On Earth Day 2013, I'd like to draw your notice to a fantastic essay by Andrea Wulf in The New York Times Book Review. Wulf explains how information recorded by Henry David Thoreau in his famous treatise Walden is now informing modern climate-change research.
Environment
Understanding Climate Change, With Help From Thoreau
I'm going to out myself. I listen to the "oldies" station on my daily commute to and from NPR West in my banged-up ride, tailpipe barely hanging on. The station's tag-line is "back in the day hits," and my favorite feature is inappropriate relationship advice from a Mexican drag queen who goes by Kay Sedia (as in, quesadilla). The station's call letters are KDAY and it cuts in and out during my commute because its FM signal is weak. So I switch from listening intently to important news and information on my local NPR affiliate to rapping wildly to Snoop Dogg's hits from the 90s, "AINT NOTHIN' BUT A G THANG BABY! TWO LOC'D OUT G'S SO WE CRAZY!" The station plays Warren G, Dre, Tupac and just about anything with a Nate Dogg hook.
Yes, this is the oldies station of my generation. For now.
The company that owns KDAY, Magic Broadcasting, this month agreed to sell the station to RBC Communications for $19.5 million. RBC is 80 percent owned by Anthony Yuen — a Chinese-American investor — and the rest by Phoenix Satellite Television, a company based in the British Virgin Islands that operates six TV channels in China.
Right now there's a 25 percent cap on foreign ownership of radio and television stations (that might explain RBC's 80/20 split). Just last week, the National Association of Media Brokers — a business group that specializes in the sale of radio and TV stations — asked the Federal Communications Commission to ease its rules on foreign ownership. The group says American investors don't have access to enough capital to buy stations.
KDAY ranks 28th in LA's very competitive media market, so it's not like it's raking in the advertising revenue. Magic Broadcasting tried to sell the station for $35 million a couple of years ago, but the transfer never happened.
The National Association of Broadcasters, another industry group, also wants foreign companies to get in on the radio and television game. They say it helps broadcasters that serve ethnic minorities acquire sources of funding from their home countries especially in markets like Los Angeles, where KDAY is based, with large Mexican, Korean and Chinese populations.
Radio industry experts, like Lance Venta (I spoke with him over the phone about the sale) say if the FCC approves the deal, KDAY will, most likely, switch from Snoop D O Double G to Chinese-language programming and he said that could happen as early as this summer.
Downside: no more solo sing-alongs to "Summertime In the LBC" on the way to work.
Upside: Mandarin-language immersion?
Airline passengers and industry analysts are watching airports for flight delays Monday, the first full day of furloughs for nearly 15,000 flight controllers and other Federal Aviation Administration workers. The furloughs are tied to the "sequestration" budget cuts that were enacted this year. We'll be keeping an eye on possible delays today, and updating this post with new information.
As of 11:45 a.m. Monday, the FAA's U.S. flight-tracking map showed delays of more than an hour at New York's LaGuardia, due to high volume and winds. The FlightAware site reported delays of more than an hour for some inbound flights at John F. Kennedy International Airport, due to runway work. Most other large airports were deemed free of trouble, with some experiencing slight delays.
"The cuts required by the sequester have forced us to slash contract expenses and furlough 47,000 of our employees," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told a Senate committee Thursday. He predicted that the agency's handling of air traffic operations would be less efficient, and that there would be less time for safety inspections of new aircraft.
Any delays that stem from the FAA furloughs are expected to be the most extreme at the nation's busiest airports, especially those that routinely handle international flights. The FAA recommends getting to the airport two hours before a domestic flight, and three hours before an international trip.
If significant delays develop, airlines say they plan to reroute flights and use shuttle buses to get passengers to their destinations or connecting flights.
The FAA's furlough plan has drawn criticism from members of Congress, who accuse the agency of mismanaging the budget cuts and hyping their impact.
"Given that the FAA's budget increased more than 100 percent over the last 15 years, finding five percent in savings shouldn't need to significantly impact our nation's aviation operations," said Rep. Bill Shuster, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
Airlines, unhappy that the furloughs might cause them to experience cascading delays — and to endure frustrated customers' ire — have created a website to help the public complain to the FAA.
The FAA furloughs, which require employees to stay home from work without pay for one or two days per pay period, are expected to continue until the financial year ends on Sept. 31. The agency says that on any given day, as much as 10 percent of its employees will be off work.
The Global Business Travel Association, which bills itself as the voice of the business travel industry, sent a letter to the FAA's Huerta Monday, saying that its nearly 6,000 members "are very much alarmed by the list of airports and the expected delays. With Hartsfield-Jackson expected to see maximum delays of 210 minutes and Chicago O'Hare close behind, the impacted airports is a veritable hit list on the business travel industry."
A White House report puts it bluntly: "Today, younger women are more likely to graduate from college than are men and are more likely to hold a graduate school degree."
For the past decade more American women than men have earned undergraduate and Master's degrees; and in the past three years, they've outpaced men at the doctoral level, too.
Indeed, women's gains in education have outpaced men's over the past 40 years. Yet in the workforce women are not reaching the heights of their chose industries. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, has brought national attention to the bleak numbers: In the U.S., women hold only 14 percent of the top corporate jobs, Sandberg writes, and that number has not changed in a decade.
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