Panich52
Panich52's Journal
New additions to my family
They're about 2 weeks old in pic.
(problems posting pix. Damn old phone)
Played With That Viral Age-Guesser This Week? You Just Gave Microsoft A Bunch Of Free Photos To Use
Consumerist
If you use Facebook, Twitter, or basically any part of the internet at all, sometime in the last 24 hours you’ve seen Microsoft’s newest tool, the age-guesser. Everyone’s sharing it, using it, and laughing over (or feeling insulted by) the results. But the tool’s rapid spread also accidentally highlights one of the biggest challenges of the digital age: the fine print.
The tool, How-Old.net, has gone viral very fast because of how hilariously wrong it often is. The world-weary baby at the top of this post, for example, was 9 months old when the picture was taken, which isn’t too far off — but the Cheerios on her tray were neither sixteen, male, nor in fact human at all. Plug in fictional characters or politicians, and the results are jokes that basically write themselves.
Microsoft isn’t planning to make age guessing a fixture of its Office Suite anytime soon; the tool was put together quickly as a demo for the company’s Azure cloud platform and services. But buried in the fine print of the Azure terms and services, as Fast Company points out, is a clause that might give Microsoft more power than you want them to have:
(B)y posting, uploading, inputting, providing, or submitting your Submission, you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies, and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses (including, without limitation, all Microsoft services), including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate, and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and to sublicense such rights to any supplier of the Website Services.
In other words: Microsoft now maintains the rights to use any image you uploaded in basically any way they want. And that “public performance” bit is basically an out that prevents you from suing on copyright grounds if they do.
More
http://consumerist.com/2015/05/01/played-with-that-viral-age-guesser-this-week-you-just-gave-microsoft-a-bunch-of-free-photos-to-use/
Religious Right Leader Rick Wiles is Fascinated by Obama’s Privates
PoliticusUSA
Religious Right Leader Rick Wiles is Fascinated by Obama’s Privates
You know the Religious Right, and maybe some of its male leaders, have got nothing when they start worrying about Obama's presidential package
http://politicususa.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=522f85d70e88c4caace8df597&id=de50ab47fb&e=b3b8b34f96
ACHE Act: A Way to End Mountaintop Removal Mining
ACHE Act: A Way to End Mountaintop Removal Mining
(Originally published in the Charleston Gazette on Aug. 25, 2014)
Coalfield residents living near mountaintop removal mining sites have long suspected this terrible, destructive practice is hurting our health.
I first started thinking about it during the long fight to replace the Marsh Fork Elementary School, which sat at the foot of a huge mountaintop removal mining site near my home in Peachtree Hollow. We had organized an educational day at the school in 2004, and a teacher came up to me and told me there were a lot of kids at the school getting sick, mostly with respiratory problems.
Coal River Mountain Watch did a survey of 60 families who went to that school and found that 91 percent of the children had respiratory problems. More than 80 percent had felt sick at the school with headaches, nausea and other health problems.
The school was next to a coal processing plant and below a huge sludge impoundment, and in large part surrounded by massive mountaintop removal mining sites.
It got me thinking about how many people I knew who were sick and dying of cancer. Cousins, neighbors. My good friend Judy Bonds had cancer. (Bonds died in 2011.)
Dr. Michael Hendryx at WVU had started doing some research. It wasn’t 100 percent conclusive, but all indications were that a lot of people who lived near mountaintop removal sites were getting sick and dying. Other research showed the rate of birth defects was increasing dramatically in regions where mountaintop removal mining was becoming more prevalent.
More from Earthjustice
http://ejus.tc/1F3OA5v
The tortured hills of West Virginia
Charleston Gazette
Robert J. Byers: The tortured hills of West Virginia
I once reported from the site of a mine blowout in Raleigh County. It had been a snowy, rainy spring, and the mountain high above Rock Creek — its insides honeycombed with a waterlogged section of abandoned mine — simply burst, sending a cascade of water, mud and rock raining down on the families below.
Their cars sat immobile, ringed by a 5-foot-deep sea of mud, studded with pieces of coal. The rear windows of their homes — the ones facing the mountain — were cracked and broken, and a tree trunk had found its way inside a back room.
My eyes followed the outstretched arm of a homeowner as he pointed up to the face of the mountain, where a gash continued to bleed a stream of muddy water. The symbolism of the mountain — broken and weeping — was hard to miss.
The coal company spokesman gave me the usual act-of-God line — “I mean, volcanoes erupt” — and life in the coalfields marched on.
Never mind that a week before, an abandoned mine in Cabin Creek had burst and flooded two homes.
A few years later, another blowout would send acid-laden water into lower Davis Creek, killing off the newly recovered fish population there.
It’s now 22 years from the day that I stood along the banks of Rock Creek, and we again have had a wet spring. The people of Hughes Creek in eastern Kanawha County had to evacuate their homes in March for fear that the mountain lining their hollow will be the latest to break open, showering them with its damaged insides.
How little it seems that we’ve learned in that time about our mountains, about how to co-exist with them.
West Virginia has a love/hate relationship with its mountains.
When we’re away for a while, we often talk fondly about getting back to the mountains, to their warm embrace.
But, like an abusive lover, we always expect our hills to be there for us — no matter how badly we treat them.
More
http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150429/GZ04/150429165/1453
x p WV & Good Reads
A better way to monitor water
Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Last year’s chemical leak quickly spread throughout West Virginia American Water’s Charleston-based distribution system. The water company has announced it will start a continuous monitoring program on the Elk River. Such monitoring is a critical element of a safe water system that detects contamination before it reaches customers.
In a January report to the Legislature, West Virginia American Water described plans to install monitoring equipment to measure water properties like acidity, temperature, salts, minerals and trace organic chemicals.
Unfortunately, the instrument they chose to detect organic chemicals — total organic carbon — has serious limitations and is blind to a broad class of chemicals which includes, remarkably, MCHM, the chemical culprit of last year’s water crisis.
Thousands of pounds of MCHM remain in the soil at the Freedom Industries site just one mile upstream of the Elk River treatment plant intake. The chemical class not detected also includes significant components of diesel fuel and other chemicals, all potential spill candidates and transported by truck and train in the Kanawha Valley.
More
http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150429/GZ04/150429167/1453
x p Envir & Energy
Ethics and Extreme Extraction: Local Reflections on Global Issues
Ethics and Extreme Extraction: Local Reflections on Global Issues
By S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
Ethics is an increasing issue in unconventional resource extraction. Taken individually, the issues which have been heard from the beginning have had an ethical component. The complaints include destruction of aquifers, air pollution, reduction of property values, costs deferred to the public including roads, record room crowding, traffic (including emergency vehicles) held up, mud slides and so on.
These have largely been thought of as individual matters and as a loss to individuals. They have been shrugged off by business and government, and largely ignored by the general public which feels little involvement and powerless to stop the well funded extraction companies, supported by endless public relations ploys and advertising.
As understanding diffuses (slowly) to the public at large, and more and more people come to know someone involved, the unifying theme of ethics becomes stronger. People are not without empathy.
Another slowly dawning awareness was discussed by Professor Garrett Hardin in an article published in Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, all the way back in 1968. This article is well worth the readers time if not familiar with the phrase “tragedy of the commons.” It is the perception that in reality much of the physical world belongs to all of us. All of us in the present, and all who follow. Life is short, and while we live and die in the present, we are bound, for our descendant’s sake, to plan for the extended future as far as we can see it. It is gross incompetence in the use of our minds to ignore that responsibility. It is ethical bankruptcy. It is properly the stuff of ethics and religion. It is a threat to civilization.
Not only has the fossil fuel industry continued trading human lives for profit, but, since it is difficult to convince free people to poison their own water sources or blow up their own backyards, it has increasingly killed democracy in order to keep killing people for profit. is part of of an article titled, ” The Church Should Lead, Not Follow on Climate Justice.” The author spoke at a conference at Harvard Divinity School, “Spiritual and Sustainable: Religion Responds to Climate Change’and in June will join many global thinkers at a process theology conference on climate change in Claremont, California. Although his emphasis is on climate change brought about in considerable part by burning fossil fuels, much of the argument applies to other aspects of extreme extraction.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/frackcheckwv/~3/8e3rSwy8Ewg/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Fracking Waste Study Says States Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Public
From an Article by Glynis Board, WV Public Broadcasting, April 12, 2015
A new report was published this month that looks at how states are dealing with dangerous waste produced during shale gas development. Not well, according to the report.
Defining Hazardous
The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the disposal of toxic or hazardous materials. Such waste includes things that may contain heavy metals, chemicals, dangerous pathogens, radiation, or other toxins. Horizontal drilling produces both liquid and solid waste streams which can contain heavy metals, dangerous chemicals, salts and radiation. But you will never hear it referred to as toxic or hazardous by anyone, officially.
Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based nonprofit, explains that thirty years ago the EPA exempted oil and gas waste from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). “So right now, oil and gas waste, regardless of how toxic it is, can be treated like normal household waste in many parts of the country,” Mall said.
“Wasting Away”
There’s a new report: (Wasting Away – Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale) that examines this subject published by Earthworks – a nonprofit concerned with the adverse impacts of mineral and energy development. Lead author Nadia Steinzor explains that the EPA didn’t exempt the industry because the waste wasn’t considered a threat, but because state regulation of this waste was considered adequate. Of course, this was a couple decades before the horizontal gas drilling boom.
Steinzor and her colleagues decided to see what they could learn about waste practices in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where Marcellus and Utica shale gas are being developed.
The report indicates that states are well behind the curve in adapting to the natural gas boom: good characterizations of the waste is incomplete according to a 2014 study that’s cited; and not much information is available about where the waste is coming from, going to, or how it gets there.
West Virginia’s Oil and Gas Waste Management
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/frackcheckwv/~3/Zn5serRf_yc/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
WV-DEP should reform itself in the public interest
FrackCheckWV
MORGANTOWN DOMINION POST editorial Monday 20 April 2015
Can the WV-DEP reform itself?
Environmental well-being is primarily a function of regulatory well-being. That at least is the idea in the state Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) realm.
The DEP is still the principal agency that West Virginia deploys to monitor its hills, rivers and streams and its air. But is that as true as we would like to think?
While some try to portray the WV-DEP as yet another regulatory bogeyman, others call it the Department of Environmental Prevarication.
In the past, we have leaned more toward the latter description. However, in recent weeks, the DEP has taken initiatives that give one reason for hope. For instance, this past week, the DEP ordered more than 90 coal prep plants to disclose potential pollutants that could be dumped into waterways. The DEP said that order will better protect state streams and that any additional costs should not be significant compared to the liability for polluting waterways.
That agency also recently hosted a public hearing on water quality standards, part of one program’s annual quarterly meetings. These meetings agendas also don’t dawdle on fluff, either.
The most recent agenda took up proposed changes to aluminum and selenium criteria and an update on algae monitoring done in 2014. The DEP has also become much more visible in the state’s annual spring highway cleanup, through the Adopt-A-Highway program.
Clearly, for those who take a dim view of the DEP’s efforts — and we often count ourselves among them — there are also reasons to think nothing has changed. For example, the state’s Environmental Quality Board recently said the DEP violated state law when it allowed a company to operate two underground injection wells with a “rule” it issued, instead of a state permit.
Or the WV-DEP’s almost cavalier approach to reports of black water flowing into a Raleigh County stream. Only after it responded in a timely manner on the fourth report was a coal company cited.
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