Blog

Gov. Pat Quinn today announced $15.6 million for much-needed repairs and updates to Brookfield Zoo’s aging buildings and exhibits.

The capital funds will help make urgent repairs to many of its aged electrical, sanitary, structural, roofing and HVAC systems.

The funding is part of the Illinois Jobs Now!, a job generation and capital improvement program that will revive the state’s ailing economy by creating and retaining over 439,000 jobs over six years.

“Investing in Brookfield Zoo will create jobs and help ensure that one of our top tourist attractions keeps people coming to Illinois,” said Gov. Quinn.

“With Illinois Jobs Now!, we can fund important projects that will help revitalize our economy while laying a foundation for future growth.”

Brookfield Zoo, also known as Chicago Zoological Park, opened in 1934, and much of its infrastructure dates back to the same era. The repairs and upgrades will create more than 370 construction jobs.

They will also help the zoo prevent layoffs, exhibit closures and the elimination of award-winning conservation education programs, according to the Chicago Zoological Society, which manages Brookfield Zoo.

“Thanks to Governor Quinn, we can begin to make worthy, well-planned and much-needed repairs to Brookfield Zoo’s aging infrastructure,” said Dr. Stuart Strahl, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Zoological Society.

“With this important capital funding we can create jobs for Chicago-area skilled laborers while averting significant layoffs at Brookfield Zoo.”

In 2009 Brookfield Zoo pumped more than $150 million into the Illinois economy while supporting 2,000 jobs. It was the state’s most popular outdoor cultural attraction with more than 2.2 million guests and 102,500 member households, including more than one million children under the age of 11.

Additionally, the zoo’s education programs reached 2,000 teachers and 22,000 students in area schools.

Brookfield Zoo spans 216 acres west of Chicago and is open every day of the year. The zoo is known throughout the world for its animal care and conservation efforts. Since its opening 75 years ago, Brookfield Zoo has welcomed more than 110 million people.

Another week, another batch of games hitting Nintendo’s online stores. This week’s highlight is, without objection, Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright on its way to WiiWare. Just in case your judgment points to another game, there a few

UPDATE: We started this thread last week.  We’re continuing it here to make sure everyone’s had a chance to weigh in.  Thanks.

EARLIER: It’s planning time at the Business Insider.  And we’d love your help.

We have a whole truckload of things we’d like to do to make the site better, many of which have been suggested by you. 

Alas, we can’t do everything all at once. 

So we’re going through the list to decide what we’ll do in the next 3-6 months.

Please help us prioritize, think, etc. by letting us know in the comments what you’d most like to see us work on this year.  (You can also send me an email directly at [email protected]).

Thanks in advance!

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Should We Fire Everyone Who Is Doing An "Adequate" Job?
• Should We Eliminate Our Vacation Policy?

As I’ve always said, part of the Primal Blueprint’s power is its continuing evaluation and evolution. As a broad lens defined by tried and true physiological principles, the PB can effectively assess and (when appropriate) seamlessly accommodate “new”/rediscovered practices and foods. Readers send me questions all the time that help redefine or further confirm the Blueprint’s existing range. Here’s one such inquiry.

Dear Mark,

I’ve been seeing more hemp products in the stores these days and have friends who call themselves hemp converts. They say it’s a good protein source. What do you think of hemp? Do you consider it Primal?

Hemp products have indeed exploded onto the marketplace in the last few years. Consumers appear to have waved off past alarm about drug associations. Up until the late 1990s, a large portion of the U.S. hemp imports came from China, where industry practices often left measureable levels of the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Since Canada legalized industrial hemp in 1998, the import picture has shifted. Today most hemp products come from Canada and are essentially free from THC contamination. (The U.S. doesn’t allow cultivation within its borders.)

If you look at the nutrition, there are some reasons to recommend hemp. As seeds go, they’re a good source of protein. (Industry sources sometimes say 33% protein. Other sources, including a university nutritional overview concluded 25%.) For a plant source, it’s a thoroughly respectably source of usable protein (albumin and edestine being the primary forms) and offers all the essential amino acids. Hemp also contains a healthy dose of fiber, vitamin E complex, iron, magnesium, and potassium. Then there’s the fatty acid content. Hemp is very high in PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) to the tune of 80% or so. Although the prevailing CW would fall down and worship the very acronym on the page, there’s more to the picture as Primal types know. Yes, hemp has a good amount of omega-3 to its name, and it also has plenty of omega-6. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio comes out around 3:1, which is considerably better than soy but still falls short of the PB-recommended 1:1. (The omega-3 is also in the form of ALA rather than the preferred DHA and EPA.) To its credit, the omega-6 content does include the healthier gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) and stearidonic acid (SA), both of which are believed to be anti-inflammatory in nature. Nonetheless, the very high PUFA content makes the seeds and oil prone to rancidity.

I think we’ll see more research coming out in the next few years exploring the particular health benefits of hemp now that the drug-associated fervor has died down and the public understands that these products don’t pose a psychoactive risk. Traditional practice supports hemp’s anti-inflammatory action. Specifically, the GLA and SA in hemp are credited with effectively treating skin disorders, particularly eczema. Some recent studies also point to hemp’s positive influence on immune function, and its prevention of unhealthy blood platelet aggregation (clumping), which researchers attribute partly to the GLA content. Finally, other researchers have explored hemp’s apparent stimulation of the brain enzyme calcineurin, which helps support both cardiac and neurological functioning.

In terms of palatability, the shelled seeds have a fairly nutty, mild flavor. I’ve enjoyed the seeds in salads and have seen people add them to homemade protein bars. Some folks liken them to sunflower seeds or pine nuts – fitting comparisons, I think. Although hemp seems to be fairly well tolerated and don’t contain the same anti-nutrients that soy does, those who are more sensitive to other seeds might find the same digestive reaction with hemp.

I can’t personally speak to the oil’s taste, but I’ve heard it can vary considerably by brand. (Hemp eaters, what say you?) If you purchase the oil, it’s of course important to look for cold-pressed and store it in a dark container in the refrigerator. As for hemp protein shakes, I’d say they’re reasonable secondary alternatives for those who can’t/won’t eat whey-based. I’d definitely put hemp above soy in the #2 spot. That said, I’d do a little homework into the processing of the brand, given the high PUFA content and its rancidity risk. Look for cold pressing (for initial oil removal) and cold milling (for powder production).

Finally, as to whether hemp is Primal or not, I’d put it (like other seeds) in a supporting role. It’s not main Primal fare, but – when eaten in its healthiest (fresh) state – it can complement a good Primal diet.

Let me know what you think. As always, thanks for the questions and comments, and keep ‘em coming!

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Dear Mark: Is Flax Bad?
2. Dear Mark: Arachidonic Acid
3. Dear Mark: Visting Family – Primal Compromises and Grain Alternatives

I wrote last week about a misguided new law in Nebraska that has expanded the state’s sex offender registry by publishing the name and information of everyone convicted of a “ sexual offense” in the state — from relatively minor convictions like indecent exposure and statutory rape to serious crimes like sexual assault.

A proposal in South Dakota could take that state in the other direction: removing people from the list after 10 years if they were convicted of less-serious offenses. An article in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader presents Tacy Chrispen’s son as an example of the desperate need for this kind of reform. He was a high school senior when he was convicted of statutory rape for having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. Under current law, he’ll spend the rest of his life on the registry.

Putting someone like him on the registry for life just isn’t helpful. Not only does it throw an undeserved wrench in his life, but it also dilutes any possible impact the registry might have on public safety.

(more…)

Army and Air National Guard members are encouraged to provide their civilian
employment information to the Department of Defense through a mandatory program that
has been around since the early 1990s…

Servicemembers and overseas voters shouldn’t assume they automatically will receive
ballots for the 2010 elections just because they have in the past…

Members of the Arkansas National Guard’s Agriculture Development Team (ADT) destined
for deployment to Afghanistan later this spring have begun their pre-mobilization
training here this week…

When she was just 5 years old, Karrie Warren was already learning to hit softballs
in her family’s Fort Lauderdale, Fla., backyard…

The Air National Guard’s top leader visited with Airmen at the 172nd Airlift Wing
here and the 186th Air Refueling Wing in Meridian this weekend in formal briefings
and base tours to see firsthand the missions they are performing…

No party holds a monopoly on misleading statements about health care
reform, and and it’s important to shine a light on such hoodwinking,
even when it’s from somebody on your own side. So I’m pleased that Ezra Klein calls out this John Kerry blog post
for a proper thwacking. Kerry defends the embattled excise tax on
expensive insurance plans in the Huffington Post, and he writes:

[The excise tax] will help control future health care costs without — I repeat without — directly taxing employees.

That is not — I repeat, is not — a very good or honest way to defend the excise tax.
The goal of the excise tax is not only to raise money, but also to
discourage employers from buying expensive health care plans. The hope
is that employers will switch to cheaper health insurance plans, and
use the compensation left over to increase wages, which are taxed. In
other words, Congress hopes — and the CBO expects — that employees will
feel the impact of the excise tax in the form of cheaper insurance and
higher wages. That’s neither hard to explain nor frightening to admit.
So why be coy and misleading?

Kerry also writes:

Fourth, the excise tax included in the Senate-passed health care bill
will affect only a small portion of the very highest cost health plans
— a total of 3% of premiums in 2013.

Ezra’s right to demur here, too. The excise tax is designed to extend its reach over the next decade because it’s tied to overall inflation, rather than health care inflation, which is moving much faster. It could hit 20 percent of employer-provided premiums by 2020. Is that a bad thing? Some folks on the left like Daily Kos scoff at the tax “not being properly indexed” but I think the indexing is entirely proper. I want this tax to creep.

There are a lot of reasons why health care is so expensive in this country. The problem is that most of these reasons nobody wants to fix. We like our doctors to be well educated and well paid. We like our hospitals to brim with sparkling new technology. We like to receive the finest new medicine and procedures. But one reason we think we like all these things is we don’t see what they cost. Employer-provided health care is taken out of our compensation. What we see are the remains — our wages — rather than the subtraction. Furthermore, as Ezra explains, a dollar in health benefits is worth more than a dollar in wages, because it’s exempt from taxation. We can’t expect to move away from rampant health care inflation if employers, who are the pivotal health insurance consumers, continue to treat health insurance as a tax haven for their workers compensation.

Let’s put realism aside for just a moment and imagine a world in which boats swim through rivers, skimming out pollutants through natural biological filters (plants). Now let’s up the ante, and shape these boats like whales.

Vincent Callebaut can take credit for this idea, a whale-shaped boat garden named Physalia. Powered by solar panels and hydro-turbines (how these sub-aquatic turbines don’t slow the boat, I don’t really understand), the boat cruises through dirty water, soaking up the bad stuff with onboard plants and purifying water with its titanium dioxide surface.

Whatever, so long as it also swallows swimmers on command, I’m happy.
[vincent.callebaut via freshome via inhabitat]

Attendees of last week’s CES were able to get some hands on time with two previously rumored handsets from Motorola that are, as of now, heading to China.  Both the Motorola Zeppelin and the Moto MT710 were available for demo, and we have read impressions of both units from attendees.

The Moto MT710 runs on China’s Ophone, a custom skinned version of Android, which according to reports really changes the look and feel of the platform as we know it here in the states.  Reports are saying that the phone is very well made and feels good in the hand.  If you are interested in the specs of the unit, you can read about them here. What is interesting about the unit itself is that it comes with a stylus for input, which means a resistive touch screen was necessary for the unit.  We are hearing the reason for this is that the stylus makes it easier to draw chinese characters.  It is a good looking unit, but I don’t think we would ever see it come stateside, and if for some reason it did, the stylus interaction would stymie the sales.  We are a touch culture in our mobile devices now, we have left the stylus behind.

Now, the Motorola Zeppelin, or XT800 is a handset that CES attendees are very impressed with, and would like to see come to the US.  Read the full specs of the unit here. The XT800 is a pebble shaped device that looks really gorgeous and flowing, with a 3.7 inch touchscreen.  The phone has an HDMI output for watching your content on high def monitors, and is a dual-sim phone.  Dual-sim allows a user to have two sim cards inside one phone, allowing them to use the same phone for business and personal use.  So basically, you can have to separate numbers for the same phone, pretty snazzy, not sure if I would use that function with the advent of Google voice, but it sure does excite the geekiness in me.  The rest of the specs seem pretty standard for a phone of this type, 5mp camera, wifi, 3g, gps, video recording.  One item of note is that it can record 720p HD video, and play that back through the aforementioned HDMI output.

Every person that actually saw this phone and wrote about it said that it is a sweet unit and would be an awesome addition to the Android family here in the states.  Here’s to hoping we will see this kind of awesomeness here in the US someday soon.

One of the trickier and more recent “intellectual property” (and I use the term loosely) rights out there is the “right to publicity” which was an odd sort of invention designed as a way for certain famous people to stop companies from putting their pictures in ads and imply endorsement. But there are some fuzzy borders here, especially when it comes to First Amendment free speech rights. Paul Alan Levy has an excellent discussion on two separate cases where publicity rights came up with regards to President and Mrs. Obama. In the first, PETA used Michelle Obama in an advertisement, as an example of someone who doesn’t wear fur. In the second, sporting goods company Weatherproof used a photo of Obama wearing one of the company’s jackets while he was in China to highlight the sort of customer they have. Levy points out that the White House was upset and complained about both uses, but likely had no legal right to complain:

As in the Michele Obama case, the White House complained, but everybody seems to agree that Obama won’t sue, not just because presidents don’t trifle with such litigation, but because Obama has no legal leg to stand on. He is a public figure and the ad is truthful — Obama did, in fact, wear its jacket standing near the Great Wall…

That is not to say that PETA and Weatherproof ran no risk when they started these ad campaigns. When receiving questions from reporters, the White House could have released statements from her denouncing PETA for extremist opposition to the use of animals in medical testing (“she thinks it is better to test on animals first instead of using poor people and prisoners”). Similarly, the White House could have told reporters, oh yes, he did wear the jacket but later decided that it is a cheap and inferior product. But instead, the White House seems to be playing along, at least with PETA, by agreeing that Obama really does share PETA’s position on furs.

Where it gets even more interesting, is that Levy notes that a reporter for the Washington Post pointed to the similarities with various media publications writing up some story about the Obamas solely to get an Obama photo on the cover, knowing that it would sell well. However, oddly, the Post reporter seems to think this is just fine for the media, but a problem when it’s someone else:

What is interesting here is the assumption that it is (mis)appropriation when a political group does it and when a clothing company does it, but not when the media do it. But isn’t is obvious that magazines were putting the Obamas on the cover to sell magazines? Givhan’s article admits that — she says, “no small part of the allure has been the sort of personal magnetism that connects with consumers as they bide their time in checkout lanes,” and quotes PETA’s preseident explaining, “It’s hard not to look at her and feel good.”

This, too, is a use of the Obamas’ selling power to sell the products of companies’ who have never received consent from the Obamas. In fact, political groups and companies as well as the media are constantly trying to associate themselves with a variety of famous personages, no matter what some “right of publicity” cases may say. It is high time to consider how far the right of publicity needs to be cut back, or whether it causes more trouble than it is worth.

Indeed. The deeper you look at the right of publicity, the more ridiculous and less justifiable it seems. It almost always serves to stifle free speech.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

KNOXVILLE — Did you resolve to read more in 2010?

If so, here are three books you might want to add to your list. These books will be featured in several upcoming events at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and in the Knoxville community.

“Justice as Fairness” by John Rawls

John Rawls’ work gives Americans a shared framework for public deliberation and reasoned judgment about the most pressing political issues that we face: guarding our basic constitutional liberties, creating and maintaining equal opportunity, and the interplay between economics and social cooperation for the common good. Without this shared framework, American citizens may find political life dominated by dogmatic fanaticism and apathetic resignation.

UT’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, in partnership with the Knox County Public Library, will sponsor five group discussions of Rawls’ book. Led by UT faculty members, the sessions will meet from 6 to 8 p.m. on Mondays in the Toyota Auditorium at the Baker Center, 1640 Cumberland Ave., on the UT campus:

• Jan. 25, Part 1: Fundamental Ideas, led by Joe Cook, College of Law
• Feb. 1, Part 2: Principles of Justice, led by Otis Stephens, College of Law
• Feb. 8, Part 3: The Argument from the Original Position, led by Iris Goodwin, College of Law
• Feb. 15, Part 4: Institutions of a Just Basic Structure, led by Matt Deaton, Department of Philosophy
• Feb. 22, Part 5: The Question of Stability, led by David Reidy, Department of Philosophy

Then, on Feb. 26 and 27, the Baker Center will host a two-day symposium, “Rawlsian Liberalism in Context(s).”

“Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water” by Maude Barlow

An author and activist, Barlow is national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, as well as senior adviser on water to the United Nations where she provides counsel to Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, president of the General Assembly. She also chairs the board of Washington-based Food and Water Watch and is a councilor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council.

Barlow’s book will be the centerpiece in several activities being sponsored by UT’s Baker Center in partnership with The Tennessee Clean Water Network, the Knox County Public Library and the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment.

On Jan. 31, a free showing of the award-winning film “Blue Gold: World Water Wars” begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium. Barlow appears in the film.

On Feb. 2, the public is invited to the “Brown Bag, Green Book” series to discuss Barlow’s book, “Blue Covenant,” from noon to 1 p.m. in the auditorium of the East Tennessee History Center, 601 Gay St. The discussion will be led by Renee Hoyos from the Tennessee Clean Water Network; Joanne Logan from the UT’s Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science; and Tiffany Foster from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

On Feb. 3, Barlow will speak at 7 p.m. in the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium.

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans

In 1936, Agee, the author, and Evans, the photographer, were on an assignment for Fortune magazine to write about sharecroppers in the South. Their work culminated in this book of stories and photos that provides a picture of life in the 1930s.

The book will be used in the first of three mini-summits to be held this spring at UT to look at various aspects of poverty, as well as work being done at UT Knoxville in these areas. Ready for the World, UT’s international and intercultural initiative, has devoted this academic year to “Our World in Need” with a particular emphasis on the issue of poverty.

The first mini-summit — “Baldwin Lee, James Agee and Walker Evans: Photography, Poverty, Politics in the South and Abroad” — will be held Feb. 4 and 11. That summit will include a day of presentations and discussions regarding themes in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” as well as a day looking at the photographs of UT Professor Baldwin Lee, who toured the South taking photographs in the 1980s.

This mini-summit is being sponsored by the Provost’s Office; Ready for the World; the Baker Center; UT Libraries; the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences; the Council on Academic Outreach and Engagement; the School of Art; and the Knox County Public Library.

For further information about each of these events, go to http://bakercenter.utk.edu, or e-mail Amy Gibson at

—

C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, [email protected])

Serious Sam HD will be available this Wednesday for 1200 points.