Feb
23

Athletes cash in on California's workers' comp

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SACRAMENTO — In his seven-year career with the Denver Broncos, running back Terrell Davis, a former Super Bowl Most Valuable...
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That Syncing Feeling

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“Smart, or stylish?” That’s the question facing casual watch aficionados looking for a new, high-tech addition to their collection.On one hand (er, wrist), you’ve got the Pebble and other smartwatch upstarts, which come with built-in smartphone connectivity, customizable screens, and burgeoning developer communities eager to feed their app ecosystems. They also, by and large, look like uninspired...
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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

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U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve HortonCapt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq. The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones. “Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors...
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Many States Say Cuts Would Burden Fragile Recovery

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States are increasingly alarmed that they could become collateral damage in Washington’s latest fiscal battle, fearing that the impasse could saddle them with across-the-board spending cuts that threaten to slow their fragile recoveries or thrust them back into recession. Some states, like Maryland and Virginia, are vulnerable because their economies are heavily dependent on federal workers,...
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Feb
22

Gunfire and deadly crash rattle the Las Vegas Strip

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LAS VEGAS — A spectacular predawn crash on the Strip — triggered when bullets fired from a black Range Rover peppered a Maserati...
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Biggest Ever NBA Data Trove Will Settle Your Next Bar Bet

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Say you’re Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra. You’re on the road, in the last five minutes of a close game, facing a key decision: Who do you want shooting the ball? Conventional wisdom says get the ball to LeBron James. But data gleaned from a trove released online by the NBA shows that Chris Bosh is a better bet.In a clutch situation — when leading or trailing by five, in the last five minutes...
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The New Old Age Blog: For Traumatized Caregivers, Therapy Helps

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I recently wrote about caregivers who experienced symptoms of traumatic-like stress, and readers responded with heart-rending stories. Many described being haunted by distress long after a relative died.Especially painful, readers said, was witnessing a loved one’s suffering and feeling helpless to do anything about it.The therapists I spoke with said they often encountered symptoms among caregivers...
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Feb
21

Interstate 5 reopens through the Grapevine

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Paradise Backdrops Turn Prison Walls Into Fantasy Escapes

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Prison Visiting Room Backdrop, Woodbourne Correctional Facility, New YorkAntoine Ealy, Federal Correctional Complex, Coleman, FloridaDarrell Van Mastrigt, State Correctional Institution - Graterford, PennsylvaniaPrison Visiting Room Backdrop, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, New YorkBrandon Jones, United States Penitentiary, Marion, IllinoisKimberly Buntyn, Valley State Prison for Women,...

We expect brightly colored scenes of sun-kissed beaches and snowcapped mountains from cheap calendars and Trapper Keeper binders, but in visiting rooms throughout American prisons, idealized scenes like these serve as backdrops to countless portraits.


Prison Landscapes, a six-year project and new book by artist Alyse Emdur, throws light upon this unexpected phenomenon. The garish murals — and more recently digitally printed backdrops — function in exactly the same way as backgrounds in commercial portrait studios. Aesthetically, they are almost indistinguishable.


“If you weren’t familiar with prisons, you might think these were prom photos or made in community centers,” says Emdur of her collected portraits. “They’re very ambiguous.”


The precise history of the backdrop as a common feature of prison visiting rooms is largely unrecorded. Clearly, they grow out of the prison mural tradition — a famous example of which would be the six frieze murals in the dining hall at San Quentin State Prison that depict parts of California’s history. Murals in Oregon and Washington State include the Cascade Mountains; Gulf Coast prisons feature beaches; and in New York State prisons — where the majority of prisons are upstate but the prisoners are from New York City — are murals of the Big Apple skyline.


In a digital age, however, murals done in acrylic and enamel paint are slowly being replaced by large, store-bought printed screens.


“In Otisville, New York (10th image), we can see a painted scene of the Statue of Liberty, but in front of it is a digital backdrop of the same scene,” says Emdur. “The inmates prefer the photo backdrop to the painted backdrop.”


Prison administrators claim the backdrops are for security purposes — using them for portraits obscures any details about the prisons that might be used for escape. The murals spare prisoners and families the indignity of a never-changing prison setting; the murals at least offer an alternative. They’re so common that many prisoners have never even thought about the backdrops and that they had even forgotten they were there.



Emdur’s interest in prison visiting room portraits began in 2005 when she unearthed a Polaroid photograph of she and her sister posing with her incarcerated older brother. She recalls, even as a 5-year-old, her discomfort posing for the camera with a tropical beach scene to her back.


In order to research prison portraiture, Emdur contacted more than 300 prisoners and explained her intent to collect and decipher this widespread but invisible vernacular form of photography. Just over 150 prisoners agreed to be part of her project and 100 portraits made it into the book. During this time, Emdur wrote and received hundreds of letters.


“My act as a photographer is not from behind the lens but as a collector of images,” says Emdur. “I see myself as a mediator. These are people who have had no relationship with the outside world so while Prison Landscapes might be a very small gesture, the people who chose to be involved in this project want to be seen; they have their own agency. They want the outside world to know they aren’t the criminals they are stereotyped as.”


Relatively late in the project, Emdur resolved to visit prisons herself to photograph backdrops at a wider angle. In the space of two weeks, she gained access to 10 prisons on the East Coast. Her photographs offer context to the portraits she had already collected. In informal interviews, Emdur was able to get the perspective of the prison administrations, psychiatrists, superintendents, guards – “people who enriched my understanding,” she says.


“Prison portraits are very intentionally framed to exclude the surroundings,” explains Emdur. “They are hiding what the visiting room actually looks like. For me it is very important to show the viewer, who maybe hasn’t been in a prison visiting room, the details, and to place the backdrops in a context.”


In their simplest interpretation, prison visiting-room portraits are about familial connection. Emdur’s thoughts returned time and time again to the estimated 1.5 million children in America with incarcerated parents.


“These photographs reflect the image that many children will have of their parents,” says Emdur. “The collateral damage of — and how families are damaged by — mass incarceration is not an aspect that is at the forefront of people’s minds when they think about prisons.”


The photos are emblematic of a cultural disassociation from the prison system itself. Just as these backdrops allow prisoners and their families to avoid documenting their own reality of incarceration, so does the U.S. avoid most public discourse about policies and attitudes that allow the country to lock people up at six times the rate of the next most punitive industrialized nation (the United Kingdom) and quadruple the prison population over the last 35 years. At the heart of the enabling is the tendency to reduce each person in prison to a one-dimensional, almost inhuman, caricature of a “prisoner” — something Emdur hopes her project combats.


“Clearly prisoners are more than their crime,” says Emdur “I’m not saying they’re not criminals; they are in prison because they were convicted and proven guilty. I am not going around that but it is important to look at these images and consider the rise of the prison industrial complex. The portraits reveal a system and how individuals fit within that system.”


Prison Landscapes, published by Four Corners, London is now available. Alyse Emdur is very grateful that Four Corners will donate books to each of the individuals whose portraits feature in the book, and to 100 prison libraries in the U.S.


All images: Alyse Emdur


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In Reversal, Florida to Take Health Law’s Medicaid Expansion

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MIAMI — Gov. Rick Scott of Florida reversed himself on Wednesday and announced that he would expand his state’s Medicaid program to cover the poor, becoming the latest — and, perhaps, most prominent — Republican critic of President Obama’s health care law to decide to put it into effect. It was an about-face for Mr. Scott, a former businessman who entered politics as a critic of Mr. Obama’s...
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DealBook: Office Supply Rivals' Merger Leaked by a Wayward Report

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8:56 p.m. | Updated It was a paragraph buried on Page 4 of an earnings release, under the heading of “other matters.” Yet what those four sentences revealed sent bankers and lawyers who had been working all night on a deal scrambling early Wednesday morning.The earnings release, from the office supplies chain Office Depot, appeared shortly after 7 a.m. and inadvertently disclosed the terms of a long-awaited...
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Feb
20

At least 16 hurt in blast and fire at Kansas City restaurant

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At least 16 people were hurt and a popular wine bar was destroyed by an apparent natural gas explosion and ensuing fire at an...
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Secret Lives of Wild Animals Captured by 1 Million Camera-Trap Images

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Thanks to motion-triggered digital camera traps, scientists have a powerful tool for studying reclusive animals in remote, inaccessible areas -- and also for generating animated .gifs of gorillas scratching their stomachs. Okay, scratching gorillas aren't the point of camera-trap research. But they're a very fun byproduct, along with up-close-and-personal photographs...
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The New Old Age Blog: The Reluctant Caregiver

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Now and then, I refer to the people that caregivers tend to as “loved ones.” And whenever I do, a woman in Southern California tells me, I set her teeth on edge.She visits her mother-in-law, runs errands, helps with the paperwork — all tasks she has shouldered with a grim sense of duty.  She doesn’t have much affection for this increasingly frail 90something or enjoy her company; her efforts...
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DealBook: Court Gives Investor an Edge in a Lawsuit Against Apple

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7:47 p.m. | Updated In the battle between Apple and the hedge fund manager David Einhorn, score a point for the billionaire who is taking up the mantle of shareholder advocate.A federal judge said on Tuesday that he was leaning toward Mr. Einhorn’s contention that Apple had violated securities regulations by bundling several shareholder proposals into one matter.A lawsuit by Mr. Einhorn’s Greenlight...
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Feb
19

Obama ramps up pressure on GOP to avert budget cuts

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WASHINGTON -- With less than two weeks before across-the-board spending cuts begin taking effect, President Obama is cranking...
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Watch a Robot Interview <em>Portlandia'</em>s Fred Armisen

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Here at Wired we don’t fear losing our jobs to robots – in fact, we advocate for it.So when Fred Armisen stopped by the Wired office after the SF Sketchfest tribute to his Peabody Award-winning show Portlandia, we decided to let our robot Rob-EE do the talking. Armisen and Rob-EE even had a heart-to-android-heart. Rob-EE also managed to get some dirt about Armisen’s...
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