VIDEO: Do we really want to teach robots this stuff?

To view this directly from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3XyDLbaUmU

Faking It While the World Burns

Words alone won’t hinder climate change.

By Emily Schwartz Greco

Rex Tillerson, of all people, just did the climate movement a big favor.

He didn’t hand the Sierra Club tens of millions of dollars to fight the coal industry like former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. Nor did the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil follow former hedge fund investor Tom Steyer‘s lead by giving political candidates with climate cred campaign cash.

What did Tillerson, whom Forbes ranks among the world’s most powerful people, do? He disclosed his take on the proper role for big oil and gas companies regarding global warming, declaring: “We’re not going to fake it.”

Chocolate for your heart

Eating 100 g of chocolate daily linked to lowered heart disease and stroke risk

Study authors: Chun Shing Kwok, S Matthijs Boekholdt, Marleen A H Lentjes, Yoon K Loke, Robert N Luben, Jessica K Yeong, Nicholas J Wareham, Phyo K Myint, Kay-Tee Khaw.

Eating up to 100 g of chocolate every day is linked to lowered heart disease and stroke risk, finds research published online in the journal Heart.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence for cutting out chocolate to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, conclude the researchers.

They base their findings on almost 21,000 adults taking part in the EPIC-Norfolk study, which is tracking the impact of diet on the long term health of 25,000 men and women in Norfolk, England, using food frequency and lifestyle questionnaires.

The researchers also carried out a systematic review of the available international published evidence on the links between chocolate and cardiovascular disease, involving almost 158,000 people--including the EPIC study participants.

Free-market grade school

If Elected, Jeb Bush Will Privatize Public Education

By Diane Ravitch

Matthew Pulver, writing at Salon.com, describes Jeb Bush’s dangerous belief in privatization and free markets in education.

It is not so much a belief as an ideology, one that is impervious to evidence. The many studies showing that privately managed charters do not get higher test scores than public schools do not register with Jeb. 

The numbers of charters that open with grand promises and soon lose their doors with big debts does not affect his belief system. He is a zealot for school choice, period.

Not even the failure of the charter school he founded in Liberty City, a poor black neighborhood, dampens his passion for charters and vouchers.

Improve Your Yard

Save money and save the environment

with this free seminar!

Session on Thursday will give tips to improve your yard and help our sensitive coastal environment while saving money on yard maintenance.

Come to the Kettle Pond Visitor Center (50 Bend Road off of Route 1) at 7 pm on Thursday, June 25 to hear Erin J Muir of The Figure Ground Studio explain methods to manage your own landscape in a way that is most beneficial to the waterways we all know and love. The talk will include a description of rain gardens and organic lawn care, and how they work sustain a healthy ecosystem. Homeowners will learn about the essential elements in the soil that need to be nurtured to support turf growth naturally, as well as cultural practices that will enhance the success of this process.Erin will also discuss a few of her favorite plants for rain gardens in Rhode Island. Presented by the Salt Ponds Coalition

Thanks to Dana Millar of Dana Designs for helping out and bringing this to our attention.

Life between a rock and a hard place…

Projo Recycles Teacher Trash Talk With Classic Dump on Public Schools

By Robert Yarnall

On Tuesday, June 16, 2015, at precisely 2:01 AM, an unidentified editorial writer representing the flailing Providence Journal crapped the keyboard and hit the Post button.  Did it ever occur to him or her that the headline “Assault on Charters” was an exceedingly poor choice of descriptor for a school-based opinion piece?

Did he or she realize that the word “assault” in conjunction with any discussion of schools forevermore evokes the stark imagery of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre?

When is it terrorism, when is it misguided youth?

Say it with me: Terrorism
By Matt Bors

CLICK HERE to see both sides of the story.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Sharpless 308: Star Bubble 

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon.

That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The massive star that created the bubble, a Wolf-Rayet star, is the bright one near the center of the nebula. 

Wolf-Rayet stars have over 20 times the mass of the Sun and are thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova phase of massive star evolution.

Fast winds from this Wolf-Rayet star create the bubble-shaped nebula as they sweep up slower moving material from an earlier phase of evolution.

The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years. Relatively faint emission captured in the expansive image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms mapped to a blue hue.

TORNADO WATCH issued for all of Rhode Island until 11 PM

What motivates people to get flu shots?

Personal experience a major driver in decision for or against flu vaccination

University of Georgia

Convincing someone to receive the annual flu vaccine goes beyond clever messaging and well-written public service announcements, new University of Georgia research finds. The study, led by UGA's Glen Nowak, outlines both the barriers and facilitators that motivate people in their flu vaccine decisions.

"One of the most important findings was that personal experiences mattered a lot, both for people who got an annual flu shot on a regular basis and for those who didn't," said Nowak, the director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. 

Unhappy Meals

McDonald's isn't making its food any better, but it sure wants you to think it is.

By Jill Richardson

McDonald’s is floundering.

There’s no other way to say it. The global fast food chain has experienced declining U.S. sales for well over a year now. But why?

I’d love to gloat that Americans have finally caught on that the Golden Arches peddles terrible food, but that might not be the case.

Theories for the slump abound.

Some believe the menu is too confusing, slowing down service. Others say that consumers are drifting toward fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Panera, even if their food costs more. And Consumer Reports notes that McDonald’s has the worst-tasting burger compared to 20 competitors.

Even McDonald’s itself doesn’t seem to be sure. The company has introduced a Create Your Taste option, allowing consumers to customize their burgers. It promised to stop serving chicken raised with some antibiotics. In Southern California, the chain even tried serving kale.

McKale? No, just no.

Charlestown picked the incompetent one, not the crook

Red Light Camera Exec Admits To Bribery of Public Officials

By Nathaniel Downes

Editor’s note: when Charlestown was shopping for a contractor to provide the town with a risk-free system of red light enforcement cameras, the subject of this article, RedFlex, was one of two bidders. 

To me, RedFlex seemed more competent than the contractor chosen primarily by Town Council Boss Tom Gentz, Sensys. He chose Sensys because he believed – wrongly and against evidence to the contrary – that Sensys was a Rhode Island company.

That was three years ago and today, we have a red light camera system that has not generated a nickel in revenue either for Sensys or for Charlestown. Why? Because this Swedish company with a Florida headquarters has no clue how to do business in Rhode Island. Click here for more detail on our problems with Sensys.

But their competitor RedFlex apparently has a different business model as you will see as you read on. I wonder if they tried it in Charlestown. – W. Collette

Over the past decade or so, unless you’ve been a pedestrian, it is highly probable that you’ve encountered intersection red light cameras. They have grown in use dramatically since New York City implemented the nations first system in 1993. Originally touted for safety, instead Red Light cameras have become nothing but cash machines for city and state authorities.

Now, it has been admitted that Redflex, one of the nation's largest red light camera companies, bribed public officials in return for implementing red light camera systems in their towns. In a release issued Friday, the prosecutors pursuing the case against Redflex executives and agents, revealed that the former CEO of Redflex, Karen Finley, has pled guilty to charges of bribery.

Elaine Morgan loves to say “Me, too”

Lots of bills “held for further study”

By Will Collette

Elaine Morgan: did she impersonate a
police officer while Hopkinton's
elected Town Sergeant?

The third member of the triumvirate of local Tea Party-crazy freshmen General Assembly members, and the subject of today’s legislative run-down, is state Senator Elaine Morgan. Last November, Morgan, a Hopkinton dry-cleaner and Tea Partier, upset intelligent and hard-working Sen. Cathie Cool Rumsey on the campaign motto, “warm, not cool,” in the race to represent Hopkinton, Richmond, the northern half of Charlestown and Exeter.

Morgan’s prior political experience was as Hopkinton’s elected Town Sergeant where she was accused in citizen complaints of abusing her office by using her uniform to impersonate a police officer. The town of Hopkinton refused to release the documents underlying those complaints and my complaint against the town under the Access to Public Records Act is still pending.

Morgan, along with House Tea Party colleague Rep. Blake “Flip” Filippi, started their new political careers off after the election by impersonating actual public officials when they administered the oath of office to the all-CCA Charlestown Town Council. That was in November; it wasn't until they were sworn in that they became legally empowered to administer oaths.

Yeah, I know the CCA Party is thinking, “picky, picky.” It made for great optics, even if it was fiction.

So what did her constituents get by electing Morgan to replace Cathy Cool Rumsey. Let’s take a look at her record of bills introduced as the General Assembly counts the days before its scheduled June 30 adjournment.

Morgan has her name on 67 bills. She is the prime sponsor of 13 of them. The other 54 bills she co-sponsored cover a wide range of Republican, conservative interests, but let’s focus on the 13 that are hers.

VIDEO: John Oliver has a suggestion for what to do with confederate flags

More suggestions from Bill from Portland, Maine:

Astronomy Picture of the Day

NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula 

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula.

Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, the glowing gas originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun.

In this representative color picture, the hot blue pool of light seen surrounding this binary system is energized by the hot surface of the faint star.

Although photographed to explore unusual symmetries, it's the asymmetries that help make this planetary nebula so intriguing.

Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes running across NGC 3132 are well understood.