A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit
October 26th, 2013The Hantz Forest Burbclave.
Via: The Atlantic Cities:
After nearly five years of planning, a large-scale attempt to turn a big chunk of Detroit into an urban forest is now underway. The purchase of more than 1,500 vacant city-owned lots on the city’s lower east side – a total of more than 140 acres – got final approval from Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week.
The buyer is Hantz Farms, and it’s a venture of financier John Hantz, who lives in the nearby Indian Village neighborhood. Indian Village is an affluent enclave of manor-scale historic homes, but much of the surrounding area is blighted. Hantz Farms will pay more than $500,000 for the land, which consists of non-contiguous parcels in an area where occupied homes are increasingly surrounding by abandoned properties.
The company has committed to clearing 50 derelict structures, cleaning up the garbage dumped across the neighborhood, planting 15,000 trees, and mowing regularly. Planting of the hardwoods will begin in earnest next fall, and the urban forest will be called Hantz Woodlands.
The huge deal drew criticism last year, when the city council – which was then still in control of Detroit – voted 5-4 to approve the sale. A coalition of grassroots urban farmers and community activists opposed it, charging that it was a play to increase land values by buying a huge swath of acreage and taking it off the market. “I think it opens the gateway for other rich folks to come here to buy up land and essentially make themselves rich compounds,” urban gardener Kate Devlin told The Huffington Post at the time.
John Hantz agrees. But he thinks that’s a good thing. As he told The Atlantic back in 2010:
[T]here’s no reason to buy real estate in Detroit—every year, it just gets cheaper. We’ve gone from 2 million people to 800,000. There are over 200,000 abandoned parcels of land and—by debatable estimates—30,000 acres of abandoned property. We need to create scarcity, because until we get a stabilized market, there’s no reason for entrepreneurs or other people to start buying. I thought, What could do that in a positive way? What’s a development that people would want to be associated with? And that’s when I came up with a farm.
Is Google Building a Large Floating Data Center in San Francisco Bay?
October 26th, 2013It’s made out of shipping containers and will possibly harness the motion of waves to generate electricity.
Great reporting, Cnet!
Via: Cnet:
Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google’s fingerprints are all over it.
It’s unclear what’s inside the structure, which stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers. The same goes for when it will be unveiled, but the big tease has already begun. Locals refer to it as the secret project.
Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But after going through lease agreements, tracking a contact tied to the project on LinkedIn, talking to locals on Treasure Island, and consulting with experts, it’s all but certain that Google is the entity that is building the massive structure that’s in plain sight, but behind tight security.
In Almost Every European Country, Bikes Are Outselling New Cars
October 25th, 2013Via: NPR:
We know that Europeans love their bicycles — think or . Denmark specifically for cyclists.
Indeed, earlier this month, , which has long had a love affair with cars, is embracing the bicycle: For the first time on record, Lauren noted, bicycles outsold cars in the country.
But it’s becoming a Continent-wide phenomenon. More bikes were sold in than cars — for the first time since World War II.
This prompted us to look at the figures across the 27 member states of the European Union for both and . New-car registrations for Cyprus and Malta weren’t available, so we took them out of the comparison.
Here’s what we found: Bicycle sales outpaced new-car sales last year in every one of those countries, except Belgium and Luxembourg.
Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters
October 25th, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
While the specifics of which police departments utilize what surveillance technologies is often unclear, there is evidence to suggest that use of mass surveillance against individuals not under direct investigation is common. “The default is mass surveillance, the same as NSA’s ‘collect it all’ mindset,” says King. “There’s not a single company that if you installed their product, [it] would comply with what anyone without a security clearance would think is appropriate, lawful use.”
Most Americans Accumulating Debt Faster Than They’re Saving for Retirement
October 25th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
A majority of Americans with 401(k)-type savings accounts are accumulating debt faster than they are setting aside money for retirement, further undermining the nation’s troubled system for old-age saving, a new report has found.
Three in five workers with defined contribution accounts are “debt savers,” according to the report released Thursday, meaning their increasing mortgages, credit card balances and installment loans are outpacing the amount of money they are able to save for retirement.
The imbalance is expanding even as policymakers are encouraging people to set aside more by offering generous tax breaks and automatically enrolling workers in retirement accounts that in some cases automatically escalate the amount of money over time.
Currently, workers with retirement savings accounts put aside more than 11 percent of their pay for retirement — 5 percent in their own accounts, and 6.2 percent in Social Security.
Despite that — and despite the $2.5 trillion the report says employers have poured into defined contribution accounts from 1992 to 2012 — the retirement readiness of most Americans has been slipping, according to the report by HelloWallet, a D.C. firm that offers technology-based financial advice to workers and conducts research of economic behavior.
Mozilla’s Lightbeam Tool
October 25th, 2013Update: Supported by the Ford Foundation
Sent in by bretwalda.
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It’s interesting to compare the graphs on sites when you have your browser shields up vs. browser shields down.
Via: Independent:
Just who is looking over your shoulder when you browse the Internet? Tomorrow, web users will be given a new tool to shine a light on the commercial organisations which track your every movement online.
Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency.
Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers to discover what your interests are.
Users who activate Lightbeam will be able to see a real-time visualisation of every site they visit and every third-party that is active on those sites, including commercial organisations which might potentially be sharing your data.
The Fat-Is-Bad-For-You Myth
October 25th, 2013Via: Catalyst:
For the last four decades, dietary fat and cholesterol have been the villains in heart disease.
Dr Michael Eades
You very seldom see the words ‘saturated fat’ in the public press when they’re not associated with artery clogging. So it’s like it’s all one term – ‘artery clogging saturated fats’.
NARRATION
But now some medical experts are coming forward to challenge this medical paradigm.
Dr Jonny Bowden
I think it’s a huge misconception that saturated fat and cholesterol are the demons in the diet, and it is 100% wrong.
Dr Stephen Sinatra
Saturated fat has been vilified for years because of the cholesterol theory.
NARRATION
A multibillion dollar food industry has fuelled our phobia of fat and cholesterol and dramatically influenced our diet.
Dr Michael Eades
That’s not science. That’s marketing.
Dr Jonny Bowden
It’s lived past its expiration date, and it’s one of these hypotheses that just won’t die.
NARRATION
Have we all been conned?
Dr Maryanne Demasi
In this episode, I’ll follow the road which led us to believe that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, and reveal why it’s being touted as the biggest myth in medical history.
Related: British Cardiologist: Eat Butter
Research Credit: ojn
Help Wanted in Fukushima: Low Pay, High Risks and Gangsters
October 25th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Tetsuya Hayashi went to Fukushima to take a job at ground zero of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. He lasted less than two weeks.
Hayashi, 41, says he was recruited for a job monitoring the radiation exposure of workers leaving the plant in the summer of 2012. Instead, when he turned up for work, he was handed off through a web of contractors and assigned, to his surprise, to one of Fukushima’s hottest radiation zones.
He was told he would have to wear an oxygen tank and a double-layer protective suit. Even then, his handlers told him, the radiation would be so high it could burn through his annual exposure limit in just under an hour.
“I felt cheated and entrapped,” Hayashi said. “I had not agreed to any of this.”
When Hayashi took his grievances to a firm on the next rung up the ladder of Fukushima contractors, he says he was fired. He filed a complaint but has not received any response from labor regulators for more than a year. All the eight companies involved, including embattled plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, declined to comment or could not be reached for comment on his case.
Out of work, Hayashi found a second job at Fukushima, this time building a concrete base for tanks to hold spent fuel rods. His new employer skimmed almost a third of his wages – about $1,500 a month – and paid him the rest in cash in brown paper envelopes, he says. Reuters reviewed documents related to Hayashi’s complaint, including pay envelopes and bank statements.
Hayashi’s hard times are not unusual in the estimated $150-billion effort to dismantle the Fukushima reactors and clean up the neighboring areas, a Reuters examination found.
In reviewing Fukushima working conditions, Reuters interviewed more than 80 workers, employers and officials involved in the unprecedented nuclear clean-up. A common complaint: the project’s dependence on a sprawling and little scrutinized network of subcontractors – many of them inexperienced with nuclear work and some of them, police say, have ties to organized crime.
Half of Nation’s Foreclosed Homes Still Occupied
October 24th, 2013Via: CNN:
Foreclosure sounds like the end of the line, but actual eviction can take months or years — even after the bank has repossessed a home.
RealtyTrac estimates that 47% of the nation’s foreclosed homes are currently occupied. The percentage actually tops 60% in some hot housing markets, like Miami and Los Angeles.
Those still living in repossessed homes include both former owners and renters. Either way, their time in the homes is mortgage and rent free.
Fukushima Readies for Dangerous Operation to Remove 400 Tons of Spent Fuel
October 24th, 2013Via: Russia Today:
Fukushima operator TEPCO is getting ready for its toughest and the most dangerous clean-up operation. In November it will try to remove 400 tons of spent fuel from plant’s Reactor No. 4. But even a little mistake may result in a new nuclear disaster.
The operation is scheduled to start in the beginning of November and be completed by around the end of 2014.
Under normal circumstances, the operation to remove all the fuel would take about 100 days. TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co) initially planned to take two years, but reduced the schedule to one year in recognition of the urgency, as even a minor earthquake could trigger an uncontrolled fuel leak.
During this period TEPCO plans to carefully remove more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies, packing radiation 14,000 times the equivalent of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, from their cooling pool.
The base of the pool where the fuel assemblies are situated is 18 meters above ground and the rods are 7 meters under the surface of the water.
TEPCO’s first task is to remove the debris from the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool.
Then, one by one, the fuel rods will be removed from the top store of the damaged building using a crane suspended above the crippled reactor.
Previously a computer-controlled process, this time it has to be done completely manually. And this is what makes this removal operation extremely dangerous.
