Why do birds migrate?

From Fake Science

Hey, are you falling asleep?

Revealing the point of transition

Science Daily

How can we tell when someone has fallen asleep? To answer this question, scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a new statistical method and behavioural task to track the dynamic process of falling asleep.

Dr Michael Prerau, Dr Patrick Purdon, and their colleagues used the evolution of brain activity, behaviour, and other physiological signals during the sleep onset process to automatically track the continuous changes in wakefulness experienced as a subject falls asleep.

The study, publishing today in PLOS Computational Biology, suggests that it is not when one falls asleep, but how one falls asleep that matters. Using these methods, the authors quantified a subset of healthy subjects who behaved as though they were awake even though their brains, by current clinical definitions, were asleep.

The First Casualty of War

A truth-telling general admits that Washington got it wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Jim Hightower

Reflecting on World War I, California Senator Hiram Johnson famously said: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Actually, in America’s recent wars, officials have slaughtered the truth even before the fighting. The Bush-Cheney regime hustled America into its Iraq escapade, for example, by snuffing out the truth about that country’s weapons of mass destruction.

Just as immoral are the dishonest post-war claims of success. Officials always insist that their military adventure was worth all the lost lives and treasure, thus validating themselves and legitimizing the idea of going to war again and again.

Officialdom’s routine mugging of the truth makes a recent bit of honesty from a three-star general seem all the more astonishing — and gutsy.

Here Comes the Rain and Drought

Many coastal regions must start bracing for frequent floods as key freshwater sources are drying up elsewhere.

By Emily Schwartz Greco

What is it about natural disasters and irony?

Just as local authorities in Detroit were denying thousands of people access to running water, the bankrupt city experienced an epic downpour. More than 4.5 inches of rain pounded Motown in mid-August, causing $1.2 billion in damage. Three people died, including a 100-year-old woman who apparently drowned in her flooded basement.

And what’s even more ironic? Both freakish storms like the one that swamped Detroit’s freeways and catastrophic droughts of the sort now parching California are about to become a lot more common. A raft of new research makes it clear that there’s going to be nowhere to hide from the devastation wrought by climate chaos.

For starters, consider a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists on the floods that will wash over the Atlantic Seaboard and the Gulf Coast during the next three decades as sea levels rise. It’s a painful snapshot of when everyone in those areas will be shopping for a new canoe, no matter how far they live from a body of water.

When in doubt, attack the teachers

TIME’s Cover Story on Teacher Tenure was wrong

Michelle Rhee who taught RI Education Department head
Deborah Gist everything she knows about screwing
teachers

By Diane Ravitch

In the past four years, TIME and Newsweek have published three cover stories that were openly hostile to teachers.

On December 8, 2008, TIME published a cover story featuring a photograph of Michelle Rhee, dressed in black and holding a broom, with the implication that she had arrived to sweep out the Augean stables of American education. (Detractors thought she looked like a witch.)

The title on the cover was “How to Fix America’s Schools,” suggesting that Rhee knew how to fix the nation’s schools. The subtitle was “Michelle Rhee is the head of Washington, D.C., schools. 

Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.” The story inside was written by Amanda Ripley. We now know that Michelle Rhee did not transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, although she fired hundreds of teachers and principals.

Bomb the Rich

For more cartoons by Andy Singer, click here.

VIDEO: This is how your next plane trip will kill you

Another step toward restoring the Pawcatuck

Plan Being Formed for Removal of White Rock Dam

A Providence engineering firm will sample sediment behind the
White Rock Dam in Westerly to see if it is contaminated.
A decision would then be made regarding its removal.
(Chuck Horbert photos)

By DAVID SMITH/ecoRI News contributor

WESTERLY — Work has begun on a plan to remove the White Rock Dam. A contract was awarded Sept. 25 to the Providence-based engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill to first study and then draft plans for the removal of the circa 1940 concrete structure.

It would be the third dam on the Pawcatuck River earmarked either for removal or modification. The effort is designed to improve fish passage on the 20-plus-mile waterway that stretches from Worden’s Pond in South Kingstown to Little Narragansett Bay. About 15 miles upstream, the Kenyon Dam and Lower Shannock Falls Dam have been removed, while a fish ladder was built at historic Horseshoe Falls.

A total of $1.9 million in federal Hurricane Sandy funds is available for the White Rock project, according to Scott Comings, director of land and freshwater in the Rhode Island office of The Nature Conservancy.

A decision on how to proceed on the project will be made when the test results of soil taken from behind the dam are analyzed. If the soil is contaminated, that could add to the cost and/or change the approach.

Always a class act

Sen. Cathie Cool Rumsey says thank you and goodbye for now

Cathie on the right, with Sen. Sue Sosnowski and Rep. Donna Walsh
Taken at the October bill-signing of legislation to divert institutional food
waste from landfills to composting, bio-fuel or agricultural feed. Cathie and
Donna (was also lost on Nov. 4) sponsored the legislation. 

By State Senator Cathie Cool Rumsey

I would like to thank all those who came out to vote on Nov. 4. While obviously I would have loved to return to the State House, I am grateful to the people of Senate District 34 for granting me the honor and privilege of representing Charlestown, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond and West Greenwich in the Rhode Island Senate for the last two years.

I am extremely pleased to have had the opportunity to participate in our legislative process and to have helped effect positive change for our state.

Did Blake Filippi bring the cookies to the CCA coronation party?

Health Department inspections at our new state Representative’s business flags food safety problems

By Will Collette

When the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) posted its invitation for people to attend the November 17 swearing in of its newly elected or re-elected Charlestown Town Council members, they made a point of noting that cookies were going to be served.

They also had Rep.-elect Blake Filippi (I-Militia), as well as Sen.-elect Elaine Morgan (R) attend and administer the oath of office. Besides the issues with the oath-giving (click here), I hope they didn’t ask Filippi to supply the advertised cookies especially after I saw the Health Department reports on the Filippi family business on Block Island, Ballard’s Inn.

I have regularly provided readers with run-downs on RI Health Department inspection reports. After looking up Ballard’s record, I’ll be adding them to the regular list as well because I found that Ballard’s was dinged with thirty food safety violations, some of them pretty nasty, just since last June.

Given Ballard’s history of failing to pay its workers the wages they are due, it’s not surprising that they have a food safety problem. Underpaid workers are not very motivated to bust their asses for the boss.

Ballard’s also appears to be a chronic offender, and many of its violations are repeats for such things as filthy meat slicers, storing food at unsafe temperatures, sloppy food handling and potential contamination. In addition to the 30 violations since June, they were cited for 15 violations in 2013 and 41 violations in 2012. 

That's a total of 86 food safety violations in the past two and a half years.

As aways, I have pasted in the inspector reports verbatim from the Health Department’s website below.

During his successful campaign against Rep. Donna Walsh (D), Filippi claimed he runs Ballard’s making him a job creator, so maybe he can explain this record and whether he is committed to public health and safety.

Or will his libertarian Tenth Amendment colors come out and will he try to use his new position as state Representative to curb those jack-booted Health Department inspectors? We’ll find out soon after he gets sworn in next January.

Keep reading to see Ballard’s record of inspection reports for the past three years for yourself.

The Fridge Whisperer

For more cartoons by Andy Singer, click here

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Tulip Nebula 

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

Framing a bright emission region this telescopic view looks out along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the nebula rich constellation Cygnus the Swan.

Popularly called the Tulip Nebula the glowing cloud of interstellar gas and dust is also found in the 1959 catalog by astronomer Stewart Sharpless as Sh2-101.

About 8,000 light-years distant and 70 light-years across the complex and beautiful nebula blossoms at the center of this composite image.

Red, green, and blue hues map emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. 

Ultraviolet radiation from young, energetic stars at the edge of the Cygnus OB3 association, including O star HDE 227018, ionizes the atoms and powers the emission from the Tulip Nebula.

HDE 227018 is the bright star very near the blue arc at the cosmic tulip's center. Glowing across the electromagnetic spectrum, microquasar Cygnus X-1 and a curved shock front created by its powerful jets lie toward the top and right.

Even Charlestown will get a piece of this

State Awards Last Small-Scale Solar Grants for 2014

By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News staff

PROVIDENCE — Small solar projects funded by the state Renewable Energy Fund (REF) finished off the year with 47 new projects. Overall, the program approved 127 solar installations in 2014. Last year, 89 small-scale solar projects were approved.

In this latest round, 45 approvals went to residential solar projects, and two went to a local chewing-gum company.

RGS Energy was the largest recipient of grants awarded Nov. 17 by the Commerce RI board of directors. The company received $157,688 for 20 new solar residential projects. Colorado-based RGS Energy has an office in Providence. Prior to a string of mergers, RGS Energy was formerly Alteris Renewables, SolarWrights and Solar Works. The company is the designated solar installer for the new Solarize RI bulk-discount purchase program in North Smithfield.

RI conservatives have found their own version of BENGHAZI!!!

RhodeMapRI opponents fear future plans, affordable housing

"Communist plot...tyranny...BENGHAZI!!!"

By Tom Sgouros 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Locally, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) is part of the right-wing circus that's going crazy over this. Late news Wednesday was that a planned meeting to move the plan along was postponed, apparently in response to the hysteria. - WC

We’re apparently supposed to be afraid, very afraid, of Lincoln Chafee’s “Rhode Map” for economic development. Since the election there seems to be a coordinated effort to scare the state about this plan for future growth.

Gary Morse, wrote a fairly confused screed in the Providence Journal Monday that complains the RhodeMap RI, well, I’m not really sure what is the problem with it. Maybe that its development was partly funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development?  He writes:

“[W]hat RhodeMap RI is really all about is HUD’s demand that low-income housing, particularly low-income rental housing, be implemented side-by-side with existing housing in every neighborhood across America.”

Shocking, I know. But he can’t quote anything in the report to support this kind of claim because it doesn’t say anything like it anywhere in the report. Go ahead, search it right here.

Bleeding the treasury

The Roth blunder barrels on

By Gerald E. Scorse, Progressive Charlestown guest columnist

“The Roth IRA, created by Congress in 1997, resulted from “a conscious, contemptible manipulation of the budget rules.”—John Buckley, former chief of staff for the Joint Committee on Taxation and former chief tax counsel, Committee on Ways and Means

What was true then is truer now. Roths have become a bi-partisan affliction: they came in under President Bill Clinton, but Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have added their own wrinkles. 

Thanks to all three, nobody has to go to the Cayman Islands to find a tax shelter; all they have to do is get their money into a Roth. Legislators continually dream up more ways to make it happen. Even the Internal Revenue Service has become an enabler, issuing a ruling that creates one more route to a federally-sanctioned tax haven.