region:northern california

Fight fires with indigenous knowledge, researchers say | PLACE
▻http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=aed310f3-cbef-46b1-a503-94a6ab5f6f48

ah ces primitifs qui ne connaissent rien de rien...

“The best firefighting equipment in the world cannot stop the most devastating wildfires. An effective weapon to prevent uncontrolled wildfire is knowledge,” the report said.

Indigenous people, who manage nearly 900 million hectares of land worldwide, hold “highly sophisticated” knowledge of fire management, the report noted.

Indigenous groups around the world deliberately light small fires throughout the year, which reduces the amount of fuel, preventing wildfires from spreading rapidly.

“Small controlled burns can reduce the impact and threat of catastrophic wildfires,” lead researcher Andrew Davis told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In the Brazilian savannah, the number of dry season fires decreased by 57 percent after fire services started collaborating with indigenous tribes, according to the Prisma Foundation.

The U.S. Forest Service formed a partnership with the Yurok tribe in northern California last year, after a fast-moving wildfire killed 43 people.

#feu #incendies #savoir-faire #peuples_autochtones #climat

Amazon needs to come clean about racial bias in its algorithms
▻https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17384632/amazon-rekognition-facial-recognition-racial-bias-audit-data

We shouldn’t be using unaudited facial recognition systems on public streets Yesterday, Amazon’s quiet Rekognition program became very public, as new documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California showed the system partnering with the city of Orlando and police camera vendors like Motorola Solutions for an aggressive new real-time facial recognition service. Amazon insists that the service is a simple object-recognition tool and will only be used for legal purposes. But even if we (...)

#Amazon #algorithme #CCTV #Rekognition #biométrie #facial #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance (...)

##ACLU

Northern California teacher placed on leave after encouraging discussion of school shooting protests - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/03/rocl-a03.html

Northern California teacher placed on leave after encouraging discussion of school shooting protests
By Dan Conway
3 April 2018

The killing of 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida last February has become the catalyst for mass protests of student youth in the United States and internationally. The demonstrations herald a radicalization of young people and the entrance of a new generation into the political arena.

On March 14, the one-month anniversary of the Parkland shooting, more than 1 million high school students walked out of class to protest gun violence and mass shootings in the US. Some of the protesters limited their actions to limited calls for gun control legislation and “get out the vote” drives. Other protesters pointed to a broader culture of violence, particularly the never-ending US wars in the Middle East and the increasing militarization of American society.

#états-unis #californie #éducation #armement #manifestation #résistance #punition

Raging wildfires in California - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2017/10/10/raging-wildfires-california/GtkTUeIILcZeqp5jlsLTMI/story.html

http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1200w/Boston/2011-2020/2017/10/10/BostonGlobe.com/ReceivedContent/Images/CALIF_WILDFIRES_1_1598437.jpg

Destructive fires in Northern California have killed at least 21 people and destroyed at least 1,500 buildings, leaving devastating scenes in their path. More than 150,000 acres have been burned, forcing the evacuation of up to 20,000 people. Hundres of people are recorded missing and the fire gained momentum as winds picked up on Wednesday.

#le_grand_incendie

Rain runoff may have undermined Oroville Dam’s concrete spillway, report says - LA Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-oroville-dam-cause-spillway-20170216-story.html
▻http://www.trbimg.com/img-58a67289/turbine/la-me-oroville-dam-cause-spillway-20170216

Officials have estimated that fixing the spillway could cost $200 million or more. Because the spillway has been used to reduce the water levels at the reservoir, officials said they still need to assess the level of damage.

Records show the same section of spillway was repaired in 2013 but do not provide details.

Large swaths of Northern California are on track to experience their wettest winter on record, with many areas having already surpassed their average precipitation for an entire year. A new series of storms is set to hit the Oroville area over the next few days. But officials are confident they’ve drained the reservoir enough that the rains won’t overwhelm it a second time.

With the reservoir’s water level down more than 30 feet since Sunday and getting lower, Croyle said at a news conference Thursday that engineers will slow releases down the Oroville Dam’s damaged main spillway from 100,000 cubic feet of water per second to 80,000 cubic feet per second over a period of several hours.

The reduction will allow crews to move into the concrete channel to clear out trees, branches and other debris that has clogged the spillway and forced the downstream hydroelectric plant to go offline, Croyle said.

There was no estimate on when the power plant would be back up and running, but it will probably not be before Monday, he said.

Meanwhile, the herculean effort to reinforce the emergency spillway before more rain arrives used a caravan of helicopters and trucks to fill three deep fissures in the dirt hillside with rocks and cement.

Les menaces intermédiaires ne sont jamais prises suffisamment en compte. La culture de sécurité est en perdition.
#environnement #barrage

The Internet Age Began on August 9, 1995
►http://www.litkicks.com/AugustNine

http://www.litkicks.com/sites/default/files/augustnine500.jpg

Two separate things happened on August 9, 1995, both by chance emerging from Northern California though they had little else in common. The first was a scheduled event: the initial public offering (IPO) by Netscape, a startup tech firm designed to make software to power the Internet.
...
I remember walking through the hallway at work that morning, probably heading for a coffee refill, when I saw a clump of co-workers and magazine editors talking anxiously. I thought they were talking about the Netscape IPO, but they weren’t. “Jerry Garcia died,” one of the editors said to me. “We need to replace the front page and get a new headline up, stat.”

#USA #internet #grateful_dead #histoire

Yet another huge wildfire is consuming southern California - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/17/yet-another-huge-wildfire-is-consuming-southern-california/?tid=sm_tw

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/08/17/National-Enterprise/Images/AFP_F29FI.jpg

As firefighters began to finally contain a huge wildfire in northern California, an even larger monster erupted in the southern half of the state, forcing major highways to be closed and schools shuttered as flames devoured homes. More than 82,000 residents were ordered to evacuate.

The so-called Blue Cut fire in rural San Bernardino County, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, started late Tuesday and, accelerated by drought-parched vegetation and breezy winds amid triple-digit temperatures, grew so fast Wednesday that sheriffs deputies raced door-to-door to move residents out of its path. As of 9 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, the 30,000-acre fire was burning out of control with zero percent containment.

#Californie #incendies #sécheresse #climat #anthropocène

Deep Cables — Disruption Network Lab
►http://www.disruptionlab.org/deep-cables

Uncovering the Wiring of the World
June 17-18 · 2016
The 8th event of the #Disruption Network Lab at Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin. Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Funded by: Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin, Senatskanzlei, Kulturelle Angelegenheiten / City Tax.
In partnership with: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
In cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien.
Pre-Lab 1.6 at SPEKTRUM, Bürknerstraße 12, Berlin-Kreuzberg.

In collaboration with: NOME, Wau Holland Stiftung, Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE), Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). With the support of the Free Chelsea Manning Initiative Berlin.

Entrance 5€ / day. In English language.

In August 2015 Henrik Moltke and a team of journalists from Pro Publica and the New York Times revealed intimate details of the National Security Agency’s decades-long partnership with the telecom giant AT&T. A seemingly innocuous detail in a random document allowed the team to pin down the elusive collaboration, referred to by codename in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A cable severed by the 2011 earthquake in Japan caused an outage, after which NSAs ‘collection’ - or tap - on the cable resumed. The date matched the repair on the northern leg of the Japan-US Cable, one of a handful of main arteries connecting Asia and the US. At the end of the cable is an anonymous looking industrial building, far off on the Mendocino coast of Northern California. The cable station is operated by AT&T. Under the motto “Follow the cables”, Henrik Moltke recounts how he retraces the physical footprint of deep state secrets.

In this presentation, Henrik Moltke and Trevor Paglen will trace a link between the imaginary concept of “The Internet” and the present configuration of geopolitical wired structures, where big data, cloud computing, mass surveillance, and the monopolies of big corporations are intertwined. By disclosing through photography the development of transatlantic and undersea fibre-optic cables, and reconnecting the past with the present by charting the hidden infrastructure of information technology, this event will expose the inner functioning of the modern business of cable infrastructures, showing the global dimension, as well as the invisible sites of the physical Internet.

etc.

#Berlin #événement #réseaux

Your Legacy on Earth May Be a Plant - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/your-legacy-on-earth-may-be-a-plant

http://static.nautil.us/9251_a2ce8f1706e52936dfad516c23904e3e.jpg

Where I grew up in northern California, we were surrounded by the remains of Gold Rush towns, now subsumed into the wild rye. I used to look for these places on old maps and then search them out by car and on foot; sometimes the only sign I had arrived was a single blackened chimney or a gravestone smothered in weeds. But in springtime, when the first flowers are opening up all over, the remnant I remember is the daffodils.Most people don’t realize how easy it is, when it comes down to it, for almost all signs of their existence to be wiped from the landscape. Fields turn into forests in less than a generation, if properly neglected. Houses are overtaken with creepers and birds’ nests and their roofs grow mossy and sag groundward after enough heavy rain. Within ten minutes’ drive of our (...)

How a ’New World’ Would Look to One of the Most Famous Pagans Alive
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/how-a-new-world-would-look-to-one-of-the-most-famous-pagans-alive

The average writing day for pagan author Starhawk seems apt for someone whose spirituality is embedded in the magical qualities of nature. The 64-year-old wakes up in her northern California home...

Water & Vice: Producing Intoxicants in an Era of Extreme Drought - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/water--vice-producing-intoxicants-in-an-era-of-extreme-drought

http://static.nautil.us/6677_9d741ec37c2318c1bcff253bbe7ab92b.jpg

California is thirsty. The state is in its fourth year of a drought that is especially severe, by any measure. For instance, an April 1 snowpack measurement, a key indicator of surface-water supplies, was lower than any year on record, going back at least to 1950. Dry statistics aside, you can grasp the scope of the problem in an instant with the many before-and-after photos of California’s reservoirs and waterways. What were once tree-lined shores of large lakes are now high ridges overlooking swathes of exposed, dried lake bed and the muddy remnants of formerly flush basins. The land itself is thirsty. Lake Oroville, a reservoir in Northern California, photographed in 2011, during a period of plentiful water (left), and in 2014, during the state’s relentless drought (right).California (...)

Visions cartographiques alternatives des Etats-Unis

The 124 states of America

▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/12/31/the-124-states-of-america

ecessionist movements are all the rage these days. A handful of counties in Colorado tried to secede from the rest of the state earlier this year. There’s an attempt to create the State of Jefferson (northern California/southern Oregon) via ballot initiative in 2014. And there’s plenty more.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/files/2013/12/Smallmap.png

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Which of the 11 American nations do you live in?

►http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/files/2013/11/upinarms-map.jpg

#états-unis #cartographie #visualisation #perception #imaginaire #vision_cartographique

““They have enormous opportunities to cash in on their Washington experience, sometimes in ways that fund further innovation and other times in ways that might be very troubling to many people,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “Both sides like to maintain a myth of distant relations. The ties have been in place for a long time.””

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/technology/the-pentagon-as-start-up-incubator.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&

#siliconvalley #hacker #CIA #NSA #FBI #sécuritéinformatique