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This wasn’t a discussion about computing, although the little Kindle did mention, offhand, that it was surprised the iPad was not going to come with any USB or Firewire ports, and so on. Rather, we concentrated on the book-reading and shopping experience exclusively.
Those darned snowmobilers.
One year after the U.S. Congress gave them 11,000 acres in California’s Eastern Sierra to roar about, the federal government announced an aerial crackdown on continued snomo encroachment in nearby wilderness areas.
The great news in California’s High Sierra this January is that its fabled snowpack, for years underfed by an apparently vengeful Skadi, is almost back to normal after a week of roiling storms left some measuring stations over 100 percent of what is normal for an average April. That means come the spring, the waterfalls tumbling into Yosemite Valley ought to be spectacular — awesome perhaps. That might not be so good for the park.
It was a sobering moment.
The new director of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, David D. Perlmutter, last December distributed a chart to members of his school’s professional advisory board. It showed that applicants to the school were so flat this past year that practically anybody who applied was approved for admission to the two-year undergraduate program. It begged the question many people in the field are asking, to wit, what’s a journalism school to do?
Like “The Island of Misfit Toys,” many old electronics this holiday season were shipped off to distant places after they are replaced. However, unlike the popular Christmas movie, most of this electronic garbage, or e-waste, won’t find a happy home in the end.
The truth is, most used electronics, which can contain high levels of toxins, will end up in landfills at home or abroad.
A study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that of 2.25 million tons of televisions, mobile phones and computers tossed in 2007, only 18 percent were recycled; the rest were thrown away, mainly in landfills.
Jack and Jill went up the hill. Jack got robbed. Jill got jobbed.
Shortchanged J & J
Shortchanged
It isn’t the classic nursery rhyme but it is what students may learn this year as school budgets across the country are gutted.
From Oshkosh, Wis. to Puyallup, Wash., schools will suffer the axe this year as districts and states continue to grapple with big budget holes due to the recession.
The Oshkosh School District, for example, is debating the closure of middle and elementary schools, larger classes and culling around 35 positions, according to WLUK-TV in Green Bay.
Oshkosh’s problems arose after Wisconsin ended the fiscal year with a $2.71 budget gap. Varying by state and district, schools are usually funded by a combination of local, state and federal money.
Thousands of miles away, the Puyallup School District faces a 21 percent budget cut that could result in layoffs, larger classes and a possible school closing, according The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.
The California coho salmon, a magnificent fish that was all but wiped out during the 1990s, have begun to trickle back to the rain-swollen Russian River and its tributaries.
It feels like a miracle.
“When it starts to rain, it somehow clicks in them that it’s time — that they can get through to their spawning waters,” says Harry Morse, communications official of the California Department of Fish and Game.
The Russian River coho salmon population faced near-extinction in 2000, he said, for reasons that are still debated. In their heyday, the size of the coho fishery off the Sonoma Coast was 200,000 to 500,000 fish in the 1940s. By 2000 the number of salmon shrank to one percent of that, and the fish was listed as a threatened species.
“Why they disappeared is the $64,000 question,” Morse said in a telephone interview.
He acknowledged that in some coastal fisheries, habitat damage caused by logging operations may have affected the fish, which depend on cool, clear, sustained flows and stable, structural elements of streams in old-growth forests.
But there are a host of other factors that may have contributed to the near-total wipeout along the Northern California coast, Morse says.
With support from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Newsdesk.org has hired print- and online-news veteran George Shirk as its first paid editor. Shirk will oversee content and network building for the site, and in particular for News You Might Have Missed (NYMHM)—Newsdesk’s signature news service covering important but overlooked news and underserved communities.
Newsdesk.org has received $25K from Ethics & Excellence in Journalism to develop a revenue-earning syndicated service providing public-interest journalism to underbudgeted commercial newsrooms. Content would be developed by a national network of independent but affiliated YOUR LOCAL NEWSDESK bureaus and fellowships. The bureaus will focus on important but overlooked news; fund themselves through earned income as well as individual donors and philanthropy; and develop extremely cost-efficient, peer-run newsrooms that are linked in a cross-promotional affiliate network.
The fishing industry brought in a record $71.5 billion last year, most of it from fisheries that lack ecological oversight. Now, a new report finds that 25 percent of ocean fisheries are virtually depleted, and 52 percent “fully exploited.”
Illustration: Halibut from George’s Bank, 1882 (NOAA Photo Library)