outcomes. Schools had leeway about how they spent the money, but all turned to the science of reading in literacy instruction, according to Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel.
Stanford’s independent examination of that change found considerably improved scores, with significantly higher numbers of third-graders reading at grade level. Science of reading also is the literacy curriculum used by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Primary Promise program, which has shown measurable improvements in reading proficiency. Sadly, the program is being cut back.
Mathematics scores improved a little, too, in the schools using science of reading. That shouldn’t be a big surprise: Most subjects are taught at least partly through reading.
Giving residents censorship rights over librarians and the public crosses a clear line that should never be breached.
It’s an impressive-sounding moniker, the science of reading. But many successful teachers call it common sense and have been using it informally for years. It involves more direct instruction by the teacher, a significant dose of phonics, or sounding out words from letters, as well as building vocabulary, encouraging students to read aloud and helping them comprehend what they’re reading.
In contrast, the two other principal methods of literacy education followed the theory that reading comes naturally to children, who just need to be exposed to engaging literature and figure out words by guessing them from the pictures and other context. While this actually does work for 30% of students, it leaves the futures of the other 70% in peril.
Opponents of science of reading complain that phonics is too mechanical. But it doesn’t have to be if combined with vocabulary and enjoyable literature. Besides, what’s worse, a couple of years of sounding out words to build fluency and comprehension, or a lifetime of illiteracy?
Consider La Salle Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles. Its most recent scores show only a quarter of students reading at or above grade level. That’s awful, far lower than the 46.7% of LAUSD students who read proficiently, which also isn’t an acceptable number. But in 2017, when the lawsuit was filed, only 10% of La Salle third-grade students read at grade level. And this improvement after several years of using science of reading has occurred despite the pandemic and remote learning, which has hurt reading scores across the nation.
Of course, it’s not enough just to change the curriculum, the Stanford researchers concluded. Teachers need training; hiring reading coaches helps, too. Some schools used part of their funding from the settlement to engage parents in their children’s reading. These changes also appear to have helped.
Aside from promoting and protecting students’ physical and mental well-being, there is nothing more important than to help them learn to read. Perhaps the Local Control Funding Formula, which hands a tremendous amount of spending authority to school districts, should be rejiggered to put more of the money meant to help struggling students toward reading.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond says the evidence supports science of reading, and he favors training teachers in it. But he is skittish about requiring schools to adopt it.
That’s too bad. Schools need a sense of urgency to ensure that California students are improving academically right now, especially those in marginalized groups and from low-income families.
A cure for the common opinion
Get thought-provoking perspectives with our weekly newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
|
The coldest air in the Northern Hemisphere is invading New England
A potent cold snap descending on New England Friday morning that's expected to last into early Sunday threatens to bring wind chills approaching record low levels.
Threat level: With wind chills forecast to reach -10°F in New York City, -33°F in Boston, and as low as -60°F in northern Maine on Saturday morning, the cold could be deadly for anyone caught outside for extended periods.
The big picture: The air mass across northern New England Friday night through the weekend will be the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere, with the possible exception of a portion of Siberia.
- Wind chill warnings are in effect for parts of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
- As of 2:14pm, a wind chill of minus-50°F had already been observed at Frenchville Airport in northern Maine. By around 8pm, it had hit -60°F, per the National Weather Service.
- The frigid winds blowing across the relatively mild waters of Lake Champlain has led to "steam devils" swirling above the lake.
- This is the coldest air to affect the region in decades.
The latest: The NWS office in Caribou, Maine, said it has received reports of "Quakes" in the area, which it said were "Frostquakes" or "Cryoseisms."
- "Just like Earthquakes, [they] generate tremors, thundering sensations," the NWS said in a tweet Friday evening. "These are caused by sudden cracks in frozen soil or underground water when [it's] very cold."
Zoom in: The NWS warns that in such cold conditions, frostbite can occur on exposed skin in 10 minutes or less.
- Strong winds are accompanying the Arctic front, particularly in southern New England, where gusts up to 50 mph are anticipated into Friday afternoon and Friday night. At the same time, temperatures will be dropping all day, down into the single digits in Boston by evening, and below zero in northern New England.
- Any power outages could knock out heat during frigid conditions. According to the NWS forecast office in Boston, temperatures there are likely to be comparable to a cold snap in February of 2016, when the city hit -9°F. But areas to the north will be far colder.
- In northern New England, winds may also howl out of the Northwest into Saturday, particularly in northern Maine.
The cold outbreak comes courtesy of a lobe of the tropospheric polar vortex, which is distinct from the polar vortex that is present at higher altitudes in the stratosphere.
- This region of extreme cold will rotate south from Hudson Bay, accompanied by a powerful cold front with snow squalls and strong winds beginning late Thursday night and Friday morning.
- New York City will miss the core of the cold but will still see low temperatures dip to 9°F on Saturday, with a high struggling to rise into the mid-20s. Wind chills will be below zero, however.
- Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. will also see unusually cold conditions Friday and Saturday.
- Blizzard warnings have been issued in northern Maine due to blowing snow on Friday and Saturday, as winds gusting to 40 miles per hour create what are known as "ground blizzard" conditions.
- The NWS reports that unofficial records of the coldest air temperatures aloft, as measured by weather balloons, could be broken.
- "Most stations are forecast to see their lowest wind chills in decades or, in some cases, the lowest ever recorded," the NWS office in Caribou stated Thursday.
Of note: Mount Washington in New Hampshire hit a wind chill of -107°F on Friday evening — its coldest on record and likely the coldest on record for any station in the U.S.
- Forecasters had sought to discourage wintertime adventurers from attempting to hike in these conditions, warning of the "exponential" risk of hypothermia and frostbite.
What's next: Fortunately, the frigid air intrusion into New England will be short-lived as temperatures are forecast to moderate by Monday.
Editor's note: This article has been updated with additional details throughout.
|
<urn:uuid:ccdf89aa-2385-4bb8-8f28-ccf36bbd527f>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-50",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100499.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20231203094028-20231203124028-00895.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9465027451515198,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.6875,
"token_count": 890,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/02/02/new-england-polar-vortex-cold-snap"
}
|
The coldest air in the Northern Hemisphere is invading New England
A potent cold snap descending on New England Friday morning that's expected to last into early Sunday threatens to bring wind chills approaching record low levels.
Threat level: With wind chills forecast to reach -10°F in New York City, -33°F in Boston, and as low as -60°F in northern Maine on Saturday morning, the cold could be deadly for anyone caught outside for extended periods.
The big picture: The air mass across northern New England Friday night through the weekend will be the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere,
|
with the possible exception of a portion of Siberia.
- Wind chill warnings are in effect for parts of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
- As of 2:14pm, a wind chill of minus-50°F had already been observed at Frenchville Airport in northern Maine. By around 8pm, it had hit -60°F, per the National Weather Service.
- The frigid winds blowing across the relatively mild waters of Lake Champlain has led to "steam devils" swirling above the lake.
- This is the coldest air to affect the region in decades.
The latest: The NWS office in Caribou, Maine, said it has received reports of "Quakes" in the area, which it said were "Frostquakes" or "Cryoseisms."
- "Just like Earthquakes, [they] generate tremors, thundering sensations," the NWS said in a tweet Friday evening. "These are caused by sudden cracks in frozen soil or underground water when [it's] very cold."
Zoom in: The NWS warns that in such cold conditions, frostbite can occur on exposed skin in 10 minutes or less.
- Strong winds are accompanying the Arctic front, particularly in southern New England, where gusts up to 50 mph are anticipated into Friday afternoon and Friday night. At the same time, temperatures will be dropping all day, down into the single digits in Boston by evening, and below zero in northern New England.
- Any power outages could knock out heat during frigid conditions. According to the NWS forecast office in Boston, temperatures there are likely to be comparable to a cold snap in February of 2016, when the city hit -9°F. But areas to the north will be far colder.
- In northern New England, winds may also howl out of the Northwest into Saturday, particularly in northern Maine.
The cold outbreak comes courtesy of a lobe of the tropospheric polar vortex, which is distinct from the polar vortex that is present at higher altitudes in the stratosphere.
- This region of extreme cold will rotate south from Hudson Bay, accompanied by a powerful cold front with snow squalls and strong winds beginning late Thursday night and Friday morning.
- New York City will miss the core of the cold but will still see low temperatures dip to 9°F on Saturday, with a high struggling to rise into the mid-20s. Wind chills will be below zero, however.
- Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. will also see unusually cold conditions Friday and Saturday.
- Blizzard warnings have been issued in northern Maine due to blowing snow on Friday and Saturday, as winds gusting to 40 miles per hour create what are known as "ground blizzard" conditions.
- The NWS reports that unofficial records of the coldest air temperatures aloft, as measured by weather balloons, could be broken.
- "Most stations are forecast to see their lowest wind chills in decades or, in some cases, the lowest ever recorded," the NWS office in Caribou stated Thursday.
Of note: Mount Washington in New Hampshire hit a wind chill of -107°F on Friday evening — its coldest on record and likely the coldest on record for any station in the U.S.
- Forecasters had sought to discourage wintertime adventurers from attempting to hike in these conditions, warning of the "exponential" risk of hypothermia and frostbite.
What's next: Fortunately, the frigid air intrusion into New England will be short-lived as temperatures are forecast to moderate by Monday.
Editor's note: This article has been updated with additional details throughout.
|
Sierra Snowpack Might Be Biggest on the Planet Right Now
The gold standard for figuring out how much water will be delivered to California communities, businesses, and farms is the annual April 1 snowpack measurement.
Finally, after three years of drought, things are looking up.
Thanks to a long parade of storms, the statewide snowpack has already surpassed the April 1 average. In fact, according to the state Department of Water Resources, the snowpack is 124% of the April 1 average and 248% of “normal” as of Wednesday.
Why does the April 1 measurement matter?
After that, as temperatures rise, the snowpack melts and feeds California’s extensive reservoir system. Water from reservoirs is released into river channels, canals, and pipes and carried to where it needs to go. In addition, the water in riverbeds and creeks nourishes habitat, wildlife, and fish. And, some of the snowmelt percolates into the aquifer for future use.
So, while California’s just-concluded parade of nine atmospheric rivers has been deadly (at least 20 people killed) and costly (damage in the billions), the storms have also possibly created the biggest snowpack on the planet.
California’s Sierra Nevada range 80 days ago versus today.
These mountains likely currently hold the biggest snowpack on the planet. pic.twitter.com/b5Lo0gnuod
— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) January 18, 2023
More Snow Ahead
The forecast from the National Weather Service in Hanford calls for a 30% chance of rain in the Fresno area Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.
But the biggest precipitation impact will be felt in the Sierra, where up to 8 inches of snow is expected at some locations.
Projected precipitation for the next storm to hit Central California. While most of the district will see light rain or snow, an area from Yosemite to Huntington Lake and Mono Hot Springs may see significant new snowfall. pic.twitter.com/CmcBC2Q8Yn
— NWS Hanford (@NWSHanford) January 17, 2023
|
<urn:uuid:6ef08953-b03f-4181-8f62-6c56a6867ec8>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224652494.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20230606082037-20230606112037-00132.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9300288558006287,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.40625,
"token_count": 448,
"url": "https://ec2-13-52-0-112.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/2023/01/18/sierra-snowpack-might-be-biggest-on-the-planet-right-now/"
}
|
Sierra Snowpack Might Be Biggest on the Planet Right Now
The gold standard for figuring out how much water will be delivered to California communities, businesses, and farms is the annual April 1 snowpack measurement.
Finally, after three years of drought, things are looking up.
Thanks to a long parade of storms, the statewide snowpack has already surpassed the April 1 average. In fact, according to the state Department of Water Resources, the snowpack is 124% of the April 1 average and 248% of “normal” as of Wednesday.
Why does the April 1 measurement matter?
|
After that, as temperatures rise, the snowpack melts and feeds California’s extensive reservoir system. Water from reservoirs is released into river channels, canals, and pipes and carried to where it needs to go. In addition, the water in riverbeds and creeks nourishes habitat, wildlife, and fish. And, some of the snowmelt percolates into the aquifer for future use.
So, while California’s just-concluded parade of nine atmospheric rivers has been deadly (at least 20 people killed) and costly (damage in the billions), the storms have also possibly created the biggest snowpack on the planet.
California’s Sierra Nevada range 80 days ago versus today.
These mountains likely currently hold the biggest snowpack on the planet. pic.twitter.com/b5Lo0gnuod
— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) January 18, 2023
More Snow Ahead
The forecast from the National Weather Service in Hanford calls for a 30% chance of rain in the Fresno area Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.
But the biggest precipitation impact will be felt in the Sierra, where up to 8 inches of snow is expected at some locations.
Projected precipitation for the next storm to hit Central California. While most of the district will see light rain or snow, an area from Yosemite to Huntington Lake and Mono Hot Springs may see significant new snowfall. pic.twitter.com/CmcBC2Q8Yn
— NWS Hanford (@NWSHanford) January 17, 2023
|
Karl Pomeroy, CEO, Motili.
Maintaining a building environment that is healthy and comfortable is imperative for building managers. Especially in office buildings, occupants tend to have less control of their indoor environment, which can lead to negative health effects, make their environment less comfortable and cause decreased productivity. I believe current issues such as the prevalence of airborne viruses and worsening air pollution will likely further fuel the awareness of indoor air quality and increase demand for more air quality solutions.
How To Tell If Your Building Has Poor Air Quality
A major sign of poor air quality is if occupants are complaining about symptoms such as sneezing, headaches, stuffy or runny noses, discomfort, coughing or forgetfulness. If you hear this feedback, it may be time to evaluate the building’s air quality.
There are many aspects that could contribute to poor air quality in a building. Mold is one of the most well-known, but issues could also be present if you have recently remodeled part of the building, are managing an older building or frequently use air fresheners and cleaning agents. Does any part of your building frequently print or use paints? The chemicals from new furnishings, deodorizing sprays, cleaning agents and paints release volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are gases that can affect your air quality and health.
If enough air pollutant issues are present, it can lead to sick building syndrome (SMB), which is when workers have “acute symptoms, such as eye and nose irritation and headache, associated with occupancy in a specific building but not indicating a specific disease.” Other possible symptoms include fatigue, lack of focus and irritation of the throat and even the lungs. SMB remains a common (and expensive) issue that I feel doesn’t get its deserved attention; it often goes unrecognized because the symptoms can be attributed to other ailments. However, a study reported that 23% of office workers in the United States frequently experience two or more sick building syndrome symptoms at work, which causes an estimated productivity decrement of 2%, with an annual cost of $60 billion.
Air Quality Solutions For Buildings
Start by evaluating the environment of your building and identifying any areas that could cause indoor air pollutants. It’s important to take note of where occupants are experiencing negative health effects. Do they feel worse when they are in a specific room? Do they feel better once they leave the building? Doing an analysis of your current environment and listing out any potential sources of pollutants will help you determine the correct solution.
After you have a list of potential sources of irritants, it’s best to start by implementing solutions that are quick and easy. Sometimes, occupants can experience symptoms that are similar to those of poor air quality but are unrelated. If there is a specific region of your building experiencing symptoms of poor air quality, but there is no evident source of air pollutants, the problem may be the environment at the surface. Consider upgrading poor lighting to brighter, blue-enriched light, adding sound panels for areas with a lot of noise, and ensuring the HVAC system is running properly and maintaining a comfortable temperature.
If these solutions do not improve the symptoms of occupants, or if you have recognized symptoms of sick building syndrome, consider implementing a maintenance routine that includes replacing HVAC filters and increasing ventilation regularly, especially in any areas that produce VOCs.
The more occupants you have in a building, the more likely viruses will spread—especially during cold and flu season. Installing UV-C light can inactivate bacteria and viruses to help keep occupants healthy.
You may also want to consider investing in an air purifier. Air purifiers are effective at removing bacteria and viruses as well as pollutants that can cause odors and trigger asthma. Note that air purifiers work best when they are fit for the correct space. You can determine how many systems you need by looking at the Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR), which measures the air purifier speed and is measured in cubic feet per minute (CFM). For example, air purifiers with CADR 300 to 400 are usually a good fit for average-sized rooms.
If you are still experiencing complaints, you have a few options, such as hiring a professional company to perform a building investigation. You can also call your local health department or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The NIOSH can perform a free Health Hazard Evaluation to identify whether any health hazards are present. Then, they will recommend methods for reducing and preventing hazards.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
|
<urn:uuid:b34da980-995d-4ffc-b9ae-ffa8842687c6>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945288.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20230324180032-20230324210032-00568.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9555190801620483,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.5625,
"token_count": 953,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/07/air-quality-analysis-and-solutions-for-building-managers/"
}
|
Karl Pomeroy, CEO, Motili.
Maintaining a building environment that is healthy and comfortable is imperative for building managers. Especially in office buildings, occupants tend to have less control of their indoor environment, which can lead to negative health effects, make their environment less comfortable and cause decreased productivity. I believe current issues such as the prevalence of airborne viruses and worsening air pollution will likely further fuel the awareness of indoor air quality and increase demand for more air quality solutions.
How To Tell If Your Building Has Poor Air Quality
A major sign of poor air quality is if occupants are complaining about symptoms such as sneezing, headaches, stuffy
|
or runny noses, discomfort, coughing or forgetfulness. If you hear this feedback, it may be time to evaluate the building’s air quality.
There are many aspects that could contribute to poor air quality in a building. Mold is one of the most well-known, but issues could also be present if you have recently remodeled part of the building, are managing an older building or frequently use air fresheners and cleaning agents. Does any part of your building frequently print or use paints? The chemicals from new furnishings, deodorizing sprays, cleaning agents and paints release volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are gases that can affect your air quality and health.
If enough air pollutant issues are present, it can lead to sick building syndrome (SMB), which is when workers have “acute symptoms, such as eye and nose irritation and headache, associated with occupancy in a specific building but not indicating a specific disease.” Other possible symptoms include fatigue, lack of focus and irritation of the throat and even the lungs. SMB remains a common (and expensive) issue that I feel doesn’t get its deserved attention; it often goes unrecognized because the symptoms can be attributed to other ailments. However, a study reported that 23% of office workers in the United States frequently experience two or more sick building syndrome symptoms at work, which causes an estimated productivity decrement of 2%, with an annual cost of $60 billion.
Air Quality Solutions For Buildings
Start by evaluating the environment of your building and identifying any areas that could cause indoor air pollutants. It’s important to take note of where occupants are experiencing negative health effects. Do they feel worse when they are in a specific room? Do they feel better once they leave the building? Doing an analysis of your current environment and listing out any potential sources of pollutants will help you determine the correct solution.
After you have a list of potential sources of irritants, it’s best to start by implementing solutions that are quick and easy. Sometimes, occupants can experience symptoms that are similar to those of poor air quality but are unrelated. If there is a specific region of your building experiencing symptoms of poor air quality, but there is no evident source of air pollutants, the problem may be the environment at the surface. Consider upgrading poor lighting to brighter, blue-enriched light, adding sound panels for areas with a lot of noise, and ensuring the HVAC system is running properly and maintaining a comfortable temperature.
If these solutions do not improve the symptoms of occupants, or if you have recognized symptoms of sick building syndrome, consider implementing a maintenance routine that includes replacing HVAC filters and increasing ventilation regularly, especially in any areas that produce VOCs.
The more occupants you have in a building, the more likely viruses will spread—especially during cold and flu season. Installing UV-C light can inactivate bacteria and viruses to help keep occupants healthy.
You may also want to consider investing in an air purifier. Air purifiers are effective at removing bacteria and viruses as well as pollutants that can cause odors and trigger asthma. Note that air purifiers work best when they are fit for the correct space. You can determine how many systems you need by looking at the Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR), which measures the air purifier speed and is measured in cubic feet per minute (CFM). For example, air purifiers with CADR 300 to 400 are usually a good fit for average-sized rooms.
If you are still experiencing complaints, you have a few options, such as hiring a professional company to perform a building investigation. You can also call your local health department or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The NIOSH can perform a free Health Hazard Evaluation to identify whether any health hazards are present. Then, they will recommend methods for reducing and preventing hazards.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
|
The Prairie Forest Guide app is an incredible resource for sharing knowledge about the ancient history of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway, now known as the West Swale. By utilizing archaeological, geological, and ecological concepts and theories, the app offers an interactive, detailed interpretation of the area’s past.
The Yorath Island Glacial Spillway was formed by the retreat of the last ice age glaciers, and it is estimated to have been in existence for more than 10,000 years. The app explains how the spillway changed over time and how its features formed, such as the intermittent wetland, the meandering channel, and the sands and gravels that fill the area.
Not only does the app provide a comprehensive overview of the geology and archaeology of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway, it also tells the story of how the glacial spillway affected the lifestyle of the Paleoindian people who lived in the area. Through the app, users are able to learn about the tools and technology the Paleoindians developed to live in the area and how their lifestyle and activities changed due to the glacial spillway.
The app also offers a detailed look at the life of the Ice Age mammals that resided in the area. Through the app, users are able to learn about the different species of animals that lived in the area, as well as the changes in their behavior and habitat due to the glacial spillway.
The Prairie Forest Guide app is an invaluable resource for understanding the ancient history and geology of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway. By utilizing archaeological, geological, and ecological concepts and theories, the app offers users an interactive and detailed journey through the area’s past. Through its interactive interpretation, the app provides a comprehensive look at the glacial spillway’s effects on the Paleoindian lifestyle and Ice Age mammals, offering a unique and insightful glimpse into the area’s history.
If you think you have what it takes to become part of this project writing stories, and editing existing interpretive app stories, please get in touch with us with your CV and a writing sample to <email-pii>. We look forward to hearing from you!
More Information is at KIJIJI on this position
More about this Contract position is posted at Sask Culture
This is STAGE ONE of the Call for Tender.
Please email <email-pii> for clarification or for further details
For directions as to how to drive to “George Genereux” Urban Regional Park
For directions on how to drive to Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
For more information:
Blairmore Sector Plan Report; planning for the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area, George Genereux Urban Regional Park and West Swale and areas around them inside of Saskatoon city limits
NEW P4G District Official Community Plan
Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area is located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada north of Cedar Villa Road, within city limits, in the furthest south west area of the city. 52° 06′ 106° 45′
Part SE 23-36-6 – Afforestation Area – 241 Township Road 362-A
Part SE 23-36-6 – SW Off-Leash Recreation Area (Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area ) – 355 Township Road 362-A
S ½ 22-36-6 Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area (West of SW OLRA) – 467 Township Road 362-A
NE 21-36-6 “George Genereux” Afforestation Area – 133 Range Road 3063
Wikimapia Map: type in Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
Google Maps South West Off Leash area location pin at parking lot
Web page: https://stbarbebaker.wordpress.com
Where is the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area? with map
Where is the George Genereux Urban Regional Park (Afforestation Area)?with map
Tumblr friendsafforestation.tumblr.comFacebook Group Page: Users of the George Genereux Urban Regional Park
Facebook: StBarbeBaker Afforestation Area
Facebook for the non profit Charity Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc. FriendsAreas
Facebook group page : Users of the St Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
Facebook: South West OLRA
Twitter: St Barbe Baker Charity Twitter:FriendsAreas
Please help protect / enhance your afforestation areas, please contact the Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc. (e-mail / e-transfers )Support the afforestation areas with your donation or membership ($20.00/year). Please donate by paypal or by using e-transfers Please and thank you! Your donation and membership is greatly appreciated. Members e-mail your contact information to be kept up to date!
Donations can be made through Paypal, Canada Helps, Contact Donate A Car Canada, SARCAN Drop & Go 106100594 for the Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc.
United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration
Use the UN Decade’s Visual Identity
Make it your own
Spread the word about the UN Decade
Let’s Bring Back Forests
Let’s Green Our Cities
“Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven..”
Richard St. Barbe Baker
|
<urn:uuid:cb9536b1-cadc-443d-995a-8c55a188900c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296944452.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20230322211955-20230323001955-00561.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.8622658848762512,
"pii_count": 2,
"score": 2.625,
"token_count": 1209,
"url": "https://stbarbebaker.wordpress.com/2023/02/06/sharing-knowledge/"
}
|
The Prairie Forest Guide app is an incredible resource for sharing knowledge about the ancient history of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway, now known as the West Swale. By utilizing archaeological, geological, and ecological concepts and theories, the app offers an interactive, detailed interpretation of the area’s past.
The Yorath Island Glacial Spillway was formed by the retreat of the last ice age glaciers, and it is estimated to have been in existence for more than 10,000 years. The app explains how the spillway changed over time and how its features formed, such as the intermittent wetland
|
, the meandering channel, and the sands and gravels that fill the area.
Not only does the app provide a comprehensive overview of the geology and archaeology of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway, it also tells the story of how the glacial spillway affected the lifestyle of the Paleoindian people who lived in the area. Through the app, users are able to learn about the tools and technology the Paleoindians developed to live in the area and how their lifestyle and activities changed due to the glacial spillway.
The app also offers a detailed look at the life of the Ice Age mammals that resided in the area. Through the app, users are able to learn about the different species of animals that lived in the area, as well as the changes in their behavior and habitat due to the glacial spillway.
The Prairie Forest Guide app is an invaluable resource for understanding the ancient history and geology of the Yorath Island Glacial Spillway. By utilizing archaeological, geological, and ecological concepts and theories, the app offers users an interactive and detailed journey through the area’s past. Through its interactive interpretation, the app provides a comprehensive look at the glacial spillway’s effects on the Paleoindian lifestyle and Ice Age mammals, offering a unique and insightful glimpse into the area’s history.
If you think you have what it takes to become part of this project writing stories, and editing existing interpretive app stories, please get in touch with us with your CV and a writing sample to <email-pii>. We look forward to hearing from you!
More Information is at KIJIJI on this position
More about this Contract position is posted at Sask Culture
This is STAGE ONE of the Call for Tender.
Please email <email-pii> for clarification or for further details
For directions as to how to drive to “George Genereux” Urban Regional Park
For directions on how to drive to Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
For more information:
Blairmore Sector Plan Report; planning for the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area, George Genereux Urban Regional Park and West Swale and areas around them inside of Saskatoon city limits
NEW P4G District Official Community Plan
Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area is located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada north of Cedar Villa Road, within city limits, in the furthest south west area of the city. 52° 06′ 106° 45′
Part SE 23-36-6 – Afforestation Area – 241 Township Road 362-A
Part SE 23-36-6 – SW Off-Leash Recreation Area (Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area ) – 355 Township Road 362-A
S ½ 22-36-6 Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area (West of SW OLRA) – 467 Township Road 362-A
NE 21-36-6 “George Genereux” Afforestation Area – 133 Range Road 3063
Wikimapia Map: type in Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
Google Maps South West Off Leash area location pin at parking lot
Web page: https://stbarbebaker.wordpress.com
Where is the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area? with map
Where is the George Genereux Urban Regional Park (Afforestation Area)?with map
Tumblr friendsafforestation.tumblr.comFacebook Group Page: Users of the George Genereux Urban Regional Park
Facebook: StBarbeBaker Afforestation Area
Facebook for the non profit Charity Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc. FriendsAreas
Facebook group page : Users of the St Barbe Baker Afforestation Area
Facebook: South West OLRA
Twitter: St Barbe Baker Charity Twitter:FriendsAreas
Please help protect / enhance your afforestation areas, please contact the Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc. (e-mail / e-transfers )Support the afforestation areas with your donation or membership ($20.00/year). Please donate by paypal or by using e-transfers Please and thank you! Your donation and membership is greatly appreciated. Members e-mail your contact information to be kept up to date!
Donations can be made through Paypal, Canada Helps, Contact Donate A Car Canada, SARCAN Drop & Go 106100594 for the Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas Inc.
United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration
Use the UN Decade’s Visual Identity
Make it your own
Spread the word about the UN Decade
Let’s Bring Back Forests
Let’s Green Our Cities
“Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven..”
Richard St. Barbe Baker
|
A new school year started in South Africa this week. Thousands of learners commenced their schooling and others returned in continued pursuit of their dreams. This glorious event should be celebrated and we must pull out all the stops to ensure that every learner of schoolgoing age enjoys the constitutional entitlement to basic education.
Unfortunately, circumstances arise where the enjoyment of the right to basic education is undermined and learners run the risk of being denied access to education. For example, Gayton McKenzie, mayor of the Central Karoo District and president of the Patriotic Alliance, has repeatedly expressed on Twitter that undocumented children “should not be allowed at all in schools in South Africa”.
McKenzie’s views, which are misinformed, xenophobic and contrary to the law, were well received and supported by his tweeps and other antiforeigner Twitter users. This shows that not only is there a lack of understanding of what the right to basic education entails, but also that the xenophobic sentiment that dominates South Africa’s social discourse severely threatens the livelihood of undocumented children.
The right to basic education is a fundamental human right, recognised in a number of international and regional legal instruments. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights regards education as “the primary vehicle by which economically and socially marginalised adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty and obtain the means to participate fully in their communities”.
Former President Nelson Mandela described it as “the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world”.
The right to basic education of every learner in South Africa is entrenched in section 29(1)(a) of the Constitution. On the face of it, the eight-word provision might seem nugatory, but when you delve into the true meaning of it, you find an empowerment right that plays an integral role in realising all other human rights.
In the landmark Juma Musjid judgment, the Constitutional Court affirmed that the right to basic education is unqualified and immediately realisable in nature. This means that every learner within the confines of the country enjoys an entitlement to this unfettered right, and that obstacles which unjustifiably limit or hinder its immediate enjoyment must be removed.
South Africa’s rich education jurisprudence that has developed since the Juma Musjid judgment informs us that this right must be enjoyed by every learner free from discrimination and on equal footing, regardless of race, language, religion, disability and status.
In December 2019, the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court delivered judgment in Centre for Child Law and Others v Minister of Basic Education and Others, a case concerning undocumented learners who were precluded from unconditionally attending public schools on the basis of their status.
Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations
The court upheld the challenge to the policy that precluded the unconditional admission of undocumented learners to public schools, and re-emphasised that the right to basic education is “unqualified, unconditional and applies to everyone” and can never be limited to “everyone upon the production of a birth certificate or provided they are in the country legally”.
The constitutional guarantee of an unfettered right to basic education must be realised to ensure that the self-esteem, self-worth and potential for human fulfilment of every learner, especially the most vulnerable and marginalised among them, are protected.
Gayton McKenzie’s expressions come at a time when xenophobic sentiments and associated violence are drastically increasing in South Africa. The worsening state of xenophobia and South Africa’s lack of reproach to it was recently criticised by Human Rights Watch in its World Report of 2023.
The report, which analyses human rights conditions across the globe, notes that despite efforts to curb xenophobia, there has been little tangible improvement in protecting the rights of all migrants who reside in South Africa.
Most alarming is the fact that xenophobic sentiments and violence, fuelled predominantly by members of anti-foreigner groups and politicians, is often based on misinformed and inaccurate views and opinions — such as those expressed by McKenzie.
When society blindly follows these misinformed and inaccurate views and opinions, especially when it disregards human rights, we run the risk of devaluing fundamental rights that have long been fought for.
Threats aimed specifically at denying the fundamental rights of the most marginalised and vulnerable human beings — which include undocumented migrants and their children — should not be taken lightly.
It is our duty to uphold the constitutional promise of a society based on equality, human dignity, social justice and the advancement of human rights of everyone who lives in our beautiful country. DM
|
<urn:uuid:9c488f05-6bc9-46a9-b7aa-9012cc2dd75c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474676.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227153053-20240227183053-00492.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9533785581588745,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.875,
"token_count": 961,
"url": "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2023-01-15-youre-wrong-gayton-mckenzie-undocumented-children-do-have-the-right-to-basic-education/"
}
|
A new school year started in South Africa this week. Thousands of learners commenced their schooling and others returned in continued pursuit of their dreams. This glorious event should be celebrated and we must pull out all the stops to ensure that every learner of schoolgoing age enjoys the constitutional entitlement to basic education.
Unfortunately, circumstances arise where the enjoyment of the right to basic education is undermined and learners run the risk of being denied access to education. For example, Gayton McKenzie, mayor of the Central Karoo District and president of the Patriotic Alliance, has repeatedly expressed on Twitter that undocumented children “should not be allowed at
|
all in schools in South Africa”.
McKenzie’s views, which are misinformed, xenophobic and contrary to the law, were well received and supported by his tweeps and other antiforeigner Twitter users. This shows that not only is there a lack of understanding of what the right to basic education entails, but also that the xenophobic sentiment that dominates South Africa’s social discourse severely threatens the livelihood of undocumented children.
The right to basic education is a fundamental human right, recognised in a number of international and regional legal instruments. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights regards education as “the primary vehicle by which economically and socially marginalised adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty and obtain the means to participate fully in their communities”.
Former President Nelson Mandela described it as “the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world”.
The right to basic education of every learner in South Africa is entrenched in section 29(1)(a) of the Constitution. On the face of it, the eight-word provision might seem nugatory, but when you delve into the true meaning of it, you find an empowerment right that plays an integral role in realising all other human rights.
In the landmark Juma Musjid judgment, the Constitutional Court affirmed that the right to basic education is unqualified and immediately realisable in nature. This means that every learner within the confines of the country enjoys an entitlement to this unfettered right, and that obstacles which unjustifiably limit or hinder its immediate enjoyment must be removed.
South Africa’s rich education jurisprudence that has developed since the Juma Musjid judgment informs us that this right must be enjoyed by every learner free from discrimination and on equal footing, regardless of race, language, religion, disability and status.
In December 2019, the Eastern Cape Division of the High Court delivered judgment in Centre for Child Law and Others v Minister of Basic Education and Others, a case concerning undocumented learners who were precluded from unconditionally attending public schools on the basis of their status.
Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations
The court upheld the challenge to the policy that precluded the unconditional admission of undocumented learners to public schools, and re-emphasised that the right to basic education is “unqualified, unconditional and applies to everyone” and can never be limited to “everyone upon the production of a birth certificate or provided they are in the country legally”.
The constitutional guarantee of an unfettered right to basic education must be realised to ensure that the self-esteem, self-worth and potential for human fulfilment of every learner, especially the most vulnerable and marginalised among them, are protected.
Gayton McKenzie’s expressions come at a time when xenophobic sentiments and associated violence are drastically increasing in South Africa. The worsening state of xenophobia and South Africa’s lack of reproach to it was recently criticised by Human Rights Watch in its World Report of 2023.
The report, which analyses human rights conditions across the globe, notes that despite efforts to curb xenophobia, there has been little tangible improvement in protecting the rights of all migrants who reside in South Africa.
Most alarming is the fact that xenophobic sentiments and violence, fuelled predominantly by members of anti-foreigner groups and politicians, is often based on misinformed and inaccurate views and opinions — such as those expressed by McKenzie.
When society blindly follows these misinformed and inaccurate views and opinions, especially when it disregards human rights, we run the risk of devaluing fundamental rights that have long been fought for.
Threats aimed specifically at denying the fundamental rights of the most marginalised and vulnerable human beings — which include undocumented migrants and their children — should not be taken lightly.
It is our duty to uphold the constitutional promise of a society based on equality, human dignity, social justice and the advancement of human rights of everyone who lives in our beautiful country. DM
|
SMU to help study new ways of teaching
SMU's Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) will take part in a five-year study examining how elementary school classrooms can become more playful.
- The study will focus on under-resourced schools around the country, including in Dallas.
Why it matters: The basic model for teaching elementary students — one teacher talking to 20-30 kids — hasn't changed much over the last few centuries. Academics call it the "sage on a stage" approach.
The big picture: SMU is one of seven universities participating in the "Learning Through Play" study, which will be led by Temple University in Philadelphia and funded by roughly $20 million from the LEGO Foundation.
- The project aims to develop a way of teaching that fosters children's creativity, critical thinking, communication skills and confidence.
- And in a future where AI will be able to handle a broad scope of tasks, a student's ability to memorize and recite facts won't help build the skills needed to thrive.
What's happening: Researchers will work with dozens of teachers to build customized lesson plans for pre-K through fourth grade, with the goal of making learning more playful and collaborative.
- Through classroom observation and a series of teacher surveys, researchers will evaluate how the teaching process changed, whether classrooms became more playful, and whether students engaged in deeper learning.
- SMU's team, led by CORE executive director Annie Wright, will coordinate all research activities for the project and consult with the national team on school partnerships and parent engagement.
What they're saying: "We have to be partners with our teachers and schools in order for [the study] to be embraced and implemented with integrity," Wright tells Axios.
What's next: A pilot study is scheduled for the 2023-2024 academic year. The full study will begin in the 2024-2025 school year.
More Dallas stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Dallas.
|
<urn:uuid:c96d8ae8-95f6-46e2-b563-07bbe7cde280>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511424.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20231004220037-20231005010037-00630.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9484733939170837,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.171875,
"token_count": 424,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2023/07/19/smu-teaching-elementary-study"
}
|
SMU to help study new ways of teaching
SMU's Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) will take part in a five-year study examining how elementary school classrooms can become more playful.
- The study will focus on under-resourced schools around the country, including in Dallas.
Why it matters: The basic model for teaching elementary students — one teacher talking to 20-30 kids — hasn't changed much over the last few centuries. Academics call it the "sage on a stage" approach.
The big picture: SMU is one of seven universities participating in the "Learning Through Play" study,
|
which will be led by Temple University in Philadelphia and funded by roughly $20 million from the LEGO Foundation.
- The project aims to develop a way of teaching that fosters children's creativity, critical thinking, communication skills and confidence.
- And in a future where AI will be able to handle a broad scope of tasks, a student's ability to memorize and recite facts won't help build the skills needed to thrive.
What's happening: Researchers will work with dozens of teachers to build customized lesson plans for pre-K through fourth grade, with the goal of making learning more playful and collaborative.
- Through classroom observation and a series of teacher surveys, researchers will evaluate how the teaching process changed, whether classrooms became more playful, and whether students engaged in deeper learning.
- SMU's team, led by CORE executive director Annie Wright, will coordinate all research activities for the project and consult with the national team on school partnerships and parent engagement.
What they're saying: "We have to be partners with our teachers and schools in order for [the study] to be embraced and implemented with integrity," Wright tells Axios.
What's next: A pilot study is scheduled for the 2023-2024 academic year. The full study will begin in the 2024-2025 school year.
More Dallas stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Dallas.
|
JULY 19, 1958
Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas, refused to serve Black patrons at its lunch counter.
“It was degrading, dehumanizing,” recalled then-teenager Galyn Vesey. “You felt like something was wrong, but you learned to cope with it.”
But something stirred up in him and other students, many of them belonging to the local NAACP Youth Council. They decided to organize to protest this segregationist policy. For three weeks, they took their seats at the lunch counter from opening to closing. For three weeks, they endured insults and threats of violence from white patrons.
“We were anticipating the potential for violence and danger, but we had faith — because we felt that righteousness and justice were on our side.”
Wichita’s nine Dockum stores belonged to the Rexall drugstore chain, which decided to end discrimination at all lunch counters nationwide because of the protest.
A downtown monument now honors those who conducted the sit-ins.
For Vesey, the fight continues. “We all have a stake in this, no matter how small,” he said. “We need both group participation and individuals speaking out for social justice and equality.”
|
<urn:uuid:2f6f32d3-1587-4867-a287-fbfd730f9951>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506045.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20230921210007-20230922000007-00875.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9739391803741455,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.765625,
"token_count": 264,
"url": "https://mississippitoday.org/2023/07/19/on-this-day-in-1958-protest-began-against-segregated-kansas-drug-store/"
}
|
JULY 19, 1958
Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas, refused to serve Black patrons at its lunch counter.
“It was degrading, dehumanizing,” recalled then-teenager Galyn Vesey. “You felt like something was wrong, but you learned to cope with it.”
But something stirred up in him and other students, many of them belonging to the local NAACP Youth Council. They decided to organize to protest this segregationist policy. For three weeks, they took their seats at the lunch counter from opening to closing. For three weeks, they
|
endured insults and threats of violence from white patrons.
“We were anticipating the potential for violence and danger, but we had faith — because we felt that righteousness and justice were on our side.”
Wichita’s nine Dockum stores belonged to the Rexall drugstore chain, which decided to end discrimination at all lunch counters nationwide because of the protest.
A downtown monument now honors those who conducted the sit-ins.
For Vesey, the fight continues. “We all have a stake in this, no matter how small,” he said. “We need both group participation and individuals speaking out for social justice and equality.”
|
You should know the story by now. In 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and it took over two years for the word to reach the last enslaved people in the US — June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas. Although Juneteenth has been celebrated in various fashions since then, it took over 150 years for the day to become a nationally recognized holiday. President Biden signed it into law following a year of racial reckoning in 2021.
It’s a day of celebration that also takes place during Black Music Month, and Boston has put together a variety of ways to mark the occasion. Here are a few of the many events to celebrate the holiday and reflect on what it means in 2023 this weekend.
Saturday, June 17
Although the Boston Public Library will be closed on Monday for the holiday, they have a series of events for Juneteenth leading up to the day. On Friday, an event titled “Celebrate Juneteenth with Little Uprisings,” at the Mattapan branch will discuss racial justice in a workshop for 6 to 11-year-olds in order to help teach about the concepts of empowerment and change-making. There are many other book readings and workshops at different branches throughout the city this weekend.
On Saturday, the Honan-Allston branch will offer a drumming workshop for children ages 4 to 10. Cornell Coley has been teaching drumming for over 25 years, and he says (while keeping a steady beat on drums, I might add), “I think this is an important art form because it brings together a lot of ways people can get stronger inside. The way they can bond with other people. The way they can find peace.” Both workshops mentioned here are free and don’t require registration. Visit the BPL website for a complete list of events.
Sunday, June 18
The Boston Lyric Opera commissioned the operetta "The Wanderer's Tethering," which dives into the experiences of people with both African and Black American roots. Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and composer Mason Bynes created this work which blends spoken word performance with Negro spirituals and Igbo folkloric music. The program also includes music by composers Jessie Montgomery, Trevor Weston and Florence Price. The performance also features BLO soprano Brianna J. Robinson and Castle of Our Skins musicians. This event will be held at Hibernian Hall and a community reception will follow.
Sunday, June 18
First, a little history. Long before Juneteenth, a group of seven people were enslaved and living in what is now known as the Longfellow House in Cambridge. In 1774, when their enslavers suddenly fled their home, this group had the unexpected opportunity to seize their freedom. Despite the odds, Cuba Vassall, one of the freed slaves, became an activist for Black freedom.
This weekend, the mansion will host Juneteenth celebrations with music and poetry performances as well as presentations from Vassal’s living relatives. Across the street, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will screen “Descendant,” a documentary about the descendants of the last known ship carrying enslaved people to the U.S.
Sunday, June 18
Before we get into the performance for this evening, it has to be noted that the venue, Groton Hill Music Center, stands out among modern arts complexes in New England. Located in north-central Massachusetts, the center is home to two world-class stages designed with modern acoustic science and the aesthetics of a lantern-lit barn. If that alone isn’t enough of a draw, consider the programming this weekend. New England Conservatory of Music alumni Kevin Harris will present “Roots, Water and Sunlight,” which features recordings of James Baldwin.
As Harris phrases it, “Baldwin is also a part, an extra instrument throughout the piece itself,” intertwined with the musical compositions of the evening. Harris hopes that by including these samples, he can revive some of the themes of change and resistance to change that Baldwin often discussed.
Juneteenth at Boston museums
Monday, June 19
For years now, Boston area museums have offered free admission and special programming on Juneteenth, and many of them are taking the opportunity to highlight Black artists who already have exhibits underway. The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston currently has an exhibit featuring Simone Leigh, whose works focus on the experience of Black women. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is marking their 11th Juneteenth open house, and this year they have a couple of exhibits to pair with the celebration. Most notably“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which centers Black potters of the 19th century, many of whom were enslaved. The exhibit pairs these older works with modern responses to them. Admission to the MFA is on a first-come, first-served basis for Massachusetts residents. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is hosting a free day of activities conversations and performances, including poetry from Amanda Shea (a WBUR's 2021 ARTery 25 artist), a screening of the film "A Reckoning in Boston" and music from DJ KNSZWRTH. Across the river in Cambridge, the MIT List Visual Arts Center is also opening its doors on Monday, but this museum is always free! So if you can't make it Monday, be sure to visit at a future date.
|
<urn:uuid:967ad495-9453-4ad8-88bd-69b15affbc3b>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475311.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301125520-20240301155520-00227.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9677168130874634,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.59375,
"token_count": 1130,
"url": "https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/06/14/weekend-juneteenth-events-boston"
}
|
You should know the story by now. In 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and it took over two years for the word to reach the last enslaved people in the US — June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas. Although Juneteenth has been celebrated in various fashions since then, it took over 150 years for the day to become a nationally recognized holiday. President Biden signed it into law following a year of racial reckoning in 2021.
It’s a day of celebration that also takes place during Black
|
Music Month, and Boston has put together a variety of ways to mark the occasion. Here are a few of the many events to celebrate the holiday and reflect on what it means in 2023 this weekend.
Saturday, June 17
Although the Boston Public Library will be closed on Monday for the holiday, they have a series of events for Juneteenth leading up to the day. On Friday, an event titled “Celebrate Juneteenth with Little Uprisings,” at the Mattapan branch will discuss racial justice in a workshop for 6 to 11-year-olds in order to help teach about the concepts of empowerment and change-making. There are many other book readings and workshops at different branches throughout the city this weekend.
On Saturday, the Honan-Allston branch will offer a drumming workshop for children ages 4 to 10. Cornell Coley has been teaching drumming for over 25 years, and he says (while keeping a steady beat on drums, I might add), “I think this is an important art form because it brings together a lot of ways people can get stronger inside. The way they can bond with other people. The way they can find peace.” Both workshops mentioned here are free and don’t require registration. Visit the BPL website for a complete list of events.
Sunday, June 18
The Boston Lyric Opera commissioned the operetta "The Wanderer's Tethering," which dives into the experiences of people with both African and Black American roots. Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and composer Mason Bynes created this work which blends spoken word performance with Negro spirituals and Igbo folkloric music. The program also includes music by composers Jessie Montgomery, Trevor Weston and Florence Price. The performance also features BLO soprano Brianna J. Robinson and Castle of Our Skins musicians. This event will be held at Hibernian Hall and a community reception will follow.
Sunday, June 18
First, a little history. Long before Juneteenth, a group of seven people were enslaved and living in what is now known as the Longfellow House in Cambridge. In 1774, when their enslavers suddenly fled their home, this group had the unexpected opportunity to seize their freedom. Despite the odds, Cuba Vassall, one of the freed slaves, became an activist for Black freedom.
This weekend, the mansion will host Juneteenth celebrations with music and poetry performances as well as presentations from Vassal’s living relatives. Across the street, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will screen “Descendant,” a documentary about the descendants of the last known ship carrying enslaved people to the U.S.
Sunday, June 18
Before we get into the performance for this evening, it has to be noted that the venue, Groton Hill Music Center, stands out among modern arts complexes in New England. Located in north-central Massachusetts, the center is home to two world-class stages designed with modern acoustic science and the aesthetics of a lantern-lit barn. If that alone isn’t enough of a draw, consider the programming this weekend. New England Conservatory of Music alumni Kevin Harris will present “Roots, Water and Sunlight,” which features recordings of James Baldwin.
As Harris phrases it, “Baldwin is also a part, an extra instrument throughout the piece itself,” intertwined with the musical compositions of the evening. Harris hopes that by including these samples, he can revive some of the themes of change and resistance to change that Baldwin often discussed.
Juneteenth at Boston museums
Monday, June 19
For years now, Boston area museums have offered free admission and special programming on Juneteenth, and many of them are taking the opportunity to highlight Black artists who already have exhibits underway. The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston currently has an exhibit featuring Simone Leigh, whose works focus on the experience of Black women. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is marking their 11th Juneteenth open house, and this year they have a couple of exhibits to pair with the celebration. Most notably“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” which centers Black potters of the 19th century, many of whom were enslaved. The exhibit pairs these older works with modern responses to them. Admission to the MFA is on a first-come, first-served basis for Massachusetts residents. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is hosting a free day of activities conversations and performances, including poetry from Amanda Shea (a WBUR's 2021 ARTery 25 artist), a screening of the film "A Reckoning in Boston" and music from DJ KNSZWRTH. Across the river in Cambridge, the MIT List Visual Arts Center is also opening its doors on Monday, but this museum is always free! So if you can't make it Monday, be sure to visit at a future date.
|
What carbon removal can — and can't — achieve
Boldface names in the carbon removal sector and wider climate world want to make something crystal clear: They don't see the tech as a substitute for cutting emissions, and neither should you.
Driving the news: "Emission reductions and [carbon dioxide removal] should be clearly distinguished from each other," the direct air capture company Climeworks said in a lengthy new statement.
How it works: Those differences must be explicitly recognized "in climate pathways, target setting as well as in industry standards."
- The same holds true in emissions credits markets and certificate programs.
Why it matters: This would help ensure "moral hazard is addressed, namely the claim that investing into CDR today could distract from emission reductions."
Zoom in: Backers include officials with Microsoft and Stripe (two companies heavily involved with removal), the CCS+ Initiative and others.
The big picture: It cites UN climate science panel estimates that emissions must fall 90% by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
- Removal is "needed to neutralize any residual emissions and thus enable the world to achieve net zero CO2 by 2050."
|
<urn:uuid:a0bba663-9052-4e74-bca5-e326f061e68d>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224652959.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20230606150510-20230606180510-00723.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9329596161842346,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.6875,
"token_count": 247,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/04/14/carbon-removal-tech-emissions-climate-change"
}
|
What carbon removal can — and can't — achieve
Boldface names in the carbon removal sector and wider climate world want to make something crystal clear: They don't see the tech as a substitute for cutting emissions, and neither should you.
Driving the news: "Emission reductions and [carbon dioxide removal] should be clearly distinguished from each other," the direct air capture company Climeworks said in a lengthy new statement.
How it works: Those differences must be explicitly recognized "in climate pathways, target setting as well as in industry standards."
- The same holds true in emissions credits markets and certificate programs.
Why it matters: This
|
would help ensure "moral hazard is addressed, namely the claim that investing into CDR today could distract from emission reductions."
Zoom in: Backers include officials with Microsoft and Stripe (two companies heavily involved with removal), the CCS+ Initiative and others.
The big picture: It cites UN climate science panel estimates that emissions must fall 90% by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
- Removal is "needed to neutralize any residual emissions and thus enable the world to achieve net zero CO2 by 2050."
|
How elementary and high school students teamed up to send pieces of Silver Lake around the country
SILVER LAKE — What could Ella Day, Brooklyn Rupp and Colter Beam tell the world about Silver Lake, Kansas?
The Silver Lake Jr./Sr. High School juniors had been students in the district since kindergarten, and they understood the small, rural community well.
So when elementary school librarian Carrie Podlena asked high school art teacher Michaela Conley for help with a project to tell the story of Silver Lake Grade School, the art teacher knew exactly who could help.
Podlena had entered the elementary school into a national “traveling mural” project, in which 10 schools around the country would design a 10-foot-long mural that would be cut up into just as many sections and sent to each school in the project.
The goal, Podlena said, would be for Silver Lake USD 372 students to learn about and make connections to students in other states. But if the students were to learn about other schools, then they’d also need to teach others about what Silver Lake and the people who live there.
That’s where the older students could help.
How students fit Silver Lake and Kansas onto 10-foot mural on butcher paper
The three students — who each contributed either a keen eye for visualizing designs, bringing them to life or putting them to paper, Conley said — had a challenge ahead of them, though.
How could they put Silver Lake, Kansas, on 10 feet of butcher paper?
“We picked out things from our community that really stood out, or things you might think of when you think about our town,” Day said.
Coloring of the mural was left to the elementary school students, though, and the three high school students said the younger artists added just as much character to the mural in their bold, vibrant choices for colors.
At the center of the mural, the students put a big, strong buffalo, bordered on one end with block letters spelling KANSAS. On the ends, they put a windmill (which Rupp said reminded her of the country around the town) and the town’s recently repainted water tower.
“The kids could have done natural colors, but they went with bright, and it’s just so much fun,” Rupp said. “They put their own personality into it.”
And although the mural was split into 10 pieces, the high school students still think the individual pieces can help other students around the country understand their district, using their imaginations to fill in any missing pieces.
“I hope the kids got to work together to create a piece that they’d be proud of as well, and know that they’re going to get to send this to someone who might not know too much about Kansas and show our heart to them,” Rupp said.
Traveling mural project can help students understand Silver Lake better
As of this month, Podlena has eight of 10 pieces of Silver Lake Grade School’s version of the piecework mural. Those pieces are now in display in the school gym, but not before Podlena talked with her students about the pieces and any accompanying information each participating school sent.
One school’s mascot was the giraffe, so all of its students drew and colored giraffes for their poster. Another school — Sippican Elementary School in Marion, Massachusetts —drew a big boat called the S.S. Sippican as a reference to the school’s location less than a mile from the coast of Buzzard Bay in New England. Podlena said she hopes to partner with Sippican to continue connecting students in a pen pal program.
More than anything, though, Podlena said she and her students appreciate the help that the high school students gave in designing a mural for them.
“It’s just such a cool way for the students to see the opportunities they have at the high school, as far as classes like art and all that, but they can also learn about other students around the country, and what they’re doing,” Podlena said.
It’s all a part of how art can not only tell the world the story of a community, but it can allow the community to better understand itself, Conley said.
“Art has historically helped people tell the story of their culture,” the art teacher said. “It can be hard to see when you live in your town, but when you see it drawn out, it becomes part of who you are.”
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at <email-pii> or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
|
<urn:uuid:74d79d24-7935-4aa2-9aea-ff0999e6a820>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500056.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20230203122526-20230203152526-00541.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9738833904266357,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.625,
"token_count": 1033,
"url": "https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/education/2023/01/23/silver-lake-elementary-participates-in-global-mural-project/69815029007/"
}
|
How elementary and high school students teamed up to send pieces of Silver Lake around the country
SILVER LAKE — What could Ella Day, Brooklyn Rupp and Colter Beam tell the world about Silver Lake, Kansas?
The Silver Lake Jr./Sr. High School juniors had been students in the district since kindergarten, and they understood the small, rural community well.
So when elementary school librarian Carrie Podlena asked high school art teacher Michaela Conley for help with a project to tell the story of Silver Lake Grade School, the art teacher knew exactly who could help.
Podlena had entered the elementary school into
|
a national “traveling mural” project, in which 10 schools around the country would design a 10-foot-long mural that would be cut up into just as many sections and sent to each school in the project.
The goal, Podlena said, would be for Silver Lake USD 372 students to learn about and make connections to students in other states. But if the students were to learn about other schools, then they’d also need to teach others about what Silver Lake and the people who live there.
That’s where the older students could help.
How students fit Silver Lake and Kansas onto 10-foot mural on butcher paper
The three students — who each contributed either a keen eye for visualizing designs, bringing them to life or putting them to paper, Conley said — had a challenge ahead of them, though.
How could they put Silver Lake, Kansas, on 10 feet of butcher paper?
“We picked out things from our community that really stood out, or things you might think of when you think about our town,” Day said.
Coloring of the mural was left to the elementary school students, though, and the three high school students said the younger artists added just as much character to the mural in their bold, vibrant choices for colors.
At the center of the mural, the students put a big, strong buffalo, bordered on one end with block letters spelling KANSAS. On the ends, they put a windmill (which Rupp said reminded her of the country around the town) and the town’s recently repainted water tower.
“The kids could have done natural colors, but they went with bright, and it’s just so much fun,” Rupp said. “They put their own personality into it.”
And although the mural was split into 10 pieces, the high school students still think the individual pieces can help other students around the country understand their district, using their imaginations to fill in any missing pieces.
“I hope the kids got to work together to create a piece that they’d be proud of as well, and know that they’re going to get to send this to someone who might not know too much about Kansas and show our heart to them,” Rupp said.
Traveling mural project can help students understand Silver Lake better
As of this month, Podlena has eight of 10 pieces of Silver Lake Grade School’s version of the piecework mural. Those pieces are now in display in the school gym, but not before Podlena talked with her students about the pieces and any accompanying information each participating school sent.
One school’s mascot was the giraffe, so all of its students drew and colored giraffes for their poster. Another school — Sippican Elementary School in Marion, Massachusetts —drew a big boat called the S.S. Sippican as a reference to the school’s location less than a mile from the coast of Buzzard Bay in New England. Podlena said she hopes to partner with Sippican to continue connecting students in a pen pal program.
More than anything, though, Podlena said she and her students appreciate the help that the high school students gave in designing a mural for them.
“It’s just such a cool way for the students to see the opportunities they have at the high school, as far as classes like art and all that, but they can also learn about other students around the country, and what they’re doing,” Podlena said.
It’s all a part of how art can not only tell the world the story of a community, but it can allow the community to better understand itself, Conley said.
“Art has historically helped people tell the story of their culture,” the art teacher said. “It can be hard to see when you live in your town, but when you see it drawn out, it becomes part of who you are.”
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at <email-pii> or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
|
The feature image you see above was generated by an AI text-to-image rendering model called Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion typically runs in the cloud via a web browser, and is driven by data center servers with big power budgets and a ton of silicon horsepower. However, the image above was generated by Stable Diffusion running on a smartphone, without a connection to that cloud data center and running in airplane mode, with no connectivity whatsoever. And the AI model rendering it was powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile chip on a device that operates at under 7 watts or so.
It took Stable Diffusion only a few short phrases and 14.47 seconds to render this image. In the example above, a text description of “man holding a smartphone surrounded by AI with images representing AI in the background” was provided to Stable Diffusion for rendering. Granted it’s more of a Van Gogh style of impressionism (and a little stoic), but in the palm of your hand and at under 15 seconds, you could easily keep refining your AI-generated masterpiece.
Overcoming Model Size And Complexity Is Key To On-Device AI
Quantization is a generalized term that speaks to the different techniques of converting parameters of a machine learning model to lower-precision values. Or put another way, it’s approximating a high-precision neural network model with lower bit-width mathematics for power, bandwidth, and storage savings, as well as application speedup.
In this case, the Qualcomm AI Research team, utilizing its AIMET tool (AI Model Efficiency Toolkit), quantized the 32-bit floating point Stable Diffusion AI model down to a much smaller 8-bit integer footprint, while maintaining nearly the same level of accuracy.
Qualcomm was able to get Stable Diffusion running on a hand-held device without internet connectivity, by optimizing and scaling the AI model down to run on more efficient INT8 (8-bit integer) precision operations, rather than the larger, more complex FP32 (32-bit floating point) operations that were used to train the model. The result is that for inference (running the model to accurately create the image and inferring details from text), the Stable Diffusion model was shrunk dramatically, or quantized, to a fraction of its size with little to no degradation in accuracy, but with significantly better performance on a low-power Snapdragon AI accelerator (Qualcomm Hexagon Processor) with much less storage and memory bandwidth required.
The other potential logical school of thought here would be to just quantize the trained model down to FP8 (8-bit floating point) precision. However, Qualcomm has already determined that FP8 is no substitute for INT8 quantization for low power inferencing, in terms of power efficiency and silicon area, nor does it offer significantly higher accuracy in most workloads. Integer quantization simply results in more efficient inferencing performance, which is critical for low power devices.
Quantization And The Quest For More Efficient AI Modeling
That said, the next frontier for further reducing the computational resource requirements of on-device machine learning is being pioneered by Qualcomm, and it drives that math down to even less complex 4-bit integer operations (INT4), while maintaining a similar level of accuracy as the original floating point-derived model.
Above, you can see examples of various machine learning models, like ResNet50 for image classification or PoseNet for human pose detection, and their resulting accuracy when using INT4 versus a source FP32-based model, when the model is optimized with either PTQ (Post Training Quantization) or QAT (Quantization Aware Training). INT4 offers tremendous benefits in this example, such as up to 64 times improvement in inference performance-per-watt, compared to FP32.
INT4 Quantization Benefits And A Real-World Demo
As you can see, the results are impressive, in terms of accuracy percentages, but what does this look like in a real-world application? Let’s take a look at AI-based game rendering upscaling, known as super resolution, for a performance uplift and image quality improvements on smartphones. A demo is worth a thousand words as they say…
This is an example of a 540p pixel input resolution image being scaled up to 4K resolution, which results in much cleaner lines, sharper textures, and a better overall experience. Though Qualcomm has a non-algorithmic version of this available today, called Snapdragon GSR, someday in the future, mobile enthusiast gamers are going to be treated to even better levels of image quality without sacrificing battery life and with even higher frame rates.
This is just one example of gaming and media enhancement with pre-trained and quantized machine learning models, but you can quickly think of a myriad of applications that could benefit greatly, from recommendation engines to location-aware guidance, to computational photography techniques and more.
We just needed a new math for all this AI heavy lifting on smartphones and other lower power edge devices, and it appears Qualcomm is leading that charge.
|
<urn:uuid:5e8c6de4-35d5-4a36-b90b-7665d0f9d50e>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224647895.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20230601143134-20230601173134-00412.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9377136826515198,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.078125,
"token_count": 1047,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/davealtavilla/2023/05/15/powering-ai-on-mobile-devices-requires-new-math-and-qualcomm-is-pioneering-it/"
}
|
The feature image you see above was generated by an AI text-to-image rendering model called Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion typically runs in the cloud via a web browser, and is driven by data center servers with big power budgets and a ton of silicon horsepower. However, the image above was generated by Stable Diffusion running on a smartphone, without a connection to that cloud data center and running in airplane mode, with no connectivity whatsoever. And the AI model rendering it was powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile chip on a device that operates at under 7 watts or so.
It took Stable
|
Diffusion only a few short phrases and 14.47 seconds to render this image. In the example above, a text description of “man holding a smartphone surrounded by AI with images representing AI in the background” was provided to Stable Diffusion for rendering. Granted it’s more of a Van Gogh style of impressionism (and a little stoic), but in the palm of your hand and at under 15 seconds, you could easily keep refining your AI-generated masterpiece.
Overcoming Model Size And Complexity Is Key To On-Device AI
Quantization is a generalized term that speaks to the different techniques of converting parameters of a machine learning model to lower-precision values. Or put another way, it’s approximating a high-precision neural network model with lower bit-width mathematics for power, bandwidth, and storage savings, as well as application speedup.
In this case, the Qualcomm AI Research team, utilizing its AIMET tool (AI Model Efficiency Toolkit), quantized the 32-bit floating point Stable Diffusion AI model down to a much smaller 8-bit integer footprint, while maintaining nearly the same level of accuracy.
Qualcomm was able to get Stable Diffusion running on a hand-held device without internet connectivity, by optimizing and scaling the AI model down to run on more efficient INT8 (8-bit integer) precision operations, rather than the larger, more complex FP32 (32-bit floating point) operations that were used to train the model. The result is that for inference (running the model to accurately create the image and inferring details from text), the Stable Diffusion model was shrunk dramatically, or quantized, to a fraction of its size with little to no degradation in accuracy, but with significantly better performance on a low-power Snapdragon AI accelerator (Qualcomm Hexagon Processor) with much less storage and memory bandwidth required.
The other potential logical school of thought here would be to just quantize the trained model down to FP8 (8-bit floating point) precision. However, Qualcomm has already determined that FP8 is no substitute for INT8 quantization for low power inferencing, in terms of power efficiency and silicon area, nor does it offer significantly higher accuracy in most workloads. Integer quantization simply results in more efficient inferencing performance, which is critical for low power devices.
Quantization And The Quest For More Efficient AI Modeling
That said, the next frontier for further reducing the computational resource requirements of on-device machine learning is being pioneered by Qualcomm, and it drives that math down to even less complex 4-bit integer operations (INT4), while maintaining a similar level of accuracy as the original floating point-derived model.
Above, you can see examples of various machine learning models, like ResNet50 for image classification or PoseNet for human pose detection, and their resulting accuracy when using INT4 versus a source FP32-based model, when the model is optimized with either PTQ (Post Training Quantization) or QAT (Quantization Aware Training). INT4 offers tremendous benefits in this example, such as up to 64 times improvement in inference performance-per-watt, compared to FP32.
INT4 Quantization Benefits And A Real-World Demo
As you can see, the results are impressive, in terms of accuracy percentages, but what does this look like in a real-world application? Let’s take a look at AI-based game rendering upscaling, known as super resolution, for a performance uplift and image quality improvements on smartphones. A demo is worth a thousand words as they say…
This is an example of a 540p pixel input resolution image being scaled up to 4K resolution, which results in much cleaner lines, sharper textures, and a better overall experience. Though Qualcomm has a non-algorithmic version of this available today, called Snapdragon GSR, someday in the future, mobile enthusiast gamers are going to be treated to even better levels of image quality without sacrificing battery life and with even higher frame rates.
This is just one example of gaming and media enhancement with pre-trained and quantized machine learning models, but you can quickly think of a myriad of applications that could benefit greatly, from recommendation engines to location-aware guidance, to computational photography techniques and more.
We just needed a new math for all this AI heavy lifting on smartphones and other lower power edge devices, and it appears Qualcomm is leading that charge.
|
Moderna has announced an increase in the price of their m-RNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 from the $26 per dose that the government has been paying to something like $130 per dose. This will affect insured people only indirectly, increasing their insurance companies’ costs, but the uninsured will pay the whole price.
Much of the research the m-RNA vaccines are based on was done under government grants or contracts, in government laboratories. The government guaranteed an initial market. So why is Moderna setting the price?
The answer to that question goes back to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.
Before 1980, organizations that hired people to do research and development routinely required, as a condition of employment, that the employee assign any patents they might get to the organization. This was the case throughout the government. I obtained three patents for work I had done and assigned those patents to the US Government.
Toward the end of the 1970s, there was a push to make research pay for itself. One way to do that would be to develop those patents into marketable commodities. There were a few difficulties with that. One was that a purpose of patenting within the national laboratories was to assert first discovery. It didn’t matter whether the discovery could be commercialized. There had been some infighting among Manhattan Project folk over such things. Of course Ed Teller was involved.
Another difficulty, industry (including Pharma) said that it was not worth their while to develop government or university patents that often required granting non-exclusive licenses. Without an exclusive license, they said, they could not recoup their development costs.
I think there may have been some truth to this claim. The Act was bipartisan – Bayh a Democrat and Dole a Republican. The act allowed corporations to hold patents on work done by the government. It was part of the general deregulation sense of that time.
I haven’t followed whatever modifications may have been made to the Act. Big Pharma has obtained many patents that were developed through government funding. They have found ways to tweak drugs just slightly (insulin is an example) to add patents and thus the lifetime of their monopolies. I am sure the same will ensue with the m-RNA vaccines.
Some of the details of what Moderna is doing are here, but what makes that possible is the Bayh-Dole Act.
Image: Public Domain
Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money
|
<urn:uuid:6c87e1e6-6aac-49d8-8ca6-31857bb6869b>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764494986.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20230127132641-20230127162641-00454.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.979551374912262,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.8125,
"token_count": 507,
"url": "https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2023/01/16/how-can-they-do-that/"
}
|
Moderna has announced an increase in the price of their m-RNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 from the $26 per dose that the government has been paying to something like $130 per dose. This will affect insured people only indirectly, increasing their insurance companies’ costs, but the uninsured will pay the whole price.
Much of the research the m-RNA vaccines are based on was done under government grants or contracts, in government laboratories. The government guaranteed an initial market. So why is Moderna setting the price?
The answer to that question goes back to the Bayh-Dole Act of 19
|
80.
Before 1980, organizations that hired people to do research and development routinely required, as a condition of employment, that the employee assign any patents they might get to the organization. This was the case throughout the government. I obtained three patents for work I had done and assigned those patents to the US Government.
Toward the end of the 1970s, there was a push to make research pay for itself. One way to do that would be to develop those patents into marketable commodities. There were a few difficulties with that. One was that a purpose of patenting within the national laboratories was to assert first discovery. It didn’t matter whether the discovery could be commercialized. There had been some infighting among Manhattan Project folk over such things. Of course Ed Teller was involved.
Another difficulty, industry (including Pharma) said that it was not worth their while to develop government or university patents that often required granting non-exclusive licenses. Without an exclusive license, they said, they could not recoup their development costs.
I think there may have been some truth to this claim. The Act was bipartisan – Bayh a Democrat and Dole a Republican. The act allowed corporations to hold patents on work done by the government. It was part of the general deregulation sense of that time.
I haven’t followed whatever modifications may have been made to the Act. Big Pharma has obtained many patents that were developed through government funding. They have found ways to tweak drugs just slightly (insulin is an example) to add patents and thus the lifetime of their monopolies. I am sure the same will ensue with the m-RNA vaccines.
Some of the details of what Moderna is doing are here, but what makes that possible is the Bayh-Dole Act.
Image: Public Domain
Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money
|
The rate of children diagnosed with autism in the United States has been growing steadily since 2000, but two new reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight disparities in the types of children identified to have autism spectrum disorder and setbacks in early detection.
In 2020, about 1 in 36 children had been diagnosed with autism by age 8, according to the CDC – about 2.8%. That’s up from a prevalence of 1 in 44 children in 2018 and 1 in 150 children in 2000.
But according to the CDC, this long-term trend has “largely been interpreted as improvements in more equitable identification of (autism spectrum disorder), particularly for children in groups that have less access or face greater barriers in obtaining services.”
For the first time, diagnosis was more common among Asian, Black and Hispanic children than it was among White children. The CDC researchers note that this shift “may reflect improved screening, awareness, and access to services among historically underserved groups.” In fact, between 2018 and 2020, autism prevalence rose more than twice as fast among Asian, Black and Hispanic children than it did among White children.
These findings are based on surveillance data from 11 communities that participate in the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. The data are not nationally representative and vary widely by location – from a prevalence of 1 in 22 children in California to about half as many in Maryland. The CDC says more research is needed to understand this variation, which could be related to differences in the strategies used to identify and diagnose the condition.
Still, some trends have stayed consistent.
Autism prevalence is significantly higher among boys than girls – in 2020, there was about a four-fold difference. But it was the first year that more than 1% of 8-year-old girls had been diagnosed with autism.
Also, disparities persist in identifying autism in children who also have an intellectual disability. In 2020, more than half of Black children diagnosed with autism also had an intellectual disability, compared with less than a third of White children. According to the researchers, this finding suggests a need to better detect and evaluate developmental concerns beyond cognitive ability.
Generally, children who have intellectual disabilities are more likely to be diagnosed with autism earlier. But early detection is important for all children with autism, as it helps connect them with helpful resources and interventions.
In recent years, good progress had been made in early detection of autism – an earlier CDC report found that children born in 2014 were 50% more likely to receive an autism diagnosis or special education by age 4 than those born in 2010.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Another new report published by the CDC on Thursday shows that there was evidence of continued improvement in these trends through February 2020, but the trends reversed as the Covid-19 pandemic hit with “sustained lower levels” of evaluations and identification of autism across most of the surveillance network.
In first six months of the pandemic, there were 217 fewer evaluations for every 1,000 children at age 4 than there were four years earlier. There were also nearly three fewer identifications for every 10,000 children, according to the CDC report.
“Disruptions due to the pandemic in the timely evaluation of children and delays in connecting children to the services and support they need could have long-lasting effects,” said Dr. Karen Remley, director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “The data in this report can help communities better understand how the pandemic impacted early identification of autism in young children and anticipate future needs as these children get older.”
|
<urn:uuid:8ec208f7-d255-4655-82db-8d396978833c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511220.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20231003192425-20231003222425-00571.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9765034914016724,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.546875,
"token_count": 776,
"url": "https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/23/health/autism-diagnosis-cdc-report/index.html"
}
|
The rate of children diagnosed with autism in the United States has been growing steadily since 2000, but two new reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight disparities in the types of children identified to have autism spectrum disorder and setbacks in early detection.
In 2020, about 1 in 36 children had been diagnosed with autism by age 8, according to the CDC – about 2.8%. That’s up from a prevalence of 1 in 44 children in 2018 and 1 in 150 children in 2000.
But
|
according to the CDC, this long-term trend has “largely been interpreted as improvements in more equitable identification of (autism spectrum disorder), particularly for children in groups that have less access or face greater barriers in obtaining services.”
For the first time, diagnosis was more common among Asian, Black and Hispanic children than it was among White children. The CDC researchers note that this shift “may reflect improved screening, awareness, and access to services among historically underserved groups.” In fact, between 2018 and 2020, autism prevalence rose more than twice as fast among Asian, Black and Hispanic children than it did among White children.
These findings are based on surveillance data from 11 communities that participate in the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. The data are not nationally representative and vary widely by location – from a prevalence of 1 in 22 children in California to about half as many in Maryland. The CDC says more research is needed to understand this variation, which could be related to differences in the strategies used to identify and diagnose the condition.
Still, some trends have stayed consistent.
Autism prevalence is significantly higher among boys than girls – in 2020, there was about a four-fold difference. But it was the first year that more than 1% of 8-year-old girls had been diagnosed with autism.
Also, disparities persist in identifying autism in children who also have an intellectual disability. In 2020, more than half of Black children diagnosed with autism also had an intellectual disability, compared with less than a third of White children. According to the researchers, this finding suggests a need to better detect and evaluate developmental concerns beyond cognitive ability.
Generally, children who have intellectual disabilities are more likely to be diagnosed with autism earlier. But early detection is important for all children with autism, as it helps connect them with helpful resources and interventions.
In recent years, good progress had been made in early detection of autism – an earlier CDC report found that children born in 2014 were 50% more likely to receive an autism diagnosis or special education by age 4 than those born in 2010.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
Another new report published by the CDC on Thursday shows that there was evidence of continued improvement in these trends through February 2020, but the trends reversed as the Covid-19 pandemic hit with “sustained lower levels” of evaluations and identification of autism across most of the surveillance network.
In first six months of the pandemic, there were 217 fewer evaluations for every 1,000 children at age 4 than there were four years earlier. There were also nearly three fewer identifications for every 10,000 children, according to the CDC report.
“Disruptions due to the pandemic in the timely evaluation of children and delays in connecting children to the services and support they need could have long-lasting effects,” said Dr. Karen Remley, director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. “The data in this report can help communities better understand how the pandemic impacted early identification of autism in young children and anticipate future needs as these children get older.”
|
The descriptive panel below, from the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC was posted on Twitter by the historian of Chinese astrology, Jeffrey Kotyk, who posed the question, “I wonder whether Ptolemy would have considered himself “pagan”?”
Reading through the text I have several other comments and queries, but first I will address Jeffrey’s question. Ptolemy lived in the second century CE and was an Alexandrian Greek. At that point in time the Latin word pagan from pāgānus meant “villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant”. Only in the fourth century did early Christians begin to refer to people who practiced polytheism, or ethic religions other than Judaism as pagans. The word pagan meaning “person of non-Christian or non-Jewish faith” first entered the English language around 1400 CE, so Ptolemy would definitely not have considered himself pagan.
Also referring to Ptolemy, one of the greatest mathematical polymaths of antiquity, as “scholar of the stars” is somewhat limited, not to say strange. The text then attributes a “passion for mathematics, geography, and astronomy” to him but leaves out optics, music theory, and, of course, astrology. Strangely the opening paragraph seems to attribute those things that developed out of astronomy all to Ptolemy alone. What about all the other astronomers, geographers, mathematicians, who existed before Ptolemy, contemporaneously with him, and after him, didn’t they contribute anything?
Of the things listed, “the ability to navigate the earth, determine agricultural seasons, and organise time into days, months, and years,” only the first, navigation, can really be said to have grown out of astronomy. Systematic agriculture and with it, knowledge of the agricultural seasons predates mathematical astronomy by about six thousand years. Days are a natural phenomenon of which homo sapiens would have been aware since they first evolved, although I assume that animals are also aware of days.
The same of course applies to the year of which every sentient creature that lives long enough becomes aware without any help from astronomers. Astronomers, of course, determined how many days there are in a solar year, but they took long enough to get it right.
Months are a completely different problem. If we are referring to lunar months, and after all the word month derives from the word for moon, then the same applies, as to days and years. Although the astronomers had the problem of how to align lunar months with solar years, they don’t fit at all, as became obvious fairly early on and you don’t really want to know about the history of early calendrics. Trust me you don’t, that way lies madness! If, however, we are referring to our current system of twelve irregular months fitted into the solar year, then, although the astronomers played a role, they are largely the result of political decisions.
As a result, the Church was able to use scripture and science to identify and commemorate holy days such as Easter.
Knowing something about the history of the determination of the so-called movable Christian holy days, I cringed when I read this very short paragraph. I will pass over it with the simple comment that these holy days are determined not identified and that determination was a very complex religio-political process stretching over several centuries and astronomers had very little to do with it, other than providing the date of the vernal equinox, which in early days was falsely considered to be the 25 March and providing lunar tables.
I developed the most advanced geocentric model of the universe, at which I believed Earth was the center.
This sentence is, of course, wonderfully tautological, geocentric meaning the earth is at the centre. The sentence is also, as Blake Stacey pointed out on Mastodon after I posted this, “not only redundant, it’s not even grammatical.”
My geocentric model of the universe was accepted until Copernicus, Galileo, and others introduced a heliocentric model.
Ptolemy’s model was extensively modified by a succession of Arabic astronomers and “the most advanced geocentric model of the universe” before Copernicus was that of the Austrian, Renaissance astronomer, Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461), whose system Copernicus studied as a student.
Galileo, who in reality contributed very little to the heliocentric model or to its acceptance, in fact by rejecting supralunar comets, which orbited the sun, and ignoring Kepler’s laws of planetary motions, he explicitly hindered that acceptance, gets a name check with Copernicus, whereas, Kepler, whose heliocentric model was the one that actually became accepted gets dumped under others!
This is a more than questionable piece of museum signage and I wish I could blame it on the religious nature of the museum but such ill researched signage is unfortunately too common.
5 responses to “Ptolemy the pagan”
On the other hand, I’ll bet you that the occurrence of the word “pagan” is due very much to the “religious nature of the museum”. Any other museum would have called him “Ancient Greek”, or perhaps (and better) “Hellenistic”.
Strictly speaking Ptolemy is post Hellenistic. The Hellenistic Period ended in 31 BCE with the Roman conquest of Egypt
It sounds odd to me ear to call him Roman, though I see Wikipedia does. Maybe Alexandrian?
As you can read above I have called him an Alexandrian Greek; Alexandria was very much a multicultural city. He may have been a Roman citizen, I’m not aware of any source for this claim. Alexandria was part of the Roman Empire but being born there didn’t automatically make one a Roman citizen.
The other problem with this bit is that the “paganism” of late antiquity, at least among educated men, was a lot more like Christianity than like the beliefs and practices of the times of Homer or Plato. Ptolemy came earlier than Julian the Apostate or most of the Neoplatonists—I don’t know if he paid any attention to the Christians himself—but his religiosity probably had very little similarity to the cults of the city states or the folk practices of rural folk.
|
<urn:uuid:c3941e16-0387-4daa-99f2-12da5d4920be>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949355.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20230330163823-20230330193823-00047.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9657438397407532,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.375,
"token_count": 1375,
"url": "https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2023/03/16/ptolemy-the-pagan/"
}
|
The descriptive panel below, from the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC was posted on Twitter by the historian of Chinese astrology, Jeffrey Kotyk, who posed the question, “I wonder whether Ptolemy would have considered himself “pagan”?”
Reading through the text I have several other comments and queries, but first I will address Jeffrey’s question. Ptolemy lived in the second century CE and was an Alexandrian Greek. At that point in time the Latin word pagan from pāgānus meant “villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant”. Only in the fourth century did early Christians begin to refer
|
to people who practiced polytheism, or ethic religions other than Judaism as pagans. The word pagan meaning “person of non-Christian or non-Jewish faith” first entered the English language around 1400 CE, so Ptolemy would definitely not have considered himself pagan.
Also referring to Ptolemy, one of the greatest mathematical polymaths of antiquity, as “scholar of the stars” is somewhat limited, not to say strange. The text then attributes a “passion for mathematics, geography, and astronomy” to him but leaves out optics, music theory, and, of course, astrology. Strangely the opening paragraph seems to attribute those things that developed out of astronomy all to Ptolemy alone. What about all the other astronomers, geographers, mathematicians, who existed before Ptolemy, contemporaneously with him, and after him, didn’t they contribute anything?
Of the things listed, “the ability to navigate the earth, determine agricultural seasons, and organise time into days, months, and years,” only the first, navigation, can really be said to have grown out of astronomy. Systematic agriculture and with it, knowledge of the agricultural seasons predates mathematical astronomy by about six thousand years. Days are a natural phenomenon of which homo sapiens would have been aware since they first evolved, although I assume that animals are also aware of days.
The same of course applies to the year of which every sentient creature that lives long enough becomes aware without any help from astronomers. Astronomers, of course, determined how many days there are in a solar year, but they took long enough to get it right.
Months are a completely different problem. If we are referring to lunar months, and after all the word month derives from the word for moon, then the same applies, as to days and years. Although the astronomers had the problem of how to align lunar months with solar years, they don’t fit at all, as became obvious fairly early on and you don’t really want to know about the history of early calendrics. Trust me you don’t, that way lies madness! If, however, we are referring to our current system of twelve irregular months fitted into the solar year, then, although the astronomers played a role, they are largely the result of political decisions.
As a result, the Church was able to use scripture and science to identify and commemorate holy days such as Easter.
Knowing something about the history of the determination of the so-called movable Christian holy days, I cringed when I read this very short paragraph. I will pass over it with the simple comment that these holy days are determined not identified and that determination was a very complex religio-political process stretching over several centuries and astronomers had very little to do with it, other than providing the date of the vernal equinox, which in early days was falsely considered to be the 25 March and providing lunar tables.
I developed the most advanced geocentric model of the universe, at which I believed Earth was the center.
This sentence is, of course, wonderfully tautological, geocentric meaning the earth is at the centre. The sentence is also, as Blake Stacey pointed out on Mastodon after I posted this, “not only redundant, it’s not even grammatical.”
My geocentric model of the universe was accepted until Copernicus, Galileo, and others introduced a heliocentric model.
Ptolemy’s model was extensively modified by a succession of Arabic astronomers and “the most advanced geocentric model of the universe” before Copernicus was that of the Austrian, Renaissance astronomer, Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461), whose system Copernicus studied as a student.
Galileo, who in reality contributed very little to the heliocentric model or to its acceptance, in fact by rejecting supralunar comets, which orbited the sun, and ignoring Kepler’s laws of planetary motions, he explicitly hindered that acceptance, gets a name check with Copernicus, whereas, Kepler, whose heliocentric model was the one that actually became accepted gets dumped under others!
This is a more than questionable piece of museum signage and I wish I could blame it on the religious nature of the museum but such ill researched signage is unfortunately too common.
5 responses to “Ptolemy the pagan”
On the other hand, I’ll bet you that the occurrence of the word “pagan” is due very much to the “religious nature of the museum”. Any other museum would have called him “Ancient Greek”, or perhaps (and better) “Hellenistic”.
Strictly speaking Ptolemy is post Hellenistic. The Hellenistic Period ended in 31 BCE with the Roman conquest of Egypt
It sounds odd to me ear to call him Roman, though I see Wikipedia does. Maybe Alexandrian?
As you can read above I have called him an Alexandrian Greek; Alexandria was very much a multicultural city. He may have been a Roman citizen, I’m not aware of any source for this claim. Alexandria was part of the Roman Empire but being born there didn’t automatically make one a Roman citizen.
The other problem with this bit is that the “paganism” of late antiquity, at least among educated men, was a lot more like Christianity than like the beliefs and practices of the times of Homer or Plato. Ptolemy came earlier than Julian the Apostate or most of the Neoplatonists—I don’t know if he paid any attention to the Christians himself—but his religiosity probably had very little similarity to the cults of the city states or the folk practices of rural folk.
|
'Aber-clam Lincoln', a 214-year-old clam born same year as Abraham Lincoln, found in Florida
- A 2.6-pound quahog clam believed to be 214 years old was found in Florida's Alligator Point last month.
- The clam was likely born in 1809 – the same year as Abraham Lincoln – and is named "Aber-clam Lincoln." He may be the fourth oldest clam on record.
- The clam's caretakers released him into the Gulf of Mexico.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Aber-clam Lincoln, a quahog clam believed to be 214 years old, was released into the Gulf of Mexico last week by his caretakers at the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab.
Americorps member Blaine Parker dug up the 2-century-old mollusk at Florida's Alligator Point, while collecting shellfish to make chowder.
Parker said the clam is hefty enough to make two servings – and has shells large enough to use as bowls to serve it in.
“We were just going to eat it, but we thought about it a while and figured it was probably pretty special. So, we didn’t want to kill it,” Parker said.
Instead, he took it to the aquarium at the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab, where he works as a specimen collector.
While most Ocean quahogs are 2.8 to 4.3 inches long and weigh up to a half pound, Lincoln checks in at 6 inches and weighs 2.6 pounds.
Parker said a clam, like a tree, lays down annual growth bands, alternating bands of light on its shell, which scientists used to estimate its age.
There are 214 layers on the shell of the clam he found, which would mean it was probably born in 1809 – the same year as Abraham Lincoln. It was also discovered on Presidents Day weekend. So, Parker named his find Aber-clam Lincoln.
What are Quahog clams?
Quahogs are found in the Atlantic from Greenland south to North Carolina.
They move about by being tossed in the surf and crawl along the sand by expanding and contracting their muscle.
With Lincoln being so old, it is possible that circumstances moved him south, – making him one of the oldest known Florida transplants.
Quahogs are known to live 200 or more years. A 507-year-old clam, found in the Icelandic seabed and named Ming, broke the Guinness World Record for oldest animal when it was discovered in 2007.
Scientists believe incredible low metabolic rates of Lincoln and other quahogs are responsible for their long lives. A 2018 University of Kansas study on the energy needs of 299 species of extinct and living bivalves found those with minimal energy requirements escaped extinction.
“The lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive,” Bruce Lieberman, the study’s co-leader, said in a statement at the time.
“Instead of survival of the fittest, maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is survival of the laziest, or at least survival of the sluggish,” Lieberman said.
'Survival of the sluggish':Laziness an effective survival skill, study suggests
Lincoln appears to have been born before the start of the Industrial Revolution, which triggered a massive burning of fossil fuels.
Researchers have used centuries-old clam shells to identify changes in the North Atlantic climate system. Analysis of oxygen and carbon isotopes revealed a dramatic shift in the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere, when a regional cooling period ended about 1850.
Lincoln may be the fourth-oldest clam on record.
A look at the oldest known clams
- 507-year-old Ming the Mollusk was found off the coast of Iceland in 2006.
- A 374-year-old mollusk was collected off Iceland in 1968.
- A 220-year-old quahog was pulled from American waters in 1982.
A more accurate age of a clam can be determined with an autopsy-like exam. Ming's estimated age was increased 104 years when scientists studied his insides.
So it’s quite possible Aber-clam Lincoln is older than what the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab estimates.
And unlike the others, Lincoln is still living. Ming and the others are not aging anymore.
Lincoln will be hitting the waves back in the surf along the Gulf Coast as of Feb. 24.
“We just figured he won’t live very well in captivity," Parker said. "And I think he’s earned the right to stay out there.”
|
<urn:uuid:51a9089c-7511-4f56-b2ee-eb06e5e42273>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224652569.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20230606114156-20230606144156-00449.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9667242765426636,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.765625,
"token_count": 982,
"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/03/aber-clam-lincoln-214-years-old-florida/11389421002/?emci=a5f61165-dcbd-ed11-a8e0-00224832e811&emdi=ea000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001&ceid=%7B%7BContactsEmailID%7D%7D"
}
|
'Aber-clam Lincoln', a 214-year-old clam born same year as Abraham Lincoln, found in Florida
- A 2.6-pound quahog clam believed to be 214 years old was found in Florida's Alligator Point last month.
- The clam was likely born in 1809 – the same year as Abraham Lincoln – and is named "Aber-clam Lincoln." He may be the fourth oldest clam on record.
- The clam's caretakers released him into the Gulf of Mexico.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Aber-
|
clam Lincoln, a quahog clam believed to be 214 years old, was released into the Gulf of Mexico last week by his caretakers at the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab.
Americorps member Blaine Parker dug up the 2-century-old mollusk at Florida's Alligator Point, while collecting shellfish to make chowder.
Parker said the clam is hefty enough to make two servings – and has shells large enough to use as bowls to serve it in.
“We were just going to eat it, but we thought about it a while and figured it was probably pretty special. So, we didn’t want to kill it,” Parker said.
Instead, he took it to the aquarium at the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab, where he works as a specimen collector.
While most Ocean quahogs are 2.8 to 4.3 inches long and weigh up to a half pound, Lincoln checks in at 6 inches and weighs 2.6 pounds.
Parker said a clam, like a tree, lays down annual growth bands, alternating bands of light on its shell, which scientists used to estimate its age.
There are 214 layers on the shell of the clam he found, which would mean it was probably born in 1809 – the same year as Abraham Lincoln. It was also discovered on Presidents Day weekend. So, Parker named his find Aber-clam Lincoln.
What are Quahog clams?
Quahogs are found in the Atlantic from Greenland south to North Carolina.
They move about by being tossed in the surf and crawl along the sand by expanding and contracting their muscle.
With Lincoln being so old, it is possible that circumstances moved him south, – making him one of the oldest known Florida transplants.
Quahogs are known to live 200 or more years. A 507-year-old clam, found in the Icelandic seabed and named Ming, broke the Guinness World Record for oldest animal when it was discovered in 2007.
Scientists believe incredible low metabolic rates of Lincoln and other quahogs are responsible for their long lives. A 2018 University of Kansas study on the energy needs of 299 species of extinct and living bivalves found those with minimal energy requirements escaped extinction.
“The lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive,” Bruce Lieberman, the study’s co-leader, said in a statement at the time.
“Instead of survival of the fittest, maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is survival of the laziest, or at least survival of the sluggish,” Lieberman said.
'Survival of the sluggish':Laziness an effective survival skill, study suggests
Lincoln appears to have been born before the start of the Industrial Revolution, which triggered a massive burning of fossil fuels.
Researchers have used centuries-old clam shells to identify changes in the North Atlantic climate system. Analysis of oxygen and carbon isotopes revealed a dramatic shift in the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere, when a regional cooling period ended about 1850.
Lincoln may be the fourth-oldest clam on record.
A look at the oldest known clams
- 507-year-old Ming the Mollusk was found off the coast of Iceland in 2006.
- A 374-year-old mollusk was collected off Iceland in 1968.
- A 220-year-old quahog was pulled from American waters in 1982.
A more accurate age of a clam can be determined with an autopsy-like exam. Ming's estimated age was increased 104 years when scientists studied his insides.
So it’s quite possible Aber-clam Lincoln is older than what the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab estimates.
And unlike the others, Lincoln is still living. Ming and the others are not aging anymore.
Lincoln will be hitting the waves back in the surf along the Gulf Coast as of Feb. 24.
“We just figured he won’t live very well in captivity," Parker said. "And I think he’s earned the right to stay out there.”
|
There are a few times you are obliged to do something or perform an action, for example, I have to keep this blog running (but I seem to be terrible at it). Maybe, you have to attend someone’s wedding or someone needs to go to the dentist. These things are called ‘obligations’ where you ‘have to’ perform some action. Now, the real outcome might waver (such as the person might not ultimately go to the dentist) but when you have to do something, you are showing obligation to perform an action.
भोक (bhok) = Hunger
खानेकुरा (khanekura) = Foodstuff
अस्पताल (aspataal) = Hospital
अवस्था (awastha) = Condition/Status/State
Take these sentences for example:
- John has to go to the hospital.
- The ball has to roll to this road.
The bolded part shows the obligation of a subject to do something, hence he/she/they etc. has to ‘do’ something. In Nepali, we express this using a compound verb. The verb construction is very simple:
-nu form of Verb + पर्नु (parnu)
= Have to do X
So, we use the basic form (the infinite form) of the verb and just join ‘parnu’ in the end. All conjugations apply to parnu and not the other one. Also, we use 3rd person conjugation for all subjects. For example,
खानु (khanu /to eat/) + पर्नु (parnu)
= खानुपर्नु (khanuparnu /to have to eat/)
Positive conjugations display the need to do something. However, it is not uncommon for people to often use simple past tense for the present and use past perfect tense for simple past. ‘Simple past’ for ‘simple past’ is seldom used. For example:
भोक लागेको बेला खानेकुरा खानुपर्छ (bhok lageko bela khanekura khanuparcha)
= When hungry (we) have to eat food.
आज अस्पताल जानुपर्यो (aaja aspataal jaanuparyo)
= (I) have to go to the hospital.
घरको अवस्था हेर्न जानुपर्यो (ghar`ko awastha herna jaanuparyo)
= (I) have to go see the status of my house.
Negative conjugations on the other hand display the need to not do something:
भोक लागेको बेला खानेकुरा खानुपर्दैन (bhok lageko bela khanekura khanupardaina)
= When hungry (we) do not have to eat food.
आज अस्पताल जानुपरेन (aaja aspataal jaanuparena)
= Do not have to go to the hospital.
घरको अवस्था हेर्न जानुपरेन (ghar`ko awastha herna jaanuparena)
= (I) do not have to go see the status of my house.
More sentence examples:
यो काम गर्नुपर्छ ? (yo kaam garnuparcha)
= (Do I) need to do this work?
तिमीलाई पैसा चाहिन्छ भने कमाउनुपर्छ (timi`lai paisa chahincha bhane kamaaunuparcha)
= If you need money then (you) have to earn it.
हामी एक भएर देश बनाउनुपर्छ (hami ek bhaera desh banaunuparcha)
= By being one, (we) have to build the country.
PERMISSION AND APPROVAL
When you ask for permission, you are asking an approval to do or perform an action. When you receive the ‘okay’ signal, then you have received an approval.
By the very nature, when you ask for permission, it is in the form of a question. As such, all question are in ‘interrogative mood’. Similarly, when you give an approval, it is in the form of an answer. As such, it is a response and as such is never in an interrogative mood. Interchanging permission and approval is easy as such, you just change the question mark into a full stop and vice versa.
In speech, questions usually have a rising intonation.
पियानो (piyano) = Piano
बजाउँदा (bajauda) = Stems from the verb बजाउनु (bajaaunu) which means ‘To play (an instrument)’
There will be a special mandate here, we will be exploring whether an action is ‘permissible’ or not, that is whether it is okay or not okay to perform the said action. For example, these are the type of sentences that we will be exploring:
- Is it okay for me to play the piano?
- Isn’t it okay for him to go?
- It isn’t okay for you to play the piano.
- It is okay for him to go.
The basic format is:
-da form of verb + हुन्छ (huncha)
-nu form of verb + मिल्छ (milcha)
Both forms are equivalent in meaning.
Here are some example sentences of asking permission. Negative conjugation of ‘huncha’ [which is हुँदैन (hudaina)] or ‘milcha’ [which is मिल्दैन (mildaina)] is kind of like using ‘isn’t it okay…’ :
म पियानो बजाउँदा हुन्छ? (ma piyano bajauda huncha)
= Is it okay for me to play the piano?
ऊ घर जाँदा हुन्छ? (u ghar jada huncha)
= Is it okay for him to go home?
तिम्रो किताब लग्नु मिल्छ ? (timro kitab lagnu milcha)
= Is it okay to take your book?
म पियानो बजाउँदा हुँदैन? (ma piyano bajauda hudaina)
= Isn’t it okay for me to play the piano?
Since you need to answer the approval, you need to make necessary changes in some sentences. For example, you cannot say ‘Can I take your book?’ and its equivalent approval be ‘I can take your book.’ Also it isn’t necessary for the approvals to be exactly ‘confirmative’:
तिमीले पियानो बजाउँदा हुँदैन (timi`le piyano bajauda hudaina)
= It isn’t okay for you to play the piano.
ऊ घर जाँदा हुन्छ (u ghar jada huncha)
= Is it okay for him to go home.
मेरो किताब लग्नु मिल्छ (mero kitab lagnu milcha)
= Is it okay (for you) to take my book.
तिमीले पियानो बजाउँदा हुन्छ (timi`le piyano bajauda huncha)
= It is okay for you to play the piano.
A. TRANSLATE THE SENTENCES FROM NEPALI INTO ENGLISH
1. किताब खोल्नुपर्दैन (kitab kholnupardaina)
2. आज मन्दिर जानुपर्छ (aaja mandir jaanuparcha)
3. गरीबलाई दान दिँदा हुन्छ? (garib`lai daan dida huncha)
4. स्वयंसेवक कार्य गर्नु मिल्छ (swamyasewak kaarya garnu milcha)
B. TRANSLATE THE SENTENCES FROM ENGLISH INTO NEPALI
1. You do not need to come today.
2. Is it okay to not open our books?
ANSWER(illustrative purposes only)
A.1. No need to open the book.
A.2. Have to go to the temple today.
A.3. Is it okay to give donation to the poor?
A.4. It is okay to do volunteer work.
B.1. तिमी आज आउनुपर्दैन (timi aaja aaunupardaina)
B.2. किताब नखोल्दा हुन्छ ? (kitab nakholda huncha)
|
<urn:uuid:9de0c257-41ba-4d6e-9e7f-33071d53ed84>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949331.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20230330132508-20230330162508-00468.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.7968631982803345,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.953125,
"token_count": 2693,
"url": "https://nepalgo.wordpress.com/2023/02/04/obligation-and-permission-in-nepali/"
}
|
There are a few times you are obliged to do something or perform an action, for example, I have to keep this blog running (but I seem to be terrible at it). Maybe, you have to attend someone’s wedding or someone needs to go to the dentist. These things are called ‘obligations’ where you ‘have to’ perform some action. Now, the real outcome might waver (such as the person might not ultimately go to the dentist) but when you have to do something, you are showing obligation to perform an action.
भोक (bhok) = Hunger
खानेकुरा (k
|
hanekura) = Foodstuff
अस्पताल (aspataal) = Hospital
अवस्था (awastha) = Condition/Status/State
Take these sentences for example:
- John has to go to the hospital.
- The ball has to roll to this road.
The bolded part shows the obligation of a subject to do something, hence he/she/they etc. has to ‘do’ something. In Nepali, we express this using a compound verb. The verb construction is very simple:
-nu form of Verb + पर्नु (parnu)
= Have to do X
So, we use the basic form (the infinite form) of the verb and just join ‘parnu’ in the end. All conjugations apply to parnu and not the other one. Also, we use 3rd person conjugation for all subjects. For example,
खानु (khanu /to eat/) + पर्नु (parnu)
= खानुपर्नु (khanuparnu /to have to eat/)
Positive conjugations display the need to do something. However, it is not uncommon for people to often use simple past tense for the present and use past perfect tense for simple past. ‘Simple past’ for ‘simple past’ is seldom used. For example:
भोक लागेको बेला खानेकुरा खानुपर्छ (bhok lageko bela khanekura khanuparcha)
= When hungry (we) have to eat food.
आज अस्पताल जानुपर्यो (aaja aspataal jaanuparyo)
= (I) have to go to the hospital.
घरको अवस्था हेर्न जानुपर्यो (ghar`ko awastha herna jaanuparyo)
= (I) have to go see the status of my house.
Negative conjugations on the other hand display the need to not do something:
भोक लागेको बेला खानेकुरा खानुपर्दैन (bhok lageko bela khanekura khanupardaina)
= When hungry (we) do not have to eat food.
आज अस्पताल जानुपरेन (aaja aspataal jaanuparena)
= Do not have to go to the hospital.
घरको अवस्था हेर्न जानुपरेन (ghar`ko awastha herna jaanuparena)
= (I) do not have to go see the status of my house.
More sentence examples:
यो काम गर्नुपर्छ ? (yo kaam garnuparcha)
= (Do I) need to do this work?
तिमीलाई पैसा चाहिन्छ भने कमाउनुपर्छ (timi`lai paisa chahincha bhane kamaaunuparcha)
= If you need money then (you) have to earn it.
हामी एक भएर देश बनाउनुपर्छ (hami ek bhaera desh banaunuparcha)
= By being one, (we) have to build the country.
PERMISSION AND APPROVAL
When you ask for permission, you are asking an approval to do or perform an action. When you receive the ‘okay’ signal, then you have received an approval.
By the very nature, when you ask for permission, it is in the form of a question. As such, all question are in ‘interrogative mood’. Similarly, when you give an approval, it is in the form of an answer. As such, it is a response and as such is never in an interrogative mood. Interchanging permission and approval is easy as such, you just change the question mark into a full stop and vice versa.
In speech, questions usually have a rising intonation.
पियानो (piyano) = Piano
बजाउँदा (bajauda) = Stems from the verb बजाउनु (bajaaunu) which means ‘To play (an instrument)’
There will be a special mandate here, we will be exploring whether an action is ‘permissible’ or not, that is whether it is okay or not okay to perform the said action. For example, these are the type of sentences that we will be exploring:
- Is it okay for me to play the piano?
- Isn’t it okay for him to go?
- It isn’t okay for you to play the piano.
- It is okay for him to go.
The basic format is:
-da form of verb + हुन्छ (huncha)
-nu form of verb + मिल्छ (milcha)
Both forms are equivalent in meaning.
Here are some example sentences of asking permission. Negative conjugation of ‘huncha’ [which is हुँदैन (hudaina)] or ‘milcha’ [which is मिल्दैन (mildaina)] is kind of like using ‘isn’t it okay…’ :
म पियानो बजाउँदा हुन्छ? (ma piyano bajauda huncha)
= Is it okay for me to play the piano?
ऊ घर जाँदा हुन्छ? (u ghar jada huncha)
= Is it okay for him to go home?
तिम्रो किताब लग्नु मिल्छ ? (timro kitab lagnu milcha)
= Is it okay to take your book?
म पियानो बजाउँदा हुँदैन? (ma piyano bajauda hudaina)
= Isn’t it okay for me to play the piano?
Since you need to answer the approval, you need to make necessary changes in some sentences. For example, you cannot say ‘Can I take your book?’ and its equivalent approval be ‘I can take your book.’ Also it isn’t necessary for the approvals to be exactly ‘confirmative’:
तिमीले पियानो बजाउँदा हुँदैन (timi`le piyano bajauda hudaina)
= It isn’t okay for you to play the piano.
ऊ घर जाँदा हुन्छ (u ghar jada huncha)
= Is it okay for him to go home.
मेरो किताब लग्नु मिल्छ (mero kitab lagnu milcha)
= Is it okay (for you) to take my book.
तिमीले पियानो बजाउँदा हुन्छ (timi`le piyano bajauda huncha)
= It is okay for you to play the piano.
A. TRANSLATE THE SENTENCES FROM NEPALI INTO ENGLISH
1. किताब खोल्नुपर्दैन (kitab kholnupardaina)
2. आज मन्दिर जानुपर्छ (aaja mandir jaanuparcha)
3. गरीबलाई दान दिँदा हुन्छ? (garib`lai daan dida huncha)
4. स्वयंसेवक कार्य गर्नु मिल्छ (swamyasewak kaarya garnu milcha)
B. TRANSLATE THE SENTENCES FROM ENGLISH INTO NEPALI
1. You do not need to come today.
2. Is it okay to not open our books?
ANSWER(illustrative purposes only)
A.1. No need to open the book.
A.2. Have to go to the temple today.
A.3. Is it okay to give donation to the poor?
A.4. It is okay to do volunteer work.
B.1. तिमी आज आउनुपर्दैन (timi aaja aaunupardaina)
B.2. किताब नखोल्दा हुन्छ ? (kitab nakholda huncha)
|
UNO researchers make progress on preventing violent acts through chatbots
OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Omaha are making progress on a new approach to help stop violence before it even starts. They’ve begun testing a chatbot prototype that will eventually be used to help people report critical information.
Dr. Erin Kearns, a researcher at UNO, says people often suspect something is wrong, but they do not speak up.
“Many people in the public understandably don’t necessarily know what really are things that should be reported.”
Kearns is heading a research project along with Dr. Joel Elson at UNO, aimed at getting more complete information from people who report suspicious activity quickly, to the people who need it: law enforcement and mental health professionals and other first responders.
The research is taking place at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center, or NCITE at UNO. It is funded through a $715,000 grant by the Department of Homeland Security.
“When it comes to suspicious activity reporting, this can often be sensitive or difficult-to-talk-about material, and in some circumstances, using technology instead of a person helps to facilitate trust,” Elson said.
That’s why the research team is developing a chatbot. It’s a system where people can report suspicious behavior to a computer instead of a live person.
Now in Phase 2, the team is currently testing a chatbot prototype.
“We want to put the power of information sharing into the person who is collaborating, who is willing to disclose information, to share information,” said Elson.
The chatbot will be embedded in reporting platforms that already exist. The information it receives will be fed into existing networks.
Elson says the chatbot will help protect people’s identities.
“We want to make sure that individual feels extremely comfortable and protected. We want to make sure our privacy and societal values are maintained,” he said.
With Kearns’ background in criminology and Elson’s background in psychology and technology, the team has a unique perspective that is coming closer to removing barriers in reporting.
Copyright 2023 WOWT. All rights reserved.
|
<urn:uuid:26cc76d4-f187-45af-9f4d-cbf392a22479>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510130.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20230926011608-20230926041608-00125.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9241082072257996,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.625,
"token_count": 484,
"url": "https://www.wowt.com/2023/03/24/uno-researchers-make-progress-preventing-violent-acts-through-chatbots/"
}
|
UNO researchers make progress on preventing violent acts through chatbots
OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Omaha are making progress on a new approach to help stop violence before it even starts. They’ve begun testing a chatbot prototype that will eventually be used to help people report critical information.
Dr. Erin Kearns, a researcher at UNO, says people often suspect something is wrong, but they do not speak up.
“Many people in the public understandably don’t necessarily know what really are things that should be reported.”
Kearns is heading a research project
|
along with Dr. Joel Elson at UNO, aimed at getting more complete information from people who report suspicious activity quickly, to the people who need it: law enforcement and mental health professionals and other first responders.
The research is taking place at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center, or NCITE at UNO. It is funded through a $715,000 grant by the Department of Homeland Security.
“When it comes to suspicious activity reporting, this can often be sensitive or difficult-to-talk-about material, and in some circumstances, using technology instead of a person helps to facilitate trust,” Elson said.
That’s why the research team is developing a chatbot. It’s a system where people can report suspicious behavior to a computer instead of a live person.
Now in Phase 2, the team is currently testing a chatbot prototype.
“We want to put the power of information sharing into the person who is collaborating, who is willing to disclose information, to share information,” said Elson.
The chatbot will be embedded in reporting platforms that already exist. The information it receives will be fed into existing networks.
Elson says the chatbot will help protect people’s identities.
“We want to make sure that individual feels extremely comfortable and protected. We want to make sure our privacy and societal values are maintained,” he said.
With Kearns’ background in criminology and Elson’s background in psychology and technology, the team has a unique perspective that is coming closer to removing barriers in reporting.
Copyright 2023 WOWT. All rights reserved.
|
The permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto contains a bronze sculpture entitled The Crucified Christ (Corpus) and attributed to the seventeenth-century Roman artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The piece was donated to the art gallery by the late Murray Frum in 2006. What isn't well known is that the bronze was lost to history for centuries, and even after decades on the art market, the campaign to attribute the work to Bernini only began about twenty years ago. Visitors to the Toronto gallery are given no reason to think that the attribution is controversial. But there is good evidence to suspect that the $50 million bronze is not what it is claimed to be.
I stumbled upon this controversy during a recent exchange with Professor Franco Mormando—a world-class Bernini scholar and the author of the 2011 biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome. In a discussion about Bernini’s politics, Mormando let slip that “there is a great debate among Bernini scholars about the attribution of the AGO bronze crucifix.” I was shocked to hear this at first. I had casually followed the story of the Frum donation in the local newspapers, and I visit the AGO several times a year, but I had never caught even a whiff of the controversy. I imagine most of the public are unaware of this.
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps. Fortunately, there is a lot that we do know. Bernini was first commissioned to produce a bronze crucifix for the king of Spain in 1653–54. That work, still extant, looks very much like the AGO bronze, especially to the untrained eye.
A year or so later, a second crucifix was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini for his Parisian residence and donated to King Louis XIV after the Cardinal’s death. It is recorded in the 1684 royal inventory but seems to have gone missing just before the French Revolution. Was it melted down in an anti-clerical frenzy, or did it manage to survive the Terror, having been smuggled away to somewhere safe? We don’t know. In addition, yet another bronze is mentioned in the historical record. According to an early biographer, this was a sculpture that Bernini initially “made for himself” and which the sculptor then gave to Cardinal Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino when Bernini visited Paris in 1665. Unfortunately, the historical trail goes cold here, until the early twentieth century.
In 1908, in Venice, a Parisian art dealer sold a large, bronze crucifix to an American financier. At this point, there was no suggestion that the work could be a Bernini. A few decades later, the bronze was sold to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, in whose private collection it remained until 1975, when it was part of an estate sale at Sotheby’s. At the auction, the bronze, which was described as “French late 17th century,” failed to fetch its meagre $200 asking price. Eventually, the work was purchased by an antique dealer in London, after which it bounced between private collectors in Spain and Monte Carlo.
This is when the attributions to Bernini began. In 2002, the Italian art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco declared that the bronze was, in fact, the sculpture that had passed from Cardinal Barberini to Louis XIV centuries earlier. Then, in 2005, another highly regarded Italian art historian, Tomaso Montanari, argued that the bronze was in fact the other missing sculpture—the one Bernini gifted to Cardinal Pallavicino back in 1665. Art historian and dealer Andrew Butterfield also endorsed the Bernini attribution on behalf of the (now defunct) Salander–O’Reilly gallery in New York, run by disgraced gallerist Larry Salander. In a breathless 2016 profile of Butterfield for the Financial Times, Dalya Alberge claims that the art dealer “was able to prove … that a bronze statue of the crucifixion that had failed to sell at auction in 1975 for $200 was in fact a lost Bernini now worth a staggering $50 million.” The major American art museums did not seem to share this conviction. None of them agreed to purchase the supposed Bernini.
Enter Murray Frum. Frum was a public-spirited Toronto businessman and art collector who, to his credit, believed that the apparently long-lost Bernini should be enjoyed by everyone. Frum purchased the bronze for $25 million and donated it to the AGO. Its appraised value quickly swelled to double the purchasing price.
As noted, there are critics who are sceptical that the piece is a genuine Bernini. Art historian and specialist in the Baroque period Charles Scribner III is among those who have challenged the claim. Scribner does not contend that the AGO bronze is a forgery or fake. Instead, he believes that the sculpture is a pastiche: the result of a “joint project” by Bernini himself and other sculptors (“non-Bernini,” as he puts it). According to Scribner, it is neither the bronze commissioned by Cardinal Barberini (as Fagiolo dell’Arco claimed) nor the one that Bernini supposedly “made for himself,” before gifting it to Cardinal Pallavicino (as Montanari believes). Scribner thinks that some parts of the AGO bronze were probably made from Bernini’s original moulds, but other parts were cast from moulds made by other people. There are compelling reasons to believe that Bernini himself was not involved in the completion of the work.
So, what is so “non-Bernini” about the AGO bronze? For Scribner, the most compelling piece of evidence is the lack of a “side wound.” The gospels relate that, when Christ died, a Roman centurion (a man named Longinus according to later, extra-Biblical texts) “pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood [invoking the Eucharist] and water [Baptism].” Tradition has it that, as a result of witnessing this miraculous event, Longinus converted from paganism to Christianity. The side wound is clearly present on the Spanish bronze—and on every single sculptureof the dead Christ that we can confidently attribute to Bernini. Dozens of these smaller works populate the Vatican. The first reason to be sceptical, then, is this evident inconsistency.
Of course, oversights happen. Perhaps Bernini was on a tight deadline and, in his hurry, omitted a detail that would have been added late in the “construction” process—at the stage of final chasing. But if the AGO bronze was originally designed for Bernini himself, for his own private devotions (and he was devout), then the omission seems inexplicable. If Montanari is correct, this was not a commissioned work that Bernini was desperate to get out the door quickly. It seems odd that Bernini would have omitted this theologically crucial detail—especially since, in 1638, he had spent months in the Vatican carving a massive sculpture of the centurion in question.
Bernini had spent significant time and energy, then, toiling away at a sculpture of Longinus—a work whose creation would have required both physical exertion and intellectual focus—trying to depict the complex psychology of his subject and the religious significance of his actions. It is hard to imagine that he would have deliberately omitted include the side wound in a subsequent work made purely for himself.
For Scribner, the second problem is the drapery. If we look carefully, we can see that the drapery of the earlier, Spanish bronze is flatter and more compact and lacks what the AGO curators describe as “the dynamic movement of the loincloth.” This constraint is appropriate, given that this is a depiction of the dead Christ. It invites the viewer to focus on the lifeless body on the cross. By contrast, the drapery on the AGO bronze looks as if it has been captured mid-movement. It seems to be almost whooshing upwards—a dynamism more appropriate for depictions of a still-living Christ. Montanari explains this inconsistency by speculating that the AGO bronze is neither a true Cristo morto nor a Cristo vivo, but depicts a comatose Jesus, caught in the moment between life and death. The loincloth’s upward flourish thus prefigures Christ’s ascension to heaven. But it seems unlikely that Bernini—artist and impresario of the Counter-Reformation—would have taken such liberties with representational tradition or theological orthodoxy. It seems much more likely that the drapery was cast by someone other than Bernini and without his oversight.
In fact, as Scribner argues, the levitating drapery on the AGO bronze is more stylistically akin to the drapery cast by Bernini’s Roman rival, Alessandro Algardi. If we accept Montanari’s thesis that the AGO bronze was a work Bernini made for his own personal use, why would he have copied the signature flourish that characterised Algardi’s depiction of Christ’s loincloth?
Of course, this similarity does not definitively prove the sceptics’ case, but art attribution is often a matter of interpreting subtle clues and patiently accumulating evidence.
When we look at the two bronzes side by side, we can spot other differences, too. While the heads and upper bodies are very similar (and possibly cast from the same mould), the legs and feet are clearly not the same. The AGO’s Christ has thinner, almost sinewy legs, and his feet are longer. His lean lower body contrasts strikingly with his muscular arms and torso—a tension that is absent from the Spanish bronze. As a result, AGO’s Christ is not as harmonious a composition as the earlier work, upon which it was modelled.
When the two bronzes were displayed side by side at a Bernini exhibition at Rome’s Borghese Gallery in 2017–18, Bernini scholar Anna Coliva, former director of the Borghese, found their discrepancies striking:
The placement of the marvellous gilded bronze crucifix from the Escorial [the Spanish bronze] executed by Bernini between 1654 and 56, next to the bronze crucifix acquired by the Toronto Museum in 2006, revealed that a direct execution by Bernini [of the latter] was untenable ... The details, observable so close together, revealed the relative lack of skill in the casting technique of the Toronto version compared to the very high level of the one in the Escorial; just as the compactness of the proportions of the latter reveals the incongruous attenuation of the limbs which give the Canadian crucifix a “slithery” shape. [All translations from the Italian are by Charles Scribner III.]
In his 1955 book Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Rudolf Wittkower includes a comprehensive list of all the works then known to be by Bernini. Obviously, this “catalogue raisonnée”—which was considered the authoritative source of Bernini attributions for generations—did not include the AGO bronze, which, as noted above, was still being described as a “late French 17th century” work at auction twenty years later. Recently, however, Maria Grazia Bernardini has published a massive, updated catalogue that meticulously documents both Bernini’s certified worksand those with contested attributions. In her entry on the AGO bronze she writes:
In juxtaposition, the two [the Escorial bronze and the AGO bronze] appear similar yet with profound differences: they derive from the same prototype but with substantial differences in details that render Montanari’s hypothesis untenable that the AGO version came from the model, even if revisited, for the Escorial [Spanish] corpus … the legs are longer and thinner … the prominent abdomen is completely altered in its connection with the upper torso … Pending further findings by critics, the Toronto bronze must therefore be assigned to an artist in the circle of Bernini, based on a prototype by Bernini, but without his intervention.
Some art historians do support the attribution to Bernini, however. Evonne Levy, a world-class Bernini scholar from the University of Toronto, agreed with the AGO's attribution. But some scholars clearly remain sceptical. Given the lack of scholarly consensus, why is a Toronto art museum claiming to possess a Bernini? Perhaps because of the incentive structures that operate throughout the art world. Rescuing a long-lost work from obscurity and restoring it to its rightful place in the canon is surely the dream of many art historians. Commercial galleries and auction houses are likewise motivated to upgrade works, as owning and displaying famous works brings them money and prestige. Wealthy donors and philanthropists want to purchase and donate big-name works in order to increase their social capital and burnish their legacies. Prestigious museums and galleries aggressively pursue works by canonical figures, as they attract visitors and enhance their institutional reputations. Local academics, who need to work closely with those museums and galleries, also have a vested interest in flattering museum directors by ignoring potential attribution controversies. Government agencies are more likely to dole out grants to people working on projects featuring well-known artists. And the thousands of visitors who pour through the doors of galleries like the AGO are clamouring to see works fashioned by those luminaries whose names they remember from their art history survey courses and their high school textbooks.
So, how should the AGO handle this? I think they should let the public know about the controversy. The curators could mount a photograph of the Spanish bronze next to the supposed Bernini and invite viewers to spot the differences. They might include a brief summary of its attribution history in the label next to their sculpture. There’s a compelling story here, and AGO visitors are surely mature enough to understand that it is not always possible to be certain about the provenance and authorship of a centuries-old artwork. We could all learn something important from this—but only if the museum curators and gallery directors are willing to engage with the sceptics.
|
<urn:uuid:e22b2c76-9d90-4a10-9ce9-630cd2965ee2>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510676.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20230930113949-20230930143949-00275.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.966756284236908,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.84375,
"token_count": 3031,
"url": "https://quillette.com/2023/09/04/but-is-it-a-bernini/"
}
|
The permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto contains a bronze sculpture entitled The Crucified Christ (Corpus) and attributed to the seventeenth-century Roman artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The piece was donated to the art gallery by the late Murray Frum in 2006. What isn't well known is that the bronze was lost to history for centuries, and even after decades on the art market, the campaign to attribute the work to Bernini only began about twenty years ago. Visitors to the Toronto gallery are given no reason to think that the attribution is controversial. But there is good evidence to
|
suspect that the $50 million bronze is not what it is claimed to be.
I stumbled upon this controversy during a recent exchange with Professor Franco Mormando—a world-class Bernini scholar and the author of the 2011 biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome. In a discussion about Bernini’s politics, Mormando let slip that “there is a great debate among Bernini scholars about the attribution of the AGO bronze crucifix.” I was shocked to hear this at first. I had casually followed the story of the Frum donation in the local newspapers, and I visit the AGO several times a year, but I had never caught even a whiff of the controversy. I imagine most of the public are unaware of this.
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps. Fortunately, there is a lot that we do know. Bernini was first commissioned to produce a bronze crucifix for the king of Spain in 1653–54. That work, still extant, looks very much like the AGO bronze, especially to the untrained eye.
A year or so later, a second crucifix was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini for his Parisian residence and donated to King Louis XIV after the Cardinal’s death. It is recorded in the 1684 royal inventory but seems to have gone missing just before the French Revolution. Was it melted down in an anti-clerical frenzy, or did it manage to survive the Terror, having been smuggled away to somewhere safe? We don’t know. In addition, yet another bronze is mentioned in the historical record. According to an early biographer, this was a sculpture that Bernini initially “made for himself” and which the sculptor then gave to Cardinal Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino when Bernini visited Paris in 1665. Unfortunately, the historical trail goes cold here, until the early twentieth century.
In 1908, in Venice, a Parisian art dealer sold a large, bronze crucifix to an American financier. At this point, there was no suggestion that the work could be a Bernini. A few decades later, the bronze was sold to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, in whose private collection it remained until 1975, when it was part of an estate sale at Sotheby’s. At the auction, the bronze, which was described as “French late 17th century,” failed to fetch its meagre $200 asking price. Eventually, the work was purchased by an antique dealer in London, after which it bounced between private collectors in Spain and Monte Carlo.
This is when the attributions to Bernini began. In 2002, the Italian art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco declared that the bronze was, in fact, the sculpture that had passed from Cardinal Barberini to Louis XIV centuries earlier. Then, in 2005, another highly regarded Italian art historian, Tomaso Montanari, argued that the bronze was in fact the other missing sculpture—the one Bernini gifted to Cardinal Pallavicino back in 1665. Art historian and dealer Andrew Butterfield also endorsed the Bernini attribution on behalf of the (now defunct) Salander–O’Reilly gallery in New York, run by disgraced gallerist Larry Salander. In a breathless 2016 profile of Butterfield for the Financial Times, Dalya Alberge claims that the art dealer “was able to prove … that a bronze statue of the crucifixion that had failed to sell at auction in 1975 for $200 was in fact a lost Bernini now worth a staggering $50 million.” The major American art museums did not seem to share this conviction. None of them agreed to purchase the supposed Bernini.
Enter Murray Frum. Frum was a public-spirited Toronto businessman and art collector who, to his credit, believed that the apparently long-lost Bernini should be enjoyed by everyone. Frum purchased the bronze for $25 million and donated it to the AGO. Its appraised value quickly swelled to double the purchasing price.
As noted, there are critics who are sceptical that the piece is a genuine Bernini. Art historian and specialist in the Baroque period Charles Scribner III is among those who have challenged the claim. Scribner does not contend that the AGO bronze is a forgery or fake. Instead, he believes that the sculpture is a pastiche: the result of a “joint project” by Bernini himself and other sculptors (“non-Bernini,” as he puts it). According to Scribner, it is neither the bronze commissioned by Cardinal Barberini (as Fagiolo dell’Arco claimed) nor the one that Bernini supposedly “made for himself,” before gifting it to Cardinal Pallavicino (as Montanari believes). Scribner thinks that some parts of the AGO bronze were probably made from Bernini’s original moulds, but other parts were cast from moulds made by other people. There are compelling reasons to believe that Bernini himself was not involved in the completion of the work.
So, what is so “non-Bernini” about the AGO bronze? For Scribner, the most compelling piece of evidence is the lack of a “side wound.” The gospels relate that, when Christ died, a Roman centurion (a man named Longinus according to later, extra-Biblical texts) “pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood [invoking the Eucharist] and water [Baptism].” Tradition has it that, as a result of witnessing this miraculous event, Longinus converted from paganism to Christianity. The side wound is clearly present on the Spanish bronze—and on every single sculptureof the dead Christ that we can confidently attribute to Bernini. Dozens of these smaller works populate the Vatican. The first reason to be sceptical, then, is this evident inconsistency.
Of course, oversights happen. Perhaps Bernini was on a tight deadline and, in his hurry, omitted a detail that would have been added late in the “construction” process—at the stage of final chasing. But if the AGO bronze was originally designed for Bernini himself, for his own private devotions (and he was devout), then the omission seems inexplicable. If Montanari is correct, this was not a commissioned work that Bernini was desperate to get out the door quickly. It seems odd that Bernini would have omitted this theologically crucial detail—especially since, in 1638, he had spent months in the Vatican carving a massive sculpture of the centurion in question.
Bernini had spent significant time and energy, then, toiling away at a sculpture of Longinus—a work whose creation would have required both physical exertion and intellectual focus—trying to depict the complex psychology of his subject and the religious significance of his actions. It is hard to imagine that he would have deliberately omitted include the side wound in a subsequent work made purely for himself.
For Scribner, the second problem is the drapery. If we look carefully, we can see that the drapery of the earlier, Spanish bronze is flatter and more compact and lacks what the AGO curators describe as “the dynamic movement of the loincloth.” This constraint is appropriate, given that this is a depiction of the dead Christ. It invites the viewer to focus on the lifeless body on the cross. By contrast, the drapery on the AGO bronze looks as if it has been captured mid-movement. It seems to be almost whooshing upwards—a dynamism more appropriate for depictions of a still-living Christ. Montanari explains this inconsistency by speculating that the AGO bronze is neither a true Cristo morto nor a Cristo vivo, but depicts a comatose Jesus, caught in the moment between life and death. The loincloth’s upward flourish thus prefigures Christ’s ascension to heaven. But it seems unlikely that Bernini—artist and impresario of the Counter-Reformation—would have taken such liberties with representational tradition or theological orthodoxy. It seems much more likely that the drapery was cast by someone other than Bernini and without his oversight.
In fact, as Scribner argues, the levitating drapery on the AGO bronze is more stylistically akin to the drapery cast by Bernini’s Roman rival, Alessandro Algardi. If we accept Montanari’s thesis that the AGO bronze was a work Bernini made for his own personal use, why would he have copied the signature flourish that characterised Algardi’s depiction of Christ’s loincloth?
Of course, this similarity does not definitively prove the sceptics’ case, but art attribution is often a matter of interpreting subtle clues and patiently accumulating evidence.
When we look at the two bronzes side by side, we can spot other differences, too. While the heads and upper bodies are very similar (and possibly cast from the same mould), the legs and feet are clearly not the same. The AGO’s Christ has thinner, almost sinewy legs, and his feet are longer. His lean lower body contrasts strikingly with his muscular arms and torso—a tension that is absent from the Spanish bronze. As a result, AGO’s Christ is not as harmonious a composition as the earlier work, upon which it was modelled.
When the two bronzes were displayed side by side at a Bernini exhibition at Rome’s Borghese Gallery in 2017–18, Bernini scholar Anna Coliva, former director of the Borghese, found their discrepancies striking:
The placement of the marvellous gilded bronze crucifix from the Escorial [the Spanish bronze] executed by Bernini between 1654 and 56, next to the bronze crucifix acquired by the Toronto Museum in 2006, revealed that a direct execution by Bernini [of the latter] was untenable ... The details, observable so close together, revealed the relative lack of skill in the casting technique of the Toronto version compared to the very high level of the one in the Escorial; just as the compactness of the proportions of the latter reveals the incongruous attenuation of the limbs which give the Canadian crucifix a “slithery” shape. [All translations from the Italian are by Charles Scribner III.]
In his 1955 book Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Rudolf Wittkower includes a comprehensive list of all the works then known to be by Bernini. Obviously, this “catalogue raisonnée”—which was considered the authoritative source of Bernini attributions for generations—did not include the AGO bronze, which, as noted above, was still being described as a “late French 17th century” work at auction twenty years later. Recently, however, Maria Grazia Bernardini has published a massive, updated catalogue that meticulously documents both Bernini’s certified worksand those with contested attributions. In her entry on the AGO bronze she writes:
In juxtaposition, the two [the Escorial bronze and the AGO bronze] appear similar yet with profound differences: they derive from the same prototype but with substantial differences in details that render Montanari’s hypothesis untenable that the AGO version came from the model, even if revisited, for the Escorial [Spanish] corpus … the legs are longer and thinner … the prominent abdomen is completely altered in its connection with the upper torso … Pending further findings by critics, the Toronto bronze must therefore be assigned to an artist in the circle of Bernini, based on a prototype by Bernini, but without his intervention.
Some art historians do support the attribution to Bernini, however. Evonne Levy, a world-class Bernini scholar from the University of Toronto, agreed with the AGO's attribution. But some scholars clearly remain sceptical. Given the lack of scholarly consensus, why is a Toronto art museum claiming to possess a Bernini? Perhaps because of the incentive structures that operate throughout the art world. Rescuing a long-lost work from obscurity and restoring it to its rightful place in the canon is surely the dream of many art historians. Commercial galleries and auction houses are likewise motivated to upgrade works, as owning and displaying famous works brings them money and prestige. Wealthy donors and philanthropists want to purchase and donate big-name works in order to increase their social capital and burnish their legacies. Prestigious museums and galleries aggressively pursue works by canonical figures, as they attract visitors and enhance their institutional reputations. Local academics, who need to work closely with those museums and galleries, also have a vested interest in flattering museum directors by ignoring potential attribution controversies. Government agencies are more likely to dole out grants to people working on projects featuring well-known artists. And the thousands of visitors who pour through the doors of galleries like the AGO are clamouring to see works fashioned by those luminaries whose names they remember from their art history survey courses and their high school textbooks.
So, how should the AGO handle this? I think they should let the public know about the controversy. The curators could mount a photograph of the Spanish bronze next to the supposed Bernini and invite viewers to spot the differences. They might include a brief summary of its attribution history in the label next to their sculpture. There’s a compelling story here, and AGO visitors are surely mature enough to understand that it is not always possible to be certain about the provenance and authorship of a centuries-old artwork. We could all learn something important from this—but only if the museum curators and gallery directors are willing to engage with the sceptics.
|
Africa’s new online foreign exchange system will enable cross-border payments in local currencies
The high cost of making cross-border payments on the African continent has driven governments to seek options to settle trade and other transactions in local currencies. This has given birth to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, scheduled to go live in 2024 under Kenya’s leadership.
Development economist Christopher Adam, who has studied the exchange rate policies of African countries, answers key questions.
Why are African countries exposed in the international currency market?
Three main reasons. African economies are small and as such are highly dependent on trade with the rest of the world. Their exports are dominated by primary commodities including oil and gas, minerals and cash crop agriculture. On the import side, they purchase a whole range of goods, from essential commodities not produced at home such as food, drugs and medicines to capital goods and energy. A large proportion of these are sourced from China and other major economies of the global north. But because African countries are small relative to their trading partners they rarely have the power to determine the prices of imports and exports. They are “price takers” in world markets. With world prices set in the major reserve currencies of the world (the US dollar, euro, yen and renminbi), African countries are exposed to movements in these world prices.
“Intra-African” trade is still a relatively small proportion of the total trade of African countries.
Since African countries’ currencies mostly can’t be directly exchanged in international transactions, the dollar remains the most widely used currency in trade, even between African countries.
What’s required for the system to get off the ground?
The basic idea of the system is to be able to settle trade between African countries without having to use the US dollar.
There are two major challenges with that.
Intra-African trade accounts for less than 15% of Africa’s exports at present, though supporters of the African Continental Free Trade Area expect this to grow significantly over the coming decades. The African payment system therefore does not eliminate the role of the dollar, or other foreign currencies, in trade settlement entirely.
The second issue is that trade is not balanced between African countries. For example, Kenya exports goods of higher total value to Ethiopia than it imports from Ethiopia. If Ethiopia paid in its own currency, Kenya would end up with Ethiopian currency it didn’t need. Some form of settlement currency that is acceptable to all is required, most likely the US dollar.
What are the challenges and potential risks?
Since trade rarely occurs instantaneously, some institution in the trade financing chain carries the exchange rate risk. Because of the gap between placing an order for imports and receiving them to sell in the local economy, there is a risk the value of local currency will change relative to the currency in which the import is denominated.
In the “old” system, this risk is borne by the trader because everything is priced in dollars. The local currency value of the income from exports or the local currency cost of imports will change with movements between the local currency and the dollar, but the banks and those counterparts pricing in the dollar are protected.
Under the new system the same allocation of risk will remain in “external trade”. This currency risk is also present for intra-African trade.
An important question for the new African payment system is: who bears the exchange risk if one African currency depreciates relative to another? Should the importer carry the risk or the exporter? Can and should the African payment system bear this risk of exchange rate movements itself? Where both currencies are volatile, traders might prefer the relative stability of settlement through the US dollar.
The success of this system also depends on scale. The more trade settlement is routed through it, the easier it will be to settle in local currencies. Large currency imbalances will be less common. But until the system achieves this scale, the African payment system will need a strong balance sheet so traders and participants can have confidence that settlement will be swift and risk-free. It is unclear at the moment how this is to be achieved.
What is the best case scenario?
If the system can address the trade imbalance problem, provide clarity on risk management and reach scale, it could be very successful. But this is all going to be driven by underlying economic performance. Improved settlement will help but what is really driving this is the structure of trade. The more the economies of Africa can develop intra-African trade and the less dependent they are on extra-African trade, the less will be dollar dependence in trade. This growth in trade depends to some degree on trade settlement and trade financing but much more on production, consumption, trade policy and fiscal policy.
— Christopher Adam is professor of development economics, University of Oxford
- This article was first published by The Conversation
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
|
<urn:uuid:c2165ae6-b8f6-497f-b1a2-ba5893e1245b>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474686.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227184934-20240227214934-00226.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9348425269126892,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.59375,
"token_count": 1036,
"url": "https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2023-11-29-africas-new-online-foreign-exchange-system-will-enable-cross-border-payments-in-local-currencies/"
}
|
Africa’s new online foreign exchange system will enable cross-border payments in local currencies
The high cost of making cross-border payments on the African continent has driven governments to seek options to settle trade and other transactions in local currencies. This has given birth to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, scheduled to go live in 2024 under Kenya’s leadership.
Development economist Christopher Adam, who has studied the exchange rate policies of African countries, answers key questions.
Why are African countries exposed in the international currency market?
Three main reasons. African economies are small and as such are highly dependent on trade with the rest of the world.
|
Their exports are dominated by primary commodities including oil and gas, minerals and cash crop agriculture. On the import side, they purchase a whole range of goods, from essential commodities not produced at home such as food, drugs and medicines to capital goods and energy. A large proportion of these are sourced from China and other major economies of the global north. But because African countries are small relative to their trading partners they rarely have the power to determine the prices of imports and exports. They are “price takers” in world markets. With world prices set in the major reserve currencies of the world (the US dollar, euro, yen and renminbi), African countries are exposed to movements in these world prices.
“Intra-African” trade is still a relatively small proportion of the total trade of African countries.
Since African countries’ currencies mostly can’t be directly exchanged in international transactions, the dollar remains the most widely used currency in trade, even between African countries.
What’s required for the system to get off the ground?
The basic idea of the system is to be able to settle trade between African countries without having to use the US dollar.
There are two major challenges with that.
Intra-African trade accounts for less than 15% of Africa’s exports at present, though supporters of the African Continental Free Trade Area expect this to grow significantly over the coming decades. The African payment system therefore does not eliminate the role of the dollar, or other foreign currencies, in trade settlement entirely.
The second issue is that trade is not balanced between African countries. For example, Kenya exports goods of higher total value to Ethiopia than it imports from Ethiopia. If Ethiopia paid in its own currency, Kenya would end up with Ethiopian currency it didn’t need. Some form of settlement currency that is acceptable to all is required, most likely the US dollar.
What are the challenges and potential risks?
Since trade rarely occurs instantaneously, some institution in the trade financing chain carries the exchange rate risk. Because of the gap between placing an order for imports and receiving them to sell in the local economy, there is a risk the value of local currency will change relative to the currency in which the import is denominated.
In the “old” system, this risk is borne by the trader because everything is priced in dollars. The local currency value of the income from exports or the local currency cost of imports will change with movements between the local currency and the dollar, but the banks and those counterparts pricing in the dollar are protected.
Under the new system the same allocation of risk will remain in “external trade”. This currency risk is also present for intra-African trade.
An important question for the new African payment system is: who bears the exchange risk if one African currency depreciates relative to another? Should the importer carry the risk or the exporter? Can and should the African payment system bear this risk of exchange rate movements itself? Where both currencies are volatile, traders might prefer the relative stability of settlement through the US dollar.
The success of this system also depends on scale. The more trade settlement is routed through it, the easier it will be to settle in local currencies. Large currency imbalances will be less common. But until the system achieves this scale, the African payment system will need a strong balance sheet so traders and participants can have confidence that settlement will be swift and risk-free. It is unclear at the moment how this is to be achieved.
What is the best case scenario?
If the system can address the trade imbalance problem, provide clarity on risk management and reach scale, it could be very successful. But this is all going to be driven by underlying economic performance. Improved settlement will help but what is really driving this is the structure of trade. The more the economies of Africa can develop intra-African trade and the less dependent they are on extra-African trade, the less will be dollar dependence in trade. This growth in trade depends to some degree on trade settlement and trade financing but much more on production, consumption, trade policy and fiscal policy.
— Christopher Adam is professor of development economics, University of Oxford
- This article was first published by The Conversation
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
|
En Garde! At JCPS summer camp kids sharpen reading skills and learn to fence
JCPS has made a concerted effort to get more students into summer learning since the pandemic. This year, students in one camp get to read and learn swordplay (with child-friendly sabers).
In a classroom at Goldsmith Elementary School in east Louisville, two lines of students faced off, sabers in hand.
“En garde!” their fencing instructor Dawn Wilson shouted — the command for fencers to raise their weapons and step forward into a ready position.
These 15 students are in the “Literacy &” program in Jefferson County Public Schools, a program designed to focus on reading skills “&” a fun engaging new activity. For two weeks the class is learning to fence. They have an hour-and-a-half lesson each day from Wilson, a coach at the Louisville Fencing Center. Wilson competed on the U.S. National Team for the Women’s Veterans World Fencing Championship in 2017 and 2018.
Wilson circled the room and checked each student’s hand position to make sure it was correct, with the thumb on top.
You’re supposed to “squeeze it like a ketchup packet,” rising third-grader Albri explained from inside her fencing mask.
Thursday’s lesson included instruction on how to parry, or defend, an attack to the head and right flank or arm. Louisville Fencing Center lent the students protective masks, uniforms and practice sabers. Practice sabers are not sharp, and have circular stops on the point.
The students also worked on footwork, which was the hardest part for most of them.
“That’s not an advance, that’s a shuffle!” Wilson admonished the students after they practiced an attack.
“This ain’t the Harlem shuffle, this ain’t somebody’s granny shuffling because they can’t move — this is fencing!”
Wilson showed them again the precise dance-like steps.
The Literacy & program is free, and the district provides transportation and meals. The other half of instruction time is spent reading. In keeping with the fencing theme, the class is reading the book “The Proudest Blue,” by Ibtihaj Muhammad, an Olympic fencer and the first Muslim American woman to go to the Olympics to represent the U.S.
Their reading teacher Taylor Darst-Kleffner said she’s enjoying her time with the students, who come from schools across the district.
“It’s diverse, so you have students with all these different backgrounds coming,” she said. Many students were able to relate to Muhammad’s book, which is about a Muslim American girl who supports her older sister as she wears a hijab to school for the first time.
Darst-Kleffner said none of her students are Muslim, but they come from many different cultural backgrounds.
“I like it,” Albri said of the book. She said she learned “that if somebody says something mean about you, then don’t listen to them.”
After two weeks learning to fence, the students will swap out with another class learning to DJ.
In addition to Literacy &, JCPS is also running Backpack League, a larger program that’s less specialized. The day includes instruction in core subjects like reading and math, along with a hands-on activity that varies day to day.
There are also a number of camps designed for specific student populations, like teen girls, young men, immigrant students learning English, and students with disabilities.
Since 2019 district leaders have wanted to increase the number of students involved in summer learning programs. JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio said he believes summer learning gives extra instruction to students who may need more support. Leaders also believe it helps to make up for instructional time students missed out on during the year, either because they were absent or due to challenges accessing remote instruction during the early pandemic.
Pollio has a goal of eventually enrolling 10,000 JCPS students in summer learning — about a tenth of the 96,000 student district.
The district says they’ve “nearly” reached that goal this summer.
Support for this story was provided in part by the Jewish Heritage Fund.
|
<urn:uuid:74ffae7b-e216-48aa-8710-943f2a15bfe8>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474690.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228012542-20240228042542-00152.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9611067175865173,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.71875,
"token_count": 927,
"url": "https://www.lpm.org/news/2023-07-03/en-garde-at-jcps-summer-camp-kids-sharpen-reading-skills-and-learn-to-fence"
}
|
En Garde! At JCPS summer camp kids sharpen reading skills and learn to fence
JCPS has made a concerted effort to get more students into summer learning since the pandemic. This year, students in one camp get to read and learn swordplay (with child-friendly sabers).
In a classroom at Goldsmith Elementary School in east Louisville, two lines of students faced off, sabers in hand.
“En garde!” their fencing instructor Dawn Wilson shouted — the command for fencers to raise their weapons and step forward into a ready position.
These 15 students are in the “Literacy &” program in Jefferson
|
County Public Schools, a program designed to focus on reading skills “&” a fun engaging new activity. For two weeks the class is learning to fence. They have an hour-and-a-half lesson each day from Wilson, a coach at the Louisville Fencing Center. Wilson competed on the U.S. National Team for the Women’s Veterans World Fencing Championship in 2017 and 2018.
Wilson circled the room and checked each student’s hand position to make sure it was correct, with the thumb on top.
You’re supposed to “squeeze it like a ketchup packet,” rising third-grader Albri explained from inside her fencing mask.
Thursday’s lesson included instruction on how to parry, or defend, an attack to the head and right flank or arm. Louisville Fencing Center lent the students protective masks, uniforms and practice sabers. Practice sabers are not sharp, and have circular stops on the point.
The students also worked on footwork, which was the hardest part for most of them.
“That’s not an advance, that’s a shuffle!” Wilson admonished the students after they practiced an attack.
“This ain’t the Harlem shuffle, this ain’t somebody’s granny shuffling because they can’t move — this is fencing!”
Wilson showed them again the precise dance-like steps.
The Literacy & program is free, and the district provides transportation and meals. The other half of instruction time is spent reading. In keeping with the fencing theme, the class is reading the book “The Proudest Blue,” by Ibtihaj Muhammad, an Olympic fencer and the first Muslim American woman to go to the Olympics to represent the U.S.
Their reading teacher Taylor Darst-Kleffner said she’s enjoying her time with the students, who come from schools across the district.
“It’s diverse, so you have students with all these different backgrounds coming,” she said. Many students were able to relate to Muhammad’s book, which is about a Muslim American girl who supports her older sister as she wears a hijab to school for the first time.
Darst-Kleffner said none of her students are Muslim, but they come from many different cultural backgrounds.
“I like it,” Albri said of the book. She said she learned “that if somebody says something mean about you, then don’t listen to them.”
After two weeks learning to fence, the students will swap out with another class learning to DJ.
In addition to Literacy &, JCPS is also running Backpack League, a larger program that’s less specialized. The day includes instruction in core subjects like reading and math, along with a hands-on activity that varies day to day.
There are also a number of camps designed for specific student populations, like teen girls, young men, immigrant students learning English, and students with disabilities.
Since 2019 district leaders have wanted to increase the number of students involved in summer learning programs. JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio said he believes summer learning gives extra instruction to students who may need more support. Leaders also believe it helps to make up for instructional time students missed out on during the year, either because they were absent or due to challenges accessing remote instruction during the early pandemic.
Pollio has a goal of eventually enrolling 10,000 JCPS students in summer learning — about a tenth of the 96,000 student district.
The district says they’ve “nearly” reached that goal this summer.
Support for this story was provided in part by the Jewish Heritage Fund.
|
Of fangs and feces: Unearthing a venomous mystery in a prehistoric latrine
The rock shelters of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are an archeological treasure trove. Here, where the Pecos and Devils rivers join the Rio Grande, shallow caves preserved what would otherwise have been lost to time and the elements. Four-thousand-year-old murals, immense and colorful. Tools, textiles, the bones of butchered game. Then, there are archeological treasures that, quite literally, were another man's waste.
Hundreds of coprolites — fossilized human poops — have been recovered from these West Texas canyonlands. In 2018, three Texas A&M PhD students analyzed one such coprolite, more than 1,500 years old. They discovered a “unique gastrological event” — what the researchers identified as “the potential ritual consumption of a viperous snake.”
Dr. Crystal Dozier, now of Wichita State University, was one of three students, along with Elanor Sonderman and Morgan Smith, who undertook the coprolite analysis.
“Imagine this: It's 1969, and you're like, 'Who's going to want all this crap?'” Dozier said. “Which is what it is. It's a totally innocuous cow patty when it's dry. But once you start the rehydration process, it gets back all the properties of being fresh.”
The coprolite was from a site known as Conejo Shelter, near the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande. The construction of Amistad Reservoir here, in the late 60s, inundated many rock shelters, and there was a flurry of excavation before the sites were lost. At Conejo, archeologist Robert Alexander unearthed an extensive prehistoric latrine. There were few tools for coprolite analysis at the time, but he trusted future archeologists to make use of what he'd found.
And he was right — coprolites can now yield vivid insights into prehistoric diets.
The students rehydrated the coprolite for two weeks – during which time it recovered the olfactory qualities of a fresh sample. Then they filtered and analyzed it.
Dozier looked for microscopic pollen grains.
“I was surprised and elated that pollen preservation was beautiful,” she said. “We had really excellent data. Even just glancing at it you could see it was dominated by one particular pollen type.”
The pollen was from a yucca flower — the coprolite's “author” had dined on these crunchy blossoms. Other plants were on the menu. The ancient canyonlands resident had eaten desert succulents — lechuguilla, sotol and prickly pear — which had likely been slow-roasted in earth ovens.
There was protein, too. The researchers found the bones and hair of a rodent — perhaps a pocket gopher. The animal had apparently been eaten whole, with little or no preparation.
The findings aligned with previous studies.
“You know, a ton of these coprolites had been analyzed before,” Dozier said, “so we had an idea of what to expect. And most of what we found in that coprolite was expected, until we got to the one thing that was not.”
The team found the scales first, and then the vertebrae — clearly those of a reptile. Then came the surprise: a fang, with the unmistakable venom channel. Its dimensions narrowed the viperous candidates — these were the remains of a rattlesnake, almost certainly a western diamondback.
Southwestern hunter-gatherers are known to have eaten rattlers — after removing their heads, and skinning and roasting them. But eating an entire rattler, including its venomous fangs, is a high-risk proposition. And the ancient West Texan who did it certainly knew the risks.
Dozier and her colleagues concluded they were seeing evidence of a ceremonial, rather than a purely culinary, activity.
And there's cause for that speculation. Snakes figure in rock art here, suggesting their cosmological significance. And across arid North America, Indigenous traditions link snakes with springs and the watery underworld, and with water itself. Hopi Snake ceremonies, the researchers note, culminate with priests holding rattlers in their mouths, to petition for rain and a successful harvest. And images of Aztec ceremonies to the rain god Tlaloc include human figures – with what appear to be rattlesnakes in their mouths.
It's impossible to know the full story behind the “snakey” coprolite, Dozier said. But it shows that haunting clues about the past can come from unlikely sources.
“I think as an archeologist you have to be okay with a little bit of the unknown,” she said. “But I can't imagine it not being a powerful statement, and somehow engaging with the supernatural. What the motive was, I'm not quite sure. But it was a brave move, no matter what way you look at it.”
Copyright 2023 Marfa Public Radio. To see more, visit Marfa Public Radio.
|
<urn:uuid:c9f122d9-9623-479f-b5dc-fb43ebe36e70>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500357.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20230206181343-20230206211343-00610.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9702311158180237,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.21875,
"token_count": 1114,
"url": "https://www.tpr.org/history/2023-01-19/of-fangs-and-feces-unearthing-a-venomous-mystery-in-a-prehistoric-latrine"
}
|
Of fangs and feces: Unearthing a venomous mystery in a prehistoric latrine
The rock shelters of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands are an archeological treasure trove. Here, where the Pecos and Devils rivers join the Rio Grande, shallow caves preserved what would otherwise have been lost to time and the elements. Four-thousand-year-old murals, immense and colorful. Tools, textiles, the bones of butchered game. Then, there are archeological treasures that, quite literally, were another man's waste.
Hundreds of coprolites — fossilized human poops — have
|
been recovered from these West Texas canyonlands. In 2018, three Texas A&M PhD students analyzed one such coprolite, more than 1,500 years old. They discovered a “unique gastrological event” — what the researchers identified as “the potential ritual consumption of a viperous snake.”
Dr. Crystal Dozier, now of Wichita State University, was one of three students, along with Elanor Sonderman and Morgan Smith, who undertook the coprolite analysis.
“Imagine this: It's 1969, and you're like, 'Who's going to want all this crap?'” Dozier said. “Which is what it is. It's a totally innocuous cow patty when it's dry. But once you start the rehydration process, it gets back all the properties of being fresh.”
The coprolite was from a site known as Conejo Shelter, near the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande. The construction of Amistad Reservoir here, in the late 60s, inundated many rock shelters, and there was a flurry of excavation before the sites were lost. At Conejo, archeologist Robert Alexander unearthed an extensive prehistoric latrine. There were few tools for coprolite analysis at the time, but he trusted future archeologists to make use of what he'd found.
And he was right — coprolites can now yield vivid insights into prehistoric diets.
The students rehydrated the coprolite for two weeks – during which time it recovered the olfactory qualities of a fresh sample. Then they filtered and analyzed it.
Dozier looked for microscopic pollen grains.
“I was surprised and elated that pollen preservation was beautiful,” she said. “We had really excellent data. Even just glancing at it you could see it was dominated by one particular pollen type.”
The pollen was from a yucca flower — the coprolite's “author” had dined on these crunchy blossoms. Other plants were on the menu. The ancient canyonlands resident had eaten desert succulents — lechuguilla, sotol and prickly pear — which had likely been slow-roasted in earth ovens.
There was protein, too. The researchers found the bones and hair of a rodent — perhaps a pocket gopher. The animal had apparently been eaten whole, with little or no preparation.
The findings aligned with previous studies.
“You know, a ton of these coprolites had been analyzed before,” Dozier said, “so we had an idea of what to expect. And most of what we found in that coprolite was expected, until we got to the one thing that was not.”
The team found the scales first, and then the vertebrae — clearly those of a reptile. Then came the surprise: a fang, with the unmistakable venom channel. Its dimensions narrowed the viperous candidates — these were the remains of a rattlesnake, almost certainly a western diamondback.
Southwestern hunter-gatherers are known to have eaten rattlers — after removing their heads, and skinning and roasting them. But eating an entire rattler, including its venomous fangs, is a high-risk proposition. And the ancient West Texan who did it certainly knew the risks.
Dozier and her colleagues concluded they were seeing evidence of a ceremonial, rather than a purely culinary, activity.
And there's cause for that speculation. Snakes figure in rock art here, suggesting their cosmological significance. And across arid North America, Indigenous traditions link snakes with springs and the watery underworld, and with water itself. Hopi Snake ceremonies, the researchers note, culminate with priests holding rattlers in their mouths, to petition for rain and a successful harvest. And images of Aztec ceremonies to the rain god Tlaloc include human figures – with what appear to be rattlesnakes in their mouths.
It's impossible to know the full story behind the “snakey” coprolite, Dozier said. But it shows that haunting clues about the past can come from unlikely sources.
“I think as an archeologist you have to be okay with a little bit of the unknown,” she said. “But I can't imagine it not being a powerful statement, and somehow engaging with the supernatural. What the motive was, I'm not quite sure. But it was a brave move, no matter what way you look at it.”
Copyright 2023 Marfa Public Radio. To see more, visit Marfa Public Radio.
|
Advocates and state lawmakers call for an end harmful restraining of children
Texas legislators filed bipartisan bills to prohibit physical, chemical and mechanical restraints of children under the age of 10 by school security personnel.
If passed, House Bill 459 — also known as the “No Kids in Cuffs” bill — would prevent restraints on students unless they present a harm to themselves or others. There are companion bills that address other forms of harmful restraint practices.
Advocates and legislators alike say these bills are primarily for students with disabilities. The “No Kids in Cuffs” bill was created in part due to the death of two students who were restrained. Both children were special education students, and stated that the restraints “hurt.”
HB 459 was originally filed during Texas’ 87th legislative session last year. The bill passed the House but not the Senate due to calendar deadlines.
If this legislation is passed, what does it mean for the students most likely to be disciplined in this way? What other best practices are advocates calling for? How often are students with disabilities restrained? What are the long-term effects of the use of restraints on children?
- State Rep. Lacey Hull R-Houston, spokesperson for the bipartisan bill "No Kids in Cuffs", or House Bill 459
- Jolene Sanders-Foster, advocacy director of Coalition of Texans with Disabilities
"The Source" is a live call-in program airing Mondays through Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. Leave a message before the program at (210) 615-8982. During the live show, call833-877-8255, email <email-pii> or tweet@TPRSource.
*This interview was recorded on Monday, February 6.
|
<urn:uuid:79eff125-29e4-4e69-89ee-88219fbd670d>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296948871.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20230328201715-20230328231715-00098.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9621930718421936,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.8125,
"token_count": 374,
"url": "https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2023-02-05/end-harmful-restraining-of-children"
}
|
Advocates and state lawmakers call for an end harmful restraining of children
Texas legislators filed bipartisan bills to prohibit physical, chemical and mechanical restraints of children under the age of 10 by school security personnel.
If passed, House Bill 459 — also known as the “No Kids in Cuffs” bill — would prevent restraints on students unless they present a harm to themselves or others. There are companion bills that address other forms of harmful restraint practices.
Advocates and legislators alike say these bills are primarily for students with disabilities. The “No Kids in Cuffs” bill was
|
created in part due to the death of two students who were restrained. Both children were special education students, and stated that the restraints “hurt.”
HB 459 was originally filed during Texas’ 87th legislative session last year. The bill passed the House but not the Senate due to calendar deadlines.
If this legislation is passed, what does it mean for the students most likely to be disciplined in this way? What other best practices are advocates calling for? How often are students with disabilities restrained? What are the long-term effects of the use of restraints on children?
- State Rep. Lacey Hull R-Houston, spokesperson for the bipartisan bill "No Kids in Cuffs", or House Bill 459
- Jolene Sanders-Foster, advocacy director of Coalition of Texans with Disabilities
"The Source" is a live call-in program airing Mondays through Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. Leave a message before the program at (210) 615-8982. During the live show, call833-877-8255, email <email-pii> or tweet@TPRSource.
*This interview was recorded on Monday, February 6.
|
Women with irregular menstrual cycles or cycle lengths may face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, a new study suggests.
Cycles that are shorter than normal – less than 21 days – and longer-than-normal cycles – at more than 35 days – were associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeats, according to the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association. A menstrual cycle was measured as the number of days between each menstrual period.
Specifically, “long menstrual cycle length was associated with increased risks of atrial fibrillation but not myocardial infarction, heart failure, and stroke,” the researchers wrote, and shorter cycles were associated with a greater risk of coronary heart disease and myocardial infarction or heart attack.
Some questions remain.
While “women with menstrual cycle dysfunction may experience adverse cardiovascular health consequences,” the exact nature of that relationship and what’s driving it remains unknown, said senior study author Dr. Huijie Zhang, chief physician and professor at Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University in China, in an email.
Still, the study findings indicate that “it is time” to raise awareness around the importance of monitoring menstrual cycle characteristics throughout a person’s reproductive life, Zhang said.
Overall, about 14% to 25% of women have irregular menstrual cycles worldwide, according to the US National Institutes of Health.
The researchers, based in China, analyzed health data on 58,056 women in the United Kingdom. The women, ages 40 to 69, reported in questionnaires the length and regularity of their menstrual cycles over time and other medical information over the course of about 12 years.
Among the women, 39,582 reported having regular menstrual cycles, and 18,474 reported either irregular cycles or no periods.
The researchers found that 2.5% of the women with regular cycles developed cardiovascular disease, compared with 3.4% of those with irregular cycles.
Irregular menstrual cycles were associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease despite other risk factors, such as “age, race and ethnicity, BMI, smoking status, drinking status, physical activity, history of oral contraceptive use,” the researchers wrote.
The data also showed that 0.56% of those with regular cycles developed atrial fibrillation, compared with 0.92% of those with irregular cycles.
And the researchers found that about 1.3% of those with regular cycles developed coronary heart disease, compared with 1.7% of those with irregular cycles. About 0.29% had heart attacks, compared with 0.45% of those with irregular cycles.
‘Another vital sign’
The findings came as no surprise to Dr. Stephanie Faubion, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health and medical director of the North American Menopause Society.
“There’s accumulating evidence that irregular menstrual cycles are not healthy, and in fact, they could be considered another vital sign for women – and irregular menses should be triggering people to think about cardiovascular risk in women,” said Faubion, who was not involved in the new study.
Guidance issued in 2015 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that medical practitioners should treat the menstrual cycle in adolescents as an additional vital sign. Like temperature and pulse, it should be used to assess overall health, and doctors should try to identify abnormal menstrual patterns in adolescence.
Faubion said that studies have found an association between irregular menstrual cycles and markers for heart disease risk such as insulin resistance, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and chronic inflammation. Yet what’s behind these associations remain unclear.
“The exact mechanism behind it, we don’t know,” Faubion said, but menstrual cycles still should be considered a “marker” of overall health.
“And if you’re not menstruating on a regular basis, your health care professional should be looking into why you’re not menstruating on a regular basis,” she said. “Part of this is educating health care professionals that menstrual cycles are another vital sign for women.”
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
More research is needed to better understand this association between cardiovascular health and the length and regularity of a menstrual cycle, said cardiologist Dr. Nieca Goldberg, medical director of Atria New York City and clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, who was not involved in the new study.
She said in an email Wednesday that some studies have found an association between shorter menstrual cycles and insulin resistance and lipid abnormalities – but the reasons are elusive.
“Short cycles are associated with lower estrogen levels that affect lipid levels and insulin resistance. Atrial fibrillation risk may relate to hormonal changes and their influence on electrocardiograms,” Goldberg wrote. “It is clear that continued research in the area of menstrual cycle and cardiovascular risk is important for women and proves our work is not done in assessing risk factors for cardiovascular disease in women.”
CNN’s Madeline Holcombe and Katie Hunt contributed to this report.
|
<urn:uuid:9bad4370-c539-4643-98c4-db94713ee7c3>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506320.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20230922002008-20230922032008-00780.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9452857971191406,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.140625,
"token_count": 1110,
"url": "https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/health/irregular-periods-cardiovascular-disease/index.html"
}
|
Women with irregular menstrual cycles or cycle lengths may face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, a new study suggests.
Cycles that are shorter than normal – less than 21 days – and longer-than-normal cycles – at more than 35 days – were associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeats, according to the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association. A menstrual cycle was measured as the number of days between each menstrual period.
Specifically, “long menstrual cycle length was associated with increased risks of atrial fibrillation but not myocardial infarction, heart failure, and stroke,”
|
the researchers wrote, and shorter cycles were associated with a greater risk of coronary heart disease and myocardial infarction or heart attack.
Some questions remain.
While “women with menstrual cycle dysfunction may experience adverse cardiovascular health consequences,” the exact nature of that relationship and what’s driving it remains unknown, said senior study author Dr. Huijie Zhang, chief physician and professor at Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University in China, in an email.
Still, the study findings indicate that “it is time” to raise awareness around the importance of monitoring menstrual cycle characteristics throughout a person’s reproductive life, Zhang said.
Overall, about 14% to 25% of women have irregular menstrual cycles worldwide, according to the US National Institutes of Health.
The researchers, based in China, analyzed health data on 58,056 women in the United Kingdom. The women, ages 40 to 69, reported in questionnaires the length and regularity of their menstrual cycles over time and other medical information over the course of about 12 years.
Among the women, 39,582 reported having regular menstrual cycles, and 18,474 reported either irregular cycles or no periods.
The researchers found that 2.5% of the women with regular cycles developed cardiovascular disease, compared with 3.4% of those with irregular cycles.
Irregular menstrual cycles were associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease despite other risk factors, such as “age, race and ethnicity, BMI, smoking status, drinking status, physical activity, history of oral contraceptive use,” the researchers wrote.
The data also showed that 0.56% of those with regular cycles developed atrial fibrillation, compared with 0.92% of those with irregular cycles.
And the researchers found that about 1.3% of those with regular cycles developed coronary heart disease, compared with 1.7% of those with irregular cycles. About 0.29% had heart attacks, compared with 0.45% of those with irregular cycles.
‘Another vital sign’
The findings came as no surprise to Dr. Stephanie Faubion, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health and medical director of the North American Menopause Society.
“There’s accumulating evidence that irregular menstrual cycles are not healthy, and in fact, they could be considered another vital sign for women – and irregular menses should be triggering people to think about cardiovascular risk in women,” said Faubion, who was not involved in the new study.
Guidance issued in 2015 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that medical practitioners should treat the menstrual cycle in adolescents as an additional vital sign. Like temperature and pulse, it should be used to assess overall health, and doctors should try to identify abnormal menstrual patterns in adolescence.
Faubion said that studies have found an association between irregular menstrual cycles and markers for heart disease risk such as insulin resistance, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and chronic inflammation. Yet what’s behind these associations remain unclear.
“The exact mechanism behind it, we don’t know,” Faubion said, but menstrual cycles still should be considered a “marker” of overall health.
“And if you’re not menstruating on a regular basis, your health care professional should be looking into why you’re not menstruating on a regular basis,” she said. “Part of this is educating health care professionals that menstrual cycles are another vital sign for women.”
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
More research is needed to better understand this association between cardiovascular health and the length and regularity of a menstrual cycle, said cardiologist Dr. Nieca Goldberg, medical director of Atria New York City and clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, who was not involved in the new study.
She said in an email Wednesday that some studies have found an association between shorter menstrual cycles and insulin resistance and lipid abnormalities – but the reasons are elusive.
“Short cycles are associated with lower estrogen levels that affect lipid levels and insulin resistance. Atrial fibrillation risk may relate to hormonal changes and their influence on electrocardiograms,” Goldberg wrote. “It is clear that continued research in the area of menstrual cycle and cardiovascular risk is important for women and proves our work is not done in assessing risk factors for cardiovascular disease in women.”
CNN’s Madeline Holcombe and Katie Hunt contributed to this report.
|
Cane toads, mosquito fish, mongoose — these are some of the images Australians may (or not) conjure at the mention of biocontrol.
To be fair, there have been some absolute cock-ups. And almost without exception, proper scientific procedure wasn't followed in their making.
Cane toads, for example, were released by an entomologist working for a sugar cane industry research body, and against the advice of other entomologists.
Next to no research was done on the cane toad's host specificity — whether the toad would stick to its intended prey, or go chasing greener pastures.
In fact, nobody actually tested whether the cane toad ate the cane beetle it was supposed to eradicate.
But what about when biocontrol is done right? We tend not to hear about the times it has gone well. And there are plenty of times where it's gone really well.
When it comes to weeds alone, Australia has completed 58 control programs, as of 2017.
Here are a few examples that demonstrate the power of biocontrols that are done right, and some of the challenges researchers face in finding suitable candidates.
Skeleton weed and the rust fungus
First recorded in Australia in 1917, skeleton weed was considered Australia's worst plant pest by the 1950s.
Although it looks fairly innocuous, it wrought economic damage on a huge scale, particularly in Australia's eastern wheatbelts.
"It's got these really wiry flower structures and ... the harvesting machine gets stuck on them," said Mariana Campos, CSIRO's team leader of ecosystem change and ecology.
"[The plant] contains latex as well, so it all gets gummy. Not only does it stop the harvester from actually working, it also contaminates the grain."
Wheat crop yields were cut by up to 80 per cent, farmland was abandoned, and estimated losses in the 1960s were around $30 million a year — more than $200 million in today's value.
In 1966, researchers from CSIRO began investigating possible pathogens in the skeleton weed's native range around the Mediterranean.
Scouring Mediterranean Europe east to Iran, they came up with an initial list of nine possibilities.
Then they spent several years testing for host specificity, which CSIRO's team leader in plant diagnostics Gavin Hunter said is the "core tenet" of biocontrol today.
"That is the bedrock upon which we operate as control researchers," Dr Hunter said.
"In terms of skeleton weed, I think they tested a total of [around] 57 non-target species against the candidate biocontrol agents to prove they were [species] specific."
With a laboratory eventually set up in Montpellier, France, they narrowed their list down to four possibilities. The first of those was released on the Australian east coast in 1971, followed by three more.
Three of the four became established and one in particular, a rust fungus called Puccinia chondrillina, decimated the weed. The two others, a mite and gall midge, worked to further weaken the plant.
In all, CSIRO estimates the program saved the Australian economy more than $1.4 billion, with a cost-to-benefit ratio of 112-to-one.
In Australia, there are three "biotypes" of skeleton weed — they're all the same species, but one has narrow leaves, another intermediate, and the third broad leaves.
The biocontrols were so specific that they only had a significant effect on the worst of the three, the narrow form.
All three types of skeleton weed still persist in Australia's east, albeit in much lower amounts.
But the west took a different approach, opting to suppress the weed through physical and chemical means rather than going all out on a biological control.
That program is ongoing in Western Australia, via an annual levy paid by grain producers. The WA Department of Primary Industries estimates that program costs around $3.4 million per year, at a cost-benefit ratio of one-to-three over 30 years.
Prickly pear and cactoblastis
Prickly pear was first introduced to Australia by Governor Phillip in 1788, for the purpose of setting up a cochineal dye industry.
At the time, red dye was valuable and was used, among other things, to create the distinctive red coats worn by the New South Wales Corps or Rum Corps.
The dye was extracted from a cochineal scale insect — Dactylopius coccus— which feeds on the spiky leaves of the cactus.
But the cochineal insect didn't take well to Australian conditions, and the dye industry floundered.
Not so the prickly pear, which was prized for its hardiness, bright flowers and edible fruit.
By 1840 it had found its way to Chinchilla in Queensland, and by 1920 it had taken over around 60 million acres of farmland, mostly in Queensland and New South Wales.
Arsenic was used to try to control the weed in such quantities that a mine was opened in Queensland to meet increased demand for the poison.
But the cactus continued advancing, swallowing more than 2 million acres a year at its peak.
Farms were abandoned, cash was offered for a solution (but never collected), and everything from flamethrowers to tanks and enlisting returned soldiers for a military assault was floated.
The eventual solution was nowhere near as dramatic but far more devastating — the combination of a moth and some scale insects.
Following the release of the cactus-eating Cactoblastis moth larvae in 1926, "within 10 years, the once dense-fields of common prickly pear lay rotting or had vanished completely", according to the CSIRO.
By 1932, 7 million hectares of land was reopened to farming.
Today, most of the credit goes to the Cactoblastis moth, but biocontrol researcher Michael Furlong of the University of Queensland says it was a team effort.
"The important thing is it wasn't just Cactoblastis ... there were cochineal insects — small-scale insects — introduced as well, and if it hadn't been for them, the Cactoblastis likely wouldn't have worked," Professor Furlong said.
"The cochineal insect was extremely important, and is still very prevalent in areas around western Queensland today."
Myxo, calici and rascally rabbits
Myxomatosis and calicivirus are probably the best known biocontrols to have been used in Australia.
But there was a long time before these viruses came onto the scene. Until then, building fences and "rabbit drives" were the only tools available.
Rabbit drives involved herding often thousands of rabbits at a time into enclosures, before clubbing them to death en masse.
Fence-building was a huge operation, and had some limited success, but weaknesses were invariably found, and rabbits made their way across.
Desperate times led to the attempted introduction (not by CSIRO) of mongoose as a biocontrol during the 1880s.
Around 1,000 mongoose were released in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, but thankfully all failed to take hold.
Mongoose today are considered among the world's most destructive invasive pests.
By 1887, New South Wales was offering a 25,000 pound reward for anyone who could come up with a novel idea to exterminate the pests.
In the 1890s, a virus that was killing rabbits in a lab in Uruguay was discovered.
But there wasn't much appetite to take a risk on releasing a virus here, and the idea was shelved.
It wasn't until 1950 that public sentiment, combined with research and political support, saw the introduction of myxomatosis.
Myxomatosis is a disease caused by the myxoma poxvirus, and spread by mosquitoes.
CSIRO vertebrate management systems group lead Tanja Strive said wildlife biologists don't really like to put a number on how many rabbits there were, because it's always fluctuated, but that best estimates suggest about half a billion in Australia at their peak.
"They talk about the 'grey blanket' before myxomatosis," Dr Strive said.
"[Myxomatosis] was slow to get going initially, but then there was good rainfall and suddenly there was an enormous number of mosquitoes.
"Then it really took off and had a massive knockdown of the rabbit population — over 90 per cent in some areas."
But the honeymoon was short-lived.
The longer rabbits lived, the longer they could pass on the virus, so evolutionary pressure was favouring more resistant rabbits and less virulent myxomatosis.
"Quickly, in two or three years, the effectiveness was starting to wane.
"By the mid-1980s, the numbers were not as high as pre-myxo, but pretty high again."
In the meantime, CSIRO had been searching for alternatives, and an emerging virus had appeared in rabbits in China.
Calicivirus, also known as rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, attacks the internal organs of the animal and is usually fatal within 30 hours.
Following four years of laboratory testing, in the mid-1990s, CSIRO set up a quarantine research station on Wardang Island in South Australia, when the virus they were testing — calicivirus — escaped on feeding flies.
"Once that got off the island and into the almost completely naive Australian [rabbit] population, again it basically wiped out over 90 per cent of rabbits in some cases," Dr Strive said.
"So it was a raging success again, but over time, much slower than myxo, we've seen some resistance developing."
Which is inevitable in disease biocontrol.
Another new strain of calicivirus made its own way here around 2014, and another was deliberately released in 2017, both of which knocked down the population.
As well as saving the Australian economy billions, the rabbit biocontrol program has also had a knock-on effect on cat numbers, which has enabled some small native mammal species to recover.
CSIRO is currently researching new viruses in rabbits both here and overseas, and looking at ways to improve the impact of calicivirus and myxomatosis.
"We're pursuing a number of avenues," Dr Strive said.
"Ideally we'll have a new tool, or virus, or strategy ready every 10 to 15 years because what we don't want is for numbers to get away again."
'Palm killers' and Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus
The coconut rhinoceros beetle or "palm killer" is an example of how biocontrol can be a moveable feast.
The coconut rhinoceros beetle was first detected in Samoa just over 100 years ago, far outside its native south-east Asian range, according to Professor Furlong.
"It's a large beetle that attacks coconut palms.
"It first got into the Pacific in 1909, devastating coconuts there, particularly in Samoa."
In the early 1960s, a virus was found in rhinoceros beetles in Malaysia and was introduced to Samoa with very promising early results.
"It's not immediately lethal [but] ... it reduces their overall fitness — how much females can move and fly, and it reduces the number of eggs they lay, and that leads to overall population suppression."
The Oryctes virus is also transmitted easily between beetles and spreads rapidly.
For years the virus played an integral role in suppressing beetle numbers across the Pacific.
But in the mid-2000s, the virus's efficacy seemed to be waning.
Attempts to infect beetles on Guam failed, leading to a hypothesis that the Guam beetles were immune, and the coconut rhinoceros beetle (Guam) type was named.
Similar beetles designated as the Guam type showed up in Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and Palau, the Solomon Islands in 2015, and Vanuatu in 2019.
In response, countries like the Solomon Islands have declared local states of emergency and launched offensives to try to stymie the beetle's spread.
A worst-case scenario of 50 per cent palm losses, would devastate the local oil palm, copra and coconut oil industries, which provide 10 to 15 per cent or more GDP to some Pacific countries.
The beetle also attacks bananas, pineapple and other crops, leading to warnings for Australia to do more to help control the beetle for its own, and its neighbours' benefit.
But Kayvan Etebari, a molecular biologist at the University of Queensland, doesn't believe the Guam type is immune, or that the Guam type has spread across the Pacific.
"There is no scientific evidence to prove that particular [Guam] population is resistant," Dr Etebari said.
He is working to understand why the virus is no longer suppressing beetle numbers, and said he thinks the virus-insect relationship has changed.
"When we screen the beetles, most of them have the virus infection. So if this is the case the first question is, 'Why is the virus not killing the insect?'
"That's why I believe the virus and insect has changed to a more 'friendly' relationship.
"[But] that can change again. It's not going to stay the same for another 10 years."
In the meantime, he's looking for another virus: "But finding a novel virus is not an easy job."
He's also working with the Oryctes virus to see if it might be able to do the job the cane toad failed to do.
"We want to use the same virus to see if it can control the cane grub, which doesn't have any biological control agent at the moment."
|
<urn:uuid:e6ead9a0-f16b-49dc-b829-fd201907cc49>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511021.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20231002200740-20231002230740-00092.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9748188257217407,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.09375,
"token_count": 2921,
"url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-04-19/australia-biological-control-success-environment-pests/102189712"
}
|
Cane toads, mosquito fish, mongoose — these are some of the images Australians may (or not) conjure at the mention of biocontrol.
To be fair, there have been some absolute cock-ups. And almost without exception, proper scientific procedure wasn't followed in their making.
Cane toads, for example, were released by an entomologist working for a sugar cane industry research body, and against the advice of other entomologists.
Next to no research was done on the cane toad's host specificity — whether the toad would stick to its intended prey, or go chasing greener pastures.
|
In fact, nobody actually tested whether the cane toad ate the cane beetle it was supposed to eradicate.
But what about when biocontrol is done right? We tend not to hear about the times it has gone well. And there are plenty of times where it's gone really well.
When it comes to weeds alone, Australia has completed 58 control programs, as of 2017.
Here are a few examples that demonstrate the power of biocontrols that are done right, and some of the challenges researchers face in finding suitable candidates.
Skeleton weed and the rust fungus
First recorded in Australia in 1917, skeleton weed was considered Australia's worst plant pest by the 1950s.
Although it looks fairly innocuous, it wrought economic damage on a huge scale, particularly in Australia's eastern wheatbelts.
"It's got these really wiry flower structures and ... the harvesting machine gets stuck on them," said Mariana Campos, CSIRO's team leader of ecosystem change and ecology.
"[The plant] contains latex as well, so it all gets gummy. Not only does it stop the harvester from actually working, it also contaminates the grain."
Wheat crop yields were cut by up to 80 per cent, farmland was abandoned, and estimated losses in the 1960s were around $30 million a year — more than $200 million in today's value.
In 1966, researchers from CSIRO began investigating possible pathogens in the skeleton weed's native range around the Mediterranean.
Scouring Mediterranean Europe east to Iran, they came up with an initial list of nine possibilities.
Then they spent several years testing for host specificity, which CSIRO's team leader in plant diagnostics Gavin Hunter said is the "core tenet" of biocontrol today.
"That is the bedrock upon which we operate as control researchers," Dr Hunter said.
"In terms of skeleton weed, I think they tested a total of [around] 57 non-target species against the candidate biocontrol agents to prove they were [species] specific."
With a laboratory eventually set up in Montpellier, France, they narrowed their list down to four possibilities. The first of those was released on the Australian east coast in 1971, followed by three more.
Three of the four became established and one in particular, a rust fungus called Puccinia chondrillina, decimated the weed. The two others, a mite and gall midge, worked to further weaken the plant.
In all, CSIRO estimates the program saved the Australian economy more than $1.4 billion, with a cost-to-benefit ratio of 112-to-one.
In Australia, there are three "biotypes" of skeleton weed — they're all the same species, but one has narrow leaves, another intermediate, and the third broad leaves.
The biocontrols were so specific that they only had a significant effect on the worst of the three, the narrow form.
All three types of skeleton weed still persist in Australia's east, albeit in much lower amounts.
But the west took a different approach, opting to suppress the weed through physical and chemical means rather than going all out on a biological control.
That program is ongoing in Western Australia, via an annual levy paid by grain producers. The WA Department of Primary Industries estimates that program costs around $3.4 million per year, at a cost-benefit ratio of one-to-three over 30 years.
Prickly pear and cactoblastis
Prickly pear was first introduced to Australia by Governor Phillip in 1788, for the purpose of setting up a cochineal dye industry.
At the time, red dye was valuable and was used, among other things, to create the distinctive red coats worn by the New South Wales Corps or Rum Corps.
The dye was extracted from a cochineal scale insect — Dactylopius coccus— which feeds on the spiky leaves of the cactus.
But the cochineal insect didn't take well to Australian conditions, and the dye industry floundered.
Not so the prickly pear, which was prized for its hardiness, bright flowers and edible fruit.
By 1840 it had found its way to Chinchilla in Queensland, and by 1920 it had taken over around 60 million acres of farmland, mostly in Queensland and New South Wales.
Arsenic was used to try to control the weed in such quantities that a mine was opened in Queensland to meet increased demand for the poison.
But the cactus continued advancing, swallowing more than 2 million acres a year at its peak.
Farms were abandoned, cash was offered for a solution (but never collected), and everything from flamethrowers to tanks and enlisting returned soldiers for a military assault was floated.
The eventual solution was nowhere near as dramatic but far more devastating — the combination of a moth and some scale insects.
Following the release of the cactus-eating Cactoblastis moth larvae in 1926, "within 10 years, the once dense-fields of common prickly pear lay rotting or had vanished completely", according to the CSIRO.
By 1932, 7 million hectares of land was reopened to farming.
Today, most of the credit goes to the Cactoblastis moth, but biocontrol researcher Michael Furlong of the University of Queensland says it was a team effort.
"The important thing is it wasn't just Cactoblastis ... there were cochineal insects — small-scale insects — introduced as well, and if it hadn't been for them, the Cactoblastis likely wouldn't have worked," Professor Furlong said.
"The cochineal insect was extremely important, and is still very prevalent in areas around western Queensland today."
Myxo, calici and rascally rabbits
Myxomatosis and calicivirus are probably the best known biocontrols to have been used in Australia.
But there was a long time before these viruses came onto the scene. Until then, building fences and "rabbit drives" were the only tools available.
Rabbit drives involved herding often thousands of rabbits at a time into enclosures, before clubbing them to death en masse.
Fence-building was a huge operation, and had some limited success, but weaknesses were invariably found, and rabbits made their way across.
Desperate times led to the attempted introduction (not by CSIRO) of mongoose as a biocontrol during the 1880s.
Around 1,000 mongoose were released in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, but thankfully all failed to take hold.
Mongoose today are considered among the world's most destructive invasive pests.
By 1887, New South Wales was offering a 25,000 pound reward for anyone who could come up with a novel idea to exterminate the pests.
In the 1890s, a virus that was killing rabbits in a lab in Uruguay was discovered.
But there wasn't much appetite to take a risk on releasing a virus here, and the idea was shelved.
It wasn't until 1950 that public sentiment, combined with research and political support, saw the introduction of myxomatosis.
Myxomatosis is a disease caused by the myxoma poxvirus, and spread by mosquitoes.
CSIRO vertebrate management systems group lead Tanja Strive said wildlife biologists don't really like to put a number on how many rabbits there were, because it's always fluctuated, but that best estimates suggest about half a billion in Australia at their peak.
"They talk about the 'grey blanket' before myxomatosis," Dr Strive said.
"[Myxomatosis] was slow to get going initially, but then there was good rainfall and suddenly there was an enormous number of mosquitoes.
"Then it really took off and had a massive knockdown of the rabbit population — over 90 per cent in some areas."
But the honeymoon was short-lived.
The longer rabbits lived, the longer they could pass on the virus, so evolutionary pressure was favouring more resistant rabbits and less virulent myxomatosis.
"Quickly, in two or three years, the effectiveness was starting to wane.
"By the mid-1980s, the numbers were not as high as pre-myxo, but pretty high again."
In the meantime, CSIRO had been searching for alternatives, and an emerging virus had appeared in rabbits in China.
Calicivirus, also known as rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, attacks the internal organs of the animal and is usually fatal within 30 hours.
Following four years of laboratory testing, in the mid-1990s, CSIRO set up a quarantine research station on Wardang Island in South Australia, when the virus they were testing — calicivirus — escaped on feeding flies.
"Once that got off the island and into the almost completely naive Australian [rabbit] population, again it basically wiped out over 90 per cent of rabbits in some cases," Dr Strive said.
"So it was a raging success again, but over time, much slower than myxo, we've seen some resistance developing."
Which is inevitable in disease biocontrol.
Another new strain of calicivirus made its own way here around 2014, and another was deliberately released in 2017, both of which knocked down the population.
As well as saving the Australian economy billions, the rabbit biocontrol program has also had a knock-on effect on cat numbers, which has enabled some small native mammal species to recover.
CSIRO is currently researching new viruses in rabbits both here and overseas, and looking at ways to improve the impact of calicivirus and myxomatosis.
"We're pursuing a number of avenues," Dr Strive said.
"Ideally we'll have a new tool, or virus, or strategy ready every 10 to 15 years because what we don't want is for numbers to get away again."
'Palm killers' and Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus
The coconut rhinoceros beetle or "palm killer" is an example of how biocontrol can be a moveable feast.
The coconut rhinoceros beetle was first detected in Samoa just over 100 years ago, far outside its native south-east Asian range, according to Professor Furlong.
"It's a large beetle that attacks coconut palms.
"It first got into the Pacific in 1909, devastating coconuts there, particularly in Samoa."
In the early 1960s, a virus was found in rhinoceros beetles in Malaysia and was introduced to Samoa with very promising early results.
"It's not immediately lethal [but] ... it reduces their overall fitness — how much females can move and fly, and it reduces the number of eggs they lay, and that leads to overall population suppression."
The Oryctes virus is also transmitted easily between beetles and spreads rapidly.
For years the virus played an integral role in suppressing beetle numbers across the Pacific.
But in the mid-2000s, the virus's efficacy seemed to be waning.
Attempts to infect beetles on Guam failed, leading to a hypothesis that the Guam beetles were immune, and the coconut rhinoceros beetle (Guam) type was named.
Similar beetles designated as the Guam type showed up in Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and Palau, the Solomon Islands in 2015, and Vanuatu in 2019.
In response, countries like the Solomon Islands have declared local states of emergency and launched offensives to try to stymie the beetle's spread.
A worst-case scenario of 50 per cent palm losses, would devastate the local oil palm, copra and coconut oil industries, which provide 10 to 15 per cent or more GDP to some Pacific countries.
The beetle also attacks bananas, pineapple and other crops, leading to warnings for Australia to do more to help control the beetle for its own, and its neighbours' benefit.
But Kayvan Etebari, a molecular biologist at the University of Queensland, doesn't believe the Guam type is immune, or that the Guam type has spread across the Pacific.
"There is no scientific evidence to prove that particular [Guam] population is resistant," Dr Etebari said.
He is working to understand why the virus is no longer suppressing beetle numbers, and said he thinks the virus-insect relationship has changed.
"When we screen the beetles, most of them have the virus infection. So if this is the case the first question is, 'Why is the virus not killing the insect?'
"That's why I believe the virus and insect has changed to a more 'friendly' relationship.
"[But] that can change again. It's not going to stay the same for another 10 years."
In the meantime, he's looking for another virus: "But finding a novel virus is not an easy job."
He's also working with the Oryctes virus to see if it might be able to do the job the cane toad failed to do.
"We want to use the same virus to see if it can control the cane grub, which doesn't have any biological control agent at the moment."
|
As time progressed from 2021 to 2022, climate scientists remarked on what a banner year it had been for global warming. Among other records, experts noted that the Earth's oceans were hotter in 2021 than at any other time in the planet's history.
Yet now that 2022 has drawn to a close, climate scientists must be feeling déjà vu all over again — as 2022 marked another alarming year of climate records being broken. The most ominous, perhaps, relates (again) to the temperatures of the world's oceans.
In the year 2022, the top 2,000 meters of Earth's oceans acquired roughly 14 zettajoules of heat — roughly 145 times the amount of energy generated by humans for electricity on this planet over the same period of time.
"In 2022, the world's oceans, as given by OHC, were again the hottest in the historical record and exceeded the previous 2021 record maximum," a group of global warming experts wrote in a new report for the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The term "OHC" is short for "ocean heat contact," a catch-all term for the saltiness (or salinity), different layers of temperatures and other factors that ultimately contribute to global oceanic temperatures.
As the Earth warms and the oceans warm along with it, scientists expect to see a domino effect of weather-related crises. The temperature of the oceans affects weather patterns, sea life, and in turn, ecosystems that humans depend on for survival.
Over the course of the 365 days in the year 2022, the top 2,000 meters of Earth's oceans acquired roughly 14 zettajoules of heat, or 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. For comparison, this is roughly 145 times the amount of energy generated by humans for electricity on this planet over the same period of time. Because oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat caused by global warming, that number is expected to go up even further unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.
The authors also noted that one of the year's most notable developments, rampant wildfires, could plausibly be explained by the ocean's overheating. As droughts worsen due to the oceans overheating, the affected regions will be at an increased risk of experiencing wildfires. In addition, as the warm water in the ocean evaporates at higher quantities, there will be increased flooding due to the more voluminous rainfall.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
Another consequence of the ocean's warming — and perhaps the biggest direct consequence — will be the destabilization of important current systems. In particular, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is already showing signs of destabilization. The conveyor belt of ocean currents is essential to the fishing industry and maintaining stable weather. If it radically changes it will cause more frequent and more severe hurricanes, alter the tides, annihilate ocean life, spread pollution and cause sea levels to rise.
Speaking to Salon in September about the sea level rise caused when warming oceans melt glaciers, Dr. William Sweet — a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — observed that this particular symptom of climate change is already upon us. He referred specifically to a pair of studies that analyzed melting of the Thwaites Glacier and Greeland's ice sheet. Just as a a glass window develops cracks if there are structural problems near its base, the spiderwebs of growing and criss-crossing fractures along the Thwaites Glacier by the warming ocean are at risk of eventually causing the whole pane to shatter. A similar process is at work with the Greenland ice shelf. The two studies in question addressed those phenomena.
"Sea level rise is already affecting us, here and now, and will continue to grow in severity during the coming decades."
"These studies provide additional evidence about future-possible rises in sea level that the public needs to be aware of," Sweet wrote to Salon. "Sea level rise is already affecting us, here and now, and will continue to grow in severity during the coming decades."
In order for the planet to be saved, carbon emissions need to be reduced to zero as quickly as possible. Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told Salon last year that "we really need to get to net-zero [emissions], and many countries have plans but not enough actions to support those." (Trenberth also contributed to the recent report.)
In the meantime, the group behind this report will continue to monitor the temperature of the world's oceans.
"In the future, the group will focus on understanding the changes of the earth's major cycles and improve the future projections of earth's heat, water and carbon changes," study second author Dr. John Abraham from the University of St. Thomas said in a statement. "This is the basis for human[s] to prepare for the future changes and risks."
|
<urn:uuid:d0c6da60-8e9a-4542-9b47-947a730a41c3>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474377.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223085439-20240223115439-00528.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9394197463989258,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.71875,
"token_count": 1031,
"url": "https://www.salon.com/2023/01/18/the-oceans-temperature-was-hotter-than-ever-in-2022-scientists-say/"
}
|
As time progressed from 2021 to 2022, climate scientists remarked on what a banner year it had been for global warming. Among other records, experts noted that the Earth's oceans were hotter in 2021 than at any other time in the planet's history.
Yet now that 2022 has drawn to a close, climate scientists must be feeling déjà vu all over again — as 2022 marked another alarming year of climate records being broken. The most ominous, perhaps, relates (again) to the temperatures of the world's oceans.
In the year
|
2022, the top 2,000 meters of Earth's oceans acquired roughly 14 zettajoules of heat — roughly 145 times the amount of energy generated by humans for electricity on this planet over the same period of time.
"In 2022, the world's oceans, as given by OHC, were again the hottest in the historical record and exceeded the previous 2021 record maximum," a group of global warming experts wrote in a new report for the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The term "OHC" is short for "ocean heat contact," a catch-all term for the saltiness (or salinity), different layers of temperatures and other factors that ultimately contribute to global oceanic temperatures.
As the Earth warms and the oceans warm along with it, scientists expect to see a domino effect of weather-related crises. The temperature of the oceans affects weather patterns, sea life, and in turn, ecosystems that humans depend on for survival.
Over the course of the 365 days in the year 2022, the top 2,000 meters of Earth's oceans acquired roughly 14 zettajoules of heat, or 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. For comparison, this is roughly 145 times the amount of energy generated by humans for electricity on this planet over the same period of time. Because oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat caused by global warming, that number is expected to go up even further unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.
The authors also noted that one of the year's most notable developments, rampant wildfires, could plausibly be explained by the ocean's overheating. As droughts worsen due to the oceans overheating, the affected regions will be at an increased risk of experiencing wildfires. In addition, as the warm water in the ocean evaporates at higher quantities, there will be increased flooding due to the more voluminous rainfall.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
Another consequence of the ocean's warming — and perhaps the biggest direct consequence — will be the destabilization of important current systems. In particular, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is already showing signs of destabilization. The conveyor belt of ocean currents is essential to the fishing industry and maintaining stable weather. If it radically changes it will cause more frequent and more severe hurricanes, alter the tides, annihilate ocean life, spread pollution and cause sea levels to rise.
Speaking to Salon in September about the sea level rise caused when warming oceans melt glaciers, Dr. William Sweet — a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — observed that this particular symptom of climate change is already upon us. He referred specifically to a pair of studies that analyzed melting of the Thwaites Glacier and Greeland's ice sheet. Just as a a glass window develops cracks if there are structural problems near its base, the spiderwebs of growing and criss-crossing fractures along the Thwaites Glacier by the warming ocean are at risk of eventually causing the whole pane to shatter. A similar process is at work with the Greenland ice shelf. The two studies in question addressed those phenomena.
"Sea level rise is already affecting us, here and now, and will continue to grow in severity during the coming decades."
"These studies provide additional evidence about future-possible rises in sea level that the public needs to be aware of," Sweet wrote to Salon. "Sea level rise is already affecting us, here and now, and will continue to grow in severity during the coming decades."
In order for the planet to be saved, carbon emissions need to be reduced to zero as quickly as possible. Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told Salon last year that "we really need to get to net-zero [emissions], and many countries have plans but not enough actions to support those." (Trenberth also contributed to the recent report.)
In the meantime, the group behind this report will continue to monitor the temperature of the world's oceans.
"In the future, the group will focus on understanding the changes of the earth's major cycles and improve the future projections of earth's heat, water and carbon changes," study second author Dr. John Abraham from the University of St. Thomas said in a statement. "This is the basis for human[s] to prepare for the future changes and risks."
|
Here's how to talk to your children about marijuana, now that recreational weed is legal
Now that recreational marijuana is legal in Missouri, children are more likely to hear about it at school or from their friends, or be in its presence if an adult in their life uses at home. Whether your household is weed-friendly or not, educating children about marijuana has proven to reduce their misuse of it while underage.
Before sitting down with your children to discuss marijuana, it's worth educating yourself first on the legalities of recreational marijuana, popular terminology and its effects on the brain and body of young people.
Missourians who consume recreational marijuana in any form must be at least 21 years old. Children are only permitted to use medical marijuana if a parent/legal guardian consent form has been submitted to the Department of Health and Senior Services, alongside a medical marijuana application.
Create a plan for starting conversations about marijuana
What a marijuana-related discussion looks like is going to differ based on your child's age and how much they already know. Remember, just because you are having a conversation about marijuana doesn't mean your children will use it.
Talk About It, an online resource that works to reduce the harms of alcohol and drug use in Missouri, offers free "talking kits" for parents. Each talking kit, curated for a specific age bracket, includes conversation starters and tips. Talk About It recommends the following conversation goals:
- Pre-K through second grade: Create a "relaxed tone" to encourage healthy behaviors which establish you as trustworthy;
- Third through fifth grade: Educate what drugs are, how they affect the body and ways to resist peer pressure;
- Sixth through eighth grade: Maintain open lines of communication, discuss why some medicines/drugs are misused and establish your stance, as a parent, on marijuana;
- Ninth through 12th grade: Reinforce healthy coping mechanisms, discuss consequences of drug use and reinforce consequences;
- College students: Give your children independence and space to learn more about themselves, while providing support and advice, when needed.
Access talking kits on the Talk About It website at talkaboutitmo.com/talking-kits/.
Encouraging your children to have conversations with their peers about marijuana may also be important. Talk About It also offers peer-to-peer talking kits, which help children and young adults have conversations with their peers about alcohol and drug use.
According to the Missouri Department of Mental Health Missouri Student Survey for 2022, about 20% of sixth through 12th graders in Greene County believed their peers would think they were "pretty cool" or "very cool" if they smoked marijuana. For the survey, 3,386 Greene County students were asked about their relationships and perceptions of drug and alcohol use.
Teach about marijuana's effects on the body and mind
Samantha Sherman is the prevention resource center director of Community Partnership of the Ozarks' Prevention and Youth Support Division. Sherman helps 21 area counties address different substance abuse issues, and is familiar with crafting conversations about drugs and alcohol with children.
"An approach I think is helpful is to talk about brain health when you're talking about (marijuana use)," Sherman said. "That's something youth are really interested in and really grab onto."
Studies suggest that marijuana use before the age of 18 may impact functions like attention, memory and learning, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that more research is needed to fully understand its effects on the developing brain.
Scientists do know, however, that marijuana impacts the brain's endocannabinoid system, which controls cognition, neurodevelopment, stress response and emotional control. When THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, enters the body, it binds to receptors in the endocannabinoid system, specifically the receptors found in the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system, according to Healthline.
Simply put, THC acts as a key that fits into the receptor lock, opening a door for the production of chemical reaction. This binding of receptors may result in positive effects, like pain reduction or appetitive stimulation but it may also cause paranoia and anxiety. The effects of THC are unique to everyone's endocannabinoid system.
Ultimately, the impact of marijuana on a developing brain depends on several factors, including the amount of marijuana consumed, how often it is used, the age of first use and whether other substances like tobacco or alcohol were consumed at the same time, the CDC states.
If an adult is using marijuana at home, keep stored in a locked place
Over 31% of sixth through 12th graders in Greene County said they believed it would be "very" or "sort of" easy to gain access to marijuana, the Department of Mental Health Missouri Student Survey for 2022 reported.
Sherman recommended that adults using marijuana keep excess products and accessories in a locked place, inaccessible by children.
Ongoing communication is important
"I suggest that it is an ongoing conversation and it really is a part of the culture of everyone's home, whether it is about marijuana or substance use in general," Sherman said. "Take an active interest in your teen's life and who their friends are because teens are less likely to use alcohol, marijuana and any other type of drug when their parents are actively involved in their lives."
Open communication between parents and children has proven to lower a young person's chances of drug and alcohol usage by 50%, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
|
<urn:uuid:fde206f5-1cd4-4ace-a77f-7dc7b9411e26>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500028.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20230202133541-20230202163541-00674.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.960134744644165,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.1875,
"token_count": 1120,
"url": "https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/2023/01/11/here-are-some-tips-on-talking-to-your-children-about-marijuana/69777830007/"
}
|
Here's how to talk to your children about marijuana, now that recreational weed is legal
Now that recreational marijuana is legal in Missouri, children are more likely to hear about it at school or from their friends, or be in its presence if an adult in their life uses at home. Whether your household is weed-friendly or not, educating children about marijuana has proven to reduce their misuse of it while underage.
Before sitting down with your children to discuss marijuana, it's worth educating yourself first on the legalities of recreational marijuana, popular terminology and its effects on the brain and body of young people.
Missourians who consume recreational
|
marijuana in any form must be at least 21 years old. Children are only permitted to use medical marijuana if a parent/legal guardian consent form has been submitted to the Department of Health and Senior Services, alongside a medical marijuana application.
Create a plan for starting conversations about marijuana
What a marijuana-related discussion looks like is going to differ based on your child's age and how much they already know. Remember, just because you are having a conversation about marijuana doesn't mean your children will use it.
Talk About It, an online resource that works to reduce the harms of alcohol and drug use in Missouri, offers free "talking kits" for parents. Each talking kit, curated for a specific age bracket, includes conversation starters and tips. Talk About It recommends the following conversation goals:
- Pre-K through second grade: Create a "relaxed tone" to encourage healthy behaviors which establish you as trustworthy;
- Third through fifth grade: Educate what drugs are, how they affect the body and ways to resist peer pressure;
- Sixth through eighth grade: Maintain open lines of communication, discuss why some medicines/drugs are misused and establish your stance, as a parent, on marijuana;
- Ninth through 12th grade: Reinforce healthy coping mechanisms, discuss consequences of drug use and reinforce consequences;
- College students: Give your children independence and space to learn more about themselves, while providing support and advice, when needed.
Access talking kits on the Talk About It website at talkaboutitmo.com/talking-kits/.
Encouraging your children to have conversations with their peers about marijuana may also be important. Talk About It also offers peer-to-peer talking kits, which help children and young adults have conversations with their peers about alcohol and drug use.
According to the Missouri Department of Mental Health Missouri Student Survey for 2022, about 20% of sixth through 12th graders in Greene County believed their peers would think they were "pretty cool" or "very cool" if they smoked marijuana. For the survey, 3,386 Greene County students were asked about their relationships and perceptions of drug and alcohol use.
Teach about marijuana's effects on the body and mind
Samantha Sherman is the prevention resource center director of Community Partnership of the Ozarks' Prevention and Youth Support Division. Sherman helps 21 area counties address different substance abuse issues, and is familiar with crafting conversations about drugs and alcohol with children.
"An approach I think is helpful is to talk about brain health when you're talking about (marijuana use)," Sherman said. "That's something youth are really interested in and really grab onto."
Studies suggest that marijuana use before the age of 18 may impact functions like attention, memory and learning, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that more research is needed to fully understand its effects on the developing brain.
Scientists do know, however, that marijuana impacts the brain's endocannabinoid system, which controls cognition, neurodevelopment, stress response and emotional control. When THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, enters the body, it binds to receptors in the endocannabinoid system, specifically the receptors found in the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system, according to Healthline.
Simply put, THC acts as a key that fits into the receptor lock, opening a door for the production of chemical reaction. This binding of receptors may result in positive effects, like pain reduction or appetitive stimulation but it may also cause paranoia and anxiety. The effects of THC are unique to everyone's endocannabinoid system.
Ultimately, the impact of marijuana on a developing brain depends on several factors, including the amount of marijuana consumed, how often it is used, the age of first use and whether other substances like tobacco or alcohol were consumed at the same time, the CDC states.
If an adult is using marijuana at home, keep stored in a locked place
Over 31% of sixth through 12th graders in Greene County said they believed it would be "very" or "sort of" easy to gain access to marijuana, the Department of Mental Health Missouri Student Survey for 2022 reported.
Sherman recommended that adults using marijuana keep excess products and accessories in a locked place, inaccessible by children.
Ongoing communication is important
"I suggest that it is an ongoing conversation and it really is a part of the culture of everyone's home, whether it is about marijuana or substance use in general," Sherman said. "Take an active interest in your teen's life and who their friends are because teens are less likely to use alcohol, marijuana and any other type of drug when their parents are actively involved in their lives."
Open communication between parents and children has proven to lower a young person's chances of drug and alcohol usage by 50%, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.
|
More than 30 people gathered Wednesday in support of a Senate bill that would establish Indigenous People’s Day as a Montana state holiday.
If the bill passes, Indigenous People’s Day would land on the second Monday of October, eliminating Columbus Day as an official state holiday.
Senate Bill 141 appeared for its first time this legislative session before the Education and Cultural Resources Committee during a public hearing Wednesday. The Montana American Indian Caucus wrote a letter of support for the proposal. Montana state law currently recognizes 12 legal holidays each year, including Columbus Day.
The committee is expected to vote on the bill at a later date. If it’s approved, the bill is expected to go to the Senate floor for a vote.
This is the fifth attempt to establish a statewide Indigenous People’s Day in Montana. Sen. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, introduced and sponsored the current version of the proposal. Morigeau said the bill would allow for a chance to help correct the harsh history of the state’s relationship with Indigenous people.
Although Columbus has been celebrated for decades as an explorer who discovered America, historical accounts have increasingly revealed a more complex historical narrative. Multiple states and cities across the country have officially replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.
“Instead of having a day that celebrates a man who murdered, raped, and exterminated innocent Native people, I want a day that acknowledges the rich cultural heritage of all Indigenous people in our state,” Morigeau said in a text message to ICT and Montana Free Press. “A day that recognizes the relationships we’ve all forged together because, at the end of the day, we are all Indigenous from somewhere.”
Morigeau said the bill is an attempt to help Montanans better understand the tribes and cultures that are so iconic to the state.
“I’m asking you to recognize the full breadth of history,” Morigeau said in his opening statement to the committee Wednesday. “To be inclusive and to include everyone in this room, in these hallways and in this state. To talk about the wrongs in our history, to write our next chapter together, to reject selective history and recognize the good, the bad and the ugly so that we can learn and do better as a society.”
Marsha Small, a co-founder of Indigenous Peoples Day of Montana, an organization that provides advocacy and education on the significance of the holiday, drove the effort for the past eight years.
Small began the battle to establish Indigenous Peoples Day in 2015 in Bozeman. In 2016, the city formally recognized the holiday in place of Columbus Day.
Small’s drive to get the bill into law is motivated by accuracy and education.
“We thought that we could have a day in Montana to introduce people to both sides of the aisle,” Small said. “To get people to know each other on more of a respectful dialogue, to get to know people from their identities, their ancestral lineages.”
If the bill passes, Montana would become the latest state to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day, following at least 14 states and 130 cities nationwide.
Several cities and communities in the state have already recognized Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day, including Missoula, Bozeman, and tribal governments.
Montana is home to seven tribal reservations and 12 tribes, including the Blackfeet, Salish, Kootenai, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Little Shell Band of Chippewa, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Plains Cree, Pend d’Oreille and Chippewa.
Across the nation, activists regularly rally in protest against Columbus Day to demonstrate solidarity with Indigenous communities that have historically been misrepresented and misdocumented in history.
The long history of anti-tribal sovereignty activity in Montana
Sen. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell, brought a draft resolution calling on Congress to “investigate alternatives to the reservation system.” The now-dead proposal was neither the beginning or the end of combative attitudes towards tribal nations in the state.
Among the bill’s supporters at Wednesday’s hearing were representatives of the De La Salle Blackfeet School from Browning, located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Multiple students spoke during the hearing, including sixth-grader Kendee Calfbossribs Ollinger.
“I would like to tell you guys what genocide means,” Ollinger told the committee. “It means the deliberate killing of a large number of people, nation or ethnic group. I’m not supposed to be here. Columbus Day should be changed into Indigenous People’s Day to honor the ones who were hurt and killed, but also the ones still here, like me.”
Along with tribal individuals, many concerned citizens have stood in solidarity with the holiday change.
President Joe Biden initially recognized the observation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021, and again in 2022. Columbus Day remains a federal holiday.
“I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities,” Biden said in his 2021 proclamation. “I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of our diverse history and the Indigenous peoples who contribute to shaping this Nation.”
With no one presenting opposition testimony during the hearing, committee member Rep. Daniel Emrich, R-Great Falls, commented on the bill. Emrich said he is in favor of a thorough historical education, but doesnt want Columbus Day removed.
“I would support this bill, but it would have to be not erasing a day that we currently have,” Emrich said. “I feel like that it would remind us of who Indigenous people are the same way Columbus Day reminds us of who Columbus was, and we take that holistic approach.”
Morigeau responded by making a distinction between educating people about the history of Christopher Columbus and celebrating a holiday named after him. Morigeau agreed that Columbus should be taught holistically in recognition of his historical significance, but that such education should include what kind of person he was.
“I don’t think it’s someone who belongs in our schools, being celebrated,” Morigeau said. “Because until we actually stop celebrating him, teachers and people aren’t going to talk about the bad things. How could you when you’re trying to celebrate somebody and put them on a pedestal?”
This story is co-published by Montana Free Press and ICT, a news partnership that covers the Montana American Indian Caucus during the state’s 2023 legislative session. Funding is provided in part by the Headwaters Foundation.
|
<urn:uuid:73c67095-495b-4f3b-af3d-2235f956508d>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949644.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20230331144941-20230331174941-00301.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9525119662284851,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.609375,
"token_count": 1426,
"url": "https://montanafreepress.org/2023/02/09/montana-lawmakers-make-another-bid-for-indigenous-peoples-day/"
}
|
More than 30 people gathered Wednesday in support of a Senate bill that would establish Indigenous People’s Day as a Montana state holiday.
If the bill passes, Indigenous People’s Day would land on the second Monday of October, eliminating Columbus Day as an official state holiday.
Senate Bill 141 appeared for its first time this legislative session before the Education and Cultural Resources Committee during a public hearing Wednesday. The Montana American Indian Caucus wrote a letter of support for the proposal. Montana state law currently recognizes 12 legal holidays each year, including Columbus Day.
The committee is expected to vote on the bill at a later date.
|
If it’s approved, the bill is expected to go to the Senate floor for a vote.
This is the fifth attempt to establish a statewide Indigenous People’s Day in Montana. Sen. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula, introduced and sponsored the current version of the proposal. Morigeau said the bill would allow for a chance to help correct the harsh history of the state’s relationship with Indigenous people.
Although Columbus has been celebrated for decades as an explorer who discovered America, historical accounts have increasingly revealed a more complex historical narrative. Multiple states and cities across the country have officially replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.
“Instead of having a day that celebrates a man who murdered, raped, and exterminated innocent Native people, I want a day that acknowledges the rich cultural heritage of all Indigenous people in our state,” Morigeau said in a text message to ICT and Montana Free Press. “A day that recognizes the relationships we’ve all forged together because, at the end of the day, we are all Indigenous from somewhere.”
Morigeau said the bill is an attempt to help Montanans better understand the tribes and cultures that are so iconic to the state.
“I’m asking you to recognize the full breadth of history,” Morigeau said in his opening statement to the committee Wednesday. “To be inclusive and to include everyone in this room, in these hallways and in this state. To talk about the wrongs in our history, to write our next chapter together, to reject selective history and recognize the good, the bad and the ugly so that we can learn and do better as a society.”
Marsha Small, a co-founder of Indigenous Peoples Day of Montana, an organization that provides advocacy and education on the significance of the holiday, drove the effort for the past eight years.
Small began the battle to establish Indigenous Peoples Day in 2015 in Bozeman. In 2016, the city formally recognized the holiday in place of Columbus Day.
Small’s drive to get the bill into law is motivated by accuracy and education.
“We thought that we could have a day in Montana to introduce people to both sides of the aisle,” Small said. “To get people to know each other on more of a respectful dialogue, to get to know people from their identities, their ancestral lineages.”
If the bill passes, Montana would become the latest state to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day, following at least 14 states and 130 cities nationwide.
Several cities and communities in the state have already recognized Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day, including Missoula, Bozeman, and tribal governments.
Montana is home to seven tribal reservations and 12 tribes, including the Blackfeet, Salish, Kootenai, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Little Shell Band of Chippewa, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Plains Cree, Pend d’Oreille and Chippewa.
Across the nation, activists regularly rally in protest against Columbus Day to demonstrate solidarity with Indigenous communities that have historically been misrepresented and misdocumented in history.
The long history of anti-tribal sovereignty activity in Montana
Sen. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell, brought a draft resolution calling on Congress to “investigate alternatives to the reservation system.” The now-dead proposal was neither the beginning or the end of combative attitudes towards tribal nations in the state.
Among the bill’s supporters at Wednesday’s hearing were representatives of the De La Salle Blackfeet School from Browning, located on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Multiple students spoke during the hearing, including sixth-grader Kendee Calfbossribs Ollinger.
“I would like to tell you guys what genocide means,” Ollinger told the committee. “It means the deliberate killing of a large number of people, nation or ethnic group. I’m not supposed to be here. Columbus Day should be changed into Indigenous People’s Day to honor the ones who were hurt and killed, but also the ones still here, like me.”
Along with tribal individuals, many concerned citizens have stood in solidarity with the holiday change.
President Joe Biden initially recognized the observation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021, and again in 2022. Columbus Day remains a federal holiday.
“I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities,” Biden said in his 2021 proclamation. “I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of our diverse history and the Indigenous peoples who contribute to shaping this Nation.”
With no one presenting opposition testimony during the hearing, committee member Rep. Daniel Emrich, R-Great Falls, commented on the bill. Emrich said he is in favor of a thorough historical education, but doesnt want Columbus Day removed.
“I would support this bill, but it would have to be not erasing a day that we currently have,” Emrich said. “I feel like that it would remind us of who Indigenous people are the same way Columbus Day reminds us of who Columbus was, and we take that holistic approach.”
Morigeau responded by making a distinction between educating people about the history of Christopher Columbus and celebrating a holiday named after him. Morigeau agreed that Columbus should be taught holistically in recognition of his historical significance, but that such education should include what kind of person he was.
“I don’t think it’s someone who belongs in our schools, being celebrated,” Morigeau said. “Because until we actually stop celebrating him, teachers and people aren’t going to talk about the bad things. How could you when you’re trying to celebrate somebody and put them on a pedestal?”
This story is co-published by Montana Free Press and ICT, a news partnership that covers the Montana American Indian Caucus during the state’s 2023 legislative session. Funding is provided in part by the Headwaters Foundation.
|
That is what comets do. They loop around the sun every X years, in this case, 75 to 79 years, only appearing in the night sky to us on Earth when they get close to the sun.
Return Of Halley’s Comet
For those in middle age who remember the last time it was visible from Earth—in 1986—this is a wake-up call. Halley’s Comet is one of the only comets that can be seen twice in one human lifetime, so if you have a memory of seeing or reading about it when you were a kid, then thinking about its return is slightly alarming.
Although it will reach its aphelion—the farthest point in its orbit of the sun—at 02:00 UTC on December 9 (21:00 EST on December 8)—there’s a long time to go until it’s again visible in Earth’s night sky. As it begins its long journey back into the inner solar system this week, it will be about 35 Earth-Sun distances, well past the orbit of Neptune.
A Christmas Comet
Halley’s Comet will next be visible from Earth in late July 2061 when it’s expected to come much closer—and, therefore, be much brighter—than in 1986. This year, the prospect of a strange bright light in the sky has festive relevance.
Named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who in the 18th century was the first to calculate its orbit and predict its return, Halley’s Comet has been observed many times in human history. Perhaps its most famous appearance was when it may have inspired the Bible story of the “Star of Bethlehem,” a bright “star” in the east that guided the Magi to the birthplace of Jesus.
“Comets, which are not stars but star-like in appearance, offer a unique explanation as they move across the sky and could have guided the wise men,” said Dr. Minjae Kim, Research Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Warwick, in an email. “Halley’s Comet was visible in 12 B.C., and Chinese and Korean stargazers recorded an object, possibly a comet or nova, around 5 B.C., aligning with the estimated time of Jesus’ birth—between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C.”
Of course, the “Star of Bethlehem” could have been a bright planet or something else—perhaps a supernova—if the story was more than that. Jupiter is shining brightly in the east this month, so for 2023, it’s the leading candidate. Come 2061, it might be a different story.
Note: 2024 will see two comets that could be visible to the naked eye—Comet Pons-Brooks in March and April and Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in late September and October.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
|
<urn:uuid:9a3ec288-cd6f-4fab-acad-2b9df04fca76>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476592.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304232829-20240305022829-00341.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9566038250923157,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.609375,
"token_count": 627,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/12/05/why-its-a-big-week-for-halleys-comet-a-possible-star-of-bethlehem/"
}
|
That is what comets do. They loop around the sun every X years, in this case, 75 to 79 years, only appearing in the night sky to us on Earth when they get close to the sun.
Return Of Halley’s Comet
For those in middle age who remember the last time it was visible from Earth—in 1986—this is a wake-up call. Halley’s Comet is one of the only comets that can be seen twice in one human lifetime, so if you have a memory of seeing or reading about it when you were a kid, then thinking about its
|
return is slightly alarming.
Although it will reach its aphelion—the farthest point in its orbit of the sun—at 02:00 UTC on December 9 (21:00 EST on December 8)—there’s a long time to go until it’s again visible in Earth’s night sky. As it begins its long journey back into the inner solar system this week, it will be about 35 Earth-Sun distances, well past the orbit of Neptune.
A Christmas Comet
Halley’s Comet will next be visible from Earth in late July 2061 when it’s expected to come much closer—and, therefore, be much brighter—than in 1986. This year, the prospect of a strange bright light in the sky has festive relevance.
Named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who in the 18th century was the first to calculate its orbit and predict its return, Halley’s Comet has been observed many times in human history. Perhaps its most famous appearance was when it may have inspired the Bible story of the “Star of Bethlehem,” a bright “star” in the east that guided the Magi to the birthplace of Jesus.
“Comets, which are not stars but star-like in appearance, offer a unique explanation as they move across the sky and could have guided the wise men,” said Dr. Minjae Kim, Research Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Warwick, in an email. “Halley’s Comet was visible in 12 B.C., and Chinese and Korean stargazers recorded an object, possibly a comet or nova, around 5 B.C., aligning with the estimated time of Jesus’ birth—between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C.”
Of course, the “Star of Bethlehem” could have been a bright planet or something else—perhaps a supernova—if the story was more than that. Jupiter is shining brightly in the east this month, so for 2023, it’s the leading candidate. Come 2061, it might be a different story.
Note: 2024 will see two comets that could be visible to the naked eye—Comet Pons-Brooks in March and April and Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in late September and October.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
|
Richmond just saw one of its warmest winters on record
The winter of 2022–23 has been Richmond's second warmest on record, with average temperatures from December through February of 45.1°F — 11°F warmer than those of winter 1970.
- That's according to a new analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration numbers from Climate Central, a nonpartisan research and communications group.
Why it matters: Warm winters can exacerbate drought (because there's less snowmelt in the spring), wreak havoc on crops and gardens, and spell disaster for towns built around skiing, snowboarding and similar pursuits.
The big picture: Winter is the fastest-warming season for much of the continental U.S.
- About 80% of the country now has at least seven more winter days with above-normal temperatures compared to 1970, per Climate Central.
- Seasonal snowfall is declining in many cities — though heavy snowstorms can still happen when temperatures are cold enough.
- In fact, precipitation extremes are happening more frequently and getting more intense, which can lead to feast or famine snowfall.
Driving the news: Not only are winters warming overall, but cold snaps are becoming less severe and shorter in duration, the latest research shows.
- That's partly because the Arctic is warming at three to four times the rate of the rest of the world.
Yes, but: March has been unseasonably cool, and we may end up with a very rare instance of this month being cooler than February, per RTD meteorologist Sean Sublette.
Zoom out: This winter has been especially mild across areas east of the Mississippi River. But across the West, it's been colder than average. This is reflected in the balance of daily record highs to daily record lows.
The bottom line: Over the coming years, most of us can expect to feel climate change's effects most acutely during the winter months.
More Richmond stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Richmond.
|
<urn:uuid:f876b504-6b38-41b3-9d39-d4206de6f3b5>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945168.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20230323132026-20230323162026-00005.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.949409008026123,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.953125,
"token_count": 424,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/richmond/2023/03/13/winter-warming-richmond"
}
|
Richmond just saw one of its warmest winters on record
The winter of 2022–23 has been Richmond's second warmest on record, with average temperatures from December through February of 45.1°F — 11°F warmer than those of winter 1970.
- That's according to a new analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration numbers from Climate Central, a nonpartisan research and communications group.
Why it matters: Warm winters can exacerbate drought (because there's less snowmelt in the spring), wreak havoc on crops and gardens, and
|
spell disaster for towns built around skiing, snowboarding and similar pursuits.
The big picture: Winter is the fastest-warming season for much of the continental U.S.
- About 80% of the country now has at least seven more winter days with above-normal temperatures compared to 1970, per Climate Central.
- Seasonal snowfall is declining in many cities — though heavy snowstorms can still happen when temperatures are cold enough.
- In fact, precipitation extremes are happening more frequently and getting more intense, which can lead to feast or famine snowfall.
Driving the news: Not only are winters warming overall, but cold snaps are becoming less severe and shorter in duration, the latest research shows.
- That's partly because the Arctic is warming at three to four times the rate of the rest of the world.
Yes, but: March has been unseasonably cool, and we may end up with a very rare instance of this month being cooler than February, per RTD meteorologist Sean Sublette.
Zoom out: This winter has been especially mild across areas east of the Mississippi River. But across the West, it's been colder than average. This is reflected in the balance of daily record highs to daily record lows.
The bottom line: Over the coming years, most of us can expect to feel climate change's effects most acutely during the winter months.
More Richmond stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Richmond.
|
(Reuters) -European Union scientists said on Wednesday that 2023 would be the warmest year on record, as global mean temperature for the first 11 months of the year hit the highest level on record, 1.46 degrees Celsius (2.63 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850-1900 average.
The record comes as governments are in marathon negotiations on whether to, for the first time, phase out the use of CO2-emitting coal, oil and gas, the main source of warming emissions, at the COP28 summit in Dubai.
The temperature for the January-November period was 0.13C higher than the average for the same period in 2016, currently the warmest calendar year on record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.
November 2023 was the warmest November on record globally, with an average surface air temperature of 14.22C, 0.85C above the 1991-2020 average for November and 0.32C above the previous warmest November, in 2020, Copernicus added.
This year “has now had six record breaking months and two record breaking seasons. The extraordinary global November temperatures, including two days warmer than 2C above preindustrial, mean that 2023 is the warmest year in recorded history,” deputy director of C3S Samantha Burgess said in a statement.
The boreal autumn September–November was also the warmest on record globally by a large margin, with an average temperature of 15.30C, 0.88C above average, EU scientists said.
“As long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, we can’t expect different outcomes from those seen this year. The temperature will keep rising and so will the impacts of heatwaves and droughts. Reaching net zero as soon as possible is an effective way to manage our climate risks,” C3S director, Carlo Buontempo added.
Efforts are lagging to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, beyond which scientists warn of a severe impact on weather, health and agriculture.
The EU has among the most ambitious climate change policies of any major economy, having passed laws to deliver its 2030 target to cut net emissions by 55% from 1990 levels, which analysts say is the minimum needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
(Reporting by Diana Mandiá. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
|
<urn:uuid:d494950c-a5d9-437f-a4d5-4a11da014f15>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475833.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302152131-20240302182131-00742.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9254320859909058,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.796875,
"token_count": 505,
"url": "https://ec2-15-188-152-128.eu-west-3.compute.amazonaws.com/2023/12/06/eu-scientists-say-2023/"
}
|
(Reuters) -European Union scientists said on Wednesday that 2023 would be the warmest year on record, as global mean temperature for the first 11 months of the year hit the highest level on record, 1.46 degrees Celsius (2.63 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850-1900 average.
The record comes as governments are in marathon negotiations on whether to, for the first time, phase out the use of CO2-emitting coal, oil and gas, the main source of warming emissions, at the COP28 summit in Dubai.
The
|
temperature for the January-November period was 0.13C higher than the average for the same period in 2016, currently the warmest calendar year on record, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.
November 2023 was the warmest November on record globally, with an average surface air temperature of 14.22C, 0.85C above the 1991-2020 average for November and 0.32C above the previous warmest November, in 2020, Copernicus added.
This year “has now had six record breaking months and two record breaking seasons. The extraordinary global November temperatures, including two days warmer than 2C above preindustrial, mean that 2023 is the warmest year in recorded history,” deputy director of C3S Samantha Burgess said in a statement.
The boreal autumn September–November was also the warmest on record globally by a large margin, with an average temperature of 15.30C, 0.88C above average, EU scientists said.
“As long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, we can’t expect different outcomes from those seen this year. The temperature will keep rising and so will the impacts of heatwaves and droughts. Reaching net zero as soon as possible is an effective way to manage our climate risks,” C3S director, Carlo Buontempo added.
Efforts are lagging to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, beyond which scientists warn of a severe impact on weather, health and agriculture.
The EU has among the most ambitious climate change policies of any major economy, having passed laws to deliver its 2030 target to cut net emissions by 55% from 1990 levels, which analysts say is the minimum needed to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
(Reporting by Diana Mandiá. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
|
Chronic absenteeism – when a kid misses 10 percent of school days – has exploded since the pandemic, rocketing up the ever-growing list of educational crises.
The concern can be summed up simply: if kids aren’t in school, they can’t learn. But it also may indicate a lack of connection with schools that’s detrimental to learning even when they are at school, and since districts are funded in part based on their average daily attendance, increased absences also affect their bottom line.
Let’s rewind the clock: Before the pandemic, San Diego County’s Office of Education was already concerned about chronic absenteeism.
“Those were kind of the rosy days when the countywide chronic absenteeism rate was about 10 percent,” said Todd Langager, the county office’s director of implementation, improvement, and impact.
That’s why in 2019 the county office launched the Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network that Langager leads, which partnered with schools across the county to drive down the number of kids missing school.
The network has focused on evidence-based practices, he said, like employing coaches to help schools focus on building an effective attendance team and using data to identify kids who may be at risk of falling into chronic absenteeism.
“Once we know who those kids are, we ask, ‘What are the reasons why those students may be missing school? And how do we apply an intervention that makes sense – whether it’s around relationship building with the community or communicating to parents and dispelling some misconceptions that may exist about attendance,” he said.
The network also seeks non-punitive approaches to avoid alienating students through punishment. One of the key strategies the network has employed is “nudge letters,” notices sent to parents of students already chronically absent or those approaching the chronic absenteeism threshold. Research has found the letters have promising results. They show parents the number of absences their children have had compared to other students and provide information on the negative effects of absences.
Cue the “Jaws” theme music: Just as the network was powering up, the pandemic hit.
“The world kind of blew up with the pandemic, and schools’ chronic absenteeism rate largely tripled,” Langager said.
Chronic absenteeism seemed to still be driven by similar factors: student connection and engagement, parental misconceptions about the harm absences can cause, transportation issues and the demotivation a student can feel when they come back to class and find they’re significantly behind.
But a couple of new wrinkles formed, like increased health concerns that led to parents keeping their kids home and the difficulty of moving back into in-person schooling. Some students have even transitioned from elementary to middle school, or middle to high school over the pandemic and now find themselves at a school where they lack connections with staff or their peers.
“It is largely the same factors as before the pandemic, those factors just got unbelievably heightened and exacerbated,” Langager said.
All of that made it even more vital that interventions occur quickly and effectively, he said.
Drumroll, please: Last month, the network released results from the last year and found that 17 of the 18 schools it worked with saw a reduction in chronic absenteeism, with an average reduction of 9 percent. He stressed that no one is jumping up and down at the results. After all, at many schools one out of every three students is still chronically absent. Still, he said the network is proud of the progress and feels it’s in large part due to the tactics it focused on.
It found the nudge letters especially effective. Before the first letter was sent, 68 percent of students had already missed at least 10 percent of school days. Those students then received two subsequent nudge letters – one in October and one in February – and the percentage of chronically absent students dropped from 68 to 39 percent, with noticeable decreases directly after each letter was sent.
There’s still much work to do, Langager said, and the network plans to adjust its tactics. One evolution is to send nudge letters more than twice a year. In a recent conversation, a researcher from Harvard suggested sending them as many as six to eight times a year.
“It really only sticks in people’s memory for about four to six weeks. And then you’ve kind of forgotten, like, ‘Hey, did Todd miss a day this past month? I can’t remember,’” Langager said.
While he said the network is confident interventions like nudge letters work, adapting them to be effective in different schools and districts can be a challenge. Ultimately, Langager said, they’re just working to advise schools and help them figure out the best ways to implement interventions.
“It’s all about testing and testing and trying again,” Langager said.
What We’re Writing
- After-school care is a perennial problem for working parents, it can even be the difference between holding down a job – as single father of a San Diego Unified student Jared Goossens found out firsthand. But over the past eight months, San Diego Unified has reduced its after-school program waitlist from 4,600 to 1,000 families. Access to free, quality childcare can be a game changer for many like Goossens, who was able to take a job as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.
- While the politics of the pandemic infused many school boards locally and nationally with divisiveness, San Diego Unified’s board has been strikingly unified. The board has unanimously passed every item that has come before it in 2023. And this trend isn’t exactly new.
|
<urn:uuid:74ad2386-7d15-4577-9cb4-1df12da0b407>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511106.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20231003124522-20231003154522-00020.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9652996063232422,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.953125,
"token_count": 1217,
"url": "https://voiceofsandiego.org/2023/07/19/the-learning-curve-countys-office-of-ed-is-nudging-kids-out-of-chronic-absenteeism/"
}
|
Chronic absenteeism – when a kid misses 10 percent of school days – has exploded since the pandemic, rocketing up the ever-growing list of educational crises.
The concern can be summed up simply: if kids aren’t in school, they can’t learn. But it also may indicate a lack of connection with schools that’s detrimental to learning even when they are at school, and since districts are funded in part based on their average daily attendance, increased absences also affect their bottom line.
Let’s rewind the clock: Before the pandemic, San Diego County’s Office of Education was already concerned about chronic absentee
|
ism.
“Those were kind of the rosy days when the countywide chronic absenteeism rate was about 10 percent,” said Todd Langager, the county office’s director of implementation, improvement, and impact.
That’s why in 2019 the county office launched the Improving Chronic Absenteeism Network that Langager leads, which partnered with schools across the county to drive down the number of kids missing school.
The network has focused on evidence-based practices, he said, like employing coaches to help schools focus on building an effective attendance team and using data to identify kids who may be at risk of falling into chronic absenteeism.
“Once we know who those kids are, we ask, ‘What are the reasons why those students may be missing school? And how do we apply an intervention that makes sense – whether it’s around relationship building with the community or communicating to parents and dispelling some misconceptions that may exist about attendance,” he said.
The network also seeks non-punitive approaches to avoid alienating students through punishment. One of the key strategies the network has employed is “nudge letters,” notices sent to parents of students already chronically absent or those approaching the chronic absenteeism threshold. Research has found the letters have promising results. They show parents the number of absences their children have had compared to other students and provide information on the negative effects of absences.
Cue the “Jaws” theme music: Just as the network was powering up, the pandemic hit.
“The world kind of blew up with the pandemic, and schools’ chronic absenteeism rate largely tripled,” Langager said.
Chronic absenteeism seemed to still be driven by similar factors: student connection and engagement, parental misconceptions about the harm absences can cause, transportation issues and the demotivation a student can feel when they come back to class and find they’re significantly behind.
But a couple of new wrinkles formed, like increased health concerns that led to parents keeping their kids home and the difficulty of moving back into in-person schooling. Some students have even transitioned from elementary to middle school, or middle to high school over the pandemic and now find themselves at a school where they lack connections with staff or their peers.
“It is largely the same factors as before the pandemic, those factors just got unbelievably heightened and exacerbated,” Langager said.
All of that made it even more vital that interventions occur quickly and effectively, he said.
Drumroll, please: Last month, the network released results from the last year and found that 17 of the 18 schools it worked with saw a reduction in chronic absenteeism, with an average reduction of 9 percent. He stressed that no one is jumping up and down at the results. After all, at many schools one out of every three students is still chronically absent. Still, he said the network is proud of the progress and feels it’s in large part due to the tactics it focused on.
It found the nudge letters especially effective. Before the first letter was sent, 68 percent of students had already missed at least 10 percent of school days. Those students then received two subsequent nudge letters – one in October and one in February – and the percentage of chronically absent students dropped from 68 to 39 percent, with noticeable decreases directly after each letter was sent.
There’s still much work to do, Langager said, and the network plans to adjust its tactics. One evolution is to send nudge letters more than twice a year. In a recent conversation, a researcher from Harvard suggested sending them as many as six to eight times a year.
“It really only sticks in people’s memory for about four to six weeks. And then you’ve kind of forgotten, like, ‘Hey, did Todd miss a day this past month? I can’t remember,’” Langager said.
While he said the network is confident interventions like nudge letters work, adapting them to be effective in different schools and districts can be a challenge. Ultimately, Langager said, they’re just working to advise schools and help them figure out the best ways to implement interventions.
“It’s all about testing and testing and trying again,” Langager said.
What We’re Writing
- After-school care is a perennial problem for working parents, it can even be the difference between holding down a job – as single father of a San Diego Unified student Jared Goossens found out firsthand. But over the past eight months, San Diego Unified has reduced its after-school program waitlist from 4,600 to 1,000 families. Access to free, quality childcare can be a game changer for many like Goossens, who was able to take a job as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service.
- While the politics of the pandemic infused many school boards locally and nationally with divisiveness, San Diego Unified’s board has been strikingly unified. The board has unanimously passed every item that has come before it in 2023. And this trend isn’t exactly new.
|
A few years ago, as dusk descended in Victoria's Great Otway National Park, I left my campsite, torch at the ready.
I was on the lookout for little marsupials emerging to start their night-time foraging.
Instead, I was confronted with the glowing eyes of a feral cat among the ferns.
We were probably out looking for the same thing.
The impact of feral cats and other invasive species is felt across Australia. Not only do they threaten native species, but they can also spread diseases to humans and livestock.
Invasive species are estimated to cost Australia an eye-watering $25 billion annually, while the global cost is a staggering $423 billion.
One species consistently tops the list as "Australia's worst": feral cats.
Feral cats are everywhere — the nation is home to up to 6.3 million of them, and they are responsible for killing millions of native mammals, reptiles, and birds each day.
Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek recently declared "war on feral cats", announcing plans involving cat curfews, desexing regulations, and caps on cat numbers in homes.
But what can we do about the millions of feral cats already wreaking havoc across Australia? And what about other pests such as foxes, rabbits, cane toads, carp, pigs, deer, or goats?
One technique with the potential to help fight not just cats but all invasive species is called a "gene drive".
What is a gene drive?
All living organisms store genetic information in their cells as long strands of DNA. Sections of these strands are called genes, which give rise to different traits, such as eye colour.
Like most animals, cats have two copies of each gene: one inherited from each parent. This means that normally, a cat will pass one gene copy onto half of their kitten offspring.
But a gene drive does not follow usual inheritance rules.
A gene drive is a gene or collection of genes that rapidly spread from one generation to another.
Even if only one parent has a gene drive, they can pass it on to more than half of their offspring, and in some cases, to all of them.
It's why gene drives are sometimes called "selfish".
Gene drives are found in nature — researchers at the University of Adelaide are investigating a naturally occurring mouse gene drive to spread infertility to female mice.
But they can also be created in the lab using CRISPR gene-editing technology.
Lab-developed gene drives can be designed to do different things.
A gene drive to reduce the number of mosquitoes that transmit malaria has been developed, and in 2019, mice became the first mammal to be engineered to contain a gene drive in their DNA.
Since then, no other gene-drive mammals, including cats, have been produced.
But if a gene drive for feral cats was developed, it could involve spreading a gene through the population that renders females infertile, or tailored so only male offspring are born.
Over time, the feral cat population would drop, then crash.
What's the risk to native wildlife?
Gene drives can be restricted to a target species, such as cats, without the chance of spreading to Australian wildlife.
That's because gene drives are passed down from parent to offspring.
Most of Australia's invasive species cannot interbreed or produce offspring with native wildlife, which means almost all invasive species in Australia could be controlled using gene drives.
The exception is wild dogs, which can breed with dingoes.
It is also important to consider that an animal that may be a pest in Australia, such as the cane toad, may not be a pest in their native range.
While cane toads have been linked to the extinction of several species in the Northern Territory and Queensland, they play an essential ecological role in their native range in Central and South America.
So how would we stop a gene-drive cane toad from leaving Australia and harming its native populations?
First, Australia's border security would need to pay as much attention to what departs Australia as what enters, ensuring potential gene-drive animals don't leave.
Second, animals resistant to gene drive technology could also be provided to regions where a target species is native.
So, if a gene drive cane toad ever made it out of Australia and back to its native range, a population of gene-drive-resistant toads could be waiting to stop the gene drive from spreading.
How long before we see results?
Unfortunately, current estimates for a gene drive to make a noticeable impact on invasive species are in the order of decades, even in species that produce multiple litters a year.
A rabbit gene drive would take approximately 17 years to halve the Australian rabbit population.
This time frame could be shortened by, for instance, increasing the number of gene-drive animals bred in captivity then introducing them into the target population.
While the current time estimates for gene drives are long, there are no stand-out alternative strategies that could reduce invasive species anywhere near as effectively in the long term.
It is still early days for gene drives. Developing the technology will take many years.
It will — and should — also be the subject of intense scientific scrutiny and careful analysis.
In a country as vast and complex as Australia, eradicating invasive species on a large scale is currently impossible.
Gene drives may finally offer some hope for the billions of native animals lost every year and the significant losses experienced by farmers and landowners because of invasive species.
And if a gene drive for cats was developed, I would undoubtedly have more success spotting small marsupials on my camping trips.
Ellen Cottingham is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. She is also one of ABC RN's Top 5 scientists for 2023.
|
<urn:uuid:efdcbd4f-7f87-4b2a-864b-a8b857c27477>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00236.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9560893177986145,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.6875,
"token_count": 1205,
"url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-11-28/gene-drives-explainer-feral-cats-invasive-species-genetic/102953190?"
}
|
A few years ago, as dusk descended in Victoria's Great Otway National Park, I left my campsite, torch at the ready.
I was on the lookout for little marsupials emerging to start their night-time foraging.
Instead, I was confronted with the glowing eyes of a feral cat among the ferns.
We were probably out looking for the same thing.
The impact of feral cats and other invasive species is felt across Australia. Not only do they threaten native species, but they can also spread diseases to humans and livestock.
Invasive species are estimated to cost Australia an eye-watering $25 billion annually
|
, while the global cost is a staggering $423 billion.
One species consistently tops the list as "Australia's worst": feral cats.
Feral cats are everywhere — the nation is home to up to 6.3 million of them, and they are responsible for killing millions of native mammals, reptiles, and birds each day.
Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek recently declared "war on feral cats", announcing plans involving cat curfews, desexing regulations, and caps on cat numbers in homes.
But what can we do about the millions of feral cats already wreaking havoc across Australia? And what about other pests such as foxes, rabbits, cane toads, carp, pigs, deer, or goats?
One technique with the potential to help fight not just cats but all invasive species is called a "gene drive".
What is a gene drive?
All living organisms store genetic information in their cells as long strands of DNA. Sections of these strands are called genes, which give rise to different traits, such as eye colour.
Like most animals, cats have two copies of each gene: one inherited from each parent. This means that normally, a cat will pass one gene copy onto half of their kitten offspring.
But a gene drive does not follow usual inheritance rules.
A gene drive is a gene or collection of genes that rapidly spread from one generation to another.
Even if only one parent has a gene drive, they can pass it on to more than half of their offspring, and in some cases, to all of them.
It's why gene drives are sometimes called "selfish".
Gene drives are found in nature — researchers at the University of Adelaide are investigating a naturally occurring mouse gene drive to spread infertility to female mice.
But they can also be created in the lab using CRISPR gene-editing technology.
Lab-developed gene drives can be designed to do different things.
A gene drive to reduce the number of mosquitoes that transmit malaria has been developed, and in 2019, mice became the first mammal to be engineered to contain a gene drive in their DNA.
Since then, no other gene-drive mammals, including cats, have been produced.
But if a gene drive for feral cats was developed, it could involve spreading a gene through the population that renders females infertile, or tailored so only male offspring are born.
Over time, the feral cat population would drop, then crash.
What's the risk to native wildlife?
Gene drives can be restricted to a target species, such as cats, without the chance of spreading to Australian wildlife.
That's because gene drives are passed down from parent to offspring.
Most of Australia's invasive species cannot interbreed or produce offspring with native wildlife, which means almost all invasive species in Australia could be controlled using gene drives.
The exception is wild dogs, which can breed with dingoes.
It is also important to consider that an animal that may be a pest in Australia, such as the cane toad, may not be a pest in their native range.
While cane toads have been linked to the extinction of several species in the Northern Territory and Queensland, they play an essential ecological role in their native range in Central and South America.
So how would we stop a gene-drive cane toad from leaving Australia and harming its native populations?
First, Australia's border security would need to pay as much attention to what departs Australia as what enters, ensuring potential gene-drive animals don't leave.
Second, animals resistant to gene drive technology could also be provided to regions where a target species is native.
So, if a gene drive cane toad ever made it out of Australia and back to its native range, a population of gene-drive-resistant toads could be waiting to stop the gene drive from spreading.
How long before we see results?
Unfortunately, current estimates for a gene drive to make a noticeable impact on invasive species are in the order of decades, even in species that produce multiple litters a year.
A rabbit gene drive would take approximately 17 years to halve the Australian rabbit population.
This time frame could be shortened by, for instance, increasing the number of gene-drive animals bred in captivity then introducing them into the target population.
While the current time estimates for gene drives are long, there are no stand-out alternative strategies that could reduce invasive species anywhere near as effectively in the long term.
It is still early days for gene drives. Developing the technology will take many years.
It will — and should — also be the subject of intense scientific scrutiny and careful analysis.
In a country as vast and complex as Australia, eradicating invasive species on a large scale is currently impossible.
Gene drives may finally offer some hope for the billions of native animals lost every year and the significant losses experienced by farmers and landowners because of invasive species.
And if a gene drive for cats was developed, I would undoubtedly have more success spotting small marsupials on my camping trips.
Ellen Cottingham is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. She is also one of ABC RN's Top 5 scientists for 2023.
|
First look: Clean water for Texas colonias
A new pilot initiative is tapping into solar-powered tech as a solution to the water crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of people living in colonias along the U.S. and Mexico border.
Driving the news: SOURCE Global, a public benefit corporation, is partnering up with Texas politicians and nonprofits to provide clean drinking water access to several colonias — unincorporated, low-income communities with limited resources, organizers tell Axios.
- The water crisis has been driven by climate-related impacts on statewide water supply as well as a lack of political will to connect colonias to municipal water sources.
The backstory: For the largely low-income, Latino residents living in colonias — communities that don't have basic human services like traditional water infrastructure — the state's increasingly unreliable water supply, which relies heavily on drought-stricken rivers and reservoirs, worsens existing barriers to access.
- "Colonia residents bought their land because they saw the opportunity to be homeowners, but they were never properly informed of the lack of political will to bring municipal water service to colonias," Laura Ponce, executive director of the El Paso County nonprofit Project Bravo, tells Axios in an email.
- "Without a safe source for drinking water, low-income colonia families take health risks like drinking potable water delivered by trucks, storing water in unsealed large containers, and minimizing their water consumption," says Ponce.
Olga Ramos, a county commissioner in Maverick County, Texas, tells Axios in an email that there are more than 19 colonias in her precinct alone — and most are without access to safe water.
- "It’s a problem we have to solve, but building water infrastructure is a complicated and expensive task, one that could take years to complete, and these families can’t wait that long," says Ramos.
A new pilot initiative led by SOURCE Global is aiming to mitigate this by installing solar-powered tech that produces clean drinking water for about 500 colonia households across Hueco Tanks and Quemado, which are in El Paso County and Maverick County.
- SOURCE hydropanels suck up water vapor from the air, drawing only pure water molecules before condensing it into liquid, leaving pollutants behind, then transforming those molecules into liquid water and adding calcium and magnesium.
- The estimated total funding needed to outfit the households in the two colonias is roughly $3 million. They've secured $150,000 of that amount and are looking to get the rest through the NADB's Community Assistance Program.
What they're saying: Ramos sees the hydropanels as a quick, cost-effective way to give colonia residents safe water at their homes.
- "They also don’t rely on groundwater, which we know is threatened by drought," Ramos says.
- A recently published Texas Department of Agriculture report found that climate instability — which is linked to water restrictions, failed crops, and increased risk of wildfires and floods — is also imperiling the state's food supply, per the Texas Tribune.
Zoom out: "People who have been underserved historically are getting locked into being underserved, because of the finiteness of the resource [water] and the nature of the headwinds that are facing all of us with climate change," SOURCE CEO Cody Friesen tells Axios.
Yes, but: Ponce, of the nonprofit Project Bravo, says the hydropanels only provide enough water for drinking and cooking.
- "They do not produce enough water for washing clothes, flushing toilets, bathing, and other functions that are needed to run a household," says Ponce, adding that while the SOURCE project is an "ethical short-term solution," bringing piped water to the colonias is the "ideal solution."
The bottom line: "These families still need the work of ... grassroots groups to make sure our elected officials don't forget them," Ponce tells Axios.
|
<urn:uuid:2de1c83f-0184-4aec-b24e-3b480f747ad9>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499713.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20230129112153-20230129142153-00523.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9602911472320557,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.046875,
"token_count": 827,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/01/25/clean-water-texas-colonias"
}
|
First look: Clean water for Texas colonias
A new pilot initiative is tapping into solar-powered tech as a solution to the water crisis affecting hundreds of thousands of people living in colonias along the U.S. and Mexico border.
Driving the news: SOURCE Global, a public benefit corporation, is partnering up with Texas politicians and nonprofits to provide clean drinking water access to several colonias — unincorporated, low-income communities with limited resources, organizers tell Axios.
- The water crisis has been driven by climate-related impacts on statewide water supply as well as a lack of political will to connect colonias to municipal water sources.
The back
|
story: For the largely low-income, Latino residents living in colonias — communities that don't have basic human services like traditional water infrastructure — the state's increasingly unreliable water supply, which relies heavily on drought-stricken rivers and reservoirs, worsens existing barriers to access.
- "Colonia residents bought their land because they saw the opportunity to be homeowners, but they were never properly informed of the lack of political will to bring municipal water service to colonias," Laura Ponce, executive director of the El Paso County nonprofit Project Bravo, tells Axios in an email.
- "Without a safe source for drinking water, low-income colonia families take health risks like drinking potable water delivered by trucks, storing water in unsealed large containers, and minimizing their water consumption," says Ponce.
Olga Ramos, a county commissioner in Maverick County, Texas, tells Axios in an email that there are more than 19 colonias in her precinct alone — and most are without access to safe water.
- "It’s a problem we have to solve, but building water infrastructure is a complicated and expensive task, one that could take years to complete, and these families can’t wait that long," says Ramos.
A new pilot initiative led by SOURCE Global is aiming to mitigate this by installing solar-powered tech that produces clean drinking water for about 500 colonia households across Hueco Tanks and Quemado, which are in El Paso County and Maverick County.
- SOURCE hydropanels suck up water vapor from the air, drawing only pure water molecules before condensing it into liquid, leaving pollutants behind, then transforming those molecules into liquid water and adding calcium and magnesium.
- The estimated total funding needed to outfit the households in the two colonias is roughly $3 million. They've secured $150,000 of that amount and are looking to get the rest through the NADB's Community Assistance Program.
What they're saying: Ramos sees the hydropanels as a quick, cost-effective way to give colonia residents safe water at their homes.
- "They also don’t rely on groundwater, which we know is threatened by drought," Ramos says.
- A recently published Texas Department of Agriculture report found that climate instability — which is linked to water restrictions, failed crops, and increased risk of wildfires and floods — is also imperiling the state's food supply, per the Texas Tribune.
Zoom out: "People who have been underserved historically are getting locked into being underserved, because of the finiteness of the resource [water] and the nature of the headwinds that are facing all of us with climate change," SOURCE CEO Cody Friesen tells Axios.
Yes, but: Ponce, of the nonprofit Project Bravo, says the hydropanels only provide enough water for drinking and cooking.
- "They do not produce enough water for washing clothes, flushing toilets, bathing, and other functions that are needed to run a household," says Ponce, adding that while the SOURCE project is an "ethical short-term solution," bringing piped water to the colonias is the "ideal solution."
The bottom line: "These families still need the work of ... grassroots groups to make sure our elected officials don't forget them," Ponce tells Axios.
|
Artificial intelligence, much like a sociopath, inherently shows no regard for right and wrong. This unsettling similarity raises an important question: Can we trust the future of AI with such a default state?
Joe Edelman, before founding the Meaning Alignment Institute, pondered deeply on this. Funded by OpenAI, MAI has created a model to guide AI, particularly large language models like ChatGPT, to respond to queries while considering democratically decided human values.
Establishing Common Values Amid Societal Challenges
How do we create common values, and why is this necessary? In an era marked by polarization, reaching a consensus on shared values is daunting. Previous attempts at socially educating AI have had mixed results, with instances of AI propagating hate speech. Leaning on the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Edelman believes values are about what we find meaningful in tough moral choices rather than ideology. This concept forms the backbone of the MAI's approach.
Instead of directly asking people about their values, the MAI model uses a chatbot powered by ChatGPT to find out what individuals truly find meaningful. This is done by asking for responses to preset questions.
I chose to answer this question: “My 10-year-old son refuses to do his homework, spending all his time at his computer instead. How can I make him behave properly?”
I answered a series of questions from the chatbot, which took about five to 10 minutes. The chatbot then interpreted and fed back the deeper meanings behind my responses, focusing on why I held my core beliefs.
From this, the model then took these and concluded that in dialogue with the user (in this case the mother), the following kinds of things would be useful for ChatGPT to mention if asked how to make her son behave properly:
- Signs of dishonesty that might indicate a breach of trust
- Understanding of the necessity of rules, even if it's not fully grasped
Thereafter, the tool suggested other relevant values that had been added by other users (who had answered the same question) that I could “like” such as “Respecting Autonomy in Politicised Contexts” and “Equality and Autonomy.” Likewise, others could vote for the values that had been generated from my responses, which may encompass other values that have been created previously. Thereafter, the MAI builds a moral graph which can guide a future version of ChatGPT (or other LLM).
In my conversation with Edelman, I raised some concerns over bias—such as sample size, sample bias (including cultural bias) and leading questions. The report of the study, which was based on the responses of 500 people selected to reflect the age, income, political leanings and geography of the U.S. population, showed progress in some areas of bias, while others remain to be worked on. However, the primary object of the study was to prove that values can be collected from diverse populations democratically and thereafter imported into an LLM such as ChatGPT to help guide its responses.
The results of this U.S.-focused study (Edelman wants to expand the study globally) showed convergence across gender and age and that people can put aside their ideological affiliations. By digging into why people responded in certain ways, rather than focusing only on the response, the model found that even those with opposing ideologies could have similar underlying values. Even if the ways that these values were expressed differed, the values established did not point in multiple conflicting directions that cancelled each other out—providing something that LLMs could use.
Why Adding Human Values To LLMs Matters
LLMs are increasingly shaping our lives, often prioritizing commercial gains over moral implications. As Edelman noted: “The Pentagon has an LLM that's doing war strategy. Financial companies are experimenting with putting LLMs at the trading wheel. And of course, we see the media consequences just starting to appear already. And yet, it's actually quite hard to hire a sociopath as your copywriter.”
Adding human values into LLMs ensures these technologies incorporate human values through a democratic process, avoiding the pitfalls of an amoral AI, or where values have been decided by the developer or by the LLM itself according to its constitution.
The Commercial Threat And Legislation
Edelman accepts that there is little commercial incentive for companies to add human values (such as self-agency, which could reduce user addiction) into their LLMs (hence MAI is a not-for-profit, grant-funded organization). Unfortunately, as history suggests that companies are unwilling to look beyond profit maximization, it is therefore difficult to imagine that, without legislative intervention, social media providers and others will implement human values into their LLMs. Perhaps, similar to a Fairtrade certification, a “human values incorporated” label could be added to LLMs?
In the meantime, Edelman is hoping that due to OpenAI’s lead in the LLM market, which enables it to be “free from some competitive forces for the moment,” OpenAI could take a lead on adding human values to ChatGPT.
Preserving Our Humanity
As we increasingly rely on AI, balancing technological trust with our human essence becomes crucial. Integrating human values into AI is not just about improving technology; it's about preserving our humanity in an increasingly automated world.
|
<urn:uuid:fe6dff32-9b53-4ed0-9c23-875406fe7fa2>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-50",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679101779.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20231210092457-20231210122457-00010.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.963015615940094,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.84375,
"token_count": 1114,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestowersclark/2023/11/21/without-human-values-what-stops-ai-from-acting-as-a-sociopath/"
}
|
Artificial intelligence, much like a sociopath, inherently shows no regard for right and wrong. This unsettling similarity raises an important question: Can we trust the future of AI with such a default state?
Joe Edelman, before founding the Meaning Alignment Institute, pondered deeply on this. Funded by OpenAI, MAI has created a model to guide AI, particularly large language models like ChatGPT, to respond to queries while considering democratically decided human values.
Establishing Common Values Amid Societal Challenges
How do we create common values, and why is this necessary? In an era marked by polarization, reaching a
|
consensus on shared values is daunting. Previous attempts at socially educating AI have had mixed results, with instances of AI propagating hate speech. Leaning on the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Edelman believes values are about what we find meaningful in tough moral choices rather than ideology. This concept forms the backbone of the MAI's approach.
Instead of directly asking people about their values, the MAI model uses a chatbot powered by ChatGPT to find out what individuals truly find meaningful. This is done by asking for responses to preset questions.
I chose to answer this question: “My 10-year-old son refuses to do his homework, spending all his time at his computer instead. How can I make him behave properly?”
I answered a series of questions from the chatbot, which took about five to 10 minutes. The chatbot then interpreted and fed back the deeper meanings behind my responses, focusing on why I held my core beliefs.
From this, the model then took these and concluded that in dialogue with the user (in this case the mother), the following kinds of things would be useful for ChatGPT to mention if asked how to make her son behave properly:
- Signs of dishonesty that might indicate a breach of trust
- Understanding of the necessity of rules, even if it's not fully grasped
Thereafter, the tool suggested other relevant values that had been added by other users (who had answered the same question) that I could “like” such as “Respecting Autonomy in Politicised Contexts” and “Equality and Autonomy.” Likewise, others could vote for the values that had been generated from my responses, which may encompass other values that have been created previously. Thereafter, the MAI builds a moral graph which can guide a future version of ChatGPT (or other LLM).
In my conversation with Edelman, I raised some concerns over bias—such as sample size, sample bias (including cultural bias) and leading questions. The report of the study, which was based on the responses of 500 people selected to reflect the age, income, political leanings and geography of the U.S. population, showed progress in some areas of bias, while others remain to be worked on. However, the primary object of the study was to prove that values can be collected from diverse populations democratically and thereafter imported into an LLM such as ChatGPT to help guide its responses.
The results of this U.S.-focused study (Edelman wants to expand the study globally) showed convergence across gender and age and that people can put aside their ideological affiliations. By digging into why people responded in certain ways, rather than focusing only on the response, the model found that even those with opposing ideologies could have similar underlying values. Even if the ways that these values were expressed differed, the values established did not point in multiple conflicting directions that cancelled each other out—providing something that LLMs could use.
Why Adding Human Values To LLMs Matters
LLMs are increasingly shaping our lives, often prioritizing commercial gains over moral implications. As Edelman noted: “The Pentagon has an LLM that's doing war strategy. Financial companies are experimenting with putting LLMs at the trading wheel. And of course, we see the media consequences just starting to appear already. And yet, it's actually quite hard to hire a sociopath as your copywriter.”
Adding human values into LLMs ensures these technologies incorporate human values through a democratic process, avoiding the pitfalls of an amoral AI, or where values have been decided by the developer or by the LLM itself according to its constitution.
The Commercial Threat And Legislation
Edelman accepts that there is little commercial incentive for companies to add human values (such as self-agency, which could reduce user addiction) into their LLMs (hence MAI is a not-for-profit, grant-funded organization). Unfortunately, as history suggests that companies are unwilling to look beyond profit maximization, it is therefore difficult to imagine that, without legislative intervention, social media providers and others will implement human values into their LLMs. Perhaps, similar to a Fairtrade certification, a “human values incorporated” label could be added to LLMs?
In the meantime, Edelman is hoping that due to OpenAI’s lead in the LLM market, which enables it to be “free from some competitive forces for the moment,” OpenAI could take a lead on adding human values to ChatGPT.
Preserving Our Humanity
As we increasingly rely on AI, balancing technological trust with our human essence becomes crucial. Integrating human values into AI is not just about improving technology; it's about preserving our humanity in an increasingly automated world.
|
North Kansas City School District is offering children, as young as in kindergarten, lessons on LGBTQ history that include stories of little boys who dress up as little girls, the Daily Caller has learned exclusively.
Parents Defending Education (PDE) was tipped off regarding an email sent to staff of the school district in October, providing a list of resources for the educators that was curated by “Equity advocates.” (RELATED: Utah School District Pulls Dozens Of Books Including ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘Two Boys Kissing’)
The resources included also contain a list of student resources on LGBTQ history compiled by the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN has opposed restricting transgender-identified children’s access to life-altering medical interventions.
“Throughout our lives, however, our many bodily characteristics work together to create a unique path of development, causing some of us to grow really tall, and others to remain short, or some of us to grow hair under our armpits and legs, while others remain bare,” GLSEN writes on its website. “While this development often happens on its own during puberty, this change can also be administered through medicine, such as hormone replacement therapy. Since our society often conflates our bodies (or genitalia) with our gender identity, it is critical that we allow space for people to self-identify.”
Kindergarteners are encouraged to read, “Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress,” and the teacher is told to say that “Some boys like to wear dresses.”
— The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) (@brainpickings) December 22, 2014
“Morris Micklewhite likes school because he can paint and sing and do puzzles. Also at school Morris likes to play in the dress-up center where he likes to wear a tangerine-colored dress. His classmates make fun of him and exclude him from games because of the dress,” a book description reads. “All week, Morris’ classmates tell him dresses are not for boys and don’t let Morris play with them. At home, Morris has a dream that inspires him and he recreates the dream as a painting where he is riding an elephant in space, while wearing the tangerine dress. Morris brings the painting with him to school and his classmates are drawn to play with Morris because of his beautiful painting. In the end, Morris regains confidence in himself and his classmates learn to accept him as he is.”
🚨NEW from @DefendingEd:
The Long Beach Unified School District in California is offering courses to children encouraging them to “explore” their sexual identities and study “social justice.”https://t.co/ixCNIsgZvA pic.twitter.com/dIlvq2yIqt
— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) November 30, 2023
“Rather than fixating on identity politics and recognizing every superficial day created, schools should focus on teaching students math, history, reading, and science,” Michele Exner, senior adviser at PDE, told the Daily Caller in a statement. “It is absurd that school officials want to waste class time on this nonsense and think children as young as 4 and 5 years old should be exposed to mature topics. Parents are fed up and want learning back in classrooms, not political indoctrination.”
|
<urn:uuid:c5d286bf-ecbe-4256-87fd-f47e608d78ad>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474669.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226225941-20240227015941-00431.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9712094664573669,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.546875,
"token_count": 736,
"url": "https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/05/exclusive-lgbtq-lesson-plans-kindergarteners-resources-sex-change/"
}
|
North Kansas City School District is offering children, as young as in kindergarten, lessons on LGBTQ history that include stories of little boys who dress up as little girls, the Daily Caller has learned exclusively.
Parents Defending Education (PDE) was tipped off regarding an email sent to staff of the school district in October, providing a list of resources for the educators that was curated by “Equity advocates.” (RELATED: Utah School District Pulls Dozens Of Books Including ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘Two Boys Kissing’)
The resources included also contain a list of student resources on LGBTQ history compiled
|
by the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN has opposed restricting transgender-identified children’s access to life-altering medical interventions.
“Throughout our lives, however, our many bodily characteristics work together to create a unique path of development, causing some of us to grow really tall, and others to remain short, or some of us to grow hair under our armpits and legs, while others remain bare,” GLSEN writes on its website. “While this development often happens on its own during puberty, this change can also be administered through medicine, such as hormone replacement therapy. Since our society often conflates our bodies (or genitalia) with our gender identity, it is critical that we allow space for people to self-identify.”
Kindergarteners are encouraged to read, “Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress,” and the teacher is told to say that “Some boys like to wear dresses.”
— The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) (@brainpickings) December 22, 2014
“Morris Micklewhite likes school because he can paint and sing and do puzzles. Also at school Morris likes to play in the dress-up center where he likes to wear a tangerine-colored dress. His classmates make fun of him and exclude him from games because of the dress,” a book description reads. “All week, Morris’ classmates tell him dresses are not for boys and don’t let Morris play with them. At home, Morris has a dream that inspires him and he recreates the dream as a painting where he is riding an elephant in space, while wearing the tangerine dress. Morris brings the painting with him to school and his classmates are drawn to play with Morris because of his beautiful painting. In the end, Morris regains confidence in himself and his classmates learn to accept him as he is.”
🚨NEW from @DefendingEd:
The Long Beach Unified School District in California is offering courses to children encouraging them to “explore” their sexual identities and study “social justice.”https://t.co/ixCNIsgZvA pic.twitter.com/dIlvq2yIqt
— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) November 30, 2023
“Rather than fixating on identity politics and recognizing every superficial day created, schools should focus on teaching students math, history, reading, and science,” Michele Exner, senior adviser at PDE, told the Daily Caller in a statement. “It is absurd that school officials want to waste class time on this nonsense and think children as young as 4 and 5 years old should be exposed to mature topics. Parents are fed up and want learning back in classrooms, not political indoctrination.”
|
Activists from Greenpeace display a banner before the United Nations headquarters during ongoing negotiations at the UN on a treaty to protect the high seas in New York Photo: Ed Jones
This is No 11 in our climate change environmental series of articles published around the world, and where necessary, interpreted into reasonable English!
If you have never heard of this treaty you are not alone. The title of the committee pulling it together would put you off reading about it, but the treaty is crucial After almost 20 years of talks, United Nations member states have at last agreed on legal framework for the ocean outside national boundaries.
It has been almost two decades in the making but on Saturday night in New York, after days of gruelling round-the-clock talks, UN member states finally agreed on a treaty to protect the high seas.
A full day after the deadline for talks had officially passed, the conference president, Rena Lee of Singapore, took to the floor of room 2 of the UN headquarters in New York and announced the treaty had been agreed. At a later date, the delegates will meet for half a day to formally adopt the text. She made it clear the text would not be reopened.
“In Singapore, we like to go on learning journeys and this has been the learning journey of a lifetime,” Rena Lee said. She thanked delegates for their dedication and commitment. “The success is also yours,” she told them. She received cheers and a standing ovation from delegates in the room who had not left the conference hall for 48 hours and worked through the night in order to “get the deal done”.
The historic treaty is crucial for enforcing the 30×30 pledge made by countries at the UN biodiversity conference in December, to protect a third of the sea (and land) by 2030. Without a treaty this target would certainly fail, as until now no legal mechanism existed to set up MPAs on the high seas.
Covering almost two-thirds of the ocean that lies outside national boundaries, the treaty will provide a legal framework for establishing vast marine protected areas (MPAs) to protect against the loss of wildlife and share out the genetic resources of the high seas. It will establish a conference of the parties (Cop) that will meet periodically and enable member states to be held to account on issues such as governance and biodiversity.
Ocean ecosystems produce half the oxygen we breathe, represent 95% of the planet’s biosphere and soak up carbon dioxide, as the world’s largest carbon sink. Yet until now, fragmented and loosely enforced rules governing the high seas have rendered this area more susceptible than coastal waters to exploitation.
Veronica Frank, political adviser for Greenpeace, said that while the organisation hadn’t seen the latest text, “we are really happy. The world is so divided and to see multilateralism supported is so important. What’s really important is now to use this tool to develop this 30×30 target into force really quickly.”
The Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) congratulates its President, Ambassador Rena Lee, on a successful conclusion of the treaty. Photograph: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore.
The Pew Charitable Trust welcomed the “landmark international agreement”.
“High seas marine protected areas can play a critical role in the impacts of climate change,” said Liz Karan, director of Pews’s ocean governance project. “Governments and civil society must now ensure the agreement is adopted and rapidly enters into force and is effectively implemented to safeguard high seas biodiversity.”
The High Ambition Coalition – which includes the EU, US, UK and China – were key players in brokering the deal, building coalitions instead of sowing division and showing willingness to compromise in the final days of talks. The Global South led the way in ensuring the treaty could be put into practice in a fair and equitable way.
It is the third time in less than a year that member states have hunkered down in the UN’s headquarters in New York to thrash out a “final” deal. The negotiations, which ran over two weeks from 20 February were the fifth round of talks after earlier negotiations ended last August without agreement. One of the key stumbling blocks, which divided developing and developed nations, was how to fairly share marine genetic resources (MGR) and the eventual profits. MGR, which consist of the genetic material of deep-sea marine sponges, krill, corals, seaweeds and bacteria, are attracting increasing scientific and commercial attention due to their potential use in medicines and cosmetics. Others sticking points included the procedure for creating marine protected areas and the model for environmental impact studies of planned activities on the high seas.
In a move seen as an attempt to build trust between rich and poor countries, the European Union pledged €40m ($42m) in New York to facilitate the ratification of the treaty and its early implementation.
Monica Medina, the US assistant secretary for oceans, international environment and scientific affairs, who attended the negotiations in New York, said: “We leave here with the ability to create protected areas in the high seas and achieve the ambitious goal of conserving 30% of the ocean by 2030. And the time to start is now.”
She said the US was pleased to agree on the major element of a high seas treaty that includes a strong, coordinated approach to establishing marine protected areas.
Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, said: “Following a two-week-long rollercoaster of a ride of negotiations and superhero efforts in the last 48 hours, governments reached agreement on key issues that will advance protection and better management of marine biodiversity in the high seas.”
“What happens on the high seas will no longer be ‘out of sight, out of mind,” said Jessica Battle of WWF in a statement after leading the group’s team at the negotiations. “We can now look at the cumulative impacts on our ocean in a way that reflects the interconnected blue economy and the ecosystems that support it.”
NOTES: This report was written by Karen McVeigh in New York.
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
|
<urn:uuid:7bc807fa-6991-4464-babd-f9f4a9e74464>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224645089.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20230530032334-20230530062334-00387.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9545608758926392,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.921875,
"token_count": 1307,
"url": "https://grousebeater.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/the-high-seas-treaty/"
}
|
Activists from Greenpeace display a banner before the United Nations headquarters during ongoing negotiations at the UN on a treaty to protect the high seas in New York Photo: Ed Jones
This is No 11 in our climate change environmental series of articles published around the world, and where necessary, interpreted into reasonable English!
If you have never heard of this treaty you are not alone. The title of the committee pulling it together would put you off reading about it, but the treaty is crucial After almost 20 years of talks, United Nations member states have at last agreed on legal framework for the ocean outside national boundaries.
It has
|
been almost two decades in the making but on Saturday night in New York, after days of gruelling round-the-clock talks, UN member states finally agreed on a treaty to protect the high seas.
A full day after the deadline for talks had officially passed, the conference president, Rena Lee of Singapore, took to the floor of room 2 of the UN headquarters in New York and announced the treaty had been agreed. At a later date, the delegates will meet for half a day to formally adopt the text. She made it clear the text would not be reopened.
“In Singapore, we like to go on learning journeys and this has been the learning journey of a lifetime,” Rena Lee said. She thanked delegates for their dedication and commitment. “The success is also yours,” she told them. She received cheers and a standing ovation from delegates in the room who had not left the conference hall for 48 hours and worked through the night in order to “get the deal done”.
The historic treaty is crucial for enforcing the 30×30 pledge made by countries at the UN biodiversity conference in December, to protect a third of the sea (and land) by 2030. Without a treaty this target would certainly fail, as until now no legal mechanism existed to set up MPAs on the high seas.
Covering almost two-thirds of the ocean that lies outside national boundaries, the treaty will provide a legal framework for establishing vast marine protected areas (MPAs) to protect against the loss of wildlife and share out the genetic resources of the high seas. It will establish a conference of the parties (Cop) that will meet periodically and enable member states to be held to account on issues such as governance and biodiversity.
Ocean ecosystems produce half the oxygen we breathe, represent 95% of the planet’s biosphere and soak up carbon dioxide, as the world’s largest carbon sink. Yet until now, fragmented and loosely enforced rules governing the high seas have rendered this area more susceptible than coastal waters to exploitation.
Veronica Frank, political adviser for Greenpeace, said that while the organisation hadn’t seen the latest text, “we are really happy. The world is so divided and to see multilateralism supported is so important. What’s really important is now to use this tool to develop this 30×30 target into force really quickly.”
The Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) congratulates its President, Ambassador Rena Lee, on a successful conclusion of the treaty. Photograph: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore.
The Pew Charitable Trust welcomed the “landmark international agreement”.
“High seas marine protected areas can play a critical role in the impacts of climate change,” said Liz Karan, director of Pews’s ocean governance project. “Governments and civil society must now ensure the agreement is adopted and rapidly enters into force and is effectively implemented to safeguard high seas biodiversity.”
The High Ambition Coalition – which includes the EU, US, UK and China – were key players in brokering the deal, building coalitions instead of sowing division and showing willingness to compromise in the final days of talks. The Global South led the way in ensuring the treaty could be put into practice in a fair and equitable way.
It is the third time in less than a year that member states have hunkered down in the UN’s headquarters in New York to thrash out a “final” deal. The negotiations, which ran over two weeks from 20 February were the fifth round of talks after earlier negotiations ended last August without agreement. One of the key stumbling blocks, which divided developing and developed nations, was how to fairly share marine genetic resources (MGR) and the eventual profits. MGR, which consist of the genetic material of deep-sea marine sponges, krill, corals, seaweeds and bacteria, are attracting increasing scientific and commercial attention due to their potential use in medicines and cosmetics. Others sticking points included the procedure for creating marine protected areas and the model for environmental impact studies of planned activities on the high seas.
In a move seen as an attempt to build trust between rich and poor countries, the European Union pledged €40m ($42m) in New York to facilitate the ratification of the treaty and its early implementation.
Monica Medina, the US assistant secretary for oceans, international environment and scientific affairs, who attended the negotiations in New York, said: “We leave here with the ability to create protected areas in the high seas and achieve the ambitious goal of conserving 30% of the ocean by 2030. And the time to start is now.”
She said the US was pleased to agree on the major element of a high seas treaty that includes a strong, coordinated approach to establishing marine protected areas.
Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, said: “Following a two-week-long rollercoaster of a ride of negotiations and superhero efforts in the last 48 hours, governments reached agreement on key issues that will advance protection and better management of marine biodiversity in the high seas.”
“What happens on the high seas will no longer be ‘out of sight, out of mind,” said Jessica Battle of WWF in a statement after leading the group’s team at the negotiations. “We can now look at the cumulative impacts on our ocean in a way that reflects the interconnected blue economy and the ecosystems that support it.”
NOTES: This report was written by Karen McVeigh in New York.
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
|
Is warm the new norm? How a lack of snowfall in Delaware is bad news for crops
Delaware hasn’t seen much snow this winter, and while you might be jumping for joy at not having to shovel or risk frostbite, a lack of snowfall is not all good news.
Winter wonderlands and snow days in Delaware might be a thing of the past as warmer temperatures experienced in recent weeks become more commonplace. But what does this really mean for the well-being of the state and its residents?
“We need to make sure we have adequate rain,” said Delaware Department of Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse. “We are well below normal for rainfall. If we had gotten snow, that would’ve helped with the deficit.”
How dry is it in Delaware?
Delaware is about 8 inches below normal levels of rainfall this winter, a value that will be hard to make up in what's left of the season. If that amount does not increase by April, either from more rain or snowfall, there won’t be enough moisture in local soil throughout the year to keep the crops growing, Scuse said.
Snow cover, the amount of land covered by snow at any given time, is needed by plants to keep the soil moist and by animals to insulate them from sub-freezing winter temperatures, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
When snow melts away earlier in the spring, the soil may dry out sooner, negatively impacting planting season. Snow cover also helps replenish groundwater and streams, both of which contribute to local ecosystems.
How snow affects more than moisture levels
Aside from land effects, snow cover affects temperatures on Earth due to the portion of sunlight it can absorb and reflect into space.
Where's the snow?:Forecasters let us know if Delaware will see any snow this winter.
A lack of snow cover means more energy is absorbed at the Earth’s surface, resulting in warmer temperatures, while increased snow cover means more energy reflects into space, resulting in cooling.
Are your spring flowers arriving too soon?
When periods of warm weather creep in during winter months, plants can begin prematurely blooming during weather episodes that drench the state with a false sense of spring.
In Scuse’s own backyard, Delaware’s steady stream of warm weather has found his daffodils sprouting up, reaching as high as 5 inches last week.
If the state gets hit with freezing temperatures soon after, most plants will not be able to survive the change in weather without intervention from farmers or gardeners and run the risk of dying. The lack of an extended freeze, which loosens up soil, also means producers should expect more insects and disease among their crops, Scuse said.
“The biggest deficit we’re facing now is these really warm temperatures. If they get any warmer, we’re gonna have issues with our fruit trees,” Scuse said. “If you lose those buds on fruit trees, and you have that type of damage on your strawberry plants, you can’t replant them. You lost that crop for the entire growing season.”
Increased maintenance during periods of fluctuating weather leads to increased labor crops for producers, said Scuse, who adds that last year, about 10% to 15% of strawberry crops in Delaware were lost and the peach crop was almost completely decimated a few years prior due to premature warm weather followed by cold snaps.
Despite the colder weather previously experienced by Delaware this winter, most notably during the holiday season, Scuse has yet to see any local winter kill yet, when plants die due to the harsh effects of winter weather.
Other economic impacts of snowless winter
And a lack of snowfall doesn't affect only farmers or orchards. It also can take an economic toll on those who rely on snow removal and related services for an income.
Businesses that plow snow or sell shovels or salt have seen a drop in revenue, although snow removal costs are less for municipalities and the state itself.
Remember when:A look back at the 2018 snow storms
Although he doesn’t know what weather is in store for the rest of winter, and the possibility of another cold snap still looms, Scuse said higher winter temperatures and early blooms are a cause for concern.
Given data about higher temperatures during winter and summer months in recent years, Scuse ponders whether these odd occurrences are truly abnormal anymore, or if what we’re experiencing is the start of a new normal.
“We’ve experienced warmer Januarys and Februarys than normal the past couple of years,” he said. “There’s a lot of children out there that would love to go sledding. The lack of snowfall the last few years has limited the sledding that our kids can do.”
Got a tip or a story idea? Contact Krys'tal Griffin at <email-pii>.
|
<urn:uuid:14b46f0e-5056-4a6f-80a6-3e21ea336b88>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949506.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20230330225648-20230331015648-00352.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9514549374580383,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.984375,
"token_count": 1045,
"url": "https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2023/02/20/delaware-snowfall-decreased-weather-crops-impact/69903624007/"
}
|
Is warm the new norm? How a lack of snowfall in Delaware is bad news for crops
Delaware hasn’t seen much snow this winter, and while you might be jumping for joy at not having to shovel or risk frostbite, a lack of snowfall is not all good news.
Winter wonderlands and snow days in Delaware might be a thing of the past as warmer temperatures experienced in recent weeks become more commonplace. But what does this really mean for the well-being of the state and its residents?
“We need to make sure we have adequate rain,” said Delaware Department of Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse. “We are
|
well below normal for rainfall. If we had gotten snow, that would’ve helped with the deficit.”
How dry is it in Delaware?
Delaware is about 8 inches below normal levels of rainfall this winter, a value that will be hard to make up in what's left of the season. If that amount does not increase by April, either from more rain or snowfall, there won’t be enough moisture in local soil throughout the year to keep the crops growing, Scuse said.
Snow cover, the amount of land covered by snow at any given time, is needed by plants to keep the soil moist and by animals to insulate them from sub-freezing winter temperatures, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
When snow melts away earlier in the spring, the soil may dry out sooner, negatively impacting planting season. Snow cover also helps replenish groundwater and streams, both of which contribute to local ecosystems.
How snow affects more than moisture levels
Aside from land effects, snow cover affects temperatures on Earth due to the portion of sunlight it can absorb and reflect into space.
Where's the snow?:Forecasters let us know if Delaware will see any snow this winter.
A lack of snow cover means more energy is absorbed at the Earth’s surface, resulting in warmer temperatures, while increased snow cover means more energy reflects into space, resulting in cooling.
Are your spring flowers arriving too soon?
When periods of warm weather creep in during winter months, plants can begin prematurely blooming during weather episodes that drench the state with a false sense of spring.
In Scuse’s own backyard, Delaware’s steady stream of warm weather has found his daffodils sprouting up, reaching as high as 5 inches last week.
If the state gets hit with freezing temperatures soon after, most plants will not be able to survive the change in weather without intervention from farmers or gardeners and run the risk of dying. The lack of an extended freeze, which loosens up soil, also means producers should expect more insects and disease among their crops, Scuse said.
“The biggest deficit we’re facing now is these really warm temperatures. If they get any warmer, we’re gonna have issues with our fruit trees,” Scuse said. “If you lose those buds on fruit trees, and you have that type of damage on your strawberry plants, you can’t replant them. You lost that crop for the entire growing season.”
Increased maintenance during periods of fluctuating weather leads to increased labor crops for producers, said Scuse, who adds that last year, about 10% to 15% of strawberry crops in Delaware were lost and the peach crop was almost completely decimated a few years prior due to premature warm weather followed by cold snaps.
Despite the colder weather previously experienced by Delaware this winter, most notably during the holiday season, Scuse has yet to see any local winter kill yet, when plants die due to the harsh effects of winter weather.
Other economic impacts of snowless winter
And a lack of snowfall doesn't affect only farmers or orchards. It also can take an economic toll on those who rely on snow removal and related services for an income.
Businesses that plow snow or sell shovels or salt have seen a drop in revenue, although snow removal costs are less for municipalities and the state itself.
Remember when:A look back at the 2018 snow storms
Although he doesn’t know what weather is in store for the rest of winter, and the possibility of another cold snap still looms, Scuse said higher winter temperatures and early blooms are a cause for concern.
Given data about higher temperatures during winter and summer months in recent years, Scuse ponders whether these odd occurrences are truly abnormal anymore, or if what we’re experiencing is the start of a new normal.
“We’ve experienced warmer Januarys and Februarys than normal the past couple of years,” he said. “There’s a lot of children out there that would love to go sledding. The lack of snowfall the last few years has limited the sledding that our kids can do.”
Got a tip or a story idea? Contact Krys'tal Griffin at <email-pii>.
|
We are all living in a technologically changing world. It holds both the promise of new wonders and threats of existential destruction.
Risk and reward will equally be impacted by the vast new opportunities to acquire wealth and lose it.
Throughout human history, people have been trying to acquire assets and protect whatever they considered valuable. Over the centuries of the growth of civilization, the dominant threats to private wealth came from both criminals and government. It was not always easy to tell the difference.
It is natural that people who are of illegal or legal larceny take what they determine to be reasonable action to protect against being plundered. This widely perceived exposure to being robbed by ever increasing scams and shams including legal, governmental, and financial privateering drives the desire by the everyday citizens for privacy and asset protection.
The protection of private wealth is vital to the maintenance of a stable country. The United States and its Constitution stands witness to this fact as the world changed from agrarian to industrial. The nature of wealth transformed creating a need for new wealth protection methods and means.
Starting in the 17th century and into the 20th century intangible wealth in the form of investments and ownership interests became a major part of the foundation for financial security along with real estate. In this 21st century with encryption technology and cyber currency, what is considered precious and valuable is expanding, taking on new forms, and needing new protection mechanisms.
Advancing forms of prosperity create new exposures for loss. Larceny has always been as much a part of the human character for some people as compassion is for others. Publicly enforced wealth deprivation due to taxes, regulations, and other governmental impositions are becoming more intrusive and complex. The nearly out-of-control litigation industry shows no sign of abating. New and novel means will be required to deal with the growing institutionalized attacks on affluence.
Corporations were initially the dominant vehicles to limit personal legal liability for collective financial risks. Insurance became the dominant means to shift risk. Since then, state legislatures have responded to the increasing needs of the public for more sophisticated means of asset protection.
Politicians sell their services just like everyone else, only they get paid in votes. Legal vehicles as limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and limited liability partnerships as well as a vast array of other legislation fulfill the needs of political campaign contributing investors and business owners. It creates a boom in the need for offensive and defensive legal and other professional services.
These entities and planning structures also serve a long litany of other individual needs such as means to organize investments, plan for tax efficiency, deal with personal and family disharmony and reduce the risk of economic or legal loss. Even traditional planning structures like trusts and foundations were updated by special legislation to provide an effective and efficient means for asset protection to secure future financial survival.
While nearly all businesspersons, investors, and their professional service providers focus their efforts at making more money, this is only half the equation. After acquiring assets, the other half of the problem is to keep it from being taken away.
The risk of loss is a fear that is on everyone’s mind, although not always spoken out. Dealing with the potential for loss due to physical or economic crime, governmental enforcement, and legal liability risks requires everyone with any amount of retained wealth to take action to protect their downsides even as they capitalize on their potential for upsides.
Asset protection reflects more than a means of wrapping financial wealth up in a protective cocoon. Financial security is a means to achieve other human value objectives such as a sense of fulfillment and purpose, and perhaps the most precious goal of all, piece of mind. The most sought-after commodity in living with other people may be privacy, which will likely be the most difficult for anyone to acquire.
Planning for asset protection should reflect an understanding of why everyone is working so hard to secure wealth and what is most important when reaching financial and personal goals. We human beings are our most precious assets.
Denis Kleinfeld is known as a strategic tax and wealth protection lawyer, widely published author and creative teacher.
© 2024 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.
|
<urn:uuid:78906b8a-3f32-4226-bc67-5bc4809ee620>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473518.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20240221134259-20240221164259-00850.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.967138409614563,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.578125,
"token_count": 850,
"url": "https://www.newsmax.com/finance/kleinfeld/asset-protection-cybersecurity-capitalism/2023/11/06/id/1141160/"
}
|
We are all living in a technologically changing world. It holds both the promise of new wonders and threats of existential destruction.
Risk and reward will equally be impacted by the vast new opportunities to acquire wealth and lose it.
Throughout human history, people have been trying to acquire assets and protect whatever they considered valuable. Over the centuries of the growth of civilization, the dominant threats to private wealth came from both criminals and government. It was not always easy to tell the difference.
It is natural that people who are of illegal or legal larceny take what they determine to be reasonable action to protect against being plundered. This widely perceived exposure
|
to being robbed by ever increasing scams and shams including legal, governmental, and financial privateering drives the desire by the everyday citizens for privacy and asset protection.
The protection of private wealth is vital to the maintenance of a stable country. The United States and its Constitution stands witness to this fact as the world changed from agrarian to industrial. The nature of wealth transformed creating a need for new wealth protection methods and means.
Starting in the 17th century and into the 20th century intangible wealth in the form of investments and ownership interests became a major part of the foundation for financial security along with real estate. In this 21st century with encryption technology and cyber currency, what is considered precious and valuable is expanding, taking on new forms, and needing new protection mechanisms.
Advancing forms of prosperity create new exposures for loss. Larceny has always been as much a part of the human character for some people as compassion is for others. Publicly enforced wealth deprivation due to taxes, regulations, and other governmental impositions are becoming more intrusive and complex. The nearly out-of-control litigation industry shows no sign of abating. New and novel means will be required to deal with the growing institutionalized attacks on affluence.
Corporations were initially the dominant vehicles to limit personal legal liability for collective financial risks. Insurance became the dominant means to shift risk. Since then, state legislatures have responded to the increasing needs of the public for more sophisticated means of asset protection.
Politicians sell their services just like everyone else, only they get paid in votes. Legal vehicles as limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and limited liability partnerships as well as a vast array of other legislation fulfill the needs of political campaign contributing investors and business owners. It creates a boom in the need for offensive and defensive legal and other professional services.
These entities and planning structures also serve a long litany of other individual needs such as means to organize investments, plan for tax efficiency, deal with personal and family disharmony and reduce the risk of economic or legal loss. Even traditional planning structures like trusts and foundations were updated by special legislation to provide an effective and efficient means for asset protection to secure future financial survival.
While nearly all businesspersons, investors, and their professional service providers focus their efforts at making more money, this is only half the equation. After acquiring assets, the other half of the problem is to keep it from being taken away.
The risk of loss is a fear that is on everyone’s mind, although not always spoken out. Dealing with the potential for loss due to physical or economic crime, governmental enforcement, and legal liability risks requires everyone with any amount of retained wealth to take action to protect their downsides even as they capitalize on their potential for upsides.
Asset protection reflects more than a means of wrapping financial wealth up in a protective cocoon. Financial security is a means to achieve other human value objectives such as a sense of fulfillment and purpose, and perhaps the most precious goal of all, piece of mind. The most sought-after commodity in living with other people may be privacy, which will likely be the most difficult for anyone to acquire.
Planning for asset protection should reflect an understanding of why everyone is working so hard to secure wealth and what is most important when reaching financial and personal goals. We human beings are our most precious assets.
Denis Kleinfeld is known as a strategic tax and wealth protection lawyer, widely published author and creative teacher.
© 2024 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.
|
The Holocaust continues to cast a long shadow over Europe’s history after 80 years. Over six million Jews died in some of the most brutal and sustained atrocities ever inflicted on a civilian population.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an opportunity to recall why it’s crucial to revisit this dark period in history during World War Two.
Here are 10 Holocaust sites which I’d recommend from my travels which are hard to erase from the memory. The words “we must never forget’ continue to resonate strongly in today’s troubled times…
Dachau Concentration Camp – “Cradle of Terror” – Germany
Dachau Concentration Camp was Germany’s ‘cradle of terror’ during World War Two, serving as a ‘school of violence’ for the Nazis.
It was Germany’s first concentration camp, a prototype of what was to follow over the next decade, a precursor to the Holocaust.
Dachau camp was established in March 1933 by the National Socialist government in Germany under Chancellor Adolf Hitler. It was located in the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory in this small town, north of Munich.
Around 188,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945. It’s estimated that at least 30,000 died here – that’s every 5th prisoner.
Heinrich Himmler described it as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners”, but it was much more than that. It was part of the Nazis machinery of oppression and, ultimately, a key part of their Final Solution.
Dachau was an experiment in terror and subjugation, a model for camps that would be built across Germany and Poland, including Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and Belsen. The terror regime started here.
Today it’s a chilling reminder of what happens when rampant political violence gathers momentum resulting in unspeakable atrocities.
Read the full story – The Bitter Truth about Dachau Concentration Camp
Where to Visit: Dachau Camp is located in Dachau, about 10 miles north-west of Munich. From Munich city centre, take the S2 suburban train to Dachau Bahnhof which takes around 15 minutes. The Dachau bus stop is straight ahead of you. There’s also a direct bus from Munch – number 726 – to the Dachau Concentration Camp site. A good way of returning to the train station is to walk the Path of Remembrance along the old railway track which features memorials along its route.
The “Holocaust Hiding House” – Riga, Latvia
The Žanis Lipke House is located on an ordinary street in Riga in a quiet neighbourhood called Kipsala but its story is far from ordinary.
During World War Two the house provided refuge for Riga’s Jews who faced almost certain death if they stayed in the city.
The Lipke House had a hidden bunker, a safe refuge from the tumultuous world beyond its doors.
Sometimes its inhabitants spent months in the secret ‘bunker’, waiting for the right moment to be smuggled out of Latvia during World War Two.
It’s a story of astonishing courage, resilience and hope, but the room’s inhabitants lived with the constant fear of being discovered.
The Lipke family were responsible for saving dozens of lives whilst taking huge personal risks, even though they weren’t Jewish themselves.
Photographs: The Lipke family in the 1940s, the secret hiding place and Žanis Lipke with his wife Johanna
© Žaņa Lipkes memoriāls, Riga.
Žanis Lipke worked at Riga Docks and had a strong humanitarian streak. This was born out of his memories of witnessing a major ‘liquidation’ exercise when 10,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were brutally killed by the Nazis.
Lipke is said to have watched in horror as the dead bodies of Jewish men, women and children were tossed into the street. He is reported to have told his son: ‘”Look carefully, my boy, and never forget”.
At first Žanis found safe houses and cellars where Jewish workers could hide in different areas of Riga but this strategy soon became too dangerous..
Žanis decided on a new tactic. He would ‘smuggle’ the Jewish escapees to his own house in Kipsala not far from Riga Old Town. He was to save dozens of Jewish lives.
Read the full story of the Zanis Lipke Holocaust Hiding House and the Riga Ghetto
How to Visit: The Žanis Lipke House is located close to Riga Old Town on the other side of the Daugava river. It’s a 20 minute walk over the ‘Vansu Tilts’ bridge to Kipsala Island. The house is on Mazais Balasta Street. Entrance is free.
‘A Bitter Truth’ – The Jewish Museum, Berlin
The Judisches Museum in Berlin is not like any ordinary museum stuffed with artefacts and historic memorabilia.
It’s more of an immersive experience which takes you on an emotionally challenging journey into the lives of the Jewish community in 1940s Germany.
From the moment you arrive at Daniel Libskind’s remarkable building, you enter into a different world which is at times disorientating, uncomfortable and confusing.
The building’s titanium-zinc façade makes it impossible to orientate your eyes and decipher where each floor begins from the outside.
Once inside, you feel like you’re walking at a tilting angle due to the zigzagging layout, sloping walkways, angled walls and bare concrete ‘voids’.
It’s almost like being stuck inside an Expressionist film with architecture designed to disarm you. The dark lighting and occasional flashes of light add to the air of disorientation.
The exhibits bring to life the harrowing stories of the Holocaust with a stark style of presentation that is devastating in the extreme.
One of the museum’s most poignant spaces is “The Memory Void”, a powerful sculptural gallery with hundreds of iron plates cut out to resemble the faces of people.
How to Visit: The Jewish Museum is located on Lindenstrabe to the south of Berlin city centre not far from the old Templehof airport. The museum is open daily 10:00-19:00. Admission to its main collection is free of charge. Behind the museum is an expansive garden and the “Garden of Exile’ sculpture walk with brilliant views.
Another important site in Berlin city centre is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which comprises 2,711 concrete blocks arranged in a grid pattern, commemorating victims of the Holocaust.
Anne Frank’s House – The Secret Annexe – Amsterdam
Photographs – Anne Frank and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam c/o the Anne Frank House Collection.
If there’s one iconic site that everybody has heard of it’s the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam which has become a touchstone for discussion of the Holocaust.
Anne was born into a Jewish family who lived in an old canal-side house in Amsterdam. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, the Jews in the city were singled out for persecution.
In July 1942, the Frank family decided to go into hiding in a series of rooms to the rear of their house. They were followed by friends from the Van Pels family a week later.
Later, a revolving book case was added to provide a secret door to what became known as the “Secret Annexe”.
Anne – who was 12 year old at the time – started writing her diary which has become one of the most remarkable accounts of life under Nazi occupation.
After two years, police officers discovered the eight people in hiding and they were arrested along with two of their helpers on 4 August 1944. There are several theories that the family may have been betrayed.
The family were arrested, and deported to their deaths in concentration and death camps. Anne, her mother, father and sister were sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous concentration camp.
Extract from Anne Frank’s Diary
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.
“People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.”
Photo courtesy and copyright of the Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam Collection.
Two months later, Anne and her sister were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne died of typhus. She was just 15 years old.
Of the eight people in hiding, Otto Frank was the only one to survive the Second World War. “Anne Frank’s Diaries” also survived and today they are perhaps the single most powerful piece of testimony from the Holocaust.
Where to Visit: Anne Frank’s House is located on Prisengracht in central Amsterdam, Holland. The House can only be visited with a ticket bought online for a specific time slot. I’ve found it almost impossible to get a ticket in the past so I’d advise booking early if you’re travelling to Amsterdam.
You can also undertake a virtual tour of the Secret Annexe
Heart of Darkness – Radun and Vasilishki – Belarus
Belarus lay at the centre of major political fault lines in the dark heart of Europe during World War Two. It was here that the battle for domination of European between Hitler and Stalin played out.
Belarus’ killing fields were some of the bloodiest in Europe. By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had been killed or moved away.
Almost the entire Jewish population of the country was annihilated during World War Two.
You don’t have to travel far to discover one of Belarus’ many Jewish massacre sites. Some lie next to roadsides, close to villages and small towns – they pop up like ghostly apparitions of once vibrant, destroyed communities.
At Radun, close to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, there’s a roadside museum to the Jewish community with large memorial stones honouring those who died during the Holocaust.
Most of the larger graves are accompanied by smaller stones placed as a tribute by travellers or family members who have returned from overseas to pay their respects.
Not far away, you’ll discover Vasilishki, a sleepy rural town which was once a bustling ‘shtetl’ (or small town) where Jews lived and worked peacefully side by side with the local Catholic community.
Life changed completely when Nazi troops drove into Vasilishki in 1941. The Germans occupied the town and turned their attentions to suppressing its Jewish community with fierce brutality.
On May 10, 1942 a Nazi officer gave the order to round up the Jews and they were taken to a wooded park close to the centre of the village.
Photographs – ‘Vasilishok’ – the park where Jews were slaughtered, (left) and the Jewish memorial (right).
In one of the most shocking incidents of the Holocaust in Belarus, over 2,000 men, women and children were shot dead in plain sight of the village.
I spoke to the last surviving witness of these traumatic events, a Catholic woman who still bears the scars of what she saw as a 10-year-old child.
After 80 years she still can’t shake off the devastating memory of the murders and the image of a young Jewish child with plaited hair lying on a cart piled high with the dead.
Photographs – An old shed owned by a Jewish family in ‘Vasilishok’ village, a typical Belarusian farm, and Holocaust eye witness Teresa Ginel-Gulbatzky.
There are glimpses of the town’s Jewish history including a deserted synagogue, a few old houses and the local park. But you have to look hard for evidence of this once busy Jewish settlement.
Walk through the quiet park and you’ll find yourself treading on top of the burial pits where the bodies of the Jews were dumped. In the far corner there’s a memorial erected and tended by the villagers. It’s a sight to send shockwaves through your bones…
Read the story of Belarus and the Jews during World War Two
How to Visit: Belarus can be reached by direct flights from the UK to Minsk or over the border by car from Lithuania. The villages of Radun and Vasilishki are about 2-3 hours drive from the southern Lithuanian border crossing. Leave plenty of time to clear border control as it’s renowned for being a slow process, if you’re arriving by car. There is hotel accommodation in nearby Lida, an interesting historic city with a fortified castle.
Biķernieki Forest – ‘Murder in the Woods’ – Riga, Latvia
Riga had a large Jewish population before World War Two. When the Nazis arrived in 1941, they banned Jews from public places, forced them to wear a yellow star, and stopped them from using sidewalks.
By November 1941, around 29,602 Jews from Riga and its environs were imprisoned in a ghetto on the edge of the city centre. But they were not to stay there for long.
Most were massacred in the Rumbula Forest by the German Einsatzgruppe on 29 November and 8 December 1941. About 25,000 Jews were exterminated including 8,000 children aged 10 or younger.
Photographs – The Jewish massacre site at the Biķernieki Forest and memorials.
Another wave of atrocities took place in early 1942 after 11,000 “German State Jews” from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were moved to the now empty Riga Ghetto.
They were taken en masse to the the Biķernieki Forest not far from Riga city centre where they were machine-gunned and killed in the woods.
It’s shocking to walk amongst the mass graves and witness the raised mounds where the bodies were dumped.
In October, 1944 the Russian army liberated Riga but its was too late for the Jewish community. Almost all of Latvia’s Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.
Where to Visit: The Biķernieki Forest is a short car or bus ride from Riga city centre in Latvia. It is located not far from the Riga Motor Museum.
The Jewish Ghetto – Chania, Crete
Old Chania in Crete is a tourist magnet with its maze of narrow alleyways and meandering, medieval street pattern. One of its most vibrant areas is the Jewish Quarter, once the home of the town’s Jews.
The Jews called it ‘Ovreaki’ but today the name has completely disappeared from Chania’s modern street maps.
With the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, there was a massive clampdown on the Jewish population.
The Jews lived under Nazi occupation for three years, fearing for their future. On May 31, 1944, their worst fears were realised. Megaphone announcements ordered anybody with Jewish identity papers to bring a single suitcase of belongings and report to the street outside their house.
Families living on in the Jewish Quarter were herded down to the harbour. Others were pushed through a narrow passage into a small open space where trucks were waiting to load them up.
They were taken to the Ayias prison near Chania and their houses and possessions were plundered. German soldiers entered Etz Hayyim Synagogue and removed all its religious artefacts whilst the Jewish cemetery was destroyed.
A few days later, 265 of the Jews were transported by trucks to Heraklion where they were loaded onto a ship called the Tanais. They were to be taken to the Greek mainland from where they would be transported by train to Auschwitz.
A British submarine spotted the ship off the island of Santorini and, seeing its enemy flag, torpedoed it. Everyone on board was killed and the Jewish community in Chania was completely wiped out in this tragic incident.
Today the Etz Hayyim Synagogue stands in the same place, surrounded by a dense maze of alleyways and streets which radiate down to Chania’s Old Harbour.
Read the full story of the Jewish Ghetto in Chania on my Crete blog feature
Where to Visit: Chania is a popular Cretan holiday resort with many flights from UK airports. The Jewish Quarter’s maze of streets is a highlight of any visit. It’s also possible to join a tour of the old synagogue.
Daugavpils – Massacre of the Jews
Photographs: The old Jewish quarter today and in its heyday (left and top right) and the Daugavpils Citadel today.
Daugavpils is Latvia’s second city, once known as ‘Dvinsk’, famous as a military stronghold, reflected in its star-shaped fortifications and almost impregnable citadel dating from Napoleonic times.
The city once boasted a large Jewish community, making up around 50% of its population. Many Jews worked in commerce, industry and textiles – and there were 48 synagogues.
It was also home to the artist Mark Rothko and his family before they emigrated to the USA in the early 1930s. He was one of the lucky escapees. In 1941 the Nazis occupied Latvia and it wasn’t long before they started their mass extermination of the Jews.
Photographs: Dvinsk ghetto was established in the fortress (left) and the Jewish Holocaust memorial today (right).
The Nazis established the Daugavpils/Dvinsk Ghetto and 14,000 Jews from the local area were herded into the old fortress.
In early November 1941, the Germans killed most of the remaining Jews in the Daugavpils ghetto.
Many of the ghetto inhabitants were shot in the Mežciems woods on the right bank of the river behind the fortress. It’s shocking to discover that this site of mass killings was in plain sight of the local neighbourhood.
Tragically, less than 100 Jews survived and many of these died of disease or hunger.
Outside the prison there is a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Daugavpils. It’s one of the few nods to the erased history of the Jews in Daugavpils.
Read the full story of Daugavpils and the Jews during World War Two
Where to Visit: Daugavpils is tucked away in the far eastern corner of Latvia, close to the Lithuanian border. It’s approximately 3-4 hours drive from Riga. I’d recommend hiring a car as public transport by bus/train is slow.
Today you can still see the buildings of the old fortress and some of the areas where the Jews were incarcerated. Please be cautious on your visit as this part of the fortress is now a high security prison with armed guards.
Buchenwald’s Death Camp – Germany
Photographs: Prisoners liberated by the Allies from Buchenwald at the end of World War Two
c/o Imperial War Museum.
Nothing prepares you for your first trip to a concentration camp. Mine was a trip to Buchenwald in Germany where I vowed not to take any photographs at the time because it was such an overwhelming experience.
It’s a decision I regret because it’s crucial that we never forget to share the extent of the atrocities committed here.
The name Buchenwald is synonymous with one of the cruellest regimes of any Nazi concentration camp. By the end of the Second World War, Buchenwald had become the largest concentration camp in the German Reich.
It was established in July 1937 when the SS cleared a forest area near Weimar in Germany to build a new concentration camp to house Jews, political opponents, and other “strangers to the community”.
Photographs – Buchenwald barracks (left) and the crematorium after liberation (right) c/o Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
The Nazis deported people to Buchenwald from all over Europe, reaching a peak of 280,000 inmates imprisoned in the main concentration camp and its 139 sub camps. The scale was that of an ‘industrial death machine’.
More than 56,000 died at Buchenwald as the result of torture, medical experiments and disease, many of them Jews.
When the Americans liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, the commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that: “Nothing has ever shocked me as much as that sight.”
Today, a visit to the camp remains one of the most shocking that I can recall on my many Holocaust journeys.
How to Visit: Buchenwald Concentration Camp is located 10 kilometres north west of the town of Weimar in Germany. The number 6 bus from Weimar train station runs hourly to Buchenwald. There’s also easy car access. Admission is free.
The “Jerusalem of the North” – Vilnius, Lithuania
Photographs: The former entrance to the Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius (left) and the Jewish Quarter today (right).
It’s shocking how genocide and mass extermination can wipe out the complete history of a group of people.
Vilnius was once one of Europe’s biggest centres of Jewish culture and learning. Before the Holocaust there were over 110,000 Jews living in the city, almost half the city’s population. Vilnius was known as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’.
But after 1940, life changed dramatically with the invasion of the Nazis. Thousands of Jews were murdered and sent to their deaths. Today there are barely 2,000 Jews living in the city and much of their history has been swept away.
However, it’s still easy to find some notable Jewish sites. A good starting point is the Big and Little Jewish ghettos where you can follow the Jewish heritage trail. Dotted along its route are reminders of the Jewish past including street signs in Hebrew, the old Jewish library and the ruins of the former Great Synagogue.
Piecing these fragments of history together provides a fascinating insight into the lives of a lost community, and raises troubling questions about Latvia’s “collaboration” with the Nazis.
Photographs: Zydu Street in Vilnius, the Jewish Quarter today and the Gaon statue.
The Big Ghetto in Vilnius operated from 1941 to 1943 with around 29,000 Jews living there. Nearly all of them were sent to Paneriai woods outside the city where they were executed.
A smaller ghetto was created in the Stiklių quarter of the city centre where 11,000 Jews were herded into a small area until it was liquidated.
Lithuania lost around 95% of its Jewish population during the Holocaust, more than any other European country.
Read my guide to Vilnius including the history and sights of the Jewish ghetto
How to Visit: There are direct flights to Vilnius from several British airports including London Heathrow and Leeds.
The Big Ghetto entrance is at 18 Rūdnininkų Street – it’s easily spotted because there’s a memorial plaque with a street plan of the ghetto. There are Jewish tours if you want to explore the hidden sights and key locations.
The Memorial Museum of the Holocaust in Vilnius is a ‘must see’ site for Jewish history. The former site of the Great Synagogue that once dominated the Jewish quarter is worth a look for its newly discovered archaeological finds.
Photographs – Old photographs Jewish residents of Vilnius in late 1930s (left and right) and the site of the former Great Synagogue (pictured centre).
Leave a Reply
|
<urn:uuid:90afe48c-4b11-451d-81e4-822ebb9bf424>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945030.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20230323065609-20230323095609-00127.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9659611582756042,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.015625,
"token_count": 5067,
"url": "https://tammytourguide.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/the-holocaust-europes-darkest-days/"
}
|
The Holocaust continues to cast a long shadow over Europe’s history after 80 years. Over six million Jews died in some of the most brutal and sustained atrocities ever inflicted on a civilian population.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an opportunity to recall why it’s crucial to revisit this dark period in history during World War Two.
Here are 10 Holocaust sites which I’d recommend from my travels which are hard to erase from the memory. The words “we must never forget’ continue to resonate strongly in today’s troubled times…
Dachau Concentration Camp – “Cradle of Terror” – Germany
D
|
achau Concentration Camp was Germany’s ‘cradle of terror’ during World War Two, serving as a ‘school of violence’ for the Nazis.
It was Germany’s first concentration camp, a prototype of what was to follow over the next decade, a precursor to the Holocaust.
Dachau camp was established in March 1933 by the National Socialist government in Germany under Chancellor Adolf Hitler. It was located in the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory in this small town, north of Munich.
Around 188,000 prisoners were incarcerated at Dachau between 1933 and 1945. It’s estimated that at least 30,000 died here – that’s every 5th prisoner.
Heinrich Himmler described it as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners”, but it was much more than that. It was part of the Nazis machinery of oppression and, ultimately, a key part of their Final Solution.
Dachau was an experiment in terror and subjugation, a model for camps that would be built across Germany and Poland, including Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and Belsen. The terror regime started here.
Today it’s a chilling reminder of what happens when rampant political violence gathers momentum resulting in unspeakable atrocities.
Read the full story – The Bitter Truth about Dachau Concentration Camp
Where to Visit: Dachau Camp is located in Dachau, about 10 miles north-west of Munich. From Munich city centre, take the S2 suburban train to Dachau Bahnhof which takes around 15 minutes. The Dachau bus stop is straight ahead of you. There’s also a direct bus from Munch – number 726 – to the Dachau Concentration Camp site. A good way of returning to the train station is to walk the Path of Remembrance along the old railway track which features memorials along its route.
The “Holocaust Hiding House” – Riga, Latvia
The Žanis Lipke House is located on an ordinary street in Riga in a quiet neighbourhood called Kipsala but its story is far from ordinary.
During World War Two the house provided refuge for Riga’s Jews who faced almost certain death if they stayed in the city.
The Lipke House had a hidden bunker, a safe refuge from the tumultuous world beyond its doors.
Sometimes its inhabitants spent months in the secret ‘bunker’, waiting for the right moment to be smuggled out of Latvia during World War Two.
It’s a story of astonishing courage, resilience and hope, but the room’s inhabitants lived with the constant fear of being discovered.
The Lipke family were responsible for saving dozens of lives whilst taking huge personal risks, even though they weren’t Jewish themselves.
Photographs: The Lipke family in the 1940s, the secret hiding place and Žanis Lipke with his wife Johanna
© Žaņa Lipkes memoriāls, Riga.
Žanis Lipke worked at Riga Docks and had a strong humanitarian streak. This was born out of his memories of witnessing a major ‘liquidation’ exercise when 10,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were brutally killed by the Nazis.
Lipke is said to have watched in horror as the dead bodies of Jewish men, women and children were tossed into the street. He is reported to have told his son: ‘”Look carefully, my boy, and never forget”.
At first Žanis found safe houses and cellars where Jewish workers could hide in different areas of Riga but this strategy soon became too dangerous..
Žanis decided on a new tactic. He would ‘smuggle’ the Jewish escapees to his own house in Kipsala not far from Riga Old Town. He was to save dozens of Jewish lives.
Read the full story of the Zanis Lipke Holocaust Hiding House and the Riga Ghetto
How to Visit: The Žanis Lipke House is located close to Riga Old Town on the other side of the Daugava river. It’s a 20 minute walk over the ‘Vansu Tilts’ bridge to Kipsala Island. The house is on Mazais Balasta Street. Entrance is free.
‘A Bitter Truth’ – The Jewish Museum, Berlin
The Judisches Museum in Berlin is not like any ordinary museum stuffed with artefacts and historic memorabilia.
It’s more of an immersive experience which takes you on an emotionally challenging journey into the lives of the Jewish community in 1940s Germany.
From the moment you arrive at Daniel Libskind’s remarkable building, you enter into a different world which is at times disorientating, uncomfortable and confusing.
The building’s titanium-zinc façade makes it impossible to orientate your eyes and decipher where each floor begins from the outside.
Once inside, you feel like you’re walking at a tilting angle due to the zigzagging layout, sloping walkways, angled walls and bare concrete ‘voids’.
It’s almost like being stuck inside an Expressionist film with architecture designed to disarm you. The dark lighting and occasional flashes of light add to the air of disorientation.
The exhibits bring to life the harrowing stories of the Holocaust with a stark style of presentation that is devastating in the extreme.
One of the museum’s most poignant spaces is “The Memory Void”, a powerful sculptural gallery with hundreds of iron plates cut out to resemble the faces of people.
How to Visit: The Jewish Museum is located on Lindenstrabe to the south of Berlin city centre not far from the old Templehof airport. The museum is open daily 10:00-19:00. Admission to its main collection is free of charge. Behind the museum is an expansive garden and the “Garden of Exile’ sculpture walk with brilliant views.
Another important site in Berlin city centre is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which comprises 2,711 concrete blocks arranged in a grid pattern, commemorating victims of the Holocaust.
Anne Frank’s House – The Secret Annexe – Amsterdam
Photographs – Anne Frank and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam c/o the Anne Frank House Collection.
If there’s one iconic site that everybody has heard of it’s the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam which has become a touchstone for discussion of the Holocaust.
Anne was born into a Jewish family who lived in an old canal-side house in Amsterdam. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, the Jews in the city were singled out for persecution.
In July 1942, the Frank family decided to go into hiding in a series of rooms to the rear of their house. They were followed by friends from the Van Pels family a week later.
Later, a revolving book case was added to provide a secret door to what became known as the “Secret Annexe”.
Anne – who was 12 year old at the time – started writing her diary which has become one of the most remarkable accounts of life under Nazi occupation.
After two years, police officers discovered the eight people in hiding and they were arrested along with two of their helpers on 4 August 1944. There are several theories that the family may have been betrayed.
The family were arrested, and deported to their deaths in concentration and death camps. Anne, her mother, father and sister were sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous concentration camp.
Extract from Anne Frank’s Diary
“Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.
“People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.”
Photo courtesy and copyright of the Anne Frank Stichting Amsterdam Collection.
Two months later, Anne and her sister were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne died of typhus. She was just 15 years old.
Of the eight people in hiding, Otto Frank was the only one to survive the Second World War. “Anne Frank’s Diaries” also survived and today they are perhaps the single most powerful piece of testimony from the Holocaust.
Where to Visit: Anne Frank’s House is located on Prisengracht in central Amsterdam, Holland. The House can only be visited with a ticket bought online for a specific time slot. I’ve found it almost impossible to get a ticket in the past so I’d advise booking early if you’re travelling to Amsterdam.
You can also undertake a virtual tour of the Secret Annexe
Heart of Darkness – Radun and Vasilishki – Belarus
Belarus lay at the centre of major political fault lines in the dark heart of Europe during World War Two. It was here that the battle for domination of European between Hitler and Stalin played out.
Belarus’ killing fields were some of the bloodiest in Europe. By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had been killed or moved away.
Almost the entire Jewish population of the country was annihilated during World War Two.
You don’t have to travel far to discover one of Belarus’ many Jewish massacre sites. Some lie next to roadsides, close to villages and small towns – they pop up like ghostly apparitions of once vibrant, destroyed communities.
At Radun, close to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, there’s a roadside museum to the Jewish community with large memorial stones honouring those who died during the Holocaust.
Most of the larger graves are accompanied by smaller stones placed as a tribute by travellers or family members who have returned from overseas to pay their respects.
Not far away, you’ll discover Vasilishki, a sleepy rural town which was once a bustling ‘shtetl’ (or small town) where Jews lived and worked peacefully side by side with the local Catholic community.
Life changed completely when Nazi troops drove into Vasilishki in 1941. The Germans occupied the town and turned their attentions to suppressing its Jewish community with fierce brutality.
On May 10, 1942 a Nazi officer gave the order to round up the Jews and they were taken to a wooded park close to the centre of the village.
Photographs – ‘Vasilishok’ – the park where Jews were slaughtered, (left) and the Jewish memorial (right).
In one of the most shocking incidents of the Holocaust in Belarus, over 2,000 men, women and children were shot dead in plain sight of the village.
I spoke to the last surviving witness of these traumatic events, a Catholic woman who still bears the scars of what she saw as a 10-year-old child.
After 80 years she still can’t shake off the devastating memory of the murders and the image of a young Jewish child with plaited hair lying on a cart piled high with the dead.
Photographs – An old shed owned by a Jewish family in ‘Vasilishok’ village, a typical Belarusian farm, and Holocaust eye witness Teresa Ginel-Gulbatzky.
There are glimpses of the town’s Jewish history including a deserted synagogue, a few old houses and the local park. But you have to look hard for evidence of this once busy Jewish settlement.
Walk through the quiet park and you’ll find yourself treading on top of the burial pits where the bodies of the Jews were dumped. In the far corner there’s a memorial erected and tended by the villagers. It’s a sight to send shockwaves through your bones…
Read the story of Belarus and the Jews during World War Two
How to Visit: Belarus can be reached by direct flights from the UK to Minsk or over the border by car from Lithuania. The villages of Radun and Vasilishki are about 2-3 hours drive from the southern Lithuanian border crossing. Leave plenty of time to clear border control as it’s renowned for being a slow process, if you’re arriving by car. There is hotel accommodation in nearby Lida, an interesting historic city with a fortified castle.
Biķernieki Forest – ‘Murder in the Woods’ – Riga, Latvia
Riga had a large Jewish population before World War Two. When the Nazis arrived in 1941, they banned Jews from public places, forced them to wear a yellow star, and stopped them from using sidewalks.
By November 1941, around 29,602 Jews from Riga and its environs were imprisoned in a ghetto on the edge of the city centre. But they were not to stay there for long.
Most were massacred in the Rumbula Forest by the German Einsatzgruppe on 29 November and 8 December 1941. About 25,000 Jews were exterminated including 8,000 children aged 10 or younger.
Photographs – The Jewish massacre site at the Biķernieki Forest and memorials.
Another wave of atrocities took place in early 1942 after 11,000 “German State Jews” from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were moved to the now empty Riga Ghetto.
They were taken en masse to the the Biķernieki Forest not far from Riga city centre where they were machine-gunned and killed in the woods.
It’s shocking to walk amongst the mass graves and witness the raised mounds where the bodies were dumped.
In October, 1944 the Russian army liberated Riga but its was too late for the Jewish community. Almost all of Latvia’s Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.
Where to Visit: The Biķernieki Forest is a short car or bus ride from Riga city centre in Latvia. It is located not far from the Riga Motor Museum.
The Jewish Ghetto – Chania, Crete
Old Chania in Crete is a tourist magnet with its maze of narrow alleyways and meandering, medieval street pattern. One of its most vibrant areas is the Jewish Quarter, once the home of the town’s Jews.
The Jews called it ‘Ovreaki’ but today the name has completely disappeared from Chania’s modern street maps.
With the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, there was a massive clampdown on the Jewish population.
The Jews lived under Nazi occupation for three years, fearing for their future. On May 31, 1944, their worst fears were realised. Megaphone announcements ordered anybody with Jewish identity papers to bring a single suitcase of belongings and report to the street outside their house.
Families living on in the Jewish Quarter were herded down to the harbour. Others were pushed through a narrow passage into a small open space where trucks were waiting to load them up.
They were taken to the Ayias prison near Chania and their houses and possessions were plundered. German soldiers entered Etz Hayyim Synagogue and removed all its religious artefacts whilst the Jewish cemetery was destroyed.
A few days later, 265 of the Jews were transported by trucks to Heraklion where they were loaded onto a ship called the Tanais. They were to be taken to the Greek mainland from where they would be transported by train to Auschwitz.
A British submarine spotted the ship off the island of Santorini and, seeing its enemy flag, torpedoed it. Everyone on board was killed and the Jewish community in Chania was completely wiped out in this tragic incident.
Today the Etz Hayyim Synagogue stands in the same place, surrounded by a dense maze of alleyways and streets which radiate down to Chania’s Old Harbour.
Read the full story of the Jewish Ghetto in Chania on my Crete blog feature
Where to Visit: Chania is a popular Cretan holiday resort with many flights from UK airports. The Jewish Quarter’s maze of streets is a highlight of any visit. It’s also possible to join a tour of the old synagogue.
Daugavpils – Massacre of the Jews
Photographs: The old Jewish quarter today and in its heyday (left and top right) and the Daugavpils Citadel today.
Daugavpils is Latvia’s second city, once known as ‘Dvinsk’, famous as a military stronghold, reflected in its star-shaped fortifications and almost impregnable citadel dating from Napoleonic times.
The city once boasted a large Jewish community, making up around 50% of its population. Many Jews worked in commerce, industry and textiles – and there were 48 synagogues.
It was also home to the artist Mark Rothko and his family before they emigrated to the USA in the early 1930s. He was one of the lucky escapees. In 1941 the Nazis occupied Latvia and it wasn’t long before they started their mass extermination of the Jews.
Photographs: Dvinsk ghetto was established in the fortress (left) and the Jewish Holocaust memorial today (right).
The Nazis established the Daugavpils/Dvinsk Ghetto and 14,000 Jews from the local area were herded into the old fortress.
In early November 1941, the Germans killed most of the remaining Jews in the Daugavpils ghetto.
Many of the ghetto inhabitants were shot in the Mežciems woods on the right bank of the river behind the fortress. It’s shocking to discover that this site of mass killings was in plain sight of the local neighbourhood.
Tragically, less than 100 Jews survived and many of these died of disease or hunger.
Outside the prison there is a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Daugavpils. It’s one of the few nods to the erased history of the Jews in Daugavpils.
Read the full story of Daugavpils and the Jews during World War Two
Where to Visit: Daugavpils is tucked away in the far eastern corner of Latvia, close to the Lithuanian border. It’s approximately 3-4 hours drive from Riga. I’d recommend hiring a car as public transport by bus/train is slow.
Today you can still see the buildings of the old fortress and some of the areas where the Jews were incarcerated. Please be cautious on your visit as this part of the fortress is now a high security prison with armed guards.
Buchenwald’s Death Camp – Germany
Photographs: Prisoners liberated by the Allies from Buchenwald at the end of World War Two
c/o Imperial War Museum.
Nothing prepares you for your first trip to a concentration camp. Mine was a trip to Buchenwald in Germany where I vowed not to take any photographs at the time because it was such an overwhelming experience.
It’s a decision I regret because it’s crucial that we never forget to share the extent of the atrocities committed here.
The name Buchenwald is synonymous with one of the cruellest regimes of any Nazi concentration camp. By the end of the Second World War, Buchenwald had become the largest concentration camp in the German Reich.
It was established in July 1937 when the SS cleared a forest area near Weimar in Germany to build a new concentration camp to house
|
This week, Boeing produced its last 747 “jumbo jet.” A freighter model, the last 747 was delivered yesterday to Atlas Air and will be used as a cargo carrier. It was the 1,574th 747 produced by Boeing, and its delivery ends a remarkable 54-year run for that airplane, beginning with the first test flight of the first 747, pictured above, on February 9, 1969.
To give that longevity record of the airplane that came to be known as the “Queen of the Skies” some context, that means the first 747 took off before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, when Richard Nixon was President and the Vietnam War dominated the news. For most people who have flown on 747s, 1969 is ancient history. It’s hard to believe that a single model of an airplane could be so dominant for so long in the field of air travel.
The Seattle Times published an interesting article this week about the 747, and some of the people who designed and built this remarkably successful engineering marvel. If you’ve ever been on an international flight, you’ve probably been on a 747–the plane that is far wider than domestic flight aircraft, with nine or ten seats across, two aisles, and lots of space (relatively speaking, of course). The plane was designed, built, tested and delivered on time. It could carry an astonishing number of passengers–more than 400, far more than its predecessor, the 707. It also had amazing range, allowing airlines to fly nonstop between faraway cities.
The Seattle Times article quotes some of the many people who designed, built, and were involved in the 747’s long run, and who are obviously proud of what they accomplished with that one ground-breaking model. They should be, of course. The 747 was a plane that revolutionized international air travel and made it what modern travelers have come to expect. As its long run comes to an end, it is worth remembering the creativity, ingenuity, and hard work that produced it–and hoping that those same qualities can be employed to produce another, newer quantum leap in travel technology.
|
<urn:uuid:856921b0-345f-478e-b95c-3eb2b383eda3>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949009.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20230329151629-20230329181629-00009.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9745116233825684,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.75,
"token_count": 441,
"url": "https://webnerhouse.wordpress.com/2023/02/01/"
}
|
This week, Boeing produced its last 747 “jumbo jet.” A freighter model, the last 747 was delivered yesterday to Atlas Air and will be used as a cargo carrier. It was the 1,574th 747 produced by Boeing, and its delivery ends a remarkable 54-year run for that airplane, beginning with the first test flight of the first 747, pictured above, on February 9, 1969.
To give that longevity record of the airplane that came to be known as the “Queen of the Skies” some context,
|
that means the first 747 took off before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, when Richard Nixon was President and the Vietnam War dominated the news. For most people who have flown on 747s, 1969 is ancient history. It’s hard to believe that a single model of an airplane could be so dominant for so long in the field of air travel.
The Seattle Times published an interesting article this week about the 747, and some of the people who designed and built this remarkably successful engineering marvel. If you’ve ever been on an international flight, you’ve probably been on a 747–the plane that is far wider than domestic flight aircraft, with nine or ten seats across, two aisles, and lots of space (relatively speaking, of course). The plane was designed, built, tested and delivered on time. It could carry an astonishing number of passengers–more than 400, far more than its predecessor, the 707. It also had amazing range, allowing airlines to fly nonstop between faraway cities.
The Seattle Times article quotes some of the many people who designed, built, and were involved in the 747’s long run, and who are obviously proud of what they accomplished with that one ground-breaking model. They should be, of course. The 747 was a plane that revolutionized international air travel and made it what modern travelers have come to expect. As its long run comes to an end, it is worth remembering the creativity, ingenuity, and hard work that produced it–and hoping that those same qualities can be employed to produce another, newer quantum leap in travel technology.
|
Unexploded Civil War artillery shell discovered at Gettysburg National Military Park
A Civil War artillery shell was found Wednesday at Gettysburg National Military Park, according to a news release.
The unexploded ordnance was found on the battlefield in the area of Little Round Top, said Jason Martz, a spokesman for the park service. It dates to the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought on July 1-3, 1863.
Crews have been working to rehabilitate that area of the park, and it remains closed to the public.
The 55th Ordnance Disposal Company (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team from Fort Belvoir, Virginia safely removed the shell and destroyed it off-site, the release states.
The team gently washed off the mud so that it could be photographed, the release states.
Little Roundtop remains closed as crews work on a project that will address erosion, parking, overcrowding, and safety concerns.
The plans involve making Little Round Top more accessible for people with disabilities, reconfiguring the parking for buses and cars, making crossings safer for pedestrians, and using ecologically friendly materials to help prevent water runoff in the large gathering spaces.
Gettysburg battlefield:Devil's Den reopens to public, Little Roundtop remains closed
Gettysburg's 'Witness Trees':How Civil-War era honey locust survived, shows US history
It also will address the soil that has been falling away on the east side of "the castle" − the 44th New York Infantry Regiment's Monument. If it were allowed to continue, it could damage the underpinning of the 1893 memorial, Martz has said.
Union and Confederate soldiers fought for three days in Gettysburg in July of 1863. It is one of the best-known battles of the American Civil War.
|
<urn:uuid:15baecde-1bcf-445f-b41e-7fd81ee4d9f4>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945292.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20230325002113-20230325032113-00727.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.951897382736206,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.734375,
"token_count": 372,
"url": "https://www.ydr.com/story/news/local/2023/02/09/civil-war-artillery-shell-unexploded-found-on-gettysburg-battlefield/69887492007/"
}
|
Unexploded Civil War artillery shell discovered at Gettysburg National Military Park
A Civil War artillery shell was found Wednesday at Gettysburg National Military Park, according to a news release.
The unexploded ordnance was found on the battlefield in the area of Little Round Top, said Jason Martz, a spokesman for the park service. It dates to the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought on July 1-3, 1863.
Crews have been working to rehabilitate that area of the park, and it remains closed to the public.
The 55th Ordnance Dis
|
posal Company (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team from Fort Belvoir, Virginia safely removed the shell and destroyed it off-site, the release states.
The team gently washed off the mud so that it could be photographed, the release states.
Little Roundtop remains closed as crews work on a project that will address erosion, parking, overcrowding, and safety concerns.
The plans involve making Little Round Top more accessible for people with disabilities, reconfiguring the parking for buses and cars, making crossings safer for pedestrians, and using ecologically friendly materials to help prevent water runoff in the large gathering spaces.
Gettysburg battlefield:Devil's Den reopens to public, Little Roundtop remains closed
Gettysburg's 'Witness Trees':How Civil-War era honey locust survived, shows US history
It also will address the soil that has been falling away on the east side of "the castle" − the 44th New York Infantry Regiment's Monument. If it were allowed to continue, it could damage the underpinning of the 1893 memorial, Martz has said.
Union and Confederate soldiers fought for three days in Gettysburg in July of 1863. It is one of the best-known battles of the American Civil War.
|
If you’re an eighth grader who wants to take algebra, can you even take the class?
The answer to that question, it turns out, depends a lot on two things: how your school identifies students for advanced math, and where you live.
According to a new nationally representative survey released Tuesday, 65% of U.S. principals said their elementary or middle school offered algebra in eighth grade, but only to certain students. Meanwhile, just 20% of principals said their school offered the class in eighth grade and that any student could take it.
But that picture differed by state. In California, nearly half of principals said their school offered algebra only to certain eighth graders. But in Florida, more than 80% of principals said the class was restricted. In both states, 18% of principals said any eighth grader could take the class, similar to the national rate.
The findings, based on surveys conducted last spring by the RAND Corporation, shed light on the uneven access students have to advanced math classes in middle school, which can have lasting effects on their higher education and job prospects.
Algebra is often considered a gateway class. Eighth graders who take the course can more easily reach calculus by 12th grade — which can set students up for challenging math classes in college and career paths in science and engineering fields.
“The kids that aren’t in algebra by eighth grade, they can do that still,” said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at RAND, and the lead author of the report, “but they would have to do something special to get there,” such as doubling up on math or taking a summer class.
The report also details the extent to which students are separated based on their perceived math abilities, starting as young as elementary school.
More than 40% of elementary school principals told RAND researchers that their school grouped kids based on their math levels, mostly within the classroom. But by middle school, nearly 70% of principals said they grouped students in math. Most commonly, students were put into separate math classes on honors or career prep tracks, the report found.
“The amount of achievement-level grouping — that it does start within classrooms in K-5 schools and that by middle school, students are typically grouped by achievement level more often than they’re not in their math classes — that’s something new,” Kaufman said.
Become a Chalkbeat sponsor
The findings come as parents and school leaders across the country engage in fierce debates over whether students should be able to take algebra before high school, and if so, what support students need to do well in the class.
Notably, San Francisco Unified schools, which attracted national attention for a policy that prevented students from taking algebra until ninth grade, are poised to bring algebra back to middle schools following parent pushback. School officials there put the policy in place 10 years ago to help prepare more Black and Latino students and students from low-income families to pass algebra and access higher-level math classes — a goal that hasn’t panned out.
The new survey data doesn’t look at whether tracking helps or hurts students’ math outcomes.
And there are other factors that could affect whether students can access higher-level math classes, the report notes, such as differing teacher certification rules, school funding levels, and state policies. California’s state math guidelines encourage students to take algebra in ninth grade, for example, while New York schools are supposed to offer high school math to eighth graders who want to take it.
But Kaufman says the report does suggest that schools should be looking at the criteria they use to group students in math, and whether it could be fueling racial or socioeconomic disparities.
“We’re not giving a recommendation that nobody should be tracked,” Kaufman said. “But if you are grouping students, I think this report calls for you to consider whether the way students are grouped, and how, is biased. Are a lot of students of color, for example, in the lower track? What’s happening there?”
Schools try various methods to expand algebra access
Nationally, white and Asian American students are more likely than their Black and Hispanic classmates to enroll in and pass algebra in eighth grade, the latest federal data shows. Historically, students from low-income families have had less access to algebra in eighth grade, too.
In Philadelphia, many students are blocked from the city’s most selective high school because their middle schools don’t offer algebra. Making algebra more accessible is part of the superintendent’s curriculum overhaul.
School districts like Chicago have taken steps to expand access to algebra in eighth grade, such as offering the class online and covering costs for educators to get algebra teaching credentials. Historically, fewer students in the city’s predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods have been able to take the class before high school.
The RAND survey found that principals of more-affluent schools were much more likely than leaders of higher-poverty schools to say they considered parent or guardian requests to place students into advanced math classes. That could shortchange kids who don’t have a parent who can step in and do that kind of advocacy, Kaufman noted.
Become a Chalkbeat sponsor
The report urges schools to look at multiple data points to place students into higher-level math classes, and to consider experimenting with the cutoff scores used to identify which students can handle the harder math coursework.
In Oklahoma, Union Public Schools is trying that, The Hechinger Report recently reported. The district, which serves parts of Tulsa and the city’s southeast suburbs, used to offer a pre-algebra placement test in fifth grade, just one time.
But after school officials realized that was mostly funneling kids from elementary schools in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods into the advanced middle and high school math classes, they made changes. The district now allows students to take the fifth-grade placement test multiple times, and teachers can recommend promising students regardless of their score. That’s helped diversify advanced math classes, particularly for Hispanic students.
Union Public Schools also added math tutoring starting in third grade — the kind of support that the RAND report says can be crucial for student success, but that many struggling students aren’t getting.
More than three-quarters of middle school principals told the RAND researchers that less than half of their struggling students participated in math support options offered by their school, such as tutoring, double-dose math classes, or a summer math program for rising middle schoolers.
That could point to the need for schools to universally screen kids for extra math help, or do more to make sure students and parents know about what help is offered. Schools may also need to change how the help is offered, such as moving after-school tutoring to during the school day or providing transportation so more kids can attend.
Those are crucial steps, Kaufman said, at a time when many kids are struggling to close math gaps that cropped up when school was remote or disrupted in other ways by the pandemic.
“I know tutoring is happening in a lot of places, it’s one of the priorities of the White House right now,” she said. But if tutoring is mostly offered to kids and parents who volunteer, “then the tutoring is not going to reach the kids who need it the most.”
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at <email-pii>.
|
<urn:uuid:4773c062-1948-4e2b-a64c-6d6538ca460b>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00569.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9659045338630676,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.625,
"token_count": 1569,
"url": "https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/02/07/eighth-grade-algebra-access-math-tracking-rand-report/"
}
|
If you’re an eighth grader who wants to take algebra, can you even take the class?
The answer to that question, it turns out, depends a lot on two things: how your school identifies students for advanced math, and where you live.
According to a new nationally representative survey released Tuesday, 65% of U.S. principals said their elementary or middle school offered algebra in eighth grade, but only to certain students. Meanwhile, just 20% of principals said their school offered the class in eighth grade and that any student could take it.
But that picture differed by state. In California, nearly half of principals
|
said their school offered algebra only to certain eighth graders. But in Florida, more than 80% of principals said the class was restricted. In both states, 18% of principals said any eighth grader could take the class, similar to the national rate.
The findings, based on surveys conducted last spring by the RAND Corporation, shed light on the uneven access students have to advanced math classes in middle school, which can have lasting effects on their higher education and job prospects.
Algebra is often considered a gateway class. Eighth graders who take the course can more easily reach calculus by 12th grade — which can set students up for challenging math classes in college and career paths in science and engineering fields.
“The kids that aren’t in algebra by eighth grade, they can do that still,” said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at RAND, and the lead author of the report, “but they would have to do something special to get there,” such as doubling up on math or taking a summer class.
The report also details the extent to which students are separated based on their perceived math abilities, starting as young as elementary school.
More than 40% of elementary school principals told RAND researchers that their school grouped kids based on their math levels, mostly within the classroom. But by middle school, nearly 70% of principals said they grouped students in math. Most commonly, students were put into separate math classes on honors or career prep tracks, the report found.
“The amount of achievement-level grouping — that it does start within classrooms in K-5 schools and that by middle school, students are typically grouped by achievement level more often than they’re not in their math classes — that’s something new,” Kaufman said.
Become a Chalkbeat sponsor
The findings come as parents and school leaders across the country engage in fierce debates over whether students should be able to take algebra before high school, and if so, what support students need to do well in the class.
Notably, San Francisco Unified schools, which attracted national attention for a policy that prevented students from taking algebra until ninth grade, are poised to bring algebra back to middle schools following parent pushback. School officials there put the policy in place 10 years ago to help prepare more Black and Latino students and students from low-income families to pass algebra and access higher-level math classes — a goal that hasn’t panned out.
The new survey data doesn’t look at whether tracking helps or hurts students’ math outcomes.
And there are other factors that could affect whether students can access higher-level math classes, the report notes, such as differing teacher certification rules, school funding levels, and state policies. California’s state math guidelines encourage students to take algebra in ninth grade, for example, while New York schools are supposed to offer high school math to eighth graders who want to take it.
But Kaufman says the report does suggest that schools should be looking at the criteria they use to group students in math, and whether it could be fueling racial or socioeconomic disparities.
“We’re not giving a recommendation that nobody should be tracked,” Kaufman said. “But if you are grouping students, I think this report calls for you to consider whether the way students are grouped, and how, is biased. Are a lot of students of color, for example, in the lower track? What’s happening there?”
Schools try various methods to expand algebra access
Nationally, white and Asian American students are more likely than their Black and Hispanic classmates to enroll in and pass algebra in eighth grade, the latest federal data shows. Historically, students from low-income families have had less access to algebra in eighth grade, too.
In Philadelphia, many students are blocked from the city’s most selective high school because their middle schools don’t offer algebra. Making algebra more accessible is part of the superintendent’s curriculum overhaul.
School districts like Chicago have taken steps to expand access to algebra in eighth grade, such as offering the class online and covering costs for educators to get algebra teaching credentials. Historically, fewer students in the city’s predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods have been able to take the class before high school.
The RAND survey found that principals of more-affluent schools were much more likely than leaders of higher-poverty schools to say they considered parent or guardian requests to place students into advanced math classes. That could shortchange kids who don’t have a parent who can step in and do that kind of advocacy, Kaufman noted.
Become a Chalkbeat sponsor
The report urges schools to look at multiple data points to place students into higher-level math classes, and to consider experimenting with the cutoff scores used to identify which students can handle the harder math coursework.
In Oklahoma, Union Public Schools is trying that, The Hechinger Report recently reported. The district, which serves parts of Tulsa and the city’s southeast suburbs, used to offer a pre-algebra placement test in fifth grade, just one time.
But after school officials realized that was mostly funneling kids from elementary schools in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods into the advanced middle and high school math classes, they made changes. The district now allows students to take the fifth-grade placement test multiple times, and teachers can recommend promising students regardless of their score. That’s helped diversify advanced math classes, particularly for Hispanic students.
Union Public Schools also added math tutoring starting in third grade — the kind of support that the RAND report says can be crucial for student success, but that many struggling students aren’t getting.
More than three-quarters of middle school principals told the RAND researchers that less than half of their struggling students participated in math support options offered by their school, such as tutoring, double-dose math classes, or a summer math program for rising middle schoolers.
That could point to the need for schools to universally screen kids for extra math help, or do more to make sure students and parents know about what help is offered. Schools may also need to change how the help is offered, such as moving after-school tutoring to during the school day or providing transportation so more kids can attend.
Those are crucial steps, Kaufman said, at a time when many kids are struggling to close math gaps that cropped up when school was remote or disrupted in other ways by the pandemic.
“I know tutoring is happening in a lot of places, it’s one of the priorities of the White House right now,” she said. But if tutoring is mostly offered to kids and parents who volunteer, “then the tutoring is not going to reach the kids who need it the most.”
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at <email-pii>.
|
Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener newsletter. Our limited newsletter series guides you on how to minimize your personal role in the climate crisis — and reduce your eco-anxiety.
A tough, bell-shaped fungus that grows on the rotting bark of trees has been used as a fire starter for centuries, earning it the nickname “tinder fungus.”
Now, researchers are taking a closer look at the molecular structure of this oddly powerful organism — and they’ve found that it could hold the secrets to replacing some types of plastics.
Parts of the fungus, formally called Fomes fomentarius, were found to have similar structural strength to plywood or leather but at a lower weight, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“F. fomentarius fruiting bodies are ingeniously lightweight biological designs, simple in composition but efficient in performance,” the study noted. “Growing the material using simple ingredients is an alternative solution to overcome the cost, time, mass production, and sustainability of how we make and consume materials in the future.”
What makes F. fomentarius so strong
Humans have long used F. fomentarius — also sometimes called “hoof fungus” because of its visual resemblance to a horse’s hoof — harvested in the wild to feed fires. It’s also been used to create some clothing items, including hats. But the fungus has only recently piqued the interest of the scientific community, according to the study.
Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland sought to analyze the internal structure of F. fomentarius more in depth, getting a glimpse of the microstructures that give the fungus its uniquely strong yet lightweight consistency. What they found was extremely promising, said study coauthor Dr. Pezhman Mohammadi, a senior scientist at VTT.
The fungus has structural integrity similar to certain grades of plastic and could be used to replace shock-absorbing materials used in things like football helmets and other sporting equipment; heat and sound insulators; and even consumer product parts, such as headset parts, Mohammadi said via email.
F. fomentarius “has a very stiff and hard protective outer layer, has softer spongy mid-layer, and a strong and tough inner layer each (of which) could outperform a different class of man-made and natural materials,” Mohammadi added.
Potential use of F. fomentarius
The researchers are not suggesting that tinder fungus should be harvested from the wild and funneled into the industrial process. That wouldn’t be economically viable, Mohammadi noted, and F. fomentarius takes seven to 10 years to grow to a significant size. The fungus, which is very common across the Northern Hemisphere, also plays a crucial role in its ecosystem, blooming on the bark of rotting beech and birch trees to aid the decomposition process.
But researchers have made promising steps toward growing the fungus or a similar species in a lab environment, Mohammadi said.
“With the advances in industrial biotechnology, we forecast the production of Metric Tons in a matter of weeks in contrast to wild-type mushrooms that take years to grow,” Mohammadi wrote in an email. “For example in our research institute, we have 1000-liter pilot scale bioreactors where this could be carried out.
“However, like any starting technology, it would take some years of R&D to be realized fully.”
|
<urn:uuid:bde4cc5a-474c-4982-ae7f-a510cd12c373>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00036.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9357775449752808,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3,
"token_count": 753,
"url": "https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/22/world/fungus-replace-plastics-study-scn/index.html"
}
|
Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener newsletter. Our limited newsletter series guides you on how to minimize your personal role in the climate crisis — and reduce your eco-anxiety.
A tough, bell-shaped fungus that grows on the rotting bark of trees has been used as a fire starter for centuries, earning it the nickname “tinder fungus.”
Now, researchers are taking a closer look at the molecular structure of this oddly powerful organism — and they’ve found that it could hold the secrets to replacing some types of plastics.
Parts of the fungus, formally called Fomes fomentarius, were found to have similar structural strength to ply
|
wood or leather but at a lower weight, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“F. fomentarius fruiting bodies are ingeniously lightweight biological designs, simple in composition but efficient in performance,” the study noted. “Growing the material using simple ingredients is an alternative solution to overcome the cost, time, mass production, and sustainability of how we make and consume materials in the future.”
What makes F. fomentarius so strong
Humans have long used F. fomentarius — also sometimes called “hoof fungus” because of its visual resemblance to a horse’s hoof — harvested in the wild to feed fires. It’s also been used to create some clothing items, including hats. But the fungus has only recently piqued the interest of the scientific community, according to the study.
Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland sought to analyze the internal structure of F. fomentarius more in depth, getting a glimpse of the microstructures that give the fungus its uniquely strong yet lightweight consistency. What they found was extremely promising, said study coauthor Dr. Pezhman Mohammadi, a senior scientist at VTT.
The fungus has structural integrity similar to certain grades of plastic and could be used to replace shock-absorbing materials used in things like football helmets and other sporting equipment; heat and sound insulators; and even consumer product parts, such as headset parts, Mohammadi said via email.
F. fomentarius “has a very stiff and hard protective outer layer, has softer spongy mid-layer, and a strong and tough inner layer each (of which) could outperform a different class of man-made and natural materials,” Mohammadi added.
Potential use of F. fomentarius
The researchers are not suggesting that tinder fungus should be harvested from the wild and funneled into the industrial process. That wouldn’t be economically viable, Mohammadi noted, and F. fomentarius takes seven to 10 years to grow to a significant size. The fungus, which is very common across the Northern Hemisphere, also plays a crucial role in its ecosystem, blooming on the bark of rotting beech and birch trees to aid the decomposition process.
But researchers have made promising steps toward growing the fungus or a similar species in a lab environment, Mohammadi said.
“With the advances in industrial biotechnology, we forecast the production of Metric Tons in a matter of weeks in contrast to wild-type mushrooms that take years to grow,” Mohammadi wrote in an email. “For example in our research institute, we have 1000-liter pilot scale bioreactors where this could be carried out.
“However, like any starting technology, it would take some years of R&D to be realized fully.”
|
How often do you need a COVID booster shot? Yearly, new data suggests.
Healthy people should get annual COVID-19 boosters to prevent widespread outbreaks, suggests a new study from Yale University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Yearly shots provide just enough frequency to prevent huge outbreaks while not putting an undue burden on people.
"There seems to be an inflection point" at about a year, said senior author Jeffrey Townsend, a biostatistician and evolutionary biologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “Delaying boosting beyond that point rapidly increases the risk of an infection."
Though federal officials have suggested annual shots, this study is the first to examine the long-term outcomes from a booster schedule and the first to show that boosters will be especially effective at intervals of no more than a year.
The study, published this month, focused on people with healthy immune systems. Townsend and his colleagues are starting work on a similar study looking at the optimal vaccine interval for people with weakened immunity from cancer treatment and other health problems.
What the study found: Annual shots prevent 75% of infections
The researchers modeled antibody levels against the virus that causes COVID-19 if someone was boosted with a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine every six months, one year, 18 months, two years or three years over a six-year time span.
Boosting twice a year reduced infections by more than 93%, the team found, but Townsend said it's not realistic to ask people to get vaccinated that often.
Annual shots prevented 75% of infections, while waiting six more months reduced the rate of protection to just 55%. Shots every three years prevented just 24% of infections, the study found.
"Delaying the administration of updated boosters has bleak repercussions," it concluded.
Boosters won't prevent all infections
For healthy people, "annual boosting really makes a difference," said Alex Dornburg, an expert in bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and a co-author of the study.
Roughly 3 in 10 people will get infected with COVID-19 even with an annual shot, Dornburg said. But 9 in 10 will be infected without such updates.
Not getting boosted triples the risk for infection over six years, co-author Hayley Hassler of Yale said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and most infectious disease experts encourage people of all ages to get boosters.
The booster has to keep evolving, too
The virus continues to evolve, "so we need to continually evolve the booster and keep it updated to the most prevalent variant," Hassler said.
Over time, people will lose the ability to respond effectively to the virus without boosters or reinfections, Townsend said.
The latest booster is directed at both the original coronavirus and the BA.4 and BA.5. Although these are not the most common variants anymore, the researchers said, the new booster is close enough to provide a benefit.
LATEST:People who haven't had COVID will likely catch XBB.1.5 – and many will get reinfected, experts say
Getting vaccinated vs. being infected
The COVID-19 vaccines have side effects; they can make people feel miserable for a day or two. But an infection can be much worse, Dornburg said.
In his own case, he felt terrible for two days after his first round of shots. When he caught COVID-19, though, his lungs hurt for weeks and he was winded climbing a single flight of stairs.
"It was awful," he said. "That calibrated me a little bit differently."
Contracting COVID-19 does provide protection against future infections, but like the vaccine, the protection fades over time, at roughly the same pace, Townsend said.
And it's better not to get infected at all.
"You can't end up in the hospital for an infection you didn't get," Townsend said.
In another study published Wednesday, researchers from the World Health Organization examined 26 earlier papers and concluded that people who are vaccinated or infected remain better protected against severe disease a year later compared with those who are unvaccinated and never infected.
A year after someone is both vaccinated and infected, they have a 95% reduced risk of getting severe COVID-19 or needing to be hospitalized, the study showed. Someone infected a year ago but not vaccinated had a 75% reduced risk.
Getting infected and vaccined reduces the chance of reinfection a year later by 42%. Someone who was infected but not vaccinated had a 25% lower chance of reinfection.
When will we have better vaccines?
Unfortunately, said Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, the federal government has lost its momentum on vaccine development.
"We need durable vaccines that would last multiple years against all variants," said Topol, who was not involved in the new research. "We're not getting the traction we need on these science projects. There's not the will, the resources, the priority."
That means if a worse variant arises at some point, the U.S. "will have to be reactive instead of having all this ahead of time – and that would be really sad because we know the path to getting ahead of the virus and we're not doing it," he said.
Topol believes nasal vaccines are needed to prevent more infections. Even if a nasal vaccine has to be given more often than shots, people won't mind as much.
"I'm excited about it. I haven't seen anything to negate it," he said. "I'd be happy to take a spray every few months to prevent infection."
Contact Karen Weintraub at <email-pii>.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
|
<urn:uuid:4abcf6ea-1ccb-4538-8078-1ce0e8a37d20>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943589.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321002050-20230321032050-00629.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9663576483726501,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 3.09375,
"token_count": 1247,
"url": "https://www.statesman.com/story/news/health/2023/01/20/annual-covid-booster-shots/11079349002/"
}
|
How often do you need a COVID booster shot? Yearly, new data suggests.
Healthy people should get annual COVID-19 boosters to prevent widespread outbreaks, suggests a new study from Yale University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Yearly shots provide just enough frequency to prevent huge outbreaks while not putting an undue burden on people.
"There seems to be an inflection point" at about a year, said senior author Jeffrey Townsend, a biostatistician and evolutionary biologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “Delaying boosting beyond that point rapidly increases the risk of an infection."
Though federal officials have suggested
|
annual shots, this study is the first to examine the long-term outcomes from a booster schedule and the first to show that boosters will be especially effective at intervals of no more than a year.
The study, published this month, focused on people with healthy immune systems. Townsend and his colleagues are starting work on a similar study looking at the optimal vaccine interval for people with weakened immunity from cancer treatment and other health problems.
What the study found: Annual shots prevent 75% of infections
The researchers modeled antibody levels against the virus that causes COVID-19 if someone was boosted with a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine every six months, one year, 18 months, two years or three years over a six-year time span.
Boosting twice a year reduced infections by more than 93%, the team found, but Townsend said it's not realistic to ask people to get vaccinated that often.
Annual shots prevented 75% of infections, while waiting six more months reduced the rate of protection to just 55%. Shots every three years prevented just 24% of infections, the study found.
"Delaying the administration of updated boosters has bleak repercussions," it concluded.
Boosters won't prevent all infections
For healthy people, "annual boosting really makes a difference," said Alex Dornburg, an expert in bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and a co-author of the study.
Roughly 3 in 10 people will get infected with COVID-19 even with an annual shot, Dornburg said. But 9 in 10 will be infected without such updates.
Not getting boosted triples the risk for infection over six years, co-author Hayley Hassler of Yale said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and most infectious disease experts encourage people of all ages to get boosters.
The booster has to keep evolving, too
The virus continues to evolve, "so we need to continually evolve the booster and keep it updated to the most prevalent variant," Hassler said.
Over time, people will lose the ability to respond effectively to the virus without boosters or reinfections, Townsend said.
The latest booster is directed at both the original coronavirus and the BA.4 and BA.5. Although these are not the most common variants anymore, the researchers said, the new booster is close enough to provide a benefit.
LATEST:People who haven't had COVID will likely catch XBB.1.5 – and many will get reinfected, experts say
Getting vaccinated vs. being infected
The COVID-19 vaccines have side effects; they can make people feel miserable for a day or two. But an infection can be much worse, Dornburg said.
In his own case, he felt terrible for two days after his first round of shots. When he caught COVID-19, though, his lungs hurt for weeks and he was winded climbing a single flight of stairs.
"It was awful," he said. "That calibrated me a little bit differently."
Contracting COVID-19 does provide protection against future infections, but like the vaccine, the protection fades over time, at roughly the same pace, Townsend said.
And it's better not to get infected at all.
"You can't end up in the hospital for an infection you didn't get," Townsend said.
In another study published Wednesday, researchers from the World Health Organization examined 26 earlier papers and concluded that people who are vaccinated or infected remain better protected against severe disease a year later compared with those who are unvaccinated and never infected.
A year after someone is both vaccinated and infected, they have a 95% reduced risk of getting severe COVID-19 or needing to be hospitalized, the study showed. Someone infected a year ago but not vaccinated had a 75% reduced risk.
Getting infected and vaccined reduces the chance of reinfection a year later by 42%. Someone who was infected but not vaccinated had a 25% lower chance of reinfection.
When will we have better vaccines?
Unfortunately, said Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, the federal government has lost its momentum on vaccine development.
"We need durable vaccines that would last multiple years against all variants," said Topol, who was not involved in the new research. "We're not getting the traction we need on these science projects. There's not the will, the resources, the priority."
That means if a worse variant arises at some point, the U.S. "will have to be reactive instead of having all this ahead of time – and that would be really sad because we know the path to getting ahead of the virus and we're not doing it," he said.
Topol believes nasal vaccines are needed to prevent more infections. Even if a nasal vaccine has to be given more often than shots, people won't mind as much.
"I'm excited about it. I haven't seen anything to negate it," he said. "I'd be happy to take a spray every few months to prevent infection."
Contact Karen Weintraub at <email-pii>.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
|
Ireland may be fortunate as it can avoid many of the extremes of climate change already happening elsewhere on the planet and more likely in the future, but that should not be cause for complacency.
The country is experiencing heating unseen in the past 100,000 years or more — 17 of the 20 warmest years in Ireland’s history have occurred since 1990. And it brings the risk of radically changing our climate later this century, making it unrecognisable to the relatively benign one we have today.
There can be no sugar-coating the findings of 23 Irish climate and energy experts, who have drawn up Ireland’s Climate Change Assessment (ICCA). It looks at where the country stands in the face of a worsening crisis that is so evident in recent storms and floods, which were exacerbated by global warming.
It is frank on knowledge gaps; unclear paths to the Holy Grail of climate neutrality; and weak implementation of Government policy on the critical fronts of reducing emissions and adapting for inevitable negative changes.
But it’s far from being a doom-laden document. It sets out considerable benefits and opportunities from collective action; not just less nasty weather but improved economic development prospects, less air pollution and stopping nature loss.
It focuses on solutions, explaining what climate cliches such as “societal transformation” and “just transition” really mean for different key players and provides tools that can help achieve such outcomes.
The big “if” is providing there are rapid transformative actions across every sector of the economy that are reinforced by societal buy-in.
“The future climate is in our collective hands,” it says.
Halting warming globally, and in Ireland, will require rapidly reaching at least net-zero carbon dioxide and substantially cutting other greenhouse gas emissions. Every action matters as with every additional increment of warming, the impact on Ireland will increase substantially.
Achieving net-zero emissions, preferably before 2050, should be our North Star. Put simply, that means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases we emit with the amount we remove or store. This is critical to stabilising our climate. For Ireland, it offers the prospect of reducing temperature rise and intensive rainfall relatively quickly.
The analysis was commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency and conducted by academics and representatives of government departments and State agencies, a who’s who of Irish climate science. It is modelled on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approach, where leading climate scientists assess progress and likely scenarios. The ICCA localises its global assessments. Essentially, it says this is hard scientific evidence by evaluating more than 2,600 research papers applying to Ireland.
Its four volumes encompass:
- What the science says globally and how it applies to Ireland? In short, we are warming in line with global patterns, which is no cause for comfort;
- How to cut emissions and achieve a climate-neutral Ireland? It notes big gaps where ways forward are unclear, especially in terms of agriculture and land use;
- What is required to adapt for inevitable impacts especially increased flooding and more intense storms? It says adaptation planning is patchy with major cities vulnerable to flooding, storm surge and sea-level rise;
- How to achieve “a climate-neutral, climate resilient, and sustainable Ireland”? This looks at realising benefits, opportunities and synergies if the country moves quickly.
There are particularly worrying findings, such as that adaptation is “too slow and fragmented”. We are not adequately prepared for storms, floods and droughts likely coming around the corner. Ireland’s energy system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels when a “net-zero” power supply system is critical to other sectors decarbonising through electrification.
There are well-established “no-regret options” that need to happen now, which can get us most of the way to net zero CO2 emissions, it finds.
Beyond that, there are “future energy choices” relating to the scale and magnitude of technologies to help get us all the way. No-regret options include demand reduction (through energy efficiency and reduced consumption), electrification (electric vehicles and heat pumps), deployment of market-ready renewables (wind energy and solar) and low-carbon heating options (district heating), while future choices include hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, nuclear energy and electro fuels.
Renewables can increasingly provide our future energy needs but will need to be complemented with CO2 removals — expensive and unproven — to achieve a net-zero energy system in hard-to-abate sectors.
The elephant in the room, however, is the political and public disconnect between understanding climate science and taking appropriate action. The Irish public demonstrates a strong understanding of and support for climate action, yet there is a gap between the desire for action and realising change, it finds.
The Irish news media is a primary source of information for people to learn about climate change “but is struggling to cover climate change to the extent that would fulfil its traditional roles of informing the public, acting as a watchdog, and holding authorities to account”, it concludes.
It evaluates how to catalyse change by overcoming inertia and motivating individuals and organisations to act. “The collective action of individuals is one of the more effective ways for society to change policy and can enable the required systems transformations.”
The ICCA underlines rewards that will come from rapid and sustained action while building on progress in train. “The potential for a faster, wider and deeper transformation offers the opportunity to enable a sustainable and resilient future, for a prosperous Ireland in a changing world,” it says.
The Government claims its climate action plan, out for public consultation, is among the most ambitious in the world. The ICCA provides a timely mechanism to test that view, whereby its findings and projections should be cross-checked against this plan to ensure it is sufficiently robust and transformative. Evaluation of both documents suggests the answer to that question is in the negative.
There is much to be done before the Cabinet signs off on its blueprint to counter an inevitably turbulent climate coming to our doorstep.
|
<urn:uuid:c14650c9-954e-46f2-8cff-312641f70306>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474700.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228080245-20240228110245-00394.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9340843558311462,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.40625,
"token_count": 1268,
"url": "https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2024/01/25/experts-offer-no-sugar-coating-of-big-climate-change-challenge-awaiting-ireland/"
}
|
Ireland may be fortunate as it can avoid many of the extremes of climate change already happening elsewhere on the planet and more likely in the future, but that should not be cause for complacency.
The country is experiencing heating unseen in the past 100,000 years or more — 17 of the 20 warmest years in Ireland’s history have occurred since 1990. And it brings the risk of radically changing our climate later this century, making it unrecognisable to the relatively benign one we have today.
There can be no sugar-coating the findings of 23 Irish climate
|
and energy experts, who have drawn up Ireland’s Climate Change Assessment (ICCA). It looks at where the country stands in the face of a worsening crisis that is so evident in recent storms and floods, which were exacerbated by global warming.
It is frank on knowledge gaps; unclear paths to the Holy Grail of climate neutrality; and weak implementation of Government policy on the critical fronts of reducing emissions and adapting for inevitable negative changes.
But it’s far from being a doom-laden document. It sets out considerable benefits and opportunities from collective action; not just less nasty weather but improved economic development prospects, less air pollution and stopping nature loss.
It focuses on solutions, explaining what climate cliches such as “societal transformation” and “just transition” really mean for different key players and provides tools that can help achieve such outcomes.
The big “if” is providing there are rapid transformative actions across every sector of the economy that are reinforced by societal buy-in.
“The future climate is in our collective hands,” it says.
Halting warming globally, and in Ireland, will require rapidly reaching at least net-zero carbon dioxide and substantially cutting other greenhouse gas emissions. Every action matters as with every additional increment of warming, the impact on Ireland will increase substantially.
Achieving net-zero emissions, preferably before 2050, should be our North Star. Put simply, that means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases we emit with the amount we remove or store. This is critical to stabilising our climate. For Ireland, it offers the prospect of reducing temperature rise and intensive rainfall relatively quickly.
The analysis was commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency and conducted by academics and representatives of government departments and State agencies, a who’s who of Irish climate science. It is modelled on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approach, where leading climate scientists assess progress and likely scenarios. The ICCA localises its global assessments. Essentially, it says this is hard scientific evidence by evaluating more than 2,600 research papers applying to Ireland.
Its four volumes encompass:
- What the science says globally and how it applies to Ireland? In short, we are warming in line with global patterns, which is no cause for comfort;
- How to cut emissions and achieve a climate-neutral Ireland? It notes big gaps where ways forward are unclear, especially in terms of agriculture and land use;
- What is required to adapt for inevitable impacts especially increased flooding and more intense storms? It says adaptation planning is patchy with major cities vulnerable to flooding, storm surge and sea-level rise;
- How to achieve “a climate-neutral, climate resilient, and sustainable Ireland”? This looks at realising benefits, opportunities and synergies if the country moves quickly.
There are particularly worrying findings, such as that adaptation is “too slow and fragmented”. We are not adequately prepared for storms, floods and droughts likely coming around the corner. Ireland’s energy system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels when a “net-zero” power supply system is critical to other sectors decarbonising through electrification.
There are well-established “no-regret options” that need to happen now, which can get us most of the way to net zero CO2 emissions, it finds.
Beyond that, there are “future energy choices” relating to the scale and magnitude of technologies to help get us all the way. No-regret options include demand reduction (through energy efficiency and reduced consumption), electrification (electric vehicles and heat pumps), deployment of market-ready renewables (wind energy and solar) and low-carbon heating options (district heating), while future choices include hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, nuclear energy and electro fuels.
Renewables can increasingly provide our future energy needs but will need to be complemented with CO2 removals — expensive and unproven — to achieve a net-zero energy system in hard-to-abate sectors.
The elephant in the room, however, is the political and public disconnect between understanding climate science and taking appropriate action. The Irish public demonstrates a strong understanding of and support for climate action, yet there is a gap between the desire for action and realising change, it finds.
The Irish news media is a primary source of information for people to learn about climate change “but is struggling to cover climate change to the extent that would fulfil its traditional roles of informing the public, acting as a watchdog, and holding authorities to account”, it concludes.
It evaluates how to catalyse change by overcoming inertia and motivating individuals and organisations to act. “The collective action of individuals is one of the more effective ways for society to change policy and can enable the required systems transformations.”
The ICCA underlines rewards that will come from rapid and sustained action while building on progress in train. “The potential for a faster, wider and deeper transformation offers the opportunity to enable a sustainable and resilient future, for a prosperous Ireland in a changing world,” it says.
The Government claims its climate action plan, out for public consultation, is among the most ambitious in the world. The ICCA provides a timely mechanism to test that view, whereby its findings and projections should be cross-checked against this plan to ensure it is sufficiently robust and transformative. Evaluation of both documents suggests the answer to that question is in the negative.
There is much to be done before the Cabinet signs off on its blueprint to counter an inevitably turbulent climate coming to our doorstep.
|
Iowa’s pollinator plants struggle amidst drought
Populations of bees, butterflies, and beetles could decline due to lack of blooms
BUCHANAN COUNTY, Iowa (KCRG) - Iowa’s plant life has taken a big hit amidst current drought conditions.
Although farmers are feeling the massive impact of weakened crops as they head into harvest season, Iowa’s wild pollinator plants are also struggling to support their most common pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and beetles.
“So as the drought comes in, the number of blooms is decreasing. The period that the flowers bloom decreases because there are fewer blooms on an individual plant. And that is going to impact the pollinators that are using those flowers.” said Buchanan County Conservation Naturalist Sondra Cabell.
The relationship between pollinator plants and pollinators is cyclical, which means fewer blooms cause issues for the plants trying to reproduce and the pollinators trying to eat.
“Most of those insects want the nectar, and if there is no nectar on the plants, then they visit the flowers less frequently because there is less food for them,” said Indian Creek Nature Center Director of Land Stewardship Jean Widenheft.
Less food means potential declines in pollinator populations, especially in Monarch butterflies, as roughly 40% of migratory monarchs that go to Mexico over the winter travel through or originate from Iowa.
However, most pollinators produce large amounts of larvae, meaning their populations aren’t likely to dwindle after one year of drought. But if the drought continues into next year, it’s possible their numbers could decrease, too.
Experts say there are several things landowners can do to support Iowa’s pollinators.
“Reduce your chemicals. So, if you are using chemicals on things, that negatively impacts pollinators. Reduce mowing, where possible. So, if you have ditches, particularly in rural areas, if you can leave those areas un-mowed, or mow them maybe once a year. Or maybe not until late September so it doesn’t have as big of an impact on the pollinators.” said Cabell.
Planting native wildflowers like goldenrod, thistle, or milkweed also helps ensure pollinators will have enough food to migrate or keep their populations stable.
Copyright 2023 KCRG. All rights reserved.
|
<urn:uuid:58cfa06c-a31a-4c5b-ab4d-11a087509ede>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233509023.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20230925151539-20230925181539-00212.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9545146822929382,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.5,
"token_count": 507,
"url": "https://www.kcrg.com/2023/09/13/iowas-pollinator-plants-struggle-amidst-drought/"
}
|
Iowa’s pollinator plants struggle amidst drought
Populations of bees, butterflies, and beetles could decline due to lack of blooms
BUCHANAN COUNTY, Iowa (KCRG) - Iowa’s plant life has taken a big hit amidst current drought conditions.
Although farmers are feeling the massive impact of weakened crops as they head into harvest season, Iowa’s wild pollinator plants are also struggling to support their most common pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and beetles.
“So as the drought comes in, the number of blooms is decreasing. The period that the flowers bloom decreases because
|
there are fewer blooms on an individual plant. And that is going to impact the pollinators that are using those flowers.” said Buchanan County Conservation Naturalist Sondra Cabell.
The relationship between pollinator plants and pollinators is cyclical, which means fewer blooms cause issues for the plants trying to reproduce and the pollinators trying to eat.
“Most of those insects want the nectar, and if there is no nectar on the plants, then they visit the flowers less frequently because there is less food for them,” said Indian Creek Nature Center Director of Land Stewardship Jean Widenheft.
Less food means potential declines in pollinator populations, especially in Monarch butterflies, as roughly 40% of migratory monarchs that go to Mexico over the winter travel through or originate from Iowa.
However, most pollinators produce large amounts of larvae, meaning their populations aren’t likely to dwindle after one year of drought. But if the drought continues into next year, it’s possible their numbers could decrease, too.
Experts say there are several things landowners can do to support Iowa’s pollinators.
“Reduce your chemicals. So, if you are using chemicals on things, that negatively impacts pollinators. Reduce mowing, where possible. So, if you have ditches, particularly in rural areas, if you can leave those areas un-mowed, or mow them maybe once a year. Or maybe not until late September so it doesn’t have as big of an impact on the pollinators.” said Cabell.
Planting native wildflowers like goldenrod, thistle, or milkweed also helps ensure pollinators will have enough food to migrate or keep their populations stable.
Copyright 2023 KCRG. All rights reserved.
|
We know about extinct species from prehistory through fossils. What constitutes a fossil is known as a “fossil record.” These records include preserved remains, corporeal impressions and any biological trace of formerly living things from the past. Examples of fossil types are bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes. These fossils are used to provide as replete a depiction of the complete living being as possible. However, many fossil records are incomplete due to the elements of time and climate wearing them down. Bones, impressions and shell fragments are devoid of more detailed characteristics, like plumage or skin texture. They also do not always tell us about how the animal behaved in their natural environment. This is why artistic renderings of these species have been a valuable resource for understanding the latter in conjunction with the fossil records.
Prehistoric art helps us compose a larger picture about extinct species and their relationship with other species, including early human civilization. These works of art reveal many things about animals, such as how climate and culture has impacted their existence. In the previous post, I wrote about how furniture conservator Bennett Bacon discovered a common motif among Ice Age cave art that revealed the behaviors and life cycles of native fauna, including extinct species like the auroch, the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. Prehistoric and ancient cave paintings have also helped modern day researchers distinguish the mobility of extinct megafauna. An example is Aboriginal rock paintings showing Procoptodon goliah, the largest known species of kangaroo, striding and hunched over on its hind legs, a trait that is markedly distinct from extant species of kangaroo.
I also had a recent discussion with artist, educator and marine naturalist Richard Dolan, which got me thinking about the important responsibilities that artists take on when they depict the natural world. During our conversation Dolan said something incredibly poignant regarding why he started incorporating found objects into his artwork representing humpback whales: “it’s not the kind of art people want hanging in their homes, but it’s the kind of art that the whales are calling for.” We are dangerously close to a day when some species of whales face the prospect of extinction due to our actions.
Unfortunately, throughout the history of art there is a fair share of artwork portraying animals that are no longer with us. One of these animals is the dodo, a large flightless bird endemic to the island of Mauritius, that went extinct in the mid-1660s.
The painting shown above features a depiction of a dodo bird in the center. It is attributed to Ustad Mansur, a seventeenth century artist from the Mughal Empire. Since the dodo existed in a time before photography, and fossil records do not provide complete details about its appearance, the appearance of the dodo that is known to us today comes from seventeenth century art and literature. Many of these descriptions vary in accuracy (both in notating its physical and behavioral characteristics) because only a few were actually created while looking at a living bird.
Mansur’s dodo bird is the largest figure in the center of a field of other birds, which include the blue-crowned hanging parrot (upper left) western tragopan (upper right), bar-headed goose (lower left) and painted sandgrouse (lower right). Scholars consider this image to be one of the most precise representations of the dodo bird since it was derived from observing a living specimen when two live birds were brought to India in the 1600s. Mansur’s painting is one of the rare colored images of the dodo in existence.
Hopefully more recent naturalist themed art will not have to be contextualized in a manner similar to Mansur’s dodo bird painting. Like Dolan, who portrays the various threats whale populations face today, other contemporary artists have employed astute observational measures to raise our awareness and empathetic responses to endangered species.
One of today’s endangered species are coral reefs. Yes, corals are actually animals, and they are teetering on the verge of irreversible calamity due to global water temperatures rising and toxins being introduced into their habitat. Most of these factors are human induced such as coral mining, agricultural and urban runoff, pollution, over fishing and blast fishing. Coral reefs are experience widespread bleaching, where they turn white as a response to environmental stress. Although bleaching does not immediately kill corals, it significantly compromises their overall structure and puts them at increased risk of death. It is estimated that over 50% of the world’s coral reefs could be destroyed by the 2030s.
In response to the dire situation corals are experiencing, artists Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim started the Crochet Coral Reef project. What began as an art installation intended to raise consciousness towards ecological conservation, has become one of the largest collaborative art projects in the history of art. The Crochet Coral Reef is an educational endeavor that is beneficial to helping us learn about environmental issues, while also honing participant’s skills in critical thinking, math, science and of course, fine art. Through roving workshops, the Wertheims facilitate conversation and insights about marine biology and prompt close observations of the impact the Anthropocene has on corals. Some of the materials that are used to crochet species of coral are the very materials that have put them on the brink of extinction, such as plastic trash. The beauty of the crotchet reef is juxtaposed with the harsh reality that our collective culture is pushing extraordinary lifeforms into oblivion.
Participants and viewers are asked to reflect on these issues and realize that there are no immediate solutions, but that ecological conservation and prevention of accelerated climate change is a long and labor intensive process that is essential for not only the corals’ survival, but our own existence as well. The Wertheims assert that multidisciplinary, cooperative endeavors reveal, “what can we humans do when we work together, not ignoring ecological problems but also not capitulating to fantasies that rescue is around the corner from some sudden technological solution.”
Creative collaboration is a direct action that needs to be consistently and widely applied in order to repair our damaged Earth. The arts give us the resources to shrewdly portray the fragility of our world. By contrasting the beauty of natural science with expressions of devastation, environmentally conscious art makes us acutely aware of how our behaviors can be the difference between extinction and the vitality of life.
References, Notes, Suggested Reading:
Brinkhof, Tim. “Cave paintings reveal what extinct animals may have looked like,” Big Think, 10 August 2022. https://bigthink.com/the-past/cave-paintings-australia-megafauna/
I look forward to watching the video. I chose extinction-threatened bird species to do a series of paintings in the pandemic years. One of my favourite artists is Franz Marc. Why you think he incorportated animals in his art?
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a really profound and poignant subject for a series during an ongoing pandemic, which really signifies how we reflect, connect and relate in times of natural disaster. I think for Marc, animals represented a representational subject matter that he considered more spiritually innocent than humanity. He has noted that his objective was to express the natural balance between animals and their environment. He also expressed an interest in pantheism. Both would explain his subjective incorporation of animals in his art. Thanks for reading my blog and for the great dialogue, Eric!
LikeLiked by 1 person
|
<urn:uuid:e495cede-44a3-4414-8943-49717902e6dd>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945433.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20230326044821-20230326074821-00322.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9602039456367493,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.875,
"token_count": 1582,
"url": "https://theartsandeducation.wordpress.com/2023/01/26/art-conservators/"
}
|
We know about extinct species from prehistory through fossils. What constitutes a fossil is known as a “fossil record.” These records include preserved remains, corporeal impressions and any biological trace of formerly living things from the past. Examples of fossil types are bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes. These fossils are used to provide as replete a depiction of the complete living being as possible. However, many fossil records are incomplete due to the elements of time and climate wearing them down. Bones, impressions and shell fragments are devoid of more detailed characteristics, like plumage or skin texture. They also
|
do not always tell us about how the animal behaved in their natural environment. This is why artistic renderings of these species have been a valuable resource for understanding the latter in conjunction with the fossil records.
Prehistoric art helps us compose a larger picture about extinct species and their relationship with other species, including early human civilization. These works of art reveal many things about animals, such as how climate and culture has impacted their existence. In the previous post, I wrote about how furniture conservator Bennett Bacon discovered a common motif among Ice Age cave art that revealed the behaviors and life cycles of native fauna, including extinct species like the auroch, the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. Prehistoric and ancient cave paintings have also helped modern day researchers distinguish the mobility of extinct megafauna. An example is Aboriginal rock paintings showing Procoptodon goliah, the largest known species of kangaroo, striding and hunched over on its hind legs, a trait that is markedly distinct from extant species of kangaroo.
I also had a recent discussion with artist, educator and marine naturalist Richard Dolan, which got me thinking about the important responsibilities that artists take on when they depict the natural world. During our conversation Dolan said something incredibly poignant regarding why he started incorporating found objects into his artwork representing humpback whales: “it’s not the kind of art people want hanging in their homes, but it’s the kind of art that the whales are calling for.” We are dangerously close to a day when some species of whales face the prospect of extinction due to our actions.
Unfortunately, throughout the history of art there is a fair share of artwork portraying animals that are no longer with us. One of these animals is the dodo, a large flightless bird endemic to the island of Mauritius, that went extinct in the mid-1660s.
The painting shown above features a depiction of a dodo bird in the center. It is attributed to Ustad Mansur, a seventeenth century artist from the Mughal Empire. Since the dodo existed in a time before photography, and fossil records do not provide complete details about its appearance, the appearance of the dodo that is known to us today comes from seventeenth century art and literature. Many of these descriptions vary in accuracy (both in notating its physical and behavioral characteristics) because only a few were actually created while looking at a living bird.
Mansur’s dodo bird is the largest figure in the center of a field of other birds, which include the blue-crowned hanging parrot (upper left) western tragopan (upper right), bar-headed goose (lower left) and painted sandgrouse (lower right). Scholars consider this image to be one of the most precise representations of the dodo bird since it was derived from observing a living specimen when two live birds were brought to India in the 1600s. Mansur’s painting is one of the rare colored images of the dodo in existence.
Hopefully more recent naturalist themed art will not have to be contextualized in a manner similar to Mansur’s dodo bird painting. Like Dolan, who portrays the various threats whale populations face today, other contemporary artists have employed astute observational measures to raise our awareness and empathetic responses to endangered species.
One of today’s endangered species are coral reefs. Yes, corals are actually animals, and they are teetering on the verge of irreversible calamity due to global water temperatures rising and toxins being introduced into their habitat. Most of these factors are human induced such as coral mining, agricultural and urban runoff, pollution, over fishing and blast fishing. Coral reefs are experience widespread bleaching, where they turn white as a response to environmental stress. Although bleaching does not immediately kill corals, it significantly compromises their overall structure and puts them at increased risk of death. It is estimated that over 50% of the world’s coral reefs could be destroyed by the 2030s.
In response to the dire situation corals are experiencing, artists Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim started the Crochet Coral Reef project. What began as an art installation intended to raise consciousness towards ecological conservation, has become one of the largest collaborative art projects in the history of art. The Crochet Coral Reef is an educational endeavor that is beneficial to helping us learn about environmental issues, while also honing participant’s skills in critical thinking, math, science and of course, fine art. Through roving workshops, the Wertheims facilitate conversation and insights about marine biology and prompt close observations of the impact the Anthropocene has on corals. Some of the materials that are used to crochet species of coral are the very materials that have put them on the brink of extinction, such as plastic trash. The beauty of the crotchet reef is juxtaposed with the harsh reality that our collective culture is pushing extraordinary lifeforms into oblivion.
Participants and viewers are asked to reflect on these issues and realize that there are no immediate solutions, but that ecological conservation and prevention of accelerated climate change is a long and labor intensive process that is essential for not only the corals’ survival, but our own existence as well. The Wertheims assert that multidisciplinary, cooperative endeavors reveal, “what can we humans do when we work together, not ignoring ecological problems but also not capitulating to fantasies that rescue is around the corner from some sudden technological solution.”
Creative collaboration is a direct action that needs to be consistently and widely applied in order to repair our damaged Earth. The arts give us the resources to shrewdly portray the fragility of our world. By contrasting the beauty of natural science with expressions of devastation, environmentally conscious art makes us acutely aware of how our behaviors can be the difference between extinction and the vitality of life.
References, Notes, Suggested Reading:
Brinkhof, Tim. “Cave paintings reveal what extinct animals may have looked like,” Big Think, 10 August 2022. https://bigthink.com/the-past/cave-paintings-australia-megafauna/
I look forward to watching the video. I chose extinction-threatened bird species to do a series of paintings in the pandemic years. One of my favourite artists is Franz Marc. Why you think he incorportated animals in his art?
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a really profound and poignant subject for a series during an ongoing pandemic, which really signifies how we reflect, connect and relate in times of natural disaster. I think for Marc, animals represented a representational subject matter that he considered more spiritually innocent than humanity. He has noted that his objective was to express the natural balance between animals and their environment. He also expressed an interest in pantheism. Both would explain his subjective incorporation of animals in his art. Thanks for reading my blog and for the great dialogue, Eric!
LikeLiked by 1 person
|
Heat wave redux brings "oppressive" conditions to 70 million people
The heat wave that just won't quit is bringing dangerously hot conditions from the Southern Plains to parts of the Mississippi River Valley, Gulf Coast, and increasingly, the Southwest, through the weekend.
The big picture: Heat alerts are in effect for about 70 million people from Georgia to Kansas, as well as an area in Arizona and southeastern California.
- The National Weather Service is predicting "oppressive heat" underneath the persistent heat dome across the South Central U.S.
- The NWS warns of "extremely dangerous" peak heat indices of above 110°F across the Gulf Coastal states from this weekend into next week, posing major health risks.
- "A few locations could see a heat index approaching or exceeding 120°F," the NWS stated.
What's next: Computer models show that the heat dome currently locking hot, humid air in place across the South-Central states will shift westward with time, pushing temperatures higher from Phoenix into California's Central Valley region.
- Phoenix, which set numerous all-time heat records in July, is already back to highs exceeding 110°F for the foreseeable future, through late next week at least, per NWS forecasts.
- The city reached a high of 111°F on Wednesday, which begins a new string of days with high temperatures of 110°F or higher.
- The city already broke its all-time record stream of days with a high of 110°F or higher during 31 straight days. This beat the old record by 13 days.
- It is possible that Phoenix will set a record high for the month of August, as will a number of other communities in the Southwest.
- Scientists have long known that climate change makes heat extremes more severe, longer lasting and more likely to occur, but the rise of attribution research has enabled more definitive statements to be made.
What they're saying: The NWS is warning about the heat wave's longevity, which is especially problematic since many areas have been experiencing similar conditions for about one to three months.
- "The heat will be most persistent in the south-central U.S., where it may last through the end of next week with no relief," the NWS Weather Prediction Center stated in a Tweet.
- It also highlighted the Southwest as an area of expanding and intensifying heat.
Threat level: One side effect of the heat wave and below average Southwest monsoon is the development of drought conditions in parts of Arizona and New Mexico.
- In addition, drought conditions are forecast to expand in Texas.
Extreme heat is the country's biggest weather-related killer in a typical year, but it is often a silent one since heat-related deaths can be difficult to classify on death certificates.
- One recent study estimated the about 60,000 people died in Europe as a result of last year's heat waves, illustrating the potential for large numbers of fatalities, especially for those without air conditioning access and who have preexisting medical conditions.
What's next: Projections from the NWS Climate Prediction Center show the warmer than average conditions across the southern tier of the U.S. are likely to continue through at least the end of August.
|
<urn:uuid:68a96d78-c32c-4db5-90a9-eadc48b2efed>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510810.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20231001073649-20231001103649-00615.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9487379193305969,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.984375,
"token_count": 667,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/08/03/heat-wave-gulf-coast-texas-arizona"
}
|
Heat wave redux brings "oppressive" conditions to 70 million people
The heat wave that just won't quit is bringing dangerously hot conditions from the Southern Plains to parts of the Mississippi River Valley, Gulf Coast, and increasingly, the Southwest, through the weekend.
The big picture: Heat alerts are in effect for about 70 million people from Georgia to Kansas, as well as an area in Arizona and southeastern California.
- The National Weather Service is predicting "oppressive heat" underneath the persistent heat dome across the South Central U.S.
- The NWS warns of "extremely dangerous" peak heat indices of
|
above 110°F across the Gulf Coastal states from this weekend into next week, posing major health risks.
- "A few locations could see a heat index approaching or exceeding 120°F," the NWS stated.
What's next: Computer models show that the heat dome currently locking hot, humid air in place across the South-Central states will shift westward with time, pushing temperatures higher from Phoenix into California's Central Valley region.
- Phoenix, which set numerous all-time heat records in July, is already back to highs exceeding 110°F for the foreseeable future, through late next week at least, per NWS forecasts.
- The city reached a high of 111°F on Wednesday, which begins a new string of days with high temperatures of 110°F or higher.
- The city already broke its all-time record stream of days with a high of 110°F or higher during 31 straight days. This beat the old record by 13 days.
- It is possible that Phoenix will set a record high for the month of August, as will a number of other communities in the Southwest.
- Scientists have long known that climate change makes heat extremes more severe, longer lasting and more likely to occur, but the rise of attribution research has enabled more definitive statements to be made.
What they're saying: The NWS is warning about the heat wave's longevity, which is especially problematic since many areas have been experiencing similar conditions for about one to three months.
- "The heat will be most persistent in the south-central U.S., where it may last through the end of next week with no relief," the NWS Weather Prediction Center stated in a Tweet.
- It also highlighted the Southwest as an area of expanding and intensifying heat.
Threat level: One side effect of the heat wave and below average Southwest monsoon is the development of drought conditions in parts of Arizona and New Mexico.
- In addition, drought conditions are forecast to expand in Texas.
Extreme heat is the country's biggest weather-related killer in a typical year, but it is often a silent one since heat-related deaths can be difficult to classify on death certificates.
- One recent study estimated the about 60,000 people died in Europe as a result of last year's heat waves, illustrating the potential for large numbers of fatalities, especially for those without air conditioning access and who have preexisting medical conditions.
What's next: Projections from the NWS Climate Prediction Center show the warmer than average conditions across the southern tier of the U.S. are likely to continue through at least the end of August.
|
Heat wave affects 45 million people from Southwest to Miss. Valley
The big picture: The high-pressure area aloft, or heat dome, responsible for this event is moving out of Mexico, parking itself over Texas this week.
- This is causing the spread of dangerously hot and humid conditions to the Southwest all the way to the Mississippi Valley.
- Records are likely to be broken again in Texas, in particular, where daytime high temperatures will soar well into the triple digits.
- Heat indices could once again top 120°F in Texas on Monday, NWS forecasts show.
Threat level: The prospect of Texas’ largest cities seeing near or record highs temperatures on consecutive days could mean an even bigger test of the state’s electrical grid than has occurred so far during this heat wave.
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid, issued another weather watch for this week, indicating a heightened awareness of energy demand and supply issues.
- ERCOT is forecasting the possibility of setting a new peak in electricity demand record this week, only days after a record was set on June 19th.
- Already during this heat wave, more than 30 monthly and all-time temperature records have been set or tied in Texas; it is possible that the state record high of 120°F will be threatened.
- Del Rio, Texas has seen 8-straight record days through June 25, the NWS stated.
Between the lines: Extreme heat is the top weather-related killer in the U.S. during a typical year, and the long duration of this event is increasing the risks since many areas continue to see overnight lows failing to drop below the low 80s.
- This prevents people from getting overnight relief, and can be a big factor in causing heat-related illnesses.
- The NWS warned in a forecast discussion Monday morning that heat indices could exceed 120°F at times in South Texas this week.
- "Temperature records are in danger of being broken during this significant heat wave," forecasters wrote.
Context: Climate change is causing heat waves to be more intense, longer-lasting and more likely to occur.
- Studies in recent years have shown that some extreme heat events would not have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change.
- Scientists have estimated that the extreme heat in Texas is at least five times more likely to occur now than in a preindustrial climate.
What they’re saying: “With oppressive heat across the Southern U.S. not going anywhere soon, it's CRUCIAL to practice heat safety no matter where you are," the NWS said Sunday afternoon.
|
<urn:uuid:1467ed14-1185-4782-aa7e-ed22ab856709>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-50",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100229.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20231130161920-20231130191920-00887.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9517782330513,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.203125,
"token_count": 549,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/06/26/heat-wave-weather-nws-warnings-texas"
}
|
Heat wave affects 45 million people from Southwest to Miss. Valley
The big picture: The high-pressure area aloft, or heat dome, responsible for this event is moving out of Mexico, parking itself over Texas this week.
- This is causing the spread of dangerously hot and humid conditions to the Southwest all the way to the Mississippi Valley.
- Records are likely to be broken again in Texas, in particular, where daytime high temperatures will soar well into the triple digits.
- Heat indices could once again top 120°F in Texas on Monday, NWS forecasts show.
Threat level: The prospect of
|
Texas’ largest cities seeing near or record highs temperatures on consecutive days could mean an even bigger test of the state’s electrical grid than has occurred so far during this heat wave.
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid, issued another weather watch for this week, indicating a heightened awareness of energy demand and supply issues.
- ERCOT is forecasting the possibility of setting a new peak in electricity demand record this week, only days after a record was set on June 19th.
- Already during this heat wave, more than 30 monthly and all-time temperature records have been set or tied in Texas; it is possible that the state record high of 120°F will be threatened.
- Del Rio, Texas has seen 8-straight record days through June 25, the NWS stated.
Between the lines: Extreme heat is the top weather-related killer in the U.S. during a typical year, and the long duration of this event is increasing the risks since many areas continue to see overnight lows failing to drop below the low 80s.
- This prevents people from getting overnight relief, and can be a big factor in causing heat-related illnesses.
- The NWS warned in a forecast discussion Monday morning that heat indices could exceed 120°F at times in South Texas this week.
- "Temperature records are in danger of being broken during this significant heat wave," forecasters wrote.
Context: Climate change is causing heat waves to be more intense, longer-lasting and more likely to occur.
- Studies in recent years have shown that some extreme heat events would not have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change.
- Scientists have estimated that the extreme heat in Texas is at least five times more likely to occur now than in a preindustrial climate.
What they’re saying: “With oppressive heat across the Southern U.S. not going anywhere soon, it's CRUCIAL to practice heat safety no matter where you are," the NWS said Sunday afternoon.
|
AI's scariest mystery
Why it matters: This may be the scariest aspect of today's AI boom — and it's common knowledge among AI's builders, though not widely understood by everyone else.
- "It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work," Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote recently in The New York Times.
What's happening: For decades, we've used computer systems that, given the same input, provide the same output.
- Generative AI systems, by contrast, aim to spin out multiple possibilities from a single prompt.
- You can easily end up with different answers to the same question.
The element of randomness in generative AI operates on a scale — involving up to trillions of variables — that makes it challenging to dissect how the technology arrives at a particular answer.
- Sure, ultimately it's all math. But that's like saying the human body is all atoms. It's true! When you need to solve a problem in a reasonable span of time, though, it doesn't always help.
Driving the news: Four researchers published a paper Thursday showing that users can defeat "guardrails" meant to bar AI systems from, for instance, explaining "how to make a bomb."
- The major chatbots, like ChatGPT, Bing and Bard, won't answer that question when asked directly. But they'll go into great detail if you append some additional code to the prompt.
- "It is possible that the very nature of deep learning models makes such threats inevitable," the researchers wrote. If you can't predict exactly how the system will respond to a new prompt, you can't build guardrails that will hold.
Between the lines: Since AI developers can't easily explain the systems' behavior, their field today operates as much by oral tradition and shared tricks as by hard science.
- "It’s part of the lore of neural nets that — in some sense — so long as the setup one has is 'roughly right,'" mathematician Stephen Wolfram wrote in February. "[I]t's usually possible to home in on details just by doing sufficient training," he added, "without ever really needing to 'understand at an engineering level' quite how the neural net has ended up configuring itself."
Of note: These systems can be tuned to be relatively more or less random — to provide wider or narrower variation in their responses.
- Developers call this setting their model's "temperature."
- Temperature control, Wolfram wrote, is where the "voodoo" kicks in:
- "For some reason — that maybe one day we’ll have a scientific-style understanding of — if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very 'flat' essay, that never seems to 'show any creativity' (and even sometimes repeats word for word). But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a 'more interesting' essay."
The other side: Some experts maintain that "we don't understand AI" is a self-serving myth.
- "The blackboxness of neural networks is vastly exaggerated," Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan tweeted earlier this year. "We have fantastic tools to reverse engineer them. The barriers are cultural (building things is seen as cooler than understanding) and political (funding for companies vs. for research on societal impact)."
- Other critics argue that the "we don't know how it works" claim is a dodge that helps AI companies avoid accountability.
What to watch: It's still an open question whether AI makers will be able, over time, to provide deeper and better answers for why and how their systems work.
- But the more companies build AI that can legibly document its choices and decision paths, the more likely we are to get those answers.
|
<urn:uuid:4a9bbbf9-4483-4799-9987-702bb9e3305a>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474671.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227053544-20240227083544-00133.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.957741916179657,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.84375,
"token_count": 816,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/07/30/how-artificial-intelligence-works-unknowns"
}
|
AI's scariest mystery
Why it matters: This may be the scariest aspect of today's AI boom — and it's common knowledge among AI's builders, though not widely understood by everyone else.
- "It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work," Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote recently in The New York Times.
What's happening: For decades, we've used computer systems that, given the same input, provide the same output.
- Generative AI systems, by contrast, aim to spin out multiple
|
possibilities from a single prompt.
- You can easily end up with different answers to the same question.
The element of randomness in generative AI operates on a scale — involving up to trillions of variables — that makes it challenging to dissect how the technology arrives at a particular answer.
- Sure, ultimately it's all math. But that's like saying the human body is all atoms. It's true! When you need to solve a problem in a reasonable span of time, though, it doesn't always help.
Driving the news: Four researchers published a paper Thursday showing that users can defeat "guardrails" meant to bar AI systems from, for instance, explaining "how to make a bomb."
- The major chatbots, like ChatGPT, Bing and Bard, won't answer that question when asked directly. But they'll go into great detail if you append some additional code to the prompt.
- "It is possible that the very nature of deep learning models makes such threats inevitable," the researchers wrote. If you can't predict exactly how the system will respond to a new prompt, you can't build guardrails that will hold.
Between the lines: Since AI developers can't easily explain the systems' behavior, their field today operates as much by oral tradition and shared tricks as by hard science.
- "It’s part of the lore of neural nets that — in some sense — so long as the setup one has is 'roughly right,'" mathematician Stephen Wolfram wrote in February. "[I]t's usually possible to home in on details just by doing sufficient training," he added, "without ever really needing to 'understand at an engineering level' quite how the neural net has ended up configuring itself."
Of note: These systems can be tuned to be relatively more or less random — to provide wider or narrower variation in their responses.
- Developers call this setting their model's "temperature."
- Temperature control, Wolfram wrote, is where the "voodoo" kicks in:
- "For some reason — that maybe one day we’ll have a scientific-style understanding of — if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very 'flat' essay, that never seems to 'show any creativity' (and even sometimes repeats word for word). But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a 'more interesting' essay."
The other side: Some experts maintain that "we don't understand AI" is a self-serving myth.
- "The blackboxness of neural networks is vastly exaggerated," Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan tweeted earlier this year. "We have fantastic tools to reverse engineer them. The barriers are cultural (building things is seen as cooler than understanding) and political (funding for companies vs. for research on societal impact)."
- Other critics argue that the "we don't know how it works" claim is a dodge that helps AI companies avoid accountability.
What to watch: It's still an open question whether AI makers will be able, over time, to provide deeper and better answers for why and how their systems work.
- But the more companies build AI that can legibly document its choices and decision paths, the more likely we are to get those answers.
|
Campaign aims to create "world’s largest library" of diverse medical illustrations
Chidiebere Ibe, whose illustration of a Black fetus went viral a year and a half ago, is helping launch a campaign to diversify images used in medical textbooks and diagnosis manuals.
- Studies have found about half of U.S. medical students learn visually, making illustrations a key component of their education.
- Yet only 5% of medical images show dark skin, according to Illustrate Change, the new campaign aiming to create "the world's largest library of BIPOC medical illustrations."
Details: The campaign, a collaboration between Johnson & Johnson, the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) and Ibe, was announced late last month. It includes a fellowship program with training and a cash award, a website with downloadable images and plans to promote the materials to medical schools.
- The images feature dark-skinned people with lupus, cataracts, breast cancer and other ailments. They also include information on how communities of color are affected by a given disease or condition.
- Jorge Leon, director of global community impact at Johnson & Johnson, says 10 illustrators will be chosen for a fellowship through the AMI.
- The goal is for each fellow to create 10 illustrations featuring "additional communities and skin presentations" for the Illustrate Change library by the middle of next year.
What they're saying: Ibe tells Axios Latino that the viral image from 2021 challenged medical professionals "to reconsider their approach to health care by not dismissing patients who didn’t look like them."
- The planned images can also help people when they search online for their symptoms, "ensuring that patients are involved in their own health care," Ibe says.
Subscribe to Axios Latino to get vital news about Latinos and Latin America, delivered to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
|
<urn:uuid:0a69c412-f6aa-4e27-870f-524b3565b04c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506669.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20230924191454-20230924221454-00046.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9432612657546997,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.59375,
"token_count": 389,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2023/07/11/chidiebere-ibe-medical-illustration-black-fetus"
}
|
Campaign aims to create "world’s largest library" of diverse medical illustrations
Chidiebere Ibe, whose illustration of a Black fetus went viral a year and a half ago, is helping launch a campaign to diversify images used in medical textbooks and diagnosis manuals.
- Studies have found about half of U.S. medical students learn visually, making illustrations a key component of their education.
- Yet only 5% of medical images show dark skin, according to Illustrate Change, the new campaign aiming to create "the world's largest library of BIPOC medical illustrations."
Details: The campaign, a collaboration between Johnson & Johnson
|
, the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) and Ibe, was announced late last month. It includes a fellowship program with training and a cash award, a website with downloadable images and plans to promote the materials to medical schools.
- The images feature dark-skinned people with lupus, cataracts, breast cancer and other ailments. They also include information on how communities of color are affected by a given disease or condition.
- Jorge Leon, director of global community impact at Johnson & Johnson, says 10 illustrators will be chosen for a fellowship through the AMI.
- The goal is for each fellow to create 10 illustrations featuring "additional communities and skin presentations" for the Illustrate Change library by the middle of next year.
What they're saying: Ibe tells Axios Latino that the viral image from 2021 challenged medical professionals "to reconsider their approach to health care by not dismissing patients who didn’t look like them."
- The planned images can also help people when they search online for their symptoms, "ensuring that patients are involved in their own health care," Ibe says.
Subscribe to Axios Latino to get vital news about Latinos and Latin America, delivered to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
|
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, including women and children, destroyed homes and livelihoods, and displaced millions of people.
With Israel pledging to continue its assault, the aerial and ground offensive is already one of the most devastating military offensives in recent history.
The deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1 percent of the territory’s pre-war population – just the latest in a long list of statistics that tell of the 11-week-old conflict’s staggering human toll.
The pounding has displaced nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, levelling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave.
More than half a million people are starving, according to a report from the United Nations and other agencies released on Thursday.
But these statistics tell only part of the story, these images help to show the grim face of war.
|
<urn:uuid:15043e1e-899a-4eb4-a1ee-92db1fad1550>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474445.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20240223185223-20240223215223-00394.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.938883900642395,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.5625,
"token_count": 186,
"url": "https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/12/25/photos-israel-palestine-war"
}
|
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, including women and children, destroyed homes and livelihoods, and displaced millions of people.
With Israel pledging to continue its assault, the aerial and ground offensive is already one of the most devastating military offensives in recent history.
The deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1 percent of the territory’s pre-war population – just the latest in a long list of statistics that tell of the 11-week-old conflict’s staggering human toll.
The pounding has displaced nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, lev
|
elling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave.
More than half a million people are starving, according to a report from the United Nations and other agencies released on Thursday.
But these statistics tell only part of the story, these images help to show the grim face of war.
|
“I got a letter from LBJ,
It said, ‘This is your lucky day...’”
-- “Lyndon Johnson Told A Nation,” by Tom Paxton, 1965
March 29, 2023, will be marked as the 50th anniversary of U.S. troops returning home from the Vietnam War. The date is also recognized annually as National Vietnam War Veterans Day.
This article seeks to provide a basic understanding of a key component of this tragic, controversial war: The draft, and those who faced the possibility of being drafted.
When I graduated from Salt Lake City’s East High School in 1964, very few young men in my class gave the draft much thought, even though the draft had been in effect since World War II. Little did we know that in a few months, thanks to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, many of us would be giving it serious consideration. Just like other young men our age would do for the next nine years.
Yes, the Vietnam War became an important part of our lives because of the draft. An article written by a draftee, Ron Schroeder, in a recent edition of “The VVA Veteran” magazine tells us, “1.8 million men were drafted, 648,500 served in Vietnam.” It goes on to say, “Of the more than 58,000 American deaths in the war, just over 30 percent (17,571) were draftees.”
Many more were wounded, and thousands now suffer from the ill effects of Agent Orange.
It was commonly thought by young men who were draft eligible that, if you were drafted, you would be sent to Vietnam. It was also said that draftees would have to serve in a combat unit. This was not always true.
Others talked about what appeared to be controversial decisions associated with the draft. However, it could also be that it was just the luck of the draw. The word “karma” was very popular during the war.
Deferments were a major way that potential draftees could avoid military service. The most popular of these were college deferments. Some say that this is why enrollment in postsecondary programs spiked during the war. Others add that this was the most unfair part of the draft system, because those who could not afford to go to college stood a greater chance of being drafted.
Some young men who did not want to be dratted fled the U.S. to foreign countries. Canada, being close, and English-speaking, was a popular destination. Others were jailed.
Many of them burned their draft cards, and marched in the streets in protest. They often shouted, “Hell no! We won’t go!”
Hundreds of thousands of those who evaded the draft were later pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
It has been said that many members of today’s military, all of whom are volunteers, might not want to serve with a draftee, primarily because they do not see someone who is forced to serve becoming the dedicated type of warrior the military needs.
This was definitely not the case in Vietnam. Most draftees served in the Army. They were integrated with volunteers from day one. I have kept in touch with four members of my Army unit in Vietnam for 55 years. Three were drafted, and two of us volunteered. We were assigned to serve in Long Binh, Vietnam, during 1967-1968. This was two years before Ron Schroeder served there.
The only differences between us was that, in those days, draftees had a US designation before their serial numbers, and volunteers had an RA designation before theirs. Also, in the Army, draftees served for two years, and volunteers served for three. That’s it.
To this day, my Vietnam buddies are the finest soldiers I have ever met. We remain Best Friends Forever (BFF).
Currently, the drums of war are silent, but they may not remain so for long. If there is another catastrophic war, it may be necessary to rely on the draft again. We can only hope that those who are called to arms do as well as those who served during the Vietnam War.
A 1970s bumper sticker said it best, “All gave some, and some gave all.”
Luciano S. Martinez, Murray, is a retired Utah educator, a member of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion.
|
<urn:uuid:a0c15cd8-24c8-4907-849d-7cdad882a2cc>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224656788.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20230609164851-20230609194851-00050.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9896656274795532,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.796875,
"token_count": 948,
"url": "https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2023/03/27/luciano-s-martinez-vietnam-draft/"
}
|
“I got a letter from LBJ,
It said, ‘This is your lucky day...’”
-- “Lyndon Johnson Told A Nation,” by Tom Paxton, 1965
March 29, 2023, will be marked as the 50th anniversary of U.S. troops returning home from the Vietnam War. The date is also recognized annually as National Vietnam War Veterans Day.
This article seeks to provide a basic understanding of a key component of this tragic, controversial war: The draft, and those who faced the possibility of being drafted.
When I graduated from Salt Lake City’s East
|
High School in 1964, very few young men in my class gave the draft much thought, even though the draft had been in effect since World War II. Little did we know that in a few months, thanks to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, many of us would be giving it serious consideration. Just like other young men our age would do for the next nine years.
Yes, the Vietnam War became an important part of our lives because of the draft. An article written by a draftee, Ron Schroeder, in a recent edition of “The VVA Veteran” magazine tells us, “1.8 million men were drafted, 648,500 served in Vietnam.” It goes on to say, “Of the more than 58,000 American deaths in the war, just over 30 percent (17,571) were draftees.”
Many more were wounded, and thousands now suffer from the ill effects of Agent Orange.
It was commonly thought by young men who were draft eligible that, if you were drafted, you would be sent to Vietnam. It was also said that draftees would have to serve in a combat unit. This was not always true.
Others talked about what appeared to be controversial decisions associated with the draft. However, it could also be that it was just the luck of the draw. The word “karma” was very popular during the war.
Deferments were a major way that potential draftees could avoid military service. The most popular of these were college deferments. Some say that this is why enrollment in postsecondary programs spiked during the war. Others add that this was the most unfair part of the draft system, because those who could not afford to go to college stood a greater chance of being drafted.
Some young men who did not want to be dratted fled the U.S. to foreign countries. Canada, being close, and English-speaking, was a popular destination. Others were jailed.
Many of them burned their draft cards, and marched in the streets in protest. They often shouted, “Hell no! We won’t go!”
Hundreds of thousands of those who evaded the draft were later pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
It has been said that many members of today’s military, all of whom are volunteers, might not want to serve with a draftee, primarily because they do not see someone who is forced to serve becoming the dedicated type of warrior the military needs.
This was definitely not the case in Vietnam. Most draftees served in the Army. They were integrated with volunteers from day one. I have kept in touch with four members of my Army unit in Vietnam for 55 years. Three were drafted, and two of us volunteered. We were assigned to serve in Long Binh, Vietnam, during 1967-1968. This was two years before Ron Schroeder served there.
The only differences between us was that, in those days, draftees had a US designation before their serial numbers, and volunteers had an RA designation before theirs. Also, in the Army, draftees served for two years, and volunteers served for three. That’s it.
To this day, my Vietnam buddies are the finest soldiers I have ever met. We remain Best Friends Forever (BFF).
Currently, the drums of war are silent, but they may not remain so for long. If there is another catastrophic war, it may be necessary to rely on the draft again. We can only hope that those who are called to arms do as well as those who served during the Vietnam War.
A 1970s bumper sticker said it best, “All gave some, and some gave all.”
Luciano S. Martinez, Murray, is a retired Utah educator, a member of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion.
|
Some of the “forever chemicals” that scientists have linked to various health risks were found at five locations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana at levels well above the EPA’s most recent guidance, according to a new report.
The chemicals, classified under the umbrella of PFAS, or per- and poly-fluorinated substances, were found in samples of Mississippi River water this summer, stretching from Pointe Coupée Parish to St. James Parish, according to a report produced by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans — an advocacy group that focuses on the needs of the urban water sector.
PFAS chemicals, of which there are more than 9,000 varieties, are ubiquitous in the United States and around the world. The synthetic chemicals, which have been widely used in consumer products like non-stick cookware, fast food wrappers and plastic containers — and in various industries like aeronautics, construction and electronics – tend to break down very slowly, hence the “forever chemical” moniker.
A National Toxicology review found that both PFOS and PFOA are “presumed to be” immune hazards to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PFAS may be linked to, among other things, increased cholesterol levels and a heightened risk of testicular or kidney cancer. High levels of exposure to PFBA was linked to thyroid and liver impacts in animals.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has seemingly struggled to catch up with regulating the emerging contaminants. It issued new advisories on the chemicals in June, lowering its recommendations from 70 parts per trillion (ppt) to 0.02 ppt for PFOS and 0.004 ppt for PFOA, both of which are interim standards.
Some of the highest readings the Water Collaborative documented were levels of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) that exceeded, in one instance, the EPA’s new health advisory limits in water by more than 26,000%.
The Water Collaborative’s study did not assign blame to any one industry, company or source of PFAS. But Rebecca Malpass, policy and research director of the Water Collaborative, would eventually like to see greater regulation of the contaminants.
“We’re not just doing the study and moving on — we’re going to use this information to help community members advocate for themselves, build solutions, and work on policy changes,” she said.
“Setting standards and requiring testing” would be one goal, she said during a press conference on Friday. While there are some options available for consumers to filter PFAS out of their drinking water, the technology available to water utilities is considerably expensive.
One water utility in Cape Fear, North Carolina, however, is operating with granular activated carbon filters in an effort to filter out PFAS. Federal regulations may help persuade other utilities to pursue filtering at scale, Malpass said.
The Water Collaborative sampled Mississippi River surface water at 31 locations in nine parishes from June 26, 2022 through July 2, 2022. The group also tested soil samples along the river.
Approximately two thirds of Louisianians get their drinking water from ground sources like aquifers or wells. Others rely on surface water, including from the Mississippi River.
In the absence of a general scientific consensus about the hazards of any given PFAS concentration, states have enacted a patchwork of their own regulations. According to data compiled last year, approximately thirty states, including Louisiana, lack regulations altogether, while the rest have adopted standards that can vary widely. For instance, California has a drinking water standard of 5.1 ppt standard for PFOA, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Nevada’s guidance for perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS) is 667,000 ppt.
Companies that produce a lot of PFAS chemicals, like 3M, based in Minnesota, have faced increased scrutiny and pressure, including from investors, to reform their manufacturing practices in order to reduce or eliminate their PFAS output. The company pledged last year to eliminate all PFAS output by the year 2025. The state of California sued 3M and DuPont last year over the “staggering” clean-up costs associated with the PFAS chemicals the state claims they’ve placed in the environment.
The 2019 movie Dark Waters was inspired by a case involving the chemical PFOA, manufactured from a Teflon plant in West Virginia. DuPont and its spinoff Chemours Co. ultimately agreed to settle for $671 million the thousands of lawsuits stemming from the plant’s contamination that allegedly had been linked to six different diseases, including kidney and testicular cancers. The companies did not admit fault as part of the settlement.
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) have both tested for PFAS, but in different capacities.
Greg Langley, a spokesman for LDEQ, told The Lens that the agency has not done a “systematic survey for PFOS/PFOA” in the state, and as such, does not have a statewide database. But the agency does test for PFAS “as part of screening at remediation sites when we suspect PFOS was handled there,” he said.
“LDEQ is aware there are many sources of PFOS/PFOA, and it’s a national problem,” Langley said. “We are closely following EPA’s rulemaking process concerning PFAS/PFOS. Right now there is only a risk number, not an enforceable standard.”
LDH shared a dataset with The Lens that contains thousands of entries for PFAS testing the agency has conducted throughout the state – for both “treated” water test results and “untreated” water test results – starting in June 2019 and extending through November 2022.
The vast majority of the entries in the dataset documented no signs of PFAS, per the EPA’s standards for minimum reporting levels, but some areas – including some that rely on the Mississippi River for their drinking water – tested positive.
Surface water treatment plants in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. John and Ascension Parishes tested positive for at least one type of PFAS chemical, according to the data. The highest reading from that bunch, which were included in the treated dataset, came from New Orleans, which clocked in at 4.3 ng/l of PFOA.
“Water systems that had test results for PFOS/PFOA above the new Interim Health Advisories for PFOS/PFOA were notified of that in June of 2022,” Kevin Litten, interim press secretary for LDH, told The Lens on Monday. “LDH will continue to sample water systems for PFAS compounds and provide guidance as needed.”
The Water Collaborative’s findings are generally consistent with the concentration levels that researchers have observed elsewhere in the country, namely in the Great Lakes, Christina Remucal, associate professor and director of the water science and engineering laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Lens.
One recent study published in the journal Environmental Research found elevated concentrations of PFAS in freshwater fish, especially those in the Great Lakes. Other research has documented PFAS in the region’s rainwater.
A complicating factor at the moment in terms of evaluating the risks of PFAS concentrations is that the EPA has yet to publish maximum contaminant levels for certain PFAS chemicals, Remucal said. The EPA said it would produce proposed rules for PFOS and PFOA by the end of 2022.
“The old [advisory] of 70 parts per trillion was too high – I think everyone thought that was way too high,” Remucal told The Lens. “And I think the new one kind of swung a little bit in the opposite direction.”
The agency, though, says it’s working hard to produce a proposed regulation that, if finalized, would have some teeth for enforcement.
The “EPA’s goal is to propose a PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (NPDWR) in the coming weeks,” the agency conveyed to The Lens on Tuesday in a statement.
The proposed rule is currently pending interagency review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
For the time being, researchers would benefit from more data with which to work, Remucal said, and it’s in that context that the Water Collaborative’s report is providing an essential service.
“Because PFAS are not regulated at the federal level, there hasn’t been as much testing as there needs to be. So finding out where we have hotspots and where we don’t is really important,” she said.
“It’s hard to get people to test,” she said, adding that if utilities “don’t have to test, they won’t.” Therefore, “anything that’s making people more aware is really important,” she said.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. The Water Collaborative also receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the location of the lead photograph in the story.
|
<urn:uuid:999167c1-9e63-4406-95d1-c7e5ce9e600c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500368.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20230207004322-20230207034322-00568.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9618328809738159,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.84375,
"token_count": 2027,
"url": "https://thelensnola.org/2023/01/25/forever-chemicals-detected-at-five-locations-in-lower-mississippi-river/"
}
|
Some of the “forever chemicals” that scientists have linked to various health risks were found at five locations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana at levels well above the EPA’s most recent guidance, according to a new report.
The chemicals, classified under the umbrella of PFAS, or per- and poly-fluorinated substances, were found in samples of Mississippi River water this summer, stretching from Pointe Coupée Parish to St. James Parish, according to a report produced by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans — an advocacy group that focuses on the needs of the urban water sector.
PFAS chemicals, of which there are more than
|
9,000 varieties, are ubiquitous in the United States and around the world. The synthetic chemicals, which have been widely used in consumer products like non-stick cookware, fast food wrappers and plastic containers — and in various industries like aeronautics, construction and electronics – tend to break down very slowly, hence the “forever chemical” moniker.
A National Toxicology review found that both PFOS and PFOA are “presumed to be” immune hazards to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PFAS may be linked to, among other things, increased cholesterol levels and a heightened risk of testicular or kidney cancer. High levels of exposure to PFBA was linked to thyroid and liver impacts in animals.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has seemingly struggled to catch up with regulating the emerging contaminants. It issued new advisories on the chemicals in June, lowering its recommendations from 70 parts per trillion (ppt) to 0.02 ppt for PFOS and 0.004 ppt for PFOA, both of which are interim standards.
Some of the highest readings the Water Collaborative documented were levels of perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) that exceeded, in one instance, the EPA’s new health advisory limits in water by more than 26,000%.
The Water Collaborative’s study did not assign blame to any one industry, company or source of PFAS. But Rebecca Malpass, policy and research director of the Water Collaborative, would eventually like to see greater regulation of the contaminants.
“We’re not just doing the study and moving on — we’re going to use this information to help community members advocate for themselves, build solutions, and work on policy changes,” she said.
“Setting standards and requiring testing” would be one goal, she said during a press conference on Friday. While there are some options available for consumers to filter PFAS out of their drinking water, the technology available to water utilities is considerably expensive.
One water utility in Cape Fear, North Carolina, however, is operating with granular activated carbon filters in an effort to filter out PFAS. Federal regulations may help persuade other utilities to pursue filtering at scale, Malpass said.
The Water Collaborative sampled Mississippi River surface water at 31 locations in nine parishes from June 26, 2022 through July 2, 2022. The group also tested soil samples along the river.
Approximately two thirds of Louisianians get their drinking water from ground sources like aquifers or wells. Others rely on surface water, including from the Mississippi River.
In the absence of a general scientific consensus about the hazards of any given PFAS concentration, states have enacted a patchwork of their own regulations. According to data compiled last year, approximately thirty states, including Louisiana, lack regulations altogether, while the rest have adopted standards that can vary widely. For instance, California has a drinking water standard of 5.1 ppt standard for PFOA, while, at the other end of the spectrum, Nevada’s guidance for perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS) is 667,000 ppt.
Companies that produce a lot of PFAS chemicals, like 3M, based in Minnesota, have faced increased scrutiny and pressure, including from investors, to reform their manufacturing practices in order to reduce or eliminate their PFAS output. The company pledged last year to eliminate all PFAS output by the year 2025. The state of California sued 3M and DuPont last year over the “staggering” clean-up costs associated with the PFAS chemicals the state claims they’ve placed in the environment.
The 2019 movie Dark Waters was inspired by a case involving the chemical PFOA, manufactured from a Teflon plant in West Virginia. DuPont and its spinoff Chemours Co. ultimately agreed to settle for $671 million the thousands of lawsuits stemming from the plant’s contamination that allegedly had been linked to six different diseases, including kidney and testicular cancers. The companies did not admit fault as part of the settlement.
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) have both tested for PFAS, but in different capacities.
Greg Langley, a spokesman for LDEQ, told The Lens that the agency has not done a “systematic survey for PFOS/PFOA” in the state, and as such, does not have a statewide database. But the agency does test for PFAS “as part of screening at remediation sites when we suspect PFOS was handled there,” he said.
“LDEQ is aware there are many sources of PFOS/PFOA, and it’s a national problem,” Langley said. “We are closely following EPA’s rulemaking process concerning PFAS/PFOS. Right now there is only a risk number, not an enforceable standard.”
LDH shared a dataset with The Lens that contains thousands of entries for PFAS testing the agency has conducted throughout the state – for both “treated” water test results and “untreated” water test results – starting in June 2019 and extending through November 2022.
The vast majority of the entries in the dataset documented no signs of PFAS, per the EPA’s standards for minimum reporting levels, but some areas – including some that rely on the Mississippi River for their drinking water – tested positive.
Surface water treatment plants in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. John and Ascension Parishes tested positive for at least one type of PFAS chemical, according to the data. The highest reading from that bunch, which were included in the treated dataset, came from New Orleans, which clocked in at 4.3 ng/l of PFOA.
“Water systems that had test results for PFOS/PFOA above the new Interim Health Advisories for PFOS/PFOA were notified of that in June of 2022,” Kevin Litten, interim press secretary for LDH, told The Lens on Monday. “LDH will continue to sample water systems for PFAS compounds and provide guidance as needed.”
The Water Collaborative’s findings are generally consistent with the concentration levels that researchers have observed elsewhere in the country, namely in the Great Lakes, Christina Remucal, associate professor and director of the water science and engineering laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Lens.
One recent study published in the journal Environmental Research found elevated concentrations of PFAS in freshwater fish, especially those in the Great Lakes. Other research has documented PFAS in the region’s rainwater.
A complicating factor at the moment in terms of evaluating the risks of PFAS concentrations is that the EPA has yet to publish maximum contaminant levels for certain PFAS chemicals, Remucal said. The EPA said it would produce proposed rules for PFOS and PFOA by the end of 2022.
“The old [advisory] of 70 parts per trillion was too high – I think everyone thought that was way too high,” Remucal told The Lens. “And I think the new one kind of swung a little bit in the opposite direction.”
The agency, though, says it’s working hard to produce a proposed regulation that, if finalized, would have some teeth for enforcement.
The “EPA’s goal is to propose a PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (NPDWR) in the coming weeks,” the agency conveyed to The Lens on Tuesday in a statement.
The proposed rule is currently pending interagency review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
For the time being, researchers would benefit from more data with which to work, Remucal said, and it’s in that context that the Water Collaborative’s report is providing an essential service.
“Because PFAS are not regulated at the federal level, there hasn’t been as much testing as there needs to be. So finding out where we have hotspots and where we don’t is really important,” she said.
“It’s hard to get people to test,” she said, adding that if utilities “don’t have to test, they won’t.” Therefore, “anything that’s making people more aware is really important,” she said.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. The Water Collaborative also receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the location of the lead photograph in the story.
|
I have featured this series over the last ten years on a regular basis for new readers who might have joined the blog. Our bodies are are greatest asset. It has a long road ahead of if from birth, through the teen years, work life, parenthood, middle age and then into our 70s and beyond.
At every stage of our life healthy nutrition is essential to help the body develop and remain as disease free as possible. I appreciate that many of you may have read this series before three years ago, but I hope it will be a reminder of how amazing our bodies are, and simply eating the right foods, exercising moderately and not doing anything too reckless…will go a long way to enjoying later life to the full.
In this first series of posts I am going to be exploring the brain and its functions.
Dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease and other related conditions are rarely out of the headlines and it is probably everyone’s worst fear. There is a genetic link to some forms of dementia,but it is not as common as lifestyle related deterioration of the brain. Even though we are living longer, dementia is not an automatic progression and understanding how this amazing organ works and what it requires to be health, is vital.
Part One: Brain introduction and anatomy
How the brain from conception through life
How the brain develops.
We are hard wired and from the moment of conception there will be enforced changes to the structure and function of our brains. Whilst the process of development is beyond our control, there is still a powerful external influence on how well that programming is carried out.
Before birth the health, nutrition, environment and lifestyle choices of the mother can impact both the rate of brain development and the health of the brain cells. After birth during the formative years up to age 15, environment, nutrition and stimulation of those brain cells is critical and if they do not receive sufficient amounts of all of these there is a chance that irreversible damage will occur.
The development of the brain does not follow a straight upward line it comes in waves with certain parts of the brain achieving full function at different times. There is however a sequence that every brain will follow.
At conception the sperm and the egg form a single cell combining to form the genetic blueprint. Over 60% of our genes are committed to forming our brain which is after all the control centre for all our other functions. Around three to four weeks into development a thin layer of cells form in the embryo, which then fold and fuse to form a liquid filled tube. This minute start is vital as it is the first stage in the development of the brain and spinal cord. This is followed by the production of nerve cells called neurons.
At around 14 weeks with millions of cells in place a change occurs as they begin to migrate to specific parts of the neural network and the inbuilt GPS usually sends them to the correct address. Some do however get lost or damaged in transit and die off.
Rarely however, some do reach the wrong destination and form incorrect connections and this coding error can lead to certain disorders such as autism or epilepsy, slower physical and mental development and in some cases more severe mental health issues.
At 20 weeks about half the existing cells are shed and those that remain are organised into compartments within the brain that govern virtually every automatic function in our bodies and also our senses and skills.
At birth we have around 100 billion brain cells and we begin the next stage in our development. Most of the connections between the neurons are barely formed and will need to be strengthened by the time we reach the age of three.
A baby has most of the senses working at birth such as sight, smell, hearing and the ability to respond to touch. Immediately with that first breath the brain kicks into overdrive and forms trillions of connections and pathways enabling learning.
As with the early development of the brain, it is vital that the environment, nutrition and stimulation are available to enable the brain to process and learn from experience.
These experiences trigger the electrical activity necessary to enable the brain to develop connections and grow. These connections are called synapses. The connections are formed by each neuron putting out a long tentacle like fibre called an axon. The neuron uses the axon to send messages to other neurons. The messages are sent as electrical signals and picked up by thousands of short, hair like fibres called dendrites (also produced by the neurons). Each neuron is able to connect up with thousands of other neurons.
It is then that ‘practice makes perfect’ comes into play as repeated experiences, sights, smells or movements form well-worn paths within the brain that we remember for a lifetime. By age two our brains have developed trillions of these pathways and although they continue to form throughout our lifetime they have reached their highest density.
Our higher functioning ability is usually operational by age three and we begin to think for ourselves, use language effectively and have developed personality traits.
After three years old we continue to absorb knowledge and experience like a sponge and the constant practice etches the functions into the brain. If that absorption ceases for some reason and we stop practicing certain functions, we can lose them completely as the brain discards little used pathways in favour of more travelled routes.
This pruning process and strengthening of the connections in the brain is most active in the teen years. The prefrontal cortex is the last to mature and it involves the control of impulses and decision-making. Anyone who has had children going through this phase will have a clear understanding of the ‘challenges’ that arise during this phase! This powerful surge in the brain is accompanied by the added influx of hormones which results in a chemical and electrical ‘perfect storm’.
There is a strong element of voluntary change at this stage of the development of the brain. It is around this age that we start making choices about what we eat, the amount of exercise we take, to take up smoking or drinking alcohol and to stop formal education. All these elements will affect the few years left of brain development we have left and therefore our mental capacity.
The brain continues to defrag the mainframe and the strongest connections survive. By our early 20s our brain development is matured into a powerful and functioning organ with approximately 500 trillion pathways.
At around 30 years old the physical changes will wind down in the brain and this is where even more of a voluntary contribution to growth, experience and maintenance is required to keep the pathways clear of debris such as plaque so that they continue to function efficiently.
This phase lasts for the next 35 or 40 years. The brain cells are active and we contribute to their health by diet, stimulation and avoiding lifestyle choices that kill them off. Such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not taking exercise, eating a diet rich in components that block our arteries and blood flow to the brain……you get the idea.
After 65 years old there is a natural dying off of cells in certain parts of the brain. This does not mean that you will lose all your mental capacity, but little things will begin to make an impact on your daily functioning. For example brain cells lost from the Hippocampus where we process memories will result in forgetfulness. Then you find you have morphed into your mother… and hopefully will still have most of your marbles into your 90s!
You are NOT destined to develop full blown dementia and you can make sure that you support your brain function by eating a healthy balanced diet, getting plenty of oxygen and regular exercise, reducing stress and interacting with others and events to stimulate the pathways to remain open. More so than at any other time in the lifespan of your brain, the voluntary choices and changes you make to your way of life will bring huge benefits.
©sally cronin Just Food for Health 1998 – 2023
Next week a closer look at Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia in general.
A little bit about me nutritionally. .
About Sally Cronin
I am a qualified nutritional therapist with twenty-four years experience working with clients in Ireland and the UK as well as being a health consultant on radio in Spain.
Although I write a lot of fiction, I actually wrote my first two books on health, the first one, Size Matters, a weight loss programme 21 years ago, based on my own weight loss of 154lbs. My first clinic was in Ireland, the Cronin Diet Advisory Centre and my second book, Just Food for Health was written as my client’s workbook. Since then I have written a men’s health manual, and anti-aging programme, articles for magazines, radio programmes and posts here on Smorgasbord.
Thanks reading and I hope you will join me again next week…Sally.
|
<urn:uuid:e51948fd-3438-4079-9766-26ab81121ad6>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499710.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20230129080341-20230129110341-00743.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9567333459854126,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.625,
"token_count": 1787,
"url": "https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com/2023/01/12/smorgasbord-health-column-2023-the-body-our-greatest-asset-the-brain-development-from-conception-to-old-age-by-sally-cronin/"
}
|
I have featured this series over the last ten years on a regular basis for new readers who might have joined the blog. Our bodies are are greatest asset. It has a long road ahead of if from birth, through the teen years, work life, parenthood, middle age and then into our 70s and beyond.
At every stage of our life healthy nutrition is essential to help the body develop and remain as disease free as possible. I appreciate that many of you may have read this series before three years ago, but I hope it will be a reminder of how amazing our bodies are, and simply eating the right foods, exercising
|
moderately and not doing anything too reckless…will go a long way to enjoying later life to the full.
In this first series of posts I am going to be exploring the brain and its functions.
Dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease and other related conditions are rarely out of the headlines and it is probably everyone’s worst fear. There is a genetic link to some forms of dementia,but it is not as common as lifestyle related deterioration of the brain. Even though we are living longer, dementia is not an automatic progression and understanding how this amazing organ works and what it requires to be health, is vital.
Part One: Brain introduction and anatomy
How the brain from conception through life
How the brain develops.
We are hard wired and from the moment of conception there will be enforced changes to the structure and function of our brains. Whilst the process of development is beyond our control, there is still a powerful external influence on how well that programming is carried out.
Before birth the health, nutrition, environment and lifestyle choices of the mother can impact both the rate of brain development and the health of the brain cells. After birth during the formative years up to age 15, environment, nutrition and stimulation of those brain cells is critical and if they do not receive sufficient amounts of all of these there is a chance that irreversible damage will occur.
The development of the brain does not follow a straight upward line it comes in waves with certain parts of the brain achieving full function at different times. There is however a sequence that every brain will follow.
At conception the sperm and the egg form a single cell combining to form the genetic blueprint. Over 60% of our genes are committed to forming our brain which is after all the control centre for all our other functions. Around three to four weeks into development a thin layer of cells form in the embryo, which then fold and fuse to form a liquid filled tube. This minute start is vital as it is the first stage in the development of the brain and spinal cord. This is followed by the production of nerve cells called neurons.
At around 14 weeks with millions of cells in place a change occurs as they begin to migrate to specific parts of the neural network and the inbuilt GPS usually sends them to the correct address. Some do however get lost or damaged in transit and die off.
Rarely however, some do reach the wrong destination and form incorrect connections and this coding error can lead to certain disorders such as autism or epilepsy, slower physical and mental development and in some cases more severe mental health issues.
At 20 weeks about half the existing cells are shed and those that remain are organised into compartments within the brain that govern virtually every automatic function in our bodies and also our senses and skills.
At birth we have around 100 billion brain cells and we begin the next stage in our development. Most of the connections between the neurons are barely formed and will need to be strengthened by the time we reach the age of three.
A baby has most of the senses working at birth such as sight, smell, hearing and the ability to respond to touch. Immediately with that first breath the brain kicks into overdrive and forms trillions of connections and pathways enabling learning.
As with the early development of the brain, it is vital that the environment, nutrition and stimulation are available to enable the brain to process and learn from experience.
These experiences trigger the electrical activity necessary to enable the brain to develop connections and grow. These connections are called synapses. The connections are formed by each neuron putting out a long tentacle like fibre called an axon. The neuron uses the axon to send messages to other neurons. The messages are sent as electrical signals and picked up by thousands of short, hair like fibres called dendrites (also produced by the neurons). Each neuron is able to connect up with thousands of other neurons.
It is then that ‘practice makes perfect’ comes into play as repeated experiences, sights, smells or movements form well-worn paths within the brain that we remember for a lifetime. By age two our brains have developed trillions of these pathways and although they continue to form throughout our lifetime they have reached their highest density.
Our higher functioning ability is usually operational by age three and we begin to think for ourselves, use language effectively and have developed personality traits.
After three years old we continue to absorb knowledge and experience like a sponge and the constant practice etches the functions into the brain. If that absorption ceases for some reason and we stop practicing certain functions, we can lose them completely as the brain discards little used pathways in favour of more travelled routes.
This pruning process and strengthening of the connections in the brain is most active in the teen years. The prefrontal cortex is the last to mature and it involves the control of impulses and decision-making. Anyone who has had children going through this phase will have a clear understanding of the ‘challenges’ that arise during this phase! This powerful surge in the brain is accompanied by the added influx of hormones which results in a chemical and electrical ‘perfect storm’.
There is a strong element of voluntary change at this stage of the development of the brain. It is around this age that we start making choices about what we eat, the amount of exercise we take, to take up smoking or drinking alcohol and to stop formal education. All these elements will affect the few years left of brain development we have left and therefore our mental capacity.
The brain continues to defrag the mainframe and the strongest connections survive. By our early 20s our brain development is matured into a powerful and functioning organ with approximately 500 trillion pathways.
At around 30 years old the physical changes will wind down in the brain and this is where even more of a voluntary contribution to growth, experience and maintenance is required to keep the pathways clear of debris such as plaque so that they continue to function efficiently.
This phase lasts for the next 35 or 40 years. The brain cells are active and we contribute to their health by diet, stimulation and avoiding lifestyle choices that kill them off. Such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, not taking exercise, eating a diet rich in components that block our arteries and blood flow to the brain……you get the idea.
After 65 years old there is a natural dying off of cells in certain parts of the brain. This does not mean that you will lose all your mental capacity, but little things will begin to make an impact on your daily functioning. For example brain cells lost from the Hippocampus where we process memories will result in forgetfulness. Then you find you have morphed into your mother… and hopefully will still have most of your marbles into your 90s!
You are NOT destined to develop full blown dementia and you can make sure that you support your brain function by eating a healthy balanced diet, getting plenty of oxygen and regular exercise, reducing stress and interacting with others and events to stimulate the pathways to remain open. More so than at any other time in the lifespan of your brain, the voluntary choices and changes you make to your way of life will bring huge benefits.
©sally cronin Just Food for Health 1998 – 2023
Next week a closer look at Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia in general.
A little bit about me nutritionally. .
About Sally Cronin
I am a qualified nutritional therapist with twenty-four years experience working with clients in Ireland and the UK as well as being a health consultant on radio in Spain.
Although I write a lot of fiction, I actually wrote my first two books on health, the first one, Size Matters, a weight loss programme 21 years ago, based on my own weight loss of 154lbs. My first clinic was in Ireland, the Cronin Diet Advisory Centre and my second book, Just Food for Health was written as my client’s workbook. Since then I have written a men’s health manual, and anti-aging programme, articles for magazines, radio programmes and posts here on Smorgasbord.
Thanks reading and I hope you will join me again next week…Sally.
|
At least four locally transmitted cases of malaria were detected in Florida and Texas, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Malaria was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 1951, and no locally acquired cases have been reported in 20 years.
We’ve rounded up how experts are interpreting this resurgence.
- Scientists have worried that longer and warmer summers lead to more favorable conditions for malaria-infected mosquitoes, in part because heat speeds up the time it takes for parasites to mature inside mosquitoes. “So not only are these mosquitoes living longer, but they’re potentially becoming infectious sooner,” Oliver Brady, an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,” told CNN. The exact impact of climate change on the recent uptick in cases, though, is an open question, NPR reports.
- The new cases underscore the need for policymakers to ensure that the U.S. has sophisticated surveillance systems in place to detect cases more quickly, Dyann F. Wirth, an infectious disease professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Politico Pulse. “If you miss a malaria case, it could have a serious consequence for the patient, not to mention for transmission,” Wirth said.
- Stopping a larger spread of malaria in the U.S. is “simple but not easy,” Wired reports. “Simple, because it requires only that people not bring the infection into the country.” But it’s not easy to control human movement, and thousands enter the U.S. from places where malaria is endemic, “whether as tourists, economic migrants, or asylum seekers and refugees.”
- No, this isn’t Bill Gates’ fault. Conspiracy theories posted to social media claimed that the Florida and Texas cases were linked to an initiative backed by Gates that involved releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in the U.S. But that biotech company doesn’t work with the kind of mosquitoes that transmit malaria. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t finance any such projects in the U.S., an Associated Press fact check found.
Most U.S. malaria cases are diagnosed after a person travels to a country where malaria is common and then returns home, according to the CDC. The locally transmitted cases happen after those infected humans are bit by domestic mosquitos, who then carry the virus and infect other people.
Globally, the number of malaria cases has risen in recent years, from 232 million in 2019 to 247 million in 2021, according to the World Health Organization. There were an estimated 619,000 deaths linked to malaria in 2021.
|
<urn:uuid:3f051db6-6eed-4bba-877a-5a39f71923a8>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506669.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20230924191454-20230924221454-00490.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9411988854408264,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.4375,
"token_count": 566,
"url": "https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2023/what-it-means-malaria-cases-detected-in-the-us"
}
|
At least four locally transmitted cases of malaria were detected in Florida and Texas, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Malaria was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 1951, and no locally acquired cases have been reported in 20 years.
We’ve rounded up how experts are interpreting this resurgence.
- Scientists have worried that longer and warmer summers lead to more favorable conditions for malaria-infected mosquitoes, in part because heat speeds up the time it takes for parasites to mature inside mosquitoes. “So not only are these mosquitoes living longer, but they’re potentially becoming infectious sooner,” Oliver Brady,
|
an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,” told CNN. The exact impact of climate change on the recent uptick in cases, though, is an open question, NPR reports.
- The new cases underscore the need for policymakers to ensure that the U.S. has sophisticated surveillance systems in place to detect cases more quickly, Dyann F. Wirth, an infectious disease professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Politico Pulse. “If you miss a malaria case, it could have a serious consequence for the patient, not to mention for transmission,” Wirth said.
- Stopping a larger spread of malaria in the U.S. is “simple but not easy,” Wired reports. “Simple, because it requires only that people not bring the infection into the country.” But it’s not easy to control human movement, and thousands enter the U.S. from places where malaria is endemic, “whether as tourists, economic migrants, or asylum seekers and refugees.”
- No, this isn’t Bill Gates’ fault. Conspiracy theories posted to social media claimed that the Florida and Texas cases were linked to an initiative backed by Gates that involved releasing genetically modified mosquitoes in the U.S. But that biotech company doesn’t work with the kind of mosquitoes that transmit malaria. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t finance any such projects in the U.S., an Associated Press fact check found.
Most U.S. malaria cases are diagnosed after a person travels to a country where malaria is common and then returns home, according to the CDC. The locally transmitted cases happen after those infected humans are bit by domestic mosquitos, who then carry the virus and infect other people.
Globally, the number of malaria cases has risen in recent years, from 232 million in 2019 to 247 million in 2021, according to the World Health Organization. There were an estimated 619,000 deaths linked to malaria in 2021.
|
Ask Rowan Reid which is the best species of tree to plant and he'll give a wry smile and a surprising answer.
"I'm not really sure."
Four decades as a forester and a lifetime of planting farm forestry trees might not have answered that simple question.
But they have reaffirmed one long-realised fact: timber is an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity worldwide, especially the eco-friendly plantation timbers Mr Reid grows on his farm.
"When people come here, they've never seen a forest like this, because there is a person who has been involved in the management of those trees while they grow," he said.
There are 70 species spaced across the 40-hectare property at Bambra in south-west Victoria.
When Mr Reid arrived in 1987, it was a denuded dairy farm, almost bereft of vegetation.
Now it's a lush world of natives and exotics and a drawcard for tour groups, especially farmers keen to integrate tree growing and timber production into their enterprise.
Beneath the canopy, sheep graze contentedly on the rich pasture, proof that agriforestry can co-exist with livestock production.
The trees have flourished and so has the biodiversity.
The towering eucalypts planted in the late 1980s are gradually being felled and replaced by an emerging understorey of rare rainforest trees and premium timber varieties such as Australian red cedar.
For agriforestry to succeed, Rowan Reid continually stresses the need for careful maintenance. Trees need to be carefully established and then later systematically pruned of low branches to a height of 6 metres.
The end goal is a long, straight log, free of knots and blemishes, that will yield stable, valuable timber.
"Maintenance is essential. What we need to do is to have a campaign and a program that supports active management of forests on farms and stop this notion that it's just plant, walk away and let nature take its course," Mr Reid said
On a gentle slope beside a stream, Mr Reid recently harvested the fruits of his foresight.
He has grown and milled much of the timber being used to build his architect-designed house, including a 35-year-old mountain ash eucalypt with a girth of more than 80 centimetres.
Using his portable sawmill, he has sawn the timber into stair treads. His pine trees have supplied much of the framing timber.
His abundance of fine timber has been a blessing at a time when Australia's construction industry has seen a severe shortage of building timbers.
"This has been a great opportunity that I had standing trees that I could convert for this purpose, and I think it's going to save us a lot of money," Mr Reid said.
Growing timber for the future was Mr Reid's aim when he started the Otway Agriforestry Network in 1987.
His neighbour, sheep farmer Andrew Stewart, also began revegetating his family's property at that time.
"Rowan has been a real catalyst about stimulating ideas about agriforestry," Mr Stewart said.
"He's got this wonderful combination of combining the scientific theory and the practice and making it happen in a living classroom on his property."
The Stewart family quickly realised that plantation-grown trees could provide far more than shelter and shade for stock.
"At that stage, we were addressing the issues that we had here, which was erosion, salting, exposure, all those sorts of things," Jill Stewart said.
Andrew, Jill and Andrew's brother Hugh began planting trees all over their property.
"The creek lines and the drainage lines, the salt-affected areas, [we] planted those out as well, planted out the water-logged areas, the remnant vegetation areas," Andrew Stewart said.
"We hooked all those up into a web of connected trees across the farm for wildlife corridors and for shade and shelter for the stock."
Three decades on the Otway Agriforestry group has grown to 200 members and its collective foresight and hard work have transformed the landscape in every direction.
The group can measure how much carbon the trees are sequestering using GPS tags on each tree that can be scanned using a smartphone app.
That, along with the growing value of these timber trees, is an emerging market.
"We're still producing the same amount of agricultural production as in prime lambs and wool now with 18 to 20 per cent tree cover compared to when we had 3 per cent tree cover," Mr Stewart said.
Andrew and Jill were recently named as national Landcare winners for their farm revegetation efforts.
They've also established a flourishing native wildflower business on a once barren, exposed hillside and have plans to establish another plot to meet the surging demand.
Like the Stewarts, Rowan Reid talks of planting trees now and carefully tending them for future generations to come.
"Use the time you have as a landholder as an opportunity to flip it into a new opportunity for the next generation.
"It's really exciting when you do that."
Watch ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday or on ABC iview.
|
<urn:uuid:e21267be-7c47-410a-aac7-00a7730e34e6>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474674.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227085429-20240227115429-00438.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9721751809120178,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.53125,
"token_count": 1082,
"url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-26/forestry-timber-from-eco-friendly-plantations-yield-rewards/102015876"
}
|
Ask Rowan Reid which is the best species of tree to plant and he'll give a wry smile and a surprising answer.
"I'm not really sure."
Four decades as a forester and a lifetime of planting farm forestry trees might not have answered that simple question.
But they have reaffirmed one long-realised fact: timber is an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity worldwide, especially the eco-friendly plantation timbers Mr Reid grows on his farm.
"When people come here, they've never seen a forest like this, because there is a person who has been involved in the management of those trees while they grow," he said.
|
There are 70 species spaced across the 40-hectare property at Bambra in south-west Victoria.
When Mr Reid arrived in 1987, it was a denuded dairy farm, almost bereft of vegetation.
Now it's a lush world of natives and exotics and a drawcard for tour groups, especially farmers keen to integrate tree growing and timber production into their enterprise.
Beneath the canopy, sheep graze contentedly on the rich pasture, proof that agriforestry can co-exist with livestock production.
The trees have flourished and so has the biodiversity.
The towering eucalypts planted in the late 1980s are gradually being felled and replaced by an emerging understorey of rare rainforest trees and premium timber varieties such as Australian red cedar.
For agriforestry to succeed, Rowan Reid continually stresses the need for careful maintenance. Trees need to be carefully established and then later systematically pruned of low branches to a height of 6 metres.
The end goal is a long, straight log, free of knots and blemishes, that will yield stable, valuable timber.
"Maintenance is essential. What we need to do is to have a campaign and a program that supports active management of forests on farms and stop this notion that it's just plant, walk away and let nature take its course," Mr Reid said
On a gentle slope beside a stream, Mr Reid recently harvested the fruits of his foresight.
He has grown and milled much of the timber being used to build his architect-designed house, including a 35-year-old mountain ash eucalypt with a girth of more than 80 centimetres.
Using his portable sawmill, he has sawn the timber into stair treads. His pine trees have supplied much of the framing timber.
His abundance of fine timber has been a blessing at a time when Australia's construction industry has seen a severe shortage of building timbers.
"This has been a great opportunity that I had standing trees that I could convert for this purpose, and I think it's going to save us a lot of money," Mr Reid said.
Growing timber for the future was Mr Reid's aim when he started the Otway Agriforestry Network in 1987.
His neighbour, sheep farmer Andrew Stewart, also began revegetating his family's property at that time.
"Rowan has been a real catalyst about stimulating ideas about agriforestry," Mr Stewart said.
"He's got this wonderful combination of combining the scientific theory and the practice and making it happen in a living classroom on his property."
The Stewart family quickly realised that plantation-grown trees could provide far more than shelter and shade for stock.
"At that stage, we were addressing the issues that we had here, which was erosion, salting, exposure, all those sorts of things," Jill Stewart said.
Andrew, Jill and Andrew's brother Hugh began planting trees all over their property.
"The creek lines and the drainage lines, the salt-affected areas, [we] planted those out as well, planted out the water-logged areas, the remnant vegetation areas," Andrew Stewart said.
"We hooked all those up into a web of connected trees across the farm for wildlife corridors and for shade and shelter for the stock."
Three decades on the Otway Agriforestry group has grown to 200 members and its collective foresight and hard work have transformed the landscape in every direction.
The group can measure how much carbon the trees are sequestering using GPS tags on each tree that can be scanned using a smartphone app.
That, along with the growing value of these timber trees, is an emerging market.
"We're still producing the same amount of agricultural production as in prime lambs and wool now with 18 to 20 per cent tree cover compared to when we had 3 per cent tree cover," Mr Stewart said.
Andrew and Jill were recently named as national Landcare winners for their farm revegetation efforts.
They've also established a flourishing native wildflower business on a once barren, exposed hillside and have plans to establish another plot to meet the surging demand.
Like the Stewarts, Rowan Reid talks of planting trees now and carefully tending them for future generations to come.
"Use the time you have as a landholder as an opportunity to flip it into a new opportunity for the next generation.
"It's really exciting when you do that."
Watch ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday or on ABC iview.
|
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
It was a shorter distance through US history from the White House to the Soviet Union or North Korea than to an autoworkers picket line in Michigan.
Presidents like to be the first to do something, particularly if it offers them an historic photo opportunity.
President Joe Biden added a presidential first when he joined an United Auto Workers picket line of a General Motors facility in Michigan on Tuesday.
In this case, Biden is happy to be seen as the labor-friendly president as he duels with former President Donald Trump for the pivotal support of union workers in Michigan and other key states.
Previous presidential firsts were wrapped in other events.
The first US president to visit the Soviet Union was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took part in the Yalta Conference in 1945 with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The goal was for the Americans, the Soviets and the British to organize post-war Europe. (Yalta, a resort town and part of Crimea, was invaded by Russia in 2014.)
No president would visit the Soviet Union again until Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972, when he and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev reached agreements, including to limit nuclear weapons.
Some firsts require physical travel. Harry Truman was the first president to travel, in a sense, into American living rooms. He gave the first televised presidential address in 1947 as he pitched the Truman Doctrine to the American people from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
He argued in favor of large investments in a massive aid program for Greece and Turkey, which were dealing with displaced populations and food shortages. Read more from the National Archives. That effort resonates today as American lawmakers consider sending ever more aid to Ukraine.
Honorable mentions: In 1922, Warren Harding became the first president to be heard on the radio. In 2015, Barack Obama was the first president to post on Twitter, now known as X, although Trump clearly revolutionized the use of social media from the Oval Office.
Obama was also the first sitting president to appear on a late-night comedy program as president in 2016, although John F. Kennedy appeared on the Jack Paar show as a presidential candidate in 1960.
|
<urn:uuid:ad98e1be-8fbc-45a4-8e22-715e7cfb79d7>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476180.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20240303011622-20240303041622-00777.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9709646701812744,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.96875,
"token_count": 483,
"url": "https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/26/politics/president-first-time-what-matters/index.html"
}
|
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
It was a shorter distance through US history from the White House to the Soviet Union or North Korea than to an autoworkers picket line in Michigan.
Presidents like to be the first to do something, particularly if it offers them an historic photo opportunity.
President Joe Biden added a presidential first when he joined an United Auto Workers picket line of a General Motors facility in Michigan on Tuesday.
In this case, Biden is happy to be seen as the labor-friendly president as he duels with former
|
President Donald Trump for the pivotal support of union workers in Michigan and other key states.
Previous presidential firsts were wrapped in other events.
The first US president to visit the Soviet Union was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took part in the Yalta Conference in 1945 with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The goal was for the Americans, the Soviets and the British to organize post-war Europe. (Yalta, a resort town and part of Crimea, was invaded by Russia in 2014.)
No president would visit the Soviet Union again until Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972, when he and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev reached agreements, including to limit nuclear weapons.
Some firsts require physical travel. Harry Truman was the first president to travel, in a sense, into American living rooms. He gave the first televised presidential address in 1947 as he pitched the Truman Doctrine to the American people from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
He argued in favor of large investments in a massive aid program for Greece and Turkey, which were dealing with displaced populations and food shortages. Read more from the National Archives. That effort resonates today as American lawmakers consider sending ever more aid to Ukraine.
Honorable mentions: In 1922, Warren Harding became the first president to be heard on the radio. In 2015, Barack Obama was the first president to post on Twitter, now known as X, although Trump clearly revolutionized the use of social media from the Oval Office.
Obama was also the first sitting president to appear on a late-night comedy program as president in 2016, although John F. Kennedy appeared on the Jack Paar show as a presidential candidate in 1960.
|
Proving a photo is fake is one thing. Proving it isn’t is another
But, for the reporting of war crimes, it matters
That truth is the first casualty of war is an old aphorism. One recent instance is the proliferation of images and videos of things that did not happen, in wars such as those currently going on in Ukraine and Syria. Some of these are outright fakes. Others are manipulated versions of honestly recorded material. Last year a doctored video appeared of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, apparently telling Ukrainian soldiers to surrender.
The proliferation of such fakes has, though, led to a second, more subtle approach to lying with images. This is to use their ubiquity to cast doubt on the veracity of inconvenient pictures that are real.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, for example, the Associated Press released a video of doctors failing to revive a young girl who had been hit in the shelling of Mariupol. The footage soon appeared on Russian television with the word “fake” stamped on it. Since it is hard to prove a negative (ie, that material has not been doctored), such evidence may thus be challenged, possibly even in court, and allegations of crimes based on that evidence may, as a result, not stick.
Ways to establish the authenticity of digital imagery would therefore be valuable. And one is now available. “Glass-to-glass” warning systems create special software “ecosystems” within which pictures and video can be taken, stored and transmitted in a way that alerts viewers to alterations, no matter when and where those changes are introduced in an image’s journey from lens to screen.
A plate of hash
One such system has been developed by eyeWitness to Atrocities, a charity based in London. The app at its core does two things. First, when a photo or video is taken by a phone fitted with that app, it records the time and location of the event, as reported by hard-to-deny electronic witnesses such as GPS satellites and nearby mobile-phone towers and Wi-Fi networks. This is known as the controlled capture of metadata, and is more secure than collecting such metadata from the phone itself, because a phone’s time and location settings can be changed.
Second, the app reads the image’s entire digital sequence (the zeros and ones which represent it) and uses a standard mathematical formula to calculate an alphanumeric value, known as a hash, unique to that picture. All this done, it then puts the metadata and the hash into a file called a proof bundle that is separate from the image and sends an encrypted copy of the image and its proof bundle to a special server.
Wendy Betts, director of eyeWitness to Atrocities, describes this server as a digital evidence locker. If an image’s authenticity needs to be verified, it suffices to rescan its digital sequence, recalculate its hash, and then ask the repository whether or not it contains an identical hash. If even a single pixel of the image has been altered, the recalculated hash will not match the original. If it does match, then the image has not been retouched.
As an additional service, roughly 80 lawyers, each working for the charity without pay for a few hours a week, review the incoming images. They package those which seem to record abuses into dossiers that are then sent to prosecuting authorities including Europol (a law-enforcement agency of the European Union), the International Criminal Court and Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor-General.
Andriy Kostin, the prosecutor-general himself, is a fan of the eyeWitness system—and not just because it provides the security of authenticity that courts require. He also likes the fact that it helps overcome a second obstacle to his efforts: witnesses’ fear of being found out.
In areas of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia, this is a serious risk. Were soldiers manning a checkpoint, for example, to discover on someone’s phone video evidence collected by that person of war crimes, the consequences could be severe. To make this less likely to happen, the app’s icon does not reveal its purpose. Moreover, if it is then tapped by a probing official and an incorrect passcode entered, that opens the phone’s normal photo gallery. Maryna Slobodianiuk, lead investigator at Truth Hounds, a human-rights group in Kyiv, says of the evidence of attacks she has collected using eyeWitness: “Even if I will be captured…no one will reach it.”
The first version of eyeWitness’s system, available gratis, was released in 2015, so most of the bugs have been dealt with. Uptake in Ukraine has soared over the past year. Ms Betts says that of the 40,000 submissions received in 2022 which her team considers relevant for investigations, more than 27,000 were sent from Ukraine.
Police officers and journalists are particularly eager users. So are analysts at the Ukrainian Healthcare Centre, a think-tank in Kyiv that employs the app to gather evidence of attacks on medical facilities.
Nor is eyeWitness the only provider of glass-to-glass services. The Guardian Project, in Valhalla, New York, has released a smartphone app called ProofMode. Like eyeWitness, ProofMode combines controlled-capture metadata and the image’s hash into a proof bundle. Instead of operating the receiving server itself, though, ProofMode uses repositories run by other firms, such as Google, which log them in the fashion of a notary. Viewers of an image taken with ProofMode can upload it to a Guardian Project website that recalculates its hash and checks the repositories for a match. If it fails to find one, the image is declared altered.
Soon, the Guardian Project will add a new feature, Synchrony. This will link an image’s location and time-of-capture to OpenStreetMap, an online cartography of the world, and also to a detailed geographical record of the world’s weather over the past few years (which one, has yet to be decided). That will make it easy to check for inconsistencies between the place and time someone claims a picture was taken, and the local landscape and the weather conditions on that day. The idea, says Nathan Freitas, the Guardian Project’s founder, is to “sync images to the real world as it was”. He hopes to link to other databases, as well—including those that record when and where street protests have happened.
A third operator, Truepic, of La Jolla, California, is taking a more commercial approach. Charities pay nothing to use its software, but companies that employ it to keep an eye on things like supply chains, progress at construction sites, compliance with loan terms, and the whereabouts and condition of expensive kit, must stump up.
Truepic provides two services. One scans smartphones for malware designed to facilitate the falsification of metadata. The other spots so-called rebroadcasting attacks, in which a doctored image is photographed to create a new picture, which thereby lacks traces of tampering in its code. Mounir Ibrahim, once a member of America’s diplomatic corps (he served, inter alia, in Damascus, a hotbed of photographic deception), and now head of public affairs at Truepic, is cagey about how this is done. But the trick, he notes, is to look for clues that all of an image’s pixels have recorded a uniformly flat surface.
In 2021 Truepic joined forces with Adobe, ARM, the BBC, Intel and Microsoft to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). This is trying to create a set of image-authentication technological standards for makers of hardware and software. The aim is to eliminate the need to fuss with special apps. Instead, the coalition wants metadata capture, hashing and the transmission of data to repositories to take place behind the scenes and without royalties.
If C2PA’s standards were widely adopted, even web browsers would be able to check an online repository of hashes and put a warning on images with no match. Eventually, hashes might be distributed automatically across blockchain ledgers. The Starling Lab, based at Stanford University, is running trials of such a system.
Hurdles, however, remain. Jonathan Dotan, the Starling Lab’s founding director, points to one in particular. The technology could potentially allow authoritarian regimes to identify devices, and thus people, who have taken damning pictures. Researchers, he says, must first find a way to make such tracing impossible. Transparency is all very well, but even the good guys recognise that, sometimes, too much of it can be too much of a good thing. ■
Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "What is truth?"
From the January 14th 2023 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
Brain scanning suggests activity patterns cluster with ideology
Soon, game players will able to pick things up—and feel the bullets, when they are hit
Micro LEDS produce sharper digital displays
|
<urn:uuid:39852ec2-c6e1-496b-b6f7-f793974b699f>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500095.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20230204075436-20230204105436-00368.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9521172642707825,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.53125,
"token_count": 1964,
"url": "https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/01/09/proving-a-photo-is-fake-is-one-thing-proving-it-isnt-is-another"
}
|
Proving a photo is fake is one thing. Proving it isn’t is another
But, for the reporting of war crimes, it matters
That truth is the first casualty of war is an old aphorism. One recent instance is the proliferation of images and videos of things that did not happen, in wars such as those currently going on in Ukraine and Syria. Some of these are outright fakes. Others are manipulated versions of honestly recorded material. Last year a doctored video appeared of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, apparently telling Ukrainian soldiers to surrender.
The proliferation of such fakes has,
|
though, led to a second, more subtle approach to lying with images. This is to use their ubiquity to cast doubt on the veracity of inconvenient pictures that are real.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, for example, the Associated Press released a video of doctors failing to revive a young girl who had been hit in the shelling of Mariupol. The footage soon appeared on Russian television with the word “fake” stamped on it. Since it is hard to prove a negative (ie, that material has not been doctored), such evidence may thus be challenged, possibly even in court, and allegations of crimes based on that evidence may, as a result, not stick.
Ways to establish the authenticity of digital imagery would therefore be valuable. And one is now available. “Glass-to-glass” warning systems create special software “ecosystems” within which pictures and video can be taken, stored and transmitted in a way that alerts viewers to alterations, no matter when and where those changes are introduced in an image’s journey from lens to screen.
A plate of hash
One such system has been developed by eyeWitness to Atrocities, a charity based in London. The app at its core does two things. First, when a photo or video is taken by a phone fitted with that app, it records the time and location of the event, as reported by hard-to-deny electronic witnesses such as GPS satellites and nearby mobile-phone towers and Wi-Fi networks. This is known as the controlled capture of metadata, and is more secure than collecting such metadata from the phone itself, because a phone’s time and location settings can be changed.
Second, the app reads the image’s entire digital sequence (the zeros and ones which represent it) and uses a standard mathematical formula to calculate an alphanumeric value, known as a hash, unique to that picture. All this done, it then puts the metadata and the hash into a file called a proof bundle that is separate from the image and sends an encrypted copy of the image and its proof bundle to a special server.
Wendy Betts, director of eyeWitness to Atrocities, describes this server as a digital evidence locker. If an image’s authenticity needs to be verified, it suffices to rescan its digital sequence, recalculate its hash, and then ask the repository whether or not it contains an identical hash. If even a single pixel of the image has been altered, the recalculated hash will not match the original. If it does match, then the image has not been retouched.
As an additional service, roughly 80 lawyers, each working for the charity without pay for a few hours a week, review the incoming images. They package those which seem to record abuses into dossiers that are then sent to prosecuting authorities including Europol (a law-enforcement agency of the European Union), the International Criminal Court and Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor-General.
Andriy Kostin, the prosecutor-general himself, is a fan of the eyeWitness system—and not just because it provides the security of authenticity that courts require. He also likes the fact that it helps overcome a second obstacle to his efforts: witnesses’ fear of being found out.
In areas of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia, this is a serious risk. Were soldiers manning a checkpoint, for example, to discover on someone’s phone video evidence collected by that person of war crimes, the consequences could be severe. To make this less likely to happen, the app’s icon does not reveal its purpose. Moreover, if it is then tapped by a probing official and an incorrect passcode entered, that opens the phone’s normal photo gallery. Maryna Slobodianiuk, lead investigator at Truth Hounds, a human-rights group in Kyiv, says of the evidence of attacks she has collected using eyeWitness: “Even if I will be captured…no one will reach it.”
The first version of eyeWitness’s system, available gratis, was released in 2015, so most of the bugs have been dealt with. Uptake in Ukraine has soared over the past year. Ms Betts says that of the 40,000 submissions received in 2022 which her team considers relevant for investigations, more than 27,000 were sent from Ukraine.
Police officers and journalists are particularly eager users. So are analysts at the Ukrainian Healthcare Centre, a think-tank in Kyiv that employs the app to gather evidence of attacks on medical facilities.
Nor is eyeWitness the only provider of glass-to-glass services. The Guardian Project, in Valhalla, New York, has released a smartphone app called ProofMode. Like eyeWitness, ProofMode combines controlled-capture metadata and the image’s hash into a proof bundle. Instead of operating the receiving server itself, though, ProofMode uses repositories run by other firms, such as Google, which log them in the fashion of a notary. Viewers of an image taken with ProofMode can upload it to a Guardian Project website that recalculates its hash and checks the repositories for a match. If it fails to find one, the image is declared altered.
Soon, the Guardian Project will add a new feature, Synchrony. This will link an image’s location and time-of-capture to OpenStreetMap, an online cartography of the world, and also to a detailed geographical record of the world’s weather over the past few years (which one, has yet to be decided). That will make it easy to check for inconsistencies between the place and time someone claims a picture was taken, and the local landscape and the weather conditions on that day. The idea, says Nathan Freitas, the Guardian Project’s founder, is to “sync images to the real world as it was”. He hopes to link to other databases, as well—including those that record when and where street protests have happened.
A third operator, Truepic, of La Jolla, California, is taking a more commercial approach. Charities pay nothing to use its software, but companies that employ it to keep an eye on things like supply chains, progress at construction sites, compliance with loan terms, and the whereabouts and condition of expensive kit, must stump up.
Truepic provides two services. One scans smartphones for malware designed to facilitate the falsification of metadata. The other spots so-called rebroadcasting attacks, in which a doctored image is photographed to create a new picture, which thereby lacks traces of tampering in its code. Mounir Ibrahim, once a member of America’s diplomatic corps (he served, inter alia, in Damascus, a hotbed of photographic deception), and now head of public affairs at Truepic, is cagey about how this is done. But the trick, he notes, is to look for clues that all of an image’s pixels have recorded a uniformly flat surface.
In 2021 Truepic joined forces with Adobe, ARM, the BBC, Intel and Microsoft to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). This is trying to create a set of image-authentication technological standards for makers of hardware and software. The aim is to eliminate the need to fuss with special apps. Instead, the coalition wants metadata capture, hashing and the transmission of data to repositories to take place behind the scenes and without royalties.
If C2PA’s standards were widely adopted, even web browsers would be able to check an online repository of hashes and put a warning on images with no match. Eventually, hashes might be distributed automatically across blockchain ledgers. The Starling Lab, based at Stanford University, is running trials of such a system.
Hurdles, however, remain. Jonathan Dotan, the Starling Lab’s founding director, points to one in particular. The technology could potentially allow authoritarian regimes to identify devices, and thus people, who have taken damning pictures. Researchers, he says, must first find a way to make such tracing impossible. Transparency is all very well, but even the good guys recognise that, sometimes, too much of it can be too much of a good thing. ■
Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "What is truth?"
From the January 14th 2023 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
Brain scanning suggests activity patterns cluster with ideology
Soon, game players will able to pick things up—and feel the bullets, when they are hit
Micro LEDS produce sharper digital displays
|
Virginia's youngest kids aren't eating enough vegetables
Virginia's youngest kids aren't eating enough fruits and veggies.
More than half of Virginia children ages 1-5 aren’t eating a daily vegetable, and 30% aren't having at least one fruit each day, the CDC reported last week.
Why it matters: The data offers a glimpse at the quality of childhood diets, which affect growth and development. It comes amid increased interest in addressing nutrition and rising concerns about the pending loss of pandemic-era food benefits, Axios’ Tina Reed reports.
Zoom in: Nearly 1 million Virginians rely on SNAP benefits for groceries, including fruit and vegetables. The majority of those are households with children.
- The pandemic-era program that provided those families with an additional $95 a month ended last week.
Details: Researchers examined more than 18,000 responses from parents to the 2021 National Survey of Children’s Health about what kids between 1 and 5 years old ate the previous week.
By the numbers: In Virginia, 51.8% said their child did not eat a daily vegetable, and 30.8% said their child didn’t eat a daily fruit.
- Over 45% said their child consumed a sugar-sweetened beverage at least once in the prior week.
Of note: The older the kids get, the less likely they are to eat a daily fruit or veggie — and the more likely they are to be drinking a weekly sugary drink.
More Richmond stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Richmond.
|
<urn:uuid:9ce2edff-769c-49f4-957f-d6991c4a84a3>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224644309.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20230528150639-20230528180639-00684.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9590787887573242,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.9375,
"token_count": 337,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/richmond/2023/02/22/virginia-children-vegetables-fruits"
}
|
Virginia's youngest kids aren't eating enough vegetables
Virginia's youngest kids aren't eating enough fruits and veggies.
More than half of Virginia children ages 1-5 aren’t eating a daily vegetable, and 30% aren't having at least one fruit each day, the CDC reported last week.
Why it matters: The data offers a glimpse at the quality of childhood diets, which affect growth and development. It comes amid increased interest in addressing nutrition and rising concerns about the pending loss of pandemic-era food benefits, Axios’ Tina Reed reports.
Zoom in: Nearly 1 million Virginians rely on SNAP benefits
|
for groceries, including fruit and vegetables. The majority of those are households with children.
- The pandemic-era program that provided those families with an additional $95 a month ended last week.
Details: Researchers examined more than 18,000 responses from parents to the 2021 National Survey of Children’s Health about what kids between 1 and 5 years old ate the previous week.
By the numbers: In Virginia, 51.8% said their child did not eat a daily vegetable, and 30.8% said their child didn’t eat a daily fruit.
- Over 45% said their child consumed a sugar-sweetened beverage at least once in the prior week.
Of note: The older the kids get, the less likely they are to eat a daily fruit or veggie — and the more likely they are to be drinking a weekly sugary drink.
More Richmond stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Richmond.
|
The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Friday more aggressive air quality standards for particulate matter, pollutants small enough to be inhaled and cause respiratory illness and other disease.
The agency’s new rules would help clean the nation’s air and bring it more in line with the past decade of research on the harmful effects of particulate matter. “Neither an individual’s skin color nor the wealth of their ZIP code should determine whether they have clean air to breathe, safe water to drink, or healthy environments in which their children can play,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in May, the Washington Informer reported.
But health advocates say the agency’s proposed change isn’t strong enough to protect the public.
“It seems to me pretty clear that this probably doesn’t go far enough,” said Matt Altman, an asthma specialist at the University of Washington who has studied the effects of air pollution on children with the asthma.
The EPA’s rule comes as asthma and other chronic diseases, particularly respiratory ones, are steadily rising. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a leading cause of death in the U.S., and asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions in children.
“Particulate matter is widespread and we know that it’s deadly. The science is very clear,” said Laura Kate Bender, national assistant vice president of Healthy Air at American Lung Association.
This is the first time in a decade that the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter will be changed, since in 2020 federal regulators under the Trump administration opted to keep rules from 2013 (a decision that drew criticism and lawsuits). By law, the EPA’s air quality standards must be reviewed every five years. Many are touting this latest development as a win for the public.
Particulate matter refers to tiny particles that float through the air and can be breathed in, residue from dusty manufacturing sites and burns, as well as other sources. Two types of particulate matter are of significant concern to the EPA: particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less, called PM10, and those 2.5 microns or less in diameter (PM2.5).
Both have been shown to cause short-term and long-term harm, and are especially risky for pregnant people, babies and children, older adults, and people with lung or heart disease. Fine particles, those 2.5 microns or less, are especially dangerous, and can increase chances of premature death, heart attacks, and strokes.
People who live in low-income communities and people of color are disproportionately affected by particulate-matter-laden air, a result of neighborhoods located near major polluters, like factories, ports, and highways.
Much of the debate around these air quality rules comes down to two numbers that dictate how many bits of pollution can be in a cubic meter of air. One number sets an annual average for how much particulate pollution can be in the air, and another sets a higher, 24-hour average, which accounts for spikes and lulls. Both of these numbers are used by federal authorities to monitor air quality, send out alerts, and crack down on major polluters. Because the air quality standards are governed by the Clean Air Act, the EPA is legally required to act based narrowly on up-to-date scientific evidence — whatever is in the best interest of public health.
The current standard, from 2013, says there can be up to 12 micrograms of fine particulate matter (the smaller particles) per cubic meter on an average day, annually. Both the EPA and its independent panel of scientific advisers, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, as well as many health and environmental groups, agreed that number must drop to protect people’s health. The EPA suggests 9 to 10 micrograms per cubic meter in its proposal.
But the consensus ends there. The American Lung Association and other groups are pushing for a maximum of 8 micrograms of fine particles as the annual standard.
Further, the EPA’s proposed policy suggests keeping the same standards otherwise. That means, in a 24-hour span, there could be up to 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air for fine particles, and 150 micrograms per cubic meter for larger particles.
Critics argue that is much too high, noting that 25 to 30 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter in a day was the range recommended by the independent advisory group in a report last year.
Things could still change. In a fact sheet released Friday, the EPA suggested it is considering the lower levels pushed by interest groups, and is soliciting feedback.
Altman’s research into children’s asthma attacks in urban areas suggests even a few days at 25 micrograms of fine particles could have deleterious effects on some vulnerable groups. “Potentially levels even below 25 could be harmful,” he said. “Lower is needed. Exactly how low, I guess to be determined.”
His study on children with nonviral asthma pointed to PM2.5 as a major driver of inflammation in children’s airways — meaning the particles could be driving cellular changes that would make many asthma therapies ineffective.
“In a perfect world, we just decrease the exposure, but as we see in the EPA guidelines, you can’t just do that,” he said.
The EPA will receive public comments for 60 days before finalizing its new rules, so the standards could still change. Pushback from industry groups that find the standards heavy-handed is expected. The EPA’s own report estimated it would cost upward of $65 billion each year in the 2020s to meet Clean Air Act amendment rules, but it also said that economic benefits would far outweigh those costs.
Standard changes could “result in as many as 4,200 avoided premature deaths and 270,000 avoided lost workdays in 2032,” according to EPA estimates.
The draft policy also includes a new proposal, which would amend air quality monitoring data and criteria to account for how close at-risk populations are to the sources of fine particulate matter pollution. Research has shown great disparities in air quality across the nation, even during the pandemic lockdowns, when fewer cars were on the roads.
The new standards, while a step in the right direction, won’t apply evenly to all places because they are regional averages, said Gaige Kerr, a research scientist who studies air quality at George Washington University. “Unfortunately, many of the areas where concentrations fall above this average of 9-10 ug/m3 are marginalized, racialized, and minoritized communities,” he said. “The fact that these communities still are disproportionately exposed, despite decades of macro-level progress across the U.S. thanks to the Clean Air Act and its amendments, suggests that more targeted interventions are needed to specifically ratchet down concentrations in the most overburdened communities.”
In its annual “State of the Air” report, the American Lung Association found Americans experienced more days of “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” air quality between 2019 and 2021 than at any other time in the past two decades.
“We keep seeing with emerging science that this pollutant is dangerous in more ways and at lower levels than previously thought,” Bender said.
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Create a display name to comment
This name will appear with your comment
|
<urn:uuid:51a56c99-183d-42d3-815b-d900b62e06f0>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764500154.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20230204205328-20230204235328-00160.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9517077803611755,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.390625,
"token_count": 1580,
"url": "https://www.statnews.com/2023/01/06/epa-tightens-air-quality-standards-respiratory-diseases/"
}
|
The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Friday more aggressive air quality standards for particulate matter, pollutants small enough to be inhaled and cause respiratory illness and other disease.
The agency’s new rules would help clean the nation’s air and bring it more in line with the past decade of research on the harmful effects of particulate matter. “Neither an individual’s skin color nor the wealth of their ZIP code should determine whether they have clean air to breathe, safe water to drink, or healthy environments in which their children can play,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in May, the Washington Informer reported.
But health advocates say the agency’s proposed change isn’t
|
strong enough to protect the public.
“It seems to me pretty clear that this probably doesn’t go far enough,” said Matt Altman, an asthma specialist at the University of Washington who has studied the effects of air pollution on children with the asthma.
The EPA’s rule comes as asthma and other chronic diseases, particularly respiratory ones, are steadily rising. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is a leading cause of death in the U.S., and asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions in children.
“Particulate matter is widespread and we know that it’s deadly. The science is very clear,” said Laura Kate Bender, national assistant vice president of Healthy Air at American Lung Association.
This is the first time in a decade that the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter will be changed, since in 2020 federal regulators under the Trump administration opted to keep rules from 2013 (a decision that drew criticism and lawsuits). By law, the EPA’s air quality standards must be reviewed every five years. Many are touting this latest development as a win for the public.
Particulate matter refers to tiny particles that float through the air and can be breathed in, residue from dusty manufacturing sites and burns, as well as other sources. Two types of particulate matter are of significant concern to the EPA: particles with a diameter of 10 microns or less, called PM10, and those 2.5 microns or less in diameter (PM2.5).
Both have been shown to cause short-term and long-term harm, and are especially risky for pregnant people, babies and children, older adults, and people with lung or heart disease. Fine particles, those 2.5 microns or less, are especially dangerous, and can increase chances of premature death, heart attacks, and strokes.
People who live in low-income communities and people of color are disproportionately affected by particulate-matter-laden air, a result of neighborhoods located near major polluters, like factories, ports, and highways.
Much of the debate around these air quality rules comes down to two numbers that dictate how many bits of pollution can be in a cubic meter of air. One number sets an annual average for how much particulate pollution can be in the air, and another sets a higher, 24-hour average, which accounts for spikes and lulls. Both of these numbers are used by federal authorities to monitor air quality, send out alerts, and crack down on major polluters. Because the air quality standards are governed by the Clean Air Act, the EPA is legally required to act based narrowly on up-to-date scientific evidence — whatever is in the best interest of public health.
The current standard, from 2013, says there can be up to 12 micrograms of fine particulate matter (the smaller particles) per cubic meter on an average day, annually. Both the EPA and its independent panel of scientific advisers, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, as well as many health and environmental groups, agreed that number must drop to protect people’s health. The EPA suggests 9 to 10 micrograms per cubic meter in its proposal.
But the consensus ends there. The American Lung Association and other groups are pushing for a maximum of 8 micrograms of fine particles as the annual standard.
Further, the EPA’s proposed policy suggests keeping the same standards otherwise. That means, in a 24-hour span, there could be up to 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air for fine particles, and 150 micrograms per cubic meter for larger particles.
Critics argue that is much too high, noting that 25 to 30 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter in a day was the range recommended by the independent advisory group in a report last year.
Things could still change. In a fact sheet released Friday, the EPA suggested it is considering the lower levels pushed by interest groups, and is soliciting feedback.
Altman’s research into children’s asthma attacks in urban areas suggests even a few days at 25 micrograms of fine particles could have deleterious effects on some vulnerable groups. “Potentially levels even below 25 could be harmful,” he said. “Lower is needed. Exactly how low, I guess to be determined.”
His study on children with nonviral asthma pointed to PM2.5 as a major driver of inflammation in children’s airways — meaning the particles could be driving cellular changes that would make many asthma therapies ineffective.
“In a perfect world, we just decrease the exposure, but as we see in the EPA guidelines, you can’t just do that,” he said.
The EPA will receive public comments for 60 days before finalizing its new rules, so the standards could still change. Pushback from industry groups that find the standards heavy-handed is expected. The EPA’s own report estimated it would cost upward of $65 billion each year in the 2020s to meet Clean Air Act amendment rules, but it also said that economic benefits would far outweigh those costs.
Standard changes could “result in as many as 4,200 avoided premature deaths and 270,000 avoided lost workdays in 2032,” according to EPA estimates.
The draft policy also includes a new proposal, which would amend air quality monitoring data and criteria to account for how close at-risk populations are to the sources of fine particulate matter pollution. Research has shown great disparities in air quality across the nation, even during the pandemic lockdowns, when fewer cars were on the roads.
The new standards, while a step in the right direction, won’t apply evenly to all places because they are regional averages, said Gaige Kerr, a research scientist who studies air quality at George Washington University. “Unfortunately, many of the areas where concentrations fall above this average of 9-10 ug/m3 are marginalized, racialized, and minoritized communities,” he said. “The fact that these communities still are disproportionately exposed, despite decades of macro-level progress across the U.S. thanks to the Clean Air Act and its amendments, suggests that more targeted interventions are needed to specifically ratchet down concentrations in the most overburdened communities.”
In its annual “State of the Air” report, the American Lung Association found Americans experienced more days of “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” air quality between 2019 and 2021 than at any other time in the past two decades.
“We keep seeing with emerging science that this pollutant is dangerous in more ways and at lower levels than previously thought,” Bender said.
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Create a display name to comment
This name will appear with your comment
|
More than any other dish, capirotada is a dessert that is identified as the most traditional of Mexican cuisine during the Lent season.
Many Hispanics have memories of their grandmothers or their mothers preparing this dessert, which is usually eaten between Ash Wednesday and Easter.
It is a bread pudding bathed in a sweet liquid, which can be made with milk or water, sweetened with sugar or piloncillo and other ingredients such as cinnamon, and then baked with nuts, peanuts, raisins, and cheese.
Pilar Zazueta, historian at the University of Texas at Austin, said that this is a dessert with influences from Arab and Spanish culture. Mexican elements were later added, and the Catholic church gave it religious meaning.
“In this dish, the bread represents the body of Christ (as bread in the Eucharist), the sweet honey represents the blood of Christ (as wine in the Eucharist), the raisins and nuts the nails of the cross, the cinnamon sticks represent the wood of the cross, and the cheese represents the shroud,” Zazueta said.
Zazueta explained that in Spain the capirotada was not a dessert, but a pudding made with chicken, almonds, and aromatic herbs. But the dish had a cultural adaptation in Mexico during the colonial times, in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“Mexico has the climate to produce sugar cane, not so Spain,” Zazueta said. “Sugar and piloncillo were cheaper in Mexico, and that’s why it began to be used in recipes.”
Capirotada is served hot or cold, depending on the consumer, and can be accompanied with coffee, milk, or hot chocolate.
In Dallas, you can buy capirotada on Fridays during Lent in most Mexican restaurants that offer Lent dishes, like El Ranchito, at 610 Jefferson Blvd., or Mexico Lindo, at 7515 E. Grand Ave., both in Dallas.
5 bread rolls (birotes or teleras) cut into thick slices (around 1-inch wide)
4 cups water or milk
2 cups piloncillo or brown sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
3 whole cloves
Nuts, raisins, and/or unsalted peanuts
Fresh cheese or cotija cheese
Sweet colored sprinkles
Heat oven to 350 F.
Fry the bread on both sides. You can use lard or butter or simply toast the bread without any fat. Set aside.
Heat the water or milk and add the piloncillo or brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. Let it boil for 7-10 minutes, then remove it from the heat.
In an baking dish, place a layer of bread, bathe it with a little of the sweet liquid, and add raisins, nuts, and/or peanuts and cheese to taste. A layer of bread is placed again and then another layer of the other ingredients, and so on.
In the end, the remaining liquid is poured over the bread.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the liquid is consumed and the bread has a pudding consistency.
It can be served hot or cold. In the end, you can add colored sprinkles to garnish.
Source: Alejandrino Fernández, head chef at El Ranchito restaurant in Oak Cliff
|
<urn:uuid:7b515a91-576d-44e3-91ba-e4d36f2e73a0>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945218.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20230323225049-20230324015049-00292.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9390512108802795,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.359375,
"token_count": 711,
"url": "https://www.dallasnews.com/food/2023/03/15/how-capirotada-became-the-quintessential-mexican-dessert-for-lent/"
}
|
More than any other dish, capirotada is a dessert that is identified as the most traditional of Mexican cuisine during the Lent season.
Many Hispanics have memories of their grandmothers or their mothers preparing this dessert, which is usually eaten between Ash Wednesday and Easter.
It is a bread pudding bathed in a sweet liquid, which can be made with milk or water, sweetened with sugar or piloncillo and other ingredients such as cinnamon, and then baked with nuts, peanuts, raisins, and cheese.
Pilar Zazueta, historian at the University of Texas at Austin, said that this is
|
a dessert with influences from Arab and Spanish culture. Mexican elements were later added, and the Catholic church gave it religious meaning.
“In this dish, the bread represents the body of Christ (as bread in the Eucharist), the sweet honey represents the blood of Christ (as wine in the Eucharist), the raisins and nuts the nails of the cross, the cinnamon sticks represent the wood of the cross, and the cheese represents the shroud,” Zazueta said.
Zazueta explained that in Spain the capirotada was not a dessert, but a pudding made with chicken, almonds, and aromatic herbs. But the dish had a cultural adaptation in Mexico during the colonial times, in the 16th and 17th centuries.
“Mexico has the climate to produce sugar cane, not so Spain,” Zazueta said. “Sugar and piloncillo were cheaper in Mexico, and that’s why it began to be used in recipes.”
Capirotada is served hot or cold, depending on the consumer, and can be accompanied with coffee, milk, or hot chocolate.
In Dallas, you can buy capirotada on Fridays during Lent in most Mexican restaurants that offer Lent dishes, like El Ranchito, at 610 Jefferson Blvd., or Mexico Lindo, at 7515 E. Grand Ave., both in Dallas.
5 bread rolls (birotes or teleras) cut into thick slices (around 1-inch wide)
4 cups water or milk
2 cups piloncillo or brown sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
3 whole cloves
Nuts, raisins, and/or unsalted peanuts
Fresh cheese or cotija cheese
Sweet colored sprinkles
Heat oven to 350 F.
Fry the bread on both sides. You can use lard or butter or simply toast the bread without any fat. Set aside.
Heat the water or milk and add the piloncillo or brown sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. Let it boil for 7-10 minutes, then remove it from the heat.
In an baking dish, place a layer of bread, bathe it with a little of the sweet liquid, and add raisins, nuts, and/or peanuts and cheese to taste. A layer of bread is placed again and then another layer of the other ingredients, and so on.
In the end, the remaining liquid is poured over the bread.
Bake for 30 minutes or until the liquid is consumed and the bread has a pudding consistency.
It can be served hot or cold. In the end, you can add colored sprinkles to garnish.
Source: Alejandrino Fernández, head chef at El Ranchito restaurant in Oak Cliff
|
Training, library, other efforts are helping change the mindset on mental health
One’s mental health is often not as prioritized as the physical body, yet they are closely connected. Taking care of one’s emotions, thoughts, and mental well-being is just as crucial as getting your yearly physical. However, many individuals with mental conditions are reluctant to seek help due to stigma, lack of access, and misinformation, unfortunately leading to delayed treatment, which develops into a crisis.
Health care leaders and policymakers at every level are becoming increasingly aware that communities need support to combat untreated mental illness and promote wellness and prevention.
Emergence Health Network, in partnership with the Paso del Norte Health Foundation, has developed the Mental Health Learning Library (MHLL). It provides foundational behavioral health education support free of charge for community members and local professionals. The training team offers the newest, most relevant evidence-based, and evidence-informed training modules. In addition, efforts are focused on accommodating anyone, anywhere, in Spanish and English, and multiple learning styles (in person, virtual or blended).
“We're open to anybody in the community, whoever is interested in learning, and allow us to prepare them with the tools they need to help those in need to advance stigma reduction” said Luis Chavarria, Emergence Health Network director of training. “Part of our effort with the support of the Health Foundation has been to find ways to promote this type of education and higher learning to professionals in the area.”
Whether it is a comprehensive Mental Health First Aid course or targeted training on suicide prevention, grief management, or stress reduction, MHLL assists in recognizing signs and symptoms of behavioral health concerns and how to seek out appropriate services.
“The video demonstrations showing correct or incorrect ways to respond to a person experiencing a mental health challenge and addictions was most helpful,” said a recent participant attending one of the Mental Health First Aid training sessions. “It helped me see the situation from an outsider’s point of view instead of being in it so that when I encounter these types of situations, I can have a better perspective and plan on how to respond appropriately.”
The Mental Health Learning Library team has trained more than 10,000 participants in the area, such as law enforcement officers, social services professionals, educators, students and community members.
The Paso del Norte Health Foundation’s mission of improving the community’s overall health includes the mental well-being of the region. The Health Foundation looks to support frontline organizations, such as the Emergence Health Network and the Mental Health Learning Library, with the resources they need to make a positive impact in the community related to mental illness and ensure access to services for those most in need. To learn more about the Mental Health Learning Library, visit https://emergencehealthnetwork.org/mental-health/ or bit.ly/3ZDebyd.
Sandra Day is associate program officer for the Paso del Norte Health Foundation. She may be reached at 915-218-2617 and <email-pii>.
|
<urn:uuid:6867a50f-0869-4a03-9073-57f2f30e03f8>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499819.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20230130133622-20230130163622-00244.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9502822160720825,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.75,
"token_count": 642,
"url": "https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/life/wellness/2023/01/24/el-paso-training-library-are-helping-change-mindset-on-mental-health/69837609007/"
}
|
Training, library, other efforts are helping change the mindset on mental health
One’s mental health is often not as prioritized as the physical body, yet they are closely connected. Taking care of one’s emotions, thoughts, and mental well-being is just as crucial as getting your yearly physical. However, many individuals with mental conditions are reluctant to seek help due to stigma, lack of access, and misinformation, unfortunately leading to delayed treatment, which develops into a crisis.
Health care leaders and policymakers at every level are becoming increasingly aware that communities need support to combat untreated mental illness and promote wellness and prevention.
Emergence Health Network
|
, in partnership with the Paso del Norte Health Foundation, has developed the Mental Health Learning Library (MHLL). It provides foundational behavioral health education support free of charge for community members and local professionals. The training team offers the newest, most relevant evidence-based, and evidence-informed training modules. In addition, efforts are focused on accommodating anyone, anywhere, in Spanish and English, and multiple learning styles (in person, virtual or blended).
“We're open to anybody in the community, whoever is interested in learning, and allow us to prepare them with the tools they need to help those in need to advance stigma reduction” said Luis Chavarria, Emergence Health Network director of training. “Part of our effort with the support of the Health Foundation has been to find ways to promote this type of education and higher learning to professionals in the area.”
Whether it is a comprehensive Mental Health First Aid course or targeted training on suicide prevention, grief management, or stress reduction, MHLL assists in recognizing signs and symptoms of behavioral health concerns and how to seek out appropriate services.
“The video demonstrations showing correct or incorrect ways to respond to a person experiencing a mental health challenge and addictions was most helpful,” said a recent participant attending one of the Mental Health First Aid training sessions. “It helped me see the situation from an outsider’s point of view instead of being in it so that when I encounter these types of situations, I can have a better perspective and plan on how to respond appropriately.”
The Mental Health Learning Library team has trained more than 10,000 participants in the area, such as law enforcement officers, social services professionals, educators, students and community members.
The Paso del Norte Health Foundation’s mission of improving the community’s overall health includes the mental well-being of the region. The Health Foundation looks to support frontline organizations, such as the Emergence Health Network and the Mental Health Learning Library, with the resources they need to make a positive impact in the community related to mental illness and ensure access to services for those most in need. To learn more about the Mental Health Learning Library, visit https://emergencehealthnetwork.org/mental-health/ or bit.ly/3ZDebyd.
Sandra Day is associate program officer for the Paso del Norte Health Foundation. She may be reached at 915-218-2617 and <email-pii>.
|
How tech companies are trying to balance child safety and privacy
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
How can a website tell for certain that a visitor is over 18 or 21? In several states, lawmakers have told tech companies, figure it out. The goal is to restrict kids' access to social networks and porn sites. Right now it's easy to lie and get around age limits. The catch is stricter verification systems raise privacy concerns. Emma Roth of The Verge has been writing about the wave of new laws and the effort to balance child safety with privacy. She's here for our All Tech Considered segment. Welcome.
EMMA ROTH: Hi. Thank you for having me.
SHAPIRO: Lots of websites make you check a box that says, yes, I'm old enough to continue. But some states have already changed this policy, right? What's going on?
ROTH: Right. So in three states right now - Utah, Arkansas and Louisiana - there are already age verification tools in place for people to access social media sites or porn sites. In Louisiana and Utah, they have laws that aim to block users under the age of 18 from viewing porn, and in Arkansas, they require social media companies to implement age verification that blocks users under 18.
SHAPIRO: So this is already in place in Louisiana. What does it look like there?
ROTH: Yeah. So they are using something called AllpassTrust. What this system is is that you kind of upload a government ID to it, and the website will then check that and see if you're of age. And you'll either be let into the site or not depending on how old you are.
SHAPIRO: What other age verification options are on the table right now?
ROTH: So far, people have come up with ways maybe to use a credit card or a government ID to verify your age. However, this might exclude some adults, especially those with lower incomes, as they might not have access to a credit card or a government-issued ID. There's also something called face-based age detection, and this uses facial analysis to estimate the ages of users, so this will require access to a device's camera. Another possibility is an inferential age verification system that essentially guesses your age based on your browsing history or your activity on a platform.
SHAPIRO: How accurate is that?
ROTH: Well, that's the thing. It's going to be more difficult to kind of assess someone's age based on that information. And it could result in false positives that somebody is under 18, or it could even imply that someone's over the age of 18 when they're not.
SHAPIRO: Are there also privacy implications for that?
ROTH: There is. I mean, anything that involves giving away your government ID or a credit card - it always poses the risk of that information being hacked or leaked.
SHAPIRO: These are two important competing values - privacy concerns and child safety. Is there any consensus, even an emerging sense of how to balance these two things?
ROTH: Right now there honestly isn't. When it comes to privacy advocates and civil liberties lawyers, they both are in agreement that there's kind of no sound way to implement age verification at this time. And a lot of lawmakers are kind of rushing into this, but we really don't have a sense of what we can do yet to safely implement these methods.
SHAPIRO: Do you think this marks a larger shift in the way policymakers are thinking about access to the internet and who can go where with what rules?
ROTH: With this - with the introduction of these age verification methods, there's a chance that the internet could become more closed than ever, and the internet may never be the same with these methods put in place.
SHAPIRO: That's Emma Roth, reporter at The Verge. Thank you so much.
ROTH: Yeah, thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
|
<urn:uuid:20f090ac-a552-4c78-8137-e43fedc60f5a>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224656675.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20230609100535-20230609130535-00075.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.960130512714386,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.703125,
"token_count": 837,
"url": "https://www.delawarepublic.org/2023-05-22/how-tech-companies-are-trying-to-balance-child-safety-and-privacy"
}
|
How tech companies are trying to balance child safety and privacy
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
How can a website tell for certain that a visitor is over 18 or 21? In several states, lawmakers have told tech companies, figure it out. The goal is to restrict kids' access to social networks and porn sites. Right now it's easy to lie and get around age limits. The catch is stricter verification systems raise privacy concerns. Emma Roth of The Verge has been writing about the wave of new laws and the effort to balance child safety with privacy. She's here for our All Tech Consider
|
ed segment. Welcome.
EMMA ROTH: Hi. Thank you for having me.
SHAPIRO: Lots of websites make you check a box that says, yes, I'm old enough to continue. But some states have already changed this policy, right? What's going on?
ROTH: Right. So in three states right now - Utah, Arkansas and Louisiana - there are already age verification tools in place for people to access social media sites or porn sites. In Louisiana and Utah, they have laws that aim to block users under the age of 18 from viewing porn, and in Arkansas, they require social media companies to implement age verification that blocks users under 18.
SHAPIRO: So this is already in place in Louisiana. What does it look like there?
ROTH: Yeah. So they are using something called AllpassTrust. What this system is is that you kind of upload a government ID to it, and the website will then check that and see if you're of age. And you'll either be let into the site or not depending on how old you are.
SHAPIRO: What other age verification options are on the table right now?
ROTH: So far, people have come up with ways maybe to use a credit card or a government ID to verify your age. However, this might exclude some adults, especially those with lower incomes, as they might not have access to a credit card or a government-issued ID. There's also something called face-based age detection, and this uses facial analysis to estimate the ages of users, so this will require access to a device's camera. Another possibility is an inferential age verification system that essentially guesses your age based on your browsing history or your activity on a platform.
SHAPIRO: How accurate is that?
ROTH: Well, that's the thing. It's going to be more difficult to kind of assess someone's age based on that information. And it could result in false positives that somebody is under 18, or it could even imply that someone's over the age of 18 when they're not.
SHAPIRO: Are there also privacy implications for that?
ROTH: There is. I mean, anything that involves giving away your government ID or a credit card - it always poses the risk of that information being hacked or leaked.
SHAPIRO: These are two important competing values - privacy concerns and child safety. Is there any consensus, even an emerging sense of how to balance these two things?
ROTH: Right now there honestly isn't. When it comes to privacy advocates and civil liberties lawyers, they both are in agreement that there's kind of no sound way to implement age verification at this time. And a lot of lawmakers are kind of rushing into this, but we really don't have a sense of what we can do yet to safely implement these methods.
SHAPIRO: Do you think this marks a larger shift in the way policymakers are thinking about access to the internet and who can go where with what rules?
ROTH: With this - with the introduction of these age verification methods, there's a chance that the internet could become more closed than ever, and the internet may never be the same with these methods put in place.
SHAPIRO: That's Emma Roth, reporter at The Verge. Thank you so much.
ROTH: Yeah, thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
|
Updated, June 20: An earlier version of this article, with a different headline, did not include a comment from the publisher of the Into Reading curriculum. After initial publication, representatives of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), provided additional information about the program used in New York, which differs in some ways from an earlier version.
In an effort to boost dismal reading scores, the New York City school system recently announced that all elementary schools in the district—the nation’s largest—need to adopt one of three approved literacy curricula. But the most popular choice so far is also the least effective.
About half of the city’s 32 sub-districts need to start using one of the new curricula this coming fall, while the other half will change over next year. That hurried pace and the infringement on principals’ traditional freedom of choice has fueled opposition. But the opposition also reflects an attachment to what has been the prevailing approach to teaching reading for the past 20 years.
That approach is called “balanced literacy,” and New York City has long been one of its strongholds. One of the most charismatic—and polarizing—leaders of the balanced literacy movement, Lucy Calkins, is based at Columbia Teachers College. A 2019 survey showed that at least 48% of elementary schools in the city used Calkins’ curriculum, making it by far the most popular choice.
Media coverage in both the New York Times and Chalkbeat have portrayed the three approved curricula—Wit & Wisdom, EL Education, and Into Reading—as being of equal quality. Wit & Wisdom doesn’t have its own phonics component and therefore needs to be paired with another approved foundational reading skills program. The other two curricula cover phonics more systematically than balanced literacy does—and all three curricula purport to cover reading comprehension effectively.
In the case of EL Education and Wit & Wisdom, that’s true. Both are among six curricula that have been identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as being effective at building the kind of knowledge that enables students to understand complex text. (I serve on the board of StandardsWork, a nonprofit that is the parent organization of the Knowledge Matters Campaign; I receive no compensation from either organization and have no financial interest in them.)
These knowledge-building curricula delve deeply into specific topics—including topics from social studies and science—rather than focusing on isolated comprehension skills like “making inferences.” They also give all students in a classroom access to complex, grade-level-or-above text, often through teacher read-alouds and class discussion. And they have students read and write about the topics covered in the curriculum.
Into Reading, on the other hand, is different. New York City might have chosen it because it got high ratings from an organization called EdReports—including high ratings for “building knowledge.”
I have reviewed three modules of Into Reading that were made available to me by its publisher after this post initially appeared, so I now have a general idea of what the curriculum is like. Several individuals who work in the field of education and have more extensive experience with the curriculum than I do—and whose judgment I trust—have confirmed my impression that it suffers from many of the same problems that traditional reading textbooks have long displayed.
These days, many teachers who use those textbooks, called basal readers, may consider themselves “balanced literacy” practitioners, because that term is used so broadly. But the origins of the balanced literacy movement lie in opposition to the basal readers, and movement leaders like Calkins still hold them in contempt.
They say the reading selections are low-quality and the curricula are overly “scripted.” In contrast, balanced literacy, at least in its pure form, relies on “authentic” children’s literature—the kind of books you can find in a bookstore—and allows teachers a great deal of autonomy.
And yet, in a bastion of balanced literacy—New York City—13 of the 15 subdistricts that have already chosen one of the approved curricula have opted for Into Reading, which is essentially a basal reader.
Why the Most Popular Choice Falls Short
I spoke with one educator in Tennessee whose district has been using Into Reading for three years. Her name is Donna Kanipe, and she’s a former fourth-grade teacher in Hamblin County who is now an instructional coach for the district. Kanipe told me that the quality of the texts in Into Reading is somewhat better than in most basal readers, but otherwise she sees little difference.
After this post initially appeared, I was contacted by HMH, the publisher of Into Reading. In addition to giving me access to three modules of the curriculum, they told me that the version of Into Reading that will be used in New York City differs from the version being used in Tennessee, although the extent of the difference is not clear to me. I have incorporated information provided by HMH below.
Based on her experience, Kanipe sees a number of problems with Into Reading:
- The curriculum puts comprehension skills in the foreground rather than the content of the texts, making it hard for students to grasp the meaning of the stories. For example, Kanipe told me, on the first day of a module, the teacher reads a story aloud all the way through, but on subsequent days the focus is on isolated pages that supposedly enable students to practice a skill like “determining cause and effect.” Most of the assessments that come with the curriculum also focus on skills. (According to HMH, after the first read-through, students are supposed to engage in “close readings of the text [that] focus on the application of a reading skill selected for its usefulness in deeper comprehension and understanding of that particular text.”)
- The modules center on “themes” that are mostly broad and superficial. The first module in fourth grade, for example, is on “What Makes You Who You Are,” and the first modules at lower grade levels have a similar focus. The fourth-grade texts for that module include a story about a “superhero squirrel” whose cynical personality changes and another about “a mouse in Africa.” By contrast, the other two city-approved curricula have topics that are specific and meaty. EL Education, for example, has modules on birds, frogs, and the American Revolution. Wit & Wisdom covers topics like the five senses, the American West, and outer space.
- Rather than having the teacher read aloud texts that are more complex than those students could read on their own—to build the knowledge and vocabulary that fuels comprehension—Into Reading only includes texts at the low end or in the middle of grade level, at least at fourth grade. By the end of the year, those texts are at the high end of grade level. But, says Kanipe, most teachers never get all the way through the units. (According to HMH, all text selections in the student book are intended to be read by students themselves, not the teacher. )
- As with most basal readers, Into Reading is overstuffed. Teachers can’t possibly cover all the material, and they may not always make the best choices.
- The curriculum restricts students to reading books at their individual reading levels, which may be well below their grade level. Generally, the tests used to assign those levels are unreliable, and the books are on random topics that students may know little or nothing about. In an effective knowledge-building curriculum, students read books on topics connected to the curriculum and are not restricted to a particular level. (In the New York version of Into Reading, according to HMH, the leveled text component is optional—and in both the New York and Tennessee versions, students are expected to read the grade-level text in the student textbook. HMH also says it provides a list of leveled readers that are “tied to the content themes of each module.”)
- There are few writing assignments, and most are on topics unconnected to the texts students have read. The final writing task in a module is supposed to require students to demonstrate their knowledge of its content—although it’s not clear that always happens. For the unit on “What Makes You Who You Are,” for instance, the assignment is to write “a personal narrative about a time that you grew and learned.” (The curriculum also has a separate writing component, and HMH representatives said the texts it includes are usually related to the theme of the module. That was true of two of the three modules I was given access to.)
Kanipe says that with the help of an outside partner organization, she and other educators in the district are trying to modify the curriculum so that it focuses more on the content of the texts. Teachers are discarding the questions in the teachers’ guide, which might ask students to do something like determine cause and effect, and coming up with more general ones that engage students in analyzing the text as a whole—Why did the author say it that way?” or “What do you think is important?” That revamping takes time, though, and not all teachers have been willing to invest the effort.
“If we had gone with a different curriculum,” Kanipe says, “then maybe we wouldn’t have to do all this work now.” Even teachers who voted to adopt the curriculum are dissatisfied with it, she adds.
Of course, teachers also need to do some work—and receive good training and support—in order to effectively implement a knowledge-building curriculum like EL or Wit & Wisdom. But the curriculum itself provides richer content and better guidance in how to teach it.
Why Might Educators Choose Into Reading?
I asked Kanipe why she thought teachers in her district had opted for Into Reading rather than a knowledge-building curriculum like Wit & Wisdom, which was also under consideration. One reason, she said, is that they liked the leveled readers that came with the curriculum. “That’s how we were all taught to teach reading,” she observed—dividing students into low, medium, and high groups.
That may also be why so many subdistrict leaders in New York have chosen Into Reading. If there’s one thing that basal readers and balanced literacy have in common, it’s leveled reading—along with an emphasis on isolated comprehension skills. They may feel that the devil they know is safer than they devil they don’t—or what they think is a devil.
A knowledge-building literacy curriculum is radically different from what educators are used to, and many are understandably wary. Often they worry the texts will be too hard for children, and the topics won’t interest them. But I’ve spoken with many teachers who have found, once they tried the new approach, that kids enjoy the challenge and are more engaged than ever. And they’ve seen their students’ vocabularies—and eventually their scores on reading tests—improve.
It's unfortunate, to say the least, that so many New York City schools are making a choice that could lead to failure for many students down the road. Better phonics instruction is crucial, but unless a curriculum is also building knowledge and vocabulary, it provides only a short-term benefit. As grade levels go up, comprehension becomes more important than the ability to decipher individual words. And comprehension depends far more on knowledge than on abstract skills.
That’s something a previous top New York City education official learned the hard way. Twenty years ago, then-chancellor Joel Klein decreed that all of the city’s elementary schools were to adopt Lucy Calkins’ balanced literacy curriculum. He later said it was the only decision he made as chancellor that he came to regret—and not because the curriculum lacked a good phonics component.
Under pressure from the federal government, the city supplemented the curriculum with a phonics program, and reading scores did improve at lower grade levels. But they didn’t rise at eighth grade, and—as Klein told me when I interviewed him some years ago—that led him to a realization: to equip kids to understand more complex text, it’s crucial to build knowledge in the elementary grades in a way that Calkins’ curriculum—and many others, including Into Reading—do not.
Perhaps current education officials in New York might want to reflect on Klein’s experience. As they say, those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
|
<urn:uuid:2630dd4b-e633-4666-a7d6-dba713eee219>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506669.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20230924191454-20230924221454-00047.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9616077542304993,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.59375,
"token_count": 2639,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2023/06/10/most-nyc-schools-are-choosing-the-wrong-literacy-curriculum/"
}
|
Updated, June 20: An earlier version of this article, with a different headline, did not include a comment from the publisher of the Into Reading curriculum. After initial publication, representatives of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), provided additional information about the program used in New York, which differs in some ways from an earlier version.
In an effort to boost dismal reading scores, the New York City school system recently announced that all elementary schools in the district—the nation’s largest—need to adopt one of three approved literacy curricula. But the most popular choice so far is also the least effective.
|
About half of the city’s 32 sub-districts need to start using one of the new curricula this coming fall, while the other half will change over next year. That hurried pace and the infringement on principals’ traditional freedom of choice has fueled opposition. But the opposition also reflects an attachment to what has been the prevailing approach to teaching reading for the past 20 years.
That approach is called “balanced literacy,” and New York City has long been one of its strongholds. One of the most charismatic—and polarizing—leaders of the balanced literacy movement, Lucy Calkins, is based at Columbia Teachers College. A 2019 survey showed that at least 48% of elementary schools in the city used Calkins’ curriculum, making it by far the most popular choice.
Media coverage in both the New York Times and Chalkbeat have portrayed the three approved curricula—Wit & Wisdom, EL Education, and Into Reading—as being of equal quality. Wit & Wisdom doesn’t have its own phonics component and therefore needs to be paired with another approved foundational reading skills program. The other two curricula cover phonics more systematically than balanced literacy does—and all three curricula purport to cover reading comprehension effectively.
In the case of EL Education and Wit & Wisdom, that’s true. Both are among six curricula that have been identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as being effective at building the kind of knowledge that enables students to understand complex text. (I serve on the board of StandardsWork, a nonprofit that is the parent organization of the Knowledge Matters Campaign; I receive no compensation from either organization and have no financial interest in them.)
These knowledge-building curricula delve deeply into specific topics—including topics from social studies and science—rather than focusing on isolated comprehension skills like “making inferences.” They also give all students in a classroom access to complex, grade-level-or-above text, often through teacher read-alouds and class discussion. And they have students read and write about the topics covered in the curriculum.
Into Reading, on the other hand, is different. New York City might have chosen it because it got high ratings from an organization called EdReports—including high ratings for “building knowledge.”
I have reviewed three modules of Into Reading that were made available to me by its publisher after this post initially appeared, so I now have a general idea of what the curriculum is like. Several individuals who work in the field of education and have more extensive experience with the curriculum than I do—and whose judgment I trust—have confirmed my impression that it suffers from many of the same problems that traditional reading textbooks have long displayed.
These days, many teachers who use those textbooks, called basal readers, may consider themselves “balanced literacy” practitioners, because that term is used so broadly. But the origins of the balanced literacy movement lie in opposition to the basal readers, and movement leaders like Calkins still hold them in contempt.
They say the reading selections are low-quality and the curricula are overly “scripted.” In contrast, balanced literacy, at least in its pure form, relies on “authentic” children’s literature—the kind of books you can find in a bookstore—and allows teachers a great deal of autonomy.
And yet, in a bastion of balanced literacy—New York City—13 of the 15 subdistricts that have already chosen one of the approved curricula have opted for Into Reading, which is essentially a basal reader.
Why the Most Popular Choice Falls Short
I spoke with one educator in Tennessee whose district has been using Into Reading for three years. Her name is Donna Kanipe, and she’s a former fourth-grade teacher in Hamblin County who is now an instructional coach for the district. Kanipe told me that the quality of the texts in Into Reading is somewhat better than in most basal readers, but otherwise she sees little difference.
After this post initially appeared, I was contacted by HMH, the publisher of Into Reading. In addition to giving me access to three modules of the curriculum, they told me that the version of Into Reading that will be used in New York City differs from the version being used in Tennessee, although the extent of the difference is not clear to me. I have incorporated information provided by HMH below.
Based on her experience, Kanipe sees a number of problems with Into Reading:
- The curriculum puts comprehension skills in the foreground rather than the content of the texts, making it hard for students to grasp the meaning of the stories. For example, Kanipe told me, on the first day of a module, the teacher reads a story aloud all the way through, but on subsequent days the focus is on isolated pages that supposedly enable students to practice a skill like “determining cause and effect.” Most of the assessments that come with the curriculum also focus on skills. (According to HMH, after the first read-through, students are supposed to engage in “close readings of the text [that] focus on the application of a reading skill selected for its usefulness in deeper comprehension and understanding of that particular text.”)
- The modules center on “themes” that are mostly broad and superficial. The first module in fourth grade, for example, is on “What Makes You Who You Are,” and the first modules at lower grade levels have a similar focus. The fourth-grade texts for that module include a story about a “superhero squirrel” whose cynical personality changes and another about “a mouse in Africa.” By contrast, the other two city-approved curricula have topics that are specific and meaty. EL Education, for example, has modules on birds, frogs, and the American Revolution. Wit & Wisdom covers topics like the five senses, the American West, and outer space.
- Rather than having the teacher read aloud texts that are more complex than those students could read on their own—to build the knowledge and vocabulary that fuels comprehension—Into Reading only includes texts at the low end or in the middle of grade level, at least at fourth grade. By the end of the year, those texts are at the high end of grade level. But, says Kanipe, most teachers never get all the way through the units. (According to HMH, all text selections in the student book are intended to be read by students themselves, not the teacher. )
- As with most basal readers, Into Reading is overstuffed. Teachers can’t possibly cover all the material, and they may not always make the best choices.
- The curriculum restricts students to reading books at their individual reading levels, which may be well below their grade level. Generally, the tests used to assign those levels are unreliable, and the books are on random topics that students may know little or nothing about. In an effective knowledge-building curriculum, students read books on topics connected to the curriculum and are not restricted to a particular level. (In the New York version of Into Reading, according to HMH, the leveled text component is optional—and in both the New York and Tennessee versions, students are expected to read the grade-level text in the student textbook. HMH also says it provides a list of leveled readers that are “tied to the content themes of each module.”)
- There are few writing assignments, and most are on topics unconnected to the texts students have read. The final writing task in a module is supposed to require students to demonstrate their knowledge of its content—although it’s not clear that always happens. For the unit on “What Makes You Who You Are,” for instance, the assignment is to write “a personal narrative about a time that you grew and learned.” (The curriculum also has a separate writing component, and HMH representatives said the texts it includes are usually related to the theme of the module. That was true of two of the three modules I was given access to.)
Kanipe says that with the help of an outside partner organization, she and other educators in the district are trying to modify the curriculum so that it focuses more on the content of the texts. Teachers are discarding the questions in the teachers’ guide, which might ask students to do something like determine cause and effect, and coming up with more general ones that engage students in analyzing the text as a whole—Why did the author say it that way?” or “What do you think is important?” That revamping takes time, though, and not all teachers have been willing to invest the effort.
“If we had gone with a different curriculum,” Kanipe says, “then maybe we wouldn’t have to do all this work now.” Even teachers who voted to adopt the curriculum are dissatisfied with it, she adds.
Of course, teachers also need to do some work—and receive good training and support—in order to effectively implement a knowledge-building curriculum like EL or Wit & Wisdom. But the curriculum itself provides richer content and better guidance in how to teach it.
Why Might Educators Choose Into Reading?
I asked Kanipe why she thought teachers in her district had opted for Into Reading rather than a knowledge-building curriculum like Wit & Wisdom, which was also under consideration. One reason, she said, is that they liked the leveled readers that came with the curriculum. “That’s how we were all taught to teach reading,” she observed—dividing students into low, medium, and high groups.
That may also be why so many subdistrict leaders in New York have chosen Into Reading. If there’s one thing that basal readers and balanced literacy have in common, it’s leveled reading—along with an emphasis on isolated comprehension skills. They may feel that the devil they know is safer than they devil they don’t—or what they think is a devil.
A knowledge-building literacy curriculum is radically different from what educators are used to, and many are understandably wary. Often they worry the texts will be too hard for children, and the topics won’t interest them. But I’ve spoken with many teachers who have found, once they tried the new approach, that kids enjoy the challenge and are more engaged than ever. And they’ve seen their students’ vocabularies—and eventually their scores on reading tests—improve.
It's unfortunate, to say the least, that so many New York City schools are making a choice that could lead to failure for many students down the road. Better phonics instruction is crucial, but unless a curriculum is also building knowledge and vocabulary, it provides only a short-term benefit. As grade levels go up, comprehension becomes more important than the ability to decipher individual words. And comprehension depends far more on knowledge than on abstract skills.
That’s something a previous top New York City education official learned the hard way. Twenty years ago, then-chancellor Joel Klein decreed that all of the city’s elementary schools were to adopt Lucy Calkins’ balanced literacy curriculum. He later said it was the only decision he made as chancellor that he came to regret—and not because the curriculum lacked a good phonics component.
Under pressure from the federal government, the city supplemented the curriculum with a phonics program, and reading scores did improve at lower grade levels. But they didn’t rise at eighth grade, and—as Klein told me when I interviewed him some years ago—that led him to a realization: to equip kids to understand more complex text, it’s crucial to build knowledge in the elementary grades in a way that Calkins’ curriculum—and many others, including Into Reading—do not.
Perhaps current education officials in New York might want to reflect on Klein’s experience. As they say, those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
|
USF marine lab to house thousands of coral as ocean temperatures warm
Researchers from the University of South Florida and the Florida Institute of Oceanography relocated thousands of coral from offshore nurseries to their shared laboratory in the Florida Keys.
Why it matters: Sea surface temperatures have jumped to unprecedented levels in recent months, putting coral — a habitat for marine life like crabs and sharks — at greater risk of dying.
- Once-rare marine heatwaves are becoming more common. The number of marine heatwave days doubled between 1982 and 2016 and is projected to increase even more, writes Axios' Alison Snyder.
Zoom in: The marine lab contains one of the largest temperature-controlled seawater systems in the Florida Keys, according to a news release. It can house thousands more coral, which researchers anticipate will be needed.
- The coral will likely be housed for months before researchers can return them to their natural environments when ocean temperatures eventually wane. They will be reattached to reefs via epoxy, cement, zip ties and nails.
- Other coral will be sent to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa for its breeding program which can help the species produce "hundreds of offspring every year," the news release said.
The big picture: Experts say the combination of El Niño and global warming will bring a "stepwise" decline in marine ecosystem capacity.
- "It's not steady and gradual, it's a cliff that species and ecosystems fall off," Kim Cobb, an earth sciences professor at Brown University, told Axios in June.
What they're saying: "For years we have been developing the infrastructure capacity to support reef restoration efforts that enable [the laboratory] to temporarily house corals during emergencies such as this," Cynthia Lewis, director of the Keys Marine Laboratory, said in the release.
More Tampa Bay stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Tampa Bay.
|
<urn:uuid:06bfe64d-6f4e-45ca-aebd-8c0bc231ef48>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511220.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20231003192425-20231003222425-00560.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9265116453170776,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.34375,
"token_count": 398,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2023/07/25/usf-marine-lab-house-thousands-coral"
}
|
USF marine lab to house thousands of coral as ocean temperatures warm
Researchers from the University of South Florida and the Florida Institute of Oceanography relocated thousands of coral from offshore nurseries to their shared laboratory in the Florida Keys.
Why it matters: Sea surface temperatures have jumped to unprecedented levels in recent months, putting coral — a habitat for marine life like crabs and sharks — at greater risk of dying.
- Once-rare marine heatwaves are becoming more common. The number of marine heatwave days doubled between 1982 and 2016 and is projected to increase even more, writes Axios'
|
Alison Snyder.
Zoom in: The marine lab contains one of the largest temperature-controlled seawater systems in the Florida Keys, according to a news release. It can house thousands more coral, which researchers anticipate will be needed.
- The coral will likely be housed for months before researchers can return them to their natural environments when ocean temperatures eventually wane. They will be reattached to reefs via epoxy, cement, zip ties and nails.
- Other coral will be sent to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa for its breeding program which can help the species produce "hundreds of offspring every year," the news release said.
The big picture: Experts say the combination of El Niño and global warming will bring a "stepwise" decline in marine ecosystem capacity.
- "It's not steady and gradual, it's a cliff that species and ecosystems fall off," Kim Cobb, an earth sciences professor at Brown University, told Axios in June.
What they're saying: "For years we have been developing the infrastructure capacity to support reef restoration efforts that enable [the laboratory] to temporarily house corals during emergencies such as this," Cynthia Lewis, director of the Keys Marine Laboratory, said in the release.
More Tampa Bay stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Tampa Bay.
|
The pill, so ubiquitous it goes by one name, has long been synonymous with women's liberation and sexual freedom.
But there's also a rising disquiet, especially online, about its effect on women's bodies.
On TikTok, young women divulge their hormone horror stories to tens of thousands of viewers. In private Facebook groups, they swap the names of their prescriptions like old friends — Brenda, Yaz, Diane, it goes on — and compare notes on the severity of their side effects. Over on YouTube, a study analysed videos about contraception posted between 2019 and 2021 and found they were "primarily about the discontinuation of hormonal birth control".
Prescriptions and consumption of the pill have steadily decreased in several western European countries over the past decade — a phenomenon labelled pillenmüdigkeit or "pill fatigue" in German — according to a study published this year. Many of these women have moved on to other contraceptives, including long-acting reversible options, known as LARCs, like intrauterine devices (IUDs), implants and injections.
Back home, however, the research suggests a different reality.
While use of the pill has declined marginally over time as longer-lasting and more reliable options have come onto the market, it remains Australia's most popular contraceptive.
"The pill is a very popular option still," says Dr Clare Boerma, the medical director at Family Planning, who attributes much of its enduring appeal to its longevity and widespread use.
Often, she says, "It's the first thing that comes to people's minds when they're thinking about starting a contraceptive."
More than 60 years after the pill first hit shelves, what do history and science tell us about its future in the lives of Australian women?
Australia's embrace of the pill
In 1961, Australia became only the second country in the world to have access to the oral contraceptive pill. The pill in question was called Anovlar and its arrival on Australian shores was a bombshell.
"Prior to the pill, there weren't really very many options for contraception and the options that were available were pretty unreliable," says Dr Bryony Mcneill, a senior lecturer in medical science at Deakin University.
Such options included condoms, diaphragms, spermicides, sponges and natural (and often crude) methods like withdrawal and fertility tracking. Crucially, most required the cooperation of a male partner.
"To have the pill available made a huge difference for women in particular and families to be able to plan when they wanted to get pregnant and separate sex from [having] children, which beforehand you couldn't really do," Mcneill says.
But the revolution didn't happen immediately. To get the pill, much like today, you needed a prescription — and conservative doctors were hesitant to give out scripts at all, let alone to unmarried women. It was also expensive, incurring a 27.5 per cent luxury tax.
It wasn't until 1972, during Gough Whitlam's first 10 days in office, that the luxury tax was scrapped and the pill was added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, bringing costs down to about $1 a month.
Five years later, the first-ever national health survey found 20 per cent of women of reproductive age (18 to 49 years old) had taken the pill in the two days before being interviewed. This was likely an underestimation given women at the time were only expected to take the pill three weeks out of every month. It was most popular with women aged 20-24 (35.4 per cent) and 25-29 (29.1 per cent).
These early pills had much higher doses of hormones than we're used to today, and consequently more side effects. They were removed from sale in 1988 and replaced with lower-dose versions.
By 1995, two-thirds of Australian women of reproductive age were using some form of birth control, with 40 per cent opting for the pill, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Because it was so revolutionary to have access to contraception at all, Mcneill says early on many women were happy to overlook the physical downsides. "People are now becoming more aware of those … and having the agency to look for better options that suit them," she says.
How the pill works
Contraceptive pills, and other hormonal birth controls, release artificial hormones that mimic those produced when an egg is growing, tricking the brain into no longer sending egg-production signals to the ovary.
At the same time, they thicken the mucus in the cervix, which stops the sperm from getting through, and alter how the uterus lining develops, making it harder for an embryo to implant.
"In a normal menstrual cycle, you've got two phases: in the first half of the cycle you're preparing for that embryo or fertilisation, and the second half is sort of nourishing it for a pregnancy," Dr Mcneill says. "So by taking the pill you kind of obliterate this natural cycle and sort of switch everything off."
The most common form of the pill contains oestrogen and progestogen (known as the combined oral contraceptive pill). Also available is the progestogen-only pill — commonly called the "mini-pill" — which can be prescribed when people are unable to take the combined oestrogen. It works by thickening the cervical mucus and most women's periods will continue while using it.
Many people also use the pill for reasons other than birth control: to manage acne, heavy periods, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and conditions like endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Some side effects have been well documented, including breast tenderness, bloating, headaches and nausea. While rare, there are also more serious health risks, including strokes, myocardial infarction, and blood clots. Because the pill is taken orally, the hormones have to travel around the entire body, which increases the risk of clots. This is less of a risk with localised contraceptives, like IUDs.
"The thing about the pill is we have incredible safety data over decades and decades, so in fact, we know exactly what the minor risks and potential side effects are," says Dr Catriona Melville, director of clinical excellence at MSI Australia, the reproductive health service formerly known as Marie Stopes International.
"I certainly wouldn't want to paint something like the pill as the enemy."
The pill is still popular
National data on contraceptive use in Australia is patchy, but a report by Family Planning collating Medicare data and national surveys found the pill and condoms remained the most popular form of birth control in 2018, while the use of LARCs had seen "small but consistent" increases over the decade to 2015.
While Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule data shows a decrease in prescriptions for the pill, many of the newer oral contraceptives are not listed and therefore not captured.
Even among the younger generation, the pill remains popular. In a 2021 study of thousands of Australian high-school students, 40 per cent of female respondents reported using the pill in their last sexual encounter, trailing condoms (47 per cent) but well in front of implants (11 per cent) and IUDs (3.7 per cent).
A small 2019 study tried to understand why women aged between 18 and 24 chose certain contraceptives. From 20 interviews, the researchers found some women felt they were persuaded away from LARCs by their doctor, while others were afraid of having something inserted into their body. "Misinformation about certain methods of contraception, particularly IUDs, was quite common among participants," the study read.
Is social media to blame?
When the pill was first introduced to Australia, information was hard to come by. Not only was advertising of it banned, but any public discussion of pre-marital sex, contraception or abortion was considered taboo.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2010, feminist scholar Anne Summers recalled visiting the doctor with her boyfriend in 1966 and being asked: "Are you married?"
"In those days before family planning clinics or women's health services, before telephone helplines or listings in the front of the phone book, before there were books about sex, before there was any information really, we relied on rumour," she wrote.
"The word would go round, and we'd flock to the medico who we'd heard would not give us a hard time for daring to ask for a script."
Today, most doctors offer reliable information and will freely prescribe the pill, but the sharing of information between women that's existed since the pill's beginnings has reached a new scale in the social media age.
"If you go right back to the beginning, this was absolute freedom … it was mind-blowing when the pill was introduced," Dr Melville says. "But there's this strange sort of theory now that people are being forced to be on the pill."
In one oft-repeated TikTok format, women hold up comically large sheets of paper with lines and lines of tiny text. The on-screen caption provides explanations: be kind to your girl, they say, because this is the list of side-effects packaged into boxes of the pill.
While not entirely accurate — the leaflets also include details about what the pill should be used for and how to take it, alongside a list of rare, but terrifying, potential side effects — the meaning behind the video trend is clear: for a long time, women's bodies have borne the brunt of avoiding unwanted pregnancies and, judging by the comments, many aren't happy about it.
In other cases, the discourse is more concerning. In one TikTok video, a self-described "menstrual health educator" tells her audience that "birth control is a Group 1 carcinogen and has been shown to cause cancer in humans". The video has been liked more than 41,000 times.
While the pill has been associated with a slightly increased risk for breast cancer and a transient risk for cervical cancer while it's being used, it's also been shown to reduce the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer. According to the Cancer Council: "On balance, the strong evidence of reduced lifetime risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer outweighs the transient risks associated with breast and cervical cancer."
While Dr Melville believes social media has played a role in "villianising" hormonal methods — after all, it's where many people go for information — she is hesitant to put too much stock in trends.
"People who don't like the pill, or have had issues with it, it's the same as anything in life, they will be more vocal," she says. "Whereas the people that do love the pill and have been on it for 20 years tend not to complain."
Giving up hormones
A particularly pervasive piece of misinformation is the belief that your body needs a break from hormonal birth control. According to doctors, there's no evidence to support this and stopping and starting may actually prolong adverse side effects, which usually subside within three months of taking a birth control method.
Dr Melville says this anti-hormone sentiment is particularly common among younger women, some of whom have ditched hormonal birth control completely in favour of fertility awareness apps. "And the unfortunate problem with that is I'm mostly seeing those people because they've had an unplanned pregnancy," she says.
Apps like Natural Cycles — which is the first to be cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to market itself as contraception — Clue, Kindara and Flo use menstrual cycle information, daily body temperature checks and an algorithm to predict fertile periods. The idea is that by avoiding sex during these times, it's possible to avoid pregnancy.
"There is quite a lot of belief that using a calendar method, for example, by itself is very efficacious — and it's not," Dr Melville says. "Natural family planning can be if you put in lots of other data, like your basal body temperature and your cervical mucus, but that's quite time-consuming and arduous."
In her clinic, Dr Boerma has also seen people coming in to reduce their hormone dose or give them up completely. "Hormones are bad and 'no hormones' is good is a bit too simplistic, but certainly some people do seem to be more sensitive than others to hormones," she says.
The copper IUD — a small device placed inside the uterus that is toxic to the sperm and egg, preventing fertilisation — is the only available non-hormonal, long-acting option on the market. It lasts for five or 10 years, depending on the device, but can cause heavier and longer periods in some women.
By comparison, the Mirena hormonal IUD can help manage heavy or painful periods. "For some people, hormonal contraceptives are really beneficial," Dr Boerma says.
"Sometimes people look at it in a bit of a black and white way; we've heard bad things and we want to avoid something that's bad, But often it's much more nuanced and complex."
What strikes Dr Boerma is the shift in attitudes over time. "It's seen as a burden, taking a hormonal contraception, rather than the liberation it once was," she says. "People are doing their own research, and trying to be more informed themselves, which is understandable and a good thing — but it does set a different landscape."Loading...
Does the pill have a future?
When advising women on birth control, Dr Melville follows this calculation to find the perfect option: the lowest doses of hormones, with the fewest side effects and the highest efficacy. Long-acting contraceptives are more likely to fulfil the final criteria, because they're not reliant on users remembering to take them or doing so correctly.
"With perfect use, short-acting methods like the pill are really good," Dr Melville says. "But we know that there's perfect use, and then there's real-life use."
Despite this, Australians have been slow to embrace LARCs. In a submission to last year's Senate inquiry into reproductive health, Family Planning NSW wrote that Australia's uptake rate is "well below comparable developed countries across the world", with only about 12-15 per cent of Australian women choosing IUDs, implants or injections.
This is a problem, according to Dr Nicole Higgins, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). "LARCs are much more user-friendly, they've got lower risks, they've got lower side effects," she says. "From a public health perspective, from a personal perspective, they're much better options for women."
Does this make the oral contraceptive pill obsolete? Dr Melville doesn't think so. There are currently plans to increase access to it by allowing pill refills to be provided over the counter in some states. "The pill has a lot to be commended for and I don't think it will ever disappear," she says.
|
<urn:uuid:7b511aba-f641-4c96-8305-5156e1f57570>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474688.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227220707-20240228010707-00735.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9697329998016357,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.53125,
"token_count": 3093,
"url": "https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-31/pill-liberation-to-burden-australian-women-contraceptive/103191234"
}
|
The pill, so ubiquitous it goes by one name, has long been synonymous with women's liberation and sexual freedom.
But there's also a rising disquiet, especially online, about its effect on women's bodies.
On TikTok, young women divulge their hormone horror stories to tens of thousands of viewers. In private Facebook groups, they swap the names of their prescriptions like old friends — Brenda, Yaz, Diane, it goes on — and compare notes on the severity of their side effects. Over on YouTube, a study analysed videos about contraception posted between 2019 and 2021 and found they were
|
"primarily about the discontinuation of hormonal birth control".
Prescriptions and consumption of the pill have steadily decreased in several western European countries over the past decade — a phenomenon labelled pillenmüdigkeit or "pill fatigue" in German — according to a study published this year. Many of these women have moved on to other contraceptives, including long-acting reversible options, known as LARCs, like intrauterine devices (IUDs), implants and injections.
Back home, however, the research suggests a different reality.
While use of the pill has declined marginally over time as longer-lasting and more reliable options have come onto the market, it remains Australia's most popular contraceptive.
"The pill is a very popular option still," says Dr Clare Boerma, the medical director at Family Planning, who attributes much of its enduring appeal to its longevity and widespread use.
Often, she says, "It's the first thing that comes to people's minds when they're thinking about starting a contraceptive."
More than 60 years after the pill first hit shelves, what do history and science tell us about its future in the lives of Australian women?
Australia's embrace of the pill
In 1961, Australia became only the second country in the world to have access to the oral contraceptive pill. The pill in question was called Anovlar and its arrival on Australian shores was a bombshell.
"Prior to the pill, there weren't really very many options for contraception and the options that were available were pretty unreliable," says Dr Bryony Mcneill, a senior lecturer in medical science at Deakin University.
Such options included condoms, diaphragms, spermicides, sponges and natural (and often crude) methods like withdrawal and fertility tracking. Crucially, most required the cooperation of a male partner.
"To have the pill available made a huge difference for women in particular and families to be able to plan when they wanted to get pregnant and separate sex from [having] children, which beforehand you couldn't really do," Mcneill says.
But the revolution didn't happen immediately. To get the pill, much like today, you needed a prescription — and conservative doctors were hesitant to give out scripts at all, let alone to unmarried women. It was also expensive, incurring a 27.5 per cent luxury tax.
It wasn't until 1972, during Gough Whitlam's first 10 days in office, that the luxury tax was scrapped and the pill was added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, bringing costs down to about $1 a month.
Five years later, the first-ever national health survey found 20 per cent of women of reproductive age (18 to 49 years old) had taken the pill in the two days before being interviewed. This was likely an underestimation given women at the time were only expected to take the pill three weeks out of every month. It was most popular with women aged 20-24 (35.4 per cent) and 25-29 (29.1 per cent).
These early pills had much higher doses of hormones than we're used to today, and consequently more side effects. They were removed from sale in 1988 and replaced with lower-dose versions.
By 1995, two-thirds of Australian women of reproductive age were using some form of birth control, with 40 per cent opting for the pill, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Because it was so revolutionary to have access to contraception at all, Mcneill says early on many women were happy to overlook the physical downsides. "People are now becoming more aware of those … and having the agency to look for better options that suit them," she says.
How the pill works
Contraceptive pills, and other hormonal birth controls, release artificial hormones that mimic those produced when an egg is growing, tricking the brain into no longer sending egg-production signals to the ovary.
At the same time, they thicken the mucus in the cervix, which stops the sperm from getting through, and alter how the uterus lining develops, making it harder for an embryo to implant.
"In a normal menstrual cycle, you've got two phases: in the first half of the cycle you're preparing for that embryo or fertilisation, and the second half is sort of nourishing it for a pregnancy," Dr Mcneill says. "So by taking the pill you kind of obliterate this natural cycle and sort of switch everything off."
The most common form of the pill contains oestrogen and progestogen (known as the combined oral contraceptive pill). Also available is the progestogen-only pill — commonly called the "mini-pill" — which can be prescribed when people are unable to take the combined oestrogen. It works by thickening the cervical mucus and most women's periods will continue while using it.
Many people also use the pill for reasons other than birth control: to manage acne, heavy periods, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and conditions like endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Some side effects have been well documented, including breast tenderness, bloating, headaches and nausea. While rare, there are also more serious health risks, including strokes, myocardial infarction, and blood clots. Because the pill is taken orally, the hormones have to travel around the entire body, which increases the risk of clots. This is less of a risk with localised contraceptives, like IUDs.
"The thing about the pill is we have incredible safety data over decades and decades, so in fact, we know exactly what the minor risks and potential side effects are," says Dr Catriona Melville, director of clinical excellence at MSI Australia, the reproductive health service formerly known as Marie Stopes International.
"I certainly wouldn't want to paint something like the pill as the enemy."
The pill is still popular
National data on contraceptive use in Australia is patchy, but a report by Family Planning collating Medicare data and national surveys found the pill and condoms remained the most popular form of birth control in 2018, while the use of LARCs had seen "small but consistent" increases over the decade to 2015.
While Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule data shows a decrease in prescriptions for the pill, many of the newer oral contraceptives are not listed and therefore not captured.
Even among the younger generation, the pill remains popular. In a 2021 study of thousands of Australian high-school students, 40 per cent of female respondents reported using the pill in their last sexual encounter, trailing condoms (47 per cent) but well in front of implants (11 per cent) and IUDs (3.7 per cent).
A small 2019 study tried to understand why women aged between 18 and 24 chose certain contraceptives. From 20 interviews, the researchers found some women felt they were persuaded away from LARCs by their doctor, while others were afraid of having something inserted into their body. "Misinformation about certain methods of contraception, particularly IUDs, was quite common among participants," the study read.
Is social media to blame?
When the pill was first introduced to Australia, information was hard to come by. Not only was advertising of it banned, but any public discussion of pre-marital sex, contraception or abortion was considered taboo.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2010, feminist scholar Anne Summers recalled visiting the doctor with her boyfriend in 1966 and being asked: "Are you married?"
"In those days before family planning clinics or women's health services, before telephone helplines or listings in the front of the phone book, before there were books about sex, before there was any information really, we relied on rumour," she wrote.
"The word would go round, and we'd flock to the medico who we'd heard would not give us a hard time for daring to ask for a script."
Today, most doctors offer reliable information and will freely prescribe the pill, but the sharing of information between women that's existed since the pill's beginnings has reached a new scale in the social media age.
"If you go right back to the beginning, this was absolute freedom … it was mind-blowing when the pill was introduced," Dr Melville says. "But there's this strange sort of theory now that people are being forced to be on the pill."
In one oft-repeated TikTok format, women hold up comically large sheets of paper with lines and lines of tiny text. The on-screen caption provides explanations: be kind to your girl, they say, because this is the list of side-effects packaged into boxes of the pill.
While not entirely accurate — the leaflets also include details about what the pill should be used for and how to take it, alongside a list of rare, but terrifying, potential side effects — the meaning behind the video trend is clear: for a long time, women's bodies have borne the brunt of avoiding unwanted pregnancies and, judging by the comments, many aren't happy about it.
In other cases, the discourse is more concerning. In one TikTok video, a self-described "menstrual health educator" tells her audience that "birth control is a Group 1 carcinogen and has been shown to cause cancer in humans". The video has been liked more than 41,000 times.
While the pill has been associated with a slightly increased risk for breast cancer and a transient risk for cervical cancer while it's being used, it's also been shown to reduce the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer. According to the Cancer Council: "On balance, the strong evidence of reduced lifetime risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer outweighs the transient risks associated with breast and cervical cancer."
While Dr Melville believes social media has played a role in "villianising" hormonal methods — after all, it's where many people go for information — she is hesitant to put too much stock in trends.
"People who don't like the pill, or have had issues with it, it's the same as anything in life, they will be more vocal," she says. "Whereas the people that do love the pill and have been on it for 20 years tend not to complain."
Giving up hormones
A particularly pervasive piece of misinformation is the belief that your body needs a break from hormonal birth control. According to doctors, there's no evidence to support this and stopping and starting may actually prolong adverse side effects, which usually subside within three months of taking a birth control method.
Dr Melville says this anti-hormone sentiment is particularly common among younger women, some of whom have ditched hormonal birth control completely in favour of fertility awareness apps. "And the unfortunate problem with that is I'm mostly seeing those people because they've had an unplanned pregnancy," she says.
Apps like Natural Cycles — which is the first to be cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration to market itself as contraception — Clue, Kindara and Flo use menstrual cycle information, daily body temperature checks and an algorithm to predict fertile periods. The idea is that by avoiding sex during these times, it's possible to avoid pregnancy.
"There is quite a lot of belief that using a calendar method, for example, by itself is very efficacious — and it's not," Dr Melville says. "Natural family planning can be if you put in lots of other data, like your basal body temperature and your cervical mucus, but that's quite time-consuming and arduous."
In her clinic, Dr Boerma has also seen people coming in to reduce their hormone dose or give them up completely. "Hormones are bad and 'no hormones' is good is a bit too simplistic, but certainly some people do seem to be more sensitive than others to hormones," she says.
The copper IUD — a small device placed inside the uterus that is toxic to the sperm and egg, preventing fertilisation — is the only available non-hormonal, long-acting option on the market. It lasts for five or 10 years, depending on the device, but can cause heavier and longer periods in some women.
By comparison, the Mirena hormonal IUD can help manage heavy or painful periods. "For some people, hormonal contraceptives are really beneficial," Dr Boerma says.
"Sometimes people look at it in a bit of a black and white way; we've heard bad things and we want to avoid something that's bad, But often it's much more nuanced and complex."
What strikes Dr Boerma is the shift in attitudes over time. "It's seen as a burden, taking a hormonal contraception, rather than the liberation it once was," she says. "People are doing their own research, and trying to be more informed themselves, which is understandable and a good thing — but it does set a different landscape."Loading...
Does the pill have a future?
When advising women on birth control, Dr Melville follows this calculation to find the perfect option: the lowest doses of hormones, with the fewest side effects and the highest efficacy. Long-acting contraceptives are more likely to fulfil the final criteria, because they're not reliant on users remembering to take them or doing so correctly.
"With perfect use, short-acting methods like the pill are really good," Dr Melville says. "But we know that there's perfect use, and then there's real-life use."
Despite this, Australians have been slow to embrace LARCs. In a submission to last year's Senate inquiry into reproductive health, Family Planning NSW wrote that Australia's uptake rate is "well below comparable developed countries across the world", with only about 12-15 per cent of Australian women choosing IUDs, implants or injections.
This is a problem, according to Dr Nicole Higgins, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). "LARCs are much more user-friendly, they've got lower risks, they've got lower side effects," she says. "From a public health perspective, from a personal perspective, they're much better options for women."
Does this make the oral contraceptive pill obsolete? Dr Melville doesn't think so. There are currently plans to increase access to it by allowing pill refills to be provided over the counter in some states. "The pill has a lot to be commended for and I don't think it will ever disappear," she says.
|
20230111. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes and #ArtificialIntelligence. We are starting our research of Sephardic Maritime Routes by integrating traditional documents, ancient and current maps and nautical charts, current satellite imagery, photos and new Artificial Intelligence tools. #OpenAI and #ChatGPT generated this AI response today after asking about this topic:
“” The Sephardic Jews were a Jewish community that originated in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and later dispersed to other parts of the world. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, many Sephardic Jews were forced to flee the Iberian Peninsula due to the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. They established communities in various places such as the Ottoman Empire, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Americas.
These Sephardic Jews used a variety of maritime routes to reach these destinations. Some of the most notable routes included:
- The Mediterranean Sea: Sephardic Jews traveled by boat to places such as the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans), Italy, and North Africa.
- The Atlantic Ocean: Sephardic Jews also established communities in the Netherlands and the Americas. They would have used ships to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to reach these places.
- The Caribbean Sea: Many Sephardic Jews also settled in the Caribbean, particularly in Dutch colonies like Curaçao and Suriname, they would have taken ships across the Caribbean Sea.
It is important to note that this was a long and dangerous journey, many people died on the sea or were captured by pirates or slave traders, this Sephardim communities have been formed from the individuals who reach their destination . “” – ChatGPT 20230111
We will continue adding new references to these maritime routes and keep track of AI progress. This model is using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Ref. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
#ChatGPT #DrLepervanche_AI #GeoSefarad_AI #ArtificialIntelligence
This is the topic of our new Story Map that we are developing in 2023. We will collect and integrate all new information in “Rutas Marítimas de Sefardíes. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes“. See progress in this link https://arcg.is/0uK04v #GlobalStoryMaps
20230129. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes. We are back in Spain and we started to organize the information and maps that we already have. For this specific research we are going to use Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT to explore their suggestions based on our questions. We will contrast this AI answer with documents, articles, and our collaborators and experts. Please, feel free to comment, contrast, and add new references. I will add our simplified #DrJoseMaps to track our journey. This is our initial map of Ports in Spain that have been already identified as being used by Sephardic Jews to abandon Sefarad after the expulsion of 1492. See our first @ChatGPT_AI response about #SephardicMaritimeRoutes posted a few weeks ago. Let’s begin our maritime journey. Let’s see what we discover using AI tools, ancient and modern maps, and nautical charts. Let’s also see if we can fix errors found in ChatGPT and other AI tools.
This new response is about the ports used. “”The ports used by Sephardic Jews to exit Spain in 1492 were primarily located along the Mediterranean coast, including cities such as Valencia, Barcelona, and Granada. Many also left from the port of Cadiz, located on the southern coast of Spain. They also fled to the border towns such as Melilla and Ceuta. The majority of Sephardic Jews left Spain for other parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.””
We will start with these ports and Ceuta y Melilla.#OpenAI #ChatGPT #DrLepervanche_AI #SephardicMaritimeRoutes #GeoSefarad_AI
Reblogged this on Global Story Maps – GeoLandmarks and commented:
#SephardicMaritimeRoutes and #ArtificialIntelligence. We are starting our research of Sephardic Maritime Routes by integrating traditional documents, ancient and current maps and nautical charts, current satellite imagery, photos and new Artificial Intelligence tools. #OpenAI and #ChatGPT generated responses.
|
<urn:uuid:38a10347-0628-4185-8188-3bf55803bedd>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949701.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20230401032604-20230401062604-00689.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9350430965423584,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.375,
"token_count": 975,
"url": "https://europeanjewishquarters.wordpress.com/2023/01/29/sephardic-maritime-routes-and-artificial-intelligence-added-to-global-story-maps/"
}
|
20230111. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes and #ArtificialIntelligence. We are starting our research of Sephardic Maritime Routes by integrating traditional documents, ancient and current maps and nautical charts, current satellite imagery, photos and new Artificial Intelligence tools. #OpenAI and #ChatGPT generated this AI response today after asking about this topic:
“” The Sephardic Jews were a Jewish community that originated in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and later dispersed to other parts of the world. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, many Seph
|
ardic Jews were forced to flee the Iberian Peninsula due to the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. They established communities in various places such as the Ottoman Empire, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Americas.
These Sephardic Jews used a variety of maritime routes to reach these destinations. Some of the most notable routes included:
- The Mediterranean Sea: Sephardic Jews traveled by boat to places such as the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans), Italy, and North Africa.
- The Atlantic Ocean: Sephardic Jews also established communities in the Netherlands and the Americas. They would have used ships to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to reach these places.
- The Caribbean Sea: Many Sephardic Jews also settled in the Caribbean, particularly in Dutch colonies like Curaçao and Suriname, they would have taken ships across the Caribbean Sea.
It is important to note that this was a long and dangerous journey, many people died on the sea or were captured by pirates or slave traders, this Sephardim communities have been formed from the individuals who reach their destination . “” – ChatGPT 20230111
We will continue adding new references to these maritime routes and keep track of AI progress. This model is using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Ref. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
#ChatGPT #DrLepervanche_AI #GeoSefarad_AI #ArtificialIntelligence
This is the topic of our new Story Map that we are developing in 2023. We will collect and integrate all new information in “Rutas Marítimas de Sefardíes. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes“. See progress in this link https://arcg.is/0uK04v #GlobalStoryMaps
20230129. #SephardicMaritimeRoutes. We are back in Spain and we started to organize the information and maps that we already have. For this specific research we are going to use Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT to explore their suggestions based on our questions. We will contrast this AI answer with documents, articles, and our collaborators and experts. Please, feel free to comment, contrast, and add new references. I will add our simplified #DrJoseMaps to track our journey. This is our initial map of Ports in Spain that have been already identified as being used by Sephardic Jews to abandon Sefarad after the expulsion of 1492. See our first @ChatGPT_AI response about #SephardicMaritimeRoutes posted a few weeks ago. Let’s begin our maritime journey. Let’s see what we discover using AI tools, ancient and modern maps, and nautical charts. Let’s also see if we can fix errors found in ChatGPT and other AI tools.
This new response is about the ports used. “”The ports used by Sephardic Jews to exit Spain in 1492 were primarily located along the Mediterranean coast, including cities such as Valencia, Barcelona, and Granada. Many also left from the port of Cadiz, located on the southern coast of Spain. They also fled to the border towns such as Melilla and Ceuta. The majority of Sephardic Jews left Spain for other parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.””
We will start with these ports and Ceuta y Melilla.#OpenAI #ChatGPT #DrLepervanche_AI #SephardicMaritimeRoutes #GeoSefarad_AI
Reblogged this on Global Story Maps – GeoLandmarks and commented:
#SephardicMaritimeRoutes and #ArtificialIntelligence. We are starting our research of Sephardic Maritime Routes by integrating traditional documents, ancient and current maps and nautical charts, current satellite imagery, photos and new Artificial Intelligence tools. #OpenAI and #ChatGPT generated responses.
|
Utah’s wetlands are crucial in times of drought and times of flooding, but they haven’t always received the appreciation and attention they need.
At Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, manager Rich Hansen is busy bracing for the deluge of snowmelt. He is clearing logs and debris from intakes. He is flooding the parking lots duck hunters typically use in the fall. His water control structures are wide open so all the Weber River’s runoff can disperse across the bay’s 19,000 acres of wetlands, instead of ending up in people’s basements.
“These wetlands are so, so crucial to flood water attenuation and just dispersing the water once it gets out here,” Hansen said while a chorus of songbirds and shorebirds chirped nearby.
He is happy to see the surge. At this time last year, following a nearly bone-dry winter, the Weber River only trickled at 60 cubic feet per second, Hansen said. After this season’s record-setting snowpack, however, it currently is gushing at 3,870 cubic feet per second. That’s almost four times the volume of its median flow.
After it slows and filters through Ogden Bay’s wetlands, it ripples to the Great Salt Lake. A vast expanse that was dry lakebed only months ago has water again. It’s only a few inches deep, but it is keeping down a source of toxic dust for the people living on the Wasatch Front.
And it is luring millions of shorebirds, ducks and other waterfowl on their spring migration.
“We know that it’s not enough to save the Great Salt Lake,” said Coryna Hebert, Utah biologist for Ducks Unlimited. “It simply has averted an ecological catastrophe we were on the brink of [at] this time last year.”
The Great Salt Lake has sunk to record lows the past two years in a row, bottoming out at an all-time low of 4,188.5 feet above sea level in November. Its brine flies were all but wiped out. Salinity concentrations were so high the lake’s brine shrimp were on the verge of collapse as well. Both critters are keystones of the food web millions of migrating birds depend on each year.
After a record-breaking winter, however, the lake’s elevation is up more than 3.5 feet from its record low.
“It buys us a little bit extra time,” Hebert said, “to implement some of these measures we need to start saving water and reversing the slow trend of the lake declining every year.”
A major component of restoring the lake’s health and resiliency is restoring its wetlands. Wetlands provide diverse habitat for wildlife and improve water quality for the lake, while helping recharge groundwater and mitigating flood damage in nearby communities.
But Ogden Bay was dangerously close to losing its wetlands with this spring’s runoff.
A three-mile levee built in 1937 to create the management area has long been neglected and left to erode. The earthen structure was originally 21 feet wide, but sections are currently as narrow as 7 feet.
“With the flows we’re experiencing, the dike would wash out and managers would lose all control of the water to Ogden Bay,” Hansen said. “We would have thousands of acres go dry later in the summer.”
Ducks Unlimited is using part of a $1 million federal North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant to help restore Ogden Bay’s levee by hauling in boulders to shore up the structure and return it to its original footprint.
The Great Salt Lake’s wetlands are controlled by dikes and levees
The Great Salt Lake is home to about one-third of Utah’s vegetated wetlands, according to the Utah Geological Survey. Many of those ecological expanses are heavily engineered and carefully managed. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built dikes and levees at Ogden Bay, Bear River Bay and Farmington Bay in an effort to stave off mass bird die-offs caused by avian botulism.
The toxin comes from bacteria that thrive in the stagnant water left after the lake rises in the spring and recedes in the summer, leaving warm, stagnant pools. Bugs consume and concentrate the bacteria. Birds eat the bugs and become infected. The disease slowly paralyzes them, causing them to drown.
“These dikes all allow managers to manage and manipulate the water,” Hansen said, “and keep it ... constantly moving.”
Engineered wetlands have also helped biologists get control over phragmites, an invasive water-sucking reed that first popped up in the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands following the floods of the 1980s. It has since ravaged the landscape, choking out native species and wildlife habitat.
“Successfully managing phragmites,” Hebert said, “like removing a big stand, often takes like three to five years of many different treatments of herbicides grazing, cutting, mowing, sometimes burning. I mean, it’s really hard to get rid of.”
At controlled wetlands like Ogden Bay, managers can drain certain areas dry to spray the weeds or corral cows to eat them. Or they can open the floodgates and try to smother the plants.
“We’ve opened up probably 12,000 acres that were phragmites 10 years ago,” Hansen said. “So we don’t want to lose the progress we’ve gained.”
Subscribe To Open Lands Newsletter
Get the latest news by subscribing to our Open Lands newsletter. Enter your email below to receive more stories like these right to your inbox.
And with climate change, aridification and a growing population in the West, wetlands are rapidly being lost to drought and development. That makes the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands vital for supporting birds and preventing endangered species listings.
“The best wetlands we have in the West are these managed wetlands,” said Ryan Sabalow, a Ducks Unlimited spokesperson. “Because we have so few of them, you kind of have to make sure they run perfectly.”
Are wetlands across Utah disappearing?
Utah’s resource managers don’t have good data on how much of the state’s wetlands have been lost in recent decades. Although they create highly a productive habitat, prevent flooding and keep the environment healthy, humans have long seen them as a boggy, buggy nuisance.
“Generally as a society, we have viewed wetlands as wastelands across North America,” said Karin Kettenring, a professor of wetland ecology at Utah State University. “So there’s always been this push to fill and drain wetlands.”
In just the 14 years since Kettenring relocated to Utah, she said she has watched development encroach along the periphery of the Great Salt Lake, in zones that would have helped absorb the rapid runoff potentially coming this spring. She also has seen development pop up along the historic floodplain of the Logan River, a tributary of the Great Salt Lake basin.
“It’s both at the end of the line at Great Salt Lake,” Kettenring said, “but also recognizing that wetlands upstream are important in helping slow the flow throughout the whole watershed.”
Utahns and other communities in the West have manipulated rivers and waterways for flood control over more than a century using dams, dikes and reservoirs. But as the Great Salt Lake flooding of the 1980s shows, or the Weber County floods of 2011, or the flooding of Logan and Box Elder County in 2017, these solutions don’t always work.
“Some would like to have complete control,” Kettenring said, “and completely hard-engineer the system, which tends to be a much more expensive and not necessarily better approach.”
All the damage to homes and infrastructure left by recent floods isn’t exactly cheap, either.
Still, Kettenring said, she sees value in the engineering done on the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands, especially with all the dams, diversions, farms and developments in the lake’s watershed.
“Without fundamentally changing how we use our water upstream,” Kettenering said, “it’s a logical response. I don’t see any way we could have wetlands without them as this point.”
And the professor is hopeful with the attention, alarm and investment the lake has received from policymakers and legislators, a similar enthusiasm for protecting wetlands will follow.
“I do have some level of optimism,” Kettenring said. “There’s a lot more awareness of the role of the Great Salt Lake. To me, that includes the wetlands. You can’t really separate the lake from the wetlands.”
|
<urn:uuid:b7615c9f-860c-4d90-af43-7d92502eaada>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506429.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20230922234442-20230923024442-00516.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9465633630752563,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.78125,
"token_count": 1915,
"url": "https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2023/04/21/great-salt-lake-wetland-managers/"
}
|
Utah’s wetlands are crucial in times of drought and times of flooding, but they haven’t always received the appreciation and attention they need.
At Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, manager Rich Hansen is busy bracing for the deluge of snowmelt. He is clearing logs and debris from intakes. He is flooding the parking lots duck hunters typically use in the fall. His water control structures are wide open so all the Weber River’s runoff can disperse across the bay’s 19,000 acres of wetlands, instead of ending up in people’s basements.
“
|
These wetlands are so, so crucial to flood water attenuation and just dispersing the water once it gets out here,” Hansen said while a chorus of songbirds and shorebirds chirped nearby.
He is happy to see the surge. At this time last year, following a nearly bone-dry winter, the Weber River only trickled at 60 cubic feet per second, Hansen said. After this season’s record-setting snowpack, however, it currently is gushing at 3,870 cubic feet per second. That’s almost four times the volume of its median flow.
After it slows and filters through Ogden Bay’s wetlands, it ripples to the Great Salt Lake. A vast expanse that was dry lakebed only months ago has water again. It’s only a few inches deep, but it is keeping down a source of toxic dust for the people living on the Wasatch Front.
And it is luring millions of shorebirds, ducks and other waterfowl on their spring migration.
“We know that it’s not enough to save the Great Salt Lake,” said Coryna Hebert, Utah biologist for Ducks Unlimited. “It simply has averted an ecological catastrophe we were on the brink of [at] this time last year.”
The Great Salt Lake has sunk to record lows the past two years in a row, bottoming out at an all-time low of 4,188.5 feet above sea level in November. Its brine flies were all but wiped out. Salinity concentrations were so high the lake’s brine shrimp were on the verge of collapse as well. Both critters are keystones of the food web millions of migrating birds depend on each year.
After a record-breaking winter, however, the lake’s elevation is up more than 3.5 feet from its record low.
“It buys us a little bit extra time,” Hebert said, “to implement some of these measures we need to start saving water and reversing the slow trend of the lake declining every year.”
A major component of restoring the lake’s health and resiliency is restoring its wetlands. Wetlands provide diverse habitat for wildlife and improve water quality for the lake, while helping recharge groundwater and mitigating flood damage in nearby communities.
But Ogden Bay was dangerously close to losing its wetlands with this spring’s runoff.
A three-mile levee built in 1937 to create the management area has long been neglected and left to erode. The earthen structure was originally 21 feet wide, but sections are currently as narrow as 7 feet.
“With the flows we’re experiencing, the dike would wash out and managers would lose all control of the water to Ogden Bay,” Hansen said. “We would have thousands of acres go dry later in the summer.”
Ducks Unlimited is using part of a $1 million federal North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant to help restore Ogden Bay’s levee by hauling in boulders to shore up the structure and return it to its original footprint.
The Great Salt Lake’s wetlands are controlled by dikes and levees
The Great Salt Lake is home to about one-third of Utah’s vegetated wetlands, according to the Utah Geological Survey. Many of those ecological expanses are heavily engineered and carefully managed. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built dikes and levees at Ogden Bay, Bear River Bay and Farmington Bay in an effort to stave off mass bird die-offs caused by avian botulism.
The toxin comes from bacteria that thrive in the stagnant water left after the lake rises in the spring and recedes in the summer, leaving warm, stagnant pools. Bugs consume and concentrate the bacteria. Birds eat the bugs and become infected. The disease slowly paralyzes them, causing them to drown.
“These dikes all allow managers to manage and manipulate the water,” Hansen said, “and keep it ... constantly moving.”
Engineered wetlands have also helped biologists get control over phragmites, an invasive water-sucking reed that first popped up in the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands following the floods of the 1980s. It has since ravaged the landscape, choking out native species and wildlife habitat.
“Successfully managing phragmites,” Hebert said, “like removing a big stand, often takes like three to five years of many different treatments of herbicides grazing, cutting, mowing, sometimes burning. I mean, it’s really hard to get rid of.”
At controlled wetlands like Ogden Bay, managers can drain certain areas dry to spray the weeds or corral cows to eat them. Or they can open the floodgates and try to smother the plants.
“We’ve opened up probably 12,000 acres that were phragmites 10 years ago,” Hansen said. “So we don’t want to lose the progress we’ve gained.”
Subscribe To Open Lands Newsletter
Get the latest news by subscribing to our Open Lands newsletter. Enter your email below to receive more stories like these right to your inbox.
And with climate change, aridification and a growing population in the West, wetlands are rapidly being lost to drought and development. That makes the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands vital for supporting birds and preventing endangered species listings.
“The best wetlands we have in the West are these managed wetlands,” said Ryan Sabalow, a Ducks Unlimited spokesperson. “Because we have so few of them, you kind of have to make sure they run perfectly.”
Are wetlands across Utah disappearing?
Utah’s resource managers don’t have good data on how much of the state’s wetlands have been lost in recent decades. Although they create highly a productive habitat, prevent flooding and keep the environment healthy, humans have long seen them as a boggy, buggy nuisance.
“Generally as a society, we have viewed wetlands as wastelands across North America,” said Karin Kettenring, a professor of wetland ecology at Utah State University. “So there’s always been this push to fill and drain wetlands.”
In just the 14 years since Kettenring relocated to Utah, she said she has watched development encroach along the periphery of the Great Salt Lake, in zones that would have helped absorb the rapid runoff potentially coming this spring. She also has seen development pop up along the historic floodplain of the Logan River, a tributary of the Great Salt Lake basin.
“It’s both at the end of the line at Great Salt Lake,” Kettenring said, “but also recognizing that wetlands upstream are important in helping slow the flow throughout the whole watershed.”
Utahns and other communities in the West have manipulated rivers and waterways for flood control over more than a century using dams, dikes and reservoirs. But as the Great Salt Lake flooding of the 1980s shows, or the Weber County floods of 2011, or the flooding of Logan and Box Elder County in 2017, these solutions don’t always work.
“Some would like to have complete control,” Kettenring said, “and completely hard-engineer the system, which tends to be a much more expensive and not necessarily better approach.”
All the damage to homes and infrastructure left by recent floods isn’t exactly cheap, either.
Still, Kettenring said, she sees value in the engineering done on the Great Salt Lake’s wetlands, especially with all the dams, diversions, farms and developments in the lake’s watershed.
“Without fundamentally changing how we use our water upstream,” Kettenering said, “it’s a logical response. I don’t see any way we could have wetlands without them as this point.”
And the professor is hopeful with the attention, alarm and investment the lake has received from policymakers and legislators, a similar enthusiasm for protecting wetlands will follow.
“I do have some level of optimism,” Kettenring said. “There’s a lot more awareness of the role of the Great Salt Lake. To me, that includes the wetlands. You can’t really separate the lake from the wetlands.”
|
Memphis Zoo welcomes a new baby, a Bongo named Birch
The Memphis Zoo has welcomed a new baby.
A baby Bongo named Birch was born at the zoo on April 26.
"Bongo are large antelope that live in the forests of central & western Africa. In the wild, bongo only eat leaves, roots, grasses, and bark so as a nod to his diet of foliage, his keepers named him Birch," the zoo said on social media.
'Blues Stage on Beale':The story behind Memphis in May's big change and what to expect
Animal stories:'That was his dog': Memphis family reunited with dog 6 years after she was stolen
The new Bongo was born to parents Cara and Franklin.
Birch is one of several babies the zoo has welcomed in recent years. Grogu the baby aardvark was born in October. 2021 saw the birth of a baby Pere David's Deer, considered extinct in the wild, and two African black-footed penguin chicks.
The zoo also welcomed Kosti, a 40-year-old elephant, two Sumatran tigers and an endangered Amur leopard last year.
|
<urn:uuid:d36fecd9-910e-4577-b7ed-b27a968e9582>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224652959.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20230606150510-20230606180510-00145.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9829041957855225,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.546875,
"token_count": 245,
"url": "https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/local/2023/05/01/memphis-zoo-welcomes-a-new-baby-bongo/70171132007/"
}
|
Memphis Zoo welcomes a new baby, a Bongo named Birch
The Memphis Zoo has welcomed a new baby.
A baby Bongo named Birch was born at the zoo on April 26.
"Bongo are large antelope that live in the forests of central & western Africa. In the wild, bongo only eat leaves, roots, grasses, and bark so as a nod to his diet of foliage, his keepers named him Birch," the zoo said on social media.
'Blues Stage on Beale':The story behind Memphis in May's big change and what to expect
Animal stories:'
|
That was his dog': Memphis family reunited with dog 6 years after she was stolen
The new Bongo was born to parents Cara and Franklin.
Birch is one of several babies the zoo has welcomed in recent years. Grogu the baby aardvark was born in October. 2021 saw the birth of a baby Pere David's Deer, considered extinct in the wild, and two African black-footed penguin chicks.
The zoo also welcomed Kosti, a 40-year-old elephant, two Sumatran tigers and an endangered Amur leopard last year.
|
What does the science say about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic?
Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.
The Wall Street Journal added to that debate this week when they reported that the U.S. Department of Energy has shifted its stance on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with "low confidence," that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.
The agency based its conclusion on classified evidence that isn't available to the public. According to the federal government, "low confidence" means "the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information."
And at this point, the U.S. intelligence community still has no consensus about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Four of the eight intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin for the virus, with "low confidence," while two of them — the DOE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — support a lab origin, with the latter having "moderate confidence" about its conclusion.
But it's a theory that the agencies are definitely bringing into the public eye. On Tuesday, FBI director Christopher A. Wray reiterated his belief that COVID-19 "most likely" sprang from "a potential lab incident" in Wuhan, China.
But at the end of the day, the origin of the pandemic is also a scientific question. Virologists who study pandemic origins are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is "very convincing" data and "overwhelming evidence" pointing to an animal origin.
In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewedpapers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.
Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE's "low confident" conclusion doesn't "negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin."
"Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis," Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, "and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either."
So just what is the scientific evidence that the pandemic began at the seafood market?
Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun — that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.
But they come close. They providephotographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What's more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.
The data in the 2022 studies paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the pandemic. Photographic and genetic data pinpoint a specific stall at the market where the coronavirus likely was transmitted from an animal into people. And agenetic analysis estimates the time, within weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occurred. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.
At this exact same time, a huge COVID outbreak occurred at the market. Hundreds of people, working and shopping at the market, were likely infected. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.
At the same time, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found two variants of the coronavirus inside the market. And an independent study, led by virologists at the University of California, San Diego, suggests these two variants didn't evolve in people, because throughout the entire pandemic, scientists have never detected a variant linking the two together. Altogether, the new studies suggest that, most likely, the two variants evolved inside animals.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey helped lead two of the studies and has been at the forefront of the search for the origins of the pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.
Back in May 2021, Worobey signeda letter calling for an investigation into the lab-leak theory. But then, through his own investigation, he quickly found data supporting an animal origin.
When the studies were first published online, NPR spoke to Worobey, who's at the University of Arizona, to understand what the data tells us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2; how, he believes, the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory; and the significance of photos taken five years before the pandemic. Here are key points from the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.
Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019
It's clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source. So we don't completely verify the photos.
Live susceptible animals were held in a stall where SARS-CoV-2 was later detected on a machine that processed animals in the market
We analyzed a leaked report from the Chinese CDC detailing the results of this environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization's report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was information not just on which stalls had virus in them — or had samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 — but also how many samples in a given stall yielded positive results.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.
So now we know that when the national public health authorities shut down the market and then sampled the surfaces there, one of the surfaces positive for SARS-CoV-2 was a metal cage in a back room.
What's even weirder — it turns out that one of the co-authors of the study, Eddie Holmes, had been taken to the Huanan market several years before the pandemic and shown raccoon dogs in one of the stalls. He was told, "This is the kind of place that has the ingredients for cross-species transmission of dangerous pathogens."
So he clicks photos of the raccoon dogs. In one photo, the raccoon dogs are in a cage stacked on top of a cage with some birds in it.
And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
So we connected all sorts of bizarre kinds of data. Together the data are telling a strong story.
Earliest known cases of COVID-19, even those not directly related to individuals who had been in the market, radiate out from the market
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don't have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren't linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That's what we show in our paper.
It's absurd how strong the geographical association is [to the market].
NPR: Absurd? How? In the sense that the seafood market is so clearly bull's-eye center of this outbreak?
Yes. How could anyone not be moved, at least somewhat, by that data and then not take this idea [of an animal origin] seriously, especially given the other things we've found in these studies? That I don't understand.
The virus jumped into people right before the outbreak in the market
For example, our new genetic analysis tells us that this virus was not around for very long when the cases occurred at the market. For example, the earliest known patient at the market had an onset of symptoms on Dec. 10, 2019. And we can estimate that at that point in time, there were only about 10 people infected with the virus in the world and probably fewer than 70.
So if the pandemic didn't start at the market, one of the first five or 10 people infected in the world was at the market. And how do you explain that?
You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.
It's highly unlikely that the first COVID-19 outbreak would occur at the market if there weren't a source of the virus there
Step back and think, "Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?" It could appear at a market. But it could also appear at a school, a university or a meatpacking plant.
NPR: Or a biotech conference?
Yes. In Washington state, SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in a man who had traveled back from China. In Germany, it was at an auto-parts supplier.
There are thousands, perhaps 10,000, other places at least as likely, or even more likely, to be the place where a new pathogen shows up. And yet, in Wuhan, the first cluster of cases happens to be one of the four places that sells live animals, out of 10,000 other places. If you're not surprised by that, then I don't think you're understanding the unlikelihood that that presents.
NPR: So what is the likelihood of that coincidence happening — that the first cluster of cases occurs at a market that sells animals known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, but the virus didn't actually come from the market?
I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. But it's interesting. We do have one analysis where we show essentially that the chance of having this pattern of cases [clustered around the market] is 1 in 10 million [if the market isn't a source of the virus]. We consider that strong evidence in science.
The analyses that we've done are telling a very strong story.
The evidence is amongst the best we have for any emerging virus.
It's important to note we haven't found a related virus from the intermediate host. But we have a bunch of other evidence.
And the data zeroing in on the Huanan market, to me, is as compelling as the data that indicated to John Snow that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. [John Snow was a doctor in London who helped launch the field of outbreak investigations by figuring out the source of a cholera outbreak in the city in the mid-19th century.]
Making these findings brought tears
Sometimes you have these rare moments where you're maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. As I just started to figure out that there were more cases around the market than you can expect randomly — I felt that way. And no exaggeration, that moment — those kinds of moments — bring a tear to your eye.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
<urn:uuid:37e38e7f-a4b1-4e0b-941f-c973d980a613>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476409.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304002142-20240304032142-00858.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9699856638908386,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.15625,
"token_count": 2753,
"url": "https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/news-from-npr/2023-02-28/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic"
}
|
What does the science say about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic?
Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.
The Wall Street Journal added to that debate this week when they reported that the U.S. Department of Energy has shifted its stance on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with "
|
low confidence," that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.
The agency based its conclusion on classified evidence that isn't available to the public. According to the federal government, "low confidence" means "the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information."
And at this point, the U.S. intelligence community still has no consensus about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Four of the eight intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin for the virus, with "low confidence," while two of them — the DOE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — support a lab origin, with the latter having "moderate confidence" about its conclusion.
But it's a theory that the agencies are definitely bringing into the public eye. On Tuesday, FBI director Christopher A. Wray reiterated his belief that COVID-19 "most likely" sprang from "a potential lab incident" in Wuhan, China.
But at the end of the day, the origin of the pandemic is also a scientific question. Virologists who study pandemic origins are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is "very convincing" data and "overwhelming evidence" pointing to an animal origin.
In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewedpapers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.
Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE's "low confident" conclusion doesn't "negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin."
"Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis," Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, "and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either."
So just what is the scientific evidence that the pandemic began at the seafood market?
Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun — that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.
But they come close. They providephotographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What's more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.
The data in the 2022 studies paints an incredibly detailed picture of the early days of the pandemic. Photographic and genetic data pinpoint a specific stall at the market where the coronavirus likely was transmitted from an animal into people. And agenetic analysis estimates the time, within weeks, when not just one but two spillovers occurred. It calculates that the coronavirus jumped into people once in late November or early December and then again few weeks later.
At this exact same time, a huge COVID outbreak occurred at the market. Hundreds of people, working and shopping at the market, were likely infected. That outbreak is the first documented one of the pandemic, and it then spilled over into the community, as one of the Science papers shows.
At the same time, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found two variants of the coronavirus inside the market. And an independent study, led by virologists at the University of California, San Diego, suggests these two variants didn't evolve in people, because throughout the entire pandemic, scientists have never detected a variant linking the two together. Altogether, the new studies suggest that, most likely, the two variants evolved inside animals.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey helped lead two of the studies and has been at the forefront of the search for the origins of the pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.
Back in May 2021, Worobey signeda letter calling for an investigation into the lab-leak theory. But then, through his own investigation, he quickly found data supporting an animal origin.
When the studies were first published online, NPR spoke to Worobey, who's at the University of Arizona, to understand what the data tells us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2; how, he believes, the data may shift the debate about the lab-leak theory; and the significance of photos taken five years before the pandemic. Here are key points from the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.
Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019
It's clear-cut these wild, live animals, including raccoon dogs and red foxes, were in the market. We have photographic evidence from December 2019. A concerned customer evidently took these photos and videos of the market on Dec. 3 and posted them on Weibo [because it was illegal to sell certain live animals]. The photos were promptly scrubbed. But a CNN reporter had communicated directly with the person who took the photos. I was able to get in touch with this reporter, and they passed on those photos from the source. So we don't completely verify the photos.
Live susceptible animals were held in a stall where SARS-CoV-2 was later detected on a machine that processed animals in the market
We analyzed a leaked report from the Chinese CDC detailing the results of this environmental sampling. Virtually all of the findings in the report matched what was in the World Health Organization's report. But there was some extra information in the leaked report. For example, there was information not just on which stalls had virus in them — or had samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 — but also how many samples in a given stall yielded positive results.
We found out that one stall actually had five positive samples — five surfaces in that stall had virus on them. And even better, in that particular stall, the samples were very animal-y. For example, scientists found virus on a feather/hair remover, a cart of the sort that we see in photographs that are used for transporting cages and, best of all, a metal cage in a back room.
So now we know that when the national public health authorities shut down the market and then sampled the surfaces there, one of the surfaces positive for SARS-CoV-2 was a metal cage in a back room.
What's even weirder — it turns out that one of the co-authors of the study, Eddie Holmes, had been taken to the Huanan market several years before the pandemic and shown raccoon dogs in one of the stalls. He was told, "This is the kind of place that has the ingredients for cross-species transmission of dangerous pathogens."
So he clicks photos of the raccoon dogs. In one photo, the raccoon dogs are in a cage stacked on top of a cage with some birds in it.
And at the end of our sleuth work, we checked the GPS coordinates on his camera, and we find that he took the photo at the same stall, where five samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
So we connected all sorts of bizarre kinds of data. Together the data are telling a strong story.
Earliest known cases of COVID-19, even those not directly related to individuals who had been in the market, radiate out from the market
With a virus, such as SARS-CoV-2, that causes no symptoms or mild symptoms in most people, you don't have any chance of linking all the early cases to the site where the outbreak started. Because the virus is going to quickly spread to people outside of wherever it started.
And yet, from the clinical observations in Wuhan, around half of the earliest known COVID cases were people directly linked to the seafood market. And the other cases, which aren't linked through epidemiological data, have an even closer geographical association to the market. That's what we show in our paper.
It's absurd how strong the geographical association is [to the market].
NPR: Absurd? How? In the sense that the seafood market is so clearly bull's-eye center of this outbreak?
Yes. How could anyone not be moved, at least somewhat, by that data and then not take this idea [of an animal origin] seriously, especially given the other things we've found in these studies? That I don't understand.
The virus jumped into people right before the outbreak in the market
For example, our new genetic analysis tells us that this virus was not around for very long when the cases occurred at the market. For example, the earliest known patient at the market had an onset of symptoms on Dec. 10, 2019. And we can estimate that at that point in time, there were only about 10 people infected with the virus in the world and probably fewer than 70.
So if the pandemic didn't start at the market, one of the first five or 10 people infected in the world was at the market. And how do you explain that?
You have to remember: Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. And the Huanan market is only 1 of 4 places in Wuhan that sold live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, such as raccoon dogs.
It's highly unlikely that the first COVID-19 outbreak would occur at the market if there weren't a source of the virus there
Step back and think, "Where is the first cluster of a new respiratory infection going to appear in this city?" It could appear at a market. But it could also appear at a school, a university or a meatpacking plant.
NPR: Or a biotech conference?
Yes. In Washington state, SARS-CoV-2 first appeared in a man who had traveled back from China. In Germany, it was at an auto-parts supplier.
There are thousands, perhaps 10,000, other places at least as likely, or even more likely, to be the place where a new pathogen shows up. And yet, in Wuhan, the first cluster of cases happens to be one of the four places that sells live animals, out of 10,000 other places. If you're not surprised by that, then I don't think you're understanding the unlikelihood that that presents.
NPR: So what is the likelihood of that coincidence happening — that the first cluster of cases occurs at a market that sells animals known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, but the virus didn't actually come from the market?
I would put the odds at 1 in 10,000. But it's interesting. We do have one analysis where we show essentially that the chance of having this pattern of cases [clustered around the market] is 1 in 10 million [if the market isn't a source of the virus]. We consider that strong evidence in science.
The analyses that we've done are telling a very strong story.
The evidence is amongst the best we have for any emerging virus.
It's important to note we haven't found a related virus from the intermediate host. But we have a bunch of other evidence.
And the data zeroing in on the Huanan market, to me, is as compelling as the data that indicated to John Snow that the water pump was poisoning people who used it. [John Snow was a doctor in London who helped launch the field of outbreak investigations by figuring out the source of a cholera outbreak in the city in the mid-19th century.]
Making these findings brought tears
Sometimes you have these rare moments where you're maybe the only person on Earth who has access to this kind of crucial information. As I just started to figure out that there were more cases around the market than you can expect randomly — I felt that way. And no exaggeration, that moment — those kinds of moments — bring a tear to your eye.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
Interior invests in bison restoration on tribal lands
Federal officials will spend $25 million to grow and conserve bison herds on tribal lands. A recent order from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland also calls to integrate Indigenous knowledge in efforts to restore bison across the U.S.
Tens of millions of bison, which are also called buffalo, once roamed North America. But the species was hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s. Today, wild bison number in the tens of thousands nationwide, including about 20,000 managed by tribes.
Jason Baldes works for the National Wildlife Federation and lives on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Bison restoration began there about seven years ago, and the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes now manage over 100 animals. Baldes said this most recent announcement is a step in the right direction for Indigenous communities nationwide.
“There's a lot of benefits to having buffalo back on the ground in our communities around education and academics,” he said. “They’re a keystone species, so that should be reason enough to restore them to the landscape because it benefits the grasses, the birds, the insects.”
He said herds also provide food for tribal members and maintain the cultural identity of Indigenous communities.
“This is a project and an effort that rights a wrong, and it's part of healing for us as Native people,” Baldes said. “It helps when other people understand that.”
The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and will go toward building new herds, transferring more bison from federal to tribal lands and creating new bison management agreements with tribes. The Interior Department currently manages about 11,000 animals across 12 states.
Baldes said Haaland’s announcement and Interior’s investment fails to meet the need for bison restoration on tribal grasslands across the country, but that he’s optimistic about future partnerships. He also said much of the land in the West has been prioritized for agriculture, rather than wildlife, and that land-use systems need to be updated so that bison aren’t treated “like cattle.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, KUNC in Colorado, KUNM in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Copyright 2023 Wyoming Public Radio. To see more, visit Wyoming Public Radio.
|
<urn:uuid:a46e886d-c02d-4cfc-b90b-0a3a2e9ef812>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943625.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321033306-20230321063306-00427.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9499368667602539,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.15625,
"token_count": 568,
"url": "https://www.aspenpublicradio.org/government/2023-03-09/interior-invests-in-bison-restoration-on-tribal-lands"
}
|
Interior invests in bison restoration on tribal lands
Federal officials will spend $25 million to grow and conserve bison herds on tribal lands. A recent order from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland also calls to integrate Indigenous knowledge in efforts to restore bison across the U.S.
Tens of millions of bison, which are also called buffalo, once roamed North America. But the species was hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s. Today, wild bison number in the tens of thousands nationwide, including about 20,000 managed by tribes.
Jason Baldes works for
|
the National Wildlife Federation and lives on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Bison restoration began there about seven years ago, and the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes now manage over 100 animals. Baldes said this most recent announcement is a step in the right direction for Indigenous communities nationwide.
“There's a lot of benefits to having buffalo back on the ground in our communities around education and academics,” he said. “They’re a keystone species, so that should be reason enough to restore them to the landscape because it benefits the grasses, the birds, the insects.”
He said herds also provide food for tribal members and maintain the cultural identity of Indigenous communities.
“This is a project and an effort that rights a wrong, and it's part of healing for us as Native people,” Baldes said. “It helps when other people understand that.”
The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and will go toward building new herds, transferring more bison from federal to tribal lands and creating new bison management agreements with tribes. The Interior Department currently manages about 11,000 animals across 12 states.
Baldes said Haaland’s announcement and Interior’s investment fails to meet the need for bison restoration on tribal grasslands across the country, but that he’s optimistic about future partnerships. He also said much of the land in the West has been prioritized for agriculture, rather than wildlife, and that land-use systems need to be updated so that bison aren’t treated “like cattle.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana, KUNC in Colorado, KUNM in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Copyright 2023 Wyoming Public Radio. To see more, visit Wyoming Public Radio.
|
'What does it mean to be Irish in this country?' In Worcester, a question amid celebrations as St. Patrick's Day nears
On a wintry Saturday afternoon, snow colored everything white, but inside the Irish Festival, held March 4, turned the hall of St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church into a sea of green.
Along with the color, came noise: friends laughing and having a gab. The Belfast Cowboys played traditional songs about shipwrecks, such as "The Irish Rover," the perils of drinking too much, as in "Whiskey in the Jar-O" and impressionable young lads hauled off to the British penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, like the youth falsely accused of theft described in "Black Velvet Band.
Among those at the festivities were author and activist Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, of Worcester, his daughter, Grace Sliwoski, also of Worcester, and her son, Theo, 6, and Fiona, 4, who were primed to participate in performances by the McInerney School of Irish Dance.
Asked about his Irish heritage, Worcester activist Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who along with his wife, Claire, helped found Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker, told this story: "My great-grandfather, Patrick John Duffy, came in 1881 to the U.S. That was a tough time in Ireland, because of the potato famine, and general poverty," Schaeffer-Duffy said, referring to the mass starvation that began with a blighted potato crop, and which lasted about 1845 to 1849. "He, like many Irish, worked in England and sent money home to the family."
A time of hardship
It was a time of British rule in Ireland, and anti-Irish prejudice. While in a pub with friends, Schaeffer-Duffy said, "Several young English people came in, and started taunting them. My great-grandfather was tall, 6-foot-3, with blazing red hair. He picked up a guy, and put him down on the potbelly stove."
A brawl ensued, and the police were fetched. "When the police were close, it would be very serious for the Irish, so they fled, sleeping under haystacks to avoid the police." Making their way to the port city of Liverpool, Duffy stowed aboard a ship, and found himself bound for America. "The captain was sympathetic, and decided not to charge the stowaway," Schaeffer-Duffy said.
Eventually, the young man ended up in Massachusetts. He met a young woman, also from Ireland, and they married. They would settle in Uxbridge, start a family and make a life for themselves.
More:Erin Giftstore is a drop of green in the city with its Irish origins
More:We persist: A first-generation Irish-American's take on St. Patrick's Day
Schaeffer-Duffy grew up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and went to College of the Holy Cross, where he studied religion. He and his wife, Claire, work at SS Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester. Part of the Catholic Worker movement, the agency assists homeless men and women and holds peace vigils.
Claire is also a journalist who writes for Catholic publications, including the National Catholic Reporter, the Jesuit magazine, America, and Commonweal.
A cultural identity
With March comes an array of festivities marking Irish Heritage Month, and in particular, St. Patrick's Day on March 17. The Irish Festival is organized by the local chapter of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and Ladys Ancient Order of the Hibernians, and it's a prelude to the annual St. Patrick's Day parade.
It's a time to celebrate all things Irish, with green hats, green beads, and maybe green beer, along with songs, from ancient rhymes to hits by Ireland's celebrated rock artists, such as Thin Lizzy, U2, and Van Morrison.
More:Exploring Worcester's Irish Roots
More:Shamrockin' in the streets: Thousands turn out for Worcester County St. Patrick’s Parade
More:Last Call: Author Robert McMaster takes readers across an ocean
But there is a serious side. Songs of rebellion, such as "The Foggy Dew" and "Come Out, Ye Black and Tans," recall the 1916 uprising, also called the Easter Rising, against centuries of British rule.
St. Patrick's Day celebrations link the past with the present, and for many of Irish descent, including in the Worcester's Irish-American community, this means honoring and debating what it means to be Irish-American.
For Schaeffer-Duffy, his principles and world view are informed by his Irish and Catholic heritage, and the struggles of his ancestors. "We've been in thousands of demonstrations," said Schaeffer-Duffy. "We've been to 18 war zones."
Schaeffer-Duffy said, "I've worked with the homeless in the inner city here and in Washington, D.C."
Schaeffer-Duffy was imprisoned for three months in Georgia on Jan. 27, 2003, during annual protests against the Fort Benning's School of the Americas, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Protestors, including actor Martin Sheen, have stated that Latin American graduates use techniques that violate human rights, and which they use in their own countries.
Seeking justice, peace
The Schaeffer-Duffys formed a Catholic Worker Peace Team with other Catholic Workers from around the U.S. to join activists meeting in San Diego in 2018. The occasion: protesting the border wall constructed on orders of then-President Donald Trump. "We went into Tijuana for several days to meet with migrants," Schaeffer-Duffy said.
They have traveled to Dublin for the trial of the so-called Pitstop Ploughshares, a group of Catholic Worker protesters who opposed U.S. military planes landing at Ireland's Shannon Airport during the Iraqi war. They have also met in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, with Mairead Maguire. Maguire was the 1976 co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in a nonviolent resolution to Northern Ireland's sectarian and ethnic conflict known as "The Troubles."
'A soft spot for Worcester'
Before traveling to the U.S. in the 1990s, Brian Clancy recalled, "Myself and a friend of mine were never a mile from cowshite in our lives." Through a friend's persuasion, they found themselves in the Bronx. "I never got such a shock. We were so sheltered, it's astounding."
A history and English teacher living in his hometown of Cloneen, in County Tipperary, Clancy spent several years in the U.S., including in Worcester, where he lived about 14 months, working contracting jobs.
More:The day Clark University 'Experienced' Jimi Hendrix, live in concert
When they couldn't find work, two friends, including poet and painter Tony Gahan, urged them to come to Worcester. "We got a train up to South Station. Tony collected us. We were thinking, we're right outside Boston," Clancy said with a laugh. "I said, 'Where are you after taking me?'"
Clancy and his friends found work, along with others from Ireland seeking similar opportunities. "I was working in construction," said Clancy, who recalled living in the Lincoln Street area, near Bell Pond. "We were basically, like, stacked up, like mackerel, like sardines, in those three-deckers."
Later, Clancy would live and work in Brighton, and venture to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Canada, and to Australia, before returning to Ireland. "I love Worcester. I still style myself as a bit of an Irish-American, as I had a soft spot for Worcester."
One ethnicity, many cultures
Even working among Irish-Americans, Clancy found differences to navigate. "In Kelley Square, I went to work for an Irish painter. This guy said to me, 'I'll meet you there, and I'll bring you a coffee.' I said, 'I don't drink coffee.' He said, 'You do now, you're in America. The place runs on gasoline and coffee.'"
Clancy told of driving to a job in Leominster, driving several miles in the wrong direction. "They had great craic, those young guys, working for the older guys." Clancy said, "Compared to Brighton, it's like Christmas every day, with so many Irish in Brighton. The Worcester Irish were closer, because there were fewer of them. They were very welcoming. There were a lot of barbecues."
'Ireland has changed'
Clancy, who spoke via Zoom, notes that present-day Ireland is a modern nation, one that has attracted U.S. corporations, and with a highly-educated population. Despite historical links to the Catholic Church, it has become increasingly secular, with many observers citing the sex abuse crisis as a major factor.
Clancy said, "Some Irish-Americans have a quaint interpretation of what Ireland is. It's an historical interpretation. Definitely, Ireland has changed. I think it takes a while for the external perception to change, of the history, the trauma."
In Ireland, Clancy said, the Irish tend to mark St. Patrick's Day in a low-key way. It's a public holiday, and many enjoy a day off to take a drive with their families to a picturesque place, or to dine out, rather than loud parties or queuing up in Irish-themed pubs.
Clancy thinks for Irish people and those of Irish descent living outside Ireland, St. Patrick's Day is a way to connect. "I think the Americans tend to celebrate those holidays squarely, whereas we are not inclined to do it," Clancy said.
As Irish-Americans examine their heritage, Clancy said they can still explore their ancestors' traditions in Ireland. "If you want a nice, friendly, authentic experience, go to the less-trodden paths," Clancy said. "Go into an old bar, maybe. The countryside is safe, and accessible. Just go to the countryside, and get that experience."
A family's history
Beth O'Leary Anish of Auburn grew up in Worcester, and channeled her fascination with Ireland and her Irish heritage into a vocation. A professor of English at Rhode Island Community College, Anish said her paternal grandfather emigrated from County Kerry in the 1880s. Many people on her father's side of the family had a role in founding St. John's Church,the Catholic church that would serve much of Worcester's Irish community.
"I was interested since I was a little kid. We did a family tree project at Gates Lane School. I had one living grandmother at the time. I loved asking her about it. Just since I was little, I loved to talk about and think about my Irish heritage." That love led Anish to study at Boston College, to participate in the college's offerings on Irish studies.
Anish first went to Ireland in 2000. "I write about Irish-American literature in my academic work, so I have been over three for three different conferences, at least," said Anish. Anish has attended the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as the Global Irish Diaspora Congress. "I went to their first meeting in Dublin," Anish said.
Novels offer insights
As a doctoral candidate, Anish said, "I ended up turning part of my dissertation into a book that came out last year." In the novels of Irish-American writers in the post-World War II era, Anish found a striking theme. "What kept me coming back to them is that these authors were trying to figure who the Irish were in America, after a few generations in, and getting a little worried about their peers forgetting their immigrant roots and more humble, working-class roots," Anish said.
"The revelation to me is that even reading literature of 70 years ago, echoes the same concerns I see now," Anish said. "What does it mean to be Irish in this country, when we have been here for many generations?"
For Anish, the dilemma resonates in a personal way. "The reason I ended up zeroing in on that time period is that it reminded me of my parents. They graduated high school in the early 1940s. So it struck me: 'Oh, these were all the formative things my parents grew up on.'"
For Catholic Irish-Americans, Anish said this could mean a complex relationship with the Catholic Church. There were papal encyclicals extolling the fair treatment of workers. At the same time, church leaders did not warm to the socialism, a political movement to which many labor rights leaders gravitated. "So, they had to walk a line there," Anish said.
'Irish America is not one thing'
In her family's experience, as well as in the novels of the time, Anish said the pain of prejudice and discrimination still cast a shadow. "My mother talked about an uncle in one of the mills in Blackstone Valley, who was passed over for promotions all the time because he was Catholic," Anish said. "These things were very much still present in their minds, and were in these books."
Irish-Americans would end up along a broad spectrum of political ideas, some in conflict. "There have always been Irish people on the liberal side of those arguments, and the conservative side. There were labor activities, and Irish on the management side who tried to quash those unions," Anish said. "The fascinating thing to me for those earliest times, is Irish America is not one thing."
More:Fiddler's Green an oasis of Irish heritage, culture
More:Listen Up: Five contemporary Irish pop acts worth knowing
Anish noted, "It's Catholic, and Protestant. It's liberal, and conservative, beyond generalizations, even different races and colors. Seeing how complex the reality of what Irish America is, compared to the overriding narrative."
With that narrative, Anish said, come enduring stereotypes. Ever-pervasive is the image of Irish people as alcoholics. Anish recalled talking with a class. "Something one of my students said is, 'Oh yeah, I'm Irish, and we drink a ton on St. Patrick's Day.' That is her proving how Irish her family is."
Anish said, "I haven't done a formal study of this, but I have been collecting memes, of awful, awful stereotypes."
Anish said. "My father was the most sober person I know, and he hated alcohol, actually, and my mother was also very sober, but the daughter of an alcoholic, and grew up hating it. I have alcoholics in my own family, but people who were the polar opposite of that."
|
<urn:uuid:ce1ed308-aa93-46bb-bf49-cd8ead3d13da>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296948965.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20230329085436-20230329115436-00619.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9812971353530884,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.796875,
"token_count": 3134,
"url": "https://www.milforddailynews.com/story/lifestyle/2023/03/16/st-patricks-day-nears-worcesters-irish-explore-a-complex-heritage/69964360007/"
}
|
'What does it mean to be Irish in this country?' In Worcester, a question amid celebrations as St. Patrick's Day nears
On a wintry Saturday afternoon, snow colored everything white, but inside the Irish Festival, held March 4, turned the hall of St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church into a sea of green.
Along with the color, came noise: friends laughing and having a gab. The Belfast Cowboys played traditional songs about shipwrecks, such as "The Irish Rover," the perils of drinking too much, as in "Whiskey in the Jar-O" and impressionable young lads hauled
|
off to the British penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, like the youth falsely accused of theft described in "Black Velvet Band.
Among those at the festivities were author and activist Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, of Worcester, his daughter, Grace Sliwoski, also of Worcester, and her son, Theo, 6, and Fiona, 4, who were primed to participate in performances by the McInerney School of Irish Dance.
Asked about his Irish heritage, Worcester activist Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who along with his wife, Claire, helped found Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker, told this story: "My great-grandfather, Patrick John Duffy, came in 1881 to the U.S. That was a tough time in Ireland, because of the potato famine, and general poverty," Schaeffer-Duffy said, referring to the mass starvation that began with a blighted potato crop, and which lasted about 1845 to 1849. "He, like many Irish, worked in England and sent money home to the family."
A time of hardship
It was a time of British rule in Ireland, and anti-Irish prejudice. While in a pub with friends, Schaeffer-Duffy said, "Several young English people came in, and started taunting them. My great-grandfather was tall, 6-foot-3, with blazing red hair. He picked up a guy, and put him down on the potbelly stove."
A brawl ensued, and the police were fetched. "When the police were close, it would be very serious for the Irish, so they fled, sleeping under haystacks to avoid the police." Making their way to the port city of Liverpool, Duffy stowed aboard a ship, and found himself bound for America. "The captain was sympathetic, and decided not to charge the stowaway," Schaeffer-Duffy said.
Eventually, the young man ended up in Massachusetts. He met a young woman, also from Ireland, and they married. They would settle in Uxbridge, start a family and make a life for themselves.
More:Erin Giftstore is a drop of green in the city with its Irish origins
More:We persist: A first-generation Irish-American's take on St. Patrick's Day
Schaeffer-Duffy grew up in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and went to College of the Holy Cross, where he studied religion. He and his wife, Claire, work at SS Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester. Part of the Catholic Worker movement, the agency assists homeless men and women and holds peace vigils.
Claire is also a journalist who writes for Catholic publications, including the National Catholic Reporter, the Jesuit magazine, America, and Commonweal.
A cultural identity
With March comes an array of festivities marking Irish Heritage Month, and in particular, St. Patrick's Day on March 17. The Irish Festival is organized by the local chapter of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and Ladys Ancient Order of the Hibernians, and it's a prelude to the annual St. Patrick's Day parade.
It's a time to celebrate all things Irish, with green hats, green beads, and maybe green beer, along with songs, from ancient rhymes to hits by Ireland's celebrated rock artists, such as Thin Lizzy, U2, and Van Morrison.
More:Exploring Worcester's Irish Roots
More:Shamrockin' in the streets: Thousands turn out for Worcester County St. Patrick’s Parade
More:Last Call: Author Robert McMaster takes readers across an ocean
But there is a serious side. Songs of rebellion, such as "The Foggy Dew" and "Come Out, Ye Black and Tans," recall the 1916 uprising, also called the Easter Rising, against centuries of British rule.
St. Patrick's Day celebrations link the past with the present, and for many of Irish descent, including in the Worcester's Irish-American community, this means honoring and debating what it means to be Irish-American.
For Schaeffer-Duffy, his principles and world view are informed by his Irish and Catholic heritage, and the struggles of his ancestors. "We've been in thousands of demonstrations," said Schaeffer-Duffy. "We've been to 18 war zones."
Schaeffer-Duffy said, "I've worked with the homeless in the inner city here and in Washington, D.C."
Schaeffer-Duffy was imprisoned for three months in Georgia on Jan. 27, 2003, during annual protests against the Fort Benning's School of the Americas, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Protestors, including actor Martin Sheen, have stated that Latin American graduates use techniques that violate human rights, and which they use in their own countries.
Seeking justice, peace
The Schaeffer-Duffys formed a Catholic Worker Peace Team with other Catholic Workers from around the U.S. to join activists meeting in San Diego in 2018. The occasion: protesting the border wall constructed on orders of then-President Donald Trump. "We went into Tijuana for several days to meet with migrants," Schaeffer-Duffy said.
They have traveled to Dublin for the trial of the so-called Pitstop Ploughshares, a group of Catholic Worker protesters who opposed U.S. military planes landing at Ireland's Shannon Airport during the Iraqi war. They have also met in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, with Mairead Maguire. Maguire was the 1976 co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in a nonviolent resolution to Northern Ireland's sectarian and ethnic conflict known as "The Troubles."
'A soft spot for Worcester'
Before traveling to the U.S. in the 1990s, Brian Clancy recalled, "Myself and a friend of mine were never a mile from cowshite in our lives." Through a friend's persuasion, they found themselves in the Bronx. "I never got such a shock. We were so sheltered, it's astounding."
A history and English teacher living in his hometown of Cloneen, in County Tipperary, Clancy spent several years in the U.S., including in Worcester, where he lived about 14 months, working contracting jobs.
More:The day Clark University 'Experienced' Jimi Hendrix, live in concert
When they couldn't find work, two friends, including poet and painter Tony Gahan, urged them to come to Worcester. "We got a train up to South Station. Tony collected us. We were thinking, we're right outside Boston," Clancy said with a laugh. "I said, 'Where are you after taking me?'"
Clancy and his friends found work, along with others from Ireland seeking similar opportunities. "I was working in construction," said Clancy, who recalled living in the Lincoln Street area, near Bell Pond. "We were basically, like, stacked up, like mackerel, like sardines, in those three-deckers."
Later, Clancy would live and work in Brighton, and venture to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Canada, and to Australia, before returning to Ireland. "I love Worcester. I still style myself as a bit of an Irish-American, as I had a soft spot for Worcester."
One ethnicity, many cultures
Even working among Irish-Americans, Clancy found differences to navigate. "In Kelley Square, I went to work for an Irish painter. This guy said to me, 'I'll meet you there, and I'll bring you a coffee.' I said, 'I don't drink coffee.' He said, 'You do now, you're in America. The place runs on gasoline and coffee.'"
Clancy told of driving to a job in Leominster, driving several miles in the wrong direction. "They had great craic, those young guys, working for the older guys." Clancy said, "Compared to Brighton, it's like Christmas every day, with so many Irish in Brighton. The Worcester Irish were closer, because there were fewer of them. They were very welcoming. There were a lot of barbecues."
'Ireland has changed'
Clancy, who spoke via Zoom, notes that present-day Ireland is a modern nation, one that has attracted U.S. corporations, and with a highly-educated population. Despite historical links to the Catholic Church, it has become increasingly secular, with many observers citing the sex abuse crisis as a major factor.
Clancy said, "Some Irish-Americans have a quaint interpretation of what Ireland is. It's an historical interpretation. Definitely, Ireland has changed. I think it takes a while for the external perception to change, of the history, the trauma."
In Ireland, Clancy said, the Irish tend to mark St. Patrick's Day in a low-key way. It's a public holiday, and many enjoy a day off to take a drive with their families to a picturesque place, or to dine out, rather than loud parties or queuing up in Irish-themed pubs.
Clancy thinks for Irish people and those of Irish descent living outside Ireland, St. Patrick's Day is a way to connect. "I think the Americans tend to celebrate those holidays squarely, whereas we are not inclined to do it," Clancy said.
As Irish-Americans examine their heritage, Clancy said they can still explore their ancestors' traditions in Ireland. "If you want a nice, friendly, authentic experience, go to the less-trodden paths," Clancy said. "Go into an old bar, maybe. The countryside is safe, and accessible. Just go to the countryside, and get that experience."
A family's history
Beth O'Leary Anish of Auburn grew up in Worcester, and channeled her fascination with Ireland and her Irish heritage into a vocation. A professor of English at Rhode Island Community College, Anish said her paternal grandfather emigrated from County Kerry in the 1880s. Many people on her father's side of the family had a role in founding St. John's Church,the Catholic church that would serve much of Worcester's Irish community.
"I was interested since I was a little kid. We did a family tree project at Gates Lane School. I had one living grandmother at the time. I loved asking her about it. Just since I was little, I loved to talk about and think about my Irish heritage." That love led Anish to study at Boston College, to participate in the college's offerings on Irish studies.
Anish first went to Ireland in 2000. "I write about Irish-American literature in my academic work, so I have been over three for three different conferences, at least," said Anish. Anish has attended the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as the Global Irish Diaspora Congress. "I went to their first meeting in Dublin," Anish said.
Novels offer insights
As a doctoral candidate, Anish said, "I ended up turning part of my dissertation into a book that came out last year." In the novels of Irish-American writers in the post-World War II era, Anish found a striking theme. "What kept me coming back to them is that these authors were trying to figure who the Irish were in America, after a few generations in, and getting a little worried about their peers forgetting their immigrant roots and more humble, working-class roots," Anish said.
"The revelation to me is that even reading literature of 70 years ago, echoes the same concerns I see now," Anish said. "What does it mean to be Irish in this country, when we have been here for many generations?"
For Anish, the dilemma resonates in a personal way. "The reason I ended up zeroing in on that time period is that it reminded me of my parents. They graduated high school in the early 1940s. So it struck me: 'Oh, these were all the formative things my parents grew up on.'"
For Catholic Irish-Americans, Anish said this could mean a complex relationship with the Catholic Church. There were papal encyclicals extolling the fair treatment of workers. At the same time, church leaders did not warm to the socialism, a political movement to which many labor rights leaders gravitated. "So, they had to walk a line there," Anish said.
'Irish America is not one thing'
In her family's experience, as well as in the novels of the time, Anish said the pain of prejudice and discrimination still cast a shadow. "My mother talked about an uncle in one of the mills in Blackstone Valley, who was passed over for promotions all the time because he was Catholic," Anish said. "These things were very much still present in their minds, and were in these books."
Irish-Americans would end up along a broad spectrum of political ideas, some in conflict. "There have always been Irish people on the liberal side of those arguments, and the conservative side. There were labor activities, and Irish on the management side who tried to quash those unions," Anish said. "The fascinating thing to me for those earliest times, is Irish America is not one thing."
More:Fiddler's Green an oasis of Irish heritage, culture
More:Listen Up: Five contemporary Irish pop acts worth knowing
Anish noted, "It's Catholic, and Protestant. It's liberal, and conservative, beyond generalizations, even different races and colors. Seeing how complex the reality of what Irish America is, compared to the overriding narrative."
With that narrative, Anish said, come enduring stereotypes. Ever-pervasive is the image of Irish people as alcoholics. Anish recalled talking with a class. "Something one of my students said is, 'Oh yeah, I'm Irish, and we drink a ton on St. Patrick's Day.' That is her proving how Irish her family is."
Anish said, "I haven't done a formal study of this, but I have been collecting memes, of awful, awful stereotypes."
Anish said. "My father was the most sober person I know, and he hated alcohol, actually, and my mother was also very sober, but the daughter of an alcoholic, and grew up hating it. I have alcoholics in my own family, but people who were the polar opposite of that."
|
Right whale calf dangerously entangled off North Carolina. Seen free of gear last year off Massachusetts
One step forward, two steps back.
That is the ongoing plight of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, put into sharp focus this month as scientists reported a juvenile female's dangerous entanglement even as her mother bore a new calf.
With the North Atlantic right whale calving season now peaking in warmer waters off Georgia, marine scientists are eagerly counting each new addition to the population, since each one represents hope for moving the species further away from the precipice of extinction.
So it is no small measure of disheartenment that comes with the severe entanglement of a 4-year-old female identified in the North Atlantic right whale catalog as #4904. She is the daughter of a whale named Spindle, estimated to be at least 41 years old and recently seen off Georgia with her 10th known calf.
Spindle's daughter was first spotted Jan. 8 off the coast of North Carolina by an aerial survey team from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, "heavily entangled" in fishing gear. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the young whale has sustained severe injuries as a result and they fear she may not survive.
"There were several wraps of line around the mouth and tail, with additional line trailing behind the whale," the agency reported, also detailing "numerous wounds across her body and whale lice on her head." While all whales may have lice, a large number of them on an individual indicates a failing animal.
The juvenile was last seen in Massachusetts Bay in May 2022, and was not entangled at that time.
"It's discouraging and frustrating to see yet another North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing gear," said Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, an advocacy group that works to protect and restore the oceans by pressing for improved ocean management policies affecting fisheries, seafood, habitat protection and pollution. "This entanglement is the result of continued mismanagement of this risk. Anywhere that whales and rope intersect, deadly entanglements can occur."
Brogan and other advocates for the whales said the federal government needs "to adopt proven safeguards that will eliminate entanglement risk in times and places where right whales swim." The entangled juvenile's struggle, scientists say, highlights the need to accelerate transition to ropeless or “on-demand” fishing gear.
That effort is already well underway in Massachusetts, where conservation methods the fishing community has adopted and is continuing to incorporate have been a help to the whales. The Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association noted that Massachusetts commercial lobstermen have already helped to reduce risk to right whales by 92%. Over the last five years, the association has collaborated with the Massachusetts Lobster Foundation, and Ketcham Trap of New Bedford to develop weaker red and candy cane rope that will break at 1,700 pounds.
According to the organization, commercial lobstermen in Massachusetts have been fishing with the weakened rope for four years now without many issues. The association is continuing to work with Ketcham Trap on the gear. The Massachusetts Environmental Trust's Drive For A Better Environment program has provided money to further Massachusetts commercial lobstermen’s conservation efforts on behalf of right whales and all whale species.
Every loss is a tragic one for North Atlantic right whales
For the North Atlantic right whale population, every loss of an individual is a significant one, though there is added concern whenever a female is lost.
According to a report released in the fall by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, only about 340 of the animals — plus or minus seven — remained during 2021. Of those, only about 72 of them are reproductively active females.
Charles "Stormy" Mayo, director of the right whale ecology program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, has pointed out that this equates to very low calving rates.
Adding to the concern is that females who are giving birth are doing so at greater intervals. Instead of a calving interval of three years, the trend is now closer to six to 10 years. Right whales gestate for a little longer than a year, but they don't actually reach reproductive age until they are about 10 years old. That becomes troublesome, as well, when the whales are likely to die as a result of entanglement and vessel strike injuries before they can reach that age.
Philip Hamilton, senior scientist and interim chairman of the Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation program at the New England Aquarium, said the situation with Spindle, her new calf, and her entangled daughter highlights the whales' position between opposite ends of a spectrum, from hope to setback.
Spindle, he said, is the most productive mother known, having birthed at least 10 calves in her lifetime, but the possibility of losing even one of her calves, especially a female, has a significant negative impact on recovery of the species. Reproductive females may produce more than 20 progeny, including calves and all related to them, according to Hamilton. If she survives to reproductive age, Spindle's daughter could increase the population by 6 percent.
New calves born, but not enough
At this point in the year, the calving season is around its peak. So far, said Mayo, "we've had 11 calves that have been born."
Sadly, though, one of the newborns has died. The male calf was seen alive on Jan. 3, but was found dead on Jan. 7 near Morehead City, North Carolina, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The calf, about two weeks old, appeared underweight and in poor health. It is not known what happened to his mother, but scientists said calves cannot survive very long separated from their mothers.
The calf is the 93rd whale to be added to the ongoing database of Unusual Mortality Events that the species has suffered since 2017.
According to the New England Aquarium, there are about the same number of new calves now as there were at this time last year. But scientists say those numbers are not enough to sustain the species. By comparison, an average of 23 calves were born annually in the 2000s. That number has not been seen since 2009.
“We are hoping for many more calves throughout the remainder of the calving season, and that these newborns can make it safely to their feeding grounds up north,” Hamilton said. “Amid ongoing threats from fishing gear entanglement and vessel strikes, right whales are still doing their part by calving year after year, even later in life as in the case of Spindle.”
The right whale Spindle has become a grandmother since first observed in 1982
First observed in 1982, Spindle had her last calf in 2019 — the now entangled juvenile — before giving birth to a new baby this season. Prior to that, she birthed eight calves including Vega (Catalog #2904) and Champagne (Catalog #3904). Champagne made Spindle a grandmother in 2021.
Spindle has had one minor documented entanglement in her life, but her family members have had 12 known entanglements, according to the New England Aquarium. Champagne has experienced at least four entanglements, the last of which left significant scars.
Aquarium research shows that more than 86 percent of right whales have been entangled at least once, some as many as nine times. One whale who has captured attention with her chronic entanglements is Snow Cone. The approximately 17-year-old whale was seen in September south of Nantucket, on her way south, struggling with her fifth entanglement.
Scientists, who noted the severe deterioration of her health, feared she was dying. Hurricane Fiona made it unsafe for a team from the Center for Coastal Studies to go to Snow Cone's assistance. She has not been seen since.
Massachusetts works to promote preservation of North Atlantic Right Whales
With an eye toward continuing to raise awareness about the plight of the North Atlantic right whale and promote their preservation, the state Legislature earlier this month declared April 24 as Right Whale Day in Massachusetts.
State Rep. Josh Cutler, D-Duxbury, was the lead sponsor of the bill, Bill H.3869, that establishes the annual event.
"Our official state marine mammal, the North Atlantic right whale, is at risk of extinction. Building awareness of their plight will help promote protection efforts and establishing this annual Right Whale Day is an important step in this process," he said.
Gain access to premium Cape Cod Times content bysubscribing.
|
<urn:uuid:9ce12da3-73a7-4f8e-a592-c9fa746c56a4>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499710.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20230129080341-20230129110341-00445.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.966394305229187,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.640625,
"token_count": 1770,
"url": "https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/news/environment/2023/01/19/right-whale-calf-known-massachusetts-seen-entangled-north-carolina/69804107007/"
}
|
Right whale calf dangerously entangled off North Carolina. Seen free of gear last year off Massachusetts
One step forward, two steps back.
That is the ongoing plight of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, put into sharp focus this month as scientists reported a juvenile female's dangerous entanglement even as her mother bore a new calf.
With the North Atlantic right whale calving season now peaking in warmer waters off Georgia, marine scientists are eagerly counting each new addition to the population, since each one represents hope for moving the species further away from the precipice of extinction.
So it is no small measure of disheartenment that
|
comes with the severe entanglement of a 4-year-old female identified in the North Atlantic right whale catalog as #4904. She is the daughter of a whale named Spindle, estimated to be at least 41 years old and recently seen off Georgia with her 10th known calf.
Spindle's daughter was first spotted Jan. 8 off the coast of North Carolina by an aerial survey team from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, "heavily entangled" in fishing gear. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the young whale has sustained severe injuries as a result and they fear she may not survive.
"There were several wraps of line around the mouth and tail, with additional line trailing behind the whale," the agency reported, also detailing "numerous wounds across her body and whale lice on her head." While all whales may have lice, a large number of them on an individual indicates a failing animal.
The juvenile was last seen in Massachusetts Bay in May 2022, and was not entangled at that time.
"It's discouraging and frustrating to see yet another North Atlantic right whale entangled in fishing gear," said Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, an advocacy group that works to protect and restore the oceans by pressing for improved ocean management policies affecting fisheries, seafood, habitat protection and pollution. "This entanglement is the result of continued mismanagement of this risk. Anywhere that whales and rope intersect, deadly entanglements can occur."
Brogan and other advocates for the whales said the federal government needs "to adopt proven safeguards that will eliminate entanglement risk in times and places where right whales swim." The entangled juvenile's struggle, scientists say, highlights the need to accelerate transition to ropeless or “on-demand” fishing gear.
That effort is already well underway in Massachusetts, where conservation methods the fishing community has adopted and is continuing to incorporate have been a help to the whales. The Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association noted that Massachusetts commercial lobstermen have already helped to reduce risk to right whales by 92%. Over the last five years, the association has collaborated with the Massachusetts Lobster Foundation, and Ketcham Trap of New Bedford to develop weaker red and candy cane rope that will break at 1,700 pounds.
According to the organization, commercial lobstermen in Massachusetts have been fishing with the weakened rope for four years now without many issues. The association is continuing to work with Ketcham Trap on the gear. The Massachusetts Environmental Trust's Drive For A Better Environment program has provided money to further Massachusetts commercial lobstermen’s conservation efforts on behalf of right whales and all whale species.
Every loss is a tragic one for North Atlantic right whales
For the North Atlantic right whale population, every loss of an individual is a significant one, though there is added concern whenever a female is lost.
According to a report released in the fall by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, only about 340 of the animals — plus or minus seven — remained during 2021. Of those, only about 72 of them are reproductively active females.
Charles "Stormy" Mayo, director of the right whale ecology program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, has pointed out that this equates to very low calving rates.
Adding to the concern is that females who are giving birth are doing so at greater intervals. Instead of a calving interval of three years, the trend is now closer to six to 10 years. Right whales gestate for a little longer than a year, but they don't actually reach reproductive age until they are about 10 years old. That becomes troublesome, as well, when the whales are likely to die as a result of entanglement and vessel strike injuries before they can reach that age.
Philip Hamilton, senior scientist and interim chairman of the Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation program at the New England Aquarium, said the situation with Spindle, her new calf, and her entangled daughter highlights the whales' position between opposite ends of a spectrum, from hope to setback.
Spindle, he said, is the most productive mother known, having birthed at least 10 calves in her lifetime, but the possibility of losing even one of her calves, especially a female, has a significant negative impact on recovery of the species. Reproductive females may produce more than 20 progeny, including calves and all related to them, according to Hamilton. If she survives to reproductive age, Spindle's daughter could increase the population by 6 percent.
New calves born, but not enough
At this point in the year, the calving season is around its peak. So far, said Mayo, "we've had 11 calves that have been born."
Sadly, though, one of the newborns has died. The male calf was seen alive on Jan. 3, but was found dead on Jan. 7 near Morehead City, North Carolina, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The calf, about two weeks old, appeared underweight and in poor health. It is not known what happened to his mother, but scientists said calves cannot survive very long separated from their mothers.
The calf is the 93rd whale to be added to the ongoing database of Unusual Mortality Events that the species has suffered since 2017.
According to the New England Aquarium, there are about the same number of new calves now as there were at this time last year. But scientists say those numbers are not enough to sustain the species. By comparison, an average of 23 calves were born annually in the 2000s. That number has not been seen since 2009.
“We are hoping for many more calves throughout the remainder of the calving season, and that these newborns can make it safely to their feeding grounds up north,” Hamilton said. “Amid ongoing threats from fishing gear entanglement and vessel strikes, right whales are still doing their part by calving year after year, even later in life as in the case of Spindle.”
The right whale Spindle has become a grandmother since first observed in 1982
First observed in 1982, Spindle had her last calf in 2019 — the now entangled juvenile — before giving birth to a new baby this season. Prior to that, she birthed eight calves including Vega (Catalog #2904) and Champagne (Catalog #3904). Champagne made Spindle a grandmother in 2021.
Spindle has had one minor documented entanglement in her life, but her family members have had 12 known entanglements, according to the New England Aquarium. Champagne has experienced at least four entanglements, the last of which left significant scars.
Aquarium research shows that more than 86 percent of right whales have been entangled at least once, some as many as nine times. One whale who has captured attention with her chronic entanglements is Snow Cone. The approximately 17-year-old whale was seen in September south of Nantucket, on her way south, struggling with her fifth entanglement.
Scientists, who noted the severe deterioration of her health, feared she was dying. Hurricane Fiona made it unsafe for a team from the Center for Coastal Studies to go to Snow Cone's assistance. She has not been seen since.
Massachusetts works to promote preservation of North Atlantic Right Whales
With an eye toward continuing to raise awareness about the plight of the North Atlantic right whale and promote their preservation, the state Legislature earlier this month declared April 24 as Right Whale Day in Massachusetts.
State Rep. Josh Cutler, D-Duxbury, was the lead sponsor of the bill, Bill H.3869, that establishes the annual event.
"Our official state marine mammal, the North Atlantic right whale, is at risk of extinction. Building awareness of their plight will help promote protection efforts and establishing this annual Right Whale Day is an important step in this process," he said.
Gain access to premium Cape Cod Times content bysubscribing.
|
Here’s an update of an old post, based on an article I published in the Atlantic, The Common Core is Tough on Kids with Special Needs, that I think is just as relevant today as it was 9 years ago.
Some people have cited the following passage from the Common Core State Standards as allowing teachers “a huge amount of leeway” to provide their special needs students with what they need:
Teachers will continue to devise lesson plans and tailor instruction to the individual needs of the students in their classrooms.
The Standards set grade-specific standards but do not define the intervention methods or materials necessary to support students who are well below or well above grade-level expectations. No set of grade-specific standards can fully reflect the great variety in abilities, needs, learning rates, and achievement levels of students in any given classroom. However, the Standards do provide clear signposts along the way to the goal of college and career readiness for all students.
It is also beyond the scope of the Standards to define the full range of supports appropriate for English language learners and for students with special needs. At the same time, all students must have the opportunity to learn and meet the same high standards if they are to access the knowledge and skills necessary in their post–high school lives.
For all this leeway, however, serious problems remain:
1. Large numbers of special ed students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms based on calendar age rather than mental age. I.e., if you turned 13 by September 1st and are not so severely intellectually impaired that you spend all your time in a special ed classroom, you attend 8th grade classes even if cognitive testing shows you reading at a 4th grade level.
2. Specific CC standards are pegged to specific grade levels (e.g., 8th grade).
3. The CC standards name specific sets of texts, including Shakespeare and America’s Founding Documents, that all students should read, as well as specific levels of reading passage complexity, exemplified by sample texts (and sample reading assignments) in its well-known Appendix B, and, again pegged to specific grade levels (e.g., 8th grade).
Putting it all together, we have all mainstreamed 13-14-year-olds, even those reading at a 4th grade level, expected to make their way through passages whose complexity matches that of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, for example, this one:
Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr. Dobbins had ever administered; and also received with indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should be dismissed—for he knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either.
So is it really the case that teachers have “tremendous leeway”? More importantly, do most teachers perceive that they have tremendous leeway? Here’s how I opened my article:
In a recent discussion board thread on reading comprehension challenges in autism, a special-education teacher commented that her students can’t understand the assigned reading passages. “When I complained, I was told that I could add extra support, but not actually change the passages,” she wrote. “It is truly sad to see my students’ frustration.”
This student isn’t alone; she’s echoing what I’m hearing from a great many students, most of whom are already teachers of special needs students, many of whom are extremely frustrated by the CC Standards.
Are all of them misinterpreting the Standards?
To some extent, the answer to that question is irrelevant. When large numbers of flesh and blood students are deprived of the developmentally appropriate reading assignments that they depend on in order to maximize their progress in reading, it doesn’t matter whether or not this deprivation occurred because of correct or incorrect interpretations of the Common Core Standards. All that matters is that they aren’t getting what they need.
Furthermore, there’s flexibility and then there’s flexibility. Letting teachers decide what reading level is appropriate for their students is one thing; the Common Core does not do this. Instead, it tells them what the reading level has to be and leaves it up to them to somehow figure out what “supports” or “intervention methods” or “materials” will somehow give all students meaningful access to texts at this reading level. This is a very different sort of “flexibility.”
Imagine being told: “You need to climb this 200-foot cliff, but don’t worry, we’re giving you all the flexibility you want because we’re not telling you how to do it or providing you with any specific materials.”
Of course, some people may simply helicopter their way to the top of the cliff. Likewise, some educators may, as I discuss in my article, essentially give away the answers or otherwise fake their way through things. Or they may convince themselves that students have attained standards when objective, independent testing would reveal otherwise.
But the ultimate problem, the one that trumps all others, is that no amount of “supporting” and “intervening” and “differentiating” and IEP writing makes any difference in the world if the curricular content assigned to special needs students doesn’t match their levels of developmental readiness.
|
<urn:uuid:e83efb79-8e8e-4e87-82c5-de9c57d11380>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-06",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499857.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20230131091122-20230131121122-00473.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.964268684387207,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.578125,
"token_count": 1147,
"url": "https://catherineandkatharine.wordpress.com/2023/01/13/special-needs-kids-and-the-common-core-straitjacket/"
}
|
Here’s an update of an old post, based on an article I published in the Atlantic, The Common Core is Tough on Kids with Special Needs, that I think is just as relevant today as it was 9 years ago.
Some people have cited the following passage from the Common Core State Standards as allowing teachers “a huge amount of leeway” to provide their special needs students with what they need:
Teachers will continue to devise lesson plans and tailor instruction to the individual needs of the students in their classrooms.
The Standards set grade-specific standards but do not define the intervention methods or materials necessary to support students who are well below or
|
well above grade-level expectations. No set of grade-specific standards can fully reflect the great variety in abilities, needs, learning rates, and achievement levels of students in any given classroom. However, the Standards do provide clear signposts along the way to the goal of college and career readiness for all students.
It is also beyond the scope of the Standards to define the full range of supports appropriate for English language learners and for students with special needs. At the same time, all students must have the opportunity to learn and meet the same high standards if they are to access the knowledge and skills necessary in their post–high school lives.
For all this leeway, however, serious problems remain:
1. Large numbers of special ed students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms based on calendar age rather than mental age. I.e., if you turned 13 by September 1st and are not so severely intellectually impaired that you spend all your time in a special ed classroom, you attend 8th grade classes even if cognitive testing shows you reading at a 4th grade level.
2. Specific CC standards are pegged to specific grade levels (e.g., 8th grade).
3. The CC standards name specific sets of texts, including Shakespeare and America’s Founding Documents, that all students should read, as well as specific levels of reading passage complexity, exemplified by sample texts (and sample reading assignments) in its well-known Appendix B, and, again pegged to specific grade levels (e.g., 8th grade).
Putting it all together, we have all mainstreamed 13-14-year-olds, even those reading at a 4th grade level, expected to make their way through passages whose complexity matches that of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, for example, this one:
Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr. Dobbins had ever administered; and also received with indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should be dismissed—for he knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either.
So is it really the case that teachers have “tremendous leeway”? More importantly, do most teachers perceive that they have tremendous leeway? Here’s how I opened my article:
In a recent discussion board thread on reading comprehension challenges in autism, a special-education teacher commented that her students can’t understand the assigned reading passages. “When I complained, I was told that I could add extra support, but not actually change the passages,” she wrote. “It is truly sad to see my students’ frustration.”
This student isn’t alone; she’s echoing what I’m hearing from a great many students, most of whom are already teachers of special needs students, many of whom are extremely frustrated by the CC Standards.
Are all of them misinterpreting the Standards?
To some extent, the answer to that question is irrelevant. When large numbers of flesh and blood students are deprived of the developmentally appropriate reading assignments that they depend on in order to maximize their progress in reading, it doesn’t matter whether or not this deprivation occurred because of correct or incorrect interpretations of the Common Core Standards. All that matters is that they aren’t getting what they need.
Furthermore, there’s flexibility and then there’s flexibility. Letting teachers decide what reading level is appropriate for their students is one thing; the Common Core does not do this. Instead, it tells them what the reading level has to be and leaves it up to them to somehow figure out what “supports” or “intervention methods” or “materials” will somehow give all students meaningful access to texts at this reading level. This is a very different sort of “flexibility.”
Imagine being told: “You need to climb this 200-foot cliff, but don’t worry, we’re giving you all the flexibility you want because we’re not telling you how to do it or providing you with any specific materials.”
Of course, some people may simply helicopter their way to the top of the cliff. Likewise, some educators may, as I discuss in my article, essentially give away the answers or otherwise fake their way through things. Or they may convince themselves that students have attained standards when objective, independent testing would reveal otherwise.
But the ultimate problem, the one that trumps all others, is that no amount of “supporting” and “intervening” and “differentiating” and IEP writing makes any difference in the world if the curricular content assigned to special needs students doesn’t match their levels of developmental readiness.
|
Outside/Inbox: Is it easy being (ever)green?
Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world.
Alyssa submitted this week’s question to us on Instagram: “How/why do some plants stay green in the winter? And what's the benefit of being evergreen?”
An evergreen plant keeps its leaves year after year, versus a deciduous plant, which sheds its leaves after each growing season.
While evergreens grow all over the world, the first that might come to mind for a lot of folks in New Hampshire is probably a conifer, the tree with needle-like leaves and cones.
“Maybe a common one for most people are pines,” said Georgia Silvera Seamans, an urban forester and founder of the Local Nature Lab in New York City. “But you also have broadleaf trees that are evergreen. I'm in New York City, so a broadleaf tree that's evergreen [here] would be a holly.”
Because evergreens keep their leaves all year, we might assume that a major benefit to staying green would be the opportunity to photosynthesize year-round — but not necessarily.
“It's not to say that there is no photosynthesis happening, but you have to think about it from the tree's perspective,” said Silvera Seamans.
In order to photosynthesize, the tree would need to open the pores on its leaves to take in carbon dioxide, but that would also make it vulnerable to losing water. It’s a balancing act.
It’s not that being an evergreen is necessarily more beneficial than being deciduous — it’s just a different life strategy. Each strategy involves trade-offs as to where plants spend their energy.
Since evergreens keep their leaves for more than one season, they tend to heavily invest in them. Evergreen leaves are often thick with a protective waxy coating, with resilient needle-like shapes, which also serve to minimize surface area.
“They're expensively made, like spending money on a really expensive sweater,” said Silvera Seamas. “You know you're going to wear it for many years, versus like fast fashion, which is inexpensively made and the next season there's gonna be something else for you to wear.”
That’s not to say that a deciduous life strategy is a lesser one. It can be an advantage to start fresh every year, especially because growing seasons can be unpredictable. Storms and insects can batter leaves, and for an evergreen, losing an expensively made leaf before its regular renewal cycle can be a significant loss, because maybe a big storm batters your leaves or a hungry caterpillar is coming into your neck of the woods.
Evergreens eventually shed their leaves as well, though they just don't shed them all in a single season, and that shedding cycle varies across species. An eastern white pine might shed its leaf every two to three years, while the needles of the bristlecone pine can last for half a century.
“I think you can look at a tree and see it as the embodiment of its evolution and the 3D resources that have been available to that species,” said Silvera Seamans.
Submit your question about the natural world to the Outside/In team. You can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to <email-pii> or call the hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. We also accept questions sent to Twitter or Instagram. We’re @OutsideInRadio in both places.
|
<urn:uuid:c50d1ddc-b10e-4517-aada-988c79d47d42>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296945472.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20230326111045-20230326141045-00309.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9696436524391174,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 3.0625,
"token_count": 780,
"url": "https://www.nhpr.org/environment/2023-03-17/outside-inbox-is-it-easy-being-evergreen"
}
|
Outside/Inbox: Is it easy being (ever)green?
Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world.
Alyssa submitted this week’s question to us on Instagram: “How/why do some plants stay green in the winter? And what's the benefit of being evergreen?”
An evergreen plant keeps its leaves year after year, versus a deciduous plant, which sheds its leaves after each growing season.
While evergreens grow all over the world, the first that might come to mind for a lot of folks in New Hampshire is probably a conifer, the tree
|
with needle-like leaves and cones.
“Maybe a common one for most people are pines,” said Georgia Silvera Seamans, an urban forester and founder of the Local Nature Lab in New York City. “But you also have broadleaf trees that are evergreen. I'm in New York City, so a broadleaf tree that's evergreen [here] would be a holly.”
Because evergreens keep their leaves all year, we might assume that a major benefit to staying green would be the opportunity to photosynthesize year-round — but not necessarily.
“It's not to say that there is no photosynthesis happening, but you have to think about it from the tree's perspective,” said Silvera Seamans.
In order to photosynthesize, the tree would need to open the pores on its leaves to take in carbon dioxide, but that would also make it vulnerable to losing water. It’s a balancing act.
It’s not that being an evergreen is necessarily more beneficial than being deciduous — it’s just a different life strategy. Each strategy involves trade-offs as to where plants spend their energy.
Since evergreens keep their leaves for more than one season, they tend to heavily invest in them. Evergreen leaves are often thick with a protective waxy coating, with resilient needle-like shapes, which also serve to minimize surface area.
“They're expensively made, like spending money on a really expensive sweater,” said Silvera Seamas. “You know you're going to wear it for many years, versus like fast fashion, which is inexpensively made and the next season there's gonna be something else for you to wear.”
That’s not to say that a deciduous life strategy is a lesser one. It can be an advantage to start fresh every year, especially because growing seasons can be unpredictable. Storms and insects can batter leaves, and for an evergreen, losing an expensively made leaf before its regular renewal cycle can be a significant loss, because maybe a big storm batters your leaves or a hungry caterpillar is coming into your neck of the woods.
Evergreens eventually shed their leaves as well, though they just don't shed them all in a single season, and that shedding cycle varies across species. An eastern white pine might shed its leaf every two to three years, while the needles of the bristlecone pine can last for half a century.
“I think you can look at a tree and see it as the embodiment of its evolution and the 3D resources that have been available to that species,” said Silvera Seamans.
Submit your question about the natural world to the Outside/In team. You can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to <email-pii> or call the hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. We also accept questions sent to Twitter or Instagram. We’re @OutsideInRadio in both places.
|
Almost a century ago, in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay for working Americans. But the act carved out one segment of the population from the wage standard: individuals with disabilities.
That section of the law, known as 14(c), is still in place today. Over generations, it’s hardened into a United States workforce system that directs people with disabilities onto a distinct path, keeping them separate from their so-called “typical” peers.
Under the law, qualifying employers can pay workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” less than the minimum wage for the work they perform. Earlier versions of the law established a wage floor of 75% and later 50% of federal minimum wage. Today, there is no wage floor for individuals with disabilities working for employers who hold what are known as “14(c) certificates.” Many earn less than $3.50 an hour.
And it’s common for certificate holders to provide those jobs on teams or in workplaces set apart from non-disabled colleagues — separate and not equal.
Part 1: Job opportunity or ‘civil rights issue’?
In the late 1980s, during his time representing Connecticut in the U.S. Senate, Lowell Weicker lent his voice to the movement seeking to end discrimination against individuals with disabilities, frequently calling out the “isolation and segregation” inherent in existing policies.
In remarks at the University of Maryland on May 12, 1987, Weicker said, “There was a time in our nation’s history when … we thought disabled individuals couldn’t measure up, that there were innate limits in their ability to enter the workforce and become independent, productive participants in the American way of life. But as a nation, we have progressed in our knowledge and in our attitudes.”
He continued: “With appropriate support in areas such as education, training, transportation and housing, disabled individuals can and want to enter the competitive workforce and take their rightful place in our communities.”
Weicker’s advocacy led to the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which championed full inclusion for people with disabilities — promoting equity and accessibility in public spaces, housing, transportation, education, telecommunications, employment and government services.
But more than 30 years after the ADA’s passage, in much of the United States including Connecticut, individuals the law intended to protect remain isolated from the general labor force and earn less than minimum wage for their work.
“The country and its public institutions are still grappling with the reality that full inclusion is more than mere physical proximity in the community, it is also economic,” the National Council on Disability wrote in a recent report.
Julie Christensen, executive director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First, which advocates for inclusive employment for individuals with disabilities, said the FLSA played an important role in getting employers to consider hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities back in the early 20th century.
But the context is different now. The industries driving the U.S. economy have shifted away from “widget based” manufacturing, Christensen said, “and we have way more sophisticated opportunities for training and the use of technology.”
“There is no reason, in 2023, that a person even with most significant disability cannot participate in the labor market,” she said.
People with disabilities make up the largest minority in the United States, and they’re disproportionately underrepresented in the workforce. Less than 45% of Connecticut’s disabled population between the ages of 18 and 64 was employed in 2021 — just a notch better than the national rate of 41%, according to the most recent Annual Disability Statistics Compendium.
They are also the largest “protected class” under national and state anti-discrimination laws. In 2021, there were 427,144 people with disabilities living in Connecticut communities, or about 12% of the state’s population. Nationally, that figure was 42.6 million, 13% of the U.S. population.
Disability rights advocates say there’s an inherent contradiction when a minority group that’s protected from discrimination generally still lacks something as basic as wage protections.
“There is only one protected class that’s exempt from the federal minimum wage,” Christensen said. “We feel that’s a civil rights issue.”
‘The right to work’
Those who back the minimum wage exemption say it provides work opportunities that might not otherwise exist.
“Most people with [intellectual or developmental disability] are unemployed or underemployed despite an ability and a desire to work,” said Stephen E. Morris, executive director of The Arc of Farmington Valley, known as Favarh, which supports people with disabilities. “Should the 14(c) certificate get phased out, scores of workers supported by Favarh will lose their jobs and will be denied the opportunities to fulfill a key societal expectation — to have a job.” (The organization’s programs employ 75 people who work for less than minimum wage and 59 people who make minimum wage or more.)
Morris added: “We all complain about our jobs from time to time, but we would be outraged if the right to work was taken away from us.”
Favarh is one of the 18 employers in Connecticut that held 14(c) certificates as of last month. Like Favarh, all 18 are nonprofit social service providers, most of whom offer vocational assistance to people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
“We see it as something that allows some of our most challenged individuals an opportunity for paid work,” said Beth Fisher, executive director of Kuhn Employment Opportunities. Without it, many individuals would have to transition to full-time day services, Fisher and others said.
Under the law, employers can set a disabled employee’s wage based on the individual’s productive capacity for a specific job, relative to other individuals performing the same task. The labor department’s certificate application includes “wage calculators,” where employers enter the amount of time it takes a “standard setter” to complete a given task and the amount of time it takes a worker with a disability to complete the same task.
The U.S. Department of Labor says employers can’t pay someone subminimum wage “unless the disability actually impairs the worker's earning or productive capacity for the work being performed. The fact that a worker may have a disability is not in and of itself sufficient to warrant the payment of a subminimum wage.” And if an employee feels they’re being paid unfairly, they or a family member can petition the department’s wage and hour division for a review.
“Every individual who is on the subminimum wage certificate can earn minimum or full prevailing wage if their productivity is high enough,” said Mary Ellen Kunz, director of development and marketing with The Arc of Litchfield County. “This process is heavily regulated by DOL and always leans to benefit the individual working.”
Vocational programs like those offered by the Litchfield Arc, Favarh, Kuhn and other agencies hold 14(c) certificates for individuals in programs known as “group-supported employment,” a model intended to teach skills and prepare people for the broader job market.
At G.R.O.W.E.R.S. in New Haven, groups of four to six individuals of varying skill levels work together on horticulture tasks, with a job coach to instruct and assist in the work. “Most of those tasks could be performed by one or two people without a coach teaching them,” G.R.O.W.E.R.S. owner Scott Hickman explained in an email.
Wages vary from one individual to the next. Certificate holders periodically conduct "time studies," where they measure how long it takes employees to perform the various tasks that make up their job. Each person's wage is then set based on how much longer it takes him or her to perform the task compared to a set standard.
"I believe that any individual with physical, intellectual and/or developmental disabilities that is productive at a rate close to the average of a competitively employed individual should be paid the same as that competitively employed person," Hickman said. "We have actually had on occasion individuals that have 'tested' during their time studies at a competitive rate and therefore were paid at the minimum wage rate."
ARI of CT in Stamford supports 21 individuals working on a cleaning crew at subminimum wage rates. The organization contracts with seven local businesses and organizations who pay its crew to clean their offices.
“The individuals who work on our cleaning crew are learning skills while they are working. They are not yet ready to work at a competitive job,” said Susanne Kuligowski, president of ARI.
“Earning a paycheck is extremely important to them. They learn that hard work is necessary to earn money and by earning money you get to have the things you want,” Kuligowski said. “By earning a paycheck, they feel valued.”
Without the ability to pay subminimum wages, organizations say, their business clients wouldn't be able to afford to hire them.
“The special wage certificate allows us to be competitive when we’re bidding on work,” said Kuhn’s Fisher. “Let’s say you have two positions open and … I have a crew of four people. I'm gonna give you a job coach with that, but I need you to pay the wages of four people for two positions,” Fisher said. “That's not advantageous to the employer.”
Still, vocational rehabilitation agencies say they offer group-supported employment only as an alternative for individuals who don’t feel they’re ready for what’s known as “competitive integrated employment” — jobs that pay at or above minimum wage and take place in locations where the employee interacts with people who don’t have disabilities.
“Our first and foremost goal is to help an individual find a job that they enjoy and can be successful at,” said Kunz of Litchfield County’s Arc. “Subminimum wage is secondary and a last resort so as not to exclude anyone from gainful employment.”
Supporting each other
Lauren Traceski and Scott Masson got married last year. They live in an apartment in an adapted housing complex in Canton, across the street from Favarh, which provides them both with employment support, transportation and other services.
Masson works Monday through Friday on a Favarh cleaning crew with a job coach. “The job coaches are very important because they help bring us to our jobs and they’re there throughout the day,” Masson told state legislators at a hearing in May. (Masson also writes occasional news posts for Favarh’s website, in a section called “Scott’s Corner.”)
Traceski works in a more integrated setting at BeanZ & Co., a coffee shop in Avon that employs “an inclusive workforce” and pays the full minimum wage. Every Tuesday through Friday she runs the register, delivers food, makes drinks and tidies up. Traceski said, “I didn’t know if I was going to like it or what it would entail," when she first landed the job.
“Four or five years later, I’m loving it,” Traceski said.
Part 2: CT's shift away from subminimum wage work
One prominent customer that hires cleaning crews from community rehabilitation programs is the state of Connecticut.
The Department of Administrative Services said it currently has 64 active contracts with the CT Community Nonprofit Alliance, which manages what are known as “preferred purchasing” arrangements between the state and service providers employing people with disabilities. The majority of those contracts are for janitorial services.
Workers on those contracts “are employed and paid under the federal wage exemption by the nonprofit and not by the state,” Jesse Imse, a spokesman for DAS, said in an email.
But Imse added that DAS is “committed to transitioning out of these contracts.” As current agreements expire, he said, DAS is shifting to a newer model known as “qualified partnerships,” where vocational rehab organizations place individuals in jobs with private companies, which then contract with the state. The program aims to incentivize private companies to create more “competitive integrated” jobs for people with disabilities.
For some organizations, that transition won’t be easy.
“We don’t see ourselves as a placement organization,” said Rick Sebastian, chief executive of the Kennedy Collective, which provides day services and operates multiple businesses that employ people with and without disabilities. “We’re not funded to place people, we’re funded to employ people,” he said.
The collective’s businesses hold several contracts with federal government agencies, all of which require that crew members be paid a wage — set by the U.S. Labor Department — that is considered locally competitive, as well as health benefits. Sebastian said if Connecticut switches over completely to the qualified partnership model, his organization would lose all its state contract work.
It doesn’t help, Sebastian and others pointed out, that the state failed for many years to boost funding for nonprofit social service providers, which includes vocational rehabilitation programs. This year, legislators passed a budget that increased nonprofit funding by 2.5% annually — still far less than the 9% raise they were seeking.
The programs say employment contracts have helped support their organizations while other sources of funding have fallen short.
'Some systemic change'
Connecticut’s efforts to move away from contracting with 14(c) certificate holders is part of a broader trend.
More than a dozen states, including several in New England — Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine — have outlawed subminimum wages for people with disabilities entirely. A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators proposed legislation earlier this year, known as the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act, that seeks to eliminate subminimum wage work for people with disabilities.
From 2010 to 2019, the number of employers with 14(c) certificates nationally declined to 1,567 from 3,117 and the number of people working for those employers fell by more than half to roughly 122,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Federal agencies, including the Labor and Education Departments, have been working with states for several years to reduce subminimum wage and sheltered work by adopting new policies, expanding program capacity, improving coordination between government agencies and collecting better data, among other initiatives.
Last fall, 14 states including Connecticut received a combined $177 million in five-year federal grants to transition to the competitive integrated employment model. Connecticut was awarded the maximum grant amount, $13.9 million.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said David Doukas, director of the state’s Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. His agency, which is in charge of deploying the funding, intends “to try to influence some systemic change and help individuals here in Connecticut with it,” he said.
Changing the system requires work on several fronts. Doukas has convened “work groups” to address four areas.
First, he said, is changing the language government agencies and nonprofit providers use in “messaging and outreach.” BRS wants families and individuals with disabilities to make informed choices about the employment opportunities they pursue and to be strongly encouraged to consider full-wage jobs in an integrated setting.
Second is bolstering services for individuals who choose to pursue those “competitive integrated” jobs — from coaching to “things like transportation, access to assistive technology, financial literacy, benefits counseling” and other logistical support, Doukas said. The agency is launching a pilot program that will offer these wraparound services to young people pursuing competitive integrated work, and Doukas said interested family members should call BRS for more information.
Third is training and providing technical assistance to current 14(c) certificate holders in the state. BRS wants organizations to “assess the individuals that they're working with, recognize when they have competitive skills … look at who might be more capable of competitive integrated employment and be able to leverage that capability and train them so that they can make that leap,” Doukas said.
Finally, the state will be working to build partnerships with businesses, establishing models for creating jobs that will work for individuals with disabilities while bringing value to employers.
That final component — the role of private businesses — is critical for a successful transition away from subminimum wage employment, advocates say. But it’s often “hindered by a lack of support and interest on the part of partner employers,” Carol Scully, advocacy director for the Arc of Connecticut, said.
“Yes, we're seeing more people in Hollywood movies, we're seeing more people with disabilities in marketing campaigns,” Sebastian said. “We’re still not seeing many people with disabilities in regular employment.”
COMPETITIVE INTEGRATED EMPLOYMENT
At the office with Kaywana Miller
The Norwalk offices of L’Amy America are bright and inviting, with a view out over the treetops and large-scale photographs of celebrities wearing the company’s high-fashion eyeglasses lining the hallways. Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 46-year-old Kaywana Miller settles in at her cubicle where she cleans dozens of pairs of glasses — spraying, wiping, drying and sealing them in narrow plastic bags.
“She takes such pride in her work,” Liz Giorgi, the company’s human resources manager, said.
Miller, who lives in Norwalk with her father, joined L’Amy about a year ago. She used to work cleaning bathrooms for Staples before the pandemic, but the new job is a better fit, her sister and legal guardian Natasha Collins said. “She works in a comfortable office space and gets to interact with coworkers,” Collins said. “The company is inclusive, and they have given her a birthday party with food and gifts and invite her on company outings.”
Miller said she likes that she doesn’t have to be on her feet all day like she used to. In the evenings, she said she likes to relax by watching her favorite show, “The Office.”
Photo: Erica E. Phillips, CT Mirror
Part 3: No longer a 'charity model'
On July 31, Goodwill of Southern New England let its 14(c) certificate expire. Individuals who'd been making subminimum wage under the organization’s group-supported employment program will now be earning at least minimum wage.
“Historically, our 14c certification had made it possible to provide job skills training and employment opportunities to hundreds of individuals with greatly limited work skills,” spokesman Marcus Notz wrote in an email. That “helped to build self-esteem, facilitate community integration and give individuals a feeling of self-worth and pride that they are contributing to employers’ needs and business operations,” Notz said.
But Goodwill SNE decided last year that it was time to change. They informed families approximately 16 months ahead of the transition date, allowing time to plan and prepare.
Notz said aside from higher wages, phasing out the 14(c) program will create new opportunities for the individuals Goodwill serves by not limiting them to the specific work associated with the certificate.
“Individuals may be interested in, and able to broaden the scope of, job tasks they perform at their employment sites, which would be mutually beneficial to the employer and the employees,” Notz wrote.
For Goodwill and other organizations, part of convincing people to move into competitive-wage jobs requires walking them through how a higher income might impact their benefits. (In Connecticut, individuals with disabilities can earn up to $75,000 annually without losing Medicaid benefits.)
This is an important component of the statewide, grant-funded effort under BRS, as well. And it’s not an easy conversation, Doukas said.
Obtaining Social Security benefits can take great effort, and individuals and families fear losing access to that support. Many have been advised by well-meaning friends or organizations to be careful of making too much money and losing their benefits, Doukas said. He encourages families to talk to the bureau’s benefits counselors, who he said are “like walking policy manuals on Social Security benefits.”
“The bottom line to it all is that people, if they are able to maintain employment, will experience a higher quality of life through their income than they ever would living at a poverty-line type of existence through the benefits they're receiving,” Doukas said.
Still, for some families and individuals, group-supported employment is preferable to the challenges “competitive integrated” work presents: finding the right job, figuring out transportation and being alone at a work site, without a job coach on hand.
Krista Ostaszewski, an administrator with the Connecticut Department of Developmental Services, said that’s why many agencies give people a choice. “The reality is that some individuals, families and stakeholders feel their loved ones need support or aren’t at a place that competitive employment is attainable,” she said. “They feel strongly that the subminimum wage has allowed their loved one to continue to be part of the employment world.”
The Arc’s Scully said many families “live in fear” of losing work opportunities. But she said that belief is “built on the lack of creative development of integrated competitive employment models.”
There are organizations in Connecticut that have been successfully placing people in competitive integrated employment for many years.
Star Inc. in Norwalk works to match people with intellectual and developmental disabilities with companies that carve out a job to fit the individual’s skills, in settings where they’re fully integrated with other employees.
COMPETITIVE INTEGRATED EMPLOYMENT
In the warehouse with Jamie Taylor
At insect repellant company Ranger Ready’s Norwalk warehouse, 25-year-old Jamie Taylor has earned a reputation. He can assemble and fill boxes for customers faster than any of his coworkers.
Taylor works with about half a dozen other employees in the warehouse, and when the work picks up, they play music and work quickly together to get orders filled. “In the summer he’s just super clutch in getting what we need done as fast as possible,” Lauren Gulliver, the company’s operations director, said.
“Whenever Jamie’s here, more work gets done,” Gulliver said. “His presence helps prevent any kind of overwhelming tension and definitely creates a much more playful and fun environment.”
Taylor also works part time at the Westport Book Shop, moving and shelving books and helping customers. Taylor said he enjoys all the work. He likes his coworkers and he likes to “make that money.” He said he’s hoping to move out of his parents’ home soon and into an apartment on his own.
Photo: Erica E. Phillips, CT Mirror
Executive director Katie Banzhaf says the job coaches at Star “shy away” from group-supported employment because people often tend to remain in that setting once they're comfortable, perpetuating the system.
“We'd rather train on the real job,” she said. “A lot of our folks don't generalize well … and the demands in the jobs are different.”
Banzhaf said Star works from the premise that “everybody’s employable.” The details of each job are negotiated up front, then the individual spends a short period learning their assigned tasks with a job coach present. They’re soon working independently on site, with Star providing transportation as needed and additional support if issues arise.
Star is currently supporting nearly 50 people in this type of competitive integrated employment (including Kaywana Miller, Jamie Taylor and Joey Agostino). On average, Star clientele remain in their jobs for nine years.
“We want the person to be valuable to the employer, we want them to be productive. We're not looking for charity,” Banzhaf said. “We like to go in really saying, ‘We can train this person to do the tasks that you need done,’ and we want to have their commitment from day one that they're paying the wages.”
That commitment is key, said Linda Rammler, a consultant and researcher with the University of Connecticut’s Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, because it can be challenging to get companies to think differently about hiring people with disabilities.
Rammler follows a process she calls “Three Cups of Coffee.”
Over the first cup of coffee, agency staff get a sense of whether an employer would consider working with one of their clients. During the second cup of coffee, usually at the company’s office, agency staff point out tasks around the facility that look like they’re not getting done — a stack of undelivered mail, a disorganized conference room or a line of people waiting at the copy machine — and they suggest it might help the company’s bottom line to have someone handling those things. Over the third cup of coffee, they bring up the name of an individual they know who has the skills to take on those responsibilities or could learn them.
“Employers need to be open to creative ways of employing people,” Rammler said. “If employers can realize it’s not that hard if you can customize the work, you will have success.”
In this model, job coaches are trained not to hover, not to do the job for the person and not to interrupt natural interactions between the individual and his or her coworkers. They’re on site for the first few days or weeks and provide additional backup if any problems arise after that.
COMPETITIVE INTEGRATED EMPLOYMENT
On the shop floor with Joey Agostino
Nielsen’s Florist and Garden Center in Darien is thick with foliage, tasteful planters and the smell of freshly-cut flowers. Every Tuesday and Thursday, 27-year-old Joey Agostino brings the nursery some extra sunshine during his shifts sweeping, unloading trucks and stocking supplies.
“He’s fun and social and a really good fit for us,” his supervisor Raya Ward said. “We have so many different departments and so many different things people can be doing. It works out really well.”
Agostino has been working at Nielsen’s for about two years and “considers them family at this point,” his mom, Laurie Agostino, said. “Work has just elevated Joey in so many ways,” she said. “He enjoys being around people, he thrives, he’s a really hard worker, and he’s eager to learn. … Every place Joey has worked has said, ‘I’d take five Joeys over one person.’”
He also started a side hustle. Joey “DJ Joe” Agostino has his own LLC and spins music for proms, parties and celebrity galas. His tagline: “Get down with DJ Joe. Rocking the extra chromosome.” Agostino said he likes to make people happy. “If I didn't have a job, my feelings would be hurting," he said.
Photo: Yehyun Kim, CT Mirror
Rammler cited several examples of problems employers were able to accommodate by working it out with a job coach: individualized training on new time management software; interacting with temporary staff during the busy holiday season; choosing appropriate attire for a job; allowing an employee to wear noise-canceling headphones in a loud workplace.
(The Job Accommodation Network provides a list of accommodations to help companies create an inclusive workplace for employees of various abilities. Rammler notes most of the accommodations are inexpensive.)
“We need to have a system where we can provide ongoing support when needed and where people feel comfortable asking for support,” she said.
That kind of support for companies is preferable, advocates said, to things like financial incentives for hiring people with disabilities.
In a wide-ranging bill passed during the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers expanded a tax break for businesses that hire individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities. A separate bill that sought to “prohibit employers from paying employees with intellectual disabilities less than the minimum wage” never got a public hearing.
Tax breaks send the wrong message, said Kathy Flaherty, executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project. “Why do we have to incentivize people to do something they really should already be doing?” she said.
Allan Bergman, head of employment consultancy High Impact, said the public mindset — and the systems in place to aid people with disabilities in finding meaningful work — need to shift from focusing on what a person can’t do to discovering what they can and love to do.
“It used to be, ‘We have to help the person with their disability overcome their disability,’ sort of a deficit model — fix them, make them better,” Bergman said. “Today, we're not saying we're denying it, but everybody has deficits.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act called for equal opportunity, full participation, independent living and economic self-sufficiency for every person with a disability with no exceptions, Bergman said. Well-trained job coaches can get to know an individual’s strengths, interests, preferences and passions, and help him or her make an informed choice for the type of job to go after. And they can work with a business to carve out a job specifically for that individual that will make a difference for the company.
“Those ‘aha moments’ will start,” Bergman said. It no longer has to be a “charity model,” he said. “We don’t need to do that anymore.”
CT Mirror photojournalist Yehyun Kim contributed to this story.
|
<urn:uuid:6d5c52ec-bc07-4b17-9c6c-899d4aecb09c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506623.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20230924055210-20230924085210-00400.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9627990126609802,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.15625,
"token_count": 6468,
"url": "https://ctmirror.org/2023/08/06/ada-jobs-employment-ct-workers-with-disabilities/"
}
|
Almost a century ago, in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay for working Americans. But the act carved out one segment of the population from the wage standard: individuals with disabilities.
That section of the law, known as 14(c), is still in place today. Over generations, it’s hardened into a United States workforce system that directs people with disabilities onto a distinct path, keeping them separate from their so-called “typical” peers.
Under the law, qualifying employers can pay workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency
|
, or injury” less than the minimum wage for the work they perform. Earlier versions of the law established a wage floor of 75% and later 50% of federal minimum wage. Today, there is no wage floor for individuals with disabilities working for employers who hold what are known as “14(c) certificates.” Many earn less than $3.50 an hour.
And it’s common for certificate holders to provide those jobs on teams or in workplaces set apart from non-disabled colleagues — separate and not equal.
Part 1: Job opportunity or ‘civil rights issue’?
In the late 1980s, during his time representing Connecticut in the U.S. Senate, Lowell Weicker lent his voice to the movement seeking to end discrimination against individuals with disabilities, frequently calling out the “isolation and segregation” inherent in existing policies.
In remarks at the University of Maryland on May 12, 1987, Weicker said, “There was a time in our nation’s history when … we thought disabled individuals couldn’t measure up, that there were innate limits in their ability to enter the workforce and become independent, productive participants in the American way of life. But as a nation, we have progressed in our knowledge and in our attitudes.”
He continued: “With appropriate support in areas such as education, training, transportation and housing, disabled individuals can and want to enter the competitive workforce and take their rightful place in our communities.”
Weicker’s advocacy led to the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which championed full inclusion for people with disabilities — promoting equity and accessibility in public spaces, housing, transportation, education, telecommunications, employment and government services.
But more than 30 years after the ADA’s passage, in much of the United States including Connecticut, individuals the law intended to protect remain isolated from the general labor force and earn less than minimum wage for their work.
“The country and its public institutions are still grappling with the reality that full inclusion is more than mere physical proximity in the community, it is also economic,” the National Council on Disability wrote in a recent report.
Julie Christensen, executive director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First, which advocates for inclusive employment for individuals with disabilities, said the FLSA played an important role in getting employers to consider hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities back in the early 20th century.
But the context is different now. The industries driving the U.S. economy have shifted away from “widget based” manufacturing, Christensen said, “and we have way more sophisticated opportunities for training and the use of technology.”
“There is no reason, in 2023, that a person even with most significant disability cannot participate in the labor market,” she said.
People with disabilities make up the largest minority in the United States, and they’re disproportionately underrepresented in the workforce. Less than 45% of Connecticut’s disabled population between the ages of 18 and 64 was employed in 2021 — just a notch better than the national rate of 41%, according to the most recent Annual Disability Statistics Compendium.
They are also the largest “protected class” under national and state anti-discrimination laws. In 2021, there were 427,144 people with disabilities living in Connecticut communities, or about 12% of the state’s population. Nationally, that figure was 42.6 million, 13% of the U.S. population.
Disability rights advocates say there’s an inherent contradiction when a minority group that’s protected from discrimination generally still lacks something as basic as wage protections.
“There is only one protected class that’s exempt from the federal minimum wage,” Christensen said. “We feel that’s a civil rights issue.”
‘The right to work’
Those who back the minimum wage exemption say it provides work opportunities that might not otherwise exist.
“Most people with [intellectual or developmental disability] are unemployed or underemployed despite an ability and a desire to work,” said Stephen E. Morris, executive director of The Arc of Farmington Valley, known as Favarh, which supports people with disabilities. “Should the 14(c) certificate get phased out, scores of workers supported by Favarh will lose their jobs and will be denied the opportunities to fulfill a key societal expectation — to have a job.” (The organization’s programs employ 75 people who work for less than minimum wage and 59 people who make minimum wage or more.)
Morris added: “We all complain about our jobs from time to time, but we would be outraged if the right to work was taken away from us.”
Favarh is one of the 18 employers in Connecticut that held 14(c) certificates as of last month. Like Favarh, all 18 are nonprofit social service providers, most of whom offer vocational assistance to people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
“We see it as something that allows some of our most challenged individuals an opportunity for paid work,” said Beth Fisher, executive director of Kuhn Employment Opportunities. Without it, many individuals would have to transition to full-time day services, Fisher and others said.
Under the law, employers can set a disabled employee’s wage based on the individual’s productive capacity for a specific job, relative to other individuals performing the same task. The labor department’s certificate application includes “wage calculators,” where employers enter the amount of time it takes a “standard setter” to complete a given task and the amount of time it takes a worker with a disability to complete the same task.
The U.S. Department of Labor says employers can’t pay someone subminimum wage “unless the disability actually impairs the worker's earning or productive capacity for the work being performed. The fact that a worker may have a disability is not in and of itself sufficient to warrant the payment of a subminimum wage.” And if an employee feels they’re being paid unfairly, they or a family member can petition the department’s wage and hour division for a review.
“Every individual who is on the subminimum wage certificate can earn minimum or full prevailing wage if their productivity is high enough,” said Mary Ellen Kunz, director of development and marketing with The Arc of Litchfield County. “This process is heavily regulated by DOL and always leans to benefit the individual working.”
Vocational programs like those offered by the Litchfield Arc, Favarh, Kuhn and other agencies hold 14(c) certificates for individuals in programs known as “group-supported employment,” a model intended to teach skills and prepare people for the broader job market.
At G.R.O.W.E.R.S. in New Haven, groups of four to six individuals of varying skill levels work together on horticulture tasks, with a job coach to instruct and assist in the work. “Most of those tasks could be performed by one or two people without a coach teaching them,” G.R.O.W.E.R.S. owner Scott Hickman explained in an email.
Wages vary from one individual to the next. Certificate holders periodically conduct "time studies," where they measure how long it takes employees to perform the various tasks that make up their job. Each person's wage is then set based on how much longer it takes him or her to perform the task compared to a set standard.
"I believe that any individual with physical, intellectual and/or developmental disabilities that is productive at a rate close to the average of a competitively employed individual should be paid the same as that competitively employed person," Hickman said. "We have actually had on occasion individuals that have 'tested' during their time studies at a competitive rate and therefore were paid at the minimum wage rate."
ARI of CT in Stamford supports 21 individuals working on a cleaning crew at subminimum wage rates. The organization contracts with seven local businesses and organizations who pay its crew to clean their offices.
“The individuals who work on our cleaning crew are learning skills while they are working. They are not yet ready to work at a competitive job,” said Susanne Kuligowski, president of ARI.
“Earning a paycheck is extremely important to them. They learn that hard work is necessary to earn money and by earning money you get to have the things you want,” Kuligowski said. “By earning a paycheck, they feel valued.”
Without the ability to pay subminimum wages, organizations say, their business clients wouldn't be able to afford to hire them.
“The special wage certificate allows us to be competitive when we’re bidding on work,” said Kuhn’s Fisher. “Let’s say you have two positions open and … I have a crew of four people. I'm gonna give you a job coach with that, but I need you to pay the wages of four people for two positions,” Fisher said. “That's not advantageous to the employer.”
Still, vocational rehabilitation agencies say they offer group-supported employment only as an alternative for individuals who don’t feel they’re ready for what’s known as “competitive integrated employment” — jobs that pay at or above minimum wage and take place in locations where the employee interacts with people who don’t have disabilities.
“Our first and foremost goal is to help an individual find a job that they enjoy and can be successful at,” said Kunz of Litchfield County’s Arc. “Subminimum wage is secondary and a last resort so as not to exclude anyone from gainful employment.”
Supporting each other
Lauren Traceski and Scott Masson got married last year. They live in an apartment in an adapted housing complex in Canton, across the street from Favarh, which provides them both with employment support, transportation and other services.
Masson works Monday through Friday on a Favarh cleaning crew with a job coach. “The job coaches are very important because they help bring us to our jobs and they’re there throughout the day,” Masson told state legislators at a hearing in May. (Masson also writes occasional news posts for Favarh’s website, in a section called “Scott’s Corner.”)
Traceski works in a more integrated setting at BeanZ & Co., a coffee shop in Avon that employs “an inclusive workforce” and pays the full minimum wage. Every Tuesday through Friday she runs the register, delivers food, makes drinks and tidies up. Traceski said, “I didn’t know if I was going to like it or what it would entail," when she first landed the job.
“Four or five years later, I’m loving it,” Traceski said.
Part 2: CT's shift away from subminimum wage work
One prominent customer that hires cleaning crews from community rehabilitation programs is the state of Connecticut.
The Department of Administrative Services said it currently has 64 active contracts with the CT Community Nonprofit Alliance, which manages what are known as “preferred purchasing” arrangements between the state and service providers employing people with disabilities. The majority of those contracts are for janitorial services.
Workers on those contracts “are employed and paid under the federal wage exemption by the nonprofit and not by the state,” Jesse Imse, a spokesman for DAS, said in an email.
But Imse added that DAS is “committed to transitioning out of these contracts.” As current agreements expire, he said, DAS is shifting to a newer model known as “qualified partnerships,” where vocational rehab organizations place individuals in jobs with private companies, which then contract with the state. The program aims to incentivize private companies to create more “competitive integrated” jobs for people with disabilities.
For some organizations, that transition won’t be easy.
“We don’t see ourselves as a placement organization,” said Rick Sebastian, chief executive of the Kennedy Collective, which provides day services and operates multiple businesses that employ people with and without disabilities. “We’re not funded to place people, we’re funded to employ people,” he said.
The collective’s businesses hold several contracts with federal government agencies, all of which require that crew members be paid a wage — set by the U.S. Labor Department — that is considered locally competitive, as well as health benefits. Sebastian said if Connecticut switches over completely to the qualified partnership model, his organization would lose all its state contract work.
It doesn’t help, Sebastian and others pointed out, that the state failed for many years to boost funding for nonprofit social service providers, which includes vocational rehabilitation programs. This year, legislators passed a budget that increased nonprofit funding by 2.5% annually — still far less than the 9% raise they were seeking.
The programs say employment contracts have helped support their organizations while other sources of funding have fallen short.
'Some systemic change'
Connecticut’s efforts to move away from contracting with 14(c) certificate holders is part of a broader trend.
More than a dozen states, including several in New England — Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine — have outlawed subminimum wages for people with disabilities entirely. A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators proposed legislation earlier this year, known as the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act, that seeks to eliminate subminimum wage work for people with disabilities.
From 2010 to 2019, the number of employers with 14(c) certificates nationally declined to 1,567 from 3,117 and the number of people working for those employers fell by more than half to roughly 122,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Federal agencies, including the Labor and Education Departments, have been working with states for several years to reduce subminimum wage and sheltered work by adopting new policies, expanding program capacity, improving coordination between government agencies and collecting better data, among other initiatives.
Last fall, 14 states including Connecticut received a combined $177 million in five-year federal grants to transition to the competitive integrated employment model. Connecticut was awarded the maximum grant amount, $13.9 million.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said David Doukas, director of the state’s Bureau of Rehabilitation Services. His agency, which is in charge of deploying the funding, intends “to try to influence some systemic change and help individuals here in Connecticut with it,” he said.
Changing the system requires work on several fronts. Doukas has convened “work groups” to address four areas.
First, he said, is changing the language government agencies and nonprofit providers use in “messaging and outreach.” BRS wants families and individuals with disabilities to make informed choices about the employment opportunities they pursue and to be strongly encouraged to consider full-wage jobs in an integrated setting.
Second is bolstering services for individuals who choose to pursue those “competitive integrated” jobs — from coaching to “things like transportation, access to assistive technology, financial literacy, benefits counseling” and other logistical support, Doukas said. The agency is launching a pilot program that will offer these wraparound services to young people pursuing competitive integrated work, and Doukas said interested family members should call BRS for more information.
Third is training and providing technical assistance to current 14(c) certificate holders in the state. BRS wants organizations to “assess the individuals that they're working with, recognize when they have competitive skills … look at who might be more capable of competitive integrated employment and be able to leverage that capability and train them so that they can make that leap,” Doukas said.
Finally, the state will be working to build partnerships with businesses, establishing models for creating jobs that will work for individuals with disabilities while bringing value to employers.
That final component — the role of private businesses — is critical for a successful transition away from subminimum wage employment, advocates say. But it’s often “hindered by a lack of support and interest on the part of partner employers,” Carol Scully, advocacy director for the Arc of Connecticut, said.
“Yes, we're seeing more people in Hollywood movies, we're seeing more people with disabilities in marketing campaigns,” Sebastian said. “We’re still not seeing many people with disabilities in regular employment.”
COMPETITIVE INTEGRATED EMPLOYMENT
At the office with Kaywana Miller
The Norwalk offices of L’Amy America are bright and inviting, with a view out over the treetops and large-scale photographs of celebrities wearing the company’s high-fashion eyeglasses lining the hallways. Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 46-year-old Kaywana Miller settles in at her cubicle where she cleans dozens of pairs of glasses — spraying, wiping, drying and sealing them in narrow plastic bags.
“She takes such pride in her work,” Liz Giorgi, the company’s human resources manager, said.
Miller, who lives in Norwalk with her father, joined L’Amy about a year ago. She used to work cleaning bathrooms for Staples before the pandemic, but the new job is a better fit, her sister and legal guardian Natasha Collins said. “She works in a comfortable office space and gets to interact with coworkers,” Collins said. “The company is inclusive, and they have given her a birthday party with food and gifts and invite her on company outings.”
Miller said she likes that she doesn’t have to be on her feet all day like she used to. In the evenings, she said she likes to relax by watching her favorite show, “The Office.”
Photo: Erica E. Phillips, CT Mirror
Part 3: No longer a 'charity model'
On July 31, Goodwill of Southern New England let its 14(c) certificate expire. Individuals who'd been making subminimum wage under the organization’s group-supported employment program will now be earning at least minimum wage.
“Historically, our 14c certification had made it possible to provide job skills training and employment opportunities to hundreds of individuals with greatly limited work skills,” spokesman Marcus Notz wrote in an email. That “helped to build self-esteem, facilitate community integration and give individuals a feeling of self-worth and pride that they are contributing to employers’ needs and business operations,” Notz said.
But Goodwill SNE decided last year that it was time to change. They informed families approximately 16 months ahead of the transition date, allowing time to plan and prepare.
Notz said aside from higher wages, phasing out the 14(c) program will create new opportunities for the individuals Goodwill serves by not limiting them to the specific work associated with the certificate.
“Individuals may be interested in, and able to broaden the scope of, job tasks they perform at their employment sites, which would be mutually beneficial to the employer and the employees,” Notz wrote.
For Goodwill and other organizations, part of convincing people to move into competitive-wage jobs requires walking them through how a higher income might impact their benefits. (In Connecticut, individuals with disabilities can earn up to $75,000 annually without losing Medicaid benefits.)
This is an important component of the statewide, grant-funded effort under BRS, as well. And it’s not an easy conversation, Doukas said.
Obtaining Social Security benefits can take great effort, and individuals and families fear losing access to that support. Many have been advised by well-meaning friends or organizations to be careful of making
|
At a summit in Nairobi this week, Kenya’s President William Ruto is encouraging African leaders to offer the continent’s abundant sun, wind and green mineral sources as energy solutions at the UN climate conference COP28.
As leaders convene in Nairobi for Africa’s first climate summit, Kenya’s president William Ruto is making it clear how he wants the world’s least developed continent to approach this year’s crucial United Nations climate summit.
While African nations still rightfully bemoan the fact they contribute very little greenhouse gas emissions and disproportionately suffer the consequences of global warming, Ruto wants the continent to put itself forward as a potential source of green energy.
Read More: Africa Offers Global Warming Solution in 1st Climate Declaration
The Kenyan president has been increasingly presenting himself as Africa’s climate champion. In addition to convening the inaugural summit, Ruto, 56, has spent his first year in office extolling Kenya’s green credentials — 92% of its power comes from renewable sources — and urging other African leaders to forsake fossil fuels. He’s also called for reform of the global financial system to provide the money needed to fund climate resilience and low-carbon development, and this year has begun campaigning for Africa to get more money from carbon markets.
“We bear the brunt of the crisis despite contributing the least to global warming, but we have chosen to lead by putting forward solutions that also support development across our continent,” he said on X, formerly known as Twitter, on the opening day of the summit on Monday. “Africa has ample renewable energy potential and resources to green its own consumption and meaningfully contribute to decarbonization of the global economy.”
To be sure it won’t be as easy for other African nations to follow Ruto’s path. Kenya is blessed with ample geothermal resources and it has few significant fossil fuel reserves, unlike the oil-dependent economies of Nigeria and Angola and emerging gas producers, Mozambique and Senegal. Macky Sall, Senegal’s president, and Muhammadu Buhari, who stepped down as Nigeria’s president this year, have both insisted on the right of Africa to develop its hydrocarbon deposits.
Read More: Africa’s Headed for a Climate Showdown With Rich Nations
Nevertheless, Ruto’s calls have struck a chord on a continent that has the wind and solar potential to supply its own power needs many times over and a significant number of the green minerals needed for the global energy transition.
An early draft of the planned declaration from the summit sets ambitious targets for ramping up renewable energy production and urging a green pathway for the economic development of the continent, which may one day supply Europe with green hydrogen and its derivatives.
Read More: Germany Backs Kenya Hydrogen in Raft of African Climate Pledges
“This could be a new departure for relationships between developed and developing economies,” said Dileimy Orozco, a senior policy adviser at E3G, an independent climate think tank. “This could signal the intent of African leaders to be shapers rather than takers of the global financial system.”
Read More: Netherlands Pushes for Foothold in Southern African Hydrogen
While Ruto may be pushing African nations to look towards energy partnerships, rather than just handouts, the continent is woefully short of the climate finance it needs. This tension has led to continuous debates between richer and poorer nations at UN climate talks, and the argument is likely to be stirred up again at COP28 climate talks in Dubai later this year.
A study released by the Global Center on Adaptation on Tuesday estimates that the continent needs as much as a tenfold increase in climate adaptation funding to $100 billion a year to buttress its infrastructure and protect its agriculture against climate change.
Read More: Africa Needs Over $100 Billion a Year for Climate Adaptation
Ghana’s Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Jinapor, acknowledged that Africa needs to transition toward greener energy and public transportation systems, but not every country is financially prepared. “All of those cost money,” he said.
To date, developed economies have never fully honored their pledge to provide the developing world with $100 billion in climate finance a year by 2020 — a promise made at a COP meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.
Initially wealthy countries responsible for the most historical emissions were asked to contribute. Now, Jinapor said, the pool of contributors should be wider and should include China, the world’s biggest source of climate-warming gases.
“They should be doing more, but not just China,” he said. “BRICS, all of them I believe, should have a role to play in mobilizing the needed financing to back and promote climate action, particularly climate action as it exclusively relates to Africa,” Jinapor said in reference to the grouping of large emerging market economies including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Still, world leaders — especially in Europe — are hoping Africa takes this moment to industrialize in a fashion that doesn’t harm the climate. Germany and the Netherlands have been plowing money into developing green hydrogen on the continent, as Europe looks to diversify its sources of energy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Barbel Kofler, state secretary to Germany’s economic cooperation minister, said it’s a positive sign that Africa — a continent so badly suffering from climate change already — is showing serious initiative in offering solutions to the global warming crisis.
“That is something new and that hopefully will push the COP in a positive direction,” she said.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
|
<urn:uuid:311651df-4214-4aae-a65d-4e296614d711>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233506320.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20230922002008-20230922032008-00713.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9438986778259277,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.515625,
"token_count": 1218,
"url": "https://ec2-15-188-152-128.eu-west-3.compute.amazonaws.com/2023/09/05/kenya-wants-africa-to-sell-green-solutions-at-cop-not-seek-aid/"
}
|
At a summit in Nairobi this week, Kenya’s President William Ruto is encouraging African leaders to offer the continent’s abundant sun, wind and green mineral sources as energy solutions at the UN climate conference COP28.
As leaders convene in Nairobi for Africa’s first climate summit, Kenya’s president William Ruto is making it clear how he wants the world’s least developed continent to approach this year’s crucial United Nations climate summit.
While African nations still rightfully bemoan the fact they contribute very little greenhouse gas emissions and disproportionately suffer the consequences of global warming, Ruto wants the continent to put itself forward as a potential source
|
of green energy.
Read More: Africa Offers Global Warming Solution in 1st Climate Declaration
The Kenyan president has been increasingly presenting himself as Africa’s climate champion. In addition to convening the inaugural summit, Ruto, 56, has spent his first year in office extolling Kenya’s green credentials — 92% of its power comes from renewable sources — and urging other African leaders to forsake fossil fuels. He’s also called for reform of the global financial system to provide the money needed to fund climate resilience and low-carbon development, and this year has begun campaigning for Africa to get more money from carbon markets.
“We bear the brunt of the crisis despite contributing the least to global warming, but we have chosen to lead by putting forward solutions that also support development across our continent,” he said on X, formerly known as Twitter, on the opening day of the summit on Monday. “Africa has ample renewable energy potential and resources to green its own consumption and meaningfully contribute to decarbonization of the global economy.”
To be sure it won’t be as easy for other African nations to follow Ruto’s path. Kenya is blessed with ample geothermal resources and it has few significant fossil fuel reserves, unlike the oil-dependent economies of Nigeria and Angola and emerging gas producers, Mozambique and Senegal. Macky Sall, Senegal’s president, and Muhammadu Buhari, who stepped down as Nigeria’s president this year, have both insisted on the right of Africa to develop its hydrocarbon deposits.
Read More: Africa’s Headed for a Climate Showdown With Rich Nations
Nevertheless, Ruto’s calls have struck a chord on a continent that has the wind and solar potential to supply its own power needs many times over and a significant number of the green minerals needed for the global energy transition.
An early draft of the planned declaration from the summit sets ambitious targets for ramping up renewable energy production and urging a green pathway for the economic development of the continent, which may one day supply Europe with green hydrogen and its derivatives.
Read More: Germany Backs Kenya Hydrogen in Raft of African Climate Pledges
“This could be a new departure for relationships between developed and developing economies,” said Dileimy Orozco, a senior policy adviser at E3G, an independent climate think tank. “This could signal the intent of African leaders to be shapers rather than takers of the global financial system.”
Read More: Netherlands Pushes for Foothold in Southern African Hydrogen
While Ruto may be pushing African nations to look towards energy partnerships, rather than just handouts, the continent is woefully short of the climate finance it needs. This tension has led to continuous debates between richer and poorer nations at UN climate talks, and the argument is likely to be stirred up again at COP28 climate talks in Dubai later this year.
A study released by the Global Center on Adaptation on Tuesday estimates that the continent needs as much as a tenfold increase in climate adaptation funding to $100 billion a year to buttress its infrastructure and protect its agriculture against climate change.
Read More: Africa Needs Over $100 Billion a Year for Climate Adaptation
Ghana’s Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Jinapor, acknowledged that Africa needs to transition toward greener energy and public transportation systems, but not every country is financially prepared. “All of those cost money,” he said.
To date, developed economies have never fully honored their pledge to provide the developing world with $100 billion in climate finance a year by 2020 — a promise made at a COP meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.
Initially wealthy countries responsible for the most historical emissions were asked to contribute. Now, Jinapor said, the pool of contributors should be wider and should include China, the world’s biggest source of climate-warming gases.
“They should be doing more, but not just China,” he said. “BRICS, all of them I believe, should have a role to play in mobilizing the needed financing to back and promote climate action, particularly climate action as it exclusively relates to Africa,” Jinapor said in reference to the grouping of large emerging market economies including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Still, world leaders — especially in Europe — are hoping Africa takes this moment to industrialize in a fashion that doesn’t harm the climate. Germany and the Netherlands have been plowing money into developing green hydrogen on the continent, as Europe looks to diversify its sources of energy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Barbel Kofler, state secretary to Germany’s economic cooperation minister, said it’s a positive sign that Africa — a continent so badly suffering from climate change already — is showing serious initiative in offering solutions to the global warming crisis.
“That is something new and that hopefully will push the COP in a positive direction,” she said.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
|
(BPT) - Wish-cycling (v.) - the well-intentioned but unfounded belief that something is recyclable when it is not.
Most consumers have the best intentions when it comes to recycling. In recent years, there's been a strong push for a more circular economy, where old materials are repeatedly reused, recycled or repurposed. While recycling rates continue to rise, some bad habits continue to hinder significant growth. In comes 'wish-cycling,' when non-recyclable items are put into the recycling bin in hopes that they can or will be recycled.
The term wish-cycling was first used in 2018 when China launched tighter restrictions (Operation National Sword) on the allowable level of contamination in bales of recyclables. Wish-cycling negatively impacts the recoverability of true recyclables.
There are several reasons why one might be a wish-cycler. One is the infamous 'recycling' symbol. The 'chasing arrows' symbol is often linked to recycling, but the symbol is not always indicative of an object's recyclability. For example, expanded polystyrene - or Styrofoam - often has the chasing arrows triangle on it, but is not readily recyclable. This symbol indicates the type of plastic something is made from and is called a Resin Identification Code.
Another reason is confusion between reuse and recycling. While items such as household appliances, electronics and toys could find a second life if given to a charity or secondhand store, they will cause problems if placed in your recycling bin.
For example, recycling centers across the nation are experiencing a significant increase in fires as a result of improperly recycled electronics, which should never be placed in your recycling bin.
Cordless electronics are one of the leading causes of fires in the recycling stream due to the volatility of their lithium-ion batteries. These batteries can cause fires if subjected to adverse conditions, punctured or smashed. All rechargeable electronic devices must be returned to participating retail stores or dropped off at electronics collection drives for recycling.
The reality of wish-cycling doesn't lie solely on the consumer. It may also be due to varying recycling rules at the state or county level, or what materials individual recycling service providers may accept.
While there isn't a standardized guide for recycling, Republic Services' Recycling Simplified Guide highlights several materials that are accepted everywhere. Paper, cardboard, metal cans and plastic bottles or jugs labeled #1 and #2 are always recyclable. If consumers focus on these 'fundamental recyclables,' the impact of recycling these materials is far greater than most realize. For example, a study by the Aluminum Association confirmed that 92% of an aluminum can is remade into a new can.
Proper recycling, no matter how small, can make a positive difference, and recycling doesn't require much effort if consumers remember a few simple rules. Even if intentions are right, wish-cycling can negatively impact the recycling process and cause valuable recyclables to be sent to the landfill.
If you're unsure whether something can be recycled, it's best to remember, 'When in doubt, throw it out.' Or better yet, 'When in doubt, find out!' Check with your local service provider for specific recycling information for your area. Following a few simple rules can lead to less waste and a more sustainable world.
|
<urn:uuid:5bcfa305-8a0e-4713-bb99-bdd9807b8b3a>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00895.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.928212583065033,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.234375,
"token_count": 695,
"url": "http://stocks.observer-reporter.com/observerreporter/article/brandpoint-2023-11-15-the-woes-of-wish-cycling"
}
|
(BPT) - Wish-cycling (v.) - the well-intentioned but unfounded belief that something is recyclable when it is not.
Most consumers have the best intentions when it comes to recycling. In recent years, there's been a strong push for a more circular economy, where old materials are repeatedly reused, recycled or repurposed. While recycling rates continue to rise, some bad habits continue to hinder significant growth. In comes 'wish-cycling,' when non-recyclable items are put into the recycling bin in hopes that they can or will be recycled.
The term wish-cycling was first used in
|
2018 when China launched tighter restrictions (Operation National Sword) on the allowable level of contamination in bales of recyclables. Wish-cycling negatively impacts the recoverability of true recyclables.
There are several reasons why one might be a wish-cycler. One is the infamous 'recycling' symbol. The 'chasing arrows' symbol is often linked to recycling, but the symbol is not always indicative of an object's recyclability. For example, expanded polystyrene - or Styrofoam - often has the chasing arrows triangle on it, but is not readily recyclable. This symbol indicates the type of plastic something is made from and is called a Resin Identification Code.
Another reason is confusion between reuse and recycling. While items such as household appliances, electronics and toys could find a second life if given to a charity or secondhand store, they will cause problems if placed in your recycling bin.
For example, recycling centers across the nation are experiencing a significant increase in fires as a result of improperly recycled electronics, which should never be placed in your recycling bin.
Cordless electronics are one of the leading causes of fires in the recycling stream due to the volatility of their lithium-ion batteries. These batteries can cause fires if subjected to adverse conditions, punctured or smashed. All rechargeable electronic devices must be returned to participating retail stores or dropped off at electronics collection drives for recycling.
The reality of wish-cycling doesn't lie solely on the consumer. It may also be due to varying recycling rules at the state or county level, or what materials individual recycling service providers may accept.
While there isn't a standardized guide for recycling, Republic Services' Recycling Simplified Guide highlights several materials that are accepted everywhere. Paper, cardboard, metal cans and plastic bottles or jugs labeled #1 and #2 are always recyclable. If consumers focus on these 'fundamental recyclables,' the impact of recycling these materials is far greater than most realize. For example, a study by the Aluminum Association confirmed that 92% of an aluminum can is remade into a new can.
Proper recycling, no matter how small, can make a positive difference, and recycling doesn't require much effort if consumers remember a few simple rules. Even if intentions are right, wish-cycling can negatively impact the recycling process and cause valuable recyclables to be sent to the landfill.
If you're unsure whether something can be recycled, it's best to remember, 'When in doubt, throw it out.' Or better yet, 'When in doubt, find out!' Check with your local service provider for specific recycling information for your area. Following a few simple rules can lead to less waste and a more sustainable world.
|
Jamaal Grant was studying biology at Colby College in Maine when a friend asked if he’d be interested in teaching after graduation.
Grant had planned to go to graduate school and build a career in science, but in need of a job, decided to teach science at a charter school in Boston.
Within two years of teaching, he realized he had met his calling. His students, most of them Black and some lacking a father figure at home, were routinely coming to him for advice on family challenges, career and life choices, and even sports talk. They confided in him.
“I felt like I was needed in that space,” says Grant, now an 8th-grade science teacher in Boston Public Schools. “I was in there and I was like ‘these kids need me.’ I felt that every day was worthwhile.”
Data shows that Black male teachers like Grant are underrepresented in schools across the country.
Just 1.3% of public school teachers were Black men in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Teacher and Principal Survey. That school year, White women made up 61% of public school teachers. Black children, meanwhile, accounted for 15% of public school students in the fall of 2020.
Black men are sorely needed in the teaching field, advocates say, as the nation’s school systems struggle with unfair disciplinary practices, achievement gaps, and political battles over Black history curriculum. Experts say Black male teachers help improve academic outcomes, including graduation rates of Black students.
Making an impact
A new national study published in the peer-reviewed journal Early Education and Development found that children taught by teachers of the same race develop better learning and problem-solving skills by the time they turn seven years old. The impact was felt most in Black and Latino children, the study found.
Black male teachers are role models to young Black students, advocates say.
And a role model is what Johnathan Hines is to his pre-K students at Barack Obama Elementary Magnet School of Technology in Atlanta.
Hines, who previously played professional basketball overseas, has taught pre-K for nine years. He said that many of his students who go on to middle and high school often come back to tell him what a difference he has made in their lives.
For some, he’s been a father figure. Hines says that one of his former students even recalls that he once helped them when they lost their first tooth.
In 2019, Hines became the first Black man to be named Georgia’s Pre-K Teacher of the Year.
He currently serves as an ambassador for the Literacy Lab’s Leading Men Fellowship where he helps the group recruit Black male teachers.
“I want to show other males that it’s possible and that you are needed in this space,” Hines says. “I see every day the impact that I’m making … just by being there and being present.”
Some Black male teachers say their presence in the classroom helps overcome stereotypes children – Black or White – may have of Black men. Some studies have found that Black male teachers are viewed as disciplinarians and are often the ones called on to punish students.
Grant says it is vital for schools to have a diverse array of Black men teaching, including those who are boisterous, reserved, heterosexual and gay.
“Blackness is not a monolith,” Grant said. “It’s important to have a variety of people in front of kids just because it expands their view. A lot of times in inner cities, it’s easy for their world to become small.”
The challenges to recruitment
Some non-profit groups say that the biggest challenges to recruiting more Black men to teach are low pay, racial bias in school systems and retention.
Robert Hendricks III, founder of the He Is Me Institute – a Boston-based group that recruits and trains Black men to become teachers – says that in many cases, school systems have not been welcoming to Black men as students or teachers. Research shows that Black and brown students face harsher discipline than their White classmates. For example, one study has found that Black children are referred to law enforcement and arrested at higher rates than White children for school-related incidents.
Hendricks says that some Black male teachers face these same racial biases, including higher scrutiny from non-Black school officials and the criminalization of their actions.
“The way that teachers and school leaders respond to Black boys is not very different from the way they respond to Black male teachers,” Hendricks says. “The misunderstanding, the misrepresentation, the inability to communicate, all of that is really similar.”
Hendricks says he believes more Black men would pursue teaching if school environments were more equitable and provided the support Black men need to succeed as students and professionals. The pay is also a concern for some, he says. The average salary for a public school teacher nationally is about $65,000.
“We are telling men unfairly that they are supposed to be the breadwinner,” Hendricks says. “But then a profession like teaching doesn’t give them the opportunity to financially provide for their families.”
Sharif El-Mekki, founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Black Educator Development, says in order to create a pipeline of Black male teachers, recruitment and clinical experience must start at an earlier age.
El-Mekki’s organization provides year-round mentorship, professional development, and teaching experience for Black high school and college students interested in teaching careers.
He also says many Black male students are not being encouraged by their school leaders to pursue teaching. So when education groups try to recruit them after college, many aren’t interested in the field.
“Black boys … they often receive messages that you don’t belong, you’re a criminal you’re unintelligent, you’re a problem here,” El-Mekki says. “They are actually being devalued in the education system, so how would they imagine being teachers?”
For those Black men who do become teachers, El-Mekki says he wants to see schools doing more to retain them.
Consider, “how are you supporting them and how would they say they are being supported?” El-Mekki says. “Create retention plans that are informed by Black men and we are much more likely to be successful in recruiting more Black men to the profession.”
|
<urn:uuid:e78e6982-858c-454a-ac75-3a8458ad54e1>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476464.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304165127-20240304195127-00599.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9821022748947144,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.3125,
"token_count": 1372,
"url": "https://lite.cnn.com/2023/03/19/us/black-male-teachers-needed-reaj"
}
|
Jamaal Grant was studying biology at Colby College in Maine when a friend asked if he’d be interested in teaching after graduation.
Grant had planned to go to graduate school and build a career in science, but in need of a job, decided to teach science at a charter school in Boston.
Within two years of teaching, he realized he had met his calling. His students, most of them Black and some lacking a father figure at home, were routinely coming to him for advice on family challenges, career and life choices, and even sports talk. They confided in him.
“I felt like I was needed in that space,” says
|
Grant, now an 8th-grade science teacher in Boston Public Schools. “I was in there and I was like ‘these kids need me.’ I felt that every day was worthwhile.”
Data shows that Black male teachers like Grant are underrepresented in schools across the country.
Just 1.3% of public school teachers were Black men in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Teacher and Principal Survey. That school year, White women made up 61% of public school teachers. Black children, meanwhile, accounted for 15% of public school students in the fall of 2020.
Black men are sorely needed in the teaching field, advocates say, as the nation’s school systems struggle with unfair disciplinary practices, achievement gaps, and political battles over Black history curriculum. Experts say Black male teachers help improve academic outcomes, including graduation rates of Black students.
Making an impact
A new national study published in the peer-reviewed journal Early Education and Development found that children taught by teachers of the same race develop better learning and problem-solving skills by the time they turn seven years old. The impact was felt most in Black and Latino children, the study found.
Black male teachers are role models to young Black students, advocates say.
And a role model is what Johnathan Hines is to his pre-K students at Barack Obama Elementary Magnet School of Technology in Atlanta.
Hines, who previously played professional basketball overseas, has taught pre-K for nine years. He said that many of his students who go on to middle and high school often come back to tell him what a difference he has made in their lives.
For some, he’s been a father figure. Hines says that one of his former students even recalls that he once helped them when they lost their first tooth.
In 2019, Hines became the first Black man to be named Georgia’s Pre-K Teacher of the Year.
He currently serves as an ambassador for the Literacy Lab’s Leading Men Fellowship where he helps the group recruit Black male teachers.
“I want to show other males that it’s possible and that you are needed in this space,” Hines says. “I see every day the impact that I’m making … just by being there and being present.”
Some Black male teachers say their presence in the classroom helps overcome stereotypes children – Black or White – may have of Black men. Some studies have found that Black male teachers are viewed as disciplinarians and are often the ones called on to punish students.
Grant says it is vital for schools to have a diverse array of Black men teaching, including those who are boisterous, reserved, heterosexual and gay.
“Blackness is not a monolith,” Grant said. “It’s important to have a variety of people in front of kids just because it expands their view. A lot of times in inner cities, it’s easy for their world to become small.”
The challenges to recruitment
Some non-profit groups say that the biggest challenges to recruiting more Black men to teach are low pay, racial bias in school systems and retention.
Robert Hendricks III, founder of the He Is Me Institute – a Boston-based group that recruits and trains Black men to become teachers – says that in many cases, school systems have not been welcoming to Black men as students or teachers. Research shows that Black and brown students face harsher discipline than their White classmates. For example, one study has found that Black children are referred to law enforcement and arrested at higher rates than White children for school-related incidents.
Hendricks says that some Black male teachers face these same racial biases, including higher scrutiny from non-Black school officials and the criminalization of their actions.
“The way that teachers and school leaders respond to Black boys is not very different from the way they respond to Black male teachers,” Hendricks says. “The misunderstanding, the misrepresentation, the inability to communicate, all of that is really similar.”
Hendricks says he believes more Black men would pursue teaching if school environments were more equitable and provided the support Black men need to succeed as students and professionals. The pay is also a concern for some, he says. The average salary for a public school teacher nationally is about $65,000.
“We are telling men unfairly that they are supposed to be the breadwinner,” Hendricks says. “But then a profession like teaching doesn’t give them the opportunity to financially provide for their families.”
Sharif El-Mekki, founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Black Educator Development, says in order to create a pipeline of Black male teachers, recruitment and clinical experience must start at an earlier age.
El-Mekki’s organization provides year-round mentorship, professional development, and teaching experience for Black high school and college students interested in teaching careers.
He also says many Black male students are not being encouraged by their school leaders to pursue teaching. So when education groups try to recruit them after college, many aren’t interested in the field.
“Black boys … they often receive messages that you don’t belong, you’re a criminal you’re unintelligent, you’re a problem here,” El-Mekki says. “They are actually being devalued in the education system, so how would they imagine being teachers?”
For those Black men who do become teachers, El-Mekki says he wants to see schools doing more to retain them.
Consider, “how are you supporting them and how would they say they are being supported?” El-Mekki says. “Create retention plans that are informed by Black men and we are much more likely to be successful in recruiting more Black men to the profession.”
|
That technology allowed instruction to continue for many as COVID shuttered schools is no longer surprising—although a mere two decades ago it would have passed for science fiction.
What’s surprised many, however, is how sticky the education technology has become as schools have reopened.
In a recent piece for The74, for example, Conor Williams describes how after having visited nearly 100 classrooms in three states over six months, digital learning is everywhere. “I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room,” Williams wrote.
One effect of the piece is to try and describe a sea change in America’s schools.
Yet has the digital technology really changed the DNA of schools themselves?
From the quoted line above, it’s not clear that it has. It seems that the basic mechanics of schools are still in place: age-graded classrooms, a “front” of the room, a teacher conducting whole-class instruction, a technology that has replaced the proverbial blackboard displaying information to the whole class.
A caveat. One hundred classrooms isn’t much of a sample size. And I certainly don’t know everything that’s taking place in the 3-million-plus classrooms across the country. I’m sure that many schools are blending learning—using online learning in brick-and-mortar schools where students have some element of control over the time, place, path, or pace of their learning. That’s a phenomenon that Heather Staker and I (along with many others) wrote extensively about over a decade ago. There are traces of some of that in Williams’ piece.
But I’ll also bet that most are (in many cases simultaneously) doing what Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and I called “cramming” technology into traditional classrooms.
In Disrupting Class, we wrote that when most organizations (in all sectors) confront a new technology, their initial instinct is to try and deploy it to do the things for which their existing model is already optimized. We argued that schools have been no different.
A central reason why technology isn’t a silver bullet in education is that when it’s crammed into an existing model, at its best it can only serve as an additional resource to bolster that model’s existing processes and priorities. That means it can make an operation more efficient or allow it to take on additional tasks, but it can’t reinvent the model in and of itself. It also means that in many cases it will conflict with the organization’s processes and priorities and therefore go largely unused.
That’s why we saw so many uninspiring uses of Zoom, Google Classroom, and other technologies during COVID’s remote schooling phase. Schools just used the technology to reinforce their existing processes and priorities, rather than rethink the model itself. Here’s a bet that we’ll see some similar things occur with AI now.
The reality of course is that this phenomenon has been going on well before COVID hit. COVID simply accelerated it.
In Disrupting Class, we predicted originally that by the fall of 2019, 50 percent of all high school courses would be powered by computer-based learning.
Indeed, by the spring of 2019, according to a Digital Promise survey, 35 percent of teachers said they used education technology daily, and another 23 percent said they used it most days. That suggested that more than half of the teachers polled use technology frequently in the classroom.
As Williams suggests, that number has likely been accelerated. But it likely hasn’t changed the “grammar of schooling,” as David Tyack and Larry Cuban memorably described the structure of America’s schools and classrooms.
Instead we remain stuck in a hybrid—a natural phase that occurs in many industries when they are in the middle of a disruptive transformation. A hybrid, as Clayton Christensen, Heather Staker, and I wrote, “is a combination of the new, disruptive technology with the old technology and represents a sustaining innovation relative to the old technology.”
And there is something strange about them. As Jal Mehta wrote, “These combinations are not the best of both worlds. At a fundamental level, they are self-contradictory.”
I take Mehta’s point even as, in my view, that might be an exaggeration. There have been real positives that have emerged from blended learning. But either way it points to a more fundamental sets of observations.
As we predicted in Disrupting Class:
“Most people who develop online learning products… will attempt to commercialize them within the [existing] system… for very rational reasons. Complex software, like textbooks, … is also scale-intensive because of the high fixed costs incurred in the development phase (the scale economics are particularly steep because software generates virtually no costs in replication and distribution). Integrated software, more easily than textbooks, can incorporate pathways for different types of learners, as methods for teaching in these different ways become understood. This increases the size and complexity of the software, but the student does not have to deal with this increased complexity directly. Programmers can build multiple paths into a program to adjust for a student’s progression; students need not see whole swaths of the software that are not relevant to their personal pathway.
“That’s the good news. Now the bad. This technology will be expensive, and there are massive entry barriers. School districts’ funding and reputations hinge upon how students do on standardized exams. Although online learning tools can build in real-time assessments, these are unlikely to replace the standardized exams that are mainstays of the existing system anytime soon. …
“There are other mandates and regulations required by district, state, and federal policies that further define—both implicitly and explicitly—what computer-based technology must do. These policies will confine this software within the traditionally defined subject disciplines”—and, we could have added, much else of the conventional structures of schooling.
To say that this is what has happened would qualify as an understatement.
As we continued:
“The evidence on this topic is overwhelming in our research on disruptive innovation. When disruptive innovators target nonconsumption for their foothold applications, they have a good chance of succeeding. But if those applications are then ensconced within a value network—a chain from suppliers to customers whose definitions of quality and profitability were honed in the established way of doing things—the disruption won’t fly unless it conforms to the rest of the players’ needs and expectations. That typically limits the scope of the innovation. And it is expensive. It is for these reasons that disruptive growth is truly unleashed only when the new technology is taken to the market not only through a disruptive business model, but also by utilizing a disruptive value network—from suppliers through distributors—whose economics are consonant with the disruption.”
If you want more on this, then see my recent piece here on so-called system transformation—in which I observe that true system “transformation” more typically happens when systems disrupt systems.
We got all this right in Disrupting Class. We even got the prediction largely right on the growth of digital learning. But one of the big things we got wrong in Disrupting Class was when we then fell prey to magical thinking. Here’s my mea culpa.
In the book we described at length about how new platforms would emerge for K–12 students outside of the reach of traditional classrooms, textbooks, and software. These platforms would be facilitated networks in which students, teachers, and parents connected to create modules to teach and learn concepts in student-centered ways. In so doing, these platforms would avoid the fate of the vast numbers of school reformers and philanthropists who have bloodied themselves by bashing the barriers that bar change in the existing system.
In many ways, you can look at YouTube as representing just this sort of a platform. As one CTO of a non-education company said to me, “When my teen wants to learn, he just jumps on YouTube.”
We went on to write: “We suspect, however, that when disruptive innovators begin forming facilitated networks through which professionals and amateurs—students, parents, and teachers—circumvent the existing value chain and instead market their products directly to each other as described above, the balance of power in education will shift.”
But rather than these tools sucking users into them—as happens in markets where disruption is afoot—in a whirlwind of wishful thinking we wrote that schools would somehow adopt them to usher in a world of user-generated, student-centered learning. And we pegged the S-curve adoption of digital learning tools to this transformation, even though the two phenomenon are disconnected and the data underlying the S-curve prediction was likely filled with many building digital learning offerings for traditional schools.
As Williams’ piece suggests, although we wrote just what would happen, we were guilty of a leap of faith that hoped that schools could simply make the jump and fundamentally change the grammar of schooling in the process. Yet the rules, restrictions, regulations, processes, priorities, revenue formulae, and so on haven’t been magically swept aside—nor should we expect them to be.
If folks seriously want a new education system, we’re going to have to be far more patient. And keep building from the outside.
This isn’t to say that the improvements—the hybrid innovations—don’t matter. Sustaining innovations are critical for those who remain in the mainstream system—and may stay there as disruption remains difficult in a system where schooling feels free and is compulsory.
But we shouldn’t put all of our faith on that being enough if transformation is what we truly need.
|
<urn:uuid:420173da-3aa3-46fd-b9da-164ad38635da>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510412.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20230928130936-20230928160936-00686.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9626928567886353,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.90625,
"token_count": 2066,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2023/05/30/post-covid-cramming-edtech-in-schools-goes-wild/"
}
|
That technology allowed instruction to continue for many as COVID shuttered schools is no longer surprising—although a mere two decades ago it would have passed for science fiction.
What’s surprised many, however, is how sticky the education technology has become as schools have reopened.
In a recent piece for The74, for example, Conor Williams describes how after having visited nearly 100 classrooms in three states over six months, digital learning is everywhere. “I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room,” Williams wrote.
One effect of the piece is to try and describe a
|
sea change in America’s schools.
Yet has the digital technology really changed the DNA of schools themselves?
From the quoted line above, it’s not clear that it has. It seems that the basic mechanics of schools are still in place: age-graded classrooms, a “front” of the room, a teacher conducting whole-class instruction, a technology that has replaced the proverbial blackboard displaying information to the whole class.
A caveat. One hundred classrooms isn’t much of a sample size. And I certainly don’t know everything that’s taking place in the 3-million-plus classrooms across the country. I’m sure that many schools are blending learning—using online learning in brick-and-mortar schools where students have some element of control over the time, place, path, or pace of their learning. That’s a phenomenon that Heather Staker and I (along with many others) wrote extensively about over a decade ago. There are traces of some of that in Williams’ piece.
But I’ll also bet that most are (in many cases simultaneously) doing what Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and I called “cramming” technology into traditional classrooms.
In Disrupting Class, we wrote that when most organizations (in all sectors) confront a new technology, their initial instinct is to try and deploy it to do the things for which their existing model is already optimized. We argued that schools have been no different.
A central reason why technology isn’t a silver bullet in education is that when it’s crammed into an existing model, at its best it can only serve as an additional resource to bolster that model’s existing processes and priorities. That means it can make an operation more efficient or allow it to take on additional tasks, but it can’t reinvent the model in and of itself. It also means that in many cases it will conflict with the organization’s processes and priorities and therefore go largely unused.
That’s why we saw so many uninspiring uses of Zoom, Google Classroom, and other technologies during COVID’s remote schooling phase. Schools just used the technology to reinforce their existing processes and priorities, rather than rethink the model itself. Here’s a bet that we’ll see some similar things occur with AI now.
The reality of course is that this phenomenon has been going on well before COVID hit. COVID simply accelerated it.
In Disrupting Class, we predicted originally that by the fall of 2019, 50 percent of all high school courses would be powered by computer-based learning.
Indeed, by the spring of 2019, according to a Digital Promise survey, 35 percent of teachers said they used education technology daily, and another 23 percent said they used it most days. That suggested that more than half of the teachers polled use technology frequently in the classroom.
As Williams suggests, that number has likely been accelerated. But it likely hasn’t changed the “grammar of schooling,” as David Tyack and Larry Cuban memorably described the structure of America’s schools and classrooms.
Instead we remain stuck in a hybrid—a natural phase that occurs in many industries when they are in the middle of a disruptive transformation. A hybrid, as Clayton Christensen, Heather Staker, and I wrote, “is a combination of the new, disruptive technology with the old technology and represents a sustaining innovation relative to the old technology.”
And there is something strange about them. As Jal Mehta wrote, “These combinations are not the best of both worlds. At a fundamental level, they are self-contradictory.”
I take Mehta’s point even as, in my view, that might be an exaggeration. There have been real positives that have emerged from blended learning. But either way it points to a more fundamental sets of observations.
As we predicted in Disrupting Class:
“Most people who develop online learning products… will attempt to commercialize them within the [existing] system… for very rational reasons. Complex software, like textbooks, … is also scale-intensive because of the high fixed costs incurred in the development phase (the scale economics are particularly steep because software generates virtually no costs in replication and distribution). Integrated software, more easily than textbooks, can incorporate pathways for different types of learners, as methods for teaching in these different ways become understood. This increases the size and complexity of the software, but the student does not have to deal with this increased complexity directly. Programmers can build multiple paths into a program to adjust for a student’s progression; students need not see whole swaths of the software that are not relevant to their personal pathway.
“That’s the good news. Now the bad. This technology will be expensive, and there are massive entry barriers. School districts’ funding and reputations hinge upon how students do on standardized exams. Although online learning tools can build in real-time assessments, these are unlikely to replace the standardized exams that are mainstays of the existing system anytime soon. …
“There are other mandates and regulations required by district, state, and federal policies that further define—both implicitly and explicitly—what computer-based technology must do. These policies will confine this software within the traditionally defined subject disciplines”—and, we could have added, much else of the conventional structures of schooling.
To say that this is what has happened would qualify as an understatement.
As we continued:
“The evidence on this topic is overwhelming in our research on disruptive innovation. When disruptive innovators target nonconsumption for their foothold applications, they have a good chance of succeeding. But if those applications are then ensconced within a value network—a chain from suppliers to customers whose definitions of quality and profitability were honed in the established way of doing things—the disruption won’t fly unless it conforms to the rest of the players’ needs and expectations. That typically limits the scope of the innovation. And it is expensive. It is for these reasons that disruptive growth is truly unleashed only when the new technology is taken to the market not only through a disruptive business model, but also by utilizing a disruptive value network—from suppliers through distributors—whose economics are consonant with the disruption.”
If you want more on this, then see my recent piece here on so-called system transformation—in which I observe that true system “transformation” more typically happens when systems disrupt systems.
We got all this right in Disrupting Class. We even got the prediction largely right on the growth of digital learning. But one of the big things we got wrong in Disrupting Class was when we then fell prey to magical thinking. Here’s my mea culpa.
In the book we described at length about how new platforms would emerge for K–12 students outside of the reach of traditional classrooms, textbooks, and software. These platforms would be facilitated networks in which students, teachers, and parents connected to create modules to teach and learn concepts in student-centered ways. In so doing, these platforms would avoid the fate of the vast numbers of school reformers and philanthropists who have bloodied themselves by bashing the barriers that bar change in the existing system.
In many ways, you can look at YouTube as representing just this sort of a platform. As one CTO of a non-education company said to me, “When my teen wants to learn, he just jumps on YouTube.”
We went on to write: “We suspect, however, that when disruptive innovators begin forming facilitated networks through which professionals and amateurs—students, parents, and teachers—circumvent the existing value chain and instead market their products directly to each other as described above, the balance of power in education will shift.”
But rather than these tools sucking users into them—as happens in markets where disruption is afoot—in a whirlwind of wishful thinking we wrote that schools would somehow adopt them to usher in a world of user-generated, student-centered learning. And we pegged the S-curve adoption of digital learning tools to this transformation, even though the two phenomenon are disconnected and the data underlying the S-curve prediction was likely filled with many building digital learning offerings for traditional schools.
As Williams’ piece suggests, although we wrote just what would happen, we were guilty of a leap of faith that hoped that schools could simply make the jump and fundamentally change the grammar of schooling in the process. Yet the rules, restrictions, regulations, processes, priorities, revenue formulae, and so on haven’t been magically swept aside—nor should we expect them to be.
If folks seriously want a new education system, we’re going to have to be far more patient. And keep building from the outside.
This isn’t to say that the improvements—the hybrid innovations—don’t matter. Sustaining innovations are critical for those who remain in the mainstream system—and may stay there as disruption remains difficult in a system where schooling feels free and is compulsory.
But we shouldn’t put all of our faith on that being enough if transformation is what we truly need.
|
How to make 'Forever Chemicals' a thing of the past in New York | Opinion
Thanks to the combined efforts of state lawmakers, the governor and the private sector, New York is on the cusp a nation-leading effort to bring an end to so-called “forever chemicals.”
With an assist from the federal government, the Empire State has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to forever rid its water supplies of these toxic chemicals. It’s critical that we seize this opportunity and make the most of it. For this effort to succeed, public and private partners must collaborate.
For decades, a class of fluorinated organic compounds known collectively as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances have been used to make a wide range of modern products, including food packaging, nonstick cookware and stain-resistant clothing and fabrics, as well as in firefighting foams at airports and military bases.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has connected a number of health effects with PFAS exposure, including cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility, and increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease.
Because PFAS compounds are mobile in the environment and are very stable and extremely resistant to natural breakdown, they can impact local surface water, groundwater, and potentially human health. A 2015 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the National Research Council found PFAS in 97% of human blood samples collected across the United States.
PFAS have been detected in communities across New York state, leading to the establishment of legal settlements and other financial mechanisms to fund cleanup projects and protect residents. These are important steps in the right direction, but much more needs to happen to truly mitigate the potential harm PFAS can inflict on our communities.
For decades, the problem appeared unsolvable, with “forever chemicals” posing a seemingly endless threat to countless communities across New York and the nation.
But that is changing. Through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $10 billion is available to upgrade municipal drinking water treatment plants for those impacted by PFAS.
In addition, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation this past summer reported significant progress in tracking and assessing threats posed by chemicals leaking into water sources from inactive landfills.
And in November 2022, New York voters approved a $4.2 billion Environmental Bond Act that will direct billions more in state funds to water quality improvements. And, in December, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation banning the sale of clothing with PFAS in New York by the end of this year.
In her 2023 State of the State Address, Governor Hochul further pledged to establish “a new program to offer financial assistance to municipalities to investigate sources of contamination and remediate contaminated sites over the next five years.”
None of this much-needed progress to protect communities and residents statewide will be possible without partnering with the private sector. In recent years, my company, Parsons, has expanded its environmental research, development, and treatability study lab in Syracuse, which has focused on and invested in the treatment of water contaminants for more than three decades including emerging contaminants like PFAS. The research conducted at this lab is producing technological breakthroughs that will accelerate the fight to detect, address, treat, and eventually eliminate forever chemicals across the state, nation, and globe.
Parsons is also working with the DEC to support the Inactive Landfill Initiative. This $23 million, first-of-its-kind program addresses critical drinking water contamination concerns associated with emerging contaminants from inactive landfills, including PFAS compounds and other chemicals.
Partnerships like these are how we eradicate the threat posed by forever chemicals once and for all. Federal agencies, Congress, state governments and the private sector must take a page from New York’s playbook and work in lockstep to address this threat. Our combined talents and resources can have a far greater impact than when we act alone.
The long-term health and safety of New Yorkers is riding on our success. With smart decisions, adequate resources, innovative solutions, and smart investments by the state and companies like Parsons, we can take advantage of this historic opportunity to show that nothing is forever — not even “forever chemicals” – and to set an example for other states to follow.
Dan Griffiths is a senior project manager in charge of Parson's contaminated site investigation and restoration program.
|
<urn:uuid:a39af308-4eb9-494e-bd9e-38cf4c1154c7>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296948756.99/warc/CC-MAIN-20230328011555-20230328041555-00634.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9512843489646912,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.59375,
"token_count": 911,
"url": "https://www.pressconnects.com/story/opinion/2023/02/13/ny-forever-chemicals-plans-must-me-made/69894031007/"
}
|
How to make 'Forever Chemicals' a thing of the past in New York | Opinion
Thanks to the combined efforts of state lawmakers, the governor and the private sector, New York is on the cusp a nation-leading effort to bring an end to so-called “forever chemicals.”
With an assist from the federal government, the Empire State has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to forever rid its water supplies of these toxic chemicals. It’s critical that we seize this opportunity and make the most of it. For this effort to succeed, public and private partners must collaborate.
For decades, a class of fluorinated organic compounds known
|
collectively as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances have been used to make a wide range of modern products, including food packaging, nonstick cookware and stain-resistant clothing and fabrics, as well as in firefighting foams at airports and military bases.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has connected a number of health effects with PFAS exposure, including cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility, and increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease.
Because PFAS compounds are mobile in the environment and are very stable and extremely resistant to natural breakdown, they can impact local surface water, groundwater, and potentially human health. A 2015 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the National Research Council found PFAS in 97% of human blood samples collected across the United States.
PFAS have been detected in communities across New York state, leading to the establishment of legal settlements and other financial mechanisms to fund cleanup projects and protect residents. These are important steps in the right direction, but much more needs to happen to truly mitigate the potential harm PFAS can inflict on our communities.
For decades, the problem appeared unsolvable, with “forever chemicals” posing a seemingly endless threat to countless communities across New York and the nation.
But that is changing. Through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $10 billion is available to upgrade municipal drinking water treatment plants for those impacted by PFAS.
In addition, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation this past summer reported significant progress in tracking and assessing threats posed by chemicals leaking into water sources from inactive landfills.
And in November 2022, New York voters approved a $4.2 billion Environmental Bond Act that will direct billions more in state funds to water quality improvements. And, in December, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation banning the sale of clothing with PFAS in New York by the end of this year.
In her 2023 State of the State Address, Governor Hochul further pledged to establish “a new program to offer financial assistance to municipalities to investigate sources of contamination and remediate contaminated sites over the next five years.”
None of this much-needed progress to protect communities and residents statewide will be possible without partnering with the private sector. In recent years, my company, Parsons, has expanded its environmental research, development, and treatability study lab in Syracuse, which has focused on and invested in the treatment of water contaminants for more than three decades including emerging contaminants like PFAS. The research conducted at this lab is producing technological breakthroughs that will accelerate the fight to detect, address, treat, and eventually eliminate forever chemicals across the state, nation, and globe.
Parsons is also working with the DEC to support the Inactive Landfill Initiative. This $23 million, first-of-its-kind program addresses critical drinking water contamination concerns associated with emerging contaminants from inactive landfills, including PFAS compounds and other chemicals.
Partnerships like these are how we eradicate the threat posed by forever chemicals once and for all. Federal agencies, Congress, state governments and the private sector must take a page from New York’s playbook and work in lockstep to address this threat. Our combined talents and resources can have a far greater impact than when we act alone.
The long-term health and safety of New Yorkers is riding on our success. With smart decisions, adequate resources, innovative solutions, and smart investments by the state and companies like Parsons, we can take advantage of this historic opportunity to show that nothing is forever — not even “forever chemicals” – and to set an example for other states to follow.
Dan Griffiths is a senior project manager in charge of Parson's contaminated site investigation and restoration program.
|
Twin reports released Thursday by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the last nine years were the hottest nine on record, with 2022 being the warmest La Niña year ever recorded.
That’s significant, scientists said, since the La Niña phenomenon typically has a cooling effect on global temperatures.
NASA also reported that 2022 was the fifth-warmest year on record for the entire planet, echoing similar findings from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which CNN reported earlier this week.
“In the pattern of climate change, the long-term trends, we’re seeing this overall warming pretty much everywhere, with perhaps an exception in the deepest southern oceans around Antarctica,” Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, told CNN.
“And unfortunately, we’re predicting that 2023 will actually be warmer than 2022,” he said.
Planet-warming fossil fuel emissions have pushed the planet’s average temperature to 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is nearly 75% of the way to the 1.5-degree threshold scientists warn it should stay under.
These aren’t small numbers, Schmidt said.
Even at 1.1 degrees, 2022 made abundantly clear the dangers of a warming planet that many are not prepared for, including a deadly heat wave that seared much of Europe, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, a devastating hurricane in Florida, and historic droughts that are draining freshwater supply in many parts of the globe.
“What we’re predicting – if we were to burn all the fossil fuels that we can – it could get as warm, by the end of the century, as the Ice Age was cold,” Schmidt said.
The NOAA analysis also noted that ocean temperatures were at a record high in 2022, surpassing the previous record set in 2021. The last four years have been the warmest four on record for the planet’s oceans.
Additionally, researchers found that the extent of Antarctic sea ice was at a near-record low in 2022, second only to 1987 with a smaller annual sea ice extent – an alarming development that threatens the region’s plants and animals, including its iconic penguins.
From slashing the use of fossil fuels to retrofitting buildings to be more climate-efficient, Schmidt said the world already has the proper tools in place to address the worst of the climate crisis. It’s just a matter of using them fast enough.
“It’s clear that people are taking this more seriously than they were a decade ago,” he said. “But let’s not sugarcoat how big a challenge this is. It’s not a challenge for a week or a year or a decade. It’s going to be the challenge of the century.”
|
<urn:uuid:ba1a15af-8735-4a71-bda0-bdbc596eb3ec>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296943625.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20230321033306-20230321063306-00064.warc.gz",
"int_score": 4,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9458506107330322,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.703125,
"token_count": 597,
"url": "https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/us/2022-warmest-la-nina-year-climate/index.html"
}
|
Twin reports released Thursday by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found the last nine years were the hottest nine on record, with 2022 being the warmest La Niña year ever recorded.
That’s significant, scientists said, since the La Niña phenomenon typically has a cooling effect on global temperatures.
NASA also reported that 2022 was the fifth-warmest year on record for the entire planet, echoing similar findings from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which CNN reported earlier this week.
“In the pattern of climate change, the long-term trends
|
, we’re seeing this overall warming pretty much everywhere, with perhaps an exception in the deepest southern oceans around Antarctica,” Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, told CNN.
“And unfortunately, we’re predicting that 2023 will actually be warmer than 2022,” he said.
Planet-warming fossil fuel emissions have pushed the planet’s average temperature to 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is nearly 75% of the way to the 1.5-degree threshold scientists warn it should stay under.
These aren’t small numbers, Schmidt said.
Even at 1.1 degrees, 2022 made abundantly clear the dangers of a warming planet that many are not prepared for, including a deadly heat wave that seared much of Europe, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, a devastating hurricane in Florida, and historic droughts that are draining freshwater supply in many parts of the globe.
“What we’re predicting – if we were to burn all the fossil fuels that we can – it could get as warm, by the end of the century, as the Ice Age was cold,” Schmidt said.
The NOAA analysis also noted that ocean temperatures were at a record high in 2022, surpassing the previous record set in 2021. The last four years have been the warmest four on record for the planet’s oceans.
Additionally, researchers found that the extent of Antarctic sea ice was at a near-record low in 2022, second only to 1987 with a smaller annual sea ice extent – an alarming development that threatens the region’s plants and animals, including its iconic penguins.
From slashing the use of fossil fuels to retrofitting buildings to be more climate-efficient, Schmidt said the world already has the proper tools in place to address the worst of the climate crisis. It’s just a matter of using them fast enough.
“It’s clear that people are taking this more seriously than they were a decade ago,” he said. “But let’s not sugarcoat how big a challenge this is. It’s not a challenge for a week or a year or a decade. It’s going to be the challenge of the century.”
|
Jesus: The Light of the World
The Feast of Tabernacles is often described as the most joyful of the great Jewish holidays. It is known as the “Season of our Joy,” and worshipers are actually commanded to rejoice during this holiday. The festival consists of festive music, and holiday food, and special decorations, and the lighting of candles. At the time of Jesus, festivities in and around the temple included the waving of palm branches while chanting “Hosanna” to God, and a procession of people following the priest in bringing water from the Pool of Siloam to the altar in the temple. Each evening of the Feast included special festivities called Simchat Bet HaShoevah, meaning “Happiness of the House of the Water-Drawing.” During these festivities, four towering menorahs (candelabras) were lit, and the priests put on a “light show,” performing “torch dances” throughout the night while the Levites sang and played music. It was said that the blaze of the torches was so bright that every courtyard in Jerusalem was lit by their brilliance all through the nights of the Festival. The holiday was so filled with joy that rabbis commented, “He who has not seen the rejoicing at the Simchat Bet HaShoevah has never seen rejoicing in his life.”
The Feast of Tabernacles was a yearly reminder and celebration of how God took care of the Jewish people during the many years they traveled through the desert. During the Festival, the people are to live in tabernacles—or make-shift tents—to remind them of how their ancestors lived during their years in the desert.
During their ancestors’ years in the desert, a cloud went before them in the day and a pillar of fire in the night. That’s what the torches in the temple represented.
The Festival was also a Thanksgiving celebration, taking place at the end of the harvest season, just before the winter rains arrived, which is why they ceremonially brought water from the pool of Siloam to the altar in the temple, in anticipation of and in prayer for the rains that God would send to them for the upcoming year.
The Festival also looked forward to the coming of the Messiah. The bright lights throughout the night reminded the people of Zechariah 14:7 which prophecies that when the Messiah comes, “There shall be continuous day …not day and not night, for at evening time there shall be light.” When the people waved palm branches and shouted “Hosanna”—literally, “Please save us—they were looking forward to the rescue the Messiah would bring to them.
The day after the Feast of Tabernacles concluded, Jesus stood in the temple courts and announced, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). In essence, Jesus was declaring to the people, “Though the Festival is over, I am still here! Though the torches have been extinguished, I am with you. And if you follow me, you will always have the light of life!”
According to Ronald Nikkel, President Emeritus of Prison Fellowship, “Charles Colson and several other Christian leaders once met with President Borja of Ecuador to discuss Prison Fellowship International’s ministry in Ecuadorian penitentiaries. They had no sooner been seated…and begun to speak when the President interrupted the conversation with a story—the story of his own imprisonment years before being elected to the presidency. He had been involved in the struggle for democracy in Ecuador. The military cracked down, and he was arrested. Without trial, they threw him into a cold dungeon with no light and no window. No one knew where he was, and for three days he endured the solitary fear and darkness that can drive a person mad. Just when the situation seemed unbearable, the huge steel door opened, and someone crept into the darkness. Borja heard the person working on something in the opposite corner. Then the figure crept out, closed the door, and disappeared. Minutes later the room suddenly blazed with light. Someone, perhaps taking his life into his hands, had connected electricity to the broken light fixture. The darkness of the dungeon was gone. ‘From that moment,’ explained President Borja, ‘my imprisonment had meaning because at least I could see.”
Nikkel adds, “Even more important than the light we see with our eyes is the light that Christ brings to our hearts, giving our lives the understanding and meaning only he can give.”
|
<urn:uuid:24d2be08-55ce-441c-bdbe-f012906ac9d3>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296948871.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20230328201715-20230328231715-00764.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9788647890090942,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.125,
"token_count": 971,
"url": "https://tomtrippblog.wordpress.com/2023/02/14/jesus-the-light-of-the-world/"
}
|
Jesus: The Light of the World
The Feast of Tabernacles is often described as the most joyful of the great Jewish holidays. It is known as the “Season of our Joy,” and worshipers are actually commanded to rejoice during this holiday. The festival consists of festive music, and holiday food, and special decorations, and the lighting of candles. At the time of Jesus, festivities in and around the temple included the waving of palm branches while chanting “Hosanna” to God, and a procession of people following the priest in bringing water from the Pool of Siloam to the altar in the
|
temple. Each evening of the Feast included special festivities called Simchat Bet HaShoevah, meaning “Happiness of the House of the Water-Drawing.” During these festivities, four towering menorahs (candelabras) were lit, and the priests put on a “light show,” performing “torch dances” throughout the night while the Levites sang and played music. It was said that the blaze of the torches was so bright that every courtyard in Jerusalem was lit by their brilliance all through the nights of the Festival. The holiday was so filled with joy that rabbis commented, “He who has not seen the rejoicing at the Simchat Bet HaShoevah has never seen rejoicing in his life.”
The Feast of Tabernacles was a yearly reminder and celebration of how God took care of the Jewish people during the many years they traveled through the desert. During the Festival, the people are to live in tabernacles—or make-shift tents—to remind them of how their ancestors lived during their years in the desert.
During their ancestors’ years in the desert, a cloud went before them in the day and a pillar of fire in the night. That’s what the torches in the temple represented.
The Festival was also a Thanksgiving celebration, taking place at the end of the harvest season, just before the winter rains arrived, which is why they ceremonially brought water from the pool of Siloam to the altar in the temple, in anticipation of and in prayer for the rains that God would send to them for the upcoming year.
The Festival also looked forward to the coming of the Messiah. The bright lights throughout the night reminded the people of Zechariah 14:7 which prophecies that when the Messiah comes, “There shall be continuous day …not day and not night, for at evening time there shall be light.” When the people waved palm branches and shouted “Hosanna”—literally, “Please save us—they were looking forward to the rescue the Messiah would bring to them.
The day after the Feast of Tabernacles concluded, Jesus stood in the temple courts and announced, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). In essence, Jesus was declaring to the people, “Though the Festival is over, I am still here! Though the torches have been extinguished, I am with you. And if you follow me, you will always have the light of life!”
According to Ronald Nikkel, President Emeritus of Prison Fellowship, “Charles Colson and several other Christian leaders once met with President Borja of Ecuador to discuss Prison Fellowship International’s ministry in Ecuadorian penitentiaries. They had no sooner been seated…and begun to speak when the President interrupted the conversation with a story—the story of his own imprisonment years before being elected to the presidency. He had been involved in the struggle for democracy in Ecuador. The military cracked down, and he was arrested. Without trial, they threw him into a cold dungeon with no light and no window. No one knew where he was, and for three days he endured the solitary fear and darkness that can drive a person mad. Just when the situation seemed unbearable, the huge steel door opened, and someone crept into the darkness. Borja heard the person working on something in the opposite corner. Then the figure crept out, closed the door, and disappeared. Minutes later the room suddenly blazed with light. Someone, perhaps taking his life into his hands, had connected electricity to the broken light fixture. The darkness of the dungeon was gone. ‘From that moment,’ explained President Borja, ‘my imprisonment had meaning because at least I could see.”
Nikkel adds, “Even more important than the light we see with our eyes is the light that Christ brings to our hearts, giving our lives the understanding and meaning only he can give.”
|
In a previous post I reviewed the commemoration of birth and death in the contemporary display of St Non’s chapel – a Cadw stewarded medieval chapel near St David’s, Pembrokeshire.
The site’s connection to St Non’s, St David’s mother, and purported to be the site of St David’s birth. While ruined the site has been restored from the early 20th century.
The chapel dates back to the 11th century AD if not earlier. Inside the ruined chapel is an early medieval inscribed stone dated to the 7th or 8th centuries AD. Nearby is the holy well linked to the miracle of St David’s birth. Both the holy well and ruined chapel are connected foci for tourists and pilgrims alike. Memorial painted stones are kept at the cross’s base.
Upslope from the holy well is St Non’s Retreat and the Roman Catholic chapel of Our Lady and St Non’s. This is a Grade II Roman Catholic chapel, built in 1934 by David Thomas of St David’s for Morgan Giffiths following the completion of the adjacent Saint Non’s House in 1929.
The first thing about this building is that it is built not only in a medieval style to emulate the foundations of the nearby St Non’s chapel, it is built out of reused medieval building stone acquired from the St David’s area. The openings are flushed ashlar moulded frames in Forest of Dean stone.
The stained glass windows depict key saints, including St. Non signed ‘William Morris, Westminster’. The interior also contain numerous reused medieval carved stone fragments from Whitwell Priory south-west of St David’s. There is also a piscina from Caerforiog Farm near Solva and a small font from a chapel at Gwrhyd north-east of St David’s. One stone in the altar is from St Patrick’s Chapel, Whitesand Bay.
Yet there is a further aspect to the furnishings of the chapel that deserves mention, namely the repeated citation in a variety of media to the early medieval inscribed stone located within the ruins of St Non’s Chapel! As such, beyond the architecture, the saint’s dedication, and variation other visual and material references to St Non and St David, it is via the repeated use of the Latin ring-cross within the chapel that the neo-medievalism is manifest. This is an example of mnemonic citations to early medieval crosses in the modern era. This structure thus articulates the Roman Catholic relationship to St Non’s revived cult and the birth of St David as twin aspects of pilgrimage to the site by citing the early medieval cross.
|
<urn:uuid:bae5b912-5a00-4c7f-834d-793085958e42>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949025.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20230329182643-20230329212643-00334.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9400410056114197,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.5625,
"token_count": 576,
"url": "https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/st-nons-recreated-modern-mnemonic-citations-to-early-medieval-monuments/"
}
|
In a previous post I reviewed the commemoration of birth and death in the contemporary display of St Non’s chapel – a Cadw stewarded medieval chapel near St David’s, Pembrokeshire.
The site’s connection to St Non’s, St David’s mother, and purported to be the site of St David’s birth. While ruined the site has been restored from the early 20th century.
The chapel dates back to the 11th century AD if not earlier. Inside the ruined chapel is an early medieval inscribed stone dated to the 7th or 8th centuries AD. Nearby is the holy well
|
linked to the miracle of St David’s birth. Both the holy well and ruined chapel are connected foci for tourists and pilgrims alike. Memorial painted stones are kept at the cross’s base.
Upslope from the holy well is St Non’s Retreat and the Roman Catholic chapel of Our Lady and St Non’s. This is a Grade II Roman Catholic chapel, built in 1934 by David Thomas of St David’s for Morgan Giffiths following the completion of the adjacent Saint Non’s House in 1929.
The first thing about this building is that it is built not only in a medieval style to emulate the foundations of the nearby St Non’s chapel, it is built out of reused medieval building stone acquired from the St David’s area. The openings are flushed ashlar moulded frames in Forest of Dean stone.
The stained glass windows depict key saints, including St. Non signed ‘William Morris, Westminster’. The interior also contain numerous reused medieval carved stone fragments from Whitwell Priory south-west of St David’s. There is also a piscina from Caerforiog Farm near Solva and a small font from a chapel at Gwrhyd north-east of St David’s. One stone in the altar is from St Patrick’s Chapel, Whitesand Bay.
Yet there is a further aspect to the furnishings of the chapel that deserves mention, namely the repeated citation in a variety of media to the early medieval inscribed stone located within the ruins of St Non’s Chapel! As such, beyond the architecture, the saint’s dedication, and variation other visual and material references to St Non and St David, it is via the repeated use of the Latin ring-cross within the chapel that the neo-medievalism is manifest. This is an example of mnemonic citations to early medieval crosses in the modern era. This structure thus articulates the Roman Catholic relationship to St Non’s revived cult and the birth of St David as twin aspects of pilgrimage to the site by citing the early medieval cross.
|
Monday, February 20, 2023. It’s Family Day. Be happy!
Culture & Society
TORONTO. February 20/23 – To start with and thanks in part to our friends at Wikipedia, we want to simply ‘attempt’ to explain to you how (some) Canadians celebrate Canada Day in the middle of winter. It’s a bit of a challenge, but here goes!
In most provinces of Canada, the third Monday in February is observed as a regional statutory holiday, typically known in general as Family Day (French: Jour de la famille)—though some provinces use their own names, as they celebrate the day for different reasons. The third Monday of February is observed as “Family Day” in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia (BC), New Brunswick, Ontario, and Saskatchewan; as Louis Riel Day in Manitoba; as Nova Scotia Heritage Day in Nova Scotia; and as Islander Day in Prince Edward Island.
In Canada more generally, the third Monday in February has also been celebrated as Heritage Day, though this is not an official holiday. This “Heritage Day” is observed by some in celebration of the country’s collective history, architecture, and cultural heritage.
In Quebec and the three territories, the third Monday in February is a regular working day. The same is true in Newfoundland and Labrador except in Corner Brook, where it is an unnamed civic holiday. In Yukon, however, one Friday in February (typically the last/near-last Friday)—rather than a Monday—is deemed Yukon Heritage Day.
Two-thirds of Canadians live in a province that observes a February statutory holiday. Some provinces have changed the observance day of their holiday to match the other provinces. As Family Day is not a federal statutory holiday, employees of the federal government (such as public servants and postal workers) work on this day in all provinces. The timing of Family Day also coincides with the United States holiday of Presidents’ Day (also known as Washington’s Birthday.
Now, to those of you who might remain confused – don’t forget this is Canada – we found a short video explaining Canada Day that will help you further appreciate how Canada functions as a society.
Family Day: What is Family Day in Canada?
>>> Click here to watch this video <<<
There you have it!
To quote Stephen Hawking, “Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.”
Credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Day_(Canada) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofgQ1bm34zM
Do you have a comment about this article? Contact <email-pii>
|
<urn:uuid:c3506a27-64a9-4ab6-a26a-9aea61d79738>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949387.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20230330194843-20230330224843-00592.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9501567482948303,
"pii_count": 1,
"score": 2.8125,
"token_count": 575,
"url": "https://cjnonlineca.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/the-wonders-of-canadas-confusing-it-is-canada-after-all-family-day/"
}
|
Monday, February 20, 2023. It’s Family Day. Be happy!
Culture & Society
TORONTO. February 20/23 – To start with and thanks in part to our friends at Wikipedia, we want to simply ‘attempt’ to explain to you how (some) Canadians celebrate Canada Day in the middle of winter. It’s a bit of a challenge, but here goes!
In most provinces of Canada, the third Monday in February is observed as a regional statutory holiday, typically known in general as Family Day (French: Jour de la famille)—though some provinces use their own
|
names, as they celebrate the day for different reasons. The third Monday of February is observed as “Family Day” in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia (BC), New Brunswick, Ontario, and Saskatchewan; as Louis Riel Day in Manitoba; as Nova Scotia Heritage Day in Nova Scotia; and as Islander Day in Prince Edward Island.
In Canada more generally, the third Monday in February has also been celebrated as Heritage Day, though this is not an official holiday. This “Heritage Day” is observed by some in celebration of the country’s collective history, architecture, and cultural heritage.
In Quebec and the three territories, the third Monday in February is a regular working day. The same is true in Newfoundland and Labrador except in Corner Brook, where it is an unnamed civic holiday. In Yukon, however, one Friday in February (typically the last/near-last Friday)—rather than a Monday—is deemed Yukon Heritage Day.
Two-thirds of Canadians live in a province that observes a February statutory holiday. Some provinces have changed the observance day of their holiday to match the other provinces. As Family Day is not a federal statutory holiday, employees of the federal government (such as public servants and postal workers) work on this day in all provinces. The timing of Family Day also coincides with the United States holiday of Presidents’ Day (also known as Washington’s Birthday.
Now, to those of you who might remain confused – don’t forget this is Canada – we found a short video explaining Canada Day that will help you further appreciate how Canada functions as a society.
Family Day: What is Family Day in Canada?
>>> Click here to watch this video <<<
There you have it!
To quote Stephen Hawking, “Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.”
Credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Day_(Canada) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofgQ1bm34zM
Do you have a comment about this article? Contact <email-pii>
|
While wearing sunscreen is the best way to prevent sun damage, experts say that eating certain foods can help protect your skin from the sun’s damaging rays. And if you do overdo it in the sun, these nutrients can help repair the damage. Summer is here and many areas of the country are experiencing a serious heat wave. When you head to the beach or pool to cool off, or whenever you venture outdoors, always apply sunscreen, but eating a diet that includes oranges, carrots, avocados and other specific foods, can give you additional protection from the sun.
According to HuffPost, these nutrients can protect you from damaging UV rays and help keep your skin youthful during the hot, summer months:
• Vitamin C. Studies have shown that a vitamin C-rich diet can help reduce the appearance of fine lines and soothe dry, irritated skin. Add more of this powerful antioxidant to your diet by eating oranges and lemons, strawberries, kiwis, and bell peppers.
ׇ• Vitamin E. This soluble antioxidant protects the fatty membranes of our cells that can be damaged by the sun’s UV radiation. Too much sun exposure causes a loss of vitamin E, which makes us more susceptible to skin damage. Eating foods that are rich in this essential vitamin will not only help protect your skin, but also boost your immune system. Add avocados, almonds, sunflower seeds, spinach, and broccoli to your diet.
• Beta carotene. Research has shown that antioxidants, including beta carotene, can help maintain skin health and appearance, and may protect the skin against UV radiation from the sun, says WebMD. Adding carrots, chili peppers, red and yellow peppers and sweet potatoes to your diet can elevate levels of beta carotene.
• Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3’s are anti-inflammatory and help protect our skin from the sun’s harmful rays, says HuffPost. Many people are deficient in this nutrient, so taking an oral supplement may be advisable if your healthcare professional thinks it is necessary in your case. Salmon is not only rich in omega-3 fatty acids but also in astaxanthin, a powerful carotenoid, that helps protect your skin’s cells from the sun and reduce inflammation sometimes caused by sunburn. Salmon, krill oil, nuts, and seeds are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids.
• Prebiotics and probiotics. Supporting your gut’s microbiome can help repair your skin after sun exposure. Both prebiotics and probiotics can mitigate the damaging effects of the sun’s UV radiation. Add kimchi, kombucha, miso and sauerkraut to your diet to boost gut health and protect your skin.
© 2023 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.
|
<urn:uuid:8267efc6-412d-4eb5-b9d2-4ce36cf3daa5>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-50",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679103810.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20231211080606-20231211110606-00307.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9120403528213501,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.15625,
"token_count": 578,
"url": "https://cloudflarepoc.newsmax.com/health/diet-and-fitness/sun-ultraviolet-uv/2023/06/19/id/1124109/"
}
|
While wearing sunscreen is the best way to prevent sun damage, experts say that eating certain foods can help protect your skin from the sun’s damaging rays. And if you do overdo it in the sun, these nutrients can help repair the damage. Summer is here and many areas of the country are experiencing a serious heat wave. When you head to the beach or pool to cool off, or whenever you venture outdoors, always apply sunscreen, but eating a diet that includes oranges, carrots, avocados and other specific foods, can give you additional protection from the sun.
According to HuffPost, these nutrients can
|
protect you from damaging UV rays and help keep your skin youthful during the hot, summer months:
• Vitamin C. Studies have shown that a vitamin C-rich diet can help reduce the appearance of fine lines and soothe dry, irritated skin. Add more of this powerful antioxidant to your diet by eating oranges and lemons, strawberries, kiwis, and bell peppers.
ׇ• Vitamin E. This soluble antioxidant protects the fatty membranes of our cells that can be damaged by the sun’s UV radiation. Too much sun exposure causes a loss of vitamin E, which makes us more susceptible to skin damage. Eating foods that are rich in this essential vitamin will not only help protect your skin, but also boost your immune system. Add avocados, almonds, sunflower seeds, spinach, and broccoli to your diet.
• Beta carotene. Research has shown that antioxidants, including beta carotene, can help maintain skin health and appearance, and may protect the skin against UV radiation from the sun, says WebMD. Adding carrots, chili peppers, red and yellow peppers and sweet potatoes to your diet can elevate levels of beta carotene.
• Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3’s are anti-inflammatory and help protect our skin from the sun’s harmful rays, says HuffPost. Many people are deficient in this nutrient, so taking an oral supplement may be advisable if your healthcare professional thinks it is necessary in your case. Salmon is not only rich in omega-3 fatty acids but also in astaxanthin, a powerful carotenoid, that helps protect your skin’s cells from the sun and reduce inflammation sometimes caused by sunburn. Salmon, krill oil, nuts, and seeds are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids.
• Prebiotics and probiotics. Supporting your gut’s microbiome can help repair your skin after sun exposure. Both prebiotics and probiotics can mitigate the damaging effects of the sun’s UV radiation. Add kimchi, kombucha, miso and sauerkraut to your diet to boost gut health and protect your skin.
© 2023 NewsmaxHealth. All rights reserved.
|
The Text Singularity
How artificial intelligence will shape the future of writing
There are several versions of the same cartoon: A 10th grader sits at her desk at 9 p.m. on the night before a big essay is due. She puts her hand on her dictionary and says, "Okay, all the words are right there. I just need to put them in the right order."
It's funny because putting the words in order, right or not, is "writing." And writing is hard, and important. Or at least it was. It may no longer be, after the text singularity.
Scientifically, a singularity is a boundary beyond which the known physical rules no longer apply, or where the curvature of space-time is no longer defined. If such boundaries exist, we cannot imagine or understand them.
A new kind of singularity—the "technological singularity" described by Verner Vinge—is easy to imagine, though hard to understand. One example would be "the text singularity," using the fourth generation of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT4) technology that will likely drop this year.
GPT4 are artificial intelligence (A.I.) software that produce grammatically ordered text. Such chatbots are often mocked because they write stilted prose. But what if chatbots wrote a lot of things? In fact, what if chatbots wrote everything: all possible sequences of words, in all languages, in all formats, from short haikus to Remembrance of Things Past? It's not a conceptually challenging problem, though it would take substantial developments in text generation and storage to produce that many sentences.
By the end of this year, GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of. Most of those "texts" would be nonsense, of course, but the advantage of GPT4 technology is that it could create all the text, of every length. That means that along with all the nonsense, we would have all the best texts, also.
The problem would be equivalent of the 10th grader's dictionary, just one step further along. "All the words are right there," but we would need some way of choosing among the library of trillions and trillions of texts to find the one that serves our needs.
That is not a very conceptually challenging problem, either. We have a substantial corpus of texts, dating from antiquity to five minutes ago, that we consider good, useful, or entertaining, and thus worth publishing. Those texts give us an obvious training set for a selection process, enabling an enormous profusion of A.I. entities operating in parallel to prune the set of all possible texts to the (much smaller, but still enormous) set of possibly useful texts. Let's call those "cullbots," because they cull or prune the set of all possible texts to a much smaller set of possibly useful texts, based on the features of existing texts that humans have decided are worth keeping around.
These first two steps—creating and storing the set of all possible texts and then culling that set using "learned" features of existing text—are conceptually simple. Though computationally intensive, both are finite, well-defined tasks. The resulting corpus will not be all possible word sequences, most of which would be nonsense, but a much smaller set of texts where word sequences form sentences and coherent "thoughts," as judged by cullbots.
If the process of creation can be replicated indefinitely, with a selection filter, we will have arrived at J.L. Borges' idea of a Library of Babel, except that the library will contain all texts of all lengths and styles, stored on servers instead of a physical library.
The feedback loop would then be closed by repeatedly rating the texts, first at a gross level, and then at a decentralized personal level. The texts that attract the most citations and views, from the following generation, and the one after that, get higher status in searches that return the "best" texts, as the selection process iteratively culls the dross.
With many GPT4 chatbots producing text constantly, and cullbots pruning the corpus of text constantly, there are no humans involved at all—except eventually as readers. A "generation" in this process might be a day at first, then a few seconds, and then a small fraction of a blink of an eye. Learning and updating becomes faster, and more text becomes available as the training set. There is no reason to wait for anything to be published—and "published" doesn't mean printed in paper anyway; it means posted on the internet. The process would spin off on its own, dynamically updating itself with only high-level human supervision.
That's when we hit the singularity. Remember, a singularity in this context means passing through an event horizon the other side of which suspends the rules as humans know them. Worse, humans cannot imagine, by definition, what the new rules will be, or if there are any "rules" at all. Finally, the event horizon is one-way: once crossed, it closes, at least from the perspective of those who have crossed it.
The write-publish-cite/write-publish cycle is already accelerating. All that needs to happen is for the cycle to become independent, relying only on A.I. entities, and the singularity will spin up. In a short period of time, by historical standards, all the things that have not yet been written will be written. All the things that never would have been written at all, at least not by human authors, will be written. And cullbots will suggest which of that corpus might interest you on a Sunday afternoon.
It's a singularity because writing is finished, forever. There cannot possibly be human writers, because we will have stored all the texts that are possible: Nothing will remain unwritten. One qualification might be that writing will survive as a boutique skill, like a home-cooked meal: The food would have been better in a restaurant, but look how much I love you, dear! Handwriting and extemporaneous words in a thank-you note would then be doubly retro. A.I.s have already noticed, producing what looks like handwriting and personalized notes.
One might object that cullbots can't possibly judge good writing. And that's right, but all the cullbots will do at first is prune text that is meaningless. (Do we include Finnegans Wake in the training set?)
What we do with the host of texts that survive the first rounds of cullbot pruning is up to us. This may seem like an impossibly complex problem, but we are used to this kind of selection process. It's just that until now the selection of the "canon" or "popular writing" has operated on a human time scale. The great theater of Greece: Were playwrights just better? No, we selected—unintentionally, by preserving some of them—the "best." Why are the greatest hits from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s so popular on the radio? A selected sample from the best of any decade excels any random sample of current music.
The personal curation portion of the process to come should already be familiar to you. There has been an explosion in the quantity and variety of musical choices available, so much that you couldn't possibly choose. But Spotify suggests some songs or albums, and over a surprisingly short time you can train the A.I. to "know" your tastes. If you have streamed a video, Netflix is ready to suggest another video that that A.I. "thinks" you will enjoy. Perhaps most interestingly, the TikTok A.I. trains itself by showing you essentially random videos, without you making any choices at all, and then "learns" from what you watch which other videos might be desirable. In all three cases, a gigantic unorganized mass of material is ordered and curated, with no human agency at all.
So what will our 10th grader do instead of writing an essay that night? There's no way of knowing, because what things will look like on the other side of the singularity can't be predicted, or even understood, until we go through it. But she won't be writing, because there will be nothing left to write.
|
<urn:uuid:11bd0094-b806-4eb4-883e-5179d8113d0b>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296946584.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20230326235016-20230327025016-00018.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9616442918777466,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.21875,
"token_count": 1765,
"url": "https://reason.com/2023/01/10/the-text-singularity/"
}
|
The Text Singularity
How artificial intelligence will shape the future of writing
There are several versions of the same cartoon: A 10th grader sits at her desk at 9 p.m. on the night before a big essay is due. She puts her hand on her dictionary and says, "Okay, all the words are right there. I just need to put them in the right order."
It's funny because putting the words in order, right or not, is "writing." And writing is hard, and important. Or at least it was. It may no longer be, after the text singularity.
Sc
|
ientifically, a singularity is a boundary beyond which the known physical rules no longer apply, or where the curvature of space-time is no longer defined. If such boundaries exist, we cannot imagine or understand them.
A new kind of singularity—the "technological singularity" described by Verner Vinge—is easy to imagine, though hard to understand. One example would be "the text singularity," using the fourth generation of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT4) technology that will likely drop this year.
GPT4 are artificial intelligence (A.I.) software that produce grammatically ordered text. Such chatbots are often mocked because they write stilted prose. But what if chatbots wrote a lot of things? In fact, what if chatbots wrote everything: all possible sequences of words, in all languages, in all formats, from short haikus to Remembrance of Things Past? It's not a conceptually challenging problem, though it would take substantial developments in text generation and storage to produce that many sentences.
By the end of this year, GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of. Most of those "texts" would be nonsense, of course, but the advantage of GPT4 technology is that it could create all the text, of every length. That means that along with all the nonsense, we would have all the best texts, also.
The problem would be equivalent of the 10th grader's dictionary, just one step further along. "All the words are right there," but we would need some way of choosing among the library of trillions and trillions of texts to find the one that serves our needs.
That is not a very conceptually challenging problem, either. We have a substantial corpus of texts, dating from antiquity to five minutes ago, that we consider good, useful, or entertaining, and thus worth publishing. Those texts give us an obvious training set for a selection process, enabling an enormous profusion of A.I. entities operating in parallel to prune the set of all possible texts to the (much smaller, but still enormous) set of possibly useful texts. Let's call those "cullbots," because they cull or prune the set of all possible texts to a much smaller set of possibly useful texts, based on the features of existing texts that humans have decided are worth keeping around.
These first two steps—creating and storing the set of all possible texts and then culling that set using "learned" features of existing text—are conceptually simple. Though computationally intensive, both are finite, well-defined tasks. The resulting corpus will not be all possible word sequences, most of which would be nonsense, but a much smaller set of texts where word sequences form sentences and coherent "thoughts," as judged by cullbots.
If the process of creation can be replicated indefinitely, with a selection filter, we will have arrived at J.L. Borges' idea of a Library of Babel, except that the library will contain all texts of all lengths and styles, stored on servers instead of a physical library.
The feedback loop would then be closed by repeatedly rating the texts, first at a gross level, and then at a decentralized personal level. The texts that attract the most citations and views, from the following generation, and the one after that, get higher status in searches that return the "best" texts, as the selection process iteratively culls the dross.
With many GPT4 chatbots producing text constantly, and cullbots pruning the corpus of text constantly, there are no humans involved at all—except eventually as readers. A "generation" in this process might be a day at first, then a few seconds, and then a small fraction of a blink of an eye. Learning and updating becomes faster, and more text becomes available as the training set. There is no reason to wait for anything to be published—and "published" doesn't mean printed in paper anyway; it means posted on the internet. The process would spin off on its own, dynamically updating itself with only high-level human supervision.
That's when we hit the singularity. Remember, a singularity in this context means passing through an event horizon the other side of which suspends the rules as humans know them. Worse, humans cannot imagine, by definition, what the new rules will be, or if there are any "rules" at all. Finally, the event horizon is one-way: once crossed, it closes, at least from the perspective of those who have crossed it.
The write-publish-cite/write-publish cycle is already accelerating. All that needs to happen is for the cycle to become independent, relying only on A.I. entities, and the singularity will spin up. In a short period of time, by historical standards, all the things that have not yet been written will be written. All the things that never would have been written at all, at least not by human authors, will be written. And cullbots will suggest which of that corpus might interest you on a Sunday afternoon.
It's a singularity because writing is finished, forever. There cannot possibly be human writers, because we will have stored all the texts that are possible: Nothing will remain unwritten. One qualification might be that writing will survive as a boutique skill, like a home-cooked meal: The food would have been better in a restaurant, but look how much I love you, dear! Handwriting and extemporaneous words in a thank-you note would then be doubly retro. A.I.s have already noticed, producing what looks like handwriting and personalized notes.
One might object that cullbots can't possibly judge good writing. And that's right, but all the cullbots will do at first is prune text that is meaningless. (Do we include Finnegans Wake in the training set?)
What we do with the host of texts that survive the first rounds of cullbot pruning is up to us. This may seem like an impossibly complex problem, but we are used to this kind of selection process. It's just that until now the selection of the "canon" or "popular writing" has operated on a human time scale. The great theater of Greece: Were playwrights just better? No, we selected—unintentionally, by preserving some of them—the "best." Why are the greatest hits from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s so popular on the radio? A selected sample from the best of any decade excels any random sample of current music.
The personal curation portion of the process to come should already be familiar to you. There has been an explosion in the quantity and variety of musical choices available, so much that you couldn't possibly choose. But Spotify suggests some songs or albums, and over a surprisingly short time you can train the A.I. to "know" your tastes. If you have streamed a video, Netflix is ready to suggest another video that that A.I. "thinks" you will enjoy. Perhaps most interestingly, the TikTok A.I. trains itself by showing you essentially random videos, without you making any choices at all, and then "learns" from what you watch which other videos might be desirable. In all three cases, a gigantic unorganized mass of material is ordered and curated, with no human agency at all.
So what will our 10th grader do instead of writing an essay that night? There's no way of knowing, because what things will look like on the other side of the singularity can't be predicted, or even understood, until we go through it. But she won't be writing, because there will be nothing left to write.
|
The politics behind Biden's natural gas dilemma
President Biden faces intense election-year pressure from his left to thwart a huge expansion of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports.
Why it matters: LNG sits at the crossroads of climate and foreign policy.
- The U.S. is already the world's largest supplier, but the Biden administration faces thorny decisions as project plans and export permit applications pile up.
Driving the news: Prominent activists, including Bill McKibben, just announced a three-day sit-in next month at the Energy Department.
- The planned civil disobedience is part of a wider pressure campaign against LNG from environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers.
- A central target is Venture Global's big planned Calcasieu Pass phase 2 (CP2) project in Louisiana.
The big picture: The U.S. LNG surge provides Biden with geopolitical leverage. That was apparent as cargoes helped Europe replace Russian gas.
The intrigue: LNG's role in climate policy is a Rorschach test.
- Backers make a pragmatic case that it helps displace overseas use of coal, the most CO2-emitting fuel, while maintaining energy security.
Yes, but: Activists point to science showing Paris Agreement targets require getting off all fossil fuels, and fear new projects will lock in emissions for decades.
- And methane releases in gas production and processing erode LNG's advantage over coal. Yet by how much is hotly debated.
Catch up fast: Domestic LNG exports, enabled by the shale boom, began in 2016, and projects under construction are slated to keep boosting shipments.
- Last fall, the International Energy Agency estimated exports would rise 60% from 2022-2026. Projects on the drawing board would add even more in later years.
What we're watching: How Biden views the risk that climate-minded voters would be upset by greenlighting more exports.
- Some analysts say the White House could delay decisions until after the 2024 election.
- ClearView Energy Partners said in a note that a freeze on approvals for more study, and perhaps a new regulatory proceeding, would be a "bid for young voters."
The odds: Rapidan Energy Group sees just a 20% chance Biden officials approve new LNG exports to countries without free trade deals with the U.S. — which basically means the biggest markets — before the election.
The bottom line: This could be the defining energy policy battle of 2024.
|
<urn:uuid:5c0a77b3-4865-4aaf-9b92-58ef0a1f86fa>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2024-10",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473738.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222093910-20240222123910-00764.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9152100682258606,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.546875,
"token_count": 514,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/biden-lng-exports-climate"
}
|
The politics behind Biden's natural gas dilemma
President Biden faces intense election-year pressure from his left to thwart a huge expansion of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports.
Why it matters: LNG sits at the crossroads of climate and foreign policy.
- The U.S. is already the world's largest supplier, but the Biden administration faces thorny decisions as project plans and export permit applications pile up.
Driving the news: Prominent activists, including Bill McKibben, just announced a three-day sit-in next month at the Energy Department.
- The planned civil disobedience is part of a wider
|
pressure campaign against LNG from environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers.
- A central target is Venture Global's big planned Calcasieu Pass phase 2 (CP2) project in Louisiana.
The big picture: The U.S. LNG surge provides Biden with geopolitical leverage. That was apparent as cargoes helped Europe replace Russian gas.
The intrigue: LNG's role in climate policy is a Rorschach test.
- Backers make a pragmatic case that it helps displace overseas use of coal, the most CO2-emitting fuel, while maintaining energy security.
Yes, but: Activists point to science showing Paris Agreement targets require getting off all fossil fuels, and fear new projects will lock in emissions for decades.
- And methane releases in gas production and processing erode LNG's advantage over coal. Yet by how much is hotly debated.
Catch up fast: Domestic LNG exports, enabled by the shale boom, began in 2016, and projects under construction are slated to keep boosting shipments.
- Last fall, the International Energy Agency estimated exports would rise 60% from 2022-2026. Projects on the drawing board would add even more in later years.
What we're watching: How Biden views the risk that climate-minded voters would be upset by greenlighting more exports.
- Some analysts say the White House could delay decisions until after the 2024 election.
- ClearView Energy Partners said in a note that a freeze on approvals for more study, and perhaps a new regulatory proceeding, would be a "bid for young voters."
The odds: Rapidan Energy Group sees just a 20% chance Biden officials approve new LNG exports to countries without free trade deals with the U.S. — which basically means the biggest markets — before the election.
The bottom line: This could be the defining energy policy battle of 2024.
|
UT Austin's John Goodenough, who changed the world with batteries, dies at 100
John Goodenough, the UT Austin professor awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for his role in inventing the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, has died at the age of 100.
If you are reading these words on a portable electronic device, you have him to thank.
His breakthroughs in battery technology paved the way for the digital age, allowing things like cellphones and laptop computers to proliferate. Still working well into his 90s, he predicted that his research on energy storage would next spark “a big revolution" toward cleaner, climate-friendly, renewable energy, in a 2017 interview with KUT.
“The fact of the matter is that modern society cannot continue to be dependent on fossil fuels,” he said.
But for all his impacts on the world of technology, Goodenough himself could come across like someone from an earlier era. In that 2017 interview, he told KUT that he never even learned to type, preferring to write his thoughts by hand.
“I don't think through the typewriter. I think through the pen,” he said “I'm an old-fashioned man.”
Goodenough was born in 1922 in Jena, Germany. When he was a child, his family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where his father taught at Yale University.
Goodenough served as a meteorologist in World War II. After receiving a doctorate from the University of Chicago, he worked as a researcher at MIT, where he helped develop random-access memory (RAM) for digital computers. He then went to the University of Oxford, where he made his big lithium-ion discovery.
“I retired twice” before arriving at UT in 1986, he told KUT. “Now I'm here. All the young people that I had as post-docs are getting ready to retire.”
In 2017, at the age of 94, Goodenough again rocked the world of science when he and his colleague Helena Braga announced they had developed a new “solid state” battery. A discovery that, they said, would lead to faster-charging and more stable energy storage.
While some were skeptical of Goodenough and Braga’s findings, the technology attracted the attention of big investors, including Canadian energy giant Hydro Quebec, which announced plans to commercialize it.
Goodenough received numerous national and international honors, including the Japan Prize, the Enrico Fermi Award and the National Medal of Science.
Despite the accolades he was quick to share credit for his work.
“The lithium-ion battery has had a very nice success in changing the way people communicate with one another,” he told KUT. “But the electrical engineers did a surprisingly wonderful job of how you can do things with these portable electronic devices. So give the electrical engineers some credit, too.”
In 2019, after Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, he was asked how he would be received by his colleagues at UT Austin upon his return.
"I hope they still keep me employed," he joked.
By then, his longevity had become almost as legendary among fellow researchers as his contributions to science.
When asked by KUT in 2017 what his “secret” was, he summed it up with the well-known phrase “work hard, play hard.”
In announcing his death, his friends at UT Austin said he will be remembered as a brilliant scientist, innovator and educator.
“John was one of the greatest minds of our time and is an inspiration. He was a good listener with love and respect for everyone,” said his friend and colleague Ram Manthiram, a professor at UT's Cockrell School of Engineering. “I will always cherish our time together, and we will continue to build on the foundation John established.”
He will also be remembered for his infectious laughter, which could often be heard echoing through the halls of the university. You can listen to that here:
|
<urn:uuid:a823f916-7932-41c2-84d1-ee34ab2b7746>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510427.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20230928162907-20230928192907-00382.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9873912334442139,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.640625,
"token_count": 862,
"url": "https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2023-06-26/ut-austin-john-goodenough-dies-batteries-nobel-prize-chemistry"
}
|
UT Austin's John Goodenough, who changed the world with batteries, dies at 100
John Goodenough, the UT Austin professor awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for his role in inventing the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, has died at the age of 100.
If you are reading these words on a portable electronic device, you have him to thank.
His breakthroughs in battery technology paved the way for the digital age, allowing things like cellphones and laptop computers to proliferate. Still working well into his 90s, he predicted that his research on energy
|
storage would next spark “a big revolution" toward cleaner, climate-friendly, renewable energy, in a 2017 interview with KUT.
“The fact of the matter is that modern society cannot continue to be dependent on fossil fuels,” he said.
But for all his impacts on the world of technology, Goodenough himself could come across like someone from an earlier era. In that 2017 interview, he told KUT that he never even learned to type, preferring to write his thoughts by hand.
“I don't think through the typewriter. I think through the pen,” he said “I'm an old-fashioned man.”
Goodenough was born in 1922 in Jena, Germany. When he was a child, his family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where his father taught at Yale University.
Goodenough served as a meteorologist in World War II. After receiving a doctorate from the University of Chicago, he worked as a researcher at MIT, where he helped develop random-access memory (RAM) for digital computers. He then went to the University of Oxford, where he made his big lithium-ion discovery.
“I retired twice” before arriving at UT in 1986, he told KUT. “Now I'm here. All the young people that I had as post-docs are getting ready to retire.”
In 2017, at the age of 94, Goodenough again rocked the world of science when he and his colleague Helena Braga announced they had developed a new “solid state” battery. A discovery that, they said, would lead to faster-charging and more stable energy storage.
While some were skeptical of Goodenough and Braga’s findings, the technology attracted the attention of big investors, including Canadian energy giant Hydro Quebec, which announced plans to commercialize it.
Goodenough received numerous national and international honors, including the Japan Prize, the Enrico Fermi Award and the National Medal of Science.
Despite the accolades he was quick to share credit for his work.
“The lithium-ion battery has had a very nice success in changing the way people communicate with one another,” he told KUT. “But the electrical engineers did a surprisingly wonderful job of how you can do things with these portable electronic devices. So give the electrical engineers some credit, too.”
In 2019, after Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, he was asked how he would be received by his colleagues at UT Austin upon his return.
"I hope they still keep me employed," he joked.
By then, his longevity had become almost as legendary among fellow researchers as his contributions to science.
When asked by KUT in 2017 what his “secret” was, he summed it up with the well-known phrase “work hard, play hard.”
In announcing his death, his friends at UT Austin said he will be remembered as a brilliant scientist, innovator and educator.
“John was one of the greatest minds of our time and is an inspiration. He was a good listener with love and respect for everyone,” said his friend and colleague Ram Manthiram, a professor at UT's Cockrell School of Engineering. “I will always cherish our time together, and we will continue to build on the foundation John established.”
He will also be remembered for his infectious laughter, which could often be heard echoing through the halls of the university. You can listen to that here:
|
New census data shows Oregon getting older
The median age of people living in Oregon rose from 37 years old in 2005 to 40.5 in 2022, according to new census data.
Why it matters: We're trending older than the rest of the country, and aging populations can affect everything from public services to taxable income.
By the numbers: Over the same period, the national median age rose from 36.4 to 40 years old.
- Utah stayed the state with the youngest median age over that time, rising from 28.5 years in 2005 to 32.1 last year.
Context: The latest census figures align with numbers out earlier this year that showed Oregon is now the oldest state west of the Mississippi River, tied with Hawaii.
Details: Senior state economist Josh Lehner, who writes frequently on this topic, has argued that Oregon's population skews older due to a low birth rate and low share of people under 17 years old, rather than an outsized elderly cohort.
- His breakdown of the new figures suggests families have been leaving the state, a trend that appears to be affecting metro areas nationwide.
- Also, deaths are outpacing births, a trend Lehner's office expects to continue.
What's next: Demographics change as people move, and Lehner advises to keep watching the numbers.
- Right now, Oregon has a higher share of millennials, compared to other states, than baby boomers.
More Portland stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Portland.
|
<urn:uuid:e3123ba3-3f68-440d-9b07-8b4370773f46>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233510707.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20230930181852-20230930211852-00214.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9370529651641846,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.71875,
"token_count": 322,
"url": "https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2023/09/19/new-census-data-oregon-trend-older"
}
|
New census data shows Oregon getting older
The median age of people living in Oregon rose from 37 years old in 2005 to 40.5 in 2022, according to new census data.
Why it matters: We're trending older than the rest of the country, and aging populations can affect everything from public services to taxable income.
By the numbers: Over the same period, the national median age rose from 36.4 to 40 years old.
- Utah stayed the state with the youngest median age over that time, rising from 28.5 years in
|
2005 to 32.1 last year.
Context: The latest census figures align with numbers out earlier this year that showed Oregon is now the oldest state west of the Mississippi River, tied with Hawaii.
Details: Senior state economist Josh Lehner, who writes frequently on this topic, has argued that Oregon's population skews older due to a low birth rate and low share of people under 17 years old, rather than an outsized elderly cohort.
- His breakdown of the new figures suggests families have been leaving the state, a trend that appears to be affecting metro areas nationwide.
- Also, deaths are outpacing births, a trend Lehner's office expects to continue.
What's next: Demographics change as people move, and Lehner advises to keep watching the numbers.
- Right now, Oregon has a higher share of millennials, compared to other states, than baby boomers.
More Portland stories
No stories could be found
Get a free daily digest of the most important news in your backyard with Axios Portland.
|
The carnival floats on a giant scale are magnificent works of art towering some 20 meters above the crowds. They are made with papier-mâché and internal machinery to animate various parts.
During winter, shipbuilders, theater technicians and artists spend weeks in workshops realizing the magical, satirical sculptures.
The construction site is now concentrated in the Cittadella del Carnevale, a complex inaugurated in 2001 which also houses a museum.
As much as four million euros are spent on the building of the carnival floats each year, much of which is generated from ticket sales.
Humorous and caricature-like, the oversized figures comment on topical issues.
This year, an enormous gorilla with moving eyes, arms and torso displaying military medals is entitled "The evolution of the species." It represents the dominance and aggression of man over nature.
"Armed Peace" features a young girl wearing a helmet and gas mask. As she opens her cloak, she reveals a flag of peace lining representing the renewal of hope.
There is a competition for the best carnival float and the constructions are sorted into four categories depending on their base size and height.
A 150-year-old carnival
This year, Viareggio Carnival celebrates its 150th anniversary. The festival first took place in 1873 and is thought to have originated as a small-scale but fiercely felt local defiance against the nobility of nearby Lucca, who descended to the coast during the winter season.
Now, hundreds of thousands of spectators from across Italy and further afield come to celebrate what is one of the country's most popular festivals.
The final parade of Viareggio Carnival will take place on February 25.
|
<urn:uuid:45f7022f-19e4-49ba-b9b5-a15984f2b995>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-40",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511021.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20231002200740-20231002230740-00507.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9485504627227783,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.609375,
"token_count": 350,
"url": "https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccahughes/2023/02/22/peace-war-and-pulcinella-giant-allegorical-floats-return-to-viareggio-carnival/"
}
|
The carnival floats on a giant scale are magnificent works of art towering some 20 meters above the crowds. They are made with papier-mâché and internal machinery to animate various parts.
During winter, shipbuilders, theater technicians and artists spend weeks in workshops realizing the magical, satirical sculptures.
The construction site is now concentrated in the Cittadella del Carnevale, a complex inaugurated in 2001 which also houses a museum.
As much as four million euros are spent on the building of the carnival floats each year, much of which is generated from ticket sales.
Humorous and caricature-like
|
, the oversized figures comment on topical issues.
This year, an enormous gorilla with moving eyes, arms and torso displaying military medals is entitled "The evolution of the species." It represents the dominance and aggression of man over nature.
"Armed Peace" features a young girl wearing a helmet and gas mask. As she opens her cloak, she reveals a flag of peace lining representing the renewal of hope.
There is a competition for the best carnival float and the constructions are sorted into four categories depending on their base size and height.
A 150-year-old carnival
This year, Viareggio Carnival celebrates its 150th anniversary. The festival first took place in 1873 and is thought to have originated as a small-scale but fiercely felt local defiance against the nobility of nearby Lucca, who descended to the coast during the winter season.
Now, hundreds of thousands of spectators from across Italy and further afield come to celebrate what is one of the country's most popular festivals.
The final parade of Viareggio Carnival will take place on February 25.
|
What is Ramadan? Why do Muslim people fast for the holy month? What you need to know.
Ramadan begins this week, a holy, month-long observance for Muslim communities in the United States and around the world.
Many Muslim people will observe Ramadan by fasting from sunup to sundown, praying together, holding communal meals and festivities and more.
Asma Sayeed, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at UCLA, explained that Ramadan is rooted in many practices, including to “invoke the remembrance of God for a continuous period" and “to celebrate and remember the revelation of the Qur'an as a gift to humanity.”
But when is Ramadan? Why do Muslims engage in fasting for Ramadan? Here’s what you need to know.
When is Ramadan?
Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, begins on Wednesday, March 22 in the United States and continues through April 21, ending in the holiday Eid al-Fitr.
What is Ramadan?
Ramadan is a significant month for many Muslim people that involves prayer, fasting, spending time with family and friends and more.
“The simplest answer is that it's the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar,” Martyn Oliver, faculty chair of the American University Core, told USA TODAY. “The more specific sense is that it's one of the holiest celebratory months in Islamic practice.”
Muslims believe that, during the month of Ramadan, the Prophet Muhammad was given the Qur'an, Islam’s holy book. It marked the first time that God revealed to Muhammed he was a prophet tasked with carrying God’s message.
Why do some Muslims fast?
One major practice of Ramadan is fasting from sunrise to sunset. Muslim people who have reached puberty are called on to fast, a practice of self-restraint intended to bring people closer to God.
“It is for Muslims to remember God, to strengthen their relationship with him through an act of piety and sacrifice,” Sayeed said. “Because it's tough. It's not easy to fast for a full month, and also to abstain from drink.”
Ramadan is also “for Muslims to engage in acts of charity by depriving themselves of food and drink,” Sayeed said.
“They remember what it is to face bodily and material deprivation,” she explained. “The idea is to sort of invite Muslims to be more charitable in that month and for the rest of the year because you’ve sort of experienced want yourself in very direct ways.”
Muslim people fasting during Ramadan do not eat food or drink liquids, but it can also “mean abstaining from sexual relationships or for smoking or for any other kind of pleasurable consumption,” Oliver said.
Muslim people break their fasts after an evening prayer with a meal called ifṭār. These meals are often communal events with friends and family. While foods at these meals can vary by community, one common choice is dates, a reference to the Prophet Muhammad eating dates to break his fast.
People who are pregnant, nursing or menstruating are often exempt from fasting, as well as older people, people with illnesses and others.
How else is Ramadan observed?
Some Muslim people will also do “an additional voluntary prayer” called Tarawih, Sayeed said.
“These are additional nightly prayers. Sometimes they're prayed in congregation, in a mosque, and one-thirtieth of the Qur'an is recited each night,” she said. “So the idea here is that by the end of Ramadan, that community or people who are praying will have read, recited the entire Qur'an in prayer. That’s a very high act of devotion. Many Muslims try to read through the Qur'an actually, during the month of Ramadan.”
The holiest night of Ramadan is Laylat al-Qadr, which takes place in the final 10 days of the month. It is referred to as the “Night of Power,” when the Angel Jibril revealed the Qur'an’s initial verses to the Prophet Muhammad.
Ramadan is also a time to give to charities, Oliver said.
“It's also the time when you do a lot of charitable giving. It's the season of giving to worthy causes or to organizations that support those who are without,” he said.
Should I say ‘Happy Ramadan?’
If you are not observing Ramadan but want to greet a coworker or friend who is, Sayeed said that you may want to say “Ramadan Mubarak” or “Ramadan Kareem”
“The first is just like sort of, congratulations for Ramadan. Ramadan Kareem is actually a really beautiful one. Kareem is a word connoting generosity and giving. The idea that even though you're experiencing a very high level of material deprivation, that Ramadan itself and these charitable acts during Ramadan that are heightened for Muslims evoke generosity and bounty,” she said.
Oliver said you may also want to “wish somebody an easy fast, which is a sort of a recognition that somebody who is participating in Ramadan is going to be hungry and tired during the day.”
What is Eid al-Fitr?
Eid al-Fitr commemorates the end of Ramadan. It means “the feast of the breaking of the fast.”
Sayeed called it a “major annual holiday for Muslims,” when they “are advised to kind of wear their nicest clothes, go out in the morning for congregational prayer.”
Children may receive presents after prayers, and communities may come together for celebratory meals and fireworks.
“There's a sense of relief at having completed the fasting or maybe a sense of accomplishment, and also gratefulness for what one has,” Oliver said.
Contributing: Clare Mulroy, Maria Jimenez Moya; USA TODAY
|
<urn:uuid:48a52878-af96-4f05-b87b-e28953957487>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-14",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296949598.87/warc/CC-MAIN-20230331082653-20230331112653-00408.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.969275712966919,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 3.015625,
"token_count": 1261,
"url": "https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/21/what-ramadan-celebrated-islam/11516555002/"
}
|
What is Ramadan? Why do Muslim people fast for the holy month? What you need to know.
Ramadan begins this week, a holy, month-long observance for Muslim communities in the United States and around the world.
Many Muslim people will observe Ramadan by fasting from sunup to sundown, praying together, holding communal meals and festivities and more.
Asma Sayeed, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at UCLA, explained that Ramadan is rooted in many practices, including to “invoke the remembrance of God for a continuous period" and “to celebrate and remember the revelation of the Qur'an as a
|
gift to humanity.”
But when is Ramadan? Why do Muslims engage in fasting for Ramadan? Here’s what you need to know.
When is Ramadan?
Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, begins on Wednesday, March 22 in the United States and continues through April 21, ending in the holiday Eid al-Fitr.
What is Ramadan?
Ramadan is a significant month for many Muslim people that involves prayer, fasting, spending time with family and friends and more.
“The simplest answer is that it's the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar,” Martyn Oliver, faculty chair of the American University Core, told USA TODAY. “The more specific sense is that it's one of the holiest celebratory months in Islamic practice.”
Muslims believe that, during the month of Ramadan, the Prophet Muhammad was given the Qur'an, Islam’s holy book. It marked the first time that God revealed to Muhammed he was a prophet tasked with carrying God’s message.
Why do some Muslims fast?
One major practice of Ramadan is fasting from sunrise to sunset. Muslim people who have reached puberty are called on to fast, a practice of self-restraint intended to bring people closer to God.
“It is for Muslims to remember God, to strengthen their relationship with him through an act of piety and sacrifice,” Sayeed said. “Because it's tough. It's not easy to fast for a full month, and also to abstain from drink.”
Ramadan is also “for Muslims to engage in acts of charity by depriving themselves of food and drink,” Sayeed said.
“They remember what it is to face bodily and material deprivation,” she explained. “The idea is to sort of invite Muslims to be more charitable in that month and for the rest of the year because you’ve sort of experienced want yourself in very direct ways.”
Muslim people fasting during Ramadan do not eat food or drink liquids, but it can also “mean abstaining from sexual relationships or for smoking or for any other kind of pleasurable consumption,” Oliver said.
Muslim people break their fasts after an evening prayer with a meal called ifṭār. These meals are often communal events with friends and family. While foods at these meals can vary by community, one common choice is dates, a reference to the Prophet Muhammad eating dates to break his fast.
People who are pregnant, nursing or menstruating are often exempt from fasting, as well as older people, people with illnesses and others.
How else is Ramadan observed?
Some Muslim people will also do “an additional voluntary prayer” called Tarawih, Sayeed said.
“These are additional nightly prayers. Sometimes they're prayed in congregation, in a mosque, and one-thirtieth of the Qur'an is recited each night,” she said. “So the idea here is that by the end of Ramadan, that community or people who are praying will have read, recited the entire Qur'an in prayer. That’s a very high act of devotion. Many Muslims try to read through the Qur'an actually, during the month of Ramadan.”
The holiest night of Ramadan is Laylat al-Qadr, which takes place in the final 10 days of the month. It is referred to as the “Night of Power,” when the Angel Jibril revealed the Qur'an’s initial verses to the Prophet Muhammad.
Ramadan is also a time to give to charities, Oliver said.
“It's also the time when you do a lot of charitable giving. It's the season of giving to worthy causes or to organizations that support those who are without,” he said.
Should I say ‘Happy Ramadan?’
If you are not observing Ramadan but want to greet a coworker or friend who is, Sayeed said that you may want to say “Ramadan Mubarak” or “Ramadan Kareem”
“The first is just like sort of, congratulations for Ramadan. Ramadan Kareem is actually a really beautiful one. Kareem is a word connoting generosity and giving. The idea that even though you're experiencing a very high level of material deprivation, that Ramadan itself and these charitable acts during Ramadan that are heightened for Muslims evoke generosity and bounty,” she said.
Oliver said you may also want to “wish somebody an easy fast, which is a sort of a recognition that somebody who is participating in Ramadan is going to be hungry and tired during the day.”
What is Eid al-Fitr?
Eid al-Fitr commemorates the end of Ramadan. It means “the feast of the breaking of the fast.”
Sayeed called it a “major annual holiday for Muslims,” when they “are advised to kind of wear their nicest clothes, go out in the morning for congregational prayer.”
Children may receive presents after prayers, and communities may come together for celebratory meals and fireworks.
“There's a sense of relief at having completed the fasting or maybe a sense of accomplishment, and also gratefulness for what one has,” Oliver said.
Contributing: Clare Mulroy, Maria Jimenez Moya; USA TODAY
|
PBS NewsHour – May 24, 2023
The United Nations estimates the world population will reach 10 billion by 2060. As the world’s population expands, so do concerns about how to sustainably grow enough food. Food production also takes a toll on the environment. A recent U.N.-backed study found that more than one-third of human-caused global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way our food is processed and packaged.
On Wednesday, May 24 at 7 p.m. ET, PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien will host a live discussion called “Tipping Point: Agriculture on the Brink” that looks at some of these challenges and answers your questions.
|
<urn:uuid:f00ba2f1-6419-48c9-a2f3-7aa5aa94135c>
|
{
"dump": "CC-MAIN-2023-23",
"file_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224647459.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20230531214247-20230601004247-00673.warc.gz",
"int_score": 3,
"language": "en",
"language_score": 0.9158989787101746,
"pii_count": 0,
"score": 2.71875,
"token_count": 153,
"url": "https://environmentaljusticetv.wordpress.com/2023/05/24/tipping-point-agriculture-on-the-brink-a-pbs-newshour-special/"
}
|
PBS NewsHour – May 24, 2023
The United Nations estimates the world population will reach 10 billion by 2060. As the world’s population expands, so do concerns about how to sustainably grow enough food. Food production also takes a toll on the environment. A recent U.N.-backed study found that more than one-third of human-caused global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way our food is processed and packaged.
On Wednesday, May 24 at 7 p.m. ET, PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien will host a live discussion called
|
“Tipping Point: Agriculture on the Brink” that looks at some of these challenges and answers your questions.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.