43 mm 072015

Monday Mailing

Year 21 • Issue 43 20 July 2015 1.

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Wildfires Are Happening More Often and in More Places Right-of-Way Issues Slow Oregon Bypass Project Room With a Boo The Really Big One The New Yorker Earthquake Article Unleashes Tsunami of Social Media: 8 Takeaways 4 Gmail Hacks That Will Change The Way You Work Oregon Main Street Update – July 2015 Webinar: Whole Measures for Community Food Projects El Salvador Farmers Successfully Defy Monsanto Nearly Every Job in America, Mapped in Incredible Detail What ‘Urban Physics’ Could Tell us About How Cities Work

1. Wildfires Are Happening More Often and in More Places This weekend, authorities evacuated some 300 homes threatened by two lightning-sparked wildfires raging in Washington State. Up in Alaska, more than 4.4 million acres of land have burned this year. And cities across the U.S. West and Midwest have sent out air quality alerts due to skies made hazy by smoke from Canadian wildfires.

Quote of the Week: “Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.” ~Brenda Peterson

Oregon Fast Fact: Haystack Rock off Cannon Beach is 235 feet high and is the third largest coastal monolith in the world.

Hundreds of wildfires now rage across Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Canada. And if wildfire seasons seem to be getting worse—it’s because they are. According to new research, fire season length has increased by nearly 20 percent on average in the past 35 years, and the global area now impacted by long fire seasons has doubled.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Right-of-Way Issues Slow Oregon Bypass Project MEDFORD — A right-of-way snafu has delayed the largest road construction project in more than 50 years in Jackson County and has raised the specter of cost hikes for the four-mile-long bypass for busy Highway 62.

“There is a possibility that things could go up, but there’s a possibility that things could go down,” said Art Anderson, regional director with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Instead of going to bid on the project in March, ODOT is looking at Oct. 29, with work starting sometime at the beginning of next year.

ODOT faces two right-of-way issues before it can proceed with the $120 million project, but Federal Aviation Administration approval is causing the most concern.

The four-lane freeway will roughly follow the old Medco Haul Road and will relieve congestion on Highway 62, where traffic rivals that of Interstate 5.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. Room With a Boo For nearly a century, starting in the early nineteen-hundreds, Caledonian Hospital served the area south and east of Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Pee Wee Reese was treated there after tearing his Achilles at Ebbets Field, in 1940, as was a Prospect Park Zoo employee, in 1982, after an encounter with a lion. But, in 2003, Caledonian shut down. Ebbets Field had already been converted into an apartment complex, and, after several years of serving as a hospital set for “Law & Order,” Caledonian reopened last summer as 123 On the Park, “Brooklyn’s most unique and luxurious address.”

It quickly developed another reputation. In January, a woman was standing in her kitchen when the overhead lights switched off. A doorman was watching security-camera footage one night when the motion-sensor lights in a stairwell flipped on one by one—first on the seventh floor, then the sixth, and on down to the ground floor—with no living thing in sight. A cabdriver dropped one resident off with a warning: “Be careful. It’s full of skeletons.” Turnover seemed high among the building’s doormen, one of whom, according to the Post, said that 123 On the Park was “a messed-up place to work because it’s haunted.”

To access the full story, click here.

4. The Really Big One When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

To access the full story, click here.

5. The New Yorker Earthquake Article Unleashes Tsunami of Social Media: 8 Takeaways Leave it to The New Yorker to publish the definitive treatment of horrors bound to spring from a Northwest Cascadia subduction-zone earthquake and tsunami.

Authors of voluminous state task-force reports have labored to catalog the probable effects of the colossal double disaster that experts say will certainly someday — perhaps in our lifetimes — kill thousands, erase Oregon coastal towns and decimate Portland, Seattle and other cities.

But when the famed Manhattan magazine — still studded with quirky cartoons, and ever authoritative under editor David Remnick's steady hand — delves into a topic, it does so with such vivid clarity that its article sweeps the Web, sending Tweets skittering across our region and the world. This week's article, entitled "The Really Big One," forces us to confront anew the Damocles sword suspended over us by a thread.

To access the full story, click here.

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6. 4 Gmail Hacks That Will Change The Way You Work I’ll be honest—I’ve had mixed feelings about Gmail. Sometimes it’s fantastic, like when my best friend and I send each other cool links all morning while simultaneously talking on Gchat. But other times, as I’m watching my inbox fill up at the speed of light, it can just be overwhelming. Gmail and I have finally come to a mutually respectful relationship (think Kanye’s post-VMA apology to T-Swift), but it’s been a long road. These four hacks have paved the way, and once you’ve got them down, I promise Gmail will feel like a whole new ball game.

1. You can fake the timestamp As a self-proclaimed night owl, I never really thought anyone noticed my late-night emailing, until one morning I came into the office and my supervisor (whom I’d emailed during a late-night catchup binge) asked, "Were you working at 2 a.m.?" Busted. I realized that if I wanted to be taken seriously, it would be a lot better if my emails looked like they were being sent at 8 a.m. instead of at 3 a.m. And then I discovered Boomerang.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Oregon Main Street Update – July 2015 It is rewarding to see the amazing accomplishments of the Oregon Main Street Network communities over the past few years in breathing new life into their historic downtowns using the nationally recognized Main Street Approach® to preservation-based economic development. Main Street programs and communities have a vital role to play in ensuring that the historic preservation movement becomes more accessible, more visible, and more inclusive.

As Doug Loescher, former director of the National Main Street Center once said, they “show that historic preservation is as much about the future as the past by inviting people to step ‘behind the velvet ropes’ and ‘don’t touch’ signs to enjoy the experience of shopping and dining in historic buildings.”

To access the full story, click here.

8. Webinar: Whole Measures for Community Food Projects Thursday, July 23rd, at 1:00 pm EST - Registration Webinar Overview This webinar will introduce Whole Measure for Community Food Systems (WM CFS), a values-based, community-oriented tool for planning and evaluation of Community Food Projects. We will talk about how CFP grantees can utilize the Whole Measures CFS frame for their annual Indicators of Success reporting, a collective impact report for all CFPs, as well as a tool for community organizing.

We will also look at examples of how previous CFP grantees have implemented a Whole MEasures CFS process. This will be an introductory webinar geared towards existing CFP grantees, and prospective grantees. Our presenter will be Jeanette Abi-Nader of the City Schoolyard Garden and formerly of the Community Food Security Coalition. Jeanette was a member of the working group that created the Whole Measures for Community Food Systems tool.

Presenters Jeanette Abi-Nader, Executive Director, City Schoolyard Garden To register for this webinar, click here.

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9. El Salvador Farmers Successfully Defy Monsanto The perils of ingesting food that has any contact with a Monsanto-produced product are in the news on nearly a weekly basis.

As Dr. Jeff Ritterman has documented, Monstanto's herbicide, Roundup, has been linked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic, and has also been repeatedly linked to cancer.

Recently, a senior research scientist at MIT predicted that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, will cause half of all children to have autism by 2025.

Farmers in El Salvador are acutely aware of the importance of producing their own seeds, and avoiding those from the bioengineering giant. The farmers, who have already been consistently outperforming Monsanto with their seed, as the local seed is far healthier and more productive, have just managed to bring about a giant defeat of Monsanto by preventing it from supplying El Salvador with its seeds. Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture released a new round of contracts to provide seed to subsistence farmers across the country.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Nearly Every Job in America, Mapped in Incredible Detail Among all the things that distinguish American cities from one another — their architecture, their demographics, their history and their terrain — their economies vary widely, too. Washington is, of course, a city of government work. Charlotte is a banking hub, Manhattan a financial center, Boston an education mecca. Metropolitan Cleveland remains relatively industrial, while Las Vegas runs on tourism.

These differences form economic identities that shape each city as much as their culture and geography do. And they're starkly — and beautifully — visible in a new visualization, made by Harvard Ph.D. student Robert Manduca, that maps nearly every job in America, one dot per job. His project, which draws on Census data reported by employers, is modeled off Dustin Cable's wellknown racial dot map that mapped every person in the country.

To access the full story, click here.

11. What ‘Urban Physics’ Could Tell us About How Cities Work What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.

At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert on the properties, patterns, and environmental potential of concrete. Taking a coffee break at MIT’s Stata Center late one afternoon, he and a colleague were looking at a large aerial photograph of a city when they had a “eureka” moment: “Hey, doesn’t that look like a molecular structure?”

To access the full story, click here.

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