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A fleet of remote-controlled aircraft has been deployed, and operators trained, not to conduct military operations, but to protect natural resources around the world. Source article: Drones on a Different Mission ; ;Related ArticlesWhite House Opens Door to Exploring Atlantic for OilDebriefing: A Mission to Separate Organic Waste in New York City TrashU.S. Raises Threat of Quake but Lowers Risk for Towers ;
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The Obama administration’s approval of guidelines for seismic searches for oil and gas in the Atlantic Ocean handed the petroleum industry a significant victory over environmental groups. Taken from – White House Opens Door to Exploring Atlantic for Oil ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions PeakDot Earth Blog: Miami’s Coastal Climate Calamity – in Super Slo-MoThough Scorned by Colleagues, a Climate-Change Skeptic Is Unbowed ;
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A fresh look at controversial efforts to nourish salmon and store carbon. Source: Dot Earth Blog: A Fresh Look at Iron, Plankton, Carbon, Salmon and Ocean Engineering ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions PeakChina Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions PeakThough Scorned by Colleagues, a Climate-Change Skeptic Is Unbowed ;
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Dot Earth Blog: A Fresh Look at Iron, Plankton, Carbon, Salmon and Ocean Engineering
Studies have repeatedly shown that there is a link between what you eat consistently and the conditions you tend to end up with. As a result of this correlation, studies have found a relationship between eating certain foods and inflammatory related diseases like arthritis. This should come as no big surprise given the obesity epidemic that the country is currently going through. However, the same research has also identified that certain foods can actually act as anti-inflammatories. That is they can actually reduce the pain of something like arthritis. It should be noted that these foods should be consumed as a preventative measure or temporary relief at best.
Teas Teas have actually been widely made use of as cleansers and detoxes for a long time. An uncommon fact was that they can really reduce and/or restrict the pain signals that are connected with diseases like arthritis. Given this information it should not be that big of a surprise that physicians recommend that people with arthritis make it a point to drink more tea. Since the research has not indicated any big difference from one type of tea to another the tea choice doesn’t matter. For it to be effective it will need to be made from real tea leaves. So you can drink the tea of your choice and get the same benefit.
Wine It’s common knowledge that drinking wine in moderation is a good cardioprotective activity. A lesser known quality of grape-based or red wine is that it is composed of high concentration of anti-inflammatory properties. To get the same effects you can also consume fresh grapes since the skin contains the same features.
Cruciferous Fruits & Vegetables There is a lot of study that would recommend that specific vegetables lower the transmission of pain signals. When it comes to particular condition process like arthritis, the suggestions have likewise been made to cut animal protein from the diet entirely. Broccoli has been discovered to include glutathione, an efficient antioxidant and detoxer. This is very important due to the fact that studies have suggested that individuals with lower glutathione levels tend to have a higher affinity to arthritis than people with higher levels. The other vegetables that include this element include cabbage, potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes and cauliflower. You can also find this product in high concentration in pineapples.
Omega 3 It can be discovered in abundance in olive oil. Researches have suggested that compared to raw veggies, those that have actually been cooked in olive oil produced more anti-inflammatory properties.
Olive Oil Olive oil also contains a high concentration of fatty acids. One of the best ways to take advantage of this is to cook your vegetables in olive oil. This has been found to create more of an anti-inflammatory effect then eating raw veggies alone.
Soy A recent research study has suggested that soy beans or soy can result in reducing arthritis pain. It can also, of course, be used as a substitute for animal protein.
A great way to take advantage of the information you have just learned is to actually use it. Make it a priority to add one of the foods we listed here into your diet. You can do this as a preventative measure if you are not currently suffering from one of the inflammation based diseases. In either case it’s a smart decision to make.
For a great look at taking care of swelling check this out right here top anti inflammation food
Mother Jones
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Almonds are a precious foodstuff: a crunchy jolt of complete protein, healthful fats, vitamins/minerals, and deliciousness. Given their rather intense ecological footprint—see here—we should probably consider them a delicacy, a special treat. That’s why I think it’s deeply weird to pulverize away their crunch, drown them in water, and send them out to the world in a gazillion little cartons. What’s the point of almond milk, exactly?
Evidently, I’m out of step with the times on this one. “Plant-based milk” behemoth White Wave reports that its first-quarter sales of almond milk were up 50 percent from the same period in 2013. In an earnings call with investors in May, reported by FoodNavigator, CEO Greg Engles revealed that almond milk now makes up about two-thirds of the plant-based milk market in the United States, easily trumping soy milk (30 percent) and rice and coconut milks (most of the rest).
Dairy is still king, of course, comprising 90 percent of the “milk” market. But as our consumption of it dwindles—down from 0.9 cups per person per day in 1970 to about 0.6 in 2010, according to the US Department of Agriculture—plant-based alternatives are gaining ground. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that sales of alternative milks hit $1.4 billion in 2013 and are expected to hit $1.7 billion by 2016, with almond milk leading that growth.
Now, I get why people are switching away from dairy milk. Industrial-scale dairy production is a pretty nasty business, and large swaths of adults can’t digest lactose, a sugar found in fresh dairy milk. Meanwhile, milk has become knit into our dietary culture, particularly at breakfast, where we cling to a generations-old tradition of drenching cereal in milk. Almond milk and other substitutes offer a way to maintain this practice while rejecting dairy. (Almond milk has been crushing once-ubiquitous soy milk, perhaps partly because of hotly contested fears that it creates hormonal imbalances.)
All that aside, almond milk strikes me as an abuse of a great foodstuff. Plain almonds are a nutritional powerhouse. Let’s compare a standard serving (1 ounce, about a handful) to the 48-ounce bottle of Califa Farms almond milk that a house guest recently left behind in my fridge.
A single ounce (28 grams) of almonds—nutrition info here—contains 6 grams of protein (about an egg’s worth), along with 3 grams of fiber (a medium banana) and 12 grams of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (half an avocado). According to its label, an eight-ounce serving of Califia almond milk offers just one gram each of protein and fiber, and five grams of fat. A bottle of Califia delivers six eight-ounce servings, meaning that a handful of almonds contains as much protein as the mighty jug of this hot-selling beverage.
What this tells you is that the almond-milk industry is selling you a jug of filtered water clouded by a handful of ground almonds. Which leads us to the question of price and profit. The almonds in the photo above are organic, and sold in bulk at my local HEB supermarket for $11.99 per pound; this one-ounce serving set me back about 66 cents. I could have bought nonorganic California almonds for $6.49 per pound, about 39 cents per ounce. That container of Califia, which contains roughly the same number of nonorganic almonds, retails for $3.99.
Click here for more comparisons. Mother Jones
The water-intensive nature of almond milk, of course, is no secret. By law, food manufacturers have to name ingredients in order of their prevalence in the product. For Califia and other almond milk brands, it starts like this: “filtered water, almonds.” Given that it takes 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond in California, where 80 percent of the world’s almonds are produced, drenching the finished product in yet more water seems insane.
Califia does make a couple of splashy nutritional claims: “50% more calcium than milk,” the bottle declares, and “50% RDI of Vitamin E.” Almonds are a great source of these vital nutrients, but not that great. Our ounce of whole almonds contains 74 mg of calcium vs. 290 mg for a cup of whole milk, and 7 mg of vitamin E, about 37 percent of the recommended daily intake.
How does Califia’s beverage manage to outdo straight almonds on calcium and vitamin E when it lags so far behind on protein and fat? Again, the answer lies in the ingredients list, which reveals the addition of a “vitamin/mineral blend.” All fine and well, but if you’re interested in added nutrients, why not just pop a vitamin pill?
Moreover, almond milk isn’t just a few nuts packaged with lots of water. It often contains additives. For example, in addition to vitamins, the Califia product, like many of its rivals, contains small amounts of carrageenan, a seaweed derivative commonly used as a stabilizer in beverages. Academic scientists in Chicago have raised concerns that it might cause gastrointestinal inflammation.
I’m not saying your almond milk habit is destroying the planet or ruining your health, or that you should immediately go cold turkey. I just want people to know what they’re paying for when they shell our for it. As for me, when I want something delicious to moisten my granola or add substance to a smoothie, I go for organic kefir, a fermented milk product that’s packed with protein, calcium, and beneficial microbes. Added bonus: according to the label, it’s lactose-free—apparently, the kefir microbes transform the lactose during the fermentation process.
The industry, meanwhile, aims to take its lucrative almond-milk model on the road. FoodNavigator reports that White Wave is setting up a joint venture to market its plant-based milks in almond-crazy China.
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John Christy, a highly credentialed University of Alabama professor, says warming predictions have been greatly overstated. His critics are many. Excerpt from: Skeptic of Climate Change Finds Himself a Target of Suspicion ; ;Related ArticlesSummer School for AnchoviesOpinion: A Pipeline Threatens Our Family LandEquity Firm Restores Louisiana Marshland to Earn Credits It Can Sell ;
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Mother Jones
It was 8 p.m. on a Tuesday evening and the Chapel, a popular San Francisco venue, was already starting to fill. Young hipsters elbowed past the fogeys idling in back to stake out a prime spot on the floor. As soon as St. Paul and the Broken Bones hit the stage, though, the diverse crowd was transformed into a seamless sea of screaming fans, singing and swaying to the Birmingham, Alabama, band’s modern take on the soul sounds of yesteryear.
St. Paul’s rise has been unusually meteoric for a band that didn’t even exist until a year and a half ago. True, frontman Paul Janeway charms audiences between songs and delivers dance moves just awkward enough to be cool. And with Jesse Phillips on bass, Browan Lollar on guitar, Allen Branstetter on trumpet, Andrew Lee on drums, Ben Griner on trombone and tuba, and the well-known Al Gamble on keys, these guys know how to work a crowd. Even so, it was their first official tour, and here they were selling out weeknight shows on the other end of the country.
St. Paul and the Broken Bones do the tourist thing. stpaulandthebrokenbones/Instagram
It all happened with lightning speed. In March, just after the release of their debut album, Half the City, St. Paul played at a South by Southwest showcase in Austin, Texas. A few days later, Rolling Stone proclaimed them one of the “48 Best Things” at the festival. Then came a review in the Guardian and an NPR story, followed by performances on CBS This Morning: Saturday and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Soon their album was No. 56 on the Billboard 200. “I think we are all genuinely surprised. We were just, we were taken aback by it,” Janeway told me. “It has been crazy. It has been a little—weird.”
Alex White could have predicted it. Actually, he did. White, 28, is the co-founder of a company called Next Big Sound (“Making data useful”), which, as its name and slogan imply, uses computer algorithms to determine which musical acts are about to take off.
Launched in 2009, and widely consulted by the mainstream music industry, the company crunches consumption data from social media and music-streaming sites, tracks buzz on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, and YouTube, and collects private sales figures from clients and partners to inform its predictions. Its engineers and analysts—some of whom hail from data positions at Microsoft, the New York Yankees (think Moneyball), and the Department of Defense—compile everything into a ranking system.
The company’s Social 50 chart lists the internet’s most talked-about acts—the Beyoncé’s of the world—while its Next Big Sound chart lists the hottest up-and-comers. St. Paul and the Broken Bones, as it happens, showed up at the top of the latter chart about a week before its March SXSW showcase. “I learned that we were number one on something,” Janeway recalls with a full-bodied laugh. “And I thought, ‘Oh! We are number one on something!'”
The guys didn’t think much of it, but it may well have kicked open some big doors for the band. Next Big Sound, first conceived by White when he was an undergraduate at Northwestern, now provides data for 70 percent of the music industry. Competitors have followed its lead, looking to cash in on social media metrics, but NBS’s paid subscribers range from the world’s biggest labels and distributors to hordes of individual artists and managers. The company is growing as quickly as some of the acts it lists. According to White, it’s on track to double its revenues this year.
White, who had worked previously with Universal Music Group, spotted his opportunity in the late aughts, as a new crop of music-steaming sites sprung up and CD sales continued to tank. “I think that everyone feels like they are very far behind in terms of their understanding and grasp of how to market successfully and analytically in this new world,” he says. “To boil it down, change has been the only constant over the last five years.”
What he was selling, really, was confidence. “We are making these predictions and drawing a line in the sand, saying these are the artists that are going to do really well,” Alec Zopf, one of the company’s software engineers, told me.
The various metrics are entered into a complex algorithm that quantifies an artist’s fan growth and social interactions to determine who is resonating most with their audiences. It’s not purely objective. The inputs are weighted according to analysts’ knowledge of industry trends and historic patterns of artistic success. “It is sort of a mix of art and science,” Zopf explains, one that combines calculation, curation, and strategic analysis.
But somewhere along the line, Next Big Sound has become something more than a data-cruncher for music marketers. In true Heisenbergian fashion, its algorithms have begun to affect outcomes by changing the way labels track artists and make decisions. In short, the company is becoming a hitmaker itself. “Measurement is never neutral,” notes Nancy Baym, who studies social media metrics at Microsoft Research and has authored several papers on the topic. “The way you measure things shapes the way you think about what you’re measuring. It shapes the way you approach it. It shapes the kinds of materials that you create.”
White acknowledges as much. He often hears from managers and artists who have been approached with record deals, publishing contracts, and higher tiers of management after appearing on his company’s charts. “I think there is sort of a feedback mechanism that has started.”
“In some ways it helps shape trends more than it helps predict them,” says Jason Feinberg, the VP of digital strategy for Epitaph Records, one of America’s biggest indie labels, who has been using Next Big Sound for years. “I don’t think any of these tools have really gotten far enough along to predict much.” Feinberg says he mostly uses the platform to see how artists are doing in particular regions, or to answer specific questions: Say a band’s numbers “spike out of nowhere where we weren’t doing a heavy marketing campaign, or there wasn’t a TV appearance, anything like that,” he says. “Looking for what causes that is often something these tools can show you.”
Baym points out that search engines and social media can be gamed—likes and follows are easily purchased. Next Big Sound’s data analysts are well aware of it, says engineer Zopf. They scour the data for irregularities and do their best to weed out any phony fans. They also regularly tweak the magic formula to account for what’s hot in social media—and what’s not. SoundCloud, for instance, has gained clout in the algorithm recently, whereas MySpace (remember MySpace?) continues to languish.
There are other pitfalls, though, to relying on social media buzz and other online interactions to identify consumer trends. “You have to think about who is participating in those systems in the first place,” Baym says. “There are a lot more people lurking and not ‘liking,’ and not actively discussing things at any given time. So it is always going to be kind of skewed, because you are not tapping who is singing along really loud in their car.”
The data also tends to be slanted toward those genres whose fans are most active on the internet, such as EDM (electronic dance music), which is consumed and shared almost entirely online, especially in Europe. “The less that a genre has consumers that interact online and are able to be measured, the less effective the software is,” White concedes. “Classical and jazz, we have strong coverage of those artists, but there isn’t a lot of volume on YouTube and Spotify.”
Sachin Doshi, the head of development and analysis at Spotify, concurs: “Our genre spectrum is a little bit different than the average across the population,” he says. “When Spotify is growing in a particular market, we get early adopters first. Things like EDM over-index, especially early on.”
And, of course, younger audiences are the most inclined to engage online, regardless of genre. “Watching a video, looking at a photo, listening to a song—simple engagement is starting to happen across all demographics,” says Epitaph’s Feinberg. “But when it comes to heavy engagement—entering contests, creating content, things like that—certainly younger demographics.”
This makes Next Big Sound attractive to corporate clients outside of the music industry who are eager to tap into the youth market—NBS signed its first Fortune 50 brand deal last fall and is ramping up that end of the business. “Brands recognize that it is a great way to attract their target customer,” White says. “I think it’s a great opportunity for our existing customers to measure and engage and work with artists that really resonate in the marketplace.”
Yet “there is a downside to the belief that the data is a crystal ball, or that by having this data we suddenly now can learn things that we have never known before,” Feinberg says. “As much as I am a believer in this, I think the downside is when people rely too heavily on it for something they don’t know, or jump to conclusions based on just a small subset of data.”
To be sure, labels that channel their investments toward artists with social media savvy run the risk of putting sales tactics ahead of talent. Mike King, a marketing lecturer at the online branch of Berklee College of Music in Boston, told me he would like to see labels use the data to help great acts move up organically, as opposed to shoving the chosen few down our throats from on high. “The goal will be the right consumer hearing about the right music through the right outlets at the right time,” he says. “I am hoping that marketers can interpret the data and say, ‘Here is where the core fans are for this particular artist, and we are going to reach out with the right content on the right platform.'”
Feinberg agrees, adding that the data needs to be interpreted by people who understand the artistic landscape. “You can’t just look at it and make decisions based on it,” he says. “You have to mix it in with all the other data you have, as well as all the expertise of the people in the room. Then you have something useful.”
Either way, these sorts of metrics are only going to become more common throughout the business world. “It will always be flawed, especially in culture industries, and there will be conflicts between the sense that these are really helpful predictors because they do provide some economic security, supposedly,” Baym says. “On the other hand, there’s the people who are saying you are taking all the art out of it.”
St. Paul and the Broken Bones is just happy to be playing for an enthusiastic audience, which stomps its feet and chants for more even after the band’s third encore. It’s late, though, and the lads have a long drive to Los Angeles ahead. Before leaving the stage, each member takes a bow. One snaps a picture of the cheering crowd for the band’s Instagram. Fans demand attention, after all, and St. Paul is happy to oblige. “The internet and social media is the best thing that has happened, because it is the judge. It tells you; the people are going to tell you,” Janeway says. “That puts it back into the people’s hands a little bit.”
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This 28-Year-Old Knows Which Artists You’ll Be Listening To 6 Months From Now
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