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Monday Mailing

Year 20 • Issue 04 30 September 2014 1.

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Literal Street Art Transforms Pedestrian Crosswalks Wyden Unveils Bill to End Large-Scale Domestic Spying Fresh Hop Beer Season Begins in Pacific NW Portland Might Get New Nickname: Tech Town Rural Poverty Increases, While the U.S. Poverty Rate Remains Unchanged Chefs & Volunteers Sought for Garden-Direct Food Day Event!

Somebody Stole 7 Milliseconds From the Federal Reserve Oregon’s North-Central Grain Belt: Cottonwood Canyon Becomes new Tourist Magnet How "The Simpsons" Fixed Apple's iPhone Keyboard Draining the Life From 'Community' Funding Opportunities

1. Literal Street Art Transforms Pedestrian Crosswalks There is a lot of commercial emphasis on the safety of vehicle designs, but did you know that 25% of auto accidents involve pedestrians?

While the purpose of these crossings is to assist people (or in some cases animals) wishing to cross a road, their utilitarianism hasn’t not stopped people from creative experimentation in the form of quite literal pedestrian street art.

Quote of the Week: "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning” –Albert Einstein Oregon Fast Fact #15: The federal government owns more than 50 percent of the land in Oregon.

The most famous of these works come, unsurprisingly, from Peter Gibson, often referred to as Canada’s answer to Britain’s Banksy.

Gibson’s stencils are a direct response to the proliferation of ‘car culture‘ and though have gotten him into trouble with the law (he was arrested and charged with 53 counts of mischief) have gotten almost universal praise from the public for questioning the impact of our dependency on automobiles on society. Ironically enough, all charges were dropped against Gibson, instead he was asked to participate in 40 hours of community service focusing on street art.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Wyden Unveils Bill to End Large-Scale Domestic Spying WASHINGTON — A proposal unveiled Wednesday by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and three other senators would end sweeping surveillance operations like the ones revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Under legislation being pushed by Wyden, Democrats Mark Udall of Colorado and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, the government could only access telephone and Internet records of those suspected of terrorism or espionage.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. Fresh Hop Beer Season Begins in Pacific NW PORTLAND – It’s the beginning of the fall and that means one thing to beer enthusiasts across the Pacific Northwest—fresh hop beer season.

The elusive beers rear their hoppy heads for only a few short weeks from late August to early September, and Northwest microbreweries are already distributing their limited runs of the small batch suds.

Full Sail brewery in Hood River has been making fresh hop beers every year since the popular trend started in the Northwest more than 10 years ago.

“The closer you are to the hops, the faster you can get them into the beer, and fresh hops have a more aromatic flavor that you can’t get with dried hops,” said Full Sail’s executive brew master Jamie Emmerson. “A typical IPA has 2-3 pounds of dried hops, but a fresh hop beer can have ten pounds of hops.”

To access the full story, click here.

4. Portland Might Get New Nickname: Tech Town Portland is known for many things around the country. Thanks to the satirical “Portlandia” TV series, some think of it as the city where young people go to retire. It also is known for its land-use planning policies, outdoor recreational opportunities, craft beer and local food scene.

Now a growing cadre of computer-oriented entrepreneurs are trying to nickname the city “Tech Town.” They want Portland to replace Silicon Valley in California as the center of innovative software development and Internet services.

“Portland is becoming Tech Town. It’s going to be that way,” says Chris Denzin, vice president and general manager of CenturyLink for the Portland market.

Denzin made the comment as part of a panel discussing cloud-based Internet services at the Portland Business Alliance’s monthly Forum Breakfast on Wednesday, Sept. 18. Denzin was praising the push by a growing number of local, small high-tech businesses to brand the region as the next center for creative technological research and development. He noted that several companies already have achieved success, including Jive, Elemental and Urban Airship.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Rural Poverty Increases, While the U.S. Poverty Rate Remains Unchanged The number of rural Americans living in poverty increased significantly last year, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall, the official poverty rate for the United States was 15.0 percent in 2012 - statistically unchanged from the 2011 level. Released today, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012, estimates that 46.5 million people had incomes below the poverty line in 2012, a figure also statistically unchanged from 2011.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. Chefs & Volunteers Sought for Garden-Direct Food Day Event!

Do you consider yourself culinary skilled? Would you be willing to prepare, on-site, a dish made from the freshest ingredients that you can collect from just yards away? If so, consider the following Food Day event as an opportunity to apply your skills and prepare healthy (and delicious!) meals for one of the highest-needs communities in East Portland.

Outgrowing Hunger is an organization committed to providing healthy food for the residents of the Portland metropolitan area that suffer regularly from food insecurity. An outcome of these efforts was the creation of a 10,000 square foot garden in East Portland's Centennial neighborhood--one of the metro area's"food deserts" which lacks access to fresh, healthy food. This garden is constructed in an otherwise empty church lot, and as it nears the end of its second season, this vibrant space has become a haven for both near-by low-income residents and also various refugee communities, including Burmese and Nepalese immigrants.

For Food Day, Outgrowing Hunger would like to have an event that includes a few chefs/culinaryskilled folks that are up to the challenge of preparing foods with items collected on-site at the garden.

Of course, the chefs can always come and see what is going to be available before-hand--and there is a kitchen at the next-door church to help with food preparation. We hope to have an event that celebrates the success of Outgrowing Hunger providing fresh, healthy food in a high-needs community while also accomplishing the twin goal of providing examples of fresh, delicious dishes that the community could prepare with the food growing in the middle of their neighborhood.

Does this seem like an event that you would have any interest in participating in? If you'd like to cook and make a dish, that would be great! If you feel like you just might want to volunteer and assist with this event, that is greatly appreciated as well! For more information, please email Kyle Curtis at: kyle@outgrowinghunger 7. Somebody Stole 7 Milliseconds From the Federal Reserve Last Wednesday, the Fed announced that it would not be tapering its bond buying program. This news was released at precisely 2 p.m. in Washington "as measured by the national atomic clock." It takes seven milliseconds for this information to get to Chicago. However, several huge orders that were based on the Fed's decision were placed on Chicago exchanges two to three milliseconds after 2 p.m. How did this happen?

CNBC has the story here, and the answer is: We don't know. Reporters get the Fed release early, but they get it in a secure room and aren't permitted to communicate with the outside world until precisely 2 p.m. Still, maybe someone figured out a way to game the embargo. It would certainly be worth a ton of money.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Oregon’s North-Central Grain Belt: Cottonwood Canyon Becomes new Tourist Magnet This state park-in-the-making gets dedicated this week, with 8,000 acres straddling the John Day River on north-central Oregon's grain belt loop. The Cottonwood Canyon State Park day-use area and campground is on the Sherman County (west) side of the river. Trails are being built on the Gilliam County (east) side.

It will take a few years for full amenities to be constructed and plants to grow tall enough to provide shade in this desert setting. The campground opens next weekend.

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A reader told me about Cottonwood Canyon back in 2009, after the Western Rivers Conservancy had bought the land and was beginning to sell it to the State of Oregon for use as a state park.

To access the full story, click here.

9. How "The Simpsons" Fixed Apple's iPhone Keyboard Today, multitouch keyboards are commonplace, enabling users to tap out texts with increasingly rapid speed on iPhones and Androids. But it's important to remember that just six years ago, in the age of BlackBerry and Nokia, physical keyboards were the only solution in the mobile world--one huge hurdle Apple needed to overcome in order to make its new smartphone a success. And to work out all the kinks and bugs, the main force driving Apple's engineers--of all things--was The Simpsons.

The insight comes as part of Fast Company's recent oral history of design at Apple, comprised of interviews with dozens of insiders and past executives. According to a former high-level engineer, one of the top priorities for Scott Forstall, then-senior vice president of iOS software at Apple, was to nail the keyboard. He knew if he couldn't deliver on the promise of typing, then multitouch, the core method for interaction on the iPhone, would be a failure. Critics, infamously including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, were loudly proclaiming that the iPhone would be a flop, even before it hit market, because the device lacked a physical keyboard. "Scott was very focused on the keyboard," recalls Nitin Ganatra, Apple's former director of engineering for iOS applications.

"Everybody on the team knew full well that Apple had attempted to ship a device in the past with an alternative touch-form input, and it was laughed at by the industry: the Apple Newton."

To access the full story, click here.

10. Draining the Life From 'Community' NEW YORK — If you don’t belong to a community these days, you’re really on your own.

But never fear. “Community” has become one of those words that should always have quotation marks around it. Words get hijacked all the time, but this is one of those really violent, eight-country, stop-for-refueling hijackings.

Actual communities in which people know each other, do things for each other and act in concert may be on the decline. But new meanings of community are rushing to fill the void.

In U.S. government-speak, there’s the “intelligence community,” which every crisis reveals to be not much of a community at all. There’s a “scientific community,” but they quarrel over citations like toddlers. There’s the “European Community”; you know how that’s going. In Silicon Valley, there is a “developer community” of headphones-wearing techies who speak to no one and play video games alone. There’s a “business community,” whose members seek to put each other out of business.

Entire races are called “communities,” however gaping their internal divisions. The religious, who always seem to be emerging from or heading into a schism, belong to the monolithic “faith community.”

To access the full story, click here.

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11. Funding Opportunities Rural Veterans Coordination Pilot Application deadline: Oct 4, 2013 Funding for organizations that will assist veterans and their families who are transitioning from military service to civilian life in rural or underserved communities.

Housing Choice Voucher Family Self Sufficiency Program (HCV FSS) Application deadline: Oct 7, 2013 Funding program that provides critical tools that can be used by communities to help families develop new skills that will lead to economic self-sufficiency.

Public and Indian Housing Family Self-Sufficiency Program under the Resident Opportunity and Self-Sufficiency (ROSS) Program (PH FSS) Application deadline: Oct 7, 2013 Funding to helping HUD-assisted renters make progress toward housing self-sufficiency.

Grants for Transportation of Veterans in Highly Rural Areas Application deadline: Oct 9, 2013 Awards grants to organizations that assist veterans in rural areas with transportation to VA medical centers and other VA and non-VA facilities for medical care.

Let's Play Community Construction Grants Application deadline: Oct 11, 2013 Grants to be used toward the purchase of playground equipment that will be built using the KaBOOM! community-build model.

Subaru Healthy Sprouts Award Application deadline: Nov 15, 2013 Award that recognizes and supports youth gardening programs focused on teaching about the environment, nutrition, and hunger issues in the United States.

Assisted Living Conversion Program (ALCP) Application deadline: Nov 18, 2013 Provides grants for the conversion of dwelling units in an eligible project into assisted living facilities for frail elderly persons.

Youth Garden Grants Program Application deadline: Dec 6, 2013 Awards funding to schools and community organizations with child-centered garden programs.

Mary Byron Foundation: Roth Award for Underserved Populations Application deadline: Dec 22, 2013 Awards to honor programs that demonstrate promise in ending the cycle of domestic violence in underserved populations.

AmeriCorps State and National Grants Letter of Intent (Required): Dec 11, 2013 Application deadline: Jan 8, 2014 Funding for programs that are designed to strengthen communities and solve local problems.

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Intermediary Relending Program (IRP) Application deadline: Applications accepted on an ongoing basis.

Provides loans to intermediaries for the establishment of revolving loan funds in rural areas.

USDA Mutual Self-Help Loans Application deadline: Applications accepted on an ongoing basis.

Provides loans to rural, low-income homeowners to construct their homes.

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