Whitney Mutch was one of 50 protesters, organized by the Gainesville chapter of National Women’s Liberation, who filled the 13th Street CVS on May 17. They demanded that the morning-after pill be available over the counter. Photo by Pete Self, 2013. Courtesy of National Women’s Liberation.

The meeting place was secret. To know the location, you had to send an email to the chair of the Gainesville chapter of National Women’s Liberation (NWL) stating your purpose. The emailed response stated the meeting time, location and necessary background information.

“PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL,” the email warned receivers, “OR INFORMATION ABOUT OUR MEETING LOCATION FOR THE FLASH MOB.”

The Gainesville chapter was organizing secretly, just like other chapters around the country, for NWL’s Week of Action. From May 13 to 17, NWL and Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD) staged various protests demanding that women of all ages have access to the morning-after pill over the counter.

Last Friday was Gainesville’s turn to take part in the week of protests. More than 50 protesters gathered on the first floor of the Shands Hospital parking garage, their voices creating a low hum while they waited.

Not everyone was a NWL member: Although Judy Etzler has lived in Gainesville for 40 years, she never joined its NWL.

“But this one was irresistible,” she said.

For as long as she can remember, Etzler has been a feminist: When she first became a part of the work force, women could only be nurses or secretaries. As an act of personal protest, she refused to learn how to type.

While Etzler offered a clipboard to protesters to sign in, Kendra Vincent, chair of the Gainesville chapter of NWL, gestured for attention. The crowd gathered around her in a pre-protest huddle.

“Change comes from everyday people,” she said to the 50 gathered. “And look at all these everyday people.”

The crowd applauded, bouncing echoes throughout the garage.

Vincent’s directions were clear: small groups will be assigned something to “shop for” and sent into the store. Once protestors hear the chant begin outside, they will join in in the change and converge on the family planning aisle where Stephanie Seguin, NWL leader, will make a brief speech. Protestors will then place their props, small medication boxes doctored to look like the morning-after pill boxes, on the shelf. Then they will leave, chanting once again.

The fight to allow the morning-after pill has been long, said Seguin who is also a plaintiff in the court case to make emergency contraception available without age restrictions.

“In England, they deliver it to you,” Seguin said as part of her speech in the family planning aisle. When she went to France, she saw government workers on bikes passing out condoms and emergency contraception, showing the two forms of contraception as equal.

In the United States, Plan B became the first emergency contraception drug to be approved for prescription use in 1999. In 2006, it was made available over the counter for women 18 or older. In 2009, the Federal Drug Administration lowered the age restriction to 17.

In 2011, the FDA approved Plan B One-Step for all women who can potentially become pregnant, following a review by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. However, the Department of Health and Human Services overruled the FDA’s decision, stating that the research did not contain sufficient data to show that young girls could responsibly use the drug. The age restriction remained for those 17 and older.

In early April, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman issued a court order to make Plan B available over the counter to women of all ages, rebuking the health department’s decision. The Obama Administration appealed Korman’s order, but lowered the age restriction to women age 15 and up.

The protesters were directed to enter the CVS on 13th Street in groups of three. Whitney Mutch, a member of NWL, was directed to look for nail polish with two other women.

As soon as the women entered the CVS, they quickly found the nail polish display. Mutch picked up a bottle, holding it up to the light.

“They have the designer type we were—”  she paused, hiking her eyebrows up and down. “Looking for.” She glanced at a fellow protester conspiratorially. They both giggled.

Over the aisles, many familiar heads were beginning to appear. Over the course of a few minutes, the population of the CVS tripled. Regular customers were unfazed; the neutral, canned music maintained a normal shopping experience—until the chanting began.

“What do we want?”

The protesters picked up the cue, shouting back, “The morning-after pill.”

“Where do we want it?”

“Over the counter.”

Mutch and others collected in front of the pharmacy where Seguin gave a speech explaining the protester’s demands.

“I am here to put this morning-after pill on the shelf next to condoms,” Seguin said. “For all men and women to buy.”

Seguin and other protesters placed small boxes made to look like emergency contraception on nearby shelves; then they promptly exited, chanting, “Old enough to get pregnant, old enough to decide.”

“It was inspiring to see so many people,” Mutch said later, as the group debriefed at the Civic Media Center. “It was fantastic; the feeling of sisterhood.”

The post Battling for Plan B appeared first on The Fine Print.

If you’re a human, though, it might feel strange to drink something labeled “for pet consumption only.” It’s a loophole that farmers have to use in order to sell unpasteurized milk to consumers.

“It don’t make sense to me,” said Chris Campbell, an employee of Wainwright Dairy, a family farm that sells both raw and pasteurized dairy products. “I can sell raw-milk cheese and nobody cares about that, but the milk itself has to be labeled.”

The company’s cheese is aged for 60 days below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which keeps bacteria from growing. But to kill bacteria, such as E. coli, the United States Department of Agriculture recommends heating foods to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. That heating process is known as pasteurization.

Raw milk, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like: milk straight from the cow’s udders — nothing added.

Since the raw-milk cheese is refrigerated for nearly two months, does that make it less dangerous?

According to Mary Sowerby, IFAS extension agent, “Aged (over three months) raw-milk cheese has usually had enough salt added for preservation to kill most pathogens.” Raw-milk cheese that is not aged is on par with raw milk, she added.

Wainwright Dairy’s pasteurized milk is heated to 145 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, the least allowed by law, Campbell said. Keeping milk as close to its natural state as possible is better for you and tastes better, he said.

The farm doesn’t skimp on feeding its cows either. Crops are grown year-round for the cattle to graze on. In the winter, the cows get rye grass. Other times of year, the cattle are supplemented with corn, but not the dried kernels that have been stockpiled in a silo. Carl Wainwright, the owner of the farm, travels to purchase non-genetically-modified corn from Amish people. When it’s harvested, the entire plant, including the leaves and stalks, are ground up into a product known as silage.

Sowerby grew up on a farm drinking raw milk herself. Since she encountered many of the same bacteria that the cows did, she said she built up the antibodies to prevent her from getting sick from common bacteria.  Now that she knows the risk involved, she only drinks pasteurized milk.

Sowerby said that when it comes to raw milk, “ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re probably fine.”

But then there’s that 1 percent of the time that you get something like E. coli or tuberculosis. While tuberculosis is virtually eradicated in livestock, she explained, it still exists in wildlife. When an infected deer or antelope grazes or urinates on the same grass that a dairy cow grazes on, the cow can become infected and the disease passed through its milk.

Campbell, on the other hand, drinks raw milk. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone else to drink it; they’d have to make that decision for themselves.

Even worse than pasteurizing milk, Campbell said, is the process of homogenizing milk. When milk is in its natural, non-homogenized state, the thicker cream rises to the top. Some people use that high-fat cream to make butter. But the dairy industry puts the milk under high pressure to break down the molecules, so that the nutritional content and flavor are consistent.

While Campbell admits that he’s not an expert, in the research he’s done, he said that homogenization puts the milk molecule under so much pressure that it “breaks the fat molecules down to where your body can’t reject it.” For that reason, Wainwright Dairy does not sell homogenized milk.

“God designed the stuff,” Campbell said. “Let it be.”

The post The Raw Truth appeared first on The Fine Print.

Hundreds of logs lay on the uncovered ground at the post-treatment storage area of the Koppers Superfund site when it was still in operation. The wood treatment facility coated the wood to be used for phone poles and rail road tracks in chemicals such as arsenic, pentachlorophenol and creosote. Photo provided by Robert Pearce. 

The final remediation plan for the Koppers Superfund site awaits a federal judge’s approval, but some citizens demand more

The Stephen Foster neighborhood used to be an orange grove — rows upon rows of lush, green trees bearing sweet citrus fruits. Neighbors, some of whom are still living there today, would gather fruit for a freshly-picked snack or chat under the shade to pass an afternoon. This was the 1940s.

Today, those rows of trees have been replaced by chain-linked fence bearing signs stamped in red: “WARNING! NO TRESPASSING! CONTAMINATED AREA.”

The residents won’t plant, let alone eat, fruits or vegetables grown in their own backyard. They have been warned not to. The Florida Department of Health has advised anyone who comes in contact with the area’s soil or creek water to immediately and thoroughly wash their skin.

The Stephen Foster neighborhood frames the westernmost side of the Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, one of the country’s most polluted hazardous waste sites as designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, in 1983.

It all began in 1916, when a wood treatment facility, Koppers Industries, Inc., was established on the corner at Northeast 23rd Ave. and Northwest 2nd St. The facility, which was shut down in 2009, manufactured the telephone poles and railroad posts. They were plastered in chemicals to preserve the wood. These toxins included arsenic, creosote, pentachlorophenol, dioxins and copper arsenate, which are classified as carcinogens, mutagens and teratogens.

These chemicals have leached into the soil, nearby creeks and have even percolated into the superficial Hawthorne and Floridan aquifers.

“You’re looking at a volume of contaminated soil that would fill literally several Ben Hill Griffin Stadiums,” said Robert Pearce, president of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Association.

Contaminants from the 90-acre Superfund site have been blamed for disease, water pollution and decimated property values. Farinda O’Steen, who has lived next to the superfund site since 1986, blames them for the death of husband, who passed in 2006, battling seven cancers and nearly $1 million in medical bills.

The Final Decision

Two years ago, the EPA resolved a final record of decision on the clean-up requirements for Koppers. It’s 703 pages long with an abridged version available as a three-page fact sheet.

This February, the public submitted their final input on the consent decree to EPA representatives, who then forwarded it to federal court.

While the final consent decree is a major milestone in the Koppers’ history, it is only the beginning. Implementation of this $90 million clean-up plan will begin once the consent decree is approved, however modified or intact the judge accepts it.

Accounting for both on-site and off-site remediation, Scott Miller, the EPA remedial site manager for the Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, estimates the entire process will be completed in five years.

The consent decree holds Beazer East, Koppers’ parent company, legally responsible for cleanup of the Koppers site and all polluted off-site soils, which are estimated to stretch as far as a two-mile radius from the site, according to a study by a lab hired by environmental justice attorneys.

Affected off-site properties, as outlined by the EPA, don’t extend quite as far. Their boundaries include roughly 100 homes, spanning from Northwest 23rd Ave. north to Northwest 32nd Ave. bound by Northwest 6th St. to the east and the Koppers property line to the west.

Beazer East has resolved to remove six to 12 inches of soil on the affected properties and replace it with new soil. The properties will also be re-landscaped according to the owner’s preferences.

The contaminated soil will be moved across the fence to reside on the Koppers Superfund site under a “low-permeability cap/cover over the consolidation area,” as the decree states, to protect against rain leaching and contaminant migration.

“Eventually things leach, containers break down, and impermeable surface aren’t so impermeable,” local resident Amy Schwarzer told the EPA at the consent decree meeting.

Miller said work on these sites won’t actually begin until December or January and should be entirely finished within the three to four weeks following.

On-site contaminated soils will also be stored in this consolidation area, surrounded by a vertical wall extending 65 feet down into the Hawthorne middle clay layer. 75 feet deeper lies the Floridan Aquifer — the source of drinking water for all residents of Alachua County, who make up just a fraction of the total 19.2 million Florida residents depending on this aquifer for drinking water.

In 2003, arsenic was found at 30 parts per billion, three times higher than the federal drinking water standards.

“We want our aquifer protected for all of the residents,” said Maria Parsons, a member of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood Protection Group.

“We want the polluter to buy out our toxic homes so residents can stop suffering and start living again,” she told the EPA during February’s consent decree meeting.

Some of the residents of Stephen Foster neighborhood don’t want to settle for merely a clean-up. They demand relocation.

The EPA, however, has not made a buyout an easily accessible solution in Koppers’ case.

“We have an option that allows for the voluntary purchase of homes between the private party and the individuals, if they come to some agreement,” Miller said.

The EPA deals with Superfund sites under the presumption that they clean things up, not relocate people, he said.

Yet, in the past, entire neighborhoods and even towns deemed too toxic for human health have been bought out and evacuated. This has happened with Superfund sites in Pensacola, Florida; Times Beach, Missouri; Niagara Falls, New York — the list goes on.

A Bleak Future

The future of the Koppers post-remediation is looking gray — quite literally slated with concrete. The City of Gainesville has zoned the area for mixed-use development once Beazer East is done with the cleanup; it’ll soon be paved over with shops, apartments and offices.

“It should be part of the city,” said City Commissioner Thomas Hawkins. “Changes to the site won’t prohibit future productive use or development. We really need to look at how that land use will be the best for the Gainesville community.”

Miller sees the neighborhood being made better. Having lived there for 27 years, O’Steen is not so optimistic.

“The place is turning into a slum,” she said.

O’Steen’s heard it all. “Why don’t you just move?” people ask. The property values have been shredded, and even if someone wanted to buy her Koppers-side home, she’d have difficulty palming it off.

“Do you think that as a human being — as a mother, as a grandmother — that I would sell that house or rent it to another human being, knowing that it could make them sick? Knowing what it did to me and my family?”

Her home has become a burden.

“[The remediation is] going to be messy,” said Pearce. “Nobody’s going to like it. But, it will last for a very short period of time and once it’s finished, it’s done and over and things will be clean. Life can get back to normal.”

While things are en route to “normal,” the consent decree awaits approval and the EPA, Miller said, is doing the legwork.

“The actual remediation is smallest part,” he said. “It’s the logistics of setting it up, receiving permissions and talking to people about how they want to undertake the remediation in their yards that is really the time-sensitive piece, and we are moving forward with that.”

“In this case, you’re coming along after 100 years of little, if any, environmental regulation and trying to clean up the mess,” said Pearce. “It becomes an extremely difficult process.”

The Last Word

The official 30-day public comment period for the consent decree ended in March, but that doesn’t mean citizens are satisfied.

Pearce advises any concerns and questions to be brought to the attention of the Alachua County Environmental Protection Department.

Miller suggests citizens attend upcoming meetings with the community group Protect Gainesville Citizens.

O’Steen’s advice? Fight.

“We’re people in the wrong place in the right time,” she said. “Every little bit helps.”

Citizens should contact John Mousa, pollution prevention manager at Alachua County Environmental Protection Department, with questions or concerns. He serves as the local liaison between citizens and the EPA and can be reached by email at JJM[at]alachuacounty.us or phone at (352) 264-6800.

The EPA’s Scott Miller can be contacted directly at miller.scott[at]epamail.epa.gov.

The post Clean Up or Cover Up? appeared first on The Fine Print.

Thanks to We Are Neutral, an initiative of the local non-profit Earth Givers, the University of Florida became the first school in the National Collegiate Athletic Association to become carbon neutral.

After offsetting the carbon emissions from one of its football games in 2007, UF decided to continue its partnership with We Are Neutral and offset the entire athletic program’s carbon footprint. In 2008, the entire football team went carbon neutral, and in 2009, UF began its initiative to offset all the carbon emissions associated with the traveling, facility uses and administrative aspects from all of its athletic programs. Then, in 2010, UF went even further and offset the carbon emissions related to the utilities for the O’Connell Center, the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts and the University Auditorium for the school’s spring graduation ceremony, making it UF’s first carbon neutral commencement. For only $542, UF offset 49 tons of carbon emissions.

To accomplish this task, the carbon dioxide emissions from all of these activities are calculated and summed up by service providers — such as the International Carbon Bank and Exchange — as a carbon footprint, measured in tons of carbon. For each ton of carbon released to the atmosphere, We Are Neutral sells offsets to UF, or any other interested individual, business or organization, at approximately $12 per ton to help “neutralize” the emissions. These carbon offsets are purchased from a reserve, or carbon bank, that We Are Neutral has created through energy conservation and carbon sequestration projects, such as helping-low income communities make their homes more energy efficient through weatherization projects and upgrades that include insulating AC units and water heater pipes, installing toilet tank bags, diverters and low-flow shower heads, as well as compact fluorescent light bulb exchanges. In addition to generating carbon credits, these upgrades help residents reduce or neutralize their carbon footprint and save money on their utility bill.

Another method of providing carbon credits for purchase is through a partnership We Are Neutral has with the Alachua Conservation Trust. Through its Revolving Tree Fund, We Are Neutral purchases native Florida needle longleaf pine trees from the trust and plants them locally with the help of local volunteers. For each tree planted, one ton of carbon offsets are generated through restoration and sequestration projects that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change impacts. The initiative has helped UF raise its sustainability ratings and get closer to its goal of becoming a carbon neutral campus by 2025.

Generally, carbon offsetting programs are not implemented where emissions were generated. For example, a business or individual may buy carbon credits from a wind farm, solar array or tree plantation located in a different state. These programs allow the purchaser to offset emissions they may not be able to avoid generating or reducing through internal restructuring or lifestyle changes. However, with We Are Neutral’s locally focused model, the community initially impacted by the carbon emissions benefits directly, making the program’s model unique. The trees provide carbon sequestration, cleaner air and cooler environments for outdoor activities, and the home upgrades help families living in the community.

The organization’s co-founder, Jacob Cravey, hopes that this model of “locally generated, locally applied” carbon offsetting will act as a model for others nationally, as well as help to build a stronger Gainesville community where residents and businesses are able to support and empower each other through their collective efforts towards carbon neutrality.

Others in the community have also grabbed hold of the momentum being generated by We Are Neutral. Here at home, Gainesville’s annual environmental film festival, Cinema Verde, has offset the festival’s activities four times. Fest, Gainesville’s music festival, has offset its activities 5 years running.

This year, We Are Neutral is also helping to make Bonnaroo, the renowned four-day music festival, carbon neutral. Their goal is to offset the entire event, as well as emissions generated by those who traveled to the event, through similar energy saving and tree planting efforts in that community. The three-member We Are Neutral team, co-founder Jacob Cravey, Anna Sampson and Jacob Adams, plus its volunteers will also be offsetting their group’s carbon footprint when they travel to Tennessee for Bonnaroo this June.

Not many businesses are happy with a net zero return, but in the case of We Are Neutral, that is exactly what they want to see. A whole lot of zeros.

The post Balancing Nature’s Budget appeared first on The Fine Print.

A recent student advising survey found that roughly 85 percent of students consider having an internship either important or very important for their career. Only 40 percent, however, had actually interned somewhere.

In many ways, having an internship is the golden ticket into that looming grey area of our futures known as “the workforce.” But that ticket comes at a price.

Interns are often pushed to the bottom of the corporate food chain. This is especially true for unpaid interns — estimates for this eager workforce range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 every year.

Unpaid positions marginalize low-income students, making way for only those students who can afford to work for free. The unwaged thirty to forty hours a week of a full-time internship allows little room for a second paid job.

But sometimes, this isn’t a problem. For the fortunate students whose parents offer financial support for them to live in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, the $0.00 salary is acceptable.

Kristin Streaker, a fourth-year advertising major at UF, spent a summer interning in New York, but there was no way she could’ve done it for free. It’s New York — no one lives there for free.

Streaker interned at Elle Magazine and fortunately for her, she was paid for her hard work.

“While in New York, I met many unpaid interns who work endless hours and hold second jobs. It can be hard,” she said.

In journalism, it’s difficult to come across a paid internship position. The fashion industry is even tougher. New York Fashion Week, in particular, is notorious for their use of interns’ unpaid and eager labor.

Gainesville holds its own Fashion Week in the springtime, “employing” more than forty interns a season, all of whom work for free.

Because most of their money is generated from sponsorships, they work on a tight budget. Instead, they offer many opportunities in position advancement.

The interns said the experience and networking were worth it. After all, this is what an internship is for.

“I’d rather do something I that love, even if it is unpaid,” said Jennie Clark. Clark started out as part of Gainesville Fashion Week’s fleet of unpaid interns and is now an assistant producer for the event.

“Experience is one of the most important — if not the most important — thing to have for your future career,” she said.

But while the Gainesville Fashion Week interns are not paid, this isn’t New York. Rent isn’t pushing $1,000 a month and your [non-existant] metro card won’t run your wallet dry. These interns are more able to afford wageless work because they’re already living and studying here in Gainesville.

Students fantasize about the bragging rights, the possible recommendation letter and the experience they’ll gain. And these are certainly all in reach, just only to the students — or the students’ parents — who can afford it. For the rest of us, best start scouting for that second or third part-time job.

The post The Unpaid, Unethical & No-Good Internship appeared first on The Fine Print.

Women on Birth Control Prefer Less Masculine Men

So, all us women know the standard trope of birth control complaints by now: weight gain, mood swings, headaches. A recent British study adds a more curious side effect to that list. The Pill causes women to see more feminine men as more attractive.

The women in the study were given a digital male face. They were able to change certain physical traits, like jaw height, cheek prominence and face width, to create their perfectly drop-dead-gorgeous man. During this round, none of the women were taking the Pill.

At the end of the first experiment, the scientists offered the women birth control. About a third of them started taking it.

Three months later, the women sat down to the same task: creating a perfect digital male face. This time, it was obvious who was on hormones and who wasn’t. The women who opted to take the Pill crafted men with more feminine features. They typically preferred narrower jaw bones and rounder faces.

Basically, women taking birth control are under the influence. The two common hormones in American pills, estrogen and progestin, play the part of a modern day Eros. They tinker with who we fall for.

If you started dating your boyfriend while you were on the Pill, how do you know your natural-state body finds him hot as well? Certainly, physical appearance is not the only trait that makes a person attractive. But we would be lying if we said it’s not an important factor.

So, to all you guys who have been called “feminine”: don’t take it as an insult. The women on birth control just may pick you over the hunky jock.

By Ashira Morris

Dropping the T: Transgender Rights in the Marriage Era

So DOMA has been called out for being doma-neering. As the Defense of Marriage Act is examined by the Supreme Court, a groundswell of people have “come out” in their support of gay marriage and equal rights for people who are lesbian, gay and bisexual.

However, the “T” in the alphabet soup of of L.G.B.T. is overlooked. (That’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender, by the way.) The Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act offers protection for the L.G.B. population. But there is still no gender nondiscrimination act.

Sexuality and gender exist on two separate continuums. Gender ranges from male to female, with plenty of room in the middle. Sexual orientation exists between homosexual and heterosexual; that line is directly bisected by bisexual.

The largest study of transgender people, released in 2011, found that the community is constantly harassed and discriminated against. Ninety percent of the people surveyed reported mistreatment or harassment at work. Forty-one percent had contemplated suicide. Compare that to the 1.6 percent of the entire U.S. population.

The Human Rights Campaign (the organization behind all those red equality signs on Facebook) may be great at social media campaigning, but they still censor their image. The organization recently released an apology for asking a trans activist to remove a trans pride flag from behind the podium.

Earlier fights for sexual orientation rights have left gender equality in the shadows. As the debate over marriage equality continues, it remains to be seen if activists and the government will acknowledge the T.

By Ashira Morris

The post Paper Cuts Summer 2013 appeared first on The Fine Print.

Charlie Lybrand checks on a hive of his honey bees. Some of the honeycomb is filled with honey, which Lybrand will eventually collect using a centrifugal force extractor. Photo by Lily Wan.

Facing the nation’s largest bee die-off in history, what’s the buzz keeping colonies strong in Florida?

A major in philosophy could lead to a variety of careers, but beekeeping isn’t usually the first to come to mind. For Charlie Lybrand, however, the path from Socrates to honey bees made perfect sense. He says beekeeping has afforded him ample time to put his college education to use.

“One of the things I enjoy about working with bees is the fact that I do it by myself,” Lybrand said. “It allows you more time to be contemplative.”

Lybrand has been in beekeeping since 1977, when his love for honey sent him searching for his own hives. He planned on getting just two, but instead came home with eight. Since that day, he has maintained an intimate and active role in the honey bee business, specializing in honey production rather than crop pollination. He’s raised his bees and watched them develop, tending to them through years of both growth and decline. The bee colonies, however, are still an indomitable force.

“Bees have had a long-term relationship with humans, but in reality, there is an essence of them that is still wild. They never will be as domesticated as cows or horses,” said Lybrand.

Through his 36 years as a beekeeper, he’s witnessed his business transform into a bustling apiary with, at times, up to 60 hives. The landscape of the industry, he’s noticed, has also drastically transformed.

The crux of this transformation came in the eighties and would forever separate beekeeping into what Lybrand classifies as the “pre-mite” and “post-mite” eras. The Varroa mite invasions led to the now-widespread crisis known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. The mites attach themselves to the bees, sucking out vital fluids and infecting them with viruses that wiped out massive numbers of their colonies.

“It’s changed the level of production that we get out of the hives dramatically,” Lybrand said. “We used to average very close to 400 pounds of honey a year off of each colony. Now we’re working hard to get back up to 200 pounds.”

The mites tore an industry wide open, instilling panic in the beekeepers who had no choice but to fight the mites.

“Beekeepers stopped being just farmers who could sit back and enjoy their livelihood,” said David Westervelt, a chief inspector of apiaries in Florida. “They started having to treat their hives with pesticides and had to start finding treatments they could use to control the mites.”

These new pesticides, brought in by large companies like Monsanto and Bayer, were employed with urgency to fight the Varroa mites, but many of them actually harmed the bees themselves.

“We’ve been at a war on both fronts,” Westervelt said. “You’re trying to keep the [pesticides] that were killing bees off the bees, and you’re trying to keep the ones that work and can control the Varroa mites.”

The mite-fighting treatment, when ingested by bees, becomes just one more drop in the cocktail of pesticides that bees are exposed to on a daily basis.

“Almost every aspect of the honeybee’s life is coming into some contact with pesticides,” said Jeanette Klopchin, a research technician and Laboratory Manager for UF’s Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory. “The interaction between each of those pesticides and their effect on the bees’ development is extremely complex.”

Commercial-scale pollination has added to the deluge of problems bees are already facing. Many pollination farmers team up with mono-crop agricultural industries like the almond producers in California because the partnership is more cost-effective. However, this partnership has brought along side effects, like the spread of weak under-utilized hives across the country and a reliance on Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs. These GMOs were designed to maximize production, often without concern for how the bees will be affected.

“There hasn’t been any real research on the long term effects of GMO pollen on the bees or anyone else,” Klopchin said.

Mono-crop pollination also alters the natural diet of honey bees — a diet that requires nutrition and diversity. In efforts to fix this, farmers are forced to provide soy-based, artificial feed to supplement the bees’ undernourished diet.

“At the UF apiary, we don’t tend to do supplemental feeding,” Klopchin said. “I think nothing is better than what’s from nature. We don’t use pollen substitutes or honey substitutes or anything like that.”

UF’s lab works to improve the health of Florida’s honeybees, including the use of RNA interference. This new technology manipulates the genes of the bees to try reduce the effects of pathogens and mites. While progress is being made, there has still been no effective way found to control the mites and curb their effects on colony collapse.

While CCD brought the honey bee population to record lows across the nation, Florida has seen a remarkable resilience in its numbers. In the last five or six years, the number of beekeepers has jumped from 900 to 3,000, and the number of colonies has grown from around 220,000 to 360,000.

These gains are mostly attributable to small-scale beekeepers.

These beekeepers, who have anywhere from 2 to 100 hives, offer a more natural, honey-centered alternative to the pollination farms that utilize GMOs, supplemental diets and pesticides.

“The beekeepers that keep their bees in more natural or small-time organic farms probably have less problems with their bees than [those with] big farms that have a widespread aerial pesticide spray,” Klopchin said.

Small-scale beekeepers like Lybrand are also trying to combat the problem of mites themselves.

“I’m slowly and progressively trying to genetically breed bees to come up with resistance to diseases,” Lybrand said. “The small-scale guys are the ones that come up with the innovations, and they know more about their bees from watching them more closely. They’re going to be what saves it in the long run.”

With one-third of all food in the U.S. directly related to honey bee pollination, the survival of the bees is vital for the survival of the entire agricultural industry.

“We’re all fighting for the same goal in the end,” Klopchin said. “We need to keep honey bees alive and productive and try to get rid of these mites before they get the better of us.”

The post The Bees’ Needs appeared first on The Fine Print.

Above: Louis Howard, 36, gives a command to his dog, Kate, at Academy 26 in the Paws on Parole program during a training session at the Florida Department of Corrections Gainesville Workshop.  Photos by Melanie Brkich.

“Sit. Sit. Okay, stay.”

Marcus Henry, 41, doesn’t spend his mandated service hours like most inmates. At the Florida Department of Corrections Gainesville Work Camp, he trains dogs. He’s spent one year and four months of his ten-year sentence working with the work camp’s Paws on Parole program.

Paws on Parole is a partnership program between Alachua County Animal Services and the Gainesville Work Camp. In each of the program’s eight-week long sessions, prison inmates train an “academy” of rescued dogs to be adopted into new “forever homes,” meaning they will no longer be shuffled around.

Henry usually calls dibs on the little ones like Ducky, his current dachshund-terrier mix. Ducky’s the seventh dog he’s trained; graduation and adoption are always bittersweet for him.

A former corrections officer himself, Henry became addicted to pain pills after knee surgery, eventually going to illegal lengths to obtain more.

“Thankfully I got caught,” Henry said. “You won’t often hear that. But this actually saved my life.”

The most powerful thing about the program, he said, is positive reinforcement for both the inmates and the dogs. Henry said the animals they train were often punished somehow without understanding why.

“I know exactly what I did, but I also know this is my second chance. We are both on the same path.”

Many of the trainee dogs are “at-risk” breeds, like pit bulls.  People mistreat or abandon them based on the misconception that the dogs are violent.

The inmates are fighting a similar stigma. Most of them are non-violent offenders, serving time for things like drug abuse, Animal Services officer Mike Kirby said. In the past, they would have to pay off their time doing roadside cleanup; now they have a chance to actually give something back to the community.

Since its start in 2009, the program has graduated 150 dogs from 25 academies, all trained by inmates, with 100 percent of dogs being placed in “forever homes.”

The success of the program has led to the creation of Paws on Parole Unleashed, the sister program at Alachua County jail, which enlists female inmates to train the dogs.

Debra Scott, a detention officer who helped spearhead the Unleashed program, said it took pushing through a lot of red tape, but two years after pitching the idea the persistence has paid off. Before Unleashed, women weren’t allowed to do work outside.

“The only chores available for women before were things like laundry and working in the kitchen,” she said. “The men were given the ‘bigger jobs.’”

Scott has been working closely with the dogs and their trainers since day one and has noticed an enormous change in the inmates. She has heard the women talking about going back to school and turning their lives around once they are done serving their time.

“The women are learning behavior modification because they are teaching behavior modification.”

Scott plans for Unleashed to expand in the future, but currently, the women’s program only has two trainers. On April 19, they graduated their first class of dogs.

Saying goodbye at graduation is hard, but it’s not necessarily forever. Henry said that every one of his families has come back to later graduations to say hello with their dogs.

“When I came into this, all I knew was I had to do the time,” he said. “Now I’m changing the lives of these families, my dogs, and my own.”

The post Homeward Bound appeared first on The Fine Print.

When Ephraim Ragasa, UF/IFAS entomology graduate student, created a comprehensive article on the Psorophora cilia — a particularly large species of mosquito — he had no idea he would be contributing to the trendy, rolling cache of evidence that Florida is both bizarre and terrifying.

Ragasa’s article was written as an assignment for a class and compiles information about the mosquito, commonly called the gallinipper, that had previously been scattered among various publications. Once the article was released online to the general public, it quickly caught the attention of the UF News Bureau. Both Ragasa and the bureau were struck by a particularly interesting feature: It was huge.

What the subsequent wave of press failed to underscore was that, other than its size, the gallinipper is not unusual.
Philip Kaufman, associate professor of veterinary entomology at the University of Florida who had assigned the article, spent his spring break answering phone calls from reporters around the nation. They were very interested in a UF News press release titled, “Huge aggressive mosquito may be abundant in Florida this summer, UF/IFAS expert warns.” Understandably, they wanted to know when the swarm would descend.

Kaufman’s responses were trimmed and incorporated into small, vaguely panicked articles. The Huffington Post titled one “‘Gallinipper’ Mosquito to Descend on Florida; Giant Insect ‘Goes After People,’ Hurts When it Bites,” and incorrectly reported its size as “ inch-long.” The Time Newsfeed warned the public to be wary about an impending “statewide infestation.” Reports favored words like “attack,” “invade,” “plague” and “strike.”

“A lot of this got blown out of proportion,” Kaufman later said. “The story unfortunately became more about the mosquito challenge. [Ragasa’s] article became lost in it.”

The spirit of Ragasa’s work, too, became lost in the urge to capitalize on latent fears.

“The questions became more about mosquito control and damage caused by the mosquito rather than the biology…and what it represents,” Kaufman said.

For Kaufman and Ragasa, the gallinipper is a glimpse into Florida before it was inhabited by humans. While the Asian tiger mosquito, the one urban Floridians most often encounter, has adapted to human presence, gallinippers are born and raised in rural, wooded environments and do not leave the place in which they were born.  Because the gallinipper is a species generally untouched by humans, its presence shows an environment in its most natural state.

“When you see this one, in essence, you’re in old Florida,” Kaufman said.

Despite the many reports warning that Florida will face an invasion, Ragasa pointed out that people living in urban areas will probably never encounter the mosquito.

“You’d actually have to hike in the woods after a significant rainfall in the summer or early fall to encounter these ladies,” he said.

And as for an invasion?

“It’s a native species, so there’s no ‘invasion’ happening,” Kaufman said.

Other misconceptions, such as its size, bite and rarity jolted through the general public, along with distressing, conflated descriptions. An article by LiveScience, later reposted by Science on NBC News, claimed that gallinippers were “One of the most ferocious insects you’ve ever heard of.”

“We’re in a news…cycle and no one wants to read the original thing,” Kaufman said. “And many of the reporters unfortunately didn’t go to the source, or even the press release, to get the information, and it was gleaned from others.”

As a result, the gallinipper — native to Florida, infrequently seen in urban areas and, while persistent and aggressive, harmless — became a monster-bug, another nightmarish and unusual quality of Florida. Mutant mosquitoes seemed to logically follow a state that spawned Florida Man, The Python Challenge and a person who ate another person’s face.

Ragasa recalls coming home from spring break, “looking at all of the reports and going, ‘oh, that’s not what we’re trying to write here.’”

It’s unfortunate that the story got out of hand, Kaufman said, but neither he nor Ragasa is worried about the gallinipper this summer, even if enough rainfall occurs to increase their numbers. In fact, the Asian tiger mosquito is of more concern, being a competent carrier of diseases dangerous to humans.

The gallinipper, though large for a mosquito, is harmless. In fact, though Ragasa has felt their bite, he looks at them fondly.

“Yeah, they’re blood suckers, but for us — for me — they’re very striking, very pretty mosquitoes,” Ragasa said. “I always tell people: When you see them, kind of look at them; appreciate them, before you smack ‘em dead.”

The post True Blood appeared first on The Fine Print.

Photo by Melanie Brkich.

“The Dixie Hotel”: The Jones B-side takes on the whiskey sour

So, The Jones B-side hosts Drag Queen Bingo every Monday evening, and that’s pretty cool. Maybe you’ve even been, had a couple drinks, gotten a little wild. But have you noticed the drinks you’re sippin’ are locally-sourced from places like Swamp Head Brewery and other nearby distilleries?

The B-side watering hole keeps it traditional, but also tries to infuse a personal touch of originality into their drinks. Audrey Dingeman, their bar manager, says they like to get creative by putting their own spin on classic beverages with subtle yet tasteful variations. In their Vanilla Old-Fashioned, for example, they replace sugar cubes with house-made vanilla from whole vanilla beans. They’ve taken on the crowd favorite whiskey sour, too. Check out the recipe for this zingy elixir they’ve conjured up and shared with us!

The Recipe:

• 1 1/2 oz. whiskey
• Freshly grated ginger
• 3 oz. Fresh squeezed sour mix
• Dash of simple syrup (see recipe below)

Fill a 10 oz. rocks glass with ice to the brim and pour it all in.
Fancy it up! Garnish with candied ginger skewer.

Sour Mix Recipe:

• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 cup freshly squeezed lime juice

Boil water and sugar, stirring until dissolved.
Remove from heat and mix in juices.
Refrigerate.

Eat me! I’m in season and fresh!

Tomatoes
Watermelons
Squash
Peppers
Cantaloupes
Eggplant
Basil
Zucchini
Cucumber

The post Read Up, Drink Up appeared first on The Fine Print.

Above: Hundreds flocked to Hume Field for UF’s first Holi Festival, a Hindu holiday celebrating the beginning of  spring with music, food and colors galore.  Photos by Melanie Brkich.

A photographed experience of UF’s first Festival of Colors

(Scroll down for more pictures!)

Set against a backdrop of blue skies, goalie boxes and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” Hume Field was ablaze with explosions of teal, crimson red, lime green, magenta, yellow — it was Holi.

Saturday’s festivities were UF’s first university-wide celebration of Holi, also called Holaka or Phagwa. The Hindu holiday is dedicated to winter’s end, music, feasting and equality. Everyone arrived donning white — canvases waiting to be pelted with dust. By the end of the celebration, each person left plastered in a spectrum of rainbow.

The celebration was hosted by UF Intercultural Engagement, the Indian Students Association and Student Government Multicultural Affairs Cabinet. Volunteers passed out Ziploc bags of pigmented cornstarch and flour, entrusting the hundreds of excited students with a total of 60 pounds of the powder.

But before the powder came a generous, free Krishna lunch followed by a talk on Holi traditions and the meaning behind the holiday. Traditional celebration welcomes the fresh agricultural season with not only color, but water, too. A handful of students stood in the crowd, clutching their water guns and juggling their stock of water balloons.

Dvaraka Das, a Hare Krishna devotee, joined UF’s Holi celebration singing “Hare Krishna,” just like when he celebrated Holi in Vrindavan, India. Vrindavan is the major pilgrimage site for all traditions of Hinduism.

“[It’s] the most holy city in all of India,” said Dvaraka.

I gestured toward the color-dusted field behind me and asked Dvaraka if it was an accurate translation. We turned to watch a group of freshmen chasing their friend with a bucket of water.

“They had Holi like this. A little more powder,” he chuckled. “They should have had a little more powder.”

The colors, the excitement and the gasps of surprise were all accounted for — just as Dvaraka described his Holi experience, but with a little extra UF touch. I doubt that Holi in Vrindavan had students running around, yelling “This is like Dayglow!”

“Young people are attracted to these fun things, so it’s nice that they get in touch with the Indian culture,” Krsodari, another Hare Krishna follower, said.

“In some ways,” she said, “they now have some of the secrets of spiritualism.”

However self-evident those secrets are is unknown, and for some of the students in attendance, I’m not sure they would invest the extra effort to find out. For further elaboration on the historical and cultural context of Holi past the celebration’s introductory talk, students were invited to find out more at www.festivalofcolorsuf.com.

I did enjoy the tasty-as-ever Hare Krishna lunch and I smiled in surprise when magenta powder puffed up in my face. I also, like Krsodari and Dvaraka, appreciate and support the intermingling of cultures and exchange of traditions. However, I’m left wondering how much of the cultural history actually stuck once the dust settled.

It took awhile for me to regain my respiratory abilities and vision, but once I had, I noticed the Hare Krishna’s Maha Mantra that cued the dancing and powder-tossing had faded. Instead, Lil’ Jon and The East Side Boyz stepped in with their chant… the one about the window, the walls, and getting low. I cringed at the cultural clash and the strangers’ body odor surrounding me and extracted myself from the moshpit to write about it.

If you missed UF’s last weekend, or attended but are up for another round, the Alachua Hare Krishna Temple is hosting an even bigger Holi festival on April 13.

The post Color Me Holi appeared first on The Fine Print.

In her blue helmet and jersey, Gainesville Roller Rebels president Miriam Hill (Stocky Balboa on the rink) skates by the girls of the Tampa Bay Bruise Crew in a bout on March 27, 2011. Photo by Dana John Hill.  

Growing up in the ’80s in Puerto Rico, Miriam Hill sat in front of the TV on Saturday nights to watch roller derby on NBC.

The youngest of three siblings, Hill had a pair of hand-me-down roller skates that didn’t quite fit. Several times a week, she would lace her sister’s loose skates tight around her ankles and head outside to her hilly street on Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Sailing down the pavement with the wind in her hair, she pretended she was passing skaters and racing to score points until her skates fell apart.

“But I didn’t have a lot of friends,” Hill said. “This was all in my head.”

A self-described nerd with an enterprising streak, she received a scholarship from the University of Florida and, in 2002, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. After graduating, Hill did not plan to remain in Gainesville. She kept a $2 bill from her grandmother in her car ashtray to pay some day for her last highway toll out of town.

She had never played a real game of roller derby.

Fast forward a decade, and Hill is the president of the Gainesville Roller Rebels, a nonprofit roller derby league owned and operated by the skaters. She recently used her business education and grant-writing experience to gain the league acceptance into the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), the highest governing body in modern roller derby. Only about 10 percent of the leagues in the world are members.

Today, at 35 years old, Hill goes by another name: “Stocky Balboa,” a tribute to the iconic underdog played by Sylvester Stallone and to her robust figure, which reflects her light-hearted sense of humor about herself.

When Hill was searching for a fun, meaningful way to spend free time as a young working adult, roller derby answered her prayers. She remained in Gainesville to be with her boyfriend (now husband), and had a job as a clinical trial contract negotiator for the UF College of Medicine, but as she progressed into her 20s, she found herself wanting more out of life.

“I’d come home from work and be super depressed, like, ‘Is this all there is?’” Hill said. “Eventually, roller derby happened.”

In December of 2007, Hill’s hair stylist mentioned that a league was starting in Gainesville. Unsure what she was getting into, Hill went to a recruitment barbecue and became one of the founding members of the Gainesville Roller Rebels (or GRR, which the players pronounce “grr,” like a growl).

She began training on- and off-skates to build muscle and stamina before playing in her first bout as a blocker. Before long, Hill was adding her derby name to the about 40,000 registered names on the International Rollergirls’ Master Roster.

Two years later, she began to feel leg pain and learned that she would need to take an extensive break from skating because she her calf muscles needed surgery.  Following her 16-month recovery, Hill became president of GRR in July 2010.

“I almost feel like the league started all over again in July 2010,” she said. “We refocused what we were doing, and it was no longer going to be a hobby for us.”

Over the course of a year and a half, Hill completed the league’s WFTDA application. She devoted practically all her spare time to it, sometimes working into the early morning hours.

“Stocky was the WFTDA application,” said GRR vice president Adrienne Fagan, also known as “Rage-rienne.”

Her work paid off when GRR was accepted as an apprentice league in January 2012 and graduated to full membership in December, making it one of only five association member leagues in Florida. GRR can now compete in regional tournaments and move up in the rankings.

“It legitimizes us as a sports team,” Hill said. “We are in a national spotlight now with people who pay attention to roller derby. This is what the league was always aspiring towards.”

The GRR Allstar Travel Team competed in their first WFTDA bout against the Washington, D.C. Rollergirls on Feb. 10 in Jacksonville. Hill coached from the sidelines wearing a shirt with a tiger on it to inspire “tiger intensity” while her teammates with names like “Killary Clinton” and “LeBrawn Maimes” jockeyed for position and knocked each other down.

The D.C. Rollergirls won the bout 201-141, but the atmosphere was jovial afterwards. Since the Gainesville league is unranked and the Rollergirls are a division one team, Hill didn’t expect to win. She was just glad to see GRR enter a new chapter.

“We did a lot better than I thought we would do,” she said. “We’re really f–king new, and the win was reachable.”

As of March 15, the Roller Rebels were ranked No. 51 in the country. If they keep their ranking above No. 60, they will compete in the Division 2 playoffs at the end of the season against teams ranked No. 40-60.

“The highest entry by a previously unranked team is Gainesville, who debut at No. 51 WFTDA,” read the rankings announcement on Derby News Network, “No other team debuts inside the top 100.”

Snapping pictures of the skaters in action, Dana Hill was at the bout to support his wife. A radio show host on WUFT-FM, he has attended every bout she has played in.

“My new motto is ‘It doesn’t pay to bet against Miriam Hill,’ because when it comes down to it, she makes it happen,” Dana said. “It’s really impressive sometimes. She’ll say to me one night, ‘I’m going to make this happen.’ And it does.”

Managing the business aspects of GRR has proven to be great for her career, too. Hill said her involvement with the league was a major factor in being offered a new job as the department administrator for periodontology in UF’s College of Dentistry, which she began on Feb. 22.

“We do our own accounting, taxes, insurance, contract negotiations, advertising, marketing, media,” Hill said. “We run our own website. We do everything ourselves. So it gives people a lot of practical, real life experience.”

Through roller derby, Hill transformed from a languid college graduate adjusting to the routine of working life to a vital member of the Gainesville community with an activity she loves.

“This is one of the best experiences you can have as an adult,” she said. “It’s the greatest.”

The post Skate, Rattle & Roll appeared first on The Fine Print.

Silence and exclusion have the power to make a struggle invisible.

This past November, a man was raped by his acquaintance, also male, here in Gainesville. We hear news like this and find ourselves surprised, but why? We are socialized to perceive rape as a “female issue,” making male-on-male rape fall out of the norm. A statistical anomaly, yet male survivors share similarities with female survivors in their experiences. Gender socializations, however, stir up stark differences and misconceptions.

Most survivors, regardless of gender, know their rapist on some level — a family member, a partner, a friend or acquaintance.

Another similarity is victim-blaming. Survivors may consider themselves responsible for the rape, believing they “should have known better”; oftentimes others, including family, partners, friends, police or the aggressor, put the blame and responsibility onto the survivors.
Some survivors are too intimidated to report the rape, deterred by the court system or fearing retaliation from the rapist. In the Gainesville rape case mentioned earlier, the rapist was arrested and charged with a second degree felony.

“Even when an arrest is made,” said Rita Lawrence, Sexual Assault Program Manager at the Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center, “it doesn’t mean the case will go forward.”

Fortunately, this case is moving forward, but that is not the case for most rape charges.

Additionally, the issue of victim-blaming in male-male rape cases is further complicated by victims’ fear of their sexuality being questioned. The rapist capitalizes on this fear and will often try to get the victim to ejaculate during the assault. The ejaculation often confuses them as they misinterpret it as an orgasm. If he had an orgasm, it must mean he enjoyed it, right? This is a common misconception.

“Body parts do their own thing, and it doesn’t mean he enjoyed it,” Lawrence said.

Ejaculation occurs from penile stimulation; unlike orgasms, it does not necessarily mean it was a pleasurable experience.

If a male survivor confuses his ejaculation to be an orgasm, he may be discouraged from reporting the assault for fear his sexuality may be suspect. Lawrence still remembers a male survivor whose friends laughed when he confided in them about being raped. They asked, “So, you liked it?”

Rape is not solely, if at all, about the sex; it is about asserting domination, power, strength and, in most cases, manhood. Most anthropologists view rape as an exertion of control by disempowering another, making male-male rape the ultimate form of power and disempowerment.

The scars and emotional damage of rape do not discriminate between genders, yet it is women who live oppressed by the fear. According to the National Institute of Justice Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, it is estimated that 14.8 percent of women — as opposed to 3 percent of men — will experience rape in their lifetime; this statistic and similar studies heavily weigh rape as a “female issue.” The exclusion of men in discussions of rape prevention and defense is a form of male privilege because it constructs rape as something not of their concern. Yet, according to the study above, around 92,748 men are raped each year in the United States.  We can’t know for sure how many male-male rapes really occur since it’s highly under-reported.

We are socialized to address and focus on rape as a women’s issue, but it is a human issue. Both women and men need to be educated about it, and rape crisis centers and similar help centers need to better publicize support for male survivors. The Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center has a support group, Male Survivors of Rape Trauma, ready to go when men start reaching out for this resource.

“Men need to come forward to break the silence and shame that surrounds being a male survivor,” Lawrence said. Breaking this silence can be very empowering for the survivor, helping him regain control over his life and pave the way for other male survivors to do the same.

Searching for Help?

The Alachua County Victim Services and Rape Crisis Center offers free programs to all victims and their families to help through the process. They are available 24/7 and can be reached at (352) 264-6760.

The post Breaking Silence appeared first on The Fine Print.

ATTN: Genius Missing

America may be the land of opportunity, but that opportunity sure isn’t evenly distributed.

A  “critical mass” of our country’s most intelligent students are concentrated in just a few of the denser and richer regions: New England, coastal California and southern Florida. Top-tier colleges are loaded with the bright minds of these high-achieving, high-income students, but surely genius comes in many forms.

A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the vast majority of high-achieving, low-income students are not only more geographically dispersed, but also do not apply to any selective colleges universities.

The study used family incomes, data from College Board and ACT and students’ average high school course grades to define their study population of low-income, high-achievers; these students come from the poorest 25% of families but have the brainpower to shoot ‘em to the top 10% of American students academically.

So why aren’t more of these geniuses out nose-deep in beer and books at America’s top schools like their high-income counterparts? Being accepted isn’t the problem. Financially discouraged and ignored by college recruitment teams, these students often don’t even apply.

Many of them would be well-qualified for financial aid and supplemental scholarships from these deep-pocket universities.

Researchers Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery liken the colleges’ efforts to “searching under the lamp-post” — while many colleges do look for low-income students, their search is centered around their campus rather than around the students they’re searching for.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all talented, poorer students don’t reach for the Ivies. Those who do apply, though, tend to be highly concentrated in high schools with grade- or test-score-based admission. These selective high schools have a greater wealth of resources and mentors who are better networked.
Without better college advisors to provide students with encouragement and guidance, these genius minds could be forever obscured. These are the minds essential to greater social mobility and a more diverse workforce, not to mention a less homogeneous, over-privileged student body.

You know that whole “shoot for the moon, miss and you’ll land on some stars or other-cool-celestial-body” saying? Yeah, that’s what these off-the-radar geniuses need to do. Never know until you try.

By Lily Wan

Pigs Still Can’t Fly, But…

It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, and it’s about four times cooler than Superman.
It’s a squid. And further inflating its bad-assity status, it’s neon.

The Todarodes pacificus’ airborne abilities were merely rumors until Japanese Scientist Jun Yamamoto and his research team witnessed a group of these eight-inch squids soaring around off the Tokyo coast in 2011 (OK, “soaring” is a slight exaggeration, but cool visual, right?),

The squid itself is not a newly discovered species, but the confirmation that these species are indeed flying — not jumping (how utterly pedestrian) — is a fresh catch.

The squid can only remain airborne for about three seconds, but they sure make the most of it. In these three seconds, a Neon Flying Squid can propel itself 98 feet through the air. At that rate, these squid are hitting speeds faster than what Usain Bolt averaged at the London Olympics.

Yamamoto and his team tracked and studied this shoal of squid to determine the exact mechanism responsible for their flight. And, stranger yet, these molluscs are flying backwards.

The squid launches itself from the water by blasting a high pressure water jet from its stems. Once airborne, it spreads out its fins to expose an aerodynamic membrane essential for the stable arc necessary for flight. The squid is also able to direct its fins to steer itself through the air. It is this posture and control that distinguish flight from leap, epic from “meh.”

While the squids resort to flight to escape their aquatic predators, those fleeting moments of safety don’t guarantee them full protection. After all, it only takes for a hungry bird a few seconds to snatch up a quick lunch.

“We should no longer consider squid as things that live only in the water,” said Yamamoto in an interview with Agence French-Presse. “It is highly possible that they are also a source of food for seabirds.”

So, yeah, just sayin’ — squids can fly now. My day/life (and probably yours, too) just got real weird, real fast.

By Lily Wan

The post Paper Cuts Spring 2013 appeared first on The Fine Print.

Photo by Melanie Brkich.

Vegan Mafe-African Peanut Soup

Recipe courtesy of Tempo Bistro To Go

The word “tempo” is not just the speed at which a melody is played. It has another meaning for co-owners John Drum and Debra Pour of the local Gainesville restaurant Tempo Bistro To Go. Although they play a healthy amount of acid jazz, downtempo, funk, and soul (John used to be a DJ in Orlando), for them, “tempo” also has to do with slow food. This is evident from the the colorful chalkboard they keep on the far wall of their restaurant displaying the names of all the Gainesville farmers that are the sources of their ingredients. If you ask John about the board, he’ll say that “the board tells a story, and we found that stories taste good.” Check out this recipe for Mafe-African Peanut Soup that Tempo Bistro shared with us.

The List

• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 1 large yellow or sweet onion
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 1/8 cup vegetable base
• 2 quarts local sweet potatoes (cubed)
• 6 cups crushed Roma tomato
• 1 cup unsalted peanut butter
• 4 cups filtered water
• 1/4 cup cumin
• 1 tablespoons coriander
• 1/2 tablespoon cayenne
• salt/pepper to taste

The Steps

1. Saute oil, onion and garlic until clear and caramelized.
2. Peel all sweet potatoes and cube 2 1/2 quarts into 1-inch pieces, and then remaining 1 1/2 quarts into 1/4-inch pieces.
3. Add vegetable base, spices, water, peanut butter and Roma tomatoes. Cover and bring to boil.
4. Add large sweet potato cubes to boiling soup and cook until tender.
5. Remove from heat and allow soup to rest.
6. Puree soup in blender or with immersion blender until silky smooth.
7. Add remaining smaller sweet potato pieces and simmer — heat for 20-30 minutes.

Try some yummy toppings:

• Crispy fried onions
• Roasted peanuts
• Plain yogurt
• Garden fresh organic cilantro

Eat me! I’m in season and fresh!

broccoli
parsley
celery
beets
kale
brussel sprouts
bok choy
cilantro
cauliflower
carrots
turnips
radishes
spinach
cadidicchio
strawberries

The post Read Up, Chow Down appeared first on The Fine Print.

Over the 20 years of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans lost their lives in the line of battle. An average two-year period in the United States sees more than 58,000 deaths — not in the face of war, but instead, due to domestic gun violence.

The violent reality of today’s society has prompted mass shootings in all corners of the country in recent years. On Dec. 14, 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. reignited the gun debate in America.

On Jan. 16, President Barack Obama signed 23 executive orders that edged toward gun control, sparking outrage from conservatives, particularly the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Under these executive orders, all states would be forced to implement stricter background checks, abolish unnecessary limitations on what information is provided in a background check, encourage the publicity of this information and use it to bar criminals from buying guns on the black market. The executive orders also aimed to clarify the extent of Medicaid plans’ mental health coverage and provide law enforcement with more adequate training for active mass shootings.

These proposals challenge state legislatures to review their gun laws, allowing for state jurisdiction to address the issue of gun reform. So, how does Florida stack up in the debate?

Florida got slapped with a “D-” in a 2012 study of gun safety by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a non-profit organization dedicated to in-depth research on gun laws in America.

The study examined 29 distinct firearm policy areas, including the state’s enforcement of background checks on firearm sales, use of assault weapons and large capacity ammunition magazines and the ease at which citizens can obtain a gun.

How did Florida end up in such a poor position? Under Florida’s current gun laws, no regulation, registration or background check is required to own a gun if received from a private dealer. Firearm dealers themselves require no state license. These dealers can purchase and obtain unlimited amounts of firearms without ever encountering a background check. Since firearms can be legally obtained without registration, law enforcement is left oblivious to the population owning and actively using guns.

Florida also does not regulate assault weapons, .50-caliber rifles, or large capacity ammunition magazines — the very weapons used in massacres such as Columbine High School, the Aurora movie theater and now Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Presented with President Obama’s requests, the governor of our “D-” state seems to think we’re just fine how we are and maintains his strong stance behind the Second Amendment. Scott — or his press secretary, rather, since he won’t speak out much about the issue — has expressed support for a reevaluation of Florida schools’ security measures, but that’s as far as he’ll budge in the realm of gun reform.

While Florida’s stuck with a “D-”, Gov. Scott was awarded an “A” by the Second Amendment’s truly, the NRA.

The NRA bases their grading system on how pro-gun a politician’s proposed policies are and typically allocates the most campaign funds to those who rank well.

John Kennedy, manager of Gator Skeet and Trap Club, believes that President Obama’s stance on gun laws has actually increased business at his sports shooting range recently. Kennedy thinks people are interpreting it as reason to assert their Second Amendment right.

Although Kennedy believes that the President’s plan infringes too far upon gun owners’ rights, he does agree that stricter laws may become necessary. “I can sympathize with someone who wants a gun because it’s our right, but there should be stricter background checks without the elimination of face-to-face sale,” said Kennedy.

“It’s ridiculous that it’s more difficult to vote than it is to purchase a gun in this state,” said Rachel McGovern, vice president of UF College Democrats.

McGovern, too, sees background checks as a necessary step that Florida’s current legislature ignores. The president’s proposals would help, McGovern agreed, but they are just the first step in a greater and more complex plan toward improving safety across the country.

But can America change? Huddled around our television screens, flooded by the never-ending headlines of lives lost due to gun violence, we constantly ask ourselves, “When will this end?”

Our elected officials can certainly motion for change, as President Obama has, but implementing and enforcing that change requires the signature of our governor. And that signature requires citizens’ voices to speak louder than lobbyists’ money, especially in Florida’s case.

The post Gun Policy Showdown appeared first on The Fine Print.

Five sets of eyes turn to the front, seeking direction. Jeremiah Tattersall stands at the head of the conference table, studying his notes closely for this evening’s meeting. He looks up at fellow member James Ingle and asks if there’s been any news on NECA.

Ingle pauses. The task force waits. The official endorsement of the National Electrical Contractor’s Association, a multi-million dollar organization, is the weighty support they need to show small businesses that preventing wage theft does not restrict profit.

“We got NECA,” he says, and grins. The members around the table let out a collective cheer.

While the task force celebrates, one member shuffles through a stack of recently-acquired endorsements. The task force has been methodically meeting with small businesses, organizations and local government officials who also believe that a wage theft ordinance would benefit the community. The task force member quickly rifles through the support of businesses like Satchel’s Pizza, Miller Electrical Company and Hear Again Music — tangible signs of community agreement.

Wage theft, the illegal withholding of wages or benefits to employees, occurs frequently in the United States. Wage theft comes in many forms, and it hits low wage workers the hardest. The numbers in Alachua County closely follow the rest of the state, where tourist and service industry employees, laborers and immigrant workers are affected the most. Often these workers are also single parents or working students.

“The people who need a consistent paycheck the most,” Diana Moreno, task force spokeswoman, said at a recent public hearing, “are the ones who are being taken advantage of the most.”

A 2008 study at UCLA showed that $2.9 billion in wages were never paid to surveyed employees in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. According to Department of Labor statistics,  Alachua County has seen over 2,000 wage theft violations from 2000 to 2010, leading to about $1 million in owed wages.

The task force hopes to reduce these numbers by implementing an ordinance that provides for a simple and effective system for addressing wage theft violations. The current state system, argues the task force, is neither. State wage theft complaints are currently handled by investigators in the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor. Florida has a total of six investigators. That’s 1.2 million employees per investigator. Usually, it takes between 8 to 10 months for an investigation to even begin.

In contrast, Miami-Dade county recently passed an ordinance that can solve a wage theft violation in 103 days on average, does not involve the courts and from 2010 to 2012 has accrued about $500,000 in lost wages. The task force hopes to follow the Miami-Dade model closely to achieve similar results.

Despite community support and the inefficiency of the current system, the ordinance faces resistance. Small businesses fear that government intervention will reduce profit. State Representative Keith Perry is one of the more vocal sources of opposition, having experience as both a part of the local government and business owner of Perry Roofing, Inc.

“We have several state laws that make it illegal to steal from employees. Do we need [another] government system now?” Perry said.  “Instead of expending energy on a local ordinance, what you might want to do is expend those energies on fixing the current [wage theft processes].”

Perry admitted that he did not know how the current processes worked.

“I’ve never filed [a wage theft complaint],” he said. “I can’t answer you that. It’s certainly worth looking into.”

Tattersall, member and spokesman of the task force, does not believe fixing the current state system would be effective.

“Under Bush, there [were] four Wage and Hourly Division investigators for the whole state; under Obama, there are six. This slight improvement isn’t near what is needed.”

Tattersall also points out that Florida does not even have a state Department of Labor. Mississippi is the only other state not to have one.

“It’d be a long way to go before we could even start to address the problem on a state level,” he said.

In the meantime, workers who do not receive their full wages struggle to pay the rent and buy groceries. Subsequently, the use of government-funded programs increases, despite the fact that the workers are technically employed.

“People need relief now,” Tattersall said, “and that’s what we’re offering.”

The post Taking Back Payday appeared first on The Fine Print.

Total student debt currently clocks in at over $1.06 trillion. In the time it took to type this sentence, the debt clock ticked up over $300,000 more. As if securing a job after graduation and maintaining a high GPA isn’t stressful enough, students nationwide are now being haunted by the debt of student loans well into their professional careers. Florida Governor Rick Scott doesn’t seem to think this mountain of debt is crippling enough.

In May of 2012, Scott created the Blue Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform. Recently, the task force introduced the idea of “differentiated tuition” – Florida students’ new worst nightmare.

This proposal stipulates that students pursuing STEM degrees — degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics — would be graced with a tuition freeze, meaning tuition for these bachelor’s degree programs would not increase over the next three years. On the contrary, students pursuing non-STEM degrees (degrees in anthropology, psychology or English, to name a few) would face a hefty tuition increase. Many of these non-STEM programs are “non-strategic,” whereas “strategic” degrees are “high-skill, high-wage, high-demand,” according to the Blue Ribbon Task Force’s proposal.

It may seem counterintuitive, but STEM courses are actually among the most expensive to teach due to the cost of lab facilities and smaller class sizes. The tuition freeze will therefore be offset by the tuition increase shouldered by non-STEM students.

In 2011, University of Florida President Machen requested to raise tuition for STEM degrees due to their increased demand, as well as the potentially higher salaries for STEM graduates. This starkly contrasts with Scott’s recent proposal. Nothing has changed regarding Machen’s request from two years ago; but the future, if the Task Force’s recommendations are executed, may look quite different.

Though Scott and his cronies have not formally implemented the proposal, they will reconvene for the upcoming legislative session in March to inch the effort forward.

In what seems to be his attempt to privatize higher education in Florida, Scott hopes to make these “strategic” degree programs more attractive. To promote job growth in these areas, he is attempting to lure students into these degrees by offering STEM tuition at a fixed price. Tuition for “non-strategic” programs, however, would steadily continue to increase. The lower cost of tuition may be enough to lure some students into pursuing a STEM degree.

Governor Scott is essentially diminishing the value of degrees in non-STEM areas. Most, if not all, of these degrees cultivate skills in students that would be useful in a variety of job settings. The value of non-STEM degrees is evident in the broad array of majors pursued by students studying law, for example.

“There is no “set” curriculum that a person aspiring to law school must follow,” Levin College of Law Dean Robert Jerry said. “A typical law school class will have a broad array of diverse academic backgrounds represented…[and] there will also be strong representation from engineering, fine arts, health sciences and other colleges.”

The set of skills that students cultivate in their college careers is far-reaching and versatile. Educational value does not lie solely with STEM degrees.

Scott also hopes to sway faculty to the STEM departments, though this hope may be in vain. Budget cuts speak loudly to faculty; many professors and researchers have recently been leaving Florida universities in high numbers because of the perceived devaluation of Florida’s education system. Florida State University has lost 50 faculty members in each of the past two years, for example. The differentiated tuition proposal would just perpetuate this decline.

Shortly after the proposal was published, a group of University of Florida history professors banded together to create a petition on Change.org against the differentiated tuition proposal. They posit that “the punitive differential tuition model will lead not only to a decimation of the liberal arts in Florida…it will also have a destructive impact on the essential and transferrable skills that these disciplines teach.”

Additionally, College of Fine Arts Dean Lucinda Lavelli leads an effort called UF SEA Change, the purpose of which is to “develop and disseminate innovative ideas for research, teaching and service to enhance the campus intellectual environment.” Binding together Science, Engineering and the Arts, SEA Change stands as a remonstration against the idea of a purely STEM-centered educational environment.

“In first review, it does not appear that the benefits of differential tuition would be realized, and there would be many negative consequences,” Lavelli said.

Lavelli, whose graduate education was in theater, dance and nonprofits, holds that students majoring in the Fine Arts are pursuing careers in law and medicine, not just the arts. Even some engineers, as she pointed out, are having trouble finding a job in today’s struggling economy.

“We don’t have a controlled economy, so we can’t manipulate it,” Lavelli said. “It’s a simplistic plan for a very complex problem.”

The post Motivated By Passion, Lured By Tuition appeared first on The Fine Print.

Rusti Pee, one of the co-founders and baristas at Radical Press Coffee Collective, brews up a strong cup of locally roasted coffee using the cafe’s new AeroPress coffee maker. Photo by Maria Correa.
What do you do when you are tired of working in environments where you “don’t have creative control,” “feel powerless,” or that your “opinions aren’t as valuable as the higher-ups’”? You get creative, partner with people and empower each other, and make an inspiring and collaborative work environment. In the words of famous architect Buckminster Fuller, “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

So what does this new model look like, and where is it?

It’s right in our backyard, at the artists’ block off south Main Street, also home to Citizen’s Co-op and Gainesville’s activist library, the Civic Media Center (CMC). This past fall, some young coffee-loving entrepreneurs pegged down this creativity hub for their new business model.

Entrepreneurs? Yes. Conventional? Hardly.

These eight founders were determined to build something better than the business-as-usual capitalist model. It would be a cooperatively run café — no bosses, anti-profit and community-focused. And with this mission, the Radical Press Coffee Collective was born.

Radical Press “dream[s] of a world where cooperative models are the norm and not an oddity,” where the management and production systems are “based on cooperation and not coercion,” said Rusti, Radical Press’s foam-forming barista artista.

At Radical Press, decisions are made laterally, meaning the decision-making process is non-hierarchical and entirely consensus-based. Additionally, all workers are self-employed and equally paid, allowing them to reduce management costs and additional overhead. Being self-employed, they have a personal interest in the success of the project as well, even if the interest is not driven by a profit motive.

One of the goals of Radical Press is to build upon the artists’ block and community that has been organically growing on south Main Street for several years. For a start, Radical Press launched an Indiegogo campaign in December to raise funds for its opening. The campaign’s goal? $15,000.

$15,000? Repeat that? A bit of a tall order for an anti-profit business model, no?

This type of speculative retort is something the collective has heard before.

The donations are for the coffee shop’s grand opening and for reinvestment back into the space, the project and partnership, as well as the community. This money will also go towards purchasing equipment and supplies, such as organic locally roasted coffee from roasters like Strongtree, Sweetwater and Tree City.

So far, the community has been supportive of the venture, donating their time, money and resources to get the collective up and running.

The founders believe that if the community wants the collective to thrive, they will keep coming back and donating for coffee and a comfortable, creative environment where they know they are truly valued as a customer.

“Our relationship with the CMC is symbiotic,” said Quinn Martin of Radical Press. “Our neighbors at the Co-op have been extremely generous in sharing their resources. We’ve been working with them to reduce our own overhead by using some of their facilities, while supporting them by purchasing most of our goods wholesale through the Co-op.”

Radical Press promises all surplus after paychecks, equipment maintenance and ingredients will go directly back into the community. Some of the campaign money and any monthly profit will be donated to the Civic Media Center for shared use of the space and utilities expenses, said Quinn.
Kenzie Cooke, another one of the Radical Press’s barista artista founders, is excited about the collective venture. “Since we don’t have any boss or owner concerned with profits influencing the space, the shop will be a real reflection of the community,” she said.

After several years of collaborating and community building, the artists’ block is now a hub for collective organizing, arts shows, workshops and music shows. It seems well on its way to being a sustainable and exemplary alternative business model, but how is success measured outside the traditional monetary metric utilized in capitalist business structures? How will the collective gauge success?

“One of our main objectives in forming this collective is to bring new energy into the CMC and revitalize it as a community space, so I think even if we can stay open as an all volunteer-run venture, I would call our project successful,” says Kenzie. “We want to be a real alternative and hope to share our process (what went horribly wrong, what we learned from it, etc.) and inspire similar collectives.”

By empowering each other, Radical Press and its neighbors hope to empower others to create similar new models and to give back to the community that helps support them in their venture. This is the kind of collaboration that builds jobs, the economy and real long-term equity. This is the kind of collaboration that has helped the artists’ block flourish.

The post No Boss, No Dairy, No Problem appeared first on The Fine Print.

Ed Braddy

After serving two terms as a Gainesville city commissioner, Ed Braddy entered the mayoral race in early January. Aside from his tenure as city commissioner, Braddy has also served as a co-host of the conservative Talk of The Town radio program. His work as director of the American Dream Coalition, a nonprofit group focusing on “the American dream of freedom, mobility and affordable homeownership” heavily influences his mayoral goals. Braddy has his sights set on a plan of fiscal conservatism and individual rights. He plans to oppose rising utility rates and taxes and promote affordable homeownership. Beyond this, he is working to “promote mobility,” as per his campaign website. What this comes down to is his desire to reject plans for a “bus rapid transit system,” a new plan circling in Gainesville city government, and focus instead on refining current RTS (Regional Transit System) service.

Scherwin Henry

Scherwin Henry is a senior biological scientist at the University of Florida, former city commissioner and a Gainesville native. Running his campaign on the concept of Gainesville as “a tale of two cities,” Henry looks to unite and promote growth throughout the city. His plans for his hometown include a focus on economic and community development, including a myriad of sub-issues, such as promoting plans to end homelessness, improvement to the existing infrastructure and environmental protection policies.

Peter Lars Johnson

Peter Lars Johnson first declared his intent to run for mayor in August of last year. A former chairman of the Gainesville Alachua County Regional Airport Authority, Johnson is hoping to “[lead] Gainesville from Good to Great,” as he describes on his campaign website. Deeply involved in Gainesville, Johnson’s resume hosts a wide range of tenures, from a term as president of the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra board to co-founder of UF’s Leadership Development Institute.  His stances seem to cling to the idea of fiscal responsibility and community development. It is clear that he wants to promote Gainesville’s reputation as a great place to raise a family, but his plans for what he would do exactly, if elected, are more vague.

Craig Lowe

Gainesville’s current mayor, Craig Lowe, a hands-on official who can often be found at student events at UF and downtown, is running for reelection. Previously, Lowe has worked as a biological scientist at UF and served as a city commissioner. Though not a Gainesville native, Lowe is finely tuned to workings of the city. His platform consists mostly of job creation through the promotion of new businesses — especially local businesses — and building projects. He hopes to create an environment in which, as he says on his campaign website, “all residents…can find a job and put down roots.” He has some emphasis on environmental concerns, neighborhood safety and promotion of a budgetary policy that would make his other plans possible. It seems Lowe, if afforded more time as mayor, would work to further the strides he has made in office so far.

Mark Venzke

Mark Venzke, who ran unsuccessfully for city commissioner last year, is largely a proponent of environmental activism. Venzke worked for a number of years in the landscape industry based in Chicago and later worked in Indiana and Colorado before eventually moving to Gainesville. Though his campaign focuses are broad, ranging from establishing “open and responsive government” to furthering Gainesville’s current transportation systems, Venzke has a keen interest in pursuing a “fully responsible energy policy,” as per his campaign website. Taking stances against  the biomass plant contract, which he says is too expensive and not well-suited for Gainesville, and the currently operating solar feed-in tariff program, Venzke seems focused on opening new avenues of renewable energy in Gainesville.

The post May (or) May Not appeared first on The Fine Print.

Founder of the Streetlight program at Shands Hospital, Rebecca Brown spoke of her experiences helping others handle life, death, and being human in the face of illness during TEDxUF at the Philips Center on February 23. Her talk, which ended the first portion of the day, was met with a standing ovation. Photos by Melanie Brkich.

When Rebecca Brown was a student in California, she found herself constantly being labeled as overly passionate. She was surrounded by laid-back people who preferred calm discussion over fervent action.

“I don’t know how many times it was said to me, ‘My, you’re passionate,” Brown said. “I can’t help it, I get worked up about whatever has gotten me on fire.”

Since coming to Gainesville, however, the people around her value her energy. Brown is the founder and director of Streetlight, a local program that partners students with young people with a chronic illness or disease. Recently, her dedication was recognized when she was selected to be a speaker at TEDxUF 2013.

She received a standing ovation after her talk about how society deals with death.

The event was held on Feb. 23 at the Phillips Center, and was the fourth iteration of TEDxUF, a testament to the idea of passionate living. Once a year, it showcases live speakers, performers, artists and entrepreneurs.

Organized locally, TEDx events are created in the spirit of TED, a nonprofit organization designed to promote “Ideas Worth Spreading.” This year’s theme, “Pursuing Passion,” was chosen by curator Stefan Wolff as the concise expression of everything the TED talks are about.

“A TED talk is a vehicle for ideas,” Wolff said. “The context and specific situations discussed might change, but the passion behind it doesn’t.”

Wolff, a junior at UF majoring in economics, has witnessed the growth of TEDxUF through the hard work of its organizers. He remembers the first year of the event as a work in progress. It was set in Pugh Hall and held only 70 people, but it also set the stage for what TEDxUF would become.

“The lighting was horrible, the videography sucked, but everything about it was organic and real,” Wolff said.

Since then, the event has grown to become one of the top 10 percent of TEDx events in terms of attendance, serving an audience of around 1,600 people. It is also one of the few events that holds the TED brand and yet is still able to remain free to the public. This is done through donations from businesses and organizations around Gainesville.

The decision to keep the event free was important to the people behind it.

“We know that a lot of people in college are eating Ramen noodles and Chipotle every day,” Wolff said. “We don’t want people to have to break the bank to come participate.”

Wolff first became involved as an ambassador to the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the organization responsible for putting together the event. Once he heard about TEDxUF, he knew he wanted to help out in any way he could. He started out as House Manager, and by the next year was promoted to Head of Sponsorship. This year as Curator, he is in charge of putting the event together with the help of a core group of about fifteen people.

Wolff believes in the work he’s put in. “I wanted to make a difference and do something that matters, and I was lucky enough to be put in positions to do so,” he said.

Part of his job with the event was finding the speakers, who ranged from college students and professors to startup founders and charity organizers. His search criteria included finding people with enthusiasm, presence in the community and a tendency toward pushing ideas outside of the status quo.

Ken Staab was one of the speakers that Wolff found who this description. Through his work as an “Ambassador of Hope” for Tyler’s Hope, a non-profit organization designated to finding a cure for the neurological movement disorder Dystonia, Staab has seen his passion lead to concrete results. The culmination of his efforts was a $1 million donation to the UF College of Medicine for research. This happened after Staab was driven to leave his successful career in corporate banking to devote all he could to the organization.

“I had always wanted to do more, and I found myself in a job taking me away,” Staab said. “There’s no way to relax once you see this thing is curable and within our grasp.”

Staab’s TED talk utilized the example of Tyler’s Hope to advocate his unorthodox approach to funding, communicating that “high-risk, high reward research” is better off this way than in the hands of government or managed care. More than this, however, his talk stressed the importance of putting passions into actions that affect change.

The people on stage weren’t the only entrepreneurs and artists given the chance to show their passion. Part of the event included a Lab made up of innovative people from around Gainesville.

Chris Cano and Steven Kanner started the business Gainesville Compost, which uses their newly invented bicycle trailers to compost food scraps without using any gas or electricity. They brought one of their bikes to the event to show people how they’re using innovative ways to pursue what they believe in.

“We’re in a field that has yet to be developed,” Cano said. “We’re working on a mission that demands a lot of passion every day.”

This year, many new aspects were added to the event, including an art exhibit showcasing artists from the university. Noel Kassewitz, a who is majoring in painting, showcased some of her works that took concepts on the multiverse theory and expressed them through the repeated use of rabbits.

“A lot of the art here really goes along with what TED is about,” Kassewitz said. “We’re trying to take the realms of science and art, which are usually disparate, and connect them.”

Another new component of the event was an app for iPhones and androids. The app was powered by Feathr, a local startup that specializes in connecting people at events like these. The company was a part of the Lab at last year’s TEDxUF, and this year they took their participation a step further.

“I’ve been involved with TEDxUF for a while,” Feathr’s co-founder, Aidan Agustin, said. “This year was a cool way to give back to something that I’ve gotten a lot out of.”

This idea of contribution and collaboration was a present feeling at the event. While everyone had something to offer, they also could find something to take out of it.

Ken Staab viewed TEDxUF as a gift. Speaking of his job in corporate banking, he said, “It got to the point where I wasn’t getting any butterflies anymore. When I was told I could do a TED talk, I had butterflies for the first time in twenty years.”

Dayna Lazarowitz, 20, a junior graphic design student at UF, demonstrates how individual images she hung from a repurposed lamp illustrate the theme and title of the piece, “Electric,” which was shown in the upstairs art gallery of TEDxUF.

Jasmine Aldershoff, 19, an art major at UF, displays her work in the TEDxUF art exhibit on the second floor of the Philips Center.

The post The Passion Behind TEDxUF appeared first on The Fine Print.

The traffic cameras overhead, the bus driving by, the convenience store across the street, that ATM you just withdrew money from — surveillance is everywhere.

But who’s watching? Law enforcement, you’d assume, but they’re only a pixel of the full picture.

Each RTS bus has four to five video cameras recording not just the inside, but the outside, as well. Audio within the bus is also recorded.

Florida Statute 812.173(1)(a) requires every convenience store to have a security camera system and the U.S. Bank Protection Act of 1968 mandates a camera inside every ATM.

Private businesses usually comply to share footage from their own cameras, often without a subpoena or a warrant, according to Ben Tobias, Gainesville Police Department’s public information officer.

Best Buy released surveillance that helped determine the clothes UF student Christian Aguilar wore the day he went missing last September. The matching clothes indicated it was his body that was found 22 days later, before he could be properly identified by an autopsy.

The traffic cameras that are used as part of Gainesville’s traffic management system, a high-tech solution to traffic congestion, can also be utilized by law enforcement to track a person of interest or a suspicious vehicle — but not to ticket drivers.

Since they don’t record, they aren’t considered surveillance cameras, said Matthew Weisman, an Intelligent Transportation Services engineer at the Public Works Department.

But the Intelligent Transportation Services’ Strategic Plan states that the Florida Department of Transportation “collects a significant amount of real-time information, such as video.”

“Generally speaking, this information is not archived,” the document states. “In part, this is to avoid the workload and potential legal implications of third parties seeking access to this information.”

For roughly the past 13 years, police cars in Alachua County have had audio and video recording technology to record interactions between cops and citizens, said Lt. Todd Kelly, public information officer for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office.

More than 80,000 license plates, along with the location, date and time, have been captured by just one patrol car using the VeriPlate Automated License Plate Recognition System, a technology the sheriff’s office started using in June 2011. This does not mean 80,000 distinct tags — it could include multiple recordings of the same tag at different times, as Lt. Kelly explained.

The black and white infrared camera can capture up to 1,440 license plates a day, from vehicles parked or moving in either direction of traffic. Another camera takes a high-resolution color photo of the vehicle to accompany its tag number.

The $20,000 system is used to find stolen vehicles, wanted persons, and people driving with suspended or revoked licenses. It’s also used for “domestic security purposes,” according to its purchase order, and to “aid in the continued protection of the motoring public of Florida.”

Storage is purchased on demand and grows as needed, Denise Rodenbough, chief of service support for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, said. “The data is stored for 3 years and is accessible on a ‘need to know’ basis.”

The records are stored and backed up at one of the state’s primary data centers in Tallahassee, a secure disaster recovery facility, according to Rodenbough.

“You have to assume that you’re being recorded 24/7,” Kelly said. “As an agency, we welcome that.”

The post Watching the Watchmen appeared first on The Fine Print.

Keri Johnson performs in the final rehearsal for “The Vagina Monologues.” After a two-year absence from the Gainesville community, “The Vagina Monologues” comes back for a highly anticipated week of performances. Keri and the 17 other actresses will give three shows throughout the week of Valentine’s Day — all three sold out the week before opening night on Feb. 11. Photos by Maria Correa.
This February, the “V” in V-Day doesn’t stand for “valentine.”

“‘V’ stands for ‘victory,’ for ‘violence,’ for ‘vagina,’ you know – fill in the ‘V’ word,” said Keri Johnson, 27. Johnson, a University of Florida graduate student, will be directing this year’s production of “The Vagina Monologues.”

Described by Johnson as a collection of monologues about the experience of being female, the show is a staple of V-Day, a global campaign to raise awareness about ending violence against women.

Activism is hardly limited to a single day or month of a year, but V-Day is typically celebrated on Feb. 14 and in the days leading up to it. Adhering to tradition, “The Vagina Monologues” will be shown at The Hippodrome Theatre on Feb. 11, Feb. 12 and Feb. 14.

Johnson has been involved with other productions of “The Vagina Monologues” in the past, but is trying her hand at directing it for the first time this year.

The UF student organization that usually coordinates it, Victory Over Violence, was unable to follow through on the project last year. Johnson was determined to bring the show back to Gainesville, but she is not affiliated with Victory Over Violence and has been leading the production independently from them.

Johnson found that being able to step up and take the reins on a project nobody else was willing or able to handle allowed her some leeway to try something new: namely, pulling the production away from the university and focusing on the wider Gainesville community.

“Having it at the university kind of shrinks our audience,” she said.

This year, Johnson and her production crew did a call to all local Gainesville artists to donate any ‘vagina-oriented’ art that is personally significant as, Johnson said, “an abstract way of the healing process of femininity, of being a woman, of the vagina itself.”

The hour before the show, audience members will be able to browse the Hippodrome’s art gallery and enjoy some food donated from local restaurants.

“It’s going to be a whole event – not just about the 90 minutes of the performance, but a whole evening,” she said.

Johnson said that all proceeds will be funneled into Peaceful Paths, a rape and domestic violence crisis center serving Alachua, Bradford and Union Counties.

Peaceful Paths executive director Theresa Beachy is looking forward to the production. The show celebrates and encourages open discussion about women’s issues, delivering a message is very much in line with the mission of Peaceful Paths. Beachy believes that silence is one of the biggest contributing factors to the continuing social blight of domestic violence.

“People are shamed into not talking about it,” she said. “As a society we don’t want to talk about it because it’s a difficult situation to deal with.”

Alachua County’s population is the largest in the tri-county area served by Peaceful Paths; between the three counties, there are about 2,000 arrests for domestic violence crime each year.

“Alachua County was identified several years ago as one of the counties with the top five highest rates of domestic violence homicide in the state of Florida,” she said. “We are working very hard to create a coordinated community response to the issue.”

Like Johnson, Beachy stressed the importance of community in the process of recovery and of raising awareness.

“The community support aspect is vital,” Beachy said. “Creating those communities and giving people the chance to start talking about it make a huge difference in their ability to have long-term recovery from the emotional scars.”

She has seen countless women return to abusive relationships simply because they felt they had no other option. In many cases, a support network can make all the difference and help these women safely free themselves.

Either way, individual recovery is a tricky thing to try and quantify, so Beachy and the staff at Peaceful Paths measure success differently.

“We judge success by how many women say that they feel safer when they leave us than they did when they came,” Beachy said.

With community being such a vital aspect of recovery, it’s important that the “The Vagina Monologues” welcomes the entirety of Gainesville.

Hosting the event at The Hippodrome seems to be helping with that as tickets sold out a week before opening night. The production’s success can only bode well for future attempts. Johnson is hoping to stick around Gainesville next year and help the community continue its participation in V-Day.

“It’s been a really monumental experience for me every year I’ve been involved in it,” she said.

The post “The Vagina Monologues” Put the “V” in V-Day appeared first on The Fine Print.

Mira Brown, 18, works on a belt strap using backstrap weaving techniques and a handmade loom. Weaving classes were among the day’s 40+ choices of classes; others classes ranged from “Rawhide Sandals” to “Papermaking” to “Eco-homesteading 101.” Photos by Lily Wan.

(Scroll down for a virtual tour of the gathering!)

Only 40 minutes outside of town, but it felt like we were days away. North Carolina, Utah, Indiana, Maryland, Virginia, another Virginia — plates tagged from all over. Folks taking a day off from their nine-to-fives, skilled foragers and didgeridoo crafters, and a handful of locals were among the mass of nearly 350 who pitched tents and spent last weekend at the third annual Earthskills Gathering.

This primitive living skills convention isn’t the first of its kind — the grandfather of them is the Rivercane Rendezvous in Georgia, which has been hosted annually since 1985. Mycol Stevens hosts Florida’s Earthskills Gathering on his 20-acre property about 30 miles north of Gainesville. As attendance increases each year, Mycol welcomes a growing community of strangers and friends alike to experience a completely independent life off the grid, learning invaluable primitive survival skills from experts through four lesson-packed days. Each day serves as a canvas for over 40 scheduled classes taught by expert instructors whose teaching was paid for by the $100 to $200 registration donation requested of each attendee.

This year, 80 instructors were on the schedule, which was printed and pinned to a large bulletin board in the front of the camp.

“The highest level of instructors are here from around the country,” Mycol said. He taught classes about ethnobotany and mycology, the study of mushrooms.

However, the classes are only details in the greater idea that permeates Earthskills: sustainable and conscious living based in selflessness and respect for people and nature.

In the Earthskills paradigm, everyone contributes to the community. Children learn from elders. People share meals around a campfire. No one is a stranger and everyone has a role to play.

“Mass society is completely disconnected,” he said. “This is a different paradigm.”

The environment of Finca Mycol (“finca” is Spanish for “estate”) buzzes with the bustle of ideas — ideas shared between friends and strangers, old and young, and instructor and student.

Under clear blue skies, surrounded by an attentive group of seated participants, CoreyPine Shane began his Hot Plants: Juicy Herbs for Late Night Endeavors class. Back home in Asheville, N.C., Shane is the director of the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine. He blends Chinese and Western herbs to create tinctures and come up with concoctions such as Corey’s Balls (yes, go ahead and snicker here). The balls are made of honey, a unique concoction of aphrodisiacs and various seeds.

Not every aphrodisiac needs preparation. Saw Palmetto berries, for example, temporarily increase testosterone levels. A participant happened to have a bagful, and he happily passed the berries around the circle. Taste reviews ranged from soapy to tangy to “like old chewing gum.”

“Western science’s definition of health is a lack of disease,” CoreyPine said before continuing on to distinguish the benefits of traditional medicinal regimes over modern western medicine, which focuses more on disease and ailment cure than prevention.

CoreyPine’s class was just one of the handful of classes on medicinal herbs and plant usage. The weekend’s classes weren’t all nature-centered, though. Other classes ranged from bicycle maintenance and assembly to preparing for a nuclear meltdown to Aikido martial arts.

Take a virtual tour of other classes hosted at Earthskills by hovering over the red circles on the map below. Get a better feel for Finca Mycol and gear up for next year’s gathering — Mycol expects it to continue growing with more instructors, more classes and more students.

To see an enlarged version of this map, click here.

The post Off the Grid and Back to Basics appeared first on The Fine Print.

Start your year right with some fresh tunes.

So maybe we’re not the cute boy/girl from your anthropology class giving you a physical mix tape complete with hand-drawn pictures, but the intention is the same. We like you and we want to share some of our favorite tracks with you. They’re here waiting to be heard in January’s mix.

If the weather outside is frightful, curl up under a blanket. If it may as well be summer, throw on those shorts and run around outside. You never know in Gainesville. Either way, click play, kick back and get excited for the new year. It’s going to be a good one.

Print editor Ashira Morris strung these tracks together.

The post THE MIX: January 2013 appeared first on The Fine Print.

“This is an intrauterine device,” she says.

An intrauterine device, commonly called an IUD, is placed into the uterus to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The gynecologist inserts the device once, where it remains in place for five to seven or 10 to 12 years, depending on the type of IUD. Any human error that comes with remembering to take a pill or insert a diaphragm is eliminated. Only 0.2 to 0.8 percent of women with IUDs have unplanned pregnancies per year. The Pill, in comparison, comes in at around nine percent per year.

An IUD can reduce the length and heaviness of the woman’s period and can be removed at any time. It doesn’t have the side effects associated with The Pill, such as weight gain, mood swings and nausea.

Despite advantages over other forms of birth control, the IUD is still a mysterious entity to many women.

There are two types of IUDs: copper- or hormone-based.

The copper model, called Paraguard works by periodically releasing small doses of copper into the uterus. It spurs a brief inflammatory reaction, calling up troops of white blood cells. The blood cell fluid kills sperm instantly.

An IUD also can work as a morning after pill because the inflammation prevents a fertilized egg from settling in the uterus.

The hormone-based IUD, Mirena, prevents pregnancy just like oral contraception. It thickens mucus in the cervix to prevent sperm from getting through to the uterus and slows the growth of the uterine lining.

Emily*, a University of Florida student, was on The Pill for four years. She didn’t have any problems with it but wanted to switch to an IUD because she saw it as a better form of birth control. By choosing the copper form, she could avoid putting unnecessary hormones in her body.

“I wanted to see what my body was like in its natural state,” she said.

Emily wasn’t nervous until the day before the procedure. But for some women, fear of the insertion process prevents them from considering IUDs altogether. According to Karen Brown Williams, a specialist at the UF Women’s Health Clinic, the process is like getting a tooth filled.

“It’s not surgery, but it is a sterile procedure,” she said.

Before anything is inserted, the woman must pass a STD screening and a pregnancy test.

For the procedure, the woman returns to the clinic during her period, because this is when the cervix is slightly more relaxed and open. The woman settles in to the usual gynecologist-visit position: legs in the stirrups. The vagina is held open with a speculum, an instrument that widens the opening of the vagina, making the cervix is more easily visible and giving the nurse access the uterus. Then the nurse inserts the tenaculum, which is used to pinch the cervix and hold it steady.

The nurse loads the IUD into a tube about the size of a finger. It slides partially into the cervix with the IUD inside — the T-shaped arms are flattened — and pushes into the cervix. It settles into place and spreads its arms. The string hangs out slightly; the nurse will trim it so that it is not bothersome.

For Emily, the insertion process was three minutes of discomfort. She felt cramps immediately after, which is expected, but within fifteen minutes they subsided.

“It was nothing Ibuprofen couldn’t fix,” she said.

Although she was uncomfortable, she reminded herself about the long-term benefit: a decade of birth control without hormones.

* Last name omitted for privacy

The post The IUD appeared first on The Fine Print.

It’s that time of the year again–the time for cheer, charity, friends, warm fuzzies and consumption. Lots and lots of consumption for the typical American, yes. But, you, Reader of The Fine Print, don’t have to live like that.

Energy savings:

Lights

Best choice: LED or Energy Star lights.

Compared to conventional lights, they use 90 percent less energy and last 10 times longer.

Once you’ve got your lights set up, make sure they’re on a timer, or just be conscious about turning them off when you’re not home.

 Heating (yep, still applicable to us Floridians)

Set your thermostat to a lower temperature at night and when you’re away from home. Even setting it just 10o lower at night can save 10-20 percent on your monthly heating bill.

Make sure your home is running at its most energy efficient. Energy audits are free in Alachua County; call GRU for more info on setting up an appointment.

Waste reduction:

From Thanksgiving to New Years Day, household waste increases an average of 25 percent.

Half the paper used in America each year is used to wrap and decorate consumer products.

Steer clear of that shellac-y, glittery wrapping paper and use one of these alternatives instead:

• paper grocery bags

• old newspapers (Stellar idea: go ahead and use this issue (once you’re done reading it, duh)

• fabric (the Japanese are way ahead of us; they call this method “furoshiki”)

• tissue paper

• old maps

Gifts:

Order or ship gifts early via ground shipping instead of waiting until the last minute and overnighting your package(s). Ground shipping is 6 times more efficient in fuel usage than overnight shipping.

Re-gift shamelessly.

Make a card instead of buying it! The 2.65 billion cards sold during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high and requires harvesting nearly 300,000 trees.

…Or save your money and resources and just swing with “it’s the thought that counts” and a shrug.

 Trees:

30 million trees cut down for holiday season every year.

No One Likes a Fake

• 90% imported from China (think about carbon footprint from overseas shipping carbon, too!)
• Made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a non-biodegradable, petroleum-derived plastic
• Depending on where your fake tree was made, it could contain lead as a PVC stabilizer. At about nine years old, it can start shedding lead dust
• However, studies show that if you use an artificial tree for more than ten years (even though the average family only keeps theirs for 5-6 years), it’s more environmentally friendly than buying a fresh-cut tree each year

Keep it Real

• There are approximately 400 million christmas trees growing in America right now; these trees continue to perform their natural ecosystem services until harvested. This includes: recycling the air, purifying groundwater and providing homes for birds mammals and insects.
• Buying real trees helps farm businesses and keeps land covered in trees.
• Buy local! Nearest Christmas tree farm:

Unicorn Hill Farm

3605 NW 69th Street

Gainesville, FL 32606

Treecycle — turn that conifer into mulch for spring gardening!

Alachua County Curbside Recycling Program will pick up your tree curbside as regular yard waste. There’s no need to try to stuff the tree in a bag (that’s quite ridiculous) as you would with normal yard waste; just set it curbside and make sure it doesn’t have any leftover decorations on it.

The post ‘Tis the Season (of Waste) appeared first on The Fine Print.

Props and literature in hand, pro-life believers stand outside the Bread and Roses Women’s Health Clinic for their two-hour shift of prayer and protest.  Photos by Lily Wan.

Shirley and Joe have been standing on the sidewalk for three hours, but they don’t mind. They stand with a handful of other protesters, Bibles and rosary beads in tow, in front of Bread and Roses Women’s Health Center, a clinic that performs abortions every Wednesday and Friday. These pro-life advocates, who have gathered in the weeks leading up to the 2012 presidential election, have joined together to pray and protest.

The couple, who has been married for 49 years, were adamant about seeking alternative options before deciding to have an abortion. The two cited several resources available to women seeking an abortion, including adoption facilities, confidential helplines and other pro-life organizations.

“If it’s something you can’t handle,” Shirley said, “another couple can.”

Shirley was especially concerned with the idea of performing an abortion on a woman who has been pregnant for several months.  However, the National Abortion Federation (NAF), a professional association of abortion practitioners, states that 88 percent of abortions are obtained in the first trimester. Nevertheless, in Florida, a woman can legally have an abortion through her second trimester.

Monica and Ryan also stood in protest in front of the Bread and Roses clinic with Shirley and Joe.  They claimed to engage in the protest both for religious and personal reasons. All four declined to give their last names.

“Everything we’re doing here is out of love for the unborn,” Ryan said. “It’s meant to be a peaceful protest.”

Though the protesters claim their demonstrations are intended to be peaceful, their mere presence can be a perceived threat to Bread and Roses patients.

“[Protesters] make it really uncomfortable for the patient who has made her decision for personal reasons,” said Amara Kaimrajh, the Escorting Chair for VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood.

As Escorting Chair, Kaimrajh’s main responsibility is to escort patients into Bread and Roses and make them feel at ease.  She said she has made an effort to remain neutral on the subject of abortion but enjoys her volunteer position.

“It’s a great way to spend your time; it’s for a good cause,” she said.

This relatively small protest in Gainesville, FL is a visual reminder of the controversy surrounding abortion nationwide. The issue made its way onto several states’ ballots of the November 2012 election, including Florida.

The Florida Abortion Amendment, or Amendment 6 on this past election ballot, would have prohibited the use of public funds for abortions except as required by federal law and to save the mother’s life. This amendment would have essentially allowed politicians to dictate what rights women have by controlling what medical insurance does and does not cover. Randy Armstrong, president of the group Citizens for Protecting Taxpayers and Parental Rights, which came out in support of the amendment, claims a private act should not be a public expense. But many against Amendment 6 believe women have the right to make their own decisions about their bodies without being held hostage by third parties, like insurance companies.

While Amendment 6 was voted down 55 percent to 44 percent this past November, there are many who disagree with the legality and availability of abortions, even in the case of incest or rape.

“Does one crime justify another?” Monica said, alluding to the notion that performing an abortion on a woman who has been raped is, essentially, committing two crimes. “I want to put an end to the abortion industry.”

According to the NAF, the “abortion industry” performs an average of 1.3 million abortions each year.  They also report that the women who do choose to have abortions come from all backgrounds, religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, etc.; are between the ages of 20 and 24 and are unmarried. 27 percent of abortion patients identify as Catholics.

While the majority of private medical insurance plans and HMO organizations currently cover abortion services, 57 percent of women who had abortions in 2000 were of low-income and unlikely to have a good medical insurance plan, let alone one with a low deductible. The NAF reports that, while the cost of an abortion increases with how far along the pregnancy is and various other factors (kinds of anesthetic, the facility, etc.), a first-trimester abortion generally costs between $350-$500.

While of course nationally, abortion remains legal, protesters like Shirley will continue to turn out nationwide and gather in front of abortion clinics, where they still exist and remain accessible, to pray for these “crimes” and attempt to sway passersby with signs and rosary beads.  Locally, Gainesville stays abortion-friendly — boasting not one, but two abortion clinics to provide healthcare services to women in need.

“There is murder going on in there,” said Shirley, standing in front of the Bread and Roses Women’s Health Center.

Amara Kaimrajh waits outside Bread & Roses to escort a patient past the protesters and into the clinic. “We’ve had human shielding,” she said. “It can get tense.”

The post Full House appeared first on The Fine Print.

Photo by Lily Wan

Seminole Pumpkin Cheesecake

From: Civilization
Fun fact: a pumpkin is a fruit. Funner fact: you can make a cheesecake out of one. Check out this recipe shared with us by Maggie Hope and Ann Murray, co-owners of worker-owned cooperative restaurant Civilization and its catering branch, Terranova. Seminole pumpkin is a native Florida fruit that readily grows in our weather conditions and soil. Quit reading and get cooking!

The List

(Makes 2 cheesecakes)

• 1 1/2 cups baked pureed Seminole Pumpkin**
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger or all-spice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 24 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
• 1/2 cup raw sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Pecan Graham Cracker Crust

• 4 cups organic graham cracker crumbs (can be ground in food processor)
• 2 cups ground pecans
• 1 cup cold butter
• 2 tablespoons raw sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

**Cut pumpkin into 3-by-3 inch pieces and bake until tender (30 to 40 minutes at 350 degrees), then cool a bit and peel off the skin. Place in colander to drain off extra moisture and then puree in food processor.

The Steps

• For the Pecan Graham Cracker Crust: Process all ingredients until very fine crumbs are formed.  Press into two pie pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes. Set aside to cool before filling with cheesecake mixture.
• Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
• Process together the first six ingredients. In an electric mixer, blend together cream cheese, raw sugar and vanilla. Add pumpkin mixture and blend until smooth and fully incorporated, but do not overmix.
• Divide the mixture between two graham cracker crusts and bake for an hour or until set. (Baker’s tip: Placing a pan of water in the oven may help prevent cracking of cheesecake.)

The Vegan Way (modification by us)

For the cheesecake mixture, instead of the eggs and cream cheese use:

• 2 cups of soaked (overnight) cashews
• 2/3 cup coconut oil, melted
• 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

Throw everything in the food processor and add the remaining ingredients according to Civilization’s recipe.

For the crust, just use vegan margarine instead of butter.

Eat me! I’m in season and fresh!

Yellow squash*
Green beans
Eggplant
Turnips*
Seminole pumpkins*
Okra
Shiitake mushrooms
Dinosaur Kale
Fennel
Sunflower shoots
Pea shoots*
Sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes)
Red zinger
Citrus: Red Navel/Navel/Valencia oranges*
Marsh grapefruit*

* Produced locally around Gainesville

The post Read Up, Chow Down appeared first on The Fine Print.

Chocolate: Doping for Nerds

It’s just as I thought.  I really am as superior as I think — not because I have a hipster playlist in my earbuds (see MUSIC on opposite page) or because I buy my unprocessed peanut butter at the Co-Op, but because I eat CHOCOLATE.

A new study out of Columbia University has provided very convincing correlational evidence that nations that consume more chocolate per capita produce more Nobel Prize winners.

Sound crazy?  Here’s some irrefutable proof. Switzerland, the most innovative country in the EU and the wealthiest country in the world (in per capita terms and wealth defined as financial and nonfinancial assets), is at the top of the list with both the highest chocolate consumption per head and the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita.

Have I convinced you yet? Okay, well, here’s further proof. Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Christopher Pissarides from the London School of Economics, says his chocolate habit gave him what he needed to pull out the win in 2010.

“To win a Nobel Prize you have to produce something that others haven’t thought about — chocolate that makes you feel good might contribute a little bit,” Pissarides said to the BBC.  “Of course it’s not the main factor but… anything that contributes to a better life and a better outlook in your life then contributes to the quality of your work.”

Okay, you’re right. Not the best testimony. But how about this: Eric Cornell, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 told Reuters:

“I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume. Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid… dark chocolate is the way to go. It’s one thing if you want a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate.”

Dark chocolate is obviously the superior chocolate.  However, Cornell came to regret his condemnation of milk chocolate when he was later asked to elaborate on the firm stance.

“I deeply regret the rash remarks I made to the media. We scientists should strive to maintain objective neutrality and refrain from declaring our affiliation either with milk chocolate or with dark chocolate,” he said. “Now I ask that the media kindly respect my family’s privacy in this difficult time.”

Clearly, chocolate is a factor in all academic, professional and intellectual achievements. Indisputably. Hands down. For the win.

Footnote: The author of this study, Franz Messerli, would like to remind the scientific community and readers that correlation does not equal causation.

“When you see a correlation, you do think there is causation in one way or another. And in general it’s absolutely true. But here we have a classic example where we cannot find a good reason why these two correlate so closely.”

By Chelsea Hetelson

Tantrums are for Babies

When I was 9 and my brother was 5, we played two-player Mario and Donkey Kong on our Super Nintendo.  Since I was four years his senior, I would usually win, and when I did, it was almost like the world was ending. Controllers would go flying, tears would flow and I would end up being scolded just because my motor skills were on pace for normal development.

But tantrums are normal for 5-year-olds. They’re basically still babies and can’t handle losing yet. But for millionaire CEOs of national million-dollar companies, throwing a tantrum seems a little, well, fucking ridiculous.

John Schnatter CEO of Papa John’s says Obamacare is going to force him to charge 11 to 14 cents more per pie and cut back on workers’ hours to make up for the higher costs, yet still manages to give away 2 million free pizzas.

CEO Robert Murray of Murray Energy (coal mines), after he forced his employees to forfeit a day’s work and pay to attend a Mitt Romney rally and pressured them to donate to his campaign, has responded to Obama’s win by “reading a prayer and firing 156 employees.”

Franchisor of Hurricane Grill & Wings and owner of several Denny’s and Dairy Queens, John Metz, cut employee hours to below 30 hours a week and added a note on the menu indicating that a 5% surcharge will be added to their bill due to Obamacare, and as Metz put it, “They can either pay it and tip 15 or 20 percent, or if they really feel so inclined, they can reduce the amount of tip they give to the server, who is the primary beneficiary of Obamacare.”
CEO of New York-area Applebee’s Zane Tankel announced Obamacare costs have made it impossible for him to hire any new employees for the foreseeable future.

And last but not least, CEO of Aetna insurance company, Mark Bertolini, has issued an ultimatum to Obama and Congress regarding the debt ceiling: “The American people are going to suffer because we’ll lay them off — because we know how to respond to these kinds of situations.”

And there you have it. The biggest (and most disgusting) cry babies of the presidential election of 2012. Oh, to be young. Or rich.  Whatever.
Note: As of Nov. 20th, Mr. Schnatter, CEO of Papa John’s, spoke out via Huff Post to let the everyone know they’ve got the wrong impression.

By Chelsea Hetelson

The post Paper Cuts Winter 2012 appeared first on The Fine Print.

Bread of the Mighty’s first customers of the day arrive right when the doors open at 8:00 am to beat the usually crowded aisles. Friday mornings are the food bank’s busiest time of the week as local organizations, such as churches, stock up for weekend meal distributions. Photos by Lily Wan.

The city of Gainesville is fortunate enough to have a host of organizations and groups that provide warm meals and a helping hand to those in need, such as Bread of the Mighty Food Bank, Food 4 Kids Backpack Program, Gainesville Harvest and Showers of Blessings Harvest Center Food Pantry.

Bread of the Mighty Food Bank, a Gainesville staple since 1987, was able to distribute 4.8 million pounds of food between 2011 and 2012 to the poor. With the economic downturn, that has included an increasing number of families and students. Campaigns like Strike Out Hunger Food Drive and Thanksgiving Basket Giveaway have proposed goals of raising 100,000 pounds of food for needy families in November, recognized as National Hunger Month. Non-perishable food items are donated to Alachua County non-profit food banks and pantries, while the Thanksgiving Baskets are distributed to families through the Alachua County Social Services.

While groups like these collect food and donations from the community throughout the year, their shelves could always be more full. These food banks, like the people they help, are always in need. In fact, just prior to Thanksgiving this year, several food banks and shelters, such as St. Francis House homeless shelter, which provides special holiday meals, reported exceptionally low donation levels. Generally, donations increase near the holiday season.

It isn’t only the homeless, the poor and working poor who are at the food banks and need the support. Students and families are increasingly seeking aid as well. Over 51,000 people in Alachua County are currently living in poverty and about 20 percent of those people are children or seniors.

Many families are frequenting food banks, if only to help supplement their needs when times are really tight. The number of public school students receiving reduced lunch has also increased over the last year, which may be another indicator of the increased needs of Gainesville’s families.

Food banks, like Gainesville Harvest, founded in 1991, seek to stamp out food insecurities such as these. Food insecurity is common among poorer communities throughout the year, not just around the holidays. These individuals and families aren’t always certain that they will have a full meal, if any, in a given day. That’s why autonomous groups like Gainesville’s Food Not Bombs chapter collects leftover food that would otherwise be discarded from places, like Wednesday’s Downtown Farmers’ Market, the Citizen’s Co-op and the Krishna House, and serve it weekly to those in need.

Community driven projects, like the burgeoning Porters’ Community Farm and Garden here in downtown Gainesville, aim to address those needs in a more sustainable way. The small, urban plot is projected to grow up to one ton of food per year, according to Florida Organic Growers, a local non-profit group spearheading the farm’s collaboration with St. Francis House homeless shelter. The Porters’ urban farm project, located only a few blocks away from St. Francis House, plans to start providing the shelter’s food bank with fresh vegetables within the next year.

The goal of projects like these, sprouting up around the nation, is to provide the local community with a means to ensure their own food and economic security by growing some of their food themselves and additionally to ensure a steady supply of healthy, nutritious food to fill food bank shelves and empty bellies year round.

If you would like to help make sure the Gainesville community has a great holiday season and a great year, try contacting one of the following organizations!

Bread of the Mighty Food Bank 
(Check out their holiday food box wish list here!)
325 NW 10th Avenue
Call: (352) 336 – 0839

Catholic Charities Gainesville Food Pantry
Gainesville Regional Office
1701 NE 9th Street
Phone: (352) 372 – 0294
Website here.

Food Not Bombs
Cooking Sunday mornings @ 11 a.m.; Sharing at Bo Diddley Plaza @ 3 p.m.
To contact, email: fnb352[at]lists.riseup.net

Gainesville Harvest
Open from 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM, Monday through Friday
4550 S.W. 41st Boulevard, Suite 1
(352) 378-3663
Website here.

Tom arrives at Bread of the Mighty early to beat the usual Friday rush and stock up for weekend meal servings at Seventh-Day Adventist Church of Interlachen. “Sometimes you can’t even get through the aisles they’re so busy,” he said, “but it’s good — the community pitching in — especially in these tougher times.”

Bob Liebler, the self-described “warehouse guy” at Bread of the Mighty, arrives to work early to prepare for the day and keep Bread of the Mighty’s shelves full. While the majority of the bank’s donations are from the government and supermarkets, individuals’ donations also help stock the food bank. “[The donations] are a little to one person,” Bob said, “but it all adds up.”

The post Hope for the Hungry appeared first on The Fine Print.

Party pic, party pic, a few statuses all either bragging or complaining, the what-I-got-at-Starbucks picture, the occasional meme…your Facebook news feed’s been seeming pretty regular these days, but where have all the photos of drool-inducing vegan cupcakes and links to intriguing news articles from your favorite local publication gone?

Did you just realize they’ve been missing? Don’t worry — Karma Cream’s still crafting their petite masterpieces and we’re still writing as much as funds and time allow. Nothing’s changed in the real world, but virtually, things are a little different.

Earlier this year, in May, we and other small businesses and organizations, which includes charities, restaurants, bands, artists, authors, activist networks, photographers, radio stations, YouTube channels, newspapers, blogs, etc., were hit by a wave of what looked like a massive spell of sudden unpopularity. At first we were sad and a little confused (almost as if we just got dumped, multiple times). Then, we took a closer look at the numbers and news, talked to fellow local businesses and figured out that it’s not us, it’s Facebook.

Under Facebook’s new news feed algorithm, business, musician, artist, etc. pages only reach about 15 percent of their fanpool. So, what about the other 85 percent? Well, we would actually have to pay Facebook real money (opposed to Farmville fake Facebook money) to “promote” each post in order for our entire fanpool to see it.  It’s not quite advertising, but it is definitely unfair.

The fair way is quite straightforward and the math is simple, really. 100 percent of our fans chose to “like” our page, so 100 percent should be able to see our updates in their news feeds. We shouldn’t have to pay for a “promoted post” to share something with people who already requested to have it shared with them.

The new addition to Facebook’s revenue roll is fueled by its drooping stocks. Over the last year, in an attempt to bump their value back up, Facebook has turned to mobile app install ads (ads displayed on the mobile Facebook app that promote other apps), promoted posts, and Sponsored Stories. The more aggressive monetization looks like it’s working, too; Sponsored Stories are reeling in $1 million per day for Zuckerberg and friends, and stocks are perking back up.

As for the rationale behind promoted posts, Facebook defends their new advertising product, saying they are merely protecting Facebook users’ news feeds from getting too cluttered with pages’ posts. Mind you, these are the posts from the pages the users chose to “like.” If they are getting annoyed with a certain page’s frequency or content of posts, they have the option to “unlike” just as easily or hide all stories from the page.

Paying even just $5 to promote a post, which is the minimum for The Fine Print given our current fanpool and reach, hurts. As a completely volunteer-run not-for-profit, we’re barely getting by as it is. Yet, we do rely on Facebook to keep in touch with our readers, locally and in faraway places, and paying a fee to ensure fans and followers see the content they’re asking to see is something we simply can’t afford to do.

Large corporations have the money to burn on wide-reach promoted posts that show up not only on fans’ news feeds but outside the fanbase as well — which can cost upwards of a few thousand dollars each, depending on their reach.  But even if a page makes that however-large investment, Facebook still regulates who sees the post.

That’s the work of the omniscient EdgeRank algorithm. It probably knows you better than you’d be comfortable admitting.

The algorithm is responsible for tailoring your news feed just to your liking based on what it noticed you care about, the time relevancy of posts, and their volume of comments and likes. It’s an ingenious filtering system; it’s why Facebook got so successful to begin with. It lets users see and share what they love. Only now, there’s the money aspect factored in, so instead of pages earning their fans’ attention simply by posting interesting content, they have to buy it.

With EdgeRank now limiting page engagement with its fans, we’re left with two solutions.

The first falls on the pages and their wallets — pay up to show up.

The second calls for users to go just a couple clicks beyond the initial “Like.” Go to an organization page, click the settings gear icon in the upper right-hand section of the main page banner and click “Add to Interests…” Now you’ve told Facebook you like us and are interested in us. It’s a little redundant, we know.

We’re in no position to pay up to show up, so that means this one’s on you. Your thumbs-up means a lot to a small business, an emerging artist or a cause. But more importantly, we want you to be able to stay connected with the organizations you love so (ahem, us).

If promoted posts and therefore this essentially broken EdgeRank algorithm minimized reach junk is here to stay, small businesses might be better off migrating to Google+ or other social networking sites. But that won’t be advantageous until Google+ becomes more popular. So, that said…coup de Facebook!

The post Paying for Popularity appeared first on The Fine Print.

Three-dimensional printers are able to print precisely accurate products.  Chandler holds an anatomically correct model of the human heart printed at the Art and Architecture Fabrication Fab Lab’s Objet printer.

Mat Chandler and Sam Lopez have joked all year about printing their own candy.

It’s not such a long shot.

Chandler is the lab manager of the University of Florida’s Arts and Architecture Fabrication Lab, which houses two three-dimensional printers. Lopez, an arts and technology graduate student, works as the lab’s graduate assistant.

It’s no longer an impossibility to print a building model, cabinet handle or midnight snack. The rise of 3-D printing has created tangible objects that people could only dream of years ago. The high-end machines can print 107 of the 4,000 known engineering materials, according to Bruce Bradshaw, director of US marketing for 3-D printer manufacturer Objet.

A 3-D printer works by building an object in a series of extremely thin, horizontal layers. Instead of carving away from a piece of material, they lay down exactly what is needed.

The A2 Fabrication Lab, commonly called the Fab Lab, bought the printers in the fall of 2009 with a grant for collaborative work between the arts and architecture schools.

“The student work jumped 10 times,” Chandler said. “It’s so far past anything you could model by hand.”

UF art professor Anna Calluori Holcombe, who specializes in ceramics, wrote the grant with Jack Stenner, an associate professor of arts and technology, and Mark McGlothlin, an associate professor of architecture.

“Our students need to be up on the latest advances,” Holcombe said, “and this is it.”

The 3-D printers and scanners are an integral part of her multimedia ceramics class. Students create a ceramic piece of art by hand, scan it and then recreate it on the 3-D printer.

Initially, when Holcombe was working on the grants, she didn’t expect to use the printers herself. Now, 3-D printing is one of her personal hobbies.

“Nature has got a genetic code,” she said, holding one of her pieces, a smooth white pinecone. “This [3-D printer] uses a computer code. I’m re-coding nature in an artificial way.”

Previously, the lab was exclusively open to UF art and architecture students and faculty. As of this semester, it is available to students, faculty, staff and anyone in the greater Gainesville community. Currently, about 100 people use the lab; Chandler hopes that number will increase as students in other fields realize the printers’ potential.

“We want to make it so students can come in and create,” he said.  Engineers could test their systems. Entrepreneurs could prototype their products.

Since the printers were purchased, they have produced everything from character figurines designed by art students to models of thoracic spines used to study regional anesthesia at Shands.

The lab has two printers: an Objet Eden 260V and a ZCorp ZPrinter 450.

The Objet printer uses a brand-specific resin plastic and prints directly layer-by-layer from an adapted inkjet nozzle. Its maximum build volume is about the size of a compact microwave and is more durable and detailed than the ZPrinter.

The ZPrinter is divided into two chambers. The actual printing takes place on the left-hand side, which is an empty 8-by-10-by-8 inch box with the bottom as a bed of white powder. A standard HP ink cartridge filled with glue builds the layers. When the glue has finished spraying, the object is formed by the white power sticking to the viscous glue. Any remaining powder can be reused for the next batch.

The display screen on the machine counts layers as it builds. It takes 2,000 layers to build a tiny cube.

Over the past five years, 3-D printing has shifted from an expensive prototyping technology to an affordable reality.

Objet sells its printers to everyone from two-person businesses to large corporations like Nike and LEGO. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man 2 suit was prototyped on the same Objet printer that resides in the Fab Lab.

According to Terry Wohlers, president of Wohlers Associates, Inc., “just about everything but trashcans” is currently prototyped on a 3-D printer. Now, the printers are creating more than just prototypes: 20 percent of their output is a final, usable product.

“It cuts across so many areas,” Wohlers said. “It’s hard to name an industry that hasn’t been or won’t be affected by this.”

Objet, one of the larger 3-D printer manufacturers, has seen a 35 percent increase in sales for the past four years and anticipates the same results this year, according to Bradshaw.

Their standard desktop model cost $100,000 three years ago. Today, thanks to more efficient manufacturing and inkjet developments, a comparable model sells for $20,000.

Chandler watches a print job in process.  The printer uses a UV lamp to harden the resin as each layer prints.

However, 3-D printing still has its drawbacks.

It costs $110 per semester for Fab Lab membership, which is required to use their printers. Students who need to use the printers for class assignments must pay the fee as well. On top of the membership fee, each print has a pricetag. A print of a palm-sized human heart figure is $200.

Although the cost of the machine itself has decreased considerably, the material can still be expensive. As is the case with regular printers, it’s the cost of ink, or material, that adds up. For 2.4 kilograms of Objet resin, Chandler pays $1,200.

There is also a programming barrier: the object must be created in a 3-D modeling program. Within UF’s art and architecture programs, students take 3-D modeling courses. However, the necessary programs may be foreign to students in most other majors.

For someone who isn’t familiar with 3-D modeling or printing, the technology can seem untouchable. Chandler wants to make the process as accessible as possible for anyone interested in learning by teaching a general elective course in 3-D modeling.

Regardless of the current obstacles, the 3-D printing industry has the potential to change industries from medicine to art even more than it already has.

“It’s taking the factory and putting it in your garage,” Lopez said.

The post New & Improved appeared first on The Fine Print.

Mackowiak lines up samples of his current beers on tap.

When Barron Humphries opened Hoggetown Ale Works ten years ago, he could predict the question people would ask when they walked into his home brew supply shop: is it legal?

“Everybody thought you made beer in a bathtub,” he said.

At the time, it was difficult to get a Florida-brewed beer at any bar in town. The beer-scape has certainly shifted. Within the past two years, Humphries’ sales have doubled as everyone and their dad joins the hip homebrewing crowd. The rise of home-brewed and craft beer has also shifted drinker expectations.

“Once you appreciate good beer, you can’t go back to drinking Budweiser,” he said.

And what, exactly, qualifies as “good beer”? The beauty of home or craft brewing is that the brewer answers that question his or herself.

For Humphries, that means a malt-focused English Brown Ale, like the Girls Gone Mild brew he has on tap in the store fridge.

For Neal Mackowiak, the head brewer for Alligator Brewing Co., the emphasis is in playing with innovative flavor combinations.

For Brian Sunter, a University of Florida senior studying computer science engineering, the answer is darker wheat beer.

Most beer is made from four basic ingredients: hops, grains, yeast and water.

Hops, the female flowers of the Humulus lupulus plant, provide bitterness, aroma and flavor to the beer. A brewer can buy them in pellet form or as whole leaves.

A large chalkboard in Humphries’ shop displays a list of nearly 100 hops, some with epic names like Glacier, Magnum and Warrior. In addition to the domestic hops, the international selection comes from as far as Germany and New Zealand.

“I order every hop you can get everywhere,” he said. He prides himself on carrying hops difficult to find anywhere else, both online and in stores.

Mackowiak uses hops from Humphries’ shop as the base for his beers. He is perpetually brainstorming to create new Alligator Brewing beers, which are brewed and sold exclusively at downtown bar Tall Paul’s.

After drinking Volta’s hibiscus tea for months, he had a moment of inspiration. He needed to brew a hibiscus sour ale. He procured a large bag of the flowers from the coffeeshop and added them to the barrel of fermenting beer. Now, it’s possible to drink the finished, fuschia product on tap.

“I’m always coming up with new things,” he said. “I want to experiment.”

Mackowiak has tried over 150 recipes in his nearly two years as Tall Paul’s official brewer. He has added a range of of flavors to his beers, from cooked pancakes with maple syrup to lavender to bacon and smoke habanero chili peppers. He is constantly reading, researching and observing to uncover new taste combinations.

He compares the brewing process to an ecosystem in which the beer is the end product. Like a terrarium, the natural elements come together in a closed environment.

At the most basic level, bringing everything together entails unwrapping the basic Mr. Beer kit, opening the bags of pre measured ingredients and following the instructions.

Sunter started brewing when he received a kit for his 21st birthday. Now, he has progressed to the second tier of beer-making: extract brewing. At this level, the brewer chooses his or her own hops. The grains are steeped in a bag immersed in the water to flavor it. Sunter follows Hoggetown Ale Works’ recipes and boils the brew on his apartment stove top.

However, once a brewer advances to all-grain brewing — and about half of Humphries’ customers have — the process becomes more complex.

At Tall Paul’s, Mackowiak’s set up has enough tubes, pumps and levers to make a science lab envious. Three vats line one wall; the other is occupied by a row of fermenting beers. The first vat is full of boiling water, which is piped into the second vat. The grain in the middle vat steeps in the hot water. This process is called “mashing.”

Then, the resulting sweet liquid, called wort, is piped to the final vat and heated. When the liquid is at a boil, the hops and sugar are added. For more aroma and flavor, the hops are only boiled for about 15 minutes. Boiling the hops longer (about an hour) results in a more bitter beer. The yeast is added once the mixture has cooled.

The beer-to-be ferments in the large containers lining the opposite wall. The fermentation generally takes about two weeks. During this time, extra flavors like fruits and spices can be added to the mix.

Once the beer is fermented, it is transferred to bottles, which need to be capped, or to a keg.

Humphries is optimistic about the growth of home and craft brewing in Gainesville. Instead of asking if home brewing is legal, customers now come in asking about specific hops.

“It’s as big as it’s ever been,” he said. “And it’s still growing.”

The post You Brew, Too? appeared first on The Fine Print.

After its first introduction by Senators Orin Hitch (R-UT) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) in 2001, it has maintained steady Democratic backing but has been acquiring and shedding Republican support for the past 12 years.

With another four years, President Barack Obama promised to set undocumented youth on the course for citizenship — but only after fulfilling specific requirements and going through a rigorous, heavily monitored application process lasting at least six years.

The transformation from a DREAMer to an American citizen is a long process, but Victor Yengle is looking forward to it.

Victor, now an economics student at UF, was 11 years old when his family made the move: Peru to Sarasota, FL.

He grew up there, eventually graduating from Sarasota High School in 2006. He is now 23 years old and working on his economics degree.

Getting here wasn’t easy, though. His parents had to work odd hours at multiple jobs, and at first, the language barrier created a sense of isolation. Despite all this, Victor felt he experienced growing up in the United States the same as any other naturalized citizen.

Every morning of middle and high school he atonally recited the Pledge of Allegiance, having memorized it long ago like his fellow classmates. He celebrates the Fourth of July in earnest. He understands nostalgic references to “the 90’s.”

“I am attached to this country in every single way,” he said.

After graduating from Sarasota High, Victor attended Santa Fe Community College for three years before applying to UF.

When he did, he was told his student visa was invalid and that he would have to be considered an international student and pay three times the amount of in-state tuition, despite being educated in Florida.

He returned to Sarasota, but did not fall into a stasis: in 2011 he helped found UnidosNow, a Sarasota-based organization devoted to mobilizing Southwest Florida’s Hispanic communities and raising awareness of the challenges faced by these communities.

He then successfully enrolled in UF and has devoted his time here to the community. He is president of Coalition of Hispanics Integrating Spanish Speakers through Advocacy and Service (CHISPAS), a member of the Gainesville Interfaith Alliance for Immigrant Justice and a member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Among many acts of advocacy, he has gone on a six-day water fast in front of Publix headquarters in Lakeland to promote an increase in wages and better working conditions.

“DREAMers are the new frontiers of advocacy,” said Angela Kelley, Vice President of Immigration Policy at The Center for American Progress.

Although Victor is deeply invested in his community and culturally identifies himself as an American, on paper he is considered an outsider. Back in birth country, any Peruvian would consider him an outsider — to them, he’s an American.

DREAMers like Victor describe this feeling of homelessness as being “neither here nor there.” Others have called these undocumented youth the “1.5 Generation.”

Should the act finally pass, Victor’s — and 2.1 million other eligible DREAMers’ — American citizenship would be well in reach. In reach, but not necessarily an easy one.

Eric Castillo, director of the Institute of Hispanic Latino Cultures at UF, stresses the rigor of the program.

“This is not an amnesty or a free ride,” he said. “The DREAM Act creates a pathway, not a guarantee, toward citizenship so students will have to work hard to receive status.”

Hard work, but many deem it worthwhile for not only the DREAMers but also the economy.

The Center for American Progress recently conducted a study of the economic benefits of the DREAM Act and found it would boost the economy directly and indirectly.

Directly, the DREAM Act would boost the economy by a total of $148 million, supporting an aggregate 19 percent increase in earnings by 2030.

Indirectly, the increase in educated workers would translate into more people with higher earnings — with a $5.6 billion increase in income tax revenue — which would generate a greater consumption of goods and services. In the end, the act would generate $181 billion and contribute to the creation of 16,000 jobs each year.

Florida would be one of the most greatly affected states should the DREAM Act finally be passed.

Florida clocks in at fourth for percentage of immigrants in the population. Approximately 1 million of the immigrant population are unauthorized, making up 5.7 percent of the state’s population. Florida also has the highest percent of immigrants — both legal and illegal — to have completed high school; yet for the many DREAMers within this percentage, the next step in education is legally impossible. Florida has also had a rocky history at the cross-section between citizenship and education: 2013 will be the first year that American-born students whose parents immigrated illegally will be eligible for in-state college tuition.

“The immigration system is in desperate need of an update,” said Kelley.

For Victor and the rest of the 1.5 Generation — those who struggle to renew driver’s licenses, apply for college and contribute to the society that they have always known — this is a fact that is always apparent.

The post A New American Dream appeared first on The Fine Print.

Seismic airgun testing is used in offshore oil exploration. The airgun, towed behind a boat, sends out loud blasts of compressed air through the ocean and further below the sea floor about every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day, for days to weeks at a time.

That obnoxious conversation behind you clocks in at 60 decibels. The old Harley that just roared down 13th Street? 90 decibels. At 130 decibels sound is physically painful to the human ear.

A single blast from a seismic airgun, used for oil exploration, racks up 190 decibels. Underwater, each blast is amplified to 250 decibels — 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) is currently pending approval of industrial seismic airgun surveying to search for offshore oil and gas reserves spanning from Florida to Delaware.

A fleet of airguns, dragged along by boat, shoot intense blasts of compressed air underwater and miles through the sea floor every seven to sixteen seconds, twenty-four hours per day for days to months on end.

These blasts pound through the water and miles deeper into the ocean floor to send back signals with information used to create three-dimensional images of geologic faults. From these images, oil and gas companies can identify potential drilling locations.

Flooding the Ocean
Sure, we might not hear or notice the airgun blasts from the shore and certainly not from Gainesville, but that’s not the case underwater.

Seismic airgun testing can be debilitating and even deadly to marine life. The frequency and amplification of the blasts can cause temporary and permanent hearing damage, habitat abandonment, disruption of vital behaviors and beach standings. For marine animals, sound is their sight. It’s how they feed, mate, migrate, escape danger — survive.

The low-frequency booms from the airgun are along the same frequency as the signals sent and perceived by larger whales, making them the most susceptible to direct impact from the testing. But the blasts don’t only emit low-frequency sounds; the range of sound transmissions include higher frequency components, too, which affect a range of other marine animals.

In its own draft Environmental Impact Statement report, the DOI recognizes that seismic airgun testing would cause 13.5 million disruptions to vital behaviors of marine mammals, which include feeding, breeding and calving.

It also estimates injury to 138,500 dolphins and whales over the next eight years. This count includes eight endangered species including the North Atlantic right whale. With only 361 individuals remaining in the entire ocean, the North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world.

Nine of those whales are on the slate as expected “take” from seismic airgun surveying. “Take” doesn’t directly translate to a death but definitely includes it. As defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it is the harassment, hunting, capturing or killing of any marine mammal. For the 352 right whales not counted as take, each would undergo disruption of vital behaviors five times, according to the DOI statement.

The Atlantic Ocean off the east coast is a critically important habitat for the North Atlantic right whale. In winter, they roam the warmer waters off the Florida and Georgia coasts and give birth to their calves. When spring comes around, the pods migrate north, hugging the coast all the way to the plankton-rich waters of Massachusetts and New York.

These critically endangered whales depend on this migration route for survival. It’s the only one they’ve known for centuries. Intensive whaling that began as early as 1150 AD drove the right whale to the brink of extinction. Once whaling of right whales was banned in 1935, populations of sister species rebounded at a healthy rate, but unfortunately, the North American right whale didn’t see such success.

While whaling is no longer a threat to the North American right whale, other human-imposed effects are still diminishing their population. Shipping vessel traffic and commercial fishing are the biggest hazards they face, and on top of other anthropogenic stressors such as military training and pollution, seismic airgun testing will likely only further jeopardize their species.

Playing it safe
Earlier this year, an estimated total of 2,800 dolphins washed up dead along the coast of Peru. The Peruvian government attributed the deaths to natural causes, but the 30 necropsies performed by conservationist and veterinarian, Dr. Carl Yaipén Llanos, pointed to a fishier and more probable cause. The middle ears of each dolphin had suffered fracture damage. Dr. Yaipén Llanos and his team also discovered an excessive buildup of bubbles in the dolphins’ vital organs. After further testing disproved his suspicion of a viral infection, he suggested that intense sound impact may have caused these mysterious bubbles.

The Peruvian government denies any seismic airgun testing in the area coinciding with the dolphin deaths, but local fishermen insist otherwise. Peru’s largest newspaper also reported the Peruvian Navy granted permission for seismic airgun surveying to foreign oil companies.

Even though the cause of the massive die-off cannot be explicitly traced to the surveying, the necropsies — along with other evidence scientists have collected — certainly put it in the spotlight as a possibility.

The Atlantic coast is safe from offshore drilling for now, or at least until 2017. Rebecca Marques, the South Florida organizer for Oceana, shares the international ocean conservation group’s view on seismic airgun surveying and is advocating to “keep dangerous oil and gas exploration off our coasts and instead focus on developing renewable energy.”

And what about the humans?
The seismic blasts are not only dangerous to larger marine mammals —
they impact fish health and populations, too. Any deleterious effect on fish health directly translates to concern for coastal economies.

According to the environmental impact statement, the seven states residing in the proposed testing area are home to 108 fishing communities that may be affected by “acoustic sound sources, vessel traffic and vessel exclusion zones, seafloor disturbance and accidental fuel spills.” Many fishing communities located where seismic airgun testing has taken place have witnessed dislocated and depleted fish stocks as a result of “acoustic sound sources.”

The Atlantic coast harbors an $11 billion-plus fishing industry, which supports more than 200,000 jobs. Effects from testing would undoubtedly impact coastal economies from Delaware to Florida.

“As native Floridians we live constantly surrounded by our oceans. It is part of who we are, what we do, and why we stay here,” Marques said. “For many it is also how we survive.”

How to speak whale, or at least for them
One alternative, mandatory to all environmental impact statements, is the “No Action Alternative,” which is exactly what it sounds like. It takes a precautionary approach and would prohibit all geological and geophysical activities related to oil and gas exploration in this particular zone of the Atlantic Ocean but still permit, on a case-by-case basis, research and development for offshore renewable energy.

The DOI will make its final decision in the beginning of 2013, which is coming up fast. If the proposal clears, oil and gas companies could start up testing as early as next year. Until then, the only voice the whales have is ours.

The main petition against seismic airgun testing is a photo petition on Facebook. However, you can also take more direct action by writing to Secretary Ken Salazar of the DOI. Calling or even sending a quick note to your state senators and representatives can help greatly. For Florida residents, contact Senator Bill Nelson, Marco Rubio, and your district representative here.

The post Testing the Waters appeared first on The Fine Print.

A small hydroponic garden set up outside Gardener’s Edge grows some leafy greens. Al Ashkuff is planning to use this efficient soilless setup for the Krishnaponics rooftop garden.

*Editor’s note: The printed version spells Al’s name as “Ascough,” which is correct, but he has requested that we spell it as “Ashkuff” since that is how he is known in business.*

As a self-described business anthropologist, Al Ashkuff deals with people for a living. He delves into their world, learning their culture and their place in the community around them. He sees how they live, what makes them happy, and most importantly, he sees their needs that aren’t being met. He then looks for ways to use his expertise to meet these needs.

Ashkuff’s latest project is Krishnaponics, a plan to create a hydroponic fruit and vegetable garden primarily for Gainesville’s Krishna House. The garden, which will use nutritional solutions in water in place of soil to grow its plants, will reside on the roofs of Citizen’s Co-op, the Civic Media Center, and an art gallery. It will provide food for both the Co-op and the Krishna lunch served daily at UF’s Plaza of the Americas.

The idea first sprouted after Ashkuff spent time with the local Krishna chapter and saw a need for fresh food from a local source. The Krishna lunch currently gets its ingredients out-of-state, but showed interest in finding a way to switch to utilizing a local source.

“The Krishna Consciousness view farming as a very noble occupation, the same way that some Christians view carpentry,” said Ashkuff. “As a community, they have this collective desire to grow their own food.”

Ashkuff saw the incorporation of local, hydroponically grown food as the solution to this problem. This form of gardening is less common due to its high startup costs, an intimidating but surmountable learning curve and its need for constant maintenance; but, it can pay off both financially and environmentally in the long run.

“There’s definitely a learning curve,” said Crystal Taylor, who works at Gardener’s Edge, a local store that sells hydroponic equipment and runs its own gardens. As Taylor pointed out, hydroponic gardening can be advantageous when managed correctly.

“[With hydroponic gardening] you get a higher density of growth in a space, you don’t have to worry about soil being contaminated, you can easily overcome sandy conditions in a greenhouse, you can save water instead of using large irrigation systems and you have a greater control over your garden,” said Taylor.

However, before Ashkuff could fully dive into the Krishna House project, he had to prove hydroponics successful on a small scale. The Krishna House supported Ashkuff through a month’s worth of research and development,  which was spent setting up trial hydroponic systems.

“We grew hundreds and hundreds of wintertime vegetables in the middle of summer,” said Ashkuff, “[and] it wasn’t even in a greenhouse.”

That’s pretty impressive, and the Krishnas agreed. They decided to invest in the project for commercial scale development.

With this funding in place, the project came to life as a joint venture between the Krishna House; the Citizen’s Co-op, who will sell some of the crops grown; and Vibrant Community Development, who owns and manages the space the garden will occupy. Ashkuff sees these partnerships as not just business ventures, but ways for these business to help out causes in which they believe.

“For Krishna House, this is an act of spiritual joy,” said Ashkuff. “They’re not out to make money, [but] to support a cool project.”

The garden will definitely produce the leafy greens used in the Krishna lunches, but as for the other vegetables, Ashkuff’s still deciding. He’s currently looking into growing bulky foods, like kale and mizuna for salads, and some high-value crops, like tomatoes and strawberries, to be sold at the Co-op.

John Woodman, 23, checks the pH balance of the water for hydroponic lettuce plants at Gardner’s Edge. Woodman has been working there for one year and hopes to major in botany at Santa Fe Community College.

Both Ashkuff and Taylor believe that any and every plant can be grown hydroponically if approached with the proper care and attention to its individual needs.

“If it can tolerate constant moisture, it can be grown hydroponically,” said Taylor.

Ashkuff plans to put this to the test. He wants to explore what his garden can generate given growth space, weight and cost of the plants and demand from Co-op customers to produce the best and most diverse yield possible.

The project is still in its early stages. Ashkuff is still purchasing all the necessary construction equipment and trying to find the right waterproofing methods for the roof. Once he sorts out these issues, the garden will be set up and seeded as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Ashkuff continues to study the people he is growing for, both around the Krishna House and the Citizen’s Co-op. Better familiarizing himself with the local community, Ashkuff is able to arrange the partnership so it’s maximally beneficial to everyone involved.

Pressing issues like Florida’s freshwater crisis and the stagnant economy are creating a desire to support locally and responsibly grown food. This support is the very foundation of the Krishnaponics project and the Co-op, as well.

“[They] want to support local food systems,” said Ashkuff, “and you can’t get more local than [a garden] thrown right on top of you.”

The post Krishnaponics: From the Ground Up appeared first on The Fine Print.

Oh, ye of little forethought, or thought.

I won’t answer that for you. Because it is your right to vote and not your obligation to vote. It is a choice you make to abstain from the political process and be a silent bystander, or to be active, take part and let yourself be heard by our lawmakers. That’s up to you.

But here are some facts about today’s youth (i.e. you), voting and why you and all your friends might be able to make an impact. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.

Fact #1: We are a big deal.

Millennials, me and you (and all those who grew up with Boys from the Backstreet and the existential Ren and Stimpy) at 46 million, make up an entire quarter of the voting-age American public. Of that 46 million, minorities make up 40%, more than any other generation in American history according to the 2010 census.

Usually pandering to AARP is a big deal, since seniors historically have the highest turnout rates of all age groups. They don’t have jobs, they love to get together in groups and play golf or mahjong, and then go vote. Standard. But Gramps might not have as much clout as he once did; Millennials now outnumber their elders by approximately 7 million and consequently have the potential to have the bigger influence in this election.

Fact #2: We’re in school and we’re paying attention.

Millennials are arguably the most plugged in, the most third-arm-electronic-device prone, and the most likely to start a blog after we graduate. But guess what? We’re also the most educated generation in our history.

According to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank and social science research group, 54% of Millennials had achieved at least some college education when they were ages 18 to 28. This measure of higher education was lower in each previous generation, with Generation Xers coming in second highest at 49%.

Fact #3: We think equality is a neat idea.

It’s just as they feared. The majority of Millennials are a bunch of long-haired, bleeding-heart liberals with a progressive stance on social issues, and embrace the idea of a more unified, socially equal America. And as almost a whole quarter of voting-age America, Millennials have the potential to make a significant impact on “hot button” issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and contraceptive use.

According to research conducted by the Center for American Progress:

• 64% of 18- to 29-year-olds support the DREAM Act, which, if passed, would open up a pathway to legal residential status for youth who were brought here as children and meet certain educational criteria.
• 84% support affordable access to prescription birth control
• 62% of young people favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally wed

Fact #4: We don’t care about China.

Millennials believe the government would be most effective in working to solve economic issues such as:

• closing the wealth gap (73% ages 18-24 agree current American economic system favors the wealthy, 72% support increasing tax rate on Americans earning $1 million+/year),
• reviving the workforce,
• and investing in education and fighting soaring college costs (73% are more supportive of government involvement in making college more affordable vs. only 56% support from other generations in the population).

Basically….

We’re pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, while a large portion of Millennials are politically engaged, a study by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) found that 23% were not engaged at all. Remember, that’s 23% of 46 million unutilized potential for change.

In the last presidential election of 2008, just over half of us, 51% of voter-age young people, turned out to vote — the third highest turnout rate since voting age was lowered to 18 in 1970. We can do better than that, best-generation-ever-Millennials.

According to the CIRCLE poll, 72.6% of young people “believe they have the power to change things in this country.”

Core values shared by a majority of Millennials can have huge impacts on American politics, but only if they are politically active and engaged. They must express their views if they want to see the changes they support and believe in.

Get up, go out and vote.

The last day to early vote is Saturday, November 3rd, from 8:00am to 8:00pm at the Alachua County Supervisor of Election Office, the Millhopper Branch Library, and the Tower Road Branch Library.

After that, it’s all November 6th, baby.

Find your precinct here (TIP: For the street name, don’t type in directions like N or NE, just the first part of your address; i.e. for “NE 5th Ave” just type “5th” and let it auto-fill) and give yourself plenty of time; there may be a wait. But your first time (or even your second time) should be special, and trust us, it’s almost always worth the wait.

The post Get-Out-the-Vote Plea, or Why Millennials are The Best Generation Ever appeared first on The Fine Print.

Illustrations by Samantha Schuyler and Emma Roulette

The wheels on the bike go ‘round and ‘round. And they go ‘round all day long so you better take proper care of them, and the rest of your bike. Get some basic know-how and save yourself a little money by checking out this easy at-home maintenance guide. Don’t be afraid to get your hands a little greasy. Of course, for more complicated procedures, it’s best to consult the experts at one of the local bike shops.

Hit the Trails

• Hawthorne Trail
  • One-way distance: 16.5 mi.
  • Connect at paved path on 2nd Ave. and 6th St. and follow it south to SW Depot Ave. Trail across the street and just keep on riding)
• Waldo Road Greenway
  • One-way distance: 8 mi.
  • Connect at Old Archer Rd. + SW 28th Pl. and ride to the airport, passing the Hawthorne Trail connection on the way.
• Paynes Prairie
  • Cone’s Dike — 8.4 mi. round-trip
  • Chacala Trail — 6.5 mi. round-trip
  • Bike straight south on 13th St. until you hit the park entrance where you can grab a map to the trailheads. Make sure your bike is suited for the unpaved pathways!

Toolkit ($25)

• mini bike pump ($10)
• WD-40 ($4)
• rag ($0, I guarantee you have one at home)
• 8/9/10 mm wrenches ($4)
• spare tube ($7)

DIY: Fix a Popped Tire

• Deflate your tire if it’s not already pretty flat
• Pry your tire off the rim, carefully working it around the entire circumference.
• separate the tube from the tire and locate the puncture or gash. pick out anything that may be sliced into your tire.
• grab a dollar bill, fold it neatly to the contour of the tube and place the tube back inside the tire.
• re-inflate, and zip on home
• make sure to properly replace your tire once you’re back

@Home Tune-Up

To those mechanically challenged, fear not — this is just some simple tinkering and it’s worth it. It’ll save you at least $25 on your yearly tune-up. This basic tune-up includes adjusting front and rear brakes and shifting, tightening bolts, a tire check-up and a good overall lube job.

Start with flipping your bike upside-down, so that it’s stably balancing on the saddle and handlebars. Depending on your handlebars this may be difficult, in which case just prop your bike up on something so that the back wheel isn’t touching anything.

1. Degrease and lube the chain (Recommended degreaser: Simple Green (biodegradable, citrus-based all-purpose cleaner (mix 1:1 with water), lube: Tri-Flow)

• Apply degreaser to chain near crankset while back-pedaling.
• Lightly hold a rag around the chain and continue back-pedaling.
• Repeat process with lubricant, but be careful not to over-lube!
• Recommended: clean chain every few months, and re-lube after it rains.

2.  Simply re-inflate your tires.
3.  Tighten bolts with the 8/9/10 mm wrench.
4.  Check brake pads to ensure they’re not “toed-in.”  If they are, just adjust them, using a heavier tool to knock the pads back into alignment if necessary.

Know the Law

A quick outline of what police look for when ticketing bikers and the policies they abide by. Police pull the most people over for:
• Not stopping at stop signs.
• Riding with earphones in.
• Failing to yield to a pedestrian.
• Riding with no lights at night.
They do not pull people over for (but technically have the power to):
• Riding with one earphone in.
• Failing to signal a turn.
Police Bike Stop Policy:
• First stop — Biker is given a written warning and a pamphlet about bike safety and rules of the road.
• Second stop — Officer can choose between a citation or another warning.
Important: Bike citations are the same form and the same cost as citiations given to cars/motor vehicles.

The post Lube, Pump and Ride appeared first on The Fine Print.

Illustration by Kelli McAdams.

Lovers of cheap wine, pumpkin yogurt and organic produce will soon find all their grocery needs in one  place.

Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s is set to occupy the former Goody’s location in Butler Plaza Central in Gainesville. Neither Butler Plaza nor Trader Joe’s representatives responded to phone calls and e-mails seeking comments.

The store is best known for its low prices, fresh-baked bread and, of course, Two-Buck Chuck wine. A large portion of its products carries the Trader Joe’s label, including vegan, vegetarian and kosher options.

“Trader Joe’s will be a great addition to our community,” Richard MacMaster, a volunteer for Gainesville’s Interfaith Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said. “We are all very enthusiastic about its arrival.”

MacMaster said the national supermarket chain supports small-sized farms and farmworker rights by carrying fair trade products like coffee and, as of recently, tomatoes.

After two years of refusing to sign on to the the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, Trader Joe’s finally joined on Feb. 9, one day before its grand opening in Naples, Fla. The agreement calls for stores to pay a premium of one extra penny per pound for their tomatoes and buy from growers who guarantee fair wages and decent workplace conditions. Nine other corporations have also joined the coalition’s campaign, including McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Whole Foods Market.

Jamie Blair, an intern with the Student Farmworker Alliance, said the corporation initially refused to sign the agreement because it called the problem a labor dispute between the farm owners  and the farmworkers.

“But after two years of community organizing and support, we were able to convince Trader Joe’s to do the right thing,” she said.

Blair said Trader Joe’s is a positive alternative to other supermarket corporations, such as Publix, that continue to turn a blind eye to the injustices occurring in Florida’s fields.

And with Trader Joe’s opening less than a mile away from Publix, students and locals will have the option to choose between the two supermarkets.

MacMaster said it’s great to be able to shop at a market that is conscious about where its products come from. “If they support fair food we should support them,” he said.

Rebekah Foster, a sustainability studies sophomore at the University of Florida, also promotes shopping at Trader Joe’s — but to a certain extent.

Although Trader Joe’s may offer a range of organic and vegan options, she said, it is better for the community to shop locally, even if that means spending the extra dollar.

“I’m willing to pay more for things that I think are important to buy local, such as fruits, vegetables and honey,” she said.

These items can be bought at local stores like Ward’s Supermarket and Citizen’s Co-op. They can also be bought straight from their producers at the weekly farmers market.

Foster said that not all products can be found at reasonable prices locally, though. In that case, she said, Trader Joe’s would be the next best option.

However, several local food enthusiasts and shop owners shudder at the idea of yet another national supermarket coming to Gainesville.

“Every time people buy from a corporation, money is going out of Gainesville,” said Emily Sparr, one of the coordinators at the Civic Media Center and member of Industrial Workers of the World. “We already struggle enough with money leaving in other ways.”

She said local markets are not only circulating money throughout the community. They are also making efforts to build strong ties to the people living within it, which is something Trader Joe’s has not taken into consideration.

“There are many other locations they could have gone into that would have been closer to actual neighborhoods and the community of Gainesville,” Sparr said. “Instead, they chose to be in the corporate blob of Gainesville.”

However, Trader Joe’s distant location might be a convenience for these local shops, considering the large amount of small food stores and cooperatives that have gone out of business due to the arrivals of supermarket giants.

The Huffington Post reported on Sept. 6 that co-ops across the nation that have been running smoothly for over 30 years are seeing their profits cut in half due to new competition from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

Julie Matheney, who shares ownership of the Citizen’s Co-op with 1,400 other members, said the food co-op’s uniqueness and its dedication to the community will keep it afloat once Trader Joe’s opens.

“We’re not really worried about going out of business because our members keep us strong,” she said. “It’s the power of community.”

The post New Kid on the Block appeared first on The Fine Print.

Bernie Machen announced this past June that he will be stepping down as UF President at the end of next year with an official date to be determined after his successor has been named.  As it now stands, Machen’s replacement process is sure to be drawn out – rightfully so, considering the magnitude of the decision.

No deadline has been set for the completion of the search for UF’s 12th President and interviews for the position aren’t expected to begin until late Fall 2012 or early Spring 2013.

Fresh out of the gate, UF has made a show of strictly adhering to chapter 286 of the Florida Statutes, which states public, state-sponsored businesses are required to make transparent their records and meetings. For those interested in the play-by-play of all the decisions not being made and meetings that have not reached any conclusions yet, the Presidential Search website at presidentialsearch.ufl.edu, has you covered.

Search committee members include UF Board of Trustee members, faculty, students, administration, the Florida Board of Governors and stakeholder groups.

C. David Brown II, chair of the UF Board of Trustees and of the Presidential Search Committee qualifies the appointees that he himself hand picked as “distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise who have in common a commitment to the future of the University of Florida.”

Janine Sikes, UF Director of Public Affairs, sent an email containing a list of 36 nominees for the UF president. However, Sikes wrote that just because a name is on the list doesn’t mean the person is interested in the position, or even that UF is seriously considering the person as a potential candidate. The names are merely nominees by alumni, professors, donors, community members and students, among others.

For instance, former UF football coach Steve Spurrier has found rank amongst the 36 names. One could wonder what new trademark act of frustration he would adopt as UF President, having to abandon his former ritual of feverishly ripping off his headset and chucking it down a sideline.

Greenwood/Asher & Associates, the same organization UF used to help hire Machen back in 2003, has again been recruited to help head hunt for the new UF president. The Miramar Beach, Fla., Executive Search Service firm boasts a lengthy list of top-name clientele.

Still, the lion’s share of the seeking, planning and considering is to fall upon the search committee and its subcommittees. The Presidential Search Committee will ultimately give recommendations to the Board of Trustees, who will make the final decision.

The last official meeting to-date the Presidential Search Committee held Sept. 13 was to brainstorm how best to orchestrate future campus interviews with potential applicants – no specific names were mentioned. Questions revolved around what campus venues to showcase, which prominent programs should be introduced, how to highlight student body interactions and how to best demonstrate the university’s relationship with the community.

As well, the Board of Trustee’s agenda for their Sept. 20 convention at Lake Wauburg did not have a scheduled discussion pertaining to the president’s replacement.

So for now, the Gator Nation can sit back, relax and hold tight.  Bernie Machen will dutifully and patiently serve as UF president until a successor is deemed worthy of leading Florida’s Flagship school. The nine-year span Machen has served thus far remains impressive compared to the length of most university presidents.  However, Machen’s retirement begs a question that has yet to receive a substantial response: Why step down now?

To answer that question, we may consider some highly probable scenarios. Understandably, he may feel it’s time to let go of the job that, at many times, has proved exhausting.  Or, quite possibly, Machen may want to focus more on personal matters. Or, what’s probably most close to the truth, he’s developed a newfound respect for the art of origami and wishes to concentrate fully on mastering his crease-and-fold techniques.  We may never know.

Stay tuned for continuing coverage of THE PRESIDENTIAL SEARCH FOR #12.

The post Adventures of the UF Search Committee: Setting the Stage appeared first on The Fine Print.

Dan Durante, Web Developer at Fracture, listens to music while he works in the Fracture office on 6th Street. In the background, Buckbeack the parrot, perches on her cage.  Buckbeack belongs to co-founder Alex Theodore and rarely misses a day of work. Photo by Ashley Crane.

Home to the country’s most unique business incubator as well as fast-growing city and community organizations Gainesville aims to inspire, foster and grow start-up businesses.

Despite the swampy weather, moss-ridden trees and glaring orange-and-blue color scheme, Gainesville is becoming a leader in business, technology and start-up development.  Between, community-organized groups, city initiatives and University of Florida resources, Gainesville offers invaluable resources and unique tools for businesses to get off the ground, grow and expand.

Earlier this year, MindTree Limited, an India-based company that develops software for Fortune 2000 companies, chose to expand and create a development center here in Gainesville.

“We found a place that is obsessed with innovation and action,” said Scott Staples, co-founder and president of MindTree, to the Gainesville Sun.

The new MindTree center is expected to bring about 400 jobs to Gainesville — 160 in the first 18 months. It will likely draw employees from UF’s IT and computer science graduates.

An impressive selling point to MindTree was UF’s Florida Innovation Hub. Founded in 2010 and located less than a mile from UF, the Innovation Hub promises to attract more start-up companies and foster their growth. The Hub, boasting a 48,000-square-foot facility, is the first and only one in the country that provides a university technology transfer office as well as service providers such as accountants, attorneys, product designers and venture capitalists.  The Hub currently hosts about two dozen companies.

Prospective start-ups must go through an application process and, once admitted, undergo semi-annual reviews to monitor their progress

Even before the existence of the Innovation Hub, UF and Gainesville have seen small businesses and tech companies start up from scratch and continue to grow today.
Grooveshark, “the world’s largest on-demand music streaming and discovery service,” got its start using services offered by UF through the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Office of Technology Licensing in 2006.  From humble beginnings, founded by three UF undergraduates, Grooveshark now currently employs over 130 people and maintains an office in downtown Gainesville.

Also founded by UF students is Gainesville-based Fracture, a company that lets customers print high-quality photos directly onto glass. Co-founders Abhi Lokesh and Alex Theodore were still in school in 2008 when they started working on the idea.  Fracture has not received help from UF or the Innovation Hub, but have continued their momentum here in Gainesville and are still growing today.

“We’ve been really encouraged by how the Gainesville community has pushed us and encouraged us, supporting our growth,” Lokesh said.

A fracture in the making; photos are printed directly onto glass. All product development, mounting, and packaging are done in the Gainesville office and shipped worldwide. Photo by Ashley Crane.

Business owners like Lokesh and Theodore, who may not benefit from the Innovation Hub or services provided by UF, can find resources elsewhere in the city of Gainesville.  Innovation Gainesville, for example, is a citywide initiative put forth through the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce with goals to attract businesses and create a network for innovators and entrepreneurs.

The City of Gainesville was also a recent participant in a global event called Startup Weekend, the weekend of Sept, 28.  Throughout the event business enthusiasts pitch their ideas, work with mentors to develop a solid business model and make a final pitch to a panel of judges, one of whom was CEO of Grooveshark, Sam Tarantino.  The winners have the potential for their ideas to be turned into tangible business ventures.

Events like Startup Weekend are drawn to cities like Gainesville, cities that value ingenuity and are actively setting the stage to be a major player in the business and developing technological world of the future.   And it’s working.  The city has repeatedly been ranked among the smartest cities, best places to live and launch, and the best place for businesses in Florida. Gainesville may not be Silicon Valley just yet, or even Silicon Alley in New York, but businesses, tech start-ups and the like may find their southern niche here in Gainesville, the Alligator Valley of technology and business.

The post Alligator Valley appeared first on The Fine Print.

Paper Cuts: National news that catches our eyes.   Fall 2012 edition. 

Theft and Torture Used to be Criminal — Now It’s the Law

Although it only lingers in the minds of many as a stale, political sound-bite, the conflict around construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline has recently taken a violent turn for a group of Texas activists.

Because TransCanada has access to private land in Texas (as well as North Dakota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma) due to a loose interpretation of “public good” under the state’s eminent domain laws, construction of the pipeline surges ahead, even without Federal approval for the project as a whole.  Eminent domain laws allow state government to take private land — land with buildings and homes and private property — and sell it for the sake of public good.

TransCanada bought forest land from the state government in Texas that was deemed “for the public good.”  The forest land had been privately owned by Texans living off the grid, to say the least.

In protest of this unapproved but technically legal scheme, activists stood their ground this past September on this once-privately held land to halt TransCanada’s construction of the pipeline’s southern leg. On Sept. 25, two young Texans, ages 26 and 34, handcuffed themselves to a TransCanada excavator parked 300 yards outside their “tree village” built 80 feet into the air. Nine blockaders sat in the makeshift tree houses, located atop a forest grove directly in the pipeline’s proposed path.

TransCanada was not pleased; soon, both plain-clothed and uniformed officers from the local sheriff’s department were on the scene. The policemen consulted with TransCanada field supervisors and then actually tortured the two protestors in an attempt to remove them from the machinery. Officers from local counties tried choke holds, stress positions and tasers to intimidate the already-handcuffed protesters. Only after repeated use of tasers and pepper-spray (shot into their open wounds) did the activists remove themselves from the equipment.

Reporters have been barred from approaching the construction site, and officers have been instructed to arrest anyone on foot or with a camera. The blockaders remain undaunted and continue to risk their lives and freedom on a daily basis to protect what should rightfully be considered their land.

by Travis Epes

Chipotle Caves, Workers Gain Victory

As a member of the nation’s working class, it’s been truly exciting to watch the strikes and protests spread: the teacher strike in Chicago for union rights and negotiations, the worker strikes against Wal-Mart for better working conditions overall, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) protests demanding the biggest tomato-buyers in the country participate in the Fair Food Program and not to mention ongoing Occupy protests and rallies at home and abroad.

And just recently, our working brothers and sisters of the CIW had another big victory.  This October, Chipotle signed on to the Fair Food Program committing to buy tomatoes in Florida that pay minimum wage and meet basic working conditions laid out and monitored by the Fair Foods Standards Council. The CIW-approved farms charge a penny more per pound of tomatoes to guarantee these improvements.

This announcement comes right before the 12 weeks in the winter season when Chipotle and many others in the country buy tomatoes almost exclusively from Florida.

95% of the nation’s winter tomatoes are grown in Florida.  The rest of the growing season, Florida tomatoes make up 45% of the market.

Chipotle is the 11th company to join the Fair Food Program and is in good company alongside Yum Brands, Bon Appetit Management Company, Compass Group, Sodexo, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, Subway, Aramark, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

Did you notice who was missing?  Publix still refuses to sign onto the Fair Food Program and buy tomatoes from farmworkers who are paid fairly and treated well.

From Wal-Mart to teacher’s unions, to every day workers, to every day farm pickers, rise up and stand proud.  It’s our time (Goonies never say die).

by Chelsea Hetelson

John, Paul, George and Ringo

In 1966, it was too dangerous to go outside.  Beatlemania was infectious and Tokyo had been hit hard.  Local Japanese authorities were unable to handle the crazed infected fans and advised the Beatles to stay indoors, remain hidden, stay away from windows and reflective surfaces and maintain a lockdown code orange status.

The Beatles were on their world tour and were in Japan for just 100 hours to play three shows.  Unable to tour the city or go out to breakfast, the Beatles remained trapped at the Tokyo Hilton, all dressed up with the whole adoring world at their feet and nowhere to go.

But luckily, Beatles band manager Brian Epstein was there to save the day.  Like a resourceful babysitter on a rainy day, he brought the foursome some oils and watercolors and a huge 30″ by 40″ canvas.  He placed a lamp in the middle and gathered them around, each taking a corner.

“Want to color?” he asked.

Over 40 years later this September, the art project sold for $155,250 at auction, $30,000 to $70,000 more than the auction’s ranged estimate.   After their delightful homey stay in Japan, the Beatles presented the painting to Tetsuaburo Shimoyama, an entertainment industry executive and chairman of the Japanese Beatles Fan Club.  After Mr. Shimoyama died, his wife sold the painting in 1989 for $280,000 ($500,000 in today’s dollars) to a collector who has kept it in a $5,000 humidity-controlled frame under his bed to preserve quality.

The painting, entitled “Images of a Woman,” is a colorful collage of 60s spirit and creativity as seen through the eyes of each Beatle.  In the blank circle in the middle, where the lamp had been placed, each signed his name.

There’s only one other piece of known artwork that all four Beatles took part in.  Entitled “Peace to Monterey” and not the result of safety-induced life-preservation lockdown, this marker-and-pencil drawing was offered to the Monterey Pop Festival as a condolence for not being able to play.  Drawn in 1967, one year after “Images of a Woman,” “Peace to Monterey” was sold at auction in 2008 to benefit the non-profit Project Interspeak.

We may not still be in a panic of Beatles-Meltdown-Code-Orange-Mania, but Beatlemania is still out there.  So, watch which records you buy — you might still be able to catch it.

by Chelsea Hetelson

The post Paper Cuts Fall 2012 appeared first on The Fine Print.

Devil’s Millhopper

Fun ideas for physically close but aesthetically far places for a day or a weekend trip to break up any Gainesville cabin fever.

DEVIL’S MILLHOPPER

Devil’s Millhopper will take you from Gainesville to the far reaches of the Old West – all for less than the price of a six-pack of beer. A visit proves to be a stark contradiction of the photos you’d see online (c’mon, everyone pays a virtual visit to a place before actually going there, right?). Google Images visually prepares you for the 200+ step winding staircase, but physically, you’re on your own. That thing’s steep. Plan your visit after a rainstorm for best viewing. Think of the sinkhole as a giant bathtub – if there’s no rain to fill it up, there won’t be much of a waterscape to enjoy.

Cost: $4 per vehicle entry fee
Distance: 15 min. drive downtown; gas money <$5.00
Do: hike, picnic, photography spot
Time: half-day trip
Gear: walking shoes, light clothing

ICHETUCKNEE SPRINGS

When the smell of chlorine and pestering lifeguards make a day at the pool a hassle, throw in the towel and head to the beautiful Ichetucknee Springs State Park. Skip your next meal out and put that money toward a stress-free day in the great outdoors. Trust me, when you’re floating down that immense river, the only things you’ll be thinking about are the cool drink in your hand and the wind in your hair.

Cost: $6 per vehicle entry fee; $5 canoeing; $5 tubing
Distance: 45 min. drive from downtown; gas money $15-$20
Do: canoe, kayak, hike, picnic, scuba, snorkel, swim, tubing, photography spot
Time: day trip
Gear: bikinis and swimming trunks (don’t forget sunscreen)

CUMBERLAND ISLAND

Think that Georgia’s just full of peaches and lawn mowers? Well, it kind of is, but it also has a beautiful 18-mile-long barrier island. Take a breather and visit the gorgeous beaches, or take on your wild side and rough it for a few nights of camping. For the skeptics, the island offers both “developed” and “wilderness” camping. Come on, a few days without your iPhone, iPad, iPod, i-anything will be good for you.

Cost: $20 round-trip ferry fee; $4 per person island visit fee; camping fee $4 per person per day
Distance: 2.5 hour drive from downtown; get your friends to chip in on gas money! (Overnight parking on mainland is available)
Do: camp, hike, hunt, fish, beach, private boating, biking, photography spot
Time: weekend trip
Gear: walking shoes, light clothing, swimming gear (don’t forget sunscreen)
GINNIE SPRINGS
Cost: $12 admission fee, $6 for tubing, $10 for 2 hours canoeing
Distance: 45 min. drive from campus; gas money $15-$20
Do: swim, canoe, kayak, snorkel, tubing, scuba diving, picnic, camp, photography spot
Time: day trip
Gear: bikinis and swimming trunks (don’t forget sunscreen)

GAINESVILLE-HAWTHORNE STATE TRAIL

Cost: FREE! (Isn’t that incentive enough?)
Distance: 15 min. drive from campus; gas money <$5.00
Do: hike, bike, fish, horse trail, pet-friendly nature trail
Time: day trip
Gear: light clothing, sturdy walking shoes, lots of water, sunscreen

MEGABUS

Gainesville to Atlanta: $10. When you book over a month in advance on www.megabus.com, you can definitely find round-trip tickets this cheap. The buses are equipped with onboard restrooms, power outlets and free Wi-Fi for the seven-hour journey. You can also nab a cheap ride to Orlando. I strongly recommend searching the site in advance to get the best deal.
Cost: As low as $10 (book early!)
Distance: To Atlanta: 7 hours; to Orlando: 2 hours
Do: Check out Little Ethiopia for a departure from the culinary norm and while you’re in the neighborhood, take a free tour SweetWater Brewery. And don’t miss the weekend markets and eclectic cafe culture of Little 5 Points area. Atlanta’s a big place – there’s plenty to do!
Time: weekend trip
Gear: your weekend bag, entertainment for the ride

The post Now That You’re Here, Get Out! appeared first on The Fine Print.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Filling

Courtesy of:  Becca Bakes, a one-woman show, hobby and talent turned into small business. She’s a student at UF and sold her first batch of goodies at the downtown farmers market in 2011 and has since branched out to do custom catering as well. Look for her treats around town at special events, such as the PumpkinPalooza sale she’s hosting at Citizen’s Co-op. Find Becca Bakes at www.becca-bakes.com; twitter + Instagram: @becca_bakes; facebook.com/beccabakesfl; info@becca-bakes.com

A bit from Becca

“I was born on the first day of fall and because of that I feel deeply connected to this season. When the air becomes rich with the flavors of autumn, it is near intoxicating. Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove combine in a symphony of spice and are always perfected with the addition of pumpkin.”

Where’s Becca Baking Next? Becca will be hosting her second annual PumpkinPalooza at Citizen’s Co-op on Sunday, Oct. 28th from 2 PM – 5 PM

The List

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1/2 tablespoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tablespoon ground cloves
• 2 cups dark-brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 3 cups pumpkin puree, chilled
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

The Steps

For the Cream Cheese Frosting:

• 1 8-ounce package of cream cheese
• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1-3 tablespoons milk, as needed

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray two cookie sheets with cooking spray.
• In a large bowl, whisk together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves; set aside.
• In another large bowl, whisk together dark brown sugar and oil. Add    pumpkin puree and whisk until combined.
• Add eggs and vanilla to the pumpkin mixture.
• Add the flour mixture to pumpkin mixture in parts and whisk until fully incorporated.
• Drop heaping tablespoons of dough onto baking sheets, about 1 inch apart.
• Transfer to oven and bake until cookies just start to crack on top and a    toothpick inserted into the center of each cookie comes out clean (about 15 minutes). Let cool completely on pan.
• Make the filling: with an electric mixer on medium speed, combine the cream cheese and powdered sugar until fluffy. Add the vanilla and cinnamon and continue to mix until smooth and frosting consistency. If frosting is too thick, add tablespoons of milk, one at a time, until frosting is correct.
• Assemble the whoopie pies with two cookies and a dollop of frosting in the center. Enjoy!

The Vegan Way

• Add 2 tablespoons of blackstrap molasses instead of the eggs
• For the frosting: 1/2 cup vegan margarine, 1/2 cup vegetable shortening, 3 cups powdered sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1-3 tablespoons non-dairy milk, as needed

The Jazzy Way

• Add 1 tablespoon of maple syrup to frosting
• Try chocolate ganache frosting
• You can use 3 tablespoons of pumpkin pie spice instead of the individual spices
• Try rolling the whoopie pies in mini chocolate chips
• Serving suggestion: pumpkin ale in hand, hanging out on your stoop

Eat Me! I’m in Season and Fresh!

persimmons*
chestnuts
pumpkins, zucchini, other squashes*
pears
yams*
cranberries
pomegranates
beets*

*Produced locally around Gainesville

The post Read Up, Chow Down appeared first on The Fine Print.

View of Tent City.  Photos by Ashley Crane

Just beyond the brush of the Hawthorne State Trail, there is the faint outline of a self-enclosed camp.  A short walk along an overgrown path will lead to the outskirts of the camp known as Tent City.  Gainesville’s Tent City has served as the convergent meeting and living space for the city’s homeless for decades.

Nina McNeal is a long-time resident of this space. She’s in her sixties and affectionately known as “Ma” around the camp.  McNeal keeps a Bible in her tent along with the clothes and food she brings in from the St. Francis House. McNeal says she likes the community that has formed in the area.

“Everybody knows everybody,” said McNeal, who thinks the residents are mostly content with their makeshift neighborhood. “Some like it, some don’t.”

Tent City sits on land that belongs to Larry Calton. Calton allows the tent site for the city’s homeless to stay on his property. His land has been the sole location for Tent City since the City Commission voted in 2007 to evict all homeless people that had been using public land to set up tents. This decision was intended to help the homeless by forcing them to find proper housing. Instead, it just caused them to move on to Calton’s private property.

Jack Donovan, Executive Director of the Alachua County Coalition for the Homeless and Hungry, says that if the city had kept its stake in Tent City, it could have used city funds to improve the conditions and expand the site to offer services and more legitimate housing.

“Pinellas Hope is an example of what can happen if the city helps improve the [tent city] it already has,” said Donovan.

Pinellas Hope, a “tent city” in Pinellas County, receives over $1 million in public funding every year and is able to effectively regulate who passes through, which in turn helps keep out illegal activity and violence. However, since Gainesville’s Tent City now illegally resides on private land, it can’t be effectively controlled, and the city has been forced to search for a new location.

Unfortunately, this city-wide search has been slowed down by opposition since it began and has gone on much longer than initially expected. The city went through a few cycles of first proposing new locations to transition to, then looking into these locations, and then finally shutting down plans after facing opposition from neighboring businesses who were resistant to the idea of an influx of the city’s homeless to their area. Progress was slow at best, and meanwhile, Calton was having to deal with violence and other issues on his property, including one incident of an alligator attack.

A significant step was reached in 2008 when the city decided on a publicly-owned site near NW 53rd Ave. for a new “one-stop” homeless shelter called the Grace Marketplace. The proposed shelter would include facilities with beds and housing for families and services like job training and medical care. In the four years since its announcement, however, the city hasn’t even broken ground on the site.

A major factor in the holdup is the requirement of a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. The land under the proposed shelter contains wetlands, and although there is no expected environmental damage, the permit is still required. Without it, the land can’t even be used as a campsite, much less begin to undergo the construction of the shelter. This delay, according to Donovan, won’t defeat the shelter but can definitely prolong its construction. He says the process in issuing the permit is usually much quicker, and thinks there may be some political motivation behind the delay.

Another obstacle to the shelter’s progress has been the efforts of Ropen Nalbandian, a local business owner with factories near the proposed site. Nalbandian is attempting to block the project by issuing a series of four different zoning lawsuits. These lawsuits center around the idea that the city can’t use the land for the shelter in an otherwise industrial area. Donovan calls the basis for these suits ridiculous. He believes their intent is to try to defeat the proposed shelter by prolonging it until it dies. The lawsuits remain pending, with one already having been dismissed. Nalbandian has offered to donate land on Waldo Road that is owned by his company, Vital Properties, in a settlement. This site, however, was already considered and dismissed as a location for the shelter before it was bought by Nalbandian in 2011.

Nalbandian isn’t the only one who opposes the shelter’s location being set in the area around NW 53rd. Cindy Lacoste works close to the site of the proposed shelter at the offices of Charles Berg Enterprises, Inc.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Lacoste. “It’s all wetlands, there are no sidewalks, no bus stops, and it’s nowhere near St. Francis or the other places that offer services to the homeless.”

Nina “Ma” McNeal has lived in Tent City for four years.  She says Tent City has a real sense of community; some people like that, others don’t. 

Lacoste is in favor of one possible solution being discussed: the former correctional institute out by NW 39th Ave which is currently sitting vacant.  This site could easily be transformed into a more cost-effective location for a shelter. However, this idea faces powerful opposition, this time from Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe. Mayor Lowe cites the failure of a previously proposed site near the correctional institute, which faced opposition in part due to its proximity to the Alachua County Fairgrounds, as evidence that the new proposal would suffer the same fate.

Many people disagree with the mayor on this issue, including both Donovan and Lacoste. They see the idea as a more practical and cost-effective solution than building completely new facilities out on 53rd Ave.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Lacoste. “It’s already there; it just needs to be improved. And if a jail didn’t affect the surrounding area,” she added, “why would a homeless shelter?”

However, the city has remained steadfast in its plan of moving forward with construction on the site on 53rd Ave. once the wetlands permit is issued, regardless of the status of the Nalbandian lawsuits.

Though the city cites a waiting period of just six months before the start of any real changes, Donovan thinks a timeline of two years is more realistic.

As a result of this frustrating waiting game, residents of Tent City have grown skeptical of the possibility of changing sites or bringing improvements. They’ve heard talk like this before, and have yet to see results. Nina McNeal thinks the transfer to NW 53rd Ave. is not going to happen. She carries on with her daily routine in Tent City where she’s lived for four years — restocking her tent with food, swapping supplies with the neighbors and praying with others at the cross whenever she gets the chance. McNeal plans to continue to live in Tent City until she sees real improvements like the ones being discussed.

“Nothing’s changed since I’ve been here,” said McNeal. “But anything will help.”

The post The Unfinished Business of Tent City appeared first on The Fine Print.

A local ranch’s hunt for water, and the public’s fight to keep it in the springs

Central Florida’s springs have been drying up for decades. In December of last year, however, new waves were made when Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach submitted an application to the St. John’s Water Management District (SJWMD, the District) for a Consumptive Use Permit (CUP) allowing him to pump 13.267 million gallons per day (mgd). These 13 mgd were requested on top of the property’s existing CUP for 0.548 mgd, which was approved for the property’s previous use for sod irrigation.

The water from the new CUP would be used to irrigate the 61,000 square foot Adena Springs Ranch in Fort McCoy, Marion County, as well as provide drinking water for the grass-fed cattle raised there, 150 of which will be slated for slaughtered two days a week at a slaughterhouse on the property.

Shortly after the CUP was submitted, several news reports were published, illustrating the magnitude of these daily withdrawals by comparing the quantity to that pumped daily for the entire city of Ocala (12.85 mgd). Prior to preliminary meetings with the District, Stronach intended to apply for 27 mgd.

Alarmed and organized, residents, well owners and environmentalists in Marion and Alachua Counties have sustained their opposition campaign since first word of the ranch’s CUP.
Together they fought the permit from state advisory board meetings to public hearings, writing editorials to holding street-side protests.

Given the already visible affect the drought and over-pumping of the aquifer have had on above and below ground water levels, residents maintain approving the permit is irresponsible on the part of the District. At a recent public meeting about the CUP, Adena environmental scientist William Dunn was asked how the Adena science team had determined there would not be damage to Orange Lake, considering it was already dry. His response was that they did not consider current hydrological conditions when they did their calculations.

In fact, the permit review process ordered a scientific study to determine the minimum flows and levels of (MFLs) one of the water bodies, Silver Springs, that the approved permit would impact. This study, however, will not be completed until 2013. The MFLs serve as a limit for district-wide water withdrawals, beyond which would bear significant negative impacts on all the water levels.

H. T. Odum Florida Spring Institute Director Bob Knight, an aquatic and wetland scientist, has determined the sustainable volume of water withdrawal to be 70 gallons per day (gpd) per acre, to ensure the flows in the springs do not drop below 10% of their current average flows.

He estimated that the District has approved CUPs for 75-90% of the spring’s watershed flows.

Additionally, there are a number of hidden costs, such as remediation of impaired waters, which are not being discussed with the public, despite the permitting process in Florida hinging on any given CPU’s benefit to the public.

Two women at the forefront of the opposition, Judy Etlzer and Pat Hawk, couldn’t agree more with Knight’s sentiments. On Sept. 11, Pat attended one of the SJWMD meetings covering the Silver Springs spring shed. She too walked away questioning the “science” behind the discussions. As Pat points out, if residents are restricted to watering their lawns from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., how does the District justify allowing Adena Ranch to use huge irrigation sprinklers that would run for a consistent 24 hours?

Pat has heard of several local wells that have dried up, including two across from the Adena Springs Ranch itself. Two by Orange Lake, one on Hwy. 318 in the Irvine-Orange Lake area, and another owned by Bruce Seaman, a local minister, have also run dry.

Some residents like Pat and Judy have been forced to drill new and deeper wells as a result. In 2001, Pat had to drill a new well due increased development in her area and recently, Judy, who lives on Orange Lake, has had to drill down another 130 feet to reach her water.

12 years ago, Pat had to pay $4,000 out-of-pocket to replace her well. In a meeting with The Activist Coalition, a conglomeration of regional activists, Pat asked rhetorically, if Stronach pumps the springs dry making his financial living, who would pay for her to have yet another well drilled so that she could have potable water for simply living? Would Stronach? The District? Or would she pay out-of-pocket again? Where was the benefit to her and her neighbors to approve this CUP application?

Adena Springs Ranch has projected it will create approximately 150 jobs. 150 at what cost? In today’s market, jobs are scarce, but so is water.

The District has again come under attack by citizens and the media who are skeptical of the District’s priorities. They’re also scrutinizing the District for not being entirely transparent in their assessments and public reports, particularly those regarding hidden costs, such as remediation of impaired waters.

At an Aug. 23 meeting, Adena Springs Ranch announced it would reduce its water demand from approximately 13 mgd to 5.3 mgd — millions of gallons less, but still only a small victory for those fought to save the springs throughout summer.

It’s hard to put the numbers thrown around in these debates into context or scope. Though the CUP reduction seems large (approximately 7.3 mpd), when those numbers are multiplied out, the effect on water flows is much more significant.

In an editorial published on July 28 in the Gainesville Sun, Knight noted that the predicted 0.1 foot drop in water levels at Silver Springs actually translates into a 5 mgd reduction in average flows. That is more water than has ever been recorded flowing at the nearby Green Cove Springs and is equivalent to 4% of the average flows of Silver Springs in drought conditions. This figure also coincides with the ranch’s new CUP request, meaning that approving the application for this amount, even though much lower than the original request, could still negatively impact the water levels and flows in the drought-stricken future.

Mark Roberts, the Adena Springs Ranch manager, announced the reduction would be made possible by raising the cattle elsewhere for the majority of their lives and then bringing them to the ranch only 6 months prior to slaughter, reducing the water consumption in that specific localized area of the watershed.  Where the cattle would be taken was not definitive, and no new CUP had been applied for pertaining to the new areas that would experience the additional, though decentralized, pumping. The ranch’s PR Director, Honey Rand, also addressed concerns regarding nutrient loadings to the springs from manure and fertilization, claiming that Adena intended to employ best management practices, though the exact details on the designs were also not available.

The future of water in Florida is uncertain, and that is something the activists and the District agree on. The District had sent the Adena staff a Request for Additional Information (RAI) the same month the CUP application was submitted. The Ranch applied for an extension on the RAI deadline and the District granted the request in April, extending the deadline until late August. The Ranch applied for another extension in August, which again was granted by the District. Adena Springs Ranch now has until Nov. 24, 2012 to respond to the District’s RAI. Until then, both sides are standing their ground in anticipation of an approval? A rejection? Or perhaps, another extension.

The Ranch does have a website that describes its plans as yet, found at http://www.adenaspringsranch.com/project-overview/. By the printing of this article, the website spearheaded by springs activists called “Water Well Justice” should also be up and running, illustrating their struggle. And Bob Knight’s Springs Institute remains a wealth of information, including a 50 year study on Silver Springs, found at http://floridaspringsinstitute.org/.

The post A Difficult Thirst to Quench appeared first on The Fine Print.

A Fine Print Box in three easy steps: Paint, Tag, Distro!

*Spoiler Alert: We have reason to believe it’s been saved.

With all the misinformation, misleading arguments, and out-of-date facts coming from banners on the tops of popular websites, we at The Fine Print thought we’d set the record straight with those monolithic modular boxes on campus.

This past summer The Alligator launched a website and petition they called Save the Racks in response to UF’s over-three-years-in-the-making decision to eliminate free-standing private newspaper boxes from campus.  The Alligator claims confining them to black modular boxes is a violation of free speech because they can’t have their orange boxes.  And with their knee-jerk reaction of a website and petition thrown together just weeks before the deadline to remove all independent racks, the Alligator is reacting as if they’ve just been hit with this news.

The truth is all publications who have been distributing on campus since 2009 have been aware of the entire process and have even been given the opportunity to meet with the Business Services Division (BSD), the entity in charge of the newspaper box distribution system, and have their voice heard.

The Fine Print has documents and emails from the BSD ranging from 2009 to present notifying us of the 2009 UF 2.003 Distribution of Printed Material, which was the first notice of the new change, their timeline for removal of private racks, notification of the removal of boxes and where they were moved to, the fact that there would be a fee for the use of the modular boxes and inviting us to meetings to make sure our voices are heard and even accepting our input by writing it into the regulation.

The most important issue to us as a small publication was the proposed fee to use the modular boxes.  So we did meet with the men of BSD on multiple occasions and we did give input that was incorporated as part of the written regulation, which was to ensure that new publications have a window to use the modular boxes for free as they are just getting started to ensure free speech and improve the chance of success of any newly-created student publications.  This happened in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

In August of  2012, the Alligator tried to sue UF for not preserving the free speech distinction between orange boxes and black boxes and began a website and online petition to “Save the Racks.”

However, as of Oct. 16 UF has released an updated 2.003 Distribution of Printed Material document which makes concessions for all unhappy parties.  Not only does the new 2.003 regulation allow previously existing non-modular boxes to remain as they are, thus letting the Alligator keep their existing orange racks, but it also, and much more importantly, completely gets rid of the original plan to charge $50 to $100, per slot per semester, and  will continue to offer the space for free.  Publications are currently, and have been for over a year, using the modular boxes for free.

That fee would have been a huge portion of The Fine Print’s printing and operating budget and would have severely limited our ability to distribute to UF students on campus.  With that fee gone however, The Fine Print fully endorses the new modular boxes.  And we’ll tell you why.

First, we think the modular boxes will make it easier for UF to maintain the boxes and keep a cleaner campus.

Second, getting back our own newspaper boxes in exchange for having to use the nine slots in the modular boxes actually lets us redistribute the boxes we had on campus to other parts of Gainesville.

Third, more boxes out and about town means increased reach and distribution, which in turn increases our promotion, ad sales and revenue.
Fourth, distributing on campus is now doubly free, by currently not having to pay for the modular boxes or having to use our own racks that we paid for, and getting those paid-for racks back and relocating them elsewhere in Gainesville.

Really, the fact that our stickers won’t be the biggest or our color won’t be stand-out is of no concern.  All the same content is still there, now just in an equal-sized, equal-recognition box.

WHERE TO FIND US

MODULAR BOX LOCATIONS ON CAMPUS
Library West
Criser Hall
Little Hall
Beatty Towers Bus Stop
Turlington Plaza
Rawlings Bus Stop
Reitz Union Bus Stop
Weimer Hall
Stadium/Gator Dining corner (Gale Lemerand + Museum)

NEW BOX LOCATIONS AROUND TOWN!
The Jones Eastside on N. Main + NE 23rd Ave
Corner of N. Main + NW 1st Ave (Near The Atlantic)
Bo Diddley Plaza on University
The Midnight on S. Main
Citizens Co-op on S. Main
Maude’s at Downtown
The Jones B-Side on 2nd Ave
Gator Bev on University
Bagels & Noodles on University
The Swamp on University
Target Copy on University
El Indio on 13th St
Starbucks/Urban Thread Plaza on 13th St + 16th Ave
Coffee Culture on 13th St
Mochi on Archer Road

BUSINESSES WE LIKE TO SHOW SOME LOVE
Harvest Thyme
Gelato Company
Hear Again
Volta
Gifthorse
Boca Fiesta
Flaco’s
Reggae Shack
Gyro Plus
Karma Cream
Video Rodeo
Earth Origins
Ward’s
Tasty Buddha
Earth Pets
Hyde & Zeke’s
8th Ave. Bikes & More

The post Save the Equality of Freedom of Speech appeared first on The Fine Print.

A new zine in Gainesville imagines times after the “big collapse.” So, what’s it going to be like?

If you’ve been to Karma Cream, The Bull or the Midnight this semester, you may have noticed a blue booklet priced at $3 titled “Elotchaway, or, How It Will Be. Accounts of the very bad times yet to come.” It is a publication of serialized stories and illustrations that are set in Alachua in a “proposed post-collapse future-time.”

The title, “Elotchaway,” refers to a common misspelling or mistranslation of the name Alachua. It was also the name of an area in the territory that was Florida in the early 1800s. New issues, each containing two short stories, are published every few weeks. The second and latest issue, Issue One (the first was zero), includes the stories “Thieftaker” and “Sugarcane.”

Jim Chapin, 24, manages the logistics of the project. He edits the stories and assembles the final product. Chapin’s friend, Chris Kane, then distributes the zines to the three establishments mentioned above.

Both the author, “Tom Sims,” and illustrator, “Cincinnati K.,” use pseudonyms. They could not be contacted for an interview. Chapin said he thinks there is something fun about the secrecy of their identity and said Sims does it partly because he “wants it to be about the writing and the stories.”

What is known — according to Chapin, who knew Sims personally prior to the project — is that these are Sims’ first published works, although he has written fiction before.

The stories take place in a post-apocalyptic time, but they are not necessarily meant to be pessimistic about the future, said Chapin. Instead, Sims uses the “big collapse” as a starting point, a blank slate.

A note at the beginning of each issue describes the “big collapse” as “an especially large solar flare, hitting the earth just right…a majority of the transformers in the industrialized world blew simultaneously.”

Some of the scenes and characters, especially the dialogue, give the sense of the past more so than the future. Chapin explained that the “old feel” is what remains after everything has been stripped away.

“The stories are meant to be real,” said Chapin. “They are written from a place of love for the area and affection for the people that live there.”

As far as reactions go, Chapin said he hasn’t heard much feedback. Kane estimates that 50 copies have been sold so far, although more were distributed at a reading held before the publication of the first issue in early August.

“The stories evoke a sense of joy within the reader, the result of a unique, stylistic prose,” said Evan Rippe, a 20-year-old University of Florida student who is familiar with the publication.

Chapin said they sell the stories instead of giving them away for free to offset printing costs, and to show the value of the work. “I don’t understand how musicians can bleed and sweat to produce something and have people take it for free,” he said.

In the end, Chapin said Sims just wants to tell a compelling story and perhaps have people look at their surroundings a little more carefully. The stories, he said, are being written in real time, so the final shape — whether the stories will tie up in an overarching narrative — remains a mystery.

The third issue will be available for purchase this week.

The post Alachua, Post-Apocalypse appeared first on The Fine Print.

First Lady Michelle Obama takes the stage at the O’Connell Center at the University of Florida on Monday afternoon to deliver a speech to nearly 11,000 supporters, her “biggest event yet.” Photos by Lily Wan and Maria Correa.

If you didn’t go yourself, you certainly know someone who did.

Nearly 11,000 people flooded into UF’s O’Connell Center Monday afternoon to share the stadium with Michelle Obama as her biggest audience to date.

Students and other Gainesville residents were surprised with the news of her visit just four days before, waited hours to get their free tickets and. come Monday, even longer to see her speech. Those who arrived around 8 a.m. were ecstatic to see her take the stage eight hours later.

Punctuated with “I love you, too”s, the First Lady’s speech only lasted half an hour, but was densely packed with reminders of her husband’s most notable achievements in office and sentimental anecdotes about Barack’s character.

She catered her speech to the student population, logically so.

“When it comes to giving young people the education they deserve, trust me, Barack knows that, like me and so many of you, he could’ve never attended college without financial aid. Never,” she said, “that’s why Barack doubled funding for Pell grants.”

She also highlighted the president’s health reform, reminding the students of the reason they’re allowed to stay on their parents’ health care plan until the age of 26.

“Your president will always, always fight to ensure that women can make our own decisions about our bodies and our health care. That’s what my husband stands for,” she asserted.

And more on women’s rights, Obama assured everyone “when it comes to understanding the lives of women, and when it comes to standing up for our rights and our opportunities, we know that my husband will always have our backs.”

We’ve got to have his, she told the wildly applauding crowd.

She especially emphasized a simple request: ensure your neighbors will vote, your teachers, parents, grandparents, “that cousin you haven’t seen in awhile.”

“Start by telling them about the millions of jobs Barack has created, tell them about the health reform he’s passed, tell them about those kids who can finally afford college, tell them how Barack ended the war in Iraq,” Obama listed, “Tell them about young immigrants brought to America on no fault of their own and how they will no longer be deported from the only country they’ve ever called home. Tell them how brave men and women in uniform will never again have to lie about who they are to serve the country they love.”

Florida is a battleground state, she reminded everyone. “In this stadium,” she said, “you all could swing an entire precinct for Barack Obama.”

She then deviated from her script and asked the crowd to imagine something.

“Pretend I’m not the first lady,” she said, “I’m like your mother. You’ve got to vote.”

By this point, the entire stadium was alight with applause, fired up and ready to go.

Obama reminded everyone, as Florida residents, that they can vote early, starting 10 days before election day. It’s just absolutely essential to take the first step and register register.
.
Democrat, Republican or otherwise — you’ve got to vote. The First Lady came here and demanded it herself.

The post Michelle Obama Fires Up Gainesville appeared first on The Fine Print.