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The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

by JMTJaniceuq Posted on May 20, 2014

Catch Word

The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

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Kids, do you remember the dictionary? No, not Urban Dictionary. The dictionary! That heavy, paper thing where you hum the alphabet quietly under your breath and look for physical proof that the seven-letter word you just played in Scrabble really exists.

Environmentalists got a few extra words added to their Scrabble repertoire on Monday, when Merriam-Webster announced it was adding some new vocab to its 11th edition, including fracking, e-waste, cap-and-trade and freegan. Also inducted into the halls of dictionarydom were such gems as turducken, tweep, and selfie. (So last year, gloats the Oxford English Dictionary, ahead on the pop culture curve for the first time in 200 years.)

The new edition has already shipped, which means the approximately 11 people who still rely on paper dictionaries (hi, grandma!) will have the pleasure of learning about the joys of dumpster diving. From the AP:

“It’s a young word, from 2006,” [Merriam Webster editor Peter] Sokolowski said of freegan. “It’s one of the youngest in this list. This kind of environmentalism was a Lone Ranger type of activity before but has taken off.”

Merriam-Webster relies on a network of observers who track down word usage in everything from newspapers to soup can labels. Three or four senior editors make the final cut.

Someone at MW must have noticed that there sure is an awful lot of noise about this whole fracking thing (or one of the editors finally watched the reboot of Battlestar Galactica). On the other hand, cap-and-trade was a bit of a gambit.

But Sokolowski pointed out that one reason dictionaries lag behind the internet is a conscious effort to avoid the it-factor:

“One of the most important things we have to watch is the trendiness of language, so we don’t want to put a word in that will then have to come out,” he said. “We want to make sure a word is here to stay.”

Freegans, nice to have you, but we kinda wish fracking had just been an awkward phase.

Let’s page through a few of the new entries:

cap–and–trade, adjective, relating to or being a system that caps the amount of carbon emissions a given company may produce but allows it to buy rights to produce additional emissions from a company that does not use the equivalent amount of its own allowance

e-waste, noun ˈē-ˌwāstwaste consisting of discarded electronic products (as computers, televisions, and cell phones)

frack·ing, noun ˈfra-kiŋ the injection of fluid into shale beds at high pressure in order to free up petroleum resources (such as oil or natural gas)

free·gan, noun ˈfrē-gən an activist who scavenges for free food (as in waste receptacles at stores and restaurants) as a means of reducing consumption of resources


Source
Merriam-Webster Adds Da ‘Yoopers’ To Dictionary, Associated Press

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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The dictionary finally admits fracking is here to stay

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Earth-Conscious Getaways That Don’t Make You Feel Like a Hippie

by SusanneSweatt Posted on May 15, 2014

earth911

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Earth-Conscious Getaways That Don’t Make You Feel Like a Hippie

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Obama talks climate with TV weathercasters

by RoxanneSands Posted on May 7, 2014

He knows which way the wind blows

Obama talks climate with TV weathercasters

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@alroker

Al Roker and President Obama share a moment.

Americans love their TV weather reports — and they trust their TV weather reporters, more than they trust most other journalists.

So when the Obama administration published a huge climate assessment on Tuesday, it turned to these trusted figures to help get the word out. Eight local and national weathercasters were invited to the White House to interview the president about the new climate report.

“This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,” Obama told Al Roker of the Today show. “Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires — all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.”

And to Megan Glaros of CBS This Morning, Obama said, “It’s having an impact on agriculture, it’s having an impact on our tourism … There are real costs, not in the distant future but right now.”

Communications experts think that engaging the meteorologists was a smart move, as Politico reports:

Weather forecasters can be “phenomenal educators” to the public about climate change, said Edward Maibach, who directs the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

“Every day when they’re on the air, they’re taking complicated scientific information and finding a way to make it simple and make it enjoyable,” Maibach said.

“They’re not as trusted as climate scientists,” he said. “But the public can’t even name one climate scientist while most of the public knows at least one weathercaster.”

Watch Obama talk with ABC News’ Ginger Zee:

And watch Al Roker excitedly prep for his one-on-one with the president:


Source
Obama tries weather outreach on climate, Politico
US meteorologists question Obama on climate change – and Boko Haram, The Guardian
Obama to Al Roker: Climate change is a problem affecting Americans ‘right now’, Today

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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Obama talks climate with TV weathercasters

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The Housing Market Is Stalling, and Stagnant Wages Are to Blame

by GeorgiaLZS Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Although the economy has shown signs of life lately, growth is still pretty sluggish. The primary culprit appears to be housing: as Neil Irwin points out today, even after recovering from its Great Recession nadir, investment in residential property remains anemic compared to its average level over the past few decades. People just aren’t buying new houses—or refinancing old ones—fast enough to power a serious recovery.

The proximate cause for this is twofold. First, median incomes have been pretty sluggish: household income today is only about 2 percent higher than it was before the start of the recession. That’s just not enough income growth to get young couples confident enough to move out from their parents’ basement and strike out on their own. Second, as the Wall Street Journal reports, rising interest rates have killed off the refi market:

Mortgage lending declined to the lowest level in 14 years in the first quarter as homeowners pulled back sharply from refinancing and house hunters showed little appetite for new loans, the latest sign of how rising interest rates have dented the housing recovery.

….The decline in mortgage lending last quarter stemmed almost entirely from the slide in refinancing. Loans for home purchases were basically flat from a year earlier and down from the fourth quarter.

Mortgage loans were basically flat, which is bad enough. But refinancing is important too, since it puts money in people’s pockets, which they can use to either pay down debt or spend on consumer goods. Either one is good for an overleveraged economy. But now that’s coming to an end.

Housing is the single most important driver of economic growth. In the past, pent-up demand for new housing following a recession would eventually overwhelm financial trepidation, causing young families to start buying new houses. This time that hasn’t happened, and sluggish median incomes are almost certainly to blame (along with high debt levels among college grads, who are one of the prime markets for starter homes). The virtuous circle of rising incomes leading to new home buying—which in turn stimulates the economy and raises wages further—simply hasn’t happened. We are learning the hard way that there’s a stiff price to be paid when virtually all of the economic gains of a recovery go to the well off. Life may be good for them, but without broadly shared prosperity, the larger economy is stuck in a rut.

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The Housing Market Is Stalling, and Stagnant Wages Are to Blame

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Chemical banned in Europe is probably on your apple

by Glinda6958 Posted on April 25, 2014

Chemical banned in Europe is probably on your apple

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A dose of diphenylamine a day won’t keep the doctor away.

The pesticide is sprayed on American apples after they’re harvested so they can be stored for months on end and shipped around the world without turning too ugly for grocery store shoppers. Federal tests in 2010 found the chemical on 80 percent of apples in the U.S. Unless you only buy organic, the DPA is also in your apple juice, in your applesauce, and maybe on your pears and in your pear baby food.

The chemical was banned in Europe because of health concerns in 2012. So the nonprofit Environmental Working Group would like to know why it remains in widespread use in the U.S.

Of particular concern to the European authorities was the fact that DPA is thought to combine with nitrogen on the surface of apples to produce nitrosamines, a cancer-causing group of chemical compounds. “While it is not yet clear that DPA is risky to public health, European Commission officials asked questions that the chemicals’ makers could not answer,” EWG scientist Sonya Lunder said in a press release on Thursday. “The EC officials banned outright any further use of DPA on the apples cultivated in the European Union until they are confident it is safe. Europe’s action should cause American policymakers to take a new look at this chemical.”

In a statement, the EPA told Reuters that it would take action if new evidence emerges that the chemical is dangerous — but, for now, it will continue to rely on a 1997 assessment that found “reasonable certainty of no harm.”

From Thursday’s EWG press release:

The U.S. EPA has taken no action to respond to the European ban and nor to the concerns about nitrosamines expressed by European food safety officials. This year, scientists in the U.S. EPA Pesticide Office tasked with pesticide safety reviews told EWG they were unaware of the new European ban and import restrictions. …

EWG’s analysis of DPA and apples says that, according to USDA, Americans eat nearly 10 pounds per person of raw apples every year. Consequently, even low levels of nitrosamines on raw apples, or in apple juice and applesauce could potentially pose a risk to human health.

Diphenylamine is used because retailers place so much emphasis on the cosmetic qualities of fruit and because distributors are shipping apples so far from where they’re grown. If we had a more sane food system, there wouldn’t be reason to use it at all.


Source
Most U.S. Apples Coated With Chemical Banned In Europe, Environmental Working Group
Group asks U.S. to examine pesticide-coated apples banned by Europe, Reuters

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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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

by gorso6 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Aetna is one of America’s biggest health insurers, and it’s currently operating in 17 different Obamacare exchanges. On a call this morning, CEO Mark Bertolini passed along a couple of interesting factlets:

Bertolini said about half of the company’s premium increases, whatever they turn out to be, will be attributable to “on the fly” regulatory changes made by the Obama administration. He cited as an example the administration’s policy of allowing old health plans that were supposed to expire in 2014 to be extended another three years if states and insurers wanted to.

….Aetna has added 230,000 paying customers from ACA exchanges, and it projects to end the year with 450,000 paid customers. It said it can’t yet draw a “meaningful conclusion” about the population’s overall health status.

The first is interesting because it suggests that Aetna’s premium increases won’t be based on fundamentals. That is, they aren’t rising because the customers Aetna signed up were older or sicker than they expected. That’s good news, even if the regulatory shakeouts of Obamacare’s early days are causing a bit of pain.

And the second is interesting because Aetna apparently expects to double its Obamacare customer base by the end of the year. That’s roughly what the CBO projected earlier this year, and this is a bit of evidence suggesting that they got it right.

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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

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Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

by Lucile2956 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at The Upshot, a crack team of researchers has put together an interactive map showing which baseball teams are preferred in which regions of the country. The overall results are pretty predictable, of course, but the authors make a few interesting points about exactly where the geographical dividing lines are between traditional rivalries. I thought the most interesting part was which teams were left out completely. Here’s the map:

There is not a single zip code in the entire country that favors the New York Mets. Even in 11368, the home of Citi Field, fans prefer the Yankees by 53 to 25 percent.

And the Oakland A’s have it even worse. In 94501, the home of the Oakland Coliseum, fans prefer the San Francisco Giants by a whopping 59 to 18 percent. This is spectacularly embarrassing. The Mets, after all, are at least in the same city as the Yankees, so divided loyalties are natural. The A’s are in Oakland, a different city with a culture of its own. Sure, maybe there’s no there there, but that’s a culture! And yet, even the working-class East Bay has apparently been so taken over by yuppified San Franciscans escaping sky-high rents that the A’s can’t get any love even after being canonized by Michael Lewis and Brad Pitt as the champions of Moneyball. Sad.

(The Toronto Blue Jays aren’t on the map either, but I assume that’s because the map doesn’t include Canada. I draw no conclusions about Toronto’s fan base, though I suspect we can assume it’s pretty minimal too.)

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Here Are Baseball’s 2 Least Loved Teams

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Net Neutrality Finally Dies at Ripe Old Age of 45

by StarlaODoherty Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Apparently net neutrality is officially dead. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the FCC has given up on finding a legal avenue to enforce equal access and will instead propose rules that explicitly allow broadband suppliers to favor companies that pay them for faster pipes:

The Federal Communications Commission plans to propose new open Internet rules on Thursday that would allow content companies to pay Internet service providers for special access to consumers, according to a person familiar with the proposal.

The proposed rules would prevent the service providers from blocking or discriminating against specific websites, but would allow broadband providers to give some traffic preferential treatment, so long as such arrangements are available on “commercially reasonable” terms for all interested content companies. Whether the terms are commercially reasonable would be decided by the FCC on a case-by-case basis.

….The FCC’s proposal would allow some forms of discrimination while preventing companies from slowing down or blocking specific websites, which likely won’t satisfy all proponents of net neutrality, the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. The Commission has also decided for now against reclassifying broadband as a public utility, which would subject ISPs to much greater regulation. However, the Commission has left the reclassification option on the table at present.

So Google and Microsoft and Netflix and other large, well-capitalized incumbents will pay for speedy service. Smaller companies that can’t—or that ISPs just aren’t interested in dealing with—will get whatever plodding service is left for everyone else. ISPs won’t be allowed to deliberately slow down traffic from specific sites, but that’s about all that’s left of net neutrality. Once you’ve approved the notion of two-tier service, it hardly matters whether you’re speeding up some of the sites or slowing down others.

This might have been inevitable, for both legal and commercial reasons. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

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Net Neutrality Finally Dies at Ripe Old Age of 45

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The Fourth Amendment Takes Yet Another Body Blow

by ShaniHMTjxkn Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week the Supreme Court has handed down decisions on affirmative action and child porn that have gotten a lot of press. But the affirmative action decision was probably inevitable, and the child porn case is an oddball example of statutory interpretation that probably has no greater significance.

More important is Navarette vs. California, which has real potential to do some long-term damage. In this case, a 911 caller reported an erratic driver, who was then pulled over and eventually convicted of transporting four bags of marijuana. The police had no probable cause to stop the driver except for that one anonymous phone call, but the Court upheld the conviction anyway. Justice Scalia is typically apoplectic in his dissent, but nonetheless makes some good points:

It gets worse. Not only, it turns out, did the police have no good reason at first to believe that Lorenzo was driving drunk, they had very good reason at last to know that he was not. The Court concludes that the tip, plus confirmation of the truck’s location, produced reasonable suspicion that the truck not only had been but still was barreling dangerously and drunkenly down Highway 1. In fact, alas, it was not, and the officers knew it. They followed the truck for five minutes, presumably to see if it was being operated recklessly. And that was good police work. While the anonymous tip was not enough to support a stop for drunken driving under Terry v. Ohio, it was surely enough to counsel observation of the truck to see if it was driven by a drunken driver.

But the pesky little detail left out of the Court’s reasonable-suspicion equation is that, for the five minutes that the truck was being followed (five minutes is a long time), Lorenzo’s driving was irreproachable. Had the officers witnessed the petitioners violate a single traffic law, they would have had cause to stop the truck, and this case would not be before us. And not only was the driving irreproachable, but the State offers no evidence to suggest that the petitioners even did anything suspicious, such as suddenly slowing down, pulling off to the side of the road, or turning somewhere to see whether they were being followed. Consequently, the tip’s suggestion of ongoing drunken driving (if it could be deemed to suggest that) not only went uncorroborated; it was affirmatively undermined.

The problem here is obvious: the Court has basically said that an anonymous 911 call is sufficient all by itself to justify a police stop and subsequent search of a vehicle.

In this particular case, it’s likely that the 911 caller was entirely sincere. But that’s surely not always the case, and this decision gives police far greater discretion to stop pretty much anyone they like for any reason. You don’t even need to roll your front bumper a foot over the limit line in an intersection to give them a pretext.

If we’re lucky, this case will become a footnote, with the precise nature of its facts giving it little value as precedent. But if we’re not so lucky, it’s yet another step in the Supreme Court’s decades-long project to chip away at the Fourth Amendment. When an unknown caller is all it takes to trigger a search, the entire notion of “probable cause” is pretty much consigned to the ash heap of history.

UPDATE: A regular reader points out that my summary isn’t entirely accurate. Under Navarette, an anonymous tip is enough for police to stop a vehicle, but to search it they still need some suspicion of illegal activity. In this case they “smelled marijuana.”

That’s true, and I should have said so. The reason I didn’t is that I figure this was basically pretextual. There’s always a post hoc reason if the police decide they want to search your car. And even if you think the cops really did smell something, they never would have gotten there without the stop, and there was no reason for the stop in the first place. This strikes me as pretty direct line from anonymous tip to search, with only the thinnest pretense of probable cause.

I admit that my cynicism here isn’t legally relevant. But honestly, once you allow the stop, cops will find a reason the search the car. There’s simply nothing in their way any longer.

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The Fourth Amendment Takes Yet Another Body Blow

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Rand Paul Apparently Thinks Republicans Controlled Congress in 1978

by LeannaFraley Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at the mother ship, David Corn has assembled a bunch of clips of Rand Paul being less than reverential toward Ronald Reagan. Here’s an example from 2009:

People want to like Reagan. He’s very likable. And what he had to say most of the time was a great message. But the deficits exploded under Reagan….The reason the deficits exploded is they ignored spending. Domestic spending went up at a greater clip under Reagan than it did under Carter.

Ouch! That’s not just a hit on Reagan, it’s a direct suggestion that his fiscal policy was worse than Jimmy Carter’s. Jimmy Carter’s!

David has a bunch more along these lines. But here’s my favorite part:

After this article was posted, Paul’s office sent this statement from the senator: “I have always been and continue to be a great supporter of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts and the millions of jobs they created. Clearly spending during his tenure did not lessen, but he also had to contend with Democrat majorities in Congress.”

Um, didn’t Jimmy Carter also have to contend with Democratic majorities in Congress? Bigger ones, in both houses? Or am I thinking about a different Jimmy Carter?

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Rand Paul Apparently Thinks Republicans Controlled Congress in 1978

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