Friday, July 31, 2020
Madrigal hits bigs after being 'a little mad' missing opener - NBC Sports Chicago
How did Nick Madrigal feel about being left off the White Sox roster for Opening Day?
“I was a little mad,” he said.
Maybe more than a little.
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“He actually didn’t shake my hand when I told him he wasn’t going to make the club,” manager Rick Renteria said. “He just turned around and walked out. And I was like, ‘OK.’
Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise after Madrigal said that he never wanted anything in his life as badly as he wanted to be a part of the 30-man group that broke “Summer Camp.” Instead, he was sent to Schaumburg, the team’s alternate training site, with general manager Rick Hahn saying the day before the season started that the White Sox were better offensively with Leury García manning second base until Madrigal was able to thrive on an everyday basis at the major league level.
Certain White Sox fans had a hard time believing that after all the rave reviews Madrigal received during camp. He was described as a different-looking player from the guy who didn’t necessarily blow the doors off spring training months earlier.
If you thought you had a gripe about Madrigal not being a part of Renteria’s lineups for the first week of the White Sox regular season, imagine how Madrigal felt.
“I was disappointed,” he said. “I really felt like I could help the team win from the beginning, and that was one of my goals, to try to be there from the first game. It just didn’t work out.
“When I went to Schaumburg, I wasn’t down at all. That night they told me I was going down, I was a little mad, but the very next day I kind of locked back in. It’s not my style to pout and be angry for more than a couple of days.”
Madrigal sat in Schaumburg and watched the big league club stumble to a 1-4 record in its first five games. Again, if you thought you were irked by the team’s sluggish start, there was someone out there with the skill set to make a difference feeling the same way.
“It was tough,” he said. “I watched every single inning, pretty much every single pitch of the game. I was following along like I was a super fan out there. It was tough not being there on the field with the team, especially through the ups and downs.
“I just tried to stay positive through it all. I was hoping my day would come soon where I could join the team. I wanted to follow along so closely just to know what everyone is doing and what’s going on. It was definitely tough watching the game.”
RELATED: Cardinals-Brewers game called off as COVID-19 postponements come to Central
And so a week after Madrigal was deemed not ready for primetime, he was the starting second baseman, batting ninth for the White Sox in their series-opener against the Kansas City Royals on Friday night in Missouri.
Now that Madrigal has finally reached the majors, Renteria can look back on the walk-out routine and appreciate what it told him about his new second baseman.
“That’s the competitor,” Renteria said. “As a former player, you see a guy react a certain way, you understand it, you get it. It’s one of those things you love about a competitive nature.
“There’s something that comes with seeing somebody that has a chance of fulfilling a huge promise in his ability to perform. It was no indication of who he is, just that he’s a fighter and he wanted to make the club.”
It’s interesting to hear that Madrigal could’ve evolved from not ready to ready simply by facing White Sox minor leaguers in simulated games for a week, but unsurprisingly, team brass had nothing but positive reviews for his brief time in Schaumburg.
“We were trying to get him some more at-bats down there, and he was working very well,” Renteria said. “(White Sox player-development boss Chris Getz) thought he looked much more loose, much more comfortable, albeit (in) simulated or intrasquad games. He was zoning in a little better. And everybody felt comfortable it was time to give him an opportunity, and we’re going to do just that.
“(Getz) felt originally that (Madrigal) was stiffening up, a little tense toward the end of camp. He went down, was zoning in a little better down there, was much more relaxed, much more comfortable, kind of getting back to what they wanted him to do. And for all intents and purposes, they believed he had worked his way through making the adjustments, and everybody felt he could come up here and give us a hand.”
Madrigal isn’t out to prove the White Sox wrong for not including him on their Opening Day roster. He’s not using his week-long stay in Schaumburg as extra motivation. He’s out to be the player they thought he could be when they drafted him fourth overall two summers ago. That night, there was talk of Gold Glove caliber defense and the ability to knock the ball all over the field. His insane contact ability allowed him to strike out just 17 times while playing at three minor league levels last season.
But now the challenge is as steep as it gets: big league pitching.
RELATED: White Sox first-rounder Garrett Crochet keeping MLB in mind while developing
Lucas Giolito, the White Sox ace, theorized that he didn’t see Madrigal swing and miss at all during camp. But now it’s time to see if that anti-modern, high-contact, singles-hitting style — with a questionable level of the kind of power that is such a large part of baseball in 2020 — will fly.
“We’re going to find out,” Renteria said. “The more he starts getting comfortable with the pitching, you’re going to see a guy — because he’s got bat speed, can put the bat on the ball — he’ll put some balls in the gap.
“I’m sure that his overall game is going to be his plus: to be able to defend, to be able to run the bases, to be able to be part of the leadership out there in the field and then give you some at-bats that drive pitchers crazy a little bit, open it up for the next hitter behind him.
“I wouldn’t necessarily worry about the power. … He has a history of being a winning player, and he also has a history of hitting some balls out of the ballpark. As he finds himself with who he is as a hitter and the completeness that it entails at the major league level, hopefully in time, sooner rather than later, we’ll find out what kind of player he is.”
It’s a challenge for the White Sox as a whole now, too, all the hype about just how extraordinary the future could be needing to come true before they start planning parade routes. But at least all the pieces have finally reached the major leagues.
Once Nomar Mazara returns from the injured list, Renteria will finally have that team he’s been dreaming of, the same one fans have longed for during the rebuilding years: José Abreu at first base, Madrigal next to him, Tim Anderson and Yoán Moncada on the left side of the infield, Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert and Mazara across the outfield, Yasmani Grandal behind the plate.
Madrigal has, the White Sox hope, completed the puzzle. This is what everyone’s been waiting for on the South Side. The future is now.
“The excitement for everybody is palpable finally seeing all these young men on the field at the major league level,” Renteria said. “Ultimately it’s going to be about performance at the major league level, and hopefully it occurs on a consistent basis. But finally having them, for the most part, all together, it’s nice to see.”
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August 01, 2020 at 06:58AM
https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/white-sox/white-sox-prospect-nick-madrigal-arrives-was-little-mad-missing-opener
Madrigal hits bigs after being 'a little mad' missing opener - NBC Sports Chicago
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
'Little brain' or cerebellum not so little after all - Science Daily
When we say someone has a quick mind, it may be in part thanks to our expanded cerebellum that distinguishes human brains from those of macaque monkeys, for example.
Sometimes referred to by its Latin translation as the '"little brain"', the cerebellum is located close to the brainstem and sits under the cortex in the hindbrain. New research at San Diego State University, however, calls the "little" terminology into question.
The cerebellum plays a versatile role, contributing to our five senses as well as pain, movements, thought, and emotion.
It's essentially a flat sheet with the thickness of a crepe, crinkled into hundreds of folds to make it fit into a compact volume about one-eighth the volume of the cerebral cortex. For this reason, the surface area of the cerebellum was thought to be considerably smaller than that of the cerebral cortex.
By using an ultra-high-field 9.4 Tesla MRI machine to scan the brain and custom software to process the resulting images, an SDSU neuroimaging expert discovered the tightly packed folds actually contain a surface area equal to 80% of the cerebral cortex's surface area. In comparison, the macaque's cerebellum is about 30% the size of its cortex.
"The fact that it has such a large surface area speaks to the evolution of distinctively human behaviors and cognition," said Martin Sereno, psychology professor, cognitive neuroscientist and director of the SDSU MRI Imaging Center. "It has expanded so much that the folding patterns are very complex."
Unprecedented insights
Collaborating with imaging and cerebellum experts from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Canada, Sereno used customized open source FreeSurfer software that he originally developed with colleagues while at the University of California San Diego to computationally reconstruct the folded surface of the cerebellum. The software also unfolds and flattens the cerebellar cortex so as to visualize it to the level of each individual folia -- or thin leaf like fold.
A pioneer in brain imaging who has leveraged functional MRI to uncover visual maps in the brain, Sereno found that when the cerebellum is completely unfolded, it forms a strange "crepe" four inches wide by three feet long. The findings were published this week in a study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
"Until now we only had crude models of what it looked like," Sereno said. "We now have a complete map or surface representation of the cerebellum, much like cities, counties, and states."
Puzzle pieces
Previous research discovered that while there were many similarities between the cortex and the cerebellum, there was one key difference. In the cerebral cortex, regions representing different parts of the body are arranged roughly like they are in the actual body: juxtaposed and orderly. But in the cerebellum, they were placed more randomly.
"You get a little chunk of the lip, next to a chunk of the shoulder or face, like jumbled puzzle pieces," Sereno explained.
Those parts of the cerebellum are therefore set up to pull in and coordinate information from disparate parts of the body.
It is intriguing to think that there might be analogs of '"fractured somatotopy"' in the cognitive parts of the cerebellum that could help support highly complex, sophisticated cognitive functions, such as language or abstract reasoning, Sereno said.
"When you think of the cognition required to write a scientific paper or explain a concept, you have to pull in information from many different sources. And that's just how the cerebellum is set up."
Until now, the cerebellum was thought to be involved mainly in basic functions like movement, but its expansion over time and its new inputs from cortical areas involved in cognition suggest that it can also process advanced concepts like mathematical equations.
"Now that we have the first high resolution base map of the human cerebellum, there are many possibilities for researchers to start filling in what is certain to be a complex quilt of inputs, from many different parts of the cerebral cortex in more detail than ever before," Sereno said.
For instance, there is some recent evidence that people who suffer cerebellum damage have difficulty processing emotion.
"The 'little brain' is quite the jack of all trades," Sereno said. "Mapping the cerebellum will be an interesting new frontier for the next decade."
August 01, 2020 at 03:20AM
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200731135558.htm
'Little brain' or cerebellum not so little after all - Science Daily
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
'Little brain' or cerebellum not so little after all - Medical Xpress
When we say someone has a quick mind, it may be in part thanks to our expanded cerebellum that distinguishes human brains from those of macaque monkeys, for example.
Sometimes referred to by its Latin translation as the '"little brain"', the cerebellum is located close to the brainstem and sits under the cortex in the hindbrain. New research at San Diego State University, however, calls the "little" terminology into question.
The cerebellum plays a versatile role, contributing to our five senses as well as pain, movements, thought, and emotion.
It's essentially a flat sheet with the thickness of a crepe, crinkled into hundreds of folds to make it fit into a compact volume about one-eighth the volume of the cerebral cortex. For this reason, the surface area of the cerebellum was thought to be considerably smaller than that of the cerebral cortex.
By using an ultra-high-field 9.4 Tesla MRI machine to scan the brain and custom software to process the resulting images, an SDSU neuroimaging expert discovered the tightly packed folds actually contain a surface area equal to 80% of the cerebral cortex's surface area. In comparison, the macaque's cerebellum is about 30% the size of its cortex.
"The fact that it has such a large surface area speaks to the evolution of distinctively human behaviors and cognition," said Martin Sereno, psychology professor, cognitive neuroscientist and director of the SDSU MRI Imaging Center. "It has expanded so much that the folding patterns are very complex."
Unprecedented insights
Collaborating with imaging and cerebellum experts from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Canada, Sereno used customized open source FreeSurfer software that he originally developed with colleagues while at the University of California San Diego to computationally reconstruct the folded surface of the cerebellum. The software also unfolds and flattens the cerebellar cortex so as to visualize it to the level of each individual folia—or thin leaf like fold.
A pioneer in brain imaging who has leveraged functional MRI to uncover visual maps in the brain, Sereno found that when the cerebellum is completely unfolded, it forms a strange "crepe" four inches wide by three feet long. The findings were published this week in a study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
"Until now we only had crude models of what it looked like," Sereno said. "We now have a complete map or surface representation of the cerebellum, much like cities, counties, and states."
Puzzle pieces
Previous research discovered that while there were many similarities between the cortex and the cerebellum, there was one key difference. In the cerebral cortex, regions representing different parts of the body are arranged roughly like they are in the actual body: juxtaposed and orderly. But in the cerebellum, they were placed more randomly.
"You get a little chunk of the lip, next to a chunk of the shoulder or face, like jumbled puzzle pieces," Sereno explained.
Those parts of the cerebellum are therefore set up to pull in and coordinate information from disparate parts of the body.
It is intriguing to think that there might be analogs of '"fractured somatotopy"' in the cognitive parts of the cerebellum that could help support highly complex, sophisticated cognitive functions, such as language or abstract reasoning, Sereno said.
"When you think of the cognition required to write a scientific paper or explain a concept, you have to pull in information from many different sources. And that's just how the cerebellum is set up."
Until now, the cerebellum was thought to be involved mainly in basic functions like movement, but its expansion over time and its new inputs from cortical areas involved in cognition suggest that it can also process advanced concepts like mathematical equations.
"Now that we have the first high resolution base map of the human cerebellum, there are many possibilities for researchers to start filling in what is certain to be a complex quilt of inputs, from many different parts of the cerebral cortex in more detail than ever before," Sereno said.
For instance, there is some recent evidence that people who suffer cerebellum damage have difficulty processing emotion.
"The 'little brain' is quite the jack of all trades," Sereno said. "Mapping the cerebellum will be an interesting new frontier for the next decade."
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August 01, 2020 at 01:10AM
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-brain-cerebellum.html
'Little brain' or cerebellum not so little after all - Medical Xpress
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Little River blue crab festival, shrimpfest canceled due to COVID-19 - WMBF
“Due to the continued uncertainty that surrounds the Covid-19 pandemic, the Little River Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center has chosen to cancel the World Famous Blue Crab Festival that was combined with the Little River ShrimpFest scheduled for October 10-11, 2020,” Jennifer Walters, president and CEO of the Little River Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center, said Friday.
The Link LonkJuly 31, 2020 at 08:29PM
https://www.wmbfnews.com/2020/07/31/little-river-blue-crab-festival-shrimpfest-canceled-due-covid-/
Little River blue crab festival, shrimpfest canceled due to COVID-19 - WMBF
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Cramer cheers Apple's stock split decision: 'Apple cares about the little guy' - CNBC
Apple's decision to split its stock was done to help make it more accessible for investors, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Friday, referencing a conversation he had with its CEO, Tim Cook.
"I think Apple is taking the right move. Tim told me last night, 'Hey, I want more people in the stock,'" Cramer said on "Squawk Box." "These other companies should do that too."
The iPhone maker, which reported an 11% sales increase in its latest quarter, also announced Thursday it would do a four-for-one stock split in late August.
Apple shareholders will receive three additional shares at the close of business on Aug. 24. Apple was trading around $407 on Friday morning, meaning that investors would be able to buy shares around $102 when the stock starts to trade on a split-adjusted basis Aug. 31.
Apple has done this multiple times in the past, too, most recently in 2014 when it did a seven-to-one stock split. Apple was then trading north of $600 per share.
A stock split does not alter a company's fundamentals, Cramer explained on "Squawk on the Street." But Cramer said it can make a stock more appealing to retail investors who may shy away from investing in a company due to a high price tag — kind of like sticker shock for equities.
"The idea that he wants more people in his stock is refreshing," Cramer said of Apple's Cook. "He doesn't play to the hedge funds. He plays to the people who buy the product and have 99% satisfaction rating. That's who he plays to."
The "Mad Money" host said other companies do not appear to place as much of an emphasis on accessibility for retail investors, such as Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud giant was trading around $3,200 per share, based in premarket moves.
"Apple cares about the little guy. Amazon is not focused on that. They're focused on getting the goods to the little guy," Cramer said.
Disclosure: Cramer's charitable trust owns shares of Apple and Amazon.
July 31, 2020 at 08:45PM
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/cramer-cheers-apples-stock-split-decision-apple-cares-about-the-little-guy.html
Cramer cheers Apple's stock split decision: 'Apple cares about the little guy' - CNBC
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Little River blue crab festival, shrimpfest canceled due to COVID-19 - Live 5 News WCSC
“Due to the continued uncertainty that surrounds the Covid-19 pandemic, the Little River Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center has chosen to cancel the World Famous Blue Crab Festival that was combined with the Little River ShrimpFest scheduled for October 10-11, 2020,” Jennifer Walters, president and CEO of the Little River Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center, said Friday.
The Link LonkJuly 31, 2020 at 08:29PM
https://www.live5news.com/2020/07/31/little-river-blue-crab-festival-shrimpfest-canceled-due-covid-/
Little River blue crab festival, shrimpfest canceled due to COVID-19 - Live 5 News WCSC
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Live Science podcast 'Life's Little Mysteries' special report: Coronavirus (July 30) - Live Science
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Live Science podcast 'Life's Little Mysteries' special report: Coronavirus (July 30) Live Science The Link LonkJuly 31, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://www.livescience.com/llm-podcast-44-coronavirus.html
Live Science podcast 'Life's Little Mysteries' special report: Coronavirus (July 30) - Live Science
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Ex-San Mateo cop charged with embezzling $100,000 from Little League - The Mercury News
A former San Mateo police officer allegedly embezzled more than $100,000 from a Peninsula Little League, using club funds to buy items ranging from an Apple watch to snorkel gear, prosecutors say.
Hayward resident Jeffrey Gueco Aspillera, 46, has been charged with six felonies for the scheme which allegedly took place over the three years that he served as volunteer treasurer for the Foster City Little League. Starting in August 2016, Aspillera was given a credit card to pay league expenses, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.
Using that card, he withdrew thousands of dollars from ATMs, made out checks to cash, transferred money to his PayPal and purchased items at Costco, Arco, golf and Halloween stores — including food, a television, an Apple watch and golf and snorkel gear.
When the league’s board reassigned roles in September 2019, Aspillera refused to give the new treasurer any records, prosecutors say. The new treasurer went to the bank and discovered that Aspillera had deposited member dues into his own account and failed to pay league insurance. The league reported him to police, who arrested him in July after a seven-month investigation.
Aspillera’s lawyer, Manisha Daryani, said in a brief phone call Wednesday that she could not comment on specific allegations but confirmed that her client’s case involved Foster City Little League.
In a July 15 letter to league members, president of the Foster City Little League David Saito wrote that the financial loss was so great it “put the 2020 season at risk” before board members and donors made up the difference.
“This is going to be a challenging time for the entire FCLL Community, but like everything else in 2020, we will get through this and be stronger for it,” Saito wrote.
Aspillera worked at the San Mateo Police Department between 2010 and late 2015, confirmed spokesperson Michael Haobsh, and was assigned to both patrol and the Police Activities League. The department conducted a “deep dive internal audit” of financial records after hearing of the allegations and found “there were no improprieties and all monies were accounted for,” Haobsh said Wednesday. Aspillera had been previously employed with the Oakland Police Department.
Aspillera was arraigned Tuesday in San Mateo County Superior Court and pleaded not guilty. He remains out of bail on a $75,000 bond on condition of being subject to search and seizure.
July 30, 2020 at 01:01AM
https://www.mercurynews.com/ex-san-mateo-cop-charged-with-embezzling-100000-from-little-league
Ex-San Mateo cop charged with embezzling $100,000 from Little League - The Mercury News
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
White House, Congress see little progress on coronavirus bill as deadline nears - Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top White House officials and congressional Republicans and Democrats tried to narrow stark differences over coronavirus aid on Wednesday, with no guarantees they can craft a compromise before some unemployment benefits expire.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin walk together in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S. July 29, 2020. REUTERS/Erin Scott
Republican President Donald Trump said he was in no hurry, and his top aides said they were considering short-term extensions of supplemental unemployment benefits and protections against evictions to help Americans affected by a pandemic that has killed 150,000 people in the United States and thrown tens of millions out of work.
“We’re so far apart, we don’t care. We really don’t care,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Texas, blaming Democrats.
The two parties remained far apart in Congress, with Senate Republican leaders on Monday rolling out a $1 trillion package of proposals that some in their own party have criticized as too expensive. Democrats rejected the new proposal as inadequate compared with the $3 trillion plan the House of Representatives passed in May.
The supplemental unemployment benefit expires on Friday. The moratorium on evictions ended on July 24.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he and the president had discussed a short-term extension of the unemployment insurance and protections against evictions, to provide breathing room for negotiations on broader points.
“We want to take care of the people, the Democrats aren’t taking care of the people,” Trump said.
A source familiar with the matter said a short-term measure has been discussed. But the amount of support for such a move is unclear because most Senate Republicans are adamantly opposed to the $600 unemployment insurance supplement and may not support even a short-term extension.
Republican Representative Louie Gohmert, a Trump ally who has balked at wearing a mask, said he had tested positive for COVID-19.
$3 TRILLION PASSED SO FAR
Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows met with congressional Republicans at the Capitol and were due to resume negotiations with the two top Democrats in Congress: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“It’s abundantly clear that the Senate Republican proposal for the next phase of COVID relief is not a useful starting point,” Schumer told the Senate.
Congress has so far passed more than $3 trillion in funding intended to ease the pandemic’s heavy human and economic toll.
In late March, Washington enacted a wide-ranging aid bill that included $600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits. The goal was to rescue millions of U.S. workers who lost their jobs because of shutdowns to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Democrats want to extend the $600 enhancement for several more months. Republicans, arguing that it discourages workers from seeking employment, have proposed temporarily reducing the federal payment to $200 a week, on top of state unemployment benefits.
Senator John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said a deal would take time. He said some in his party “don’t think that we probably need to be doing anything more at this point.”
Besides the jobless benefit, lawmakers are arguing over a Republican plan to prevent liability lawsuits against reopening businesses and schools.
Trump also wants any legislation to include $1.8 billion to build a new FBI headquarters in Washington.
Members of both parties object, with Democrats saying Trump is trying to protect his Washington hotel, which is across the street from the FBI. Some of Trump’s fellow Republicans said they want coronavirus aid to focus on the health crisis.
Democrats also want to help state and local governments avoid massive layoffs as tax revenues dwindle.
Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Susan Cornwell and David Morgan; Additional reporting by Alexandra Alper; Writing by Richard Cowan and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Scott Malone, Peter Cooney and Jonathan Oatis
July 29, 2020 at 05:13PM
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-congress/white-house-congress-see-little-progress-on-coronavirus-bill-as-deadline-nears-idUSKCN24U1FR
White House, Congress see little progress on coronavirus bill as deadline nears - Reuters
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
What Has Happened to Police Filmed Hurting Protesters? So Far, Very Little. - ProPublica
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
It has been almost two months since a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car accelerated into Brooke Fortson during a protest over police violence. She still doesn’t know the name of the officer who hit her or whether that person is still policing the city’s streets. The officer did not stop after hitting Fortson and instead turned around, nearly hitting other demonstrators in the process, and sped off.
The LAPD almost surely knows who the officer is. The squad car’s number is clearly visible in one of the multiple videos that captured the incident. But the department hasn’t released any information: not the officer’s name, or whether that person has been disciplined. The police say the incident is still under investigation.
As hundreds of videos of police violence during protests have circulated, ProPublica wanted to see what happened to officers in the aftermath.
We set out to see whether the incidents caught on camera were investigated, whether officers were named and what information we could get about any investigations or discipline. We found a widespread lack of transparency that made it difficult to find out even the most basic details about whether and what sort of investigations were taking place.
ProPublica looked through hundreds of viral videos and focused on those that most clearly show an officer using apparently disproportionate force. We ended up with 68 videos involving more than 40 law enforcement agencies across the country, in both large cities and small towns.
We asked each police department a few simple questions: Who were the officers in the video, were they under investigation and have they been disciplined?
The departments mostly declined to give any specific information.
We learned that officers from eight videos have been disciplined so far. Officers from eight others will not be disciplined. And for two videos, police departments still insist they’re unsure of whether the officers involved are their own.
While officers have the right to use force if their own or others’ lives are in danger, the widespread violence against protesters has been unwarranted, said Chris Burbank, the former chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department.
“When you have a peaceful protest, people sitting on the ground, does that justify the use of tear gas or pepper spray on them? It absolutely does not,” said Burbank, who is now the vice president of law enforcement strategy at the Center for Policing Equity. “I see that as a violation of policy, violation of state and city ordinance and as a violation of common decency and what is good about policing.”
The LAPD told us it has moved 10 unnamed officers to non-field duties while it investigates incidents related to the recent protests. The department declined to say whether the officer who struck Fortson is on that list. Fortson has filed a claim for damages with the city and has retained a lawyer instead of filing a complaint with the Police Department.
Here’s what we learned while looking into these videos:
Officers Remain Anonymous — Even When They’re Caught on Camera
Departments have only named officers in 17 of the cases we examined as of publication. A name can allow the public to learn more about the disciplinary history of an officer and to see any patterns in prior allegations. It also could allow us to see if officers appear in multiple videos involving use of force.
Minneapolis has a public database of officers’ complaint histories. Still, the police department declined to identify the officers in videos we compiled, making it impossible to check their records in the database.
As protests have continued across the country, many states are struggling with how far to go in revealing officers’ disciplinary records.
In June, New Jersey’s attorney general directed the state’s law enforcement agencies to name officers who have been cited for serious disciplinary violations. In his directive, he noted that prematurely naming those accused of misconduct can be unfair if allegations are not ultimately proven. But, he argued, the likelihood of officers misbehaving increases when they “believe they can act with impunity; it decreases when officers know that their misconduct will be subject to public scrutiny and not protected.”
In some states, there are union contracts and laws preventing the disclosure of officer names, said Phil Stinson, a former officer and now a professor at Bowling Green State University. In other instances, though, Stinson said, departments may just be “stonewalling” or trying to get rid of problem officers before things become public.
“They just try to ride it out and hope it quiets down,” Stinson said.
In Florida, Miami-Dade Police Department spokeswoman Sgt. Erin Alfonso at first declined to provide the names of officers from a May 31 incident we examined. The video shows police abruptly arresting a man who was talking to them but not doing anything aggressive before an officer appears to grab him by his shirt. An internal report obtained by ProPublica through a public records request identified the officers as Roberto De la Nuez and Jorge Encinosa. Encinosa declined to comment on the arrest to ProPublica and De la Nuez did not respond to a request for comment. The department’s Professional Compliance Bureau is investigating the case, Alfonso said.
In San Jose, California, anti-bias trainer Derrick Sanderlin was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet after trying to talk to officers with his arms raised.
The incident, which took place May 29 and was reviewed by ProPublica, remains under investigation by the San Jose Police Department. Shivaun Nurre, the Independent Police Auditor for the city, confirmed that her office has received multiple complaints related to the incident. The office does not release the names of officers to complainants. According to a civil rights lawsuit filed by Sanderlin on July 18, three officers fired at him, but as of the initial filing, he had been unable to determine exactly who hit him and he was too far away to have caught badge names. “If someone else who wasn’t a police officer did the same thing, they would be held accountable,” Sanderlin said.
“All allegations, complaints, or concerns of the public will be taken seriously,” the San Jose Police Department said in a statement. The department said all videos provided by ProPublica are “part of an extensive Internal Affairs investigation. As such, this is a personnel investigation and [we] cannot communicate further.”
And in another instance, ProPublica requested the incident report related to a man’s arrest in Kansas City, Missouri. We were told that wouldn’t be possible to obtain because the charges against him and other protesters were dismissed and vacated by a city ordinance, meaning it was “as though it never happened,” a Police Department spokesperson said. The actions of the arresting officer remain under investigation, but without the report ProPublica is unable to obtain the officer’s name or see the rationale for the arrest. “We are not saying we don’t care and it isn’t a big deal,” the spokesperson said.
Investigations — if They Happen at All — Are Far From Transparent
In case after case, departments have cited ongoing investigations for not providing details such as whether officers captured in the videos remain on active duty; they also often can’t say how long the investigations might take. Sometimes, police union contracts prevent police departments from releasing such information.
In Portland, Oregon, the Bureau of Police would only say that all incidents of force were under investigation, including the two identified by ProPublica. Ross Caldwell, the director of the Independent Police Review, a civilian oversight office in the Portland auditor’s office, said that while he could confirm that both incidents were under investigation, he wasn’t “legally allowed to talk about these investigations.”
How long departments legally have to process complaints varies by jurisdiction. In at least 14 states, police officers have a “bills of rights” written into state law that provides special protections during investigations. There’s a one-year statute of limitations in California on police discipline cases. In Florida, investigations of police misconduct must conclude in 180 days. Both states have provisions to pause the clock if there’s a concurrent criminal investigation and California pauses for civil litigation, but otherwise, if a department can’t close out a case in time, officers cannot be disciplined, suspended, demoted or dismissed.
“They have gotten these protections, especially in state laws, through sheer political power and lobbying effort, and that’s a serious problem,” said Samuel Walker, a retired professor of criminal justice who has researched the bills of rights.
Officers Are Unlikely to Be Disciplined — at Least Publicly
Even in cases where victims are able to identify officers, they’re unlikely to see them face discipline.
Because there’s no federal mandate for police agencies to report details about the civilian complaints they receive, the most recent nationwide dataset about how many complaints are fully investigated and “sustained,” meaning the allegations of wrongdoing are confirmed, was published in 1993 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, according to Carol Archbold, a police accountability expert and professor at North Dakota State University.
In New York City, where 10 of the videos we examined took place, the Civilian Complaint Review Board investigates allegations of excessive force against the police. The board investigated more than 3,000 allegations of misuse of force in 2018, but only 73 of them were substantiated. Los Angeles, which handles its complaints internally unless an officer asks for a review by a citizen Board of Rights, had 5% of complaints from the public sustained that same year.
In California, only investigations that result in sustained findings or those involving deadly force, discharge of a firearm or “great bodily injury” become public.
The picture is similar at smaller departments. Of the 206 citizen allegations against Omaha police officers in 2018, only 17% were sustained by the department’s internal review process. In Indianapolis, where a video from the protests captured officers beating a woman, that number was 7%.
When asked about a video showing officers kicking a protester who was backed up to a fence, the Omaha Police Department said all use of force incidents are being reviewed and that officers from other agencies were assisting. The department declined to comment further and said it is “bound by contractual language that prevents us from disclosing the contents of any personnel matter.”
Hundreds of Complaints Are Overwhelming the Oversight Agencies
Departments now face a mountain of work to sift through the events of the protests. There have been more than 750 complaints filed with New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board since protests began in late May, leading to over 200 open investigations. The LAPD has assigned 40 investigators to sift through protest complaints.
The Seattle Office of Police Accountability, an independent oversight body, has been contacted over 18,000 times about police actions at the protests and is aiming to increase transparency.
The agency’s new Demonstration Complaint Dashboard shows 28 ongoing investigations, but the department is continuing to work its way through complaints and plans to continue updating the tracker, said Anne Bettesworth, the deputy director of public affairs for OPA.
It typically takes 180 days for Seattle to investigate civilian allegations against officers, but Bettesworth said the agency is working to complete as many protest-related investigations as possible in under 90 days. It’s an “all hands on deck situation,” she said.
Tell Us About Police Misconduct
We want to hear from police officers, public employees and community members who can help us learn more about police misconduct and why it’s allowed to continue.
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July 29, 2020 at 09:00PM
https://www.propublica.org/article/what-has-happened-to-police-filmed-hurting-protesters-so-far-very-little
What Has Happened to Police Filmed Hurting Protesters? So Far, Very Little. - ProPublica
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
As the Pandemic Forced Layoffs, C.E.O.s Gave Up Little - The New York Times
When the pandemic prompted companies to furlough or lay off thousands of employees, some chief executives decided to show solidarity by forgoing some of their pay.
But it turns out that their sacrifice was minimal.
A survey of some 3,000 public companies shows that the cuts — which, so far, have come in the form of salary reductions — were tiny compared with their total pay last year. Total pay includes things like bonuses and stock awards that typically make up the bulk of what corporate bosses take home.
Only a small percentage of the companies cut salaries for their senior executives at all, which is surprising given that the pandemic has crushed profits and sales for many companies, forcing large layoffs. But even among businesses that did cut the boss’s pay, two-thirds of the chief executives took reductions that were equivalent to only 10 percent or less of their 2019 compensation, according to an analysis by CGLytics, a compensation analysis firm.
Companies in this group include the Walt Disney Company, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Marriott International. All of those businesses have laid off or furloughed employees or pressed workers to take pay cuts.
This compensation analysis offers another example of how the coronavirus pandemic has walloped the working and middle classes while mostly sparing the people at the very top of the economic hierarchy.
“These salary cuts were more window dressing than anything else,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The labor federation on Wednesday released a report showing that companies in the S&P 500 stock index last year paid chief executives on average 264 times as much as median employees, down from 287 times in 2018.
Of course, this analysis is incomplete because the year is not over. In the coming months, corporate boards could decide to significantly reduce the bonuses and stock options they hand out to top executives for 2020. That would represent a big break from recent years when boards, which are primarily made up of corporate executives and investors, approved ever higher pay packages.
A few chief executives have already taken a sizable hit. The survey showed that Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a Seattle-based real estate brokerage, took a pay cut that was equivalent to the $284,000 he got in 2019. “The reason we did it is because we had to furlough or lay off more than a thousand people,” Mr. Kelman said when asked what motivated the decision to withhold his salary. “It’s not just about the pay cut; it’s about the general sense that capitalism is not working for everyone.”
CGLytics surveyed the companies in the Russell 3000 index, which comprises most of the publicly traded businesses in the United States, and found that 419 companies had disclosed details of salary cuts. Only about 10 percent of those companies cut salaries by more than 25 percent of the executive’s 2019 total “realized” compensation, a figure that CGLytics came up with by adding up all the money and stock each boss received last year. The firm values the stock at the price at which trading ended on Dec. 31.
The price of many stocks fell sharply this spring when the pandemic took hold. But stocks can recover over time, and many have soared since March.
As it became clear that the pandemic was going to devastate the economy and their businesses, many boards and chief executives appeared to sense a need to tell workers and investors that they were sharing in the pain.
United Airlines said the executives’ salary cuts were a recognition of the impact of the pandemic and “to lead by example.” United, which has been hit hard by a plunge in demand for air travel, is expected to start furloughing up to 36,000 workers on Oct. 1. Oscar Munoz, who in May became United’s executive chairman after serving as chief executive, did not get salary from March 10 through June 30, which amounted to a $610,000 pay cut on the $2 million salary he is being paid this year. But the reduction was a little less than 3 percent of the $22.2 million Mr. Munoz took home in 2019.
United’s new chief executive, J. Scott Kirby, will give up around $790,000 of salary this year. That is equivalent to 9 percent of the $8.7 million that CGLytics estimates he received last year. United said that it was “extremely unlikely” that it would make 2020 bonus payments, which it planned to set at 250 percent of salary, to its top executives.
Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, took a salary cut of around $714,000, or 5.35 percent of the total compensation he received in 2019, according to CGLytics. A Delta representative said the decline in Delta’s stock price and difficulties ahead for the airline would weigh heavily on the value of Mr. Bastian’s pay. The spokesman, Trebor Banstetter, said the value of Mr. Bastian’s total compensation this year was likely to be down 58 percent from “pre-pandemic projections,” but he did not provide details of how the company arrived at that figure. Delta is asking its pilots to take pay cuts in order to keep their jobs.
Disney awarded Robert A. Iger, its former chief executive who stepped down in February, large compensation packages over the nearly 15 years that he led the company. Mr. Iger, who is now executive chairman, gave up his salary from the end of March through the end of the year. The $2.25 million in forgone pay is equivalent to 3.3 percent of Mr. Iger’s total realized compensation in 2019, according to CGLytics. Disney furloughed tens of thousands of workers in March.
The hotel industry has also been hit hard by the pandemic and companies like Marriott International have been furloughing and laying off workers. The company’s chief executive, Arne M. Sorenson, took a salary cut that was equivalent to less than 2 percent of the $66 million in total compensation that CGLytics says he was paid in 2019. Connie Kim, a Marriott spokeswoman, said nearly $50 million of the compensation for last year was related to stock appreciation rights granted nine to 10 years earlier.
Some companies merely deferred salary payments for senior executives, rather than make outright cuts. General Motors deferred 30 percent of the salary of its chief executive, Mary T. Barra, and other top leaders, and 20 percent of other white-collar employees. The deferrals, which began on April 1, were going to last for as long as six months, but on Tuesday, General Motors told employees that it was ending the 20 percent deferrals on Aug. 1. Ms. Barra and the other senior executives will continue to defer 10 percent of their salaries. She made $30 million in total realized compensation last year, according to CGLytics.
When asked why the deferrals were ending sooner than expected, James R. Cain, a company spokesman, said, “The business demanded that we conserve cash and it is recovering faster than we expected.”
July 29, 2020 at 09:00PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/business/economy/ceo-pay-pandemic-layoffs.html
As the Pandemic Forced Layoffs, C.E.O.s Gave Up Little - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
NHL Preps Return With Little Caesars, Pepsi 07/29/2020 - MediaPost Communications
Little Caesars has signed a deal to be the official pizza delivery company of the National Hockey League as longtime sponsor Pepsi launches a sweepstakes.
The partnership between the league and the pizza restaurant begins immediately and runs through the 2020-2021 season. Fans will see the Little Caesars brand displayed in a corner in-ice ad position during every game of the 2020 Stanley Cup Qualifiers and 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs, as well all exhibition games.
As the brand continues to add stores and customers across the globe, the partnership will allow it to connect with millions of consumers around the world in a new way, said Dave Scrivano, president and chief executive officer of Little Caesars.
Little Caesars has a longtime affiliation with hockey. Mike and Marian Ilitch, the founders of Little Caesars, purchased the Detroit Red Wingsin 1982 and began sponsorship of amateur hockey in 1968. Little Caesars is also the naming rights sponsor of Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, the home of the Detroit Red Wings, Little Caesars AAA Hockey Club and the Little Caesars Amateur Hockey League.
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The NHL receives more than $5 billion in annual revenues and partnerships, with more than 40 blue-chip corporate sponsors.
Another NHL sponsor, Pepsi, the official soft drink of the NHL for more than decade, is kicking off the return of the NHL season with a contest.
The brand will give away up to half a million dollars through its Pepsi Zero Sugar NHL Shutout: Stanley Cup Qualifiers Edition program and 2020 Pepsi Zero Scores Sweepstakes.
An extension of the fan engagement Pepsi Zero Sugar Shutout program, the 2020 Pepsi Zero Scores Sweepstakes, with each shutout that occurs, one fan will receive $24,000, celebrating each of the 24 teams vying for the Stanley Cup title during the NHL Stanley Cup Qualifiers.
“We wanted to reward those unapologetic hockey fans that have been waiting nearly 150 days for the return of the league with something special,” said Melissa Duhaime, director of sports marketing at PepsiCo, in a release.
Fans can enter the Pepsi Zero Scores Sweepstakes by following @Pepsi and tweeting #PepsiZeroScores and #Sweepstakes. Select winners will be featured across @Pepsi handles as each shutout occurs.
PepsiCo also renewed its sponsorship with the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team this week, signing a seven-year extension Another contest, “The Pepsi Has Landed” sweepstakes, gives Philadelphia Eagles fans the chance to win prizes including 2021 season tickets, signed Eagles jerseys or a year’s supply of Pepsi products.
The Link LonkJuly 29, 2020 at 06:01PM
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/354159/nhl-preps-return-with-little-caesars-pepsi.html
NHL Preps Return With Little Caesars, Pepsi 07/29/2020 - MediaPost Communications
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Rebuilding Year? Sox Have Little Choice After Betts Trade, Pitching Losses - NBC10 Boston
This transcript has been lightly edited. Watch the full interview above.
NBC10 Boston: It hasn't even been a week yet since opening day and Major League Baseball has a coronavirus outbreak. Do you think baseball should have returned?
Julian McWilliams: I don't blame them for trying to return, but I do question the way in which they did. We had [former Red Sox pitcher] David Price come out yesterday, who will opted out of the season. He came out on Twitter and said the reason why I opted out of the season and I'm sitting at home right now is because I got to the field and I did not feel protected. He just had a newborn baby. I know he has a 3-year-old boy. His wife and them are in Arizona, which is already a hot spot, and then you're trying to tell him to go to L.A., which is another hot spot, and he doesn't feel protected... I think it probably should have been a bubble situation.
Who do you think the onus lies on when players don't feel protected?
It obviously falls back on the league. There's a report that said two planes came from Dominican Republic and none of those players were tested... Now you have a situation like the Marlins where, even though three players tested positive, they agreed to play through a group text. Of course the players say they're going to play. They want to play, but you have a situation now where that should be a league decision, that should be health officials' decisions. Whereas players shouldn't take that decision into their own hands because they're going to want to play. Now you have 15 to 16 people test positive, so it falls on the league, it falls on commissioner [Rob] Manfred.
Eduardo Rodriguez is dealing with a heart condition as a result of his battle with the coronavirus. How does this affect the Red Sox pitching rotation?
Back in spring training, they lost Chris Sale to Tommy John surgery. Then they lost David Price to L.A. in the Mookie [Betts] trade, so they really have no pitching. I don't think I've seen a pitching staff this bad, ever, in my life. They're pretty bad right now. In terms of E-Rod, he was talking on Sunday and I asked him, "Have you ever given any thought to opting out of the season?" and he said, "No, no, no I want to play. I want to play. As soon as I get this thing under control I want to play." In the back of your mind it's like, is it really worth it though?
Is it safe to say this is a rebuilding year for the Red Sox?
I think the next couple of years are probably going to be rebuilding. The only untouchable person I would say that can't be traded, that wouldn't be traded is probably Rafael Devers... He has four to five more years of control before he reaches free agency, so he's being paid like pennies. You probably keep hold of something like that, but somebody like JD Martinez who's making $23 million as a designated hitter, and it is probably gonna be a universal DH so he's probably going to have more places, more options. You could send him to an NL team now because the National League didn't have a DH before. If you put him in the National League that's probably a place where he could be traded. Xander Bogaerts is coming off a great season. He's improved as a player. Those are pieces they can look at, to be able to build their team, build out their minor league system, if they if they did in fact trade those guys. Now, from a leadership perspective I don't know if you want to trade a person like Xander Bogaerts because he's sort of been like the the epicenter of that team, but if you're looking long term like Chaim Bloom always does, he's possibly somebody that could be traded in the future.
Mookie Betts was thought to have been one of those untouchable players. It's still early to tell but do you think that trade will have a long term effect on the Red Sox future?
Mookie's always been the type of person that's always wanted his value, and good for him he got it. He got right below Mike Trout money. From the Red Sox perspective, I think this is something that will come back to haunt them. This is somebody that was homegrown. [Betts] was a fifth round pick. He had to develop into what he was. Nobody expected him to be that type of caliber player where he's like the second best player in the league... From a business perspective, I could see why the Red Sox didn't want to pull the plug. If it were me, if you have somebody like that, you don't let that person walk, and obviously the Dodgers were adamant about not letting him walk.
What should Red Sox fans expect to see this season?
I think it's gonna be a rough year. Hopefully going into next season it gets a little bit better, but I think it's going to be a year of development. You're going to see a lot of guys who you didn't hear of get chances to play. Chaim Bloom is a guy who is trying to piece together the pitching. I will say one thing, this lineup does hit. They will score runs. I think they're still a lethal lineup even without Mookie Betts. You've got JD [Martinez], Xander, Michael Chavis, Mitch Moreland, [Rafael] Devers. You will see a lot of offense, but from a pitching perspective, it always comes down to pitching, and the Red Sox just don't have that.
We saw the Red Sox put up a "Black Lives Matter" billboard at Fenway Park and Sam Kennedy called it a human rights statement rather than a political one. What are you thoughts on the team's decision to share that message?
I was talking to one [MLB] manager and I'm just telling them, "I appreciate what you're doing, but can you get us to a point where we're heard? Can you get us to a point where you hire us? Can you get us to a point where we're an analytics department that doesn't look white." ...If you look at the Red Sox analytics department, it's all white; you look in the A's analytics department, it's all white. Those are the places where these players become GMs, executives and presidents of baseball operations. It's through the analytics department, so it's like "How do we get into this space now?" I'm cool with the "Black Lives Matter" signage they have on I-90, but you want to see action at some point. I think the action starts with us being being in positions of power.
The Link LonkJuly 29, 2020 at 08:38PM
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/10-questions-with-nbc10-boston/rebuilding-year-for-sox-team-has-little-choice-after-betts-trade-pitching-losses/2167529/
Rebuilding Year? Sox Have Little Choice After Betts Trade, Pitching Losses - NBC10 Boston
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
The Mars Rover and the Story of a Curious Little Girl - Scientific American
Three years ago, I received an e-mail from a 10-year-old girl I'll named Ann, from Brazil, my native country, asking me several questions. Is there life on Mars? Do you control the Curiosity [rover]? Does NASA have a lot of technology? Do you work with research? Do you know many scientists? Do you know the president of the United States?
I was so pleased to see a girl asking me these questions, since that I would also have been fascinated by rovers on Mars at her age. I grew up admiring NASA’s missions to explore the solar system and wondered how they were able to send photos back to Earth from millions of miles away. I was the only girl I knew who had a favorite spaceship, and those missions were the reason I decided to become an astronomer.
I knew I had to meet that curious little girl so I wrote back to her teacher and scheduled to visit them in Rio de Janeiro at Redes da Maré, a nonprofit organization designed to increase the quality of life for local residents, including through additional educational opportunities. I had visited Redes da Maré before as part of my own outreach program to trigger kids' curiosity by telling them about the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. This time, I brought a few meteorites to teach them about the solar system. I showed them how it’s interconnected because it formed out of the same enormous cloud of gas and dust. We talked about life on other planets, and about the fact that they were touching a rock from space. The girl who had written to me took her role as guardian of the meteorites during the lecture seriously, knowing how special the specimens were.
While I was there, I kept thinking how surreal the situation was. I traveled from the United States to meet a 10-year-old girl who was surrounded by poverty but who knew there were rovers on Mars. I met her again last year during the filming of a documentary on empowering women at the same Redes da Maré. But the 12-year-old was not as fascinated by rovers as the 10-year-old was. She asked me about music and if I knew K-pop, her favorite genre. I asked her how she was doing in school and she confessed that she didn’t like her math teacher in the public school. She had left Redes because she was now living far away with her aunt. She came that day just to see me.
Honestly, I don’t know if she will be able to have a career in science. The odds are very, very low. At this point, finishing school would be an impressive achievement. Many girls like her don’t. They drop out of school, they feel unsafe and don’t have the same opportunities as boys to explore possibilities.
But how do we make sure girls embrace science as a possible and safe career path? How do we make sure we do a better job to nurture young girls’ interest in science? I don’t have a magic formula for this, but I do know you can’t be what you can’t see. If little girls don’t see women scientists, they will not see themselves in those roles. At age 10, that little girl could see me, a female scientist, as someone who could maneuver the rover on Mars. But what happens during teenage years that change their perception?
Life-changing events will pull them in many directions, and we need to make sure their curiosity about science doesn't fade with age. We must empower them with quality education to keep them engaged with science. We must keep them curious during their journey to adulthood and help them envision science as a career. And we must help them see themselves as agents of change to transform the world for the better. Maybe then we will be able to attract more girls into science.
When I heard that NASA’s new rover Perseverance, scheduled for launch in just a few weeks, named by a seventh grader named Alexander Mather, I thought about writing to the now 12-year-old girl. In my letter, I would talk not only about Perseverance, but also about the practice of perseverance. It doesn’t matter if she is not able to have a career in science and she chooses something else. What matters is that day after day, we need to find strength to keep our dreams alive, and education can make your dreams come true. As Mather said in his winning essay, “We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation” and “The human race will always persevere into the future.” He is right.
Imagine how many girls and boys were touched by the possibility of winning the NASA competition of naming the rover. Then imagine how many went beyond that and dreamed of maneuvering the rover on another planet. When a little girl of the future asks me if I control the Perseverance, I will tell her I don’t, but I will make sure I tell her how much a little girl I once knew had to persevere in her life, and how her curiosity drove her to dream of maneuvering a rover on another planet.
July 29, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mars-rover-and-the-story-of-a-curious-little-girl/
The Mars Rover and the Story of a Curious Little Girl - Scientific American
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Horry County police investigate woman’s body found in Intracoastal Waterway in Little River - WMBF
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Horry County police investigate woman’s body found in Intracoastal Waterway in Little River WMBF The Link LonkJuly 29, 2020 at 05:48AM
https://www.wmbfnews.com/2020/07/28/horry-county-police-investigate-body-found-intracoastal-waterway-little-river/
Horry County police investigate woman’s body found in Intracoastal Waterway in Little River - WMBF
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
With Perseverance and a little MOXIE, MIT is going to Mars - MIT News
On July 30, a two-week window of opportunity opens for Perseverance — the newest Mars rover, forged in the spirit of human curiosity — to begin its journey toward the Red Planet with a launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Center on the eastern Florida coast. With MIT’s help, this latest NASA mission will build upon the legacy of its roving laboratory predecessors and dig deeper than ever before into questions about life on Mars.
In its current state, Mars is inhospitable; the surface is dusty, and the only available water is frozen near the poles, deep underground, or so tightly bound to the soil that it would have to be cooked in an oven to extract it. The air is unbreathable, and the thin atmosphere allows worrisome levels of radiation while maintaining an average temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit. At one time in the past, however, it may have looked a lot more like Earth, and may have been more sustainable for life.
The goals of Perseverance — a signature component of the larger Mars 2020 mission — are to explore questions of this former habitability, to characterize the environment, and to help pave the way for future human exploration. One of seven experiments traveling on the rover will specifically address future human missions to Mars: MOXIE, short for the Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment, will help us prepare for those first missions by demonstrating that we can make our own oxygen on Mars to use for rocket propellant and for the crew to breathe when astronaut explorers arrive there. MOXIE was proposed and developed through a collaboration between researchers at MIT’s Haystack Observatory and the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), along with engineers at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
MIT is well-represented in other aspects of the mission as well. Perseverance will carry a sophisticated system for selecting, coring, caching, and preserving rock and soil samples to someday bring back to Earth. Associate professor of geobiology Tanja Bosak and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss, both from the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), are participating scientists who will work with this system to help choose which samples from the Martian surface to collect and analyze. And Ariel Ekblaw, a graduate student in media arts and sciences and the founder and lead of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, contributed to a rover experiment during a summer at JPL that will search for evidence of past microbes.
The little mechanical tree
In the 2015 film The Martian, when astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) was left stranded on Mars, he managed to survive long enough to coordinate a rendezvous rescue mission with his crew by living off the land of the Red Planet. This is the basic principle behind in situ resource utilization, or ISRU, and MOXIE represents an important first step in realizing ISRU for future Mars explorers.
“Not only do you need oxygen for people to breathe, but you need it for the rocket to breathe too. If you are burning fuel, you need oxygen to consume it,” says Michael Hecht, MOXIE principal investigator and director of research at MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. “There is a reason why oxygen tanks are the heaviest items on a spaceflight manifest.”
Launches consume a lot of fuel: Propelling a spacecraft to exit the Earth’s gravitational pull requires a great deal of energy, and returning back to Earth requires doing it all over again. What's more, the heavy tanks required to transport the oxygen needed for a given mission take up precious real estate in a carefully calibrated spacecraft. This is where the ISRU approach comes in.
“Instead of taking it with us, why not just make it when we get there as we need it?” Hecht says. “Oxygen exists on Mars, just not in a form we can use it. So that is the problem we were trying to solve with MOXIE.”
MOXIE will collect carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Martian atmosphere and electrochemically split the it into oxygen and carbon monoxide molecules. Animation: NASA/JPL
One potential source of oxygen is ice that exists under the Martian surface. But mining this ice would require complex machinery, and the physical act of digging and drilling would put significant wear and tear on equipment, which is a problem when a repair person is a planet away. Thankfully, there was another potential resource the team can tap to generate oxygen: the atmosphere.
“With the mining approach, you have to mine the ice, refine and process it to release the oxygen, and bring it back, which is just not something we can do robotically, especially within our space constraints,” says Hecht. “I wanted to find a much simpler approach. The Martian atmosphere is about 96 percent carbon dioxide, so we built a little mechanical tree, because that is much easier than building a miniature, self-contained mining company.”
MOXIE’s objective: collect the carbon dioxide abundant in Martian air, convert it to oxygen, and measure the oxygen’s purity. After pulling in Martian air, the system filters out dust, compresses it, and then feeds it into the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), the key element that takes pressurized carbon dioxide and uses a combination of electricity and chemistry to split the molecule into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The purity of the oxygen is analyzed, and then the oxygen is released back into the Martian atmosphere.
Currently, the plan is to perform at least 10 oxygen-producing runs throughout the mission under as many different seasonal and environmental conditions as possible. Due to the intense amount of energy required to run the MOXIE experiment, the team will coordinate with the other researchers, who will have to power down for the duration of MOXIE’s several-hour run time, and then wait for most of a Martian day (called a sol) for Perseverance’s batteries to recharge. The data will be sent back to a lab on MIT’s campus, where MOXIE’s performance will be analyzed.
Assembling the team
In 2013, NASA put out a call for proposals for oxygen-generating experiments for the 2020 rover within specific parameters. Despite working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission during his 30-year tenure at JPL, when Hecht moved to his current position at MIT Haystack Observatory in 2012, he didn’t expect to be a “Mars guy” anymore — he thought he was done with Mars for good. But his former JPL colleagues disagreed and asked him to lead the experiment as principal investigator. According to Hecht, even after he signed on, he believed the project proposal was a long shot, but in July 2014, he and his colleagues got word that they landed the project.
“Researchers at other NASA labs had a huge head start and a lot of technology heritage. MOXIE’s selection was a huge surprise to me,” says Hecht. “Since this mission has a human-centered focus, I knew we had to establish real credibility with the human exploration community, that we weren’t just looking for an excuse to do some interesting science. So, how do we convince them that we are for real and we want to help with human exploration? It took me about five minutes to think of Jeff Hoffman.”
Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT AeroAstro, certainly knows a thing or two about human space exploration. He logged four spacewalks on his five space flights during his career as a NASA astronaut — including the initial rescue/recovery mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.
In addition to Hoffman’s extensive experience with human spaceflight, he shared another connection with Hecht: Hecht was Hoffman’s first graduate student advisee as a new MIT researcher before he was called up to enter the astronaut program in 1978 and pursue a career with NASA. He returned to the MIT faculty in 2001, and in addition to being deputy principal investigator on MOXIE, he directs the Human Systems Lab at MIT and teaches courses about human spaceflight systems.
“It’s a great experience to collaborate with a former graduate student as colleagues, especially on a project like MOXIE because it shows how important graduate students are to the research process in a story that comes full-circle,” says Hoffman. “Not only do graduate students carry out the day-to-day work on a project, but we are also developing the next generation of people who will carry on the exploration of not just Mars, but the entire solar system.”
AeroAstro PhD students Eric Hinterman SM ’18 and Maya Nasr ’18 have been on the MOXIE team since 2016, when Hinterman was working on his master’s degree and Nasr was performing a MOXIE-related research project as a junior in aeronautics and astronautics.
For her master’s thesis, Nasr focused on calibrating the sensors in the MOXIE unit by performing experiments under different pressures and temperatures and conditions that mimic the environment on Mars. The goal of her master’s work was to understand how the sensors may behave differently in an environment like that of Mars, and to calibrate them accordingly so they would send back accurate data while on the mission. Her PhD work will focus on processing and analyzing both the MOXIE experimental laboratory data and telemetry data that will be sent back from Mars, which will help determine how well the unit functions at its task of extracting oxygen.
“For me personally, it means a lot to work on this project and it’s amazing that the launch is already happening. I grew up in Lebanon and remember watching the Curiosity Rover landing, and at the time the NASA JPL director was Dr. Charles Elachi, who is originally Lebanese,” says Nasr. “Seeing him in mission control made me realize that it was possible to be part of a Mars mission, and it’s one of the reasons why I applied to MIT.”
The newest member of the MOXIE team is AeroAstro master’s student Justine Schultz, who joined in the late spring of 2020. Schultz, who also works full time at General Electric, will focus her graduate work on constructing a detailed thermal model of MOXIE.
What’s in a name?
Since “Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment” is a mouthful, Hecht wanted to get creative with the project name. The initial inspiration comes from Moxie soda, which was invented in Massachusetts in the 1800s as a nerve-calming tonic. When the company mixed it with soda water for added carbonation, it started flying off the shelves and became one of the first mass-produced sodas in the U.S.
In addition to the local connection and the important role of carbon dioxide in Moxie soda’s success story, Hecht thought the meaning behind the word that has become part of our cultural lexicon was particularly fitting to the project. Merriam-Webster defines “moxie” as “energy, pep, courage, determination, and know-how.” The deeper meaning became even more relevant as the world grappled with a dangerous global pandemic with the finish line in sight.
“The situation with the coronavirus certainly caused some delays from where we thought we would be, but thankfully it never endangered the mission. Despite some setbacks, we were able to pivot and adapt to keep the launch on track,” said Hecht. “But Covid-19 be damned, we are launching this rover.”
The launch window is an important factor because it marks the period of time where Earth’s orbit around the sun is aligned with that of Mars in such a way to allow a rocket to follow a flight trajectory like changing lanes in a highway to rendezvous with its target landing point on Mars’ Jezero Crater. The window closes on Aug. 15, and won’t open again for another 26 months.
“While it will be sad not to have that moment of celebration in person together, the critical thing is that we are going to get on the surface Mars and produce oxygen, which we will be doing online from home,” says Hoffman. “Looking at everything that has happened over the past few months and all the people who have worked hard to get Mars 2020 ready for launch despite the world around us closing down, I’m happy we went with the name Perseverance because hanging in there and persevering with the mission has become the name of the game.”
July 29, 2020 at 11:58AM
http://news.mit.edu/2020/perseverance-and-little-moxie-mit-going-to-mars-0729
With Perseverance and a little MOXIE, MIT is going to Mars - MIT News
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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