Monday Mailing
Year 21 • Issue 6 13 October 2014 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
$5 Million Knight Cities Challenge Opens for Ideas Oregon Rejects Wyoming’s Appeal of Proposed Coal Port Drone Operators in Oregon Eager for FAA Approval InFARMation: Tuesday October 14th: You Down With TPP? Facebook's Plan To Own Your Phone Thin Ice – Exploring Mount Hood’s Glacier Caves What Your Home Address Says about What You’ll Buy Oregon Ghost Towns: Boyd, Dufur and Friend Farm Commons Webinars - Archive New Web Resources from Hazards Research Center A Mesmerizing Interactive History of the High-Rise
1. $5 Million Knight Cities Challenge Opens for Ideas What’s your best idea to make cities more successful? Today we’re starting a journey to answer that question and uncover new thinking from civic innovators of all kinds everywhere. We call it the Knight Cities Challenge, and Knight Foundation is investing $5 million to move these ideas forward.
Quote of the Week: “If we are to succeed in saving the planet, the battle will be won or lost at the local level.” ~Governor Tom McCall Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon has more ghost towns than any other state.
Research shows that three of the most powerful levers for city success are talent, opportunity and engagement. We know that if your city can attract and retain talent, expand economic opportunity and create a culture of civic engagement then your city is much more likely to be successful. But what we don’t know is how to get there. That’s why we’re running the challenge and looking for ideas to advance talent, opportunity and engagement in the 26 Knight communities. For more information, click here. 2. Oregon Rejects Wyoming’s Appeal of Proposed Coal Port The Oregon Department of State Lands has denied an appeal by the State of Wyoming that sought to revive a proposed coal terminal project on the Columbia River, leaving proponents with fewer avenues to bring it to life. Oregon’s lands department rejected the terminal in August and Wyoming appealed, saying the state would be adversely affected by the project’s denial. But the Department of State Lands found that Wyoming had no standing to appeal its rejection of the proposed terminal. Oregon ruled that building the terminal would threaten its water resources. To access the full story, click here.
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3. Drone Operators in Oregon Eager for FAA Approval Drones are nothing new for Stephen Burtt and his employees at Aerial Technology International in Clackamas. Burtt's launched his company back in 2007, then under the name of Northwest Aero Pix, looking to work as a service-based provider in Oregon offering aerial images for local professionals. From real estate to farmers to city planners, a range of clientele rely on aerial photography for property assessment, crop inspection and urban mapping. Equipped with hovering, remote-control propeller drones, Burtt saw an opportunity. But the service was short-lived. That same year, the Federal Aviation Administration suspended commercial activity by drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, until the agency could perform a safety review and implement new rules. So Northwest Aero Pix halted activity and ATI, which manufactures drones for hobbyists and international companies, was born. To access the full story, click here. 4. InFARMation: Tuesday October 14th: You Down With TPP? You down with TPP? Hell no, not me!, says a diverse range of advocates from consumer groups to labor organizations. But why? Join us Tuesday October 14th from 5:30-8:30 pm at Holocene (1001 SE Morrison St) for a discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We aim to gain a basic understanding of the controversy surrounding these trade policies, learn if/ how Oregon farmers, rancher and eaters would be impacted and explore organizing efforts taking place and see how citizens can take action. Our panel includes Elizabeth Swager, Executive Director, Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, Julia DeGraw, Northwest Organizer, Food & Water Watch and David Delk of Portland Alliance for Democracy and the Populist Dialogues. Read up on the TPP/ TTIP ahead of time: Oregon Fair Trade Campaign TPP Page & Report: Trade Policy and Family Farms in Oregon Food & Water Watch TPP/ TIPP Info Pages Alliance for Democracy TPP Campaign Page
Join the conversation and bring your friends and family InFARMation (and Beer!) is free, open to the public and all ages! It happens every 2nd Tuesday of the month at Holocene. The topic changes each month but the focus is always about food, farming, policy and the connections in between. For questions or to suggest a topic please contact Leah@friendsoffamilyfarmers.org Read more about InFARMation and view previous topics here>>> 5. Facebook's Plan To Own Your Phone Mark Zuckerberg streams through the crowd at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco like a politician working a pancake breakfast. As the Facebook CEO makes the rounds at f8, the company's daylong developer conference, it is clear that he is among his people. Fifteen hundred hackers have amassed, the first time Zuck has called this flock together in two and a half years. They're here to attend engineering sessions about Page 2 of 5
how to build, grow, and monetize their apps; to munch on plastic-wrapped sandwiches trucked up from Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters; and to try to catch a glimpse of Zuck casually hanging out by the Oculus Rift demo, a sight even more surreal for them than the virtual-reality experience itself. Despite the stuffy heat--the 125,000-square-foot space doesn't have air-conditioning, so Facebook had to import its own ventilation ducts, which hum along the wooden ceilings--Zuck looks cool and relaxed in his T-shirt and jeans. He walks tall, chest out firmly, and with each quick hello he leaves a trail of starstruck smiles and excited whispers in his wake, as if Harry Styles were strolling through a suburban shopping mall. As one beaming attendee says after shaking hands with the CEO, "He seems pretty fucking confident!" To access the full story, click here. 6.
Thin Ice – Exploring Mount Hood’s Glacier Caves On the slopes of Mount Hood, six explorers set off in a line up the Sandy Glacier. Eddy Cartaya pulls ahead of the group, a stony expression on his face. He’s wearing a white helmet with his name and “Cave Rescue” printed on it. Cartaya is worried because the sun is starting to rise and hit the ice. His climbing partner Brent McGregor follows at a more reasonable pace. The bearded 60-year-old takes in the morning and smiles. “One of the best sounds in alpine mountaineering is the sound of crampons and ice axes on good firm snow,” he says. To access the full story, click here.
7. What Your Home Address Says about What You’ll Buy Where you live can give a good indication of who you are and what you buy, according to mapping software company Esri. In its Tapestry Segmentation project, Esri overlays geography with other information, such as demographic data from the Census and marketing data from GfK Mediamark Research & Intelligence. The result is a detailed picture of the socioeconomics and demographics as well as attitudes and brand preferences of people in a given zip code. From this information, Esri compiled 67 profiles of American market segments, which include farranging attributes, so that companies or governmental organizations can potentially figure out if your neighborhood is more into lattes or latkes. To access the full story, click here. 8. Oregon Ghost Towns: Boyd, Dufur and Friend Driving through the sun struck wheat fields south of Mosier and The Dalles, it’s nearly impossible to believe that the sculpted chasm of the Columbia River Gorge is anywhere nearby. It’s also hard to believe that the ghost towns dotting the map out here were once bustling farming communities filled with immigrants who, like so many of us, followed their dreams to Oregon. An invisible line divides Central Oregon from the landscape of its river cousin. You can feel it in the shift of color — golden fields of maturing grain against a bright blue sky —and in the heat of this dry country that gets less than 14 inches of rain each year. You can see it in the weathered grey buildings
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and aging grain silos of little towns that once thrived and are now lingering memories of the 19thcentury small farming communities that faded away in the 20th century. To access the full story, click here. 9. Farm Commons Webinars - Archive Farm Commons delivers fast-paced webinars that help farmers move forward on the legal issues that affect their farm operation. Their webinars are engaging and practical- this isn’t just theoretical learning! To access a list of archived webinars, click here. 10. New Web Resources from Hazards Research Center Putting Libraries on the Map: A Protype for Location-Based Literature Collections At the Natural Hazards Center, we’re always looking for ways to make our vast collection of resources more useful to the hazards community. With that in mind, we submitted this entry to the Knight News Challenge in hopes of funding our next great idea. We’d love for you to take a look, offer feedback, and let Knight know how our plan to provide map-based disaster information would benefit the hazards community. Supporting the Supporters This Winston Churchill Fellowship report by Jolie Wills of the New Zealand Red Cross examines the reality of those working in support roles during long-term disaster recovery. After conducting numerous interviews with individuals at all levels of disaster support, Wills has developed 12 principles to make sure those called on to continuously provide support to their communities are equally supported in return. TRAIN Public health workers will get schooled (in a good way) when they visit this site, dedicated to providing free courses on topics relevant to the field. TRAIN offers thousands of courses available on a variety of platforms, so public health professionals can easily keep their education current or learn about new topics. And with a national site and network of affiliates, the TRAIN users can learn as broadly or specifically as they’d like. Continuing Education Units are also available and the course offerings are easy to search, so start learning even more today. Global Defense Security Index on Climate Change This newly updated index by the American Security Project takes a country-by-country look at how nations around the world view climate change in the context of national security and their plans for addressing it. With easy-to-read summaries and full text reports, the index is a great resource for gauging the link between climate and security. Resilience at the National Academies This Web site is one-stop shopping for the many National Academies activities related to resilience. Visitors will find books, Web sites, workshops, and videos all categorized in easy-to-find topic areas such as natural hazards, critical infrastructure, health and pandemics, and terrorism.
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11. A Mesmerizing Interactive History of the High-Rise Told over four parts meant to evoke chapters in a storybook using films, photos, archive materials, text, and miniature games, this "Op-Doc" is a short masterclass in the 2,500-year global history of vertical living. "A Short History of the Highrise" tells the technical, social, and cultural history of vertical living in a spellbinding series of short films with rhyming narration, intricate animation, and interactive materials. It starts with Roman experiments in apartment living for the working poor made of mud and timber, and continues through the cliff dwellings of Arizona, stacked circular buildings of rural China, and Yemen's medieval "Manhattan of the Desert". An in-depth examination of the modern era of high-rise construction begins with the "game changing" invention of the elevator. To access the series, click here.
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