Author Archives: Ilariaujg

20 Houseplants That Clear Toxins From Your Home

Bringing a bit of nature into your home does more than brighten the atmosphere. Introducing houseplants into various rooms in the house can help reduce the chance of getting seasonal sicknesses (such as the common cold), remove airborne contaminants (volatile organic compounds, or VOCs), reduce the chance of headaches, lift your mood, decrease your blood pressure, reduce allergies, improve sleep and much more.

The 20 plants listed below are specifically known for their air purifying properties. And while an open window may feel like all the fresh air you need, did you know that everything from toilet paper to common household cleaners can contain chemicals and release toxins like formaldehyde? Or that VOCs like benzene can be released into the air by everything from the paint on your walls, to the printed material found in your home?

So why not breathe a bit easier and enjoy the beauty of a new houseplant at the same time! A warning for pet owners: some common plants can cause toxicity in pets. Please check this list of common poisonous plantsbefore bringing home a house plant.

(All plants listed will clear CO2 and may clear more VOCs than noted.)

Related: 7 Indoor Plants That Will Survive In the Darkest Rooms

1.Golden pothos

Golden Pothos(Scindapsus aures): clears formaldehyde and other VOCs.

2. Ficus alii

Ficus Alii (Ficus maeleilandii alii): Good general air purifier.

3. Spider Plant

Spider Plant (Chlorophytum comosum): Clears benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide and xylene.

4. Lady Palm

Lady Palm (Rhapis Excelsa): Good general air purifier.

5. Snake plant

Snake Plant (Sansevieria trifasciata Laurentii): Clears formaldehyde.

6. Aloe Vera

Aloe: Clears formaldehyde and benzene.

7. Moth Orchid

Orchid (Phalaenopsis): Clears formaldehyde.

8. Dwarf/Pygmy Date Palm

Pygmy Date Palm (Phoenix roebelenii): Clears formaldehyde and xylene.

9. Chinese evergreen


(Aglaonema Crispum ‘Deborah’): Clears air pollutants and toxins.

10. Chrysanthemum

Chrysanthemums(Chrysantheium morifolium): Clears benzene.

11. Gerber daisy

(Gerbera jamesonii): Clears trichloroethylene and benzene.

12. Red-edged dracaena

(Dracaena marginata): Clears xylene, trichloroethylene and formaldehyde.

13. Weeping fig

Weeping Fig (Ficus benjamina): Clears formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene

14. English ivy

(Hedera helix): Clears airborne fecal-matter particles.

15. Azalea

(Rhododendron simsii): Clears formaldehyde.

16. Heart leaf philodendron

(Philodendron oxycardium): Clears formaldehyde and many other air pollutants.

17. Warneck dracaena

(Dracaena deremensis ‘Warneckii’): Clears pollutants such as those associated with varnishes and oils.

18. Boston Fern

Boston Fern (Nephrolepis exaltata Bostoniensis): Clears formaldehyde. | Image credit: melissa b. via Flickr

19. Bamboo palm

(Chamaedorea sefritzii): Clears benzene, trichloroethylene and formaldehyde.

20. Peace lily

(Spathiphyllum): Clears formaldehyde, benzene, trichloroethylene, toluene and xylene.

Related Stories:

24 Common Plants Poisonous to Pets
4 Unexpected Health Benefits of Basil
5 Surprising Benefits of Hemp
How I Finally Kicked Xanax to the Curb with CBD

Sources:
Science Daily
Mother Nature News
Sustainable Baby Steps

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Credit:  

20 Houseplants That Clear Toxins From Your Home

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What’s the End Game for the Trigger Warning Movement?

Mother Jones

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“Trigger warnings” are having their 15 minutes of fame this year, and a New York Times piece about them this weekend made the rounds of the blogosphere. Apparently some activists want trigger warnings for books like The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn:

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them….Bailey Loverin, a sophomore at Santa Barbara, said the idea for campuswide trigger warnings came to her in February after a professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have been warned.

Ms. Loverin draws a distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa Barbara are veterans — and slapping warning labels on famous literary works, as other advocates of trigger warnings have proposed.

Maybe somebody can help me out here. Not snarky “help,” mind you, but real help. As you might expect, I’m not especially sympathetic to the trigger warning movement, which seems more appropriate for explicitly safe spaces (counseling groups, internet forums, etc.) than for public venues like university campuses. But put that aside. What I don’t get is what anyone thinks the point of this is. You’re never going to have trigger warnings in ordinary life, right? So even if universities started adopting broad trigger policies, it would accomplish nothing except to semi-protect sensitive students for a few more years of their lives, instead of teaching them how to deal with upsetting material.

Now, you could make this same argument about a lot of things. But in other cases—for example, a university policy aimed at racism or disabilities or whatnot—it would presumably be done in the hope that it might influence public policy and eventually lead to changes in the wider world. But does anyone have this hope for trigger warnings? It doesn’t even seem feasible to me.

But maybe I’m just demonstrating a lack of imagination here. In any case, I’m curious about what the ultimate point is. Are supporters of trigger warnings just hoping to give kids a few more years of refuge from the outside world? Or do they somehow think that these policies might spark the outside world to change? I’ve never really heard anyone explain what the end game is here, and I’d like to hear it.

See original article here – 

What’s the End Game for the Trigger Warning Movement?

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How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

Mother Jones

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March 31 is Cesar Chavez’s birthday and a national holiday honoring his pioneering activism (which is the subject of a new feature film) around farm-workers rights. He is perhaps best known as a founder of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), now the United Farm Workers, a labor union. His cofounder Dolores Huerta, though still alive, is not nearly as well known. So who is she? Born in 1930 and raised in Stockton, California, Huerta, who is portrayed by Rosario Dawson in the Chavez film, has been arrested more than 20 times during peaceful protests, and is still out on the front lines taking part in civil rights actions. Here are five things you should know about her.

1. She’s the mother of the farm-workers movement.
After quitting her teaching job in 1955, Huerta helped register people to vote and became an organizer in the Community Service Organization, a Mexican-American association in California where Cesar Chavez was the statewide director. The pair eventually branched off, in 1962, to found the NFWA, and the rest is history.

2. She was instrumental in winning key protections for workers.
Only a year after launching the NFWA, Huerta secured disability insurance for California farm workers, and was central in the creation of the Aid for Dependent Families, a federal assistance program that stayed in effect until 1996.

3. She led a historic boycott against the grape industry.
In 1965, a group of Filipino workers went on strike for better working conditions, a cause that became known as the “Delano Grape Strike.” Huerta suggested to Chavez that the National Farm Workers Association boycott all California table grapes in support of Filipino workers. In 1970, the grape industry signed an agreement that increased wages and improved working conditions.

4. She originated the phrase, “Si se puede.”
Translated as “Yes we can,” this expression should be familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a labor protest in California. Although it is often misattributed to Chavez, Huerta told Makers that she came up with it. “It’s important for women to be able to take credit for the work that they do,” she said.

5. She helped put Latinas in power.
After a life-threatening assault by a police officer at a protest rally when she was 58, Huerta took a leave from the union to focus on the women’s movement. She campaigned across the country for two years as part of the Feminist Majority’s project to encourage Latinas to run for office. According to Huerta’s website, it had a significant affect on the number of women in government.

So, Happy Cesar Chavez Day, and don’t forget to give Huerta her due! Here’s a trailer for the film:

View article – 

How About a Dolores Huerta Day?

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Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off

Mother Jones

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The folks who walked through Tressie McMillan Cottom’s door at an ITT Technical Institute campus in North Carolina were desperate. They had graduated from struggling high schools in low-income neighborhoods. They’d worked crappy jobs. Many were single mothers determined to make better lives for their children. “We blocked off a corner, and that’s where we would put the car seats and the strollers,” she recalls. “They would bring their babies with them and we’d encourage them to do so, because this is about building motivation and urgency.”

McMillan Cottom now studies education issues at the University of California-Davis’ Center for Poverty Research, but back then her job was to sign up people who’d stopped in for information, often after seeing one of the TV ads in which ITT graduates rave about recession-proof jobs. The idea was to prey on their anxieties—and to close the deal fast. Her title was “enrollment counselor,” but she felt uncomfortable calling herself one, because she quickly realized she couldn’t act in the best interest of the students. “I was told explicitly that we don’t enroll and we don’t admit: We are a sales force.”

After six months at ITT Tech, McMillan Cottom quit. That same day, she called up every one of the students she’d enrolled and gave them the phone number for the local community college.

With 147 campuses and more than 60,000 students nationwide, ITT Educational Services (which operates both ITT Tech and the smaller Daniel Webster College) is one of the largest companies in the burgeoning for-profit college industry, which now enrolls up to 13 percent of higher-education students. ITT is also the most profitable of the big industry players: Its revenue has nearly doubled over the past seven years, closing in on $1.3 billion last year, when CEO Kevin Modany’s compensation topped $8 million.

To achieve those returns, regulators suspect, ITT has been pushing students to take on financial commitments they can’t afford. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking into ITT’s student loan program, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how those loans were issued and sold to investors. (Neither agency would comment about the probes.) The attorneys general of some 30 states have banded together to investigate for-profit colleges; targets include ITT, Corinthian, Kaplan, and the University of Phoenix.

A 2012 investigation led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) singled out ITT for employing “some of the most disturbing recruiting tactics among the companies examined.” A former ITT recruiter told the Senate education committee that she used and taught a process called the “pain funnel,” in which admissions officers would ask students increasingly probing questions about where their lives were going wrong. Properly used, she said, it would “bring a prospect to their inner child, an emotional place intended to have the prospect say, ‘Yes, I will enroll.'”

For-profit schools recruit heavily in low-income communities, and most students finance their education with a mix of federal Pell grants and federal student loans. But government-backed student loans max out at $12,500 per school year, and tuition at for-profits can go much higher; at ITT Tech it runs up to $25,000. What’s more, for-profit colleges can only receive 90 percent of their revenue from government money. For the remaining 10 percent, they count on veterans—GI Bill money counts as outside funds—as well as scholarships and private loans.

Study Haul

How for-profit schools leave their students high and dry

96% of students at for-profit colleges take out loans. 13% of community college students, 48% of public college students, and 57% of nonprofit private college students do.

For-profit colleges enroll 13% of higher-education students but receive 25% of federal student aid.

The 15 publicly traded for-profit colleges receive more than 85% of their revenue from federal student loans and aid.

42% of students attending for-profit two-year colleges take out private student loans. 5% of students at community colleges and 18% at private not-for-profit two-year colleges do.

1 in 25 borrowers who graduate from college defaults on his or her student loans. But among graduates of two-year for-profit colleges, the rate is 1 in 5.

Students who attended for-profit schools account for 47% of all student loan defaults.

Sources: Sen. Harkin, Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, Education Sector

Whatever the source of the funds, the schools’ focus is on boosting enrollment. A former ITT financial-aid counselor named Jennifer (she asked us not to use her last name) recalls that prospects were “browbeaten and hassled into signing forms on their first visit to the school because it was all slam, bam, thank you ma’am.” The moment students enrolled, Jennifer would check their federal loan and grant eligibility to see how much money they qualified for. After students maxed out their federal grants and loans, there was typically an outstanding tuition balance of several thousand dollars. Jennifer says she was given weekly reports detailing how much money students on her roster owed. She would pull them from class and present them with a stark choice: get kicked out of school or make a payment on the spot. For years, ITT even ran a (now discontinued) in-house private loan program, known as PEAKS, in partnership with Connecticut-based Liberty Bank, with interest rates reaching 14.75 percent. (Federal student loans top out at 6.8 percent.)

Jennifer, who had previously worked at the University of Alabama, says she felt like a collection agent. “My supervisors and my campus president were breathing down my neck, and I was threatened that I was going to be fired if I didn’t do this,” she says. Yet she knew that students would have little means to get out from under the debt they were signing up for. Roughly half of ITT Tech students dropped out during the period covered by the Harkin report, and the job prospects for those who did graduate were hardly stellar. Even though a for-profit degree “costs a lot more,” Harkin told Dan Rather Reports, “in the job market it’s worth less than a degree from, say, a community college.”

Jennifer says the career services office at her campus wasn’t much help; students told her they were simply given a printout from Monster.com. (ITT says its career counselors connect students with a range of job services and also help them write résumés, find leads, and arrange interviews.) By the time she was laid off, Jennifer believed the college “left students in worse situations than they were to begin with.”

It’s not just whistleblowers who are complaining about ITT. There’s an entire website, myittexperience.com, dedicated to stories from disappointed alumni. That’s how we found Margie Donaldson, a 38-year-old who says her dream has always been to get a college degree and work in corporate America: “Especially being a little black girl in the city of Detroit, a degree was everything to me.”

Donaldson was making nearly $80,000 packing parts at Chrysler when the company, struggling to survive the recession, offered her a buyout. She decided to use it to get the college degree that she never finished 13 years before. Five years later, she is $75,000 in debt and can’t find a full-time job despite her B.A. in criminal justice from ITT. She’s applied for more than 200 positions but says 95 percent of the applications went nowhere because her degree is not regionally accredited, so employers don’t see it as legitimate. Nor can she use her credits toward a degree at another school. Working part time as an anger management counselor, she brings in about $1,400 a month, but there are no health benefits, and with three kids ages 7, 14, and 18, she can barely make ends meet. She has been able to defer her federal student loans, but the more than $20,000 in private loans she took out via ITT can’t be put off, so she’s in default with 14.75 percent interest—a detail she says her ITT financial-aid adviser never explained to her—and $150 in late fees tacked on to her balance each month. Donaldson says she has tried to work out an affordable payment plan, but the PEAKS servicers won’t agree until she pays an outstanding balance of more than $3,500—more than double her monthly income. “It puts me and my family, and other families, I’m sure, in a very tough situation financially,” she says.

Donaldson says she didn’t understand how different ITT was from a public college. If she had attended one of Michigan’s 40-plus state and community colleges, her tuition would have been roughly one-third of what it was at ITT. Now, she says, all that time and money feels wasted: “It’s almost like I’m like a paycheck away from going back to where I grew up.”

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Screw U: How For-Profit Colleges Rip You Off

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Natural Remedies for Pest-Free Plants

Continued: 

Natural Remedies for Pest-Free Plants

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Exxon demolishing homes ruined by its Mayflower spill

Exxon demolishing homes ruined by its Mayflower spill

Zillow

36 N. Starlite Rd., in happier days.

If you wish to bid Jose Modica and Daneshia Roberts-Modica farewell in the wake of the tar-sands oil spill that wrecked their Mayflower, Ark., neighborhood in the spring, don’t bother sending the flowers to their 36 N. Starlite Rd. address.

The couple bought the four-bedroom house last year for $180,000. Then the oil spill happened, and their family was never allowed to return. So they sold it to Exxon in August for $3,000 less than they had paid.

Let’s call them motivated sellers.

On Monday, Exxon took a bulldozer to the former family home, along with another that used to belong to their neighbors a couple doors down.

Since ruining the neighborhood with its pipeline rupture, Exxon has become something of a local real estate tycoon in Mayflower — specializing in sullied property.

The Log Cabin Democrat reports that the energy giant has purchased five of the 22 homes that were evacuated in the wake of the oil spill — and that it is in talks to purchase more:

The demolition process took 45 minutes to an hour for each home. Crews used Mayflower fire trucks and hoses for dust control.

[Exxon spokesman Aaron] Stryk said it would take about two weeks to remove debris and landscape the area, and all work will be done during typical working hours.

He said the decision to demolish the two homes was a recent one, and was determined to be the most effective and efficient way to remove contaminated soil.

Stryk said he doesn’t have information about the depth of the excavation but said new dirt would be brought in, and the lots would be sodded.

Stryk said the two lots owned by Exxon will remain as “green space.”

Here’s hoping some neighbors can pick up the oil-stained pieces of their lives and actually enjoy that “green space.”


Source
Exxon demolishes Mayflower homes with oil at foundations, Log Cabin Democrat
36 Starlite Rd N, Mayflower, AR 72106, Zillow

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Exxon demolishing homes ruined by its Mayflower spill

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