#Allegheny Streak

[1863-project]

Meet the crew of the Allegheny Streak!

These five are the main characters of my current writing/drawing project, 21st Century Unlimited, about the crew of a modernized steam locomotive working towards making steam run in environmentally-sustainable ways whilst going for a speed record. They've received some retooling since I first introduced them here, and these are their most up-to-date bios at the moment.

I'm always happy to talk about these five as they run between Hoboken and Pittsburgh and back, so feel free to ask me any questions you have about them! My inbox is always open as I work on this project - hopefully some pages will be ready soon once my work schedule settles back down!

[foreverlogical]

Democrats secured victory in two state-level special elections this week, extending an impressive winning streak that Biden campaign officials cited today as they appealed to supporters to stop panicking about polls.

Why it matters: Down-ballot, low-turnout state elections aren't necessarily a harbinger for national contests. But the trend is unmistakeable: In 30 special elections this year, Democrats have outperformed by an average of 11 points, according to a 538 analysis of each seat's base partisanship score.

The analysis doesn't take into account the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, city elections and ballot referendums where Democrats have also dominated — largely by campaigning on abortion rights.

Driving the news: In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Democrats defended a one-seat majority in the state House for the fifth time this year, outperforming Biden's 2020 margin in an Allegheny County seat by eight points.

In New Hampshire, a Democrat won by 12 points in a district Trump narrowly carried in 2020, putting the party within one seat of ending the GOP's state government trifecta. The Republican who lost, Jim Guzofski, is an election denier who claimed "prophets" told him Trump won in 2020.

What they're saying: "You can keep talking about polls 14 months out, but this is what I've been looking at all year," tweeted Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina of the trend in special elections.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Snow Blankets Eastern U.S. After Arctic Blast

More than a week of storms and bitterly cold temperatures left a blanket of snow across much of the eastern United States. The winter weather was brought on by fronts of Arctic air that swept across the country in mid-January.

Starting on January 13, a cold front brought sub-zero wind chills to over 100 million Americans. The system dropped several inches of snow in parts of Mississippi and Tennessee and buried cities downwind of the Great Lakes in multiple feet of lake-effect snow.

Over the next two days, parts of Tennessee saw accumulations of 5 to 8 inches (13 to 20 centimeters). More than 6 inches fell on Nashville on January 15, breaking the city’s record for that date and exceeding its average annual snowfall of about 5 inches. Icy, snowy roads created hazardous driving conditions in the state, which led to a high number of fatalities, according to news reports.

Another blast of cold air plunged south from Canada and moved through the eastern U.S. on January 19 and 20, piling on more wintery precipitation. The skies cleared on January 21, 2024, when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image. The band of snow stretched from Mississippi to Maine.

According to the National Weather Service, 2 to 5 inches of snow remained on the ground near Baltimore, Maryland, on January 21. The snowfall in Washington, D.C., and New York City ended their two-year streaks without measurable accumulation. Around 2 feet of snow persisted on parts of the Allegheny Mountains.

According to the Weather Channel, snow has fallen in all 50 states as of January 17. They reported that the recent Arctic blast brought flurries to Milton, in Florida’s panhandle, and a previous storm left a dusting of snow at high elevations in Hawaii.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Emily Cassidy.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.9 (after 1900)

1914 – World War I: The creation of the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade, the first fully mechanized unit in the British Army. 1922 – The Greco-Turkish War effectively ends with Turkish victory over the Greeks in Smyrna. 1923 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, founds the Republican People's Party. 1924 – Hanapepe massacre occurs on Kauai, Hawaii. 1936 – The crews of Portuguese Navy frigate NRP Afonso de Albuquerque and destroyer Dão mutinied against the Salazar dictatorship's support of General Franco's coup and declared their solidarity with the Spanish Republic. 1939 – World War II: The Battle of Hel begins, the longest-defended pocket of Polish Army resistance during the German invasion of Poland. 1939 – Burmese national hero U Ottama dies in prison after a hunger strike to protest Britain's colonial government. 1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer. 1940 – Treznea Massacre in Transylvania. 1942 – World War II: A Japanese floatplane drops incendiary bombs on Oregon. 1943 – World War II: The Allies land at Salerno and Taranto, Italy. 1944 – World War II: The Fatherland Front takes power in Bulgaria through a military coup in the capital and armed rebellion in the country. A new pro-Soviet government is established. 1945 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Empire of Japan formally surrenders to China. 1947 – First case of a computer bug being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University. 1948 – Kim Il Sung declares the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). 1954 – The 6.7 Mw  Chlef earthquake shakes northern Algeria with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). At least 1,243 people were killed and 5,000 were injured. 1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. 1965 – The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is established. 1965 – Hurricane Betsy makes its second landfall near New Orleans, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10–12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to cause over $1 billion in unadjusted damage. 1966 – The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act is signed into law by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. 1969 – In Canada, the Official Languages Act comes into force, making French equal to English throughout the Federal government. 1969 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 863 collides in mid-air with a Piper PA-28 Cherokee over Moral Township, Shelby County, Indiana, killing all 83 people on board both aircraft. 1970 – A British airliner is hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to Dawson's Field in Jordan. 1971 – The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, eventually resulting in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison. 1972 – In Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, a Cave Research Foundation exploration and mapping team discovers a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making it the longest known cave passageway in the world. 1988 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 831 crashes in Khu Khot, Thailand, while on approach to Don Muang International Airport, killing 76. 1990 – Batticaloa massacre: Massacre of 184 Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan Army in Batticaloa District. 1991 – Tajikistan declares independence from the Soviet Union. 1993 – Israeli–Palestinian peace process: The Palestine Liberation Organization officially recognizes Israel as a legitimate state. 1994 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on STS-64. 2009 – The Dubai Metro, the first urban train network in the Arabian Peninsula, is ceremonially inaugurated. 2012 – The Indian space agency puts into orbit its heaviest foreign satellite yet, in a streak of 21 consecutive successful PSLV launches. 2015 – Elizabeth II becomes the longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom. 2016 – The government of North Korea conducts its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test. World leaders condemn the act, with South Korea calling it "maniacal recklessness".

[cavenewstimes]

How the Steel City became a vanguard of the progressive movement

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh is renowned as a city of bridges, industry and championship sports teams — and now, in a much newer development, as a powerhouse of progressive politics. Progressive candidates are in the middle of an eye-opening winning streak over more moderate Allegheny County Democrats who for decades had a firm grasp on power around Pittsburgh. In May, progressive state Rep. Sara…

[customerwint]

Mariners shortstop

In many ways, Young’s journey to the Major Leagues started. 20 in this year’s Top 250 Draft prospects from MLB Pipeline. 21 overall pick in the first round out of North Allegheny High School in the Pittsburgh suburbs. Either way, one thing is for certain… JP Crawford is raking right now. That left-handed cut belongs to Cole Young, the shortstop who the club selected with the No. Mariners shortstop Brad Miller has been named the American League Player of the Week. Hopefully, the answer lies in the middle, at his current average of. 160 hitter, but he also isn’t going to hit. 292/.336/.374, but was traded for Floyd Bannister to. If someone is going to rake like this though, I’ll take singles all day.Īgain, this is all a small sample size. Craig Reynolds (2.3) was the Mariners first shortstop and second all-star, making it in the 1978 season. There is a bit of a worry though, as Crawford has just one walk on the season, and has yet to hit anything other than a single, outside of the go-ahead double today. Mariners keep talking about top prospects, but the bottom line is they cant get to the playoffs with this team without starting to add veteran pitchers and. If he can keep it going it the latter half, it’s going to cap off a great finish to the road trip for Crawford. He has since gone 7-17 with a five-game hitting streak, including knocking in the go-ahead runs in the opening victory of a doubleheader against the Orioles as they won 4-2. Crawford will begin serving a four-game suspension tonight for his role in a brawl against the Los Angeles Angels last Sunday. Over the last five games, he has answered that question, laying waste to those doubting him. SEATTLE - Seattle Mariners shortstop J.P. Since then, JP Crawford has been one of the best hitters on the Seattle Mariners. For someone with a lackluster hitting history, you had to ride the line of concern or early-season small sample size. The defense was still there, of course, but the bat just hadn’t shown up yet. 160 batting average from going 4-25, with just one walk, one RBI, and three runs. Through the first seven games of the season, he was really struggling. Further than that, we wanted to know if he was going to be more than just a guy in the lineup, but that someone you could rely on as one of the best players on your team. The Mariners started opening day with good vibes for their future, announcing a five-year extension with 2020 American League Gold Glove shortstop J.P. Dissatisfied with the bullpen inadequacies, Mariners Manager Lloyd McClendon optioned starting shortstop Chris Taylor to Triple A Tacoma to bring up. We wondered a lot during the offseason if he was going to be able to provide enough offense for the team to be able to stick around at shortstop. SEATTLE - Seattle Mariners shortstop J.P. There were the first seven games of the season, and over the last five, he has looked like a completely different person for the Mariners. JP Crawford has had two different seasons up to this point. 1/9 Seattle Mariners Shortstop INKED Mug. Now, back to the regularly scheduled article. The Shortstop Mug holds 9oz of your favorite beverage - hot or cold. It is instead Dylan Moore, who he drove in as the go-ahead run. I know that isn’t JP Crawford in the picture. 715 OPS with 89 runs, 37 doubles, nine home runs and 54 RBIs in 2021, serving mainly as the Mariners’ leadoff hitter during the team’s first 90-win season since 2003.By Christopher O'Day 1 year ago Follow Tweetĭisclaimer. Crawford will take over shortstop duties after Dylan Moore was rested on the road. #SeaUsRiseĪfter winning the Gold Glove in 2020, Crawford continued to play stellar defense in 2021 while also making significant strides offensively. Crawford is batting ninth in Friday's game against the Texas Rangers. We have signed to a 5-year contract extension. I’ve said before that I’m here to win, and we’re going to win for a long time. “This place is going to be nuts when we do it. The 2001 Seattle Mariners team roster seen on this page includes every player who appeared in a game during the 2001 season. “Seattle is a special place for me, and I can’t wait to be a part of the team that brings a championship here,” Crawford said in the press release. Its team graphics and ombre design add a. Subpar production from both middle infield positions surely isn’t ideal, but it hasn’t. I feel really comfortable at shortstop because its the position that obviously Ive. The Mariners traded for Crawford in a swap with the Phillies prior to the 2019 season, and he has blossomed both in the field and at the plate, especially in the past two seasons. Cheer on the Seattle Mariners in style with this Shortstop Ombre raglan V-neck tee from G-III Sports by Carl Banks. Combined, Mariner shortstops have produced 1.6 fWAR on the season, a mark that’s 17th in the majors. Heres a look at second-ranked Mariners prospect Noelvi Marte.

[lizardtracks]

August

8/1/22: It’s August. Sirius, the Dog Star, has slid out of conjunction with the sun and escapes below the horizon ahead of the afternoon heat. For those of us with no escape, the Dog Days lay over the land like a vaporous malady. The Druids knew this to be a harvest season; the planet has turned a corner into autumn. I am off to harvest a boyhood memory.

To come along, go to the tiny town of Berlin in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Find a road once called The Old Plank Road. Yes, it was always old. To the highway engineer and the tourist, people who use roads as artlessly as a spinster uses a hammer, it looks like any other stretch of winding macadam two-lane in the Allegheny Mountains. To me, it seems like the footsteps of a small boy running barefoot through the collective memory of the German and Scotch-Irish settlers who lived there.

Pass the Ponfeigh Farm. The standard Herefords and Holsteins will be in the fields. With luck, a gray Percheron will be hanging its wide face over the top of a white board fence like a harvest moon. I ignore the dirt road to the right. It leads to other memories I will gather another time. 

Instead, I follow the Plank Road to an unpainted bus shanty still bearing the imprint of a steel arrowhead. The arrow went through a foggy November morning and a phantom deer on its flight to the shanty. When the wood impeded its flight, the arrow stopped abruptly, quivering in the damp, cold air like a rudely plucked guitar string. A young man still recovering from a skull fracture shot the arrow. He and his motorcycle had learned the three important laws of physics from a deer. From that moment on, with or without cerebral fluid leaking through his skull, he saw deer in places other folks did not.

The small boy later broke off the shaft, sharpened it and shot it from his own handmade bow into his sister’s head. Accidentally. Her hair, until that moment, had been just as tow colored as his. After that moment, it had crimson streaks in it. They matched the crimson welts that soon appeared on the buttocks of the small boy, the regularly appearing stigmata of culpable boys everywhere. The streaks on the buttocks soon disappeared, though the impression they left remained like marks from a pillow on a dreamless night. The crimson streaks in his sister’s hair never went away. The year was 1965. You will sense all this when you see the shanty.

At the shanty, a dirt road leads off to the right. The road is still dirt over half a century after the small boy last scuffed his shoes on it walking home from school in the third grade. The road follows a creek that was once waded by a pair of coverall clad boys, brothers, looking for crawdads. The progeny of the uncaught crawdads still troll the pebbly creek bottom. Driving counter to the creek, I let the dappled sunlight flowing across the windshield —from the birch trees, maple trees, hemlock trees, and blighted chestnut trees—bring on a dream state. I roll down the windows and breath in the wintergreen and the ferns.

The road crosses a culvert above a forlorn looking pond. The pond became forlorn looking by trying to imitate the faces of the cows that once drank from it. I’ll park here. Yes, it’s nothing but a derelict sidehill farm with an overgrown apple orchard. The apple orchard is what I want. You can cut across the orchard if you like. I’ll walk down the drive past the east side of the white clapboard house. As I pass the cistern maybe I’ll glimpse, through the screened window, the small boy’s mother canning peaches. The regulator on the heavy cast iron pressure cooker will be rocking furiously. Peaches are a delicate fruit. You must put them up right away. They go from fresh to ripe to rotten in a fortnight. So the regulator rocks furiously as basket after basket of peaches go into Mason jars for the winter.

Not so our apples. They are a sturdy fruit. You can pluck an apple off the ground and eat it until well after the first frost. Stored in a root cellar, they can add to the festivities and seasonal color of Christmas.

But this memory is not about Christmas. Not in August. Not with the keening of cicadas coming from every tree. I am here for a particular apple. A Sheepnose apple. This orchard has only one tree of that apple. The tree is near where the Model A truck sat. Most of the year it sat, its wheels chocked; its tires dry rotting; its engine drained of water. But once a year, just because, the small boy’s father refilled the radiator from the cistern, cranked the engine over and un-chocked the wheels. The family would clamber aboard the backfiring machine. Away they went, riding up and down the dirt road raising glorious rooster tails of dust. But mostly the truck made a platform for gathering Sheepnose apples.

The truck has long since become elemental, rusted into the ground. I will pick my apple today from on my tiptoes. And with a snap and swish of a branch now it is in my hand. The long conical shape, like a sheep’s nose, is covered in a thin garnet-colored skin flecked with gold. Sometimes they ripen to a deep purple. When I bite into it, it tastes like… Like what? Here the memory fades. I know that it is neither tart nor sweet. And that a bite taken neither snaps away in a juicy spray, nor slowly separates like drier apples. But I cannot recall the exact flavor, or sensation. Since then I have eaten hundreds of Red Delicious, maybe as many Granny Smiths, and dozens of Braeburns, Galas, Fujis, McIntosh’s, and Honeycrisps. But since then, I have never crossed paths with another Sheepnose. Fifty intervening summers have faded the memory, like a Polaroid left in a window sill.

With a sigh, I drop the prize apple on the ground for the field mice and ground hogs. Or the black bear I was sure lived in the abandoned coal mine in the most shadowy nape of the woods. I will harvest only part of a memory today. It was a good one. Though it’s hard to say how much was real and how much was simply snatched from the ether. That’s the problem with memory.

The sun is just touching the crest of the hill at Valhalla, a long gone sugarhouse. Maybe there is still enough daylight to head down the Old Plank Road, the pavement still warm, to someplace more recent and a little closer to home.


[spaceexp]

Researchers are using data from weather satellites to detect meteors entering Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA scientists are using lightning detecting instruments on weather satellites to find large meteors, called bolides, entering Earth's atmosphere. This map shows the 3,000+ bolides detected by the GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites since July 2017.

The new year began with a bang in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Early on New Year’s Day, many local residents heard a loud boom and felt the ground shake, prompting calls to 911. Allegheny County quickly acknowledged the event, noting that it wasn’t an earthquake or thunder and admitting “we have no explanation for the reports.”

The culprit was later confirmed by NASA Meteor Watch: it was a bolide, a very large, bright fireball (a meteor brighter than Venus). The meteor was estimated to be half a ton, a yard wide, and traveling about 45,000 miles per hour. When it exploded in the atmosphere, it released the energy equivalent of a 30-ton TNT blast that was recorded by detectors at an infrasound station near Pittsburgh.

While there are a few space-based bolide detection programs around the world, the majority are ground-based—including the NASA Meteorite Tracking and Recovery Network and the NASA All-Sky Fireball Network. Yet most bolides enter the atmosphere over the 70 percent of Earth that is covered by ocean.

“Bolides are rare and, due to the limited observational areas of ground-based systems, very few bolides are detected from the ground—perhaps only a couple a year,” said Jeffrey C. Smith, a data scientist at the SETI Institute and the principal investigator on a cooperative project with the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Bolide explosions are also very quick, typically lasting just a fraction of a second, so very fast detectors are needed.”

Recently, scientists figured out that they have such a detector, even though it was not designed to detect space rocks hurtling through the atmosphere. In 2018, astronomer Peter Jenniskens (also of SETI and NASA Ames) and colleagues showed that the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite could be used to observe the fleeting flashes of bolides. The GLM samples transient light at a rate of 500 frames per second. It can detect bolides from about 4 inches (1 decimeter) up to about 9 feet (3 meters) wide.

Two years ago, Smith and colleagues began developing and training a machine learning algorithm to have computers automatically detect bolides in GLM data. Their goal was to build a publicly available database of bolide events and their light curves—the trajectories and intensity of the light streaks they left across the sky. Smith and his team described their work in the journal Icarus in November 2021.

The map above shows the distribution of more than 3,000 bolides detected by the GLMs aboard GOES-16 and GOES-17 between July 2017 and January 2022. Blue points are bolides detected by GOES-16; pink points were detected by GOES-17. The lone pink point over the Atlantic Ocean was detected by GOES-17 during its commissioning phase before it was moved into its operational orbit over the West Coast.

Bolides that are observed by both GOES-16 and -17 are recorded in stereo. On the map, the slight offset between the stereo detections is due to the different perspectives from which they were viewed by each satellite. Stereo detection allows researchers to reconstruct the trajectories of the bolides through the atmosphere. These data, along with the light curves, are helpful for modeling how asteroids enter the atmosphere, break up, and impact Earth. Such data also can inform models that assess the risk of larger meteor impacts, while aiding asteroid population studies that improve our understanding of the evolution of the Solar System.

No humans observed the New Year’s Day bolide over Pittsburgh, where skies were overcast, but the GLM detected four bright flashes of light. It was not a particularly bright bolide or even the brightest one recorded that day, Smith said. The others were just over the ocean or in rural areas, where they were less likely to be seen.

“This is one of the great things about using a geostationary satellite—we can detect events in very remote areas that are missed by ground observers,” Smith said. The geostationary orbits of GOES satellites allow them to monitor the Western Hemisphere from 55 degrees north latitude to 55 degrees south. While the coverage is not global, it allows scientists to capture an unprecedented number of meteors in data that is accessible to the public. “Right now, GLM is the only accessible tool available to get hemispherical-wide coverage to search for bolides.”

Currently, the events identified by the computer algorithm are reviewed by humans before being added to the database. After several iterations of the program, the computer is getting pretty good at correctly identifying bolides. “Four out of every five detections we make is legit,” Smith said. “A very small amount of manual vetting is now necessary to weed out the false positives.”

The team’s goal is to improve the detection precision enough so that humans are not required in the process, Smith said. “Then we can automatically post our bolide detections very soon after the events occur, perhaps within a minute.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using NASA Bolides data courtesy of Jeffrey Smith/SETI. Story by Sara E. Pratt.

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Addiction Treatment Providers in Pa. Face Little State Scrutiny Despite Harm to Clients

This investigation is a joint project of KHN, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues, and Spotlight PA, an independent, collaborative newsroom dedicated to producing investigative journalism for all of Pennsylvania.

This story also ran on Spotlight PA. It can be republished for free.

When Ian Kalinowski was at work, his mom usually texted him. So when he saw her number show up as an incoming call around lunchtime one Tuesday, he figured it had to be important.

Now, more than seven years later, he remembers her screams, the shock and the questions she asked over and over again.

“Why are they saying this to me? Why are they lying to me?” Ian recalled his mom asking. “They’re telling me Adam’s dead. Why would they do this to me?”

Adam was Ian’s older brother. Growing up, it seemed they spent every second together. Football, hockey and tag filled long days outside their Pittsburgh home. When Ian moved away for college, he and Adam turned to online poker to stay in touch. Adam served as best man at Ian’s wedding, and Ian admired his brother’s artistic streak. Adam could turn any piece of paper into an origami swan. His mom’s home is still full of swans.

Adam’s struggle with opioid and alcohol addiction was painful for Ian to watch. The problems began, it seemed to Ian, after Adam dropped out of college and used drugs to deal with his depression. Adam sought treatment, and he relied on methadone for many years, but his problems continued. When he was 32, he typically drank dozens of beers each day. On Feb. 3, 2014, he entered a treatment center run by Addiction Specialists Inc., according to a lawsuit later filed by his family against the facility. The center, in a Fayette County strip mall, was about an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh.

Less than 24 hours after Adam made it to the facility, he was dead, according to expert reports from doctors in the family’s wrongful death lawsuit. Ian couldn’t understand what went wrong, and neither could his mom, still in denial on the other end of the phone call.

What his family didn’t know was that Addiction Specialists, often known as ASI, had a history of violating state rules. In a later federal investigation into the facility’s billing and drug distribution practices, a grand jury concluded that a litany of problems occurred at the business many months before and after Adam’s arrival.

In the wrongful death suit, a lawyer for the Kalinowski family alleged Adam wasn’t evaluated by a physician when he arrived at ASI, didn’t receive the medication or treatment he needed, became increasingly uneasy and anxious throughout the night and killed himself. An Allegheny County judge in December 2019 said the business, two of its owners — Rosalind and Sean Sugarmann — and an ASI physician were negligent in caring for Adam. The judge ordered them to pay over $1.6 million in damages, although Ian doubts they ever will.

ASI eventually shut down, two years after Adam died.

In recent interviews with KHN-Spotlight PA, the Sugarmanns denied responsibility for Adam’s death and maintained that ASI was a good facility. Rosalind said it helped a lot of people in a rural area with a high drug-overdose rate.

Addiction treatment facilities in Pennsylvania, like ASI, are licensed and regulated by the state to ensure they follow certain rules and keep vulnerable people struggling with addiction safe. Oversight used to fall to the Department of Health. But in 2012, the state created the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, a $125 million agency set up to give substance use the attention lawmakers felt it deserved.

At the time of Adam’s death in 2014, the department had taken few disciplinary actions against ASI. It had issued citations and required the company to submit plans to correct them. But the Sugarmanns told KHN-Spotlight PA that, at the time, they didn’t fear the state would shut them down.

Perhaps for good reason.

A KHN-Spotlight PA investigation found that the department has allowed providers to continue operating despite repeated violations of state regulations and harm to clients. More than 80 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of state government and court records revealed that the department lacks resources and regulatory power, uses an inherently flawed oversight system that does little to ensure high-quality or effective care, and rarely takes strong disciplinary action against facilities when so many Pennsylvanians need services.

The department has no standard criteria for when it should force facilities to serve fewer patients and, as of early April, had revoked just one treatment provider’s license in nearly a decade. It doesn’t, as a regular practice, compare facilities to see if any stand out for an unusual number of violations or the most client deaths. And since state inspections focus heavily on records, they can be tricked with fraudulent paperwork, former employees in the treatment field said.

This leaves Pennsylvanians — who suffer one of the highest drug overdose death rates in the nation — in the dark about which treatment facilities have troubling track records.

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Some advocates point out that overregulating or closing facilities could leave people suffering from addiction without options for care. But in the current system, state and judicial records show, some patients have received inadequate treatment or even died; certain facilities have fraudulently billed insurance companies; and owners rake in federal and state tax dollars, as well as private money from victims of the opioid crisis.

“Many of these rehab facilities are not properly run or supervised, and many are in it for the money,” said Peter Friday, an attorney who represented Adam’s family in their lawsuit. “These places have been unbridled.”

Who Polices the Providers?

Even though the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs provides the licenses that allow addiction treatment facilities to operate, Jennifer Smith, secretary of the department, said it has limited responsibility for them. Law enforcement agencies are often better positioned to take action against troubled providers, she said, and insurance companies that pay for services also offer oversight.

“It’s not our job to really police the providers,” Smith said in an interview. “Our function is to really try to enable them to meet the [state’s] requirements, and by doing so, enabling them to provide quality services.”

Yet, as the regulating body of these treatment facilities, the department collects some of the most critical information necessary to properly police them, including reports of client deaths and physical and sexual assaults.

Smith said most providers are trying to do good work. She said annual inspections ensure facilities meet safety standards, like having enough staff members and a building that’s up to code. But inspections are not meant to evaluate quality of care, she said.

The KHN-Spotlight PA investigation found the department makes little of what it knows about troubling facilities accessible to the public. Its website shows if a facility currently has a provisional license — a designation indicating the provider failed to meet several state requirements and will be inspected more frequently until it resolves those concerns — but not whether it ever received such a sanction in the past, for what issues, nor how they were resolved.

The department does not post the reports it collects about deaths and assaults, which represent some of the most concerning events at treatment facilities.

When KHN-Spotlight PA filed a public records request for those reports, the department shared only incidents that it decided did not warrant investigation. It said it could not provide the total number of such events at specific facilities since it doesn’t have aggregate data prior to September 2019, when it launched a new electronic reporting system. Even the available data from that new system provides an incomplete picture, as less than a quarter of treatment facilities had enrolled in the voluntary system as of March 2021.

Smith said people should pick facilities the same way they do primary care doctors, based on publicly available information, personal recommendations and discussions with insurers.

One of the main public resources the department offers is a website with reports from its facility inspections. Inspectors write these reports after a site visit, listing any violations of state regulations they found. But these reports provide a limited window into the daily reality for clients, as there’s no indication of which violations are more severe than others, and many regulations focus on building conditions and completion of records. One regulation, for example, mandates the temperature at which refrigerated food must be maintained.

In response to each violation inspectors find, the facility submits a plan to address it. If the facility fails to provide a plan or follow through on it, the department has two primary options: force the facility to reduce the number of clients it serves or issue a provisional license. If the department wants to permanently revoke a facility’s license, it must go through an administrative court process to get approval.

In nearly a decade before December 2020, the state issued provisional licenses to fewer than 80 facilities — less than 10% of providers— and forced only three to reduce their capacity, according to data from the department. In ASI’s case, regulators said multiple times that the company failed to document that it provided required counseling and other services. A department spokesperson said it didn’t force ASI to operate under provisional licenses before 2015 because the business submitted plans of correction the department found acceptable. Even if a facility has many violations, the department considers how cooperative it is in working to fix them, Smith said.

After a recent reorganization, the department formed a quality improvement unit with three employees, Smith said. The unit may work directly with treatment facilities but is meant to address broader prevention efforts and other addiction-related programs as well. The department is also working with a national company to provide an online platform where clients can leave reviews of facilities, starting in spring 2022.

But many employees and clients in the treatment field are skeptical of any long-term improvement. For years, they’ve seen troubled facilities make fixes, only to have the same deficiencies arise in later inspections.

The department’s own records show the cycle can persist for years.

Years of Citations, Little Action

At SOAR Corp methadone clinic in Philadelphia, inspectors from the state Department of Health first issued citations for unqualified employees in 2009, before the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs was created and took over inspections in 2012. Inspectors at the time also found one counselor who was responsible for 40 clients — above the state-mandated maximum of 35.

SOAR Corp responded by saying it had demoted an unqualified counselor, had hired another counselor to lower caseloads and would ensure future hires met the state’s requirements.

But state records show that within a year of those 2009 citations, the facility was cited three more times for similar issues: hiring an unqualified project director, overloading counselor caseloads and lacking enough medical personnel. Year after year, state inspectors found the same problems. Yet the state approved SOAR to open additional locations in Lansdowne, Levittown and Warminster in 2010, 2016 and 2018, respectively.

In interviews with KHN-Spotlight PA, a dozen former employees and nearly a dozen current and former clients across multiple SOAR sites complained about poor hiring practices and chronic understaffing as just two symptoms of their much larger concerns. They believed the company relentlessly pursued profits by getting as many clients in the door as possible, with little care for the quality of treatment.

The Philadelphia location has received three provisional licenses from the state, in 2012, 2019 and 2020, putting it among the 10 most frequent recipients of this sanction over nearly the past decade.

The former counselors felt that expectations to maximize “billable hours” led to their burnout. And they saw high turnover among staffers. The former and current clients said they sometimes went weeks without therapy or were switched from one overwhelmed counselor to another every few months.

Nicole Tihansky was a client at SOAR’s Levittown location for about a year until last fall. She said she waited more than a month before getting her first counseling session, and then was assigned about five counselors, one after the other.

“It makes you just want to get in and out of the session quickly, because you know you’ll get another counselor in a month,” she said.

Understaffing is a problem across the treatment industry, according to employees in the field. But former SOAR employees who have worked for multiple companies said SOAR stood out in their experiences for its high staff turnover and inadequate therapy.

“It’s not about therapy or addressing the needs of clients,” said Esther Kirshenbaum, a counselor who worked at the Philadelphia location from 2017 to 2019. “The attitude is to just get clients in here and make sure we get paid.”

In a statement, SOAR CEO Richard Mangano said the company “makes every effort to comply with local, State, and Federal regulations.”

KHN-Spotlight PA shared with SOAR a detailed list of more than a dozen allegations from their reporting, including violations of state regulations and putting profits over patient care. Mangano did not address them specifically.

“Soar Corp categorically denies any allegation or suggestion of wrongdoing. … Soar Corp has and will continue to work with DDAP to improve the important services it provides,” Mangano wrote, referring to the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.

In its responses to state citations in recent years, SOAR explained that clients didn’t show up to scheduled counseling sessions, and that services like drug tests and physician evaluations had been provided but simply not documented properly.

The Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs has never forced SOAR to decrease its capacity, nor have state officials initiated the administrative court process to permanently revoke its license.

Former clients and employees said state licensing inspections were announced ahead of time, causing a rush by SOAR employees in the days before a site visit to complete treatment plans, counseling notes and other required paperwork.

Nicholas Cucchiaro was a SOAR counselor from 2017 to 2018. He shared with KHN-Spotlight PA what he reported to the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs and the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General after he was fired. He told the agencies that a senior administrator at SOAR instructed him to make up counseling notes for clients who had gone weeks without an assigned therapist.

“These are notes from therapy sessions that never happened,” he said, adding he knew it was wrong but feared losing his job if he didn’t comply.

About a dozen other former employees and clients described to KHN-Spotlight PA their own experiences of similar practices, ranging from thrusting months’ worth of forms upon clients in the days before an inspection to backdating their paperwork.

The Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs and the attorney general’s office both agreed to look into the allegations, Cucchiaro said, but he didn’t hear of any consequences for SOAR.

The attorney general’s office told KHN-Spotlight PA that it reviewed “a small number” of complaints regarding SOAR and referred the matter to the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.

Smith, the department head, said that as a general matter it’s difficult to prevent facilities from falsifying paperwork, because state regulations require advance notice of licensing inspections. But if the department receives a complaint, it can conduct unannounced inspections, she said, and other facilities have been cited for fraudulent paperwork.

Unannounced site visits were made in response to the complaints at SOAR, according to a department spokesperson, and citations were issued for violations that did not include fraudulent paperwork. SOAR’s Philadelphia location received provisional licenses in 2019 and 2020, but as of mid-April all the company’s sites were operating on full licenses after remedying the cited issues.

A Growing Industry

One significant limitation on the department’s oversight is its inability to impose financial penalties on treatment facilities.

In contrast, the state’s environmental protection and health departments can fine polluters and nursing homes for violations.

A 2017 report from the state auditor general’s office urged lawmakers to allow the department to charge licensing fees and assess financial penalties, pointing to other states that do so. Smith told KHN-Spotlight PA that fining facilities would help weed out repeat violators.

A bill introduced in the Pennsylvania legislature to allow the department to generate licensing fees went nowhere two years ago. A similar measure was recently referred to the state Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

“I hope that it’s considered quickly as ensuring drug treatment facilities are given appropriate oversight is of utmost importance,” the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Judy Schwank (D-Berks), said in a statement. 

Meanwhile, with millions of dollars on the line, the treatment industry is growing in Pennsylvania. Over the past four years, the state has seen a net gain of about 40 facilities, the department said, bringing the total to more than 800 treatment providers. State budget documents suggest the industry’s client capacity has grown by about 5,000 over a similar period.

The Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs employed 82 people, including two dozen who conduct facility inspections, as of April. That's about half the number of dog wardens employed by the state to inspect kennels.

Smith said there is “adequate staff to perform our current licensing responsibilities.”

In December 2018 — the same year the department said it received complaints from former SOAR employees and clients — it approved the company to open a location in Warminster. Inspection surveys at the facility since have found it violated state rules by providing a certain medication without state approval and failing to provide the required hours of therapy to some patients.

A former SOAR supervisor who is still working in the treatment industry and asked not to be named doubts the state will ever take stronger action against the company.

“The state knows the demand for treatment and the demand for medication-assisted treatment,” the former supervisor said. “If you took SOAR’s license in Northeast Philadelphia and didn’t give them a provisional, you could be displacing 500 clients.”

The Need for Treatment

The urgency of the opioid crisis puts regulators in a tough position: If they shut down a facility, where will all the patients get treatment?

James McKay, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school who researches the efficacy of addiction treatments, said facilities that are committing insurance fraud or actively harming patients should be penalized. But the question becomes more complicated when judging how well a facility is serving its clients.

In Philadelphia, where there are many treatment programs, it might make sense to close one that has ineffective interventions, untrained counselors and many clients dropping out, McKay said.

“But if you’re out in the middle of the state and there’s only one treatment program in any reasonable distance, as long as they're not treating you badly, you’re at least going to get some support and meet others in recovery,” he said. “So much of this depends on what the other alternatives are.”

In western Pennsylvania, an inpatient detox and rehab facility called Clear Day Treatment of Westmoreland has received multiple provisional licenses since it opened in 2018. State inspectors have noted at least six incidents that involved drugs on the premises and have cited the facility at least twice for understaffing, writing that the lack of sufficient staff fails to ensure “efficient and safe operation.”

Despite these concerns, the facility is the only one in the county that provides detox services while allowing patients to stay on any of three medications for opioid use disorder. Many patients in the area need that service, said Colleen Hughes, executive director of the Westmoreland Drug and Alcohol Commission. (The commission is one of more than 40 agencies across the state that the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs contracts with to coordinate substance use services locally.)

The commission determined in 2017 that a lack of residential rehabs in the county was one factor delaying people’s treatment. Clear Day responded to a request for proposals to meet that need from companies that manage Medicaid-paid behavioral health for the state in that region. Clear Day has been awarded nearly $750,000 in state Medicaid funds left over from previous years to help with startup costs, according to Southwest Behavioral Health Management, one of the companies that put out the request.

Stephen Devlin, executive director of Clear Day, said in a statement that Southwest Behavioral Health Management closely monitored those funds, which helped the facility provide “much needed” addiction treatment services.

“State auditors have been diligent in ensuring that Clear Day addressed all deficiencies that have been identified during audits,” Devlin wrote, “and, further, that Clear Day provides strong and effective treatment to the individuals in our care.”

Hughes said her office has addressed the issues of understaffing and drugs on the premises with Clear Day through meetings and training sessions.

Smith, head of the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, said: “None of us want to see providers closing. We want them to be successful. We want them to be able to deliver the services for their benefit and for ours.”

Waiting for Consequences

In Fayette County, ASI came under fire from state and federal authorities in 2015.

The FBI raided the facility that October. The following January, a federal grand jury indicted one of the owners, Rosalind Sugarmann, and an ASI doctor on multiple counts of illegally distributing a medication to treat opioid addiction.

Nearly three months later, a counselor employed by ASI overdosed while staying at the facility, an attorney for the state later said in an administrative court filing against ASI. Ultimately, a bankruptcy case forced the business to close.

In late 2016, Sugarmann pleaded guilty to illegal drug distribution and health care fraud. But that hasn’t kept her and her family out of the recovery business. Less than a year after she was released from prison, Sugarmann — who has talked publicly about her own substance use decades ago — announced she was opening a recovery home.

“I’m not going to stop working with addicts ever. That’s my calling in life,” Sugarmann said in an interview with KHN-Spotlight PA. “Somebody helped me, and I help somebody else.”

But two families said Sugarmann failed their loved ones.

There’s Adam Kalinowski, who died at ASI in 2014, and there’s 37-year-old James Pschirer, who died of an overdose in a recovery home Sugarmann’s family operates. These homes offer peer support and often have curfews and rules designed to help people stay away from drugs after they’ve been discharged from inpatient treatment.

In Kalinowski’s case, Sugarmann said ASI reported his death to everyone it was required to. There’s no indication from department records that the state cited ASI in connection with his suicide.

(The Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs wouldn’t comment on Kalinowski’s case specifically but said it worked with the FBI to investigate problems at ASI.)

Neither Sugarmann nor her husband, Sean, mounted a defense against the Kalinowski family’s lawsuit in court. In a recent interview with KHN-Spotlight PA, Sean Sugarmann placed the blame for Kalinowski’s death elsewhere, saying that the facility was staffed correctly and that, given his eventual suicide, Kalinowski never should have been sent to ASI.

Kalinowski’s family also sued UPMC Mercy, the Pittsburgh hospital where he was treated before going to ASI, and affiliated entities, but resolved the claims against them through a private settlement, according to a family attorney. UPMC denied responsibility for Kalinowski’s death. In a pretrial court filing, an expert witness for UPMC directed blame at ASI, saying Kalinowski was well enough to be safely discharged to a residential treatment facility. That he wasn’t evaluated by a doctor, nurse or professional counselor when he arrived at ASI was a concern, the expert wrote, and “perhaps this tragedy could have been avoided” if ASI had provided a higher level of care.

More recently, Rosalind Sugarmann has faced criticism for her involvement with recovery homes.

In February 2019, while still under federal supervision, Sugarmann announced on a blog that she was “back in commission!!” and would open a men’s recovery home called The Second Act outside Pittsburgh.

A 2017 law gave the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs new power to regulate recovery homes in addition to treatment facilities. The state missed a June 2020 deadline to implement the voluntary licensing process but plans to roll out the program this year.

James Pschirer turned to The Second Act for a place to stay in the fall of 2019. His mom, Andrea Zack, helped him with rent, writing out a $250 check to Sugarmann, according to a photocopy of the check the family provided.

Then, on Nov. 1, 2019, James died inside the home from a fentanyl and cocaine overdose, a photo of the death certificate provided by his family showed.

Andrea and James’ sister, Amanda Pschirer, went to The Second Act to collect his clothes and personal items. Andrea kept the coins in his pockets, knowing he had touched them.

It wasn’t until after James’ death that his family found out about Sugarmann’s criminal conviction, they said.

Amanda knows her brother chose to use drugs, but she thinks he could still be alive if he had stayed in another home with better oversight. And she’s angry that nothing stopped Sugarmann from being involved with one.

“I am worried that someone else will die under her care,” Amanda said.

In interviews, Rosalind and Sean Sugarmann downplayed their involvement with The Second Act. “My kids are involved in the recovery homes,” Rosalind told KHN-Spotlight PA. “I’m not an owner there.” The business is registered in their children’s names, and Rosalind said she’s lived in Los Angeles since early 2020.

Still, Sean Sugarmann acknowledged helping his adult children manage the business, and said in March he was living in the men’s home at that time. One of his daughters referred questions about The Second Act to Sean. Rosalind promotes the business on social media accounts, encouraging people to move in. She told KHN-Spotlight PA, “I’m not gonna deny that I’m a consultant.”

Sean said an overdose death “could have happened anywhere, and I think it happens everywhere.”

Last fall, Amanda Pschirer reached out to state officials with concerns about recovery homes. But she said she didn’t receive a response for four months. The department said a computer glitch with an online form, discovered in January, caused the delay in responding to her submission and about 260 others.

Ian Kalinowski, whose brother died at ASI seven years ago, has followed Rosalind’s posts online and saw that she’s still involved in the recovery business. He’s outraged.

He and his family are still grieving Adam’s loss. Ian wishes his young children had gotten to meet their uncle. He doubts the ASI defendants will ever provide the $1.6 million-plus that the judge said they owe.

Ian recognizes that ASI’s leaders faced some consequences for problems at the business.

“But there have still been no repercussions for what happened to my brother,” he said of the Sugarmanns.

He’s not optimistic there ever will be.

Methodology: How We Investigated Pennsylvania’s Addiction Treatment Industry and Found Weak Oversight of Providers

Pennsylvania is at the epicenter of the nation’s opioid crisis, ranking among the top five states for overdose death rates and top 10 for number of adults suffering from substance use disorder in recent years, according to national data. And the addiction treatment industry there is growing.

Federal grants, state initiatives and Medicaid pump millions of taxpayer dollars into the field annually. The state has seen a net gain of about 40 licensed treatment facilities over the past four years, bringing the total to more than 800.

But an investigation by Spotlight PA and KHN found the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs — which licenses these facilities — provides weak oversight and lacks the resources and regulatory power to police them, allowing providers to continue operating despite repeated violations and harm to clients. The department has no standard criteria to determine when it should force facilities to serve fewer patients and, in nearly a decade, has revoked just one provider’s license.

Spotlight PA, an independent, collaborative newsroom reporting on the Pennsylvania state government and statewide issues, began investigating the oversight of addiction treatment facilities shortly after its launch in late 2019. The newsroom later partnered with KHN, a national organization that produces in-depth journalism about health issues.

Our team began by scraping thousands of facility inspection reports from the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs’ website. We then analyzed them to find the most egregious citations: ones that mentioned a failure to report patient deaths and assault, that noted medication errors or that revealed unsafe staffing ratios.

We also requested from the department historical data about which facilities had received provisional licenses — designations indicating that facilities have failed to meet several state requirements and will be inspected more frequently until they resolve those concerns. The department didn’t have an automated system to gather this data but agreed to compile it manually. It provided the information with the following caveat: “Due to incorrect data entered into the licensing database, the attached report may not include all provisional licenses since 2012. It is as close to accurate as we can determine base[d] on the available data.”

Additionally, the team filed an open records request for reports of unusual incidents. These are certain serious events that the department requires facilities to report, including client deaths and incidents of physical and sexual abuse, among others. The department provided reports of only those incidents that it decided did not warrant investigation. It said it could not provide the total number of such events because it doesn’t have facility-specific aggregate data prior to September 2019, when it launched a new electronic reporting system. Even available data from that new system provides an incomplete picture, as less than a quarter of treatment facilities had enrolled in the voluntary system as of March 2021.

Reporters also reviewed the department’s administrative court history to see cases in which the state had initiated legal action against a facility.

To further inform our reporting, Spotlight PA launched a public callout for readers to send in tips and concerns about facilities.

Using a combination of these sources — facility inspection surveys, provisional license history, administrative court cases, limited reports of unusual incidents and tips from the public — we compiled a list of 34 facilities that appeared to have the most troubling track records.

From the short list of facilities, Spotlight PA and KHN reporters then reached out to current and former employees and clients at various locations. The interviews helped establish whether people’s firsthand experiences matched the concerns that arose in the data.

Our reporters also reviewed the licensing applications that these facilities had submitted to the state, as well as lawsuits filed by clients and employees against the facilities. We interviewed former employees of the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs to understand the oversight system and challenges within the agency.

The final story was based on interviews with more than 80 people and a review of thousands of pages of state government and court records.

Spotlight PA is powered by The Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with PennLive/The Patriot-News, TribLIVE/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF Public Media. The independent, nonpartisan newsroom is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results: spotlightpa.org/donate

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Addiction Treatment Providers in Pa. Face Little State Scrutiny Despite Harm to Clients published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[1863-project]

Actually, on an OC note, a reminder that Engineer actually now has her own blog over at @ironhorsegirl and is more than happy to talk to you all when she's not driving or doing mechanical work!

She'll talk about steam locomotives, her friends, etc. if asked as long as she's not on the road!

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Looking for Lightning, Finding Fireballs The new year began with a bang in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Early on New Year’s Day, many local residents heard a loud boom and felt the ground shake, prompting calls to 911. Allegheny County quickly acknowledged the event, noting that it wasn’t an earthquake or thunder and admitting “we have no explanation for the reports.” The culprit was later confirmed by NASA Meteor Watch: it was a bolide, a very large, bright fireball (a meteor brighter than Venus). The meteor was estimated to be half a ton, a yard wide, and traveling about 45,000 miles per hour. When it exploded in the atmosphere, it released the energy equivalent of a 30-ton TNT blast that was recorded by detectors at an infrasound station near Pittsburgh. While there are a few space-based bolide detection programs around the world, the majority are ground-based—including the NASA Meteorite Tracking and Recovery Network and the NASA All-Sky Fireball Network. Yet most bolides enter the atmosphere over the 70 percent of Earth that is covered by ocean. “Bolides are rare and, due to the limited observational areas of ground-based systems, very few bolides are detected from the ground—perhaps only a couple a year,” said Jeffrey C. Smith, a data scientist at the SETI Institute and the principal investigator on a cooperative project with the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Bolide explosions are also very quick, typically lasting just a fraction of a second, so very fast detectors are needed.” Recently, scientists figured out that they have such a detector, even though it was not designed to detect space rocks hurtling through the atmosphere. In 2018, astronomer Peter Jenniskens (also of SETI and NASA Ames) and colleagues showed that the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite could be used to observe the fleeting flashes of bolides. The GLM samples transient light at a rate of 500 frames per second. It can detect bolides from about 4 inches (1 decimeter) up to about 9 feet (3 meters) wide. Two years ago, Smith and colleagues began developing and training a machine learning algorithm to have computers automatically detect bolides in GLM data. Their goal was to build a publicly available database of bolide events and their light curves—the trajectories and intensity of the light streaks they left across the sky. Smith and his team described their work in the journal Icarus in November 2021. The map above shows the distribution of more than 3,000 bolides detected by the GLMs aboard GOES-16 and GOES-17 between July 2017 and January 2022. Blue points are bolides detected by GOES-16; pink points were detected by GOES-17. The lone pink point over the Atlantic Ocean was detected by GOES-17 during its commissioning phase before it was moved into its operational orbit over the West Coast. Bolides that are observed by both GOES-16 and -17 are recorded in stereo. On the map, the slight offset between the stereo detections is due to the different perspectives from which they were viewed by each satellite. Stereo detection allows researchers to reconstruct the trajectories of the bolides through the atmosphere. These data, along with the light curves, are helpful for modeling how asteroids enter the atmosphere, break up, and impact Earth. Such data also can inform models that assess the risk of larger meteor impacts, while aiding asteroid population studies that improve our understanding of the evolution of the Solar System. No humans observed the New Year’s Day bolide over Pittsburgh, where skies were overcast, but the GLM detected four bright flashes of light. It was not a particularly bright bolide or even the brightest one recorded that day, Smith said. The others were just over the ocean or in rural areas, where they were less likely to be seen. “This is one of the great things about using a geostationary satellite—we can detect events in very remote areas that are missed by ground observers,” Smith said. The geostationary orbits of GOES satellites allow them to monitor the Western Hemisphere from 55 degrees north latitude to 55 degrees south. While the coverage is not global, it allows scientists to capture an unprecedented number of meteors in data that is accessible to the public. “Right now, GLM is the only accessible tool available to get hemispherical-wide coverage to search for bolides.” Currently, the events identified by the computer algorithm are reviewed by humans before being added to the database. After several iterations of the program, the computer is getting pretty good at correctly identifying bolides. “Four out of every five detections we make is legit,” Smith said. “A very small amount of manual vetting is now necessary to weed out the false positives.” The team’s goal is to improve the detection precision enough so that humans are not required in the process, Smith said. “Then we can automatically post our bolide detections very soon after the events occur, perhaps within a minute.” NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using NASA Bolides data courtesy of Jeffrey Smith/SETI. Story by Sara E. Pratt.

[samsterham]

I just finished reading The Graveyard Book by @neil-gaiman . It's easily one of my favorite books & has done wonders to ease my anxiety & the low-hanging sense of doom that has latched itself to & weighed heavily on my consciousness during quarantine . Me & K have coincidentally taken to long walks through Allegheny cemetery several times weekly. I've begun to acknowledge & photograph the physical remnants of it's residents, particularly those of notable visual aesthetic such as this, with a single copper streak down the side. Getting to know the dead & regularly walk among them has been beneficial practice in coming to grips with my own mortality, something I have fiercly & unsuccessfully grappled with since toddlerhood. Between the graveyard walks & The Graveyard Book, Death is slowly ceasing to be the impending threat & source of terror it always has been to me, and simply the next mode of existence, though, certainly not one I am eager to experience any time soon.

[whatmattered]

Successful entrepreneurs throughout the world

Successful entrepreneurs have revolutionised the world. It's not some thought that is stuck onto your subconscious mind. Entrepreneurs take the thought and execute on it. Entrepreneurship is about execution of thoughts. An entrepreneur is the individual who sees an issue in the world and promptly focuses on making the arrangement. They're the pioneers that strike out individually to improve society. Regardless of whether they're making jobs or another item, they always make a move to ensure world advancement. Whether startup entrepreneurs take care of an issue that many effort with every day, unite individuals in a way nobody has previously, or assemble something progressive that advances society, they all make them thing in like manner activity.  #Entrepreneur #Entrepreneurship #WhatMattered #DonaldTrump #SteveJobs #BillGates

Donald Trump as one of successful entrepreneurs

He began his career by effectively patching up a bombing complex than shocking occupancy rate, transforming it into a fabulous complex with a 100% occupancy rate. Succeeded again when a couple of years after the fact he took on a huge venture which the city of New York had neglected to finish, he was given a little spending plan, but most complete set and utilized not exactly 33% of the rest of the financial limit. Donald Trump as we know that he has not just a successful businessman, he's had his good and bad times, and he's been to a point where most entrepreneurs would have surrendered. In 1992 Trump had to sign a  bankruptcy plan because of the way that he couldn't make installments towards his obligations. Trump figured out how to not just escape his obligation and get his business out of obligation, yet he likewise figured out how to climb straight back up that stepping stool and become a multi billionaire. It has been evaluated that Donald Trump is worth approximately $2 billion.

William “Bill” Gates

The second richest man on earth, one of the most recognized names in the world, as much a big name as the pop stars and film stars because of his exceptionally open profile in also one of the most successful entrepreneurs. Bill has consistently been in the lime-light since he started his career route back matured 13yrs. Bill, Paul Allen and some others from secondary school began utilizing the computer of the time, the DEC PDP-10 was one of them. Bill, Allen and their companions considered the internal activities and making notes of coding language and attempted to decipher it to see how computers functioned. They were in the end restricted from the DEC PDP-10 after they were found abusing code "bugs". in the wake of finishing secondary school with a 1600 (top score) in his SAT's, he selected at the University of Harvard. While learning at Harvard Bill made another companion in Steve Ballmer, they have kept on being companions right up 'til today and Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft upon Gate's initial retirement. Bill chose to leave Harvard so as to go into business. he went out on a limb an immense that inevitably satisfied. Having picked up enthusiasm from MIT's chief Bill and Allen, made an emulator that kept running on a microcomputer to reproduce a computer they had no entrance  to show to Ed Roberts (MIT). They got it from MIT and started chipping away at their new business in 1975 with the company name "Micro-Soft" despite the fact that in 1976 they transformed it to Microsoft. During the time Bill and Allen made some astonishing headways in computer innovation and cooperated with some huge organizations. They propelled the first since forever duplicate of MS Windows. As we probably aware Microsoft turned into the standard in computer innovation and has now turned into the biggest computer data and innovation business in the world. Microsoft right now remains at $62.4 billion (2010) with Bill Gates have an individual fortune of around $53 million which he uses to support exceptionally noble purposes and charities; including his own, the Gates Foundation.

Matthew Boulton

Matthew Boulton was a pioneer in manufacturing, he was a long way from wealthy, his dad was a toy creator. At the age of 21yrs, he took responsibility for his dad’s business. He later leaving behind the toy trade. In the United Kingdom, he selling his merchandise any place he could. He purchased a bigger property for his developing business with inheritance he got from his dad. He bought Soho House a huge premises in Staffordshire. He soon became to be broadly referred for his perfectionist just as his numerous mechanical progressions inside assembling forms. Soho House before long turned into an unquestionable requirement see to the rich and amazing.  Later in life, Matthew became charmed by science and space science, and turned out to be notable for his work. He was additionally named as the Sheriff of Staffordshire before his death in 1809. When he passed on Matthew had turned out to be one of the wealthiest and most spearheading producers and successful entrepreneurs in the UK.

Ariana Huffington

The most persuasive and expert just as successful female inside the blogging business. she is additionally a writer of the disconnected assortment, composing a life story of Maria Callas in 1981. She later established the Huffington is which is presently liberal American news sites which he helped to establish with Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti. The site itself of some mass of important data in regards to governmental issues, business, way of life, and environmental causes just as media and entertainment news. Just as composing articles for the blog herself she likewise has the assistance from a significant number of her well known supporters. She has additionally won numerous awards through the Huffington post.

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was born into a typical lower-class family in Scotland, and lived in a weavers cabin, a little house. His family were experiencing close to starvation and poverty when William, his father, emigrated the family to Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the USA. The primary occupation he had was that of a bobbin kid. He Feeling this wasn't the profession for him he proceeded to turn into a telegraph messenger for $2.50 every week. He before long advanced to $4.00 every week at the time of 18yrs and through diligent work and fast improvement. In the long run he turned into an investor, contributing the cash he had spared throughout the years into Adams Express Company a messenger service. Carnegie later got offers in a vehicle business. He putting $40,000 of his own cash into Story Farm, a creek rich in oil. Before the year's over the speculation had paid of in profits to the amount of $1 million. Carnegie offered $40,000 to help construct a library in his local Dunfermline, he additionally gave $50,000 of his cash to a hospital college.  Presently a financial specialist in both oil and steel Carnegie was becoming very wealthy, and chose to compose his first book which sold more than 40,000 duplicates. His writing style and intelligence helped Carnegie become known as an extraordinary creator and writer. By 1898 Carnegie was worth more than $20 million and broadly offered $20,000,000 to purchase the Philippines from Spain in an offer to permit them independence. By the time of his death in 1919, Carnegie had turned out to be well known for his investments, his oil his writings and obviously his enterprising streak. With the cash he made from all his investments he died a very wealthy man his net worth being $350,695,653, today that figure would be about $300 billion.

Steve Jobs as one of successful entrepreneurs

He's actually adopted, yet that hasn't stopped him getting to be one of the best individuals in the world. First employment was quite a technician the combs lost control of the Apple computer company and was forced out. He at that point proceeded to frame another organization NeXT computers, he purchased "The Graphics Group" which was later named Pixar Animation, the $10 million. Apple computers organization chose to purchase the NeXT company for around $429 million, taking Steve occupations back to Apple as the organization's interim CEO. Oo as should be obvious Steve jobs has found real success.  Jobs had figured out how to persuade Steve Wozniak that it would be a smart thought to begin collecting computers and selling them on for a benefit. Inside only 4 years; the Apple Computer Company being established Apple turned into a publicly traded corporation. Jobs went on by a wide margin and in 1984 on January 26th occupations presented the principal Apple Macintosh. 

Henry Ford

He was born into a family of farmers. In his teenage years, his dad had given him a timepiece, which he later took to pieces just to check whether he could sort it out again effectively, which he did. He at that point began to do likewise with different people groups timepieces and in the long run he began to fix them as well. In 1891 he met with Thomas Edison who enjoyed his idea of an auto-mobile, so he allowed him to utilize his warehouses to manufacturer two vehicles. Later proceeded to fabricate his very own company so he could construct the autos all alone. The business went under however it didn't stop him. Ford went on to build the Cadillac Automobile company. After practically bombing a second time because of absence of offers and high obligations more accomplices came into the business and the name was changed to the Ford Motor Company. Current deals for the Ford gathering are presently a gigantic $190 billion.

Oprah Gail Winfrey as one of successful entrepreneurs

After being the subject of horrible sexual assault at nine years old; she later wound up pregnant, losing the kid during childbirth she was just 14 years old at the time. The following introduction was explosive and she before long wound up one of the most famous, most all around adored, and most expert individuals in media. Her entrepreneurial side seek after her. she established the organization Harpo Studios, which for those of you not understood is basically Oprah spelt in reverse. The business went on by a wide margin no doubt because of her TV profession which gave her a huge measure of promoting is every single day. She likewise helped to establish oxygen media which draws in more than 50 million watchers. Due to the majority of the skills she has, and her enterprising side she's figured out how to make an individual wealth $2.7 billion, hence being considered as one the most successful entrepreneurs.

Thomas Alva Edison

He was a poor child. he experienced an extreme ear infection that rendered him deaf in one of his ears. In the wake of turning into a minor big name for sparing a little child from being hit by a train, Thomas was extended to an employment opportunity as a telegraph operator. Thomas proceeded to make a large number of developments and licenses, flopping significantly a lot more times than succeeding. he built up the tin foil phonograph, in the wake of filling in as a broadcast administrator he needed to make a method for making a telegraph transmitter to work in an increasingly productive manner. He did this. Building up his thought further he proceeded to record a message through this implies making his first fruitful innovation that lead the route for some more. Thomas Edison was a patient and energetic man, roused by progress and indeed among successful entrepreneurs.

Larry Page

His parents were both computer science professors at the University of Michigan. Larry was an extremely fortunate individual. Larry met Sergey Brin. They turned out to be dear companions and in the end started a new business as partners in 1996, framing the organization Google Incorporated. Larry and Brin got their first money related support from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the fellow benefactors of Sun Microsystems, with the aggregate of $100,000. It was here that Page's "Web Crawler" was soon to turn into the search engine we know today. Larry and Brin ended up getting to be bothered by speculators, and they at last accepted $25 million from Kliener Perkins Caufield and Sequoia Capital. By 2001 Google, presently worldwide; was delivering benefits of over $100 million, and by 2003 had raised those benefits to $960 million a huge sum development in only two years! Google starting today is currently worth $172,399,800,300. Here are some more good reads: Titanic, Royal Mail Ship (RMS): A journey to remember Constipation? Causes, diet, home remedies & treatment Kidney stones: Types, symptoms, causes and treatment Hormonal Acne: symptoms, causes, types & treatment Diabetes: symptoms, treatment and prevention High blood pressure (hypertension) causes, symptoms & treatments What is Global warming? Effects, causes and prevention Doctor Faustus: tragic hero, morality and renaissance play Oedipus Rex: Story, summary, main characters & themes Halloween: Entertainment, Cosmetics, Costumes, Halloween Games

Conclusion

Beginning a business is tough, it's a difficult long distance race and factually, very few make it to supportability. In any case, attempting to accomplish supportability and after that productivity is just a test once you have a business thought. It can require some investment thinking of something you really need to do. Entrepreneurship is an important idea for those working and leading in associations and not only those beginning new ventures. This idea covers innovation, imaginative, technology and social enterprise measurements and presents the sorts and fundamental standards of business enterprise. Read the full article

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

This is the fourth in a series of articles examining the politics and demographics of 2020’s expected swing states.

Right now, Pennsylvania looks like the single most important state of the 2020 election. According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast, Pennsylvania is by far the likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the decisive vote in the Electoral College: It has a 31 percent chance of being the tipping-point state.1 (That’s what happens when you take one of the most evenly divided states in the union and give it 20 electoral votes.) In fact, Pennsylvania is so important that our model gives Trump an 84 percent chance of winning the presidency if he carries the state — and it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning if Pennsylvania goes blue.

Few could have guessed that the Keystone State would eventually become the “keystone” of the Electoral College,2 since going into 2016, Pennsylvania had voted for the Democrat in six straight presidential elections. More impressively, Pennsylvania had been more Democratic-leaning than the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1952. But both streaks were snapped in 2016, when Trump carried Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points — making it 2.9 points redder than the nation as a whole.

Is Pennsylvania now a Republican-leaning state?

How Pennsylvania has voted relative to the nation as a whole in presidential elections since 1952

Pennsylvania Year Dem. GOP Margin Nat’l Margin Penn. Lean 1952 46.9% 52.7% R+5.9 R+10.5 D+4.6 1956 43.3 56.5 R+13.2 R+15.9 D+2.7 1960 51.1 48.7 D+2.3 D+0.2 D+2.1 1964 64.9 34.7 D+30.2 D+22.4 D+7.9 1968 47.6 44.0 D+3.6 R+1.1 D+4.7 1972 39.1 59.1 R+20.0 R+23.0 D+3.0 1976 50.4 47.7 D+2.7 D+2.1 D+0.6 1980 42.5 49.6 R+7.1 R+9.4 D+2.3 1984 46.0 53.3 R+7.4 R+18.0 D+10.7 1988 48.4 50.7 R+2.3 R+7.6 D+5.2 1992 45.1 36.1 D+9.0 D+5.8 D+3.2 1996 49.2 40.0 D+9.2 D+8.5 D+0.7 2000 50.6 46.4 D+4.2 D+0.5 D+3.7 2004 51.0 48.5 D+2.5 R+2.4 D+4.9 2008 54.7 44.3 D+10.3 D+7.3 D+3.1 2012 52.1 46.7 D+5.4 D+3.9 D+1.5 2016 47.9 48.6 R+0.7 D+2.2 R+2.9

Sources: Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, Pennsylvania Department of State, U.S. House of Representatives

Pennsylvania’s eventual defection shouldn’t have surprised us, though. Non-Hispanic white people without bachelor’s degrees make up 55 percent of Pennsylvania’s population age 25 or older, and Trump accelerated their migration to the Republican Party in 2016. According to the Center for American Progress, the turnout rate among these voters increased from 53.0 percent in 2012 to 57.4 percent in 2016 — and they went from voting for Mitt Romney by 20.3 points to voting for Trump by 28.6 points.

Pennsylvania’s run to the right, however, has been a long time in the making. For much of the 20th century, blue-collar, white Pennsylvanians were considered part of the Democratic base. But the share of workers in Pennsylvania belonging to labor unions (which have historically played a huge role advocating and organizing for Democratic candidates) has fallen from 27.5 percent in 1983 to 12.0 percent in 2019, and many have blamed trade and environmental policies pushed by Democrats for the decline of the state’s manufacturing and mining industries.

Campaigns have also been forced to reconsider their conception of Pennsylvania’s political geography. The conventional wisdom was that western and eastern Pennsylvania were Democratic and central Pennsylvania was solidly Republican (memorably summarized by Democratic strategist James Carville’s quote that, between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was just Alabama). While this may have been true (at least politically) in, say, 2000, working-class western and northeastern Pennsylvania have slowly but surely been getting redder. As a result, Pennsylvania’s new geographic divide is between southeastern Pennsylvania and the rest of the state — in other words, the parts of the state that are culturally Northeastern and the parts that are culturally Midwestern or Appalachian.3

Granted, even this is an oversimplified description of Pennsylvania’s political divide. Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County is one of the few counties in the state that is getting bluer (the Midwest has upper-class suburbs too!). And Philadelphia County actually voted more Republican in 2016, despite having the state’s smallest non-college-educated white population (by percentage). This hints at another problem Democrats would like to solve: returning to their former strength among Black voters. (Philadelphia County is 44 percent Black.) According to CAP, Clinton won “only” 89.8 percent of the Black vote in Pennsylvania. That’s obviously very high, but it’s short of the 96.0 percent that Barack Obama received four years earlier — and those margins matter. If Clinton had matched Obama’s share of the Black vote, CAP found, she would have narrowly carried Pennsylvania in 2016 — even with her poor performance among white voters without a bachelor’s degree.4

Apart from winning back non-college-educated white voters or Black voters, some Democrats may see a third way forward in Pennsylvania: running up their margin in the suburbs. The other trend evident from the map above is that Democrats are gaining ground in the affluent, well-educated counties around Philadelphia. Philly’s four “collar counties” — Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery — went from voting for Obama by 10 points in 2012 to voting for Clinton by 14 points. But the problem for Democrats is that those four counties contain only 22 percent of Pennsylvania’s 2016 voters, and they are moving to the left far more slowly than the rest of the state is moving to the right. For example, the 24 counties in western Pennsylvania5 other than Allegheny contain a similar 19 percent of Pennsylvania voters, yet they went from voting for Romney by 18 points to voting for Trump by 32 points.

Of course, Democrats don’t have to choose just one group of voters to appeal to. Biden has been making overtures to suburban voters, Black voters and non-college-educated white voters — and there are signs he’s succeeding on multiple fronts. The last two polls (one Democratic, one Republican) to ask about the presidential race in Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District — which is almost coterminous with Bucks County — both gave Biden a 9-point lead in a suburban district Clinton carried by only 2 points. And a February poll by Mercyhurst University showed Biden at 48 percent and Trump at 44 percent in post-industrial Erie County, which Trump won by 2 points in 2016 — although Biden’s lead was still a far cry from the 16 points by which Obama carried Erie in 2012. And, in a stroke of luck for Biden, he may be uniquely positioned to reverse some of Democrats’ most severe 2016 losses: the 24 points shaved off the Democratic margin in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties. These counties are the heart of the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, where Biden was born, grew up and speaks of often on the campaign trail.

All told, Biden currently leads the FiveThirtyEight polling average in Pennsylvania by 4.9 points. Adjusting for demographics and the possibility of change over the next two months, our forecast projects that the Democrat will ultimately carry the Keystone State by 4.6 points. However, both numbers are closer than Biden’s lead nationally, implying that if the overall race tightens, Biden could fall victim to the same trends that made Pennsylvania so inhospitable for Clinton in 2016. In other words, it’s no coincidence that Biden’s 75 in 100 chance of winning Pennsylvania is nearly identical to his chance of winning the election: As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the Electoral College.

[1863-project]

I find I love drawing Engineer because I don't feel any obligation to make her "pretty." She's a weird little gremlin (affectionate) with eyebags and thyroid weight and an insatiable desire to drive locomotives as fast as possible, and since I don't feel like I have to keep her "pretty" for anyone I get to play with her facial expressions and whatnot a lot.

She feels more "real" that way, I think.