Author Archives: ztx6uu6c

American Lung Association Touts EPA’s New Carbon Rules In TV Ads

by ztx6uu6c Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk initiative.

The American Lung Association released a new television ad on Wednesday defending limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that the Environmental Protection Agency issued this week.

The ad is a first shot in what’s likely to become an advertising war over the new rules. The ad features a young boy and argues that regulators are now closing the “loophole” that allows power plants to “pump unlimited carbon pollution into his air.”

“Don’t let polluters weaken our clean air protections,” it says.

“We’re trying to help people understand what’s at stake when it comes to carbon pollution and climate change,” said Lyndsay Moseley Alexander, assistant vice president and director of the healthy air campaign at the American Lung Association. “It’s a call to action to keep our clean air protections strong.”

The Lung Association has been one of the more prominent groups cheering the new regulations. The group held a call with supporters on Monday afternoon, featuring President Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

The administration has focused much of its public outreach on the health benefits of the new rules, including the avoidance of asthma, heart disease, and respiratory problems, that would come from cutting both carbon and conventional pollutants from power plants. The ads are airing nationally on cable channels such as CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Comedy Central. Alexander declined to say how much the group is spending on the ads, but said it is “a significant investment” in the six figures.

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American Lung Association Touts EPA’s New Carbon Rules In TV Ads

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America’s Chinatowns Are Disappearing

by ztx6uu6c Posted on October 11, 2013

Image: Dan Nguyen

When was the last time you took a trip to Chinatown? You might want to head there soon, because they might not be around for much longer. According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education fund, Chinatowns all over the United States are being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas due to gentrification. At Wired‘s Map Labs blog, Greg Miller breaks down this break-down. Based on the maps, Boston has it the worst:

According to Census records, the percentage of the population that claims Asian heritage in Boston’s Chinatown dropped from 70 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2010. New York and Philadelphia’s Chinatowns did not see big change either way by that measure during the same time period, but in all three cities the proportion of homes inhabited by families and the proportion of children in the population dropped considerably. To Li that suggests that multigenerational immigrant homes are breaking up — or moving out.

To figure out the composition of these Chinatowns, volunteers went out and surveyed what types of restaurants, businesses and residential properties were in the area. Restaurants in particular are good barometers for a neighborhood’s service to immigrants. In other words, more Asian restaurants means a more robust Chinatown. But as the survey found, other restaurants and shops are moving in quickly.

The very existence of Chinatowns are a product of discrimination—immigrants created these communities to live in because they were excluded from pre-existing ones. And that tradition continues today, according to Bethany Li, author of the report. But with pressure from condominiums and high-end shops from all sides, many Chinatowns are slowly shrinking. While communities are fighting back, Li’s report says that without help they’ll be pushed out again:

Without the fights against unfettered development led by members from groups like the Chinese Progressive Association in Boston, Chinese Staff & Workers’ Association in New York, and Asian Americans United in Philadelphia, these Chinatowns would likely contain even more high-end and institutional expansion. City governments removed and replaced working-class immigrant residential and commercial land uses in each of these Chinatowns.

Bonnie Tsui at Atlantic Cities breaks down what some of those actions might be:

What’s to be done? Recommendations include allocating public land and funds for low-income housing development and retention at a more reasonable proportion to current high-end development; supporting small, local businesses to offset rising rents, given the symbiotic relationship with residents; prioritizing public green spaces; and engaging community organizations, residents, and the larger satellite communities to maintain Chinatowns as shared cultural history and home to working-class immigrants.

For many, Chinatowns are an attraction to a city, and many cities boast about their robust cultural neighborhoods. But they might not be around for much longer.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Many Chinatowns of North America
San Francisco’s Chinatown at night

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America’s Chinatowns Are Disappearing

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Dan Snyder to Native Americans: We’re Cool, Right? Native Americans to Dan Snyder: Redacted

by ztx6uu6c Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Dan Snyder, the owner of Washington’s pro football team, wrote a letter to season ticket holders yesterday to once again defend the franchise’s racist name. Snyder, who in May said he’d “never” change the moniker, focused on the team’s long history—mentioning three times that it has been in existence for 81 years—and argued that it “was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.” He also argued, in a bit of marketing wizardry, that the name “is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect.”

Snyder went beyond lauding the positive symbolism of the Redacted brand, though. Like ESPN columnist Rick Reilly before him, Snyder cited a poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center that found that 90 percent of Native Americans didn’t find the team’s name offensive. He also pointed to a Richmond Times-Dispatch story in which a writer contacted three Native American tribal leaders in Virginia; none of them was offended by the name.

“I’ve listened carefully to the commentary and perspectives on all sides, and I respect the feelings of those who are offended by the team name,” Snyder wrote. “But I hope such individuals also try to respect what the name means, not only for all of us in the extended Washington Redskins family, but among Native Americans too.”

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Dan Snyder to Native Americans: We’re Cool, Right? Native Americans to Dan Snyder: Redacted

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Here’s Why It Takes So Long to Move From Concept to Commercial Success

by ztx6uu6c Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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The computer mouse was invented in 1963, demonstrated in 1968, shown off in a lab in 1973, introduced on a personal computer in 1984, and finally widely adopted in the early 90s. That’s three decades:

That might seem like a long time, but as computer scientist Bill Buxton has argued, thirty years is actually a typical amount of time for a breakthrough computing invention to go from the first laboratory prototype to commercial ubiquity.

The first packet-switched network, the ARPANET, was launched in 1969. It took about 30 years, until the turn of the millenium, for Internet access to be widely adopted by American consumers.

….Why does it take so long? In all of these cases, it took a decade or longer for the new techniques to spread and mature inside the research community….Once a computing concept has been refined in the laboratory, it can take another decade to turn it into a viable commercial product.

….This 30-year rule of thumb can help to form an educated guess about when future innovations will reach the mass market. For example, the first car capable of driving itself long distances was created in 2005, and the technology has been maturing in academica and corporate labs over the last eight years. If self-driving technology follows the same trajectory as previous computing innovations, commercial self-driving cars will be introduced sometime in the 2020s, and the technology will become widely adopted in the 2030s.

That’s Tim Lee, and I’d add one more thing: a lot of these inventions depend on computing power. A mouse isn’t very useful without a graphical user interface, and you can’t run a useful GUI on a Z80. You can do it—barely—with a small black-and-white display—on a Motorola 68000. And then, finally you can do it at reasonable cost with a decent display on the microprocessors of the late 80s and early 90s.

Driverless cars are following the same arc. Obviously software is a huge issue too, but sufficient computer power at a reasonable price is a bare minimum. We’re still a decade or so away from that.

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Here’s Why It Takes So Long to Move From Concept to Commercial Success

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