Monthly Archives: July 2017

The Night I Was a Bear: Reflections on Cruelty to Animals – Undark Magazine

Posted: July 31, 2017 at 10:18 am

Once, I thought I was a bear.

For one long night, tethered to medical equipment after a grueling more-than-six-hour cancer surgery performed by a human-robot team, I felt this as a strange and overwhelming certainty. I wasnt one of the wild bears Id observed loping through the hills in Yellowstone National Park, or even a bear in a zoo. I was a caged bear held in a bile farm somewhere in Southeast Asia.

WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, Barbara J. King shares a story left out of her new book, Personalities on the Plate.

It was May 2013, and for the past few years I had been researching the expression of emotion in animals. Along the way, I had learned about the bile-farm bears and the hard cruelty of how they are kept.

For about 30 years now, bears have been squeezed into cages on farms, surreal places where they dwell in a nightmarish limbo as their bile is harvested.

For more than a thousand years, bear bile produced in the liver, stored in the gallbladder, and extracted from that organ by humans has played an extensive role in traditional Chinese medicine. Used to treat liver diseases, including cirrhosis and cancer, the bile is also supposed to fight fever and pain, increase libido, and even, according to an article published last year in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, to stop endogenous wind.

The efficacy of many of these treatments is highly debatable, but the suffering caused by the bile extraction process is clear. Originally, the bile was procured by killing wild bears and removing their gallbladders. For about 30 years now, bears mostly Asian black bears (also called moon bears), but also sun bears and brown bears have been squeezed into cages on farms, surreal places where they dwell in a nightmarish limbo as their bile is harvested. In 2010, Fiona MacGregor, a reporter for The Telegraph, visited such a farm on the outskirts of Luang Prabang, Laos. There, the bears are confined in barred enclosures measuring 15 square feet, she wrote. Some of the animals cannot stand fully upright and some display the repetitive swaying movements of severe stress. Most also have mange, and scratch incessantly at their patchy fur. Despite the 100F heat outside, there is no water in any of the cages.

Grimly, MacGregor noted that the Luang Prabang bears were luckier than others because in some bile farms the bears live with a catheter inserted into their gallbladder. In the 2009 book Smiling Bears, Else Poulsen has more to say: Without proper anesthetic, drugged only half-unconscious, the bear is tied down by ropes, and a metal catheter, which eventually rusts, is permanently stuck through his abdomen into his gallbladder.

That catheter was the point of connection for my imagined hospital transfiguration. My catheter didnt hurt, but it caused constant unpleasant pressure. I was also hooked up to cardiac telemetry equipment, and on both legs were boot-like devices that automatically inflated and deflated to reduce the risk of blood clots. My husband and daughter had gone home to sleep; I was alone and feeling gutted, because to some extent I was.

Skillfully working the controls of a da Vinci surgical robot and boring small holes into my abdomen, my oncologist had removed my uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and 29 lymph nodes. A few weeks earlier, a biopsy indicated that serous papillary carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer, had invaded my uterine lining. The sequence of my treatment was clear: surgery, three rounds of chemo, 25 sessions of external-beam radiation, three courses of internal radiation via canister inserted into my vagina, and three final rounds of chemo.

In the years since that treatments conclusion, I have never spoken of my nighttime bear visitation to anyone but my husband. Profound and at first inexplicable, it was not a fever dream or hallucination, I now believe, but an attack of acute, embodied empathy.

Like us, bears are omnivores, smart and often highly social. In the wild, they show evidence of prodigious learning and memory skills in foraging. Working in a zoo, the psychologists Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University and Michael J. Beran of Georgia State University have demonstrated that black bears have a degree of numerical competence, according to a 2012 study. Vonk and Beran devised a touch-screen experiment in which the bears, using their noses, showed they could distinguish sets of items based on number and surface area.

Our primate brains ability to take the perspective of others (our theory of mind) causes us to realize to feel as well as to know that bears must experience anguish when their bile is continuously harvested using the methods I have described. Yet the animal studies scholar Lori Gruen cautions in her 2014 book Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships With Animals that empathy is far more complicated than it looks on the surface.

Entangled empathy involves a particular blend of affect and cognition, she writes. The empathizer is always attentive to both similarities and differences between herself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom she is empathizing. This alternation between first- and third-person points of view allows us to preserve the sense that we are in relationship and not merged into the same perspective.

Humans, Gruen says, are in relationship with many, many animals and we may never have the opportunity to meet them or look into their eyes. Our connection doesnt depend on being with them; it exists and is primary. Or as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it in his 1972 masterwork, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, The mental world the mind the world of information processing is not limited by the skin. We are in relationship all the time, everywhere.

So we need to distinguish between the experiences of other creatures and anything we might imagine to be parallel in our own experiences. Unlike the bears, for instance, I was in a safe place as a post-surgical patient. My organs had been removed for my own good; I was surrounded by people caring for me and about me; and my distress was acute, but it was temporary and inflicted without cruelty.

The bears, turned into harvestable commodities year after year and decade after decade without relief, do experience cruelty. Only by focusing on this central difference can we begin to understand and to address what is happening to them.

Claims of human exceptionalism are increasingly unsustainable because evidence from animal behavior lets us see the lives of thinking and feeling animals: Chimpanzees who make tools, hunt, and swing between poles of compassion and lethal aggression; cetaceans who create vibrant learning-based cultures in the ocean; and the savvy, moody invertebrates described by Sy Montgomery in The Soul of an Octopus.

Cruelty, though, stands as unique or nearly unique to humans. When lions run down antelopes, orcas hunt and consume whales, or house cats toy with mice, theres no evidence that they are aware of causing harm to another being. (Its an open question whether male chimpanzees, capable of taking the perspective of others to at least some degree, might qualify as cruel when they attack other male chimpanzees and twist off limbs, beat and kick their bodies, and rip a testicle clean off the body.)

In a very real way, bile farms mirror the factory farms that underpin our food system in North America and the West.

A lesson of the Asian bear bile farm in addition to the primary one, that the bears need our attention and our rescue is that it acts as a pointer to what we may not so readily want to see. Despite intense and often successful rescue efforts by organizations like Animals Asia, bear bile farms still arent very widely known. Its tempting to exoticize them as Asian, as something that supposedly civilized Westerners wouldnt do. But in a very real way, they mirror the factory farms that underpin our food system in North America and the West. Unlike the prolonged suffering of the bears, the crowded, uncomfortable, and wholly unnatural lives of pigs and chickens raised for food are drastically short: They are chemically fattened and slaughtered within months.

We have the burden and the opportunity, writes Jonathan Safran Foer in Eating Animals, of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into public consciousness. That opportunity critically depends on understanding where cruelty is present, and where its absent.

I have argued that eating less meat adopting a reducetarian, vegetarian, or vegan diet according to our individual abilities is an ethical way to put our large, evolved brains to good use for the sake of our planet (reducing global warming), other animals (reducing animal suffering), and our bodies (reducing meat-induced physical harms). A balky response often comes back to me: But many animals eat other animals! Its the natural way of the world!

Its precisely cruelty that makes what Gregory Bateson called the difference which makes a difference. We know or we can know, if we choose that we are in relationship with the other animals on our planet. We know or we can know, if we choose that we can eliminate or reduce the cruelty we inflict on other animals bodies. The bears I write of are not, of course, bile bears any more than chickens and pigs are factory farm animals. They dont exist for the use we can make of them. They are inherently valuable animals with their own thoughts and emotions who want to live untethered.

BarbaraJ. King, emerita professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, is also the author of How Animals Grieve and Evolving God.

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Dr. Gary Richter Announces the #RescuesRock Campaign and Donates His New Book to Animal Rescue Shelters – PR Newswire (press release)

Posted: at 10:18 am

OAKLAND, Calif., July 31, 2017 /PRNewswire/-- In honor of National Mutt Day, America's Favorite Veterinarian, Dr. Gary Richter, is donating his #1 Amazon Best-Selling book, The Ultimate Pet Health Guide, to animal rescue shelters who participate in the campaign, #RescuesRock. Pet owners have an opportunity to win a signed copy of his best-selling book on Pet Parent Pack Facebook page, #RescuesRock.

In an effort to bring awareness to rescue animals and pets, Dr. Richter and his team educate pet owners how to take the best care of pets. The #RescuesRock Campaign is a fun way for pet lovers to celebrate pets and rescue animals. The process of the campaign is:

In his book, The Ultimate Pet Health Guide, Dr. Richter discloses his best-kept nutritional secrets that help pets live much longer and healthier lives. The Ultimate Pet Health Guide uncovers essential steps for pet owners to navigate treatment options for their pets while leveraging the best traditional and holistic veterinary techniques. He reveals 50 of his best custom-developed dog and cat food recipes. Some recipes are specifically designed for diseases such as cancer, heart and kidney disease. Dr. Richter's book is gaining momentum at a rapid pace and was also featured on nationally recognized Pet Shows with Dr. Katy and also Dr. Frank Adams.

Dr. Richter is generously donating the Ultimate Pet Health Guide, where he shares his expert recommendations for an integrative approach to common pet diseases such as allergies, skin condition, diabetes, pancreatitis, GI and heart disease and cancer. All of the recommended treatments discussed in the book are backed by extensive research and from years of success using these treatments at Dr. Richter's clinical practice.

Dr. Richter's book has caught the attention of Ian Somerhalder - actor and founder of the Ian Somerhalder Foundation, who invited Dr. Richter to join ISF as a Veterinarian Medical Advisor to the Foundation. "We absolutely wanted to be involved to help pet parents get these life-changing insights, to ensure you have as much time as possible with your furry loved ones," said Ian Somerhalder.

About Dr. Gary RichterDr. Gary Richter M.S, D.V.M, C.V.C, C.V.A., has owned and been the medical director of Montclair Veterinary Hospital in Oakland, California since 2002 and launched Holistic Veterinary Care in 2009.

He obtained a B.S in animal science, an M.S. in veterinary medical science and a doctorate of veterinary medicine with honors from the University of Florida. He is also certified in veterinary acupuncture and as a veterinary chiropractor, using these treatments alongside his traditional veterinary education.

Alongside his two animal hospitals, Dr. Richter has received more than 30 awards at a local and a national level. These awards include Best Veterinary Hospital, Best Veterinarian, Best Canine Therapy Facility and Best Alternative Medicine Provider. Dr. Richter was also voted as America's Favorite Veterinarian in 2015 by the American Veterinary Medical Foundation (AVMF).

Those wishing to find out more about Dr. Richter can visit the website http://www.PetVetExpert.com. The Ultimate Pet Health Guide is available on Amazon: https://amazon.com/Ultimate-Pet-Health-Guide-Breakthrough/dp/1401953506.

About Ian Somerhalder FoundationThe Ian Somerhalder Foundation works to empower, educate and collaborate with people and projects to positively impact the planet and its creatures. ISF delivers unique programs and services and provides public outreach, education and grants in support of creatures, environment, youth and grassroot initiatives.

Contact Susan Koehler 425-999-9816170236@email4pr.com

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SOURCE Dr. Gary Richter

http://www.DrGaryRichter.com

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Food supplements and tea subject of EFSA warning on pyrrolizidine alkaloid consumption – NutraIngredients.com

Posted: at 10:17 am

By Will ChuWill Chu , 31-Jul-20172017-07-31T00:00:00Z Last updated on 31-Jul-2017 at 12:37 GMT2017-07-31T12:37:05Z

High consumption of tea infusions is a possible long-term concern for human health due to their carcinogenic properties, the European Food and Safety Authority rules.

The consumption of food supplements based on pyrrolizidine alkaloid-producing plants could also result in exposure levels causing short-term toxicity resulting in adverse health effects,stated theEuropean Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

The agency points primarily to the pyrrolizidine alkaloid (PA) content in tea, but also notes that it appears in honey and some dietary food supplements.

Updates to its risk assessment, which now take into account more recent data on exposure levels of these toxins establish a new Reference Point (RP) of 237micrograms per kilogram per body weight per day (g/kg bw/day).

This latest decision falls in line with other findings outlined in 2011, in which EFSA ruled there was a possible health concern for some high consumers of honey such as toddlers and children.

The panel at the time also concluded that 1,2-unsaturated PAs may act as genotoxic carcinogens in humans. An RP of 70 g/kg bw/per day was thus calculated.

In increasing the RP, the report stated that the changemaintains the conservative nature of the previous risk assessment.

This considers the general degree of uncertainty related to the available studies used for the dose response analysis and the fact that both riddelliine and lasiocarpine are classified among the most potent PAs.

Along with riddelliine and lasiocarpine, another PA, monocrotaline was also classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2008.

The EFSA Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain (CONTAM) agreed, identifying a list of 17 PAs in total that required continued observation. These include lasiocarpine, lasiocarpine-N-oxide and senkirkine.

Following a Commission request, EFSAs scientific report, published in August 2016, detailed dietary exposure to PAs through the consumption of honey, tea, and food supplements.

Here, they found the highest average concentrations of PAs consumed were found in the samples of rooibos (lower bound (LB)=4.1g/L) and peppermint (LB=3.5g g/L).

Concentrations of PAs in black tea were twice as high as reported for green tea (LB=1.6g/L and LB=0.8g/L, respectively).

Certain food supplements contained very high levels of PAs. Average PA concentrations of 235253g/kg (LB upper bound (UB)) were reported for pollen-based supplements. Retail honey contained PA concentrations of 14.527.5 g/kg.

Using the RP of 237 g/kg bw per day for the sum of all 1,2-unsaturated PAs, exposure levels were calculated for dietary exposure.

Acute exposure that also accounted for high contamination levels in all food commodities ranged from 1 to 300ng/kg bw per day and from 6 to 170ng/kg bw per day for mean consumers in the younger age classes (infantsadolescents) and adults, respectively.

Acute or short-term exposure to PAs related to the consumption of food supplements varied considerably depending on the type of supplement.

Consumption of PA producing plant extracts to be consumed following infusion led to exposure levels as high as 890ng/kg bw per day.

Ingestion of one tablet/capsule based on PA-producing plants corresponded to estimates of acute/short-term exposure levels of about 800 or 1,800g/kg bw per day.

Acute/short-term exposure through the consumption of pollen-based supplements showed much lower exposure estimates in the range of 344ng/kg bw per day.

In view of the margin of more than three orders of magnitude between these exposure levels and the lowest known dose range associated with human acute/short-term adverse effects, the CONTAM Panel concluded that there is a low risk related to acute dietary exposure to PAs through the consumption of teas, herbal infusions and honey, the report concluded.

Consumption of pollen-based supplements is not considered to pose acute risks to human health, the Panel added.

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Buyer Beware: The Dangers of Confusing Food with Supplements – Healthy Eats (blog)

Posted: at 10:17 am

Are you looking for the magic pill for weight loss, increased energy or anything else that ails you? You arent alone. While the draw of dietary supplements is strong and the claims compelling dont be fooled these products are not the same as food. For example, a recent study identified green tea extract as a potentially dangerous ingredient. While sipping on green tea can benefit health, the supplemental form commonly found in weight loss and bodybuilding supplements has been linked to many cases of liver damage. Here are 4 other supplements that are much more dangerous than their food-based counterparts.

Why Supplements Can Be So Dangerous

Unlike foods and medications, the dietary supplement industry has very little FDA oversight. For this reason, many products sold on store shelves and online are manufactured without proper safety testing. These dangers may be the culprit for a dramatic uptick in liver disease over the last decade. Health conscious consumers are rightfully confused. When a nutrient gets attention for its health benefits, its logical to look for more from a supplement, but this can do more harm than good. While there is a time and place for supplements when a true deficiency has been detected, some of the most popular nutrients out there can treat your body very differently when taken in supplement form. The good news is, however, its spectacularly hard to eat your way into toxicity if you stick to the whole food sources.

Red Yeast Rice

Touted for its cholesterol lowering properties, this supplement has made the Consumer Reports list of 15 Supplement Ingredients to Always Avoid. Not only can it negatively affect the action of cholesterol-lowering prescription drugs, it may also affect proper function of the muscles, kidneys and liver.

Iron

Your body relies heavily on iron for healthy blood. According to the National Institutes of Health, populations at risk for deficiency include infants, children, teen girls and both pregnant and pre-menopausal women. Eating iron rich foods like dried fruits, fortified cereals, dark-meat poultry and red meat can help you meet those daily needs, while supplements can be toxic to the liver. For this reason, if you choose to take a supplement monitor blood levels regularly and work with your doctor and registered dietitian to establish a proper supplement dosage.

Vitamin A

This essential nutrient is found in red and orange fruits and veggies as well as milk, cheese and meat. The animal based sources are known as retinol and high doses from supplements can cause skin changes, liver problems and birth defects in pregnant women.

Vitamin B6

Lots of folks reach for B vitamins like B6 to help boost energy and brain function, but the truth is only calories from food will truly give you energy and nutrients the body needs. Large doses of B6 can lead to nerve damage when taken for long periods of time. Since this nutrient may appear in many different supplements, its vitally important to take inventory of all the supplements you are taking. Vitamin B6 can be found in a wide variety of foods including chickpeas, chicken, potatoes, cottage cheese, nuts, raisins, tofu, rice and watermelon.

Dana Angelo White, MS, RD, ATC, is a registered dietitian, certified athletic trainer and owner ofDana White Nutrition, Inc., which specializes in culinary and sports nutrition.

*This article was written and/or reviewed by an independent registered dietitian nutritionist.

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Dietary supplements linked to more calls to poison control – Heber Springs Sun-Times

Posted: at 10:17 am

Dawn Teer

In a recent American Medical Association newsletter under the Leading the News headline were these three news links on the results of studies on energy supplements such as the ones reported on recently in The Sun Times.

ABC News (7/24) reports on its website that calls to poison control centers in the US caused by exposures to dietary supplements rose by nearly 50 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to a study published in the Journal of Medical Toxicology. The study said that a majority of those calls involved children, and the authors support increased FDA regulation for certain supplements that were associated with high amounts of toxicity.

This is the article in its entirety. A new study found calls to poison control centers in the U.S. due to exposures to dietary supplements rose by nearly 50 percent between 2005 and 2012, and that a majority of those calls involved children being exposed to supplements. The report, published Friday in the Journal of Medical Toxicology, called for an increase in regulation by the Food and Drug Administration for certain supplements that were associated with high amounts of toxicity. Researchers combed through all calls that were made to poison control centers in the U.S. related to dietary supplement exposure between 2000 to 2012, and also found that the majority of supplement exposure calls (70 percent) involved children 6 years old and under. Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News' Chief Women's Health Correspondent shared some tips on "Good Morning America" today to help keep your children safe from accidental exposures to dietary supplements, advising parents to treat supplements like prescription medicines, and keep them far away from children. She adds that you should never assume that just because something is "natural" that it is safe. Ashton recommends keeping a poison control center phone number handy in your home, and if you do suspect your child has accidentally ingested supplements, to never induce vomiting without speaking to poison control authorities first.

CBS News (7/24, Welch) reports, Seventy percent of the calls involved children younger than 6 years old, and the majority of cases were unintentional, occurring when children swallowed supplements they found at home. Additionally, approximately 4.5 percent of the time more than 12,300 cases serious medical complications occurred. NBC News (7/24, Charles) reports researchers singled out yohimbe tree bark extract as the latest in a long list of dangerous substances that children are accidentally ingesting. It is noted as being particularly dangerous because it had the largest proportion of serious outcome and has been found to cause heart beat rhythm changes and kidney failure in children. Yohimbe is most often used to treat erectile dysfunction in men and low libido in women, even though there is scant evidence that it works. The FDA has received reports of seizures and kidney failure associated with yohimbe consumption.

CNN (7/24, Knight) reports that ma huang, yohimbe, homeopathic agents and energy drinks were found to be the most dangerous supplements.

These stories seem to support the recent stories Jacque Martin has been reporting on in The Sun Times regarding a student who was given an energy product without knowledge or consent from the students parents.

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Dietary supplements linked to more calls to poison control - Heber Springs Sun-Times

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APR Applied Pharma Research Introduces SwitzAge: The First 100% Swiss Made Nutraceutical Product Line … – Business Wire (press release)

Posted: at 10:17 am

BALERNA, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--APR Applied Pharma Research s.a. (APR), the Swiss, independent developer of science driven, patent protected healthcare products, is proud to announce the reinforcement of its consumer products portfolio with SwitzAge, an innovative range of nutraceuticals, 100% Swiss made, specifically created to meet adult people well-being needs.

Life expectancy has been globally growing in the last decades thanks to the overall improvement of life quality standards and the so-called Generation X is having a transformative impact on society. By 2050, the number of over 50s worldwide is projected to double to nearly 3.2 billion people. These consumers are transforming what it means to be older in terms of lifestyle and aim for an overall improvement of their vitality, thus being more conscious of their diet and combing it with the consumption of specific food supplements. Asia-Pacific countries, in particular, where adult people account for almost 30% of the population, seem to drive the growth of the global food supplements market with an expected CAGR of 9.1% in the next five years, thus generating nearly half of the whole market, estimated around 84 USD billion, by 2020.

The SwitzAge project has been specifically designed to match the increasing demand for high-quality food supplements tailored on adult people health needs. SwitzAge was inspired from a holistic approach focused on the specific physiological needs of man and lady for a balanced well-being of body and mind along the ageing natural course.

Each SwitzAge product is the result of the Swiss high-quality pharmaceutical research applied to healthy ageing. In particular, products formulations contain a balanced mix of active ingredients - vitamins, minerals and functional extracts, accurately selected and controlled along the production process according to highest Swiss quality standards. On the other side, SwitzAge formulations are compliant with European, Swiss and current Chinese food supplement regulations, thus ensuring a favourable tolerability profile. Moreover, they are lactose, sugar and gluten free and they all come in user-friendly pharmaceutical forms (mono-dose effervescent powder, chewable tablets and soft-gel capsules) for an easier administration, whilst offering the appropriate daily dosage in compliance with European and Swiss NRV recommendations.

SwitzAge product line is currently made of 8 food supplements, that provide the right answers for body and mind enhancement, by improving physical energy extent as well as the overall balance in terms of memory, concentration and sleep quality, along with a proper differentiation per gender. Among the others, the range spans solutions for cardiovascular system efficiency and genitourinary well-being, for men, as well as for menopause hormonal swing regulation and skin anti-ageing for ladies.

"We are very proud - said Paolo Galfetti, CEO and Co-Founder of APR - to offer this new business opportunity to potential partners who are ready to exploit the increasing growth of the food supplement market addressed to adult and mature people needs. Seizing the global trend towards healthy ageing, SwitzAge is the first range of scientific proven solutions which aims at enhancing adult and mature people quality of life, enabling their physical, social and mental well-being.

About APR Applied Pharma Research s.a.

APR is a Swiss, independent developer of science driven, patent protected healthcare products. The Company identifies, develops and licenses, value added products designed to address patient or consumer needs in niche or rare therapeutic areas on a global basis. In particular, APRs business model is currently focused on two pillars: (i) internally developed and financed (alone or together with co-development partners) proprietary, value added products to be licensed to healthcare companies for their commercialization, and (ii) support to third party projects by offering added value R&D services under contract and fee for service arrangements. APR has a balanced pipeline of revenue generating branded products marketed in all major markets, combined with a compelling pipeline of products at different stages of development. APR has entered into licensing and partnership agreements with pharmaceutical companies in over 70 countries, with international sales on a worldwide basis.

For press releases and other company information, please visit: http://www.apr.ch or http://www.switzage.ch/en

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Ribbon cutting held for Fields Avenue extension – The Daily Citizen

Posted: at 10:16 am

In the spring of 2007, city of Dalton and Whitfield County officials met to discuss the possibility of a TSPLOST (Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) program dedicated to improving the transportation infrastructure of the city and county. Working together, city and county transportation and administrative officials put together a project list which had more than 50 specific road and bridge improvement projects. Later that year, voters approved the TSPLOST.

One of the city's top three TSPLOST projects was the widening and extension of Fields Avenue from Underwood Street south to East Morris Street. This project had three main objectives.

Traffic congestion relief: This project gives an alternate north-south route to Glenwood Avenue, which is heavily congested during certain times of the workday. This project provides the last leg of a three-lane roadway beginning at East Morris Street and extending north to Cleveland Highway. A new traffic signal at MLK Jr. Boulevard and Fields Avenue provides a much safer intersection.

Quality of life: This project improves the quality of life for this area by providing sidewalks on both sides of the street. Since schoolchildren who attend either Blue Ridge Elementary or Roan Street Elementary who live within 1/2 mile of either school are not provided bus service, sidewalks will make their walk to and from school each day much safer. Biking and walking is also safer for everyone.

Economic development: The East Morris Street corridor is one of the fasting growing areas for startups of small businesses in the city. This new street provides greater connectivity for those businesses and customers.

Project facts

Project length was 3,650 feet (one-third of that was new location construction from Nelson Street to East Morris Street).

Construction contract: Just under $5.1 million and was completed by Northwest Georgia Paving Inc. of Calhoun.

Project involved widening Fields Avenue from two to three lanes from Underwood Street to Nelson Street and constructing three new lanes from Nelson Street to East Morris Street.

Two new traffic signals were constructed:

1. At East Morris Street and Fields Avenue/5th Avenue.

2. At Fields Avenue/MLK Jr. Boulevard (corrected an offset problem that traditionally had a high number of crashes).

MLK Jr. Boulevard was also widened to five lanes to accommodate left-turn lanes at Fields Avenue.

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Ribbon cutting held for Fields Avenue extension - The Daily Citizen

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Take a break fair days ahead – Ontario Argus Observer

Posted: at 10:16 am

Despite a harsh winter that took a toll on buildings and facilities, the Malheur County Fair is ready to open for another week of fun and excitement. That is all thanks to the hard work of Lynelle Christiani and members of the fair who have gotten things back on track and ready for the big show.

Attending the fair is an opportunity to take a break from the rest of a busy summer, and enjoy an iconic piece of Americana that celebrates rural life and family traditions. Beyond the opportunity to catch up with friends you might not have seen since last years fair, there are any number of events and activities to take part in. Whether it is kids karaoke or Mickey and the Motorcars, there will be opportunities to sing and dance every day. In addition to jamming with the kids or the Motorcars, you can enjoy some gear jamming action in the tractor driving contest and bone jarring action in the rodeo.

One of the centerpieces of the fair has to be the animals. Spend some time viewing all of the different animals in the livestock barns and see how hard the 4-H and FFA kids have worked in raising their animals and getting them ready to show. In addition to the rabbits, chickens, goats, pigs, steers and other assorted livestock, keep your eye out for another special animal. Oregon State Universitys very own Benny the Beaver will be roaming the grounds on Saturday.

Of course, one of the biggest reasons to attend the fair is to enjoy the food. It may not be low calorie, but hey, the fair does only come around once a year. So grab a snow cone or turkey leg to snack on while wandering the grounds. One unofficial game that you can play is guessing which fair foods you are munching on may have a local connection.

There are a few obvious hints come that to mind. If youre enjoying a hamburger, there is a chance the beef came from Malheur County. It seems there are about ten times as many cattle in the county as there are people, which might be expected for Oregons leading cattle producing county. On the other hand, I will guess that the lemons that went into your lemonade probably didnt come from Malheur County. However, it is quite possible that the sugar that went in to sweeten the lemons came from one of our local sugar beet fields. If you are enjoying a scone or a funnel cake (some of my personal favorites), its not just the sugar that might be local. The dough and batter for those just might be made with flour harvested from a local wheat field and with milk from one of our local dairies. If you happen to go for a bag of kettle corn, it likely has a local connection. The Crookhams Company in Caldwell is one of the nations leading purveyors of popcorn seed. If instead of kettle corn, you opt for corn on the cob that too probably originated in the Treasure Valley. Our valley produces the majority of the countrys sweet corn seed. And of course, if you are participating in the onion decorating contest, those bulbs were lifted from a nearby field.

If you need to prioritize your time at the Fair and when to grab a snack, you can find the schedule of events at the Fairs website http://www.malheurcountyfair.com/ or you can pick up a Fair Book at the Extension Office. Benny and I will see you there.

Stuart Reitz is a Malheur County Extension Office agent. The views and opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily represent those of The Argus Observer.

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Take a break fair days ahead - Ontario Argus Observer

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On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Doghouse – E-Flux

Posted: at 10:16 am

What does it mean to speak of postinternet cities or postinternet architecture? To invoke any post- term (postinternet, postmodern, post-technological), especially in the context of that trusty binary of utopia/dystopia, we seem to have an a priori whiff of the future. And yet the word alone reveals the truth of its pointing to a post hoc condition; of reflecting on something that has already come to be status quo.

When I began using the term postinternet over a decade ago to describe my own art work and that of my peers that I wanted to support, I had no inkling that I was starting a controversial movement or coining a term over which others would fight about the provenance, insisting it must have been this or that man that actually said the word before me or knew better what he meant than I did. I could not project that Kanye West would come to call himself the Postinternet Disney and describe his wedding seating chart as arranged according to postinternet philosophy, or that Id one day open the catalogue for an exhibition I was in and find anonymously quoted London gallerists laughing around a far away dinner table about wanting to kill me for having coined the term.

Image from The New Yorker,cartoon by Peter Steiner, 1993.

As I feel Ive now had to repeat endless times over the last decade, only to constantly read that postinternet art has yet to be defined, or to endlessly see people compelled to place the words so-called before the term, I was simply doing two things in using the word Postinternet":

1. Describing my own work, which was a combination of art made online and art made offline, after the internet, i.e. immediately after logging off and in the style of the internet, both celebrating and critiquing itmuch as I also did online, independently and in my pro-surfer work as a founding member of the collective Nasty Nets;

2. Working at Rhizome, an organization then about to celebrate its tenth anniversary of supporting internet art, I wanted to expand the mission statement to address internet-engaged art that could be offline or online. At the time, it seemed radical to propose that a painter, photographer, or textile artist could be an internet artist and that these underdogs could use our support. Who knew postinternet was about to be the most common submission theme at the Frieze fair?

Both of these sentiments were informed by my having been a part of the new media scene since the mid/late-1990s. It all came out of a zeitgeist in which Id been influenced by the other artists I was seeking to champion (not to mention the thinking of much earlier artists like Nam June Paik, who said even in the late 1960s, Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated), as well as curators & critics like Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Josephine Bosma, Jon Ippolito, and Lev Manovich, whod all expressed related sentiments, including the fact that new media was not really new anymore and the novelty had worn off. In a sense, these were organizers shoring up and riding a line between utopia and dystopia: Whereas theyd once gone out on a limb to identify experimental forms and practices in art, those practitioners were now starting to feel ghettoized in the small niche expression zones painstakingly carved-out for those using technology to make art, whereas the rest of the world was using technology to do everything.

I summarize this old story here for those readers unfamiliar with it and to draw out a point I feel might be germane to the discussion of postinternet architecture. One small, yet often overlooked aspect of the postinternet movement is its social context. In a broader art world in which curators are controversially including their partners in biennials and nepotism abounds, social connections are often a dirty joke, if not a secret, but I think it behooves those with an interest in city planning, architecture, and broader concepts of world-building to consider these social aspects when they draw on networked culture and aesthetics to design for the social and emotional needs of communities that are increasingly defined by their relationship to digital media. I do not mean to imply that nepotism was the word of the day and that it should also drive architecture, but rather that sharing, social bookmarking, the old saw that information wants to be free, and a spirit of internet friendship were the guiding ethos behind the genesis of the movement.

Sondra Perry,Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One, 2015.Courtesy of the artist.

Much as I referred earlier to the late-90s dichotomy between what new media artists were doing with technology and how the rest of world related to it, the reason that the term postinternet now refers to a status quo is that, certainly for those who are reading and exchanging the word (those whom I presume to be literate Westerners with access to the World Wide Web), the internet is a given. We know what it is, what it looks like, what its aesthetics and many of its inside jokes are about, and were not surprised when we see its vapors offline: Yelp stickers on restaurant doors, emoji magnets, Tumblr aesthetic bedsheets, etc. In fact, we increasingly see very little difference between online and offline, because the internet keeps our calendar of events, GPS helps us arrive at destinationsmoreover, technology often helps us be in two places at once, we live-tweet and Instagram experiences (if only in our minds and conversations), we punctuate our downtime by checking our phones for emails and texts, and as we so often joke, we never log-off.

If there is any reason at all to have a word like postinternet (and at this point, it really could be any word), it is to have a placeholder to discuss the situation of network conditions. Feeling unable to unplug (due to the forces of capital, the infrastructural reach of the grid, family expectations, FOMO, etc.) is but one of many symptoms of network culture, which may also include the perversion of the notion of transparency in the slippage between surveillance and software lingo; the dismissal of failure and the abject along with a conflation of disruption and experimentation; a naivet as to the physicality of infrastructures and the spatial logic of the net; the ongoing veiling of physical, intellectual, and affective labor involved in the production and maintenance of network culture and its participants; an outdated assumption that technological determinism is somehow teleological; and finally two that relate most to our purposes here: an overarching internet centrism, a la Jaron Lanier's cybernetic totalism that casts an anthropomorphic lens on the net privileging a singularity in which nature and technology are fusing in a misguided assumption that technology and the net will solve all of our emotional problems; and lastly a kind of eschatological cynicism of the doomedness of the network (and hence human cultures) that has led to the misnomer (and subsequent criticism) that "post-internet" refers to the death of the internet, a fallacious techno-apocalypse.

All of that said, to imagine planning for the city of the future in the context of designing postinternet architecture is to imagine designing for the singularitya moment in which the intelligence, creative, and emotional capacity of humans is seen to merge with or be surpassed by machines. It should be pointed out that this concept is defined by its speculative nature, and that various writers have cast it as utopian versus dystopian. As an artist and cultural historian of technology, my interest lies in the perseverance of the theory, as an artifact, and the way that it reflects and even affects (as a phantasmatic byproduct of programmers and developers who subscribe to the ideal) the way that we share information across social networks and the public sphere writ large. After all, these are our commons and the spheres around which we bounce and mold our ideas of public and private. In fact, I would argue that the introduction of metaspheresof online and offline spaces that are both real and different worldshave bifurcated these concepts so that we have more than one notion of public or of private. There can be private acts in public space, public records of very private information, an insistence on privacy that stands parallel to a persistence in frequent public disclosure.

Installation view of Signe Pierce, Virtual Normality, 2017.

Its almost as if the more we try to push toward these binaries, the more tenuous they reveal themselves to be. To give in to them is to be locked into a kind of Althusserian subjectivity that queer theory has described all too well as a non-choice. If we try to persist with frameworks of proposed heterogeneity that really offer only a sequence of either/or choiceschoose your own adventure: public or private, inside or outside, utopia or dystopia, skyscraper condo or suburban duplexwe may in fact be both liquidating all fantasy potential from the concept of the utopic and overriding the greatest creative tactic at the disposal of the overall schema of postinternet art, which falls under the rubric of appropriation.

To speak first to the latter, I mean to say that whether a work of postinternet art is online or offline, in any medium or duration whatsoever, part of its distinction as such is its participation in conveying, critiquing, existing under or during the conditions of network culture. The work itself is somehow part and parcel of those conditions, and one likely would not have to look hard to see those symptoms. This ability to appropriate at a sort of constitutive, DNA-level blows open the shutters on discourses of relationality, binarism, perspectivalism, and either/or states of being. This is where postinternet meets sci-fi meets 17D-modeling.

This is where we meet fantasy and look back to the future. The literary and film theorist Jos Esteban Muoz wrote, in Cruising Utopia, "The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and nows totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of the moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Muoz, a pioneer among queer theorists in arguing for a postbinary way of looking at the world, drew on close readings of multiple artists to expand the definition of queer to embrace a broad vision of an alternate reality: Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world."

I am not an architect, not a city planner, not even an engineer or psychic with a great sense of what the future holds. I am simply a city dweller. A resident. Ive called four countries home in my life, and numerous cities. Ive read and even taught all the great undergrad theories on the poetics of space and place, and their phenomenologies and semiotics too, but at the end of the day I find myself thinking more about Black Mirror and Tron and Tati than Bachelard or Merleau-Ponty when I think about the future and what I may or may not want in a living space. I think about FOMO vs JOMO (the Fear of Missing Out versus the Joy of Missing Out) while at home, isolating oneself from humans on a social network, and the relationship between windows in rooms and computer screen windows. I wonder about the smart devices were going to be living with and if they are going to be smart enough to trick us into actually going outside now and then, or to tell when were lonely or even dead, rather than just lying very still for a very long time, uploading and downloading material to and from our consciousness. I wonder how tall the buildings will need to be to accommodate our planets growing population, and sometimes I just imagine buildings like the ones we have now, copied and pasted many times on top of each other. I just wonder if we will be able to see this sky of ours that we keep polluting with new technologies and the factories that produce them in, and the server farms that run the social networks we use to organize our environmental protests on

But above it all I try to keep an open mind. I remember that those speculative forecasts about unregulated growth, the ones that would pitch our dwellings and computer brains into an endless scroll, are just speculation. Its not like we wouldnt be there to keep up with it. Its not like we wouldnt be participating in the design and appropriation, going along for the cruise. And its not like Im describing the status quo and not a future, right?

Post-Internet Cities is a collaborative project between e-flux Architecture and MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology within the context of the Utopia/Dystopia exhibition and Post-Internet Cities conference, produced in association with Institute for Art History, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Instituto Superior Tcnico Universidade de Lisboa, and supported by MIT Portugal Program and Millennium bcp Foundation.

Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work combines performance, video, drawing and installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture and the aesthetics of failure.

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On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Doghouse - E-Flux

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Robots are replacing managers, too – Quartz

Posted: at 10:10 am

A startup called B12 builds websites with the help of friendly robots. Human designers, client managers, and copywriters still do much of the workbut they dont coordinate it.

That job has been given to a software program called Orchestra.

As its name implies, Orchestra conducts a swarm of workers, most of whom are freelancers, and other robots to complete projects. When a client requests website improvements, which B12 sells a la carte, Orchestra generates a new Slack group, identifies team members who are both available and appropriate to complete specific tasks, and hands off work to humans and automated processes in the appropriate order. It constructs a hierarchy of workers who can check and provide feedback on each others work.

Automation is often associated with repetitive work such as torquing a bolt or combing through contracts during an audit. Orchestra and other systems like it demonstrate that the management of that work, and even work too complex to fully automate, also involves tasks with high automation potential. According to a McKinsey analysis, 25% of even a CEOs current job can be handled by robots, and 35% of management tasks can be automated.

The future of work may have become the hot topic, but the future of management may involve an equally drastic change.

Almost a decade of research on how to automate coordination and other managerial tasks has focused on managing crowds of freelancers, which with platforms like Amazons Mechanical Turk can be easily recruited from all around the world.

Employees at a company called MobileWorks (which now builds databases of sales leads and is called LeadGenius), for instance, published a paper with researchers at the University of Berkeley in 2012 describing a dynamic work routing system that automatically priced taskseverything from managing a Twitter account to digitizing stacks of business cardsand assigned them to qualified workers. Multiple workers completed the same task to help check for accuracy. If they disagreed, the task was served to other workers and, if they continued to disagree, marked for review by managers, workers who had already demonstrated high speed and accuracy. Workers who made a lot of mistakes were assigned to practice tasks until they improved.

At Stanford, a group of researchers (including Daniela Retelny, who is now B12s director of product) has published papers about how to coordinate crowds to complete projects that involve interdependent tasks, such as prototyping an app. One strategy, called flash teams, used software to automatically assemble a team of freelancers and hand tasks between them, like an assembly line. The process effectively turned napkin sketches into functional web applications and recruited users to test themall within a single day. Another called flash organizations, discussed in a paper published earlier this year, placed freelancer teams into a hierarchy and allowed members to suggest changes to the organizational structure as they worked. Those teams completed prototype designs for a card game, an app for use by EMTs, and a client training portal for use by a business services company.

B12 isnt the only company to incorporate these strategies. A startup called Gigster uses a similar system to build software and websites. Konsus, which offers business services such as data entry and PowerPoint design, has created automated workflows that hand work between its pool of freelancers and automated processes.

What all this means for the job of managing people within a company isnt necessarily straightforward. To the extent that we can build systems that aid coordination and awareness for teams performing routine tasks, that seems the most likely to reduce the need for managers, says Michael Bernstein, a Stanford researcher who is an advisor to B12 and co-authored the papers on flash teams and organizations. But to the extent that managers are providing informal and evolving coordination support, that will still be useful in my opinion.

A Bain report published in April suggested that by the end of 2027, most of a companys activity will be automated or outsourced.Teams will be self-managed, leading to a vast reduction in the number of traditional managers, the reports authors write. Employees will have no permanent bosses, but will instead have formal mentors who help guide their careers from project to project.

The report suggests new types of leadership will emerge. Rather than aiming to become a professional manager (to take expert bricklayers, so to speak, and make them managers of other bricklayers), top talent would shift to contribute directly to a companys service or product and communicate directly with each other rather than through managers (they should beguilds of bricklayers). In this new company structure, there would be multiple tracks for career advancement. Some tracks will recognize and reward the efficient management of routine processes, they write, while others, just as highly prized, will value the coaching and development of apprentices as they migrate from one role to another.

Roger Dickey, the CEO of Gigster, imagines a system that automates this type of career advancement for freelancers based on the quality of work (B12 already has some hierarchy of freelancers, as do LeadGenius and Gigster). Leaders can oversee as many as 20 projects at a time, offering guidance to their team, recommending bonuses to people who are doing well, coaching, training and jumping in when an issue is escalated, he wrote in a recent blog post on LinkedIn. Companies are then able to hire an entire team of freelancers to manage a project, knowing that there is a hierarchical structure in place to support them.

In any case, if we have truly entered a fourth industrial revolution, as the World Economic Forum recently declared, it follows that work wont be the only aspect of an organization to see sweeping changes.

Our philosophy is that anything that can be automated around these workflows will be, says Nitesh Banta, B12s co-founder and CEO. The efficiencies are too great not to automate.

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Robots are replacing managers, too - Quartz

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