California launches a tool to compare and contrast schools, Joshua Tree struggles to handle a huge influx of visitors, the Queen Mary needs repair
California's got a new 'Dashboard' to compare and contrast grade schools
If you're a parent you probably know the agony of trying to figure out the best school for your kids. Well, help is on the way.
This morning a brand new tool for evaluating the state's public schools will go live online. It's called the California School Dashboard and it ranks every institution, from elementary to high school, using a color-coded pie chart to indicate the ones that are the highest performing, and those that are not.
It's all based on different, some might say, complex metrics. KPCC education editor Maura Walz got a sneak peek and talked about it with A Martinez. She started by describing how the new system would look:
You have this color coded pie system where you can see if a school is doing really well in an area you have a blue full pie ... and then it goes down as the performance does not do so well it goes from green to orange to red.
She went on to say that the worst you could get was a single red slice. But if you're a parent and you're looking at this new system as a sort of Yelp review for schools, it probably won't work as well as you might hope.
It's not an overall simple summary of what's going on in the school, its something that you really need to spend a lot of time on ... its not a restaurant rating where you can look up a Zagat guide and its a 5 star restaurant, its not that at all.
Click on the blue player above to hear the entire interview.
How recreating the woolly mammoth could combat climate change
In 2008, a mostly intact skeleton of a Columbian Mammoth that was found at the La Brea Tar Pits. He was nick-named, "Zed."
Zed and his fellow mammoths roamed the earth until their extinction about 10 thousand years ago.
Now, if a pair of Russian scientists gets their way, mammoths will be reborn and have their own domain in Siberia. At a place called Pleistocene Park.
It sounds like that dinosaur movie, and the connection is no accident, but this place is not a tourist attraction.
Ross Anderson is the senior editor at The Atlantic overseeing science, tech, and health. He went to Pleistocene Park to find what they hope to accomplish.
"Pleistocene Park is a rewilding project. It's an attempt to return the landscape to its previous form. Many rewilding projects are only interested in turning a landscape back 3 4 500 years to its pristine state before some level of human interference. In this case, the idea is to turn it back all the way to the ice age when much of Siberia and much of the world indeed was a grassland."
On who's behind the park's creation
The original idea came from Sergei Zimov, who is just a wild kind of Russian mad scientist who's lived in the arctic for many years. As a scientist, he is widely respected in the field as this kind of luminary. He's the one who had the idea for the park and his son Nikita is the one who's now running it.
lOn how a Woolly Mammoth fits into the re-wilding efforts.
Elephants are in every eco-system that they appear in, they are what's called a Keystone species, which is to say they are very important to the environment, their activity has a huge effect on the shape of the landscape and the ecological relationships between the animals. and one of the things is they like to knock down trees.That's one of the reasons why the mammoth step, which is what that ecosystem during the ice age what it was called, was a grassland is because the mammoths were so diligent about knocking upstart trees.
On why grasslands would help with climate change
In the Arctic oceans, for instance, one of the scary feedback loops with climate change is when the polar ice caps gets smaller, it reveals more dark ocean, which in turn instead of reflecting light away it absorbs sunlight and makes the arctic even warmer. The same thing is true for grasslands and forests. Forests tend to be much darker and absorb more heat whereas grasslands reflect more away.
On how this mammoth would be created
There’s this common mythology that we all have from Jurassic park. 'What we need to do is find some ancient mammoth cell and take the DNA out of it and pop it into an elephant cell and off we go. The problem is DNA degrades quite quickly. But all a woolly mammoth is is a cold adapted Asian elephant. If you can take the genome of an Asian elephant and tinker with it and give it things like an under-skin layer of fat, anti-freeze blood and long fur, you can have yourself a mammoth.
Meanwhile, what about LA's local mammoth, Zed?
We called up Emily Lindsey, assistant curator at the La Brea Tar Pits to tell us how he was doing.
"Zed is mostly finished, he's been fully excavated and almost fully prepared. The exciting project that we're working on now is partnering with local school students on citizen's science project to understand the environment that Zed came from."
Very exciting, but when it comes to recreating Zed's kind at Pleistocene Park, Lindsey's more of a pessimist.
"From a scientific standpoint and curiosity standpoint, it's obviously something out of the movies. But for that expense, the money and the effort, why not put those into preserving the remaining proboscidians today so we don't have to try and de-extinct elephants in 30 years? "
To hear the full conversation click the blue player above.
Answers have been edit for clarity.
People LOVE Joshua Tree but park officials are struggling to deal with its 2 million-plus visitors
Joshua Tree National Park has always been a popular spot for campers, hikers, rock climbers and folks who just want to get away to the desert, but park officials say its popularity has become too much of a good thing.
In 2016, 2.5 million people visited the park — twice as many as two years before.
And sure, it's good to know folks are enjoying the great outdoors a little more, but the staff there says they just don't have enough resources to handle the crush.
KPCC environment reporter Emily Guerin spoke to A Martinez about some of the solutions park officials have been experimenting with to juggle the increased traffic and make sure Joshua Tree's delicate ecosystem is protected.
Click on the blue player above to listen to the entire interview
Sports Roundup: March Madness is almost here; will USC be there?
March Madness is about to kick off. UCLA is in the tournament but tonight the USC Trojans play Providence in what's known as a play-in game because the winner then advances to the actual NCAA Tournament.
But what are their chances? And what will happen to the stock of UCLA's Lonzo Ball if he doesn't performa as well as some ... namely his father Lamar Ball, predict?
A Martinez gets the latest on that with Take Two contributors
The Queen Mary may be sunk without millions for repairs
The Queen Mary in Long Beach is not in shipshape, and needs as much as $289 million for urgent repairs.
Otherwise, it may be sunk — literally.
The Long Beach Press-Telegram has reported that the decommissioned ocean liner and tourist attraction has a number of problems.
Some of those can be seen by visitors before they even board.
"You can see some of the rust that's dripping down the sides of the ship," reporter Courtney Tompkins told Take Two as she stood near the Queen Mary. "You can see peeling paint, large chunks of paint that's flaked off."
However, the ship is plagued by more than cosmetic issues.
"The hull, or the underbelly of the ship, has a lot of rust and corrosion over the years from the exposure to salt water and the elements," Tompkins said.
If the hull is breached, then major flooding could send the Queen Mary sinking to the floor of the lagoon where it is docked.
Floorboards on the Queen Mary's deck are loose from lack of maintenance, as demonstrated by KPCC's Leo Duran (Leo Duran/KPCC)
Naval architects report that rehabbing the ship could cost nearly $300 million. The Long Beach City Council in November approved spending $23 million to pay for the most urgent repairs.
The Queen Mary got to this point because of a lack of maintenance.
Long Beach owns the ship and surrounding property but leases it out to companies who are responsible for the upkeep.
"Some criticism that people have had over the years is that the city hasn't done a good job of holding leaseholders accountable," Tompkins said. "But also, there have been statements from the city about the struggle that operators have faced, over the years, to make enough money to put back into the ship."
Urban Commons, the current leaseholder, took over operations of the Queen Mary in November and is trying to address the problems it inherited.
"Our team is already in full swing, making critical structural renovations and repairs to ensure the Queen Mary is well equipped for the next 80 years," Taylor Woods, principal at Urban Commons, said in a statement to KPCC.
But it's unclear where the company or the city will find the rest of the money necessary to bring the ship back to its former glory.
"I think a lot of people are passionate about the ship and the ties that they or their family may have to it," Tompkins said.
Listen to the full interview by clicking the blue audio player above.
The Styled Side: South Coast Plaza turns 50
Fifty years ago, luxury shopping center South Coast Plaza opened its doors.
It's a big milestone for the Costa Mesa mall, which is also a juggernaut of retail.
"They are the highest-grossing shopping mall in the country with nearly $2 billion in sales," says Michelle Dalton Tyree of Fashion Trends Daily.
The land had humble beginnings as a dairy farm, owned and operated by the Segerstrom family.
"I recall vividly being able to stand at our farm and look in a 360-degree radius and see nothing but open land," says Anton Segerstrom.
But the advent of mechanical milking machines led the Segerstroms to close the farm – they thought the technology hurt cows – and open up South Coast Plaza, instead.
The mall primed Southern California for some of the biggest luxury retailers in the world.
The Nordstrom family opened the first Nordstrom outside of the Pacific Northwest at South Coast Plaza, which remained its highest-grossing store until recently.
Paris-based Courrges joined in 1975, and Halston followed in 1976.
"These were stores that wouldn't have deigned to go into a mall, before," says Tyree. "Founder Henry Segerstrom believed that if you build it, they will come.
That gamble has paid off.
Some of the biggest spenders at South Coast Plaza are overseas tourists.
"They have a huge Chinese customer base," she adds, noting that it has a tourism department dedicated just to Chinese visitors. "Many of their stores and boutique have Mandarin-speaking salespeople."
Shoppers from the United Arab Emirates also come out in big numbers during the summer.