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allanamayer · 7 years

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More Product, Less Pollution

Earlier this week the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice (sounds a bit more pleasant than “Against Climate Change” I suppose?) posted a great meditation on air travel and its contribution to pollution (which I saw thanks to the great Eira Tansey). It’s inspired a long and meandering rumination of my own about the environment and our work.

Here in Canada our GLAM work covers a huge geographic area, and at ridiculous cost (“cheap flights from Iqaluit to Toronto start at $1,732,” proclaims the Expedia headline). Our national library and archives frequently hosts “national” symposia and other in-person events in places like Ottawa and Toronto, but has yet to livestream or provide other ways to access and participate in the events remotely.

Compare to the recent Ontario Digital Inclusion Summit, that livestreamed using Youtube (making rewinding and replay immediately available) and offered digital Q&A participation through a tool called Slido. Thanks to this, the Summit was able to include both far-flung participants from all ends of the earth, but also people who couldn’t attend the event due to mobility, cost, or scheduling.

Similarly forward-thinking, the aptly-named Access Conference for library technology livestreams its events, keeps up a steady stream of Twitter participation, and shares edited individual sessions and slides on Youtube and its website after the fact. It’s the smarter way to overcome Canada’s geographic divide, and to be inclusive to all types of stakeholders. And it’s vastly cheaper and less damaging per capita than flying around the country.

A certain quality of internet access is required to livestream events and to keep up with Twitter hashtag use on the fly, I know. Canada still struggles to provide basic internet connectivity to the vast majority of its northern and rural communities, especially in Indigenous communities - 18 percent of the population has no access to better-than-dialup internet. The nation declared in December 2016 that broadband internet is an essential utility “for quality of life” but won’t hit its target of 100% delivery until somewhere between 2026 and 2031.

This lack of residential service, of course, doesn’t mean that Library and Archives Canada can’t start offering livestreaming of its events well in advance of full market saturation - and I hope I never hear them argue this.

I’m sure there are, instead, a bunch of mitigating factors I can’t possibly understand or have explained to me because I’m sooooo far outside the world of LAC and its millions of restrictions. I’m sure federal government livestreaming has to, by law, provide simultaneous transcription and audio in both official languages, or something else totally prohibitive, and a million signed waivers from both presenters and audience members, and some sort of deposit requirement, and on and on and on. I’m sure it can’t cost just a few thousand to do properly with existing in-house expertise and existing in-house equipment. I’m sure LAC’s internet connection is so bad it can’t even provide wifi to conference delegates, let alone reliably stream audio, let alone video.

The last email exchange I had with a LAC staff on this topic was for the “Foundational Meeting” of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy - a new standard that sets digitization goals for every heritage organization across the country regardless of capacity. That was October 2016, and I was advised that “If there is sufficient demand, LAC will do its utmost to provide this service.” I asked the national archives listserv to weigh in and make “sufficient demand” known at the time, but apparently no action has been taken since. Which is funny, because I hear complaints about LAC’s initiatives being inaccessible to smaller, rural, and northern organizations basically all the time.

For an industry consistently denied opportunities by cost barriers, an industry with a consistent critique of being too top-down, large-organization-focused, and ignorant of the issues facing non-academic institutions, livestreaming events of national interest seems a no-brainer. National professional conferences, symposia, and committee meetings should all be included in this. (Someone with enough clout to sit on the latter will have to fill me in on how easy it is to Skype in to such meetings as a member, let alone an observer.)

We could, eventually, settle on one of many different models, from fully-virtual conferences and a mix of on-site and remote presentations, or local-hub conferences (satellite events for watching livestreams in groups, and having breakout sessions or collaborating digitally with other hubs) - such as what the Canadian Archives Summit did in 2014, which I would link to, if the links weren’t all broken already. Flying Less has a great FAQ (in a Google Doc) to help you think about ways to decrease air travel and increase remote participation.

Canada is the perfect country to pioneer such forward-thinking policies as nation-wide virtual events and reducing barriers to participation. Alongside broadband as a utility, can’t we conceive of virtual professional development as a nationwide right? Especially in heritage, where we already believe digital heritage is the way of the future - else why would we have an NHDS at all?

For now, let me end this section with a plea: tell your conference organizers to spend less time deciding where to host a conference to maximize attendance, and more time working out ways to attend remotely. I’d happily throw in a tenner for live access to my national conferences, especially the wonderful ACA Annual. For events around ideas with national reverberations, such as the NHDS, it seems like an obvious priority for federal funds.

It’s easy to use sticker-shock as a reason to cut down on needless expenses, and it’s an exciting bonus that reducing those expenses is also environmentally superior. But to me it’s equally compelling to talk about what changes we, in our little profession, can do to mitigate climate change.

Eira Tansey is at the forefront of this, leading Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change) and sharing useful resources wherever she shows up on the internet (and also walking the walk on other ethical issues by recently leaving Twitter, the hotbed of hate). I have been thinking of how to contribute to this discussion for a long time.

There’s as much reading about how climate change affects archives (emergency preparedness and disaster relief for heritage collections; institutions in high-risk regions; preservation environments in the time of climate instability) and how archives can affect climate change (utility consumption and sustainable operations; sustainable materials and buildings; efficient digital consumption and offerings; dealing with volatile storage media and disposal; renewable conservation) as well as how to archive and promote data and information related to climate change, which is especially relevant in an era of government censorship and cuts to environmental protection services and science.

One thing I hope to write in the future is a non-exhaustive list of ways archives and other heritage organizations can divest from corporations and vendors that contribute to climate change (such as banks that invest in oil pipelines, suppliers that aren’t using recycled materials where possible, etc.).

For now, I’m not in a position to do building or space planning, order LEED-certified HVAC and recycled-material acid-free boxes, or work with local scientists to do data-rescue initiatives. I am, however, in a position to research and write about two things relevant to my work and the profession at large: digital labour and digital consumption.

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It’s indeed modest and necessary to claim that air travel for work and professional development is a brutal abuse of our environment and our budgets. By very minimal extension, we can see that car travel for work and professional development is the same. A car commute produces more than ten times the carbon-dioxide emissions of an equivalent public-transit trip.

In the archival industry, which is so very material-focused and place-based, it’s hard to imagine a career that doesn’t involve heading in to the office, sitting among the collections, supervising the reading room, setting up the computer terminals and microformat readers, giving tours and organizing exhibits, lecturing in classrooms, processing in the workroom, digitizing in the lab, and meetings, meetings, endless meetings. I realize that, but I also realize that as the profession transitions slowly but surely to more digital tools, digital work, and digital communication, opportunities are popping up all the time to think about ways to make our work more energy-efficient and less environmentally damaging.

Of course, I know plenty of library and archives workers who are able to take days at home - whether this is because part of their job includes professional-development and research time, because they work primarily on tech they can access remotely, or because they’ve organized their schedule to optimize a day for writing, editing, and emails. I can rattle off a quick list of tasks that can be done at least partially at home:

Virtual and phone reference, especially on institution procedures or web resources

Administration and coordination through email and phone

Lecture, tour, and exhibit planning

Research and policy-writing, such as on legislation or involving environmental scans

Writing and editing documentation

Marketing, social media, web copy

Web/systems admin, digital collections admin

Metadata, copy cataloguing, finding-aid writing and editing

Post-processing of digitization

Lots of meetings! So many meetings!

The obvious financial expense of using your home technology and utilities to do your job’s work will have to be reckoned with in your contract. And none of that will cut down on pollution - but saving yourself a gas-guzzling commute certainly will.

Desk shifts and tours aside, lots of people work better without social interruptions and casual chats around the watercooler, and when occasionally saved from the stress of deciding what to wear, at least a day or two a week (or month, or whatever works in your shop). The flipside is yes yes yes I know your IT department would never give you remote access, ever ever, I know.

I hope dearly that heritage institutions of all kinds will look clearly at such factors as their regional roads and bike lanes, walkability and public transit, housing costs relative to proximity, and relevant compensation (and office perks - including employee parking! Space on your land! That you could use to hold stuff!) in order to find ways to offer increased remote work for GLAM staff.

Then it’ll be up to GLAM staff to figure out if they can work productively from home - something that isn’t easy for everyone.

I’m relatively lucky in that I’ve captured for myself one of the few remote-work jobs in the heritage industry: a nonprofit software provider with a team entirely decentralized across the province. We work together with Skype, Google Hangout, shared documents, and plenty of emails. We get together once a year on the occasion of the Ontario Library Association SuperConference, as many of us as can be gathered; there are team members I still haven’t met in the flesh.

We’re able to support ourselves in this by working on digital solutions for a number of public libraries, archives, museums, galleries, historical societies, and other interest groups. Many of these organizations are simply too small to have the capacity for internal IT staff and stacks, so our process often involves shipping USB sticks and HDDs across the province for ingest, and arranging for the shipping of materials to digitization vendors elsewhere. Our process also often involves talking to municipal IT workers who are managing the unfamiliar world of digital heritage collections - a point of contact rife with opportunity and conflict, and one I’d love to be able to explore more in the future.

I believe strongly in a consortial approach for small organizations and want desperately to see our nonprofit grow in capacity and stature. I want this not just for my own prosperity (and because I have a job with a five-second commute and no dress code) but because it’s the answer to our problems both financial and geographical.

At one point I thought of having Iona’s job: the Archives Advisor for the province, driving from one border to the other to assist in training, project management, and emergency relief. I imagined driving a mobile digitization studio around in a suspicious white van to do processing right there in the parking lots of archives and libraries. It would take some math to discover whether one vehicle delivering digitization to a variety of organizations would be less energy-consuming than the equivalent in shipping costs and remote digitization. And hey, what if I put solar panels on the roof of the van? What if I converted it to biodiesel and ran it on food-frying oil from the many A&Ws on the road between institutions?

Working in digital means the actual energy consumption of what we do and what we offer is quite obscured, compared to the monthly electricity bill of a library branch. Unfortunately, this means obscuring the intense cost of web servers with 99.9% uptime and multiple redundancies.

A recent (and very impressive) look at the climate-change contributions of Amazon Web Services brings this into stark relief: AWS was predicted (in 2015) to use almost as much energy in 2016 as the entire residential sector of Seattle - 7.2 million megawatt-hours serving up data, producing 3.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. Converting land - to produce solar and wind power in server-heavy places like Virginia - is only going to offset one fifth of this pollution. By now, cloud hosting and services take up 2% of the USA’s total energy consumption.

These numbers scare me, but I lack the immediate capacity to translate them into meaningful comparisons. I don’t know how much energy my employer’s digital collections consume, and I don’t know what nationwide numbers might look like. I do think that sooner or later we’ll need a benchmark that measures financial cost, energy consumption, and pollution effects compared to access and download rates to decide whether or not to put stuff online, and whether or not to restrict access. I absolutely envision a future where digital collections are unavailable overnight and on weekends because the traffic doesn’t justify the cost of keeping the server on. Maybe the energy usage is negligible - but we don’t have the numbers to be sure, and at some point the carbon emissions will outweigh those pennies of actual consumption.

I have been thinking about digital consumption in heritage since I started hearing the dreaded phrase “blockchain in libraries.” A library school recently got a tidy grant to research the possible uses of consensus algorithms for libraries - decentralized linked metadata is an obvious one, provenance information for digital assets is another. Past that, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any kind of “distributed authority” system that would benefit from power-chugging servers meaninglessly generating blocks to hold our not-all-that-often-used data or to arbiter our not-all-that-sensitive transactions. (We literally have TDRs for that.)

Most importantly, blockchain mining (or, the most popular algorithm anyways) is a huge energy sink, inspiring assholes everywhere to set up giant server farms in the Arctic just to keep their systems cooled, and hacking networked devices to utilize unoccupied memory. Bitcoin alone is a network of such consumptive scale that it out-emissions Ireland. Already. Renewable energy is an absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite to using blockchain technology for anything at all, let alone for anything as superfluous as library checkouts. Sorry, blockchain-in-libraries enthusiasts, but this is just another digital evangelism without ethical grounding. Moving fast and breaking stuff shouldn’t mean actually destroying the planet.

Digital Consumption For Archives is going to be a much larger and more exhaustive research project, perhaps not up to me to complete. A nice first step would be for things like the National Heritage Digitization Strategy to conceive of what total storage and bandwidth would be required were Canadian heritage organizations actually to get all these materials online. Or for organizations to start doing environmental audits, to make transparent their power consumption and where that power comes from, and to ask their contractors and vendors to be transparent as well. To always choose the sustainable option when it presents itself, to include sustainability in RFPs, and to provide the aforementioned flexibility to get your employees’ cars off the road one day a week.

However we do it, what we talk about when we talk about digital heritage needs to include the costs to our power grid and to our planet, and the costs if we can be smart enough to offset or reduce those emissions to zero.

#libraries #archives #galleries #museums #digital archives #digital labour #labour #climate change #environment #sustainability #project arcc #digital heritage

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Trump admin is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting Trump and his family when they travel — until **after** the 2020 election, WaPo reports.

Mnuchin seeks delay of proposed disclosure of Secret Service spending on presidential travel until after election

By Carol D. Leonnig and David A. Fahrenthold | Published January 08 at 4:46 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 08, 2020 |

The Trump administration is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting President Trump and his family when they travel — until after the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The issue has emerged as a sticking point in recent weeks as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and key senators have been negotiating draft legislation to move the Secret Service back to his department, its historic home.

Mnuchin has balked at Democratic demands that the bill require the Secret Service to disclose the costs related to the travel of the president and his adult children within 120 days after it is passed, according to people with knowledge of the talks. Mnuchin has agreed to Democrats’ push for a requirement that the Secret Service report its travel expenses but wants such disclosures to begin after the election.

In a statement, the Treasury Department confirmed that Mnuchin has been working with Secret Service Director James Murray and congressional committees on a bill to transfer the Secret Service from the Department of Homeland Security to Treasury, but did not address the dispute about the reporting requirement.

“Conversations about the return of the Secret Service to the Treasury Department are ongoing, and we decline to comment on individual aspects of those conversations,” said a Treasury official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing negotiations.

The administration’s resistance to disclosing how much taxpayer money has been spent on presidential travel has drawn criticism from Democrats, who say the public has a right to know the price of his frequent visits to his resorts in Florida and New Jersey.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to “rarely leave the White House” and cut back on what he called wasteful travel by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Since taking office, however, Trump has made more than 50 visits to his properties outside the Washington area, according to a tally kept by The Washington Post.

The government spent about $96 million on travel by Obama over eight years, according to documents obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch. A report by the Government Accountability Office, which serves as the congressional watchdog on federal spending, estimated that Trump’s travel cost $13.6 million in just one month in early 2017. That total included the costs of travel for Secret Service and Defense Department personnel, and the costs of renting space and operating equipment such as boats and planes. If spending continued at that pace, Trump would have exceeded Obama’s total expenses before the end of his first year in office.

The extensive international business travel and vacations of his grown children, with Secret Service agents in tow, as well as the expense the Secret Service incurs to secure numerous Trump properties, have added to the agency’s financial strain, according to its budget requests.

Since their father was elected, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have made business trips to overseas locales including Ireland, Scotland, Dubai, Uruguay and India. In 2017, Eric Trump’s visit to a Trump building under construction in Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,000.

But exactly how much the frequent travel of Trump and his family has cost taxpayers is unknown.

A 1976 law allows the president to designate one primary residence outside the White House for the Secret Service to protect full-time. It also requires the agency to report to Congress semiannually the costs of securing that property. The measure did not anticipate a chief executive who regularly visited that one property, as well as multiple others.

The Secret Service has failed or been late in recent years to provide even those limited cost reports. The agency did not file such reports in 2016 or 2017, according to the GAO. It has delayed submitting subsequent reports, filing a recent report in November that was due in March.

Agency officials have cited staff changes as the reason for its failure to submit two years of reports.

The Secret Service did not respond to a question about its required reports. A spokesperson declined to answer questions about its spending on presidential travel, saying the agency does not discuss “protective means and methods.”

The White House has also declined to share information with the GAO about how much it spends to coordinate Trump’s travel. In March 2017, the office sought to tally the cost of Trump’s frequent travel to Mar-a-Lago based on a question from Congress. But for two years, the White House Counsel’s Office failed to answer questions about the costs associated with coordinating travel for the president, according to a GAO report.

Last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and other Democratic lawmakers saw an opportunity to push for more transparency and strengthen the reporting law when Mnuchin began seeking bipartisan support for a bill to move the Secret Service, which the Treasury Department said would improve the agency’s ability to carry out its mission.

Originally created by Treasury in 1865 to help stop rampant counterfeiters, the agency was housed there until 2003, when it moved to the new Department of Homeland Security created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Secretary Mnuchin came to me last year with a proposal to move the Secret Service to the Treasury Department,” Feinstein said in a statement. “As part of that effort, I proposed that the cost of presidential travel be included for greater transparency, accountability and oversight associated with protection during travel of presidents and their families.”

Feinstein wants the Secret Service to make annual reports of its travel costs, but beginning a few months after Congress authorizes its transfer, according to people familiar with the talks.

But in a Dec. 23 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mnuchin said he was strongly opposed to that earlier reporting requirement. Instead, he is seeking an annual report that begins in fiscal year 2021, releasing information in December 2020 at the earliest.

His demand for the delay in reporting is likely to reduce Democratic support for the bill, according to people monitoring Mnuchin’s proposal.

The available records about Trump’s travel provide only snapshots of the costs to the public: The GAO, for instance, found that his first four trips to Mar-a-Lago in 2017 cost the Secret Service about $1.3 million each. (Other agencies also spent money on those trips, bringing the federal government’s total spending to $3.4 million per visit to Mar-a-Lago.)

Trump has made 22 more trips to Mar-a-Lago since then, according to a Post tally. If the Secret Service’s costs remained constant, that would mean more than $28 million in further spending by the Secret Service alone, and $75 million from the government in all — and just on a small fraction of Trump’s total travel.

Another snapshot came in March 2017, as the Secret Service was still adjusting to Trump’s large family and frequent golfing trips. The agency asked Congress to add $60 million to its budget just to handle Trump’s travel, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Post.

The Secret Service has also disclosed how much it spends on golf carts, to protect Trump and escort him during his golfing outings. These carts — leased from third-party vendors, not Trump himself — have cost the government $588,000 since 2017, according to federal spending data posted online.

The Secret Service spent at least $250,000 at President Trump’s properties in just the first five months of his term, according to records of federal charge card expenditures released last year to a watchdog group, Property of the People. The documents were released two years after they had been requested, and only after the group sued. It is not clear whether some of this spending was also counted in the GAO report.

The records released by the Secret Service last year give very little detail — saying only the date of the purchase, the dollar amount and the kind of Trump property involved. They do not give the reasons for the purchases.

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chestnutpost · 6 years

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Acting Interior Chief To Sign Orders On Public Access, Big Game Habitat

This post was originally published on this site

In an early effort to earn points with conservation groups, acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt will sign a pair of secretarial orders on Wednesday that he said will improve public access to federal lands and protect key habitat for moose and bighorn sheep.

Bernhardt, an avid hunter and former fossil fuel lobbyist, unveiled limited details about the upcoming directives during a speech Wednesday morning at the North American Wildlife & Natural Resources Conference in Denver. The move comes a month after President Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Bernhardt to replace former agency chief Ryan Zinke, who resigned in early January under a cloud of ethics scandals.

One order expands a secretarial order Zinke signed in February 2018 directing agency officials to work with western states to “enhance and improve the quality of big-game winter range and migration corridor habitat” for elk, antelope and mule deer, with an ultimate goal being to expand opportunities for hunting. The new directive will apply to moose and bighorn sheep, as well as summer range habitat for those species, Bernhardt said.

The second order would change how the agency goes about determining if parcels of federal land are suitable for sale or transfer to state control. The Federal Lands Policy and Management Act of 1976 allows for tracts of public land to be considered for sale if they meet certain criteria, including being “difficult and uneconomic to manage,” if the land is “no longer required” for the specific purpose for which it was acquired, and if its sale would “serve important public objectives,” including the “expansion of communities and economic development.”

Moving forward, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will be required to “think very carefully” about how any potential sale, transfer or exchange of federal land would impact hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation, Bernhardt said.

This new test is “focused on enhancing access,” Bernhardt said.

Big thank you to the 84th North American Wildlife & Natural Resources Conference for hosting me today. Cooperating with state, local, & tribal partners to implement effective conservation stewardship efforts has & will be a priority of the Trump Admin, particularly at @Interior. pic.twitter.com/molvQn6kkp

— Acting Secretary David Bernhardt (@DOIDepSec) March 6, 2019

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for more information Wednesday. Bernhardt’s appearance was not announced to media, and his name did not appear on the conference’s official program.

In an emailed statement, Jesse Prentice-Dunn, policy director at the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities, said Bernhardt “can’t use his signature to cover up the damage he has already caused to our public lands in less than two years at Interior.”

“Even as he put his pen to paper today, Bernhardt continues to lease off hundreds of thousands of acres of prime wildlife habitat for oil and gas drilling,” he added.

It’s unclear whether the secretarial order related to land disposal will result in fewer sell-offs. The Trump administration has repeatedly said it opposes selling off federal lands or transferring control to states. And yet, Interior has proposed doing just that.

Last August, the agency considered pawning off more than 1,600 acres that until recently were protected as part of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, as HuffPost first reported. The recommendation ― buried in a draft resource management plan ― called for the selling or transferring of 16 federal parcels, including 120 acres adjacent to property owned by Utah state Rep. Mike Noel (R), an ally of the administration and a staunch opponent of the Clinton-era monument.

At the time, a BLM spokeswoman said that then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke “still opposes the sale or transfer of federal land,” but that under the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act the agency “is required by law as part of its land use planning process to identify lands potentially suitable for disposal.”

The administration ended up scrapping that proposal two days later, with Bernhardt telling staff in a memo that the plan was inconsistent with department policy, as the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

“The failure to capture this inconsistency stops with me,” he wrote.

BLM has since proposed at least two more land sales, including 70 acres of an important wildlife conservation area adjacent to California’s San Bernardino National Forest to a limestone mining company that unlawfully dumped mineral waste materials on it. And in November, Zinke and Bernhardt hosted at Interior headquarters members of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, the Koch brothers-backed nonprofit that advocates handing over control of federal lands to states.

During his speech Wednesday, Bernhardt said the Trump administration “generally” opposes “large-scale transfer,” but later added that “not everything is required to stay in federal hands.”

Despite having prioritized hunting and outdoor recreation, the agency has had a rocky history with the outdoor sporting community. Initiatives like the one to protect migration corridors have been widely celebrated, only to have BLM turn around and offer oil and gas leases in key migration habitat. Many groups say Interior has consistently prioritized the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda over habitat and resource conservation.

Bernhardt faced widespread criticism from conservation groups during the 35-day government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Even with a skeleton staff, Bernhardt found a way to press ahead with fossil fuel development. And in an unprecedented move, he directed the National Park Service to dip into park entrance fees to combat garbage and sanitation issues and keep sites open.

Along with secretarial orders, Bernhardt announced Wednesday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to lift federal protections for gray wolves in the Lower 48.

“Like you, many of our experts believe that the wolf no longer needs the protections of the Endangered Species Act,” he said.

RELATED…

The post Acting Interior Chief To Sign Orders On Public Access, Big Game Habitat appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/acting-interior-chief-to-sign-orders-on-public-access-big-game-habitat/

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omgdifferentgardenbouquet-blog · 7 years

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In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg assembled an Interagency Job Force on Truancy, Chronic Absence and School Engagement, which has launched a comprehensive project to get children to school, including wake-up calls from celebrities, coaches to encourage and assist students to attend school daily, and participation meetings where teams of administrators and community partners work to increase presence. WYSE Biometrics Systems Pvt. When the FaceIN time clock is connected to an Ethernet network, PayClock Online time and attendance solution can immediately poll the time clock and seamlessly transfer staff member punch data into to the PayClock Online database for editing, exporting and running reports to popular payroll solutions like QuickBooks ®, Paychex ® and ADP ® Don't have an Ethernet network? You can establish the FaceIN ® biometric time clock as stand-alone system that lets you submit staff member details or download punch information utilizing just a basic USB flash drive. FreshBooks is a cloud-based invoicing and accounting program designed for freelancers handling work for multiple customers. (It works well for teams, too.) Utilize the time tracking function-just start the timer, struck time out if you take a break, then log hours-or by hand enter your hours into a timesheet. Quickly billing customers as soon as or on a recurring schedule, costs for expenditures, even see when a customer has seen the billing. It incorporates with Google, Stripe, Gusto, and many other programs you may currently utilizing. Because www.synel.co.il , the city's school district has provided preschool to citizens, ultimately growing the service into a full-day program that also offers transportation, lunch, and breakfast to 4-year-olds. But it was only this year that the district had the ability to require parents to take a pivotal next step in their kids's education: really sending all 5-year-olds to the district's full-day kindergarten programs. To make that a required took a change to New York state law, which doesn't need school attendance until age 6. Wasp Barcode Technologies is the leading manufacturer of time and presence systems for little to medium-sized companies. Our complete line of biometric, RFID, and barcode time and participation services are developed to improve efficiency and reduce errors for your worker time tracking needs. An IIT graduate was jailed for > illegally accessing the Aadhaar database back in August 2017 for accessing the database between 1 Jan and 26 July without authorisation. He created an app called 'Aadhaar eKYC' by hacking into the servers related to an 'e-Hospital system' that was created under the Digital India initiative. The eKYC app would then route all the requests through those servers.

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takenews-blog1 · 7 years

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How hate speech crowdfunding outfit Hatreon crept back online

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/how-hate-speech-crowdfunding-outfit-hatreon-crept-back-online/

How hate speech crowdfunding outfit Hatreon crept back online

If you wish to make a residing creating white supremacist content material, you’re in all probability not going to do it through websites like Kickstarter and Patreon, which prohibit hate speech. Happily there’s Hatreon, a hate speech crowdfunding website that, regardless of having been booted from the online by a pair hosts, is again on-line and desirous to allow you to again your favourite xenophobe.

Hatreon was primarily faraway from the general public internet in August, when its host Digital Ocean terminated its providers. However it reappeared, its area registered at Tucows by means of Njalla, a privacy-focused area registry service that obscures the identification of the registrant. Cloudflare appears to be offering DNS and the remainder of its traditional CDN and DDoS safety providers. (Replace: This paragraph beforehand said that Cloudflare terminated its providers to Hatreon in August – it didn’t. It has additionally left Njalla to now be hosted by Tucows-associated Enom.)

I contacted all three to see in the event that they’re conscious that Hatreon is a buyer and that the location encourages and financially helps hate speech; Tucows assist ultimately provided the next assertion:

Tucows/OpenSRS has no management or possession over this area. We’re simply the Registrar. We don’t host any content material or present bandwidth.

Tucows’ Ross Rader additionally replied to questions from Ryan Block (who was a useful collaborator on this publish, and tweeted his personal conclusions right here) indicating that the corporate doesn’t take into account Hatreon a buyer:

a) they aren’t a buyer – we work by means of resellers and b) even presuming we all know upfront how somebody will use a registration, ought to we additionally get to select which startups we offer registrations to? which political candidates? abortion docs? NRA activists?

That appears to be as a result of technically, their buyer was Njalla, which acts as an middleman between the efficient proprietor of a website and the registrar. It’s a bit like a shell firm for domains. I agree with Block that it’s disingenuous to faux that Hatreon is just not a buyer of Tucows — solely the thinnest membrane separates them. It’s very very similar to saying you’re not taking cash from a white supremacist as a result of they handed it to another person handy to you.

Rader’s clarification that (ought to he be ready to confess that Hatreon have been a buyer) they’ll’t choose and select who to supply providers to holds extra water. There don’t look like any limits on speech within the Tucows phrases of service — not that I might discover, anyway. There are many laws for complying with nation code necessities and so forth, however no part saying, for instance, that Nazi publications aren’t welcome. Njalla, likewise, has prohibitions in opposition to “unlawful actions” however nothing pertaining to hate speech, harassment, abuse, and so on.

Replace: Whereas Njalla didn’t initially reply to my requests for remark, founder Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi contacted me shortly in the past to say that Hatreon is the truth is not welcome on the service, though it was not mirrored within the FAQ or phrases.

“Certain, Hatreon did register with njalla to start with. They determined to not be a buyer fairly rapidly,” wrote Sunde; the location’s house owners determined to go away after being contacted by Njalla admins. “We’re not giving out any names of buyer information after all, however we additionally don’t take part in any right-wing extremist funding or something like that. I all the time try in direction of the stability of an open and secure web. Discovering the best stability is tough typically, however a call about Hatreon is sort of simple for me personally.”

The dialog round Hatreon and different websites claiming to supply shelter from what they see as politicized, left-leaning tech platforms is a charged one, and the query of when — particularly — it’s acceptable to limit speech or shut off a platform to it’s removed from settled.

However as a part of that dialog it’s additionally essential to name a spade a spade: Hatreon’s said goal is to empower and defend purveyors of hate speech, and its hottest initiatives are actually by neo-Nazis. Both a platform permits that, or it doesn’t.

Once I checked final month, Andrew Anglin, who runs the Each day Stormer, had $7,788.61 coming his manner each month. Swedish neo-Nazi group Nordic Resistance and all-purpose white supremacists Id Evropa had greater than $1,000 per thirty days in backing. Different proud racist people like Richard Spencer and Sam Hyde have been additionally receiving a whole bunch per thirty days to finance their vaguely articulated operations.

Nevertheless, the location on the time warned that “Pledging might solely work intermittently whereas we endure testing,” although Hatreon confirmed to me that its payout system (it’s unclear what fee processor is getting used, although PayPal is an possibility for payouts) was functioning regardless of that message. Since then, the location has up to date once more with a discover that pledging is disabled, and founder Cody Wilson advised The New York Occasions “main bank card firm” had eliminated them from their platform.

What is that this firm? The location contained PayPal references; that firm advised me that each Hatreon and GhostGunner.web, Wilson’s gun-printing website that he used as a proxy for funds, had been banned a while in the past. Shopify, additionally utilized by GhostGunner, advised me they’d no indication that Hatreon was utilizing the platform.

But a fee initiated on Hatreon by Block went by means of in November, processed by means of a GhostGunner account. If Hatreon makes use of GhostGunner as a proxy for funds, and GhostGunner makes use of Shopify for its personal funds, that appears to point Hatreon is not directly utilizing Shopify. I’ve requested the corporate for clarification on this, and whether or not the corporate lately booted GhostGunner — which might circumstantially determine it as the corporate that not directly hamstrung Hatreon. The corporate has indicated previously that it’ll not choose and select its prospects based mostly on ideology, however will “defer to the regulation.”

Replace: Cody Wilson contacted TechCrunch to elucidate that his firm, Protection Distributed, does use Shopify as an ecommerce platform for GhostGunner, however not as a funds processor. It follows that Hatreon is just not utilizing Shopify however another funds processor. It was my mistake to conflate the 2 and make that connection.

Regardless of these technical and monetary issues, that is an energetic funding engine for hate speech — not unlawful, and unlawful for the federal government to limit, but in addition demonstrably a goal which some privately run platforms select to not assist.

MailChimp, for example, was alerted to Hatreon’s use of its providers, and though the corporate advised me that it doesn’t touch upon particular person accounts, it additionally famous that it’ll take no half in selling hateful content material. That appears clear sufficient.

Additionally amongst these platforms is Cloudflare; as a result of founder and CEO Matthew Prince beforehand took a controversial stand in primarily personally kicking Each day Stormer off the service, I requested him for extra data on the corporate’s subsequent transfer right here, if any. Though he has been outspoken on this previously, I obtained a response from the corporate’s communications crew with the next assertion:

Cloudflare doesn’t touch upon particular prospects however is conscious of considerations which were raised over some websites on our community. One clarification: Cloudflare is just not the host of any web site. Cloudflare is a community that gives efficiency and safety providers to greater than 7 million domains. Cloudflare terminating any consumer wouldn’t take away their content material from the Web, it will merely make a website slower and extra weak to assault.

Regarding the Each day Stormer, Cloudflare has been clear that this choice didn’t set a precedent for the corporate. That stated, Cloudflare will reply to legitimate court docket course of and work with regulation enforcement in any investigations.

Certainly, Prince did remorse in some methods his choice relating to the Each day Stormer, saying that “We didn’t simply get up and make some capricious choice, however we might have and that’s terrifying.” He known as for a greater course of for this type of factor, and for now that course of doesn’t contain Cloudflare ceasing to supply providers to websites like Hatreon.

Considerably tangentially, I additionally contacted Patreon over whether or not the corporate can be pursuing some type of motion in opposition to Hatreon for what is sort of definitely a trademark violation — the corporate wouldn’t verify or deny it. However one has to think about that if the hate website have been to realize any actual traction, a lawsuit or on the very least a stop and desist wouldn’t be lengthy in coming.

The net is a hostile place in some methods for the likes of Hatreon and the Each day Stormer, however there’s simply sufficient room on the very edges that, with some cautious maneuvering, they’ll nonetheless discover their manner on-line. There’s, in spite of everything, nice demand for what they provide. Happily, these websites and providers are nonetheless nearly as good as radioactive to the platforms essential to allow them at scale, as a result of these platforms are sometimes based on progressive rules and customarily decline to do enterprise with Nazis. Hatreon and its ilk have been supposed to sidestep these platforms and rules, however as you’ll be able to see, it’s more durable than they thought it will be.

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genevattl50917-blog · 7 years

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The best ways to Acquire (A) teacher On A Tight Budget plan

Do well With instructor In 24 Hr.

The Grosvenor Educator Other (GTF) program is a specialist growth opportunity enabled by a collaboration in between Lindblad Expeditions and also National Geographic Education. This technique helps teachers effectively organize their classrooms, which is an exceptional class management strategy. Coaches should function very closely with the brand-new teacher, utilizing special approaches such as mentoring sessions and reflective journal techniques for easing the brand-new educator into the class. Teachers could use them for worksheets, Lesson Program, Quizzes, Website, as well as other classroom demands. If a scientific research instructor has actually restricted access to supplementary devices as well as training products then their class lectures and tasks are mosting likely to get on the uninteresting side. It was signed into law on January 8, 2002 and also reauthorized a number of government programs that aimed to boost the performance of UNITED STATE second as well as key pupils and also schools by enhancing the requirements of accountability (higher standardized examination scores) for states, school areas and schools, as well as offering moms and dads a lot more flexibility in choosing which specific institutions their kids will certainly attend. I don't mind to work extra time to prepare mi lesson, however educators typically aren't earning money for remaining in institution lengthy hours preparing just for the observation and also requirements. Directly I see absolutely nothing wrong with an educator hugging a child, several of the bad little kids prob don't get one at home as well as to be straightforward today's over the top response just makes me unwell. The more financial assistance alternatives the school supplies, from government funding to exclusive gives, the even more recognized the institution is in the outside world. Students have 4 days of different kinds with the pattern they're working with, and on the 5th day I offer trainees the next group of words. Doing cardio to increase the variety of calories you're burning for claim a half an hour 4 times a week would ready. A liable spiritual teacher can be the light after the path to spiritual satisfaction. Maybe the most considerable difference in between key school as well as high school teaching is the connection in between educators as well as youngsters. However some students with darker skin, that are generally tracked in lower degree programs, share stories of educators that have lower assumptions for them. She takes every little thing she does in course very seriously and listens quite possibly to the teacher.

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Once had a primary educator who did not know his or her mathematics realities unlike two of my son's primary college instructors, I never. Ultimately, some teachers think that dividing the trainees in groups as well as assigning tasks to them is a better strategy that choral or set work. Tomorrow lots of students educated by these instructor will become doctors, engineers, attorneys, high organisation icon and great deals more. Among my buddies is an on-line high school literary works and creating instructor in Florida. As a house education mama, I have a recently discovered gratitude for just how challenging it is to do it well! The pay is typically reduced, however you won't have all the stress and bureaucracy that a routine teacher needs to manage This week beginning 24 Could - There was a horrible Motor Mishap, in which Teenagers of a College were entailed. If a moms and dad or educator can not translate what the youngster created, it could be annoying for all parties involved. As an example, if they dip into the end of course as opposed to cleaning their location, they do not leave up until their location is tidied up. Or, that particular student who let others clean up for him/her will have to clean the entire table/room the next day. Every person is constructed in different ways and the wonderful teachers adapt to their pupils' psychological as well as physical make-up. While main scientific research concepts are not naturally tough this does not mean that teachers are going to comprehend the concepts well enough to answer concerns and also to clarify the procedures. I think Marzano is a lot more for admin compared to instructors - the majority of our admin were never classroom teachers - they were college counselors, reading specialists ... etc Wireless microphone: as the name suggests it is a cordless gadget that could be made use of to amplify the voice of the teacher and even to record the entire course. Federal government websites are excellent for supplying instructors with scientific research products, games and interactive computer programs. Miss Siebenhaar has had a globally impact since she makes everybody unique to her, makes everyday important, and makes every lesson essential. Usage English, making on your own a better educator and also aiding your pupils to get more information systems management (click through the next document). Communication: One of the most smart person in the world is of little use as a tutor or teacher if they can't clearly share their understanding. The first points you may find out in an instructor specialist development training course about bringing collaboration to the class are the standard qualities of a joint classroom, which we touched on above. You need to ask if the Qigong expert is a martial artist, most QiGong educators have at least a passing skill in an art, and also numerous are trainees of several of the internal arts: Taijiquan, Bagua Zhang, Xingyiquan, Yiquan, Baiji, Liuhebafa as well as a couple of others.

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oldguardaudio · 7 years

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Illegal Immigration News -> Illegal immigration grew by 740,000 people in 2016 due to overstayed visas

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Illegal immigration grew by 740,000 people in 2016 due to overstayed visas

Nearly 740,000 people, more than the population of Alaska, overstayed their U.S. visas last year, the Homeland Security Department said Monday. A large percent of those were students and foreign …

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Illegal Immigration and the Book of Ruth

We read the Book of Ruth every year for Shavuot, the harvest festival that commemorates the Jews receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. This year, Shavuot—which begins in the evening of May 30—will …

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