A1A South

GAINESVILLE, FLA. — Termites aren’t just out to eat the wood in your home. A new University of Florida study shows the voracious insects like to feast on your home’s insulation, too — making it nearly 75 percent less effective.

In tests measuring how termites damage the thermal properties or insulation in homes and other buildings, three types of widely used construction materials — 2-by-4 boards, five-ply plywood and foam board insulation — were exposed to the pest for eight weeks by entomologists at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“All three building construction materials were damaged by termites, but the pest caused more damage to insulation than to either the wooden 2-by-4 or plywood samples,” said Phil Koehler, an entomology professor who supervised the study by graduate student Cynthia Tucker and research associate Roberto Pereira. Their findings will be published in the April issue of the journal Sociobiology.

The thermal imaging tests, which measured heat transfer through the three building materials, focused on damage caused by a species of subterranean termite, Reticulitermes flavipes, that’s well known in North America.

Tucker, who is completing work on her doctoral degree in entomology at UF’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, said they were surprised to find that rigid foam board insulation was most heavily damaged by termites, with 12 percent of the material being removed by termites in eight weeks, causing a 27 percent loss in insulation values.

“Most types of insulation are composed of plastic that’s not a source of food for termites, but the soft texture of insulation allows termites to build extensive tunnels and consume paper that lines the outside surface,” Tucker said. “In fact, the insulation materials are an almost ideal habitat because they protect the pest from cold temperatures.”

She said tests showed that plywood was the most resistant to heat flow, but once termites damaged the plywood, temperature changes were significant. After termites ate just 3.1 percent of the wood, insulation values dropped 74 percent.

When the pest attacked 2-by-4 boards, consuming 6.7 percent of the wood by tunneling along the fibers and within softer spring wood, there was a 35 percent drop in insulation values.

“Until recently, changes in the thermal properties of a structure caused by termites — especially for buildings in areas where temperature extremes require lots of heating or air conditioning — have been overlooked,” Tucker said.

Termite damage has been most commonly thought of in terms of weakening structures, making infested areas prone to collapse, she said. Water damage is also linked to these termites because they bring moisture up from the soil into structures.

Pereira said homeowners should make sure a high quality pre-construction termite treatment is done and a termite-protection contract is maintained. Once termites damage the structure, killing the pest will not correct the damage or restore insulation properties.

D.R. Sapp, president of Florida Pest Control and Chemical Co. in Gainesville, said the research provides valuable information that many homeowners overlook.

Insulation can be a “termite turnpike” because the foam material has a low density and holds moisture, he said, making it easy for the pest to quickly tunnel through buildings and attack wood.

“Homeowners always are concerned about anything that can affect the value of their homes, especially now when there is a downturn in the housing market,” Sapp said.

Source:  University of Florida News

Yikes.  We were discussing ways of making our 30-year-0ld block and brick house more energy efficient.  We considered tearing out all the interior drywall and installing insulation which we found through some incidental sheetrock repair was not done 30 years ago when the house was built, or we considered having some foam insulation applied on the outside and stuccoing the exterior which would be a lot less disruptive.

Dang.

Looks like we’re going to get disrupted.

TALLAHASSEE - Florida’s controversial school grading system — a remnant of the Jeb Bush era — may be headed for its first major revamp, one requiring that high schools be rated on much more than how their students perform on a statewide assessment test.

Under a plan unanimously passed by the Florida Senate on Thursday, the state would use multiple factors, not just student scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, to determine a high school’s grade each year. Currently, the FCAT is the only tool used to decide whether a school receives an A, B, C, D or F.

“There is finally a recognition that there is too much emphasis on one test,” said Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston.

The grading system was implemented in 1999, a cornerstone of then-Gov. Bush’s education changes. It quickly became a major bone of contention with parents, teachers and school administrators because of its reliance on FCAT scores.

Based on those test results, only 55 of 392 Florida high schools were awarded an A during the 2006-07 school year. With that top grade came extra funding.

The new rating method has been proposed by the Senate education committee chairman, Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, a former school superintendent who said Floridians have been screaming for a change to better reflect a school’s performance.

The new grading requirements, if approved by the House and signed by Gov. Charlie Crist, would take effect in the 2009-10 school year and reflect a high school’s graduation rate, students’ performances and participation in advanced courses and seniors’ readiness for college as reflected by SAT and ACT scores.

FCAT results would still account for 50 percent of a school’s grade.

“I’m a parent, and it troubles me that the sole evaluation of a high school is all based on the outcome of a test that only half the students in that school now take,” Gaetz said, referring to the fact that the whole battery of tests is given only to ninth- and 10th-graders.

It was unclear when the House might take similar action, but House Education Chairman Joe Pickens, R-Palatka, said he has spoken with Gaetz about changing the rating system “and I think we have some common ground. We’ll definitely give it consideration.”

Broward CountySchool Board member Stephanie Kraft, who initiated a district effort to de-emphasize the focus on FCAT, was thrilled with the Senate’s 38-0 vote.

“I think it’s wonderful. I really think that the Legislature and the governor, quite frankly, are starting to get the message that there really needs to be more than just the emphasis on the FCAT,” said Kraft, who would like to see high schools use a different test, such as the ACT, to determine students’ progress.

For several years, the Palm Beach CountySchool Board has called the abolishment of school grades at all levels its top legislative priority, in favor of a new system of measuring gains in learning.

So the Senate vote to overhaul the grading system appears “generally positive,” said Board Chairman Bill Graham. “That gets them away from a one-size-fits-all mentality.”

Also Thursday, the Senate overwhelmingly adopted a proposed constitutional amendment that would return the post of education commissioner to an elected Cabinet position. If the House agrees, the measure could be placed on the Nov. 4 ballot.

A decade ago, Florida voters changed the state constitution to downsize the Cabinet, putting the education commissioner under the governor. Crist was the state’s last elected education commissioner when the change took effect in 2003.

Voters also would be asked under the same proposed amendment to transform the governing body that oversees the state university system and strip it of most of its powers. Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, angered by the board’s attempts to wrest tuition-setting authority from the Legislature, has made it a top priority for the session.

Board of Governors Chairwoman Carolyn Roberts said the universities are not “playthings to be brushed away” when their actions anger powerful legislators.

Senators also approved an “Ethics in Education” bill that would modify screening, hiring and termination policies for teachers — and toughen reporting procedures related to allegations of misconduct.

Anyone convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude, luring or enticing a child, video voyeurism and voyeurism — or who committed an act that put them on the registered juvenile sex offender list — would be barred from holding a Florida teaching certificate.

Source: Sun-Sentinel.com

I don’t know what the answer is.  While I do know that students were dropping out of school because they believe that they couldn’t pass the FCAT, those were generally the students who didn’t attend school regularly anyway. 

I do believe that teachers need to be held accountable for the content of the classes. However, parents also need to be held accountable for their child’s behavior at and truancy from school, an issue that sorely needs addressing.

What we definitely do NOT need are some crap standards put into the school evaluation system to make everybody feel all happy, like “well, your students are functionally illiterate but are really high in self esteem and state champions in (insert sport of choice), so we’ll give the school a ‘B’ to reflect this”.

PALATKA, FL — A Palatka police officer is recovering at the hospital, after he was shot during a traffic stop.

The shooting happened on US-17 near the Beck Chrysler Jeep Dodge Dealership, near Old Jacksonville Hwy and North SR-19 around 8 p.m.

Officers say six-year veteran Police Corporal Pete Ruiz stopped a suspected drunk driver. When the officer approached the driver’s door, police say 39-year-old Paul D. Savage shot him one time in the left shoulder.

Police say Ruiz returned fire as Savage continued shooting. Savage took off in his car.

Another Palatka Police Officer, who was arriving as the shooting was in progress, began chasing the suspect. After a short chase, the suspect was stopped in the area of West River Road and State Road 17, approximately 5 miles from the original scene.

Savage ran into the woods, but was captured by Palatka Police Officers and Putnam County Sheriff’s Office Deputies, with the help of a Palatka Police Department K-9.

Corporal Ruiz was flown to Shands Hospital in Gainesville for treatment of a gunshot wound to the shoulder. He is in stable condition.

Savage was taken to Putnam Community Hospital for treatment of injuries he received from the
K-9 and is currently being booked into the Putnam County Jail by Putnam County Detectives.

Source:  First Coast News

Shooting a police officer to get out of a DUI is the sensible thing to do, right?  I suppose that we’ll find out later he had a body in the trunk, just committed an armed robbery, or had a warrant out against him.

I could be too hasty in overlooking drunk and stupid.

Update:  Drunken shooter was a North Carolina man. 

DUBLIN, Ireland — From Rome’s Colosseum to the Sydney Opera House, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change. The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe in cadence with the setting of the sun. Several U.S. cities also planned symbolic blackouts or dimmings of monuments, including at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Read the rest here.  I really can’t get beyond burning candles made of paraffin and stearic acid as an environmentally correct and emissions free source of light to go any further. 

Really, WWF, if you were serious, you’d advise your acolytes to forget the lights entirely and go to bed at dusk, get up at dawn, and live in a one-room hut made of indigenous renewable materials without heat, air conditioning, or running water, and toil all day in the fields so that nasty diesel-drinking equipment doesn’t have to be used in agriculture.  Think of the CO2 savings as everybody once again achieves a global life expectancy at birth of 30 years!

I suppose it’s just another excuse for self-absorbed people to once again feel all superior about themselves without any hard evidence to support such feelings of superiority.

Half a century after most of Costa Rica’s rainforests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute took on a project that many thought was impossible - restoring a tropical rainforest ecosystem.

When the researchers planted worn-out cattle fields in Costa Rica with a sampling of local trees, native species began to move in and flourish, raising the hope that destroyed rainforests can one day be replaced.

Carl Leopold and his partners in the Tropical Forestry Initiative began planting trees on worn-out pasture land in Costa Rica in 1992. For 50 years the soil was compacted under countless hooves, and its nutrients washed away. When it rained, Leopold says, red soil appeared to bleed from the hillsides.

The group chose local rainforest trees, collecting seeds from native trees in the community. “You can’t buy seeds,” Leopold says. “So we passed the word around among the neighbors.” When a farmer would notice a tree producing seeds, Leopold and his wife would ride out on horses to find the tree before hungry monkeys beat them to it.

The group planted mixtures of local species, trimming away the pasture grasses until the trees could take care of themselves. This was the opposite of what commercial companies have done for decades, planting entire fields of a single type of tree to harvest for wood or paper pulp.

The trees the group planted were fast-growing, sun-loving species. After just five years those first trees formed a canopy of leaves, shading out the grasses underneath.

“One of the really amazing things is that our fast-growing tree species are averaging two meters of growth per year,” Leopold says. How could soil so long removed from a fertile rainforest support that much growth?

Leopold says that may be because of mycorrhizae, microscopic fungi that form a symbiosis with tree roots. Research at Cornell and BTI shows that without them, many plants can’t grow as well. After 50 years, the fungi seem to still be alive in the soil, able to help new trees grow.

Another success came when Cornell student Jackeline Salazar did a survey of the plants that moved into the planted areas. She counted understory species, plants that took up residence in the shade of the new trees. Most plots had over a hundred of these species, and many of the new species are ones that also live in nearby remnants of the original forests.

Together, these results mean that mixed-species plantings can help to jump-start a rainforest. Local farmers who use the same approach will control erosion of their land while creating a forest that can be harvested sustainably, a few trees at a time.

“By restoring forests we’re helping to control erosion, restore quality forests that belong there, and help the quality of life of the local people,” says Leopold.

That quality-of-life issue is drinking water. It’s in scarce supply where forests have been destroyed, since without tree roots to act as a sort of sponge, rain water runs off the hillsides and drains away.

Erosion is also out of control. “You might drive on a dirt road one year, and then come back the next to find it’s a gully over six feet deep,” says Leopold. “It’s a very serious problem.”

Does the experiment’s success mean that rainforests will one day flourish again? Fully rescuing a rainforest may take hundreds of years, if it can be done at all.

“The potential for the forest being able to come back is debatable,” Leopold says, but the results are promising.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “We’re getting an impressive growth of new forest species.” After only ten years, plots that began with a few species are now lush forests of hundreds. Who knows what the next few decades - or centuries - might bring?

Source:  Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research

Nearly 50 undocumented Cuban migrants who landed ashore at Hollywood shortly after midnight Saturday will be allowed to stay in the United States under the existing ”wet-foot,dry-foot” policy, authorities said.

Smugglers had brought the 46 migrants from Sagua la Grande, Cuba, near the island’s northern coast, according to U.S. Border Patrol Agent Lazaro Guzman.

Once a small fishing town, Sagua la Grande become a popular jump-off point for migrants wanting to leave the country.

Along the way, this latest group of migrants stopped in the Bahamas for a couple of days, where they refueled and remained until the weather calmed down, Guzman said.

Their arrival so far north along the Atlantic Coast surprised Border Patrol agents. ”They’ve never really landed that far north,” Guzman said, noting that smugglers adjust their routes of travel regularly to avoid capture by law enforcement.

All of the migrants were put in custody and will be released to the Miami-Dade Health Clinic after being processed and interviewed at the agency’s Pembroke Pines station.

The migrants will be allowed to stay in the United States under the U.S.-Cuba migration policy known as wet-foot, dry-foot. The police permits Cubans migrants who make it to U.S. soil to remain here, while those intercepted at sea are usually repatriated.

Source:  Miami Herald

Well, 46 more citizens that have first-hand knowledge of what it is like to live in a socialist “paradise” and have no desire to replicate it can only be a good thing.

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer — and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority — essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year — saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart trucks pre-loaded with emergency supplies at regional depots were among the first on the scene wherever refugees were being gathered by officialdom. Their main challenge, in many cases, was running a gauntlet of FEMA officials who didn’t want to let them through. As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA’s confused response: “If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.”

This benevolent improvisation contradicts everything we have been taught about Wal-Mart by labour unions and the “small-is-beautiful” left. We are told that the company thinks of its store management as a collection of cheap, brainwash-able replacement parts; that its homogenizing culture makes it incapable of serving local communities; that a sparrow cannot fall in Wal-Mart parking lot without orders from Arkansas; that the chain puts profits over people. The actual view of the company, verifiable from its disaster-response procedures, is that you can’t make profits without people living in healthy communities. And it’s not alone: As Horwitz points out, other big-box companies such as Home Depot and Lowe’s set aside the short-term balance sheet when Katrina hit and acted to save homes and lives, handing out millions of dollars’ worth of inventory for free.

No one who is familiar with economic thought since the Second World War will be surprised at this. Scholars such as F. A. von Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have taught us that it is really nothing more than a terminological error to label governments “public” and corporations “private” when it is the latter that often have the strongest incentives to respond to social needs. A company that alienates a community will soon be forced to retreat from it, but the government is always there. Companies must, to survive, create economic value one way or another; government employees can increase their budgets and their personal power by destroying or wasting wealth, and most may do little else. Companies have price signals to guide their productive efforts; governments obfuscate those signals.

Aside from the public vs. private issue, Horwitz suggests, decentralized disaster relief is likely to be more timely and appropriate than the centralized kind, which explains why the U.S. Coast Guard performed so much better during the disaster than FEMA. The Coast Guard, like all marine forces, necessarily leaves a great deal of authority in the hands of individual commanders, and like Wal-Mart, it benefited during and after the hurricane from having plenty of personnel who were familiar with the Gulf Coast geography and economy.

There is no substitute for local knowledge — an ancient lesson of which Katrina merely provided the latest reminder.

Source:  National Post, In From the Cold

The assistance that Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s gives to those recovering from disasters is no surprise to those of us that live in disaster-prone areas. 

Friday was my first day of spring break.  Yay!  I have sooooo much to do in the way of housekeeping that I’ve been putting off to when I had the uninterrupted time to paint and make everything look nice and clean and well kept as opposed to the chaos we usually live in. 

So when I came home from work Thursday evening with a sore throat, I was not happy.   I spent a restless night but woke up sore throat free and attributed it to the pollen instead of my boss, who had called in the previous Thursday with a temperature of 103 and a flu diagnosis, and was back at work Monday morning. 

I was in the kitchen yesterday morning, looking through the fridge and pondering whether I could stand another breakfast of Easter eggs when suddenly I began retching with no accompanying symtoms of nausea whatsoever.  My throat was too sore to eat anything the previous evening, so it wasn’t like there was anything to bring up.  I then started shivering with cold and on an 80-degree day was wrapped in an electric blanket turned on “high” with a comforter wrapped around for insulation.  

I spent the rest of the day in a fog of shivering, aching, and occasional periods where the temperature dropped briefly below 100, and I could actually read the news of the day and put up the occasional post albeit very slowly.

Well…I HAD planned on beginning a new diet and exercise program during my week off.  Having no desire to eat or drink anything whatsoever besides sucking on ice chips seems like a good start. 

Update:

Awakened again with pounding head at 12:30 p.m. to the sound of snoring.  Ol’ SwampMan is sitting next to me, snoozing, in his recliner, inhaling flu germs as I cough.  I was sleeping out here so he wouldn’t get sick, damnit! 

I’m waaay late on feeding the livestock, better grab some feed buckets and a bale of hay and get to it.

I spent about 1/2 hour out in the sunlight which I hadn’t been doing lately.  Vitamin D has been shown in some studies to be of value in fighting the flu.  Hey, I’ll take all the help I can get but don’t want to take Tamiflu.  That’s for people that are really sick.

Update Again:

While I was (am) sick and not feeding on a set schedule, the chickens ate all of my pansies.  Again.  Bastards.

Chicken soup is supposed to be good for respiratory infections, isn’t it?

Checked the scale out of curiosity and found I was 7 lbs. lighter in 2 days.  Yeah, I know it’s dehydration, but lemme enjoy it anyway.

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Ever been on the receiving end of an angry grandmother?It’s not pleasant.

They don’t hold back. Their eyebrows furrow. Their jaws clench. Any minute you think fire and brimstone may come out of their eyes and shoot through your forehead.

In short, it’s terrifying. Three teenagers in St. Petersburg had to learn this the hard way. They got the scolding of their lives, in the course of a crime.

81-year-old Maxine Cortimiglia looks like a docile, quiet lady. She lives alone, weighs less than 100 pounds, and stands just over five feet tall.

Looks can be deceiving.

Tuesday evening, Maxine wanted to take an early evening nap, even though it was just 6:00, with bright sunshine streaming through her windows.

She never thought someone would break into her home by smashing a glass window in her kitchen. Her first reaction: in her own words, fury.

“I can’t believe they would pick on me. I was mad. [Were you scared?] Scared of what? 3 kids, sheesh!”

She yelled at them, “If you think I’ve got money, you’re out of your mind!”

As they demanded cash, Maxine noticed something that got her even more fired up. Broken glass all over her kitchen. That, she says, was the final straw.

She yelled at the kids to clean up their mess.

“I was furious! Pick up the glass! Sweep it up! Make it hurry! You don’t leave glass laying around when there’s an old lady and cats.” She paused and got a huge grin on her face, “I’m the old lady!”

Yep, she schooled three thugs in her own kitchen, watching them as they took a broom and cleaned up their mess. Bold and brave. She says, it was her anger that took over.

Unfortunately, the teenagers didn’t leave empty handed. They got Maxine’s crucifix and wedding band from a jewelry box, plus $300.

In the end, she had one final message for these kids, who, as of Thursday night, remain on the loose.

“Drop dead!”  Source:  FirstCoastNews.com

Granny needs a gun. 

SANFORD, Fla. — A woman on Friday abducted a 1-day-old baby from a secure hospital unit and apparently managed to smuggle the child from the facility inside a tote bag, police said. Jennifer Latham, 39, of Sanford, was arrested a short time later after being pulled over by police in nearby Lake Mary, said Darrel Presley, deputy chief of the Sanford Police Department near Orlando.Officials at Central Florida Regional Hospital alerted police of the abduction around 1:45 p.m. after hospital alarms indicated the child had been removed from the newborn unit, Presley said.

The hospital was immediately locked down as officials searched the grounds, but the woman was apparently able to slip by security because she had the child hidden in a bag, he said.

“We believe at this point she had a large blue tote bag that she may have actually placed the child inside,” Presley said. “And she just apparently walked out.”

Presley said hospital staff acted appropriately and quickly.

“But in just those few minutes that it takes to gather the information and disseminate it, she was able to walk from the maternity ward through the exit and then depart the hospital,” he said.

Authorities initially believed they were looking for two women because the suspect wore street clothes into the hospital, then changed into a scrub-like shirt in an apparent attempt to blend in, Presley said.

Police in the nearby town of Lake Mary pulled over a vehicle at about 3 p.m. that matched a description of the vehicle witnesses described Latham driving, he said. The baby was found inside unharmed and has been returned to the hospital and reunited with the parents.

Read the rest at News4Jax.com.