john torrison president
   
  • Club Home
  • Club Members
  • Listen with Bill
    • Bill's History
  • Turntable
    • TT History
  • The FlipSide
  • Picturesque!
  • Skips Corner
  • Gulliver's Travels
  • The Club Pub
    • Sucks News
  • Harv's Corner

The Club PUBlication  12/28/2020

12/28/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

​Rise of the robots: How pandemic led to faster automation

By OLIVIA ROCKEMAN, JAMES ATTWOOD and JOE DEAUX Bloomberg News

Picture
NINA RIGGIO • Bloomberg A health care worker received groceries delivered with a Starship Technologies robot in Mountain View, Calif.


​For decades, the attitude of unions and their advocates to increased automation could be summed up in one word: no. They feared that every time a machine was put into the workflow, a laborer lost a job.

The pandemic has forced a shift in that calculation. Because human contact spreads the disease, some machines are now viewed not exclusively as the workers’ enemy but also as their protector. That has accelerated the use of robots this year in a way no one expects to stop.

“If you keep me 6 feet away from the other worker and you have a robot in between, it’s now safe,” said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “The unions aren’t going to say, ‘No, you should have the workers standing next to each other so they get sick.’ ”

The result is the spread of windshield-mounted toll detectors, automated floor cleaners at factories, salad-chopping machines in grocery stores, mechanical butlers at hotels and electronic receipts for road pavers. What remains less clear is where the men and women who used to do some of those jobs will work.

The impact of technology on employment has been a topic of anxiety and study for generations. Cars didn’t kill trains, television didn’t end radio. When banks installed ATMs, they hired more people, not fewer, because the variety of their services grew. Still, machines have eliminated many jobs, and the current wave is likely to be no exception. “When we come out of this crisis and labor is cheap again, firms will not necessarily roll back these inventions,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These are kind of one-way transitions.”

That’s what worries union leaders. “In the auto industry, we see COVID accelerating transformation toward digitization,” said Georg Leutert, who heads the automotive and aerospace industries at Geneva-based IndustriALL Global Union. While the transition is unavoidable, workers are nervous and need help with up-skilling and re-skilling, he said.

Mark Lauritsen of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in North America said that in order to avoid the kind of disruption in the meat industry caused by the virus, automation will clearly continue but warned, “If automation is unbridled it’s going to be a threat.”

With office workers at home communicating via remote tools, a knock-on effect is also being felt: Bus drivers, sandwich stall owners and janitors are in trouble as their jobs, which support in-office work, diminish. Jobs in administrative support, which includes roles in office buildings, are down about 700,000 since last year, according to November data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The World Economic Forum reported in October that 43% of businesses surveyed are set to reduce their workforce due to technology integration while 34% plan to expand their workforce for the same reason.

Some argue that turning over repetitive jobs to robots will free up workers to take on new roles. But Marcus Casey, an economist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that while some high-skilled workers will be retrained, many low-skilled ones — like toll collectors — won’t, exacerbating inequality.
0 Comments

The Club PUBlication  12/21/2020

12/21/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

​As Lake Michigan solutions erode, scramble to save coasts

By PATRICK M. O’CONNELL • Chicago Tribune

Picture
Picture
Photos by ZBIGNIEW BZDAK • Chicago Tribune FORCE FOR CHANGE: Visitors walked by the breakwall at Big Sable Point Lighthouse in Ludington, Mich.“If it wasn’t for that sea wall, those dunes would be gone,” a park manager said. Among the ideas to halt erosion along Lake Michigan is installing offshore reefs.

LUDINGTON, MICH. – As the wind whipped across the top of the Big Sable Point lighthouse, one of the most famous and beloved on the Great Lakes, Jim Gallie pointed to the disappearing beach: “It’s been progressively getting worse.”

Hikers and beachcombers who trekked along the shoreline to the remote, historic lighthouse at Ludington State Park once had ample room between the waves and the metal breakwall.

Now the Michigan Department of Natural Resources is spending $130,000 to recap the sea wall and place new stone barriers at its base. “If it wasn’t for that sea wall,” said Gallie, the park manager , “those dunes would be gone.”

From 112 feet above the beach on the deck of the 1867 lighthouse, the effects of a changing climate and a lake near historically high levels are clear: Increased precipitation, rising temperatures and human development across the Great Lakes basin have changed Lake Michigan and the lives of the millions who live, work and play along the coast in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

“It’s a system that’s really been whipsawed in many ways by a variety of factors, from climate change to nonnative species, to the legacy of contaminants,” said J. Val Klump, dean and professor at the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

As part of the series “Great Lakes, High Stakes,” the Chicago Tribune is exploring the environmental issues and how coastal communities are adapting to a warming world.

The third largest Great Lake by surface area (second by volume) is an eclectic mix of dune bluffs, sandy beaches, rugged rocks, major Midwestern cities, tourist towns and marshlands. But it is also emblematic of the myriad issues facing all of the Great Lakes as the climate continues to change. Surging water levels have collapsed bluffs, swamped coastal dune lands, erased beaches and damaged homes, businesses, docks, trails, campgrounds and sewer systems.

Residents and officials are scrambling to find new solutions as stone barriers and beach replenishment are often too costly and ineffective over the long term. In Illinois, environmental officials, engineers and scientists are experimenting with offshore reefs and shoals with the idea of blunting the force of storm surges before they eat away at the sand, dunes and marshland habitats.

In Wisconsin, cities and towns up and down the coast are spending millions on projects such as stormwater sewer upgrades and pier stabilization. In Indiana, shoreline protection has been contentious, including a federal lawsuit filed by residents and officials of Ogden Dunes who claim dunes, roads and private homes are “in danger of total destruction” if current protections fail.

On the western shores of Michigan, houses have begun to slip into the lake, leading homeowners to stabilize their structures, build waterfront barriers or move altogether.

In Orchard Beach State Park, north of Manistee, Mich. , park officials are planning to relocate the historic pavilion building that overlooks the lake because of the danger of erosion.

Doug Barry, unit supervisor at the park, described moving the entire structure, a 400-ton limestone building with a concrete foundation, as “controlled retreat.” “It’s a temporary fix,” he said. “Lake Michigan is going to win.”

The movement of sand, and its effects on the shoreline and the underwater environment, is the focus of offshore projects at Illinois Beach State Park in Zion and the Fort Sheridan Forest Preserve in Lake County, north of Chicago.

There, a consortium of agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, private researchers and the Lake County Forest Preserves, is working to install a series of offshore reefs and underwater natural breakwalls. The goal is to protect the shoreline, but also study whether reducing the flow of sand, sediment and crashing waves along the shore will alter the character of the lake itself, the nearshore habitat, the beaches and the unique marshlands beyond.

Scientists across the Midwest are studying how changes in air and water temperature are altering the water, aquatic life and the proliferation of invasive species. University of Minnesota researchers Tedy Ozersky and Sergei Katsev have been studying the effect of the quagga mussels on the biology and chemistry of the lake.

What they have found is that the quagga mussels, an aquatic mollusk native to Ukraine that arrived in ballast water from transoceanic vessels in the early 1990s, have outcompeted zebra mussels in the deep regions of the lake bottom. Their impact stretches beyond changing the food web. Their proliferation has filtered the water and changed the chemistry of the sediment. When the researchers lowered a camera into the water, they were surprised at not just how many mussels they saw, but also how active they were. “It looked like they were having a party,” Ozersky said.
​
The invasives, he said, can filter 200 meters of lake in a matter of days, pulling the nutrients from the water, stealing them from other creatures that need them to survive.


0 Comments

The Club PUBlication  12/14/2020

12/14/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

​If we sit a lot, do we have to move a lot?

New research finds it may be less than we thought.

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS New York Times



​Walking for at least 11 minutes a day could reduce the undesirable health consequences of sitting for hours and hours, according to a new study of the ways in which both inactivity and exercise influence how long we live.
​

The study, which relied on objective data from tens of thousands of people about how they spent their days, found that those who were the most sedentary faced a high risk of dying young, but if people got up and moved, they slashed that threat substantially, even if they did not move much.

​For most of us, sitting for prolonged periods of time is common, especially as we face the dual challenges of COVIDrelated restrictions and the shortening days of winter. Not surprisingly, there could be long-term health consequences from this physical quietude.

But how active a person should be if he or she hopes to mitigate the downsides of sitting has remained unclear. If you sit for eight hours at work, for instance, then stroll for half an hour in the evening — meaning you comply with the exercise recommendation of about 30 minutes of exercise most days — is that enough movement to undo most of the health risks of too much sitting?

Some past research suggested the answer is no. A 2016 study involving more than a million people found, instead, that men and women needed to exercise moderately for about 60 to 75 minutes a day in order to diminish the effects of sitting. But that study asked people to remember how much they had moved or sat.

So, for the new study, which was published in a special issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, many of the authors of the 2016 review used data from nearly 50,000 people who had worn activity monitors to objectively track how much they moved and sat.

The scientists found that most of volunteers sat a lot, averaging close to 10 hours a day, and many barely moved, exercising moderately, usually by walking, for as little as two or three minutes a day.

The researchers checked death registries for about a decade after people had joined their studies. Dividing people into thirds, based on how much they moved and sat, researchers found that people in the top third for sitting and bottom third for activity had a 260% more likelihood of premature death than the people who moved the most and sat the least.

But people in the middle third for activity, who exercised moderately for about 11 minutes a day, were significantly less likely to have died prematurely than people who moved less, even if all of them belonged to the group that sat the most.

The researchers concluded that the sweet spot for physical activity and longevity seemed to arrive at about 35 minutes a day of brisk walking or other moderate activities, an amount that led to the greatest statistical improvement in life span, no matter how many hours someone sat.

“Brisk walking is excellent moderate exercise.”

Ulf Ekelund, professor of epidemiology and physical activity at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences
0 Comments

The Club PUBlication  12/07/2020

12/7/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture

This rat covers itself in poison

The chemical armor is powerful enough to bring an elephant to its knees.

By KATHERINE J. WU New York Times

Picture
STEPHANIE HIGGINS via New York Times African crested rats chew branches of a poison arrow tree and spit them — along with their toxins — back out into its fur . A scientist said the creature behaves like it “knows it’s poisonous.”
For a rodent that resembles the love child of a skunk and a steel wool brush, the African crested rat carries itself with a surprising amount of swagger.

The rats “very much have the personality of something that knows it’s poisonous,” said Sara Weinstein, a biologist at the University of Utah and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

In sharp contrast to most of their skittish rodent kin, Lophiomys imhausi lumber about with the languidness of porcupines. When cornered, they fluff up the fur along their backs into a tip-frosted mohawk, revealing rows of black-and-white bands that run like racing stripes down their flanks — and, at their center, a thicket of specialized brown hairs with a honeycomb like texture.

Those spongy hairs contain a poison powerful enough to bring an elephant to its knees, and they are central to Weinstein’s recent research, which confirmed ideas about how this rat makes itself so deadly.

Give them a chance and African crested rats will take nibbles from the branch of a poison arrow tree. It’s not for nutrition. Instead, they will chew chunks of the plants and spit them back out into their fur, anointing themselves with a form of chemical armor that most likely protects them from predators such as hyenas and wild dogs. The ritual transforms the rats into the world’s only known toxic rodents, and ranks them among the few mammals that borrow poisons from plants.

Weinstein’s research, which was published last month in the Journal of Mammalogy, is not the first to document the crested rats’ bizarre behavior. But the new paper adds weight to an idea described nearly a decade ago, and it offers an early glimpse into the animals’ social lives.

People in East Africa have long known about the crested rat’s poisonous punch, which has felled many an over curious dog. (Those that survive their encounters tend to give the rats a wide berth.)

For their new paper, Weinstein and her team snared 25 rodents and filmed them in the lab. When offered cuttings of Acokanthera, some of the animals chomped on the bark then groomed it into their stripes.
​
Scientists still aren’t sure how often the rats anoint, or even how they tolerate the toxins themselves, especially if some of it ends up going down.
0 Comments

    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018

    RSS Feed