Tuesday, October 21st, 2014
Lindsay Abrams, Staff Writer - Salon
Stephan: Once again we have a story about the disgusting industrial husbandry model that dominates food sourcing in the U.S., as well as another cautionary tale showing how corrupt the oversight agencies that are supposed to protect us have become. Eat locally sourced organic produce, meats, seafood, and fowl seems to be the take away lesson here.
Credit: AP/Paul Sakuma
Fremont, Nebraska, 2004: Maria Lopez, a meat production line worker, gathers and bags fat trimmings while her co-worker slices pork shoulders. Struggling to keep up with the plant’s accelerated assembly line, her fingers slip toward a spinning saw on her workspace — she gets a bit too close; her reaction is a bit too slow. Lopez is rushed from the premises, her severed index finger reattached in a series of surgeries that leave her without feeling in the appendage. The drama keeps her out of work for two months — and, when the plant’s line speed is once again increased, convinces her to quit her job for good — but the accident wasn’t enough to bring production even to a pause. As journalist Ted Genoways describes it in his new book, ”her coworkers were instructed by floor supervisors to wash the station of her blood, but the line never stopped.”
What journalist Christopher Leonard recently did for Tyson and the chicken industry, Genoways, the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, does […]
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2014
Marian Wang, - The Huffington Post/Pro Publica
Stephan: The Charter School Movement, whatever it might have intended in the beginning, has become something of a racket. Like all privatization movements it is about finding a way to tap the public treasury to make profit. Unfortunately, what it was supposed to deliver has not panned out -- improved education for children. Note particularly the involvement of the Koch brothers. For close to a decade they have been exploring ways to use their money to bias the education of children to their worldview on the theory that if they can get them young they can mold them to support the policies they espouse.
In late February, the North Carolina chapter of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — a group co-founded by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers — embarked on what it billed as a statewide tour of charter schools, a cornerstone of the group’s education agenda. The first — and it turns out, only — stop was Douglass Academy, a new charter school in downtown Wilmington.
Douglass Academy was an unusual choice. A few weeks before, the school had been
warned by the state about low enrollment. It had just 35 students, roughly half the state’s minimum. And a month earlier, a local newspaper had
reported that federal regulators were investigating the school’s operations.
But the school has other attributes that may have appealed to the Koch group. The school’s founder, a politically active North Carolina businessman named Baker Mitchell, shares the Kochs’ free-market ideals. His model for success embraces decreased government regulation, increased privatization and, if all goes well, healthy corporate profits.
In that regard, Mitchell, 74, appears to be thriving. Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell’s chain of four nonprofit charter schools to […]
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2014
Agata Blaszczak-Boxe, Contributing Writer - Livescience
Stephan: This story makes it very clear that if you have children that you discuss any medications given to them in depth with your physician before administering them.
Credit: Ilike/Shutterstock.com
Every eight minutes, a child in the United States is affected by a medication error on the part of their parents or caregivers, according to a new study.
In the study, researchers found that 63,000 children younger than age 6 were affected yearly by out-of-hospital medication errors between 2002 and 2012, and most of those mistakes occurred at the children’s homes.
“Some of these errors have very serious consequences,” said study author Dr. Huiyun Xiang, the director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. During the study, 25 children died from medication errors, and 4,658 had to be hospitalized.
The researchers also found that the number of errors involving the use of cough and cold medications decreased by 59 percent between 2002 and 2012, but the number of errors related to the use of all other medications increased by almost 43 percent.
In 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began recommending against the use of cough and cold medicines in children under 6 because there […]
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2014
Froma Harrop, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The fascination young boys and men particularly once had to own the hottest, fastest, latest cars seems to have passed. Almost every millennial I know wants to buy an electric car, and a surprising number do not own a car at all, thus vouchsafing at a personal level the points made in this report.
If this trend continues it portends major changes in the American economy, which for a century has depended on the manufacture and sale of automobiles, and the entire network that supported cars, for much of our prosperity.
I think this is also saying that if high speed rail were available it would be successful. However, I don't see high speed rail in America's short to mid-term future. As a country we no longer support large national infrastructure projects. We can't even manage to maintain what is already in place.
Young Americans are just not into driving the way their elders are or did at their age. They are less likely to own cars or use cars. The drives they do are shorter. Meanwhile, the bus is looking good to them.
A new report confirms this trend and offers reasons that millennials — we’re talking 14- to 31-year-olds — seem less drawn to the automobile thing. They’re sure not singing car songs as the baby boomers did. No “Little Deuce Coupe,” no “G.T.O.,” no “Hot Rod Lincoln.”
But the report, by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Frontier Group, misses what I see as the biggest factor. Driving is no longer a coast down the great American open road. It’s become a pain and a drag — drag as in “a boring or tiresome thing.”
From 2001 to 2009, the average number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds fell by an astounding 23 percent. There are economic reasons, for sure. The Great Recession whacked millennials especially hard in the job area. They are therefore shorter of cash — and less likely to get married, have kids and pursue other […]
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Monday, October 20th, 2014
Stephan: It is fascinating to watch solar technologies develop one after another. One can only wonder what would be happening if the government were really committed to the transition out of the carbon era, instead of being controlled by carbon interests.
Credit: Ohio State University
Costs on solar are coming down steeply, and now they’re about to get even cheaper. A group of chemists at Ohio State University has invented a solar panel that stores energy without an external battery. The self-contained tuner/capacitor panels are already being licensed to industry.
Above, you can see a scanning electron microscope image of the mesh solar panel, whose molecular structure allows oxygen to enter the device and assist in a chemical reaction that powers its onboard battery.
Ohio State University released a statement about the new devices, which they’re calling “solar batteries”:
“In the October 3, 2014 issue of the journal Nature Communications, the researchers report that they’ve succeeded in combining a battery and a solar cell into one hybrid device.Key to the innovation is a mesh solar panel, which allows air to enter the battery, and a special process for transferring electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode. Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different parts […]
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