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Ed. note: our hearts are with the people of Japan who are experiencing — again — the brutal downsides of human ingenuity, on top of the combined nightmare of two natural disasters. For a good live feed of news from NHK World TV, click here. For good information on the ongoing nuclear issues in Japan from the Union of Concerned Scientists, click here.

By Chris Burrell, The Patriot Ledger

Read the original article here

PLYMOUTH – The Pilgrim nuclear power plant runs the second-highest risk of catastrophic earthquake damage of all the nuclear plants in the country, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission study.

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth (photo credit: Entergy Corp.)

The agency estimates the risk of an earthquake damaging the core of Pilgrim’s reactor over the course of a year at 1 in 14,493, a significantly higher risk assessment than its previous estimate of 1 in 125,000.

The federal agency considered both earthquake probability and the stalwartness of a nuclear plant’s design in tallying those odds.

Continue reading Study: Plymouth nuke plant carries 2nd-highest risk of major earthquake damage
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Happy Pi Day, Massachusetts (3/14). According to the Boston Globe, “Pi Day is a big deal for Raytheon.”   Raytheon is distributing apple pies to math and science teachers within a 3.14 mile radius on 3/14  to express their appreciation of excellence in the teaching of math and science and celebrate the irrational number pi (which is approximately equal to 3.14).

“Our employees – so many of whom are engineers – are extremely grateful to teachers who spend each day encouraging and inspiring today’s students to become tomorrow’s innovators,” said Pam Wickham, vice president of Corporate Affairs and Communications for Raytheon Company. “We hope this small gesture of gratitude will encourage others to show their appreciation for these educators, while helping to drive awareness and interest in STEM beyond the classroom walls.”

http://www.boston.com/business…

Heady stuff, but as way of supporting teachers, it’s a bit half-baked. The pies might cost $314/year, maybe even $3141.59 a year, but the tax exemption Raytheon brought about in 1995 now costs our schools almost $314 MILLION/year.

Continue reading Raytheon Redistributes The Pie
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My hairdresser in Iceland receives paternity leave benefits from his country’s social security system.

Here in the US neither of the prevalent points in the bi-partisan debate paints an encouraging picture of the future.  The quality of benefits such as sick time, parental leave (if it even exists), and health care are declining.

We are essentially saying to the next generations that they can expect lower living standards into the future.   The solutions, though, are within the reach of dedicated organized citizens who see successful models that operate outside of the bi-partisan paradigms.

Now back to Iceland …

Continue reading Reykjavik Post Card – Family Values

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You know it is time to make the switch  to solar when you’re using solar steam generators to extract oil! From Oil and Gas Journal:

The world’s first commercial thermal enhanced oil recovery project that uses solar steam generators went on line Feb. 24 at Berry Petroleum Co.’s heavy oil 21Z lease in McKittrick, Calif.

…GlassPoint built the solar unit in less than 6 weeks and estimates that its facililty on the 21Z lease will supply during the day about an average 1 million btu/hr of solar heat and replace 25-80% of the steam generated by gas-fired boilers on the lease.

The challenge: solar is used for heat and electricity; oil is used for transportation.

http://ow.ly/4e7hI

Continue reading The latest in “enhanced” oil recovery: solar energy
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Adam Friedman’s Op-Ed in The Boston Herald:

Boston taxpayers, take heed: You just paid $29 per ballot to elect a city councilor. You probably could’ve used that extra money for a half-tank of gas, or a night out at your favorite restaurant. Instead, you spent an estimated $83,000 so that 7 percent (2,886) of District 7’s registered voters could brave the cold last Tuesday to elect Chuck Turner’s successor. At that price, those must have been some pretty nice ballots.

Tito Jackson won the race in a landslide, drawing 1,943 votes (67 percent) against five opponents. But Jackson did not win the office – not yet. He only topped the field in the preliminary election. Voters still have to return for the general election March 15 to vote for one of the two front-runners. This would make sense, except that the second-place “front-runner,” Cornell Mills, received only 271 votes (9 percent). So, taxpayers will plunk down another $83,000 for a second election.

Welcome to the electoral antique road show, where a 19th-century paradigm trumps 21st-century common sense. As thin as city budgets have been in the past two years, we continue to pay double the tab for primitive runoff election procedures. Although runoff elections are important to ensure a candidate wins by a 50 percent majority vote, holding two elections when the vote gap between the top two candidates is 58 percent is simply wasteful. It is the electoral equivalent to the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere.

There a way to run our elections more intelligently. The District 7 example serves as the perfect opportunity to upgrade our electoral system to Instant Runoff Voting (also known as Ranked Choice Voting), which combines the preliminary and general into a single high-stakes election. Instant Runoff Voting uses a “smart ballot” that lets voters rank all of the candidates by number – 1, 2, 3 and so on.

Continue reading “Better Run-Off in an Instant”

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Win a lottery, get a job at the state house, without owning favors to any campaign contributors (because you didn’t have any)! That’s the proposal of a physics/political science/economist team extending the principle of random jury selection to promotions in organizations and legislative elections. Crazy?

http://improbable.com/2011/03/…

Improbable Research – The Italian research team that received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2010 for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random has extended its work (as well as gained some team members).  

Continue reading Scientists propose randomly selecting certain fraction of legislators
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We’ll see where Reich decides to stand when push comes to shove. Or has push already come to shove? Come on Robert, you said it back in 2001. The Democratic Party is dead. Join us and liberate yourself from that farce!

By Robert Reich at RobertReich.org

Look at the outrage in Madison, Wisconsin. Look at the crowds in DesMoines, Iowa. Look at the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio and elswhere around America.

Hear what they’re saying: Stop attacking unions. Stop making scapegoats out of public employees. Stop protecting the super-rich from paying their fair share of the taxes needed to keep our schools running.

Stop gutting the working middle class.

Are we finally seeing average Americans stand up and demand a fair shake in an economy now grotesquely tilted toward the wealthy and the privileged? Are Americans beginning to awake to the fact that our economy now delivers a larger share of total income to the very top than at any time in living memory? That big corporations are making more money and creating more jobs abroad than in the United States?

That this concentration of income and wealth has so corrupted politics that corporations can extort whatever they want from the government – tax breaks, loan guarantees, subsidies – while the super-rich can take most of their income as capital gains (taxed at 15 percent), and the rest at the lowest top rate in 25 years? And that because of this our kids are crowded into classrooms, our streets and highways and bridges are falling apart, and our healthcare bills are out of control?

Continue reading The Birth of the People’s Party