A New York newspaper is under scrutiny for publishing the addresses of gun owners. Plus, could gun liability insurance help curb gun violence? Then, new research shows that electronic records are vulnerable to attack by hackers, the nationwide primary physician shortage is worsening and much more.
New York paper under scrutiny for publishing map of gun permit holders
A New York newspaper is coming under fire for publishing a map that identifies licensed gun owners in the area. The Journal News of suburban Westchester, New York published the map last week in the wake of the mass shooting in nearby Newtown Connecticut.
The article went viral, making its way to conservative blogs like The Drudge Report and the response has quickly turned nasty.
For more on this story we're joined by NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik.
Could gun liability insurance help curb gun violence?
Even though the nation is still reeling from the tragic Sandy Hook School shooting, passing gun control laws will not come easy. But would it be easier to get Congress to approve a law if it avoided banning any guns, and just imposed stricter restrictions?
John Wasik, contributor to Forbes.com, has such an idea for gun control: mandatory gun liability insurance.
Electronic medical records vulnerable to attack by hackers
Nearly four years ago, Congress mandated the widespread adoption of electronic health records. Since then, thousands of hospitals, clinics and doctors have made the move to digitize medical records.
They say going high-tech could save billions of dollars and improve the quality of care. But, online records are also vulnerable to attack.
Over the past year, the Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow Jr. has been writing a series on cybersecurity. His last article focused on the health care industry.
Primary care physician shortage worsening
The way things are going, finding a family doctor is going to be increasingly challenging. Fewer and fewer medical students are signing up to become primary care physicians.
According to the American Medical Association only 2 percent said they were interested in practicing primary care.
Dr. Colin P. West, associate professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has been looking into why medical students are passing over the family doctors office.
The new definition of drones
When you hear the word "drone," images of warfare or high tech surveillance may come to mind. But two entrepreneurs believe drones will revolutionize our daily lives. Earlier this month, Chris Anderson resigned as editor-in-chief of Wired magazine to team up with a 26-year-old engineering whiz from Tijuana. From the Fronteras Desk in San Diego, John Rosman says they plan to jumpstart what they call the, "personal drone industry."
When you hear the word drone, images of warfare or high-tech surveillance come to mind. But the former editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and a young Tijuana programmer have a different idea. They believe drones will revolutionize our daily lives.
Outside a warehouse in San Diego engineers huddle over a computer. They are about to launch a drone, a remote controlled aerial vehicle. They punch in a start and end point on a map, and it takes off.
But the quadcopter that zips by looks like a toddler’s nightstand. It doesn’t look that threatening and that’s what Chris Anderson is betting on. He believes in a decade drones will have evolved way beyond their current military uses.
“You’ll think of them being like crop dusters," Anderson said. "You will think of them in entirely new context. We’ll forget that drones were once a defense industry thing and we’ll think of it as something you’ll buy at Wal-Mart.”
What makes a drone a drone is the ability to go from point A to point B, with a click of a mouse or touch of a screen, without direct human interaction. It’s a robot using GPS to perform a simple command: go here. But it’s also a launch pad for amazing possibilities. All you need to do is look down at your cell phone to see how fast technology progresses.
Anderson gives an example. “What if we sold a box that you can put on your belt and while you’re out windsurfing a drone can just follow you 30 feet up, 30 feet back. Keep your camera on you as you did your cool stuff. That perfect aerial view.”
Imagine how this could impact search and rescue missions or, even, pizza deliveries. These flying nightstands could transform into hoverboards a la "Back To The Future," or into a fleet of mail carriers.
In 2007, Chris Anderson became obsessed with the possibility of drones. So much so he started a blog, DIY (Do It Yourself) Drones, to learn about the emerging landscape.
A few hundred miles south, Jordi Muñoz was ripping apart a toy helicopter and Nintendo Wii. The 21 year-old programmer was scouring Google to find out how to use sensors from the Wii to get his helicopter to fly straight.
Muñoz remembers, “One week when I Googled something I didn’t find anything, and the week later I Googled the same thing, and I found this blog.”
He joined the DIY Drones blog and started sharing the code from his project. “I was just in my own world in a bubble, I was super obsessed trying to make it work, finally making it work and posted it online. I didn’t realize I was doing something high-end.”
Anderson was blown away by that code. The two immediately hit it off and began collaborating.
Fast-forward five years, today they’re running a multimillion-dollar cross-border company that produces and sells hardware and personal drones. The company, 3D Robotics found success in Muñoz’s misunderstood hometown, Tijuana.
“Prior to 18 months ago, I thought Tijuana was drug cartels and cheap tequila," Anderson said. "What Jordi knew and taught me was that Tijuana is the Shenzhen of North America."
Shenzhen is China’s manufacturing epicenter just north of Hong Kong.
“It’s not just cheap, it’s better skilled. They graduate more engineers. Those manufacturing skills that we lost in much of the United States are still there,“ Anderson said.
Anderson believes their use of Tijuana’s high-skilled, low-cost labor teamed with San Diego’s engineers is the business model of future.
The goal now is to streamline the whole process for the consumer. Buy the drone, download the app, type in coordinates and go. Simple enough for a grandmother to fly and open source for programmers to reinvent the product.
But drones remain suspect. Many are concerned about a more invasive drone future — with devices like flying sniper rifles or hovering spy cameras.
Ask Chris Anderson and he will tell you it’s entirely possible. "Do we limit the technology so we can’t use it for ill? I would ask you the same thing about your phone or your computer. General-purpose technologies are incredibly empowering, they change the world, but by definition they don’t limit the way you use it. If somebody’s going to do something stupid, you can’t stop them.”
Remember, computer technology got its biggest early boost from the military. Chris Anderson is banking on the inevitability that the good this technology could do — be it food drops in Africa or fire fighting down the street — will ultimately outweigh the destruction it could cause.
Our music critics on the best tunes and trends of 2012 (Video)
This is one in a series of year-end stories that look back at the most memorable pieces KPCC reporters worked on in 2012 and look ahead at a key issue that will be the focus of coverage in the coming year.
What better way to celebrate the arrival of 2013 than with the best sounds of 2012? We've got the best indie, world and alt-latino music from the past year. Our regular music critics Steve Hochman, Josh Kun and Drew Tewksbury gave us their top picks for 2012.
Drew Tewksbury's Picks:
"I think it was a pretty good year for music, because there was a really wide variety of things that happened. You had very big pop things coming out, but also experimental music, there were a lot of interesting things happening. One of my favorite albums from the year that probably no one likes is by this band Swans, they made a beautiful, noisy, kind of grimy album. That's what I thought was so cool about this year, that there was some really grimy stuff, but some high-end pop stuff that came out that sounded really great too.
Lianne La Havas, "Forget"
Tame Impala, "Apocalypse Dream"
Quakers, "Fitta Happier"
Trends: "I saw a lot of return to Blues with "Alabama Shakes" and a lot of other bands that were starting to get back to roots music. One thing we didn't see a lot of is Rock & Roll. Rock & Roll has, for the last couple of years, kind of taken a back seat to pop. So that's something that I hope for next year, that we get some more basic, some gritty rock back in there."
Steve Hochman's Picks:
"Looking on the global perspective, on the one end you had the huge phenomenon with Pussy Riot, the punk female collective from Russia getting jailed and becoming this big protest icon, then on the other side you had Psy from Korea, a whole new global phenomenon. And most people around the world don't even understand the words to either of these things, but they've become the icons."
Ondatrópica
Malawi Mouse Boys, "He Is # 1"
Dr. John, "Revolution"
Josh Kun's Picks:
"Judging by the fact that I can't keep up with just how much stuff is out there and how much good stuff is out there. Every single day you can start the morning and not finish throughout the day listening to all the new stuff…for me, personally, the ongoing death of genre is a beautiful thing. The more and more that people are just making music for the sake of making it, and not worrying about where its going to fall, how its going to sell. It's a beautiful place when we can have all of that diversity being produced every single day."
Natalia Laforcade, "Aventurera"
Ana Tijoux, "Saca La Voz
Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas, "Helicopteros"
Trends: "I'm hoping it's the last year for Euro, techno dance sythwashes to infect all manners of hip-hop and R&B in this country. I'm hoping its the end of LMFAO, I'm hoping its the end of David Guetta's sound. I think it's time to move on."
A look at the new California laws coming in 2013
Governor Brown signed nearly 900 bills into law last year, many of which will take effect on Tuesday.
For more on what you can and can't do in California come January 1st, we're joined by John Myers, he's the political editor for the ABC affiliate in Sacramento.
A look ahead to the biggest environmental issues of 2013
This is one in a series of year-end stories that look back at the most memorable pieces KPCC reporters worked on in 2012 and look ahead at a key issue that will be the focus of coverage in the coming year.
KPCC reporter Molly Peterson fills us in on the biggest environmental issues ahead in 2013.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced she was stepping down from the Cabinet after the State of the Union early next year. Jackson has won praise from environmentalists for revitalizing the agency after the Bush Administration.
Much of that praise has been for her agency’s unprecedented action on climate change. Early in her tenure, the EPA released what’s been called an “endangerment finding” – a document in which EPA officials wrote that carbon dioxide and five other gases that contribute to a warming climate endanger the environment and human health. That finding made it possible for federal regulators to create stricter rules for emissions from light and heavy duty trucks.
Jackson also placed a special emphasis on urban environmental issues. In California, EPA developed environmental justice programs in places like Boyle Heights, the I-710 corridor, the Inland Empire, and Imperial County.
Under Jackson’s tenure, the EPA named the Los Angeles River a navigable river under the Clean Water Act. That decision is key to moving money towards Southern California for river development, cleanup and revitalization projects advocated by local officials.
"We have to think about a river with a concrete bottom that flows through one of our nation's largest cities and through this lovely city as well," Jackson said at the time. "We need to think about urban areas and we need to make it clear to the residents who live here – our neighbors – how important these issues are."
Jackson found herself at odds with the White House in 2011, over an issue that has strong implications for southern California. EPA was on track to tighten up an ozone standard to something in a range recommended by scientists. In intense lobbying, business interests told President Obama the new standard would be too costly and dangerous to the economy. He recommended backing off the more aggressive standard, in the interest of “reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.”
You can expect to hear more about climate change in 2013, and not just because President Obama’s going to confirm a new EPA Administrator.
In the Arctic, ice was measured at record lows. The CEO of a French oil company, Total SA, decided in 2012 that the environmental and public relations risks of drilling in the Arctic outweighed the potential benefits. in 2013, Shell intends to pick up where it left off with drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, though the company still faces logistical and regulatory challenges.
California's cap and trade market got off the ground in 2012. The California Air Resources Board deemed the initial auction in November successful. The next auction will take place in February.
Those auction proceeds aren’t just going to burn a hole in the state’s pocket. They’re on the move. The California Public Utilities Commission announced it would use auction revenues to pay “climate dividends” to ratepayers who live in territories served by investor-owned utilities: Southern California Edison, PG&E, and San Diego Gas & Electric. The credits of either 20 or 40 dollars will appear on customers’ bills midway through next year. The dividends are a beginning. CPUC expects to put billions of dollars into ratepayers’ hands over the next seven years.
And locally, climate change figures into a discussion about what happens to a stretch of California’s coastline in tony Malibu. Broad Beach is no longer broad; battered by increasingly strong storms, currents, and rising sea levels, its sand is washing away and ending up, among other places, at Zuma Beach, a county-managed beach a mile away.
Historically, sand washed down from inland would replenish Broad Beach. But development, including the houses lining Broad Beach themselves, has prevented beach replenishment.
Broad Beach residents have joined together to create a special assessment district: essentially, they’re taxing themselves to create revenue to solve the problem of lost land.
Their solution could set a precedent for other communities along California’s coast who are already feeling the impacts of stronger storms and share concerns about rising seas.
Still undecided is where Broad Beach will get the over 600,000 cubic yards of sand the project requires. Candidate sand supplies in Manhattan Beach, Ventura, and Santa Monica may or may not be available. Trucking sand in from the Mojave Desert or other inland locations could be prohibitively costly, even for Malibu denizens.
The State Lands Commission delayed a hearing in early December to accommodate a huge volume of public comment on the issue. The commission says it’ll address the issue early next year.
Van Gogh's 'Self Portrait' comes to Los Angeles
As part of an exchange with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum will now be showing the work of one of the greatest artists ever, Vincent van Gogh, from today until March 4, 2013.
His hauntingly compelling Self Portrait, was produced in late August 1889, less than a year before his untimely death at age 37, in July 1890.
“The words that one normally thinks of with Van Gogh are rapid movement and electrifying light, and I think that the color is something that also is sort of the calling card for van Gogh, especially at this point, at this juncture in his life,” said Chief Curator Carol Togneri, about Self Portrait.
Self Portrait comes from a time when van Gogh traveled to Paris a second time and ended up in the South of France. He became overwhelmed by the color, light, and rustic nature that encapsulated life in the south and eventually, after much pleading, convinced his friend Paul Gauguin to join him in this new movement in art.
While living and working together, the two artists viciously fought. Their conflict ultimately brought on the infamous event of van Gogh severing off his own ear. The incident led to Van Gogh’s stay in an institution in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Self Portrait was created.
Though the work shows van Gogh with his ear intact, Togneri says the artist was likely painting himself using a mirror. In a painting prior to this, however, van Gogh painted himself with a bandage on his head. Togneri says it’s unclear as to why he decided to omit it in this instance.
“Is it a way of saying, ‘I’m on the mend?’ Is it a way of saying not only that he is perhaps healing but that he is feeling more confident as an artist himself and thus shows himself as an artist?” Togneri asked.
Throughout his 10-year career, van Gogh painted a total of 36 self portraits, but portrayed himself as an artist only three times. Togneri explained that van Gogh was actually quite obsessed with painting heads and human figures, even begging his brother Theo for money to pay models for practice.
“When he didn’t have recourse to human figures, or when he frightened them away because of his strange periodic attacks or personality, he would revert to painting himself,” said Togneri. “Or he’d paint anybody in a field that he could get to pose for a very limited amount of time. I think he paints himself because he has a certain amount of self introspection. But I also think he paints himself because he needed to have models.”
Ann Hoenigswald, of the National Gallery of Art, will give a lecture at the Norton Simon Museum in March 2013, during which she will speak about how van Gogh built up the layers on his canvas and his use of color, specifically relating to the self portait painting on exhibition.
“That’s what’s so amazing to me,” Togneri added, “is to be able to read through it and see the way his mind was working as he was conceptualizing about this.”
Nicholl Fellowship winner Allan Durand on 'Willie Francis Must Die Again'
The Academy Awards aren't just for billion-dollar blockbusters and art-house films.
Each year, the Academy presents up to 5 Nicholl Fellowships, where amateur screenwriters are awarded $35,000 to help launch their careers.
Allan Durand was one recipient of the award this year. He's a lawyer based in Layfayette, Louisiana, who wrote "Willie Francis Must Die Again," the real-life story of a 16-year old who survived his first execution attempt on the electric chair.
KPCC's Patt Morrison spoke with Durand about the only man to be executed twice in Louisiana.
Russian Adoption Ban: Tell us how the new law will affect you
Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he plans to sign a law banning all adoptions from his country to the U.S. It's retaliation for an American law that punishes Russian officials for human rights violations.
Last week we spoke about this political battle with Chuck Johnson of the National Council for Adoption. He said it's wrong for children to be caught in the middle of this international tit-for-tat.
At the time, Johnson said he was unsure how the new law would affect the plans of American families now in the midst of adopting a Russian child. If you are currently trying to adopt from Russia, we'd love to hear from you.
You can share your story by heading to our Public Insight Network.
Can a re-imagined and walkable downtown save America?
The traffic in L.A. is enough to drive anyone crazy. But if you're city planner Jeff Speck, it could inspire you to write a book.
He's a city planner who travels around the world looking for ways to unclog traffic and make cities more livable. His new book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time."
Interview Highlights:
Why do we need to be saved?
“I started out studying sprawl and the difference between sprawl and traditional neighborhoods and what life was like in those places, as a designer. I was surprised to find the groups that who got more attention and were more serious than designers were talking about the same thing. There are three main groups that have been stressing the value of cities over suburbanization. First is the doctors, the epidemiologists who in the 90’s figured out that sprawl is killing us in terms of what it was doing to our bodies, living in this environment where the automobile is a prosthetic device. The second is the environmentalists who now realize that for most of us who don’t own factories, the best way to stop contributing to global warming is to live in environments where we drive less, the third group led by Ed Glaeser, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, and others, said that cities tend to be where the most inventiveness happens. Cities make us more productive”
You have travelled a lot in your studies, which city do you think is the best designed?
“The best cities for people and in some ways for living in with a car are those that were designed before the car… cars behave like water. The more space we give them the more space they take. Such as LA, they have been given a lot of room and they take up a lot of room. So my favorite cities are the ones that have plenty of cars in them, but cars that move slowly, like a Florence, Italy or a Boston, Massachusetts. There are a lot of small cities on the East coast, places designed before the car and have not been reamed out in order to speed the car.”
Are there places in Southern California that are fairly successful as “walkable” places?
“Santa Barbara is famous for being a place you can go to walk around. Interestingly LA is on “walk-score,” a website you can score your community, as one of the top ten neighborhoods in America list. There are tons of great neighborhoods in LA that are walkable, Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, old town Pasadena. What isn’t so functional in LA is the way that they are connected together. The transit system that used to connect them together is dismantled. Living in LA and having friends all over LA means that you are in your car a lot.”
Can you talk about how old town Pasadena became successful?
“Old Pasadena is a fascinating experiment, Don Shoup, the world’s leading authority on parking at UCLA, studied old town Pasadena and Westwood, who back in the he 80’s were competing downtowns, they both decided they had a parking problem. Westwood responded by making parking free… and Pasadena responded by making parking a dollar an hour. The merchants didn’t want it at first, but they said look, we are going to take every dollar you spend on parking and put it towards improving the streets, planting trees, turning the alleys into beautiful pedestrian walkway system, and now as you know old town Pasadena eats Westwood’s lunch as a place you would want to be on a given afternoon, what sort of tax revenue comes out of it, and how the merchants are doing.”
What changes would you make to improve LA?
“Great thing about LA, the way we planners refer to it was say the ‘bones are good.’ It has a really nice street network, it has small blocks, blocks are essential. There was a study done that found if you double the block size you increase the fatality rate. The bones are good. The problem with LA is you essentially reamed out your streets. What were two or three or four lane streets with parallel parking and ample sidewalks and trees for pedestrians, in many cases those became four and five and six and eight lane streets, without moving the buildings or changing anything. So the basic framework is healthy. It is a matter of street by street determining where walkability is possible. There is no point trying to make the whole city walkable. There are certain parts which can be walkable which will attract people because of what is there, the uses and the pleasantness of the buildings, they have friendly faces and all the things that add up to people making the choice to walk because it is a pleasure. Those are the streets to fix, you have everything else but a good horizontal surface. And you fix the horizontal surface because that’s what a city can do.”
Is this an excessive cost in a state where money is at a premium?
“Most places I work do not rebuild the streets we simply restripe the street. When you restripe the “four-laner” into a “two-laner” downtown you can actually get rid of a lot of your signals. The best parts of many cities have four way stop signs at all the intersections. If you have ever been to Georgetown in Washington D.C. that’s essentially 100 blocks of four way stops and it’s a pleasure to walk around and a pleasure to drive around.”
What is your ideal city?
“The best places are places that have the quality that comes from many generations of people carrying for them. There isn’t a new city that has been built or I’ve worked on that I would rather be at than a place that has had 50, 100, 500 years of people being in it. The thing that distinguishes the current generation of planners, the new urbanists, is that we are not trying to reinvent the city, we are trying to recreate, we base it on all the qualities that make the cities we love great. We measure the streets, we count the trees, we see how tall the buildings are and how far apart they are and when we make new places we make them just like the best analogous places in the world.” You can read more about urban planning in Jeff Speck’s new book, "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time.”
Excerpt of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time by Jeff Speck