Archive for May, 2015
State of Emergency Declared for Oil Spill Off Santa Barbara Coast
May 20th, 2015More oil drilling for New Zealand? Look and learn. Via: NBC: California Governor Jerry Brown on Wednesday issued an emergency proclamation for Santa Barbara County due to the effects of an oil spill near Refugio State Beach. Oil floating off the Southern California coast after a spill from a broken oil pipe now stretches about […]
Wall Street’s Hot New Financial Product: Your Rent Check
May 20th, 2015Via: Mother Jones: Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses […]
Teachers Using Pens and Paper in the Classroom “Not Fair” to Students, Microsoft Official Says
May 20th, 2015In other news, Microsoft Study Shows that Technology Is Shortening Attention Spans. Via: The Georgia Straight: Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom. And chalkboards? They should be banished from our schools too. That’s what Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada, told the Georgia Straight ahead […]
Los Angeles: Minimum Wage Going to $15 Per Hour by 2020
May 20th, 2015This is definitely a dire situation: CEOs Make 373 Times Average Worker Pay. Increasing the minimum wage, while politically expedient, is going to spell doom for many small businesses. A relative earnings limit, on the other hand, could bring sanity to the wage inequality situation without destroying businesses that operate on smaller profit margins, thus […]
German Retail Giant Removes Glyphosate from 350 Stores
May 20th, 2015Via: Natural Society: I recently snapped a photo from an advertising circular that was delivered to my home, proudly promoting Monsanto’s ‘probably carcinogenic’ Round Up, on sale no less, at a local hardware store. While US garden and DIY stores are still selling cancer-causing poison in a jug, a German retail giant will no longer […]
Amputees Control Bionic Legs with Their Thoughts
May 20th, 2015Via: Reuters: Amputees can control their bionic prosthetic limbs with their minds, thanks to tiny implanted myoelectric sensors (IMES) developed by Icelandic orthopedics company Ossur and surgically placed in a patient’s residual muscle tissue. Ossur implanted tiny sensors in the residual muscle tissue of two amputees that they say trigger movement in the prosthesis via […]
Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
May 20th, 2015Via: Harvard Law Review: It did not surprise me that almost every child in the D.C. public high school class raised a hand when I asked if any of them had been stopped and searched by the police. When I told them that being stopped without reasonable suspicion that they were committing a crime is […]
The Death of Sgt James Brown Inside El Paso County Jail
May 19th, 2015Via: KFOX14:
CEOs Make 373 Times Average Worker Pay
May 19th, 2015Via: CNBC: The average S&P 500 company CEO made 373 times the salary of the average production and non-supervisory worker in 2014, up from 331 times in 2013, according to the AFL-CIO.
Fermenting Morphine with Genetically Modified Yeasts
May 19th, 2015Laudanum Pale Ale? Via: Radio New Zealand: Scientists have figured out how to brew morphine using the same kit used to make beer at home. They have genetically modified yeast to perform the complicated chemistry needed to convert sugar to morphine. The findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology, raise promise for medicine but also concerns […]
