How are sequester cuts affecting CA's ability to fight wildfires?; Immigrant spared from deportation over pot bust 20 years ago; The woman behind the chemistry on 'Breaking Bad'; Can relocation save the endangered Mojave desert tortoise?; How does Netflix's algorithm know what you want to watch?; 'Real World' star and AIDS activist Sean Sasser dead at 44; Ask.fm is the latest hotbed of cyberbullying among teens, plus much more.
How are sequester cuts affecting CA's ability to fight wildfires?
The Silver Fire near Banning continues to spread quickly, and as of now has scorched nearly 16,000 acres and is just 25 percent contained.
More than 1,400 firefighters and six helicopters are working around the clock to keep the fire from spreading — and that doesn't come cheaply.
CalFire Battalion Chief Julie Hutchinson is here with an update on the fire.
Immigrant spared from deportation over pot bust 20 years ago
A California Supreme Court ruling yesterday could help immigrants who've had minor brushes with the law. As the California Report's Scott Shafer says, the decision could make it easier for some people to avoid deportation.
Friday Flashback: Obama speech, Fannie and Freddy out, and much more
It's finally Friday. Time for a little analysis of the biggest news stories of the week. Joining us from Washington is Atlantic editor Garance Frank-Rutah and back in the Flashback chair here in studio is James Rainey of the LA Times
President Obama will be speaking later today. He also called for a phase out of federally controlled loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. What does this mean?
Of course, Congress is home on recess this week, but they're facing their constituents empty-handed when it comes to comprehensive immigration reform. It depends on the district, but what are they hearing back home?
Is it perhaps worse news that there's been no progress on a budget and that the government will run out of money on October 1st unless Congress raises the debt ceiling?
San Diego mayor Bob Filner entered rehab this week as an 11th woman came forward said she'd been propositioned by Filner. This is the news story that just keeps on giving.
It's getting more difficult for a lot of people to understand why this man doesn't resign. Is it something specific to Bob Filner, or is the instinct to hold onto office at all costs just a common trait for politicians?
'Breaking Bad': The real woman behind Walter White's meth chemistry
At first glance, Donna Nelson looks like the last person you'd ask for the perfect recipe for methamphetamine.
But the University of Oklahoma organic chemistry professor has been acting as the "science consultant" for the hit AMC series "Breaking Bad" since just after season one, providing the real-life chemistry behind the show's fictional meth cooking. ("Breaking Bad" returns for the first of its final eight episodes this Sunday night.)
"My intention was only to give advice on the high-school organic chemistry teaching things. … But the show moved away from that pretty rapidly," Nelson told KPCC. "When it came to balancing equations — such as, if you had 40 gallons of methylamine, how much meth would be produced? — they turned to me to calculate that."
Nelson's involvement in the show all started after she read an article with "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan in the trade publication Chemical and Engineering News. In it, Gilligan mentioned that he and his writers were struggling with the science, often turning to Wikipedia. Nelson saw an opportunity to help.
"I contacted the editor and said, 'Please communicate to Vince that if he's really serious, I volunteer,'" said Nelson. "Then I heard from him, and he said, 'If you really want to help us, we would be delighted to have you help. How frequently do you make it out to Burbank?' And I said, 'Oh, all the time!'"
Luckily, Nelson happened to have a trip to San Diego planned for about a month after Gilligan contacted her, so she decided to stop in Los Angeles to meet with his team of writers.
Showing real meth production
Though she was excited to be involved in a hit TV show, she did have reservations about getting involved in a show about meth production.
"I thought, 'Well, we don't want to give students the impression that the teachers are making meth in their spare time,'" said Nelson. "When I saw the first few episodes, I thought, 'The way Vince is presenting this, no student in their right mind [would] say, "Yeah, that's the lifestyle I want."'"
Nelson says she was surprised about how specific and accurate Gilligan wanted to be when it came to the method used on the show to cook meth. The method used on the show was actually patented in Germany back in the 1950s. Nelson had to look up the patent to make sure she was getting the formula right.
"I asked them, 'Do you just want me to approximate this?' They said, 'Oh, no, we want that exact method.' They really wanted accuracy," said Nelson. "I went back and looked it up, and, thankfully, I had taken some German courses, because the patent was in German."
Nelson has been a big fan of the show from the beginning and plans on tuning in for the final season — which kicks off on AMC Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT — even though it has definitely taken a more sinister turn in recent seasons.
"The show has gotten a little bit dark," said Nelson. "I don't think that most science teachers behave like Walt does all the time, but I'm still very interested."
Natalie Cole follows in father's footsteps with new album 'En Espanol'
Back in 1958, legendary singer Nat King Cole released his first album that was completely in Spanish. 'Cole Espanol' was notable for a few reasons. For one, it was rare for a major American performer to release a record in Spanish and it became a top-20 album.
Even though the record was a success and Cole toured with it, he didn't speak any Spanish. None of that mattered, and two more albums in Spanish came after that.
Recently his daughter, Natalie Cole, followed in his footsteps by releasing her own spanish album: 'Cole En Espanol.' She joins Take Two to talk about why she decided to release a Spanish-language album.
Interview Highlights:
On why she made the album in Spanish:
"I just thought I would do something different for a change. I didn't want to do another jazz record, I didn't want to do a pop record. I get bored very easily. I think I wanted to also broaden my horizons internationally. We have seen the Latin culture become huge, and I thought it would be fun to tap into it and see what happened."
On how she decided which songs to cover:
"Rudy Perez, who was my producer, they call him the Latin David Foster, has a great knowledge of this Latin music. He's from Cuba and he started off with probably 100 songs that he gave me. We somehow managed to whittle it down to 14. There's 12 on the record, but there's also two songs on iTunes. Not unlike the unforgettable approach with the American Songbook, Rudy and I took the approach of the Latin Songbook. That's how we came to end up zeroing in on these 12 songs."
On how much Spanish she had spoken before the project:
"Not very much. Muy poquito. But I did discover something else, which is that I can sing in Spanish a lot better than I can speak it. I just dove in and loved singing it. I love singing in Spanish; it's so beautiful, so pretty. But a lot of Spanish people tell me that when they first came to this country, if they weren't born here, they say they learn a lot of English by listening to songs and watching TV."
On how she makes an emotional connection with a song despite not understanding it:
"I made sure that Rudy gave me the summaries of what all these songs were. He translated them in English for me. Many of them are like poetry. I think when you approach a project, and it's foreign to you, you need to get as much information as possible. For me, the melodies have a lot to do with how I sing a song. The melodies are so wonderful on these tunes, and I just seem to go there naturally."
On why singing in spanish was important to her father
" I think my dad was just a fearless pioneer kind of guy. His manager is the one that persuaded him to do this first project. His manager was named Carlos Gastel, who was from Honduras. He did a Calypso Blues type of tune in his show, so some of his percussion players were at these different Latin American countries. It wasn't that foreign to him, so when Carlos suggested that he do a Spanish record, I think he jumped at the idea. Not to mention, it was the first time any iconic American singer had done anything like that, so he was received so well even though his accent wasn't the greatest. I think it was because he took the time to pay respect to the music of the Latin culture. People loved him for that."
On the iconic song 'Unforgettable:
"It's always been one of my favorite songs. I remember the original version would always make me giggle a little because there's a woman who does this operatic singing in the background of Dad's original version of this. For some reason, that always tickled me. I just love this song. I think it such a pretty song, it's a good song to do as a duet because it means 'come closer.' I just thought it was really nice. On top of it, we were able to find, as a fluke, footage on Dad singing this song in Spanish. So we're now putting it into the show. I'll be at the Hollywood Bowl next week, and it'll be the first time anyone has seen that footage, so it's very exciting."
Ask.fm is the latest hotbed of cyberbullying among teens
There really aren't enough social networking sites, so let's add another one.
It's called Ask.fm and it's all the rage among the kids these days. Unfortunately, it's also become a popular site for cyberbullies. So much so that companies have started to pull their ads.
The site is similar to the now-defunct Formspring question-and-answer site. Half of the site's 57 million unique users are under the age of 18.
Casey Newton is senior reporter for the technology site Verge based in San Francisco. He joins the show to explain.
'Real World' star and AIDS activist Sean Sasser dead at 44
Before it was all about hot tubs and hookups, MTV's the Real World was groundbreaking.
The show's third season in 1994 was set in San Francisco, and cast member Pedro Zamora was one of the first HIV-positive men to have his life documented on a national TV show. Also, almost 20 years before gay marriage became legal in California, he traded wedding bands with his partner Sean Sasser, who was also HIV-positive.
But shortly after that season of the show ended, Pedro died from complications due to AIDS.
And this week, Sean Sasser also died. He was 44, and passed from mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer.
Looking back, Pedro and Sean had a big effect on Generation X, and they've been credited with putting a human face on the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Tyler Argüello is a faculty member at the USC School of Social Work who also conducts HIV-AIDS therapy, research, and education for LGBTQ populations.
Can relocation save the endangered Mojave desert tortoise?
Before humans moved in to the Mojave desert and began building tract homes and army bases and solar farms, it was the land of the tortoise.
This hearty creature has been a part of the desert landscape for millions of years, before it even was a desert. But over time, humans have been creeping further and further into tortoise habitat and their numbers have been shrinking.
In an effort to save the desert tortoise, conservation groups settled on a simple fix: move them. Over the last decade, hundreds of tortoises have been relocated and there are plans to move thousands more.
Reporter Emily Green writes about some of the problems with this approach in a new piece for High Country News. She joins the show to explain.
Interview highlights:
On how important tortoises are to the desert ecology:
"They are terribly significant. A lot of animals — burrowing owls, reptiles, all the different kinds of mice you have out in the desert and kangaroo rats — rely on the burrows that the tortoises dig. They have burrows that they hibernate in in the winter. If you walk through the mojave, and see a bush, look at the root of the bush and you'll see a burrow entrance."
When and why did they become listed as endangered:
"There was a population biologist named Christine Berry. She began censusing tortoises and she realized that the numbers were dropping precipitously. And because they're very slow and very long-lived, if the numbers drop below a certain concentration per square mile, they can't find their mates, they can't mate or lay eggs and you have just a total crash.
"In 1984, she published a paper pointing out that the numbers had fallen by 90 percent in the century before and within five years, a pet store disease had ripped through a wild population. Somebody had been dumping pet tortoises and they introduced a pet store disease…the animals were just lying on rocks, kind of feverish, vividly dying.
Is relocation really a good solution?
"It's a $10 term for moving an animal from where it is to where you want it to be so you can build over its habitat. And it's something that the fish and wildlife service has been doing for a long time to other species. They've been airlifting big horn sheep from one part of the Sierra and putting it in another. The problem with doing it to tortoises is that they have very finely tuned homing instincts. They seem to know where they were taken from and they try to get back."
What makes it difficult to track them?
"You have to radio tag them and watch them for a period of years, because with the mammal you might be able to tell whether it was going to live or die within a year. A tortoise can go a year without water. You have this situation where they could appear to live if you only studied for two, three four years but could be dying very slowly."
How have the relocation efforts gone so far:
"There have been lots of different moves. The one that's being monitored very closely had to do with the 2008 expansion of Fort Irwin, [when] they moved hundreds of animals. I wrote about a scientist who studied 150, and five years in, half of those animals were dead. They translocated more than 9,000 tortoises during the big expansion of Las Vegas. Nobody kept track of them.
"I interviewed desert tortoise recovery office coordinator about it and he said, 'Well we haven't really pulled the data yet, but if you go out there, there are a lot of dead tortoises.' It is shocking that this is the de facto conservation technique and it's got such a shocking failure rate."
Tarahumara people fight logging in old growth forests
One of the Mexico's most isolated indigenous groups, the Tarahumara, has won a significant legal victory, protecting its land. Mexican courts have suspended logging permits affecting old growth forests in the group's ancestral territory in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico.
This as export demand for the lumber is growing, and pressure is on to open up logging on other sections of indigenous land. For the Fronteras Desk, Lorne Matalon reports from the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Rep. Xavier Becerra on the status of the House immigration bill
It's been almost four months since the U.S. Senate's Gang of Eight released its immigration bill. However, the House's version of the group, now down to just seven members, still hasn't come up with its version of an immigration reform proposal.
One of the members of that group is Los Angeles Democrat, Congressman Xavier Becerra, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus who represents California's 34th District, which includes most of Los Angeles.
How does Netflix's algorithm know what you want to watch?
If you're like most people, you probably use Netflix for watching shows and films you already know you like or ones in tandem with your interests. Depending on how often you use it, though, there's a good chance that Netflix already knows what you like, too.
Don't believe us? Try watching the first selection in the "Suggested for You" queue.
It's an algorithm-generated list that's supposed to take all the stuff you've watched and tell you what else you might like. We won't tell you what our list looks like, but if you're a Netflix user, you've probably wondered how that algorithm works.
Wired writer Tom Vanderbilt wondered, too, so he tracked down the guys who track your entertainment preferences.
The process consists of two steps: first is the team of human taggers who watch movies and categorize them. Second is the algorithm that takes those categories and fits them to your viewing preferences.
How can you make sure that you're getting recommendations that you enjoy? It's simple. According to Vanderbilt, all you need to do is watch more movies.
"Like any of these systems, the more information you give it, the better it works," he says, "I like to call it 'training your algorithm.'"
Over the years, Netflix has evolved its algorithm to make training it easier for the customer. While you still have the option to rate titles after you watch them, Vanderbilt says that it isn't all that important anymore. Apparently, there's quite a disparity between what people rate and what they actually like.
"It turns out, the best way to predict what someone will want to watch is what they're actually watching, not what they're rating," said Vanderbilt.
So, if your recommendations are based off your viewing habits, why are some of them rated two or three stars? There's a reason for that, too.
"[Netflix] wants to throw in a certain amount of variability," said Vanderbilt. "A lot of us have these guilty pleasures hidden somewhere in the queue. Your 'Hot Tub Time Machine' and stuff like that."
So, even if you're watching the same genre every night, Netflix is there trying to make sure you don't get bored. And even if you do get tired of watching your recommended titles, there are still other rows like 'What's New' or 'What Are Other People Watching' so you can discover new titles.