ScienceBlogs » Politics http://scienceblogs.com Where the world turns to talk about science. Tue, 21 May 2013 01:24:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2-alpha The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment [Confessions of a Science Librarian] http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/05/20/the-canadian-war-on-science-a-long-unexaggerated-devastating-chronological-indictment/ http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/05/20/the-canadian-war-on-science-a-long-unexaggerated-devastating-chronological-indictment/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 12:01:23 +0000 John Dupuis http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/?p=2856 This is a brief chronology of the current Conservative Canadian government’s long campaign to undermine evidence-based scientific, environmental and technical decision-making. It is a government that is beholden to big business, particularly big oil, and that makes every attempt to shape public policy to that end. It is a government that fundamentally doesn’t believe in science. It is a government that is more interested in keeping its corporate masters happy than in protecting the environment.

As is occasionally my habit, I have pulled together a chronology of sorts. It is a chronology of all the various cuts, insults, muzzlings and cancellations that I’ve been able to dig up. Each of them represents a single shot in the Canadian Conservative war on science. It should be noted that not every item in this chronology, if taken in isolation, is necessarily the end of the world. It’s the accumulated evidence that is so damning.

Most of the items come from various links I’ve saved over the years as well as various other media articles I’ve dug up over the last week or so. This series at The Huffington Post has been particularly useful as has this article at the Wastershed Sentinal.

A long list of various environmental programs that the Harper government has discontinued or slashed funding to is here. I haven’t found individual media stories about all of them, so they aren’t in the list below. If you can help me find stories about some of those programs, etc, please let me know. As well, some stories are treated multiple times, with perhaps an initial story telling the big picture or introducing a large series of cuts and later stories fleshing out details.

This list is no doubt incomplete. There may also be link errors or duplications.

In particular, if you have updates on any of the stories, including reversals or reprieves, I want to hear those too.

Please feel free to make suggestions and corrections in the comments or to me at jdupuis at yorku dot ca.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/05/20/the-canadian-war-on-science-a-long-unexaggerated-devastating-chronological-indictment/feed/ 0 Weekend Diversion: Against Scientific Racism [Starts With A Bang] http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/19/weekend-diversion-against-scientific-racism/ http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/19/weekend-diversion-against-scientific-racism/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 18:04:34 +0000 Ethan http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/?p=28053

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” -Frederick Douglass

I thought we were past this, I really did. Having grown up in New York, having lived in eight different states and traveled to 39 others — as well as maybe a dozen different countries — I truly thought there were a few things that were obvious. One of them, of course, is that you’ve got to give something a shot to know whether you like it or not. Hopefully, no matter who, where, or what you are, you’ll enjoy this upbeat song by Bob Schneider as much as I do, so have a listen to

Mudhouse.

Another, even more fundamentally simple and obvious one, is that people are individuals, and ought to be judged solely on their merits as individuals. You might be tempted to make generalizations about someone based on your preconceptions about their race, their gender, their country-of-origin, their sexual orientation, etc., but at the end of the day, each one of us is an individual.

And in no way — to me, at least — is that more obvious than when it comes to studying the Universe.

Image credit: Tanja Sund.

Image credit: Tanja Sund of http://astrotanja.com/.

Which brings up my point: do you think race, gender, or ancestry determines who can or cannot succeed in a given career?

If the answer isn’t a swift and immediate “of course not” for you, congratulations, you might be a scientific racist! I would’ve thought this had gone out of fashion after World War II, and I certainly didn’t think I’d encounter it ever in my lifetime. In a famous statement all the way back in 1950, UNESCO had the following to say:

The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.

And yet, here we are, studying things like gender-and-math-aptitude or IQ-and-race like these are actual sciences.

Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Quizkajer.

Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Quizkajer.

There are some of you out there who have no idea why this is offensive, why this isn’t science, and why this is racist.

Let me try to put this in perspective for you.

How do you feel when you see unequal treatment, based on race, in situations such as this?

Image credit: Alexandra Dal of http://alexandradal.tumblr.com/.

Image credit: Alexandra Dal of http://alexandradal.tumblr.com/.

Do I need to explain to you why this is offensive, why this is racist, or why this is grossly unfair treatment? Do I need to explain to you that the person on the left and the person on the right in each case deserve to be treated equally, regardless of what any test, statistic or study has said about outcomes?

Here’s why, for those of you who need the explanation: Every person in this world deserves to be treated with the dignity and respect that we, ourselves, would like to be treated with.

The idea that tests like an “IQ Test,” the “SATs” or the “GREs” are somehow indicators of what races or genders are better suited to certain types of careers are meritless, not borne out by evidence, and also incredibly offensive. And yet, you can apparently get a Ph.D. in this from Harvard.

Image credit: screenshot from Jon Wiener's blog at http://www.thenation.com/.

Image credit: screenshot from Jon Wiener’s blog at http://www.thenation.com/.

This. Is. Not. Okay.

People have been using studies like this to argue about genetic inferiority for centuries, contending that some races are genetically inferior, the female gender is inferior at math, and that this makes them ill-suited to careers that involve heavy amounts of math/science/detail-oriented work.

And yet, if you’ve ever gone to school or met a substantial number of human beings of any race, gender, or ancestry, that notion seems like utter lunacy. It’s as plain to me as it was to Charles Sumner nearly 200 years ago.

Image credit: Theoretical Particle Physics at SISSA, via http://www.sissa.it/tpp/.

Image credit: Theoretical Particle Physics at SISSA, via http://www.sissa.it/tpp/.

Everyone should be not only allowed but encouraged to pursue their interests and passions, and should be granted the opportunity to develop their skills and do their best. We have a terrible track record of denying women their deserved place in scientific history, and despite the incredible successes of women and people of color in all sorts of arenas of life, we still stereotype that somehow, white (and maybe asian, too) men are simply innately better-suited to becoming scientists.

After all, you’ve probably heard the story of Carl Sagan’s first encounter with science when he was a boy, when he received a toy robot:

But the most fascinating things about this, was a panel you could take off the side of it, and you could actually see inside, all the gears and all the workings inside. After that, I was hooked. I had to see how all these things worked. I was always in competition with my… brother, to find out who could be the smartest, who knows the most about how everything worked.

Except I lied to you. That’s not Carl Sagan’s story; it’s Vincent Rodgers’ story!

Image credit: University of Iowa, via http://siena.cs.uiowa.edu/~vrodgers/.

Image credit: University of Iowa, via http://siena.cs.uiowa.edu/~vrodgers/.

The idea that someone would be denied the opportunity to pursue their dream career for any reason other than their own individual merits is absolutely bigoted, and always wrong.

So this week, I was heartened to come across something simple and straightforward being done to fight this evil, but almost no one has heard about it. Let’s change that together; allow me to introduce to you Scholars Against Scientific Racism.

Image credit: Scholars Against Scientific Racism.

Image credit: Scholars Against Scientific Racism.

Rather than focus on the latest egregious offense in this vein, let’s focus on ending this garbage once and for all. There’s a simple google document (I tested it, there’s no malware or anything) that you can sign your name to to say that this line of thinking has no scientific merits when it comes to crafting public or social policy, and does not deserve to be studied as though it does. Let’s get the racism, sexism and bigotry out of science once and for all, and we can start by fighting against this garbage:

Dean Ellwood at Harvard Kennedy School takes the position that this dissertation is part of an academic debate. We are not against academic freedom. However, there is no academic debate on whether or not Hispanics as a group are less intelligent than native-born whites. There are debates on whether or not Hispanic is a pan-ethnic, ethnic, or racialized category. There are debates on how and whether or why we should measure intelligence. There are debates on the extent to which intelligence is a heritable trait. But, there are no debates on whether or not Latino immigrants have the intellectual caliber to be part of the United States. Those kinds of debates happen in nativist and white supremacist circles, which have no place in academia, which prizes arguments and debates based on valid constructs and scientific evidence.

It’s not science, and it’s not right. Let’s do our part to make sure that people are judged on their merits as people, nothing less and nothing more.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/19/weekend-diversion-against-scientific-racism/feed/ 0 Will God Allow Us To Ruin Our Planet? [Greg Laden's Blog] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/16/will-god-allow-us-to-clean-up-our-planet/ http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/16/will-god-allow-us-to-clean-up-our-planet/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 20:19:57 +0000 Greg Laden http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=16660 It is being debated in the US Senate! (Unofficially.) Here’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on the issue:

See also: Sen. Whitehouse destroys colleague who said God won’t allow climate change

And this:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/16/will-god-allow-us-to-clean-up-our-planet/feed/ 0 Can Obama’s Organizing For Action (OFA) help save the planet? The jury is out. [Greg Laden's Blog] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/15/can-obama-for-america-help-save-the-planet-the-jury-is-out/ http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/15/can-obama-for-america-help-save-the-planet-the-jury-is-out/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 03:07:32 +0000 Greg Laden http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=16613 You’ve gotta love South Minneapolis.

My friend Sharon Sund passed me an email this morning about an Organizing for Action meeting in South Minneapolis to discuss climate change activism. Sharon and I had been talking about local climate change activism earlier in the week so she thought I’d liked to go to this meeting and see what they are up to.

Organizing for Action(OFA) is an offshoot of the Obama campaign, a grassroots non profit that is separate from any campaign committee (so they don’t support or run candidates) that organizes in favor of Obama’s issues like getting some sensible gun regulation or immigration reform passed in Congress, or keeping Obama care intact.

The organizer of the event described OFA’s structure and purpose, gave a bit of a pep talk, and then opened it up for discussion.

I was the first person to speak up, and after making a brief remark about some interesting climate science related news I won’t bother you with here, I brought up Keystone XL pipeline. I noted that it would be awful nice and a lot easier to get a climate change component of OFA going if Obama would just come out and say “no” to Keystone. The official OFA response, blew me away. Keystone XL might be someone’s personal issue, and that was fine, but since the President was neutral on it at the moment, OFA was as well.

Now, I don’t want to take credit or breaking the meeting. Had I not said something about Keystone, the guy next to me, or the woman behind me, or the guy two seats down, or the woman across the room, or any one of the 30 hard core activists attending the meeting, would have. I know this because once Keystone was brought up, and the need for Obama to take a stand, and in particular, oppose the pipeline was mentioned, everybody in the room had something to say, clearly indicating that they had all thought about it quite a bit.

Keystone is not a personal issue. It is the key, urgent, not-to-be-ignored grassroots issue that OFA and Obama should be all over.

I kinda feel bad for the organizer because he was swamped. I think we stayed on keystone for about an hour. He would say, “OK, let’s move on to a different issue. Sally, did you have something, I saw your hand up?” and Sally would say something very brief not about keystone, and then, “Well, I was in Nebraska last month chaining myself to construction equipment to stop the pipeline …” and then it would be back to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Or the organizer would say, “Oh, Bill, I see you’ve had your hand up,” and Bill would say, “Yeah, that idea of having house meetings to discuss climate would be good. This way we can get together and plan an organized push to get the President to do the right thing on the Keystone Pipeline..” and so on and so forth.1

There are two things that I now know for certain. The first, which I learned tonight, is that Obama for America will not have an effective climate change component if Obama does not come out in opposition to Keystone. Every single one of those activists is involved in a half dozen different projects, some focused on one issue, other on many, that they devote considerable time to, and that they regard, quite rightly, as very important. Many of the individuals in the room are heavily involved already in climate change activism and are already working with existing political groups, churches, or other organizations on climate change (our local 350.org guy was there for example). These climate change activists don’t need the OFA, though the OFA needs them. In fact, the meeting organizer had noted how great it was when OFA engaged in a new issue, and brought new volunteers into the fold in so doing. Most importantly, this little meeting tonight was a microcosm of the larger political landscape. Obama has to lead on climate change. He’s taken a few steps in that direction. And we’re all waiting around for the next couple of steps. Right now, Obama has not moved forward enough for us to find any space behind him so that he can actually lead us.

The consensus at tonight’s meeting was this: The local Minneapolis OFA has to take a message back to Obama and OFA headquarters: Yes, of course we’ll help. But first you need to get your head out of the sand. In particular, the Alberta tar sands. And then we will do more than help. We’ll carry you.

The second thing I know for certain, but that I didn’t learn from this meeting because I already knew it is this: The people of South Minneapolis (and adjoining inner ring suburbs) are awesome.2

_____________

See also: Obama’s decision on the Keystone Pipeline IS a legacy making or breaking thing.
Added: See also OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone

and

OFA Refuses To Push On Keystone
_____________
1Those were not the actual names of participants or what they said. Since I’m not prepared to report those things exactly, I’m just wildly paraphrasing to make the point.

2A word I’ve probably used four times in my entire life. Just so you know.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/15/can-obama-for-america-help-save-the-planet-the-jury-is-out/feed/ 0 Want to boycott stuff? There’s an app for that. [Greg Laden's Blog] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/14/want-to-boycott-stuff-theres-an-app-for-that/ http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/14/want-to-boycott-stuff-theres-an-app-for-that/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 23:13:06 +0000 Greg Laden http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=16597 Vote with your wallet. Tired of the Koch Brothers ruining everything for everybody? Prefer to buy products from companies that contribute to Sandy relief? Do you just want to know which major megacorporation produced the item you are considering putting in your shopping cart?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an app that allowed you to scan the product’s bar codes and quickly determine which evile empire you are supporting, or avoiding supporting, with your purchasing decision. Well, there is, and it is called Buycott. Click here to see iOS version
icon

From the app developers:

How Buycott works

-Join a campaign to help a cause you care about and commit to actively supporting the companies on your side of the issue, while avoiding those that oppose your position.

-Scan product barcodes and Buycott will find out what company owns that product (and who owns that company, ad infinitum).

-Using this information, Buycott will determine whether you have joined a campaign that includes the product’s owners.

Features

- Lookup the ownership structure of any product and trace it all the way back to its parent company with our interactive family tree diagram.

- Offers a variety of contact data for companies and brands, so you can easily inform them of your decision to support or avoid their products.

- Scans all major retail barcodes (UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN8, EAN13, etc).

- Create your own campaign from buycott.com

Once installed you have to sigh up. I chose the “Log In with Facebook” option and then was asked if Buycott could post to my friend’s walls. I said no. The signup failed. So, right there, somebody needs to sit these kids down (the ones who made the app) and explain to them the meaning of Irony.

So then I signed up with the manual sign up and I got an “error creating account” error. No explanation.

So, I’d like to try this app out for you but it’s broke, so I can’t. But I also know that word of this app just went around the internet a few minutes ago, so their server is probably getting hammered. I’ll try again in a day or two and let you know how it goes. If you try it and have any info to report, please put it in the comments.

This would be good if it works. But first, it has to …. well, work.

UPDATE:

I was able to join this evening, but the join up process took a long time, presumably because of the developer’s server still being overwhelmed (or attacked by nefarious forces, perhaps?). Then things were still a little glitchy. When I went into the app I was told that I needed to join before I could use it, but Ignored that and signed in using the info I had given it when I had joined earlier, and then I was told that I’d have to Join, the, I was allowed to use the app as though I had joined.

This all happened because the app seems to reset to some prior level when my iPhone does its partial sleep power down thing it does after several seconds of no activity, and everything the app does is so slow that this happens all the time.

Lawry's Salt is OK! Yay!

Lawry’s Salt is OK! Yay!

I tried scanning a book ISBN code and it was smart enough to tell me it couldn’t do that. Then I scanned the bar code on my lens cleaning solution. The app correctly identified it as Flents Wipe-n CLear Lens Cleaner! But there was no information on the company, which probably means it is not made by the Koch Brothers or Satan or anyone like that. I then checked out my Lexar Jump Drive, recently purchased (so the empty cardboard container was still sitting on my desk). It seems to have recognized the manufacturer but did not know what the product was, but asked me to enter information about the product in order to “earn points.” I entered the data and got an error.

I then checked All Free an Clear laundry soap, a container of little tomatoes, and a container of Laqwry’s seasoned salt. The first two returned errors, the third returned data on the product that was accurate and information about the company. I was told that there were “no campaign conflicts.”

Lawry Salt is OK!

So the bottom line is that the app works but there are glitches that hopefully will be ironed out.

The amount of time it takes to get the information back from the scan is fairly long … tens of seconds … but that is probably because their server is still working too hard.

____________________
Photo Credit: frankhg via Compfight cc

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/05/14/want-to-boycott-stuff-theres-an-app-for-that/feed/ 0 Wage theft in South Florida: Nation’s first county with wage theft protections reports on progress and perils [The Pump Handle] http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2013/05/14/wage-theft-in-south-florida-nations-first-county-with-wage-theft-protections-reports-on-progress-and-perils/ http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2013/05/14/wage-theft-in-south-florida-nations-first-county-with-wage-theft-protections-reports-on-progress-and-perils/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 17:10:58 +0000 The Pump Handle http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/?p=6638 by Kim Krisberg

Earlier this month, Florida lawmakers wrapped up their latest legislative session. And nearly 500 miles south of Tallahassee in Miami-Dade County, workers’ rights advocates breathed yet another sigh of relief.

Ever since Miami-Dade adopted the nation’s first countywide wage theft ordinance in 2010, it’s been under attack. For the first two years after its passage, state legislators tried to pass legislation to pre-empt local communities from passing their own wage theft laws; this last legislative session, they tried again but included a carve out for Miami-Dade and for Broward County, which passed its own wage theft measure in 2012. All three tries have died in the state Senate, but worker advocates aren’t optimistic that the fight is over.

Still, in a state that decided to dismantle its department of labor a decade ago, Miami’s wage theft ordinance is a milestone for Florida workers and one that’s slowly spreading throughout the Sunshine State. Just last month, the northern county of Alachua passed a wage theft measure, and north of Miami in Palm Beach County, the local Legal Aid Society runs a wage theft pilot program that could pave the way for a legal ordinance.

“Wage theft is a huge problem in South Florida — it’s absolutely huge,” said Jeanette Smith, executive director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, one of the groups that led the passage of Miami-Dade’s ordinance. “As individual organizations we couldn’t solve this problem on our own. Cases just kept coming and coming and we needed something systematic, a more institutionalized solution.”

Since Miami-Dade’s wage theft ordinance went into effect, hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages have been recovered and more workers are filing wage theft complaints. Much of the progress to date is credited to the broad and diverse coalition that came together to tackle the problem — the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force (today, it’s known as just the Florida Wage Theft Task Force). Its members include faith-based groups, immigrant rights organizations, unions, women’s groups, researchers, legal aid and many more.

The groups originally came together about seven years ago to help a group of day laborers in Cutler Bay just southwest of Miami. At the time, a local developer had begun harassing the workers and their potential employers. At one point, the developer was arrested for physically attacking workers. In response, advocates came together in defense of the day laborers and quickly began talking about other issues facing workers in South Florida. Wage theft was at the top of the list. It was the first step on the road to a countywide ordinance.

“Today, people are talking about wage theft, workers are speaking up,” Smith told me. “The success has been so much broader than just the ordinance itself.”

Sun, surf and wage theft

In the span of just two-and-a-half years, more than $28 million in unpaid wages has been recovered by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in Florida, county staff enforcing Miami-Dade’s wage theft ordinance and by advocacy groups throughout the state, according to a 2012 report from the Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy at Florida International University (FIU). But even though it’s clear that Florida has a serious wage theft problem, as of late 2011, Florida’s attorney general hadn’t taken a single civil action to enforce the state’s minimum wage law, and there is no state agency charged with enforcing wage and hour laws. Miami-Dade County leads the state in wage theft cases.

Cynthia Hernandez, a co-author of the report and a senior research associate at the institute, estimates that the South Florida economy is losing between $2 million and $6 million every year to wage theft. And that, by no means, reflects the larger impact of wage theft on families, neighborhoods and local economies, Hernandez told me. Hernandez and her colleagues first began investigating wage theft in 2006, interviewing immigrant workers and employers in the region’s plant nursery industry. Many of the employers interviewed said they pay below minimum wage because they can get away with it, while others said it was the only way to compete.

“We were definitely surprised,” Hernandez said. “I think everyone at the table was surprised they would just admit to it.”

From there the researchers began digging deeper. While immigrants and agricultural workers were certainly among the most vulnerable to wage theft and more likely to experience it, they weren’t the only ones. Wage theft complaints were coming in from the tourist, retail, hospitality and constructions sectors, but also from workers not typically associated with wage theft problems, such as teachers, attorneys and accountants.

“Unfortunately, it’s just become the way of doing business in South Florida,” Hernandez said.

At South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, staff had spent years helping workers on a case-by-case basis to recover their wages. Their approach was similar to worker centers throughout the country — approach the employer and let him or her know that this worker is not alone. Ask for the owed wages or negotiate a payment plan. If that doesn’t work, it’s time for direct action, such as protects and attracting media attention. (See past stories on worker centers addressing wage theft and other employer abuses in Austin, El Paso, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley.) The cases, however, just kept coming and there was no systematic incentive for employers to stop practicing wage theft in the first place. That’s where the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force came in.

After first coming together to help the day laborers in Cutler Bay, task force members spent two years meeting with officials and stakeholders, looking for any measure or authority already in existence that could address wage theft. But other than taking cases to federal labor investigators or to court — an option very much out of reach for low-wage and immigrant workers — there was nothing that could effectively stem the rising tide of wage theft in South Florida. Having sought and found no other alternatives, when task force members went to their local elected officials to call for a wage theft ordinance they could truly say that a local ordinance was the best chance for a solution.

State Rep. Jose Rodriguez, who at the time was working with Florida Legal Services, developed most of the ordinance language, and task force members found a champion in County Commissioner Natacha Seijas (she’s no longer on the commission). On Feb. 18, 2010, county commissioners voted 10-0 to pass the nation’s first countywide wage theft measure — it was technically a unanimous vote, though some commissioners left the room instead of voting.

Throughout the process, advocates didn’t call a lot of attention to their work. It turned out to be a great advantage, Smith said, as the business community didn’t catch wind of the wage theft proposal until the last minute. Eventually, the Florida Retail Federation did catch on, but it was too late to stop a vote. The federation did end up filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the ordinance (a judge threw it out last year) and is behind the statewide attempts to pre-empt local wage theft measures.

With passage of the ordinance, the county’s Small Business Development division was responsible for dealing with wage theft complaints (the task has now been shifted to the county’s Consumer Services Department). The process works like this: County staff directly contacts employers engaged in wage theft and leads negotiations between workers and employers. If employers don’t respond, the case goes to an administrative hearing, where both sides present their cases before a hearing officer. If the officer determines that wage theft has occurred, he or she can order the employer to pay up to three times the amount of wages owed as well as administrative costs.

Within the first year-and-a-half of the ordinance’s passage, hundreds of thousands in owed wages was collected simply by having county officials pick up the phone, said Francesca Menes, policy and advocacy coordinator at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a member of the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force.

“As a local organization we can call an employer, but it doesn’t come with the power of the government,” Menes told me. “We’ve made so much progress. Not everything is perfect, but we’re learning as we go along.”

Progress and protection

According to a September 2012 report from the Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy, Miami-Dade County staff had recovered more than $500,000 in owed wages and received nearly 2,000 wage complaints. It took an average of 103 days to recover wages. Still, more than $2 million in owed wages has yet to be collected, and wage theft complaints have doubled every year since the ordinance went into effect. At the time of the report, only 1.5 county staff were responsible for addressing wage theft cases, and hundreds of workers were still waiting to be helped.

While there have been some hiccups along the way, Menes said that task force members regularly meet with county officials to monitor the program’s effectiveness.

“If these wages aren’t going into workers’ pockets, it’s not going into the local economy and that’s detrimental to all of us in the end,” she said.

Jonathan Fried, executive director of We Count!, an immigrant workers advocacy group and a member of the wage theft task force, said the ordinance hasn’t been as effective as he’d hoped. He said he’s concerned that many workers are being misclassified as independent contractors and that “there’s a bias creeping in in favor of employers.” He noted that with such a backlog of cases and limited county resources, many cases never got heard and the workers involved have already left the area. We Count! also has a history of combating wage theft cases on an individual basis via employer-employee negotiations and direct action.

“We’re concerned that workers aren’t getting a fair hearing and the process is disadvantageous to workers who don’t have an attorney,” Fried told me. “It’s been a big step forward, but there’s some small changes that could be made to really improve it. Ultimately, my belief is that in addition to a state department of labor, we need some changes in federal law and federal enforcement. You shouldn’t be able to get away with not paying a worker.”

Hernandez at FIU said she’ll be spending the summer studying the ordinance’s effectiveness and how it can be improved, including the issue of having an attorney present at an administrative hearing (both sides can bring an attorney if they want, though it’s not required). In the long run, Hernandez said Florida “needs a statewide strategy so we’re not just on the defense.”

Beyond just wage theft, Hernandez noted that employers that break wage and hour laws also seem more likely to ignore workplace health and safety regulations. Smith agreed — “wage theft and health safety violations go hand in hand,” she said.

“As we’ve been working on wage theft, we’ve been looking at workplace health and safety…and now a few of us are working together to be more mindful and deliberate about workplace safety,” Smith said. “It’s complicated to get people to focus on safety because a first concern is getting their wages and keeping their jobs. We’ve been looking at it as an offshoot, but we need to pay it more attention.”

To learn more about Miami-Dade County’s wage theft progress, visit www.stopwagetheft.org or www.risep-fiu.org/tag/florida-wage-theft-task-force.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2013/05/14/wage-theft-in-south-florida-nations-first-county-with-wage-theft-protections-reports-on-progress-and-perils/feed/ 0 Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, May 12, 2013 [A Few Things Ill Considered] http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 02:31:54 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1640 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup

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Information is not Knowledge…Knowledge is not Wisdom

May 12, 2013

co2now gfx skeptisci app gfx

 

Laugh. I dare ya:

Low Key Plug

 

My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk(which includes some quotations), An overview of my writing is available here.

A Simple Plea

Webmasters, web coders and content providers have mercy on your low bandwidth brethren. Because I am on dial-up, I am a text surfer — no images, no javascript and no flash. When you post a graphic, will you please use the alt text field … and when you embed a youtube/vimeo/flash video, please add some minimal description. Thank you.

<regards>

-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

I notice moyhu has set up a monster index to old AWoGWN on AFTIC.

“Whatever lies ahead, we know its main dimensions will emerge over the next two decades. The global economy is already so far above sustainable levels that there is very little time left for the fantasy of an infnite globe. We know that adjustment will be a huge task. It will entail a revolution as profound as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. We appreciate the difficulty of finding solutions to problems such as poverty and employment, for which growth has been, so far, the world’s only accepted hope. But we also know that reliance on growth involves a false hope, because such growth cannot be sustained. Blind pursuit of physical growth in a finite world ultimately makes most problems worse; better solutions to our real problems are possible.” -Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, page 12

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/feed/ 0 A Step toward Fixing the Colorado River [Significant Figures by Peter Gleick] http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/05/10/a-step-toward-fixing-the-colorado-river/ http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/05/10/a-step-toward-fixing-the-colorado-river/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 18:12:35 +0000 Peter Gleick http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/?p=287 The Colorado River, recently named America’s most endangered river, supports millions of people in the American Southwest and northwest Mexico and helps irrigate millions of acres of land. It is shared by seven states in the U.S. and Mexico, through a complex series of legal agreements and treaties.

Yet every drop of water on the river is accounted for, used, reused, and transpired away, and today, no water reaches the Colorado River delta in an average year. Quite simply, demands on the river exceed the river’s average supply, and this problem is projected to get worse as populations continue to grow and as climate changes increase temperatures and reduce runoff.

Today, irrigated agriculture consumes more than 70% of the water supply within the Colorado River basin. For the first time, new research from the Pacific Institute presents comprehensive data on the extent of irrigated agriculture throughout the seven Colorado River basin states and two additional states in Mexico, the types of crops grown, and the amount of water used to grow these crops.

More importantly, the new report – Water to Supply the Land: Irrigated Agriculture in the Colorado River Basin – explores the potential for agricultural management strategies to save water, without remove agricultural land from production – through changes in irrigation technology, management strategies, and cropping patterns.

 Colorado basin interactive

Click here to visit the interactive map of Colorado River basin agriculture, showing federal and state agency information on the amount of irrigated and total harvested acreage in the basin by county, and total reported water use as reported by USGS.

The report shows that more than 90% of pasture and cropland in the 256,000-square-mile Colorado River Basin requires irrigation, with about 60% of the irrigated acreage devoted to pasture, alfalfa, and other forage crops used to feed cattle and horses. These forage crops consume about 5 million acre-feet per year, equivalent to a third of the river’s annual flow.

Innovative irrigation techniques, which many farmers around the world are already using, can help ensure continued agricultural production, while cutting water demands, even in the fact of the growing threat of climate change.

The new study evaluates specific water-efficiency strategies, including regulated deficit irrigation, crop shifting, and advanced irrigation technologies. The Institute’s results show considerable water savings are possible. For example, almost a million acre-feet of water may be saved cheaply and quickly by irrigating alfalfa less often (a practice known as “regulated deficit irrigation”), at an estimated base cost of approximately $81 per acre-foot.

Other scenarios, such as shifting to less water-intensive crops, also yield impressive water savings at relatively low costs and without reducing the total amount of irrigated acreage in the basin. For example, replacing about 10% of the basin’s irrigated alfalfa acreage with cotton and wheat could save about 250,000 acre-feet of consumptive water use each year, with estimated base costs of less than $40 per acre-foot. Total reductions in water withdrawals and applied water would be even greater.

Lead author of the study, Michael Cohen, observed

“We know water supply and demand don’t match up and it will get worse going forward. We know there is much that can be done; the question is how much and where, and how to get there. This analysis improves understanding of crop acreages and water use in the basin and offers a set of plausible scenarios in which some of the water currently devoted to irrigation could be conserved and used for other purposes – without taking agricultural land out of production.”

Dr. Juliet Christian-Smith, a report co-author, observed that the water management techniques proposed in the study are proven. She says that if efforts are made to expand use of them in the western U.S. it

“could generate significant consumptive use water savings that could be transferred to other users. This report considers different alternative futures and it is important to develop the right incentives to encourage more efficient water use as the gap between water supply and demand grows.”

It is time to get serious about returning the Colorado River basin to even a semblance of hydrologic balance. This report shows how to start.

Download the full report (pdf).

Download the Executive Summary (pdf).

Download the interactive map.

 

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/05/10/a-step-toward-fixing-the-colorado-river/feed/ 0 May 2013 Open thread [Deltoid] http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2013/05/09/may-2013-open-thread/ http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2013/05/09/may-2013-open-thread/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 09:54:52 +0000 Tim Lambert http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/?p=5764 Past time for more thread.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2013/05/09/may-2013-open-thread/feed/ 0 Psychics like Sylvia Brown are immoral frauds [denialism blog] http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2013/05/09/psychics-like-sylvia-brown-are-immoral-frauds/ http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2013/05/09/psychics-like-sylvia-brown-are-immoral-frauds/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 13:33:38 +0000 Mark http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/?p=1834 In the wake of the dramatic events surrounding the discovery of three women including Amanda Berry, being held captive for a decade by a monster, it’s important not to forget another sociopath played a role in this drama. That sociopath is the psychic who told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead:

Her mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope that the girl known as Mandy was still alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The case attracted national attention when Miller went on Montel Williams’s nationally syndicated television show in 2004 and consulted a psychic.

“She’s not alive, honey,” the psychic said. “Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call.”

After Berry’s mother died in 2006, there were occasional clues in the search for Berry, and police have conducted a number of searches over the years. All proved fruitless — until Monday night, when Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were rescued from the house in Cleveland.

As Ben Goldacre reminds us, that psychic was Sylvia Brown, speaking out of her ass, surely “just for entertainment purposes” when she told Louwana Miller her daughter was dead. As the Wiki shows, her predictions aren’t reliable, and not surprisingly, she has a history of criminal behavior, including indictments and convictions for fraud and grand theft.

Psychics are by definition frauds. They don’t have magic powers. No human has the ability to read minds or see into the future. If you then take money under such known false pretenses that is the definition of fraud. If they truly do think they have magic powers, they should submit themselves to James Randi’s 1 million dollar paranormal challenge to determine if they can perform in a blinded, controlled test (which none of these frauds has ever come close to passing). Not surprisingly, Sylvia Brown has refused, many times, to take this challenge. This is because psychics know they’re frauds. Worse, Brown has even been previously convicted of fraud but sadly not for giving psychic readings. As a criminal, I guess she smartened up since 1992, the question is, why don’t we treat all psychics as criminals all the time? The burden of proof should be on them to prove they have this exceptional ability under controlled circumstances. Until then, we should simply arrest people that take money from others on the basis of such lies.

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