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Atole de elote is a warm corn drink from Central America. Student Jose Rivas wrote an essay about a weekly tradition of enjoying atole with his late father in El Salvador, and how the drink helped him to feel more at home after he moved to the U.S.
Becky Harlan
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Becky Harlan
Atole de elote is a warm corn drink from Central America. Student Jose Rivas wrote an essay about a weekly tradition of enjoying atole with his late father in El Salvador, and how the drink helped him to feel more at home after he moved to the U.S.
Becky Harlan
Washington, D.C.’s Capital City Public Charter School feels like a mini United Nations. Many of the school’s 981 students are first-generation Americans with backgrounds spanning the globe, from El Salvador to Nigeria to Vietnam. So when the staff of the literacy non-profit 826DC began a book-publishing project with the junior class, they picked a topic everyone could relate to that also left room for cultural expression: food.
Writing coaches asked students to think of a family recipe with a backstory — and then write an essay around that dish. The 81 recipes and their accompanying stories that resulted make up a cookbook of global cuisine with a heartfelt touch, revealing that storytelling may be the most important step in any recipe.
Some students shared tales of beloved dishes, the mere thought of which can make their mouths water. “As the steam from the macaroni rose, the smell seemed as if it had fallen from heaven,” writes Mark St. John Pete about his grandmother’s macaroni and cheese, eaten around a full table in Washington, D.C.
Others focused on less, uh, beloved foods. “I think tamales do not rot because they can be in a fridge for weeks and look the same,” says Rolando Fuentes, who lost his taste for the bundled packages of corn masa, from his mother’s native El Salvador, as a result of what you might call overexposure.
As the current class of 2017, many (maybe all) of these students are preparing to head to college. (Since graduating its first class in 2012, 100 percent of Capital City Public Charter School students have been accepted to college.) Writing these food-focused stories has helped the students become better writers, but it’s also forced them to delve into their identities and hone their reporting skills with their families, reinforcing important connections before they leave home.
In order to fill holes in their narratives, many of the young writers had to reach out to older family members for more information. When they didn’t know a detail or an ingredient, the writing coaches would encourage them to ask. “We’d say, ‘Talk to your dad about it,” explains 826 D.C’s Lacey Dunham. “And they’d say, ‘Well I did talk to my dad. We had a conversation, and he told me all this stuff. I had no idea.'”
On the last day of the project, the students celebrated their accomplishment with a potluck — each bringing in the dish they’d so thoughtfully written about. A few even read their stories aloud. “It’s a fun way to get students to think critically about who they are,” says Zachary Clark, executive director of 826DC, “to tell their stories through a mechanism where the outcome is everyone gets to eat.”
Excerpts from five of the 81 stories are below, recipes included:
Chidinma Lantion
Courtesy of Becky Harlan
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Courtesy of Becky Harlan
Recipe Origin: Nigeria
My mom came to this country on Halloween night in 1990 (she still doesn’t understand the purpose of the holiday); it was an experience. She was a petite, wide-eyed 18-year-old Nigerian who had never been out of the country, but who was brave enough to go into the unexpected. She was pushing towards another life outside of what her parents expected of her back home. It was dark and cold, and she felt as if the little children in masks were a projection of what she felt inside. She went to her cousin’s house in Rockville, Maryland, and the first thing they tried to feed her was pizza, but she was not having it. There were too many new and unusual flavors that she was not used to, all on one slice that she could not handle it. It just tasted artificial. So she made them go out in the middle of the night to get some okra soup because, after such a long journey to a foreign country, she needed something to remind her of her home and what she was used to. She needed the sliminess of the okra and chewiness of the cow skin to let her know, no matter how far away she was from home, no matter how much things changed, she would always have the comfort that the food would always be the same.
Janet Arevalo
Courtesy of Becky Harlan
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Courtesy of Becky Harlan
Recipe Origin: El Salvador
I always helped my mom make nuegados as much as I could … I would help her peel the yucca with a plastic knife. It took me forever but, you know, safety first. My face would lighten up brighter than the sun when my mom dropped the mushy balls of yucca into the roaring fire. The heat was so intense that over time my mom lost almost all of her lashes. I would help her pack them in bags of five, but I would always take a bite from one of them and put it back in. I called this taste testing for customers, satisfaction guaranteed. My mom would always laugh loudly at my shenanigans, you could hear it from miles away, but she would never get mad. How could I not bite those delicious nuegados itching to be eaten? The smell of the atado de dulce was like a pool of sugar that mixed with my saliva and the rest of the nuegados. (Of course, she took the bitten nuegados out, they had my cooties on them!) Then, after all the food was prepared, my mom would head out to the streets to sell her yummy food to the hungry people.
Idriis Hill
Courtesy of Becky Harlan
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Courtesy of Becky Harlan
Recipe Origin: United States
As a child in junior high school, my mother loved chili. A couple blocks away from her school, there was a concession stand owned by a man named Mr. Steven. Mr. Steven was a skinny African-American man who wore a hat and had a mustache. He was always happy and took pride in his “shop,” which was just a small stand. Every day after school, my mom and a couple of her friends would go to Mr. Steven’s hot dog stand because he sold the best chili she ever had. He told her that you couldn’t get his chili anywhere because it was his wife’s homemade recipe.
After becoming an adult and living on her own, my mother was determined to re-create the chili she remembered from Mr. Steven’s stand.
Ana Nguyen
Courtesty of Becky Harlan
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Courtesty of Becky Harlan
Recipe Origin: Vietnam
In a country filled with many diverse cultures, I always felt like the outcast at school. When there was a potluck for Christmas or Thanksgiving, I was the kid who brought a bag of chips, not because I couldn’t bring cooked dishes, but because I lived in a Western culture with a Vietnamese background. I’m in a country mainly dominated by foods my family doesn’t normally cook. When I was little, I never ate cereal for breakfast. I would have it as a rare snack, without milk. The few times I brought my culture into the school, I received remarks like, “It looks weird,” “It made me want to barf,” and “What is that?” …
One day, two of my close friends came over. They were your average Hispanic-American teenagers. It was mid-July and over 90 degrees outside, around noon. The three of us sat around a small table in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen. Then, my mom brought in chaÌo for us to eat. The preparations began in my mind. I prepared my mom an excuse as to why they wouldn’t eat it. Why I would probably eat most of it. Why I would ask her not to share Vietnamese food with my friends. I watched as they both took a sip of the alien soup. A long silence passed — in reality several seconds — and I hesitantly asked, “How does it taste?” To my surprise they loved it.
Jose Rivas
Courtesy of Becky Harlan
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Courtesy of Becky Harlan
Recipe Origin: El Salvador
Even though I was born on March 26, 1999, I feel as if my life didn’t start until I was 5 years old. Although many people go as far as to say that they remember everything since they were in the womb — which, by the way, I find a little unreliable — I do have some memories of when I was a little boy. One of my most vivid memories is drinking atole de elote in a small restaurant in El Salvador near the neighborhood where I used to live. Atole de elote is made out of corn and milk. There are some traditional beliefs that surround the making of atole de elote. It’s believed that only one person can stir the atole de elote or it will taste bad, and that pregnant women and anyone in a bad mood can’t stir it because it will make the atole de elote taste bitter.
See the rest of the 81 recipes featured in 826DC’s Delicious Havoc here. To download the recipes in this post, click on the title of the recipe.
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The US Senate yesterday voted to eliminate privacy rules that would have forced ISPs to get your consent before selling Web browsing history and app usage history to advertisers. Within a week, the House of Representatives could follow suit and the rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year would be eliminated by Congress.
So what’s changed for Internet users? In one sense, nothing changed this week, because the requirement to obtain customer consent before sharing or selling data is not scheduled to take effect until at least December 4, 2017. ISPs didn’t have to follow the rules yesterday or the day before, and they won’t ever have to follow them if the rules are eliminated.
But the Senate vote is nonetheless one big step toward a major victory for ISPs, one that would give them legal certainty if they continue to make aggressive moves into the advertising market. The Senate vote invoked the Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress eliminate regulations it doesn’t like and prevent the agency from issuing similar regulations in the future. For ISPs, this is better than the FCC undoing its own rules, because it means a future FCC won’t be able to reinstate them.
Unless the House or President Donald Trump oppose the Senate’s action, ISPs will not have to worry about any strong privacy rules getting in the way of using your browsing history for profit. There won’t be any specific rules requiring them to get opt-in consent before sharing browsing history, even if that data is related to just one customer instead of being aggregated with other customers’ data in order to anonymize it.
Senate Democrats warned before yesterday’s vote that ISPs will be able to “draw a map†of where families shop and go to school, detect health information by seeing which illnesses they use the Internet to gather information on, and build profiles of customers’ listening and viewing history.
The Senate vote was 50-48, with every Republican senator voting to kill privacy rules and every Democratic senator voting to preserve them.
ISPs can’t see encrypted traffic, so if you visit an HTTPS site, ISPs will see only the top-level domain rather than each page you visit. But that’s still plenty, said Dallas Harris, an attorney who specializes in broadband privacy and is a policy fellow at consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge.
ISPs might be able to figure out where you bank, your political views, and your sexual orientation based on what sites you visit, Harris told Ars.
“You don’t need to see the contents of every communication†to develop efficient ad tracking mechanisms, she said. “The fact that you’re looking at a website can reveal when you’re home, when you’re not home.â€
An ISP might notice that a particular tablet often visits children’s websites. From that, “they can infer that this tablet then belongs to a child,†and deliver advertising targeted to kids. “The level of information that they can figure out is beyond what even most customers expect,†Harris said.
The legal changes all stem from the FCC’s decision in February 2015 to reclassify home and mobile ISPs as common carriers. The reclassification had numerous effects: It allowed the FCC to impose net neutrality rules, but it also stripped the Federal Trade Commission of its authority over ISPs because the FTC’s charter from Congress prohibits the agency from regulating common carriers.
Before the February 2015 reclassification, ISPs could have been punished by the FTC for violating customers’ privacy. But following the FTC rules wasn’t too onerous—the FTC recommends opt-in consent before selling or sharing the most sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, financial information, and information about children. But ISPs could use an opt-out system for everything else, including Web browsing history.
ISPs “want to be the advertising powerhouse.â€
The FCC’s reclassification of ISPs removed FTC authority but imposed privacy requirements from Title II, Section 222Â of the Communications Act. The problem is that Section 222 was written in 1996 for telephone service, so the FCC said it would write new broadband-specific rules explaining exactly how Section 222 would be enforced on ISPs. Those rules, including the opt-in requirements, were finalized in October 2016.
Theoretically, Congress and the FCC could return jurisdiction to the FTC by eliminating the privacy rules and eliminating the ISPs’ common carrier classification. But even that might not work, because a federal appeals court ruling in August 2016 said that any company with a common carrier business cannot be regulated by the FTC at all, even when they’re offering non-common carrier services. The common carrier designation is also used for landline phone and mobile voice service; that means ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint could be entirely exempt from FTC oversight. Comcast and other cable companies are only common carriers for Internet service, so they could more easily go back under FTC oversight.
But even if the FTC regains jurisdiction, its guidelines are weaker than the FCC’s privacy rules. Thus, yesterday’s Senate vote could leave us with no rules preventing ISPs from selling your Web browsing histories to advertisers and data brokers without obtaining opt-in consent.
The most prominent example of an ISP monetizing customers’ browsing history comes from AT&T. Starting in 2013, AT&T charged fiber Internet customers at least $29 extra each month unless they opted into a system that scanned customers’ Internet traffic in order to deliver personalized ads.
AT&T killed this “Internet Preferences” program shortly before the FCC finalized its privacy rules. But that doesn’t mean ISPs are giving up on advertising.
ISPs “want to be the advertising powerhouse, which is why they fought so hard against these rules,†Harris said. “They want to compete with Google and Facebook and other edge providers in the advertising space. This is going to be their new frontier, a new way for them to increase their profits.â€
ISP lobby groups have argued that privacy rules would prevent them from showing Internet users more relevant advertising via “data-driven services,†and would prevent ISPs from competing in the online advertising market. They’ve argued that Web browsing and app usage history should not be classified as “sensitive†information.
Advertising lobby groups, knowing that they could end up working more closely with ISPs, recently thanked Republican lawmakers for taking steps to kill the privacy rules.
AT&T sells advertising via its AdWorks division, which boasts of “more targeted†ads to “more screens,†via TV set-top boxes and online video. Comcast sells online advertising that can appear on xfinity.com and NBC sites. Verizon boosted its online advertising technology when it purchased AOL, and is trying to finalize a purchase of Yahoo.
“They’ve already begun marketing [to advertisers], explaining how they have the ability to track you on four devices,†Harris said. “Because they’re also your cable [TV] providers, they can combine what you’re watching on TV with what you’re doing on the Internet and looking at on your phones and your tablets. They’re heavily invested in this idea that they have a lot of data that can be valuable to advertisers and want to build up that part of their business.â€
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People around the world depend on their EpiPen to work in the case of life-threatening allergic reactions. But two people recently found out the hard way that their EpiPens were faulty. As a result, the makers of EpiPen are recalling over 81,000 EpiPens in Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and…
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Anna O. Szust is not a real person. She is, literally, a fraud: oszust means “fraud†in Polish. Nonetheless, Szust has been appointed as an editor at 40 bogus academic journals. After sending out her fake application for an editorial role, the researchers responsible for the world’s nerdiest sting operation began to receive responses almost immediately. “Four titles immediately appointed Szust editor-in-chief,†report Piotr Sorokowski and colleagues in Nature this week.
At legitimate journals, editors play an important role in quality control. They decide whether a paper is worth sending out for peer review, and, if so, who is best qualified to review it. Then they decide whether to publish it, based on the advice of the reviewers. A high-quality journal has rigorous editors who work to ensure higher-quality science, which helps to stop bad science—ranging from the silly to the truly dangerous—from getting the approval stamp of publication and peer review.
Bogus, predatory journals, on the other hand, are not concerned with quality; they’re concerned with making a buck or ten thousand. They take advantage of legitimate open access scientific journals, which often charge a fee for publication in order to cover their costs; papers are then made available without a subscription.
Predatory journals invite researchers to publish in the journal, also for a fee. Except the papers go out without proper editorial oversight or peer review. To make this work, they “aggressively and indiscriminately recruit academics to build legitimate-looking editorial boards,†write Sorokowski and colleagues.
Many academics treat these kinds of recruiting e-mails as a kind of weird, niche spam, but they represent a pretty big problem. Predatory journals may fool young or isolated researchers who don’t have proper mentorship or guidance. These researchers pay money to publish in a journal that ultimately does their career little good, while the journals spew out poor-quality research and stomp on the reputation of open access as a whole. By 2014, nearly half a million articles had been published in journals like these.
Just as problematic, the public often can’t tell the difference between legitimate scientific publications and the junk published in predatory journals.
The point of the sting operation was to shed some light on how journals like these function. Anna O. Szust was a pretty half-hearted fake, and no journal worth its salt would have brought her on as an editor. Her CV listed degrees and book chapters, and she had social media profiles but no published academic articles, no experience with peer review, and no previous editorial roles. Sorokowski and colleagues sent her CV to 360 journals, 120 of which had been blacklisted as predatory, 120 of which were traditional, and 120 of which were open access.
The responses from the 40 predatory journals that accepted the application were eye-popping. “One journal spotted that Szust’s cover letter stated that becoming an editor would allow her to obtain a degree that she had listed as already having obtained,†the authors write. “That journal nevertheless appointed Szust as an editor.â€
Many of the journals that did accept her application did so on condition that she pay them or publish her own papers with them (paying the accompanying fee). Some offered to share the profits of new journals or conferences with her, while some wanted her to recruit new researchers to publish in their journals, like some kind of scientific pyramid scheme.
Perhaps even more disconcertingly, eight of the 120 “legitimate†open access journals accepted Szust’s application. These eight journals hadn’t been blacklisted as predatory. Sorokowski and colleagues report that as of this month, when they submitted their write-up, six of the eight remained on the whitelisted Directory of Open Access Journals, despite a large-scale purge of whitelisted journals that turned out to be predatory or otherwise unethical.
This points to a big part of the problem: it sometimes isn’t immediately obvious whether or not a given journal is a scam. Existing whitelists are helpful, as are other online tools like the Web of Science, but ultimately, it’s up to researchers to check on the reputation of a journal before they publish in it. With pressure to publish at fever pitch, it’s unsurprising that predatory journals have such a strong grip.
Nature, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/543481a  (About DOIs).
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Turning sunlight into power is a surprisingly tricky thing. Experiments in academia have created solar arrays that can capture up to 40-percent of the sun’s energy and convert it to electricity, but consumer cells are notably less efficient. At best, silicon-based technology has a theoretical 29-percent efficiency ceiling — meaning any consumer panel in the low 20s is doing pretty well. Still, we’re inching ever closer to the technology’s limit. Researchers at Kaneko corp recently announced that they’ve developed a silicon solar cell with a record-breaking 26.3 percent efficiency rating.
The score is only just barely higher than the previous record of 25.6, but that 0.7 percent gain is no easy feat. Researchers had to analyze what factors in current cell design was keeping the technology from reaching its theoretical limits. The group decided that reducing optical loss was the best path forward, and moved low-resistance electrodes to the rear of the cell to increase the amount of photons that could be captured.
That’s a lot of technical jargon, sure — but the big win here isn’t just that the cell is more efficient, it’s that the more productive silicon cell was produced using the same kind of production process used for consumer sells. In other words, this isn’t just an experiment, it’s something we might actually see on the market soon.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Nature Energy
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The United States Endangered Species Act is often considered to be the most powerful piece of environmental legislation not just in the US, but in the world. As a result, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) formally lists a species as either threatened or endangered, it can be a game-changer for the species in question, protecting and even recovering a plant or animal that would otherwise be headed towards extinction. Such an action usually garners a fair amount of notice among conse
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