Tuesday, February 25, 2014


News Clips For The Day


http://www.pawnation.com/2014/02/18/prince-william-wants-buckingham-palace-ivory-destroyed/
Prince William Wants Buckingham Palace Ivory Destroyed
By Nancy Barber Feb 18th 2014

Prince William is calling for the destruction of all ivory in the royal collection at Buckingham Palace, the Guardian reports. This comes days after he attended the largest conference ever held on the subject of illegal wildlife trade.
Primatologist Jane Goodall told The Independent that when she spoke to Prince William and he said that he would "like to see all the ivory owned by Buckingham Palace destroyed."

The royal collection at Buckingham Palace contains about 1,200 pieces dating back hundreds of years. It includes furniture such as an ivory throne that belonged to Queen Victoria. Some art enthusiasts oppose the destruction of these artifacts, but conservationists support the idea.

"It would be a demonstration of them putting their money where their mouth is. It would be extremely significant and visual, and might help Britons hand in their ivory, illegal or legal," said conservationist Dr. Paula Kahumbu.

Prince William is not alone in his stance against illegal ivory. His father, Prince Charles, has asked to have items of ivory removed from his sight at his homes, Clarence House and Highgrove.

"It's difficult to imagine a stronger symbol of the horrors of ivory than Buckingham Palace publicly destroying its own. Good for Prince William for pushing this," said Member of Parliament Zac Goldsmith.

A spokesman for Prince William refused to confirm or deny any private comments attributed to the prince.


Ivory trade
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ivory trade is the commercial, often illegal trade in the ivory tusks of the hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal,[1] mammoth,[2] and most commonly, Asian and African elephants.

Ivory has been traded for hundreds of years by people in such regions as Greenland, Alaska, and Siberia. The trade, in more recent times, has led to endangerment of species, resulting in restrictions and bans. Ivory is used to make piano keys and other decorative items because of the white color it presents when processed

Elephant ivory has been exported from Africa and Asia for centuries with records going back to the 14th century BC. Throughout the colonisation of Africa ivory was removed, often using slaves to carry the tusks, to be used for piano keys, billiard balls and other expressions of exotic wealth.[3]

Ivory hunters were responsible for wiping out elephants in North Africa perhaps about 1,000 years ago, in much of South Africa in the 19th century and most of West Africa by the end of the 20th century. At the peak of the ivory trade, pre 20th century, during the colonisation of Africa, around 800 to 1,000 tonnes of ivory was sent to Europe alone.[4]




This Wikipedia article on the recently mostly illegal ivory trade is too long and detailed to include here, but it is well worth reading. It can be found on my second blog called “Thoughts and Researches.” The conclusions I drew from this article is that some conservationists, especially WWF, have been supportive of the ivory trade as a means of financing their conservation activities in the various African countries. They have concluded, I think, that the forces behind the worldwide ivory trade are too large and powerful to stop, so they have worked with the African governments to get an agreement on managing the trade in elephant ivory and apparently received money from the trade. They were only in support of a ban on the ivory trade in 1989: “WWF only came out in support of a ban in mid-1989 and even then attempted to water down decisions at the October 1989 meeting of CITES."

In 1989 the parties desiring a ban on the ivory trade achieved that through CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). See also the CITES website http://www.cites.org/eng/disc/what.php. “CITES is an international agreement between governments. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.”

China and Japan are heavily involved in carving the ivory, as well as being markets for the ivory products, but most of the carved ivory goes to Europe and America, according to this Wikipedia article. The forces behind the ivory trade are as powerful and entrenched as those involving diamonds, uranium, gold and oil. The beauty of ivory objects makes them so highly desirable that they are almost irresistible as personal treasures.

I am afraid that Prince William's goal of destroying all the historic ivory pieces in Buckingham Palace, if it occurs at all, would be a drop in the bucket of the world ivory trade. It just wouldn't make any difference. It is possible that African nations need to follow the example of South Africa in setting up protected reserves for all of their elephant populations and “culling” them for their ivory periodically. I consider elephants to be highly intelligent animals, so I hate the thought of that, but the ivory trade probably cannot be stopped completely, and if it is managed carefully will be less harmful than in the present situation.




Battle begins on defense budget spending; Obama plan seeks to curtail army to pre-WWII size – CBS
CBS NewsFebruary 25, 2014

The Obama administration wants to build a 21st century military, but it may have to go to war with Congress to get its plan approved.

The pushback began quickly on Monday as the Pentagon revealed next year's proposed budget, which would shrink the Army to its smallest size since the 1930s before World War II.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, has called the changes "a huge challenge."

Some of these changes have been coming for years -- getting the military out of war mode and reshaping it into a modernized force, and that means smaller and more high-tech, but it could come at the expense of some of the men and women who serve.
The announcement at first didn't sound that dramatic. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, "We are repositioning to focus on the strategic challenges and opportunities that will define our future."

As Hagel began outlining sharp spending cuts in the Pentagon's new budget, concern and dismay spread from Washington, D.C., to military bases across the country.
"What we're trying to do is solve our financial problems on the backs of our military," Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., the House Armed Services Committee chairman, said. "And that can't be done."

The requested cuts are widespread, affecting popular programs and troop benefits. Pay raises for enlisted men and women would be capped at one percent for a second straight year. Housing allowances would be reduced.

One veterans group estimates that an army captain with a family of four and 10 years of experience would lose $2,100 a year.

Megan Zemke lives at Fort Lee just outside Richmond, Va., with her husband, an Army captain with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It definitely affects us, and it's definitely a scary prospect," she said.
She also served in the Army for seven years, and now is at home expecting the couple's first child.

"It is a pinch," Zemke said. "It is a belt-tightening. It is trying to figure out, 'How are we going to make this work?' And on top of that, trying to figure out how am I going to have my husband be away again, how am I going to be the sole provider for my children while he or she is gone?"

Hagel also asked for a new round of base closures and to cancel the Army's ground combat vehicle and the Air Force's A-10 attack jets.

But two areas are being protected: money for special operations forces and cyber warfare.

Hagel says the cuts have to come and the U.S. is no longer on war footing, CBS News' Jan Crawford reported on "CBS This Morning."

Reshaping the military is something even former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to do, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said it was one of his biggest "failures" -- not being able to reposition the military for the 21st century.




If we commit to a peacetime force, what does that entail? “Getting the military out of war mode and reshaping it into a modernized force, and that means smaller and more high-tech,” is the proposed plan of the future, according to this article. If we are going to reduce the nation's budget overall, it is probably necessary to do this. I wonder what new kinds of more highly technical weapons they have in development? Lazer guns, increased use of drones, robotic assault vehicles? I got that last one from War Of The Worlds, but with smart cars that can drive themselves now it seemed a likely new weapon.

The Republicans will fight this measure very hard, I expect, as a powerful military is one of their main parts of an ideal government. I think the Democrats would say that our military is too bulky and not as flexible as a more mechanized military strike force and smaller, more highly trained groups of soldiers. Those things are appropriate to a situation in which we stay firmly away from full scale invasions, and only make air strikes or send in special forces groups.

I wouldn't want to weaken our military, but to make it more effective would be a good thing. The financial waste that the army has committed to has been reported in the news from time to time over the years. The fact that the military budget is a secret, but known to be huge, is also one of our problems. The waste continues partly because the public rarely hears about it in specifics, and can't control it even through our Congressional intervention. “Whatever is needed” has been the rule, and that has led to selection of equipment which upon testing doesn't work as it should, etc., with those new fighter jets costing billions of dollars. President Obama can make a restrictive budget, which will help, but careful procurement will have to be an ongoing policy to avoid getting back into the same situation again. I'm glad to see that he is making the effort. It's a positive step.




California to split into six states? Plan may get on ballot – CBS
CBS News February 25, 2014

A plan to split California into six different states is one step closer to a vote. California's Secretary of State is allowing a wealthy investor, Tim Draper, to start collecting signatures for his petition.

Draper recently told CBS News' Ben Tracy why he wants to draw the line in so many parts of the West. "Leaving the status quo as it is, is a crime," he said. "It's a crime to all those children and all those grandchildren. It's a crime that we should be ashamed of." 

Draper is a billionaire venture capitalist. He made much of his fortune with investments in tech start-ups, such as Skype and Hotmail. Now he wants to cut California down to size.

"California is just too big and too monolithic to manage all 38 million people," he said. "They're trying to be all things to all people, and they are doing nothing for anyone."

California is the world's eighth-largest economy. Farmers in the state's central valley grow one-third of the nation's produce. Hollywood is the entertainment capital of the world, and Silicon Valley is the center of tech.

Draper's plan would create the new states of Jefferson, North California, Central California, and South California. But the majority of the population and wealth would be concentrated in what he calls West California, including Los Angeles, and in the State of Silicon Valley containing San Francisco -- the area where Draper lives.
Tracy remarked to Draper, "The criticism is that you're a rich guy who wants to see his taxes kept local where they benefit you the most."

Draper replied, "I am a rich guy, and I am thinking that I want my government and my taxes to be well invested. I want them to create a great education system for my children and my grandchildren and their children."

There have been past proposals to break up dozens of U.S. states or even turn cities like New York into their own state.

Constitutional law professor Vikram Amar, of the University of California, Davis School of Law, says Draper's California plan is not crazy, but it could create more problems than it solves.

"We might be exacerbating the gap between wealthy and the less wealthy, by separating some of the less wealthy parts of the state from the wealthy parts of the state, into separate states all together," Amar said.  

To get his plan on the ballot, Draper needs 807,000 signatures by July. But even if Californians pass it, Congress would have to approve it.




Every now and then somebody comes up with a magic solution to a real problem. Anything as extreme as this is strikes me as being basically hazardous, as it would necessarily be an unpredictable set of massive changes, and whole new sets of laws and governmental bodies would have to be set up to cope with it all. At least Draper is not some crazy who is trying to set up something like racially segregated states and then have them secede from the union. I am imagining all the scramble over new struggles between the political parties that would ensue, and arguments over who gets the fertile farmlands or other natural resources. I wouldn't like to see it happen. Sometimes the known problems of the present are better, to me, than a whole new set of issues to battle. I like California as it is.




Mother of child struck with polio-like symptoms still coming to terms with illness – CBS
CBS News February 25, 2014

Doctors in California are trying to unravel a medical mystery. A handful of children are afflicted with a polio-like illness that robs them of use of their limbs.

In at least two of five confirmed cases a specific strain of a virus called enterovirus has been found. Although 10 to 15 million cases are reported each year, only a handful result in symptoms like paralysis. Still, doctors involved are hesitant to say they are certain that is the problem.

The first known case struck Sofia Jarvis in 2012. At a press conference Monday, her mother Jessica Tomei spoke about the diagnosis.

"She started wheezing suddenly and she had not had any history of asthma, but I heard the wheezing so I called our pediatrician. We were given albuterol." said Tomei. "On the way home she started vomiting."

When her symptoms worsened through the night, Sofia was admitted to the ICU. While at a follow-up doctor's appointment days later, Tomei noticed something strange.
"Sofia went to the treasure box to grab her toy and I saw her left hand mid-grasp stop working," she said.

What they thought might be soreness from an I.V. was instead permanent paralysis caused by a spinal lesion.

"The prognosis that we've seen so far is not good," said Dr. Keith Van Haren, who is a pediatric neurologist who has treated Sofia.

While Sofia's parents are grateful to doctors, they are still coming to terms with her condition.

"Day-to-day, getting dressed, tying her shoes - those things that she would normally be learning right now or be doing, we are gonna to have to find a new way of doing," said Tomei.

Van Haren and his team have been unable to identify the cause of the illness and those sickened are not responding well to medications. Still, he cautions this is rare.

"This is not an entirely new phenomenon but the frequency of the cases we're seeing right now appears to represent to us, at least, a slight increase from what is normal," he said.

The average age of these victims is 12-years-old. Experts say they are publicizing this issue not to scare the public, but to inform doctors and parents so they can be aware of what to look for. At least 20 additional cases across California are being investigated.


Enterovirus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Enteroviruses are a genus of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses associated with several human and mammalian diseases. Serologic studies have distinguished 66 human enterovirus serotypes on the basis of antibody neutralization tests

On the basis of their pathogenesis in humans and animals, the enteroviruses were originally classified into four groups, polioviruses, Coxsackie A viruses (CA), Coxsackie B viruses (CB), and echoviruses, but it was quickly realized that there were significant overlaps in the biological properties of viruses in the different groups. Enteroviruses isolated more recently are named with a system of consecutive numbers: EV68, EV69, EV70, and EV71, etc.[1]

Infection can result in a wide variety of symptoms ranging from mild respiratory illness (common cold), hand, foot and mouth disease, acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, aseptic meningitis, myocarditis, severe neonatal sepsis-like disease, and acute flaccid paralysis.[2]





Viruses are scarier than bacteria because unless there is a vaccine available they can't be cured, and they also often have more severe symptoms. “A virus” usually means nasal or stomach symptoms with a slight fever, but sometimes they attack the nervous system, causing problems in the brain or as in this case, paralysis. These California doctors seem to be stymied by this disease. I notice they didn't name it, saying only that it is “very rare.”

According to the Wikipedia article, polio, while not identical to this virus, is related genetically, polio being one of the types of entero virus. There was a news report of polio itself beginning to surface again, as some parents have opted out on vaccinations for it. I don't want to see that. I was around ten when the big polio scare happened. I was not allowed to go to the swimming pool during that time. Luckily it wasn't many years before the Salk vaccine was developed and everybody was vaccinated.




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A College Project That Imagines A Floating City For Oil Workers – NPR
by Wade Goodwyn
February 25, 2014
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Imagine you're in a college-level architecture class and your assignment is to come up with an idea so revolutionary that it could be considered an important advance in industrial design.

Students at Rice University in Houston accomplished that with plans for a floating city that is being considered by one of the world's largest oil companies. Last year, the students won the inaugural Odebrecht Award for a radical design of man-made floating islands where as many as 25,000 oil workers and their families could live for extended periods of time.

"We started focusing in around Brazil and into the oil industry, and one of the fascinating things with the oil industry in Brazil is that it's all offshore," says professor Neeraj Bhatia. His fourth-year Rice University architectural students focused on a 600-kilometer [373-mile] area off the coast of Brazil called the Campos, Santos and the Libra Oil Basins.

"We saw this crisis, this logistical crisis that was emerging as the newer [oil findings] were further and further offshore," Bhatia says.

The newer discoveries push the limits of normal helicopter range. That means getting to and from work on the oil platforms is both expensive and a grind. So the Brazilian oil company Petrobras is looking for a new, better way for its employees who must work on these platforms.

"And I think what was interesting was being able to affect their lives both at the human level, basically how they go about their day, and then in the broader sense we could change the way that those accumulated lives affected the whole industry," says Alex Yuen, one of the Rice students on the project.


Their solution seems right out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The class designed three large floating islands that are surrounded by 42 smaller islands. These smaller islands would provide the larger hubs with among other things, crops and electricity through solar and wave power. The three main hub islands would be as large as 1 kilometer by 2 kilometers [0.6 by 1.2 miles] and would be a mix of residential, office and industrial centers.

The floating city project designed by Rice University architecture students is the subject of a new book, The Petropolis of Tomorrow.

"We have a series of islands. There are three types — the hub island, which is the largest, considered more like a metropolitan island, where it has the densest population. It has apartments for workers and families, it has resources such as schools and office space," says Weijia Song, another student designer on the project.
There'd be a hospital, a commissary, office buildings and a desalination plant as well as a beach with volleyball and soccer fields and also a swimming pool. The platform workers would be transported to and from the island hub by ferry.

The family unfriendly life of working two weeks on, two weeks off could be eased.
Meat and other commodities would have to be imported by boat, but in many ways this offshore community would be self-sufficient. And the two square kilometers above the water is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath each hub is designed a mountain of submerged steel, including massive ballast tanks.

"With the ballasting techniques, not only can you raise and lower the island by the ratio of water to water, they also have techniques now for digitally sensing wave levels and these things are constantly being calibrated," Bhatia says. "So the technique of using digital stabilizers that are constantly reballasting the tanks would be what was employed."

The three hubs would serve as oil transfer facilities, pumping the offshore crude back to the coast through three large pipelines. The hope by Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company, is to build and have operational floating residential islands in the next five years. Just how much of the Rice students' elaborate concept ultimately might be realized is still unknown. The company's project is in its early phases on the drawing board.




One of the things I enjoy most about gleaning these news articles is that sometimes I come across something entirely new, such as these permanent artificial islands. Some of you readers will surely have seen the movie Waterworld, made in 1995 and starring Kevin Costner. I enjoyed it thoroughly for its ingenuity and excitement, and exploration of what was a theoretical post-global warming scenario. I have heard that even if all the ice on earth were to melt, the sea wouldn't completely cover that much of the coastline and create that kind of setting, but it was still very entertaining. Seeing New York City underwater was fun to contemplate, even if it wasn't realistic.

These students did think out the aspects of life that would be possible to provide on the artificial islands, and create a very livable environment. I just passed over an article about the powerful hold college fraternities have on University life, showing the thing I dislike most about colleges – their maintenance of the class structure due to the high cost of attending college. This article, however, shows what colleges do best. They not only teach a classic core of subject matter, they encourage creative thought and inventive ideas among the students, at least the best professors do. This project has a buyer on the market already. That is great! I hope those students get some money out of it. At the very least they should receive an award of some kind. Maybe the college will do that for them.




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Cool Or Creepy? A Clip-On Camera Can Capture Every Moment – NPR
by Elise Hu
February 24, 2014
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With digital cameras and camera phones everywhere, there are few moments we don't document. But some designers still think we're missing the opportunity to capture some important, simple moments. The solution: the Narrative Clip, a wearable camera that automatically and silently snaps an image every 30 seconds.

"The dream of a photographic memory has come true," reads the box. The Narrative is now on the market and sells for $279.

NPR photographer and Picture Show blogger Claire O'Neill has been fearing a device that would automatically shoot photos all day long, so she joined me in testing it out. (Claire reviewed the user interface and shows you all the warped, blurry images she captured in a post for the Picture Show. Check it out.­

"I already have too many photos to look at," she said.

The Narrative Clip is a lightweight square only a smidge larger than a postage stamp. A tiny lens is in the corner, capable of shooting 5-megapixel images. You clip it to your lapel and it starts shooting two photos a minute. Later, you can simply connect it to your computer to store the photo stream. A Narrative app then organizes what it thinks are the best shots of the day.

"I don't even have to try to remember anything. Great. I'm just gonna turn my brain off now. This is crazy," Claire said.

Or is it? Narrative's founder, a Swedish designer named Martin Kallstrom, says his wearable camera reacts to a real need: We don't often capture simple or serendipitous moments because we don't know they're significant until later.

"What I wanted to achieve was to have a tool to make it possible for me to document stuff that I experience while I experienced them. Without taking me out of that moment," Kallstrom said.

The always-on camera means being fully present, without pulling out a point-and-shoot.
"You have special moments in your life where you want to be fully in that moment. Maybe spend time with your friends, or your kids," Kallstrom said.

I wore the Narrative Clip while spending time with my friends, family and co-workers. The most common reaction to seeing a white square clipped to my shirt was actually: "Is that a radiation detector?" Since these aren't mainstream, I had to explain it was an automatically snapping clip-on camera.

There were many "that's creepy" reactions, too. Even my closest friends said they felt strange about being photographed this way.

Kallstrom says he designed the Clip so it's obvious that you're wearing it. And, he says, just because it's shooting doesn't mean the images go anywhere.

"We never publish stuff automatically on the Web. Through the app, it's always a manual, human decision behind every photo that gets published out of your stream," Kallstrom said.

A lot of the worries people had about being photographed were overblown, for now. Mainly because the Clip just doesn't shoot many really compelling images at this point. (See our slide show, below, of the very best photos the Clip could muster.)
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Most shots in my stream were of my computer screen, people in meetings, and my hair, which accidentally covered the lens. This is partly why Claire, the photographer, is less concerned about privacy and more curious about the effect on our memories.
"I think this could potentially reshape the way you remember your life. Because these aren't the scenes you chose to remember. It's what this thing remembered for you," she says. The app does let users manually pick out images from their streams, but the work it takes to do so is pretty time-consuming.

If this all seems like a lot, tech investor and Narrative backer Evan Nisselson says we're just at the beginning of the wearable camera era.

"Within five to 10 years, wearable cameras and camera phones will replace 99 percent of digital SLRs and video cameras," he says.

A near future of clip-on cameras snapping away at every moment? Picture that.




"Is that a radiation detector?" I think that's a pretty strange reaction, and for it to be the most common is amazing. Who goes around thinking about radiation in their daily life? This new device would be handy if you wanted to record something, but it would need to snap way more than one picture every 30 seconds. That won't give a smoothly flowing image of anything, and of course there's no sound recorded either, so I just don't think it will be useful right now. (Of course, Google Glass isn't very useful, either, and people are buying it.) There is also the complaint that the shots it snaps are flawed and often blurry. I think it's just a novelty right now. They need to work on it some more, and then I think a lot of people might buy it. $279 is a good bit of money for most Americans. Still, it's an interesting new invention, and one that I might like to own if it were more highly developed.