How much money and resources does it take to investigate fires? A new algorithm to pinpoint people living in poverty, indigenous heritage and Latinos' long lifespan.
Though homes are lost, residents affected by the Blue Cut fire are 'resilient'
It's burned roughly thirty-seven thousand acres in San Bernardino County, but firefighters now say the Blue Cut Fire is eighty-nine percent contained.
Evacuations for 82,000 people have been lifted but 105 homes have been lost as well as more than 200 other buildings.
John Blodgett is a public safety reporter for the Southern California News Group and has been in the field for the last 6 days, talking to people who live in the area.
On Sunday, he came across the Nims family whose home was destroyed. They spoke to Blodgett as they sifted through their personal belongings, like a mug with "Mom" stenciled across it.
Blodgett spoke to A Martinez about the areas most affected by the fire and how the community is faring.
Click on blue player above to hear the whole interview
The search for the spark: investigators look for the origin of wildfires
It's burned roughly thirty-seven thousand acres in San Bernardino County, but firefighters now say the Blue Cut Fire is eighty-nine percent contained.
While it and other wildfires continue to burn throughout California, investigators are already looking into what sparked the flames in the first place.
To help us better understand how experts study wildfire cases, Take Two's Libby Denkmann called up Joe Sesniak in Arizona.
He's an active arson investigator with the International Association of Arson Investigators.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue play button above.
New Trump plea draws fine line between observation and intimidation
Over the weekend, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump called on his supporters to independently monitor polling places on election day on a hunch that the election may be rigged.
"The only way we can loose, in my opinion, I really mean this, Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on, I really believe it," Trump declared to a boisterous audience Friday. Recent polls from swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio show a lag in support for Trump. The candidate used vague language to finger specific precinct areas, citing, "I know what's happening here, folks. I know-- she can't beat what's happening here. The only way they can beat it, in my opinion and I mean this 100%, if in certain sections of the state, they cheat."
"That seems to be kind of a dog whistle or a code word urban areas like Philadelphia with large African American populations," UC Irvine law professor Richard Hansen told Take Two. "[Trump] has suggested that people could vote 5 or 10 or 15 times because the state does not have a strict voter identification law. It's in fact impossible to have some kind of multiple voting like this on any large scale. You'd have to have hundreds of thousands of people in on a conspiracy to try and swing a presidential election."
Trump's campaign website directs supporters to sign up to be "election observers" on the big day. "While we encourage campaigns to have observers because it helps keep the system honest, the line is between observation and intimidation," says Hasen. "We do have an unfortunate history in this country, especially in minority areas [of] people being intimidated..." He continues, "I'm concerned that by Trump encouraging his supporters to take matters into their own hands that he's trying to rig the election himself."
Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson recently stated Trump's concerns over election rigging are hypothetical because the election has yet to happen.
'Rio pulled it off': The Summer Olympics wraps up
The Summer Olympics in Rio have officially come to a close.
As predicted, the United States dominated the overall medal count—46 gold, 37 silver and 38 bronze for a total of 121 medals.
For a recap on the Olympics, A Martinez caught up with Christine Brennan at the Rio airport, while she waited her flight. She's sports columnist for USA Today and commentator for ABC News, CNN and PBS.
Click the blue audio player to hear the full interview.
ESPN's Jessica Mendoza on being a trailblazer for women in sports, 'I just want to make an impact'
Just about a year ago, broadcaster and athlete Jessica Mendoza made history. She became the first female analyst for a Major League Baseball game in the history of ESPN, when she stepped into the booth for that day's broadcast of Monday Night Baseball.
Here she is calling a game between the Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs.
A few months later she became the first woman to be an analyst for a nationally televised MLB Postseason game, an American League Wild Card Game on ESPN between the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros.
Mendoza spoke with A Martinez about that first game, how she's dealt with negativity from some people and how many high profile players have openly welcomed her and praised her performance.
Click on the blue player above to listen to the whole interview.
The Binge: KPCC's staff picks!
Finding a new television series and devouring it is lots of fun, but what you choose to binge on can be a very personal choice.
One man’s “Breaking Bad” is another man’s “Wayward Pines”. For every person who swears by “Downton Abbey”, there are others who roll their eyes and yawn.
For this month's installment of The Binge, we asked many hard working KPCC staffers what they've been binging on of late.
Far and away, the biggest vote getter was none other than the Netflix series, "Stranger Things."
An off-beat hybrid of genres - science fiction, coming of age, horror and drama - this 8 episode summer series has turned out to be a big hit for Netflix.
Set in a small town in 1983, a local boy named Will goes missing, setting off a massive search party. But the search for him leads to strange and terrifying revelations.
Our resident audio-visual media maven, Mark Jordan Legan notes that it’s beautifully shot and very much in the style of classic eighties movies like E.T or Goonies and the performances are strong all the way around.
Next up, thanks to KPCC's
,
,
and
we have the hilarious BoJack Horseman.
This animated series premiered back in the summer of 2014. It is a dark satire on celebrity and tells the story of Bojack Horseman, a washed up 90’s sitcom star voiced by Will Arnett. It’s set in the human world except anthropomorphic animals co-exist side by our side.
The show has a huge following and celebrities themselves now clamor to be on it – everyone from Paul McCartney to Daniel Radcliffe have portrayed themselves.
The Binge is produced by none other than the great
, sort of the pillar of KPCC whose spirit animal is more like a tiger, or lion ... maybe majestic like an eagle. (Maybe you've figured out that he's actually writing this web page)
At any rate, his pick is the FX show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It's available for streaming via Netflix, and here's a clip from the show.
Jordan Legan says that this raucous sitcom has had an amazing run for eleven seasons. A gang of off-beat, shall we say “underachievers,” run a bar in South Philadelphia. They are selfish, impulsive and immature. Here's a scene where the guys try to create a dating profile for one of the gang, Charlie.
Actor Danny DeVito was such a fan of the first season, he contacted the producers and said he’d love to be part of it ever since.
And finally, thanks to AirTalk's Jasmin Tuffaha we look at the show, Peaky Blinders.
Set in post-World War I England, it focuses on a working class Birmingham gang – all veterans – returning home with physical & mental scars from the war but ready to pick up where they left off – bookmaking, gun running, fixing horse races, whatever can make them some money.
Jordan Legan says the show is filled with outstanding performances, and the writing is top notch. The show’s creator and head writer is Stephen Knight, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for such powerful films as “Dirty Pretty Things” and “Eastern Promises”.
is a writer, living in Los Angeles. Clink on the link to check out past installments of The Binge.
POUND fitness: Channel your inner drummer while you work out
All summer long we’ve been bringing you out-of-the-box workouts available in the Southern California area. First, Take Two’s Alex Cohen gave pole dancing a spin, then she was bouncing off the walls with the newest trampoline workout fad.
But this time, it was Take Two's Libby Denkmann’s turn to get in on the fun. For her fitness experience, Libby got to head over to Crunch gym in Burbank, for a workout with a beat.
POUND “is the world’s first cardio jam session inspired by the infectious, energizing and sweat-dripping fun of playing the drums.” Libby picked up POUND’s lime green weighted drumsticks and gave it a try.
She met up with Natalie West, a POUND fit instructor, who was her drumming guide throughout the whole experience.
Highlights
Natalie: "So in that first track, we saw a lot of what we call our set position, which is really our home base in POUND. Your feet are a little wider than shoulder distance apart when we're squatting down we want to make sure all of the weight is in the heels. We're holding our ripstix like a remote control, your thumbs are on top of the stick, so that way in normal drumming, a lot of your drummers are going to use your wrist, you need to keep loose wrists to keep the beat.
In POUND, however, we want to extend that arm and we're pumping from the elbow. So when you're pumping both of them when you feel the wrist, you're really only feeling that impact in the wrist when you start to pump from the elbow you're going to feel it in the arms, you're going to start to feel it in the core."
Natalie: "So, we're going to be squatting while we're hitting so we're using our arms, we're using our legs if we're pumping out it's like a chest press, but we're using the ripstix instead. So, we're getting a little bit of everything in that warm-up, starting to warm-up those muscle groups."
Natalie: "We do over 15,000 repetitions and pumps in a class, in a 45-minute class. Don't be scared, you're going to let your inner rockstar out, you're not even going to notice, you're not going to feel it. It's like stress release. It's therapy. Hitting the ground that many times actually starts to feel really good."
Libby: "Natalie, I'm a little scared."
Natalie: "Don't be scared, it's going to be great."
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
UCLA researchers may have discovered why Latinos live longer
Scientists have known that Latinos tend to live longer than their white counterparts, but they have not been able to explain why.
It's a mystery known as "The Hispanic Paradox," because Latinos tend to be at higher risk for health issues, like obesity and diabetes. But a team of researchers out of UCLA may have cracked the case.
Steve Horvath led this research. He's also a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at UCLA. He joined host A Martinez to explain more.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.
How companies like Twitter can identify terrorist or extremist accounts
Twitter has vastly expanded its fight against extremism online. The San Francisco-based company says it has suspended 360,000 accounts for what it calls "violent threats and the promotion of terrorism."
Elizabeth Bodine-Baron is co-director at the RAND Center for Applied Network Analysis and System Science. She and a team recently performed a study of ISIS supporters and opponents on Arabic-language Twitter. She joined the show to give some perspective on how a social media company can determine which accounts to block — and if it can make a difference.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.
Satellite technology's new role in the fight against poverty
More than a billion people are living in poverty around the world, according to researchers at Stanford University. But one of the biggest obstacles to providing aid is the lack of resources to pinpoint the places that need the most help.
Aid organizations have typically used door-to-door surveys to find information on impoverished communities. But now, Stanford researchers are using satellite technology to get a clearer picture, literally, of impoverished areas.
In a new study, images of the earth were taken at night, and depending on how bright an area was, the pictures were used as a guide to figure out which areas are in need. The study focused the countries of Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda
A Martinez spoke to the study's co-author, Neal Jean, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford, to explain how this new technology could be a catalyst for providing aid to people in poverty around the world.
Interview Highlights
How does this technology work?
We don't have as much information on much poverty data as we need to work on the poverty problem, and we have lots of satellite images that contain a lot of unstructured information, some of which tell us about poverty and socioeconomic data that we care about. And our job is to take a machine learning algorithm to take in these raw pixels in the form of satellite imagery and output predictions about poverty.
What are you looking for with these images?
We teach the computer to take in these satellite images and predict whether those areas are light or dark at night. In that process, the computer learns to pick up image features such as buildings or roads or forests or water. And our hypothesis is that some of these features are useful in predicting poverty as well.
But isn't pinpointing poverty based on how light or dark an area is too simple? Is that the only factor this technology uses?
People have tried to use nighttime lights alone to predict poverty in certain outcomes, but night lights is just one value, so it doesn't carry that much information. For example, it's hard to use night lights to separate an area that's densley populated to an area that's poor to an area that's rich but sparsely populated. So our hope is that by using daytime satellites as well, we can pick up on a lot of other information.
Do you think we can expect to see this technology in action on a larger scale?
I'm not sure how much of this technology could be visible right away, but it could happen in the next few months. We've been talking to some people who would be interested in using these detailed poverty maps that we can produce and overlay them with maps of their current operations. Then these organizations would be able to see if they're deploying their resources to the right places.